This Book Is Not for You

by Daniel A. Hoyt

  The skins understand the power of that transaction.

  If the skins were walking down the street, you’d cross and walk on the other side.

  And, okay, fine: I was involved. I lived with them. I shaved heads. I shaved my own down to the bristle-rasp stubble that comes when your hair barely exists. I was a not-quite skinhead. When I shaved off my hair, I felt like something new, like someone else. You would too. Try it. An electric razor costs about fifteen bucks. Self-transformation should cost a hell of a lot more than that.

  I shaved heads, and I punched shitheads, and I kicked some ribs until they cracked. If I had told you this on page four, what would have happened to the two of us? I’m a violent asshole, but you can kill me on the spot. If you put this book down, I die. Pick it up, and I live again. You have some crazy God juice in your veins right now. I myself killed off Huck Finn, resurrected him, condemned him to die, saved him again. Feel free to do the same to me. I can take it.

  Just promise to come back and resurrect me.

  So I was fully involved with the skins. We weren’t quite aligned with the anarchists, but if you drew a Venn diagram, we’d be humping each other’s legs. We got involved in some serious shit. We had beat up a couple of Ku Klux Klan motherfuckers from Topeka, and a few times we went into Kansas City and threw down with some bikers who were fucking with some Muslim students. It was a delicate balance, an egg wobbling on a table: principles and violence. We beat the shit out of racists.

  We threw some great fucking parties too.

  CHAPTER ONE

  You still there?

  CHAPTER ONE

  And then we had another run-in with the KKK. We were heading into Kansas City to beat the shit out of those people. I guess I need to tell you about this in particular.

  We were safety skins, or you might have heard us being called SHARPs. It’s not exactly an official thing. No dues, no uniforms—okay, sure, the heads are kind of a uniform.

  But you have a head too.

  I was seventeen years old. I was even callower than I am now. I was even dumber than I am now, if that’s even possible.

  Allen and I had been fighting over this girl. He didn’t want to sleep with her anymore, but he didn’t want anyone else to sleep with her either.

  Her name was Tomorrow. I’m not joking. I don’t remember much about her. It makes me a little sad.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Allen left to borrow a truck, and then he came to pick me up at the skins’ house. I knew he was pissed at me. I knew this trip wasn’t going to be fun.

  Allen wanted maximum violence. We were going to Kansas City to perpetrate it, to perpetuate it.

  I could hear the nothing of outside coming in through the window, and then I heard the rumble of the truck. The muffler muffled nothing. Allen wanted you to know when he arrived.

  He hit the horn twice, real fast, and then again and held it.

  I could have pretended I wasn’t there, but how long would he have waited, how many times would he have hit the horn? Each one would have been a scold, a way of saying coward.

  If I ended up killing someone, it was just something that had to happen. I remember thinking this as I slammed the front door behind me.

  I walked down to the truck, cracked the passenger door. Allen pointed behind him, said, “In the back.”

  I could have sat up front at least until he picked up the others. I could have walked right back inside the house.

  Instead, I hoisted myself over the tailgate, huddled up against the back of the cab.

  Allen slid open the little window between the cab and the bed.

  “Ready?” he said.

  “Fuck you,” I said, and he closed the window, nodded through the glass.

  He drove like he wanted to double the wind.

  The cold tried to kiss my legs through my jeans. The truck bed was scraped down to bare metal, flecks of rust, worn stripes of the original red paint. So much shit had been shoved into that pickup and then out again. I could see the fog of my breath as we whistled through the cold street. I had an ax handle wrapped with electrical tape. I had a four-inch buck knife, sharp enough to Van Gogh somebody. I had never cut anyone with it. It was too knifelike to use in that way. I wanted to go home and butter toast with it, an English muffin.

  On the way to Kansas City, we picked up a few other skins, and we picked up a German Shepherd, relegated like me to the back.

