“Times are good now. Some of you will enter careers upon graduation. Enjoy them. Soon enough the wheel will turn. Take, for instance, the case of John. He has his days when he tosses his cookies, but he’ll enjoy days when he eats them too! Fortune cookies, chocolate chippers, oatmeal raisin, oven warmed and bakery fresh! Learn to swim in the tide of history, and you’ll learn to navigate life!”
Licht grabs a tissue to wipe his eyes and blow his nose again.
Below on the lawn, frat boys throw their shirts to the wind, bump chests, and flatten grass as they perform a pastiche of professional wrestling. Their women chew on pig bones and watch the spectacle of drunken males grabassing about. In my fuzzy mind, the ritual merges into Licht’s conclusions on history—hence, the importance of pork, America’s other white meat?
The carcass and remains cause me to wish I had eaten a few morsels from the wok before so altruistically donating it to the cause of John Dhou. I am unsure if sweat or saliva stains my notebook.
Two burly linemen types toss the pig’s head across the lawn.
I leave my last class in a drunken fog, my gentle high ruined by demon liquor’s soggy rust.
II. Evening Turns to Night
I stumble and stride along the cement path leading from the Social Studies Hall to the student center. Stoned, I stare through the pupils of each peer passing me by. Drunk, they crowd me in and steal my leers from me. Charged by the confluence of substances, I compensate by smiling at passersby, certain my faces look like lewd grins more than polite snarls. The walking is good for me, and fifteen minutes later, in front of the campus center, I experience encroaching sobriety. I feel a slight balance, enough to look at and judge the world.
In the six p.m. rush hour, the sundry kinds of Ward mingle where the various paths merge before the stone student center steps. Here, we express our differences in height, dress, girth, sex, and even skin tone. But the spring sun shines upon us all, cloaking dissimilarities in carcinogenic rays. We are privileged kid clones to pizza deliverers, security guards, mail clerks, and cafeteria workers—the campus townies who protect and serve. And perhaps there is some truth to their truth. Over half of us may or may not deserve the financial aid we receive, and I suspect in most cases parents or grannies help repay the massive student loans that may be in our way. To us the money is easily lent, thus contributing to our feeling of liberty and consequent desire to help the less free. Professor Dich, my feminist-narrative prof, says that on average, the over half of us who owe, owe over twenty grand. After college, or so I’m told by John Dhou, some of us will feel lucky to deliver pizzas for a living.
In the mailroom, a large red-lettered sheet advertises for the early evening rally against racism. At the end of each Spring term, campus radicals protest things—American foreign policies, cafeteria dinner entrees, professorial apathy, the plight of strays and pigeons on campus, the inequality of contemporary social constructions of quality, the dearth of dark skin from our mostly suburban hometowns. These protests commence two weeks before commencement, so the Ward intelligentsia might tidily absolve itself of guilt at spring semester’s end, whereupon students elide long-term commitment in favor of pilgrimage to varied hills and shores.
I stare at the crowd of mail collectors.
Too fearful of finding unsuccessful papers and failed exams, I have not checked my mail in three weeks. But this evening my resistance breaks, and I squeeze through the masses of rich and indebted Wardites collecting allowances and mailing home their clothes. Wedged into my box is a conic thickness of multicolored fliers. In school colors is news of graduation robes while a green sheet asks for class-fund contributions. My degree is in question and massive student loans are on the way, but already they crave my cash. I wish I were as hungry as this institution.
Behind the junk mailings is a letter from Jake. At the recycle can, I toss in the fliers and stash Jake’s small envelope in my back pocket. I want to smoke before I read his letter. I see a thin woman whose hands shake as she reads her mail. Upon my request, she gives me a mean glare and an unfiltered cigarette.
