So I’m sitting there inside the gas mask and for a second I forget about being claustrophobic and not liking closed spaces, I forget all that, I’m just enjoying the high, watching the smoke swirl around with me inside and feeling good, feeling comfortable) and then it occurs to me that someone at some point must have worn this gas mask out of necessity. And I swear I heard—you know those people you see in old newsreels, all huddled together down in the Underground and in shelters when the bombing was going on? and the soldiers in the trenches when the bombs were falling, trying to dig down deep, trying to cover up, looking up through the smoke and not knowing where it’s coming from, not seeing anything, not knowing when or if or why it’s going to come down on them? Well, it was like I was with them, and I heard a voice say:
It is coming down for all of you, everywhere, all the time.
I tore off the mask and ran down the stairs and outside. I stopped in the street, and looked up, then back at the house I had run from. They were gathered at the window, laughing. I looked up and down the road. It was dark and I had no idea where to go.
CHICKEN
We were stopped at a red light on Pac-Highway just past Sports World and this car full of girls pulls up on our left side. This was late on a Saturday night. It was me and Dave and Bill, and Bill says we should race them. So when the light turns I gun it and get a good lead on them, even though my car was a piece of shit, but we’re just having fun. It was a guy driving the girls’ car, I could see that as soon as we took off, which meant it’d make for a better race, I thought, and he gunned it off the line too and was about to catch up and right when he was almost even, I put some more on it and cut him off so he had to swerve out of his lane and into what had been ours. Bill and Dave were cracking up and telling me to go faster, so I go faster, and I look back and their car picks up speed and the girls are sticking their heads out the window and yelling at us and I thought that was the coolest thing. I cut them off again because a car had turned onto the road in my lane and when they passed that car they got into the lane next to me. We were all laughing and having a good time. Bill kept telling me to gun it faster and Dave, in the backseat, was laughing too. Then the guy put something extra on it, because he comes tearing up to us and goes by—the girls are hanging out the window, flipping us off and yelling, which I thought was cool—then he swerves over in front of us and his brake lights go on. I swerved into the oncoming lanes—there wasn’t any actual traffic, so it was completely safe—and we’re yelling and I’m gunning it, hoping no cops come and no cars come, and when I’m past him again on the other side of the road, I cut back into his lane, and the stoplight up ahead goes from green to red and I slam on my brakes and skid into the crosswalk, and the car behind me—those girls and that guy—they screech out too, they slide a little and come to a stop about a foot behind me. We were laughing. I looked in my rearview mirror and I could see those girls pointing at us and one in the backseat was standing up and leaning over the seat and talking in that guy’s ear, and that guy looked mad, man—he looked really pissed. Then I see him undo his seatbelt and he gets out of his car and I see him walk up towards my car. Here he comes, said Bill and he was laughing too. There were three of us. We could have taken him. I rolled down my window to see what the guy was up to—he was much shorter than me, and pretty stocky—he could have been a boxer or a wrestler, I guess. But he comes up to the window and he’s really mad. What the fuck are you doing? he says. What the fucking hell are you doing, you little piece of shit, and I get a twinge of nerves. My heart starts going faster and nobody’s laughing in the car anymore. Pull over to the side, the guy says. We’ll settle this like men. I don’t want to pull over, I say. It’s no big deal. It is a fucking big deal, he says. Pull the fuck over and we’ll settle this like men. The light turned green right then and my foot touched the pedal a little, just a little, not enough to make a revving noise, but a little just to know it was there. I’ll take all three of you on, the guy says, and nobody in my car makes a sound, except me and I say, Take it easy, man. I was just messing around. It’s a green light, I say, I gotta go, but the guy’s got his hand on the door like he has the intention of keeping this car right where it is and I feel the gas pedal, but I don’t stomp it. You’re a fucking little pussy, the guy says, and his hand moves off the car and I almost gun it right there—I look up at the light and at the cars stopped on the corners, and I don’t see his hand—I don’t see it—but it does come down and it comes down hard—he hits me with a straight shot to the face. I put my hands up to my nose and there was blood. I wondered what those girls were thinking. Don’t fuck with me, he said. Don’t ever fuck with me.
