It talked about God, too.
“Ah, I see. So it was a fantasy film.”
You just said that to get a stir out of me. Well, it’s not going to work. The film was all about there basically not being any such thing as God. I already know there’s no such thing as God.
“Of course you do. You’re smarter than the average flesh-thing. So, just think: no God, no penalty for deciding your life’s a mistake that you’d like to erase.”
Maybe, just maybe, it isn’t a mistake. Mr. Chin understands me in a way that other people don’t. He’s more… well… I guess you’d say… sophisticated. He doesn’t grade things in a way that’s all focused on right-or-wrong, black-or-white. He’s willing to give credit for creativity. Like, this one time, he gave us this test with an essay question asking us to analyze this poem by Sylvia Plath, all about riding a horse at dawn. I hadn’t read the damned thing. I wasn’t about to pretend that I’d read it. But I knew a little about it, because it had been discussed in class.
So instead of writing an essay answer, I wrote a little story. I wrote a story about how this weird fungus planted itself in the pores of the horse’s hide and how it grew and grew until it consumed the horse. By the end of the story, the horse was nothing but a galloping fungus, and the rider threw herself off the horse because she was all dainty and shit and the horse was too disgusting. She was also scared that if she didn’t jump off, she would get the fungus, too. She broke her neck when she jumped off, but it was worth it. When I got the test back, I was expecting to get an F.
“But you didn’t, did you, kiddo?”
No. He gave me an A+, “for imaginatively paraphrasing the theme”. But I think he was worried he was going to get into trouble for doing that because right next to the grade, he wrote: “But tell no one.”
“Heh… Now that’s Larry Chin for you, a regular card. My kinda guy. Never one to color inside the lines, that fellow. You get no bullshit from him. He doesn’t care about all the shit your normal teachers care about. I mean, have you seen the way that guy dresses? He stretches the school’s definition of casual, to be sure. Not the only boundary he stretches, either, if you catch my drift.”
You make it sound like you know him.
Silence.
How do you know him?
Silence.
How do you know him?!
***
When you were fifteen, Mr. Suicide taunted you.
“He was your role model, kiddo. You said it yourself: you wanted to be just like him. Now’s your chance. Go out into the garage at three in the morning and turn on the ignition. Then you’ll be just like him.”
You’re an asshole.
“And you’re out of reasons to stay alive.”
You’re forgetting something. I knew Mr. Chin. He was more than a teacher. He was my friend. I had him for Freshman Comp last year and World Literature this year. I don’t think he killed himself. I think he was murdered.
“Oh, puh-lease! I know you’re a kid, but you can’t be that naïve. He was your friend, sure. Of course, if you think about it, no emotionally well-adjusted adult should want to be your friend, but I guess we now know that Eddie Chin wasn’t emotionally well-adjusted, don’t we? Not only do we know that he was your friend; we also know he was Andrea Matthews’ lover. Her mother, for some crazy reason, objected. I suppose an age difference of twenty-seven years was a wee bit too much for her. Of course, without that little dalliance Mr. Chin would be without an heir. And then the whole world would be fighting over those cinder block and lumber bookshelves in his apartment and those ’90s self-help paperbacks in his collection. Do you know he had one called Care of the Soul? Can you fucking believe it?”
Fuck. He knocked her up?
“I know. Careless, right? My understanding is Andrea’s keeping the baby. I’m trying to talk her out of it. I keep whispering sweet nothings in her ear. I tell her that her life will be practically over, anyway, if she has that baby. I try to persuade her to go out like Ophelia, but she’s hard-headed. Refuses to acknowledge my existence.” Then Mr. Suicide giggled. “Hey, you know a thing or two about that, now. Don’t you, kiddo? Girls refusing to acknowledge you exist, I mean.” More giggles.
Maybe that’s why he was murdered. Did you ever think about that? Andrea Matthews’ dad wanted revenge, and so he killed Mr. Chin and made it look like a suicide.
