Copyright © 2021 David Stuart MacLean
Cover © 2021 Abrams
Published in 2021 by The Overlook Press, an imprint of ABRAMS. All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the publisher.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2020932369
ISBN: 978-1-4197-4719-9
eISBN: 978-1-68335-995-1
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for Emily
FIRST PART
“Blessed are the weak who think they are
good because they have no claws.”
—BARUCH SPINOZA
CHAPTER 1
My parents bought an old farmhouse when we moved here. It’s ancient. Built in 1876 with the weird brownout wiring to prove it. You buy a house this old, you’re a person happy to inherit problems, which is fine for the owners—screw them, right? They deserve the problems: the crappy furnace, the inefficient ventilation, the wasps in the attic. It’s less enviable for the kids of those people. No one knows what we deserve.
I was the farthest kid out on the bus route. You would think that since I was the first kid picked up that I would have my choice of seats. But thinking that shows you’re a fool. There is never a blank slate in a town this size. Or any town. Or anywhere. Live anywhere long enough and you become a person happy to inherit your own problems.
I had a socially assigned seat. Third row from the front. Left side. Only once have I ever not sat in my seat.
That didn’t work out so well.
We rode against the traffic. We were eastbound and everything was mostly clear, every once in a while a Volkswagen Cabriolet, Nissan Leopard or Maxima, or maybe a Volvo 780. I saw a Volkswagen Thing once. Westbound on the other hand was practically standstill. People driving to the factory. Their cars were composed of the palette of rusted-out American: Falcons, Rampages, Darts, Meteors, Lasers, and Hondas, which weren’t American cars but were products of our town. The westbound cars had defensive bumper stickers: “Don’t Laugh It’s Paid For”; “Don’t Laugh At Least It Runs”; “Don’t Laugh Your Daughter Might Be In Here.”
The eastbound were all college people, like people of the college. Rutherford College in town—at one point last year the cover model of Time magazine’s report on the absurd cost of private colleges—was the most expensive college in the US in 1984–85. After that report came out, applications to the college rose fifteen percent. The bumper stickers on the eastbound cars advertised better colleges: Dartmouth, Harvard, Oberlin, Middlebury.
The town was founded by limestone barons of the nineteenth century. It was originally called Mingo, which was what whites called the Mingwe, which was what the Eastern Algonquins called the Iroquois-speaking tribes that moved here in the eighteenth century. Then Rutherford B. Hayes was born here and became president in 1877 and it was renamed Rutherford in his honor, even though you’d think it should’ve been named Hayes.
Accuracy in naming things isn’t necessarily a strong suit in this part of the country.
Sprinkled throughout the city were spent quarries, giant holes where the limestone had been torn from the earth and then donated back to the city for use as parkland and a tax write-off for the barons. The biggest one was at the center of the town. Blue Limestone was what everyone called it, even though it was gray and depressing. It was so deep no one is said to have touched the bottom and lived. It was the giant drain hole that our little lives circled. The high school kids had a legendary party there at the end of every school year with a bonfire so big you could see its glow from anywhere in town.
The town had two main industries: the factory and the college.
The factory was three shifts. It made Honda Accords, which are and are not American cars. The plant was, my dad claimed, more Public Relations than anything else, a way to keep people from freaking out about imports. He worked at the college. He was an adjunct, which means he was and was not a professor. My mom liked to say that everyone treated him like a professor except his colleagues and his paycheck. She said that Dad’s problem was that he was overeducated and underutilized; she said he’s got smarts that are going stagnant teaching eight sections of Intro to Modern Thought. I don’t know how smart my dad is; I just know my mom was always telling me how smart he is.
My mom worked for Marriott. She did project analysis. She flew to places Marriott was thinking about building a Marriott and told them if it was a good place to build a Marriott. She was gone a lot. I got a postcard from her on Saturday from South Korea. It had a palace on it. She wished me luck, told me she was sad she wasn’t home, told me she couldn’t believe her baby was in high school, told me something else but it was covered up by the stamp cancellation. I knew that I should have known how long she’d be gone for but I’d forgotten. It was hard to keep track of her absences.
The bus driver started punching the horn. I looked up just as she hit the brakes and the metal bar of the seat in front of me popped me in the chin. The metal taste of blood filled my mouth. I peeked out the window at what was going on. A red Saab was tearing right at us in our lane. He was dragging honks from every car he whipped by. He was going fifty-five easy and skipping along outside of traffic in our lane.
We were at a full stop and I was bracing for impact even though he was two hundred yards away. As a rule I think it’s never too early to start bracing for impact. I was staring at the seat back in front of me. It was upholstered in dark green vinyl, a green so dark it was almost black, a black so cold it was like a milkshake.
Right before he was about to plow right into us, traffic opened up and the Saab dipped back into his rightful lane, as if he had planned it that way the whole time. In the front seat of the Saab, the driver and passenger were brown-skinned and wearing what looked like turbans. The driver was talking to the passenger. Waving his hands in the air, he seemed unaware that he’d almost smashed into a school bus, unconcerned with the chaos he’d caused.
