Though he didn’t really condone the closing sentiment, Bill was so relieved to have anyone side with him that he thanked this hallway apparition, whom he’d never given a second thought to, and who soon stalked off. It was the last thing they’d say to each other until more than a decade later on a summer night the temperature of warm blood. The strictures of high school cliquery were simply too much for another interaction—let alone a friendship—to propagate.
Whatever burgeoning political rage he’d felt, he was also still a child. Precocious, maybe, but a kid who loved the joy of the dribble, the Zen of a ball ripping through a net, and when he saw that this could be taken from him he had that little-kid feeling of wanting to cry down to the bottom of himself. It was a lesson he’d learn over and over again—in college, in activism, with his finicky, conformist parents. Like MacMillan and the clique of teachers and coaches who all went to the same church and barbecued at one another’s houses, much of the country’s small-bore civil servants were itching to do some repressing of their own. Millions of Dick Cheney wannabes swelling the ranks, enjoying their little authoritarian fiefdoms. His disagreements with Rick ebbed and flowed but like storms on a warming planet, grew in ferocity. Maybe his popularity was grandfathered in because he won basketball games with his J, but even when he slipped into a cloak of conformity, his isolation followed him like a hot sweet smoke. What an important lesson for every young person to learn: If you defy the collective psychosis of nationalism, of imperial war, you will pay for it. And the people in your community, your home, who you thought knew and loved you, will be the ones to collect the debt.
* * *
Bill watched an owl—possibly imaginary—streak magnificently across the diving darkness. “You hated me?” he asked.
“I wasn’t exactly sitting at the center of the lunchroom.”
He walked slightly behind Dakota, each of them swigging whiskey. Bill’s shirt was baggy enough, but he worried about the bulge on his spine. He stretched his back, the tape stressing skin. He had to get this shit off. But the idea of smoking some green or snorting a rail had wormed too deep.
“You’re down with Jonah Hansen now,” Bill noted. “He was like the social chair back when.”
Dakota had a look of permanent resentment carved into his features, which made him impossible to read. He kept picturing the kid with that clean part right down the middle. The spasming dreadlocks must have been the work of years. “Doesn’t mean we’re tight.”
“Had a few beers with him tonight. Eaton and Beaufort too.”
“Yeah, I see ’em around.”
“Ever talk to Beaufort?”
“Nope.”
Bill scratched his balls. “And I thought I was the sad-sack, washed-up ex-jock.”
Because he’d had that beer with Beaufort, now he couldn’t get Tina Ross off his mind, and all the weird shit that had gone down because of her. All these years later, he still saw her snickering at him, that image somehow the totem of all that had gone on with his stupid T-shirt wars. When had their brief fling happened? He remembered the milk shake and making out on the couch in his basement (pretending to watch a movie, his mom pretending to do laundry to keep an eye on them). He remembered how she’d petted his dick without taking it to the next step. When her mom picked her up, Bill curled into a fetal coil in his bed, feeling that ache in the testicles that made you want to simultaneously come, shit, vomit, and die. She’d ghosted him after that. Why had he been so furious at her? Wasn’t her fault. She hardly had a thought in her head that hadn’t come from her youth pastor. Yet when he heard the rumors, he’d felt glee. His turn to laugh at her.
“Thought I’d still loathe him. Beaufort, I mean.” His memories kept jerking him around in bumper car collisions. His mind had the consistency of quantum foam. “I actually felt sorry for him.”
They passed an ExxonMobil station, bright sign beaming its massive con. The searing fluorescent white cast a fog over his speeding, bleeding brain. Then he admitted the obvious:
“I suppose in high school I would’ve hated me too.”
“It’s relative. You and Harrington, y’all two were cooler than most.”
His friend’s name echoed in the stillness, the very sound a weary refugee dragging an ache to his dry throat. “Ever listen to his music?”
“Huh?”
“Harrington. His albums.”
