this job is killing you

Spiral of Divinity.

2012-01-28T20:37:00.006-05:00

Introduction

The irrational number Phi is represented in integers by ~1.618 and is the only working integer of dividing a straight line into two segments, in which the ratio of the line to its larger segment is equal to the ratio of the larger segment to the smaller, and can thus be infinitely squared to smaller segments.

Phi’s relevance is in its persistent appearance throughout seemingly unrelated dynamic systems, be they in nature, animal biology, art, human physiology or otherwise. Phi, its reciprocal phi and their geometric equivalents have been found throughout popular works like The Last Supper and Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man as well as patterns in sunflower seeds and cephalopod shells. This paper will specifically focus on understanding Phi and its use within the song “Lateralus” by the Los Angeles-based heavy metal musical act Tool.

Understanding Phi and phi in Integer Sequencing and Geometry

To find Phi in Euclidean geometry, a straight line (a) must be divided into two segments: one larger (b) and one smaller (c). The ratio of the length of the entire straight line (a) to the larger segment of the line (b) is the same ratio as the length of the larger segment (b) to the smaller (c) (see Fig. A). Mathematically, a:b::b:c. This is only possible when the first number in the ratio is ~1.618 times larger than the second.

Conversely, Phi’s reciprocal integer, phi, is Phi minus one. To find the length of b in the above example, one must multiply a by ~0.618. Then c is equal to b times 0.618, etc., squared down into the infinitesimal. This brings us to the much simpler analytical tool of 61.8% to examine phi.

Keeping in mind the Phi ratio 1.618:1, which is referred to as The Golden Ratio or The Divine Ratio, is essential to its applications throughout the known universe. It was first discovered by Leonardo da Pisa, alias Fibonacci, b. 1175 A.D.. Fibonacci was presented with a problem at a popular math competition – “Beginning with a pair of rabbits, if each productive pair bears a new pair, which becomes productive when they are one month old, how many rabbits will there be after n months?” (Knott, Quinney) Fibonacci’s resulting equation was that each number in the sequence (F_n), which would have to be a whole number, would be equal to the addition of the previous two numbers in the sequence (represented as F_n-1+ F_n-2), starting with 0 and 1. It follows that 0 + 1 = 1, giving the first three numbers 0, 1 and 1; of course 1 + 1 = 2. The next step is that 1 + 2 = 3. To explain the equation F_n = F_n-1 + F_n-2, we would simply plug in the numbers 3 = 2 + 1. The integer sequence developed through this equation’s whole integer application is known as the Fibonacci Sequence. It proceeds as follows.

0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89…

As the Sequence progresses, the ratio of the newest number (F_n) to the previous number (F_n-1) rapidly approaches The Golden Ratio and only continues to do so. By the time any mathematician adds 34 and 55 to equal 89, the relationship between Fibonacci and Phi is clear: 89:55::~1.618:1.

The final two pieces of the puzzle lie in geometry. The Golden Rectangle is drawn using either the Golden Ratio or the Fibonacci Sequence. Utilizing our first explanation of the Ratio with line segments, the wide rectangle’s x-axis, or long horizontal lines, is our full line (a). It is divided into two segments: a longer (b) and a shorter (c). The wide rectangle’s y-axis, or vertical lines, are equal in length to b, so that the rectangle’s full length to height are a:b. This results in the Golden Rectangle. If we draw a vertical line through The Golden Rectangle where b meets c on the x-axis a, the resulting larger portion of the rectangle is a perfect square, in equal length and height of b, and c is a perfectly proportioned new Golden Rectangle, whose length and height can then be calculated and segmented the same way, as can its smaller rectangle and so on.

To understand The Golden Rectangle with The Fibonacci Sequence, imagine a rectangle as wide in number as a Fibonacci number and as tall as the previous number in the sequence. For this example, let’s use 21 wide by 13 tall. The width of the rectangle, 21, is arrived by adding 8 to 13, so imagine it’s now cut into two pieces: on the left, a square 13 x 13; on the right, a vertical rectangle 13 tall by 8 wide (see Fig. B).

This new rightmost rectangle contains essentially the same ratio or proportions in height to width (8 x 13) that was just used for the initial rectangle’s width to height (21 x 13), but turned 90 degrees. So we can start over and cut it into a square at its bottom and a rectangle at its top, which can then be cut, etc.

When we draw an arc from one corner of the Golden Rectangle to the opposite corner (where we “cut” the rectangle) and repeat for each new Golden Rectangle, we’re drawing the Golden Spiral (see Fig. C).

