Random

by Lesley Choyce

  Do nothing, my mother might say—which, of course, did not mean to be lazy or negative or unambitious. Financially, if I leave that $25,000 “doing nothing,” it will be worth several million dollars by the time I am a hundred. But then what? What does a centenarian do with a fortune? Go looking for the aisle with the ginseng and horny goat weed?

  I dutifully shoveled another spoonful of yogurt and muesli down and pondered all this. Pondering often made me look unhappy, I think.

  “Are you okay?” my dad asked, for maybe the millionth time in my life.

  I was thinking about another bit of advice I’d come across, on a random Web site that I had stumbled onto with a Google search. Whoever had posted the site, a guy known to his Internet audience simply as Ron advocated music, sex, and beer as the three key elements to happiness and longevity. Ron had a picture of himself on the site. He looked to be about fifty. He was bald but had hair coming up from around the collar of his shirt, so he must have had one hell of a lot of chest hair. And he did look happy. Maybe he would write a book some day. Chicken Soup for the Horny, Drunken Music Lover’s Soul.

  To answer my father’s much repeated question, I said, “Does anyone actually know when they are okay?”

  He studied me again. “Yeah, sometimes they do. You will, too. I promise.”

  As you might have noticed, I have a fascination with words. I notice that most kids at school use the same words and phrases over and over. People tend to be very lazy when it comes to vocabulary, but when I hear a new word, I want to know its meaning. We had a substitute teacher, a young guy just out of university called Philip Bird. He wanted us to call him Phil. He took over teaching history from Mr. Briar. Briar had one of those mid-career breakdowns that comes from teaching history for twenty years to teenagers who have no interest in anything that occurred in the world, no matter how momentous, before the previous week. We all saw it coming, but those who had been unkind to Briar remained so up until the end, up until he cracked. Poor Mr. Briar cracked like an egg, right there in class. “You idiots don’t give a rat’s ass about the Versailles Treaty, do you?” This is what a history teacher says when he is losing it. His shell. His marbles. His cool. His twenty-year record of never going nuts during school hours.

  I had tried giving a rat’s ass about the Versailles Treaty but there were a lot of hands in that pie and I couldn’t keep all the players straight. Everybody wanted something and they went about dividing up Europe (including the yogurt-eating Balkaners) and the Middle East and Africa. In the right frame of mind, it could have been quite fascinating. But no, we didn’t have a rodent’s derriere of interest in any treaties on Mr. Briar’s thorny curriculum.

  I don’t blame him for going nuts. He had his say and then left the room, slamming the door. And everyone in the class (except me, of course, and Gloria) looked at each other like, What did we do? It wasn’t our fault. Gloria and I understood Briar’s plight and his exodus. And we both felt kind of bad about it. Gloria, for her part, was getting an A in the course and wrote great papers about political shifts in Europe. My papers rambled, as you can imagine, but I did at least “show some effort,” as Briar noted in the margins.

  The way I showed effort was by bullshitting. I can’t find any other word that describes what I did. I did not usually read the textbook or pay close attention to the lectures but, instead, I’d write convoluted, cryptic answers that would achieve a C, which gives you an idea as to how bad the other papers must have been, papers and the student thinking behind them so bad that it would drive any high school history teacher to succumb to madness.

  The instruction might read like this: Explain how the Treaty of Versailles set in motion the major political changes across Europe in the decades after it was signed. My answer would begin something like this:

  There is no doubt that the Treaty of Versailles, one of the most significant and profound treaties of the twentieth century, set in motion a chain of events that could not have been foreseen by the architects of this document. The treaty purported to solve one set of political and economic problems, but while failing to do that, it created other more numerous crises that swept the continent and led to unrest, dissent, squabbling, and ultimately war. Critics of the treaty say it unleashed havoc on the modern world in an unprecedented way that could have been avoided, had more forethought and less self-serving ambitions come into play.

  I need not torture you further, but as you can see, I was skillful with words while being somewhat short on any actual concrete information. That’s what a bullshitter does on a test. He bullshits. And like I said, I like words, so I could nail down a C on most any subject and garner that slightly complimentary comment of at least “showing some effort.”

  But just as the Treaty of Versailles was certain to fail and lead Europe into another world war, so, too, was Briar certain to reach his breaking point. Gloria wrote him a get well card that read, “Hope you get well soon,” and I signed it at her request.

  I am reporting all this here in my digital diary to illustrate to anyone who listens to this what kind of student I was and provide some insight into the education of my day.

  Anyhow, Phil Bird flew into the classroom the first day of his substitute stint with great enthusiasm coupled with the kind of polished naïveté and idealism that can only come from lack of actual teaching experience.

  He had longish hair, a mustache, and a goatee like I’d seen in old paintings. He read out our names and looked each of us in the eye. I liked the fact that he used big words.

