Chapter Four – Letters from Saints and Dark Green Libraries part 2
97
Sidney - March 27, 1991 - I need to learn how to deal with
stress. I have the SAT’s coming up. This friend of mine Steve keeps calling
me. He wants a progression and I
don’t. Every time Steve calls, he tries
to make me feel sorry for him. I feel
guilty for not wanting to talk. He tries
to control me. I hate it. I am not a toy. Are you going to your junior prom?
In
the spring of my eleventh grade year I wrote to Sidney describing the events pertaining to her
inquiry. A month prior to the April
prom, I asked Marie to be my date. We
spoke on the phone in the preceding months following the summer leadership
workshop. Marie came to my house. We visited a local mall.
We
went swimming down-the-street from her house.
I saw Marie in this blue one piece.
I was not sure what to make of anything. I knew she liked commercial-pop dance music.
The occasional erection was not enough to keep my head above water. The encounters never amounted to much.
After
my mother came to pick me up on a ride home, my mother bubbled openly about how
beautiful Marie was. The commentary sort
of fucked me up. The level playing field
was eternally tilted to understand the segmentations that nines do not date
sixes or fours or whatever I was. Maybe
such mathematical anomalies could occur by mistake or be sucked in on the
notion of a pleasant conversation with an airport stranger in transit to a more
permanent destination sort of man. Some
sections of the airplane are just off limits for people like me.
I
called Marie in early April in a nondescript fashion. I was not sure how contractual an arrangement
Marie viewed the occasion versus the emotional potential entanglements I might
dream to exist in a hypothetical utopia.
Marie
agreed. We spoke a few, but not many
times. I think Marie liked how I
listened and reassured her without judging.
Dress color was communicated in a dark green shade to coordinate with a
corsage purchase. Transport, timing, and
dinning logistics were configured with a six o’clock pick up at Marie’s home in
a gray minivan full of St. Baptiste male and female seniors. Dining was reserved at a restaurant mandating
well over a week’s pay from my summer employment.
98
I
arrived at Brad’s house, the shaved-head Trent Reznor fan from student
council. Brad relayed how he banged his
girlfriend on the countertop in the kitchen as he offered me a no-pube Coke. His girlfriend and the dates of the soon to
be arriving two other guys were fixing their hair, pruning and powdering in a
nearby location. The evening involved
packing the Saint Baptiste people into a wheeled opossum pouch to venture to a
suburb for Marie.
I
was hopeful and smiled full of my fake-denture teeth clamoring for the brief
grace of burgeoning rather than weed-killer.
I escorted Marie from her door to the van and affixed her corsage. The driver replaced the restaurant with a
concrete picnic-table punk show in the middle of a local park. Apparently I was uninformed to his penchant
for bass-guitar plucking to three-chord anthems that would probably lead to him
getting laid. Marie and I sat in the
background conversing in swivel rotation of which direction the police were
going to pull up from.
Part
of me enjoyed the teenage give-a-fuck of the moment and the music. I needed more give-a-fuck in my life. However, in a rented tuxedo with a primrose
girl and a pinned-magnolia flower melting under a New Orleans spring sunset, I was not sure of
Marie’s reaction or how to pose the moment.
The
look in Marie’s eye was off like a black bird on a wire sitting in a
murder-of-one. She had that teenage girl
passive reassurance that everything was fine with a painted-on halcyon
smile. I tried to massage the tone with
passing jokes to settle the mood about the formality of our
transportation. I jested that if I ever
became a limo driver I would bring a pet diapered monkey along named Rico. I would dress him up in a little tuxedo to
dance for tips. I complimented Marie on
how pretty she looked, but it was drowned out by dogs barking over the fence,
the amplified guitars and a drum kit.
Eventually
the impending diligence of the local cops arrived. Kids negotiated with adults. Eight of us ate dinner at a Wendy’s in
tuxedos and prom dresses after our reservations expired. I avoided getting ketchup on my
cufflinks.
We
arrived at the prom as fashionable as tardiness can allow for a Catholic school
function. The dance floor was huddled
with mix-a-lot ass music. I eschewed
knowledge of what to do for doing. I
moved in gyrations befitting Marie’s dance-team roots.
Minutes
converged. I introduced Marie to
people. A slower song rotated. I was on the dance floor holding her. My hands gripped the smooth-stitched verdant
fabric. Marie bent into my earlobe and
said, “I have been seeing somebody else.
I have a boyfriend.” Her words
disrupted my feet like being tranquilized on a metronome factory. I lost my sense of rhythm.
Marie’s
dress swayed like a severed beanstalk to the clouds for the ant-boy climbing to
find a golden egg. Her words crushed him
for thinking he could scale so high. I
made the eternal mistake of getting noticed.
Marie must have smelled the effort on my breath of trying to impress her
in a way that was presumptive of wanting more than a memorial photo opportunity
of a first love on a daguerreotype.
Marie
told me she met this guy in the play she was doing just after she agreed to go
to the prom with me. Marie felt it would
have been wrong to cancel, but promised this guy that nothing was going to
happen. I was sullen in a
sophomoric-slump un-wanting of so much of what I had wanted preceding her
single sentence.
Certainly
Marie was in no debt of exclusivity to me, but the timing struck me startled in
an obliteration of my hope for this Superbowl of my high school dating
timeline. What if I could have crossed
that great threshold of manhood in a comet-tailed anomaly of the universe?
Afterwards,
we wandered to some random senior’s house.
I told Marie in layered on Dawson’s-Creek-teenage-undertones,
“I feel like I do not know how to tell you goodbye, because I feel like we
never really said hello.” We left and
acquired alcohol. We brought Marie home
before anyone else. Marie gave me a
split-bead of a kiss on the cheek. She
told me she would write.
After
closing the sliding van door Brad’s girlfriend asked me, “What was that?” I reprised a simplified version of events
that I got dumped on the dance floor to truncate further inquiries. The group of us took the suitcase of
beer. I got dressed in its contents
drunk alone in a hot-tub back at some other senior’s house while the rest of
them got laid inside. I woke up at
Brad’s house. I tried and failed in a
pathetic attempt to forget the whole thing.
