Segments of Flight [Tobi].

from '100,000 Years in Detention'

Tobi should never have had a crush on me. I met her when I was 13 and she was everything I should’ve wanted in a girl, and only some of what I did want. We lived in Hawaii then, on Maui. I heard she had a crush on me, that cliché junior high school recurrence, and I went to speak with her. She leaned against a wall of large bricks painted peach and wore a Boy Scouts of America oxford shirt over a black tank top and straight olive drab slacks. I asked her out and she acquiesced. Her head nodded slowly downwards as she did so.

Once we visited my house and my parents didn’t want to meet her. They were too tired from work, or the house was a mess, or they just weren’t prone to seeing people outside of the family; I don’t remember. We sat downstairs beneath our back deck, under the grill and the patio furniture, looking out at the ocean guarded by fields of high dead grass and tumbleweed-like entanglements of plant life in withering exile. A tree where the Satanists met was ornamented with the skulls of small animals, and beyond that a strip mall of convenience stores and tourist traps stood as the final barricade between the dead things and the beach. There was also a twenty-foot wall of dug-up rock we were forbidden to climb down but did anyway. We took it all in, or imagined what we couldn’t see.

I met her another day in the next neighborhood over from mine while she was on her paper route. She was the first person I knew who owned a moped, and we talked for awhile before she had to press on. The late afternoon sun waned and she offered me a ride back to my house. I hopped on the back and held on for dear life.

Later, I would meet her father, who confronted me fiercely. His thick moustache moved behind an equally thick finger he had pointed in my face. He told me his other two daughters were all grown up now, and Tobi was the only girl he had left. He told me if I did anything to hurt her, we’d have problems. He left it at that.

I broke up with Tobi after we dated for a month. She never should have liked me; she was far too interesting and independent and care-free to wind up with a guy like me. I met her in the field between my neighborhood and that of her paper route and I told her we shouldn’t date anymore. We walked opposite ways home and I turned back to look at her. She looked defeated, walking home pounding her feet into the grass with her head down. But my lasting memory of her is careening down the highway on her moped, as she took deep turns and dodged cars like in the movies, myself scared unimaginably, unable to watch the road with my head buried against her back and my eyes shut tight, smelling her clean vintage floral-print shirt, holding on for dear life, my hands wrapped around her perfect waist, heading home.

Segments of Flight [Kayla].

from '100,000 Years in Detention'

When I started college in New York I didn’t know anybody. I met Kayla my first or second day on campus and just loved her immediately. I needed a phone to talk to my ex-girlfriend Melissa, so the day I met Kayla she gave me an extra one from her room that had a Care Bears sticker or three on it. She was a great friend every day and had a tattoo of some lyrics by A Perfect Circle on her lower back, and she hated this ex-boyfriend of hers who I think cheated on her with another girl, just before all three of them arrived at the same New York university.

This other girl, in the three months I knew her, spent a session of our Honors English course laughing in contempt at the professor; invited me to her dorm to look at pictures of her wearing only masking tape; and fell asleep on my bed for 10 hours in the middle of me helping her write her term paper.

Kayla was all smiles, though. She had a shaved head, save for her green bangs and a bit of fuzz on the rest of her head.

“It’s called a Chelsea,” she told me one day, at lunch, her metal fork poking and prodding some lukewarm starch in a tiny bowl.

“Why?”

“Chelsea was a French prostitute who sold her hair to a wigmaker. He shaved it all except her bangs, and she wore a kerchief around her head so all you could see was what was left, like this.” She demonstrated with a pride that matched the tone in her voice, and it looked like she had a full head of hair.

“See, the men wouldn’t sleep with a bald woman, so she had to make it look like she had a full head of hair. She made a fortune…well, as much as you could, I guess.”

The harder I try to remember our first days in college, the more exaggerated and cartoonish my image of her becomes; by now in my mind she wears multiple rings per finger and an impossible rainbow of colors in her hair.

I helped her get over her ex-boyfriend and she helped me deal with trying to understand and please Melissa. My relationship with Melissa was rocky at best; I felt under her thumb and in my place more often than not. Kayla and I spent a lot of late nights together full of hugs and junk food and personal chatter. As soon as I bought the game Silent Hill 2, I called Kayla up to come play with me. We played for half an hour and turned it off; we were so scared that we’re still traumatized by – and addicted to – Silent Hill games to this day.

Melissa lived upstate from our school and decided one night not to come down to go to dinner with me. Instead she stayed at home and went to the movies with her friends. Kayla walked into the cafeteria at lunch after leaving a class early and found me with my head on the table, the brisk autumn winds outside still chilling my hands after my meal.

“What’s wrong?”

“Melissa’s ditching me today.

“It’s our anniversary.”

“Jonny, I’m sorry.”

She put a hand on mine – somehow it was warm, impossibly warm – and the blood rushed to my head.

“You know what we can do?” she said.

“What?”

“We can go out on a date,” she said.

“I can’t. I’ve got Melissa and – “

“I’m not talking about anything like that; just…get ready and meet me at 8.”

