I got a job at a little motel in town and got paid under the table. I painted parking blocks, I rewired lamps, I patched walls, I studied for the GED. I stopped seeing people my own age. I hung out with Jim the main maintenance guy who told me that cigarettes aren’t what caused cancer rather it was what was in matches that was the problem. “That’s why I always use a lighter.” And the women I saw everyday creeped into my fantasies, a trio of middle-aged women employed as maids.
Once Dad was out of his chair, he and I came to an agreement. He cosigned on an apartment for me and I moved out for him. We never talked about what happened that day in the hotel, whatever was said between the launch and the explosion I’ll never know. And I think he felt that getting me out of the house would prevent that conversation from ever happening.
Since I didn’t go back to school, I didn’t have to turn in my project on the Challenger. I did though learn a lot of jokes from Jim about the Challenger.
What was the temperature of the ocean after the Challenger exploded?
Seven below.
What did Christa McAuliffe say to her husband before the launch?
You feed the dog, honey. I’ll feed the fish.
What I realized about the jokes, even though I hated them for a long time, is that they serve to callous up the sensitive parts. And maybe that’s what was going on with all of the gay jokes too. As the body count of AIDS rose higher and higher and we all got a sense of how awful the disease was, the jokes took that nascent empathy with the afflicted and smothered it in its crib. Like we could maintain a sense of how the world should be by leaning into our hatred and mockery of the diseased and dying. Jokes provided some kind of handle on our emotions, helped make some sense of the damned carnival chaos of existence. We could control the world by slotting it into setups and punchlines.
What were the last words said on the shuttle?
No, I said a Bud Light.
Where did Christa McAuliffe spend her vacation?
All over Florida.
They came back and said the causes of the explosion were the O-rings and the cold weather. There were congressional hearings and everything. The shuttle was shelved for a while. The twenty-two planned launches for 1986? Gone. The program for civilians to go up into space? Shelved. There was this moment before the explosion when we had a future all set for ourselves and we were trundling towards a space-age utopia—flying cars, jet packs, people on Mars, international space stations. And then it was gone. Replaced by a giant yawning Y in the sky. Mom and Dad divorced. Mom and Mr. Singh married. Dad got Mr. Singh fired for not having his degree.
What color were Christa McAuliffe’s eyes?
Blue. One blew this way one blew that way.
There’s a distance between what we think will happen and what does happen. And those of us living in the fallen world, post-explosion, make jokes designed to desensitize ourselves to the death of our dreams.
What does NASA stand for?
Need Another Seven Astronauts.
It’s like we need to resort to greater and greater grotesqueries in order to keep us from crying all of the time. Mom and Mr. Singh moved away to New Hampshire. They sent me cider doughnuts in boxes with love notes stained with grease.
Did Christa McAuliffe have dandruff?
Yes. They found her head and shoulders washed up on the beach.
No one leaves this world unsullied.
They knocked down the house where Rutherford B. Hayes was born. They put a BP station there. And a plaque to commemorate what they knocked down.
The past can be erased as well as the future.
LAST PART
“You know where you are? You’re in the jungle, baby.
You’re gonna die.”
—AXL ROSE
JUNE 1991.
It was the week before high school graduation and Gurbaksh had come for a visit. We’d done some patching up over the years, done some Christmases together, even saw Blues Traveler together which made no sense at all since neither of us could stand jam bands. Maybe we’d done it to have some people we could laugh at together again.
“You’re my only brother,” he said when I asked why he was coming to visit. “I miss you.”
But I had the sense that he was coming for Ottilie rather than me. She was at Oberlin. And we were going to drive up and visit her after this weekend. “Reunite the team supreme!” he said. He was anxious, kind of perpetually zipped up. He was always talking about that semester of high school we’d spent together, remembering parties and teachers and madness. He still wasn’t wearing his turban.
“I’ve had an anti-religious conversion,” he said. His black hair was chin-length and he was forever pushing it back behind his ears. He was beautiful.
I was twenty years old and working at Honda of America. I was in Post-Weld. The raw-weld bodies of Accords drifted towards me on these massive hangers. My job was to put spacers on the doors and bars to secure them, so that when the weld bodies were dipped in the electrolyte bath the doors would stay securely ajar, allowing the bath to coat everything. It’s all about getting the paint to adhere more securely or something. I’m kind of notorious for reading during lunch.
Gurbaksh crashed on the couch and stayed up late watching my videotapes. I’d accumulated kind of a lot since I’d been taken on full time at Honda. I’ve never had this much of my own money before. O’Dell, my shift supervisor, keeps at me to reapply to colleges. He likes my work and all but he wants me to go to school, says he doesn’t want to see me wait twenty years for retirement before I live my dreams. I tell him going to school doesn’t always realize everybody’s dreams. He tells me he hates to see brains go to waste.
