The End As I Know It

by Kevin Shay

  Over by the crowd, a young guy in a sport coat, blue jeans, and Dodgers cap speaks into a cell phone as he herds the other protesters into position. The producer. “Where’s Holly?” he says into the phone. “Well, get her down here!” He’s wrangling the parents into line with the camera, so the shot will show a crowd behind Len. The protesters meekly go where he points them, looking a bit starstruck to be part of the news-gathering process. “No, it’s a good standup, it’ll play,” the producer says. “Just send Holly ay-sap.” So Holly’s the on-air talent, who can’t be bothered to show up at a scene like this until her advance team has gauged its news-worthiness.

  “We have speed,” the cameraman announces. The producer retreats out of frame. Len comes alive, transformed in the space of two seconds from placid sound-level provider to fire-eyed holy roller. He shakes his Bible stagily. “If God’s book can’t come into our schools!” Doesn’t literally thump the Bible, but that’s the effect. And now brandishing Harry (left hand, of course): “Then Satan’s books must not come into our schools!” The crowd clustered behind him lets forth an affirming whoop.

  These are the same God-fearing folks who used to go around railing about the dangers of Dungeons & Dragons. The people who made that horrendous TV movie with a presuccess Tom Hanks as a college student whose obsession with role-playing games brings about his silly and unconvincing demise. Around the time that little piece of scare-mongering hit the airwaves, three or four other boys and I were getting together most Saturdays to play D&D. One day my friend Thomas showed up and announced sadly that his parents had barred him from our future campaigns. They weren’t born-agains, but some alarmist had convinced Thomas’s mom that the game would lead inexorably to moral decline. One day you’re fighting Kobolds with your plus-two broadsword, the next day you’re trading sexual favors for crack. Now it’s J. K. Rowling’s turn.

  The producer has lost interest in the speech, trusting his crew to take it from here, and drifts toward me, plugging one ear against the crowd noise as he continues his conversation. “If Holly comes down, I think I can get them to burn some books,” he says. “No, we’d have to send someone to buy the books.”

  I could watch this twin travesty of journalism and religion all day, but duty calls. I head toward the school as Len repeats his soundbite-ready dichotomy. But bringing the guitar was a mistake. It draws the attention of the other TV crew members, who have gotten their footage already and stand by their van, starting to pack up. Their producer, interchangeable with the other producer except this one has a Lakers cap, notices me. He strides over and positions himself in my path, beckoning his crew to follow.

  “Hey! My friend! Hey!”

  I give him an unfriendly smile. He points to my guitar. “Are you here for the protest?” he asks, excited. Why does everyone assume that? Are sing-along book-burnings an everyday thing around here? Hell, maybe I should play along. Yes, sir, I’m here to fight the forces of evil! I could come up with a few memorable couplets for the cameras. Hey, hey, Harry Potter! Don’t corrupt my son and daughter! Then, once the eyes of the Bay Area were on me, I’d lay my cards on the table: You know, there’s this computer problem you should all be paying more attention to.

  “No,” I tell the producer. “I’m not with them. I’m a hired entertainer with bad timing. If you’ll excuse me.” I brush past him, skirt around the rear of the crowd—they’re fixated on Len, who’s still tossing off variations on his good-book, bad-book incantation—and go into the school.

  Jim leads me to the principal’s office. Jim is the secretary, a slender, put-upon man in a sweater-vest and tailored corduroy slacks. He has the kind of elfin face that looks like it wasn’t meant to age, and with his graying hair and the wrinkles around his eyes he could be some fictional youth a couple of decades after the adventures have ended—Tintin with his first pair of bifocals, Richie Rich in line for a prostate exam. He wears a faint expression of nausea, as if the whole thing with the picketers has disgusted him physically. Since meeting me inside the front door, he hasn’t said a word about the situation, so maybe he’s just trying to ostrich it out of existence.

  The office is behind a door whose frosted glass panel says MAUREEN PEASE in old-fashioned stenciled gilt lettering, and below it in intimidatingly larger letters PRINCIPAL. Such a fraught and awful portal. But right now no troublemakers await their comeuppance in the chairs outside the door. Today it’s the parents who have misbehaved. Jim raps twice with his middle knuckle, then opens the door without waiting for a reply. “Mrs. Pease, this is Mr. Knight,” he announces, and ushers me inside.