I couldn’t say no. The rest of the day I was a sight – I thought at a million miles an hour, my palms sweat, my throat ran dry, and I tried to keep myself focused on things like monogamy and Jerry Springer to stay virtuously sound.

I met Kayla at her dorm at 8. She wore a mini t-shirt and a plaid miniskirt with knee-high black leather boots that were swarmed with straps and buckles and zippers and eyelets. She had dyed her Chelsea a brilliant blue-purple. We had dinner together, held hands all night, saw a movie, and talked about everything: comics, heavy metal, exes, family – everything. That night I knew for the first time what it was like to share a life with a beautiful, wonderful girl who respected me for who I was – and who I wasn’t. It was like a momentary epiphany, being healthy two days between sicknesses, a segment of flight in an otherwise grounded matriculation. I wiped tears from my eyes many times.

“What’s wrong?”

“Allergies,” I lied.

When I was walking her home, Colin, my bassist at the time, ran into us and I asked him to accompany us the rest of the way back to her dorm. Frankly, I didn’t know if I could keep my moral compass pointed North without Colin and what I assumed was the threat of reporting an infidelity or discretion of my relationship to Melissa.

Kayla’s door shut gently and I leaned back against it from the outside and sighed deeply. I shut my eyes and and she danced behind my lids, a 5’9” pillar of leather and buckles, of fearlessness and individuality, and I knew deep in my heart that she was just on the other side of that door, her back leaned against it, hesitating.

And I went home.

One Hundred Thousand Years in Detention.

from '100,000 Years in Detention'

So what about penance? Does repeating so many Hail Marys cleanse my soul of sin and guilt? And what’s the scale of Hail Marys? I always wanted to know if priests had a cheat sheet on that side of the confession booth. “Uh, that’s five for taking the Lord’s name in vain, do another fifteen – no, twenty for smoking the joint, and…what? You killed a kid? Hmm…make it a half-million and we’ll call it a day, alright?”

If you die before you get to say all your Hail Marys, I imagine they add on the time it would take you to say them, multiply it by some number and that’s the time one spends in Purgatory. Ironically, the only description I ever received of Purgatory growing up was that it sounded a lot like church: it was cold and dark and large, and was neither like Heaven nor Hell, and there you sat and worked off your sins for your lifetime surrounded by people you didn’t know, with whom you couldn’t really carry on a very good conversation anyway even if you wanted to do so.

In college, we didn’t have Hail Marys; we had drinking games. We drank from boredom, from anxiety, for fun, for the flavor of liquor; we drank to forget our old sins or to help us chase new ones with less guilt. But mostly it was the boredom. One drinking game is called “Never Have I Ever.” Your circle of drunks, one at a time, will say things they’ve never done in their lives, and then, upon the honor system, anyone who has done that thing will have to take a drink of their drink. When you have a small group of close, honest friends playing, it can be a funny way to relive memories. “Never have I ever woken up at 3 a.m. and pissed in the trash can because I thought it was the toilet,” one will say, and everyone will laugh and watch the only guilty party, whose story they’ve heard a thousand times before, tug at his container of whiskey and Coke.

Or, if you know someone’s done something they’re a little reluctant to admit, but you’ve done it too and it’s too silly not to mention, you can sacrifice yourself a mouthful and get both of you. “Never have I ever gotten drunk in the dorms and tried kicking in people’s doors like they do on cop shows.”

And then I and my old roommate would, inevitably, take a swig.

More often than not, however, when surrounded by your garden variety of people you ran into or generally dislike, Never Have I Ever quickly becomes a pissing contest of degradation and one-up-manship. At some point, the laughter dies and instead of taking bird sips for fear of getting tipsy, the gamers are suddenly chugging stronger drinks to get through this question to the next where they might not, pray to God, be so embarrassed.

“Never Have I Ever begged a guy not to dump me.”

And a few girls will turn away and drink, nonchalantly, and to try to save the night, I turn my questions to silly things from childhood.

Never have I ever stayed after school to clean the chalkboards or clap the erasers together.

And a few people will laugh and drink, maybe, and I’ll stare at my glass and trace my thumb around its lip.

Never have I ever written any sentence repeatedly on a chalkboard after school while the other children played in the playground and frolicked in the dirt.

And a few other people will drink, and a bead of condensation will run like August sweat down my glass and dampen my leg.

Never have I ever been to detention.

And I drink. Twice.

I’ve only been to detention once, at least if you mean “detention” in the after-school, writing an essay on what I’ve done wrong and what I learned from my experience, Breakfast Club sense.

A girlfriend and I had gotten to school one morning on Maui and decided we just couldn’t go through it that day. It was the only time she and I ever ditched school together. We decided our morning would be better spent hoofing it to the mall, which was only about a half-mile off school grounds, and getting McDonald’s for breakfast.

The Northwest corner of campus had a large soccer field with a banyan tree at its tip, big enough you could hide ten kids behind it and never see them from the other side. Security had golf carts on which they drove around on 40-second patrols, so when one of them drove Southeast behind one of the main buildings, you had about a half-minute to dart from the building just past them to the Banyan tree and hide behind it, peek around for the next security guard to do the same and race across the street and along the road out of sight. From there it was a straight shot North to the highway, and a block west to the mall.

