“Nice flask,” I said, taking it from him and sniffing the tip of it. I took a drink and my sinus cavity felt like it’d been napalmed. I gagged and coughed and wheezed then I took another drink.
“Except he’s not wearing the turban anymore.”
“What?” I asked with snot dripping out of every orifice on my face.
“He’s not wearing his turban. He’s got some bullshit faggot grunge haircut.”
“Yeah,” I said. Whatever bad blood still existed between Randy and Gurbaksh I wanted no part of. “I thought I saw him.”
“He’s still some type of Saddam-worshipping oil-rich camel jockey.”
I rubbed my eyes with the hem of my shirt. “You know he’s not a Muslim, right?”
“Fuck you.”
“He’s a Sikh.”
“Is that like Sunni or, what’s that other one? Shih Tzu?”
“No,” I answered, amazed that Randy knew so many sects of Islam. And dog breeds. “It’s a warrior culture from India. It’s a mixture of Hindu, Islamic, and its own teachings. It’s a beautiful religion. The next time you’re in a library you should check out a picture of the Golden Temple in Amritsar on the border of Pakistan and India.” I wondered if the Rutherford County Library ever replaced the world religions book that I tore the Golden Temple picture from. I was such a little faggot about Gurbaksh when I first met him.
“You know what Muslim means?”
I didn’t. I was disappointed in myself. Or maybe I just wanted to hear what Randy thought it meant.
“To submit.” Randy poked me hard in the chest with each syllable. And he said it again as if I were going to miss his point. Which I was. “To submit. So you’re not just fighting people—a person has a brain and like free will. What we’re fighting now—damn.” He spit a fine stream of tobacco juice in the direction of the bonfire. “It’s like nigger commies but with religion. We should just nuke that whole area until it’s glass. Cigarette?” He shook his pack at me. It drifted in rainbow waves for so long that I took one just to make it stand still. Randy lit it for me and stuck it in my mouth, laughing and pounding my back as I choked on my first inhale.
I wanted to get out of there, grab Gurbaksh and get back home. My legs weren’t working though.
Randy pulled a folded-up piece of paper from his jean jacket. “Have you seen this? Fucking hilarious but it’s got like a real point, y’know.”
The picture was clipped from a newspaper and was drawn in the “political cartoon” aesthetic. It showed a man wearing white robes and a turban. His face was a grotesquely “Arabic” caricature—giant nose (complete with profuse nose hairs), bushy eyebrows, massive beard, wildly furious manic eyes. He was swinging an enormous sledgehammer intending to slam a camel’s hairy testicles which sat on a tree stump in front of him. The camel, who was sweating profusely, had an enormous missile shoved down his throat so that only the tip and the first set of aerodynamic fins were exposed. The picture was titled “Iraqi Missile Launcher.”
I wondered what was the “real point” Randy found in the picture. That Iraqis were technologically backward? That they were so willing to fight that they’d sacrifice their camels’ fecundity for their homeland? That Iraq was a country so beneath the United States in terms of military power that they were easy pickings? What was the artist’s reason for drawing this limpid scrap of propaganda? Why would a newspaper run it?
My stomach felt dry and heavy. My eyes were doing a weird thing. I was blinking like crazy.
I folded the paper and gave it back to him. “But you know that Gurbaksh is not a Muslim, right?”
“He’s part Muslim. That’s what you said.” And that’s when I saw all the guys standing behind Randy. I could’ve sworn one of them was the one I’d seen beating his dog all those years ago. Still shirtless. Still in cutoffs. Like a Dickensian ghost of some lower caste’s anger. “It’s even worse. Some half Muslim who worships gold.” He spit on the ground.
“No. I said ‘Golden Temple.’ ” I asked, “Who are they?”
“Don’t worry. They’re all family,” Randy said, then burped. “Patriots.”
Stoned, confused, a little drunk, I’d been garrulous about the Sikhism stuff, trying to impress Randy with how smart I was. They were a crowd of hillbillies on acid and what I said to Randy was flash-fried into what they wanted it to mean.
