How I Learned to Hate in Ohio Read online

My brain was going nuts, but I thought she might’ve been asking if I was gay. Like because somebody had written it on my locker it made it true. This was absolutely the worst way to be called a faggot—some awful $10,000 Pyramid method of just saying clue-words and not the thing itself. I wanted to jump at her, claw her glasses right off her stupid cocker spaniel face.

  After a few portentous moments during which she gave me her full condescending “you can talk to me” moist eyeballs, Mrs. Gildea leaned back. “Your English teacher, Mr. Morris, has shared with me an essay of yours.”

  She pulled out a piece of paper. It was a mimeographed copy of the essay I’d written in class the other day. I knew what essay it was. We’d only written one. “There’s some pretty violent stuff in there. A man beating a dog and then the dog licking the man’s neck? Why does the dog lick the man’s neck do you think?”

  “It’s just what happened. It was on the bus ride to school yesterday.” Was I being accused of something here? I thought it was a good essay. “You can ask anyone on the bus. The bus lady went out and challenged the guy. She’ll tell you it really happened.”

  “It’s not about what happened or not,” Mrs. Gildea said. “It’s that you chose to write about it. That’s what concerns me.”

  “But it happened. So I wrote about it.”

  “You seem, in this essay, to be really concerned for the dog.”

  “He was punching her.”

  “So why does the dog lick the man’s neck?”

  “You’d have to ask her,” I said, and because I couldn’t stop myself I added, “Do you speak dog?”

  Mrs. Gildea spun sideways in her chair away from me. “This doesn’t need to be confrontational, Barry.”

  “What does it need to be?” I felt my throat get tight and my voice was squeaking a little. But this was not going all right. This was unfair. My chest was collapsing on itself. What was going on with my chest? “This is bullshit,” I said and regretted it immediately.

  Mrs. Gildea folded her notebook and capped her pen. She gave me a look. I’d crossed a line. My lungs were trying to switch places with each other in my chest. My head was a confetti parade.

  My brain was rushing so fast the rest of the world had become syrup. The room was full of data and it was all trying to bum-rush my head. The tags on the folders, the words on the files. My brain was too full and more was clamoring to get in (the paint-loaded molding, the freckles on the drop ceiling, Mrs. Gildea had a gold tooth!—left side, right before her molar). I stood up and my chair banged off the back wall. Glass broke. Larry Bird fell to the floor.

  “You tell people to write whatever they want but it works like the Stasi here.” I knew I was in trouble but I kept going. Once you break a school employee’s stuff and tell her that she’s the Stasi you might as well go full feral.

  I grabbed the filing cabinet but it was too heavy, so I shook it hard until I exhausted myself. All the files on top of the cabinet slid off and splayed open on the floor. I put my back against the file cabinet and slid down the gray metal of the thing and sat on the floor. There was broken glass, papers. I still couldn’t breathe. I wanted to puke but my stomach and mouth didn’t seem to be connected anymore.

  The door to her office slammed open. The principal, the vice-principal, and Randy Colton all stood there.

  I wished I could make myself pass out. Make them have to carry me wherever they wanted me to go. I was done being the one who had to move my body where they wanted it to go.

  Randy hooted and clapped as I was led from the office to the nurse’s.

  CHAPTER 9

  The car ride home was silent. I went to my room when we got home. So did my father. At 11:00 p.m., I took a bath and read a book by Harriet Jacobs, who escaped slavery and then lived in an attic where she couldn’t sit or stand up but she could watch her children through peepholes in the wood. I thought of my mom and immediately was ashamed for comparing my mom living in hotel rooms and peeping at me through postcards to what Harriet Jacobs went through. Sometimes reading is about helping to connect yourself to your own emotions; most of the time, though, it was about how small and little your life was in comparison to what other people lived through.

  I ate a sleeve of graham crackers, then went to bed.

  On my pillow was a note from my dad. The school called. I’d been suspended for three days. I was supposed to seek counseling and present evidence of that search before I was to come back. Dad wrote that he’d get someone at the university to sign off on the forms without me needing to meet with anyone. I’d had two days of high school and now I was suspended for three. Some kind of record.

