by Nick Mamatas
School is a specter haunting the evening, more so than even the Ann-shaped hole in the household. The thought of going back to Hamilton ruins the pizza on Dave’s tongue. It deflates every joke on The Simpsons. It taints the memory of the bookstore, and the feeling of Erin’s sex in his hand. It turns the sprightly theme to Masterpiece Theatre—usually Dave’s signal to head upstairs to his room for the night because PBS is boring—into a funeral dirge. Dave’s surprised that his father is even watching; he’d always assumed that Masterpiece Theatre was his mother’s show.
The Internet is no help, at first. The songs he downloaded yesterday sound tinny and juvenile. Goth Babe of the Week is a horse-face, and plus all girls look different now that he’s actually touched one in a sexual way. It’s even more disgusting to look at them, to realize what they want and how they let any asshole with acne and a backwards baseball cap paw at them. The thought of masturbation just reminds him of Erin, which in turn reminds him of school, and the fist in his face, and the sound of his nose pancaking against his skull. He wonders how Oleg is doing, but his friend isn’t on AOL Instant Messenger at the moment, and it’s probably too late to call. Oleg has an overprotective family—every American has AIDS and deals drugs, you know.
Thinking of Oleg makes Dave think of trench coats, and trench coats suggests Columbine, so Dave Googles that and reads up on the latest news, of which there is very little. Then he types in “assault rifles mail order” and a few dozen pages of links appear. He’s just curious. Colorado is a long way from New Jersey, and apparently guns are much easier to get out west. A remnant from the cowboy days, Dave decides. It is possible to buy a rifle via Internet, but it’s a huge pain in the ass, and one needs to be eighteen years old. It has to be shipped from a licensed dealer to a licensed dealer, and who the hell would hand an awkward-looking kid a submachine gun? In his momentary fantasy, Dave is hoping for a site named something like www.MachineGunsToURDoor.com, with a seven-day free trial on an AK-47 and a no-questions-asked post-massacre return policy.
“That would be cool,” Dave says to himself. Downstairs, the TV switches on to The Sopranos. “Too bad I don’t know any Mafioso,” Dave says, again to himself. It’s hard to imagine some big Italian guys showing up at a high school to blow away a bunch of high school kids, even if some of them are “moolies,” even if some of them are probably in gangs. But Hamilton does have metal detectors, and metal detectors imply the existence of contraband metal objects; and the existence of contraband metal objects means that somehow kids Dave’s age can get their hands on guns.
Dave decides that he just needs to put his mind to it. Poke around. Ask some questions. Cough syrup gives him strength.
But not too many smarts. Lee is laughing at him the next morning. “Oh man!” he cries, “you think just because I’m black I know where you can buy a motherfucking AK Forty-Seven!”
Malik is as surprised, but less entertained. “Listen, pussy, just hit the fuckin’ gym and lift some weights. Put some muscle on your skinny white ass. You think you’re gonna pull a piece on a brother up in here? They’ll snatch it out of your hands and punk your ass with it.”
Lee suddenly stands very straight and waddles in place, turning to face Malik. With an affected honky accent he asks, “Pardon me, Mr. Negro. Do you think you might be able to assist me in procuring some illegal firearms, so that I may wreak havoc upon your ebony brothers?” Then he collapses into giggles.
“Hey, dudes . . .” Dave begins. Lee laughs even more, snorting out the word dudes once or twice between laughs. Malik just shakes his head and pulls out a plastic toothpick. He works it into the gap between his front teeth. “Y’all so fucked up. This fuckin’ school is so racist.” He walks off, a simmering cloud.
“Anyway, I’m a lover, not a fighter,” Lee says. “A heterosexual lover, I mean. Faggot. Anyway, y’all should check in with George. He’s a thug, but I don’t think he’ll sell your white ass a gun. Would you sell him one, if you had one?”
“Well, no,” Dave says.
“Why not?”
“Because I’m afraid of him! I’m afraid of everyone, even you!” Dave says. “But he has no reason to be afraid of me.” Dave’s up on the balls of his feet, his blood thick with syrup but feeling just that much lighter for it, like he might float away and drift over the Hudson River at any moment, and land at Ground Zero to the applause of the misery tourists. That would be better than another day at Hamilton.