Presence in Everyday Life

Phi and phi are not only useful tools in algebra and geometry, but maintain a frequent presence in art and popular culture – usually by accident. In the hit British horror film 28 Days Later, the plot takes a sharp turn from a small group of survivors’ attempts at escape from a zombie-infested England to a mysterious martial law drama reminiscent of Lord of the Flies. If we equate the film’s total length in minutes and seconds as the first line a in the earlier examples of the Golden Ratio and Phi, and divide it into the same proportions of two segments (b and c), the change of focus in plot from zombies to lawlessness occurs within seconds of where b meets c, with b constituting about 62% of the film’s length and c the final 38%. The aforementioned 62% of the film’s duration is nearly exactly phi, 61.8%.

In the 1975 film Jaws, the titular shark is not seen on-screen until ~61.8% of the film’s duration has passed, as well. The John Wayne Western Stagecoach features Wayne’s decision to return to a group of wagon-traveling pioneers at this moment as well – again, nearly down to the second – performing the denouement leading to the film’s final conflict. Similar examples follow suit, with climaxes or major movements changing, in Beethoven’s Fifth and Ninth symphonies, The Last Supper, Vertigo and countless others.

In human physiology, the Golden Ratio is regularly present. Dividing the finger’s length over the length from the second knuckle to the fingertip is generally equal to The Golden Ratio, as is dividing the length of the arm, from shoulder to the fingertip, over the length of the forearm, from the elbow to the fingertip. Dozens of others are found throughout the human body.

Linking The Golden Ratio’s presence in the human body to that in art and media has led many to believe in the Ratio beyond coincidence, that artwork depicting it is more naturally appealing to humans. This in turn has generated several artists to utilize the Golden Ratio or the Fibonacci Sequence either as a means to an end of fame or fortune, or simply to express the artist’s interest in the subject.

Evidence in Tool’s “Lateralus”

One thorough example of Phi in recent musical history is the song “Lateralus” by Tool.

Tool is a progressive metal quartet from Los Angeles. Progressive metal, a sub-genre of heavy metal, is partly a successor to progressive rock, which included bands like Led Zeppelin, Yes and King Crimson. Progressive rock’s main characteristic of time signatures changing regularly within the same song distinguished it from other rock music at the time. Following the advent of heavy metal music, progressive rock translated with metal’s increased usage of loud guitars with overdrive and distortion, steadier bass guitar rhythms, faster drums and more abrasive vocals and became progressive metal.

Tool, at the forefront of the progressive metal scene, released their fourth album, Lateralus, in 2001. Lateralus, and specifically its title track, are in perfect keeping with Tool’s signature sound. Tool’s songs are written regularly in 5/4 time, usually eschewing pop music’s near constant 4/4 time signature. The song “Lateralus” itself does contain several sections in 5/4 and others in 4/4, but its primary refrain is a repeat of three separate signatures – 9/8, 8/8 and 7/8. These constitute a total of 24 even beats before starting again – 9, 8, and 7.

24 is not a “Fibonacci number,” but 987 is. The band’s drummer Danny Carey stated in an interview that this was a coincidence, but singer Maynard James Keenan’s vocal patterns are anything but that. In either of the song’s verses, the singer’s stanzas of lyrics are organized in groups or lines whose syllables strictly adhere to The Fibonacci Sequence, usually increasing or decreasing along the sequence itself. For example, his first lines are “Black / Then / White are / All I see / In my infancy / Red and yellow then came to be / Reaching out to me / Lets me see,” and are sung with deliberate pauses between lines (Keenan). This means the syllables sung proceed as 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8 before descending to 5 and 3 again; the first seven digits of the Fibonacci Sequence are 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5 and 8.

The following line begins at 13 syllables and works its way back down the sequence to three: “As below so above and beyond I imagine (13) / Drawn beyond the lines of reason (8) / Push the envelope (5) / Watch it bend (3).”

In addition, the second verse of the song plays out along similar lines as the beginning of the first, except that when Keenan arrives at the eight-syllable line “Red and yellow then came to be,” he descends the Fibonacci Sequence one step at a time back to one syllable per line before climbing back up to 13 and down again. “Red and yellow then came to be (8) / Reaching out to me (5) / Lets me see (3) / There is (2) / So (1) / Much (1) / More and (2) / Beckons me (3) / To look through to these (5) / Infinite possibilities (8) / As below so above and beyond I imagine (13) / Drawn outside the lines of reason (8) / Push the envelope (5) / Watch it bend (3).”

Of course it’s possible to look into any facet of the song and find what the seeker is looking for, if one tries hard enough. The second chorus of the song has the lyric “Feed my will to feel this moment, urging me to cross the line.” The first part of that line is eight syllables, and the second part is seven syllables. Though the first is a Fibonacci number, the seven syllables of the second part are sung “Urging – me to – cross the line,” which one could argue is 2+2+3, which are all Fibonacci numbers. However, this level of scrutiny feels unnatural at best, if not far-reaching and a bit obsessive.

