How I Learned to Hate in Ohio Read online

  1) No National Geographics (I’m not sure if this was a rule or just a reaction. I’d always heard about Nat Geo being the place to find pix of naked women, but the only time I actually found a naked woman—after months of scouring through picture spreads on Iceland’s glaciers, emperor penguins, the white squirrels of western North Carolina, the architecture of African anthills, and pages and pages of lava flowing—she was in a spread about a famine in Ethiopia. I jerked off to her emaciated nakedness in the library’s bathroom—single occupancy, sturdy lock—and felt so awful that I didn’t masturbate for two weeks.)

  2) No masturbating on holidays. I did it once on Christmas and felt so guilty that I overcompensated in my thank-you notes.

  Dearest Aunt Becky, Thank you from the bottom of my heart for the ten dollar check you sent to me. It’s a gift that I will treasure and will make sure to put in a savings account so that I can spend it wisely later on in my future.

  3) No redheads. I don’t know why. They just gross me out. All doughy and freckles.

  I hugged the laundry and humped it upstairs, then cleared the living room of old plates and glasses, scrubbed and flushed the toilet, and put the classical music station on the hi-fi. I was elbow-deep in dishwater when Mr. Singh knocked on the door. This is the first truth of hosting people: you make your house look like you don’t live in it.

  Mr. Singh opened the door before either Dad or I could get to it.

  “Knock knock,” he shouted into the house. “We have arrived.”

  His voice was deep. That was my first impression. Way deeper than any man I’d ever heard before. Like Darth Vader deep.

  I toweled off my hands, ducked into the living room, and there was Dad shaking the hand of a man who was over six feet tall and that was before his turban. He was a solid guy, with a barrel chest and a potbelly, wearing a navy polo shirt tucked into his khakis. He was wearing penny loafers without socks. His salt-and-pepper beard was neatly trimmed and his nose was sharp. He was impeccably put together. My dad on the other hand was five-nine in an untucked flannel shirt, sweatpants, and gym socks. Unshaved. My dad was incapable of growing a beard, a talent he promised would be mine as well, so when he didn’t shave, little patches of peach-fuzz stubble grew in random places. It was just one of the parts of his face that refused to become an adult. He still had acne every once in a while for God’s sake.

  After all the pleasantries were passed around, after I shook Mr. Singh’s large hand and pulled away nearly crippled from his grasp, Mr. Singh snapped his fingers at Gary and he handed over two plastic bags drooping from his left hand to Mr. Singh, who presented them to my father. In them were two two-liters of Coke and Sprite and a six-pack of Budweiser.

  “And your wife? Where is she this evening?” Mr. Singh asked.

  “Out of the country, unfortunately.”

  “Some sort of vacation she’s taking?”

  “Work,” my dad said and fluttered both of his hands in front of him to show how useless it was to keep track of a woman like his wife. “She’s a motel scout. Identifies and develops properties.”

  “She sounds fascinating,” Mr. Singh stated. “Does she use your last name? On these business trips?”

  Gurbaksh buried his head in his hands.

  My dad was bewildered and blinked away his confusion. “No. She uses her maiden name. We’re both what you would call feminists, I guess.”

  My dad shrugged his shoulders. Again a gesture in the “who could tell with a woman like that” phylum.

  “And she works for Marriott, you say?”

  “I didn’t but yes. Columbus’s airport is pretty great as a hub and she can be anywhere in the world in about two or three days.”

  “I knew a woman who worked for Marriott, once,” Mr. Singh said. “Anyway, we ordered the pizza before we left, it should be arriving any minute now,” Mr. Singh announced. His voice was amazing. It made everyone shrink away from him a little. The sheer manliness of it would have been bullying all on its own, but it was accompanied by a tone of condescending apology, as if to say, “I’m sorry for being so much more of a man than any of you are, but that’s the way it goes. I’m larger and more virile and if Darwin held any sway in human affairs your genes would be washed out of the pool, but lucky we’re all more civilized than that, eh?”

  “It’s already here,” my dad said. “Arrived a couple of minutes ago.”

  “I am so sorry. Please let me reimburse you,” Mr. Singh pleaded, pulling his wallet from his pocket and opening it. “Ah, no cash. I’ll get my checkbook from the car.”