99
I
started writing in a robust way, on a basis reminiscent of when Sidney shed-skinned
me. I wrote this poem called “Dark
Green” longer than most and processed a feeling of aborted hope. The ballooning-possibility body swelling
inside me popped in Marie’s words. I was
not angry, but sad and dazed. There was
no defendant, no accused. There was just
a mass of emotion holding service in my head.
I spoke the muddled sounds out onto those pages. I mailed the poem in a letter to Marie. I later felt guilty.
Marie
wrote me back in awe of the shadowed beauty of the language. She relayed an account of her boyfriend’s
grip on the letter compelling her that if she wrote me back I would some how
Hulk-transform into this obsessive character from a Lifetime movie gerrymandering
her words into some kindled spark to a fire that never ignited.
I
think I just wanted something real. I
had so few bullets in my chamber. I
wanted a lingering-friend that would not pass me on a street obliviously. I wanted to salvage. As a teenager with a treacherous
chemical-slush brain I did not even understand myself.
I
did not want to be alone. Marie chose
other options, some actor. My writing
probably did come across as random weird ranting pleas for something other than
the desolate alternative heartbroken teenagers like I was, tend to see. At least I wasn’t in one of the other New Orleans schools
dodging real bullets. High school is
hell.
Sidney - May 20 1991 - Sometimes girls, including myself,
can be total bitches. Guys aren’t
perfect, but most of the time, they don’t play head games. I can understand why guys have a hard time
dealing with girls. When girls are
around other girls they are always sizing the other girl up. Girls are competitive in a way most guys are
not.
Guys compete in sports. Girls compete in looks and with other girls
for affection from guys. Girls expect
guys to know what they are thinking, what they want and need without saying
anything. (I’m guilty of this). Part of that comes from the stories we’re
told and movies where everything is so perfect and works out. Girls tend to have an idea in their
head. They try to mold a guy into
that.
I am optimistic about dating this guy Mathew. We haven’t kissed. When you have feelings for someone it makes
you extremely vulnerable because you crave acceptance. When you get rejected, no matter how tough
you are, it hurts.
People don’t look deep enough to see what is really
there. They take a surface glance. Like you told me people see the surface of
the water, yet they rarely put their head under the water to risk the breath to
see. You are complex and not what you
seem. I wish I was there, in my mind I
am sitting there holding your hand. Keep
your head up.
100
In
the last weeks of school we learned that Mr. Roberts had been fighting
cancer. I did not know about
chemotherapy or radiation. None of that
was real to me. I was not sure how to
tell an adult, ‘I hope you do not die.’
After psychology class with little accompanying explanation I gave Mr.
Roberts a sealed white envelope with this poem called “stone crack.”
“I gave you a stone out from the Earth. With mineral veins and crackling wrinkle
cheeks I broke it out from under the forest floor and gave it to you, To remind
you of me, so when I get buried broken and old, Inside there is a story of
friendship it lasts the winters and seasons Age after age beating upon
smashing, put it in your palms and keep close to time For it will be here past
you and I. Past my sons and past all the life for some things go on forever
even past this cancer’s fight.”
I
wanted Mr. Roberts to know that no matter what he made a difference to me and
that I would remember him. The knowledge
he gave me was the stone. I would always
hold it even after he died. That piece
would live.
We
never spoke of the letter. I just told
him I had something I would like to give him.
He smiled this coy-mischievous grin at me. He took it in a way cross generational
students and teachers often fail to bridge the gap into operating as peers
without a change in context. The
alteration was sleeping inside the sealed envelope in a letter to a man on
death’s row. This was Orleans not St. James Parish.
The
words were written dormant to address my sixteen-year neophyte understanding of
the spreading cells inside his riddled body calling mutiny on itself in a man I
really did not know. Mr. Roberts taught
thousands of students before me. I was
at the caboose-of-his-career flopping this token piece of gratuitous luggage
into his coat pocket like a tip for the porter.
I would keep going. The next
would be his final stop. He died within
the next three months. I went to his
wake and wished my condolences to his widow, but did not attend the funeral.
Sidney - June 18, 1991 - I have been with Mathew a month,
but it feels like forever. I do not feel
pressure. I am really sorry about things
with Marie. That is kind of shitty on
her part. I think you will have better
luck with girls in college.
I do not want to be the tall-skinny-gorgeous girl
anymore. I realize I am not half-bad the
way I am.
Mathew came over and his witch step-mom called three
times, bitched him out for dumb shit. He
got grounded for turning his pager off.
His stepmom said he is not part of her family. My stepmom used to compete with me for my
dad’s attention, so I know how it feels.
101
I
headed to the leadership student council workshop for a second time. The bus ride was dormant. It was absent of shooting-stars, just a mixed
collection of asteroids colliding and reminding me of what they were not. I conversed with a different summer
tribe.
The
groups were named after holidays. St.
Patrick had a Roman-clover-conversion team of Catholic dogma. Thanksgiving conducted polio-blanket Sioux
biological warfare. Christmas celebrated
the world’s beloved burglar. I was
Birthday, symbolized by a candled cake of years of gratitude and regret that a
human emerged alive, post fertilization dodging in-womb assassination to take
successive inhalations of oxygen and pumped blood to fuel a commemorative solar
revolution.
A
girl named Julia from St. Marina’s was in my group. Julia was preoccupied, taken and relaxed,
focused on impressing no one as a teenage socialite resting where she knew
few. Coasting was allowable.
The
excursion brought a soup of faces. Each
member of our birthday group endeared and quickly estranged. Promises to write were kept in sporadic and
singular instances. Memories folded in
like left-in-the-dryer forgotten lint-crusted pocket notes.
The
summer melted into itself in like a grilled cheese sandwich. The kind that tastes good in gluttonous-hasty
production, with low-level concern for long-term consequences to the diameter
of one’s abdomen or cholesterol levels mucking up the blood.