Listlessly kicking a plastic Slurpee cup, sending it skittering across the road, memory gave birth to memory in botched C-section bloodletting. Dakota rolled up a sleeve, and he saw a tattoo on his forearm in florid script: Money Power Respect.
“Maybe I checked ’em out a while back. Didn’t care for it. Kid had a dim view on things.”
“A dim view? Can you even blame him—”
“No offense, man, but you buying anything?”
They came to the intersection of South Main Street and Newark Road, where a cardboard box of a building, which had over the years shuffled through being a sub sandwich joint, an athletic apparel store, and a real estate office, currently idled in vacancy. Brown paper taped to the interior of the windows obscured whatever copper-wire-salvage scene lay within. They stopped at the crosswalk. Dakota was right; he really needed to be on his way. Get this deal done and the night on-withed. Then he remembered his truck.
“Fuck,” he muttered.
“Yo?”
The thousand dollars he’d left in the glove compartment seemed more important now. “Forgot my cash. Don’t suppose you’d take plastic?”
Dakota threw up his hands. “You call me all the way out here and ain’t even got cash?”
Bill pffffed. “One of those nights, man.”
The glowing mid-stride crosswalk guy beckoned. Then he felt the dealer’s stiff hand tap his shoulder, guiding him to cross the street.
“Hey. We gotta move.”
“Kinda need to be on my way.”
“No. I mean we really gotta move.”
Bill followed his gaze to the distant traffic light where a police cruiser waited, the hood looking like a hungry lion. Dakota picked up the pace, and even though they weren’t doing anything—just a couple old acquaintances out for a late-night stroll—he knew Dakota had illicit this or that on him, and Bill, well, he had no idea what he might have in tow.
“Don’t want those fuckers even seeing us. Let’s get to the football field. Then we can talk deals.”
The prospect that Dakota might spot him a joint—hell, that sounded like honey in the famine. They hustled toward New Canaan High. Bill hummed another Harrington song, one of home and sky and heat and road, as they made their way toward his chosen place of worship.
* * *
He was never sure who he missed the most, but Ben Harrington was the friend he frequently found himself talking to in his head. Harrington who’d had a tenderness, a disinclination toward a hard heart. Hell, Harrington’s real name was actually William, and he’d gone by Will until kindergarten when the two of them became friends. Just like that, he began going by his middle name, Ben, to settle the confusion—the kid changed his name for their friendship. As a boy he probably spent more time at the Harringtons’ than at his own house, flirting with his sisters, nosing around Doug Harrington’s incredible garage with every dangerous power drill, saw, and sander one could imagine. He had a special fascination with Harrington’s father because he’d been a star guard at New Canaan back in the seventies. He was also a hard, often unpleasant man. When he heard the song “Trouble in Hand,” which included lyrics like Born in the same town you’ll die in dumber, he wondered what Doug thought.
“Way back, I planned to write the album so he’d stop speaking to me,” Harrington said. “Turns out I didn’t need to work so hard.”
By then Harrington was living in L.A. Bill found this appropriate, as the kid had always looked the part. Floppy blond locks, a year-round tan, and big white teeth straightened with seventh-grade braces to resemble wall plaster. He was Americana prepackaged,
belonging on the glossy spread of an Abercrombie ad. His love songs all sounded like they were written for Stacey even though, like Bill and Lisa, they broke up in 2003. There was a sappy, precocious energy that reminded Bill of the way Harrington had doted on her.
