The Moth Presents All These Wonders

by Catherine Burns

  Before you know it, there we were—me, Lynette, her boyfriend, Rob—piled into the back of his red hooptie, flying down the highway heading from Hollis to the Hamptons. For brevity’s sake let’s just say that Rob is like Eminem and Lynette’s like an Italian Rosie Perez. They’re in the front, and I’m in the back.

  Now as we’re getting closer, I’m getting a little more nervous, and I’m thinking of all these things to explain.

  I’m like, “Oh, shit! Did I tell you about the ketchup?”

  “The what?”

  “You can’t put the ketchup bottle on the table.”

  “Where do you put it, on the floor?”

  “No, listen. You gotta take the ketchup out of the bottle and you gotta put it in a little bowl with a spoon first. Remember that.”

  “Oh, and I didn’t tell you this: there’s no TV there.”

  “Dear God!” That always got the biggest reaction. “What does he do all day?”

  It’s like in Queens, the most diverse place in the world, the one thing everybody has in common is a perpetually blaring TV set. So that would lead me to have to explain what we did after dinner instead of watching TV, which was the talks—the moon and stars talks.

  Like I said, I really loved them, but they weren’t for the faint of heart, meaning that Mark did not care if you were some kid unaccustomed to this type of thing. He talked, and he argued with you like you were his peer, and he fully expected you to keep up. So I was not sure if my friends were gonna be into that, or if he was gonna be into them, but too late. There we were pulling in to the driveway.

  The most shocking thing you first saw at Mark’s place wasn’t the hand-laid stone pool, or even the regulation croquet court, or the five-bedroom historic farmhouse. It was Mark himself. He was six foot ten. Again, six foot ten. Everyone just sort of looked at him like, Is that a man or is that an oak tree wearing chinos?

  Likely because my friends ignored my stupid paranoia and were just themselves, the day went without a hitch. But still, that night as we finished up dinner, I couldn’t help but be a little nervous again, as I knew the questions were coming.

  So Mark says, “Presuming we can fix all of the societal ills right here and now, where would you begin? Go.”

  Really, you have to understand that nobody is asking us these kinds of questions. Maybe, sure, we’re at an age where you may be starting to think bigger picture, starting to think about what you are gonna do for a living. But we come from a place where it always felt like there were only two job options: cop…not a cop. It was what your parents did: you took the first solid city job that came along, and you held on for dear life. And you were proud, and you did your best, and you did it forever.

  Solving society’s ills doesn’t get you a pension. We weren’t thinking about these kind of things.

  So I kind of look away, I look down. But then I hear Rob say something, and I look up, and then I see Lynette kind of disagrees with that. Then I see that Mark is nodding along, and it’s on, just like that, and not just that one time.

  There would be many more moon and stars talks over the years. And it was a beautiful thing, because I think what most of us would tell you now is that those talks forever changed the way we thought of ourselves. Those talks made us think that maybe there was a little more to us than we knew.

  For some of my friends, certainly not all, but for some, and definitely for me, they even made us think, Well, shit, if (a) I like talking about these big things, and (b) the universe is infinite, then (c) there’s gotta be more job options than cop.

  But really, I think that when we stood at that same crossroads as our parents had, it was this experience that gave us something that unfortunately they didn’t have, and that’s just the confidence to know that we had a choice.

  And so here I am today, living in a whole other world: Manhattan, a whopping twenty minutes away from where I grew up.

  But that is not because of fear. That’s my choice.

  TARA CLANCY is the author of The Clancys of Queens. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, the Paris Review Daily, and the Rumpus. She is a Moth GrandSLAM winner, and her stories have been featured on The Moth Radio Hour, as well as NPR’s Snap Judgment and Risk! Tara lives in New York City with her wife and two sons. More info at taraclancy.com.

  This story was told on February 10, 2014, in the Great Hall at Cooper Union in New York City. The theme of the evening was Flirting with Disaster: Stories of Narrow Escapes. Director: Jenifer Hixson.

  I came to New York City in 1998. I was seventeen.

  I entered the United States with just a passport in my hand, because somehow the baggage that I’d checked when I boarded the flight from Ivory Coast (which was tattered in ways unimaginable) didn’t make it.

  I stood there at the luggage rack watching all these huge bags go by, and mine didn’t come. This bag held all my possessions at this point: two pairs of pants and two shirts—one long-sleeved and one short. So I just started laughing, and I didn’t even bother going to the lost-baggage section to claim it.

  I just walked right out to meet my new adoptive mother, who was standing there with a beaming smile, waiting for me. And I explained to her what had happened, and we laughed some more.

  We left and went into Manhattan, and that evening we went to Kmart. (After we had had Chinese food and a fortune cookie that said, “You’re about to have new clothes.”)

  And I thought to myself, What a great omen. Fresh new start to everything.