  “Twentieth-century history,” he announced, reminding us all of what class this was. “A century is a hundred years. A lot can happen in a hundred years.” Some rolled their eyes at such an obvious observation. “In French, century is called siècle, in Italian it is secolo, in Czech it is století, and in German Jahrhundert.” This didn’t seem to have much to do with anything, but maybe he just wanted to show off his knowledge of European languages. Next he proceeded to give us the tallies of the dead in at least a dozen European countries, resulting from the First World War. He had them memorized. “The War to End All Wars, they called it,” he said. “In many parts of Europe, it set in motion a kind of nihilism that would have devastating results.” I had said as much in my paper, I realized. But I had not used that word. And a very good word it was. Nihilism. Bird pronounced it “Nigh-hill-izm.”

  Before I could muster the energy or courage to ask what the word meant, Gloria had already put her hand up. “What does nihilism mean?” she asked.

  Bird fluttered a bit and seemed to puff up with an exaggerated intake of the school’s oxygen supply. “It’s a kind of negative philosophy. You could say it is a denial of beliefs, traditions, and meaning. It is a rejection of order and, well, everything—a rejection of what others believe. It suggests that nothing in our lives has any meaning or value. Some would call it a belief in nothing.”

  Clearly, this was a different sort of nothing from my mother’s investment code where doing nothing amounted to something like, in her world, creating wealth. In the European world, belief in nothing, rejection of everything, led to bloodshed and horrors. But that was then. This was now. Having heard the word for the first time, I realized that I was a kind of nihilist myself. I wasn’t the vengeful, hating kind. I was just the teenage, confused, nerdy kid kind. I had emptied myself of many of the tried and true kid things to believe in and was now living my small open-ended and confused life. I was not using my nihilism to do anything bad ... or good, for that matter. I was just waiting for something to happen.

  And I had no idea what that something was.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Captain’s log. Stardate whatever.

  In the nineteenth century, scientists believed in the conservation of matter principle. Matter could not be created or destroyed. But it could change. They also believed that energy could not be created or destroyed. It just changed form as well. Then Einstein came along with the theory that matter could change to energy and
energy to matter, and he formulated the famous E=mc2 thing. Still seems that nothing goes away; it just changes form. I’m not sure why I care about any of this but I do.

  For so long I had tried to make sense of the world and it didn’t seem to be going anywhere. Living was all about loss. L=lss2. I invested four years of my life into that formula along with the one MOL=0 (meaning of life equals zero). The best-selling title would be Cold Chicken Shit Soup for the Teenage Loser.

  This all could get dark and depressing if it weren’t for the fact that Gloria came into my life. Gloria is my closest friend. I can’t call her my girlfriend, exactly. I don’t kiss her or take her on dates. I like Gloria for her mind. And her loyalty. She is loyal to me, no matter how moody I am. Gloria as in “glory.”

  The Oxford English Dictionary has nearly half a column with definitions for “glory,” but I most like the one that says, “resplendent beauty and magnificence.” Resplendent is a very good word and so is magnificence. I think there is a term in the Bible (not that I spend much time reading it) that uses the phrase “Gloria in Excelsis,” as in glory in the highest ... or most excellent.

  Gloria keeps her beauty hidden. She’s one of those girls. She keeps her hair tied up. She wears glasses with plastic rims. She does not wear makeup. She doesn’t seem to care what clothes she chooses in the morning to wear. (Maybe she, too, is an automatic dresser.) She walks funny and sits kind of slouched over. She is probably the smartest girl in the school. Gloria in Excelsis.

  Gloria seeks me out in the hallways and sits with me in the cafeteria. Sometimes she doesn’t say much or speak at all. She loans me money to buy junk food. Or at least she did until they removed all the junk food from the cafeteria. Now you can’t even buy potato chips or candy at school. What’s this world coming to, anyway?

  The first day I discovered there were no more chips, I was pissed.

  Gloria actually held my hand in hers and looked into my eyes. “This is all an illusion, anyway,” she told me. “This is just the surface of things. The real world is something else.”

  “What something else?”

  “I don’t know for sure. But it’s there inside your heart,” she said. This is the way she speaks.

  “Then there’s still junk food in the real world?”

  “Probably,” she said. “All things are possible.”

  Now, a statement like “All things are possible” is probably directly in opposition to my entrenched nihilism. The motto of my club was: nothing is possible. Don’t believe in anything. Gloria, while having no single religious or philosophical inclination, had a very open view of what was possible. I could call her a naïve optimist. Actually that is what I called her.

  “You’re just a naïve optimist,” I said, even though she was still holding my hand and I liked holding hers. She did not pull her hand away. She looked deeper into my eyes. “Thank you,” she said. “I’ll take that as a compliment.” Then she let go of me and reached into her backpack, retrieving a candy bar. She handed it to me. An Oh Henry. The name on the wrapper made a wave of dizziness go through me. I closed my eyes for a second. Saw my father. Dad-1. He was a bit of a candy freak. I guess I had never told Gloria about that.

  “Are you okay?” Gloria asked.

  “Sure,” I said. I didn’t want to get into it. I unwrapped the candy and ate it.

  “Watch out for the sugar rush,” she said. Gloria was eating a tofu and spinach sandwich that she had made herself. It must have been her mom who had put the Oh Henry bar in her bag. Gloria and my current father would have a lot in common.

