“I won’t remember that. It’s too weird of a word.”
“It’s supposed to be. That way you won’t accidentally say it when it’s not time.”
“How about cardinal?” I asked. “It is the state bird.”
“Whatever, you freak. Just say it and I’ll take off.”
Mr. Tyler sauntered over to us and we shut up and started soaking in the history. The building was old. It was wood. It was brown. It’d fall down if someone didn’t pony up some dough soon. And who would want to donate enough money to commemorate Rutherford B. Hayes? He didn’t even win the election. Samuel Tilden, the democrat from New York, did. The conservatives were too freaked out by Tilden’s reputation as a reformer, and with the state of the union being still precarious in 1876, the smoky backroom of American politics got Florida to fake enough votes so its electoral total went Hayes’s way. What did Hayes have to teach us really? To be quiet and unobtrusive enough so that you’d be a suitable candidate when the real powers-that-be wanted someone easy to manipulate. None of this we went over in class. He was local pride. A two-headed calf would deserve as much historical attention. And we stood outside of where his mother birthed him and we all shivered in the central Ohio November wind trying to figure out how to elevate a dilapidated old house to historical importance. The only thing Hayes had to teach us was that if we wanted to do anything in our lives, we needed to get out and never look back.
Fuck Rutherford.
“Boys,” Mr. Tyler said behind us. “You getting this?”
“Yessir,” we both mumbled.
“We’re sending teachers to space, Halley’s Comet is coming back, there’s the gay plague, and a woman was a vice-presidential candidate of a ‘major’ party.” You could hear the air-quotes Mr. Tyler put around “major.” Democrats weren’t anything but a major pain in his ass, but it was swell of the sure-losers to put up a lady. Reagan seemed to make men think all men thought the same. “The world is changing right before our eyes, boys. Good or bad. You can’t even imagine what the future has in store.”
“Is that why you teach history?” I asked, trying to make Gary laugh. “Cause you’ve got no idea about the future?”
“Shut up, Yo-Yo Faggot,” Mr. Tyler said and walked away.
CHAPTER 26
My face was hot all day after that. I couldn’t even get my head around the fact that he had said it at all. The panic stuff was on me but set on simmer. My esophagus wanted nothing to do with my body anymore. It strained at my throat, felt like it was trying to tear free, but not so much that I could plausibly go to the nurse. What would I tell her if I went? A teacher called me something bad and now my breathing tube was getting shoehorned out of my body? You go in for symptoms like that and you get sent to a guidance counselor and I couldn’t risk another meltdown. Now that my dad wasn’t a professor, I didn’t want to screw up my college chances totally by being me. Maybe no one else noticed it happened. Maybe it hadn’t happened at all. Maybe I was called it so often by my peers that I just misheard Mr. Tyler.
On the bus, Gary sat next to me.
“Holy fuck, are you okay?” he asked.
“I’m fine,” I lied.
“That was so fucked up. A teacher, man. A teacher called you that. You’re certified now.”
“I don’t think anyone else heard it,” I said. I pulled my backpack up from the floor and looked through it for, I don’t know, a wormhole out of this dimension.
“Everyone heard it, man.”
“Not everyone.”
“Every. Fucking. One. Heard it,” he said, slapping the syllables out on the green vinyl seat. “It’s all over the school.”
“Did you tell anyone?”
“No,” he said. “I mean, yes. How could I not? Mr. Tyler is an asshole. This should get him fired.”
“I don’t think it was that bad.”
“He called you a faggot in front of the whole class.” Gary’s eyes were bugging out of his skull. “Don’t you see that he’s over? Don’t you know what he’s done to you? You know it’s fucked up, right?”
“Students call me that all the time.”
“Yeah, but a teacher? That’s a line, man. A line that shouldn’t be crossed.”
“Probably heard it from his wrestlers,” I said. The panic simmer was turning to a rolling boil. My rib cage started to feel like it was shrinking.
“Doesn’t matter where he heard it. He shouldn’t have said it. I’m serious, we could get him fired because of this.”
I watched out the window. I wanted to find something I could focus on, freeze it in my mind, and trade places with it. There was a hydrant. Would I rather be a hydrant than me? Yeah. “You’re making too big a deal out of this.”
“You might have to change schools.”
“He called me ‘Yo-Yo Faggot,’ ” I said. “He didn’t even get it right.”
“Does that matter?”
“I mean there’s a difference between fag and faggot, right?”
Gary stared at me in disbelief. “Like one’s the formal address? Since he called you ‘faggot’ he was showing you more respect?”
“Right. It’s like the difference between ‘gaylord’ and ‘gaywad.’ ”
Gary laughed. “There’s a difference?”
“A gaylord is part of the landed gentry,” I said. “He’s got serfs and shit. A gaywad is . . . something else.”
“Gay serfs.”
“Serfs nonetheless.”
Gary was doubled over. “You’re fucked up, Barry.” A beat passed and Gary said, “Really, though, if we’re not going to get him fired what are we going to do?”
“Like what?”
“Like payback, man. Like totally mess him up.”