You know who works there? It took me a month or so to recognize him but it’s Trevor, the bartender. He’s in charge of replenishing our parts bins. He’s terrible at it and he gets a hell of a time from the other guys for being late and sloppy. He’s a little shelled out, more residue than man at this point. I’d say he doesn’t recognize me, but he doesn’t really see me, doesn’t really see anybody. Some people weren’t built for Plan B living.
I told all of this to Gurbaksh. He told me about his classes in Medieval Literature, Statistics, the Old Testament, and Intro to Sculpture.
“There was this time last February, I shit you not, when all of my classes started bleeding into each other. Like I was seeing connections between them that I don’t think anyone had ever seen before.” His eyes were bright with fervor as he smoked this pack of cigarettes I had lying around and ashed into an empty Keystone can, whose slogan “Bottled Beer Taste in a Can” suckered me into buying a six-pack. “It’s the closest thing to like the spiritual, I’ve ever experienced.”
“What’s your major going to be with classes like that?” I asked.
His eyes cleared up and he looked so disappointed in me. “I don’t have to declare until the end of next year, Dad.”
He gave me a look like I was just another one of those people who just didn’t get it. And he was right, I didn’t. Here I was making $32K a year and he was pissing away my mom’s money so he could have profound connections between sculptures, scripture, and math problems.
“You’re not even wearing your kara anymore?” I asked.
“It’s creepy that you both noticed and know the name of my bracelet.”
“First thing I told you when we met was that I had a library card.”
“And you’re not afraid to be obnoxious about it.” He tucked his hair behind his ear. “I think I’m done with it all. I realized that while Sikhism is the best of a bad bunch in terms of religions, I just couldn’t subjugate myself to a religion with a dress code.” He lit up another cigarette. “I’m gonna borrow your car, OK? It’s still hard to believe that it’s your car. I can’t believe my dad gave you his Saab.”
“I bought it. He sold it to me.”
“For like five hundred bucks. I should’ve gotten the chance for a competitive bidding process.” Gurbaksh sulked.
It
was a deal, but the brakes were shot and it needed a new transmission and the only person who would work on it was in Columbus and booked to judgement day. I did like driving the red Saab around, even though all the guys at Honda gave me endless amounts of shit about it.
“Whatever,” I said to his aggrieved face. My mom was putting him through school and his dad gave me a deal on a used car and somehow he was the wronged one. Some people don’t know when they have everything already.
We were supposed to go up and visit Ottilie that weekend and right around the time when we’d run out of things to talk to each other about someone had jammed a flier for a graduation party in my apartment’s mailbox, “Bonfire Down at the Quarry!” I’d barely spent any time at the damned school but they must’ve still had me on some inalterable mailing list. I threw it away immediately, but when I got home on Friday Gurbaksh had it smoothed out on the dining room table.
“We should totally go to this,” he said.
“I thought we were going to Oberlin,” I said, peeling off my steel-toe boots. My downstairs neighbors had complained about the clomping so I took them off when I came home.
“Ottilie has some end-of-the-year dinner thing going on tonight,” he said. “This will be hilarious. We’ll be some real throwback, blast-from-the-past guest stars.”
“I’m not sure, man. I bump into a lot of these people around town enough as is.” I opened up a beer and cracked a window. Gurbaksh had run through my pack of cigarettes and picked up another pack from the United Dairy Farmers on the corner. “None of them has changed.”
Last August, we invaded Iraq. The city was littered with Support the Troops car washes, pancake breakfasts, raffles, and candy sales. The Vietnam Vet dads seemed to be overly amped up about the fact that we should be supporting our troops. It was like they were admonishing the rest of us for not supporting them back in the day.
I hadn’t been called Yo-Yo Fag since I quit school. Saddam Hussein and this war—it’s like everyone found someone else to hate.
“But we’ve changed, man.” Gurbaksh opened a beer as well and pushed his hair behind his ears before he drank. “Let’s go rub our success in their faces.”
The party was at Blue Limestone Quarry in the center of town. I hadn’t been to a high school party since my disastrous freshman year, but even though I had no real friends and I hated everything about high school I got suckered into Gurbaksh’s nostalgist zeal. So I put on some sweats.
Blue Limestone Quarry had playground equipment, baseball diamonds, and a picnic shelter. The quarry had been filled with water from a diverted stream and even though there were “No Swimming” signs posted everywhere two or three people drowned there every year. There weren’t any directions on the invitation because no one would need them. The bonfire was almost visible from my apartment. We followed it like a thousand other moths that night.
“When did you start smoking so much?” I asked. The air was brisk for a night in June and I wish that I’d worn a jacket. There was a moldering smell of cut grass that nearly choked me.
“This is crazy, right?” Gurbaksh said. “Do you think anyone even remembers us?”
“Maybe,” I replied, feeling like it probably went without saying that turban or no, Gurbaksh was going to be remembered. I’d prefer no one remember me from those days.
“Do you think we could get lucky? We should set up a signal just in case one of us is going to get lucky.” Gurbaksh was already three beers deep into the six-pack that we brought.