Maybe he should’ve looked closer at his friend back in high school: the anxiety, the uncertainty that probably fueled a lot of artist types. He’d smoked more pot than the rest of them, but so what? When they visited each other in college, Harrington would always want to score prescriptions. Once he showed up with a bottle of Vicodin. Another time they snorted Oxy, and Bill discovered the one drug he hated because for whatever reason it made it so he couldn’t piss no matter how full his bladder was. Over the years, he watched his friend’s music career accelerate, watched him play in bars and small clubs, saw fans begin to attach themselves. His sound was retro-Dylanish, pretty but insipid, not really Bill’s thing, but he at least appreciated all the references, the inside jokes. They’d met up in Chicago while Harrington was on his second self-financed van tour. Before the show, Bill had himself a peak into his friend’s backpack, which looked like a fucking pharmacy. Vic, Val, Oxy, Hydro, Norco—Harrington had a serious set of pals. But Bill operated by the principle that you don’t intervene in people’s coping mechanisms—however they faced down the storm. So he stole two Vals, and went about feeling like sexy melted marshmallow the rest of the night.
Since meeting in kindergarten, they’d had only one serious fight. When Rick was killed. Harrington could not believe, could not stand, could not countenance that Bill wasn’t going home for the funeral.
“Whatever happened between you two, it’s going to last after the kid’s dead?” They spoke by phone, and Bill walked out of his college apartment. The semester was over, and he stood in the street watching a sorority girl try to pack piles of dirty laundry into her SUV.
“We didn’t all drop out, Harrington. I graduate next week.”
Harrington’s end of the line was silent.
“It’s not about Rick,” Bill continued, trying to explain the inexplicable. “It’s about what the spectacle represents. As long as the Rick Brinklans of the world are held up as heroes, and we’re celebrating their pointless deaths with patriotic parades, all this shit rolls on.”
Harrington still said nothing.
“Dude,” he demanded.
“I don’t know what you want me to say, Bill. You don’t hear how selfish you sound? You’re hiding behind some bullshit political reasoning because you’re still mad at him over—over who the fuck even remembers.”
Bill’s skin crawled with righteousness. “You don’t get it, and why would you? You always wanted to stand in the middle and play peacemaker. Not because you can’t think for yourself but because you’re afraid.”
“Man,” Harrington started, then stopped. “Stacey’s not going. Lisa never wrote me back. I’m just— What the fuck is with you guys? He was our friend.”
“Christ, Harrington, we were children. We didn’t have a choice who our friends were. Oh, this kid lives down the road from me? I can ride my bike to his house? Sure, let’s be best pals. That’s over. And yes, what I’m telling you is that he no longer means anything to me. Not enough to go be a part of some jingoistic spectacle. It’s a narrative, man. It’s a narrative they want everyone to swallow—that what he did was honorable. It wasn’t.”
That phone call ended badly, but unlike with Rick, they patched things up.
Four years later, after Cambodia and the Ho Chi Minh Trail, Bill was back in Columbus looking for a job, ranks of temp agencies failing to call him back for ten-dollar-an-hour call center work, when he saw the story on CNN. He booked his bus tickets, routing through Pittsburgh, that same night.
He spoke to Harrington on his way to New York, telling him that depending on what happened in Zuccotti Park, maybe he’d come stay with him in L.A. afterward.
“And take a corporate airline?” said Harrington in his gentle tenor. The voice that made twenty-year-old coeds mad with desire. “You already selling out, bro?”
“Harrington, the day you figure out your albums are radical documents of protest . . .”
“You know those evil sons of bitches only take money, right? Have you heard of money? Currency? Here, I’ll give you a primer . . .”
His Occupy experience was a novel in and of itself, complete with villains and minor antagonists and a low-rent threesome he had in a tent one night with a Palestinian dude and a woman who smelled of onions. The park thronged with Guy Fawkes masks, kempt reporters with stiff hair products, percussive music that thrummed in the fillings, gawkers, NYPD standing at the perimeter, rigid and bored, the active murmur of hundreds of simultaneous conversations convening to a river’s roar. It was thrilling, it was maddening, it was fascinating. He made friends he thought he’d stay in touch with the rest of his life. They would smoke cigarettes at night and watch the glowing cinders of the park. Mere blocks away, the new One World Trade Center tower glowed the color of molten steel. As the movement grew and other occupations erupted across the country, then the world, he and his new friends had the sensation of a wildfire catching the right wind.