Other examinations of “Lateralus” in search of Fibonacci prove futile as well. If we examine the song’s movements in terms of duration, as we did successfully for Jaws, 28 Days Later, Stagecoach and others, we find that 61.8% of the way through the song is about 5 minutes and 48.5 seconds, which is just shy of the halfway mark in the bridge, and not within several seconds of any changes in composition whatsoever. Also, although the song’s climax is mostly contained in eight exact lines of eight syllables each, it is paired with a couplet of 16 syllables (minus one), totaling in 95 syllables – also not a number in the sequence.

Analysis and Interpretation

However, in spite of – or perhaps because of – this obsessive and fruitless search, we find the meaning of the song and its relationship to Phi culture. “Lateralus” is a word invented by the band, although the Latin word “lateralis” means “of the side” (Dictionary.com Unabridged). Nearly all uses of the word “lateral” denote a movement to the side or a spreading out horizontally, including a lateral pass in football. Tool has often written songs and expressed their belief in expanding the human consciousness and gaining new perspectives, by any means necessary – whether thinking about a situation in life from the other person’s point of view, taking perception-altering drugs or, in this case, studying mathematics. Hence, it seems that moving laterally is being used as a metaphor for broadening our minds.

This idea is reinforced by the verses, when Keenan states “Black and white are all I see in my infancy / Red and yellow then came to be / Reaching out to me / Lets me see.” In the first verse, he then says “As below, so above and beyond I imagine / Drawn beyond the lines of reason / Push the envelope, watch it bend.” The metaphor being used here is that newborn babies can only see in black and white at birth, and shades of gray; one week after birth, babies can see in red, yellow, orange and green (Heiting). By this time, all these new possibilities about their world should fascinate babies. Likewise, at first, the singer – or the narrator, if we’re to believe he’s singing in character – had a limited view of the world, which he refers to as “my infancy.” As more colors became visible to him, which could easily mean as he gained new insight into the world, his imagination ran wild and he becomes excited at what could lay outside the frame of his logical mind. As he considers greater and more alien possibilities in the world, which are drawn “beyond the lines of reason,” he realizes just how much he’s “thinking outside the box,” to use a common phrase.

In the second verse, Keenan adds that seeing the colors “Lets me see / There is so much more / And [it] beckons me to look through to these infinite possibilities” before returning to the “As below…” lyric. This further emphasizes his point that his fascination with gaining knowledge and getting a more objective view of the world is like an addiction, that it “beckons me” to “look through to” – or consider – the “infinite possibilities” that are out there.

With regards to the tool he’s using to widen his gaze, it’s clear that Keenan is using Phi and all its aforementioned components at least partially as subject matter. The formulation of lyrics in both verses, using the Fibonacci Sequence, as well as the song’s six individual mentions of spirals, tell us that much. The interest in the Golden Spiral is compounded in the bridge, when Keenan sings “I embrace my desire to […] Swing on the spiral of our divinity and still be a human.” It is very likely that Keenan is referring to the Golden Spiral at least somewhat with the phrase “spiral of our divinity,” as the Golden Ratio is often called The Divine Ratio and the verses’ lyrics are structured with Fibonacci numbers.

The entire bridge’s lyrics are as follows:

“I embrace my desire to

Feel the rhythm, to feel connected

Enough to step aside and weep like a widow

To feel inspired, to fathom the power

To witness the beauty, to bathe in the fountain,

To swing on the spiral of our divinity

And still be a human.”

Since Phi and the Golden Ratio are found in so many unrelated places and systems throughout the known universe, it’s only natural that once one can see that it exists virtually everywhere, one would “feel connected enough to step aside” and simply weep, be it from the epiphany, the beauty of oneness in the universe or even from fear of what implications such unity could have. The inclusion of “like a widow” implies a possible sorrow of the death of something, unless Keenan is simply using consonance to follow the “w” in “weep.” If there is the implication of loss, perhaps the weeping is over his previous perception of the world dying.

Keenan continues to meditate on this new world view, which – as we learned from the verses – is a great way to expand our horizons and a goal he seems to condone. The extended sentence finds him proclaiming that he is embracing his desire to feel the inspiration, awe and beauty that would come with this scientific enlightenment, which is summarized in the line “To swing on the spiral of our divinity,” or to use mathematic and scientific tools like Phi and the Golden Spiral as tools or toys to come to the same enjoyment of life and the universe that others may find in religion, philosophy or LSD. This section ends with the caveat that he wishes to do all these things “and still be a human.” Interpretations on this final line vary, but it seems as though a level of humility and imperfection – “being human” – would need to stay in mind for Keenan so as not to become self-righteous. A not entirely dissimilar idea is expressed several songs later on the same album. “Reflection” contains the lyric “I must crucify the ego before it’s far too late,” and a variation of it.