  A council of war. Seven people sit in folding chairs arranged in an uncomfortably close knot, taking up most of the floor space in front of Mrs. Pease’s desk. Some have notepads on their laps. They turn to look at me with all the interest they’d show a delivery boy. Jim follows me in and shuts the door behind us.

  “Mr. Knight!” Maureen Pease turns from the window behind her desk. She starts to cross the room toward me, but sees this would involve a difficult journey through a thicket of chairs and thinks better of it. She makes do with a weird little half wave, half salute. She’s a formidably massive person, tall and broad, her rectangular figure not flattered by her mute-colored outfit—skirt, sleeves, and turtleneck all of puritanical length. She wears her hair in a tight braid from which a few wiry salt-and-pepper strands have escaped. She chews a piece of gum with great vigor. Her voice is precisely as loud and bassoonish as you’d expect from her stature. “What did you think of the welcoming committee? Ha!” She doesn’t laugh, exactly, but shouts the syllable with such gusto that I actually hear some object in the room hum briefly as it vibrates in resonance with her “Ha!”

  “Everyone, this is Mr. Knight, who has braved the Moral Fucking Majority to sing for our children today.” She reels off the names and roles of her seated guests, which I instantly forget. The only one that sticks with me is Eric, a lawyer—“our esteemed counsel,” Mrs. Pease calls him—who has rolled up his shirtsleeves for this powwow and looks me up and down like the Terminator, scanning for potential legal liabilities. Finally Mrs. Pease claps a thick hand onto the shoulder of a frail young woman who’s recently been crying. “And last but not least, Ms. Elkins, the one who got us into this goddamn mess!” She says this with good humor, but Ms. Elkins flinches from her boss’s boisterous paw and gives me a pained smile that suggests she doesn’t find it the least bit funny. “Well, Mr. Knight, thanks for showing up. I suppose you weren’t expecting Custer’s Last Fucking Stand.”

  “Nooo. This was all a complete surprise.”

  “I did call your manager, you know. He said you couldn’t be reached. What’s that all about?”

  “I was in transit.”

  She shoots me a skeptical look she must have practiced on generations of recidivist hair-pullers. “Well, anyway, you’re here. We’re in day two of this shit. I’ve got twenty kids absent today because of all the chickenshit parents trying to run away from the situation, and that’s not even counting the ones who are out there being used as fucking props.” She turns back to the window, pushes aside one of the vertical blinds, and appraises the crowd through the gap, working loudly on her gum. “Jim! Look! There’s the Colemans. Fucking traitors. At least they didn’t drag Katie along.” She turns to me. “Some of them make their—did you see? The children? How can you justify that as a parent, I’d like to know? I would really like to fucking know. Yanking your kid out of school and marching her back and forth outside the school, yelling shit at the school, while her friends are inside the school? How is that responsible? You know, the hell with a restraining order, Eric, if they pull this again tomorrow I’m calling fucking Social Services.” Mrs. Pease isn’t the first principal I’ve met who turns sailor-mouthed behind closed doors, but it’s always a bit of a shock to hear an adult talk like this on school grounds, even with no kids in earshot.

  “Are they gonna be out there all day?” I ask. I don’t relish running that gauntlet
again with a huge kit bag that for all anyone knows contains high-powered rifles. More to the point, do they really expect me to perform? My inner child psychologist says the kids have had quite enough commotion for one day without adding any more excitement to the mix.

  “I don’t think so,” says a man whose name I didn’t catch. “Yesterday they left at nine-thirty.”

  “Yeah,” Mrs. Pease agrees. “They’ll skulk off as soon as the fucking TV people get their footage and go. Not much stamina, these people, you know? That’s why we’re gonna outlast ’em.”

  Ms. Elkins is visibly appalled at the prospect of outlasting ’em. “Um, Mrs. Pease?” she peeps. “You know, I really wouldn’t mind, um, just to stop reading the book. I mean, instead we could read—”

  “That’s out of the question, Ms. Elkins!” snaps Mrs. Pease. She maneuvers herself around Ms. Elkins’s chair and towers over the daunted little teacher, speaking more softly. “Listen to me, Ellen.” Ellen Elkins? That’s unfortunate. Smellin’ Smellkins, the children must say. “Don’t pussy out on us now. This isn’t about a fucking book anymore. This is about right and wrong. You will read every last word of that book to your students, and if anyone missed anything you’ll start again on page one. Understand?”

