How I Learned to Hate in Ohio Read online

  My dad invited some of his old students to the party. They brought their friends. And when they saw the free booze, they called their friends. Soon the party was over a hundred people. The students wore jam shorts and half shirts and spaghetti-strapped jersey knit dresses. The students shouted eight different drink orders at Trevor and then dropped at least two of them as they moved back to their friends. The students bummed cigarettes and crowded the dance floor.

  The DJ played “Shout.” The DJ played “Louie, Louie.” He played “Hang On, Sloopy” and “Respect.” Dance music having stalled out in Central Ohio at the Animal House soundtrack. The DJ said he was going to bring things down a little and the dance floor/back deck emptied while he played “My Girl.” Three couples clutched each other and danced. Two male students did a jokey swing dance thing, theatrically grabbing each other’s butts. Adults laughed.

  I got my mom a glass of wine and deposited her on the couch. She smoothed her dress with the flat of her hand.

  “You’re a good boy, Baruch. Better than I’ve ever deserved,” she whispered in my ear.

  I nodded. I never liked how sincere she could get. It made me feel small. It made me realize I could never be that uncomplicatedly sincere with her about my emotions towards her.

  I saw Gurbaksh sitting on the piano bench. Next to him was Ottilie. They were pushing the keys on the piano and laughing. The party was so loud I couldn’t hear what they were playing. The only teenagers here. The only brown people here. Their age and their skin probably enacted a kind of gravity on each other. Of course, in all of these people they’d find each other.

  The crowd was impossibly thick. I pushed my way through it slowly over to them. I looked back at my mom and saw Mr. Singh float over to her. His red turban hovered above the crowd like a body-surfing ladybug. He gave a little bow and my mom put her hands to her mouth and then she shook her head violently. She was crying. A woman with a cigarette tottering backward on her heels swung her hand to try and find balance, crushing the cherry of her cigarette into my bicep. I yelped. No one noticed. The woman laughed to the men she was talking to, shoved the cigarette back in her mouth, and brushed something off of her dress. The pain seared through me. The crowd swallowed me up. It was a forest of tweed and nylon. I wanted to flop to my stomach and worm my way through on my belly.

  I said “excuse me” to no one in particular and pushed my way through.

  “You guys met?” I asked.

  They looked up from the piano as if I’d caught them doing something.

  “Holy shit, man. There you are,” Gurbaksh said. He jumped up from the piano bench and pushed me down on it. “This is so weird.”

  “Like this is crazy. The entire lawn is full of cars. I didn’t know there were this many people in town,” Ottilie said.

  I noticed immediately how she didn’t say hi to me. I was swallowed into their conversation. The pain in my arm flared.

  “Rutherfuck, Nohio, is on fire tonight,” Gurbaksh said.

  “Is there some place we can escape to? We didn’t want to explore too much without you,” she said.

  “There’s the garage. It’s an old barn, really,” I said.

  “I’ll get us drinks,” Gurbaksh said and disappeared into the thicket of adults.

  Ottilie and I pushed our way out to the backyard and across the crowded driveway. We startled a couple clutching each other in the dark. We were way more embarrassed than they were.

  The lights were already on in the barn. An owlish man was standing staring at the walls. He swayed a little as he told us, “This is all original centennial construction. Red Elm.” He knocked on the wall, a fine mist of dust sprinkling from the roof. “A horse barn. Maybe some grain storage. Not very much. Just enough for the house to use in the winter. There’s probably a missing larder somewhere.” The man turned to us, his owl eyes bulging, and solemnly said, “Could you point me in the direction of the root cellar?”

  “The basement?” I asked.

  “More than likely,” he slurred.

  “We don’t let guests in the basement,” I said.

  “Oh.” He wobbled past the lawnmower and left the barn saying “how rude” under his breath.

  Ottilie grabbed the drink the man left behind and swallowed it down in one motion.

  “It’s like a nature documentary out there,” she said.

  “I don’t know where all those people came from.”

  “Gurbaksh said his dad catered the whole thing.”

  “Is that where all of that stuff came from? That solves a big mystery for us. I mean, my dad did some of it,” I said, thinking of the sad six-foot sub my dad had thought would be sufficient. “But the DJ and stuff was a total surprise.”

  “The bartender stared at my chest. He’s a total perv.”

  “Gross,” I said, reminding myself to not look at her chest. She was wearing a purple t-shirt with neon turtles on it. She’d cut the crew neck out of it and the shirt hung off her shoulders.

  “Nice weird old barn,” she said. “Did you bring me out here to kill me? Or do you want to kill me in the root cellar? Bury me in your larder, Baruch.”

  “I, uh . . .” Nothing came out. I didn’t know how to play this game of shocking statements.

  “You could totally dismember me and hide it all in the root cellar.” Her voice was still as bubbly when it described acts of awful violence.

  I tried to come up with something to say and only came up with a million sure-failures. “How’s Olentangy?”

  She pouted momentarily. “You mean as a school organism?” She hopped up onto the hood of the lawnmower. “I don’t know. Boring?”