I was just one small-for-his-age guy. I had been bullied so much, so long, and so often that I didn’t notice that what I said matters. No one ever listened to me. Why did they start at that point? Since when did my words matter at all?
“There he is,” someone said, and the crowd of four or five guys snaked its way towards Gurbaksh. I saw him smiling, a brief flash of his full-fledged drunk charm. He tucked his hair back behind his ear. I should have told him to run.
Randy and the rest of them circled Gurbaksh and at first I thought they were just talking. Randy had his arm around his shoulder and Gurbaksh had his around Randy. They could’ve been mistaken for friends. I saw Gurbaksh give Randy a cigarette, then while he was lighting Randy’s cigarette, someone brought a beer bottle down on Gurbaksh’s head. He swung around and then the shirtless guy punched him hard in the stomach. Gurbaksh basically hung on the guy’s fist and soon the other guys started punching him, knocking him loose and once he was down on the ground, they kicked and stomped him.
I turned away and groped in the moonless dark, looking for an escape. As chants of “USA! USA! USA!” filled the air, I struggled in the night to find the ruts of the dirt road and once I got onto it I ran. By the time I got to Houk Road, I couldn’t ignore the screams any longer and cars started to pour out of the party careening in all directions, like marbles scattered on a dance floor. I was tripping from redneck LSD and all of the headlights bouncing over the ruts made me nauseous. I ditched the road and ran into the woods. Briars reached out and grabbed me, tripping me, scratching me. I stumbled in the crick but kept running. I heard screaming and I heard sirens and in my head, trying hard to separate scream and siren from scratch and wet, there was a fuse that burned out.
The police found me in the morning. And they were so distracted and glum, I knew my sleeping out in the woods wasn’t the tragedy here.
As there wasn’t a gurdwara nearby, it was a simple funeral in the Methodist church. But it was like the whole town had turned out for it. There were cops on hand to make sure there was no more violence and also to show that law and order were present even if they were more often than not late. Randy and the other Coltons involved in his death were in jail and everyone felt a little too good about that, as if them being caught absolved any of the rest of us.
Mr. Singh was going to read the entire required forty-eight hours from the Guru Granth Sahib himself when he was back in New Hampshire but had pulled a small selection out to read here. He couldn’t get through it and he was crying so hard that for a while no one went up and comforted him. He scolded the town with his grief and we all took it into our hearts as deeply as we were able. His tears echoed in the big chapel.
And outside of his weeping, there was silence. The entire chapel filled with people and no one moved. All there were shamed by what had happened, what had been allowed to fester in their town, in their hearts. And I was proud of their shame. I saw their earnest shame, people for whom earnestness was all they had to shield them from the world, and I knew it meant something in that moment, even if it would mean nothing an hour after the service. I was ashamed. I was one of the chief mourners and at the crucial moment, I’d done nothing but run. So worried about getting punched or called a nasty name that I let someone else die instead.
I was a person skilled at transmuting my sins into virtues, who exemplified cowardice but believed it to be restraint, a cynic who called it rational thought, a possessor of a broken and closed-off heart, who blamed others for its failures.
We all sat there and listened to him cry, just as they had all stayed silent when I was bullied, just as we had stayed silen
t as the Coltons killed Gurbaksh. The Coltons were a minority in our town, evil was a minority in our town. But the majority lived in a tepid silence, avoiding the difficult confrontations, avoiding standing up for each other. I hated their silence the most. I hated them.
Mr. Singh stopped crying and sat down and everyone felt relieved to be let loose of a feeling too close to complicity to bear. I felt as bad as I could at that moment, but what was worse was that I knew I’d forget this moment, that time would erase this pain.
See, I was always going to be safe. I was not a survivor because of some inner quality of strength or courage, which at this point can surprise no one. I was a survivor because I learned how to hide, learned how to stand to one side when the evils of the world came down, hoping they’d attack anyone else but me. Lucky for me, hiding was possible. I blended in. Unlike Gurbaksh, I looked like my tormentors. The service ended, and the town filed out. Gurbaksh was to be cremated and Mr. Singh wanted his ashes spread in the crick near where he had died as a rebuke to the town that killed his boy. But in the meantime, my dad opened up our old home where he now lived alone and hosted a potluck of mourners. The dining room table groaned under the weight of the dishes. Before anyone got there, I had to run through the house and hang “No Entry” signs on the rooms Dad had ceded to the invading wasps. I tried to busy myself with these dumb tasks.