  My dad waved his hands in front of himself in an oddly girlish gesture, one I’d never seen him do before. “No. It’s fine. It’s nice to meet you. Please come in.”

  Mr. Singh and my dad got the two clean plates and Gary and I used paper towels. The pizza boxes flapped open on the dining room table and Mr. Singh sat down at the head of the table.

  “I’m sorry for the mess,” my dad said. He gestured to the mound of books and files and loose sheets of paper nearly moldering at the other end of the table.

  “No, no,” Mr. Singh admonished. “It’s a lovely house you have here.”

  “Just wish I could keep it from being consumed by papers.”

  “You’re an academic.” Mr. Singh laughed. “You don’t have time for order or any of that small-minded nonsense. Too many big ideas exploding all the time, eh?” He put his fingers at his temple and made them pop away from his head.

  My dad sucked his fingers clean after pulling several slices onto his plate. “Something like that,” he said. “My son tells me you’re a lawyer.”

  I snorted and Gary kicked me under the table.

  Mr. Singh shot a glance at his son and then explained that he was a mechanical engineer. “I’m working at Bettle Brothers currently, helping them with their operations.”

  “I walk by their building every morning and have no idea what they do,” Dad said.

  “Well, not much goes on in that building. What the Bettle Brothers do is containers. Large plastic or cardboard drums. But here’s where they are brilliant. They make nothing on site. They contract with companies and build mini-factories right next to their factories, producing what the company needs when they need it. No shipping costs, no warehousing, no extras sitting around doing nothing. It is quite brilliant. Terrifically exciting to work with such an innovative company.”

  Mr. Singh’s Indian accent was buried underneath all the Britishness of his English. His posture was perfect and he leaned towards the person he talked to, like he was a hawk pausing before he snatched up a mouse.

  “The contracting company recoups the startup cost within three years and it’s all savings and convenience for them from then on to eternity.”

  “Sounds great,” Dad said. “You’ve got me sold.”

  Mr. Singh laughed. “Maybe we will set up a fabrication plant here on your lawn. Package your ideas, your articles, your philosophies.”

  “Yes,” Dad said, laughing as well. “I could use some philosophy boxes.”

  “We would need containers for the big ideas as well as the wee ones.” Mr. Singh opened another beer and sipped the foam off, some of it nestling in his mustache.

  “All that’s left is the delivery mechanism,” Dad said, opening another beer as well. He was one ahead of Mr. Singh. When he drank his posture got worse. He was always a sloucher but alcohol made his shoulders tip forward far enough so his chest was a bowl, looking like he’d just been punched in the solar plexus.

  “Well, we could employ birds to deliver any thoughts you have on the environment.” Mr. Singh slapped his knee at his own joke.

  “And moles,” Gary said. “Y’know, for his deep ideas.”

  Everyone laughed at this. The table was suddenly tense with everyone trying to think up another method, another joke. Angels for his eschatological thoughts? “Do Not Open: Alive/Dead Cat Inside” stickers for his Schrodinger’s boxes? Leather strops for his line of Occam’s razor
s? Special felt-bottom shoes for his mirror stages? Return to Sender stamps for the Socratic method? My mind wheeled with jokes, but I didn’t say any of them. Mr. Singh was still laughing, even after everyone else had stopped. It was like he was having a fit.

  Gary put his hand on his Mr. Singh’s shoulder. “Dad? You okay?”

  Little tears squirted out of the corners of his eyes. “It’s so funny. I am sorry. It’s just that the joke here is that you really produce absolutely nothing. Wait. Wait.” Mr. Singh gulped at his beer. “We could use balloons for all the hot air you spew out.”

  “Hey,” my dad said. “Hey.”

  “You have this beautiful house and you make nothing, you create nothing, you don’t even have your own ideas.” Mr. Singh was laughing so hard he was having a hard time breathing. “You make a living off of the ideas of others.”

  “I’m sorry,” Gary said. “He shouldn’t drink. He’s got no tolerance for it.”

