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All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Published in the United States by Ghostweed Press, Chicago. www.ghostweed.com
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contents
| Book 1: Silence | ||
| I. Technicians in dirty jumpsuits | ||
| II. Me banana you banana me you give | ||
| III. Join in the newer industries | ||
| IV. For I was hungered, and ye gave me meat | ||
| V. Banana me me me eat | ||
In the dark, my parents were up front. We drove home in the dark and they didn’t say anything. I looked out the window. Not out it but at it. Drops of rainwater clung to the glass, lighting up with colors from illuminated advertising. We drove only the one route through town, so I knew where we were without having to focus beyond the window. The droplets shone red and white from Dairy Queen. They shone red and green from Chili’s. There was nothing to see beyond that—I got everything from the colors.
The bigger drops cut zigzags through the drops that weren’t as big. The air rushing past the car drove them all backward, and the more each drop swallowed the quicker it went. My mom mumbled something, but when my dad asked, “What?” she didn’t answer him. Blue and yellow: Best Buy. I’d heard kids at school talk about shoplifting videogames from Best Buy, but I don’t know how they could have done it.
The parking lots were empty on the weeknights. The empty asphalt and the fading guidelines lay there unused, covered up by the rain that rolled across the windows. And there was more rain where that came from, and you could tell the traffic lights because the whole window changed from red to green, all at once, just like that.
Just like something can begin in the smallest way—the stupidest, most inconsequential and stupid way, that makes you want to stop before you begin, because what kind of a story would begin like this?
I hadn’t said anything at the restaurant. I hadn’t listened to whatever they’d said. I’d accidentally left a bottle of Coke in the freezer, and when it exploded it would stick to everything, dripping and freezing and leaving sugary trails of brown ice. It had happened to me before.
I’d put the Coke in the freezer that afternoon. I’d found a six-pack in the basement, and the fridge would have taken too long so I’d put one bottle in the freezer. The glass bottle looked a little like the plastic ones you can buy but it was narrower and sharper, and the glass had a greenish color instead of no color at all. And “Coca-Cola” was painted in white, so there was no plasticky paper to tear off and throw away.
I don’t know how the Coke got down there in the basement.
My parents kept on saying nothing as we got closer to home, waiting at empty intersections for nobody in the other direction. They’d probably stand there while I sponged out the freezer. They’d watch me and give me cleaning tips.
The car slid into our street like it always did. It slid softly around the corner, and the corner was the same as it always was, with the same curb holding up the same white rocks, all the same color, the same size of your palm. With the same multiplex mailbox for the entire cul-de-sac, and the same wooden sign that sort of tried to look old, that said Glenwood Park. There never was any park, unless you counted the plastic climbing toy in the neighbors’ yard—the rainbow-colored thing that nobody ever touched. The climbing toy was soft and puffy, like a padded cell, because when you saw it sitting there dirty and forlorn on somebody’s lawn you wanted to kill yourself on it first thing.
“First day of school tomorrow, eh Aleks?” My dad raised his eyebrows in the rearview mirror just before my mom opened her door and the overhead light came on.
“Yeah.” I was still hoping to catch the Coke before it froze. I hurried inside. The bottle was cold but it wasn’t frozen. It let out a little puff of vapor when I opened it, but when I tilted it up to my mouth nothing came out. I held the bottle to the light and saw that the top had frozen over. I thought I’d got there just in time.
“That’s interesting.” My dad came up behind me. “Did it just freeze?”
“I forgot about it. In the freezer.”
“You know what happened Aleks?” He took the bottle from me and held it to the light himself. “The pressure.” Sometimes it was hard to think of my dad as a teacher—of other kids calling him, “Mr. Szczygiel.” Other times it wasn’t hard at all. “Pressure is like heat. Pressure keeps it from freezing.”
I took back the bottle and jabbed at the frozen Coke with the butt of a fork.
“When you open the bottle the pressure drops, just like a drop in temperature but it’s instant, so it freezes. That’s cool.” Cool came out the way it always does with teachers, like a third-grader saying fuck. Like an extra-large t-shirt on a preteen that dresses his bony thighs. “I should do that in class.”
I don’t think my dad had changed his class once since the high school hired him. There was a pile of xeroxes in his study that he ran off once a year. There were little comics in the corners of some of the pages that were supposed to be funny, but they were all fifteen years old.
“All the water molecules are sliding around, packed so tightly they can’t slow down. When the pressure falls, the molecules want to form crystals but they don’t know how to begin. It takes a little impurity, like a speck of dust. The dust hits a water molecule and they link arms and start a new crystal. Each molecule that hits the crystal attaches itself somewhere around the outside. Then it’s that much bigger, it runs into more of the others, faster and faster, until just like that,” he snapped his fingers and the empty kitchen amplified the sound, “the whole thing’s frozen. All from just that one speck of dust.”
I was still trying to make it pour while he talked. I took it with me to my room, but everything that came out was syrupy and flat. After I drank all I could get the bottle was still full of ice, but the ice wasn’t so brown anymore.
The next morning it was there on the nightstand with an inch of gray water at the bottom. I saw it sitting there when my mom woke me up, and it was still there when I left for school, sitting there all stupid in a little mess of condensation.
The first day of school it’s still summery. Because it was the first day my mom gave me a ride, and because it was the first day I jumped at the alarm and we pulled up to the school with twenty minutes to spare. The school was squat and brick just like before. We all crowded through the front door and I watched for old faces with new haircuts. We were ninth-graders now, at the top of the junior high. In seventh grade the ninth graders were big and hairy, but I didn’t feel big. The new kids looked like elementary schoolers.