  The air in the barn felt miserable. Too close and stinking of ancient horses. “Do you have a favorite, a favorite subject or activity or something?”

  “Jesus, you’re worse than my uncles. Can’t we talk about something other than school? You’ve got me alone in your barn. Tell me about your weird shirt. Did you wear that to impress me?”

  I’d forgotten my shirt. It was a black tank top that was torn and stitched back together in four jagged seams. It had something scrawled across it in Korean graffiti letters. The shirt was like the cabinet full of miniature bottles of shampoo and soap and conditioner, all the things my mom brought home that were evidence of how much time she spent away. I’d forgotten my mom. Twenty minutes ago I was pulling her crying from a shower. I abandoned her on the sofa at a party she didn’t want to have.

  “Just something my mom got in Korea. I was wearing something else but it got wet.” My arms were cool in the shirt. I never wore tank tops because they showed off my narrow little arms. “I might need to go find my dad.”

  Ottilie stared at me. Her stare made all the air fall out of the garage. On my tongue, I could feel the little specks of dust the owlish man had let loose. Is this what people meant when they talked about beautiful people? Like if I just stared at her nose I was fine. If I just stared at her left earlobe I was fine. But to look directly at her made something awful happen to my stomach. It was like when I looked right at her I could get a sense of how disappointing I was to her, a scrawny kid in a dumb shirt in a dusty old barn. Beautiful people must always be so disappointed in the world. It must be their defining trait.

  Or maybe she just didn’t understand why I was going to leave her alone.

  “Don’t anyone worry. I come bearing refreshments,” Gurbaksh shouted as he came in. He was balancing four drinks in his hands. “I didn’t know what you guys liked so I grabbed enough for choices. It also made that Trevor guy think I was getting these drinks for adults.”

  A blond woman followed Gurbaksh into the barn. It took me a second too long to realize that it was Stacey from the restaurant. She had makeup on and was wearing a pastel leotard with a skirt.

  “Oh,” she said when she saw me. She had three wine coolers in her hands. “I’m not sure I should be giving you these. Gurbaksh made it sound like y’all were college students.”

  “My d
ad invited you?”

  “Jesus. Rude much?” Ottilie said as she pushed past me and grabbed one of the wine coolers from Stacey’s hand.

  “Are we interrupting anything?” Gurbaksh waggled his eyebrows at me.

  “Baruch was just leaving.”

  Everyone looked at me.

  “I was just going to find my dad and tell him something.”

  “Tell me,” Stacey said. “I was going to go look for him. I’ll tell him.”

  “No. It’s fine.”

  Gurbaksh laughed. “What did you just call him?” he asked Ottilie.

  “Baruch.”

  “Hah! No one calls him that. He tells everyone that his name is Barry.” Gurbaksh put two of the drinks down on my dad’s car, the condensation rolling off of them and pooling near one of the vents in the hood. I knew what was coming next. “But everyone at school calls him Yo-Yo Fag.”

  Ottilie barked out a mean laugh.

  “You poor kid,” Stacey said. There was nothing worse than the sympathy of my dad’s waitress.

  “It’s cool,” I shrugged.

  “It’s super messed up is what it is. There was even a teacher who called him that.” Gurbaksh sipped at his drink, made a grimace, and swapped it out for one of the others. “Like it’s crazy.”

  And then Ottilie said the thing I was hoping to never hear from her ever. “Yo-Yo fag, huh?”

  I took the drink Gurbaksh rejected and drank it down as fast as I could. I wanted it to be a growth serum, something that would affect me on a cellular level and make me grow a thousand feet tall, destroying the barn, smashing the drinks, and allowing me to stomp away ten thousand yards at a stride.

  “Jesus, you okay?” Gurbaksh was pounding me on my back.

  “What the hell was that?”

  “I think that one was Southern Comfort and 7-Up.”

  “That was awful.”

  Stacey laughed. “I used to drink in barns like this all the time growing up.” She stretched her arms out above her head. “You all don’t know how lucky you are. These were like the best times of my life doing this.”

  I snatched a wine cooler from her. It was fruity with a little alcohol burn. Like a Popsicle that had gone bad.

  Ottilie opened the door on my dad’s car and started the motor.

  “Are we driving somewhere?” Gurbaksh laughed.

  “We’re listening to some radio,” she said.

  She turned on the rock station from Columbus. A Tears for Fears song was on.

  “You know your friend won’t let me touch his turban,” Stacey announced. “Like how can you go around wearing a turban and not let people touch it? It’s rude.” She ended her little statement with a curt nod, like she’d limned out some important and eternal rule of the world. “I love this band,” Stacey said next, her posture collapsing from moral arbiter to wiggling puppy.

  “Me too. Have you seen the video?” Ottilie and Stacey leaned together and compared notes on who was hottest in the band.

  Gurbaksh leaned up next to me and rubbed my neck. “You getting anywhere with her?”

  “A gentleman doesn’t kiss and tell.”