“Here’s another theory, Junior: Mr. Chin had read Lolita enough times to know a scholarly pedophile is a loathsome son of a bitch. He knew he couldn’t help himself, and so he did the honorable thing. Or, hell, maybe he had no honor at all and just couldn’t bear the idea of showing up on the six o’clock news. It’s funny, you know. I have long talks with honorable and dishonorable people alike. Both give in to me, at times. You should be giving in to me. Your friend is dead, and you know you won’t be getting another one.”
That’s bullshit. I’ll have another friend before I leave high school. Fuck, I’ll have a girlfriend before I leave high school.
“If you scrape the bottom of the barrel, maybe, kiddo. Because only the very bottom of the barrel is going to be interested in hanging out with you.”
You can just fuck off! You hear me. Fuck. Off. You’re not welcome here anymore. You’re a fucking jackass. A fucking monster!
III
You lived on, mostly out of spite. Mr. Suicide was too obnoxious to give in to. In fact, you found Mr. Suicide too obnoxious to even talk to, right after that whole Mr. Chin ordeal. But, inevitably, the pressure didn’t stop mounting. If anything, it got worse. You had to find another way—any other way—to deal with things.
So, in February of your sixteenth year, you turned to other, slightly less severe alternatives to suicide as a way to cope. At the gentler end of the spectrum, you considered playing hooky. At the more extreme end of the spectrum, you considered blinding yourself. One February morning you (sort of) combined the two.
You’d been assigned Oedipus Rex for a classical literature class. You hadn’t read it. You half-paid attention to the class discussion. When you were called on, you took your head off of the desk just long enough to tell the teacher you hadn’t read a word of it. “I’m not going to lie,” you told her with self-defeating integrity, “I haven’t even started it.” There was no real reason for the other kids in the class to laugh, but they did. Like a movie audience chuckling at an unfunny joke, they did.
You hadn’t replied to the teacher with malice, but she apparently thought you a little too nonchalant about it all. Or perhaps she thought your fellow students were laughing at her, instead of you. Maybe she felt threatened. You, alone, dared to not even feign attention. You hadn’t even cheated in the manner that all the other kids cheated, by reciting details gleaned from a plot summary on Wikipedia. Perhaps, in the teacher’s eyes, you were patient zero in a possible epidemic of apathy, and you needed to be neutralized immediately. She gave you a detention.
You honestly didn’t care about staying after school for an hour (as much as you hated school, it was better than home). The only part that sucked was they called your mom that day to inform her of your infraction. When you got home, she said you weren’t nearly as bright as what the school said you were. She made you sit down at the kitchen table and read Oedipus Rex right there while she browbeat you for a good hour and a half. Which were you supposed to do, read or listen to her? When you were reading, she seemed to hold it against you that you weren’t listening to her. When you were listening to her, she seemed to hold it against you that you weren’t reading.
When she noted you were cringing in sufficient humiliation, she took a deep breath, paused, and proceeded to call your father at work.
The first person your mother reached was a receptionist at the Ford plant. You could only hear little squeaks coming out of the land line receiver, but from your mother’s responses (and your past experiences) you could infer that the receptionist was telling Mom that Dad was working on the line and he couldn’t be pulled off unless
it was an emergency. “But this is an emergency,” Mom shrieked. When she was put on hold, she started yammering to you again. “See what your behavior’s done? Making your father get pulled away from the assembly line? This is what you do to us. This is what you’ve always done to us.”
You couldn’t wait for Dad to get on the phone. At least then, her snark wouldn’t be surging directly into you. But it turned out to be no more comfortable. If anything, it was even more uncomfortable for her to talk about you as though you weren’t there. She loudly denounced you to him. She repeated the same criticism, over and over.
“He just got a detention,” she said. “I’m not sure if any of our kids ever got detention. I mean, it’s been a long time since we had a kid in high school, hasn’t it? Maybe one of them got detention, somewhere along the way. But I don’t think so. Anyway, something must be done. Ever since he hit middle school, he hasn’t been the same boy. I think he’s not as smart as the testing says he is. It was right at the end of elementary school that they gave him those tests and said he was super-smart. That’s probably why he’s not the same boy as he used to be. I’m going to talk to the school about it. Bright children do their assignments. I’m pretty sure if he could do the work, he would. I mean, you have your faults, that’s for sure, but one of them isn’t laziness. You’ve always been a good provider. And the good Lord knows I’m not lazy, either, doing all the work to keep the household going—all the work I have to do to keep your son focused on school. It’s not easy being a mother, let me tell you. It’s like you say: when you have kids, that’s all you have.