We were on the street adjacent to the Banyan tree when we saw them coming for us. We ran along the side of the nearest house to the backyard and hopped over the brick fence behind the house to the next street down, in another house’s backyard.

Looking back southwest, listening for the golf cart, panting and gulping air, neither of us bothered to look into the backyard in which we sat. We waited, and waited some more, until we heard the golf cart roll past and on into infinity. Assuming we’d lost security, we turned to walk through the yard to the street, where we planned to walk north to the highway and make up our vault east on safer grounds, further from school.

Then we saw the Doberman, asleep in his house.

Never Have I Ever done something this inadvertently solipsistic, I could imagine myself saying.

And then I’d have to take a drink.

We grabbed each other, then, and stared in silence at the sleeping beast. She covered my mouth with a warm, sweaty hand and I shielded my arm across her collarbone and held her by the far shoulder, my other hand tightly gripping her knee as if she were actually considering moving.

Weeks passed. Maybe months. Finally, security rolled up in a golf cart and the morbidly obese woman in the dirty navy blue polo and white khakis nodded us towards her cart. “Let’s go.”

We were so happy to see her we laughed the whole way back to the administrators’ offices. They tossed referral forms and detention sentences at us like they were practicing Frisbee skills. Then I realized I’d met the administrator’s son, Chris, the week before, and I thought my only chance out of facing the firing squad was to butter him up. The feeblest “How’s Chris?” came out of my mouth, and he grunted a “Fine” without breaking stride on my referral.

We walked back to class, defeated. It was 2^nd period by now, and our Honors English group was just beginning a long, arduous discussion of Romeo & Juliet.

“Ho, Misty Jonny; where you been?” the teacher asked.

“Well, I’ll tell you where we weren’t, and that was at McDonald’s eating breakfast.”

I got to detention at my appointed time and prepared for my Hail Marys. My friend never showed up. Of course this was public school, so rather than strip off my shirt and whip myself along the back with a cat-o-nine-tails I sat in a desk in a 95 degree portable classroom and wrote a letter about the importance of attending classes and paying attention.

The strangest thing was being surrounded by kids who beat the shit out of me. They’d backhand one another gently on the shoulder and point at me. Maybe we were wrong about him, their eyes said. Maybe he’s cool enough we should leave him alone, if he’s here. Man, I wouldn’t have thrown that lunch tray at him if I knew he was cool enough to do something to get him detention.

At the end, the teacher stuck with corralling us all made us sign our names, testament that we’d served our time and were ready to rejoin society. He knew some of them by name and dismissed them with a fond “See you next week!” or “How many weeks left for that fire alarm you pulled?” I felt like I’d truly crawled through the trenches and vowed never to go to detention again.

The year after, my friend and I were talking about ditching school and we relayed the story with the Doberman to our friends. I talked about detention.

“Yeah, I never went to that.”

“I noticed. It was really fucking boring in there.”

“I wonder why they never said anything to me about it?”

I looked down at my shoes, then.

“…because I signed your name on the attendance sheet.”

“Oh,” she said, and resumed talking to one of the boys who’d been in detention with me.

Never Have I Ever done something stupid for a girl with whom I had no chance, I’d say.

And then I’d have to take a drink.

* * *

But if we were drinking for going to detention, Maui would only get me one small tug at my cup, out of the two I owe it. The other is a larger drink.

We moved to Atlanta in fall of 1999. I started my junior year of high school and had a teacher who taught some generic mixture of politics, economics and U.S. history. Sometimes she got bored of teaching and took our 45 minutes to tell us about taking men on pity dates so they’d help her hook up her new TV.

I wanted to go see an old punk hero give a speech an hour from my home and she told me I could do a presentation on it when I got back for extra credit. I came back to class the next day and talked about what he’d said regarding the WTO and its role in reversing the Clean Air Act, how Tipper Gore was to thank for the Parental Advisory stickers on CD’s, and so on. Everyone laughed along with my jokes and said they learned a lot, including my teacher.

At her request I made her a tape of a couple old punk bands and told her to take it with a grain of salt, as it was all sarcastic satire and had some graphic material in it. She also asked about my hobbies and I mentioned my ‘zine and my ex’s artwork for it, including a sketch of a baby resting in its mother’s womb, which I showed her and she asked if she could keep a copy because she liked it so much.

Then just before Christmas I got mugged outside my house. I was terrified, of course, but after the fact I was just angry. I wanted to feel safe in my neighborhood again and I never did, among other things. So I went back to school the first day of spring semester, late January maybe, and sat in the cafeteria at 6 a.m., tired and pissed off. It was the only area of campus they let us wait in before school started, and since I was the first person to get picked up by my bus at 5:15am and dropped off at school at 6 so the bus could go make its 2^nd run before school started at 7, I often found myself with plenty of nap time in the mornings – on the bus, in the cafeteria, and frequently through Algebra II. So I sat at a cold table and laid my head down on my elbow and shut my eyes and drifted off.

“YOU are going to Hell!”