Sidney - July 20, 1991 - I can’t wait for summer school to
be over so I can see Mathew more. I
trust him. I am happier now than I ever
was with Brandon. Matt can make me smile even when I feel like
crap. Last week, I was trying on some
funky shoes. I asked Matt how they
looked. He said, “Honestly they are ok,
but for you they’re perfect. They fit
who you are.”
102
I
got a job as a lifeguard, taught swimming lessons, and filled in as a hot-shot
pick-up truck driver for an oilfield company down to Venice.
My boss of the pool had a Christian parental-bestowed Irish name, but I
called him Pig. Pig had a gut the size
of a beanbag chair that he probably lost the remote in, a permanent beer
appendage and a Napoleon-complex from being berated at his real job and his
minivan-wife. He had pudgy cheeks with
sloop-skin. Have you ever seen the
floppy face jowls of a basset hound running?
I
often imagined Pig as a barge being nudged by a tugboat with his illegal
in-pool brewski. He would lounge on an
inflatable Navy vessel to buoy his lard-load from the shallow to the deep-end
during adult swim time. Pig tried to
legislate community-pool politics. I
would abduct his towel or change the country radio station to a hip hop
modulation to piss him off. I did save a
kid from drowning and removed an air-way obstruction in a kid at a pool
party. My work was not entirely
purposeless, despite my inability to prevent pandemic in-pool urination.
The
child choked on a candied-clustered peanut confection better fit for a
disaggregated natural delivery of non-animal protein than its pre-packaged
congealed form. It would have been
better for the kid to pilfer his fingers in bar nuts. Alas the child was invariably handed a
gooey-nut commercial chocolate bar and left to his own devices.
The
child seemed to be obedient, not hustling to the diving board or venturing
beyond his depth capabilities. There was
a sense of trust in the order of the system in his democratic limbs, despite
occasionally sucking in water inevitably tainted by the other miscreant’s
plumbing-leakage.
I
spotted the munching munchkin from my perch pulling on his mother’s towel
wrapped around her waste. The suburban
socialite was tucked in a conversation of wafting non-verbal communication
fluttering hand and shoulder in exaggerated movements to support her cogent
debate points on either Iran Contra or interior decorating.
The
six-year-old yanked on the towel in gagged silence. At the sight of an inadvertent hand shrug in
a not-now mouthing, I blew my whistle and jumped off the stand. I gripped hand-in-hand in an upward surge to
the abdomen of the boy and jarred a cluster of huddled peanuts from his
trachea.
The
mass was lubricated in red-glossy fluid and plopped into the pool reminiscent
of kid-barf which was a more common flotsam during swim parties. The clump rippled out into the words of the
quickly transfigured apologetic mother who saw fit to cut her conversation
short. The mother thanked me for being
attentive to her child. I never talked
to the kid.
Sidney - August 28, 1991 -Mathew and I broke up on July 31st. I was losing part of myself. He kept tabs on me. We are still friends. I am going to be eighteen soon. There is no going back.
103
I
got a summer summons in the mail from the principal of St. Baptiste, Brother
Gregory. The note was cryptic and
insinuated a novel purpose set for an evening meeting of a group of students at
the school.
A
band of freshman to seniors totaling to twelve assembled, including Sal. Brother Gregory informed us that we were to
become the “Oz Committee”; a benevolent Illuminati apostleship of sorts. Brother Gregory desired yellow-brick idealism
to better the school. Were we his flawed
caravan, tin man’s heart, inverse intrepid lions, innocent scarecrows, and
homesick Dorothy’s? Was he the emerald
voice with no real answers manipulating the high school warzone? What was our purpose?
Brother
Gregory spoke. We gathered on throw
pillows across his office floor. We were
his upcoming homeroom. St. Baptiste was
eschewing its traditional mono-level morning assemblies for an intermixed
assortment. Brother had either led us to
believe or actually handpicked our membership into his lot. We did not really understand our mission, but
surely as time and the curtain unfolded the man would divulge his plan. We spent the evening portioning out
introductions and personal ammunition to be used against us later if the
suitable high school firing range presented itself.
Unveiled
insecurity in high school was lethal.
Kids can shark-sniff the blood in the hall through
six-degrees-of-separation like a fat man to bacon. Teenagers eat that shit up. “At least it is not me,” is the usual
rationalization for such tragedies.
Rumor in the yard, in the spliff-puffing car ride, innuendo is portioned
out for any one-thousandth of a drop of crimson difference from a hundred
whispers away. Deviations are dissected
and allocated to their proper storage bins.
Some
kids would grow up to have two-thousand Facebook friends, drive luxury SUV’s
and dictate society simply for mastering the skill of this hunt. Others would work their asses off alone
wondering why, never noticing the giant jaw marks in their abdomens and
half-moon missing chunks.
Brother
Gregory was a tall man, six-foot-six, imposing and monk-like. He was like Chief from Keasey’s Cuckoo’s
Nest. Except his brain was a
yet-to-be-lobotomized library. The wings
of reamed tomes populating his cranium were stacked from this unassuming
aggregation of people: students, fellow educators, religious texts,
contemplations, parents and some unknown personal life that like children with
death was just never considered.
The
personal life of a celibate Catholic ordained or ordered individual was like a
sealed envelope impressed with the embossed wax-warmed coagulated paste of the
Pope. Regular kids did not inquire or
even ponder about such past lives. He
was in place, religiously affirmed authority and henceforth segregated from
bouts of familial tethers.
Brother
Gregory had been my sophomore religion teacher.
He was the generator of the mind-maps and a proponent of the alterative
assessment practices. Alternative
assessment was a composite evaluation and education system incorporating both
the visual and the auditory to capture the brain power of both concrete
sequential and abstract random thinkers.
Sometimes we would catch Brother dozing off during some of the more
random of the abstract. We worked in
groups and outlined what we felt God must have really meant in bestowing us
with the pages translated from Aramaic to Greek to eventual assured perfect
English.