  CHAPTER 10

  The next day, I woke up late. Dad took me to breakfast at the restaurant in the grocery store across the street. He was a regular. He had a booth that was his, according to the waitress who sat us.

  “I know you want coffee,” she said to my father. “What are you gonna want to drink this morning, Mister Man?”

  “I’ll have coffee too.” I looked at my dad to see if he’d object. He didn’t. I wished he would’ve. I’d much rather have had a Dr Pepper.

  The waitress left a menu for me but not for Dad. His footprint was large at the restaurant in the grocery store. My dad had brought the newspaper. It sat folded up on the table. Both of us tried to act like we didn’t want to be reading it.

  Our coffees came, along with a cold little dish containing a pyramid of creamers. My dad grabbed one but didn’t put it in his coffee. I took one as well. The little pyramid collapsed. I poured my creamer into my coffee. It made a swirl of clouds in the blackness. I stared at the clouds and grabbed another creamer and poured it in. It was a game between my father and me. Who would talk first? I could maybe make it through the breakfast by just watching the khaki clouds settle in my cup.

  The waitress came back. “What’s the meaning of life today, Professor?”

  “Today it’s two eggs over medium, bacon extra crisp, and whole wheat toast.” Dad looked at me. “What do you want?”

  “Pancakes,” I said. “And bacon.”

  “You want that short or tall stack?”

  I didn’t know what she was saying. Did they stack the bacon? Like part of the curing process? Was short like raw? I didn’t want raw bacon. Who would serve raw bacon? Isn’t that a recipe for trichinosis? The tension began in my chest. It started pushing the air out of me. I couldn’t order breakfast. That’s how dumb I was.

  “He’ll have the tall stack,” my dad said, rescuing me. “He’s a growing boy.”

  “It comes with eggs. How do you want them?”

  Jesus Christ, how many questions were there?

  “Maybe fried,” I said. “But not so that they’re gooey in the middle?” The thought of yolks bursting and creeping down my plate suddenly made me nauseous.

  “Over medium,” my dad said.

  “And toast: white, rye, whole wheat, or biscuit?”

  I hated her.

  “He’ll take a biscuit.”

  “Good choice. They’re real fresh today. I’ll throw in one for you too, Professor.” The waitress took the menu and gave my dad a wink.

  “How’s the softball team, Stacey?” my dad asked.

  “We’re good,” she replied. “Better than we have any right to be, at least.”

  “Your humility is your strong suit,” my dad said. It was amazing watching him talk with her. He did it so easily. More easily than he ever did with me. It was like spending all day walking on the street with a frog and then getting to a pond and seeing it swim for the first time. All that awkward architecture of its body being put to perfect use. How did this recluse at home have charisma for a waitress?

  “You need refills on coffee, you just wave me down, okay?”

  My dad looked at the paper. Something that happened yesterday in the world caught his attention and he pulled the paper next to his coffee.

  After a few minutes of reading, he asked, “Who is the second person Raskolnikov kills i
n Crime and Punishment?”

  “Lizaveta, the pawnbroker’s half sister.”

  “You’re fourteen.” My dad pulled at his collar and adjusted his glasses. “You should not know that by heart.”

  “I’m precocious,” I said.

  “I’m going to start paying more attention to what you’re reading. I think you’re getting too maudlin too fast.”

  I nodded as if this were a welcome thing, knowing he’d never follow through on it.

  My pancakes came. They were revolting. As I ate them all I could do was imagine vomiting them up later. The smell of maple syrup and butter mixed with stomach acids. How could you not remember Lizaveta? I tore my biscuit and stabbed it into the egg yolk because it seemed like the most disgusting thing to do.

  “When is Mom coming home?” I asked.

  My dad took off his glasses. I tried to read the state of their marriage in the way he rubbed his eyes before he answered my question. “Her project has been held up. She’ll be another two weeks at least.”

  “She’s still in Seoul?”

  “Morocco.” My dad put his glasses back on and unfolded the paper. He handed me the Arts section. “She got called to Morocco. Should be home in two weeks if all goes well.”