  “And since you’re not a gentleman, I’m going to guess you haven’t even made the first move.”

  “I just don’t know how to talk to her. My brain stops working and my mouth is all stupid. I asked her what her favorite subject in school was.”

  “Jesus. You’re worse off than I thought.” He sipped from his drink, almost successfully hiding his grimace at the taste. “Have you considered that she’s out of your league? Like maybe for your first time dating, a black girl is a little too much for you.”

  “Who said this is my first time dating?”

  Gurbaksh laughed. “Whatever slow dance you might have had at sleepaway camp doesn’t count here. This is a damn almost-woman.”

  Stacey and Ottilie shrieked, jumped up and down and started dancing.

  “I’m just saying talking to girls is difficult enough for you. Talking to a black person might not need to be added to that difficulty.”

  “She’s half black.”

  “Then you’re thinking you’ll just talk to the white half?”

  We leaned against the idling car and watched the girls dancing.

  “Man, this wine cooler is strong,” I said. My head was woozy. If this was drunk, it sure took no time to get there.

  The girls had fallen on top of each other laughing. How old was Stacey? There seemed an indeterminate age between seniors in high school and my mom’s age that I couldn’t place women in. What was a woman of twenty, or twenty-eight, or thirty-five to a fourteen-year-old? All the same wash of distance and impossibility. Complications and maturities and issues I wouldn’t be able to pick out of a lineup. The women in the Sears catalog—standing around in their underwear with descriptions and prices next to them—seemed of another race of human. Placid icy stares I tried not to meet as I jerked off to their smooth hairless bodies. The panty section was a series of disembodied crotches all in the same pose with different panties offering varying levels of coverage. Women’s crotches lined up like they were guitars at a music store. Jerking off to them made me feel awful.

  “How often do you beat it?” Gurbaksh asked.

  Dammit. Had I been speaking out loud?

  On the ground, Ottilie was laughing hysterically and shaking her head at something Stacey had asked. Stacey turned to us and shouted, “Either of y’all ever huffed gas?”

  “Jesus,” Gurbaksh said. And I saw every nightmare he’d had about moving to Central Ohio play out in his posture. This was a long way from Toronto. Here were the white people he was afraid of, the gangly-limbed bad-teethed tobacco-chewing gas-huffers.

  Stacey hunted around the barn until she came up with an oily rag and the gas can. “We used to do this all the time at parties when I was a kid.”

  She cleared the drinks off of the car, the glass tinkling as it broke on the concrete. She moved sloppily. We were all so damn drunk. It was crazy. Stacey unscrewed and tossed the nozzle and wrapped the rag around the opening. “Dare me,” she said. Her eyes were wild. “I can’t do it unless you dare me.”

  I hadn’t noticed before how small her teeth were. Little worn-down yellowish nubs in an expanse of gum. How many generations of oral health neglect were there in her smile? Was she related to the forever failing Randy Colton or the couples at the County Fair who put their hands in the back pockets of each other’s jean shorts or the guy who’d beat his dog in front of the school bus? Was there a world of poor whites huffing gas and beating their animals going on concurrently with my own? Like a Narnia setup and we’d just fallen through the back end of the cupboard? Tiny the janitor guarded the door and underneath him, pale as worms, the descendants of the people whose ambitions went only as far as Ohio, a people who named most everything in the language of the Algonquin people they exterminated.

  “I dare the hell out of you,” Gurbaksh said. He was steely. It was like his drink had turned his personality rigid. He was staring at Stacey with contempt.

  She hunched over the gas can, her legs splayed out, and she wet her lips and bent down to the red dented can and there was a loud grinding sound and my dad’s voice, shouting, and other men shouting and the garage door opening.

  “Are you kids trying to die in here?” my dad said, coughing and waving his arms. “You can’t have a car running in a closed garage. This is how people commit suicide.” He reached into his car and snapped the ignition off.

  We stumbled out onto the yard laughing. The fresh air came into me in big coughing gulps. I collapsed dizzy onto the lawn and Gurbaksh and Ottilie did the same on either side of me. She was laughing. The fact that we could have accidentally died seemed unbearably funny to all of us.

  Dad grabbed Stacey and shook her. “I’ve been looking everywhere for you.”

  Stacey said something to my dad which I couldn’t hear. My dad replied, “There are rules for a reason.” And he dragged her away. My eyes
were liquid and dreamy but I saw her reach up and run her fingers through his hair. I saw him push her hand away. I saw her kiss his temple.

  “What the hell happened to your arm?”

  Gurbaksh had his thumb close enough to the burn on my bicep to make it hurt all over again.

  “Somebody’s cigarette,” I said.

  “Damn,” he said. “People are just careless with their portable fire sticks.”

  “I’m also short and wearing a shirt with no sleeves.” The cool night air wrapped around us. Ottilie’s laughter had ebbed to intermittent giggles. The looming issue of contacting her father and getting her home was too much for my brain to handle. I wanted to just lie there and enjoy the alcohol and asphyxia-induced high sitting next to my friend and Ottilie.