I return to Utah. Public education in Utah is excellent, but students are not treated like adults. My citizenship grades in school are horrible. I am chronically tardy or absent. Each unsatisfactory citizenship grade has x number of community service hours attached to it. I have hundreds of hours to do. I move out of my parents’ house and begin living in an apartment with a friend. The best part about living on your own while in high school? Qualifying for free lunch tickets—technically, I am utterly poverty stricken. I guess there can be free lunch after all!
I am a decent student—my grades are good. I get a 29 on the ACT. I have Advanced Placement credits in English and Chemistry. I am part of the literary magazine staff. But I am overwhelmed by these infernal community service hours. I do janitorial work at the school to fulfill them. I also work at the local firehouse, washing the same sparkling clean fire truck, day after day. I forge numerous hours for myself. I still cannot work or forge fast enough.
Then I see the movie Pump Up the Volume, a wonderfully eighties flick about pirate radio, starring Christian Slater. I am inspired. The previous year, a senior at school printed an underground newspaper. He harped on how bad our school newspaper was and he wrote some innocuously funny things. He got in a bit of trouble, however, for writing that Mr. Such-and-such, one of the teachers, should have a tie with I’M A MEAN OLD BASTARD, AREN’TI? printed on it. A light goes on in my head. I will publish an underground newspaper! I have two months before the end of the school year, so I have to get to work.
I should tell you that I renewed my faith in the Mormon church (religion recidivism!) after returning from California and after going to Basic Training with the Army following my junior year. At the beginning of the school year, I was made the president of my seminary class. In Utah, you are allowed to take a period of seminary each day. At the beginning of every class I made some sort of military analogy in order to teach a religious principle. (Mohammed Jason Al Sadr!) But by the middle of the school year, I find a new religion; her name is Heather. Heather, Heather, Heather.
We are inseparable, we are each other’s evil twin cum guardian angel, we are partners in crime, like a pair of dragons soaring through the medieval night sky in search of villages to lay to waste. Though I have dark brown hair and brown eyes, and she has blonde hair and blue eyes, eyes I drown in every time I look into them, we look a lot alike (big forehead, toothy grin, general air of mischief) and are commonly mistaken for brother and sister. An uncommon familiarity that shows, I suppose, because we feel and act as though we have been friends for millennia, spanning countless lives. She is incredible. She makes me feel like I can do anything. And I can, so long as I can do it with her. But when you have a sense of self-worth based through someone else and not first through yourself, your insecurities will inevitably get the better of you. I learn this the hard way. Eventually I ruin everything I have with Heather, and our relationship spirals into an abominable co-dependency.
But I suppose character is built based on what you have lost more than on what you have. I love who I am today, but I hate what I had to lose in order to know myself. But back to underground newspapers and how I found time to write one during the hour each day when I was supposed to be spiritually leading my seminary class.
At first, my intentions are mature and adult. I know that anyone can criticize something they don’t like, so I want to offer feasible solutions along with my criticism. I want to present a rational argument against the current citizenship grading policy. There are also a few other issues I want to provide intelligent alternatives to. Then I smarten up. Students are treated like children at my school and their opinions are not given any credence. This becomes apparent to me when a committee of students and teachers are formed to discuss an issue. (I forget what the topic was exactly, but I remember that after all the hullabaloo, the decision reached was the same as it would have been if there had been no committee.) It is a farce, a front. Something they can say was done to come to a mutual decision that took into account the desires of the administration, the faculty, and the student body. I now know that this is simply how the world is run—most everything is bullshit, like makeup on a corpse, like China calling itself a republic, like invading a country that is a “threat” to our national security then telling them they can form their “own” democratic government. But at the time, my idealistic eighteen-year-old mind cannot reconcile this affront to reason and democracy. My voice, the voice of the student, in this case the voices of a few student representatives on the committee, are summarily ignored.
I hate to be ignored. So I scrap all my ideas and start over. That’s when the Murray High Muckraker is born. We become literary terrorists. We take on a scorched-earth policy. (“We’ll use their guts to grease the treads of our tanks!”) I berate the fascist citizenship policy. I write a tastelessly vulgar horoscope and an article on how the word “fuck” can be used for all parts of speech. (Did you know that “fucking” is one of the only infixes in the English language? Prefixes and suffixes are ubiquitous in English, as they are in most languages, but not many words can be used like this: “Absofuckinglutely.”) Heather goes off on how physical education for girls is useless sexist hogwash. She makes an unspeakably sacrilegious Mormon trivia crossword puzzle. We write all manner of offensive material. But the real coup de grace is my indiscriminately venting my spleen on every single administrator, even those of whom I am fond, all in the name of libel fairness. It is nothing less than an act of terrorism. We use multiple pseudonyms to make it appear as though there is a small army of revolutionaries hell-bent on burning the school to the ground. The staff photos are fun: my armpit, my ass, my crotch; Heather in her underwear; our friend Mandy’s feet.