As Keenan seems to be expressing the idea of using various tools – in mathematics and science, in this case – to open our minds to fantastic perceptions of the known universe, he also mentions that this process can’t be forced or faked, lest the person risks consequences of disconnecting from the entire endeavor. Nowhere is this clearer than in the first chorus of “Lateralus,” which reads as follows: “Over-thinking, over-analyzing separates the body from the mind / Withering my intuition, missing opportunities and I must / Feed my will to feel my moment, drawing way outside the lines.” In other words, to keep a strong intuition and stay on the same wavelength as this sort of manual evolution, things like working falsely towards the answer one wants is counterproductive – like our earlier examples of seeking to break down lyrical syllables that don’t fit the mold or assign connotation to its lack of a Jaws-like denouement at 62% of its duration.

Conclusion

Any attempt to fully analyze and interpret lyrics from Tool songs will likely be met with a degree of woe. In a 1997 interview in Alternative Press Magazine, Keenan himself had the following to say about fans’ varying takes on their music: “I’m not going to spoon-feed anybody and rob them of their personal experiences. I read the interpretations of the lyrics that people send to [the Tool web] page. They’re way off. But that’s fine” (Pettigrew). Tool have never included lyrics with their albums, only much later releasing differing drafts of the lyrics to a fan’s website.

The same may or may not be said about the song’s popularity. In a recent poll on toolshed.down.net, the internet’s leading Tool website, “Lateralus” was voted Tool’s most popular song in a grand prix-style series of “either/or” votes, beating six other songs and winning its final round by a 2:1 vote against Tool’s next fan favorite, “Third Eye” (Akhtar). It’s impossible to gauge whether the supposed “naturally pleasing” presence of Phi and the Fibonacci Sequence play a part in the popularity of “Lateralus,” or if knowledge of the band’s intentional use of those was admired and respected enough by fans to win it some votes. As is often the case with Tool, fans should probably read into it however much they like, save for a grain of salt.

Phi and its subsequent studies permeate countless facets of nature and have played a subtle role in several wildly popular and successful pieces of artwork. Some of their uses have been intentional by the user, as with “Lateralus,” and some have been unintentional, as with Phi’s permeation throughout our skeletal systems. Whether utilized naturally or artificially, implementing Phi is a universal phenomenon worth studying and can help humankind take one step closer to understanding the very fabric of nature – Tool’s song is just one tribute and a call to arms for those ready and willing to unravel the mystery.

Bibliography

28 Days Later (2002). Dir. Danny Boyle. DNA Films and British Film Council.

Akhtar, Kabir. “Tool Madness.” The Tool Page. Web. 7 July 2011. <http://toolshed.down.net/news/madness/>

Dictionary.com Unabridged. “lateral.” Random House, Inc. 28 January 2012. <http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/lateral>

Heiting, Gary, OD. “Your Infant’s Vision Development.” All About Vision. October 2010. Web. 28 January 2012. <http://www.allaboutvision.com/parents/infants.htm>

Jaws (1975). Dir. Steven Spielberg. Universal Studios.

Kator, Andrew, and Legaz, Jennifer. “Quick Tips in Art and Design: Pattern.” Web. 28 January 2012. <http://articles.katorlegaz.com/quicktipsinartanddesign/pattern/>

Keenan, Maynard James, and Tool. “Lateralus” and “Reflection.” Lateralus. CD, Volcano Entertainment, 2001.

Keenan, Maynard James, and Tool. “Lateralus.” The Tool Page. Web. 7 July 2011 and 28 January 2012. <http://toolshed.down.net/lyrics/lateraluslyrics.php#09>

Knott, Quinney. “The life and numbers of Fibonacci.” Plus Magazine. 31 August 1997. Web. 7 July 2011. <http://plus.maths.org/content/os/issue3/fibonacci/index>

Pettigrew, Jason. “Nobody’s Tool.” Alternative Press. March 1997: 52. Print.

PhiPoint Solutions, LLC. “Phi for Neophites.” Goldennumber.net Web. 7 July 2011. <http://www.goldennumber.net/neophite.htm>

Modern Warfare 3 / Battlefield 2 Review Bombers.

2012-01-28T12:01:00.003-05:00

It's only just occurred to me that my last full entry in this blog is almost a year old. My apologies; It's been a very complicated fall/winter. I plan to dust off and finish a few things by the end of February to post, but in the meantime, please enjoy this article I wrote for IGN last November. Whether you're a gamer or not, I think it speaks volumes about online culture.

http://games.ign.com/articles/121/1212549p1.html

Samigina.

