by Adam Johnson
When I was thirteen or fourteen, I was having a bunch of problems. Teenager problems. I was really antisocial, like this emo chick. I liked to walk around outside at one o’clock in the morning, like I wasn’t scared of anything, like I was practically already on my own. If somebody tried to be nice to me I would flip out. I’m telling you, I had issues. I don’t exactly know what I was so angry about. I guess it was because I wasn’t letting my emotions out.
In the ninth grade I had surgery on my tonsils and they gave me painkillers. Me being all depressed, I started taking a lot of them. I was gonna take a bunch at once—seven pills—and I looked at them and said, “Nope,” and I closed the bottle and walked away from it.
Afterwards I started talking to my Spanish teacher. I met her in tenth grade. She’s kind of like how a therapist is—you know, they don’t tell anybody your secrets. I’d go see her every other day. And if I could sneak out of the cafeteria during lunch, I’d visit her in her class. They don’t let us, but she always told me, “Definitely come over for lunch.” I would tell her some of the stuff that was going on with me, and then I wouldn’t feel like doing any of the bad stuff, like cutting classes.
Some Changes Are Being Made
One day when I was fourteen, my sister Yesenia told me she was having a meeting with Miss Melissa, a woman who worked as an activist for farmworkers, and asked if I wanted to go.9 I said sure, if it’ll get me out of the house! That’s how I got involved in Rural Youth Power. It’s a group of young people. We talk about working in the fields, the education we’ve received, or haven’t received, and the difficulties of moving around. We’ve stayed in Pink Hill the whole time because my mom put her mind to it: when she wants to stay somewhere, she stays somewhere. But a lot of families never settle down because they keep moving to find work. One kid, Eddie, I think he’s thirteen or fourteen, he had to move six different times. And we have so many at-risk kids. Two farmworker friends who went to school with us died last year in a shooting. They weren’t in a gang but they hung around with people who were. They were supposed to graduate with us.
We don’t have a lot of opportunities where we’re living. I want my family to be able to start off again. Hopefully I can do something to help my mom. I don’t want her to have to keep focusing on the rent and everything by herself. My hope is to get into a college this year and get started working on my major. I definitely want to work in agriculture, keep advocating. Farmworkers need better wages. We asked to take the kids out of the fields, but it’s kinda hard because sometimes it’s the kids who are working to help the family. And we want to reduce the spraying of pesticides.
Some changes are being made. Last year we held an event called YouthSpeak in Kinston, North Carolina. I was a panelist and I did a spoken word; everybody liked it. You get to express yourself and how you feel. You don’t have to rhyme, but I like rhyming all the time. We talked about how we wanted to see a change in the minimum wage and how we wanted to give out materials and equipment to the people working in the fields. Educate them so they know the rules—that we’re supposed to get a break, for example, and that we should have better bathrooms, with soap, so we can actually clean our hands. One of the people at the YouthSpeak event was from the North Carolina Department of Labor, and he said, “All the stuff you asked for is pretty easy. I think we can actually change it. I think that’s really possible.” When the Department of Labor guy was speaking, we were all really hopeful. It seemed like all these little things that could make our work bearable were possible. Then a little later at the meeting, Miss Melissa gets a call, and somebody’s telling her that a farmworker was behind a truck in the sweet potatoes that day and it went over him. He just got crushed and died. We got really quiet and gave a moment to him.
They Can’t Get Me to Stop Talking
Right now school is going really well. This year I think I have all As. And I won an award—the national art and essay contest.10 I had always been hearing about the contest, and one day I said to myself, “Okay, I’ll do it.”
The topic of the essay was “The Rhythm of the Harvest.” I got two pages done, but it wasn’t a lot. On the last day I started working on it at eleven and it was due at twelve o’clock at night. I was like, Just think about how it is. Out of nowhere I finished it and turned it in one minute before it was due.
