How I Learned to Hate in Ohio

by David Stuart MacLean

  “I have this idea in my head that every boy in Ohio chews tobacco.”

  “What about the girls?”

  “Only girls in private schools chew tobacco. I hear it’s because it’s an appetite suppressant. They also cut themselves but that’s not an appetite suppressant, that’s externalized self-hatred.”

  He didn’t speak like I expected a guy in a turban to speak. Instead he had almost a Minnesotan accent. Mostly weird exaggerated o’s.

  “You’ve been in a lot of private schools?” I asked.

  “Mostly.” He tilted his head a little. “This is only my third public school.”

  “It’s my only school, period.”

  “My dad moves around for business a lot. As well as for personal stuff.”

  “What else are girls in private school like?”

  “It depends if it’s a boarding one or not. Boarding schools, everyone is kind of shitty. It’s like what a kennel would be like if you stopped feeding the dogs. You learn fast that girls are dogs like everyone else.”

  “What’s with the turban?”

  “I’m a Sikh, man.”

  “Like the Golden Temple?”

  He looked at me sideways. “What do you know about the Golden Temple?”

  “My mom sent me a postcard from Amritsar once,” I said. And because he kept looking at me, I added, “She works for Marriott. She was in talks to build a hotel there but India’s too protectionist and wanted too much control.” I blushed. I hated it when I ran at the mouth.

  There was silence. The slight hiccup of the engine noise as the bus lady changed gears. The cars toddling past us. A terrifyingly thin, absurdly made-up woman walked on the broken sidewalks under the train bridge. Lipstick and stretch pants, swinging her arms vigorous-like. It was seven in the morning. Gurbaksh was nodding like he was doing silent computations in his head.

  It was too weird to be sitting together on an empty bus and not talking. “Are you from Amritsar?”

  “Toronto,” he said. “You’re the first white person I’ve met who has ever known anything about being a Sikh.”

  “If it makes you feel any better, I don’t know anything about Toronto.”

  “You know what a Sikh is and don’t know anything about Canada?”

  “I have a library card,” I said. I only knew about the Golden Temple from the postcard and I was afraid he’d ask more detailed questions about what I knew of Sikhism so I changed the topic. “What does your dad do that keeps you all moving so much?”

  “He’s a liar,” he replied.

  “A lawyer?”

  “No. A liar. He’s kind of an engineer without, you know, any degrees to back it up with.” Gurbaksh shifted in his seat. “He stays at a place until they decide to check his references. Then we move.”

  “Whoa.”

  “Yeah. Every place we move to, the students at the school usually think I’m a foreign exchange student. I’ve started thinking about my dad as my host family. It’s easier to deal with that way. He’s just someone I’m staying with for a discrete amount of time.”

  There was a loud commotion as the bus ground to a halt. Porky Boxwell and Holly Trowbridge were screaming at each other. She had a fistful of his hair as he tried to climb the steps. She was bigger than him by four inches and fifteen pounds but most of her punches landed on his backpack. They collapsed on the bus floor and Porky curled into a ball. The bus driver was trying to pull Holly off of him. She got her off and Holly kicked at Porky as he escaped to the back of the bus. The bus driver made Holly sit in the front, right next to the redheaded girl who somehow got on during all of this. She was some kind of ninja. Holly started crying.

  “They must be boyfriend/girlfriend,” Gurbaksh said.

  I told him about the health class and Holly and the Coca-Cola.

  “Oh lord. So they’ll breed,” Gurbaksh said. “The stupid ones get laid all the time.”

  After the Blob got on, Gurbaksh turned to me. “Why did he call you Yo-Yo Fag?”

  I shook my head.

  Gurbaksh started laughing. “That’s the funniest nickname I’ve ever heard.”

  “I try not to hear it.”

  Gurbaksh shrugged his shoulders. “That shit is at least original. I can’t wait to hear what they’ll call me.”

  In the back of the bus Porky and Holly were continuing their argument separated by five rows of seats.