“Yeah, but what if you had a gun? He’d have a reason then.”
“Yeah . . . that’s why I want the gun.”
“’Zactly,” Lee says, “that’s right.” And then the bell rings and they go their separate ways.
Erin isn’t in Social Studies. She rarely seems to be in class. Charles is there though, and he’s peering at Dave. Dave’s just stopped caring and says, in his best imitation of what people have been asking him his whole life, “What are you looking at?”
“Hey, fag, how’d you break your nose?” Charles says. “Some guy thrust too hard in your face at the Mineshaft this weekend?” There are some titters from the class. “Occupational hazard of being a professional cocksucker, eh?”
“I broke it in the fights after the false alarm,” Dave says. “Some guy punched me right in the face.”
“Yeah, who?”
Dave shrugs.
“Same guy who stabbed you?”
“How’d you hear about that?”
“Word gets around when someone with AIDS starts bleeding all over the school,” Charles says. “It was a black guy, wasn’t it? Both times, right?”
Dave shrugs again, but doesn’t say anything.
“That’s a yes,” Charles says. “Are you their bitch or something?”
“Yeah, a punk!” some girl says. People turn to look at her; even Charles seems surprised. “I heard that in prison the guys who take it up the ass are called ‘punks’,” she explains, a little sheepishly. She isn’t even affiliated with the Cult of the Shell Necklace, but is confident enough to kibbitz. Dave looks over his shoulders for Mr. McCann, but he’s late.
“Man, if one of those ‘brothers’ tried something like that on me, I’d fuck them up,” Charles says. “My older brother was a Dotbuster back in the day.” Dave had heard of the Dotbusters—a few dozen kids who used to beat up Indians and Pakistanis up in the Heights.
“Yo, that’s bullshit,” a kid named Luis calls out. “The Dotbusters were all Spanish, homes. Except for one Polack.” Luis holds up a single finger to represent said Polack. “Your family didn’t live on no Central Avenue.”
“You calling me a liar?” Charles says. Dave takes his seat, happy to be forgotten, almost anxious for some interracial strife. He begins to feel almost giddy, almost the way I do, seeing everyone and everything from the slightest of removes. Maybe it’s the long-term effects of the cough syrup, maybe he’s just begun to look forward to abuse and beatings, or maybe he just wants to see someone else beaten up for a change. He’s on the edge of his seat.
Luis laughs at Charles. “Eat it, man. Just sit there and swallow it.” Luis has the mustache of a thirty-year-old and doesn’t even bother talking back to teachers to show off. He doesn’t need to. Charles decides to swallow it, as recommended, with a shrug and a “whatever.” Then to Dave he says, “What are you looking at?”
Dave bursts into rich peals of laughter. He even points at Charles and puts his other hand on his stomach. “Fuck you, man!” Dave shouts. “Fuck you up your ass. You’re such a fucking poseur. Tell you what?” Dave says, pointing at his nose. “Punch it.”
“I will fucking punch it, if you don’t stop fucking laughing.”
“Okay,” Dave says. He takes ahold of his desk and scoots his chair from its row so that he’s closer to Charles. “Go right ahead.” He can’t stop giggling. Charles doesn’t punch him in the nose, but he does slap Dave right across the face. Dave rolls with the blow and cackles, then
hops away, still in his seat. Charles jerks his seat with him too, the world’s slowest and dumbest chase scene. “C’mon, make me your bitch!” Dave shouts. “Fuck me in the ass!” Then McCann walks in.
“Take your seats,” he says. With an eye toward Dave and Charles, he adds, “Back to your rows.” McCann doesn’t look good—stubbly cheeks, bags under his eyes. Dave giggles and snickers his way through roll call and then another lesson about Latin America. Something about “the disappeared,” which Dave thinks is a strange way to put it.
Erin’s disappeared, Dave realizes. She usually shows up for at least one or two classes, or lunch, and certainly has a gift for turning the corner at just the right moment and smiling, or scowling, or waving with twinkling fingers at Dave. She’s not in school at all today. Did she get sick? Take a bare-assed belt-whipping from her father—isn’t that what people from “the Old Country” do to their slutty girls?—or is Erin just avoiding him after the bookstore incident? Because she’s embarrassed, or because Dave didn’t do a good job with her after all.