  Ellen Elkins begins to cry.

  “Look, maybe this isn’t the best time for a puppet show,” I offer.

  “Oh my God! Mrs. Pease!” shrieks Jim, just behind my left ear, with such utter horrified urgency my blood runs cold and I assume he’s spotted a tarantula on her shoulder. Everyone tenses for action, and a couple of people start to get up, but nobody knows what kind of response is called for.

  “Is that the nicotine gum?” Jim careens across the room toward Pease, bumping, not gently, into every person and chair in his path. “You’re not supposed to chew it like that! It’s not like regular gum—didn’t you read the instructions?” He reaches his destination and with a deft trio of wrist-flicks grabs three tissues from a box on the desk. “Please spit it out right now!” He thrusts the wad of tissues toward her, his eyes pleading. Given the way she’s been munching on that gum this whole time, I’d say it’s already done whatever damage it’s capable of, but he’s desperate to get the stuff out of her mouth. She grabs the tissues from him and spits the gum into them with an exasperated shake of her head.

  I bite my lip to keep from laughing. The principal had to spit out her gum! Does she have enough for the whole class? Nobody else seems to appreciate the irony. Ms. Elkins tries to bring her sobs under control. Eric the attorney sits with his arms crossed, taking it all in with the indulgent patience of someone who’s billing his time by the quarter hour. Jim inspects his boss with deep concern, watching for early symptoms of Mischewed Nicorette Syndrome.

  From the crowd outside, a cheer goes up. “Oh, for God’s sake,” says Mrs. Pease. “I want to go out there. Can’t I go out there? Relax, Eric, I’m not. They’d just shout me down anyway. Unless we could—” She suddenly looks at me, and my guitar, with a slightly crazed gleam in her eye. “You know, Mr. Knight, maybe you can help us out.”

  Uh-oh. “Help you out?”

  “Sure. Let’s get a little hootenanny going.”

  “Maureen,” Eric says.

  Maybe Jim was right about the gum. She’s getting a tad loopy. “A hootenanny, you say.”

  “Absolutely! Show these assholes they’re not the only ones who can make some noise.”

  “Maureen,” Eric says.

  “No, come on, this could be great. Do you know any Harry Potter songs?”

  “There are Harry Potter songs?”

  “Oh, I don’t know—there must be, right? Or what about ‘We Shall Overcome’?”

  Nicotine-addled or not, this woman is starting to piss me off. “Maureen,” Eric says, “I don’t recommend you antagonize them.”

  “I tend to agree,” I say. Please, Pease. I’m not about to profane “We Shall Overcome” by singing it at a Harry Potter counterprotest.

  She peeks through the blinds again. “Guess I’m the only one here with the courage of my convictions. But you’re in luck, Eric. The fuckers are dispersing.”

  A couple of people get up and go to the window to verify this. That last whoop we heard must have been the climax of the morning’s activities. Will they come back tomorrow morning? I’m filled with relief that I’ll be long gone by then, that I don’t have to stick around to find out how the confrontation between preening Len and intractable Maureen plays out. Maybe a year ago I could have worked up a little righteous indignation in support of a harmless teacher’s right to read her kids a harmless story. Now, though, I simply can’t bring myself to care. Most of this school’s parents probably work at one of the countless tech companies a few miles from here, in the belly of the beast, the industry that’s leading us all to the slaughter. These should be the people best equipped to understand and mitigate the technological judgment day we’re hurtling toward, and here they are bickering about a children’s book while we are losing time, losing time by the minute, and there is none left to lose.

  And me? What’s my excuse? Why don’t I grab these sheep by their necks and throttle the complacency out of them? Well, because it would do no good—thanks, indirectly, to idiots like the ones outside. We live in a world so rich with shrill axgrinders and schizophrenic self-styled prophets that reasonable people have learned to categorically ignore any message whose messenger delivers it with too much urgency. Zealots have given zeal a bad name, and even if the sky really does happen to be falling, only the soft sell stands a chance. So I hold my tongue, pick my battles, and swallow the rage that comes over me when I see the Mrs. Peases of the world caught up in a pissing match like this, the proverbial rearrangers of the Titanic’s deck chairs. It was sad when the great ship went down.

