by Dave Eggers
No.
It was pretty funny.
What did you call it? Country Gay.
Country Gay. Get it? Country Gay?
This was a fairly intolerant town.
Homogeneous, yes; intolerant, no. It was overwhelmingly white, of course, but racism of any kind—at least outwardly expressed—is kind of gauche, so we basically grew up without any sense of prejudice, firsthand or even in the abstract. With the kind of wealth and isolation we had from societal sorts of issues—crime, outside of the vandalism perpetrated by me and my friends, was unheard of—the town was free to see those kinds of things as a kind of entertainment—wrestling matches being contested by other people, in other places. The only instance I ever knew of any truly bigoted stuff was when I was in grade school and this one thin, geek-looking kid with glasses moved in down the street and on the corner, and in his room he hung one of those flags, the southern flag... ^
The Confederate flag.
Right. So this kid, who was my brother’s age, three years older, moved in when I was about nine, and almost immediately turned everything upside down. First, on the bus, my brother Bill saw him draw a swastika on the back of a seat. None of us had ever seen, firsthand, something like that, and thus it became the big story for a while. An actual racist! Then, the kid started an informal kind of club, converting—sorry, bad word—a little group of other kids from the neighborhood, and then they all started drawing swastikas on their notebooks, and using the word that people use for these purposes.
What word?
I might get it wrong. The word is kike, right?
Yes.
Is that k-y or k-i?
/ think k-i.
Huh. I would have thought k-y. But so, suddenly, that was a word kids were using. We were this enclave of civilization, suddenly corrupted by—it was backward, in a way, with the arrival of this sort of missionary of bigotry... Anyway, one of the neighborhood kids, this guy Todd Golub, was up until this time friends with the rest of the neighborhood kids, but then suddenly he was Jewsh And immediately he was off-limits. Of course, I didn’t ever hear much of it myself. These guys were older, my brother Bill’s age, so I’d hear small bits from Bill, and even then the information was discouraged, my parents not wanting us really to know anything about it at all. “Bad kids,” my mom said, and that was that. We knew absolutely nothing. I didn’t know any profanity, knew nothing about sex, anything. I was twelve when I realized “balls” referred to testicles, and not the two cheeks of your butt. Don’t laugh. I was terrorized for that kind of thing. At that point, I had the Catholic knowledge of my own anatomy, meaning none at all— I digress. So Bill tried to hold on to these kids as friends in some way, hoping this swastika stuff was just some temporary viral thing. But just from what I knew, I started having these elaborate fantasies about what went on in the kid’s house. Whenever we’d drive by, I’d crane my neck back, looking for that big Confederate flag. You could actually see it pretty easily, it covered the entire window of the kid’s room, draped so it sagged in the middle. I had no idea what to think, how deep it ran in that house, so when we drove by, I half expected to see him and his dad out in front, burning crosses, hooded men tossing nooses over tree branches. I really did. We had no frame of reference. This kid was exotic in the same way that the kids who lived in apartments were. I just had no way to process the information. Our town was rigid in many ways, in terms of the uniformity of things, the colors of skin, the makes of cars, the lushness of the lawns, but on top of that it was sort of a blank canvas so—and again, I guess this is true of any child—I was ready to quickly accept the sudden and total substitutions of all I knew to be true.
What about black kids?
We had a few. Maybe four, five at a time. Growing up, in grade school, there was Jonathan Hutchinson. He lived on Old Elm Road, an east-west thoroughfare that acted as the border between Lake Forest and Highland Park, not far from our house; he was okay. A sort of awkward kid, but nice enough. Then he moved away and for a while there weren’t any black kids. Then Mr. T moved in.
Mr. T?
Yeah, this was, God, I think we were in junior high, or just in high
school, and it was after The A-Team had been off the air for a year or two when we heard about it—Jesus, then it was all anyone could talk about. The town was still reeling from Ordinary People being filmed there and all—there were all these pictures of Robert Redford at the McDonald’s—but we never had anyone on the level of a Mr. T. I mean, at the time he was still this massive star; I forget what he was doing right then, maybe between series or something, you know how hard that can be, but still this huge star. He moved into this enormous place on Green Bay Road, easily ten acres or so, with a gate, and a big brick wall facing the street. The place was right near town, a few doors down from our church, St. Mary’s.