  Dad and I read the paper for the rest of breakfast. I read the comics. I tried as hard as I could to be amused by drunk Andy Capp beating his wife or by the obese cat or by Beetle Bailey, the soldier who wanted nothing to do with being in the army but was stuck in it no matter how much he disobeyed.

  This reading was so much more inappropriate than Dostoyevsky.

  CHAPTER 11

  I was outside in our driveway. I’d bought a case of Scot-Lad soda, an off-brand array of knockoffs of popular sodas at pennies a can. I was tossing them up and hitting them with a bat. They smashed whether or not I made contact, spraying sugar-water everywhere when they landed on the asphalt. It was a big goddamn day for the ants.

  “Yo-Yo Fag!”

  I flinched.

  There was a squeal of brakes and someone yelling that name again.

  Gurbaksh yelled right by my ear, “You naughty naughty boy.”

  “You heard?” I asked.

  “Randy Colton saw the whole thing and told everybody.”

  “I’m fucked, Gurbaksh.”

  “It’s Gary,” he said. “They call me Gary here.”

  “Of course they do.”

  “It’s either that or listen to the toothless yokels mangle my name. Like how we call Deutschland ‘Germany.’ ”

  “I’ve never understood that.” I pitched another Scot-Lad to myself and missed it. It landed and spun at my feet. “Like shouldn’t we just call things by the names the people who live there call them? Is it really so hard?”

  “I’ve looked this up because I get renamed so many times. The word is exonym for the things other people call it and an endonym for what the people themselves call it.”

  “Damn. It’s fucked up that there’s words for that.”

  Gurbaksh shrugged a what-are-you-gonna-do shrug then he smiled wide. “Yes. Gary and Yo-Yo Fag,” he announced and then whispered, “their real names altered to protect the stupids.”

  “Gary and Barry sounds better,” I said. Gurbaksh didn’t hear me. He picked up one of the sodas and opened it. He took a swig, made a face, and then set it back down. “So does everyone think I’m crazy?”

  “Yes,” he shouted. “Like crazy badass, like crazy unpredictable, like crazy cool. People want us to come to their parties. Like junior and senior parties. People are a little afraid of you.”

  “That’s stupid,” I said.

  “That’s high school. Meggie Morrison asked me if we were coming to her party on Saturday.”

  “Is she the one who looks like a turtle?” I could just picture her in my mind. Frosted lip gloss. Curly hair. Ghostly eyes. Sweaters.

  “A sexy turtle,” Gary crowed. “A turtle who let me feel her up after school yesterday.”

  “You’ve been busy.”

  “I’m living off your legend.” Gary put his arm around my neck and kissed my cheek. “I’m the remoras to your shark.”

  “I think I’m grounded for a while.”

  “That reminds me, can we come over to dinner sometime? My dad wants to meet your dad.”

  “Why?”

  “Who knows? Some old Punjabi nonsense. I told him about you and your mom and your dad and he got all excited to meet you all.”

  “My dad’s kind of weird is all.”

  Gary put his hands on either side of his turban and adjusted it. “And my dad’s a lunatic. It’ll be fun. Is there good pizza in this town?”

  “DelCo.”

  “The beer drive-thru?”

  “They make good pizza,” I said. “Greasy, but good.” This is a fact of Rutherford, Ohio’s cuisine: it’s actually so bad it’s amazing. When you strip yourself of judgement and expectations, lose the platonic ideal of “Pizza” haunting your brain, DelCo pizza is a revelation. Pair it with a Scot-Lad soda, and you’d have a kind of feast that activated vestigial taste buds, ones ghettoized by civilization and progress and sanitation, and the pure pleasure of the non-food would overwhelm you. It’s the same kind of pleasure that comes in County Fair food—Dumbo ears, chili corn dogs, cotton candy, oversized pretzels slick with oil and covered in hail-sized chunks of salt, nachos in flimsy plastic trays with compartments overflowing with too-yellow cheese sauce and chili, flavored ice with syrup so violent it’d stain your shirt for good.

  “Can we say Thursday?” Gary asked.

