How I Learned to Hate in Ohio Read online

  “This guy bothering you, Little Psycho?”

  I turned around and there hovering over us with his close-set eyes burning holes into Gurbaksh was Randy Colton.

  “Go away, raghead. Don’t bother my friends.”

  Gurbaksh wiped his mouth and repeated, “Next time, say no.”

  Randy Colton punched Gurbaksh in the stomach.

  “The fuck he cares about what you say to anyone,” Randy said. “Fucking sandnigger.”

  Gurbaksh slung his backpack off and jumped at Randy, simultaneously a totally badass and dumbass move. He got in a couple of swings at Randy’s head before Randy picked him up and slammed him to the ground. And then did it again. And then stomped on Gurbaksh’s chest a couple of times. A crowd had formed around us. Chanting, “Fight! Fight! Fight!” basically begging for a teacher to break it up. Gurbaksh wrapped himself around Randy’s legs to stop him from stomping him. Randy lost his balance and crashed, his head bouncing off the hard ground. Gurbaksh climbed up onto Randy’s chest and punched him in the throat and the face. There was blood on the linoleum. Honest-to-God blood. Whose it was I had no idea.

  Coach Study Hall pushed through the crowd and wrestled Gurbaksh off of Randy, putting him in a sleeper hold and shaking him a couple of times like a dog does to a kitten it’s caught.

  The vice-principal blew his whistle several times and yelled, “Disperse, students. Disperse.” And everyone ran away.

  Randy stood up shakily. The back of his head was a gory mess. He reached behind and felt it then looked at his hand. Then he fainted.

  CHAPTER 13

  I started breathing again around lunch. It was then that I realized that I had not been punched, slapped, or made fun of at all up until then. In the lunch line, one of the cafeteria ladies asked me if I was Barry. She told me she was Randy Colton’s aunt Flossie and she gave me an extra slice of pizza. The pizza was rectangular and was shaped to fit the tray’s largest divided section, so the extra piece was placed chiastically on top of the other one. And she was so shocked to hear that I didn’t know about dipping my pizza in ranch dressing that she gave me four extra packets and then waved me through the line.

  Something very strange was going on. Randy was sent to the hospital. He’d cracked his head open badly when he fainted. And Gurbaksh was disappeared into the front office. I sat down at an empty table and pulled out the book that I picked up at the Quarter Price Books, the storefront of the remainder mill. The books there are shelter puppies waiting for the needle and I can’t go in there but for wanting to rescue them all. It was a copy of Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino, which was a weirdo book of Marco Polo bullshitting about different cities he saw in his travels like if Scheherazade made an almanac, but it was slow reading and didn’t weigh much so it was the perfect pleasure book for me. I see people with their Stephen King restaurant hamburger with all the fixings–sized paperbacks. Those books are dangerous. You could herniate a disc just picking one up and you flipped pages so quickly that you could accidentally start a fire. I liked this weirdo book. High school had made me feel like a remainder, some unpopular appendage which isn’t doing at all what was expected of it. Now selling at a loss.

  I was still in shock from the fight. I didn’t know what any of the last twenty-four hours augured for me. I ate both slices of the pizza and when I stood up I noticed that I had spilled some of the tomato sauce on my pants. But as I scraped at it with my fingernail, I realized that it was blood. I’d gotten flecked with blood. I didn’t jump in on the fight for either Randy or Gurbaksh. I didn’t even try to break it up. I thought I could stand by and not get involved. But my pants got involved regardless. I was marked complicit.

  Now I got to explain my stained pants to my dad.

  CHAPTER 14

  I was walking into my study hall at the end of the day before I realized that everyone in that room thought I’d wet myself the day before, a possibility that normally would have engulfed every one of my manic thoughts. But it didn’t matter anymore. Fuck them if they wanna think whatever dumb little things that filter through their bullshit and emerge in their rinky-dink backwater consciousness. Fuck the bruise on my sternum where coach had thrown the hall pass. I was now involved in a deeper violence. Fuck a hall pass. I walked in and while there was whispering and glances shot my way, there was no laughing and no pointing.