  “Yo-Yo Fag,” Gurbaksh said. “This is the first time I’ve been optimistic about this place.”

  When we got to school, Gurbaksh waved to me as he disappeared through the doors. “See ya, Yo-Yo Fag.”

  CHAPTER 6

  The first class of the day was English. It was taught by a frazzled chubby little mouse of a guy named Mr. Morris. He wore a bright orange polo the first day. We had to let him know that the size sticker was still on the shirt. Once he’d peeled the sticker off I noticed that the shirt still had the creases from the way it had been folded at the store. Today he was wearing what must be his regular clothes. A crap button-down and a thin old cardigan that was shiny at the elbows.

  Teachers always try to sell you on the subject the first couple of days. The halls were as thick with evangelism as they were with hair spray applied by amateurs. Mr. Morris at least didn’t try to convince us of the importance of English. Maybe he was burnt out.

  We were supposed to write about something that struck us as having sublimity. We read a poem about a mountain. He defined the sublime five different ways. I was so confused about what we were supposed to write that I wrote about the guy I saw beating his dog in the middle of the street.

  Honors Science was kind of cool. The teacher was a kind of celebrity in town. Reagan wanted to send a teacher into space. Mr. Reynolds was one of fifty thousand NASA applicants and he made it past a couple of cuts before being rejected. He wore his pin and his hat. He told us that space was the future, that within our lifetimes we’d have a space community and we’d all become real citizens of the cosmos. It was cool. You think about living in zero gravity and your brain has this little hitch where it can’t really conceive of it. All the movies about space, ships always have their own gravity. Everybody isn’t always just floating around all the time, which is too bad because that would be the best part of space.

  Science is cooler than philosophy because they’re developing new ways of living. New ways of being. Philosophy is stuck on trying to describe who we are and why we are. I’m going to tell my dad I’m going to be a scientist.

  CHAPTER 7

  On my locker someone had drawn this in thick marker:

  The custodian gave me a bucket, a sponge, gloves, and some spray he told me not to get anywhere near my skin. I missed PE that day scrubbing it off.

  CHAPTER 8

  It was in seventh period when the speaker came on. It was during band. I was third chair trumpet. There were four of us. I sat next to Flossie Beckley, a girl so heartbreakingly beautiful that I’d gladly collect and ferment the leavings of her spit valve and drink down the resultant wine. We were sight-reading a Sousa piece when the voice came on.

  “Mr. Kendrix?”

  We kept playing.

  “Mr. Kendrix?” the voice said louder. Some of the kids stopped playing but Kendrix kept conducting, shooting all of us evil looks, daring us to stop without his say-so. He was a very thin tall man who had talked me into the trumpet when I was in fourth grade, saying it was what all the cool guys played. He’d gotten grayer since then but hadn’t gained a pound. Inexplicably he had a little bit of a wattle under his neck and it swayed as he popped his baton up down right left. He was having a power struggle with the voice on the speaker. He and only he stopped the music. Most of us had trailed away, only a couple of the flutes and Roxanne Nolan on the clarinet kept going.

  Roxanne was an ass-kisser. She stared at Mr. Kendrix as if he should know she was his only true disciple. It was never a question for Roxanne Nolan that only Mr. Kendrix stopped the music. There could be nuclear attacks,
swarms of locusts, Russian soldiers storming into the room, and Roxanne would keep playing until Mr. Kendrix did that little sky-cursive motion with his baton and clasped his other hand into a fist.

  “Mr. Kendrix,” the voice was now near screaming.

  Kendrix chewed his bottom lip, swung his hands in the “all silent” move, and then pushed his hands down so we could all lower our instruments. He put his hands on the lectern and exhaled dramatically a couple of times before he shouted, “Yes?”

  “Baruch Nadler needs to come to the office.”

  I liked getting called to the office. It was like I was a little bit famous. I put my trumpet away in its velvet-lined box and put it in my band cubby.