  But my patience with grown-ups is wearing superthin. If I don’t get out of this room, I may start saying all this out loud. “So where do I play?” I say. Nobody pays attention. I clear my throat and try again, louder. “Mrs. Pease? Where am I gonna play?”

  Maureen Pease turns and looks me in the eye, opens her mouth to speak, and raises an index finger as if about to point me toward the performance venue. Then she lurches forward and vomits lavishly onto her desk.

  “The thing is, you’re not supposed to swallow the nicotine,” Jim says for the third time. However sincerely I assure him that I understand the cause of Mrs. Pease’s mishap and that it’s fine, really, these things happen, I can’t make him stop the explanations he’s been offering ever since he hustled me out of the suddenly pungent office. If he seemed vaguely queasy when I met him, the principal’s puking turned him positively green, and he’s kept up a stream of apologetic chatter as some sort of coping mechanism while helping me get my gear from the car.

  “I mean, I told her a dozen times, you’ve got to follow the instructions on that stuff. That’s powerful stuff!” He hovers over me, dancing on my frayed nerves, while I set up. We’re on the stage of a large, expensive auditorium that I can tell won’t work for my act. It’s too big, the stage too far from the front row to allow much intimacy with the audience. With rows of cushioned theater seats, dim house lights, and bright stage lights, this room is for an edifying hold-your-applause string quartet concert or ballet recital, not for my brand of participatory silliness. Also, I know what big seats and darkness represent to kids: shelter from adult eyes, an atmosphere deliciously conducive to kicking, punching, small-object chucking, and assorted other provocations. You get much less trouble with everyone cross-legged on the floor under harsh fluorescents that leave no rascal unturned.

  But that’s the least of my problems, I realize as soon as the children start coming in. This whole controversy has them keyed up in a very bad way—how could it not? Ignoring their teachers’ attempts to herd them into lines, taking full advantage of their brief interval of mobility between the classroom and the assembly, they hop, shove, twirl, veer, screech. Jesus, they need to be let loose in the backyard to
blow off some steam, not sat down for an hour in front of a stranger with a googly-eyed puppet on his hand. Over the din I try to tune. Jim has left the stage and consults in low tones with a teacher who’s been through the wringer. I see the little girl from the parking lot, standing apart from her classmates, looking lost and anxious, effervescence gone, pigtails askew, verging on tears.

  Jim comes back for more hovering. With a poor show of nonchalance, he asks what songs I plan to play. Feeling me out, no doubt, for any sparks I might throw onto this K–2 tinderbox. I list a few titles, tempted to throw in a fake one just to see what he’d do. And then, Jim, I’ll segue into that old favorite “Get Up and Poke Your Neighbor in the Eye.” (Poke your neighbor to the left! Now your neighbor to the right!) But it’s only funny until someone loses a paycheck, so instead I reel off the blandest songs I can think of. “It’s just they’re kind of rambunctious today,” Jim informs me confidentially, winning fifty understatement points.

  “Oh, well, you know, kids will be kids,” I say. And adults will be Biblemongering buffoons who traumatize their children for no good reason. The faculty has succeeded in getting about half the kids into their seats, or at least into the rows—another drawback to theater-style seats is that when you’re three feet tall, you’re the same height whether you’re standing or sitting, so it’s hard to tell. Wish I could sneak away to the bathroom for a few minutes while they’re getting situated. Not to relieve myself but to clear my head, and also it’s freezing in this room and I could use some hot running water to thaw my fingers before I try to play. But for all I know, my presence onstage, indicating imminent entertainment, is the only thing keeping this scene from devolving into all-out lawlessness. None of these teachers look very effectual. Mrs. Pease is still nowhere to be seen, maybe digesting nicotine on a fainting couch somewhere. And look, here comes someone else to vet my set list. It’s the harried-looking woman Jim was conferring with. So much for my foolish fantasy of five minutes to myself. Hell, I’d settle for a sound check.