  At my desk there was a wrapped bundle and two notes. One note was written in impeccable cursive and it went: “Dear Barry, There was a mix-up yesterday and somehow I ended up with your shopping bag. It was not until I reached home that I realized my mistake. I unwrapped the package to see what it was. And after realizing that it wasn’t mine, I realized that I had accidentally taken your bag on mistake. Here is your Garfield doll. I rewrapped it myself. Hope there’s no hard feelings. Sincerely, Anonymouse”

  It was obviously a girl’s handwriting. Someone who took great pride in their cursive z’s. Why else include three variations on the word “realize.” Also they only misspelled one word and that was the signature, which seemed to say that the author decided against signing it until the end. Or maybe it was that they were trying to throw me off the scent by making an error because the person who wrote it never makes errors. Or it was written by a rodent seeking to conceal their identity.

  The second note was from Coach Study Hall. And while it didn’t apologize, it did excuse me from Saturday school on the basis that I had already learned my lesson. I was learning a lesson. A lesson of sex and violence. It turns out that when you see people doing something you can’t unsee, they’re more embarrassed than you are and the fact that you can’t unsee what you saw establishes your new power. There’s opportunity in being the person who’s in the wrong place at the wrong time. I’d seen Randy’s white ass and his blood within about fourteen hours.

  I was nearly halfway through my freshman year; 1986 was being rolled out to the launchpad, and I was caught in a war between Randy Colton and the tribe of Coltons who were the thread sewn through our town and my ex-friend (and maybe soon to be stepbrother) Gurbaksh. I wanted each of them to lose.

  CHAPTER 15

  Some of us are powerless not because we’re underdogs who’re being kept down and shuttled to the margins. No. Some of the powerless are powerless because we cannot be trusted with power. It’s like the universe preemptively strips us of power since all we’d ever do is cause others pain if we had any of it. Some of us are losers and not the loveable kind. Some of us have never lit a match without looking for someone nearby to burn.

  Everyone at school wants to talk to me, wants the direct poop on the fight. I want them all to fuck off and die.

  I find a note in my locker inviting me to a party at Randy’s family’s house on the next Saturday, like a post-Thanksgiving thing. I don’t know how it got into my locker. But there it is.

  I walk home, taking the long way around to avoid the train tracks. I’m in some kind of horrible funk. I don’t know why I’m thinking this stuff about underdogs and loneliness and burning. It’s like for most of my life I live in a submarine and sometimes it’s like I need to pop my head out of the hatch. I watch way too much TV. The VCR is killing me with all the movies—every movie available at my fingertips. I don’t know what it’s doing to my head. I think this will be the last generation raised on screens. We’ll hit a tipping point and people will turn away from the TV screen and actually talk to the person in the room.

  Granted there is no one here for me to talk to.

  Dad is off with his waitress friend. Mom might be on a trip, might just be shacked up down the road. No, I think with this generation what we are exploring is isolation. Everyone staring at TV screens together but being totally alone, learning how to deal with tedium, establishing outposts on the edges of loneliness. And the tide will swing and the pendulum will turn. The future is outdoors, naked and huddled on rock faces far from the storm. This is how we are preparing for life on the moon. Staring at TV screens like we’re staring at the inside o
f our visors. On the moon we would have to live in our space suits all the time, helmets on and sealed.

  I come home from school and I watch TV until it’s dark enough outside and I run. I’m the fucking Lewis and Clark of teenage angst. I am first on so many mountain peaks. There might have been people who’ve lived here before me but I am an American and I occupied my land like no one had ever previously held honest claim to it; my pubescence was radical and new, my future form indeterminate. My sweat is amniotic fluid as I forced myself to be reborn every mile on my weekday five-mile loop. I am original. I am alone.

  These are the thoughts of any moth in any cocoon ever. I am so fucking gizmo.

