1.
In their house on Clearasil street, where Jed's friend Simon's mother
told Simon not to go, Jed was trying to rise above his situation, learn
all the right names, get the right seals, move up. It was all garbage to
him- Number four, Pachdi, Gevoorti, Kazoo, Shekhini, Shatki, etc. Damn
chapter seventeen. Or, better not. As Jed was memorizing, his brother
Duff, older by one year, was singing along with the most horrible of
post-glam metal Jed could imagine. Oh, Duff wasn't his real name. His
real name was Samael, Sammy. Forget it: it was Duff. Duff, dude. The
whole thing filled Jed with annoyance that occasionally broke through into
anger or despair. Jed's mother was never around anymore, his father
hadn't been around for years, and there was no reason to feel anything
towards this fattening, acned fool. Duff had this stuff on extremely
loud; Jed, through the wall, mainly heard an insistent bass line, which
didn't seem to be played very evenly. He got up; it was useless studying,
damn music. He only appeared at Duff's open door, running his fingers
through his hair, thinking of moral choice, and Duff anticipated what was
coming. Good Duff.
"What the fuck do you have against heavy metal?" he said.
This wasn't the issue. But Jed found himself suddenly inspired.
"It cheapens the human spirit. It denigrates what should be one of our
most inspiring tools to aesthetic beauty. Here you take a form of art
that can and does sometimes express the anger, joy, just the youth of
being young, you know, without even trying, and you buy into this
corporate bullshit scam of phallic fantasies and indulgent adolescent
misogyny. Shit, Duff, have you ever even listened to what they're
singing? It may as well be Aramaic--you don't have anything in common
with what they're saying. It's all canned anyway, a collection of handy
cliches that only in the hands of one or two metal bands even sound
coherent. And except for those one or two, the playing Sucks! It's just
a posture: heavy drums, a big guitar playing noisy power chords. There's
no skill, there's no subtlety--I mean that would be okay, what subtlety or
skill is in things like 'Wild Thing' or 'Louie Louie.' But those songs
were fresh. You can tell the people singing just don't give a fuck or are
just so full of life and want to make a girl or something. These
guys, this insipid, gratuitously loud nonsense, they're cheap, they're not
sincere like real musicians, or cynical or ironic instead. They're just
stupid, Duff. And they make you be stupid, because you stop thinking.
Duff, if this music meant anything to you you wouldn't play it all the
time, like at 8:00 in the morning when we're just waking up. Hell Duff
you don't want to wake up to hot power chords in the heat of the night or
whatever.. not really. You don't know what you're waking up to. To you
it's all just 'metal, man.' It kills your sense of quality, it kills your
humanity. It turns you into a pathetic, drooling slob who just bobs his
head with the guy in the spandex pretending the mike is his cock or
something. It's ridiculous Duff, that's what I hate about it. If it's
going to sound like shit to me, it better at least mean something to you.
If it meant something, I'd tolerate it, but if it doesn't, you're just
polluting my damn space."
Duff said as he rose, "Man I'm gonna kick the fuckin shit out of
you," and grabbed Jed's T shirt, ripping it, as Jed tried to turn and run.
"What the fuck did you call me," Duff kept saying as he hit him, punching
his legs, his gut, his arm, slapping his face. Jed could hardly fight
back: Duff was a lot bigger. You can't rise above your station, Jed. You
don't know the magic words, you haven't learned enough contempt for him to
stay quiet. Jed's mouth started bleeding and he thought he broke a finger
when Duff threw him against a wall. Duff threw him on the ground one last
time when he was too beaten up to get back up, kicked him a few times and
let him cringe in pain for a while. Then he turned back up the heavy
metal, dude.
2.