Everybody I knew ended up in the same homeroom except me. The printout on their schedules had “Schloticker 204” where mine had “Flatworth 208.” I’d long since torn the feeders off the sides of the schedule and wound the strips of paper into springy rolls. Somewhere there was a whole landfill of those rolls, along with spiraled tubes and accordions.
I’d seen Mrs. Flatworth in the halls for two years. She was always trying to be friendly with one of the ninth graders, but she didn’t have a friendly face. Her face was molded in a permanent scowl, patched up with putty and starting to droop at the corners. She had dull skin and dull brown saggy hair, and I could tell I didn’t like her even without hearing her speak.
I walked to the classroom on the second floor, pushing past all the kids catching up with their friends. The girls squealed like they’d been locked in the basement all summer, and the guys took turns tripping each other. I could see through the glass that the lights were off so I didn’t go inside. I went back down the stairs and through the lower hallway in the opposite direction. The school had five or six loops that you could walk if you didn’t want to arrive anywhere. They’d painted the lockers gold instead of gray, and with no locks half of them hung open.
It was still early. I went to the bathroom. I stood in front of a urinal until I heard someone else coming in, then I pretended I’d just finished.
The next time around the loop there were people in the classroom. There were a couple clusters of twos or threes and some loners—nobody I really knew. I sat by myself at the far right, halfway back. I was hoping she’d put us in alphabetical order or something.
She came in and sat against her desk and she tried to chat us up. Her voice was tinny, with a drawl. It matched her baggy face.
“How was your summer?” Nobody said anything. “Just kind of ok? Not bad, not great?” There were a couple nods.
Jenie Berman and Ericka Anderson came in together. Ericka said “Hi everybody!” and Jenie laughed. Ericka started toward the back of the room but Jenie pulled her hand and said, “Let’s sit up in the front. We want to pay attention.” Mrs. Flatworth looked skeptical but Jenie kept smiling. They sat in the first row—Ericka in front of me, Jenie one desk over.
Jenie had huge new breasts. She and Ericka tugging at each other made the breasts bounce back and forth, and when she sat forward in her seat the breasts pushed her tie-dyed t-shirt against the desk. The elite kids always seemed to have the brightest and best-looking tie-dyes, on down to the losers wearing one faded color over white—baby blue or sorry magenta.
It was past seven thirty but people were still coming in. Drew Mullins and Todd Spade walked through the door and Todd said, “Let’s sit by Chesty.” They took the seats between me and the two girls—putting me in the middle of the elite kids. Drew Mullins turned in his chair to face me.
“How was your summer man?” The skin on his forehead was rough and shiny.
“It was ok.”
“Yeah? That’s cool man. Cool.” He checked that Mrs. Flatworth wasn’t watching him, then he whispered to me. “What do you think of Berman?”
I caught her glance, but she pretended she hadn’t heard. I didn’t have to answer because Todd laughed. “Dude, why would he care?”
Mrs. Flatworth was standing in front of the class trying to get us to be quiet. “I’m Mrs. Flatworth, and this is World History, so if it doesn’t say that on your schedule, you’re in the wrong—”
Then Ken Duffy came running in. He stopped at the front of the class, looked around and shouted, “It’s ok everybody! I made it here!”
Drew Mullins’ voice boomed, “Duffy!” I probably could have made a voice like that, but I would never have tried it at school.
“Sorry, sorry. I didn’t mean to interrupt the class. Let me just go and quietly take my seat.” He sat next to me. “What’s he doing here?”
Ericka laughed. “God, you guys are so mean.”
Mrs. Flatworth was half-trying to look impatient. She gave handouts to the people at the front of each row. “Now, everyone here should be ready to learn about World History.” She said “World History” like an annoying little song. “But first we need to go over some basic rules and regulations. Mr. Duffy, why don’t you read this handout for us.”
| 1. The teacher is always right.
2. When the teacher is wrong, see rule 1.
|
Mrs. Flatworth smiled after that. Nobody else bothered to pretend that it was funny. There was a list of supplies. Every year we were supposed to get colored pencils, but we never used them. We were supposed to fill out index cards with our names and numbers and things, and she passed those out, too.
Jenie and Ericka were whispering. “Did you hear about Lili?”
Todd and Drew answered her, both talking at once:
“I heard about Lili.”
“I read about Lili in the bathroom.”
Ericka made a disgusted face. “I can’t believe her. Maybe she’ll get a STD—”
All three of the guys laughed.
“—I mean ... Not a dying one. Like Herpes or something.”
Mrs. Flatworth collected the index cards and started laying them out to match our desks, but then she stopped.
“Do you guys want me to assign seats, or do you want to stay like this?”
“Stay like this.”
“Like this.”
Anyone who spoke up always wanted to stay where they’d sat, with their friends.
“Ok, we’ll stay like this, but remember where you’re sitting because I’ll take attendance by your seat.”
I could never learn names either. I don’t know what the teachers did, but I made up nicknames for the people I didn’t know. Usually the names were about each kid’s own special style of ugly: Leukemia Boy, Mugger, Earhead, Harvard Jr. Then there were kids you didn’t have to name: Black Kid.
Here there was Chin Man and No Chin Man and a girl I called The Fang-Toothed Fiend because she needed braces so bad. I always wondered whether the teachers did the same thing—I imagined Mrs. Flatworth making little notes on her index cards, like “red hair,” or “fat.”