  CHAPTER 16

  The house was in Hayes Colony, a strip of duplexes surrounding an emptied swimming pool and bordered by the train tracks with four or five acres of woods on the other side. I’d never been in a duplex before. A house split in half vertically, with families on either side. The Colton family rented duplexes in serial, so even though each house had two families they were all the same family. The party was being held in three of the duplexes. There was a small fire out in the walkway built of scraps of two-by-fours, even though it was a fairly temperate late November night. Men in wifebeaters, men without shirts, men in Browns jerseys, men in those half shirts that Johnny Depp wore in A Nightmare on Elm Street milled about. The women were in oversized jerseys and sweats or tube tops and booty shorts depending on their age and body type. There was a steady stream of traffic between the different houses. Someone had crawled out onto one of the low roofs and put a boom box there, blasting out Black Sabbath, Rush, and Heart, a kind of sonic compote of late-70s guitar licks and drum solos. Everything I saw and heard made me want to run away.

  “Little Psycho!” Randy busted out of a screen door and jogged over to me. He still had a bandage on the back of his head and a black eye. “You showed up. I was convinced you’d pussy out.” He plopped his hand on my head and directed me over to the fire. “Let’s get you a beer and introduce you to people.”

  At the fire, an older man outfitted in a Camel Cash jacket was telling a joke. “There’s these three guys called into the draft board, right? They’re stripped down and each of the guys gets a bell tied to his dick. The first guy gets called up and the psychiatrist shows him a picture of a naked chick. The guy’s bell goes ding ding ding. The psychiatrist writes something down in his file and says, ‘Go on and sit on that bench there.’ Next guy gets called up, right? Same thing. Picture of a naked chick and his peter starts going ding ding ding. ‘Go on and sit over there on that bench.’ Third guy gets called up. Psychiatrist shows him the same picture of the naked chick.” The guy took a big swig of his beer. “Fucking silence. Not even a little ringing. Psychiatrist writes something down in his file and says, ‘All right. Go sit next to those other guys on the bench.’ And the guy’s bell goes ding ding ding ding ding.”

  “That’s my uncle John. Guy knows every joke ever. Uncle John. Uncle John. This here is Little Psycho.”

  “Hey, little man.” Uncle John was a bear of a man. He switched his cigarette from his right to his left to give me a meaty handshake. “How’s it hanging?”

  “Pretty good, I guess,” I said and immediately regretted it. How were you supposed to answer that dumb question?

  “Hey, you know why when the hotel caught on fire the fags were the first ones out?”

  “I don’t.”

  “Cause they had their shit packed the night before, man.” He laughed hard and told me to pull up a chair. “You hungry? I can get one of the girls to make you up a plate.”

  Randy put a cold beer against my neck and everyone laughed as I jumped.

  “You ever shoot a beer, Little Psycho?” Randy asked.

  “Sure,” I lied. “Plenty.”

  “Let’s do it then.”

  I started to open the beer and Randy clamped his hand down on mine. “No, man. First you’ve gotta make the hole in the bottom.”

  Randy took out a small knife and poked a hole near the bottom. Three of the other guys did the same. Randy handed me the knife and I struggled to pierce the can. “Here. Take mine.”

  He popped a hole in the can.

  “All right, on the count of three you’re going to put your mouth on the hole and open the can at the same time. Beer is just gonna slide down into you real quick. Ready?”

  The countdown happened and everyone ducked down and then rose up. I fumbled for a while to get the can open but once I did the beer choked me and forced its way down my throat. I drank maybe a third of the beer with the rest of it spewing down my shirt. I emerged coughing and gasping and laughing. And so did everyone else. We threw our cans into the fire and everyone high-fived one another. It was actually pretty great.

  People started to drift over to us, attracted by the clamor.

  “Why they call you Psycho, little man? Cause you must be some serial-killer shit as small as you are.”

  Randy answered for me. “This little dude tore up this guidance counselor bitch’s office on the second damn day of school.”

  The crowd laughed and someone shook my shoulder and roughed up my hair.

  “I was there in the office when it happened . . .”

  “Of course you were,” someone shouted.