Yet he wasn’t around in the end when the weather turned cold and the park filled with drug addicts, the mentally ill, the homeless—all the people society had cast off, drawn like moths to the flame of Zuccotti. He wasn’t around when in November the police put on their riot gear and cleared the park; armed with NYPD vans, corrections buses, plastic zip-tie handcuffs, and pepper spray, they carried the bodies of nonresistant occupiers while helicopters thundered above and searchlights beamed up the apostasy. Flatbed trucks stacked with metal barricades moved in while a backhoe clattered down Broadway like an Imperial Walker, loading the books, boxes of food, sleeping bags, tents, duffels, clothes, suitcases, and mattresses into soggy dump trucks that delivered it all to nowhere, just more cast off effluvium of the American experience.
He wasn’t there because five weeks into his time at Liberty Square, he saw he had a voice mail. Only his parents still left voice mails. He had to walk down multiple blocks to get enough quiet from the drum circle, and then he called his mom.
It was difficult to hear her and even more difficult to process. “Ben,” she choked. “There was an apartment fire. I can’t believe this—I’m so sorry, baby.” His skin went cold, and he thought irrationally that this was his fault. That he’d somehow brought this on.
The details were even more harrowing. Harrington had overdosed in bed with a lit cigarette in his hand. Heroin, according to the autopsy. He also killed a couple who lived above him, newlyweds from Mendocino, who’d just moved in the month before. They died of smoke inhalation. Bill slipped into that kind of stunned that settles in after impossible news, those random acts of freewheeling madness that change everything in one blood-draining beat.
He hung up on his mom and sank against the side of a building outside a deli. He stank. He hadn’t showered in a week. Occupiers chanted from down the street. We. Are. The Ninety-Nine Percent. Bill found himself thinking of grade school. They’d had this thing called the Angel Award that went to the most well-behaved student, which Harrington won every single year, much to his dismay. They gave him such shit about it. Called him “Angel in the Outfield.” Then when they got to sixth grade, their lunch table gathered a pool of money for the man brave enough to poop in the girls’ bathroom. Harrington stood up, shrugged, and said, “No more Angel Award, so I’ve got nothing to live for.” He took a detention for it and everything.
Bill lowered his head into his lap as despair erupted in his chest. Then he wept for a long time. The way you will.
He thought about staying in Zuccotti. Who knew where all this was going? How could he leave now? Harrington wouldn’t know the difference, and maybe this was it—the event that would change things. But of course it wasn’t. In the end he caught a bus back to Ohio for the funeral and watched the NYPD clear Zuccotti on the TV in his parents’ basement.
* * *
“The song’s not racist,” Bill told Dakota. “It’s about the desperation of the narrator. He’s looking to lash out, to blame anybody available.”
“I fought that nigger again,” Dakota quoted, reading the lyrics from his phone. “I fought that nigger again / I said, ‘Boy, don’t you know, you stole my granddaddy’s soul / Now I got my enemies as kin.’ ”
“Right, he’s talking to a specific person. That nigger, who’s now somehow a part of his family. Who he thinks stole from his grandpappy, probably with the Voting Rights Act or some shit.”
Dakota’s face remained skeptical as he read more of the song.
“I killed a man again / I killed a man again / I stuck a knife in his ribs outside a bar in West Texas / I got his ATM pin.
“I beat my son again / I beat my son again / I said, ‘Kid, don’t you know, this hard world grows you cold’ / I broke his arm again.
“I raped his mother again / I raped his mother again / I met her on a FOB over in Afghanistan / I killed her heart with my sin.”
“Exactly,” said Bill. “They’re expressions of the dispossessed. It’s about a dude who can’t even understand why he acts out in these ways. People dismiss him as a monster because that makes it easy on them. But he’s been bred and brought up, almost like a dog, to be vicious, to be cruel. The song’s about his remorse. Very Johnny Cash.”
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