  As we sped down the highway toward Kansas City, that Ger-man Shepherd and I found a mutual interest in staying warm.

  CHAPTER ONE

  We hung out all day and drank beer in someone’s apartment in Kansas City, and at about 10 p.m., we drove down to a city park, where the Klan was having a rally. Six people in sheets were spewing up bullshit near a fountain in this decrepit park. One of the sheets hollered before a little campfire. There was no audience. It was some fucked-up private ceremony, an initiation or something.

  My ax handle was gone. I had this great capacity for losing things.

  “A little violence never hurt anyone,” Allen said.

  Allen started yelling as we walked toward the park, and then he threw a bottle, drilled it right into the campfire. Flames rushed out, and we ran at those assholes. There were at least ten of us, all shaved down to scalps.

  Those assholes scattered. I chased after one of those sheets, ran like a motherfucker.

  We headed out of the park and across a major street and then into a rundown neighborhood.

  I pumped my arms and sprinted. The man under the sheet was slow. I was gaining. I was so close I could hear his breath, a hot and frequent gasp. Above us, the sky was dark gray.

  He ran down an alley, but I ran faster. When I got close enough, I kicked out at the back of his left knee, and it made me stumble, but he buckled and released this high, awful moan, and then my momentum plowed into him. My weight pushed him toward the tar and we fell together. Something made a cracking sound as his hand hit the ground, and I thought, finger bone, and I pictured a piece of chalk snapping, something I wished I had done up in front of a blackboard, back when there were blackboards to be embarrassed in front of.

  I had a Kluxer under me. I pulled back on the sheeted head, and then I slammed his forehead into the pavement, and the voice said, “Stop,” and it was a female voice.

  I straddled her and flipped her over. I ripped off the hood, and a bloody forehead with eyes stared back at me.

  “We could fuck,” she said, “right here.”

  I spit in her face, and then I tried to summon up more saliva to do it again. Her arms were pinned by my legs, and the spit rolled down from the bridge of her nose toward her eye.

  She said, “I will bear your children. They will be pure. I can purify you.”

  I spit again, and it hit her other eye.

  “I’m not pure,” I said. I wrapped my hands around her neck. A neck is firm and strong. It feels ropy. It feels like a plastic flowerpot, under the flesh I mean. You can break that plastic if you apply enough torque.

  (I bet you wish I had stopped and recognized the poverty of my own act. I bet you wish I had seen the tragedy of my own actions, my failure as a human being, the emptiness of all this.)

  (Or maybe you’re sort of rooting for me?)

  I could smell urine. I ripped the sheet right off her.

  “You’re not KKK anymore,” I said. “You’re not anything. You’re not dead because of me.”

  “This is my curse,” she said. “I will come back in your women. I will come back. You will see me in your daughters. You will see me when your wife parts her legs. You will see me in your mother.”

  “I don’t have a mother,” I said.

  I left her there in her pissed jeans.

  She would do all kinds of evil thinking. That would continue, and I knew it. She would pray for the eradication of brown babies, black babies, yellow babies.

  This is my almost-murder. I could have killed her. I don’t think I would have lost any sleep.
>
  I didn’t like that I had touched her. I didn’t like that she had felt my fluids.

  My spit was in her eye, part of her.

  CHAPTER ONE

  In the alley in Kansas City, I committed murder in my mind. She knew this. I left the idea of her dead.

  She yelled at me as I walked away: “Rapist chink, rapist chink, chink fucker, chink rapist.”

  She could turn adjectives into nouns and back again, which is what I think about now, but then my brain felt like bloody mud. I thought about running back and kicking her until her meat was ground, until her teeth littered the alley, until she shut up for five minutes or forever.

  My own fingernails bit into the palms of my hands. I raised my own blood, and I walked away as she screamed and screamed, “Fucking chink.”

  I wandered back to the park, but everyone was gone. I heard sirens, and I wandered some more.

  After everything, we were going to meet at some bar, and I had to ask this random fucker in a suede blazer how to get there.