  “Fuck you,” Randy shouted back. “I was there and all of a sudden there’s all this noise of glass breaking and shit. The principal, that dick of a vice-principal, and the little office ladies we all jumped up and opened the door and there’s Little Psycho sitting on the floor, papers everywhere, her pictures broken on the floor, looking cool as shit.” Randy laughed. “They basically had to carry him out of there. He got suspended before I could.”

  The crowd roared. The adulation combined with the beer was the best I’d felt in months.

  “Good on you, Psycho man. I don’t know why you’re still wasting your time at that school, Randy. You’re sixteen. You can leave, get you a real job.”

  “Maybe because we don’t need another Colton with only a ninth-grade education, John.”

  The crowd hushed. A woman with a paper plate of food in her hand came into the circle. “You know I hate you encouraging the boy’s devilishness, John. Just cause you’re a failure doesn’t mean you need to make sure my son follows your dumbass into poverty.”

  “I’m not a failure, you old cow,” John shot back. “And I’m not in poverty neither. I’ve got a steady job.”

  “You’re Honda poor. Making the same there that you made when you first got hired on. A salary that’s great when you’re eighteen isn’t a great salary when you’re forty-three. But you can’t do anything else, so that’s as good as it’s gonna get for you.”

  “I take care of my responsibilities. I’ve got a boat. I travel. What the hell else do you want out of life?”

  “Travel? Going to Indianapolis for the race isn’t travel. You’re barely leaving the state. You’ve got no vision.” She was stabbing her cigarette at him as she spoke, its cherry sparking and tracing through the night. “You tell your stupid jokes and get wasted every weekend. Forgive me for wanting more from my boy.”

  She flicked her cigarette into the fire and stormed off. The crowd around the fire went dead silent. If it weren’t for the AC/DC song blaring about Big Balls, you’d think we were praying.

  Randy’s mom slammed the screen door shut and it released us from something. People went ooooooooo like the sound studio audience’s make when characters kiss.

  I loved her like someone would love the idea of a new opposable limb. A mother’s love like that seemed impossible. All fury and devotion.

  John slapped me on the shoulder, “Don’t mind her. Randy’s mom runs hot nowadays. Women’s troubles.” He took a long pull from his beer and crushed it. “What do you call a fag with broken teeth?”

  CHAPTER 17

  Mr. Morris died a week before winter break. It was AIDS. Those purple spots on his face turned out to be something called Kaposi’s sarcoma. He’d been ou
t for a few days last week but we all just figured he was trying to grade our essays even though all the teachers told us it was pneumonia.

  The day after we found out, I was leaving band in the old half of the building and there was a clutch of students standing in front of the corpus callosum stairway. They were talking about him with the uncomfortable, awkward motions of grief of people who’d never had to express such emotions before. They were mourning not only the death of a teacher no one really liked but also the fact that they had met an honest-to-God gay person and hadn’t sniffed him out.

  “He seemed so regular, right?” Kevin Lawson asked. “Like he wasn’t all gay-acting or anything.”

  Everyone nodded solemnly. He wasn’t all gay-acting. Whatever that meant.

  Roxanne Nolan, the kiss-ass clarinetist, said, “He deserved it. You make those kinds of decisions, do that kind of behavior, you deserve what you get.”

  I wanted to shove her down the marble stairway.

  CHAPTER 18

  Winter break finally came. School released me to my own devices. But I just didn’t have a lot of devices. Dad had bought a lot of dumb gadgets but gadgets aren’t the devices the phrase means. I didn’t have a lot of things to occupy my time, seeing as how I was free of friends, responsibilities, family.

  The college had a film series (like an intro to film class), and they held it at the theater in town so anyone could go. If you came late you could usually miss the lecture. Tonight was Citizen Kane, which was supposed to be the best movie ever made. The theater was a quarter full when I showed up having run from home. It started snowing as I was running. The big fluffy silver-dollar-snowflake kind of snow. It was cold but not that cold and running gets me so hot I figured I’d be OK. It was also only two, two and a half miles. I got a small Dr Pepper to go with the two Whatchamacallits I had in my backpack. I found a seat towards the back and promptly fell asleep.