by Thom Jones
White scheduled a personal one-on-one conference with Harold after school. He was far from courteous when he told Harold of the conference, and he did not stutter. The motherfucker was on the rag! Hammermeister staggered through the day, certain that he was about to be fired. But it wasn’t that at all. White dumped a book challenge on Harold. At issue was John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row—it had been called “filth” by an irate parent. White told Harold to handle it without saying exactly how. White just didn’t want to get his hands dirty, that was all. There was a levy vote coming up and “how” had to mean: get the library to pull the book. Or did it?
After thinking the matter over, Harold went upstairs and spoke with the head librarian, who was horrified at the suggestion that the book be pulled. She vowed to “go to the wall.” Hammermeister thoughtlessly warned her that librarians were a dime a dozen. It was the codeine talking. At least there were no witnesses.
That night Hammermeister left the building well after dark, and when he got to his car he discovered that all four tires were flat. Later, after a tow truck had hauled the car in, Hammermeister was informed that the tires were okay. The party that flattened them had simply removed the valve-core stems, then after the tires were deflated, poured Krazy Glue into the valves. The culprits didn’t pull the valves and run, they were brazen enough to wait until the tires went flat and then carefully squirted glue into the valves. They even took the trouble to screw the valve caps back on. Professionals! The valves were of a type that wasn’t available at that hour of the night. The car would be ready tomorrow afternoon.
Head down, hands in pocket, Hammermeister furiously strode the three miles to his apartment through a biting Nanook of the North sleet storm. Just as he cut through the back entrance, where the covered parking stalls were located, he heard the abrupt rustling of leather jackets. He barely turned his head when a large tawny palm engulfed his face like an eclipse of the sun. The mighty hand snapped Harold’s head back and firmly cradled it between the abductor’s solid chest and a rock-hard biceps muscle. As his face was getting squashed Hammermeister suddenly felt his shins getting pounded with fierce woodpecker rapidity. The tonk tonk tonk sounds were those of an aluminum baseball bat. Hammermeister sagged halfway to the ground, but the large hand held him firmly like he was some kind of rag doll, and Hammermeister was not a small man. He stood over 6′2″ but with all of the recent stress, he was down twenty pounds from his normal weight of two hundred and twelve.
The powerful hand that encased his face forced Harold’s mouth to open in an “O” as a thick, wet, balled-up sock was rammed inside, a smelly cloth was placed over his eyes, and then, as Hammermeister heard the quick rip of duct tape, the stinking rag was adhered to his face like a layer of fast-drying cement.
There were two of them. The woodpecker with the bat continued to expertly peck at his legs, knees, and elbows, while the powerful strong-armed man spun him around, cranked a solid punch into Hammermeister’s solar plexus, and then let him free-fall to the ground. For the next moment Hammermeister was kicked and pounded mercilessly. He wondered if it was murder. The woodpecker was batting him in the head now but not with massive, clobbering blows. It felt like he was being poked with the knob end of the bat. Hammermeister felt himself sinking into the black vortex of hell, but then the shower of stars abruptly stopped, and in the frigid night air he heard his assailants’ cold, rasping breaths tear through his brain like the sandpaper tongue of a lion. It occurred to Hammermeister that the dictum “when you lose your sight you become all eardrums” was profoundly true. Hammermeister could distinctly hear the different ways the two men breathed. If he lived to be a thousand, he would never forget the way these men breathed.
The stronger man grabbed his wrists and pulled them behind his back. As a knee came down on his spine, Hammermeister heard the sound of duct tape being unreeled and torn again, and soon his hands were bound as tightly as if he were displayed in a pillory. Then, with a suddenness that was frightening, he felt himself being lifted like a suitcase and lugged away from the lighted parking stalls to a very dark place. Even though his eyes were masked, he had been able to see shadows—now nothing. All the while the hollow bat rapped away at him. Neither of the abductors said a word. Hammermeister attempted to scream through the sock, but it was a scream that just couldn’t get off the ground.
The pain in his shoulders felt like a crucifixion. Harold emitted a high-pitched scream through his nose as he was hauled off into yet a deeper forest of blackness. After what seemed like an interminable voyage, he was dropped roughly to the pavement, where he wet his pants in abject terror, waiting for the mechanical action of some sort of firearm—the rotation of a revolver cylinder, perhaps.
Both of the unseen men were panting heavily. Before they shot him, they were waiting to catch their breath. After a moment he felt their rough hands pulling at his pants, ripping them down to his knees as they turned him over on his stomach. Harold let his legs kick out wildly, and this only made the men laugh.
Suddenly there was a jolting, searing-hot pain in his right ass cheek. Hammermeister could smell his own smoldering flesh. The whole focus of his being gravitated to the burn.
The other pains were gone, he was nothing but a single right ass cheek. He writhed with the vigor of a freshly landed marlin. Then he felt himself lifted like a suitcase again. The two men heaved him up, and by the smell of things, Hammermeister realized he had been cast into the garbage Dumpster before he even landed. His body was greeted by cardboard boxes, nail-embedded two-by-fours, metal cans, offal—the slime, grit, and stink of coffee grinds and cat litter, rib and chicken bones, and cigarette butts.