  Gloria gets depressed a lot. Like I said, she takes everything too seriously. Unlike me. When life gives you a lemon, I say, step on it and make it squirt. When it gives you chicken bones, make chicken soup. When it gives you ... well, you get the picture. This does not make me an optimist, though. Please. Cheerful optimists, the type I find at school, can be so annoying. It’s like they think everything is for the good. Like there is some grand plan. Some meaning. Some purpose.

  Not me. I won’t be fooled by such tricks of the brain. Life is meaningless and I move on from there. But I don’t get depressed about that fact if I can help it. The trick is not to care too deeply about anything and not to take anything too seriously. Then you don’t crack like Mr. Briar or blather on like Phil Bird. And you don’t get depressed like Gloria Westerbend.

  But what if I told you I’d be lost without Gloria? Would that surprise you? This must mean I care about her. And I do. How can a nihilist care about anything? you might ask. Call it a paradox, if you like. The world still makes no sense but I care about Gloria. So when she gets depressed, I get worried.

  Right after the Oh Henry bar, she suddenly got quiet. Quiet like the way Dean gets quiet. (More on Dean later.) Gloria sat staring at the wall as I chewed the candy bar. I didn’t have to ask.

  “It’s my parents,” she said. “They love each other.”

  “That’s a good thing, right?” I asked.

  “Yes and no. They love each other but they fight all the time. They disagree on everything.”

  “But they love each other?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s the way it goes sometimes,” I said, way too casually. To me, such illogic made perfect sense—in a world where nothing made sense, if you get my drift.

  “But these are my parents.”

  “And you’d like to see them happy.”

  “Yes.”

  “But now their unhappiness has made you unhappy. And that’s not good. Gloria, you are too sensitive. You can’t make them happy. You can’t stop them from arguing.”

  “Do your parents argue?”

  “Sometimes they argue over which brand of laundry detergent is least harmful to the environment.”

  “That’s not an argument,” she said.

  “Then what constitutes an argument?”

  “My mom says she wished she’d never met my father. She says it ruined her life.”

  “That’s a large generalization. Probably unfair.”

  “Then my father says he should have gone to Spain. He always wanted to move to Spain.”

  “Why Spain?”

  “Barcelona. He wanted to live in Barcelona.”

  “And if he had moved to Barcelona, I would not be having this conversation with you, would I?”

  “No. Everything would have been different.”

  “And you would not have existed,” I said. And now I felt sad. Wow. I’d be sitting here alone, probably, no Oh Henry bar, no junk food. No Gloria. “Listen, all we can do is live in the present,” I said, probably quoting from one of those books my mom gave me. I guess for all my weirdness, I did believe in that. Living in the present. The good and the bad. Not trying to feel too bad about the past or too anxious about the future. The good old here and now.

  Gloria was staring at the wall. I’d seen her do this too many times before. She was going away somewhere. And this was not good. I couldn’t come up with the code to break the silence. And it’s funny how silent and empty everything seemed, because the cafeteria was filled with noise.

  “What about your first parents?” she asked.

  “Henry and Seal?” I hadn’t said their names out loud in a long time. “What about them?”

  “Did they ever argue?”

  I thought about it. I don’t think I had any memories left of them arguing. They must have, but I erased them. Or maybe they never did argue. Maybe they loved each other so much that they were incapable of arguing. “Yes,” I said, however, hoping it would help Gloria. “They had arguments like umpires and baseball coaches. They used bad language. The neighbors were appalled.”

  “But they loved each other?”

  “Of course.” Now I was the one feeling sad. Anything that conjured up my bio-parents took me toward a dark, cold room inside me. Gloria’s depression was now contagious.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I shouldn’t have asked that.” She looked away to the wall again for
a second, but then looked back at me. Soft, sad eyes. She took off her glasses and I was reminded how pretty she really was.

  “Thanks for the Oh Henry,” I said. I wanted to take Gloria’s hand and lead her outside into the sunlight. I wanted to run with her down the street, like we were little kids running away. Running away from the world. I wanted to save her, I guess.

  But I didn’t do that. I wasn’t that kind of person.

  I don’t know who invented the idea of school. Plato? Socrates? I don’t know who to blame.

  My point being that school does not work. A teacher in a room with twenty to thirty students with attention spans of about thirty-five seconds. Three minutes tops. After that, it’s all daydreaming about anything but school. The bell rings and you move on to another subject where you get your good thirty-five seconds of learning before you start to drift.

  I’m a drifter. I settle into my seat, become lulled by the weary tones of my instructor, and then move on to some other realm. I prefer beaches and oceans. So I go there. Or mountains and forests. I go there, too. Or girls. Sometimes there are girls there. Imaginary ones that I have never met.

  I am drifting to islands with palm trees and white sandy beaches when Dean passes me a note.

  Dude, do you think we’ll be able to visit Mars in our lifetime?

  That’s what Dean is thinking about. Travel to other planets. I write back on the piece of paper. The moon, maybe. Probably not Mars. I slip it over to his desk while the teacher has her back turned. Dean looks disappointed.