How I Learned to Hate in Ohio Read online

  “Fire meets skin,” Gurbaksh said. “Doesn’t seem like a fair fight.”

  My mother’s laughter burbled inside the house. I was sure she was laughing at me.

  CHAPTER 30

  As I made my way to bed, I wandered through the party-crumpled rooms. I picked bits of meat or cookies off of napkins and stuffed them in my mouth, I sipped drinks I found left behind on tables, on bookshelves, on the ground. I kept seeing Stacey kissing my dad’s temple, seeing my dad shake her. My head and my stomach both felt awful.

  The party staff were folding tables, the DJ was putting records back into their sleeves. In the den, Trevor was wiping off his silver bartender tools, wrapping them carefully in cloth napkins, and stacking them in an old milk crate.

  “Hey, buddy,” he hissed at me.

  “What do you need?”

  “You’re the kid of the house, right? I need to talk to your dad.” He wasn’t that much taller than me. Just a cummerbund and a mullet of a man, really.

  “He’s taking some girl home.”

  “You kidding? I need to get paid.”

  I shrugged my shoulders. “I’m going to bed.”

  “Where’s your mom?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Somebody’s gotta pay me,” he mumbled to his little vials of bitters.

  I went upstairs. Before I went to bed I knocked softly on my parents’ door. There was no response. I pushed it open and saw two silhouettes wrestling in the bed. A blanket was flushed out and soared over the two figures. I giggled. My dad wasn’t sleeping with Stacey. He was here with Mom.

  I heard my mother scream, “No, Baruch. Oh, sweet boy.’ ”

  And then I heard Mr. Singh say, “Don’t you lock doors here?”

  CHAPTER 31

  The next day my mother went on one of her trips. This time though she was across town, staying with the Singhs.

  My dad didn’t talk about it. The night of the party I heard him come home late. I laid in my bed pretending I was asleep. He cracked open the door and stood there. I could feel the triangle of light coming from the hallway. I moaned and turned over, making it as natural as possible. And then the door closed. Something happened at that moment. Something that could have passed between us, some small intimacy that was possible only at that millisecond. And I realized it immediately after he shut the door. I wanted to jump up as soon as it was closed and try to recover whatever I could, but the shame of faking sleep stopped me. A rut of behavior was wedged between us in that microscopic instant.

  SECOND PART

  “She . . . left me the way people leave a hotel room.”

  —TONI MORRISON, The Bluest Eye

  CHAPTER 1

  On Monday, we watched the 1974 version of Gatsby. Robert Redford and Mia Farrow. All pastels and soft focus. The fact that the biggest best-looking actors get cast as Daisy and Gatsby is an example of everyone misreading the book. But Francis Ford Coppola wrote the screenplay, which is interesting, because, if you think about it, The Godfather II, which Coppola wrote and directed and which also came out in 1974, is all about the Italian immigrant experience around the time that Gatsby takes place, someone new to New York who becomes very wealthy in a criminal enterprise. Are they the same movie? Not the Al Pacino/Cuba brother-killing stuff but the Robert De Niro rise-to-infamy stuff. Is Gatsby an immigrant story? Some guy who comes to the country and sees it for what it is: a brutal form of capitalism that chews up and kills anyone not at the top. American capitalism is especially brutal in that it was built by slaves, financed by banks who financed slave owners, and its founding documents were written by slave owners who said everyone is equal. An immigrant would be the only person who would see this hypocrisy for what it is and realize that the laws only applied to poor people.

  So stop being poor as soon as possible.

  Also, I don’t know why I’m just noticing this for the first time, but Daisy and Tom have a kid. A little kid but a kid nonetheless. Shouldn’t people with kids maybe not act like fucking self-involved idiots? No wonder Daisy wants her daughter to be a fool. The only way to be an American is to be a fool. The only way to be a kid is to be a fool.

  “Hey, Yo-Yo Fag,” Mitch Macdougal hisses at me. “Why’re you sweating so badly?”

  “Sorry,” I said. And I don’t know why I said it or what I was apologizing for.