I wrote first about how at nighttime you hear the slithers of a snake, the flaps of a bat, and in the morning you hear the frogs croaking, the crickets chirping. When you get into the fields you hear the screech of a truck stopping and, as you’re working, the noise from pulling your boots out of mud. Just the different sounds that go on while you’re in the field. So I turned in the essay on time and I got first place for fourteen- to eighteen-year-olds. I got to go to Boston for the award ceremony.
I like to dye my hair different colors: I’ve dyed it purple and two or three shades of blue. When I won the award my hair was red. One lady who was on the award staff, Norma Flores, was like, “You have to dye your hair black for the trip.” I said, “Okay, I’ll dye it black, but when I get back I’m dyeing it blond and pink.”
There were at least two hundred people at the ceremony in Boston, and I was just freaking out. I’m supposed to go up there and I’m supposed to read my essay. I have stage fright—I’ve always had it. And I felt really awkward. I was thinking, Something’s gonna happen, I’m gonna embarrass myself. But I got up there and I started reading. I was very awkward at first but then I just thought, You know what, it’s all good. I’m calm, I’m good. I read it and at the end I got this whole standing ovation. People came up to me saying they were in tears from my story.
At Rural Youth Power, we’re planning on showing kids how to speak up, to not be afraid, to speak for your rights—’cause you do have them. One of my friends was gonna get paid $6.25 an hour to work in tobacco. I was like, “Boy, you do not even need to go there.” You should be getting paid the minimum wage at least. That is a right, right there. They can’t just fire you.
I’m one of those people to step in. I’ve become less scared since I got involved. Now I can actually have a phone conversation. Before I was practically antisocial. And then I started talking, but I couldn’t get serious. But now Miss Melissa says I’ve changed. Before it was like, “Speak up, Neftali.” Now it’s like they can’t get me to stop talking.
BOX BROWN
Andre the Giant
FROM Andre the Giant: Life and Legend
BEGINNING ON THE following page are a series of excerpts from Box Brown’s graphic novel Andre the Giant. Andre was a 7'4", 500-pound professional wrestler from France who, we learn in the early chapters of Brown’s book, once got a ride home from school from Samuel Beckett. It’s a strange world, this one.
In his introduction to the book, Brown explains that it is important to understand that professional wrestling is built on a foundation of deception. Its outcomes are fixed and most people in the audience know this. That being said, there are still real rivalries and conflicts and moments of improvisation. As Brown says, “the idea of truth in professional wrestling is certainly elastic . . .” And there were few figures in wrestling who were more elastic and enigmatic than Andre the Giant. He was a hero to some and a villain to others, and Brown’s book does a wonderful job exploring his complex legacy. This excerpt focuses on the end of Andre’s career, as his body is deteriorating and he is preparing to cede his throne to the next great wrestler, a young man named Hulk Hogan.
SARAH MARSHALL
Remote Control
FROM The Believer
YOU DON’T HAVE to listen very closely to realize we’ve been wrong for all these years. It’s not a difficult phrase to remember, and she repeats it again and again and again, clutching her knee as she rocks back and forth like a child hurt on a playground. It is, in fact, not a phrase at all, but a word—just one—and though we hear it mostly as a keening, inarticulate wail, it’s also impossible to mishear. The word is why.
In the video
—which will be shown on the news again and again in the weeks that follow the incident—she says the word three times, stopping only when she is spirited away from the cameras in her father’s arms, her face pressed fearfully against his. She looks, in her lacy white costume, like nothing so much as an anxious young bride being carried over a threshold she isn’t quite sure she’s ready to cross.
For all the hours she has spent in the public eye prior to this moment, and for the many more hours she will spend there yet, she has been stoic, strong, reserved. She was famous before, for her skills as an athlete and as a performer, but this moment of anguish will make her an icon. Newspaper headlines and magazine covers and reporters and talk-show hosts and families joking in the car and around the breakfast table and on the couch as they watch her on TV will quote her, now and for years to come—or at least they will think they are quoting her. But they will say, without fail, the one thing she didn’t say: “Why me?”