“I’m not,” I said, my mind wheeling at the possibility of retribution. “I don’t know if that’s my thing.”
“We look in the phone book, find his address, and go over to his house in the middle of the night.”
“And what? Key his car? Toilet paper his house?”
“At least. That’s the right direction. Do some kind of lasting shit to him.”
The bus stopped. The redheaded girl got off. Porky Boxwell and Holly Trowbridge walked by hand in hand. They passed by in silence. Their silence was awful. It was better when they’d just make fun of me.
Gary paused and made sure he had eye contact with me. He was starting to let his beard grow. There were soft little whiskers littering his face. Less like a beard and more like hair acne. “What if you could do anything to him? Like fuck him up for good.”
“Like I was all-powerful and no one would ever find out? I’d do that thing Bill Murray talks about in Caddyshack. Slice his Achilles tendon as he pulls back for his golf swing.”
“Yeah.” Gary slapped the back of the seat. “That’s what I’m talking about.”
“I’d lead him into a factory and have him chase me through a stamping machine and turn it on right when he was in the middle of it.”
“Splat! Eyeballs and shit everywhere.”
“Language,” the bus lady said.
“He could jump on me and I’d throw him in the microwave and turn it on.”
“There are people-sized microwaves?”
“It’s from Gremlins,” I said.
“Oh. I don’t see many movies.”
“Then I could go all Kali Ma and tear his heart out from his chest.”
“Jesus, dude. That’s dark.”
“It’s Indiana Jones. You really don’t see any movies, do you?”
“My dad says they’re all racist. The Hollywood ones.”
“They probably are.”
“Also there’s no singing or dancing like Bollywood ones so he thinks they’re a rip-off.”
We sat there as Rutherford rolled by our pinch-and-pull-down windows. Race never really came up between Gary and me. But when it did, it was like we were sitting in a really bad fart and didn’t want to acknowledge it. The thing was that I envied Gary. I envied his tur
ban. I envied his brownness. I figured it was his brownness, his turban, that allowed him to be so popular. He stood out. But not in the way that I stood out: my weakness on display for everyone. People just naturally avoided and despised me like a Band-Aid in the pool. I liked being friends with Gary, I liked being around his brownness, I liked that his brownness was now associated with me. But we didn’t talk about his brownness. I researched him. I read about Sikhism as fast as interlibrary loan would allow. I figured I would know him then, decode his affect, distill and bottle his personality. What does anyone want in a best friend other than to swallow him up and own what makes him different from you? Is this so different because he’s brown? Would I research a white friend if I had one?
I was getting a headache. The same kind I got when Dad used to explain Hegel to me. Sometimes you stand at the edge of what you know and you can see spread out in front of you all that you don’t. But it’s smeared in fog. There were times when I learned something I could feel it, like could feel it altering my brain—and I knew the cliff had extended a little bit further out into the fog.
Example: the movie Alien—at first I thought space suits were like scuba-diving suits. But the ocean is full of life, just not hospitable to us. Space is so enormous and made up of so much nothing that when the crew woke up from their pods suddenly I felt small and I could feel my brain adjust to this new reality. We’re tiny and insignificant from the point of view of space. The moon doesn’t care if we visit it. Space doesn’t care that we’re sending up a teacher in January. Space doesn’t care about us. It doesn’t even have the capacity to be indifferent. Like language is impossible as a means to describe space. It’s a negation. It’s not.
Is this how Gary felt? A not? The Jewish kids were different but they blended in and most of the school was too dumb to know what Jewish meant. But the school knew what “brown” meant and had an idea of what “turban” meant. But Gary disarmed all of that. People loved Gary. Teachers, lunch ladies, students, custodians, all fell under his spell. But was this the result of having lived as a “not” for so long? Was he constantly his own PR agency?
The black kids, after about sixth grade, started to hang out exclusively with one another. Maybe fifth grade had become the year they’d started having to be their own PR agencies and maybe sixth was when they decided to close up shop.
Was Gary so nice, funny, smart, and outgoing because if he wasn’t something bad would happen? Did he know something about us, small-town Ohio, that we didn’t know about ourselves? I could feel the locks and slides moving in my brain trying to accept this new kind of thinking.
My stop was here. Gary was already standing in the aisle to let me pass.
“Monsignor Yo-Yo Faggot, I believe this is your stop,” he said, bowing.
“See you tonight,” I said.
“Wouldn’t miss it,” he said. “Actually not allowed to miss it. Papa Singh is a little too excited about this party.”
CHAPTER 27
My mom has always worried about my popularity.
She had been in the Homecoming Court three times and thinks it meant something. And maybe it does. Maybe it’s where she gets her fearlessness from: those days sitting on floats riding through town waving at strangers might have been the perfect training for a job in hotel development. But it’s not for me. Not that I choose to not be popular as an ascetic choice—it’s not in the cards for a short skinny weenie who can now officially go an entire week wearing different Batman-themed shirts. I’ve never had the heart to break it to my mom what they call me at school.