I had my own problems this time of year. “Here’s an interesting one. Mr. ... Sick-zit-gel?” People laughed and turned to look at me. “Oh, did I say that wrong?”
“It’s Szczygiel.”
“Shtick-you?”
“Szczygiel.”
“Well, you’re going to have to help me out with that one. What kind of name is that?”
“Polish.”
“Oh, that’s interesting. Does it mean something?”
“It means goldfinch.”
“Oh, what a pretty name.” She said “Oh” in the same way both times, still singing the “World History” song.
I got more xeroxes in other classes and filled out more index cards. I got a locker and textbooks to fill it, and they gave us a week to make covers for the textbooks.
Lunch was the first place I saw people I knew. We sat at the same table we’d used the year before. I was done with my sandwich before the school lunch people got out of the line. Their lunch was pizza the first day. That made them happy.
Gabe was talking to Scott about Mr. Schloticker, the physical science teacher. “I told my sister that I had Mr. Schloticker and she told me that her friend saw him eating at IHOP with another man once.”
“So? Maybe it was some teacher meeting.”
“No, I mean she said they both looked like they just woke up, and they were playing footsie and stuff.”
Nobody said much to Gabe’s news.
“I’m telling you. He’s like a serious gay sex magnate.”
“I just don’t like his glasses or his weird combover. But I’m at the back of the room, thank God.”
I said, “Thanks, God!” Except for telling Drew Mullins how my summer was and telling Mrs. Flatworth how to say my name, that was the first thing I’d said all day.
Gabe laughed. “Yeah. You’re the best God ever!”
Lunch was fifty minutes. Nobody said anything for a while—they were eating their pizza. There was a red-haired kid Timothy Meigs who always sat with us. He’d get school lunch and then play with it. He was winding cheese around his fork until it looked like a mummy’s arm. After a while, he said, “Has anyone seen Cafeteria Harrison yet?” We all looked around for the lunch monitor but he wasn’t there.
Cafeteria Harrison had been a student at my school once. He would have been one of the stoner kids. Now he had shoulder-length hair and a lip-liner mustache, and aside from the skateboarding assistant principal he was the only adult that favored the stoner kids instead of the elite kids. I don’t know what kind of kids we were. Nobody favored us.
“I heard some of the teachers talking about him earlier, but I couldn’t hear what they said. I don’t think he’s coming back.”
“What happened to him?”
“They were talking about it like it was some big secret. I was trying to listen but then they noticed me. I don’t think he’ll come back.”
“Do you guys want to go outside?”
“No.”
There was an eruption of shouting at one of the crowded tables. We all turned to look but nothing was happening. Lunch went on like that until it was time for sixth period. Mr. Schloticker had tinted sunglasses and a combover that reached all the way to where his bangs should have been. It looked like he’d gone at it with a glue stick three or four days ago and slept with a bath cap ever since. He had the look of a solid child molester.
Gym was last. The gym teacher for the ninth graders was Mr. Forman, a stubbly bald guy who always had on a sweatshirt and a pair of shorts that showed his swollen calves. Except for the bald parts, the gray stubble was the same length all over his head. He took us on a tour of the equipment, and he told us what would happen to us on it if we misbehaved.
He showed us the locker room, where the floor was dark brown tile with a white tile every so often. “Run on the tile and you’ll crack your skull.” There were benches for changing, with two heavy wooden beams separated by a fist-width space. “See these benches? If you goof off in here and you jump up on one of these benches and you fall, your foot might get caught in here, and your calf will splinter right in half from your weight. Your shattered bone will tear out through your skin. We had a kid once, the edge of his bone was sticking through the middle of his leg. I had to hold him down while the ambulance came.”
He told us we were required to change clothes. “You guys, you know, you get to a certain age, you start to stink. I don’t want Mr. Ludovich coming in here and complaining to me because you stink. I better not see anybody wearing the same clothes during the day as they are in my gym class. If I catch you, you’ll have to sit the day out and you’ll get an unexcused absence.”
It didn’t take that long and there wasn’t anything else to do, so he told us we could just wait around in the gymnasium. Some people talked to their friends. The guys shot baskets.
The ceiling panels zigzagged up and down and the south-facing panels had windows. There were girders underneath the panels, and the panels and girders were covered with fluffy, brownish-white stuff. Sometimes chunks of it would float down from the ceiling, and sometimes people would argue about whether or not it was asbestos, but it couldn’t have been asbestos.
After the bell rang I could leave straight away because I had all my stuff with me—nobody had a lock for their locker. I went slowly so I might run into somebody I knew, but that didn’t happen. The kids who lived far away got into buses or cars, and everybody else walked. Even moving slowly I was one of the first to reach the sidewalk that led away from the school. I looked back a couple times to see if there was something going on that was holding people up—something I didn’t know about—but I don’t think there was.
My dad told me about an experiment where they raised kittens inside cylinders painted with either horizontal or vertical stripes. The floors and ceilings were mirrors that extended the stripes forever—stripes were all the kittens could see. When they grew up the scientists let them out of the boxes, but their vision was all wrong. The cats raised in boxes with horizontal stripes would knock their heads into poles because they couldn’t see them. The cats from the vertical-striped boxes couldn’t see stairs.
I don’t know what happened to the cats after that.