Me and Jim stood in the island in the middle of the big intersection by the mall. Jim was smoking a cigarette and he might have been stoned. We were there to interview this guy, Mick Midano, who was running for state senator. We were interviewing him for class, not because we wanted to, but because we’d pulled his name.
“Where do you stand on the issues?” Jim said.
“Put that cigarette out,” Mick Midano said. He wasn’t looking at us. He was holding a sign that had his name on it, and waving to people driving by with a big smile on his face. When he said to put the cigarette out, he spoke out the side of his mouth.
Jim thought about it for a second, then put the cigarette out. Later he’d start talking all sorts of shit about it, how he had no right to tell him to put it out, and I’d bring this all up later in a conversation with my dad, after Mick Midano was running for senator of the United States.
“What are your thoughts on gun control?” I said. I was the one carrying the notebook.
Somebody honked. “Well,” he said. “I suppose you’d have to ask me something a little bit more particular.” He never looked at us, just smiled and waved at cars. I looked at Jim. Jim was getting sort of mad.
“What about abortion?” I said.
“Is this for the school paper?” Mick Midano said.
“It’s for class.”
“Hey!” he said. “All right!” He was yelling at someone who had yelled something encouraging at him out the window of a car.
“We should push him into the street,” Jim said to me.
“What?” the guy said. He was looking at us now. “What did you say?”
We left and drove to Seattle to this passport photo place where everyone was getting fake IDs. I was sixteen and I looked about fourteen, but I got one that said I was twenty-two to make it seem more official. I had to ask the lady what the zip code was for Anchorage and she checked a book for me.
Santos was a basketball star in high school. They went to finals and lost to Bellingham. He scored thirty-six points out of fifty. He walked on at the University but never got a chance to play. This was in the seventies. Anyway, he had a baby with a girl from his high school, Meg, who I met when Santos and I were parking cars in the nineties. I was just out of high school and Santos was getting up there. Meg was picking him up early in the morning after work when I met her. She was a nice lady, although I could tell she probably had other plans once upon a time. Santos was a fast worker, but he always had people yelling at him for moving their seats back. The man was tall. The man still is tall, I guess. We would work graveyard shift sometimes and lie out in the shuttle van. The shuttle van was to take people to the airport or to wherever they wanted to go or to take people from the airport to the hotel or the parking lot. We would lie there and talk about things we liked to eat, or would like to eat if we had the money and the know-how. One night we went to Denny’s when we were supposed to be training a new cashier who had come from Ethiopia and didn’t speak much English. It was three in the morning and we knew no one would be coming in. We took the van and the radio and we ordered Grand Slam breakfasts. Then something came in on the radio right in the middle of the restaurant. It was Derrick, our boss. Derrick was all right normally, but his wife had just gotten cancer which meant he wouldn’t be able to quit his job and go back to school like h
e wanted. He wanted his wife to support him while he got his medical degree. Now that wasn’t happening and he was in a terrible mood. He told us to get our asses back. The new cashier had already screwed up with a customer and had panicked. Derrick found him out back crying his eyes out, and mumbling things in his strange tongue. We jumped in the van and drove back quickly. Santos was driving and swerving at cars to make me laugh and he was smiling because he knew he’d never get fired—and that meant that nothing would happen to me either. Santos was pretty tight with Derrick. Well, it turned out the Ethiopian guy couldn’t work anymore. He was a wreck and no matter how much Derrick tried to explain that it was all right, that it was just his first day on the job and things like this happen, etc.