How I Learned to Hate in Ohio

by David Stuart MacLean

  The next time I opened my eyes, the last stragglers were leaving the theater and all the ice had melted in my Dr Pepper.

  In the lobby a half dozen people were stacked by the doors, shrugging into jackets, tugging at the wrist of one glove and then the other, knotting scarves in idiosyncratic magical ways—all these people performing their ritual protection dances watching the snow come down. There seemed to be some concern about the roads and it wasn’t until I got right up to the door that I saw the magnitude of the problem. There was nearly a foot of new snow just plopped down on the streets.

  “Bad day for shorts,” someone said behind me. It was a college kid, rocking a color-block rugby that looked like it could double as a bit of semaphore. He stuck out his hand. “I’m Brett but my friends call me Phil.”

  “Why’s that?” I asked.

  “Never asked.”

  “Huh,” I said. “I’m Barry.”

  He thought for a second and responded with, “OK.” His brown hair was parted on the right side and feathered and moussed into a dune of rigid fluffiness. “Why’re you in shorts? Don’t you have a mommy or something?”

  “My mom’s dead,” I said, amazed at how easily the lie came out.

  “Whoa. Sorry little dude.” Phil looked aggrieved, mildly. “I was just making conversation.”

  “It’s OK. It was a long time ago,” I said. “I’m wearing shorts because I ran here.”

  There were cars spinning their tires, desperate to escape their parking spots. One of the lucky ones to get free immediately lost control on the road and slowly rotated 90 degrees and came to rest blocking both lanes of traffic. It was like watching emus ice skating—somebody was going to get hurt.

  “Folks? If I could get your attention?” A guy behind the concession stand was standing on a chair and doing his best to project. He was kind-looking; he wore gray wide suspenders with brass accents. The elastic was old and curling on the edges. “I just spoke with the police and they said that no one should be on the roads right now. We need to let the plows and salt trucks do their jobs. I can’t turn you all out into the cold, so we’ll start up a movie again. I have a couple to choose from. We can watch Enemy Mine with Louis Gossett Jr. and Dennis Quaid. Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times gives this summary: ‘Enemy Mine is Robinson Crusoe set under the two suns and six moons of the volcanic planet Fyrine IV, a grim red landscape lashed by meteors and savage cold. The look of the planet in Enemy Mine is so convincing, the special effects are so elaborate, and the performances are so good that I only gradually became aware of what a clinker the story is.’ Maybe I shouldn’t have read that last part.

  “The other movie we’ve got is Fool for Love with Sam Shepard and Kim Basinger. Cowboy drifter Eddie (that’s Shepard) reconnects with May (Basinger), the love of his life, in a seedy desert motel, even though she’s taken up with a new boyfriend, who’s played by Randy Quaid. Well, it’s a choice between the Quaid brothers I guess. Roger Ebert says of this one that Kim Basinger is one of those Robert Altman women characters, and I’m quoting here: ‘unfulfilled women, conscious of the waste of their lives, living in backwater where their primary pastime is to await the decisions of men.’ People magazine says that Shepard and Basinger ‘ignite a sexual bonfire whose embers will haunt you.’ ” The man in suspenders laughed a dry hiccup of a laugh and said, “So if you want some haunted embers you know which one to choose. I guess we’ll take a vote. And if you don’t want to watch another movie we’ve got Scrabble and cards and popcorn. Or if you’re sick of us all together, I called over to the Backstretch and they are staying open as well, serving adult beverages and the hermit crab racing guy is there, so good fun to be had despite the snow. And concessions is going to stay open until we go home and everything is half price. If you don’t have money, don’t worry about it. You can pay us later.

  “Now, my wife is jabbing me with her pointiest finger telling me to stop talking but there’s just a little bit of housekeeping here left. I know you all are tired of hearing from me and I am so tired of talking. We’ve never had to do this before so bear with us. I’d offer up the use of the phone to you all but the lines just went down. We’ll keep you all updated. As soon as we know any information, you’ll know it. And if nothing changes we’ll run the second movie after the first and then Citizen Kane once again if God forbid we’re here all night. Being snowed in was not part of anyone’s plan tonight, but at least you’re at the movies. Let’s see a VHS tape machine beat that. Now let’s vote on the movie.”