Brother
was like most leaders, not perfect, procrastinated, but full of ideas. The Oz committee only had that one official
meeting. The rest were homeroom sessions
consisting of marked attendance and listening to intercom announcements about
meatloaf and volleyball. We never
ascended to a model United Nations to resolve peace accords or discuss
existential dabbles with God or chlorofluorocarbons.
At
least I got to hang out with Sal and chat.
We were pretty good friends until a Mu Alpha Theta convention. We were ditching calculus ciphering to hang
out on the hotel roof when he started smoking pot with these other kids. After that it was like a
line-in-the-high-school desert. Sal had
this new cloud to puff out in. We were
still friendly. I will always have his
back, but it was just never the same.
104
Before
school started I got my first car, a used blue Ford Escort paid for with the
wealth of my grandparents. I funded the
insurance. My parents footed the
dollar-a-gallon gas. I was fresh out of
driver’s education empowered with even more rules.
One
time heading to my grandfather’s house, I decided to flip this lady off in a
common turn inside the median when she shortcut the opening instead of turning
wide. The baby boomer caused me to
almost ram her passenger door. I stopped
in time and held my finger to her lord as long as my foot was on the
break. I was impudent staring at the
ramifications of her short-cut. I fixed
my gaze full-steam to the oncoming traffic.
My finger stood like a shield from her disregard for my freshly studied
rules.
The
middle-aged Ronald-McDonald-haircut grandiose surface-dweller u-turned to follow
me into Grandpa Kurt’s driveway. The
bird-lady got out of her vehicle and was magnetized on teaching my sardonic ass
a lesson. Grandpa Kurt and Grandma
Jennifer came out in befuddled repugnance.
This hen-woman started barking at his grandkid, “Do you realize what
could happen to you for doing something like that? What if I had been a black?” I told her she needed to leave.
Grandpa
Kurt basically told her the same with some spiel about “Don’t Tread on Me”
private property and second amendment gun ownership rights about who should be
fearing who in terms of getting shot right now.
I think the lady was amazed at this cross-generational defection. Her head cocked back and forth like a
dead-brained chicken aghast that her verdict was retorted in the same guttural
nature display that prompted her self-appointed presence. Maybe I did have a little bit of Grandpa Kurt
in me.
The
lady left. I explained what happened to
my grandfather. He told me to be careful
with that shit. Grandpa Kurt said it was
up to me whether I told my parents. I
never did. My parents trusted me. A middle finger or a sleepover junior high
vandalizing shit-bag was about as bad as it got.
I
was a lame punk full of angst against internal matters, but not my own parents. I have always loved my parents. They are intelligent fair, kind and good
teachers and providers. Why would I
rebel against them? Other assholes
fucking up the world, I will contemplate a way to combat that. Some oblivious ill-attentive lady who almost
ruined my perfect three-week driving record, I might exert some
frustration. My parents are nice
people. Sorry to disappoint you Sigmund.
105
My
first semester of my senior year consisted of calculus, English five, creative
writing, and classical music. Calculus
was taught by Brother Leopold, a Methuselah-of-a-man also gargantuan in height
with an eighty-five-year death-grip handshake with a nicotine-stained Santa
Claus beard. The man had two singed
yellow solid-rocket-booster cones emblazed upon his white mustache. He moved without use of cane, but in a
Frankenstein staggered walk. The man was
a master of mathematics in the way Brother Gregory was an artist of people’s motivations. I learned derivatives and integration in due
course and began a small glimpse into the iterations of true rates of change.
English
and creative writing were taught by Mr. James House. Mr. House was a Woodstock bulldog with a folk-rebel-punk
streak buried in books beyond such landmark identifiers as the name Huckleberry
to orient the reader’s navigation. He
propped up Ginsberg, Patchen and Calvino in the spectrum of a thousand
questions we did not know to ask, but considered in the knowledge that there
was typically a thief in the room.
Mr.
House knew that original ideas were farces of narcissistic men, either too
ignorant or proud to realize that in the collective history of this universe
with its infinite thoughts, any naked idea birthed in one man was invariably
the inadvertently adopted progeny of another that preceded him that he did not
complete the due diligence to uncover.
All the best writers were pick-pocket foxes borrowing from the burrows
of other animals. Humans were always
scribbling and rearranging, transposing and proclaiming answers to a test completed
a million other times in a million other days.
It is our nature.
Mr.
House was a grump Mr. Tambourine Man to the bureaucracy of the establishment
and a champion of the proletariat. House
was a Catholic school teacher with more faith in goodness than religion. He could see the beauty and danger in you
like Yoda. He was undaunted to acquiesce
to politically-correct behavior. If you
were wrong House called you out on it in front of your peers. If you were weak House supported you in front
of your peers. If you were excellent
House commended you in front of your peers.
This was reinforcing management on a bed of crayon-thinking within the
English discipline. Lines were coming in
color. Words had purpose.
There
was a reason the author used that word in that instance, chose that animal or
number to communicate innocuous passing commentary connecting the web-skeins of
a greater portrait. House helped me
begin to see those iridescent strands across the back lit sunrays of
literature.
I
felt lucky like a man turning a corner to a hidden world beyond Grecian Urns
and Canterbury Tales. I met writers of
longing, sex, drugs, desperation, and pain presented in a duality of two-sided
life. I saw ghosts unhidden like the
first names of homeless men with their thumbs up at interstate exits. Writers praying someone would take the time
to read beyond their shoe-polished cardboard appeared. It was like Bible authors got last names and
sex lives.
I
remember a few quotes from the incomparable James House. “What do you want whiney girl? Support your quadriplegic Olympic
candidates. I am a pigeon
vigilante. Would you like a cheap suck?”
(This was a favorite when dispensing generic bagged candy to students.) “I can beat you in a fight by at least two or
three blocks. Wouldn’t it be great if
all the weapons in the world spontaneously melted? “Self deprivation is my favorite game. I bet you’re reading right now. Joyce, I hate attendance slips. Use a tree 900 million dogs can’t be
wrong. If you want to catch goldfish,
don’t use refrigerators as bait. If
there is a hell, I’m sure my place is booked.”
