by Steve Toltz
The next night I found Virginia Woolf, George Sand, Ayn Rand, Gertrude Stein, Dorothy Parker, Simone de Beauvoir, Simone Weil, Mary McCarthy, Margaret Mead, Hannah Arendt, and Susan Sontag waiting on my pillow.
In this way I was not self-educated so much as I was force-fed, and in truth I liked them all well enough. The Greeks, for example, had fine ideas about how to run a society that are still valid today, especially if you think slavery is wonderful. As for the rest of them, all unquestionable geniuses, I have to admit that their enthusiasm for and celebration of one kind of human being (themselves) and their fear and revulsion of the other kind (everyone else) grated on my nerves. It’s not just that they petitioned for the halting of universal education lest it “ruin thinking,” or that they did everything they could to make their art unintelligible to most people, but they always said unfriendly things like “Three cheers for the inventors of poison gas!” (D. H. Lawrence) and “If we desire a certain type of civilization and culture, we must exterminate the sort of people who do not fit into it” (G. B. Shaw) and “Sooner or later we must limit the families of the unintelligent classes” (Yeats) and “The great majority of men have no right to existence, but are a misfortune to higher men” (Nietzsche). Everyone else or, in other words, everyone I knew was nothing more than a corpse rotting upright mainly because of his preference for watching football over reading Virgil. “Mass entertainment is the death of civilization,” those highbrows spat, but I say, if a man giggles at something puerile and his body glows from the joy, does it matter that it was caused not by a profound artwork but by a rerun of Bewitched? Honestly, who cares? That man just had a wonderful inner moment, and what’s more, he got it cheap. Good for him, you ponderous fuck! Basically they thought it would be lovely if the dehumanized masses, who made them literally sick, would please either pass into history or become slaves and be quick about it. They wanted to create a race of superbeings based on their own snobby, syphilitic selves, men who sit on mountaintops all day licking their inner god into a frenzy. Personally I think it wasn’t the “plebeian desire for happiness” of the masses they hated so much, but the secret, sour acknowledgment that the plebes sometimes found it.
That’s why, just as my father had abandoned me, I’d abandoned his learned friends, all those wonderful, bitter geniuses, and at school I’d settled in comfortably doing the bare minimum. Often I’d give myself the day off and walk around the throbbing city to watch it throb or to the racetrack to watch the horses eke out their unfortunate existence under the arses of small men. Occasionally the administration would send grave, unintentionally humorous letters to my father about my attendance.
“Got another letter,” Dad would say, waving it in the air like a $10 note he’d found in an old pair of pants.
“And?”
“And what do you have to say for yourself?”
“Five days a week is too much. It’s draining.”
“You don’t have to be the first in the state, you know. Just scrape by. That’s what you should be aiming for.”
“Well, that’s what I’m doing. I’m scraping.”
“Great. Just make sure you turn up enough to get the little sliver of paper with your name on it.”
“What the hell for?”
“I told you a thousand times. You need society to think you’re playing along. You do what you like later, but you need to make them think you’re one of them.”
“Maybe I am one of them.”
“Yeah, and I’m going to the office tomorrow morning at seven.”
But he wasn’t always able to leave it alone. In fact, I had achieved a certain notoriety among the faculty because of the universally dreaded and personally mortifying visits of my father, whose face would appear suddenly pressed against the frosted glass of the classroom door.
The day after I showed my father my Hamlet essay, he came into my English class and took a seat in the back, squeezing himself into a wooden chair. Mr. White had been writing the word “intertextualization” on the blackboard when Dad came in, so when he turned back to us and saw a middle-aged man among all of us fresh-faced dopes, he was confused. He glowered at my father disapprovingly, as if getting ready to chastise one of his students for spontaneously aging in the middle of a lesson.
“Bit sluggish in here, isn’t it?” Dad said.
“Pardon me?”
“I said, it’s a bit difficult to think in here, isn’t it?”
