No More Dead Kids

by Thomas Marshall

  From the museum, we trekked behind the museum and hiked up a landscaping path to avoid paying. I know that it’s stealing and that we’ve done it quite a bit now, but I don’t know, I feel like certain things should be free, those certain things that every American should have the right to see, like the how most things in DC are free, that’s a good policy. Ken found a turtle on the way up the path, he wanted to bring it back with us, but I was eventually able to convince him not to.

  I fell in love with the building the moment that I saw it, everything, the symmetry, the detail, the library, the inventions, everything except the whole slavery thing. This dude wrote the Declaration of Independence, read in six languages, was an architect and an inventor wrote a Bible and was just awesome. Again, except for the whole slave thing. Ken kept curiously trying different doors to the building, and eventually an attendant asked him if he needed help, he said we were looking for the entrance, and she asked to see our tickets so she could tell us what time our tour was. We said we’d check and left. We then joined a tour just as it was about to enter the house. Things were going well. Well, until that same lady saw us with the group and asked to see our tickets again. She asked us to leave. At least I got to see the atrium or the foyer or the anteroom inside. And we left.

  We traveled onward to the capitol. Ken slept for most of the drive, Ken sleeps a lot. I had fried catfish for lunch at a roadside stop while he slept, then we found a spot to park in DC and walked around. I’ve been wearing the same pair of pants for the past fifteen days, they just feel crusted and hard, but they’ve done well so far. I felt a little bad wearing them in front of the white house, though. We spent the night in the capitol.

  . . . . .

  Day 16. After we woke up, we went everywhere that wasn’t open the afternoon before, and I still know there was so much more we could see, but we left that night for Annapolis.

  I really like DC, it just feels important. I wish I were the kind of American that would weep at the site of the Star Spangled Banner, but I couldn’t be. I’ve loved driving so much. Just watching the vast landscapes change in this incredible expansive country. Driving from coast to coast gave me such an idea of the scope of the country, but it also brought it so much closer together. For how vast and different each place is, the sprawling deserts, or the dense swamps, or the thick forests, each gradually turning into the next as the land rolled out before us, it brought the coasts together so close. After all, we did drive it all, and fast.

  Each town we passed through or stayed in had its differences in dialect, the evolving twang as we moved East and South; and each town had its different little quirks or regional landmarks, though they all shared certain things. The golden arches are the same, the way Coca-Cola tastes, the inside of a gas station bathroom, or the parking lot of a CVS, they all stayed the same. That is the placelessness of modern America, but I love it nonetheless. And I love the journey as well as all the destinations. And Ken, oh Ken, with a gun for a hand and a head full of troubles. I love Ken, really, in spite of everything, he’s been a great companion on this adventure.

  We made it to Annapolis by nightfall and slept. On the backroads there, fireflies darted in and out of view in the gloaming mist as we drove through the tall grasses, meadows, and trees of the backstreets of the town; it was magical, I’d never seen anything like it.

  . . . . .

  Day 17. I feel like a pubescent teen again, I woke up to find that I’d jizzed in my pants overnight. I guess that’s what I get for not jerking off for like 15 days. Oh well, at least I won’t have to deal with this again for another two weeks I guess.

  After sleeping in, we walked around the small town, having really good seafood and ice-cream, and checking out the town hall, and the Naval Academy (Ken’s dad’s alma mater). Everything there was Old Bay, food, potato chips, everything, and it was awesome. We swam in a muddy river, a gorgeous river that the houses went right up to, each with its own private dock, each sadly lacking any green lights though. Swimming down the river we found quite a lot of semi-sunken and abandoned sailboats that were fun to play on like kids. One boat, half-sunk in the neck-deep water was still roped to a completely submerged section of deck, ‘only memories of its firmament jutting above the murky surface’ Ken wrote. We spent some time just messing around there, and I expected at any time that it could turn into that scene in Jaws where the head pops out of old Ben Gardner’s sunken boat.

  Anyway, we made it back to shore, and we hosed off quickly in someone’s yard before returning to our car. We had Jimmy Cantler’s and Rita’s Ice and Custard and then headed up to Baltimore.

  We walked around the Raven’s stadium, talked to two kind security guards about the gas mileage of the car because they were in the market for something sporty and fuel efficient, and had Five Guys, overpriced Five Guys, for dinner in a mall. I drove around inner-city Baltimore, full-on-fuck-you-inner-city Baltimore, really wishing I’d never watched The Wire; all to find what Apple Maps said was Edgar Allan Poe’s house. And either they tore that historic landmark down and built projects, or it’s a different Po man’s domicile.

  We drove up to Philly and walked the campus of UPenn in the moonlight (my former dream school) before settling in a Walmart parking lot for the night. I know now that it was Lila that I was missing, and not just someone. And I know now that I’m going to have to talk to her, and apologize to her, and take her back in New York. I could spend the rest of my life with her, I love her, and I intend to do so.

  . . . . .

