One Breath

by Adam Skolnick

  —

  JUSTIN WATCHED IN awe as Nick built up speed and glided across the Civic Center’s concrete apron toward two long flights of steel-tipped stairs, lined by black iron railings. Nick hopped onto the railings to grind both sets in a single shot. It was immaculate, and the best trick Justin had ever seen in person. Nobody rode like that in Tally. Not until Nick showed up.

  Justin ushered Nick into his straight edge crew. Among them was Clayton Rychlik, a gifted musician who would go on to play drums for Of Montreal. Clayton also lived at Miccosukee and went to school with Nick and Justin. Lincoln was an open campus and the boys would spend their lunch hours gobbling vegan food at New Leaf Co-op, sitting among Tally’s hippie, stoner set. Nick’s new friends were all vegan, but they weren’t hippies.

  After school the guys usually gathered at Railroad Square, where Justin had rented an old railroad warehouse and was in the process of converting it into an all-ages punk rock venue, dubbed Mega Rock Arena, with his pal Soliman Lawrence. Nick rode over one day and bunny hopped onto the loading dock. That was the first time Soliman had ever seen the new straight edge kid who was a monster on a bike.

  “You’re a unique sort of creature,” Soliman said with a side glance. Nick looked like an athlete, and athletes bored him. Nick took stock of Soliman, as well. He was short, his hair was close cropped, and his wire-framed glasses made him look tense and earnest, like a big-brained intellectual who acted more sure of himself than he was. “I’m Soliman. Most people call me Soli.”

  “Soli, huh?” Nick said. “What if I call you Sol [soul]?”

  “Sol. I guess that’s okay.”

  “You don’t go to Lincoln, do you, Sol?”

  “No, I go to the high school for dropouts, hippies, and weirdos. It’s a class size thing. My parents are cuckoo for small class sizes. Supposedly we learn more ‘optimally’ in more ‘personalized’ environments. Studies have shown. But, you know, whatever.”

  “Right, studies have shown.”

  “I think unschooling is the wave of the future, though. Have you read much about unschooling? It’s the most radical invention ever to hit education, because it’s not really education at all, except it totally is. The premise is that education itself is the problem with society. Not the solution.” Sol went on to explain the virtues of letting young kids explore the world in feral delirium, learning from their Tom Sawyer-esque adventures. Nick could tell Sol liked to talk about ideas, and he enjoyed listening. They clicked immediately.

  “The point of staying sober and lucid is to see things as they really are, so we can engage with the world,” Sol said, as they painted the Mega Rock Arena’s stage. “Change shit. That’s what Mega Rock Arena is all about. If we think Tally is boring and fucking lame and all about sports and sorority girls and fucking football, and it is, then let’s do something about it. If we don’t like that all the good shows around here are twenty-one and over, or eighteen and over, then let’s throw our own damn punk shows, you know?”

  Nick did know. He’d always seen the world as imperfect, because his world certainly was, and he set about altering it in the ways he saw fit. Whether that was modifying his $1,000 bike, building his own jumps, removing his own cast, or even asking for and receiving dive weights when he was nine so he could stay down deeper and longer. The world was his canvas, and it would stay that way.

  Nick’s Tally crew didn’t hide their disdain for consumer culture and industrial food. To them, mainstream American life was dysfunctional, the American Dream a hoax. Happiness wasn’t bundled in thirty-year mortgages or well-paid careers or a thick steak. Not if everything they bought with their hard-earned cash was disposable and animals were tortured for their sustenance. But while most dealt with teenage ennui by numbing the truth and marinating their minds with herb and booze, Nick and his friends wanted to stay angry. Their melancholy would be a force of good, though it didn’t always feel that way at home.

  During his first week in Tallahassee, Nick came home late for dinner while Belinda was putting a platter of sliced tenderloin on the table. He glimpsed it on his way to the kitchen and said, “I don’t eat that stuff anymore.”

  “You don’t eat steak?” she asked.

  “Meat. I don’t eat meat. And that butter stuff. You gotta stop putting that in the vegetables. I don’t eat that either.”

  “Okay,” she said. Nick’s sisters, six-year-old Kristine and four-year-old Katie, took it all in. “Would you like to tell us why?” He came back into the dining nook, wearing the most disgruntled expression he could muster.