You know what I like? It's when you finally get to know a person
and you realize that you loathe everything they stand for. It's kind of a
good feeling you get, you know, you've explored the guy's personality as
thoroughly as you feel able, and they turn out to embody oppressive,
thick, drivellous inanities you either find boring or offensive. One guy
I met actually owned a 'Monster Truck.' He had taken it out to Handon --
you could tell that was the boonies because it had a real name that didn't
mean anything like health or valley or stream -- and ran it in some sort
of Jamboree. He called it "Bad Ass." Part of me thought about this for a
while, I was thinking, well maybe this is Real and Authentic and out in
Handon you meet some really unpretentious people, but then I thought, no,
there are just a damn load of stupid men there, beating their wives in
cement one-story homes in between sitcoms, subscribing to cliches about
those dam' politicians and what the American people need and so on. So if
this guy went out there and thought the whole thing was bad ass, either he
was some meta-cool bohemian virtually indistinguishable from, well, sorry
to say it, scum; or he was just scum. One time he mentioned he was goin'
to a wet t-shirt contest at Frank's -- also out in Handon -- and, you know
at this time I was wearing flannel and gas-station hats, I guess, so he
invited me to see if I wanted to come along. I thought at that moment,
the point of light bursting through a little cloud, that, well; this guy's
for real, I don't want anything to do with him.
3.
Gordon's son Mattathias studied assiduously for this goddamn test
they had tomorrow in the damn al-jabr class, a load of bullshit really,
x's and y's. O, but you are being taught how to think, Mrs. Worgenbohler
had said. You know, I never met anyone with a name as ridiculous as
Worgenbohler, Mattathias said back. Well he said it quietly so she didn't
here. But it was true - where do you come across people with names like
this except as high school teachers? As Matt was studying, his second
girlfriend ever, Hecate, appeared at the window. Gordon hated this bitch
because she wore a lot of black. Dammit there's no way her name was
actually Hecate, either, Gordon complained to his wife Kell. Kell had
complained about Mattathias, she had wanted Matthew or something, so she
had precedent on her side. But Gordon was likely correct.
Hecate materialized outside Mattathias's second floor window and
scared the living shit out of him, as he reported it. "Matt, it's me."
She reached out her hand, and he took it, so as to help her in and get a
handjob or something. But she grabbed his hand and pulled him hard
through the open window and the momentum carried him clear off the narrow
ledge on which she was standing, and he fell toward the concrete of his
driveway. It seemed to go by so slowly that Hecate had the time to
realize and think about what had happened, and to choose, she could let go
of his hand and save herself, or hold on to it. She held on to
Mattathias's hand as he shouted and fell crashing to the ground with him.
4.
Lex walked over to the quiet seven-eleven sitting at the corner
of Fogtree and George. He walked in and ordered a cola slurpee, the
large, 72-ounce size, larger than Socrates' vial of hemlock. He wandered
outside for a cigarette. Marlboro. Fortunately Lierberman walked up.
"Hey Lex," Lieberman said. Lieberman was so cool.
"Ay Lieberman," Lex replied. It didn't sound as good. Lieberman
went inside, wearing a dark scotch-plaid shirt. The thing with plaid is,
it's good to wear.
Lieberman came out with a pack of cigarettes. Camels. Couldn't
imagine Lieberman buying into that corporate ad campaign with the big dick
in it. But there he was. Lieberman was more an old-Camels guy, more like
the package than the ads. Lex felt bad for heading off to college next
year. Question is, if Lieberman slacks for the rest of his next few
years, is he still cool in a few years or is he only cool when he's in
movies..
Lieberman flicked his pack against his right fingers and then
opened it and took out a cigarette. Damn friendly of him, thought Lex.
Shit damn friendly. Lex didn't know any slackers like the ones in the
movies. He knew some annoying, lazy people. But the people in the movies
were pretty good people. Good to watch anyway. Lex thought, shit should
I make a movie? But Lex was going to major in political science. "Lex,"
Lieberman asked, "do you still have my Alice in Chains record?"
Of course he did. "Yeah, do you want it back?"
"No, I just thought that Ronda had it and I would hate to be
supporting anything that Ronda's involved with. You know."
Of course. "Yeah." A pause, then, "It's a good cd." Lex
instantly worried about the term 'cd.' Lieberman had said 'record.' His
parents were divorced.
"Not bad, I guess, but the overt co-option of supposedly
underground icons such as Alice in Chains leads to a situation where you
can't believe in anything, because if you've heard about it, they've
probably been exploited by some large, Japanese-owned corporation for
money and profit, or in the alternative are so self-absorbed and
narcissistic that their attempt at coolness is forced. It seems the only
way to truth is through complete failure," Lieberman said by way of reply.
No verdict on the 'cd' issue. Lieberman had been going out with Ronda for
a while, mainly to have sex with her, which he did. She was mostly
despicable, it's true.