There was a loud clang as the two men dropped down the metal door. There was the sound of the metal lid reverberating, followed by the squeak of sneakers peeling across the snowy pavement of the back drive, as the thugs made a New Balance getaway.
The pain of the burn was incredible. It gave Hammermeister superhuman strength. In just seconds he was able to wrest his hands free from the tape. In another few seconds he pulled the tape from his face and spit out the sock that was choking him. By the time he slipped out of his bindings and pushed up the lid of the Dumpster, the men were gone; the sleet had turned to snow, and a soft white blanket was laid about him like a kind of Currier and Ives/Edward Hopper Detroit. The Motor City.
Harold hastened to his room. After four tumblers of straight bourbon and a handful of Tylenol #4s, Hammermeister, still trembling, stood before his phone imagining what he would say to the police. When he finally called 911, a dispatcher answered with a disaffected tone and Hammermeister quickly replaced the phone in its cradle, afraid that his call would be traced and an aid car would be sent to his building.
He staggered into the bathroom and looked at the burn. It was hideous, his buttock exuded a watery yellow fluid, yet the letters KKK were crudely apparent. They had somehow taken him to a prearranged spot where the hot iron was cooking. This sort of vicious calculation made him think of gangs. Of gang planning. Somebody really was playing hardball. Not kids. Not janitors. But who else except fucking kids and fucking janitors? Funny that they didn’t steal his wallet or shoot him. Rip-off artists shaking down a random victim in a parking lot would go for the money. Kids and janitors had access to a high school metal shop where branding irons could be made.
Hammermeister went back to the phone to call an ambulance and was once again struck by indecision. It had been a warning. Maybe it would be best not to get the police involved. After all, how would he explain it to Dr. White?
One of the legs of his pants had been torn off completely. His legs were swollen with red and purple abrasions yet no bones were broken. He hurt all over, yet he really wasn’t that hurt except for the searing pain on his buttock, which was an agony unlike anything he had ever known. Twenty minutes later, the burn seemed a thousand times more painful. Hammermeister took a warm shower and carefully soaped his wounds. It helped to take action. After he dried himself,
he applied some antibiotic cream to his right butt cheek and placed a nonstick dressing on it. There was only one such dressing in his medicine cabinet that would fit it, a super jumbo—hell, in Detroit you would think that gun-trauma kits would be fast-moving items at every drugstore. After Hammermeister put on a pair of clean Jockey shorts, he went back to the phone where he found himself again paralyzed with indecision. As the booze and dope kicked in, Hammermeister felt a magical sense of relief. Suddenly he was packing his suitcase. He would drive back to Sondra in the morning. He missed her and the kids more than anything. God, he had been a dick. Sometimes it took a real shocker to bring you back to your senses. Well, this night had been an epiphany. The booze and the codeine were so good, so nice, he was thinking straight for the first time in years. He had a proper sense of perspective again.
In the morning Hammermeister abruptly came to in a world of pain. The burn felt more like a chemical burn, like a deep burn—like a real deep burn. He couldn’t look at it. Instead he immediately dosed himself with vodka and codeine, and then, when he realized that his car was in the shop, he wondered about his plan for claiming the vehicle and driving back home after all. You could not drive when you could not sit down. Canada—shit, the bridge had been burned. He really hated his wife, and while he loved his kids in a way, it was one of those deals like “out of sight, out of mind.” There was no going back.
Nipping from the pint of vodka, Hammermeister laced up a pair of heavy weatherproof brogues and walked to work, stopping at McDonald’s for two Egg McMuffins and a large coffee to go. He was going to the school where he would confront Duffy and Cline. He wouldn’t even have to ask a question, all he would have to do is listen to them breathe.
It was a zoo day. The place was a zoo. First period the head of the English department—tough, smart, and formidable—came into his office and told him there was no way in hell her department was going to see John Steinbeck banished from the school. Hammermeister told her it was a matter between himself and the librarians, and she closed the door, took three powerful strides over to his desk, where he stood looking through his memos. “Now you just wait here, buster!” In casting this role, Harold was suddenly thinking in terms of Bette Midler or Cher on a tirade.
Boy! Twenty-five Hans Seyle stress points for that one. Hammermeister had tried to appeal to her sense of reason. “We’ve got a levy coming, we don’t need this right now. What will you say if I tell you we can’t buy new language-arts books this fall?” His voice was hollow. His legs, the shins especially, began to hurt more than the burn on his ass. He gulped down more codeine with the last of his cold coffee. Why in the hell had he come back to this hellhole? To nail Centrick Cline and Sean Duffy, that’s why—and from the stack of morning memos he could see that both of them had already called in sick. His secretary gave him their numbers, and he called them both at home. Neither of the malefactors answered their phones. Off somewhere together, drunk, sniggering in iniquitous delight.
Later that morning he was forced to phone the parent who had raised the hullabaloo about Cannery Row. She was a real kook. What the fuck! Yet Hammermeister deferred to her, sympathized and told her off the record that he was in full agreement with her. It was necessary to placate this woman. Dr. White had insisted upon it. Hadn’t he?