Imagine the sleepiest you’ve ever been. Let’s say you work until after midnight on a project for work and commute an hour home to fall asleep and be back at the office by 5 the next morning. Then you worked 16 hours and had to dig your car out of the snow on the way back home. The way you’d feel when you got home that night, that level of sleepy, is how most of us felt doing homework until 11 p.m. and getting up at 4:30 for school, and we were not morning people.

“YOU are going to Hell!”

So when someone woke me up with Fire-and-Brimstone condemnation in his best John Madden-meets-Billy Graham voice as I was that tired, I was less than friendly.

“YOU, the Jew man, the Muslim, the Atheist who denies God before His only begotten son. YOU, the sinner, the whore, YOU are going to Hell and only by accepting Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior will you be spared from the fire!”

Then someone yelled out “Shut the Hell up!” and I was amazed that it wasn’t me. I just wanted to go back to sleep, but I found myself creeping slowly up the cafeteria to where some clean-shaven, middle-upper class fresh haircut hiding behind an oversized N.I.V. Bible – which actually made it look like the Bible was wearing a toupee for a minute – was very sincerely damning us all to Hell. I saw my friend Greg, who would be a bouncer if he were an asshole, and poked him in the shoulder.

“What in the name of sweet merciful Christ is going on?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Kid just started up a few minutes ago.”

“Why isn’t anyone standing up for themselves?”

Greg pointed to a campus security officer standing behind the fresh haircut. Any time someone would speak up or approach the lad, security would reach for their nightsticks and charge a couple steps towards the person.

“I don’t think this is right,” Greg said. “He’s really offending a lot of kids who aren’t Christians, and some who are.”

“Yeah.”

“Not to mention this is a public school, so by the security guard endorsing this kid they’re violating a separation of church and state.”

“Yeah.”

“And I can’t get any sleep with this going on either.”

“Yeah.”

We listened to the kid talk until the first bell rang, at which point I approached him in my best “I’m not going to kick your ass” stance.

“Hi.”

“Hey there brother; you enjoy the sermon today?”

“Yeah, no, it was good; I just was a little afraid some people would be offended, y’know…when you told us all we were going to Hell.”

By now he was packing up his bag and preparing to leave. “Well if they were right with Jesus they wouldn’t have that problem.”

“Okay, and I know it’s none of my business, but it looked like a couple of those kids kinda wanted to fight you – “

“Who, like you mean the homosexuals?”

“Um…And God knows I don’t want to fight anyone. I’m not a fight starting kinda guy; I just think maybe if we could all respect one another’s lives this won’t, y’know…escalate.”

Then he touched me. He laid his warm hand on my shoulder and gripped it firmly.

“Don’t you worry buddy; the good Lord is on my side so I have nothing to fear.”

He went to class.

And the next day he was back. And he had an apostle.

His girlfriend, doe-eyed and only as high as his shoulder, sporting a promise ring and a lavender turtleneck, with tight jeans and Eskimo boots, shadowed his every footstep, wringing her hands together and nodding emphatically. Occasionally she would shout “It’s in The Book, y’all!”

And I still couldn’t get any sleep, and so my famous kind streak began to thin.

On the third day, I approached the boy again, but this time didn’t wait for him to finish his sermon. Of course I was a day late for interruptions, as there was now a second boy with another Bible commenting loudly upon our cafeteria regarding its pathetic lives and eventual suffering at the hands of Lucifer. Talking over the second lad to speak with the first was nearly impossible, but I felt like making the effort. I waited until the security guard went away.

“Look, bud, this is getting obnoxious.”

“…the flames, y’all, the flames!”

“You two have got to stop. You’re clearly not converting anyone to your point of view and all you’re serving to do is piss people off. I’m asking you kindly…”

“God does not love a homosexual! God does not condone the smoking of marijuana!”

In the background, “It’s in The Book, y’all!”

“…to leave everyone alone and let us sit in here in peace. If you want us to respect your religious views, which I know I and my friends are willing to do, maybe you should consider doing the same.”

And then there was a hand on my chest, not from the boy with whom I spoke but from a fourth young man – not brave enough to speak on his own, but with enough moxie to push me back from the preachers and tell me if I were obstructing The Message I should go wait outside in the snow for school to start.

“Get your hand off me; I’m not talking to you.”

Greg came up behind me and grabbed the boy by the wrist and twisted it, and removed it forcibly. “Fuck. Off.”

In the following weeks, things only escalated. I was a bit of a busybody then, and was concerned about the eventual Crusades that would launch. It’s hard enough to nap on a cold, hard lunch table with no pillow or blankets, let alone in the middle of a battlefield.

Efforts were made by those around me to counter-balance the environment. Greg and our friend Ashley brought the Satanic Verses in and were removed from the cafeteria by security. My friend Jimmy found a life-size portrait of Jar-Jar Binks and had about 20 kids chanting his name before they were dispersed. Another girl had mentioned her excitement about finally being able to have the platform to discuss her religion with us and the next day she wasn’t at school. Fearing for her safety and others, I went to speak with the vice principal, Wes Jackson, and addressed my concerns to him as well as any 16-year-old can do to an adult, including how it may look if the school were to appear to be endorsing one particular theology.

