I Swear I'll Make It Up to You

by Mishka Shubaly

  Alcohol was miraculous. Like in Harold and the Purple Crayon, I had drawn an escape hatch in a wall and plunged into another world. Drunk, I’d finally felt comfortable in my own skin. I’d had wild adventures. For a minute, I had been cool. Then I had woken up in bed as if transported by faerie magic. This was an earth-shattering discovery.

  As a child, I had pinwheeled through various imagined futures: I would be a knife thrower, I would be an undersea explorer like Jacques Cousteau, I would wail on guitar like Slash. Now I had found it. My father was a nuclear physicist. My mother was a mom. Alcohol was what I was supposed to be. I would do this again as soon as possible. I would do this all the time!

  After Lon got a solid chewing out from my mother, my main connections for alcohol were Bernie, a homeless schizophrenic Vietnam vet who occasionally tried to grope me, and Pinhead, an ex-Marine who had been kicked out of the military. He had a tattoo on his stomach of a flying penis and testicles ejaculating a winged drop of semen with a single blue eyeball.

  I pounded a liter of white zinfandel and fell down a flight of stairs. I chugged a magnum of champagne, swallowing the cigarette butt someone had tossed into it. I got drunk on vodka and came home covered head-to-toe in poison ivy. I climbed one of our neighbor’s apple trees with a bottle of Sambuca and drank until I fell out. I lost my virginity later that year on the floor of Lon’s bedroom with four other people passed out around us. I remember the dark fake wood paneling and the orange shag rug and not much else.

  By the time I was fourteen, my mother had given up trying to control me. She tried to ground me, but what could she do—stop me as I was walking out the door? I was over six feet tall and strong, powerful as I was naive, juvenile and hardheaded, abrasive and arrogant. My dad was rarely around, traveling constantly for business. I got in daily screaming matches with my mom and Tatyana and got shitfaced at every opportunity.

  I breezed through my classes with minimal effort, squeaking by at just above C level. I had finally learned to fight back when picked on and had been suspended from school for fighting so often that I faced expulsion for my next offense. My hairy legs sprawled out from under my desk into the aisles, my gangly arms hung over the front. Once, I stood up, and the desk-and-chair came with me. I almost made it out the door wearing it before the study hall teacher stopped me.

  High school’s arbitrary social codes were as meaningless as they were constricting. Champion sweatshirts, button-down shirts, and lettermen jackets? I felt like I had walked into an Archie comic book. Why the hell must you roll the cuffs of your jeans? I wore the same clothes two or three days in a row, sleeping in them so I could sleep later. My classmates’ dreams were hollow, their concerns pointless. The girl I liked wanted to be a dental hygienist! It was all beneath contempt. I had two friends, a couple of guys in my grade who shared my passion for alcohol and my distaste for everything else, and that was enough for me. I carefully set about mocking, offending, and alienating everyone else.

  There was nothing I couldn’t overpower or outsmart, no game I couldn’t cheat or manipulate, no system I couldn’t beat. Childhood was claustrophobic and demeaning, a truncated, dependent existence. I was so done with all this. I had nothing else to learn from my parents. I was ready to go out into the world. Okay, I had to learn how to drive, but that was it.

  In the beginning of my sophomore year, my two friends suddenly stopped talking to me. A week later, our house was vandalized: “GET OUT COMMIE” and a huge swastika in fluorescent orange spray paint. It was as baffling as it was hurtful. We were not Jewish, or Russian, or communist, or socialist. Was it a response to the immigrant last name I hated so much, the token remnant of my father’s Ukrainian heritage?

  Surprise, surprise, the vandals were my ex–best friends. What had I done to alienate my only allies? I never found out. I wanted them dead. My mother declined to press charges.

  Overnight, I went from cocksure to persecuted. Before, we had been outnumbered. Now I was alone. My mom tried to throw me a surprise birthday party at the Kingston House of Pizza a couple of months later, in the depths of winter. Two large pizzas, one cheese and one pepperoni. We waited there for an hour together before packing them up and bringing them home.