“I’m sorry, you are…”
“A concerned parent.”
“You are a parent of a student in this class?”
“Maybe the word ‘concerned’ is an understatement. When I think of him under your tutelage, I start bleeding from the eyes.”
“Which child is yours?”
“I’m not ashamed to admit it. My son is the creature labeled ‘Jasper.’ ”
Mr. White shot me a stern glance just as I was trying to merge with my chair. “Jasper? Is this your father?”
I nodded. What choice did I have?
“If you would like to speak with me about your son, we could make an appointment,” he said to Dad.
“I don’t need to talk to you about my son. I know my son. Do you?”
“Of course. Jasper has been in my class all year.”
“And the others? So they can read and write: well done. That’s a lifetime of shopping lists taken care of. But do you know them? Do you know yourself? Because if you don’t know yourself, you can’t help them know themselves, and you’re probably pissing away everyone’s time here simply training an army of terrified copycats like all you lackluster teachers in this state-run fleapit are prone to do, telling the students what to think instead of how, and trying to fit them into the mold of a perfect taxpayer-to-be instead of bothering to find out who they are.”
The other students laughed, out of confusion.
“Keep quiet!” Mr. White yelled, as if it were the Day of Reckoning and he had the crucial role of sorting all the souls. We shut up. It didn’t do any good. Silence that has been commanded is still very noisy.
“Why should they respect you? You don’t have any respect for them,” Dad continued, and to the students he said, “To bow down to an authority figure is to spit in your own face.”
“I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”
“I’m looking forward to that moment.”
“Please leave.”
“I notice you have a crucifix around your neck.”
“What of it?”
“Do I really need to spell it out for you?”
“Simon.” Mr White addressed one of the baffled students. “Would you kindly run down to the principal’s office and explain to him that we have a disturbance in the classroom and the police should be called.”
“How can you encourage your students to think for themselves with an open mind if you’ve got an outdated belief system crushing your own head like an iron mask? Don’t you see? The flexibility of your mental movement is constricted by stringent dogmatic principles, so you might think you’re standing there telling them about Hamlet, but what they really hear is a man in fear of stepping outside the tight circle that was drawn around him by long-dead men who sold his ancestors a bunch of lies so they could molest all the little boys they wanted in the privacy of their confessional booths!”
I shot a look at Brett. He sat in his chair silently; his face was slender and delicate-looking, and I thought if it were not for the hair, eyes, nose, and mouth, his face could be a pianist’s hand. Brett caught me staring at him, but I don’t think he knew I was composing similes about his face, because he smiled at me. I smiled back. If I’d known that two months later Brett would take his own life, I would’ve cried instead.
***
We actually spoke the morning of his death.
“Hey, Brett, do you have that five dollars you owe me?”
“Can I pay you tomorrow?”
“Sure thing.”
People are amazingly adept at faking
happiness. It’s almost second nature to them, like checking a public phone for coins after making a call. Brett was a champ at it, right up until the end. Hell, I spoke to a girl who chatted with him ten minutes before he jumped, and she said they talked about the weather!
“Hey, Kristin, d-do you think it’s a southerly wind?” Brett had a slight stutter that came and went in relation to fluctuating social pressures.
“How the hell would I know?”
“It’s p-p-pretty strong, eh?”
“Why are you talking to me, zitface?”