  “Do you guys have any idea how they make butter and beef? What the cows are eating? How they’re killed? It’s disgusting. It’s an industry of murder and you’re participating. Not me. Not anymore.” Sol and Justin had downloaded the basics to Nick, who retreated to the kitchen and opened a pack of tofu. Fred and Belinda watched as he rattled pans, found cooking oil, and began slicing bland globs of tofu into cubes.

  “You won’t eat steak, but you’ll eat that?” Fred asked. Belinda glared at him.

  “Don’t worry, from now on I’ll make my own meals.”

  It wasn’t cool to be happy in Tallahassee in 1998, at least not among Nick’s crew, but from a distance, Nick certainly looked that way. He got a job busing tables at a farm-to-table restaurant called Kool Beanz, which eats better than the name suggests, and began riding with one of the chefs at Tom Brown Park, where he helped build a proper BMX track.

  The park was large and leafy with pines, poplars, and southern live oaks, but when Nick first saw the BMX track, he found the terrain modest and cramped, with just two manmade hills that lacked the pitch or depth Nick needed. X Games tryouts were in a few months and he needed a proper course, so he shaped it himself, one shovelful of earth at a time. Clayton and Justin used to see him cruise into school in the morning in his beat-down Chrysler ragtop, his clothes caked in mud from digging and molding the dirt track since dawn. His hard work paid off. Soon Nick was pulling 360s and even getting close to landing his backflip. But with a few weeks to go before tryouts, he put his seat post into his leg, inches from his femoral artery. It was a bad enough gash to knock him off his bike for a month and dust his X Games dream. Jen happened to be in Tally that weekend and, once again, she and Belinda took Nick to the ER.

  “You almost lost an eye, now you almost punctured your artery,” Jen said. Nick sat between them, his leg elevated, as they awaited a prescription for pain meds he wouldn’t swallow. “When is this gonna stop?” Nick didn’t say a word.

  “Don’t. Just. No more. I can’t take it,” said Belinda. The three of them stared into the distance for a few minutes until Belinda saw tears streaming down Nick’s cheeks. She rested her head on her son’s shoulder as he wept and mourned his dashed X Games dream.

  That night he watched his favorite movie for the twentieth time: The Big Blue. Later, when his family was asleep, he locked himself in the bathroom and filled the tub with warm water. He slung his wounded thigh over the edge of the shallow tub, checked the time on an old wristwatch he’d balanced on the ledge, and dipped his head beneath the surface. The pain started to build in the third minute. His body shuddered with contractions, the urge to breathe manifesting in physical demands he would stave off. Each time his muscles contracted and his rib cage rattled, his smile got wider.

  The Mega Rock Arena lasted less than a year, but it had its moment and it helped cement Railroad Square as Tally’s coolest corner of town. In a few months they’d turned a defunct 500-square-foot space into a thriving punk palace. They booked name bands, like Converge and Dillinger Escape Plan, on the come up, and their shows were a dissonant thrashing of metal and angst, hope and release.

  After it fizzled, Justin, Clayton, and Sol frequently road-tripped around Florida to see their favorite straight edge bands live. They’d usually hit festivals that Nick seldom received clearance from Belinda to attend. Like Jen before him, now he was the babysitter, but after Nick had spent all his free
time for months helping Fred build their beautiful new home by hand, she greenlit his weekend pass to the Gainesville Fest, North Florida’s hottest music festival.

  Giddy, the boys piled into Justin’s van on a perfect blue-sky Friday afternoon. An hour outside of Gainesville they stopped for gas at the kitschiest truck stop they could find, and Nick noticed a cattle truck parked between two semis, the driver nowhere in sight. He peered through the wooden slats, and caught a pair of sad cow eyes. She stuck her nose between the planks and Nick petted her snout. Next to her was a doe-eyed calf teetering on spindly legs. Was she days old? A week? Maybe two? He looked back into that mama cow’s beautiful eyes, which seemed to be peering deep into Nick’s novo vegan soul. What if they were bound for Larry’s blade at George’s Market? What if the calf was about to become veal? Would he do something to stop it? He checked the back gate. No lock. Delicious mayhem bloomed in his brain.