***
Outside the campus center, the protest is forming. Students mill about. It looks like a quarter of the campus is here, at least a few hundred students. Many wear multi-colored, third-world clothing—Mexican hooded pullovers, llama’s wool sweaters, African and Amerindian robes. The wealth of color contributes to the warmth of smiles—shades of green and blue and purple and yellow. Everyone appears happy to be protesting under a warm spring sun.
Two campus-center employees set up a microphone. A short black woman takes the microphone and begins proceedings. She wears an expensive leather jacket. She speaks.
“We are gathered here today to speak out against a heinous crime on campus. Racist grafitti was found in the campus center bathroom. White chalk was scrawled on black boards in the African Center. We, black students, did not come to Ward to encounter bigotry. We left that behind in American cities policed by racist cops. Today, we speak out against such atrocities. Today, the entire white community is responsible. Racism is intellectual genocide. We will not tolerate it.”
Soon many students shed tears. In a huge steel trashcan, a fire is built and a book burning commences. One of Ward’s unshaven ties back his thick dreads and begins to throw texts into the flames. He shouts out names as he tosses—Melville, Faulkner, Conrad, Twain. Toward the end of the canon, he tells us, the racism got worse. In the heat, students shed their third-world leather and begin singing tunes from sixties suffrage times.
What is to be Done?
Envy.
Who is to Blame?
I squint to read these titles as they are handed over to the fire.
It starts with racism but becomes an open forum for all lament under the perfect spring sun. A black shirt but bootless punk-rock type, perhaps a crusty, bald save for a single dread hanging down his back, seizes the mike to confess his sins. A self-proclaiming lesbian of color balls up her “his-story” final and hurls it in with the books. Those whose hand-me-down Volvos are parked nearby occasionally run off to refill their meters.
Baseball-capped frat boys sneak around the crowd and into the campus center to purchase burgers and fries from their townie brethren. Guys they spat on in high-school football, guys the frat boys seem better able to relate to. Protest or no, it is feeding time for Regular Joe.
Wealthy vanguard of the world, unite!
In the distance, through the glass walls of the science library, I can see the disciplined studying to become lawyers and doctors, investment bankers and hedge-fund operators. A future dot-com millionaire presses his face against the glass. There’s an overrepresentation of post-colonial ambition: East and South Asia; perhaps a few from former Soviet republics; even a token African or islander. According to John Dhou, our resident expert on the studious, none of their folks were young Americans protesting in the sixties; or in the seventies, curing our national debt with disco and forgetting; or in the eighties growing older and rich. John says that these students are as ambitious as the college’s five-year plan.
Back at the protest, poetry is read. “Pity me, pity me, pity me, please; my father was such an awful man, buying sin stocks and cooking with lard as he did.” To the cause, students donate their work-study dollars and checks from their trust funds. Justice, or at least youthful righteousness, is served.
The mike is tossed to a brooding fellow with a cappuccino complexion. He wears jeans and a black tee shirt. His presence quiets the crowd.
“All of you white Ward people don’t understand how this makes me feel. You don’t understand what’s wrong with this country. You don’t know what is evil in this society, spreading like a cancer, blanketing these United States. It makes me sick.”
I can’t say for sure that I know where this is headed, but his words appeal to me.
“I am telling you that it is time for the peoples of color to fight back. The only historically successful revolutions have been a
chieved by violence. Don’t give me that bull about revolutions in science and technology. The American, French, and Russian Revolutions—revolutions made by the people against an unjust system—were achieved by violence. We will use violence because we are not just about ‘by any means necessary.’ We know, I know, that violence is the only means necessary! Violence is how we get our voice heard. Violence gets the job done. History has proven this again and again.”
Momentary silence chills the collective spine.
After letting it all sink in, the people shout back at their leader.
“Violence never accomplishes anything.”
“Violence destroys. It doesn’t build.”
“In war, peaceful people suffer. Civilians die in mass graves. Women and children. Combatants walk.”
“You think your skin color gives you the right to male rhetoric.”
And so the man on the mike shouts back.