I don’t want to make a bigger production out of Brett’s death than it was for me. He wasn’t my closest friend or even my confidant. We were allies, which in a way made us closer than friends. Here’s how it happened:
One lunchtime a small crowd had formed a circle in the quadrangle, standing so close to each other they looked woven together like an ugly quilt. I winced in anticipation. There are no private humiliations in the schoolyard; they are all mercilessly public. I wondered who was being shamed this time. I peered over the flattop haircut of the shortest link to see Brett White on the ground, blood dribbling from his mouth. According to several delighted spectators, Brett had fallen while running from another student, Harrison. Now, peering down at Brett, all the students were laughing because their leader was laughing. It’s not that these were particularly cruel children; they’d just abandoned their egos to his, that’s all, submitted their will to the will of Harrison, a bad choice. Why groups never follow the sweet, gentle child is obvious, but I wish it would happen just once. Man, as Freud noted, has an extreme passion for authority. I think his secret yearning to be dominated could really work nicely, if he would just once allow himself to be dominated by a real sweetie. Because the truth is, in a group dynamic the leader could scream, “Let’s all give the bastard a tender kiss on the cheek!” and they’d run at the poor kid with their lips pursed.
As it was, Brett’s front teeth lay on the concrete. They looked like Tic Tacs. He picked up the teeth. You could see him struggling not to cry.
I looked at the other students and despaired that none had enough compassion to go about their business. It was painful to watch all those meager spirits harassing Brett in this way. I bent down beside him and said, “Laugh like you think it’s funny.”
He followed my advice and started laughing. He whispered in my ear, “Can they put them back in?” and I laughed loudly too, as if he’d made a joke. Once I’d gotten him to his feet, the humiliations persisted. A soccer ball came flying at his face.
“Open your mouth wide, I want to get it through the posts!” someone yelled.
It was true that his teeth looked like goal posts.
“Is that really necessary?” I shouted, pointlessly.
Harrison stepped out of the crowd and, towering over me, said, “You’re Jewish, aren’t you?”
I groaned. I had told just one person that my grandfather was slaughtered by Nazis, and I’d never heard the end of it. Generally speaking, there wasn’t too much anti-Semitism at school, just the usual jokes about money and noses, noses and money, great big noses with money falling out of them, grubby Jewish hands stuffing money into their big Jewish noses. That kind of thing. After a while you don’t care about the ugly sentiments behind the jokes, you just wish they were funnier.
“I think you have a stupid face, Jew.”
“And I’m short too,” I said, remembering that Dad once told me the way to confuse your enemies is to respond to their insults with your own.
“Why are you so stupid?” he asked.
“I don’t know. I’ll get to that after I work out why I’m so ugly.”
Brett caught on fast and said to me, “I’m uglier than you, and I have bad hand-eye coordination.”
“I can’t run without tripping over,” I said back.
“I’ve never kissed a girl and I probably never will.”
“I have bad acne on my back. I think it will leave lifelong scars.”
“Really? Me too.”
Charlie Mills pushed through the mob and started up too. “That’s nothing,” he said. “I’m fat, ugly, smelly, stupid, and adopted.”
Harrison stood there, confused, thinking of something to say. We all looked at him and burst out laughing. It was a good moment. Then Harrison stepped toward me with the confidence of someone who has biology on his side. He pushed me, and I tried shifting my weight onto my front foot, but it made no difference. I wound up facedown on concrete. For the second time I went home with my white shirt splattered with blood.
Eddie, Dad, and Anouk were on the veranda drinking tea, looking exhausted. There was a heavy stillness. Something told me I had just missed a heated argument. The smoke from Eddie’s clove cigarettes hung in the air. As I approached, the sight of my blood reanimated them. They all leapt to attention, as if they were three wise sages who had waited ten years for someone to ask them a question.
Anouk shouted first. “Are you being picked on by a bully? Why don’t you give him my phone number and ask him to call me? I’m sure meditation would really calm him down.”
“Pay him money,” Eddie said. “Go back and talk to him with a paper bag filled with cash.”