And how was his arrival met?
We lost our brains. Our world exploded. We fucking loved it. The kids, that is. I mean, The A-Team had been by far our favorite show—we threw A-Team parties, used to run around the seventh grade cafeteria singing the theme song—Duh duh duh DUH! Duh duh duh...dududududuhl—while spraying the girls’ table with imaginary fire. But our parents, I think now, in retrospect, were a bit more cautiously enthusiastic. First of all, those with money don’t want to seem impressed by fame, especially ill-gotten fame, which is what I assume was the thinking in T’s case. You don’t mind if I just call him T?
Not at all.
After all, this guy was a bouncer when he was discovered. And of course he didn’t help matters when he started cutting down all the trees.
/ think I remember this.
It made news all over. It was a scandal. Here you had this supposedly uptight white town, and then this large black man with the gold chains and the mohawk comes in and takes this chain saw, and cuts down, literally, all but about two trees on his property—about two hundred of them, probably, all in plain daylight, by himself, with the chain saw. It was incredible. The nerve! He said he was allergic. But that didn’t really fly. See, this was a town that really took pride in its trees. And for good reason; we had some nice goddamn trees. We had the signs all over: “Tree City, U.S.A.” We loved those signs. So then he cuts down all these trees and everything, and no one really knows what to say, because they want to condemn him—and some did—but the vast majority of people were kind of afraid of looking racist, or like poor sports or something—this was a place where the black janitor got a standing ovation when he sang “Deep River” in the talent show—so everyone eventually just sat back and watched. My dad thought the whole thing was hilarious, loved reading about the debate, giggled wildly about it. “Oh fantastic,” he’d say, whenever the town was being embarrassed by the Chicago newspapers. He never identified with Lake Forest, had no friends in town, didn’t drive the right kind of car—
So we actually saw him once, Mr. T, when we were on our way to church, saw him right there, in front of his gate, with the chain saw. Amazing. He was doing the shrubs.
How was it that we started talking about all this? Black kids. Well, he had two daughters, and they went to the high school. So when they showed up, they immediately doubled the black student population, brought it up to four students. I think it was four.
How many kids were in your high school? About thirteen hundred.
And this is only twenty-odd miles from Chicago.
Right, and there was actually a town to the north, maybe five miles
away, called North Chicago, which was mostly black. I think.
How do you mean, you think?
Well, I’ve never been there or anything. I have been to Highland Park, that’s the Jewish town, and used to buy beer in Highwood, which was where all the Italian restaurants were, and where all the Mexican men who cut lawns lived. And there was a mall in Waukegan, I think—always full of sailors—and Libertyville was where the kids with the hockey haircuts lived.
So how were Mr. T’s girls treated?
Everyone seemed to like them, as far as I could tell. They were supposedly very nice, and kind of funny, but I didn’t know them at all, didn’t (and don’t) even know their names, actually—they were a year younger. They were always driving around in that white Mercedes of theirs—all customized, with those plates: Mr. T 3. But everyone liked them okay. They were Mr. T’s kids, after all, and as such were a source of great pride for the school, at least as far as us kids went. It was the first thing we told anyone, really. That and about Ordinary People.
They were the only black kids?
The only other black kid I remember was a guy in my sister’s class, this guy Steve, whose last name I don’t know, never did. Not that I would really know much about anyone in my sister’s class, but the thing with Steve was that, because he was the only black guy in their class, he was known simply as Steve the Black Guy.
Pardon?
Yeah, to hear my sister tell it, that was basically his name in all contexts. His handle, if you will. He was just this average guy, not incredibly popular, but nice enough. And so people liked him, and people I guess thought it was this odd novelty that he was different, odd in the same way that it was odd how that one kid had a crewcut, or how that one girl, I forget her name, she hung out with the basketball players—what was her name? She was a dwarf. But so he was Steve the Black Guy.