  A bulk mailing came one day, addressed to me. I turned it over. “Attend college early!” it said. I tore open the slim pamphlet and read with mounting interest. Simon’s Rock College was an accredited university in Massachusetts that accepted students after just two years of high school. Their specific focus was teaching a college curriculum to “bright, motivated adolescents.” “Bright” was a word often tossed my way. “Motivated” wasn’t. But if escaping both high school and my parents two years early couldn’t motivate me, nothing could. I walked into the house and said, “Hey, Mom, can I borrow twenty-three thousand dollars?”

  My parents talked it over when my dad got home from his latest business trip. There was no way they’d be able to afford it in the same year they were footing the bill for Tatyana’s out-of-state tuition to the University of Colorado . . . but what was the harm in getting a little more information?

  It was decided that I would be allowed to send away for an application. My mom made it clear that the B-minuses I had been pulling down in everything except weight training wouldn’t impress anyone. Overnight, I dug in at school.

  The application required what amounted to extra homework. Such bullshit! But the faraway school seemed to shimmer with possibility. Simon’s Rock didn’t just promise escape. It made me reconsider all the lectures I’d gotten about the potential I was wasting.

  That thin booklet had sought me out for a reason. I was supposed to do Some Great Thing.

  I tackled the application with immediate and sustained effort. For the first time I could remember, I gave an essay my full attention, writing it not with the minimum amount of effort necessary but with everything I had. This work counted for something.

  When my next report card came, it was straight As.

  After I sent off my application with my latest report card, I began checking the mailbox every day. Finally, I got an envelope with the seal and return address of Simon’s Rock. Without bothering to close the mailbox, I tore the envelope open. I hadn’t just gotten in—they had given me a big scholarship.

  Every cell in my body felt alive. My entire life was about to change. The sky seemed to open. I would not drop out and get a job driving a forklift. I could do anything. I would do everything. I sat down on the grass in the summer sun to treasure the moment for a minute. Then I ran in to tell my mom.

  Somehow my parents found a way to cover college tuition for not one but two kids in the same year. There had been many heated discussions, and it was made clear that all of us would have to make sacrifices in order for this to happen. The school had strict rules. Two infractions for drugs or alcohol, and you were out. One fight, and you were out. And no refunds. Even as an infant, I had recognized the duality of my nature. Like the nursery rhyme, when I was good, I was very, very good, but when I was bad, I was rotten. Could I control myself? I would have to.

  The tiny school of Simon’s Rock was tucked away behind the small town of Great Barrington in western Massachusetts. The other kids . . . it was like every high school across the country had sent its weirdest, smartest, funniest kids there for quarantine. My roommate, James, had blue hair and a pierced nose. He wore a beret constantly, even to bed. Each morning, he carefully pulled his pants on both legs simultaneously just so no one could say, “Oh, James, he’s a regular guy, he puts his pants on one leg at a time like everyone else.” Zack, the lanky smartass across the hall, owned every Beastie Boys album, even the early punk shit, and had played drums in his high school band, Fuck You, Punk Rock. Ben Bertocci was a local kid, a handsome goblin obsessed with Tolkien, a great chunky scar over his left lip from blowing up aerosol cans. He drove a lurching 1970s Chevy Nova, always blasting Gwar or Metallica, and enjoyed making weapons and terrifying masks and creepy sculptures out of the bones of
roadkill. Ben White, a skinny Florida redneck in a Skinny Puppy T-shirt, was quiet but cuttingly funny whenever he spoke. Sure, there were nerds and jocks and even a few normals, but for once, freaks were in the majority. After a month, Simon’s Rock felt more like home than any of the five houses I’d lived in, my friends closer than my family.

  My easiest course was more challenging than anything I’d encountered in my life. We were treated like adults in class and expected to respond as such. My classmates were up to it—was I? For the first time, I couldn’t phone it in. I was no longer the smartest kid in the class; I had to bust my ass just to keep up.

  Still, to be a rebellious fifteen-year-old, liberated from your parents, treated with respect by your professors, living in a coed dormitory with your best friends, three meals prepared for you each day, surrounded by woods, a creek running through campus . . . it was heaven. I had been allowed to spit out my pacifier. I was living my real life.