The walk home was a long one. I followed the road along the edge of the mall parking lots. The road turned to highway once you got out of town, so it was always jammed. There was never anybody walking there—just cars speeding forward to catch lights, or backed up behind them, or circling the lots looking for a closer spot. When you did see people they were walking from their cars to Sears or Osco or Home Depot. At the drive-throughs they didn’t even do that. Nobody walked like I did—along the edge of the lots, trailing the cars in the street. I counted the cars parked in one row, and then counted the rows and tried to estimate how many people were parked outside The Container Store. Maybe seventy.
The strip with the big lots went a couple blocks before changing over to little malls with only ten or so cars each. Each store put different plants in its medians: the bank had little reddish bushes sprouting out of rocks; the fake Chinese restaurant had saplings in mulch. The saplings couldn’t seem to take root—they put in new ones every couple years, and the old ones got thrown in dumpsters.
The oldest part of town was past the malls and over the disused train tracks. But only parts of it were old—every few months one of the buildings got replaced by a new Pearl Vision or travel agency or Starbucks.
My favorite was the animal feed manufactory that still ran sometimes. It looked like one big machine. Iron structural beams ran every which way beneath the water tank, the ducts, and the conveyor belt between the silos. The towers seemed to sag in on themselves a little. Crows would sit on the beams, and in the winter you could see the whole thing steaming.
It bristled with sharp edges like an evil jungle gym, and if there hadn’t been people around I would have climbed it. I had a plan for getting up there, from the fence to the office roof to the slanting storage roof to the struts underneath the conveyor belt. The duct at the top was treacherously curved, like I could have slipped and fallen and impaled myself on the air intake two stories down. I thought it would be fun to haunt the animal feed manufactory and scare the kids that came around the back to smoke. Maybe crows would take orders from a ghost.
The animal feed manufactory was squeezed right into the old downtown, half a block from the new twelve-screen cineplex and its mall of fancy shops. Past that were Wendy’s and Red Lobster and the first houses. Not houses but those half-houses all bound together at the edges, all painted the same light brown, all with pale blue garages and doors, the doors all with brass knockers and knobs. I’d never met anybody who lived in one of those.
After that came some older houses—one story with slanty roofs and trees around them. Real trees now, not saplings. Then the houses got newer and bigger and the trees got smaller. Cul-de-sacs sprang up with pastoral names: Lakewood Terrace, Maple Glen, Elmwood Lane, Woodgrove Farm. Sometimes I made up new ones as I went and imagined them nestled in with the rest: Cunny Glen, Cock Lake, Analrot Manor, Sodomy Park.
Our street was concrete-paved. The concrete split and cracked in the summer and they’d fill the cracks with tar, and the bubbly black veins of tar crisscrossed the white road surface. You could jab a rock into the tar and it would just stick there on end.
Most of the neighbors had bright green lawns, and trucks would come by and spray them with chemicals. The trucks never stopped at our house.
Our lawn was dead as could be. It was almost orange. Sometimes Dad would get on a big lawn kick, especially in the summer. He’d stand out there pouring water onto it with the hose. The hard ground and the dead grass didn’t take up the water, and the puddles would sit there in the sun till you could almost hear the grass sizzle, and if you walked across it, it was warm on your feet and disgusting. After a two or three weeks he’d give up and stay inside for another year.
I let myself in the front door—Dad would be at the high school until four or five. I was nervous about what would happen in a year, when I had to go to the same school where he taught. But the first day of the year was over. There was nothing I needed to do, so I watched TV. When the phone rang I thought it might be someone calling to talk about the first day of school.
“Hi, my name is Cindy and I’m with the Veteran Firefighters Association, and what we are is a nonprofit organization made up of retired firefighters that do all kinds of work within the community for example if you have a child yourself you may know it’s back-to-school time and we did a program this year to provide new clothing for children of low-income families so that they’d have something to wear to school, and right now we’re doing our fall fundraiser trying to raise money that we’ll use for community programs like our back-to-school-clothes program and to buy uniforms for our members so they can participate in parades and other community events and hopefully raise awareness among members of the community for the need for this kind of involvement by these people who’ve already in their lives given so much and so many hours doing such a hard job, a job that you or I probably wouldn’t be able to do but they’re out there every day and so once a year we go around and ask that people maybe give a little back, and I was just hoping that we could count on you. Can we count on you for support this year?”
“Yeah, that sounds great.”
“Yes it is it’s just a great bunch of guys and they do great work here and for our community. It’s something you can really feel good about. What level would you like to support us at?”
“Oh, um—fully.”
She laughed. “You’re sweet. Ok. Well, one of our most popular options is a ten-dollar-a-month plan, and if you support us at that level you’ll get a genuine fire badge like the firefighters wear, with your name on it. Would you like me to put you down at that level?”
She hung up when she found out I didn’t have any money.
When I heard my parents coming in, I went up to my room to hide. They called me down to eat and Mom asked first thing, “So how was it?” Dad was staring at the sports page spread out next to his plate.
“Fine.”
“Is that all you have to say?”
“Yeah.”
“Was it good?”
“Dunno.”
“Is there somebody else who knows?”
I pretended to be saying something through a mouthful of chicken.
“Our son is always so articulate, isn’t he honey?”
Dad imitated me with the chicken and kept reading. Mom always made the same jokes about how I didn’t answer. I couldn’t have answered. What was there to say?
How did it go? Most of my teachers already made it clear that they expect nothing more than good behavior.
How did it go? I spent most of the day standing around and eavesdropping.
How did it go? I’m pretty sure the cafeteria monitor got fired for acting pervy, but the biggest difference from last year was Jenie Berman’s tits.