2011-01-31T09:00:00.003-05:00

Unpublished

The road to Baltimore at midnight in January is so cold your tires will complain. In a mid-size two-door sedan with a heater working part-time, it’s hard to talk or think about anything but the weather, which doesn’t help. No matter the volume of the radio, or the quantity of salt and processed cheese on the bags of chips, the discomfort of the bladder and the skin permeate anything under the moon.

The foam 1-Up mushroom from Super Mario Bros. atop Stuart’s radio antenna was so cold it practically broke in half as we made our way east, then north, from Leesburg, VA to cross the state line and towards Baltimore. Our conversation changed from what our balls had turned into to what our relationships had turned into.

“Sarah and I have a deal,” Stuart said. “If she runs a tangent on a subject she knows holds no interest to either of us for more than three minutes, she has to bake me a pie.”

“Oh man, that’s a deal,” I said.

“What about you?”

“We just tolerate each other’s tirades, I guess.”

“How does that work out for you?”

“Fine, overall. I mean sometimes she…well, I’ll…”

“Yeah?”

“Man, it’s fuckin’ cold.”

We made our way downtown and struggled with our printed directions for a few minutes before locating a crowd of pilgrims and onlookers lining a 10-foot stone wall around Westminster Hall and Burying Ground.

“Is that them?”

“That has to be them; look at the make-up on that chick.”

Stuart parked the car less than 10 feet from where we camped the rest of the night with the other members of the crowd. There were 50 or 60 men and women of all ages bundled in jackets, scarves, snow hats, gloves, thick skate shoes, boots, long johns, blue jeans, snow pants, ski masks, beanies, mittens and, oddly enough, a couple miniskirts in our accompaniment. Among the crowd, our teeth chattered, our noses turned red and ran, we shivered and cuddled and drank and talked. Unlike the blizzard of the following winter, which brought our neighborhood together into a community of sharing and symbiotic friends, nobody along the wall seemed to have hot cocoa or coffee to share. A few people broke out heating pads and acted as misers over them as though they were the last food on a desert island. Everyone tried to become friends with the guy who had the heater powered by a crank generator.

We met a short, stout English teacher with black hair and her husband. She’d driven in from the Midwest and her students were texting her incessantly to inquire about the night. Stuart piped up first.

“So, you’re an English teacher?”

“Oh, honey, look; Jennifer from my third period just sent a picture of her and her friends’ sleepover since they couldn’t come. Can you believe it? What great kids. Yeah, I teach freshman English Lit just outside Chicago.”

“I’ve been thinking of teaching myself; is it worth it, all in all?”

She was responding, and her keypad went click, click, click.

“I love English; it’s a great subject.”

“….All right then.”

None of us knew we were, in all likelihood, there to witness the end of an era. It was just another January 19 downtown to most of the troupe and Stuart and I did our best to blend in. There were a few tiny goth girls enamored and late-teen sports boys attending for extra credit, but primarily there were middle-aged men and women and a few real eccentrics in the crowd to cheer on the Poe Toaster.

Edgar Allan Poe never escaped controversy, nor mystery. For every student who loves and understands the loss and harrowed loneliness piercing through the majority of his body of work, there are ten who will ask “Didn’t he marry his cousin and die of rabies?” Stuart was even in a production of a play at college called “Nevermore,” which offered a romantic look at the final days of Poe’s life, during which he went missing and was later found dead.

Then in 1949, Boston’s own Evening Sun reported that a mysterious figure dressed all in black, save for a white scarf, had been seen stopping at Poe’s grave on the anniversary of Poe’s birthday, leaving at his headstone three roses and a near-full bottle of Cognac, only missing enough for him to have drunk to Poe and made his peace.

The next year, it happened again.

Over the next 60 or so years, people began to wait outside Westminster all night, hoping to catch a glimpse of the Poe Toaster and share in the commemoration of the life and work of the renowned poet. At first oddities fanatics and thrill-seekers, then more somber English scholars and lifelong fans would crowd around peering through the shut cast-iron gates on January 19 every year. Surely the Poe Toaster caught on, as his tribute metamorphosed from a plain stroll to a near magic act to avoid crowds, lest he be unriddled and unmasked by the curious onlookers.

As far as the public could tell that night, there were only two entrances to the cemetery where Poe had been laid to rest: the main entrance, which the majority of us surrounded, and a smaller gate around another side which offered a far more limited view of the area. Between both entrances was the high stone wall, and beyond the other entrance was a city block, ending the cemetery with a tall office building. The church itself bordered another wall and the fourth, we were told, was also blocked in by office buildings.