  CHAPTER 2

  I came home to a note Mom had left me in the mailbox. She apologized. She said that sometimes parents had to take a break. She said that she didn’t want me to ever think that she didn’t love me or that any of this was my fault.

  Why would I think it was my fault?

  Now I couldn’t help but think about how maybe this was all my fault.

  There was a knock on the door. Trevor the bartender stood there. Without his little sign and his half-tux, he was sad and gray-complexioned, like he was sick or something.

  “Is your dad home?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “When do you expect him?”

  “Shouldn’t Mr. Singh have paid you?”

  “I don’t care who pays me. I just haven’t been paid.” He wiped at his upper lip where a small amount of spittle had collected.

  “I’m pretty sure it’s not my dad’s fault you haven’t been paid.”

  “Listen, kid,” he said, and tried to push his way into the house. I quickly locked the screen door. And that small amount of machismo had exhausted him and he fell back as if I had kicked him in the nuts. “I don’t want any trouble here. Just tell your dad I came by.” He reached into his wallet and pulled out one of his business cards and tried to wedge it into the door but it kept falling down until it was a folded-up mess. He ended up putting it under the mat. “This is pretty important. I’m an independent vendor.”

  “Sure. Okay.” I closed the front door and locked it. Then I went through the house and locked all of the other doors before hiding in the front room. He didn’t leave. He stood there kind of deflated and then sat down on the porch swing.

  He was there for an hour.

  CHAPTER 3

  I started running around the block containing the grocery store across the street every night. It was quiet, almost no cars at all. Just the cold fluorescent tents of the parking lot. The air was cool and the leaves ticked and the cicadas argued endlessly as men unloaded semitrucks into the grocery store’s massive rear doors. The men sat on the loading dock and smoked. I’d run by and five minutes later I’d run by again.

  One night one of the grocery men waved me over. He was tall and heavy. His skin was nicked in a million different ways and his nose was a dollop of mangled flesh. He wiped his hands on his pants and grabbed me by the shoulders. He said, “Stop bouncing. Keep it low. You’re wasting too goddamn much energy going up. That energy should be pushing you forward.” He took his hands away from me and motioned for me to get back to it. The smell of mustard from his sandwich clung to him. “And get some real shoes for chrissake.”

  This was the most significant human interaction I had for about two weeks.

  CHAPTER 4

  Also . . .

  I never called Ottilie after the party. I figured her dad would be mad. I figured I couldn’t really be of much interest to her. There are kits, like model airplanes and cars, and their included instructions are frequently inscrutable, but you always have the picture on the box to go on. You know what you’re building because you see the image on the box.

  My parents’ marriage was over. I was a mess of parts on an unlabeled box. I didn’t know who I was or who I was supposed to be. I figured I was doing her a favor by staying away. I would only make a mess of their lives.

  Dad parked himself in the living room each day after work and watched TV. He wouldn’t eat unless I made him something. We ate a lot of spaghetti while watching whatever was on TV. He was silent. It was like living with a remote control, a lump of inert plastic that’d change channels whenever it wanted.

  CHAPTER 5

  Rheu
my-eyed Mr. Morris handed out a mimeographed sheet of the topics for the essays we had to write, due before Thanksgiving break. He had lost about thirty pounds since the beginning of the school year and one of those purple spots on his scalp had gotten huge and now looked like a birthmark the size of a Tic Tac container on his cheek. He told us it was the flu.

  Each essay must include quotes from two secondary sources. Essays must be formatted and proofread and free of grammatical and usage errors to receive full credit.

  1. Write a 750-word essay on the topic of tragic love and how it applies to Daisy and Gatsby. Feel free to use other examples from literature (Romeo & Juliet, Ethan Frome, etc.). You will receive a failing grade if you mention Madonna and Sean Penn or George Michael and Brooke Shields.

  2. Write a 750-word essay on the meaning of the green light that Gatsby stares at and how it relates to Gatsby’s own desire for wealth. Think about capitalism on this one.

  3. Write a 750-word essay on the meaning of the billboard of Dr. T. J. Eckleburg and its enormous eyes and its relationship to Christianity during the Jazz Age. Is Fitzgerald maybe positing that God is as dead to the Jazz Age as those eyes on that billboard?