  But you can’t be good all the time. We drank vodka, we drank cough syrup, we smoked pot, we screwed, we stayed up all night, talking endlessly about music: Big Black, the Velvet Underground, the Stooges, Nick Cave, Bauhaus, Daniel Johnston, John Zorn, Einstürzende Neubauten, Bikini Kill.

  I lived in terror of getting caught drinking. One night, I stumbled home drunk to find myself locked out. James was in his girlfriend’s room, not to be disturbed. I wobbled out to the atrium, where people often hung out till the sun rose. A couple of second-years were in the kitchen. One sat on top of the fridge, loudly singing Frank Sinatra, tripping on acid. The other, Galen, sat at the table, smoking a Camel, laughing at his friend. He had a wooly head of thick brown hair tied into a loose ponytail at the base of his neck, scruff on his face and neck.

  When I explained my problem, Galen grinned and rolled his eyes, then hopped up from his chair.

  “You,” he said, pointing to his friend giggling on top the fridge, “stay here. I’ll be right back.”

  Galen followed me to my room.

  “I can’t believe no one’s showed you this. This is one of the fundamentals.”

  He knelt down by my door, pulled out his student ID, and pushed it into the crack between my door and the doorjamb. There was a soft click. My door swung open. Galen stood up, bowed grandly, and gestured at my open door. I shuffled in. When I turned around to thank him, he was already gone.

  I spent all of Monday, December 14, cramming for my physics final the next morning. The class had seemed an obvious choice, but I soon realized my father’s gifts for physics had passed me over. I was in my room with a friend from class, struggling desperately to understand the concepts that were so immediately logical to him. I heard a thin, explosive sound, a feeble pap, then another, then a flurry. Firecrackers? No, firecrackers didn’t sound like firecrackers; they split the air, they made your ears ring. Firecrackers sounded like guns. That firecracker sound I heard, it was a gun. It could only be Wayne Lo.

  Under the spikes and Mohawks and combat boots, Simon’s Rockers were just goofy kids. Many of us had been ridden hard in the outside world and carried baggage from it, but under that, there was a sensitive, open humanity, an intelligent caring to Simon’s Rockers, almost every one of us. Even Zack, bitter and caustic before he even got out of bed, had a wicked sense of fun. Wayne was different.

  Wayne was one of an elitist group we called “the hardcore kids” because they listened exclusively to hardcore punk. Everyone listened to some strain of punk/noise/metal/experimental/unlistenable music, and lots of us listened to hardcore. But the hardcore kids had a deeper investment in it; hardcore music was a vehicle through which they held themselves above the rest of the student body and the rest of humanity. At meals, they sat at the same table in the corner closest to the cafeteria entrance, with Wayne at the head, facing the entrance. You could see him clocking and judging every person who walked through the door.

  Of the hardcore kids, Wayne was the darkest, the most intense, the most extreme. He was openly misogynistic, racist, and bigoted. Wayne had turned in papers arguing that African Americans, Jews, and gays were inferior, that the Holocaust had never happened, that HIV-positive people should be quarantined or executed.

  Wayne and I were on the basketball team together. He was eerily intense on the court, even just running drills. One night after practice, I had talked about shooting cans with my .22 rifle. Wayne asked me if I could get him a gun.

  “Maybe over winter break,” I had said, stalling.

  “No,” he had said, “I need it now.”

  In my dorm room, my mind put the pieces together so fast I felt nauseous.

  “Those are gunshots,” I said. “It’s gotta be Wayne.”

  I’d run into him earlier that night. I always said hi to him, not because I wanted to befriend him but because I wanted him to know not everyone was intimidated by him. He never responded, not even a grunt or a nod. But that night he had.

  “How’s it going?” I said as I passed him on the stairs, not expecting a response.

  “Good, man,” he had said with a small smile. “See you later.”

  I told my friend to stay put and ran out of my room, headed in the direction of the gunshots. I didn’t know if I could stop Wayne, but I would try. When I burst out of our hall into the atrium, one of the resident assistants was coming up the stairs. He was the all-American kid, always wearing a baseball hat and an I-dare-you grin. Tonight, for the first time, he wasn’t smiling.