At year end, House sat all-fours on his desk for a foaming spit-mouth
bulldog impression with his push-broom mustache.
106
In
creative writing I met my best friend, Michael Robinson. Michael was a St. Baptiste veteran since
eighth grade JV football. In all
appearances we were reciprocal faces in the crowd. We never truly conversed to deposit a coin in
the meter to dedicate even a nickel-of-minutes to find out more than could be
obtained from a yearbook roster and a stock pre-packaged uniform headshot. We rectified our mistake in mingled group
writing and skit assignments.
Creative
writing consisted of daily themes destined for in-class stage productions of
sock puppets, impersonations of divorced parents, recurring characters
exploiting the stereotypes we each brought to the table and above all the
willingness to play with language.
Michael and I came from opposite ends of the city. Michael was the east. I was the west; black and white, different
colors, but the same kid. Our sense of
humor to dissect the frivolity from the microcosm of high school was affirming.
There
was a moment after school where I helped Michael with impromptu math tutoring. In the algebra, I had a friend however bricked
to get to that point; neither of us was concerned with what anybody
thought. I was into Nirvana and
Operation Ivy. He was into Michael
Jackson.
Hanging
out with Mike I got to experience a window into black-people life by trading my
traditional white-majority mathematics.
Both are the same, the emphasis just shifts on the context. Hearts are never different.
107
One
day after school while waiting for a student council meeting, one of the
school’s maintenance workers, who we referred to as Eazy E for his remarkable
resemblance to the jerry-curled Aids-fallen rap star, was around to help us
jump the battery of Michael’s stranded car.
Eazy E was with this other student in work study in our class named Malique.
Eazy
E pulled the cables out of his truck next to a mini-baseball bat and scattered
beer cans. As Eazy E walked up he calls
Malique, who had to help Eazy fairly often, a “pussy-lipped mother fucker.” We are standing in the street around Eazy’s ride. Malique has trouble with the lock while
attempting to enter the passenger-side door, but we mange to enter. I move a Hustler off the seat and place the
crinkled pages next to a small purple-and-gold teddy bear.
Eazy
goes into an in-depth analysis of a possible fight between Malique and himself,
“Man you might get your one good lick in early then after that it’s all
over. I’m gonna bat da shit outa ya,
leave a big old knot on ya (touching Malique’s forehead.) Then I’ll leave ya by da side ah da road. De never gonna know.” Malique rocks his head as Eazy continues.
“Man dis summer (pointing to the hole in his dash where the radio should be
with wires spitting out), I’m gonna get me a kickin’ system so I be swingin
uhm.”
Michael
and I are having trouble containing the laughter. As we back up Eazy E is mumbling. We turn left Eazy is rolling with the windows
down as he spots a big-chested white girl jogging. He rambles, “Swing it girl. I make ya sweat when I take ya home.” He then proceeds with a hand signal of some
sort and a honk. He does this to another
girl. This is all in two blocks.
Michael
says, “It’ll be a red Nissan coming up on the right.” Eazy, “I know what you
drive.” (How does he know? This isn’t
even Michael’s regular car.) After a
while we jump in Michael’s red rover.
Eazy points to the convenience store across the street. We pull over at the Easy Serve/ Serve
Eazy.
Eazy
walks in, I ask Michael, “What does he want?” thinking he may be using
secret-black body language that I can not comprehend. I just go in to find Eazy holding up a Bud
light and saying “a dollar eight.” I go
out telling Michael he wants a beer. So
I hand Eazy two dollars as I step back in the convenience palace. I stand around in my whiteness so Eazy
blurts, “What you want change?” That was
the first time I purchased alcohol for a school employee while in my
uniform.
108
Outside
of such adventures in jumper cables, Michael and I, along with a few of our
other friends made a mock James Bond film called Golden Fro. Michael appeared as the arch-super villain
with a golden afro hell-bent on dispensing toxic golden dust through our
school’s air conditioning vent to golden-super-size-afro-ize the students and
put them under his mind control chemicals.
(It was not really that different than Ritalin or Adderall, just instead
of a pharmaceutical company it came from a stereotyped dark-skinned super
villain. I will let you decide which one
is scarier.)
I
was James Bond and the director. We took
over the school and filmed a remote control car driving around in the
hallways. House chatted us up while
catching smoke sessions on his monitoring-duty chain after school. We even caught the Byron-Hadley-impersonator
disciplinarian chugging a beer in the teacher’s lounge on camera. We had a mini coup d’etat until he abused his
authority to confiscate the VHS tape as all good prison guards are bound to
do. (B. Dolan says film the
police.) We shot my Ford Escort in a
chase scene after Golden Fro and his evil henchman Knick Knack and Oddjob.
Oddjob
was played by this kid Huaii Yu Nguyen who was also in our creative writing
class. Huaii Yu was our favorite Dick
Duck Dong side-character to cast in any roll.
He had such memorable natural quotes.
Not written into scenes, just things he would say in-class that were
better than fiction. “When you die
you’re dead.” “You can’t let outside
people hump your baby.” “There was this
retarded kid who threw a rock at me. I
beat him up.” “This kid can’t speak
English very well.” “I was a wagon
bagon.” (This is what he called a
rickshaw.) “That’s a sign of a date from
hell, a girl who tries to be smart. “My
first word in English was a curse word.”
“My child is going to look like crap.”
“Casinos, all casinos, urine tests in schools baby.” “You smokin’ primo-style, freestyle
bra.” “Homophobia, that’s when ya scared
of homos bra.” “Hey give me the tall
girl.” “The fear of open spaces, that’s
the Greek-oyster phobia.” He use to
sell stereos out of his trunk outside school.
We
made the pre-show to our in-class movie premiere a top ten list of Huaii Yu
quotes of him popping up in different parts of the school. Sometimes members of the faculty held a
hand-printed subtitled as he annunciated his verbal-gold. Huaii Yu brought eggrolls from his family’s
probably-work-eighteen-hours-a-day restaurant.