  Mr. Morris deserved all the shitty essays he’d have to read.

  CHAPTER 6

  In my science class, we all had new workbooks about the history of the shuttle program. Mr. Reynolds was wearing his NASA hat and pin and was patrolling the aisles as we completed the activities.

  We calculated the thrust necessary to pull free of the Earth’s gravity and figured out how much we would weigh on the moon. There was a maze where we had to get a spaceman out on a spacewalk back to his ship.

  It wasn’t a walk at all of course. It was more like a swim in a substance that no one knew how to swim in. Your limbs totally awkward because of your space suit. Any little tear capable of destroying you. Any little push enough to send you somersaulting forever into space. The spaceman had a big smile on his face as he hung there in zero g. His giant space-suit arm held up in a wave.

  Thanksgiving was two weeks away and Christmas loomed large. I had no idea what it would look like. Who would attend? Where? And why?

  I had no idea how much shopping I needed to get done. Or if I needed to be writing a wish list. No one had asked me for one. My dad left me checks whenever I asked him for anything. I had new running shoes, a Walkman, and was totally outfitted in cold-weather gear, so I could keep running every night.

  If you became separated from your spaceship and were spinning and you knew you were going to die as soon as your air ran out, would it be possible to enjoy the view? Because you’d know you were the only human being to ever get to see all the things you were seeing. I wonder if you could calm down enough, give up the hope that you’d be rescued, give up the hope that you could do anything to change the outcome, and instead accept what was happening, know that you only had this many breaths, know that you could control nothing, and marvel at how incredible it was to be alive in space, hurtling not towards but through oblivion. If the worst had already happened, wouldn’t some great weight be lifted? Like you didn’t have to worry anymore, instead you could wonder at how your toes felt as they lost their warmth, at the very particular feeling of your lungs freezing.

  Mr. Reynolds wanted us to hurry so he could tell us again about almost becoming the first teacher sent up into space.

  The spaceman in my workbook hung there in space, waving at me, smiling.

  CHAPTER 7

  I think I might have given the impression that the results of that party, indeed my brief friendship with Gary Singh and failed courtship of Ottilie Regan, had been all that had occupied me during the entirety of the fall.

  I read a lot of comic books. I read a bunch of back issues of X-Men, nearly the entirety of the Dark Phoenix saga, where Jean Grey, Marvel Girl, gets cosmic powers and then becomes omnipotent and then evil and then dead, killed by her own teammates. But then she comes back to life, y’know, ’cause her name is Phoenix. And then in more recent issues Rachel Summers, Jean Grey’s daughter from an alternate future, shows up and raises all sorts of hell because she hadn’t known her mother in her timeline and here is her mother, walking around, oblivious to a daughter she never had. It was so fucked up. The daughter wanting connection and the mother unaware she was a mother.

  Maybe in another timeline, Mom and I had a different relationship.

  Dad and I went to see an encore screening of Back to the Future because we’d missed it during the summer. Dad spent the whole drive home railing against how love and capitalistic success were linked. Fix your parents’ marriage, get a new truck. He said that any movie in which the teleology of love is that people were made for each other was suspect, that marriage is much more than the courting but Hollywood can’t show you the other parts of marriage because it’s boring, hard work. Dad ranted all the way into the house about vows and fidelity and movies about marriage making it to be all about uxori-ousness. And I think he was still going when I closed my door and went to bed. It was hard to see a person use their whole vocabulary to distract themselves from their pain.

  In one day in November, I drank two suitcases of Dr Pepper.

  I developed and nurtured a crush on Jennifer (never Jenny) McComber, who sat beside me in study hall, and who smelled like Hubba Bubba. But then I heard she gave Randy Price a BJ on a field trip to the science museum.

  After detention one day, I wandered the empty halls of the school and dared myself to go into the girl’s bathroom. There was a vending machine for pads on one of the walls. I slid a nickel into it and took the little package home with me and hid it under my pillow. I felt perverted and it crept across my skull in spidery shivers and I blushed so hard that it hurt.