—no matter how much Derrick talked to him, the guy only became more confused. Apparently a man had come out of the hotel while Santos and I were at Denny’s and had wanted his car to do some late night cruising, and the Ethiopian guy didn’t understand him. Plus he was just the cashier. So the guy went into the hotel and talked to the doorman, who said he didn’t know where Santos and I were, even though we’d told the Ethiopian guy that we were going to Denny’s and to call us on the radio if he needed anything—and the doorman called Derrick at home. Then Derrick came in and called us on the radio and told us to get our asses back. The Ethiopian guy was driving away all teary-eyed when we got back. I saw him once after that working at a movie theater downtown. He was tearing tickets. He seemed to be enjoying himself and he didn’t seem to recognize me, so I just said thank you and walked past. When Santos and I got back to the hotel, Derrick came storming out of the booth and he pounded on the door for Santos, who was driving, to open it. He flipped the switch and Derrick stormed onto the van. The gist was that Santos and me were fired on the spot and there wasn’t any changing things, no matter what Santos said to try to calm down Derrick, and no matter how he tried reminding him how long they’d known each other, and no matter how he tried reminding him that he had a daughter to support, and that I was still in high school and saving up for college, myself. Surely he could understand that, couldn’t he? said Santos. But apparently he couldn’t. Derrick told us to take off our valet jackets and I did and Santos said, You’re making a mistake, Derrick. Don’t make me look bad in front of the kid, he said, but he took his off too. We walked home because Santos didn’t want to wake up Meg. It was a long way and we bought 40’s and drank them on the road out of paper bags. I still had a long way to go, but pretty soon we were at Santos’s house and we stopped. I still had a long way to go. Santos looked at the dark house and said, What a piece of shit house. He was buzzed and so was I. What a piece of shit house, he said. Then he told me about the time he was in the finals against Bellingham, and he’d scored thirty-six points already, but they were still down by one with five seconds left. Santos’s team had the ball. The crowd was going crazy and Santos’s family was in the stands and there was Meg with the rest of her cheerleader friends all waving their pom-poms. It was very quiet in his head, Santos said. He didn’t hear any of that. He only heard it later in the locker room, and on the bus on the way home, and for a long time after that. He said he felt the aftershocks, but didn’t feel the earthquake. They inbounded the ball to Santos and he took it down the length of the floor, the clock counting down: 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. He told it like this: He gets to the top of the key and he plants both feet and springs up high—he gets the highest and best extension he’s ever had, right over the defender, who was seven feet tall and went to some college or other and ended up in the pros on some team or other; Santos lets the shot go and it arcs real pretty—all the pretty girls in the stands and all of Santos’s friends are watching, and Meg, too—and the ball comes down, pretty, perfect, right down the middle of the net—swish! The crowd goes crazy. People run out of the stands and hop up and down and someone breaks his foot trying to jump onto the floor to congratulate the team. Everyone is throwing their hats into the air, and the team mauls Santos and they collapse into a pile on the floor. For awhile no one notices the refs talking to each other under the basket. But soon they do. The refs talk it over and the crowd turns quiet and everybody’s watching the refs now, Santos being the last to see—he’s smiling and he’s got tears in his eyes and his teammates are peeling off of him one at a time, and they stand there looking at the refs, and Santos gets up and looks at the refs under the basket, too. The refs decide that Santos released the shot after the buzzer, so the basket was no good. Bellingham wins, they said. After he finished telling me this, he tapped his bottle on his forehead and he looked at his house and he hit me on the shoulder and told me I should apply at the place down the street. They pay more anyway.
Sometimes we’d burn past the security guard in front of the school and drive down to the bowling alley where some of us would play pool. I’d play pool too, once in awhile, but I never was very good at it. Sometimes I’d go entire days without making a shot, missing every one.
There were always old men there, old men who didn’t have jobs—they used to hang out at the bowling alley. Unemployment, I think. One of these men had only one arm and he used to shoot pool better than anyone I’d ever seen. He’d beat anyone who came in. His name was Harold. He would beat you with one arm, and he’d beat you convincingly.
One time I gave him a cigarette and I said, Where’d you learn to play like that? You mean with one arm? he said. That’s exactly what I meant, but I said, No, I mean, where’d you learn to play pool so well, Harold? You have to find something, Harold said. You know what I mean? You know what I mean by that? He took a long drag off of that cigarette and rolled his empty shoulder around.