The class was so enjoyable I took it twice in one year as an elective
with the four-by-four schedule. Mr.
House was good with it. Unfortunately
Michael was not there, but we still hung out.
109
In
the second semester, we had this Cletus the-slack-jawed-yokel sort of Simpsons’
character kid that informed us he used to get off for the opening of coon
hunting season back in Tennessee. This other kid Paul was a pompous son-of-a-millionaire
with a built in mega phone P.A. system to his S.U.V. Paul use to get written into roles to mock
his arrogance with moments like “Perfection bores me. I will rule you all. I own my own zoo. Let me tell you about the time I got shot in
the back.”
Paul’s
sense of I-am-Caesar humor was a moving target on the fringe of fearing he
would show up with a gun one day. Paul
also demanded every once in a while to be called by his favorite pseudonym
Jared. Jared, in pure high school is
hell fashion, got written into roles as a student at another school who Paul
was in love with and murdered. Paul was
in the process of assuming Jared’s identity to cover the crime. We also had this black guy nicknamed Pookie
with the classic line, “A white person is in my seat, so what’s new.”
110
We
had to write at least a page a day in a journal which could be on
anything. Most of my recollections and
transcriptions were a random stream of high school consciousness.
“My
neighbor thinks his dogs are having an identity crisis. They are climbing trees and not eating as
much of their feces. Life is about
asking the right questions. Finding the
answers is an ancillary task to learning.”
“One
time when my friend Michael and I were giving Muldrow a ride home we made a big
circle totally out of the way. Muldrow
replied, ‘I thought you knew a short cut.’
I cursed Muldrow out. Muldrow can
smell if politics has just been discussed.”
“I
think on Valentines Day nightly news, anchors should read a list of people they
have had sex with. A stripper accidently
knocked on my door today. I guess my
neighbor was horny.”
“Today
I was introduced to using sign language in church songs. Stoffler (my classical music teacher) likes
to talk about the assholes with big-bass speakers in their cars who are slowly
killing themselves. It’s a shame only a
few people get to be rodeo clowns. It
would be a great job for the government to use in place of unemployment
insurance.”
“McDonalds
defeated the Russians. I am not above
games of hide and go seek. I think
building a giant naked golden statute of yourself and having everyone kiss your
feet would be a more honest form of governance.
Let’s stare at Reagan’s sack-hair and FDR’s merkin.”
“I
learned today that elephants eat their own dung to replace the microbes in
their digestive track. Is it a rule that
dentists have to play adult smooth listening stations? You already have to lay helpless as a
stranger explores your oral cavity with sharp objects; why make me want to
vomit?”
“Note
for today I want to invent a convenience store in a drink machine. Items to include: tube beef jerky, malt
liquor on tap, slushy from a pump, built in hot dog rotator; a burrito
microwave fresh, candy and nuddy magazines.
We bury people above the ground so we can keep an eye on them.”
“Questions
for Vanderbilt’s undergraduate admissions department: Do you allow pet
funerals? Have you discovered a cure for
this rash? How do you feel about the
term bed wetter? Do you have any little
drink umbrellas with your goat mascot?”
“I
wonder why religious schools don’t make prayer a sport and compete against one
another. Don’t look in there that’s
where they keep the circus children. Not
my Honda! (I use to yell this one at the
top of my lungs at people that drove Hondas in front of me as a random and
arbitrary excuse to find stress relief through non-anger primal screams.) Anyone with a stuffed animal lodged over the
back-dash of their automobile should be monitored for poor vehicular operation. It is an empirically proven statistic.”
“If
you saw a banana sitting in the middle of the road would you run over it or try
to avoid it? Cartoons suggest one course
of action; impish joy another. Today in
physics class I kidnapped Ted Wells’ flour baby. I wonder if animals have birthday
parties.”
“There
should be an event in figure skating competitions where the contestants have to
try to dodge octopuses thrown from the audience while doing sow cows and toe
loops.”
“Next
time you are bored in church count the number of older women with Ronald
McDonald haircuts. (A Ronald McDonald haircut is that light-bulb mini-afro
teased perm older white women get. The
style is impervious to movement, yet somehow requires weekly beauty shop
maintenance, despite its utter dearth of feminine beauty.)”
111
During
the first semester of my senior year I ran a campaign for student body vice
president and lost to a girl. Never
underestimate the power of the vagina or tampon co-sympathy. I am not sure on the vote tally, but my
campaign certainly did not lack effort.
I
plastered the school with homemade photocopies of torn-out pictures from People magazine I stole from the local
library with captions written to support my endeavors in crayon. I illegally made flyers in the school
office. We are never too old for crayons
or too young for siphoning toner for loosely connected school and personal
purposes.
I
had this one photo of Bruce Willis from Die Hard with this body hanging placard
revised for broadcast television sign that said, “I hate everybody.” Underneath it I wrote, “Except for you vote
for Ethan.” I also had celebrity
endorsements from Mr. Bill the clay-mation superstar. I had Emanuel Lewis in a kung fu outfit, but
unfortunately I was unable to get Gary Coleman to commit to complete the 1980’s
sitcom of midget black adults being raised by adopted white parents duo. If only Thurgood Marshall could have Webster
as evidence of the damaging inferences of separate-but-equal to over come the
precedents of that Homer Plessy New Orleans train car in Brown v Board of Education
instead of those dolls.
I
made a resonating commendable speech at the school assembly according to the
school president and lost. I contemplate
if anyone else listened. Maybe I should
have asked for a show of hands of people in the gym who have masturbated to
show just how alike we all are. In a
maneuver imitating a veteran politician, I dovetailed my campaign into a
victory as senior class president. I
enjoyed the term, assisted in ushering in spirit shirts and Halloween dress up
day. I was Darth Vader.
112
St.
Baptiste had a living way of the cross one day before Easter Break. This practice was a novel re-creation of the
physical torture of the center of Christianity.
Nothing gets Catholics riled up like guilt-filled focus on how bad off
Jesus had it to rip out any sense of permissible self-pity. Good Friday fasting and who can out-do who in
self-flagellation.