  Day 18. We went in the Walmart after waking up, washed off in the bathroom, and then had McDonald’s at the in-store restaurant, the two monoliths of middle America, together in one building. Walmart is like the 24 hour, all-blue Target where the employees aren’t really paid enough to care. I don’t know, I’m part of the only 10% of Americans that don’t live within ten miles of a Walmart, so I guess I didn’t ever grow up with it as a staple of life. It was still convenient though, and they encouraged travelers to sleep in their parking lots, which was a plus.

  On to Philly, we drove the city. Okay, yes, I know I’ve been using certain phrases a lot, but I just like them, and they make sense. Anyway, so we drove the city, and it was really nice, bustling, and active. Active, historical, and modern. We parked and walked to Independence Hall, which was absolutely incredible.

  Ken can just be an interminable self-centered bore sometimes. I honestly couldn’t tell you what he wanted to do, his mind either focused on one thing a second, or on one thing for a day and nothing else, and I don’t know which was more annoying. The fact that we haven’t been apart for more than a few minutes for the past eighteen days has really started to wear on me.

  A family that was leaving the Hall was kind enough to give us tickets, and so we got in. There was a first draft of Common Sense and the early handwritten iterations of the Declaration with notes and edits in the margins from TJ himself. We took a tour of the signing hall, and I really don’t want to be melodramatic or sound like a nerd, but it was absolutely incredible. You know what, fuck anti-intellectualism, I’m a nerd, so be it. I could feel the weight of that room, I could hear the debate and the cracks of musket fire in the distance. Ken liked the fucking leaves outside. I asked him about this, and he said he’d rather ‘just read about it online.’ I don’t know, maybe I’m just a more visual or experiential person, or maybe I’m just not a goddamned sociopath. I don’t know though. Speaking of sociopaths, there was a pasty group of adults and their offspring that I’m almost sure were in a cult. Or at least the very soft-spoken, tall, pale kids with bowl cuts wearing enough khaki to make the British Indian Army say ‘tone it down a bit, mate’ all extolled the virtues of homeschooling, and all of a sudden my road companion Ken didn’t seem all that bad.

  Before we left, we had to get Philly cheese steak at both Pat’s a
nd Geno’s. And as much as I hate to take sides, Pat’s really did it for me with their grilled onions, Ken liked Geno’s better. A house-car divided. And really I’ve just been trying to do or think of anything to keep me from thinking about the fact that I’d be seeing Lila that night. I texted her that I’d be arriving soon to the one letter response of ‘K.’ I didn’t know what the fuck that meant.

  I drove to New York, terrified, hopeful, and uncertain, taking the Jersey Turnpike as it revealed the magnificent city to us. I wanted her back, if all this time away has taught me one thing, it’s that I really wish I had done everything in the world with her. And I feel so goddamned awful for putting her through that whole horrible breakup for me to realize this; but I hoped, I knew, that I’d see her, that we’d talk, and then we could just start back like we didn’t miss a beat. God I’ve missed her, and I love her so much.

  As we parked and I walked to the door of the apartment complex, she was living in my heart swelled with anticipatory hope, and I felt those same nervous butterflies that I had the first time I saw her as my girlfriend. I heard her voice as she buzzed me in at the front and my heart skipped a beat.

  We took the small, rickety elevator up to her floor; I took a deep breath as I walked down the hall to her door, imagining that maybe when she opened the door, she’d leap into my arms for a huge hug, that smile of hers I loved so much lighting up her face, or maybe she’d even open the door and immediately kiss me. I knocked on the door and held my breath as I heard a rustling on the other side towards it. The peephole went dark from the looker on the other side and then lit up again as the figure drew back. Okay, I thought, here we go. Lila. The door swung open.

  On the other side stood a college-aged girl wearing only an unpadded flesh-toned bra and gray sweatpants, who seemed to have showered less in the past month than Ken and I. She was curt too, which just compounded the effect.

  “Lila’s in the living room,” she let out like saying that was even too much effort and went back into one of the other rooms.

  I shook off the dust of my shoes or at least tried to at the threshold, but still walked in with dirty loafers. I walked towards the main room, and Lila turned the corner to greet me, with a hug, like the kind you give an old acquaintance you hadn’t seen for a while.

  “Hey Alex, hi Ken. How was the drive?”

  What, the drive all the way from San Diego to see you, or just the drive into the city?

  “It was fine, not a lot of traffic at all,” I said.

  Okay, so, friends, play it by ear, as friends. Okay. It was nice to see her, nice to be physically with her, but there was also that hesitation that loomed over me. Ken and I had had a long talk about Lila on the drive from Baltimore to Philly. All in all, Ken was hopeful, and I was nervous, and I wanted to wait to see how she was before I’d think about bringing anything up with her, though I had hoped I wouldn’t even have to and things would just work out. That was the plan.

  I wanna bring you home myself, bring you home myself.

  The three of us went downstairs and started to walk, saying goodbye to Lila’s nice older sister, her curt roommate, and the two other roommates, the lot of them like something out of Girls. Ken hung back, following Lila and I, giving us space. If he believed in anything, he believed in love. We walked through Central Park, the sun shimmering behind clouds in a blue sky. We sat for a while together on the grass, silent, just existing in the same place as each other, but it was still nice. And as we kept walking, we started to walk closer to each other, the time and the distance fell away, and I felt like I was hers again. We laughed, we talked, and our hands would brush up against each other’s as we walked.