  To Justin and Clayton it seemed to happen in slow motion. While another friend, Tim, flung open the back gate, Nick hopped into the trailer and guided the mama cow and her calf to the pavement. The rest piled out in a hurry. Cows wandered the parking lot. Some looked scared. Others amused. A few made a beeline to a patch of green grass near the air and water station and started to munch and empty their bladders. Cars stopped short. Patrons at gas tanks watched in wonder. The driver tore out of the diner and charged after Nick and Tim, who sprinted toward the van. Justin sped over with his side door slid open, the boys jumped in, and Justin peeled out, all of them in hysterics. The truck driver kept running after them. Justin picked up speed. By the time sirens rang out they were but a whisper.

  On the day Nick graduated high school, he rented a house with Justin and three other friends and moved out on his own. Theirs was a perfectly lovely middle-class home, in a perfectly lovely middle-class neighborhood of midcentury brick houses, with American flags and basketball hoops, on a street lined with towering pine and oak trees. They called the place The J Spot. When Nick and Justin showed up with their boxes, their neighbors braced for the worst, and just as they feared, weirdos descended all day, every day. One of them had hitchhiked into Tally from a small farming town a few hours south the year before.

  When Aaron Suko arrived in their world, Justin was hosting a gathering storm of a party while Nick was in the midst of writing a letter to his new crush, Michelle, a twenty-one-year-old, pink-haired lead screamer of a band called Scrotum Grinder. He couldn’t get into the mood in his room, so he moved his desk, floor lamp, desk chair, and sofa into the backyard to write alfresco. He typed feverishly, in a zone, his eyes aflame. Aaron was curious. “What are you doing?” he asked, sinking into the sofa.

  “Writing the most important letter in my entire life,” Nick said, still typing.

  “Oh,” Aaron said, getting up. “Sorry to intrude.”

  “You’re not an intruder,” Nick said. He finished his thought, leaned away from the desk, and motioned for Aaron to sit back down. “You’re always welcome. We have a strict open door policy around here. I’m Nick, by the way.”

  Aaron was from Auburndale, Florida, the kind of God, mom, and football town where it ruins a childhood to be labeled a nerd, which is what happened to whip-smart, quiet kids with Coke-bottle glasses, especially if their mom was the school librarian and their dad a truck-driving Christian mystic. The night he graduated high school, Aaron hitchhiked to Tallahassee, where he enrolled in Florida State to study linguistics. He excelled in the classroom, but was still lost socially, because small talk and typical college parties weren’t for him. Through word of mouth he landed at The J Spot.

  “Aaron. Who’s the letter to?”

  “This girl.”

  “Of course.”

  “A woman, actually. She’s amazing. The way she thinks. She’s so creative and has this tenderness, but refuses to take any shit. She inspires me, and needs to know that, but we can’t be together the way we want because she’s in Tampa and I’m here.”

  Earlier, Aaron had been in the living room eavesdropping on Sol, who raved about the virtue of direct action and the importance of an upcoming protest in DC against the International Monetary Fund. And he’d met Justin and Clayton in the kitchen where Justin had gushed about plans for his own vegan café in Tallahassee, while Clayton strummed a stray guitar ever so beautifully. Now, here was Nick, who he’d soon learn had dropped out of community college and starred in a handful of FSU student films. It was a party full of oddballs, obsessed with interesting, even fleeting, passions. There was no small talk to suffer through, and for the first time, Aaron didn’t feel like the weirdest dude around. He’d finally found somewhere he belonged.

  “Fucking geography,” Aaron said. Nick smirked. Aaron smiled back.

  Y2K was fast approaching, and on New Year’s Eve Nick’s Tally crew stormed the commune to hear Clayton’s dad’s band, the Harvest Gypsies, play. It was a Miccosukee tradition, and Nick dressed for the occasion by wearing a Speedo, cowboy hat, and windbreaker and nothing else. The friends all danced around a bonfire, set off fireworks at midnight, then drove out to the beach to start a new century. Nick was still in his outfit, looking brash, beautiful, intense, and weird, and as dawn threatened to launch a new year, he relaxed into the sand to think. Aaron and Sol found him there and slumped down on either side of him. Nick threw his arms around their shoulders as a pink thread spread across the horizon.

  “What’s on your mind, freedom cowboy?” Sol asked.

  “Death, I guess.”