How did it go? It went, and now it’s gone.
It was all permanent—the same as it had been the year before, the same as it always would be. Every year I followed the same steps, not one of them worthy of remark, and with no end in sight the best I could say at the end of each day was that I’d finished that one.
In 1976, the LA Herald named the Reverend Jim Jones “Humanitarian of the Year.” Fathers of Church and State heralded the People’s Temple. They called it “a very close-knit group of people who really do carry out the admonition of Matthew 25.” They said, “You’d go in if you were in trouble, if you were in need, and they’d take care of you—no questions asked.”
On November 18, 1978, 911 of Jones’ followers living in Jonestown, Guyana died with a few shudders of chemical asphyxiation. They died because they drank from dixie cups filled with a mixture of FlaVorAid and potassium cyanide.
Jimmy Carter, the President of the United States, said, “We don’t need to deplore on a nationwide basis the fact that the Jonestown Cult—so called, was typical of America—because it’s not.” Forbes Burnham, the Prime Minister of Guyana, disagreed: “Essentially, it’s an American problem of these cultists.” The Russian magazine Tass blamed the “American way of life.” The French Le Monde said, “It would have been inconceivable and impossible on American soil. They needed to be uprooted, transported into the heart of the jungle and transformed into convicts of a delirious faith in a Messiah unleashing his instincts of domination and death to become self-destructive robots.”
Journalists and conspiracy theorists blamed the CIA, the Mafia, the Freemasons, the KKK, and the B’nai B’rith. They blamed General Foods. They blamed the delirious Messiah and they blamed the self-destructive robots.
The whole world disowned the People’s Temple and disowned the corpses of its nine hundred members. One Congressman said, “They should have dug a hole in Guyana and bulldozed the whole bunch of them in.” Instead the U.S. Government flew the bodies to an Air Force base in Dover, Delaware. Most of them were never claimed, and the citizens of Delaware wrote letters of protest: “Cremation at sea is a lovely burial rite and ceremony, and, of course, we will not contaminate the landmass of the United States with another quasi-religious temple.”
The members of the People’s Temple had been outcasts to begin with—deadbeats, junkies, geriatrics, blacks and retards—but their bodies were simple contagion. Death transformed them from humanitarians to subhumans. The change was made possible when people demanded an explanation for a thousand blackened bodies strewn around a shoddy farm in South America. They demanded a story, and in stories, things change.
Two weeks into the school year, Scott Setter and I stood waiting for Gabe outside the school. We were going to Scott’s to play Sega. Gabe hadn’t come out the front doors yet, but the school Christian group was gathering. They had a sign-up table hung with a banner made from a white sheet. A couple of the Christian kids were standing behind the table, but nobody was paying them any attention.
There was a boombox on the table playing some Christian rock. A guy was singing about how he needed nothing but Jesus. It sounded like a bunch of ordinary sentences that someone had strung together with notes—mostly the same two notes. The cadence of the words wasn’t right. It was like they weren’t even trying.
I looked down on the Christian kids. They made it easy with their Christian rock, Christian rap, and Christian events. It was all meant to draw people in, but you’d have to be truly, deeply pathetic to be taken in by any of that. The kids in the Christian group were the kids nobody liked—nobody at all—who weren’t good at anything. Of course those kids wanted to believe their reward was coming in the next life. It was obvious it wasn’t coming in this one—as obvious to them as it was to everybody else. Of course they wanted to believe God loved them. It was obvious no one else did.
One of them was a kid named Roger, with blond white hair and pale white skin. He was sitting at the table like he expected someone to run up and punch him in the face. He always looked like that. What kind of name was Roger anyway? Nobody was named Roger anymore—his parents must have been as out of it as he was. The other was a girl I didn’t know, but she looked even more timid than Roger.
Gabe finally came out and we left the Christians behind. We walked toward Scott’s house. “What’s the funniest Bible story, you think?”
“Moneychangers!” Scott lived only a few blocks from the school, so when we went anywhere it was usually to his house.
I said that I liked when the lady got turned into a pillar of salt.
“Moneychangers! It’s totally moneychangers!”
We were walking along the dry sewage ditch at the side of the road. Gabe said, “Shut up,” and shoved Scott in the ditch. Scott went along toggling the red flags on all the mailboxes, and Gabe said, “I think the funniest was when Jesus Christ got crucified.”
“Aw, man.” Scott was the only one of the three of us that still had to go to church. “That was only funny the first time.”
The Reverend Jim Jones didn’t care for religion. He found his first congregation in a used car lot in Indiana. When he heard the owner was a Methodist Superintendent he started badmouthing the Church just to get a rise out of him. The Methodist invited Jim Jones into his office. “I thought, ‘You fucker I’m not coming to your god-damn office.’ But I did, for some instinctive reason I went. He said, ‘I want you to take a church.’ I said, ‘You giving me a church? I don’t believe in anything. I’m a revolutionary.’ He appointed me, a fucking communist, to a god-damned church. I take this god-damned church as a communist who believed in nothing—that is how religious I was and still am.”
The Reverend Jim Jones was a revolutionary. Sometimes he said God up in the sky was like a buzzard, feeding on His people. Sometimes he talked about God almighty, Socialism. Sometimes he himself was God. Sometimes he was just a man with supernatural powers. Sometimes he was a man who put on a show, like the Wizard of Oz.