In
the remembrance of the event House decided to assign us to make up our own
stations. I tried to capture maybe
another route the day could have gone.
Still ending in the whole crucifixion executed path to eternal glory,
but maybe a bit more vibrant than triple fall, spike, roll stone, cue release
of souls from purgatory into heaven.
“Soldiers
play tic-tac-toe on Jesus’ chest. Jesus
strikes up his endorsement deal with Disney for a movie. Jesus gets a stunt double to come in for two
stations to go home to feed the cat.
Jesus has to take a break for twenty minutes to switch long distance
phone companies. Jesus jacks a bull
dozer to knock down the crucifixion racks.
Jesus puts on his red ribbon for Aids awareness.”
“Jesus
cures the ballet dancer with Tourettes syndrome. Jesus shoots Pat Buchannan in the thigh. Jesus stops to get a green punk-rocker spiked
mow hawk. Jesus rents a movie at
Blockbuster. Jesus plays double-Dutch
with a group of black girls. Jesus gives
someone over the shoulder tips on their solitaire game.”
“Jesus
finds the fourth golden ticket. Jesus
pawns his donkey for a hammer. Jesus
checks to see if he has on clean underwear.
Jesus is beaten by white police officers. Jesus makes an infomercial on loosing weight
by carrying large wooden objects and sweating a lot.”
“Jesus
funnels, he gets drunk. Jesus pulls the
fire alarm at the non-kosher sausage factory.
Jesus asks Mary Magdalene for one last go-around. Jesus gets a tattoo of a random Chinese
character. Jesus waves goodbye to his
gutter punk friends. Jesus knits an
afghan. Jesus uses alternative
assessment to forgive the world of its sins.
Jesus spills his coffee. Jesus
complains about the turnout and yells at Simon for stealing the spotlight. Jesus gets nailed to a tree and we cry.”
113
Sidney-January 17, 1992 - It is New Year’s Eve and I
am sitting at home with my mom feeling shitty.
I was dating someone named Sky, but it did not work out. Sky was too showy. Now I am dating Alden from work. I am nervous.
I do not want to let myself get vulnerable. Alden asks me a million questions, but
doesn’t reveal much about his self. If a
relationship has no room to grow, it is over.
Being popular in high school doesn’t mean shit once
you graduate.
At
my local library I found James O’Barr’s graphic novel, “The Crow.” I felt connected to the stark black and white
clown of a nothing-to-lose vigilante hero.
When the Brandon Lee movie came out, I hung a poster of the
died-in-filming son of the world’s greatest kung fu star on the back of my
bedroom door. I was drawn to the thought
of a man attempting to live within the rules of society and forcefully
extracted to reconcile blood.
The
Crow character’s wife was raped, both were murdered; vengeance was seething
with the possibility of a resurrected justice.
I ordered the poster and a rope necklace with a silver ring I wore
around my neck for years that was inscribed with, “real love is forever.” However clichéd, however naïve; that was the
type of world I wanted to live in, intensely connected, yet I was utterly
alone.
Spring
break came in a season of similar fissures in the eggshell. By the second half of my senior year I was
burnt out. Classes, wrestling, student
council and the vast gumming nothing were gnawing at my sides that this term of
my life was exasperated.
114
My
mom’s side of the family was in a mini-conference. Unmarried Aunt Audrey was pregnant. Grandma JoAnne was irate from what I could
decipher from my mother’s end of phone conversations. Audrey was Buddha-like. She was quiet and rarely spoke up.
I
later found out my mom drove Audrey to get an abortion. She said Audrey made the car smell like
peanut butter. They almost got in a
fight because Audrey was not supposed to eat before hand. My mom said Audrey did not know, but who knew
the truth. My mom had to wait in the car smelling the peanut butter the whole
time. The scent permeated her memory.
If
Audrey had gone to full term the child may have represented an immaterial
differentiation below a standard deviation in weight that may have been veiled
to the general public under simple visual inspection. However, much of my knowledge on the course
of events is constructed from the robust conversations echoing through the
sheetrock of my bedroom adjacent to my parents.
Although I had learned to block out the sound of my parents humping each
other earlier in my adolescence, boisterous debates over the contents of my
Aunt Audrey’s uterus managed to slip through the filter. My mom ended up spilling the beans when I
asked her about it later in life.
115
I
sent out final college applications. I
was down to Georgia Tech, Tulane, the University
of New Orleans and the University of North Carolina. The swarming ramifications of the American
debt dream hovered over my consciousness.
Tulane was no longer my father’s school.
The cost was exorbitant, privatized and deficient of the milkshake
straws to federal funding public universities were afforded. The gratuities of grants were being eaten by
greed into privatized loans with Shitty-Bank processing fees.
Should
I or could I go away to some unknown land in Chapel Hill? Would I go off to be an engineer in Atlanta? What the hell do engineers do? Would I stay at home? Envelopes were out. Applications were in and I was waiting for
financial aid answers. I was accepted to
all of them, but as with most endeavors in life aptitude is secondary to financing.
Sidney-March 11, 1992 - My life is so unsettled. I am dating someone new named Mark. Mark is not drop-dead gorgeous. He makes me laugh, but he is only my
height. He might be enlisting in the
army and going into boot camp in three months.
We talk about what will happen if he is gone in the army for three years. Today he showed me the papers. It kind of made it real.
I know I am a decent person. I am ok looking. That is enough. I will never be a super model
look-alike. At least I have a
personality and form an actual thought.
Have you decided what college you are going to? I am going to USF, University of South Florida. I want to major in psychology with a minor in
Italian. I am joining the Air Force
directly after college, which they will pay for my college and I am guaranteed
a job. The Coast Guard called too after
my results from the ASVAB, the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery.
Flirting is easier for girls. It is like trying to see something
indirectly. Relax, make eye contact and
smile. Trust your instincts and let them
see who you are. P.S. Did I tell you I
got my navel pierced?
116
Michael’s
two friends and I became a quartet. The
other pairing consisted of Trevor and Kristi.