As the night drew on, every person walking the streets was suspect. “Did you see how quickly that guy walked past us?” a woman said. “I bet that was him. He was just scouting the location, seeing where his best entrance would be.”

“Well I was sure I saw someone in that office building behind the cemetery a few minutes ago,” someone else said. “I bet he’s got the lights off and a window open and he’ll scale down and pay his respects.”

Stuart and I were fascinated by the event and happy to honor the writer, but we couldn’t help slipping in a few comments. “Nah, man, you see that headstone next to the mausoleum? That high one, that looks a little too new? I swear I just saw it wobble. He’s probably in it and he’s making his way over an inch at a time to visit Poe.”

Then ten minutes later someone came over and said “I heard he might be in one of the gravestones; my buddy and I saw one move a few minutes ago.”

“What do you think, Stu?”

“…It is really, really cold out here.”

He was right. We had stopped moving around as every step was agony on our frozen toes. A woman reading “The Raven” with as much gusto as she could muster had stopped long enough to tuck her face into a winter jacket and continue her recitation through its collar.

“Mmph a ruvmph, ‘Nevermore.’”

A large metalhead had been carrying around a foot-long coffin all night. God knows what’s in it, I thought. Then I saw him talking to an elderly gentleman on the other side of the gates, who we believed was the curator of the grounds. I trotted over to them on my heels so as not to snap any thawed toes and listened to their conversation.

“…so they’re just like little tributes; I brought one for the Toaster and one for you, if you think your connections at the museum might be interested in carrying them.”

“Oh, yeah,” the other man said with a clear air of dubious caution. “I’ll definitely take this inside and show it around the next time I see the rest of the staff.” It was the same tone I used when a threateningly aggressive man approached me in a bookstore the previous Christmas season and ordered me to buy a spy novel by his favorite author.

Near the metalhead with the coffins, the teenage Goths with the zombie Poe t-shirts and fishnets stared in mock indifference at the graveyard. In reality I could see a thrill dancing behind their eyes so fiery they could barely sit still. Between us and them was a tedious dork who kept asking us what our favorite story “of Edgar’s” was, taking for granted that we were all on a first-name basis with Poe.

“I have to find a bathroom,” I told Stuart.

“There’s a hospital a block that way and down the side street,” replied a man with snow caught in his beard.

I fled and sought the hospital. Everyone’s personalities were starting to grate my nerves like the beating of the hideous heart. I began to wonder if even Stuart and I were starting to get sick of the sight of each other; we’d been rolling our eyes at some of the more fanatical members of the crowd for hours and it was only a matter of time before that intolerance extended to each other. That’s what below-freezing temperatures do to friends, I imagined.

I was allowed into the lobby of the hospital by security but not into its bathroom.

“Oh come on man, it’s 15 degrees out and we’re all waiting by Poe’s gravesite and I really have to piss.”

“Sir, this bathroom is for patients and visitors only.”

I left and tried to find another bathroom or street corner to relieve myself. Before I could, I managed to catch the attention of a suspicious-looking man who started walking towards me from 50 feet off.

I tried to nonchalantly turn and walk the other way, and he continued to follow me. I rounded the corner of the hospital, out of his sight, and ran until just before he would be able to spot me again. When he came around the corner, he broke into a jog to catch up with me.

Fuck, I thought, walking briskly back towards Westminster. How stupid am I to walk around downtown Baltimore in the middle of the night alone? This is how idiots die, jonny you…idiot. They camp outside famous people’s graves like stupid tourists and get mugged.

Just before he got to me I rounded the last corner and started loudly talking to the crowd of onlookers again. My pursuer stopped and turned around, retreating to his street in front of the hospital. I doubled back and pissed behind a dumpster near the crowd.

As I passed the small gate towards the main entrance, a couple of the younger kids tried scaling the wall, getting boosts from their friends and snooping over the masonry in hopes of seeing the Poe Toaster. A few minutes earlier, one had hopped over and tried hiding in the shadows on the corner of the property from the caretakers and curator, but they found him and ushered him back out onto the sidewalk.

“How’d it go?” Stuart asked. “You find a bathroom?”

“More or less.”

“I’m not sure I can take much more of this cold.”

“If you don’t mind risking a mugging there’s a hospital where you can argue with a security guy until…”

“Until what?”

“Stuart, look at that.”

A van turned onto our street and turned its lights off and kept driving.

“Why’s that guy got his lights off?”

“Looks pretty suspicious.”

“I think he’s stopping.”

One by one, everyone turned and stared at the van.

“Stuart, I think that’s him.”

“jonny?”

“Yeah?”

“Why are you whispering?”

“…I don’t know.”