A long time later, I was sitting in the basement of the hotel where I was working and I was suffering. I had a fever and the shakes and every inch of my body was falling apart. I thought I was going to shake to pieces. I thought people were out to kill me. I thought, particularly, that everyone I saw was hideously ugly and deformed, and that they were sick too. I planned on killing myself as soon as I felt better. I had a conversation in my head with someone I hadn’t seen in a long time, demonstrating in words the gist of my sickness. I didn’t know where she was anymore. She could have been anywhere. I wanted to get on a bus and find her. I missed her.
Prince got a girl pregnant, a girl named Shawna who used to be in a class of mine when I was in junior high. I’d had a shitty year that year when nobody knew me, and Shawna was always very nice. She was my lab partner and she’d often talk about guys she liked. I had an extreme thing for Shawna. I thought at one time that I loved her. Prince got her pregnant a few years later and I hadn’t seen Shawna in a long time, but I mentioned I had always thought she was a nice girl and very cute. We were playing in an indoor soccer league. We split when the ball went up. I ran down the right side towards the goal. Prince ran down the left. The ball bounced off the side wall ahead of me and the defender and I touched the ball at the same time. I pushed him down and kicked it ahead of me and ran after it. Prince was on the left side, swinging in. We were flying. I popped it up over the goalie’s head—off the post—and Prince ran in and drilled it into the net on the fly. We laughed so hard we had to call a timeout.
After looking for a long time, I bought some pills off this epileptic at the Trolley. I waited, and finally had to take a bunch at the Greyhound station in Tacoma, and then when we stopped up at Snoqualmie, I took some more. I remember I thought I was an iceberg. I had the impression I was an iceberg. This had something to do with the way I was moving; very slowly. I’d move down the aisle to stretch my legs and I’d get the impression I was a cold, slow body of ice. I get like that sometimes, mostly when I’m on opiates.
But the old guy. He gets on in Ellensburg and sits next to me and starts going on about the Communist Conspiracy and the American Way and how this generation is a generation of spoiled, whiny candyasses. “Not you, of course,” he said.
“America is not the place that it was!” he said. “It is a dying mirage! All the men who made it great are dead
! All our heroes are gone and now there’s nobody! What have you people ever had to survive?” he said. “What have you ever had to suffer?”
This went on for hours. I’d pretend to fall asleep and he would stop talking for awhile, but he would always start up again, and I’d open my eyes, and if I really was asleep, I’d open them much slower.
A few miles before we hit Spokane he starts into a story about Guam, or some island in the Pacific he was on during World War II. I mean, the setup is here’s where the old guy’s going to get down to business. He knows Spokane’s coming up and we’re all going to disembark and head off in different directions, so he knows he’d better get down to business. Everything has been leading up to this point. It’s been coming. It was all going to eventually end up here.
“Bullets whizzing over my head!” he goes. “It was a massacre! We were running into their fire! They were combing the beaches for us! We were being slaughtered! We were being blown to pieces!” He kept going on like that. The whole bus could hear, I imagine, although no one was saying anything. I just kept looking at the seat in front of me while he told the story, or at this girl across the aisle wearing yellow headphones. My eyes were tearing up from the pills—the old guy goes, “I know, son. Don’t be ashamed to let it out. It was a terrible time.”
“Darkness!” he goes. “They were right up on us! They were shooting the wounded! Miles of them, as far as the eye could see! So what did I do? I dug a hole. I dug a hole and I covered myself with dirt.” This part he was whispering, see. He was whispering in a low voice. We passed an exit sign for a McDonald’s. An outlet mall. A Holiday Inn. “I dug a hole and covered myself with dirt,” he says. “They were combing the beaches for us. They were shooting the wounded. I dug a hole, so what? So what?” Right about now, he grabs my wrist and squeezes down on it with his hot, sweaty hand, and he puts his face against mine; right up on it. “You think I wanted to?” he says. “You think it was comfortable under all that dirt? You think I wanted to? You do what you gotta do. That’s not desertion. Running the opposite way is desertion. Digging a hole is not desertion. Digging a hole is not desertion.” And so on.
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