Events quickly came to a head when the issue was thrown in at the tail end of the monthly board of directors meeting the next evening. The librarians throughout the district were on hand, as were librarians from nearby school districts. The word spread fast. “Oh God,” Hammermeister thought, “a cause célèbre.” He had to go home and crash before the meeting, and then, heavily medicated, he overslept and showed up looking like Howard Beale coming in to deliver the news in that old movie Network. Harold’s buzz cut was sticky with tape, he needed a shave—he looked like a madman. But he was high and didn’t care. He had not prepared for the debate; he had decided to just “wing it.” Sometimes it paid to be spontaneous and genuine. You were walking on thin ice, but sometimes it did work.
The W. E. B. Du Bois High School librarian was dressed like a model of propriety. Armed with a thick packet of note cards, which she hardly ever seemed to look at, she gave a convincing pro–First Amendment presentation. This was followed by an eloquent statement by the head of the English department. Then Hammermeister suddenly found himself on his feet making counterarguments, all weak and vapid. The beneficial effects of the nap were short-lived. He was strung out from too much booze and Tylenol #4, and as he scanned the room looking for a sympathetic face, the fact that there seemed to be none inflamed him with hollow fury. This was a setup. The board members, the superintendent, and his own principal looked at him expectantly. The formality of the room was hard, as were the faces of the people sitting in the gallery. A press photographer snapped photos of Hammermeister, and as he did so, a feeling of depersonalization overcame the Canadian. Exhausted by the previous evening, the present onslaught was too much for him. He found himself saying, over and over again, that he was about to receive a doctorate in education, as if that were germane to the situation at hand. He said something about how a society that was too liberal became soft and festered with decay. Harold said something about the rightness of trying to change society for the better turning to “wrongness” when everyone focused on gender, sexual entitlement, and the color of skin. Whatever happened to genuine achievement leading to entitlement? You couldn’t play center for the Tigers just because you were white. No! You had to be the best center fielder in Detroit. So what was the problem? What did sex or color have to do with genuine achievement? Why did society have to allocate prizes and create heroes out of sex perverts and deluded, talentless know-nothings, be they black, white, or brown? Why did they have to hand the keys to power over to fools? The right-minded liberal inclination to make the “all men are created equal” utopia had led to ruin. Utopia-building, good in theory, simply did not work anymore. It only led to ruin, decay, and dispersion. It was time to resort back to the police state. Like Duffy had said—Singapore!
Somewhere in the back of his brain he realized it was the codeine talking—a medicinal “misadventure”—yet Hammermeister could not stop himself. He told the audience that America was going down the sewer as it coddled weaklings and slackers. He began to talk of racial polarization and the subway shooters, until finally the superintendent, aghast at Hammermeister’s presentation from the first, shot him a withering look and cut him off. “That will do, Mr. Hammermeister. Thank you for your views.”
In the morning, Dr. White was sitting in Hammermeister’s chair reading through Hammermeister’s thesis when Harold came in. He looked up at the Canadian and said, “We’ll pay your salary through the year, but don’t ask for any job recommendations. You aren’t gonna want my recommendation. I’m sorry for you, huh-huh-huh-Harold. There are people of cuh-cuh-cuh-color out there who can dance circles around your qualifications. It’s my fault for letting you buh-buh-buh-bullshit me during the interview. I wanted to hire a white man. I wanted some diversity. I wanted you to succeed, but you’re a buh-buh-buh-bad person!”
“I didn’t bullshit you. I can do this job. I can do this job!” Hammermeister began to spill his guts about the janitors, his beating and abduction. Dr. White drew his head back in alarm.
“You don’t believe me, do you?” Hammermeister shouted. He pulled down his pants and showed the man the burn on his ass and the bruises on his legs. “It looks like Kaposki’s or whatever they call it.” Hammermeister began to spin his theory that the custodians—Duffy and Cline, the weight lifter—had beaten him, gang bangers had stabbed his spiders…and so on.
“That’s the most preposterous thing I’ve ever heard. For one thing, those spiders were ridiculous, and for another, Duffy has been with us for ten years and I’ve never heard a single buh-buh-buh-bad word—”
“Bullshit! He’s an alcoholic! He’s a drunk! Everybody knows it. Where have you been?”
“He hasn’t taken a sick day in th
e whole ten years,” the principal said incredulously. “The buh-buh-buh-best attendance record in the district, sh-sh-sh-short of my own.”
“Alcoholics are like that. With their low self-esteem, they overcompensate at work. Have you ever read The Nigger of the Narcissus, Sidney? Do you know the character Waite? That piss-and-moan, do-nothing crybaby! Well, that’s who Duffy is. Duffy is Johnny Waite! And if you haven’t read the book—judging by that vacant look on your face, I dare say you haven’t—then by God you should!”
“Harold. I don’t know what happened to your legs or how you got that burn, but the alcohol fumes in here are bad enough to knock a person down. I think you should check yourself into…a facility! The district has a progressive policy—”
“Duffy and that burrhead in the gym, Cline—that’s what you call a bad nigger.”