Not to be outparented, Dad shouted from his armchair, “Come here, boy, I want to tell you something!” I walked up the veranda steps. He slapped his knee to indicate the all-clear to sit on it. I preferred to stand. Dad said, “You know who else used to get a rubbishing? Socrates. That’s right. Socrates. That’s right. This one time he was out philosophizing with some mates, and this bloke who didn’t like what he was saying came right up to him and kicked him in the arse so hard he fell to the ground. Socrates looked up at the man and smiled at him benignly. He was taking it with amazing calm. An onlooker said, ‘Why don’t you do something, or say something?’ and Socrates said back, ‘If you were kicked by a mule, would you reprimand him?’ ”
Dad broke into howls of laughter. His body shook so badly I was glad I had opted not to sit on his knee. It was bouncing like a rodeo bull. “Get it? Get it?” Dad asked me through peals of laughter.
I shook my head, although in secret I did get it. But truth be known, I would absolutely reprimand a mule for kicking me. I might even have it put down. It’s my mule, I can do what I want. Anyway, the point of the story is I got the point of the story, but it didn’t help my situation any more than Eddie’s or Anouk’s impossible suggestions. I tell you, Dad and Eddie and Anouk, the lights I had to guide me through childhood, did nothing but lead me into brick walls.
***
A few weeks later I went to Brett’s house. He’d lured me there with the promise of a chocolate cake. He said he wanted to try out his teeth. As we left the school grounds, he explained how, by wiring them back into his gums, the dentist had managed to prevent the nerve from dying. To finish the job he’d had root canal treatment, during which the dentist gave him lots of gas but not quite enough to make it worthwhile.
When we arrived at his house I was disappointed to find there was no cake, and shocked when he said we’d have to make it ourselves. I thought it best to come clean with him.
“Listen, Brett. You’re OK, but I feel a little funny baking a cake with you.”
“Don’t worry. We’re not really baking anything. We’re going to make the batter and just eat that. We won’t even use the oven.”
That sounded OK, but really in the end it was not that dissimilar to making a proper cake, and when he started sifting the flour, I nearly made a run for it. I didn’t though. I held out. We finished the mixture and were just digging into it with large wooden spoons when we heard the front door open and a voice say, “I’m home!”
My body froze and stayed that way until the kitchen door opened a crack and Mr. White’s head came through the door.
“Is that Jasper Dean?”
“Hello, Mr. White.”
“Hi, Dad,” Brett said, which struck me as odd. I had stupidly assumed he called his father Mr. Whi
te at home.
Mr. White pushed the door open and came into the kitchen. “You two making a cake?” he asked, and, looking at the mixture, added, “Let me know when it’s ready and maybe I can have a piece.”
“Ready? It’s almost finished,” Brett said, beaming at his father.
Mr. White laughed. First time I’d ever seen his teeth. They weren’t bad. He came over and stuck his finger into the bowl and tasted the thick chocolate.
“So, Jasper, how’s your father?”
“You know, he is what he is.”
“He certainly gave me a run for my money,” he said, chuckling to himself.
“I’m glad,” I said.
“The world needs passionate men,” Mr. White said, smiling.
“I suppose,” I said, and as Mr. White went upstairs, I thought of all Dad’s long catatonic periods when passion meant remembering to flush the toilet.
Brett’s room was more or less a typical teenager’s room, except it was so neat I felt my breath might make a mess. There were a couple of framed photographs on the desk, including one of Brett and Mr. White standing with their arms around each other’s shoulders on an oval- they looked like actors from a mushy television movie about a father and son. It didn’t look in the least bit real. Above Brett’s bed was a great big crucifix hanging on the wall.
“What’s that for?” I asked in horror.
“It was my mother’s.”
“What happened to her?”
“Stomach cancer.”
“Ouch.”
Brett walked to the window with slow, hesitant steps, as if crossing unfamiliar terrain at night.
“You don’t have a mother either, do you? What happened to yours?”
“The Arab mafia.”
“OK, don’t tell me.”
I took a closer look at Jesus strung up there, his long-suffering face looking down at an angle. He appeared to be studying those sentimental photographs of Brett and his father. His unhurried eyes seemed to be contemplating them with a certain sadness. Maybe it made him think of his own father, or of how sometimes you get resurrected when you least expect it.