  The movie everyone chose was Fool for Love first, which makes sense seeing as how they were all film nerds and it was a Sam Shepard play directed by Robert Altman, names that can make a film professor at the most expensive college in the US squeal and grunt in deep pleasure-anticipation like a pig. The movie is OK. Confusing. Kind of far-fetched. Sam Shepard finds Kim Basinger who is hiding in a hotel somewhere in New Mexico. They are old lovers. But it’s not that simple. And the movie gets weirder and sadder and angrier. It turns out that the hotel is also home to their drifter father—oh right they’re brother and sister, their dad is a mess of a man who never had a relationship that didn’t involve him cheating.

  It was over quick. Between the movies, the phone was working but the line to use it was way long. Enemy Mine was starting and Dad probably was snowed in at his girlfriend’s and I really wanted to see Enemy Mine.

  So here’s the setup. An alien and a human end up on a planet foreign to both of them. They ended up there because they were fighting a battle in space and both of their ships were damaged. Each man was the sole survivor among his crew. Each man was stranded alone. I keep saying each man, but the alien, his race was neither man nor woman, more like both. The alien and Dennis Quaid try to fight each other then they need each other to survive and then the alien is pregnant and dying, so Dennis Quaid ends up taking the dead alien’s baby to raise.

  Neither of these movies were very good but I’m not sure how much I slept through either one of them. In the lobby was the college kid who’d commented on my shorts.

  “You running home?” he asked.

  “Do you have a better idea?”

  “C’mon, my roommate has a four-wheel-drive truck.”

  “I’m not sure I’m OK with that.”

  “They’re closing the theater. It’s 4:00 a.m.” He pointed outside; snow had remade all the parked and stranded cars into its new undulating landscape. All yellow in the sodium lights. “I’m your best option. And you know that old saying: there are no murderers in a blizzard.”

  “I’ve never heard that one.”

  “That’s because I just made it up. Let’s go. I’m right around the corner on Sandusky. We might even have some pants for you to change into.”

  I don’t think I’d ever heard Rutherford as quiet. I could hear the snow landing on other snow. That was the noisiest thing outside of our postholing every step. When we passed the bank, I could hear the time-and-temp sign buzzing, and at the intersection I could hear the lights changing in the black box attached to the stoplight’s pole. It was still snowing and the crinkle sparkle twist of the snow catching the light as it fell was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. My hometown was beautiful, it just took a blizzard smothering it for that beauty to be seen.

  The college guy ruined it by talking. “So which one of her son’s movies do you think Mother Quaid is going to see first?”

  “What?” I asked, hoping that he’d not answer it.

  “Her sons were in the movies we watched. Dennis in Enemy Mine, Randy in Fool for Love. Randy has the smaller role in a movie that’s bad because it’s pretentious but Dennis headlines a movie that’s bad because it’s really really bad.”

  “Funny,” I said, immediately aware of a deep truth. “I’m sorry.”

  “Why’re you apologizing to me?”

  “It’s just that if you tell a joke and someone says ‘funny’ after it, the joke was not funny, at all. It’s like building a pool in your bac
kyard and your friend comes over and volunteers as he’s toweling off that ‘it was definitely wet.’ Like it’s an atonal statement of what should’ve been obvious.”

  “Damn. Townie kid got some smarts. There might still be a party going on in the P&J house. But don’t worry, it’s like a nerd-life protection sanctuary of a house.” He slapped his hand on his chest and uttered in a fancy British accent, “We are positively against the poaching of nerds within these four walls.”

  “How far is it?” My excitement for the snow had dwindled. My shoes were soaked and my thighs were getting chapped by the wind. I was equal parts thrilled by the snow adventure college partyness of it and worried that I wasn’t being totally safe. We had made a couple of turns and I think we were near the Rax restaurant that was like a block from the quarry. I ran through all of these streets in the fall and I had an amazing map in my head of near the whole town, just no idea what any of the streets were called.