So this was oppressive. How do you mean? No.
Did you like it?
Yes. I did. Many did not. Many complain about it. Many are ashamed to say that’s where they grew up—people in Chicago, in Champaign, can be rough when you tell them; they’ll bow, kiss your hand—but I won’t apologize for having been brought up in what was, at least in my part of town, a pretty simple suburb— trees and a creek, nice parks. It’s not like we had a choice, that at eight or nine, whenever, we could have left home, moved somewhere less horribly fraught with this hideous prosperity. I should say, though, that like any seemingly stable and contented context, one with a certain stability and attention to detail and respect for family—comfortable but deeply mid western, this was—at the same time, it was very quiet sometimes, oddly quiet, and underneath the quiet there was the tiniest, faintest sound, like air being let out of a narrow hole, a sound like someone screaming from worlds away, and people were dying in dark and bewildering ways.
How do you mean?
Oh, suicides, weird accidents. One kid I knew growing up was apparently in the basement poking around and a stack of wood fell on him. He suffocated. That was our first death. He was ten maybe. Then, like two years later, Ricky’s dad.
Ricky’s dad?
Ricky was one of my best friends, lived just across the creek—it mn just behind both of our houses—and he and Jeff Farlander and I used to do stuff together, were on the same swim team, everything. It was strange across the creek. Most of the things we did together involved some sort of vandalism, come to think of it, throwing stuff at cars—ice, rocks, crabapples, acorns, snowballs—
In retrospect I have no idea why. Did we resent the passing of these cars? We were bored, and loved the thump of a projectile hitting a passing car, truck, whatever. It kept escalating. First just the throwing of things, then, one winter, we built, using seven or eight full-size snow boulders we rolled from fresh snow, a complete snow wall in the road. We lined them up, packed them together, and watched from the bushes, giddy, giggling. It was a three-foot tall, three-foot deep wall, right on Valley Road, created, because we were very bright and the police knew our handiwork, right in front of Jeff’s house. It worked as designed, though, with drivers either stopping and turning around, or stupidly plowing through it, underestimating the wall’s depth and craftsmanship.
“There goes the transmission,” Jeff would say.
“Yep,” I would say, having no idea what he was talking about. I knew nothing about cars.
One summer, we went further. We had always done stuff with lighters and gasoline, lighting this or that. The usual object was to soak a tennis ball in gasoline, light it, and kick it around the street.
“Fireball!” we would yell. “Fireball!” “Fireball!” “Fireball!”
Guess what we called that game?
/ give up.
We called that game Fireball.
/ see.
But one night a fourth kid, Timmy Rogers, a rangy, stringy-haired kid a year older than us, had the idea that what we’d do, see, would be to take the gasoline and... pour it across the street, and then— But we didn’t have any matches. Someone would have to go home and quietly get some, not arousing suspicion. But as we were figuring out who would go, and who might have those long-stemmed barbecue matches, Timmy Rogers just took out his lighter, a tiny Bic lighter, leaned down to the gas-soaked pavement — by this point I was literally jumping out of range — and lit the thing, the whole street going up at once. Incredible, flames five feet high, the streets of Lake Forest burning! It didn’t last long, not at all, but long enough to attract the police, who came and poked around as we chuckled in the bushes. We lit the street on fire! Then we went back to Jeff’s and watched Used Cars for the sixth time.
What does this have to do with Ricky’s dad?
Oh. It was a clear day, in the early summer. I was at home, building a Martian city out of Legos, matching it to the intricate architectural plans I had drawn out in my sketchbook, next to my drawings of flying dinosaurs and friendly aliens with big feet. I had all the foundations laid out, on the gray cratered baseplates I had gotten for my birthday. Then Jeff called and said we had better go over to Ricky’s because something terrible had happened.
“What happened?”
“Ricky’s dad doused himself with gasoline and lit a match and then ran around the yard on fire, and then stopped running and then had died right there, in front of the house.”