Trevor liked to impersonate deep-black-lady voices. He played upon the subject of laughing at
race in the room with the disparity in melanin between our Oreo cookie. Michael and Trevor were on the outskirts of
Kristi and me.
(April
29th 1992, the riots in Los Angeles were like Homer Plessy returned
as one of God’s rapture angels leading an Armageddon army. Pew kneelers tend to imagine angels full of
white wings strumming harps. The Old
Testament is chock full of smote-purged bodies and cities in ruin.
For
the majority I was a pacifist, but I also sensed the duty of revolution. Sometimes a field needs razing. Rodney King was an emblematic rerun re-taped
piñata finally caught on video. Plessy’s
guts were busting out: Malcolm’s pancreas, Martin’s liver. Dread Scott was bubbling blood from ear
holes. Booker T had broken ankles. Easy E said it straight. Koon, Solano, Powell, Briseno, Wind, blew
away into sky like firecracker batons sparked into exonerated boys-in-blue dust
mounds. Denny got pummeled like a
reciprocal denominator, as if all our faces are just protons and
electrons.
I
am white. I don’t know. My words are Elmer’s glue. Nobody was listening. If the LAPD could do that, shit has got to
burn. You put a man in a box and just
short enough to where he is not allowed to stretch his limbs. There is always a bend in the knee, a cramped
elbow, and hunched shoulders. Eventually
the coffin is going to splinter. Ground
is going to shake. A man needs a purpose
and the dignity of fair work, not to be experimented on in sequestered lab-rat
ghettos. Crack, shit schools, no jobs,
police acted like border patrol. Criminalizing
drugs was a sadistic surrogate jobs program. )
Kristi
was a returning student, who spent her junior year at New Orleans’ secret-pregnant Catholic-run
girl’s high school for sequestered young mothers. I imagined a nun with a wagging finger at a
trans-dimensional iron-gate portal to the 1950’s. The nuns grabbed the Mary Magdalene’s by the
ear as the celibates sternly lectured on the landmines of sex. The nuns kept watch on the uterus to ensure
no Cinderella fairy godmother abortions were bippity-boppity-booped. The boys in the equation, when apprehended,
were forced to stare at a picture of Attorney General Janet Reno for three
hours a day and rub their scrotum with holy water to subdue their cum-loads of
devil-urges.
Kristi
had a son with this guy Dave, who she constantly huffed about; Dave-this and
Dave-that and a steady stream of “Well Fine’s!”
Kristi’s predicament made her a pariah to the dating class. Who wants to take on those prerequisite
burdens? Kristi would mouth things like,
“Me and Dave got arrested last night for fighting each other and I have to go
to classes now on how to be a good mother.”
Around
prom, I did not have any dating prospects.
Neither did Michael or Trevor. We
seemed to all be in the same boat. So we
decided to sail stag. Stay at home or go
basically alone. I faced the hurdle of
appearances and led to an uneventful evening: no dark-green drama, no dancing,
just a voyeuristic evening, watching the rest of my class blow out the trade
winds of final crowns and sashes. There
was no after party. No hot-tub time
machines, just the end of high school in an unremarkable blip. Los Angeles and
New Orleans
kept moving.
College
funding notifications arrived. The lotto
number combinations of tuition and room and board never summed to an equivalent
threshold to warrant the encumbrances of debt to validate my enrollment out of
state. I prayed for a miracle from Louisiana’s corrupt
legislative system. State legislators were
each allowed to grant a full-tuition scholarship to a single student in their
district to Tulane University, a private school.
I
had gotten an academic offer to Tulane.
There was a gap that represented indentured servitude. The legislative scholarship represented about
two hundred grand in that swindle, but that rat pellet went to some campaign
contributor’s grandson. Unfortunately my
parental precepts and my own insanity agreed to finance my yoke. I received a partial tuition scholarship and
took out loans. I had to pay my room and
board, fees and books, which was as much as tuition at a state school. I was going to be a townie, live at home and
commute.
117
We
had a senior awards breakfast. I posed
for pictures with the father-time-looking Brother Leopold. House gave me the English five award in the
form of a 1988 USA
hockey team commemorative puck. I made a
mini rink for it on the dashboard of my Ford Escort and tried to shoot goals on
left turns. A week later I graduated,
ate boiled seafood my dad got for peanuts at the Westwego shrimp lot and went
out like a never-lit candle.
I
always figured there were so many measures of high school that I completely
missed. I was there. I saw humans crawling in tunnels, embracing,
fondling, and combating each other.
It
was not that I thought I was better than anybody else; it was that these thoughts
in my head refused to stop. The
questions on the purpose of the pheromone parades, the preoccupations spread
like spores infecting my head. So little
of what was in the hallways, the streets made sense. It seemed so frivolous, insane, and
unattainable. There was no interface
like a car without a keyhole for ignition.
I
felt like an observer, a scientist peering into a microscope at a virus. I could not talk to it. I could not taste it. It looked like it would probably kill me if I
tried to ingest it or touch it or breathe it.
I had to stay away, just thinking about it, questioning why it did what
it did. All it got was bigger. It was spreading and all it made me feel was
separate.
Reality
was the virus and I were one in the same.
The blob was an amalgam of species and spirit, the microscope was but a
mirror. All of that was me; all of me
was that.
The
reason I wrote conundrum sentences and senseless poems was that looking from
inside the viral train station in the commotion all I could hear was
quiet. The quiet wandered externally in
the crowd. The silence was always at
battle with the incessant pondering babble inside my skull.
The
jackhammer questions still have not stopped!
It is so damn loud in all this silence.
The only way to make it cease is to write. I must write to expel the toxins. Out, out, out damn spot, out! Make room on the assembly line for the next
batch of thoughts. I wanted somebody to
talk to and could never figure out how to start a conversation. Where is the ignition? Passengers with hat boxes and gray sweaters,
uniforms are useless to identify who is open to talk; all I learned in high
school was to keep my mouth shut.
Continue to Chapter 5 part 1
Continue to Chapter 5 part 1
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