There was no movement inside the van. There was no movement in the crowd. The frostbite, the tedium of company and the wait all melted into the background. Minutes passed and enough of the crowd turned back to what they were doing that it almost seemed to have never happened. We kept our eyes peeled.

An eternity later, the curator appeared again and told us the Poe Toaster had already come and gone and we should all go home and get out of this weather. Nobody believed him. Nobody moved. Denial turned to anger, and people started cursing and leaving. Our group diminished from 50 to 20 over the course of five or ten long minutes.

Then one indignant woman, standing next to our English teacher from Chicago, declared she was going to go find out who was in the van. No sooner had the sentence escaped her lips than it started up, its brights blinding us all, and peeled out of its parking spot at an alarming speed. It was like someone had punched the gas and was escaping a bank robbery.

It was only then we saw the manhole over which the van had been parked.

“Oh, son of a bitch.”

“He walked right under our feet! He opened that manhole and went and paid his respects while we all stared at his god-damn van!”

“I am not coming back for this next year.”

“What a genius!”

A few of us started laughing. The little we’d seen, the winter we’d braved, the pomp and circumstance of the night all ended with such an anti-climax it was befitting of some of Poe’s most underrated work. The night felt like it needed a redo, another viewing.

Confused, half-frozen and hungry, we all moped back to our cars and drove home. Stuart told me a few days later there was a blurb about it in a Baltimore newspaper he’d found online, after returning home. At the time we’d felt cheated, but had we known it was the last visit of the real Poe Toaster to Edgar Allan’s final remains, we surely would’ve raised a solemn glass with him and saluted his life and work, imitating his same admiration of one of America’s great writers before disappearing into the biting cold fog of New England for the last time.

Ka'ahumanu

2011-01-30T09:00:00.004-05:00

from 'The Xenophobe'

It occurred to me in 1996 at some point. I was at the front of my middle school’s campus and the buses had just dropped us off. It was bright, hot and early that morning. My backpack had about 30 lbs. of books in it and I was looking at the field, the portable classrooms, the big peach-colored buildings, the countless bugs swarming and the construction work going on near the other corner of campus.

“Man, fuck this.”

And I turned around and left.

I got to the edge of the school property and took my first step into a larger world, of optional class attendance and absenteeism-for-mental-health. I remember feeling like a total badass. I walked to the end of the block, then over to a tourist-trap strip mall. I bought a Coke with my lunch money and sat at a table for about an hour trying to come up with something to do or someone to see.

But everyone was in class. Shopkeepers started giving me dirty looks. “Don’t you have school today?”

Sheepishly, I wandered back to campus halfway through the day, warm Coke in hand.

“Dude, where were you all morning?”

“Ditching.”

“Whooooooa.”

The entire fruits of my labor were three missed lectures and a warming bottle of soda. Even still, I was hooked. It was shortly thereafter that I reached high school and the stakes were raised.

Maui High faced east. This meant from the front of its campus, staring at the whole of its collection of buildings, you were pointed west and the Iao Valley was a lovely, foggy backdrop against it.

Maui High had a six-foot fence around its entire perimeter, with the exception of two spots. The bus lanes that dropped the kids off at the front of the campus had locking gates. Even if they hadn’t, they were right in front of over half the staff’s and faculty’s offices, and the remainder of the front of campus was empty, save for that chain-link fence, so any escapees were visible to anyone peering across the front half of the campus.

The other spot was at the northwest corner of campus. There was a soccer field adjacent to the locker rooms and a banyan tree at the corner of campus with a trunk you could park a Mini Cooper inside. There was also no chain-link fence, and the buildings were mostly windowless classrooms. When you combine those with its seldom visits from campus security, it was like The Underground Railroad of slackers, stoners and misfits.

The real problem was security. They patrolled on golf carts at approximately 60-second intervals around campus. They were almost always somewhere along the front of campus, but only intermittently in view of the northwest corner. The trick was to hang out until they passed, and once out of their field of view, run. From the locker rooms it was a 20-second run to the far side of the banyan tree, then another 10-second dash across the street and behind the nearest house to campus. The neighborhood next to school hid the ditchers from that point on, and the mall was nearby.

Freshmen and sophomores who had struck up paid deals to hide in the trunks of seniors with early leave were suckers, I thought. What kind of self-respecting punk handed over cash for the privilege of being locked in a trunk face-down in jumper cables and red dirt until the driver felt like letting him out in front of God knows who? Those of us with dignity just dropped our books in our lockers and hauled ass. By the time the trunk-ditchers were released from their tombs after their drivers had run an errand or two, most of the rest had hoofed it to the mall and gotten the best tables at the coffee shop and drunk whatever was in their bags.
We knew half the staff at the coffee shop – one of them managed my first band – and so they’d get us free drinks on occasion. Also, the post-high school mallrats were always in abundance: Omar, who had gauged his tongue bar out so far he could lock a Master Lock through it; Charles, who worked nights and had nothing to do all day but hang out with us; Portia, the first transgendered person I ever met and nice as could be; Jade, who home-schooled, etc.