"Yeah, you're right, but on the other hand maybe it's a good
thing that alternative culture is being made available to wide masses of
people via the corporate structure. If art is at all to be supposed to be
capable of social change, then it should be in everybody's interest to
have good art spread as widely as possible, no matter what the motive."
"True, and it is hard to find any change in history that wasn't
driven by self-interest," Lieberman agreed. Lieberman was agreeing!
Therefore it was true.
Lex said, as he finished his cigarette and had enough of his
slurpee to satisfy him, "I guess once youth rebellion became such an
obvious moneymaker, it was just a matter of time." Lex got up to leave.
Lieberman leaned back. He was going to stay. Then leave.
"Later," Lieberman said. Later? Lex headed away from the seven
eleven, where Lieberman stayed smoking, another kid in all this.
5.
When Handy shaved his head the first time, his mother asked him if
this meant he was a Nazi, because she didn't understand Handy's
straightedge beliefs. His mother was similarly lost on the idea of
Handy's not eating any meat--or even dairy products. Handy's straightedge
beliefs were something like the latest fad in many places, but he had only
recently read about it on the Net, and ordered away for some Fugazi and
old Minor Threat records, so it was free of that Republican-flavored
tarnish that you get when something's been Time-Lifed already.
Handy's friend Kristi had already died, operatically, of a drug
overdose. It was such a big deal to everyone. The newspaper wrote about
it. The anchorman, who probably beats his wife, said "A tragedy struck a
New Featherhills family today." Just think, he seemed to be saying, she
could happen to you. The principal called some sort of assembly, which
Handy and most of Kristi's other friends skipped. So that led Handy to be
thinking, the death I mean, that there was some discipline lacking in all
this elaborate storyboarding, complicated posturing, insincere
criticizing, and of course, the sex and the drugs. Not that the sex and
drugs were bad, but for some reason they seemed a part of taking nothing
seriously. Anyway, that was when Handy came across the straightedge zine
at some club, and it had the web address on it, and the rest is history
and hair covering the barber shop in the center of town.
There was something centering about Kristi having offed herself --
accidentally. It was ironic, too, because she had done far worse than the
bad weed which combined with whatever it was to knock her off. But
everything Kristi had lived for. She managed to get over having a name
that ended in i.' She never, ever put a heart over it. She was honest
enough, and was a bad painter. There was truth involved. Well that was
the end of that, Handy had to say to himself. No more trivia. No more
rattails and dyed hairs and pretending that things were less worth living
for than they were. They were bad enough already.
Old dead Christian Pat came over the television as Handy and his mother were eating
dinner. His mother had cooked some vegetarian stew. It was lousy, but she was trying, and
Handy appreciated it. Who knows, he thought, maybe she thinks that this means I won't be
hanging around with that "crowd" anymore. It was hard to imagine her world. But both of
them stared at the hypocrisy blathering out from the set at them, usurping, standing in for
reality or real experience or any combination of the two. Spouting things that no one but a
fool would believe, and no one but a crook would say. Handy and his mother both got up to
turn the fucking thing off, and sat down again to eat.
6.
"No, mainly there's only one thing I hate about being Native American," Joe said in
high school.
What's that, what's that, his friends asked. Especially Israel, the yid; he was very
interested.
"It's that people expect me to be sage and wise, and always
recycle. Shit, man, if I want to thrown my coke can into the garbage, I
shouldn't have to feel accountable more than anyone."
7.
I didn't have much of a clue when I was a teenager growing up in the
middle of bullshit, surrounded by people who supported the parading of a
scantily and ultrasuede clad tanned girl with nice breasts, down the
fucking fairway of our high school football field, home of the Chiefs, as
the goddamn fairest princess, and when she was finished--when she had been
paraded, on the back of a pickup truck, at the only pep rally I ever
attended, when she was finished, she leapt into the waiting arms and cock
of our high school quarterback, miraculously elected by manufactured
consent to be our highest chief, carrying some Jim Crow spear high in the
air and bedecked with more feathers than a drag queen with his dick in a
pouch.