Twenty years later, we are still trying to answer this question. And if we have been mishearing something so simple for so long, we have to wonder what else we have been mistaken about.
First, the facts: on January 6, 1994, Nancy Kerrigan left the ice after a public practice session in Detroit’s Cobo Arena, where she was to compete in the US Figure Skating Championships the following day. “I was walking toward the locker rooms, away from the ice,” she said later, “and someone was running behind me. I started to turn, and all I could see was this guy swinging something . . . I don’t know what it was.” The man had been aiming for her left knee, but missed, instead hitting her on the lower thigh. Later, in an exclusive interview with Jane Pauley, Nancy put a brave face on the assault, reassuring Americans that she knew how lucky she was, because if the man had actually hit her knee she would undoubtedly have been unable to skate at the Olympics. She had to feel thankful, she said in a moment of good-natured wit, for his poor aim. By then, however, it didn’t really matter what she had to say. To the public, her injury had already been transformed into a gangland kneecapping, while the assailant’s weapon, revealed soon after the assault to have been a collapsible police baton, was routinely characterized as everything but—a crowbar, a wrench, a lead pipe—in an ongoing public game of Clue. Nancy, meanwhile, would be remembered not for anything she was doing now, but for the way she had acted immediately following the assault. There was room for only one image of Nancy in the public’s memory, and it had already been chosen.
By the time the cameras caught up with Nancy, her attacker had fled into the parking lot, and was visible on the film played on the news that night—and endlessly replayed, reproduced, referenced, and eventually parodied over the next six weeks—as a blurry black splotch about to disappear through the arena’s Plexiglas doors. The assailant lost, the camera then turned to his victim, who had collapsed on the ground, sobbing, as medical personnel tended to her injured leg. The camera zoomed in on her as closely as possible as she wailed, “Why? Why? Why?” When asked what she had been hit with, she responded: “I don’t know, some hard, hard black stick. Something really, really hard. Help me. I can’t move. I’m so scared. I’m so scared. It hurts so bad.”
The next day, Nancy, unable to skate, watched as Tonya Harding became the national champion for the second time. Tonya had won the title for the first time in 1991, and in the process had also become the first American woman to land a triple axel in competition. She never regained the success she had enjoyed that year, and her career had been on the decline since her disappointing performance at the 1992 Olympics, when she began losing the ability to land her famous triple axel in competition. Since then, she had come in sixth at the 1992 World Championships, and fourth at the 1993 US Championships, not even managing to make the American team at Worlds. Her only successes, including a bronze medal at Skate America a few months before, seemed to take place when Nancy wasn’t around, and this time was no different: with Nancy out of contention, Tonya delivered a stronger performance than she had in recent memory. “I know there are a lot of people out there who think I’m a has-been,” she had told the press. “I have something to prove tonight.”
Tonya still didn’t have her triple axel, but she landed a spectacular triple lutz. Her spiral sequence—the move Nancy was famous for—displayed more flexibility and grace than it ever had before. After turning up at too many competitions looking exhausted and out of shape, Tonya was dynamic and disciplined again, showing her strength in the deep edges that had wowed judges since she made her senior debut in the mid-’8os. Yet Tonya’s skating showed not just a return to form but a maturation. It seemed as if she had finally stopped fighting against her sport, and, remembering her old love for it, was again greeting it as a friend. “For all the skeptics who felt Tonya’s peak had passed,” commentator Peggy Fleming said, “I think she has proved she still is a winner even without that triple axel.”
She was also, notably, a winner without Nancy Kerrigan, though anyone who watched Tonya skate that night would have a hard time believing that she couldn’t perform just as well as Nancy. At the time, figure skaters were scored by nine judges, who each awarded two scores, one for technical merit and one for artistic impression, with 6.0 representing a perfect mark. Tonya had been awarded 6.0s in the past, and at her career peak, when she was able to land axel after axel, both her technical and her artistic scores had been dominated by 5.9s and 5.8s. Tonight she earned those scores again. At the end of the evening, Tonya’s marks were even higher than the ones that had allowed Nancy to win the national title the year before.