What about Ottilie? I wanted to ask. There was nervous energy peeling off of him as we walked. Something had happened between the two of them. I was getting that Gatsby in the bushes feeling, staring at the wall waiting for someone to give me answers. At this point, I’d be surprised if we ended up in Oberlin at all that weekend.
The fire was about two stories and it hurt to look at even from a quarter-mile away. There were layers of party, like concentric orbits around the bonfire. There were kegs sprinkled on the edges, minor moons which had their own weaker gravitational pull of boys and girls impatiently chugging beer from plastic cups brought from home. The outer edge of the party was owned by the pot smokers. Then the stumbling asteroid field of drunks moving erratically, powered by their hilarity, arrogance, and solipsism. There were minor bands of dancers surrounding ghettoblasters pumping out Metallica, Aerosmith, Guns N’ Roses, Naughty by Nature, and Digital Underground. Then there was the band nearest the fire: full of sad drunks staring into the fire as if that’s where the answers were, high glassy-eyed gurus overwhelmed by the heat and spectacle, couples making out, the same foursome who played euchre every lunch period my freshman year was here with a card table playing euchre. You almost couldn’t go anywhere in Rutherford without seeing people playing euchre.
Gurbaksh peeled off from me and went to hang out by the kegs. He was drinking a lot. Maybe he was figuring out what a bad idea this was.
“Little Psycho!” Randy Colton put his arms around my waist, half hug, half wrestling move—showing his affection and his dominance at the same time. “Fuckin’ perv. How are you?”
“Hey, man. How’ve you been?”
“I’m graduating, man. Who would’ve thought this burnout would ever get it together?” He cuffed me on the back of the head. He was a high school graduate at twenty-two. It was good to see Randy so nakedly elated. I was proud of him. “Look at you, Barry. You grew. You’re like the size of a regular person now.”
“Yeah. Puberty happens.” I smarted a little at this. Compliments wrapped up in punches or the other way around—men don’t communicate any other way. “Even to us Little Psychos.”
“Hey, man. I never got the chance to thank you for being so cool about not telling anyone about catching Holly and me fucking.”
“Who would I have told?”
“Yeah, it was still cool of you. Porky would’ve had my nuts for that one,” he said. “You heard they got married right?”
“Whoa.”
“Yeah, they’re already divorced.” Randy’s eyes danced with glee at his cousin’s misfortune.
“That was fast.”
“Can’t trust women, man.” Randy blew some snot out of his nose onto the ground, hard. “Hey. Do you want some doses?”
“What?”
“LSD, man. You wanna trip?”
“Oh. I didn’t bring any money.” This wasn’t true. I had fifty bucks in my sweats. But why was I not saying No? What door was I opening by not saying No?
Randy rubbed his chin and said he’d give it to me as a graduation present almost like I knew he would. I am not sure but I think I just manipulated a redneck into giving me free drugs because I also still hadn’t told him I’d had my GED for three years now.
“What’s this going to be like?” I asked as he opened up his wallet and pulled out a folded cigarette cellophane with scraps of blotter paper in it.
“You’ve never done it before?”
“I’ve heard it like makes you hear colors. And jump off buildings.” I held the little rectangle of paper up to the firelight. “Will it make me an asshole?”
“Put it under your tongue. Let it dissolve there. It, like, makes you more you, you know? Like you only a lot more.”
“It doesn’t taste like anything. You sure I got some?”
“This is so exciting. Doing acid with Yo-Yo Fag.” He clapped me on my back then punched me in the gut with his other hand. He leaned in close to my ear and grunted out, “It is good to see you, Little Psycho.”
Dear God, when Appetite for Destruction was released in 1987, it didn’t seem as much new as something pure vomited up from the subconscious of the Midwest wrapped up in the tinfoil of hair metal and jammed into the microwave of Los Angeles. See, when Axl Rose first started jitter-stop high-stomping around the stage, any Midwesterner worth his corn recognized him as one of our own. Axl was from Indiana. He got out. He left and he found the streets lined with cocaine in LA. This was our collective fantasy. To leave.
I was at the fire sitting on an old tire, wondering when the acid would kick in. I might have gotten a dud. It was nice sitting at the fire on an old tire. Fire. Tire. A fired tire is better than a tired fire. It was really impressive how they got the fire to dance to the music.
Randy bumped me over and sat down on the tire, handing me a beer. “Where’d you go? I went around the party three times looking for you.”
“I’ve been here,” I said, pointing to the tire. My throat was so dry, I drank what must have been half of the beer before I remembered I hated keg beer and spit it all out back into my cup. “Right here, for as long as I can remember.” I paused to listen to a secret the fire was telling me. “I think the drugs are kicking in.”
“So your boy’s here.” Randy punched me in the arm. “Back from college or whatever.”
“Who’s that?” I asked but I knew he was talking about Gurbaksh. There was literally no one else that Randy would be talking about as “my boy.”
“Your shit-brown friend. The one with the turban.” Randy took a big swig out of a silver flask and offered it to me. “The one whose ass I kicked.”
How I Learned to Hate in Ohio Page 19