Saab. Turbans. Brown skin. Driving the wrong way in traffic. Any one of the four would get your ass beat in this town. A Saab wasn’t just foreign, it was snooty foreign.
A Saab wasn’t even a car you’d see in Columbus. More like a Cincinnati car. They put chili on pasta in Cincinnati. They were used to exotic things there.
The bus stopped at the lip of the trailer park. Seven kids got on. Holly Trowbridge, who was in my grade, was totally having sex. In seventh grade, she told the health teacher that douching with Coca-Cola prevented pregnancies. This was in front of the whole class.
I wanted to tell her about the Saab.
“Morning, Holly,” I said to her.
“Don’t talk to me, Yo-Yo Fag,” she said.
Her two younger brothers laughed as she said it. Two more trailer park kids said Yo-Yo Fag as if it was an echo in the bus. It was my name. It’d been my name since sixth grade. I was Yo-Yo Fag. I was hoping that with the switch to high school I could also scuttle my nickname. But no. No one was going to forget a nickname like mine.
We rolled through downtown, picked up a couple more kids. Porky Boxwell gave me a dope slap as he passed by. He and Holly sat in the way back. Porky was basically all baby fat, mullet, and undeveloped chin. Holly found him irresistible.
> One time when we were waiting for the bus after school, Porky had picked me up off the ground by putting two fingers in each of my armpits. I had bruises that no one ever saw. The worst part of it was the way I had laughed weakly as Porky held me aloft, like I wanted to act as if we were both working together as he hurt and humiliated me. Trying to force myself to laugh about it kept me from crying.
“What’s up, Yo-Yo Fag?” Kurt Gummo shouted as he waddled in. Seventh grader. Five-two, 225.
“People should call you the Blob,” I said.
“Eat me, gerbil penis.”
“Language,” the bus driver said, glaring at Kurt in her big rectangular rearview mirror.
This was Rutherford, Ohio, where “penis” was considered swearing but “fag” was acceptable. Being a fag was worse than calling someone a fag. I wasn’t gay but I was called a fag because I had refused to share my yo-yo with Shane Colton in sixth grade.
“Fuck you then, you yo-yo fag,” he had muttered. I thought no one had heard.
But the Colton family in our county was a breeding force equal to none. They were, in the words of SAT prep, both capricious and ubiquitous. My nickname spread throughout Hayes Intermediate by week’s end. The name had stuck through middle school, and it seemed it was going to continue to stick through high school.
It was August 25, 1985, and I was the Yo-Yo Fag of Rutherford County, Ohio.
CHAPTER 2
My homeroom was really not all that new. We were in the same building we were in for junior high, now we were just in the other half. Construction was being done on the new high school over on Euclid Avenue, some sprawling design from a California architect, a fact that had been a big part of the bond issue campaign, as if “California Architect” was a signifier of the highest possible quality.
The building we were in was constructed during the WPA. Well, half of it was—the other half was built during the fifties, an addition made with no attempt to join the two by any design concept. It was a massive building cleaved down the center—the junior high on the old side, the high school on the newer side, with just a single narrow hallway connecting the two. It was a new room but homerooms are assigned by last name and grade. I’d been standing in lines next to these kids forever.
Our teacher was Mrs. Black. She told us all to call her “Mzzz Black” but within ten minutes it was clear that it was not going to stick. Mrs. Black’s husband was my dentist. He once took my mom, dad, and me out on his boat on Lake Erie to fish. My dad and he got to be buddies somehow or other. My dad ended up friends with a lot of these professional guys who like to have a philosopher friend. Made them feel smart or something. They adopted my dad like a weak kitten. They bought him lunch and told him their justifications for the shitty things they did. That was what they thought philosophy was: justifications for being an asshole.
You know who’s awful? Dentists who read Nietzsche.
What my dad actually did was draw diagrams and equations and stare at them for an hour or so before giving up. He said it was the benchwork of philosophy that no one cared about. His dissertation was a diagramming of a sentence by Hegel in the original German and then in three different English translations. It was five hundred pages long. We used it to keep the living room window open in the summer.
Mrs. Black read roll. Maybe because I knew her outside of school, maybe because I’d mowed her lawn and helped clean her basement when it flooded this summer, maybe because I’d seen her in a swimsuit, maybe I just expected a little bit of kindness. But she read my full name anyway.
“Baruch Nadler?”
“Barry,” I said while raising my hand. “I go by Barry.”
I was not sure what I expected. It was going to be a long day of correcting teachers.
I was named after Baruch Spinoza, a seventeenth-century Jewish philosopher from Amsterdam. Hegel supposedly said, “You’re either a Spinozist or not a philosopher at all.” Which is why my dad bullied my mom into this ridiculous name. So, I have a Jewish first name which means “blessed” and gets me punched after class. Try being this kid with this name in this town—the kind of place where most people thought “Jewish” was a kind of salad dressing.