Was Tonya able to pull out a better skate simply because she wasn’t sharing the ice with Nancy that night? Perhaps. In the few years they had occupied the spotlight together, Nancy had gradually come to embody all the qualities that Tonya, it seemed, would never quite be able to grasp. Nancy’s presence was elegant and patrician despite her working-class background; her skating was as graceful and dancerly as Tonya’s was explosive and athletic. Audiences and commentators wanted elegance and grace; they wanted Nancy, and as good as Tonya was—as great as Tonya was—it had become painfully clear, over the last few years, that she would never quite be right. With Nancy out of sight, perhaps Tonya could for once remember all she was, rather than all she wasn’t, and deliver the skate of a lifetime.
And perhaps, too, the judges had something to do with it. Audience members weren’t the only ones who liked Nancy: the judges liked her, too, and had ways of showing it. When it came to the technical merit score, with its necessary deductions for errors and falls, judges’ rankings were more or less objective; artistic impressions left a little more room for interpretation. Despite its specific list of requirements—for musicality, use of the rink, deportment, and other qualities—“artistic impression” was a far more elastic score. Judges could allow their scores to be influenced by a skater’s costume, or by a skater’s appearance, or simply by some ineffable quality that struck them, somehow, as “right”—right for the moment, right for the event, right for the sport. Many judges saw these qualities in Nancy. “She’s a lovely lady,” an Olympic judge, who preferred to remain anonymous, told sports writer Christine Brennan. “She was raised as a lady. We all notice that.”
At the time, judges’ opinions were also far less reliable—and far more malleable—than many outside the sport would have imagined. Working without the aid of instant replay or slow-motion analysis, judges—some of whom were former skaters, many of whom had simply devoted their careers to the sport—had to judge a program as it happened, with no opportunity to take a second look at a skater’s performance. Judges were all too likely to miss skaters’ errors on the ice—and at times did—making even the most objective portion of the score surprisingly unreliable. It was standard practice for judges to “leave room” in their scores, meaning that if a skater performed phenomenally at the beginning of the evening, they would be likely to receive a lower score than if they had performed at the end of the night, so that later and potentially better skat
ers might have a chance to win. Judges sat in on practice sessions, and scored skaters not just on their performance on the night of the competition but on the skill they displayed over a period of time. And judges were also likely to prop up the scores of skaters they knew to be solid competitors, even if the performance they were actually scoring was mediocre.
If Nancy Kerrigan had skated in the US Championships that night, and had skated just as well as or even somewhat worse than Tonya Harding, she likely would have beaten her, not because of the quality of her performance but because she was more consistent, more admired, more in keeping with the sport’s ideals, and, above all, because she was the American skater who seemed the likeliest to bring home Olympic gold. The judges knew it. Nancy knew it. Tonya knew it. The only thing that remained a mystery was just who had taken Nancy Kerrigan out of contention, and why.
But that night, none of those questions mattered, and none of the unspoken rules of judging held true. Tonya won the gold by a generous margin. She would be going to the Olympics, but so would Nancy, who, even injured, was still more valuable to her country than any other skater in good health, and was given a bye despite her inability to compete at the US Championships. Unlike Tonya, Nancy didn’t need to prove her worth.
Nancy Kerrigan may not have had the protection she needed to ward off an assault at the US Championships, but Tonya Harding did: namely, a man named Shawn Eckhardt, who at the tender age of twenty-six boasted an Errol Flynn mustache, a three-hundred-pound girth, an ambitiously fabricated resume studded with counterterrorism and espionage, and a company called World Bodyguard Services, whose headquarters occupied a spare room in his parents’ home. Though he described himself as Tonya’s bodyguard, he entered her life as a highschool friend of Tonya’s ex-husband, Jeff Gillooly. According to Shawn, it had been upon Tonya’s return from the NHK Trophy the previous December that Jeff, believing the judges had shafted her, suggested they might find a way to keep Nancy out of contention for the Games.