It is all a secret. We tell no one. I figure the way to do something and not get caught is simply to not tell anyone, not even friends. Heather and I bring Mandy in at the eleventh hour, when it comes time to make copies. We can’t afford to print hundreds of copies of an eight-page paper at Kinko’s (not to mention the security risk), so late one night we steal the keys to Mandy’s dad’s place of employment. It almost doesn’t happen because the photocopy machines need a code to be entered into them to work. I search every workspace in the office until I find where someone has written the code down—a trick I learned from Matthew Broderick in the movie War Games. (Thanks again, American pop culture!) If I remember right, we made five hundred copies, double-sided. Collating and stapling them all is a chore. Once we finally leave, as the sun is about to come up, we lock up and walk out, passing a VA employee coming in to work. Had we left ten seconds later, we would have been in a world of hurt.
I am very proud of myself. I plan everything very meticulously. I map out where all the lockers in the school are and how many there are in each section. I break it down by class—seniors, my target audience, will get the majority, one for every other locker, while juniors will get one for every third locker. The actual distribution is another coup I am proud of. Given that I now have intimate knowledge of the janitors’ schedules at the school (thanks, community service hours!), I know that there is a thirty-minute window each Saturday when the school is completely devoid of any adult supervision. So I recruit a gaggle of losers who party at my apartment and who don’t go to my school, give them each a bundle of newspapers folded lengthwise, and instruct each one on which row of lockers is their responsibility. The newspapers are slipped through the horizontal vents of the lockers. It takes us less then fifteen minutes to inseminate the school with our demon seed. There is no turning back.
ALL HAIL WILLY! THAT BASTARD! PART TWO
I came to school early on Monday. As students started to show up, the buzz began. “Oh my heck! Do you have one of these in your locker? Read this part!” By the time everyone was there, minutes before the bell for the first class was to ring, the school was in a state of complete pandemonium. Like an amorous pyromaniac admiring his work, I walked up and down the halls and took it all in. A few teachers were running around the
halls, trying to collect as many of the illicit newspapers as possible. There was shock and disgust, there was laughter, there was speculation on the identities of the authors.
I made it through only the first fifteen or twenty minutes of first period before I was pulled out by the vice principal, who was the attendance enforcer and the butt of most the jokes in the newspaper. His name was Mr. Long, a man ironically named, I surmised publicly. He was former Army and a total stress case. He made it very clear to me, once we were alone, at our most excellent moment together, that he wanted desperately to kick the living shit outta me and that Mrs. Long could attest to the fact that his name was not an oxymoron. I later found out that he would mow his lawn every single day to relieve his tension. Apparently it didn’t work, because he died of a heart attack a few years later. He was not old. I wish I could have a beer with him now.
So how did they catch us? I covered every base. Except one. Or maybe two. No matter the lengths I went to in order to hide our identities, I couldn’t disguise my writing style. The English department most likely sang in unison like a Greek chorus, “JASON DID IT!” Once they determined that it was me, and therefore Heather as well, they took us both separately and told us that the other one had already admitted to the deed. Heather took the bait and just said, “Yeah, I did do it, and I’m glad I did! Fuck you!” I held out for about an hour, but now that Heather really had admitted it, and the fact that the lady who ran the computer lab could corroborate that she had seen me print out one of the pages (drat! foiled!), I knew I was screwed. (I had had to go to her to retrieve a page I had printed, and she looked offended by its content. I remember explaining to her that I was writing an essay for an “adult” magazine. I was eighteen! I was an adult! It’s possible I could have been a contributor to an adult publication, right? It was a pathetic explanation.) So I folded and admitted to it.
The fallout from The Muckraker was pretty extensive. One of my English teachers criticized me for not putting my name to my work, calling it a cowardly thing to do. In a sense, she was correct, but like I said before, I wanted to be heard, the way a suicide bomber wants to be heard, and this approach worked far better than any other. Besides, it was much funnier and a lot more exciting to go the route of typewriter terrorist. The seminary teachers advised their students not to read it. You know you’ve hit the big time when local religious leaders devote time to speaking out against your work. I egotistically imagined that it was a spiritual triage situation for them. A lot of people thought it was funny, a lot of people thought it was in colossally bad taste. I think they were both basically right. My mom, in a state of anguish, wrote a letter to George, my biological father in New York, whom I had only recently met for the first time, essentially blaming him and his genes for my transgression. She sent him a copy of the paper, as if to show him the product of all the bad parts of his genetic contribution to his wayward son.
The one thing that I didn’t plan on was the reaction the students’ parents would have. That’s where things got complicated. I really didn’t plan on any of the chaos leaving the school. In addition to the newspaper mess, I had recently been arrested on two counts of criminal mischief for exploding two mailboxes with dry-ice bombs. My dad, Jim, had opened a letter he found in our mailbox that I had written to George, where I bragged about the deeds, so he ratted me out to the cops. One mailbox was a random act of violence and the other belonged to Heather’s ex-boyfriend, my ex–best friend. When the detective came to my house and read me my rights, I couldn’t help but giggle. One more thing I could scratch off my list of archetypically lurid things to do before I died: being Mirandized.
I don’t mean to get sidetracked with more stories about my behaving badly, so let me just establish that because of this dry-ice bomb thing I had already become fairly well acquainted with the attorney for Murray city.