  I still couldn’t believe we were in New York, I still couldn’t believe that I was with Lila. We went to a place she liked for dinner, it was okay, but it was really expensive, I could see she hadn’t changed in that regard. I just ordered soup and said that I wasn’t that hungry. It was dark in the city by the time we left the restaurant. Lila looked stunning in that golden-hour light streaming between the tall buildings and onto the rain-sheened streets. She had adopted the metropolitan New York summer look fully, and it did suit her well.

  The three of us walked to the Metro and took it to Times Square; we emerged into a city illuminated, it might as well have been daylight at street level, it was incredible. Looking upwards from the commotion and the dense mass of people, under cover of complete black darkness above as the buildings scraped the sky. The city was absolutely electric. The city was alive, it was a living entity, and even the ground was breathing, belching out hot steam at every exhaling manhole.

  Walking then to 30 Rock Plaza, the city didn’t stop. New York is really two cities, the one looking up and the one looking forward. The metropolitan monoliths looking up, and the people of all sorts and the waste they leave behind looking down. The waste, and the debris, and the constant repairs, and the scaffolding (I love the look of scaffolding), and the overflowing trashcans, and the jackhammered potholes. I looked at both cities in awe and fascination. Moloch the unforgiving.

  After walking through and back through the electric and living night, we eventually made our way back to the Metro and took it back to what was Lila’s home. She loved the city, she wanted to stay there, she wanted to go back there after the summer, and she dreamt of NYU or Columbia or Fordham, and of the Times, and of the city she saw as her own.

  We were greeted in the apartment once again by Lila’s sister and her roommates. Her sister was interested in city boys of all sorts, the roommates spouted their litany of label-obsessed neo-feminist privileged East Coast hyper-politically correct opinions like they were rehearsing for a Lena Dunham/Noah Baumbach script, and the brilliant and womanly Lila was somewhere in the in-between. These two girls were the kinds of girls that hated everything I was, no matter who I happened to be; girls that could say anything and never be wrong because it’s their right to expression, but anything anyone else said contrary was completely incorrect, bigoted, or hateful. Girls who spoke vehemently against their systematic objectification and body shaming, but talked in the same breath about how hot Channing Tatum was and how, even though he was funny, they’d never date someone who looked like Jonah Hill. I don’t mind opinions, in fact, I strongly believe in feminism and equality, I just can’t stand a hypocrite.

  As a generation born into the crisis of a Fourth Generational Turning, we are predestined to see our place in the world as change-makers and moralists. The young adults of the 40’s, the ‘Greatest Generation,’ rebuilt a post-war America into a moral and patriotic metropolis, destroying what they perceived as the amorality of the 1920’s they saw as young children. Their morality was based on nationalism and religion, and now ours is based on political correctness and social justice; we practice rightness for rightness’ sake, even for the sake of personal freedoms of speech. But where are our Beats? Where is our counterculture in the face of this conspicuous morality? We might just be the first generation in history to be less subversive than our predecessors. We can be the next greatest generation, we only need to direct this energy to things that matter.

  To us, watching a YouTube video or liking a Facebook post is activism, Converse and a flannel is an identity, Sperry’s and a polo is a personality, a phone is a status symbol.

  We can’t each fix every problem, and being an SJW doesn’t help, it only makes you feel better about yourself and better than everyone else; if you want to make a real difference don’t like a hundred Facebook posts, or just talk about injustice, actually go somewhere and do something, a quantifiable something. Clean up a beach, sit down and talk with someone who seems sad, hand out meals or blankets to the homeless, just do something; volunteer your time not your opinions. We’re a passionate and a conscious generation, let’s not also be a selfish one, let’s actually direct that energy into cha
nge and progress and good. Go out there and do something; don’t see all of the dying fish and say ‘look at all of these problems,’ actually pick one up and put it back in the ocean. But who am I to say anything, I don’t know, it’s just that hearing people like that always aggravates me so much. The progress of one group doesn’t come from the degradation of another, it comes from the elevation of that one group, benefiting everyone; a rising tide lifts all boats.

  But oh well, we’re still fucked. Take away my home and give me student loans, but they’ll say it’s all our fault anyway; I’m a millennial blame it all on me, we can only make it out of here alone. But I don’t know. If post-modernism is what fucked the generation before us, then post-irony is what’s fucking ours. That and the boomers.

  I’m really just trying to think of anything to distract me from the reality of the situation, and the gut-wrenching confusion coupled with the heart-lifting elation of being with Lila right now. Anyway, Ken and I were given the couch, and it was nice to have a place like that indoors to sleep, which he did almost immediately, leaving me with the girls and Lila. They continued to talk amongst themselves and go to bed one-by-one as Lila, and I had that talk. We walked outside and sat on the stairs that lead to an elevated city park across from the apartment complex, we talked until 3AM.

  She told me how hard it’d been for her, and how because of that she actively tried not to think about it, that she was good, she had moved on, and that there was nothing to worry about. She was ready to be friends.