  I was coming from a country called Sierra Leone. At age eleven, a war had started in my country. At twelve I had become an orphan, because my mother, father, and two brothers had been killed in that war. At thirteen I was fighting as a soldier in that same war. At sixteen, after three years of war, I’d been removed from all that and had gone through rehabilitation, where I began learning how to deal with the memories of the war.

  So from this experience, I had come to the United States. To have a new home, and to live with a mother who was willing to take me into her life when most people at the time were afraid of somebody like me.

  It was a chance at living again, because all I had come to know, since I was eleven, was how to survive. I didn’t know how to live. All I knew, really, up until this point in my life, was struggle. This was what I had come to expect from life, and I didn’t trust in happiness or any kind of normality at all.

  So here I was in New York, with my new mother. We needed to step into that normality.

  But we had a lot of things to deal with, and one of the most pressing ones was that I needed to get into school. You see, the visa that I had been given was a prospective-student visa. This meant that when I arrived in the United States, I had three months to get into a school. If I didn’t, I would be returned to my war-torn country, Sierra Leone.

  Now, when I arrived, it was in the summer, so all the schools were closed. But my mother got on the phone and called every school principal she could think of in Manhattan, and tried to get them to grant me an interview.

  When I went to some of the interviews, I was immediately denied because of the following conversation:

  “Do you have a report card to show that you had been in school?”

  I would say, “No, but I know I have been in school.”

  And then my mother would interject to explain the context.

  I would sit there thinking to myself, What do these school principals think? Do they really think that when there’s a war in your village or when your town is attacked, and people are gunned down in front of you, and you’re running for your life, you’re thinking to yourself, “You know, I must take my report card and put it in the back of my pocket.”

  At some of these interviews, I was able to say some of these things, thinking that it would be funny. But the school principals didn’t find it funny. I learned a new American term for what they did find it. They were “weirded out” by the strange sense of humor that I had about this.

 
So I decided that I was going to write an entrance essay about this, and the essay was simply titled “Why I Do Not Have a Report Card.”

  With this essay, along with exams that were given to me, I was accepted to the United Nations International School and placed in the eleventh grade.

  Thus began my two years of high school and making other teenagers confused about who I was. You see, I didn’t fit into any box. I didn’t have the same worries about what shoes or clothes I wore. And so my teenage counterparts always wanted to find out why I was like that. Why I didn’t worry about my essays or exams or things.

  And of course I couldn’t tell them, because I felt that they were not ready to hear the truth. What was I going to say?

  During a break from class, “Hey, you know, I was a child soldier at thirteen. Let’s go back to class now.”

  So I was silent, mostly. I didn’t say much. I would just smile. And this made them more curious.

  They would say to me, “You’re such a weird kid.”

  And I would respond by saying, “No, no, no. I’m not weird. Weird has a negative connotation. I prefer the word unusual. It has a certain sophistication and gravitas to it that suits my character.”

  And of course when I was finished saying this, they would look at me and say, “Why don’t you speak like a normal person?”

  The reason I spoke like this was because of my British-African English that I’d learned, which was the only formal English that I knew. So whenever I spoke, people felt ill at ease, particularly my fellow teenagers. They thought, What is wrong with this fellow?

  Some of them, though, didn’t find it as strange. They thought maybe my English was like this because I was from some royal African family.

  So throughout my high-school years, I tried to make my English less formal, so that my friends would not feel disturbed by it. (However, I did not dispute the fact that I was from some royal African family or that I was a prince. Because, you see, sometimes some stereotypes have their benefits, and I certainly took advantage of that.)

  But I needed to be silent about my background, because I also felt like I was being watched. When I got into the school, some of the other parents were not very happy that somebody with my background was in school with their children. And I realized that the way I conducted myself would determine whether they would ever let another child who had been through war into such a school.

  But even with all of these attitudes, and with my silence, I started making friends. To them it was sufficient that I was just some kid who lived in the East Village, who was from an African country.

  And these kids were tough (they told me). Because they lived in a tough city, New York. And therefore they were tough.

  They had been to the Bronx. They had been to Bed-Stuy. They had taken the train there. They had gotten into fights and won.

  So they would say things to me like, “If you want to survive the streets of New York City, we need to teach you a few things.”

  And I’d be like, “Okay, sure. I’m open to learning.”

  And they would tell me things about how to be tough and stuff, and I would say, “Well, thank you very much. I truly appreciate this advice that you’re giving me.”

  They were like, “No worries, our African brother. Anytime, anytime.”

  Truth was, I’d been to some of these places that they spoke about, these neighborhoods, and I knew that the people who lived there didn’t glorify violence the way they did. They didn’t have time to pretend, because they lived in it, just like I had.

  I noticed that these kids had a sort of idea of violence that they’d never really lived. They glorified it in a way, because they’d never actually experienced it at all.