  “Oh, be quiet,” Mr. Singh said. “We’re all having fun here. I’m merely pointing out, for the record, that our host, our dear, dear host, is useless. His wife is the breadwinner and he’s the nanny taking care of that one, the Yo-Yo Fag, is it? The troublemaker.” He jabbed a finger in my direction. “His philosophy? It’s like a little hobby for him.”

  My father’s face was ashen. His lips quivered, there were too many things he wanted to say—there was a logjam at his mouth. His life’s work had been sucker punched.

  “I think it’s time you left,” I said.

  “C’mon. I’m the soberest one here,” Mr. Singh said, after regaining a modicum of composure. He stood up. Gary did as well and shadowed his old man. “You can take a joke. He can take a joke.” He patted my dad on his head. “It’s all in fun. Just taking the piss out of your old man.”

  “Please leave,” I said.

  Gary grabbed his dad’s hand and led him around the table. Mr. Singh shook him off. There was a family picture on the north wall. Mom, Dad, and me. Sears studio. Fake library screen behind us. Mr. Singh gazed at it for a minute. He reached out to touch the picture but his hand just hovered there, finger nearly grazing my mom’s face. He shook his head.

  “C’mon, Gurbaksh,” he yelled. He got to the door of the dining room. “I’m sorry if you thought I was being rude. Sorry if you took offense. I was just playing, eh?” He then performed an elaborate curtsy, picking up his shirt’s tails like they were his skirt. No one laughed. “In Budweiser Veritas,” he muttered, then giggled. He walked outside, leaving the door wide open.

  “I’m really sorry about this. He had a couple of beers before we left. He was nervous about meeting you and your dad,” Gary said to me. There was humiliation on his face, but there was also fatigue. This wasn’t the first time his dad had done this. “I’m sorry, Dr. Nadler. My dad’s kind of a jackass.”

  My dad sat there silent. His mouth still doing that quivering logjam thing.

  “I’ll see you on Monday,” Gary said. He hugged me then followed his dad, closing the door gently behind him.

  I cleaned up the pizza boxes. Put the remaining slices into ziplocks and into the fridge. I crushed the beer cans. Washed the glasses. Stuffed the two-liters into the garbage. At some point my father disappeared into his office. I didn’t see him the rest of the night.

  I went outside and watched the stars for a while. My heart was racing. I know I should’ve been worried about my dad but another thing had occurred to me: I hadn’t been hugged by someone my own age since kindergarten.

  I actually had a friend.

  CHAPTER 14

  The weekend dribbled out of my fingers and suddenly I was waiting for the bus again. People called me “Yo-Yo Fag” as they got on the bus, but it seemed like there was a little bit of deference in their voices.

  At school, on the shiny spot on my locker where I’d cleaned the drawing off, was this:

  By this time, I was on a first-name basis with the janitor. His name for real was Tiny. It had probably started out as a nickname that he’d accepted with hope that acceptance would lessen its sting. It was written on his sewn-on badge in cursive. He had a set of keys to a door that led downstairs, into which he’d go and come back with the steel bucket, gloves, steel wool, and spray cleaner.

  “Don’t let that splash back into your eyes,” he said, poking at the bottle. He could’ve been anywhere from forty-five to seventy. He was under five feet but seemed like he had extra skin, and only lacked the willpower to grow into it. He looked like Jimmy Durante—sad, beat up, worn down, giant nose, in the bottle. He shuffled when he walked, which led one to notice how his jumpsuit pants were cuffed several times over to accommodate his stature. He stuttered when he talked. He stuttered and he shuffled and he worked at a high school. The poor son of a bitch.

  I wanted to get away from him as soon as possible.

  My wrist hurt from scrubbing my locker. The central patch of it shone brighter than ever. Probably even more than when it was first installed. I think I’d gotten down to the unfinished steel of it.

  There were rumors that the room down the stairs where Tiny got his cleaning products from led to a network of tunnels built during the Underground Railroad days. People at my school believed that the Underground Railroad was literally beneath the earth, which might be the grandest act of imagination they ever committed. The tunnel myth persisted maybe because Tiny kind of looked like a mole person, someone always blinking in the bright lights of the aboveground world. And maybe when people see a shuffler, a stumbler, a guy with a big nose pushing a broom and cleaning up teenagers’ puke, the natural reaction I think is to imagine via the negative capability what realm he rules in his off time. Off the clock, down the stairs, out of his jumpsuit, was Tiny, lord of the mole people, ruler of all that happens underneath Rutherford, Ohio?