I mean what, what, choice did I have? An innocent virginal Jewish
neurotic masturbating liberal, trying desperately to get his shiksa
girlfriend to go to bed with him, and it ended up, let me tell you, being
a sofa. I wasn't searching for transcendence then, just a good orgasm or
some free liberation, you know, God in a kid's face, well God was in a
pig's face back then, wondering if he'd ever be let out, underneath this
velour-covered pig's face of our Highest Chief mascot, chief
fuckyouuptheass, I think was his name. You know I saw a film the other
night about high school and it was all sort of rosy, it almost made me
nostalgic for those times growing up in the condomized suburbia of my own
dear dear youth, until I remembered that the condom was spent and there
was sperm leaking out the hole that failed to keep her from pregnancy, the
valedictorian dating a skinhead, sperm leaking out the hole onto the sheer
floor of the 600 Hall, where they had sex in the middle of broad goddamn
daylight. That's the high school I remember, the one where you were
treated with cruelty that makes us all feel better about that little mess
over in Tibet, I mean after all each high school principal is Deng
Xiaoping, isn't he, the functional equivalent of a senile old inheritor of
power relations who merely administers while his seemingly inept yet
remarkably effective subjects administer not the efficient running of a
just society but the repeated miniature tortures which inure our children
to the idea of vast unfairness and social arbitrariness, a quality which
becomes extremely helpful once they attain voting age and elect
republicans from their whitebread conservative districts of condominiums
and subdivisions and competing christmas displays and violative creches
and similarly violative fourth of july slave labor Chinese made
firecrackers going off like so many vibrators in the cloud-induced sky
over the golf courses and gold coasts and high school gymnasiums where
children sit inside sucking each other off after hours and smoking each
other down if they can get lucky enough to score some suburban hash from
the scary black man who teaches them all about what it means to be a
racist user of people who have little choice but who have, we're told, all
the choice in the world, and where, during the daily bildung rituals of
high school physical education classes, people suffer indignities on
sweat-smelling mats laid out by drunken civil servant tenured jockstraps
with their collared golf shirts tucked tautly into their bright green
shorts and their socks pulled tightly over calves while they preach the
gospel, whether that of Christ or Notre Dame seems to matter to them not
at all, all the while turning blind eyes to the homoerotic tensions being
released by the tights-wearing football players at the expense of Jew
geeks like me, looking out for their own transcendence, thank you very
much, just trying to grab myself a little piece of liberty from the
yeasted snatch of defeat, the jaws of victory clamped down like the
wrestling hold put on me by some cheese-dicked emissary of what can only
to a sixteen year old be called the dark side of evil, as he flips me on
my big ears and semitic, drooping nose, slamming me down like some Aryan
picture of Highest Chief, descendent of the exterminators of those fake
earth-worshipping Seminoles, those aped creators of chocolate who now
present us with our bingo cards in the vast flourescent lit halls of
escapist Veblenian dreams, some white trash sixty year old lady with her
curled graying hair and flowered dress straight out of the pages of a
poorly thought through collection of very short stories, accent straight
out of Dixie, someone who'd've seen Pride of a Nation if she knew what it
was and drool drool drool over the revelation of the truth there being
presented, as she marks her bingo card carefully before returning home to
her cinder-blocked ranch-style one story, pulled back fifteen feet from
Bouganvillea street, a road she can neither understand nor even pronounce,
as she is verbally abused by her trucking husband and waits patiently by
the telephone with a gold knob for her indecent daughter, slaving away as
a check out girl at the Montgomery Ward, to get out from under her butch
stubbled husband's throbbing cock and give her dear ma a call, tell her
all about what never happened at work because nothing happens under the
nothing new in a town so similar to every other it's a cliche, so
seemingly empty of life it's a cliche, so cliche that it too becomes a
repeated mantra of me, remember, the Jewish liberal youth kid trying to
get his rocks inside of someone for a change, reading books about living
free and freeing lives and all that jazz--and jazz is what it was, of the
houseplants Kenny G variety--and mantra is what it was, of the comfortable
price is right variety--and variety is what it was, of the illusory
mayaesque style, appearances presenting themselves in varied forms but
substances either absent or static, ignored and rightly so we are lately
told, a variety not so much of things but of referents, not so much of
grammer but of occasional vocabulary, with words like Bouganvillea
pronounced incorrectly but pronounced nonetheless, and for this we are to
be thankful, for this we are to bless our dear dead God in his mausoleum,
separating out religion into another thing you can do in spare time with
spare change and a few, spare emotions placed far apart so that each has
room to breathe and slowly harden like a slice of stale white bread
oxidizing on a formica kitchen counter, somewhere in the laid out spread
of people frittering themselves, a stale piece of white bread growing hard
like some Jew liberal's futile erection looking for a hole to put itself
in, a stale piece of white communion wafer bread being placed onto the
passive tongue in a french-kiss parody of devotion, a mere shadow of what
must be passing for real somewhere, somewhere, out here, far estranged,
far from interest in estrangement, far from those moments never labelled
true which are all that we have left, the each day given stale piece of
white bread on a wood-toned formica kitchen counter, which hope can only
position properly, year after year, a stale white piece of bread, sitting
on a formica kitchen counter.