  When I walked with them, I observed that I paid more attention to the people who walked past us—how the person walked, which way they were coming from. I didn’t take the same route twice, because I didn’t want to develop a predictable path. These were all habits that were formed from my experiences, but I noticed that my new friends didn’t do that at all. So I knew they were just saying these things to seem tough to me.

  Now, I did enjoy listening to my new friends that I had made. I enjoyed listening to them tremendously, because I wished, when I listened to them, that the only violence I knew was the violence that I imagined.

  And listening to them allowed me to experience childhood in a way that I hadn’t known was possible. It let me be a normal kid.

  So I listened to them, and we hung out all the time, and through that I participated in what was left of my childhood.

  I got to be a child again with them; the only worries that we had were when we went Rollerblading without any protective gear. We took our brakes off, and sometimes we would avoid hitting an old lady by falling into a trash can on the street, and we laughed about it.

  These things meant a lot to me.

  After about a year of being friends with these boys, one of them decided to invite a group of us, about ten of us, to upstate New York. His family had property up there, and he said we were going there for the weekend to play a game called paintball.

  I said, “Well, what is that?”

  And he said, “Oh, man, you’ve never played paintball? You’re gonna love it. It’s a great game. The fellows and I, we always play it. And don’t worry, we’ll teach it to you, and we’ll protect you.

  “You use these balls of paint, and you shoot people,” and he explained the basics of the game to me.

  I said, “Okay, that sounds interesting.”

  And I thought, If these guys who only pretend about violence can play it, it must not be that difficult a game.

  But of course I didn’t say this. I just thought these things. So I went with them upstate to a humongous property that had trees and creeks that ran into a bigger river—this beautiful open place.

  But as soon as we arrived, I began to memorize the terrain immediately, and this was from habit. I knew how many paces it took to get to the house, how many paces it took to the first tree, to the first bush, to the shed. I learned the spaces between the trees.

  Overnight, while everybody was sleeping, I tried to replay some of these things in my head—to memorize the terrain.

  And this was all out of habit, because where I came from, in my previous life, this kind of skill set could determine whether you lived or died.

  In the morning, at breakfast, they were pumped up.

  Everyone was saying, “Yeah, the game is gonna be awesome today.”

  And so after we finished breakfast, I was introduced to the game of paintball. They showed me the weapon, how you can shoot it. And I allowed them to teach me to shoot things.

  They were very macho about it.

  They said to me, “This is how you shoot, you aim like this.”

  I said, “Okay.” I tried it a few times. I deliberately missed.

  Then they showed me the camouflage and the combat gear and everything.

  And then everybody was ready to go, and they were amped up, and all like, “Yeah, we’re gonna go out! We’re gonna DO THIS!!”

  They decided we were going to play one-on-one. And then, after, we would play team games.

  So they started painting their faces, getting into this idea of war that they knew.

  I declined putting the face paint on, and I wanted to give them a hint about my past, but then I thought, You know what? I’m going to have fun with this.

  So we went off into the bush, and when one of them shouted, “Yeah, let the war begin! I’m going to bring pain to all of you! I’m going to show you how it’s done!” I thought to myself, First rule of warfare, you never belittle your opponent.

  But I didn’t say this. I went into the bushes. I already knew where to go, because I had memorized the layout of the place.

  And so I would hide. I would wait for them. I would climb a tree here. I would hide under certain shrubs. And they would come rolling around, jumping, doing all kinds of things, things they’d probably seen in
movies about how people act in war.

  I would just wait for them. And after they were done exhausting themselves, I would come up behind them, and I would shoot the paintball at them.

  This went on all day. And when we came back that night, during dinner, they talked about it.

  You know: How come you’re so good? You’re sure you’ve never played paintball before?

  I said, “No, I have never played paintball before. I’m just a quick learner, and you guys explained the game to me, and you are really great teachers. This is why I’m able to play so well.”

  But they said, “That can’t be all.”

  Some of the kids’ parents were there, and the kids said to them, “This guy, he comes up on you. You can’t even hear him coming at all.”

  And I said, “Well, you know, I grew up in a village. And I used to be a hunter when I was a boy, so I know how to blend into the forest, like a chameleon. I know how to adapt to my environment.”

  And they looked at me and said, “You’re a very strange fellow, man. But you’re badass at paintball.”

  I said, “Well, thank you. Thank you very, very much.”

  So this went on. We never got to play the group game. We played as individuals all throughout the weekend, because they wanted to beat me, and so they started to team up with each other. I would see them doing this, and then I would come up with a kind of watered-down version of another guerrilla tactic, just to play with them.

  For example, sometimes I would walk backwards and then stand where my footsteps “began” and hide. They would follow my footprints, and then I would come up behind them.

  Anyway, at some point I decided that I was going to sit out the game, just so that they could enjoy it. And I saw a sense of relief on all of their faces.

  They were like, Oh, well, FINALLY!

  When I returned, I told my mother about this game. And my mother, being a mother, was immediately worried.