When my court date came, the city attorney and I were waiting outside the courtroom and he told me he had heard about The Muckraker. This sorta shocked me, that it had gotten as far as him. He tried to argue how my characterizing the attendance policy as the love child of Hitler and Stalin was inaccurate in terms of political theory. I had used the pseudonym Holden Caulfield for some of the articles, and the attorney argued how he thought Franny and Zooey was better than Catcher in the Rye and would have been more appropriate to reference. He wanted to articulate how he thought my message was flawed. But what I couldn’t get across to him was that there wasn’t really a rational message, just the simple fact that it blowed up real good.
But then he told me that there were four separate parties who were putting “political pressure” on the city to prosecute me for various things like libel and lewdness or whatever. He told me he didn’t think it was much of a case, that if someone wanted to sue me they would do it themselves and not ask the city to do it, and he said outright that he didn’t want to pursue any of it. But he told me I could discuss this with the judge. I was perplexed and a bit overwhelmed. Sue me? Discuss it with the judge? Jesus, I never thought it would go this far.
Judge Burton happened to be the father of one of my classmates and was part of the local Stake High Council. In Mormon-speak, this meant that he was part of the church leadership in my area. He knew my dad and thought well of him. My case number was called, and I stood before the man. We discussed the dry-ice bombs, and I pretty much spilled my guts about them. I never had a chance to get my story straight with Heather or the others involved before the detective questioned us, so I let the truth set me free. So to speak. Then the judge brought up the Muckraker incident. I wasn’t sure that this was appropriate, but who was I to say anything? He basically repeated what the city attorney had already told me. At some point I think I explained that I needed to resolve my current legal problems and get a high school diploma so I could leave for infantry school. Then the judge asked me about my dad, I guess to be friendly. I told him we didn’t get along. I had to be honest. I mean, I was under oath, right? He asked me why not. I said, “We have a difference of religion. He thinks he’s god, and I disagree.” I didn’t come up with that joke, but the judge thought it was hilarious. My dad’s religious zeal was well known. That was when the judge told me something I’ll never forget. He said, “I like you, Jason. So we’ll make you a deal. The city will agree to dismiss the charges against you and not pursue any further charges with regard to the newspaper incident, if you agree to leave town.” Leave town? WTF? Are you kidding me? That’s all? I wasn’t sure how any of this was appropriate or even legal, but I loved the Old West feel to it. Leave town. Classic. The judge spat on his palm, and I spat on mine, and we shook. Then I saddled up, lit a cigarette, gave him and the city attorney an acknowledging tip of my hat, and I rode off into the Utah desert sunset.
I took a geography class through an adult education center, which got me residency in another school district. The superintendent of that district said he would back me up if I wanted to go the whole ACLU route and fight to get my diploma through my own district, but by this time I just wanted to take the path of least resistance, Heather even more so, because this wasn’t really her fight to begin with. This could have been a sensational battle, but my priority was the Army and Heather’s priority was college. I paid the fine, got a letter from the Granite school district stating that I would “graduate” through Hunter High School with the class of ’93, and a few months later I was on my way to Fort Benning, Georgia.
The End.
The whole reason I’ve shared this story with you now is because I recently recounted it (in a more abbreviated format) to Cesar, the newest member of my team, along with the story about how our commander made me take this blog off the internet. I figured he’d be able to identify with it and I wanted him to know that I could empathize with his current situation intimately.
Before I explain Cesar’s little imbroglio and how he came to join my team, I think it’s time that I got you up to speed with regard to my squad. When we originally deployed, our squad of nine m
en was led by Chris, a New York cop and an outgoing former Army Ranger. I’ve said this before, but Chris is like a blonde with big tits; he’s like the hottest girl in school and pretty much acts as our idol. I know this sounds like a grotesque amount of ass-kissing, but it’s the best way to explain it. He’s just a really good soldier with a lot of experience and training under his belt. When he was our squad leader, we were the best squad in the company. In reality our squad was completely average, he just made us look really good. He’s long since left the squad to lead the company’s sniper section. He’s in a position now where he arguably is more of an asset to the company than he ever could have been with a regular squad, but truth be told, our squad never survived his departure.
Our new squad leader is Stan, or “Whiskey” as we call him, for having an incredibly long last name starting with a W. Whiskey is a really easy-going guy, and is a very decent squad leader, but he’s not part of the inner conclave of the platoon leadership (the Army version of the popular kids in school), so he’s commonly out of the loop on information and planning. This sucks because this means the team leaders, Kirk and I—we lead three men each—are usually left out of the loop as well. Whiskey’s capacity for sleep is unrivaled, and he spends most his free waking time watching the same DVDs over and over again. He’s literally turned this deployment into an extended vacation for himself. It’s remarkable. But don’t get me wrong, he’s not complacent. He plays by the rules and is a hard worker, and his amiable attitude makes for a much less stressful work environment. It’s just that our platoon (which is four squads) is run by an unspoken social structure that he is not a part of.
Just Another Soldier Page 13