I stood on our front lawn, pointing out where people should park. Ottilie came up to me and said something but I was too dug down into myself to hear it. She was with some guy, like I think she brought a date to her old boyfriend’s funeral, and maybe it was this guy who was the real reason Gurbaksh and I never went up to Oberlin. And maybe she felt as awful and responsible as I did. But it didn’t matter. Even if we felt awful, we still got to feel something, while Gurbaksh was . . . beyond any kind of feelings. I hated that I got to keep on living.
For the majority of the reception, I paced around outside my father’s house. To go inside even to pee felt awful. All those people and their mouths being stuffed with food from plates balanced on their knees, it was grotesque. The stink of grieving: talcum powder, dry cleaning, and well wishes. The humanness of it all. This was the obscenity of Gurbaksh’s death. That we got to continue. That we got to “draw lessons” from his death. I kicked over an anthill and suppressed a wish for matches.
People lingered. People left. I helped them find their jackets, wrote down names on Post-its I attached to their Pyrex dishes to return later, accepted their apologies that they couldn’t stay later, and aided while they navigated their cars from our lawn. I stood on the front lawn and stared at my house, with my father, my mother, and stepfather inside. I was amazed that this house had been able to stand for over one hundred years. It seemed an insult to gravity.
I knew there was goodness in this town, that there was goodness in me, that goodness was possible. But it would always arrive too late, bearing overcooked casseroles that no one would eat. I hated Ohio for what it had done to my friend. I hated it for what it had done to me. I hated myself because the only strategy I was any good at was escape.
After everything was cleaned up and final hugs handed out to Mr. Singh and my mom at the airport, I climbed into the red Saab—packed with all of my books, half of my clothes, a lamp—and left. For good.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I was bullied in school. Even worse, I bullied other people. It’s the friction between bullied and bullying that this book came from. The problem of not feeling loved by my community was compounded in me by the guilt of not loving, of not knowing how to love my community. There’s something there but when I try and put it into words it slips away. That’s why I had to write this book.
Big thank-yous to Tracy Carns, my editor, and to Stephanie Kip Rostan, my agent. Both of you saw something special in the early drafts, and I thank you for your belief in me.
Thank you to the men I got to work with in Division 10 of the Cook County Department of Corrections. Your bravery and vulnerability helped me as I wrote this book.
Thanks to Noname, whose albums played constantly as I wrote. Same goes for Spiritualized, Chance the Rapper, De La Soul, Bobby “Blue” Bland, and Ugly Stick.
A big thanks to my sister Katie, who’s always up for reading a draft and talking about music and movies and soul stuff. Thank you to my sister Betsy, who more than once defended me from the bullies of my hometown.
Scott Brown is a fantabulous writer of things from TV to Broadway to books. He’s amazing and one of the best texting friends I’ve ever had.
Thanks to Gillian and Brett, readers extraordinaire and dear friends.
Thanks to Scott Repass who dropped what he was doing and flew out to help me and my family when my depression got as bad as it could get. He’s the greatest in so many ways. Friend. Writer. Bar owner. Parent. Husband. Human.
Thanks to my totally excellent in-laws, Susan and Errol Stone.
Thanks to my wonderful parents, who support me even when I write things they don’t like.
Thanks to all the mental health professionals who’ve kept me in this world when my brain chemistry wanted otherwise.
Thanks to my kids, who make every day a whirlwind of blessings and chaos.
And to Emily: best reader, best partner, best friend. I’ve learned more about love than I ever expected to learn. Thank you.
Islamophobia, homophobia, and racism are all part of this book; sadly, they are defining parts of American culture as well. People who want to know more about how to combat these ills in schools can go to It Gets Better (itgetsbetter.org); islamophobia.org; Islamic Networks Group (ing.org); and sikhcoalition.org.
How I Learned to Hate in Ohio Page 20