  “Do you like Robin Williams? Have you seen his show at the Met? It’s the fucking greatest thing that’s ever skullfucked my head.” Had he told me his name? Oh, right. He had. But he’d told me two names and that he was one and not the other. He seemed to be an exhausting person to be around. Or maybe I was just exhausted. “And in an unrelated question, do you like cocaine?” He laughed hard at his own joke and then asked me if I wanted a bump.

  I said, “More like a shove.” Because it seemed like something funny to say and I pushed him before I saw the vial in his hand. I realized at that moment that he was offering me drugs. We both watched the vial get flung from his ragg wool mittens, sparkle in its arc against the streetlights and get swallowed up by a snowdrift.

  “Why the fuck did you do that?”

  “I’m sorry. What was that?” I moved towards the little bullet hole the vial had made in the drift.

  “Get away,” Phil or Brett shouted. “Go in the house. Your little chicken legs are depressing me. I’ll rescue the drugs.”

  The house was giant. And its windows were all shining in different colors—blue, green, red, orange. The windows of each room lit up in its own color. I knocked but the music was so loud that it was futile. Some screechy slow-burn music. Loud enough for a person to want to nestle into it, like an angry beanbag chair/womb thing. I opened the door and went in. This entry room was orange. I blinked several times. There were several people asleep on the floor and a couple going to town on each other on a couch by the window. And another couple of people talking and laughing loudly who either didn’t notice me or didn’t care that a stranger in shorts was hanging out in the foyer. I could see the kitchen, a slice of harsh white light illuminating a guy reading a textbook and smoking.

  This was a campus on the verge of Christmas break. Either people were blowing off steam or were panic-stricken over exams and papers. Dad used to unplug the phone for the nights in the middle of December and the end of May to keep desperate students from disturbing us. I hadn’t even noticed that he hadn’t unplugged the phone this year. It’s the first time ever we’ll have phone service at night during the holidays, which is good so I’ll be able to reach him.

  Phil/Brett banged open the door and belted out a Here’s Johnny joke. “What’s up, puppyfuckers?” His charm was built on ironic arrogance and scattershot obscenity. He’d seen too many movies about college and he claimed a BMOC role as if that was his destiny. “I brought a boy in shorts.”

  I didn’t know who he was talking to.

  “Shut the fuck up, Brett,” someone shouted from upstairs.

  “Ahhh, my flock speaks to me.” Brett shrugged out of his jacket. He held the vial right up to my eyes. “All grains present and accounted for, I think. Unless it’s all snow in there. I’m serious, it was hard work. It was like picking fly shit out of black pepper out there.”

  The record climaxed and ended. The silence in the house was eerie. And then the scratching sound of a needle dropped on a record and then the music. It was like being on the launchpad of the space shuttle. With your mouth open.

  “What is this playing?” I was a second away from plugging my ears with my fingers.

  Brett cocked his head for a moment. “This I believe is Spacemen 3. And the album, the album has the best title in the world: For All the Fucked-Up Children of the World We Give You Spacemen 3. We’ve got a guy, Trey, who spent the summer in London with his family. He picked up some weird righteous stuff over there. More shoegaze than pop.”

  I nodded like these words made sense to me.

  Brett hustled upstairs and knocked loudly on a door. The house was massive. Brick, three stories. It’d been a mansion for one of the families who’d gotten rich off of the quarry during the limestone fad of the 1880s. The limestone barons would buy up land cheap, mine and strip the land of any charm and then donate the land back to the state for a hefty tax write-off. They made money coming and going. They brought their own workers—West Virginia mountain folk—and paid them little more than what they charged them for rent in company housing and food in the company store. The mine would eventually be spent, the workers would end up stranded and broke, and the barons built mansions. The barons founded the university, which never made sense since most of the barons were uneducated. But they founded the university to give a good education in the Methodist tradition.