If people needed a God, he could be their God. If they needed faith healing, he would heal them. If they needed to see him return from the dead after being shot, that was what he’d do. As long as it got them where they needed to be: in his church. He based his interracial ministry on his own role as a living God, fashioning his church after the Peace Mission founded during the Depression by M.J. “Father” Divine, who had preached, “Because your God would not feed the people, I came and I am feeding them. Because your God kept such as you segregated and discriminated, I came and I am unifying all nations together.”
He put on a healing show to bring in a black audience. They displaced the white congregation, and Jim Jones didn’t care. He wanted people of all races in his church. He wanted old people and poor people. His church raised money and gave it to schools in black communities, they brought groceries to people who couldn’t get their own, and they campaigned for candidates who would look out for the poor. He got George Moscone elected. If you were going to stage a rally or protest, you could call Jim Jones and hundreds of people would show up courtesy of the People’s Temple. He called himself Nigger Jones. He used white to mean “bad,” and black to mean “good.”
He called the night those nine hundred people died a white night.
When we got to Scott’s place, the Sega was busted. We all trooped down to the basement, pushing past each other to get one of the two controllers. I jabbed the TV and the Sega on. The TV whistled and warmed from black, but the image that came up was mangled and out of place. I recognized pieces here and there, but the colors were all pink and weird. I rushed to turn it off because I imagined it destroying itself like a melting reel of film. Scott said it couldn’t hurt and he tried it again, but it was the same every time.
“Damn, Setter. Nice Sega.”
“Weird. Maybe the cat peed on it. He likes to, for some reason.”
“We could go back and join the Jesus people.”
He had a ping-pong table in his basement. We tried to play ping-pong, but all the balls were cracked and they didn’t bounce right. So we just sat there on the dirty couch with the springs that went up your ass. We stared at the dark red carpeting that covered the concrete floor.
“Can we see the bird?”
Scott’s brother had a falcon. It was in a cage in his room under a blanket. It would sleep as long as the blanket was there because it thought that made it night. “My brother would kick my ass,” Scott said.
“He won’t get back for another hour. I always used to snoop around my sister’s room right after I got home. They don’t get out for another hour.”
“It doesn’t even do anything. It’s just a bird.”
“It’s better than your Sega and your ping-pong table. Or is it broken, too? Did its beak fall off? Is that why you don’t want to show it to us? Your house kind of sucks.”
“Then why don’t we go look around your sister’s room?”
“My sister doesn’t have any falcons.”
“Your sister’s totally hot.”
“That’s great, Scott.”
“No I’m serious. It’s true right Aleks?”
I didn’t want to annoy Gabe, so I just mumbled, “I dunno.” She was a year older than Scott’s brother. She was working for a year, saving up money to go to college. I hadn’t seen her since the year before, but sometimes when we were hanging around Gabe’s house she’d show up in bare feet and torn jeans. She always seemed to be eating something sugary, but her torn jeans were still tiny. They were tight around her slender legs.
“Come on Aleks admit it, it’s true.”
“He already said he didn’t know.”
“He’s just being nice. She’s hot, right Aleks?”
“Shut up!”
I gave up. “She kind of is, yeah.”
Gabe rolled his eyes.
“I’m just saying.”
“Hey speaking of that, you know how Mr. Forman had us doing those stupid relay races in gym today?”
“Don’t try to change the subject. We’re talking about your sister.”
“Shut up sooo much.” Gabe turned away from Scott. “So I was sitting there in the bleachers while the girls were doing their relay, and Jenie Berman got the baton and ran to the opposite side of the gym, and then she turned around and while she was running back her boobs were just crazy bouncing up and down—like so much it looked painful. And Ken Duffy stood up and started stamping on the bleachers and shouting ‘Yeah!’”
I looked over at Scott, who was sitting against the ping-pong table laughing. “What’d Mr. Forman do?”
“He didn’t do anything. He just ignored the whole thing. She didn’t say anything either.”
Scott pulled his legs up to sit cross-legged on the table. “Wouldn’t that be weird if you had to show up at school one day with these big boobs?”
Nobody answered him.
“What would you do? It’d be like when you get new sneakers or something.”
“I’d probably leave them at home, at least until they got a little roughed-up and not so shiny white.”
“Yeah really.”
“Oh and Aleks listen to this: in Physical Science while we were working on that lab, totally out of nowhere, Eric DeCarta—”
Scott burst out laughing.
“—in this really loud voice he suddenly says—”
In unison, Gabe and Scott shouted, “Man, I’m way too hung for these pants!”
The Reverend Jim Jones was a fan of Huey Newton’s book Revolutionary Suicide. Huey Newton said later that he hadn’t meant it like that. He meant to distinguish revolutionary suicide from reactionary suicide. Reactionary suicides were not just the literal suicides but everyone who abandoned hope: alcoholics, druggies, and petty criminals. Revolutionary suicides died before they broke. The two choices were exhaustive; that you ended up a suicide was never in doubt; the only question was how. “The first thing the revolutionary must learn is that he is a doomed man.”
On January 1, 1976, Jones gathered thirty temple members together for a white night. He warned them about enemies of the church in the United States. They drank a glass of wine together, and then he told them the wine had been poisoned.
But there was no poison. “It was a good lesson,” Jones said. “I see you’re not dead.” He conducted not one but seven of these suicide drills. The members of the People’s Temple didn’t mind the idea of dying.
“I don’t understand people wanting to live anyway.”
“It would be fun to die.”
“It would be better to die and get it over with.”