“I don’t care how it looks; they can say whatever they want as long as it’s the right religion.”

“I’m sorry?”

“All this other crap that you kids have been trying with your devil and your Star Wars and your what-not is disruptive and I won’t have it in my school.”

“But telling a hundred kids they’re going to Hell and should be ashamed of themselves for having different opinions than you isn’t?”

“No sir.”

“What about first amendment rights? Freedom of – and from – religion?”

“That don’t matter in school, son.” Then he began poking at his desk with his index finger. “This school is not going to the heathens like that Columbine did. We caught a girl getting off the bus this morning bringing some damn Wiccan book in here; we suspended her for the rest of the week. She can’t get up and tell kids to start worshipping whatever the Hell those witches worship, dancin’ around naked and doing God knows what.”

“So these kids who are going to start the riot, they get Freedom of Speech and anyone who isn’t with them doesn’t?”

“That’s right.”

I couldn’t make this up. All I had left to say in the conversation came from rhetoric and spite. “So listen, Wes…”

“You call me Mr. Jackson, son, I’m a man.”

“Right. So Wes, what if the Jewish, Muslim, Hindi and Atheist kids don’t feel like being persecuted in the cafeteria anymore? What do you think they’re going to do?”

“They can go outside and wait in the cold if they don’t wanna hear it.”

“Should they have to?”

“I don’t see why not.”

By the time I left I was so angry and bewildered I had a panic attack. But I couldn’t leave it alone either. The ACLU and local news stations wouldn’t return my calls or e-mails, and I’m not sure they should have anyway.

I was taping up 8.5 x 11 signs in the halls that said “JC 4 VP” and “He died for your vote!” when I realized I was starting to hate who I was becoming. I considered tearing them all down, but the rest of the student body beat me to it.

The bus rides in the morning felt longer and longer. It was 45 minutes from my doorstep to the front of the school. Knowing that I was fighting an uphill battle made the mornings stretch to a grey infinity. My CD player kept me company on those bus rides. The fourth Nine Inch Nails album, The Fragile, had come out four months prior and I listened to it often. They catalogued each of their albums as a “Halo,” which I think is a play on how much value people are able to place on music and the shape of the disc may have contributed.

By February, my mugging bruises were all but gone and the cafeteria was near total upheaval. There were three or four kids holding large construction board neon signs with passages from the Bible on them, and every day the two preachers and their girlfriends got up and pointed their fingers and flaunted their power, and every day the winter weather looked a little more welcoming outside.

“Nobody can stop the message of the Lord! Even the evildoers, like him,” they said with a finger pointed at me, “who want the chaos and the devil to rise, God and Jesus shut him down.”

Their congregation of a dozen seated teenagers applauded and cursed my name. Then the one speaking walked up to me and asked, “Son, is this where you wanna be when Jesus comes?”

“No. I’d rather be in Miami.”

Miami, evidently, is not the answer they sought. With half the school officials watching, I found myself surrounded by overpriced polo shirts and hair gel. I was shoved back and forth by angry zealots until, against my earlier wishes, a dozen or so friends of mine got into the fray and started prying hands off me and shoving back. It was this horrible sea of pale hands and black clothes interlocking, violently, with spray-on tan hands and half the Aeropostale catalog. Quickly they managed to forget about me and I was pushed out of the way and onto the floor.

Security guards rushed to separate the ruckus, which was almost 30 strong. I was at the feet of Wes Jackson, and I looked up at him and shrugged. It occurred to me then and there that at some point, this was going to happen at another school, and it would be on the news because it was going to resolve itself more violently. Then investigations would be launched, and I wanted more than my word to say it had happened at my school too.

So the next morning, I brought my video camera. I wore a suit and tie to school that day, and under my suit I wore a spiked bracelet on my left arm. The day of the riot, a kid in a class later on had asked me what a spiked bracelet was and I told him I’d bring it and show him.

I got to the cafeteria, raised the viewfinder to my face and pressed record.

Just as quickly, Wes ripped it from my hands and told me to go to his office. He kept my camera and I asked to use the bathroom first. He reluctantly agreed, provided I had a security escort, and I excused myself to a stall.

Spiked bracelets are not allowed in school and, knowing they’d search my person, I threw it in my bag and dug it into the bottom to avoid further punishment. I figured I could get away with the CD player too, as the only mentions of portable electronics in the student handbook detailed not listening to music in class and not using cameras on campus for any purposes that weren’t directly related to an extracurricular activity.

When I got to Wes’s office, he and another security officer were waiting for me. This, for posterity, is the last place on Earth anyone wants to be, for educational authority, like the law, bends and curves from case to case. Anyone who’s ever gotten out of one speeding ticket and paid another will tell you that. I felt a burning in my stomach, which had just been diagnosed as a peptic ulcer the summer before, and Wes gestured for me to sit.

It was very quiet.

“Now son, we’re gonna ask you to empty your bag – legally we can’t search it ourselves – but if you refuse we can have the police come and do it.”

I cursed myself for not leaving my spiked bracelet on my wrist as I started emptying my bag. I took out my CD player and I plead my case for it and Wes popped it open and read aloud.