  “It’s that urgent?”

  “My dad likes to know my best friend’s parents.” Gary smiled and imitated an Indian accent. “He wants to make sure I am surrounded with the best of influences.”

  “Sure,” I said, stunned that I had a best friend.

  Gary started talking about all the other parties we’d been invited to and the girls who’d been asking about me and the ones he wanted to feel up next. Feeling up seemed to be Gary’s peak sexual experience.

  “I’ll have to ask my dad,” I said.

  Gary nodded. “It’ll be cool. We’ll bring everything. Seven o’clock. But my dad’s always late so seven thirty. Your mom’s not around is she?”

  I shook my head. “Morocco.”

  “Just the boys then.” Gary put his arm around me and hugged me close. “Oh, Yo-Yo Fag, this is going to be great.”

  CHAPTER 12

  Out of type, my dad said okay to Gurbaksh and his dad coming over. On my second day of suspension, I listened to the classic rock radio station until my head ached. I hated classic rock but I figured it would be part of my punishment, a Deep Purple penitence. I showered then rode my bike to the library. I tried to track down something on Sikhism. They didn’t have a book just on Sikhism (they had to interlibrary loan that for me). They did have an Encyclopedia of World Religions I could look at but not check out. There were four paragraphs on Sikhism and an inset picture of the Golden Temple.

  It was incredible. Even better than the postcard my mom had sent. The sun flickered off the filigreed bits. It was gold folded onto gold onto gold. And it was all sitting on a pond. The sun caught the pond and parts of the pond were gold too. It was like the building was so beautiful that it levitated. There were people walking around the temple, people in the water. A religion of gold, of beauty, of swimming. I tried to memorize the five paragraphs, the new words clapped away in my head: words I had no idea how to pronounce, words that kept falling to pieces in my head.

  I carefully tore the picture out of the book. I wadded it up and put it in my mouth. It was thick, expensive paper. I didn’t want to chew it. I slid the encyclopedia back on the shelf. I got outside, unlocked my bike, and the Golden Temple disintegrated in my mouth as I rode home.

  CHAPTER 13

  The pizza arrived before the Singhs did. Dad glared at me as he opened his wallet and shoved bills at the delivery boy.

  “The house is a mess,” he said and s
lammed the door. “Go do what you can to make it presentable.”

  “It’s fine. They’re bachelors too.”

  Dad gave me a look that let me know the cleaning up was more about punishment then presentation.

  I pulled the laundry I’d been folding off of the couch, trying to keep the stacks of Dad’s stuff and mine tidy in the basket while I heaved everything else on top. I’m the laundry guy in the house. I was twelve when I was elected to that position by a vote of two to one. Folding your parents’ underwear is a hell of a way to go through puberty. You run the Oedipal gamut in a medium-sized load: the guilty erections handling Mom’s delicates, the histrionic repulsion at Dad’s skid marks. Adolescence is not for amateurs.

  I had such limited access to pornography that the women’s and teen’s underwear sections of the Sears catalog qualified. I didn’t keep them under my mattress. Movies had told me that was a cliché. And clichés were where moms will snoop. For Christmas when I was eleven I was given a miniature briefcase with a plastic infrastructure to hold and categorize cassette tapes. My mom had told someone that I was into music. My mom bought me the music she thought the popular kids in my school listened to: the Human League, Phil Collins, Bruce fucking Springsteen. The case was cheap and probably not even new when it was wrapped and sent to me. It was covered in light brown plastic leather and not even good plastic leather. I used a serrated kitchen knife and sawed the plastic inner casing out and put the best pages from the catalogs and magazines in there. It was my little box of sin. I felt like a perv whenever I opened it. Sometimes there’d be naked women in the movies Dad took me to and I’d hide my boner in the elastic of my pants until I’d get home and then rush to the closet, pull out my briefcase and jerk off. The briefcase made it professional-like, a final transaction to finish out the day.

  To wake up to. To come home from school to do. To stop mowing the lawn to do.

  I never masturbated twice in a row. I wanted to save that for my first time. This is how I dealt with feeling I was addicted to jerking off—I made rules.