  The school passed a rule against torn jeans.

  Randy Colton and Tommy Williams came up with a game they could play after gym class, when we were supposed to be changing back into our regular clothes in the locker room. They’d wait until the majority of us were bent over, wrestling our jeans on, and Tommy Williams would jump on Randy’s back with his legs stuck out either side of him and Randy would spin down the narrow aisles scattering everyone. One time when he was trying to escape them, Bryce Palatini ended up tripping and splitting his head open on the concrete floor. There was blood everywhere. The locker room smelled like bleach for a week.

  The drama club did a performance of Free to Be You and Me that we all were required to attend. Raelynn Thompson got sick in the middle of it and vomited on the stage.

  Porky Boxwell ran a little black-market business of Now and Laters that I accidentally tattled on, making a mortal enemy of Porky Box-well. That meant Randy Colton, the giant, was now my enemy as well. But he was so big that it was easy to avoid him in the halls.

  I bought Run-D.M.C.’s King of Rock album, which was popular, which would’ve made my mom happy, if she wasn’t off living with Mr. Singh. It was good music to run to, though I had to keep my head very still so the headphones wouldn’t slide off.

  CHAPTER 8

  My paper on Gatsby:

  What Eyes Can’t See Even

  When They’re Looking Right At It:

  The Role of Looking in The Great Gatsby

  Eyes are an important part of The Great Gatsby. The way people see (and are seen) is an essential storytelling strategy that Fitzgerald employs. Fitzgerald lets us know that this is an important part of his book by including a billboard of lifeless eyes for an expired optometrist’s practice. This would seem like a clumsy attempt to create a symbol and some people have tried to make an absurd argument about the eyes of God and the theological moral deadness inside the book. But Fitzgerald is up to something way more interesting than a simple moral argument.

  There are two very important moments of Gatsby looking. One is his looking across the bay at the green light at the end of the Buchanan’s dock. This is an important moment because he is being observed by Nick Carraway without his knowledge. Gatsby just wants any kind of inti
macy with Daisy and if he has to settle on a light stuck on the end of a pier, well that’s a whole lot closer than he’s been since he last saw her in Louisville, Kentucky. The color of the light doesn’t matter here. It’s the ardency of his gaze. He’s been staring at Daisy since he first saw her, during the war, at Oxford, all while amassing his fortune. One could say he’s been staring at Daisy for so long from so far away that he doesn’t ever really see her in the present day. Right?

  The second time and even more important moment of Gatsby staring at Daisy is after the accident that kills Myrtle Wilson. Gatsby is waiting in the bushes for Daisy to come out and he’s staring at her house. He’s out there waiting for her to honor a promise that she won’t ever honor. The thing Gatsby doesn’t see is that Daisy is married and is a mother. He can’t even imagine the conversations being had in the Buchanan house. He doesn’t see her as anything but that girl from Louisville and this is his mistake. Gatsby has lived his life trying to assemble a future that would impress a woman from his past and he assumes she’s the same person from those days, stuck in amber waiting for him to be worthy of her.

  He can’t see across the bay, he can’t see through the walls of her house. His eyes are as dull and blind as the billboard of Dr. T. J. Eckleburg. And this is the biggest thing that Fitzgerald is saying, I think, that we can stare as much as we want to but we can’t stare our way into someone else’s marriage or into someone else’s life. Our eyes are the wrong organ to be using. Gatsby should be listening rather than staring. Daisy is a mom (a crappy one but a mom nonetheless). And since Gatsby doesn’t ask any questions about Daisy’s life he loses her because of this simple fact. The years have changed Daisy. Gatsby has used those years to make him someone who could impress the young woman in his past. As a result, he sees nothing and is left trying to stare across distances and through walls to make her someone she isn’t. And even though Tom is a horrible husband (like literally the worst husband ever), they’ve spent too many years together to just give up entirely. At least Tom sees her or has seen her through the years, there’s an intimacy to Tom’s looking, while Gatsby’s looking is too remote (across the years, across the bay), too distant to matter.