“N…I…N. The Fragile. Halo Fourteen – what the Hell is that, some kinda Satanic reference?”

“No sir.”

I tried to keep emptying my bag, slowly, dreading the spiked bracelet, until the security guy, Officer Jim, decided he was bored. “Oh, to Hell with this,” he said and pried open my bag and started digging through it. Wes sat back and chuckled.

And out came my textbooks – History, AP English, Algebra II, Economics and Spanish. Then came my notebooks for each. “Damn, boy, how much you got in your bag?”

“About 40 pounds.”

The more of my little 6:15 – 2:30 life sat on Wes’s desk, the littler I felt. Pens, pencils, a protractor, one of those $90 calculators, a journal for writing ideas, my lunch and a hackysack all came out. Then, at last, it happened.

“What in the fuck is this?!”

My heart leapt into my chest as the spiked bracelet came out. It had pyramid-shaped studs and three metal eagle’s talons on it and Wes and Jim pored over it as though it were the Holy Grail.

They called my father at work and told him to come pick me up from school. He’s the nicest guy on Earth, my dad, and he’s never raised a hand to his kids, but I remember having this feeling he was just gonna beat me to death with his bare hands right then and there in the office.

“Why would you think that?” someone asked me once. “Your dad’s a sweetheart.”

“He had to leave work…and come get me. From the vice principal’s office. I mean, come on…”

In front of Wes, though, it was a “show no fear” scenario. I held my tongue as best I could as he danced all over my corpse. We waited for dad to come get me. 20 minutes turned into 30, then 45, then an hour had passed. Then he came in and my breath began to shallow. They told him I was being suspended for about a week and a half for the contraband in my bag, and for the video camera. They read their cheat sheets on the other side of the desk. “He’ll do three days out of school for the video camera…”

“Okay…”

“…two for the CD player…”

“Okay…”

“…and another two for the spiked bracelet.”

They told him I could get my homework from friends or wait until I came back the following Friday to get it all and make it up.

“Okay…so I have a question, Wes.”

“Mr. Jackson.”

“Right. My concern, Wes, is whether this matter will be closed after this suspension.”

“Yes it will.”

“No detentions, no problems completing his classes and so on?”

“None at all. Just have him come back to classes next week Friday and no sooner.”

We got in the car and I looked down at my shoes. It was still dark out. Dad put it in reverse and pulled out of the parking lot and I buried my face in my hands and burst into hysterical tears. I tried explaining myself but all that came out were choking sobs and thick spit.

He slapped his hand on my back a few times and rubbed it around with vigor. “Thaaaaaaaaaaaat’s alright.”

The rest of the car ride was silent as I tried to regain my composure, save one point at which I looked over and saw him shaking his head, recoiling from his visit to the office.

“Fuckin’ assholes.”

* * *

I felt just a little guilty about how much I enjoyed my week at home. I sat around and watched cartoons, got online, downloaded music – Napster was in its glory days, then – and cleaned the house to keep out of the fire. I called my teachers during office hours and explained what had happened and asked them for my homework. Most of my teachers were on my side of the argument, though.

“They suspended you? For wha – oh that’s bullshit. What were you making, let’s see…87 average? Ok, we’ll just keep you at that and see you when you get back.”

I think I collected a few worksheets of Spanish homework and was told to write a brief essay on some Hemingway piece. All in all I got a 10-day vacation for the penance of about four hours’ homework and a mark on my permanent record.

One afternoon the doorbell rang. I opened it in my underwear, half a sandwich in one hand, and signed for a letter from the Department of Education. I opened it and read that I was being summoned to a judicial hearing in front of a panel of members of the Board of Education to determine whether or not I’d be expelled from school and I had the duration of the week to gather evidence and character witnesses to support my case.

For a minute I thought, I’ll just hide it. I’ll burn the letter or bury it in the backyard and mom and dad will never know. I can ride my bike or get a ride to the hearing and I’ll just do my best. They never have to know.

Slowly I began to realize the inevitability of breaking the news to my parents. There may be legal documents for them to sign, or as a minor I may forfeit my case without parents or legal guardians around.

Again I found myself waiting impatiently for my father to beat me to death with his bare hands.

The following several days were incredibly taxing on our family. We pored over legal books, looked up case histories on the internet and picked through my student handbook with a fine-tooth comb. It was around the third day of research my father found the loophole.

“Wait a second,” he said, and proceeded to read aloud from the student handbook. “’Any student caught wearing a spiked or studded bracelet will be asked – that’s asked, not told – to place said bracelet in his or her backpack for the remainder of the school day.’ That’s bullshit.”

“But grammatically beautiful,” I interjected.

“The point is, if the spiked bracelet were already in your backpack, they have nothing to say to you. You complied with their rules and, therefore, the case should be dropped.”

After making a few calls to try and adjourn the jury, dad was told that the danger lay within my ability to strap the taloned spiked bracelet around my hand and use it as a set of brass knuckles.

The charge against which I stood was Possession of a Lethal Weapon with Intent to Assault – the same charge they’d give some psychotic who brought an Uzi to school and told some kids he’d planned on gunning them down.