  “Death? But the world didn’t end, did it? Y2K was a hoax, right?” Aaron joked. “This isn’t a dream. It can’t be!”

  “We’re gonna make it, won’t we Nick?” Sol took the baton, and kneeled at Nick’s feet. He and Aaron were in full movie cliché mode. “Tell us, Nick. Tell us, we’re gonna make it!”

  “Damn right we are,” Nick said, unable to resist. “You know why? Because we’re Americans! And we’ll get through this thing together!” As the sun rose, the friends were shredded with laughter and sleep deprivation, but soon Nick grew pensive again. “Death’s the wrong word, I guess. I’m thinking about life.”

  “That is a different word,” said Sol.

  “As in the meaning of life?” Aaron asked.

  “As in life insurance,” Nick said. “That’s what my dad got me for my eighteenth birthday this year. Life insurance.”

  “Wow. Who does that?” Aaron asked.

  “Larry Mevoli apparently,” Nick said. “$100,000. That’s what I’m worth.”

  “If you’re dead,” Sol said with a smile.

  “Probably depends how he dies,” said Aaron. Nick couldn’t help but laugh.

  “You know what’s really funny? The policy was supposed to be a gift to me, but he only bought it because his stepson is selling life insurance now. So really, it was a gift for him. You know, first sale to make him look good.”

  “That’s fucked up,” said Aaron. “I’m sorry, Nick.”

  “Consider it one more reason to get the fuck out,” Sol said. Aaron looked confused.

  “Sol’s moving to Philly this year,” Nick said. “He wants me to come. Gave me a sales pitch and everything. What did you say again?” Sol stood and cleared his throat.

  “Life is urgent! Life is meaningless! Nothing matters! Travel! Seek! Live!”

  Sol saluted and stood at attention. Nick tackled him. It was a clean takedown, and though he was outweighed and outmuscled, Sol was tenacious and would have fought back if only he could stop laughing. Aaron piled on top of Nick and soon they were all on their backs staring at a brightening sky, laughing until they couldn’t breathe.

  They laughed at the absurdity of life, at the crooked birth lottery, at their wide-open futures, their empty bank accounts, Nick’s lucrative life insurance policy, and their refusal to give in to norms of any kind. They were part of a sacred generation torn between feeling everything way too much and not giving any sort of fuck at all. Fueled by the dueling influences of Jack Kerouac and Ja
ckass, they stared into the sky, then out to the blue sea with a fresh new year—make that millennium—all laid out before them. Escape sounded damn fine. It was the only pure move to make.

  “My whole life I’ve been in Florida,” Nick said. “And there is a big world out there.”

  “Year 2000, man. Time to do the shit we’ve never done,” Aaron said.

  “Hell yes,” said Sol, as golden light spread around them. “Let’s do what we’ve never even imagined.”

  Later that spring, on one of Nick’s last days as a Florida resident, he drove out to Wakulla Springs State Park, alone. Sixteen miles south of town, the springs gush 225 million gallons of sweet water each day and propel a river fourteen miles to the Gulf of Mexico. It’s a pristine ecosystem of bullrush stands and five-hundred-year-old bald cypress trees, blue herons, gators, and manatees. There’s a small swimming area just off a sandy beach, and about thirty feet below the surface is a network of limestone caves, where the springs bubble from the earth’s crust.

  That’s where Nick liked to go. He’d never seen anybody down there, probably because nobody else had the balls. To Nick it was effortless. He’d wait for the ranger to turn his head, then swim through clear green water to the mouth of a cavern, and penetrate it a little at a time. Sometimes he’d jump off the fifteen-foot platform and dive with momentum. He was wise enough to know that without a light and a line, and no scuba tank, a diver could die in a cave. So he wouldn’t go too far. He was happy enough to feel the serenity and silence underwater. There are only so many bath tub breath holds one man can enjoy before getting bored of being perpetually interrupted by his baby sisters banging on the door, with an urgent request to pee. At Wakulla he could take his time, dive deep. Explore. As much as he enjoyed his creative life—acting in student films, writing self-indulgent letters, and jamming on the drums and guitar with Clayton—underwater he could be an athlete again. Underwater he was free. Besides, lobster season was coming up, and he needed to get back in shape before joining the Bonzo crew for another mission.