The Reverend Jim Jones’ first congregation in Indiana moved to Ukiah, California. They became the People’s Temple. They opened an office in San Francisco where they did most of their humanitarian work. But Jim Jones’ fears of meddling and nuclear holocaust convinced him to move again, to Jonestown, Guyana. He wanted to create a self-sufficient community. The People’s Temple Agricultural Project raised cassava, cutlass beans, goats and chickens. A thousand Americans living in the jungle in Guyana worked to feed, house, and entertain each other. They held dances. They listened to Radio Moscow.
“It’s fantastic to hear what’s going on in the world, the very opposite of what it was in the States where they just told you a bunch of crap all the time about what you needed to buy.”
A group called Concerned Relatives spoke out against all the good press. They were former members and relatives of members. They said the Temple held people against their will. They called Jim Jones a brainwasher and a tyrant. Jim Jones called them jilted meddlers bent on destroying the Temple. It was because of the Concerned Relatives that Congressman Leo Ryan arrived in Guyana on November 17, 1978, the day before the final white night. He was at the head of a congressional investigation into the Temple.
No one knows how all the Temple’s members felt, but many of them shared Jones’ desire for escape. “I’m no longer afraid. I’ve lost interest in the whole world of capitalist sin. I’d just as soon bring it to a gallant, glorious, screaming end, a screeching stop in one glorious moment of triumph.”
The moment of triumph began when Congressman Ryan and his delegation were ambushed at the Kaituma airstrip and killed. Jones’ mercenaries slit the throats of a family that had tried to defect. 911 Temple members drank cyanide. Three died from bullet wounds.
Months later, a lawyer for the Temple called a press conference in a hotel room in Modesto, California. His name was Michael Prokes, and he had survived the white night because at the time he was working in San Francisco.
“Through the Temple,” he said, “I understood what it meant to be black and old and poor in this society.
“The Temple was making tremendous achievements in terms of human rehabilitation and improvement in the quality of peoples’ lives and character.
“I can’t dissociate myself from those people who died, nor do I want to.”
He excused himself from the press conference, went into the bathroom, and shot himself in the head with a .38 caliber pistol.
Scott’s brother Ryan got home after about an hour. We were still sitting on the pokey couch when he came down the stairs to get something from the dryer.
“What are you guys doing?”
“The Sega broke.”
“You broke the Sega?”
“No we didn’t break it. It just broke.”
“Yeah, ok. It ‘just broke.’ How did it ‘just break’?”
“We don’ know dicknock! We just turned it on and it wasn’t working.”
“Maybe the cat peed on it.”
The basement was dirty and dark. The only light came through the high grungy windows and hit the couch between me and Gabe.
“You weren’t messing with Orclos were you?”
“No, we weren’t messing with your stupid bird.”
“So you’ve just been sitting here, doing nothing, just cause the Sega’s broken?”
“Yeah, so?”
“You guys are losers. No wonder you can’t get girlfriends. I’m gonna listen to music. Stay out of my room.”
He went back up the stairs. Gabe and I looked at each other, and Gabe looked at Scott. “Hey, you know how your brother and my sister used to be in the same math class?”
Scott looked up. “Yeah?”
“Did I ever tell you that she told me one time they all looked in his notebook while he was in the bathroom, and it was full of drawings of falcons, guys with swords, and dicks?”
The walk home was long enough that I usually rode my bicycle to school. My parents made me wear a helmet that was huge and white and egg-looking. Before the time change the sun wasn’t up when I’d start, so I’d pedal along in the cold half-light. I’d try not to get run down by cars that probably couldn’t see me even with the egg on my head.
I didn’t have any close calls that morning. At one stoplight a black jeep pulled up—stopping and lurching like it couldn’t stand to be reined in. Like it had to menace at the next car’s bumper like an idiot dog. The stereo was up loud but only an angry, phlegmy growl came though the sealed windows. The light changed and the jeep jumped and the tires tore at the pavement just a few feet away from where I stood.
I got near the school and then veered onto a side street like I did every morning. Like every morning I took off my bag, took off my helmet, stuffed the helmet in the bag and pulled the bag back over my shoulders. With the helmet in my bag I rode the last two blocks past the kids getting off buses and out of their parents’ cars. The edge of the sun burned my eyes from behind a building while I leaned over to lock the bike.
Mrs. Flatworth hadn’t changed our seats. I was still stuck with the elite kids, and every morning they resented me all over again. I felt Ericka Anderson’s eyes on me, but she ignored me once Todd Spade arrived.
“Todd! Oh my God! Sunday! My dad won’t even speak to me!”
He had a little giggle when he laughed. The giggle cracked his voice a little, and that always made girls smile at him. He had big brown eyes and a sharp jaw.
“It’s not funny.” She was only play-angry.
“I didn’t make you get in Lloyd’s car.”
“You got in first!”
“My dad’s not mad at me.”
She rolled her eyes, but she was smiling at the same time.
“I was pissing myself when I first heard that siren. I was praying. ‘I’ll never drink again! Please!’” Todd did the laugh again, and the giggle.
“Look what they let me keep.” She reached into her pocket and pulled out a small cylinder of whitish plastic.
Jenie Berman came in then, and when she saw Jenie’s plastic she pulled out one of her own. It was the cops that had let her keep it—the mouthpiece from a breathalyzer. “Hey Ericka didn’t you think he was kind of cute?”
“The cop?”
“No, Lloyd.”
Todd laughed. “What? He’s like nineteen. He would rip you in half.”
“I’m not saying I want to get together with him. But he was cute.”
“I’ll tell your dad.”