  I shouldered my backpack and made my way through the halls. The two halves of the building were connected by a corpus callosum of a marble staircase whose pitch was ten to fifteen degrees steeper than code. It was always a delicate act getting down the steps, the front edges of which had been smoothed down and made slippery by decades of school shoes. Going down alone was difficult enough. The steps were the choke point between the halves of the building and so going down between classes with the herd of hormone-cases was an invitation to a concussion.

  “I’m here,” I said to the office lady. “The office called for me to come down.”

  The room was all yellowish wood that shined from the years of use. The sun slanted through the blinds and made the glass on top of the counter separating the waiting area from the offices in back almost too bright.

  The office lady had hair that was like a pile of spun sugar dyed an unnatural blond. She was so skinny her dresses always hung off of her like robes. She looked like a Q-tip with a lot of foundation.

  “What’s your name, dear?”

  Behind me there sat three big kids. Big kids shifting in wooden chairs. Why’d she have to call me dear?

  “Barry Nadler.”

  “Barry?”

  “It might say Baruch,” I said.

  “There you are. I’ll let Mrs. Gildea know you’re here.”

  I sat in the only free chair. The guys next to me both had their arms on the armrests. I couldn’t put my arms up there without accidentally touching their elbows. When you’re Yo-Yo Fag, you’ve got to watch stuff like that.

  Don’t touch guys.

  Even accidentally.

  The guy next to me was Randy Colton. There was no one more famous than Randy Colton. Randy Colton flunked sixth grade two times. It was my class that he finally started passing. He was six feet tall and built like a man. He was wearing a green army jacket that stunk of cigarettes. His dad had been in Vietnam. In seventh-grade history he gave a presentation on the Mai Lai massacre and failed because he kept calling the Vietnamese “gooks.” My dad was not in Vietnam. He’d gotten a student deferment. Randy Colton’s dad had killed people. My dad diagrammed sentences.

  I had been in gym classes with Randy every year since sixth grade. It was its own kind of hell. In gym class, we play a game that’s a variation of dodgeball. It’s called Kill Ball. It’s played not with an oversized kickball ball but with volleyballs, four of them. The rules of Kill Ball are absurdly simple. You aren’t out when you’re hit with a ball, you’re out when you can’t take it anymore.

  The gym teacher Mr. Harolds developed the game in response to the ban on paddling students. He sat in the bleachers chewing gum and watched us peg one another as hard as we could with the volleyballs. The fact that there were four volleyballs meant you could never really keep yourself safe. In dodgeball, you watch the big red ball and avoid it. In Kill Ball, you watch one ball, you get pegged with two others. Randy Colton was a prodigy at the game.

  It was Achilles against a kindergarten class.

  I saw him peg Brent Gates so hard that he flipped over and landed on his neck. Mr. Harolds was interested in creating men. To Mr. Harolds men were created within a cocoon of bruises and concussions.

  I knew how Darwinism worked, so I’d call myself out at the beginning of the game and run laps on the track that circled the gym.

  Randy Colton was in the office because he was in trouble. The second day and he was in trouble. It’s nice having your burnouts be so reliable.

  Mrs. Gildea was a guidance counselor. Guidance counselors’ offices were the safest spaces for kids like me, even better than the classrooms. They were caverns to which we could retire, furnished with scrying pools where our fabulous fortunes were foretold. When you test well, the future is always better than the now. And I reliably tested in the ninety-eighth percentile.

  That’s in the country. My scores showed that I was better than this school. Only in the guidance counselor’s office was I given the respect I was due. Let the glue-sniffers get scolded by the vice-principal, I had the rest of my life to plot out.

  “Hey, man,” Randy said to me. “Do you know what AIDS stands for?”

  “It’s Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome,” I said.

  Randy shook his head. “No, man. It’s Anally Injected Death Syndrome.” And he laughed so hard that the woman behind the desk gave him a look that would have frozen most land mammals.

  Mrs. Gildea came out.

  “Baruch Nadler,” she said.

  “The fuck kind of name is that?” Randy Colton asked.

  I followed her back into her office.