“Anyway… like I said, it can’t be laziness because he doesn’t get that from either of us. So I can only assume it’s above him. Those test scores were a fluke. Maybe even a mistake. Maybe there’s another child with the same name, somewhere else in Louisville, and that child is the one who deserves all the opportunities your son is getting.”
She talked to him for far too long. Minutes went by. Dozens of minutes went by. Your father would surely get chewed out by the foreman for gabbing on the phone with your mother that long. You would surely explode before she hung up the receiver. Once she built up a head of steam about something like this, she wouldn’t stop talking until she’d exhausted herself. And, judging by the empty cup of coffee in front of her on the kitchen table, it would be a long time before she exhausted herself.
You looked up from Oedipus Rex and wanted to punch her. Surely, she had to know that her chatter was distracting you. She had you trapped in one of her patented no-win scenarios. Part of you thought that she’d sadistically planned it this way. If you earnestly tried to read the play, you would face constant frustration from the distraction. But if you stopped trying to read it, she would take that as all the more evidence it was beyond you.
You did the best you could to survive the ordeal. You flipped pages, but you didn’t read. You skimmed. The pages were old and musty-smelling. Like maybe they’d been printed closer to Sophocles’ time than yours. But you kept flipping them at a realistically slow pace.
It seemed like enough to satisfy your mother until she got off the phone. Then she looked at the clock. “Oh, dear, you’ve made me late for starting dinner.” She frantically went to preheat the oven. (She always had dinner on the table at six o’clock, even though Dad frequently changed shifts. Dinner time could’ve just as easily changed along with his schedule. But she insisted it must never stray from six, and reacted with something close to rage if pressures forced a delay. Six o’clock was a time to which she’d assigned significant meaning. The fact that it was totally arbitrary didn’t rein in her contempt. She let you know how rude you were to be messing it all up.)
She opened the refrigerator’s freezer and grabbed a box of fish sticks. Put them on a cookie sheet. When the oven beeped to announce it was at the right temperature, she slid them in. Then she started to get potatoes out to put in the microwave. Dinner presented a fresh crisis, and as you continued to try to read Oedipus she fidgeted back and forth—not really doing much besides fidgeting. Finally, she spoke to you. “What kind of son are you? You haven’t even offered to set the table.”
You knew how this was going to go. Really you did. Why did you even say the words? “Do you want me to get up from reading and help you, Mom? I can set the table for y—”
She yelled at you. “Don’t you even pretend to be helpful, now! If a son really wanted to help his mother, he’d go ahead and start helping out without being asked. Now, go to your room!” With relief, you did as you were told. You thought that she might start to quiz you about Oedipus Rex over dinner, so you fired up your laptop and went onto Wikipedia to find a plot synopsis. You figured you should do this as soon as possible, because Mom would likely get the idea before too long that she should punish you by confiscating your laptop.
The summary of Oedipus Rex wasn’t as simple as you’d wanted it to be. There was a lot of information jammed in there. The big take-away, though, was that Oedipus unknowingly slept with his mother and killed his father. Horrified by the revelations (and the suicide of his mother/wife), the dude blinded himself and begged to be exiled.
That’s where you got the blinding idea. It wasn’t that you were being dramatic and trying to be exactly like Oedipus. Your situations were totally different. You were no king, and you hadn’t fucked anyone yet (let alone your mother). Nor had you killed anyone yet (although, yes, you’d had the urge). No, you were not Oedipus.