  “Mishka, get back in your room. Wayne’s got a gun.”

  I kept running toward the door.

  “I heard it. He’s down by the library.”

  “Mishka! Get back in your room right fucking now. Turn the lights off, lock the door, and lay on the floor away from the windows. Right fucking now.”

  I went back to my room, turned the lights off, and locked the door. I looked out the window toward the library. I could hear screams, and I saw silhouettes of students running away from the library, students I knew. My friend grabbed my physics notebook and started writing frantically. I looked over his shoulder. He was writing out his will.

  After a while, the screams stopped. There were sirens, then cop cars and flashing lights. Then, as we watched, Wayne Lo was led down the path from upper campus toward a waiting cop car. He was handcuffed, and two cops held his arms tightly.

  I ran out into the atrium, then outside and into Dolliver, the boys’ dormitory. I didn’t know what else to do. There was blood on the stairs and blood on one of the landings, more blood than I had ever seen, a thick pool of blood, just starting to congeal at the edges.

  Students were crying and saying that people had been shot, that Galen was dead. But rumors were insane at Simon’s Rock—people just repeated shit they’d heard without a thought.

  “Are you sure?” I said. “Did you see him?”

  No, no one had seen him.

  “He’s not dead. He’s fine,” I said. “Maybe he’s been shot and he’s hurt, but he’s not dead. Don’t say it unless you know it’s true.”

  I saw one of the residence directors for Dolliver.

  “Is Galen okay?” I said. “I guess he got shot?”

  “Mishka,” the residence director said, “Galen’s dead.”

  We were ushered into the dining hall. Six people had been shot. Galen and Nacunan, a teacher, were dead. Wayne had only surrendered because his cheap Chinese SKS assault rifle had jammed. He had been carrying enough ammunition to kill us all.

  My friends were stone-faced. A lot of girls were crying, but I’d seen girls cry before. I had never seen my teachers cry. I didn’t cry. I took Wayne’s seat at the head of the hardcore table, a move that creeped out my friends. I refused to leave that seat open, to grant him any kind of legacy out of fear.

  We stayed awake the entire night. My mom arrived in the morning to bring me home to New Hampshire. The campus had been locked down, so my mother had to park beyond the front gate, then check in with police before she was allowed to come and get me. As we were
walking off campus to her minivan, a cluster of reporters was waiting just beyond the gates. It was 1992, a long time before Columbine or Virginia Tech or Newtown; the media arrived in droves.

  “You don’t have to say anything if you don’t want to,” my mom said. “And we don’t need to be polite. We can just walk right through them.”

  The minute we stepped off campus, we were surrounded. My mom tried to pull me through, but I stopped her. We had to make some good come of this.

  I told the reporters that everything Wayne had done, right up until he pulled the trigger, was perfectly legal, and that that was wrong. A kid shouldn’t be able to buy an assault weapon, a weapon designed to kill the most human beings in the smallest amount of time possible. Hit with a barrage of questions, I let it slip that I had known it was Wayne the instant I had heard the shots, then climbed into the back of my mom’s Ford Aerostar for the long drive home.

  I couldn’t talk. I couldn’t cry. But as we drove further and further from Simon’s Rock, my body began to realize that I was safe. My heart slowed. The shooting was no longer happening; it was something that had happened. I tried to sleep. But as the terror of the night before began to dissipate and I began to process what had taken place, horror rose up in its place. My mind raced.

  I had known Wayne was violent. I had known he was looking for a gun. I had even seen him early the night of the shooting. I could have stopped him. I should have stopped him. Why hadn’t I stopped him? I had nearly died. Had I nearly died? I should have died.

  Earlier that semester, we had joked about what we wanted our last words to be. Something juvenile and frustrating, like “The money is buried under . . .” then trailing off. What about just the cryptic and classic “knock knock”? What got the biggest laugh was when someone suggested that the perfect sign-off would be “I’m dying.” As Galen bled out in the library atrium, those had been his final words.