“Yes, this is black male rhetoric. This is how we feel. This is how we have been treated by your cops, your pigs, your white pigs who protect and support the values of your system. All you rich white students are just baby piglets squealing about in your parents’ mess and mud. Your whole damn life has been given to you by the system.”
His words seduce me more than those of the average student protestor. His offerings—real flesh and blood—taste rich compared to the low-calorie calls for hunger strikes and veganism.
“Goddamn, I hate you all!” With this last note, he tosses the microphone into the fire and sprints away from the crowd.
Although my heritage is the more or less Ward’s usual in white and suburban—between city and country, Jew and gentile, middle quintile and filthy rich—I am uncertain if I am a fascist pig. Mass rallies and armbands might not be my thing; I feel too self-absorbed to take it all in. Two brave souls employ a tree branch to remove the microphone’s wires from the flames. I experience not belonging. I feel guilty, almost tearful, for feeling apart from the crowd shedding guilt and tears.
My cigarette long since extinguished, I duck back into the campus center. After ascending three flights, I find a quiet corner of the coffee shop. Once seated, I tear open the envelope and read Jake’s news.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
May 7, 199-
Dear Andy,
I did it, and that’s why I have to write this on paper. My computer is packed with the rest of my stuff. Hal took his girlfriend to the mountains, and I took action. First, I took off all of my clothes. I stood by my window and stared at the park. It was Friday evening and the park was crowded. As usual, I was alone, away from people. I turned off all the lights and stood at the window for a good half hour. I saw people walking in twos and threes. It looked like people were having fun. I saw a pretty girl walking a puppy. I stared at them. I guess you’re supposed to go up to the girl and start playing with her dog. I don’t know. I do know she’s not Jenna.
Well, I didn’t put any clothes on and go down to the park. I went to the bathroom instead. I put the rubber drain stopper in and began to fill up the tub with warm water. As the water ran, I stared at myself in the mirror. I didn’t feel like I really knew who I was looking at. I went to my desk drawer, and I took out my journal and my glossy photo of Jenna. She was vain enough to give me the picture, too selfish to offer her heart. I also took out a set of razors and a pack of matches. I went back to the bathroom, and over the sink, I began ripping my journal to shreds. Then, I burnt the shreds in the sink, carefully so that the ashes went into the sink’s basin and not onto the floor. Then I burned the photo. It smelled bad. When I had finished burning everything, I turned around and turned off the tub water. Then, I lit another match and watched its light glow under the razor. Yeah, I was disinfecting the razor. I tossed the match into the toilet, and then I entered the bath. I kneeled down and then eased myself into a lying position, careful so that the razor remained dry. I looked at myself under the water, thin and sinewy. My penis bobbed up toward the surface, flaccid but as if it could float were it not attached to me.
Then I did it. I don’t know how I got the nerve. I watched the blood diffuse into the tub water, red clouds slowly dispersing. I don’t know how long I watched, but I saw the water turn pink. I heard the doorbell but assumed whomever it was would go away. So I began to wait it out, but then I remembered my older brother had planned a visit, because he knew I was down, and I had forgotten all about this. I didn’t go to the door, but then the phone began to ring. When the answering machine picked up, I heard his voice, but I could also hear him from the hallway. So I got out of the tub, and I immediately saw that the incision I had made really wasn’t that large or deep. So I put a towel over my wrist and ran to the door. Saul asked me how I was, and I told him exactly what I was doing.
Now I’m at this hospital. I’ve been here for over two weeks. I think they want to let me go, and so I keep threatening to kill myself again. It seems like my only defense. The doctors look at me skeptically, as if they don’t believe me. Apparently, the incision I made was not deep enough to rate as a legitimate suicide attempt and that on at least a subconscious level I knew that Saul was coming. They say I anticipated a rescue, so they classify it as a threat, not an attempt. That really makes me feel like a phony. They’re trying to fit me with the right meds. I’ve been introduced to three psychiatrists and five psychologists, and I’ve dismissed them all. I try to keep my mind off Jenna, but she’s all I can think of. Is it true she already has a boyfriend? I don’t want to die, but I don’t know why I should go on living.