But that didn’t mean you couldn’t borrow Oedipus’ answer. Blinding, perhaps, offered some of the same comfort suicide did, but without quite so much fear attached. It would mean just losing your eyesight, not losing your existence. But, at the same time, it would offer some of the same features as losing your existence. You’d no longer have to look at all the ugliness. The ugliness in the mirror, the ugliness on your mother’s face as she snarled and slapped you. The ugly grins of other kids at school when they were talking about you. Ugly, old teachers like Mr. Winnick. The ugliness of a city like Louisville; as gray and inconsequential as a ball of lint in a bum’s pocket. It could all be gone, if you blinded yourself.
Even better, if you blinded yourself, you’d likely be removed—at least temporarily—from your parents’ house. There’d be a hospital where you’d be taken away for treatment. Then they’d take you out of the regular kids’ school and put you in the Kentucky School for the Blind. And, who knows, with a change of setting, you might even be able to transform yourself into something of a badass. You’d have several years of non-blind life under your belt, whereas some of the other students might have been blind from birth. You’d have the advantage. You could be one of the cool kids at a blind school, couldn’t you? Of course you could.
You turned off the lights in your room and put a pillow over your glasses to imagine what it would be like. It felt warm and cool and peaceful all at the same time. You couldn’t relax, though. You couldn’t relax because the walls were so thin you could hear the opening and shutting of various kitchen drawers as your mother prepared the meal. You knew it was only a matter of minutes until she would scream for you to come and get your food.
And that’s just what happened. She screamed for you and she screamed for your brother-who-still-lived-at-home to come to the table. You knew that if you didn’t hurry she wouldn’t stop screaming. You went out to the table.
Your mother’s tacky ceramic knickknacks rattled on the coffee table when you walked past them and into the kitchen. It wasn’t that you were heavy. It’s that the house had been made in a factory. It had been shipped out to the lot in two pieces and nailed together. Everything was made of plastic or the cheapest plywood. You’d been in trailers before. Your family had poor relations who lived in them. And that’s exactly what it seemed like. It seemed more like a trailer than a house. But you knew better than to tell your mother that. She relished the relative affluence your father’s union job at Ford granted her. It was a house, not a trailer. It was, to her, the farthest th
ing from a trailer in existence.
You sat at the table and saw the fish sticks sitting on a plastic plate your mother had gotten as a “collectible” from McDonald’s sometime back in the ’70s. There was half a baked potato next to them, and an unappetizing mush of green beans as the other side dish. You started to stab your fork and knife into the potato, when Mom slapped your hand. “Your brother’s not out yet!” she said. “And after that, we say grace.”
Your mother went back to your brother’s door and knocked five times in rapid succession. “I said, it’s dinner time!” You heard his door open and his footsteps follow Mom’s out to the kitchen. She was like a prison guard or loony bin orderly coming to take her prisoner/patient to the cafeteria. All that was missing was a big mess of keys jangling on her hip.
When all three of you were finally seated at the dinner table, she asked your brother if he wanted to say grace. He didn’t respond.
“Your brother’s shy,” she said. She sighed and folded her hands together. “I guess that means I’ll have to do the honors. Now let’s all bow our heads. Father-God, we ask that you bless this bounty which you have provided us, and we thank you that we share meal time as a family. We thank you that we are not like so many other families these days, scattered all over the country, not even talking to each other each day. We thank you for the closeness we share. In the name of the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.”
From that point, it was like there was a race between you and your brother to determine which of you would finish and leave the table first. You wolfed down your fish sticks in two bites. The potato took longer because it was still hot. The beans could be mushed into a big gummy ball and shoveled in rather efficiently. Your brother finished in less than five minutes and then walked back to his room. You finished a minute or two after that.
You didn’t want to spend any more time around your mother than you needed to, but you knew you’d be screwed if you didn’t volunteer to help with dishes. When you asked, your mother laughed at you. Laughed, dramatically, like it wasn’t a real laugh at all but forced. “You’ll do anything to get out of reading that play, won’t you? You’d even rather do dishes than be forced to increase your knowledge by trying something that’s hard. I was born at night, but I wasn’t born last night. I see though your tricks. Now I’m even more convinced that your classes are too hard for you. Go to your room. I don’t want to see you the rest of the night.”
Mr. Suicide Page 3