  “Four blocks,” he said, and he pointed, and he lied, except for his finger, because the direction was right, but it was ten blocks, maybe more. I had to ask three more people, and one said, “You’re bleeding,” and I saw it dripping off my palm. That’s how I read my palm: four self-induced crescent moons filling with blood.

  When I got to the bar, a beard attached to a fat guy asked for my ID, and I said, “I’m here with Stevie K.,” and he waved me in. Everyone was drinking in the back.

  Someone handed me a beer, and someone handed me a shot, and someone handed me another beer. I drank myself into oblivion, but it took a while.

  “I made mine piss her pants,” I said. “It was a woman.

  ” “Bad luck,” Allen said. “Hitting a woman, I mean.”

  CHAPTER ONE

  I woke up in the back of the pickup truck, stars for a quilt, wind running through my skin and deep into my bones and then into the marrow, which wouldn’t freeze, which could get eaten up. But you have to snap the bones first. You have to break them to get to the good part.

  I felt whole, cold but whole.

  I didn’t know where the German Shepherd was. I didn’t know who was driving, I had to peek into the cab to make sure it was the right truck.

  Allen was driving, and two women I didn’t recognize were lined up next to him. His right hand was tucked between the thighs of the one pushed up next to him. We were on a highway but not I-70—there weren’t enough lanes. We weren’t headed for home, at least not yet.

  We drove into the night. We were going some way, and it didn’t matter to me that I didn’t know which one.

  I woke up wind-drunk. I woke up into motion. Allen was driving that truck hard. We had somewhere to go, I was sure of it.

  I thought that bad luck would just blow right past me.

  CHAPTER ONE

  I rapped on the cab. Allen rolled down his window.

  “What?” he yelled, and it blew back to me.

  “I’m going to freeze back here,” I said.

  “Too bad,” he yelled, and he rolled up the window, but he finally pulled over into the shoulder, and I jumped out. The passenger door opened.

  “Get in,” the gal said, and I pushed in next to her. She smelled like skin and cigarettes. We were jammed together. She grabbed hold of my knee.

  “It doesn’t mean anything,” she said. “I’ve got to hold onto something or I feel all wobbly.”

  “You were passed out back there,” Allen said.

  “Snoring even,” the other woman said.

  The one I was pressed into said “I’m Emma” right into my ear.

  “Where are we going?” I said.

  “Some place to fuck!” Allen said.

  “We are not,” not-Emma said. Something about her, some thing around the eyes, something around her lips, looked familiar, but I was too drunk to map the geography of her face.

  “We’ve got a little surprise for you,” Allen said.

  I felt the fingers on my knee, breast on my elbow, leg against leg. The pickup truck was too warm, but I didn’t know it yet. After the wind, it felt pretty good.

  CHAPTER ONE

  We took an exit off the highway, and then we turned onto an access road, and then we turned onto a road running through a field.

  The woman next to Allen told him when to turn. When the road became gravel, she said, “Not much farther.”

  We came up on an old white farmhouse. One of the walls had been stripped of clapboards and was covered with Tyvek. Three cars and a pickup truck with a Confederate flag bumper sticker were parked outside.

  “They’ve got the best shit here,” the woman next to Allen said. “Just say Sierra sent you, and they’ll know what to give you.”

  “What about money?” I said.

  “You don’t need money,” Allen said. “It’s all set.”

  I opened the door, and then I turned back and kissed Emma

  on the cheek.

  “Hey,” she said, but she slapped my ass as I got up.

  I slammed the door behind me and stretched a little. The muscles in my shoulder felt all pingy.

  When I went up to the porch, I could hear people inside, a radio playing. I knocked on the door, and someone yelled, “Coming, darling.”

  There was no screen, so when the door opened, she was right there, my KKKer with the still-bloody forehead.

  “Come on in,” she said.

  That’s when Allen gunned the engine. His pickup truck ripped it on out of there.