  Mrs. Gildea had gotten some new posters. One was Kermit the Frog with a book that was about how important reading was. There was a framed picture of Larry Bird, one of Jane Pauley, and one of Julia Child. They were all signed. There was one of Bill Cosby too. His wasn’t signed.

  “Baruch,” Mrs. Gildea said and motioned to the chair. Her office was small and had no windows.

  “I go by Barry.”

  “That’s right, you do,” she said, after glancing at a file. “How have you been?”

  I expected a hug or a handshake or one of those side hugs teachers start giving you when they don’t have to squat down to your level anymore but they don’t want to come into contact with your genitals.

  “Fine,” I said.

  Mrs. Gildea sat there for a moment with her mouth open. She looked a little like a cocker spaniel, her hair flopping over her ears and her little nose, her glasses making her eyes kind of bugged out.

  “Summer was fine, I guess,” I added. “I read a lot. I read about slavery like all summer.”

  She didn’t make a note of that in her file. That seemed like college app gold: reading and history? I hoped she was good at her job.

  She tented her fingers. “Barry, I like to take some time in the beginning of the year to meet with students who, well, live in unorthodox situations—broken homes and such.”

  “My home isn’t broken,” I said.

  “But your mother travels a lot, doesn’t she?”

  “Yes, she sends me a lot of postcards. We don’t talk on the phone because of the long-distance charges. But we keep up a lively correspondence.”

  “She’s gone a lot, isn’t she?”

  “Probably three out of four weeks.”

  “And your father? He works for the university still?”

  “Yes,” I answered. “He mostly teaches the Intro classes so it’s kind of like I’m already going to college by living with him.”

  “He teaches you then? You talk? Every night? Every day? Do you have dinners, just meals, together?”

  “No. I cook for myself. His work is very exacting,” I said. My palms weren’t sweating anymore. I was back in control. “I read the books he leaves around. Lives of the Philosophers. That kind of stuff.”

  “And that’s as interesting to you as slavery?”

  “Well, it’s like examples of ways of being smart. Baruch Spinoza, my namesake, was talking with two friends about his views on God and the Torah. They knew a little bit how he felt and they kind of like goaded him into harsher ways of articulating his views. These two friends then went and told the Elders about Spinoza’s views and he was excommunicated.” I waited for her to be impresse
d. She should be impressed. “Like the best philosopher since Aristotle was caught by a couple dummies who just asked him what he really felt. You can be smart and really dumb at the same time.”

  “Is it dumb to say what you really feel?” she asked.

  “No,” I said, remembering that I was in a guidance counselor’s office. “But the things we feel . . . there’s also like intellect. Intellect is there to protect the feelings from dummies who’ll betray you. My dad taught me this. He’s taught me discipline.”

  “Discipline?” Her ears perked up. Mrs. Gildea wrote something in her notebook and then leaned forward as if she was going to confide in me. She didn’t write down anything else I’d said until I’d stumbled onto one of her button words. “That brings me to one of the things I wanted to talk to you about. You missed PE yesterday.” She let a quantum of quiet radiate for a moment. “Each class you miss earns you a detention, you know.”

  I swallowed hard. “Someone had drawn on my locker.” I felt so stupid, caught by such an obvious trap. “I was scrubbing it off.”

  “What was it?” She was still leaning forward.

  My breathing took a funny turn, like it got confused if it was supposed to inhale or exhale and the air got caught in my throat until it was all figured out.

  “Nothing.” I tore the Kleenex into little strips and wound the little strips around my fingers and then flexed my fingers and burst the strips.

  “Are you engaging in,” she paused trying to find the words, “risky behaviors?”

  “What? No.”

  “Are you having urges?” She cleared her throat. “Perhaps of the, well, untraditional variety?”

  I stared at her agape. My head was going full-tilt shitstorm carnival ride. All I had for her was silence.

  “I just want to let you know—I’m not sure you’ve been reading the news—but there’s a terrible disease going around in some, well, untraditional communities. And, um, I just want you to know you can talk to me, talk to any of the counseling staff, before you, um, engage in those untraditional, well, practices.”