By this point I’d already subpoenaed two teachers to step in on my behalf as character witnesses – Ashleigh Winters, last semester’s Economics teacher who encouraged my punk rock presentation; and Daniel Reinect, my World History teacher. I hated to legally demand their presence at any date or time, as they’d both been incredibly kind to me, but as I had no other contact with them, it had to be done and I simply hoped they’d understand.

The morning of the hearing came. I wore a suit and tie – the same suit and tie of the day of my suspension – and spent an extra ten minutes apiece cleaning my hair, teeth, skin and face, this last of which was plagued with acne.

We rode the car a half hour to a little ugly yellow brick building on a little snowed-in street in the middle of who fucking cares. We gathered, nervous as virgins, into an impersonal hall with white tile floors, white brick, white faux-wood at the receptionist’s counter, where we waited for my fate to be set before us.

A woman explained the process to us.

“Now jonny, this is not a trial, do you understand? It may seem like one at times, but this is not a courtroom and you’re not a criminal.”

“Is there a jury?”

“No; it’s a panel of objective members of the Department of Education selected to determine whether or not you’ll be allowed back in school.”

“How will they decide?”

“After hearing your case, they’ll withdraw to a private room to examine the evidence and witnesses’ testimony and make a verdict.”

“That sounds like a jury.”

“Well, it’s not.”

“Do they say ‘guilty’ or ‘not guilty’?”

“Yes, but it’s not a trial.”

I had more questions, but my name was called and my parents and I walked into a small room. More white brick was on the walls, but the carpet was a dark grey with red and beige flecks about it. Déjà vu set in and Wes Jackson was there and guided us, quietly and shamefully, to our respective chairs.

The hearing was laid out in six parts: the introduction, the description of wrongdoings by the guilty party, the witnesses’ testimonies, the deliberation and the verdict.

We introduced ourselves and our places in the scenario. I was jonny, the Defendant. After their introductions my parents might as well have been wearing an albatross on each of their necks. Somewhere, deep inside me, an anger started to brew.

The panel of D.O.E. members described my crimes like a focus group analyzing a new script, much like my time watching Officer Jim empty my bag. Systematically and without privacy my life was laid out on the line.

Ashleigh Winters was called into the room. Finally, I thought, a voice of reason. She would light the beacon of hope. And so she sat, with a piece of paper clutched between her eagle’s talons, and began to speak.

“I have a statement I’d like to read,” she said.

Dad’s face said Oh, no, but I assumed it was in my favor.

“jonny is the spawn of The Devil. His mind is fragmented and disturbed, much like the Columbine shooters’, and if allowed to roam free he will be the penultimate detriment to this school.

“jonny attended an anti-American political rally last semester and demanded he promote his anarchist ideas in my classroom,” she brazenly lied into her printed disclosure. “He recorded dozens of songs onto a cassette tape for me, which included the words ‘Kill Kill Kill’ –“ here she was talking about the Dead Kennedys song “Kill the Poor,” which, in Swiftian fashion, lauds the idea of killing off the poor to serve the rich, “and repeatedly stalked me to find out if I’d read a radical pamphlet he’d written.” This was her allusion to my ‘zine. “It held abortionist references in it…” which I could only assume meant the baby in the womb my ex had drawn, “…and shook me to my very core.”

And all the while, in a safe background and behind-the-glass audience to my execution, Wes Jackson sat with one hand cupping his cheek, smiling, an audience to a circus of his own design.

“I would have brought the pamphlet in for y’all, but I opened my desk drawer the other day to find it missin’…” and with this she shot me an incriminating glance. She had lost the copy of my ‘zine that I’d given her, thank God, but in her mind I’d snuck into her office and twirled some 1930s villain moustache and broken open her drawer and stolen her copy to defend myself against a case I’d never seen coming.

Never have I ever been royally, royally fucked.

And then I would have to drink.

Mr. Reinect’s testimony couldn’t come soon enough. I knew he was a smart and honorable man and hoped some of his testimony could undo some of hers. He, too, arrived without any previous communication with myself, and read, without paper, from the heart.

“With respect, this hearing is an embarrassment. jonny is a bright student, and a positive influence on our class. He knows when to crack a quick joke to lighten the mood of the room and when to be quiet and take notes. He has, not once, disrupted class in a negative way. He offers unprecedented insight to our discussions and is an absolute value to the class to which he belongs.”

They asked him if he thought of me as any of the things Ashleigh had called me.

“Absolutely not.”

They asked him if I seemed disturbed, violent, depressed or homicidal.

“Not a chance.”

I was nearly in tears by the time he’d finished. Then he stood and approached me, and looked at me with confidence.

“I’ll see you on Friday, alright? Stay strong, kid.”

All I could do is nod in reverence as he held his massive hand out and I shook it. I later found out he’d cut his honeymoon short by two days to speak on my behalf.

Then mom and dad spoke on my behalf. Mom chipped in for my character.

“I don’t understand why this is happening to my boy. He’s so smart, and so good, and he writes the most beautiful poetry you could imagine…”

Then the tears came and I cut her off in the same gibberish I had offered my father in the car the week before.