  Methodists are the Jesuits of the Protestant faith: they might cover up piano legs to avoid sinful urges but they also couldn’t sneeze without founding a dozen schools. It was just like those early white settlers to want to set up institutions to teach the very values that they ignored in order to be successful. Maybe it was a matter of wanting more from the next generations. Maybe it was a way of smothering possible competition, slamming the door they had used to enter into generational wealth shut.

  Brett opened the door and there arrayed in a loose circle was a clutch of ten people sitting on mattresses on the floor. They had a long purple bong they passed around the circle. In between bong hits, they recovered their cigarettes from ashtrays and neighbor’s hands. I couldn’t say the smoke in the room hung heavy like drapes or anything like that. The smoke seemed a more substantial denizen of the room than some of the students. They were dressed in ponchos and rugby shirts and cowl-neck sweaters. They wore jeans and overalls. There were ball caps advertising teams that played in different conferences and states, nothing local. Their body odor could be smelled over the stench of smoke. The light for the room was a pink harsh enough to cook the eyeballs.

  “I brought us a boy in shorts,” he re-announced to the group. “His name is Barry. Watch your drugs around this man.”

  “How is it out there?” someone in the puddle of people asked. “Is it still snowing?”

  “I am sorry to announce that it is fucking snowing massively, the roads are impassable, the phone lines are down.” He flopped down onto a beanbag and nearly fell over. “We need to face facts. We will run out of food soon. It’s only a matter of time before we turn on each other and we’ll be forced to eat each other to survive.”

  “Damn,” a guy with a starter Flock of Seagulls cut perked up and said, “I’ve been eating Becca out all day and I’m still hungry.”

  A woman I assumed was Becca threw a pillow at the guy.

  “That’s your own fault,” Brett said. “Everyone knows Becca is empty calories.”

  “Oh, fuck you. Why are you even here? Didn’t you flunk out?”

  Brett sat up with difficulty. His mood changed immediately—dark, defensive, and small. “I paid for these classes. I have a right to be here.”

  “Really? You paid for these classes? I don’t think you’ve ever paid for anything. Your daddy, big shot at Deutsche Bank, pays for it all.” Becca was clearly not ready to take any of Brett’s shit.

  He sat for a second, his eyes inward, his fingers tapping out a spastic tarantella on his knees. He stood up and left the room. I wasn’t sure if I should follow him so I stayed in the pink room, wishing I’d had the strength to follow him out. While he wasn’
t my ride, he was the guy who was going to get me to a ride. This was when I started to panic. It was a blizzard, I was an easy three miles from home, and I was wearing shorts, a windbreaker, my shoes were soaking wet, and I was stuck in a room with a bunch of stoned strangers.

  I was cold and I wanted to go home.

  I sat there. No one paid me any attention. The bong started its journey around the room. I was brainstorming ways to refuse it when it was offered to me but I never got the chance to refuse since no one ever offered it to me. These people were only five or six years older than me but those years built an impossible wall between us. I couldn’t imagine ever being their age and they had forgotten what it was like to be my age. They seemed made out of sterner stuff than I was. I was so young I was invisible.

  After a good ten minutes, I left to explore the rest of the house. I went downstairs trying to find the normal fluorescence of the kitchen, with the understanding that I’d be more likely to find sober people in a room with regular lighting.

  The living room was still occupied by the couple dry humping on the couch. There was another couple sitting on the floor not five feet away from the action but they were oblivious it seemed to the near-procreation happening nearby. The music was so loud that it isolated people into small clusters, each cluster its own bubble of privacy. Loud music is so much more intimate than soft music is. Soft music, you can be overheard by the whole room; with loud music the only people who can hear you are people you feel okay leaning into and speaking with your lips an inch away from their ears. The people on the floor were laughing but I had no idea at what.

  In the kitchen, there were two people. A guy with half-closed eyes eating Fruity Pebbles and a woman with a book open in front of her and a pile of books next to her and a notepad, filled with the most outrageous and esoteric doodles, doodles I used to see on the chalkboard in my dad’s office. I closed the door to the living room, muffling the music.