  “I think the lady said to fucking come in,” a male voice said.

  Maybe I could have run toward the fields. Maybe I should have.

  CHAPTER ONE

  I’m not going to write about it.

  “He’s just a child,” one of them said, and another one flicked on the Bic, tried to stop the flame with my flesh.

  It’s one of those things I survived.

  I have burn marks all the way up my arm, all the way down my leg, and when I kicked out the bathroom window, I had to walk ten miles down to the highway. I had to hide in drainage ditches when their truck went past. The thigh of my jeans was glued to my flesh with pus.

  I think they just decided to let me go. They got bored with all of the screaming.

  CHAPTER ONE

  If you lived through this shit, would you want your misery to go on and on, without a break, in perfect detail, in exact chronological order?

  In most stories like this, the callow and rough-edged protagonist decides he doesn’t have the stomach for it. He doesn’t want to commit acts of violence anymore. He washes the dirt from his hands, cleans his fingernails with a toothpick.

  I still want to commit acts of violence.

  I usually don’t anymore, but I still want to.

  You wouldn’t want me to touch you with these hands.

  CHAPTER ONE

  When I got back to Lawrence, everyone knew what Allen had done.

  He had given me up for two hundred bucks. Some said three hundred. Sierra was the KKKer’s sister.

  I have a long brown scar on my left arm and a blotchy pink-brown one on my right thigh.

  I’m not going to let you touch these ones.

  They’re not exactly pretty shapes. I can’t just type them out for you.

  CHAPTER ONE

  For a short time, I slept on the street and I begged for change on Mass.

  I had nowhere else to go, so I went back to the skins’ house.

  “You all right, dude?” Karl, one of the other skins, asked.

  “I’m all right,” I said, “but Allen’s dead.”

  Allen owned that house. He literally owned it, and I went

  back and threatened to kill him.

  “Shut up,” Karl said. “He will kill you, and he’ll kill you again. He will break your motherfucking back.”

  “I don’t care,” I said, and I went upstairs to sleep on the mattress I sometimes slept on, bowed and hollowed out from so many ot
her bodies.

  CHAPTER ONE

  I was asleep at the skins’ house. Everyone knew what house it was, on account of the parties, on account that it was a bad idea to ask us to turn the stereo down—and I guess Allen knew I was there.

  I could hear him from upstairs.

  “I never noticed before,” he said, “but she’s right: he is a chink. He’s a stupid chink motherfucker.”

  He knew I was upstairs. He wanted me to hear.

  When I walked down the stairs, I heard Allen say, “That chink is a funny motherfucker.” And then he told the story of what happened in Kansas City.

  I listened to the whole chinking story, and he didn’t tell it half bad. When I shoved my head in the living room, he was talking to a couple of dudes I didn’t know, some chick too. The guys weren’t skins. They weren’t anything. The girl looked about twenty. When she turned to look at me, I saw the thin bones of a smile, her clavicle pushing up through the skin. Her hair was that kind of dyed black that parodies blackness. At some point, I realized it was Allen’s sister, Saskia. I had met her just once before.

  “So now I’m a motherfucking chink?” I yelled.

  “You’ve always been a motherfucking chink,” Allen said.

  I flipped him off, and I kind of freaked out, and I kicked the moaning television set right off the stand, and it spit out a couple of sparks and smoked a little bit. Then I dove for Allen, and he kicked me in the side of the head. The two dudes grabbed me. I tried to knee somebody or spit on somebody or bleed on them. I didn’t know the two other guys. They were guys in a way that didn’t matter. They had their fingers gripped around my arms and my body. They were hugging me in a way. Saskia just watched. She watched everything. Everyone wanted to impress her.

  “Fuck you, Allen,” I said, and I tried to kick him in the face, but he was too far away. The guys dug into my shirt and skin, tried to smash my feet into the floorboards. Saskia’s eyes burnt on and on.