Dad passed out pictures of brass knuckles to the panel and to Wes.

“Tell me how that can slip on your arm and be considered a bracelet or piece of men’s jewelry.”

The room was silent.

“Better yet, are the children allowed to wear watches to school?”

“Of course,” said one of the panelists.

Dad undid the clasp on his steel-banded watch and refastened it as he held the watch at his knuckles and held it up. “Why? Isn’t this a set of brass knuckles too?”

Again, the room fell silent.

The panel of humans I hadn’t met before and hadn’t seen since adjourned us to the hallway, and mom and dad and I discussed what few options remained to me after what would be my inevitable expulsion from high school.

“There are a few good GED programs the state offers to kids like myself…”

“Oh come on, you’re not gonna be one of those kids. We can put you in a different school, with different teachers. You might only be held back a year…”

The panel had deliberated for 45 minutes before Wes Jackson came and offered words of encouragement.

“This is the longest any jury has ever debated a case; usually they’re in and out in about five minutes. Hopefully they’ll rule in favor of the boy and he’ll get to come back.”

“Oh bullshit,” my parents and I said, in unison, in our heads.

As the morning waxed on, with the false hope of absolution, we did our best to extricate ourselves from the situation. Over an hour passed, in which we spoke of my fate. Then we were called back in.

“From the jurisdiction and power vested in our panel by Fulton County, this child should be granted full pardon back into our schools.”

It was all I could do to keep from flicking off everyone in the room besides my parents.

“Welcome back,” Wes lied.

“Glad to be back,” I lied.

That day, Smashing Pumpkins were doing a CD signing for a promo disc Virgin Records had put out to support their upcoming album, Machina. I, in my suit and tie, met Billy Corgan and James Iha and Melissa Auf Der Mer. I remember Billy being so polite, and I shook his hand and thanked him for making such great music, and James took pictures of everyone in line to publish on their website.

I returned to school that Friday and strolled by the principal’s office with confidence for all of 20 feet before Officer Jim stopped me.

“Whoa-ho-ho, little buddy, where do you think you’re going?”

“First period? Honors English?”

“I don’t think so pal.” And he pointed towards the vice principal’s office.

By the time I walked in, Wes had my papers out and was reading aloud from them. He could hardly keep from laughing as he threw out detention like bread for geese.

“Upon the charge of possession of a lethal weapon with intent to assault, one week of In-School Suspension.”

“Oh you’re fucking kidding me.”

“Then for possession of a video camera unrelated to extracurricular activities, three days In-School Suspension.”

“I thought you and my father agreed that all the rest of my truancies were contained within my initial suspension.”

“You want me to add a week on? No? I didn’t think so. Finally, for the CD player with the Satanic message, two days of In-School Suspension.

“Oh, one last thing, jonathan.”

I was transferred to a different Economics class and was served a restraining order from Ashleigh Winters, who lived in fear of me until I left the high school for good.

So I did two extra weeks in detention with the glue-sniffers and graffiti artists and fighters. The detention room had a long table pushed against each of three walls, with high barriers between the chairs facing the walls. I quietly read my copies of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road and The Dharma Bums, serving penance before rejoining the commonwealth as a dysfunctional – but capable – member of society in my little corner of the world. We weren’t allowed to use the restroom until the entire group went, and when we ate lunch it was in a single-file line to the cafeteria, where we sat at the same table upon which I had so badly wanted to take a nap, and all the normal kids pointed at us and threw food at our table, which the detention officer thought was hilarious.

None of the kids with Bibles ever spoke again in the mornings. The bus rides were silent and long without my CD player. They confiscated my spiked bracelet and when I got my video camera back, what little footage I had on it of the kids in the cafeteria had been taped over.

That last day of detention, I knew that everything would be different for me, for better or worse, in the long run. By that June, I finished the year out and made the decision to home-school myself for my senior year via a Seattle-based distance learning program. I didn’t get to walk the line at graduation – in fact my diploma was mailed to me in a frame before I’d even realized I was finished with my classes – nor could I attend my junior or senior proms. Ashleigh Winters was awarded Teacher of the Year by Wes Jackson and received the best parking spot on campus. At the time, I couldn’t bring myself to think about anything resembling that, though, and focused on my first day back to class – finishing homework and packing my bag full of textbooks and notebooks and supplies again.

Detention ended before a holiday weekend, so after three days I rose, from my bed, to return to class. One period at a time, I walked through the door and the mean faces fell and the friendly faces brightened, and I resumed normal life, walking again amongst people.

“I heard he was expelled,” they whispered.

“I heard he was dead.”

“But…he’s back.”

---

The special commentary track is available two ways for this piece: first, as a downloadable Microsoft Word document, with word bubbles to the side pointing towards each reference point, in which I explain inside jokes/stories, choices I made writing different parts and so on. Here are several links from which to download them.

http://www.mediafire.com/?dnzj1gqu2lw http://www.megaupload.com/?d=Z79ST2P3
http://rapidshare.com/files/332380228/One_Hundred_Thousand_Years_in_Detention__with_commentary_.doc.html