I told my mom, then walked down the street to the dead end part, jumped across the creek where it was shallow, went over to Jeff’s, and then we walked to Ricky’s. He was in the family room, watching TV. His family room was like ours, wood paneled and dark. He said hi. We said hi. There was one of the early music video shows on—this was before MTV—and they were showing a video for a Bob Dylan song called “Jokerman.” We liked the video. There were things hurtling toward the screen, like in 3-D. I had just started reading Rolling Stone, and had heard of this Bob Dylan, and knew if I was to know anything I had to know and like Bob Dylan, and so I really wanted to like the song, but then Ricky beat me to it.
“I like this song,” Ricky said.
I was kind of pissed. I decided to let it go.
Ricky’s two little sisters, much younger, floated in and out of the room from time to time. We watched more TV, sitting close to it.
“What did it look like?” Jeff asked. I couldn’t believe he asked.
“You know what it looked like?” Ricky said. “It was like at the end ofRaiders of the Lost Ark.”
We knew just the part, the very end, where the Nazis open the Ark of the Covenant and the spirits come out, the spirits that are at first pleasant and beautiful but then turn angry, and flames come from the Ark and kill all the Nazis, impaling them with stiff ropes of fire where they stand, and then the head Nazis, one by one, melt like wax dummies, the skin then cartilage then blood running off their skulls, in order, like differently colored waters. It both terrified and fascinated us.
Wow, we thought. Raiders of the Lost Ark.
We sat with Ricky, sat there for a while watching TV, and then got bored and went out into the front yard to see if there were any marks anywhere on the grass, or blood or anything. But there was nothing. The lawn looked perfect, lush and green.
And why are you telling me this?
I don’t know. These are the stories I tell. Isn’t that what you’re looking for? These terrible deaths tearing through this pristine community, all the more strange and tragic given the context, the incongruity—
So tell me something: This isn’t really a transcript of the interview, is it? No.<
br />
It’s not much like the actual interview at all, is it? Not that much, no.
This is a device, this interview style. Manufactured and fake. It is.
It’s a good device, though. Kind of a catchall for a bunch of anecdotes that
would be too awkward to force together otherwise.
Yes.
And the point of the anecdotes again?
Well, the point of the stuff about Lake Forest should be fairly obvious. It grounds us in a certain world, in a world that will be familiar to many people, especially those who’ve had the privilege of seeing Ordinary People, with Timothy Hutton in a breakthrough role. Best Picture, 1980. The passages describing suicides are formative experiences, of course, which foreshadow both my assumption that I and those I know can be reasonably expected to die in absurd and dramatic ways, and also foreshadows things that happen in the second half of the book. The stuff about race and ethnicity is supposed to make clear the kind of context we grew up in, where there was an incredible sort of homogeneity, where we were deeply embedded into that, in contrast to Toph and me in Berkeley, where there’s this outrageous kind of diversity, though within which, ironically enough, we still feel very strange, outside the mainstream—so that’s about inclusion and exclusion. The anecdote about Sarah—
Sarah? Who’s Sarah?
Oh. I meant to get that in earlier. Let me do that quickly:
We found out about my mom’s situation, in between my junior and senior years in college, having been gathered by Dad in the family room. That summer was just a mess. I did some weird things, that summer and that fall. Lots of just simple drinking -based things, and some breaking of things, the clawing at the walls while dreaming, and I started going home from parties in strange cars, drinking with not-good friends. One humid summer night I went to this one party, at this guy Andrew Wagner’s place. He lived in an old wooden house, across the highway, kind of remote, and he used to have these massive parties, the outdoor sort that were hard to have in Lake Forest, with so many alert and vigilant police officers at work. And I went there with Marny and a bunch of her friends—they figure in a little later, when I go back home to look for my parents—and drank a lot, keg beer in shiny red cups, the thick kind with the white inside. Soon—it seemed soon, but probably wasn’t—the people I came with were leaving. Marny asked me if I wanted a ride, but I said no, that I was talking to Jeff Farlander, that I’d stay. I was talking to Farlander for the first time in years. We had grown up together; I had stayed at his house for days at a time. His house was the first place we went when things were bad at home, his mother was the closest thing to an aunt—