  Or maybe he had a pretty good marriage that ended too quickly.

  I knocked on his door to return the cleaning products. He was sitting on a bucket, smoking a cigarette, underlining stuff in a Reader’s Digest. He nodded at the bare space near his feet.

  CHAPTER 15

  Ohio history was a mandatory class for all freshmen. It was pretty much all about the locks on the Erie Canal, the Pro Football Hall of Fame, Branch Rickey, and Rutherford B. Hayes. It was unlikely that even in February we’d talk about Paul Dunbar. It’d be a special kind of pleasure to watch Mr. Tyler, the Junior High School Wrestling and Assistant Football Coach, read and parse out “We Wear the Mask.”

  He had wavy black hair and giant glasses, which made his brown eyes look cowish. His skin was the color of whatever comes out of zits when you squeeze them. He wore white polo shirts tucked into slacks of the three male colors: dark blue, gray, and black. Mr. Tyler liked to lean back in his chair with his hands behind his head and talk about his truck, all the modifications he’d done to it. We were supposed to memorize all of the eighty-eight counties in Ohio by the end of the term. He had used the same test for twelve years. He still had the paddle he made for the now-illegal spankings. It sat on the chalkboard. Six inches wide with a series of holes drilled in it to make it whistle through the air when he spanked someone who’d broken one of his rules. The real insult was the handle wrapped in the cushion tape used on tennis rackets; beating you wouldn’t hurt his hands.

  He told us at the beginning of the quarter to feel free to call him “Coach.” No one took him up on it. In a small town, in a small district, you know so much about a teacher before you ever have him. Mr. Tyler was a lifelong bachelor. Thirty-five or -six, he’d talk about his dating life in class. He had a famous story about a time when a woman he was dating for a long time, three months or so—divorced woman, three kids—asked him if he had ever smoked “Mary Jane,” and then he’d tell us that was slang for marijuana. They were at dinner and he walked out on her without saying a word. He left her at the restaurant to get her own ride home, to pay the bill. He told this story to his classes. He wanted us to know how righteous he was. How anti-drug he was. He bragged a
bout how the woman kept calling and how he had to call the phone company to block her number. He also let his classes know in a whisper that there might have been an anonymous phone call or two to the police as well as to Child Protective Services, tipping them off to a drug user in their area.

  It was the only class that Gary and I had together. Word was Mr. Tyler had led the opposition to the corporal punishment ban and gave some impassioned speeches to the school board. He told them that they were cutting off a teacher’s arm and replacing it with a pile of detention slips. This was the guy who didn’t talk about Cincinnati’s role in the Underground Railroad, didn’t talk about Dayton’s crazy position as the Paris of Ohio, and brushed over the fact that Marietta was the first capital of Ohio. Nothing mattered other than memorizing the counties and writing a three-page essay on the importance of the Erie Canal.

  That day we were coloring the different counties different colors. We each had a partial set of colored pencils and there was constantly a line at the pencil sharpener because the things broke so easily. I was coloring mine according to the metaphysical exports each county produces. Ottawa County I shaded brown and then erased it and colored it white to represent its existential irony as a place named after the people whose land was stolen, same with Erie, Miami, and Delaware counties. Lucas County, home of Toledo, was the color of an abscess. And Cuyahoga County, home of Cleveland, was green—(poor Cleveland doesn’t know if it wants to secede from Ohio or if Ohio wants to secede from it). Akron was rust, the color of the belt that’s strangling it. For Dayton I tried to find a color in all of the crappy ancient cast-off colors that represented how Dayton is the prettiest girl at a pretty hideous ball—poor Dayton, which has produced more culture than the rest of the state combined but everyone thinks is just race riots and tires. Gallia County, poor Gallia county, whose name means “France” in Latin, was colored burnt umber since that color sounds classy. Ashtabula, I put four red dots to represent the dead at Kent State. I left Rutherford blank.