Before long, it’s lunch, and there is Charles, and James, and a few other of the larger white guys, and they’re in a huddle and shooting glances at Dave. So Dave finds George, who is getting himself a whole mess of tater tots and falls into step next to him.
“Hello,” Dave says.
George just looks at him.
“Uhm, can I ask you something?”
“I want to ask you something first—what the hell happened to you, dawg?”
“Well, that guy,” Dave says, pointing a finger back at James, “punched me in the nose, breaking it, and then the other day when we were all outside with the fire drill, someone else also punched me in the face, so that explains the eye.”
“You’re a popular kid,” George says. He sits in one of the few smaller round tables with freestanding chairs on the far side of the cafeteria—in the “black kid” section. Dave goes to take a seat next to him, but George says, “That seat’s reserved,” without even looking up from his tater tots. “They’re all reserved.”
“Oh, well, can I ask you something?”
George shrugs.
“Someone told me that you might know something about self-defense.”
George looks at Dave’s face. “That makes one of us, eh?”
“I want a gun.”
George slaps his hand over his mouth to keep the tater tots in his mouth from escaping all over the table. He holds up one finger and tries to swallow. Finally, he does. “Aw man, what you need a gun for? Gonna off yourself?”
“For protection,” Dave says. “I mean, look at me.”
“You’ll shoot your eye out, Ralphie,” George says. “Ever see that movie? You look like that kid a little bit.” Dave thinks that the conversation has attracted some attention, but it’s really just George’s usual crew, including Lee and Malik and a few girls, standing around the table and watching the spectacle unfold rather than taking their seats.
“This kid wants a gun?” one of the girls asks.
“Remember that fucked-up shit the other day when they brought all the black men in and walked some white kids through to stare at us?” Malik says. “He was one of them.”
“I was out that day,” George says.
“What was that all about, Damien?” Lee asks.
“Dave,” Dave and Malik both say. Then Dave lifts his shirt and shows off his stitches to an appreciative chorus of daaaamns. “Someone stabbed me with a pen. For no reason, just came up to me. It wasn’t a student, not anyone I recognized anyway. But the principal wanted to get to the bottom of it, so uh . . . I mean, I was totally against it. I’m not a racist.”
“Get the boy a medal,” the talkative girl says. “He ain’t no racist, and now he wants to buy a gun.”
“What the fuck, man?” Lee says. He takes a seat opposite George. “Fuck this, I’m eatin’.” The others take their seats as well, one girl pushing past Dave and sitting next to George. The conversation is over. Lunch is half-over. Across the cafeteria, the Cult of the Shell Necklace is eating, but still occasionally looking over at Dave, pointing openly and aggressively sipping milk from half-pint cartons. It’s a show, and a stupid one, but Dave is a half-pint himself compared to even the smallest cultist, and he’s injured and his face begins to throb again. Dave doesn’t eat, and he doesn’t move. He knows that Charles and his crowd won’t dare risk a general confrontation by crossing the imaginary line that separates the races in the cafeteria. At the end of the period, Dave drifts from the black section through to the Latino group and finally attaches himself to the end of the South Asian formation to escape.
I’ve seen what happens next over and over again. It’s like fingering old scar tissue. Dave leaves Hamilton, half-mad, half-terrified. He just wants to go home, get under the covers, and die from the concussion he doesn’t even have. What happened to the big lawsuit, to Detective Giovanni? Briefly Dave considers going into Manhattan, to see if Erin was forced to work in the diner after corralling adult help to come get him from the hospital, but he’s too tired. He walks home on automatic pilot, limbs working from muscle memory, his mind a worried blank, except for one jejune thought—How funny it is, Mr. Holbrook, that the guards never try to stop a kid from leaving the school?
Dave doesn’t look back as he walks down the steps. He takes it slow, like the hero in a bad HBO film, and walks purposefully toward a notional movie camera—me, actually, in the Ylem, as I positioned my awareness at the school’s gate—and imagines the school going up behind him. Fireballs belch forth from every window, the roof bubbles up and shatters, flaming tiles rain down and litter the street. Then the whole building collapses into its own footprint. If Dave had been wearing sunglasses, he would have whipped them off for effect. Dave is finally free. The marrow of his bones boils with glee.