Maybe Yo-Yo Fag was a blessing.
The factory’s kids run the schools. I was of different stock than they were.
Thinner-boned, weaker-skinned, a more tender build, shortest kid in my class eight years running. I barely survived the moments in between classes. I paid attention in class because I wanted that time to extend and last forever. Wrap me in the triple-fold of fatted sacrifice Odysseus offers up to Algebra Two; let me remain physics-drenched and band-tired. My greatest wish was for there to be human-sized pneumatic tubes I could climb in and be sucked through from class to class.
Just don’t put me in the hallways where the real owners of this town reinforce their lien on my body. Fag tags, red necks, Indian burns, knuckle punches, charley horses, calf bites, wedgies, purple nurples, swirlies, frogging, dope slaps, sternum typewriters, two hits for flinching, “stop hitting yourself, stop hitting yourself.” It’s one thing to be weak in this world, it’s another to be reminded of it all the time.
By assholes.
“Welcome, students.” The speaker over the door crackled and came to life. “Let’s start the day with the pledge of allegiance.”
And the day went on from there.
Every class I got called Baruch. Every class I corrected the teacher while the other kids giggled. “I go by Barry,” I said at least eight times.
CHAPTER 3
The bus ride home was the bus ride home.
Three rows from the front and to the left.
Yo-Yo Fags all around. The smell of first-day cologne and perfume was replaced by the stink of hormones; of pheromones; of erections and menstruations that no one knew how to properly deal with. We were all acolytes in these bodies. Trainees without the manual or appropriate supervision.
We pulled to a stop at the railroad crossing. The bus driver opened the door to check for trains. A guy with jean shorts, combat boots, and no shirt crossed the tracks. His Doberman, who wasn’t on a leash, trotted behind him. The dog stopped at the tracks, pawing at the rocks of the crossing. The guy turned and whistled. The dog lay down and whined. We were all watching and he knew it. He whistled again, two fingers in his mouth: high, piercing. He was probably famous in his family for that whistle.
The dog did not move. The train tracks were freaking it out. The guy was maybe twenty and skinny with muscle, like all he ever ate was beef jerky. He stomped his foot at the dog but it still didn’t move. He slapped it on the head. He slapped it on its butt. The dog still didn’t move, just took the hits. He closed his fists and started punching the dog. We heard the thud of the punches and the jangle of the dog’s choke chain. He hit the dog in the jaw, in the chest, kicked it in the stomach. The dog didn’t fight back. It was a Doberman pinscher. It could’ve torn this guy’s neck out. It took the beating. Whining and yelping at the blows.
We were all church-silent watching this. It was too early in the school year for any of us to process this.
The bus driver jammed the emergency brake down. She was outside before any of us knew it. She had the paddle with her and she was yelling at the man. The man yelled back.
I heard, “God’s creature.” I heard, “My dog.” I heard, “Police and don’t think I won’t.”
The man spat hard on the ground like it was the grammatical hard stop to their fight. He then picked the dog up and tossed it over his shoulder. The dog’s claws left pink lines on his redneck flesh.
“Holy sweater,” said the Blob.
The man strutted down the street with the dog over his shoulder. The dog licked his ear. I felt nauseous. After all of that man punching the hell out of the dog, it was the dog licking the man’s ear that made me want to puke.
This was the end of my first day of high school.
CHAPTER 4
At home, there was a note from Dad to not dist
urb him and a bouquet of cookies on sticks from Cheryl’s Cookies from my mom. College started in two weeks, and I wasn’t going to see my dad a whole lot until then. He always forgot to plan his classes until the last minute and he never kept hard copies of his previous syllabuses. He said it kept him fresh. He was always worried about falling into a rut. If mom was here she’d tell him that worrying about falling into a rut was its own kind of rut.
I plucked three cookies, got a pack of matches, and went outside to burn stuff.
CHAPTER 5
The next day, the bus was six minutes late. People honked as they drove by. Some dude flipped me off. I flinched every time a car went by. I’m the free pass for other people’s casual aggression. I have on my jeans and a different Batman t-shirt on. My mom wants me to dress like my peers. She says it like that. My peers. She wants me to be popular with my peers and she thinks that you dress for the friends you aspire to have. I want to own enough Batman t-shirts to have a different one for each day of the week.
The bus stopped in front of me and the doors collapsed open. I mumbled good morning to the driver. I don’t mention anything about her being late. She probably had a complicated life.
I was the first person the bus picked up so what I was seeing was impossible. I was the farthest kid out. But three rows from the front and to the left was a brown kid in a turban. He was in my seat. Not knowing what to do, and fearing being caught in any other seat, I sat down next to him. We were two guys on an empty bus sitting next to each other. The gears ground into place.
“Gurbaksh,” he said and offered his hand to me.
“Barry,” I said.
“You must be a very friendly person,” he said. “I hate first days of school.”
“This is the second day,” I said.
“Do you chew tobacco?” he asked.
“I’m sorry?”
How I Learned to Hate in Ohio Page 1