Sincerely,
Jake
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I close the letter. I’m smoking pot and feeding John dog food while Jake on the other side of the country is dying. I feel a welling up inside, the same one I’ve gotten after his last several letters. This one produces actual tears. I rest my head in my lap to muffle my quiet sobbing.
***
Back at the house, upstairs, I take off all my clothes and drown myself under steaming water. Its heat reminds me to feel lucky I live with John; his laundry allowance ensures that eventually our bills get paid. After drying, I return downstairs, enter the kitchen, put on coffee and search for Dhou’s bong. I find it in the cabinet behind a quart of peanut oil and a bottle of cooking wine. I go up to his room and find his stash between a couple stacks of CDs. I put on Bob Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks. I turn up the volume and bring the pot downstairs. I sit and alternately suck bingers and coffee; massive doses of each create enough buzz to kill the pain.
I space out a bit. From the back door, John barges into the kitchen with a small bag of groceries. When he notices I’m nude, he emits a deathly shriek. Milk, eggs, and bacon go flying in five directions as he thrusts his forearm in front of his eyes and dashes out of the house. From his safe haven, he screams, “Holy fucking shit, dude. You could lock the fucking door.”
“There aren’t any locks on these doors. I thought you liked it that way.” Feeling uninhibited, I venture out into the twilight. I touch his shoulder.
“You fucking asshole,” he screams as he darts away. He bolts into the kitchen and hooks the door.
I stand nude, outside of the house, a bit stunned John reacted so. I absorb momentary solitude, breathe in, breathe out, and tap gently on the glass.
“John, let me in. Please.”
I hear him running down the steps. As he approaches the door, he shields his eyes. He unhooks the screen, pushing the door open and hands me what must have been on top of my hamper—a green tee shirt and maroon sweatpants. I put them on before I re-enter, and it is only then that I glance back and around the neighboring yards and trees to ensure that no one has seen me without my clothes.
“Dude. You could kill a guy like that.”
“My bad, John.”
“Well, I forgive you. I guess.”
“Thanks.”
“Since you cooked lunch, I brought breakfast.”
“T
hanks, John. You’re a cool guy.”
He smokes some and starts frying up the bacon. I put on more coffee. He tosses a couple bagels in the toaster oven. John’s good for bagels and bacon. It’s about all we eat aside from wok and rice.
While the bacon dries, the eggs fry.
John carries the violet-tinted phallus in from the kitchen.
We methodically kill off the remaining buds. Three full hits each. I come to a stoned state in which I simultaneously act and watch myself acting, a certain dis-integration of my self, my “I” as the Ward intelligentsia would say. In some weird way, I am living the American dream of two for one. If I were to break up into three or four, there may be cause for concern. But now I am saved by John’s voice.
“Have you heard from Jake?”
“Yeah.”
“How’s he doing?”
“I think he’s hanging in there.”
“Man, I wish I had the balls to do what he’s doing. Dropping out of school. Going for it. I’d go into the music business, start my own label. You know what I mean?”
“Yeah.” I don’t have the heart to ruin John’s stoned ambition by relating Jake’s attempted threat.
Back to the kitchen, John decides to fry up the rest of the bacon.
After smoking again, we head for the computer lab. The campus tower clock says 10:37 p.m. We sit down opposite each other. Within a half hour, John bounces up and announces, “Dude, I can’t write. Do you know what I mean?”
He darts off before I can nod.
Determined to end my own anxiety, I fight through the initial struggle and proceed to bang out my last college essay. In three hours, I produce ten pages. After proofreading the first third or so, I print and leave the computer lab. I know it isn’t good, but I hope it is good enough.
I see John sitting on the library steps.