“Shut up!” I could always tell what Todd was going to say before he said it. I wondered where she found all that enthusiasm—if it was just more fun for her to pretend he was roguish instead of obvious. He kept on giggling and playing his part.
They never seemed to mind that I heard everything they said. It was almost like participating, the way their lives changed from day to day as I eavesdropped. But on Saturday, when they were getting their zero-tolerance alcohol tests, I was asleep after watching a movie on TV. My mom had read in the other room, under the orange lamplight that the closed white blinds held inside the house. The movie was a shoddy, twenty-year-old comedy, shown with low-rent ads on an unaffiliated broadcast channel—ads for tire replacement and debt consolidation.
I used to wonder how long it would be until I would drink and have sex—whether I’d be some pathetic twenty-year-old, or even then. The kids on TV went on dates at my age, but it was hard to imagine how I could ever have found myself on a date.
I heard about some real life kids my age who had a plan to kill the members of N*Sync. They said N*Sync got all the best girls. They called their plan Operation Death Strike, but they were found out before they could pull it off.
But for all the things missing from my life, for all the reasons Todd Spade had probably had sex with both of the girls sitting two rows in front of me, for all my resentment toward him, and them, and Mrs. Flatworth, my mom, that guy Lloyd—still, it was hard for me to imagine that I could have pinned it all on N*Sync. That just didn’t make sense.
“Ok. Let’s get started.” Mrs. Flatworth repeated that, louder each time, but with no expression on her sagging face. “Ok, everyone. Let’s get started.” There was a TV cart at the front of the room—that meant we’d get to watch a video. Once she had everyone’s attention, she pressed play. The cart was rickety and it flexed away from her buttonpushing. It looked ready to crush the first kid who didn’t obey the safety stickers.
She went to the back of the room and pulled down the creased white blinds, fighting with them and scraping them against the heater so they’d stick. I felt a sudden, overwhelming desire that she not exist. I hoped she’d try to return the TV cart herself and it would fall on her. She seemed dead enough already—as if it wouldn’t have made any difference.
When it started, the sound from the video was loud and nasty, rattling around inside the small plastic gratings on the sides of the television. The video was called Egypt’s Tombs: Time Capsules of the Sun God. It was boring, but at least it went the whole period.
Five minutes before the end of class I saw Bud Wright duck his head in the door and whisper something. Bud Wright was the assistant principal. He insisted that everyone call him “Bud,” but I would just as soon have called him “Mr.” Mrs. Flatworth turned on the lights, and the stuttering, green-gray brightness hurt my eyes. She stopped the video, too, just before the end: “But it’s because of these elaborate burial rites that we’ve been able to learn—”
Bud Wright went out the door and then came back with a kid I’d never seen before. The kid was small and thin with shaggy black hair that didn’t match the close style of all the other guys. He had on brand new sneakers that were too white and the front of his shirt was tucked in. He had a defiant expression on his face—looking us all over like he’d be getting into trouble soon.
He looked like a dropout loser except for his face. His face was narrow and bony, not disproportioned like most of the ninth graders. It was a face like a cartoon, like you could draw with just a few heavy black strokes: cheek, nose, jaw, everything in its place. His eyes were gray and the defiance seemed to come from somewhere inside them—as if it were our shoes and shirts and hair that was wrong, and not his own.
“It looks like we have just enough time to introduce a new student. This is ...” Mrs. Flatworth trailed off and turned to Bud Wright.
“Quentin Thomas. Quentin is joining us from ...” But he stumbled, too.
“Baltimore. I’m from Baltimore.”
“—from Baltimore, and I’m sure you’ll all give him a warm Wildcat Welcome if you see him in some of your other classes.”
Mrs. Flatworth paused to see if he would say anything else, but he didn’t. “And, your homework assignment due Monday—”
People stopped putting away their things so that they could write down the assignment, and Mrs. Flatworth waited. She didn’t give us many papers to write because she was lazy and slow to grade them. Next to videos, her favorite use of class time was to have us read aloud. She never seemed to be bothered by the stumbling arrhythmia of all the kids’ bad reading, or bothered that we could all have read it silently in a quarter the time.
“Your assignment is a five paragraph expository essay. Imagine that you’re a prince—or princess—in ancient Egypt. You’ve just died, and your family wants to give you a fancy burial. Tell us what objects they include in your tomb, and why. And make sure you follow your essay guidelines handout and include your thesis statement and supporting paragraphs and your concluding paragraph. Now does anyone have any questions?”
“Why do we always have to do these gay essays?”
“Does anyone besides Kenneth have any questions?”
The bell rang, and people jumped toward the door. They’d already forgotten the weird scene with the new kid. Then Mrs. Flatworth raised her voice a little. “Aleks, could you come up here?”
I stopped and turned to the front of the class. I tried to think what I might have done, but I never did anything. The rest of the kids kept filing out.
“Aleks, your schedule is the same as Quentin’s, so he’s going to shadow you today. Please show him around, and try to be nice?”
Bud Wright made a point of looking me in the eye and nodding. He said, “Ok. Thanks buddy,” and he left.
Quentin stayed where Bud Wright had left him. I looked at him and realized he’d be watching me all day, and everyone else would be watching too because he’d be tethered to my side. I wondered if Mrs. Flatworth expected me to introduce him to people. I didn’t ask her, and I didn’t ask Quentin if he expected me to have friends. He stood there next to her like a little dog, without saying anything, with an empty half-smile on his face.
“Hi Aleks,” he said, full of stupid courtesy. “I’m Quentin.”