My mom is undeterred. She wants me to let her take me to a stylist to do my hair, instead of the five-dollar barber cuts I’ve been getting for years. She tells me that these are the best years of my life. She doesn’t know how much that depresses me.
CHAPTER 28
I Dialed Ottilie’s number again at five. It rang three times. She answered this time.
“Hey, have you been calling and hanging up a lot?”
“No. I don’t think so.”
“You don’t think so? My dad’s pissed. He’s worried there’s something wrong with our line. He’s going to have the phone company come out and check it. It’s like three hundred dollars for a service visit and line check.”
There was a long pause.
“It was me,” I said.
“Hah! I knew it, you stalker.” She was laughing. I wanted to like her laughter more than feeling humiliated, but it wasn’t going to happen. “Did my dad scare you? He’s got that voice.”
“It’s deep,” I said.
“He only does it when he answers the phone. My mom is allergic to dogs so he’s like, ‘Somebody has to guard this place.’ Personally, I think he thinks he’s not black enough because he bought a Phil Collins record and likes jigsaw puzzles, so he does the phone voice to compensate. He’s the nerdiest guy in real life. He’s a chemist.”
“Your mom is white, right?”
“Swedish. He couldn’t have married a whiter woman.”
There was a pause again. How did people do this? Talking to girls was fine when they were speaking but in the gaps between it was awful.
“You were lying about the phone company,” I said.
She laughed. “You’re not my first pervert. I was totally going to hang up on you if you didn’t own up to it.”
“You just tested me.”
“And you passed! Doesn’t that feel good? You passed. And your reward is that you get to keep talking to me, which is way more valuable than you might think.”
“You’ve had perverts?”
“Yeah. Just one but I’m young still. He came to the house a lot to do homework with me and then I started to notice that my underwear was going missing, which is so gross to think of the kid I did differential equations with jerking himself off with my underwear. When I figured out what he was doing, I told my parents and they called the cops on him. It was so embarrassing. Like we ended up going over to his house with the police to tell his parents what he was doing, so they could like send him to counseling or whatever. They thought I wanted my underwear back and while we sat there in their dining room sent him to put them all in a paper bag to give back to me.”
“That’s gross,” I said, and remembered not to tell her that I was supposed to be in counseling myself.
“Right? Like I’d ever want them back. They just sat there on the dining room table in the paper bag while the adults and the police officer talked it all out. We were going to have a restraining order put on him, which is super rare for a minor to get, like no kid gets a restraining order, right? But he switched schools instead, which is kind of unfair because it’s like he gets a blank slate somewhere new and he’ll end up doing it to some other girl. I don’t know which school he transferred to. Do you know how to find stuff like that out?”
Pause again. Did I know?
“I don’t think so. Unless you called every school in the phone book asking if he’s there, enrolled or whatever.” I was cobbling sentences together. It was taking effort to answer her. She talked in streams of information while I had to hand-build my sentences.
“I think people, like the girls at his new school, should know what kind of pervert is around them. It’s like their right to know. Right? Like he should wear something like Hester Prynne had to. Except Hester wasn’t really guilty of anything other than banging the hot preacher.”
“At least you got all-new underwear out of it.”
“No. I just have to wear all the gross ones he wouldn’t steal.”
There was a large pause.
“You’re thinking about my bottom,” she sang into the phone. “You’re totally a perv too. God, I’m like a perv magnet.”
“I’m not. I’m not a pervert. I swear. I wouldn’t even know how to begin.”
“Begin what?”
“I don’t know. I’m flummoxed.” My chest was tightening. I could feel the air getting thicker in my lungs. I pinched my thigh as hard as I could.
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“Flummoxed. Good vocab word, perv.”
“Can we stop talking about your underwear?”
“I think it’d be best. Oh my God, I can’t believe I just told you that whole thing. It was a mess and traumatized me like crazy and now I’m just telling strangers about it like it was just a weird thing that happened. I’m totally messed up.”
“Do you want to come to a party?”
“I don’t know. I’m not really a party person. Isn’t that like how we met? By us both not being party people? Weren’t we hiding from a party the last time? Are you really asking me to hide from a party with you?”
“Yes. It’s a party my dad is throwing.”
“Do you have brothers and sisters?”
“I’m an only.”
“So you and I will be the only kids at the party?”
“My friend Gary is coming too.”
“Gary was at that other party, where we met. That Gary? With the turban? The Muslim guy? He’s a friend of yours?”
“He’s my best friend. He’s a Sikh, not a Muslim.”
“Whatever. He’s really loud and obnoxious. At least he was the night of the party.”
“He’s my best friend and really nice. One of the smartest people I know.”
“I’m the smartest person you know.”
“You think Dimmesdale is hot.”
“So?”
“I don’t think there’s textual evidence backing up your claim.”
“When’s this party you want me to avoid with you and this best friend and second-smartest person you know, Gary?”
“Tonight,” I said.
“Not a lot of warning.”
“Yeah, I tried calling earlier but your dad kept answering.”
How I Learned to Hate in Ohio Page 8