That’s the amazing thing about school. Kids go. Kids who have no interest in learning, who can’t learn—they attend. Kids who get picked on, beaten up, groped and robbed in the halls, they show up the next day for more. Dave had taken a creative writing elective the term before and the teacher, a pretty hippie woman named Ms. Reyes, said on the very first day, “And please, no fantasy shoot ’em ups about rampaging down the halls of this school with a machine gun. It’s a new day out there, and you won’t even flunk the assignment. I’d just have to send you down to the school psychologist.” Oleg raised his hand then, and without missing a beat Reyes said, “No, not even if all the other students and teachers have been transformed into zombies or vampires.” Oleg put his hand down, defeated.
So Dave got the very top grades in that class, by sitting on the top of the steps, transcribing arguments between his parents as they happened. Reyes loved the pieces because they sounded so authentic, and plus Dave knew the basics of spelling and didn’t try to mess with the margins or font sizes in order to meet the four-page minimum for stories.
Dave thinks about that class now, as he walks down Newark Avenue. He has nothing to do, so he heads downhill, almost by instinct, toward the Newport Centre Mall. He can dick around in the small bookstore there, and the game shop, and even check out a movie. It’ll be a matinee, and cheap, and he might even be the only one in the theatre. It’ll be like being rich and having a personal screening room in the basement, Dave thinks. Ms. Reyes was pretty cute, with a wide mouth and deep red lipstick artfully applied each morning. She left Hamilton after a single term, but had to live close by. Maybe she’d be at the movies too, her days free because she had published several poems in literary magazines and royalties were almost certainly pouring in.
Ms. Reyes isn’t at the mall. Erin isn’t at the mall. It’s actually pretty desolate for the early afternoon. Some older white people wander back and forth as though the long arcade of stores is a running track, knots of Indian women and Latinas pushing baby wagons full of purchases chat away happily, and then there are the various workers in their awful synthetic vests, not d
oing very much at all. They’re like school kids, except so beaten down that they don’t even have the energy to plot and gossip. Dave feels a surge of power. There’s a CVS on the first floor and he decides to get a little cough syrup to make whatever movie is playing upstairs in the multiplex more interesting. And then there’s Ann.
“David,” she says, surprised.
She sounds odd. Sober, Dave realizes. He knows what to say, he thinks. “What are you doing here?”
“What are you doing here?” his mother asks. “That’s a better question.” She’s sharp. She is sober. Then she looks at Dave’s face. The bruise, the bandage over his nose, the something or other in his eyes that unnerves her. “Let’s get lunch,” Ann says, “then go see a movie.”
“Really?” Dave’s voice squeaks; it’s still breaking. He’s a bit of a late bloomer.
She slides her arm into his and leads him to the cash register. Dave should be embarrassed—normally he would be, like any other teen boy seen out with his mother—but ultimately he’s just relieved.
The afternoon is dreamy and odd. Dave even takes a swig of the cough syrup his mother paid for without going through the preliminaries of pretending a hacking cough, a scratchy throat. He’s ready for a fight, for a mid-mall meltdown, ready to shout But you drink all the time, Mom! but Ann only lightly hmms when he drinks. It’s not enough for a physical buzz, but enough for Dave’s brain and autonomic nervous system to do half the work. The flavour coating his tongue is the one associated with the drowsiness, the little fever, the colours, and his body obliges even without a full dose. He likes his cheesesteak just fine, and the salty rough-cut fries that come with it, and his mother lets him pick the movie. Samuel L. Jackson is in it, which is enough for Mr. Holbrook, cineaste. The film is even about a powerful hallucinogenic drug that happens to be a placebo, but Dave doesn’t get the irony as he sits there and pretends to hallucinate colourful trails on the edges of his own vision. After the movie, they do a little more shopping. Ann treats Dave to a long peacoat. It’s not quite a trench coat, but it’ll do for winter, and he won’t look quite so childlike and weird as he did in his puffy down jacket with the fuzzy hood last year. “Who are you, Ralphie from A Christmas Story?” some kid asked him back then before tripping him and sending him headfirst into a pile of grey slush.