8.
Gregory, the fat, sweaty kid, stood sweltering in the middle of
a ragged softball field. He wasn't waiting for the ball so much as
waiting for his pathetic existence to show some promise. He was fourteen
already. It was really hot out.
Gregory looked over to the right-fielder, who was scratching
himself through the gaping hole in his umbro athletic shorts. He looked
at left-field, where the guy was leaning on himself, his hip stuck out
like a homosexual doorknob. This wasn't athletics by choice; it was gym
class. That ritual of adolescent undress, humiliation, and undress again,
which marked fat and uncoordinated American kids as losers for life. From
his armpits, forehead, kneebacks, toes, thighs, navel, balls, asscrack,
and the space under his chest, Gregory began to really sweat. He noticed
a small gingerbread house behind first base, and that the sky was slowly
rusting in the sun.
It was taking a long time for Gregory to get anywhere. He'd
just hit puberty, with more zits than hairs, and he wondered if his father
had given up on him. (Secretly, his father loathed his fat, stupid son.
He mentioned lyposuction once to his social butterfly of a wife, who
laughed it off as silliness. But it became an obsession; collecting
brochures, Yahoo web searches, covert browsing among the yellow pages.)
Now he was out here melting in the hot, waxy sun, tracing the outlines of
the buttcheeks of the second baseman as the infield taunted the batter.
Gregory had visions of angelic beauty, absurdity ripping to shreds the
fabric of the sea and sky and land, but it was all sex. Like one big cock
bursting through the panties of the universe. The rightfielder had his
arm stuck up his ass to his elbow, and was fisting himself hard, sticking
his hand out his belly button to wave hellow. The flame in left field was
wearing lip-gloss and Cheryl Tiegs mascara, dancing to Tito Puente and the
music of Frankie Yancovic. Gregory began to jello-wrestle in his own
sweat and flesh, raising up his head to see a theophany of angels blowing
trumpets and french horns and playing the marimba. Gregory thought, you
know, there's probably lots of fish out there in the ocean that no one has
ever eaten. Imagine, some fish has been around for ten million years, but
I could be the first one to taste it. It could be at the bottom of the
Indian ocean or something. Imagine, there's no way of knowing what it
might taste like. It might be like the best flavor we could ever imagine,
we would have no way of knowing, until I tried it.
Gregory looked over at the inside-out rightfielder whose hand
was knotted around his privates in three ways at once. The batter was
having eggs thrown at him; kids spit in his mouth, their saliva colored
differently each minute by a handout of everlasting gobstoppers.
Gregory's fat mind drifted out over the softball field, flying over the
junior high school and its maroon-tinted portable additions, past the
pulsating testicles of this fecund world and its moribund human
inhabitants as the gingerbread house invited him in by extending its door,
and he wandered in to the candycane world of bannisters and socks around
the fireplace. Gregory met his coach, in his tight golfing shorts and
clipboard with no writing on it, and asked him about the weather, and why
the sky was oxidizing, getting out protein with protein, and what about
the gingerbread house and the naked second baseman, what were they each
doing in a supervised athletic activity. And it was only when Gregory
mopped his forehead with his shirt that his stomach felt the breath of God
blowing for the first time, some sort of fat symphony, played with a
hundred pizzicato violins in the string section, and the angels' trumpets
on brass, and giving it up for mister philly joe jones on the drums,
ladies and gentlemen, cinderella on ice, her glistening pumpkin carriage
shining brighter than Al Jolson's teeth, her foot fitting so delicately,
slimly, into the glass ice-skate held out beneath her, and their amongst
the lilies and the dandelions of the softball field, the word was made
flesh for young Gregory, rapturously erect and melting in the humid, hot
air, as phantoms played softball and angels played Porgy, and Bess.
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