The third option was more of an emergency escape hatch than anything else. Near the southeast corner of campus, almost directly opposite the soccer field, the portable classes lined up in a row and one in particular stood across the street from the closest house to our high school. Coincidentally, my third period American Government class was held in this very shack and I had triple the absences in it than my closest second.

As it went, the street bordering the campus on the south, running east to west, was angled ever-so-slightly north as it ran east. At that nearest point, just at the corner of my Government class, was one tiny three-foot wide gate the school had been made to install for emergency evacuation purposes. To get to it, nobody could waltz around the front of the building – the teacher knew the gate was there and promised security she’d keep an eye out for ditchers – and if you went around the back, there was an additional appendage to the chain-link fence that blocked the route to the open gate. This fence appendage was about two feet shorter than the rest of the fence and 18 inches shorter than the bottom of the windows in the classroom, so to get out was an acrobatic feat of vaulting over the fence while keeping low – and quiet, of course – but not until after hearing the teacher sit in her chair and start to call attendance. Once over, it was easy to walk straight south out the open gate and into the residential neighborhood. Of course, to get to the only point of interest, the mall, it added an extra 15 minutes of circumnavigating campus to escape from the southeast corner, so most of us just used the soccer field.

School, in that sense, was like its own little battle map. Every student in attendance at that institution could point out the best spots to ditch, to smoke, to egg classrooms, to disappear with a fling and of course which bathrooms to avoid. Some of the locals had developed nasty crack habits and took to smoking it in one set of bathrooms in a big building on the southern end of campus, which made them even more prone to violence against littler kids than usual. Often on the way to class I’d smell that smoke coming out a bathroom window and it would make me shudder – it was like the smell of death in amphetamines and sky blue tile.

The strangest story we ever had while ditching was that one of the faculty members had decided to ditch school too, so when we saw him it was incredibly awkward. It was strange enough for us being semi-caught a mile from campus, and it was stranger for him to be negotiating with 15-year-olds and saying “If you don’t tell on me, I won’t tell on you.”

It wasn’t until the end of my tenure on Maui that security discovered our route near the soccer field and covered it en masse, after our last great adventure out. A school assembly had been called and none of us had any intention of sitting through 90 minutes of cheerleader pep and being slapped in the back of the head by locals. We had to leave in several groups, as nothing draws suspicion on or off campus like 10 kids hanging out in a pack, constantly peering over their shoulders.

I went on the first party, of underclassmen. It was three younger friends and me. The second party was leaving the opposite end, via the narrow gate, around the same time. We were the guinea pigs; if we got caught, the older kids knew security was onto us. I was actually older than two of the kids in the third party but they were decidedly cooler so I got stuck babysitting the freshmen and geekier sophomores.

Security passed by and we picked our moment and ran. I was paranoid about being seen with my backpack at the mall so I ditched it under our car, which was parked at the corner behind the banyan tree. We sprinted for the next block and embraced freedom after making our way northwest; I planned on picking up my bag after school as we got back to the car.

We went bowling, first; our bowling alley had the best food on earth and we had lunch and bowled a couple games for about $6 each. We moseyed to the mall and spent our usual day window-shopping, chatting and wasting our idle youths away.

By noon, only one person from the second group showed up and came running, soaking wet. It was one of the local skaters.

“Man, everyone got fucked.”

“What?!”

“I barely made it here; security caught me and the other freshmen a block from campus and I jumped into some dude’s swimming pool to hide. They didn’t see me when they rolled on by to catch everyone else running.”

“What about all the upperclassmen? Where are they?”

“Man, I don’t even know. I heard some yelling when I was crossing by the houses near the soccer field but who the hell knows; I wasn’t stickin’ my head out to see.”

Anxiety got the better of all of us, then. We worried far too much to enjoy our free time and ended up going back to school early.

We came back via the soccer field. If we ever had to come back in the middle of the day, odds were good we could blend in once we got back on school property. Plus my bag was there, under the car, with all my books in it.

Only when we got to the car, there was no bag. There was no 40 lb. stack of $30 textbooks in it. There was just settled dust and dying grass and the car. The bag wasn’t in the car, so I knew my brother hadn’t put it in there for me. My stomach tied itself in knots and I spent the rest of the day coming up with any excuse, any lie, anything to get me out of losing an entire set of textbooks.

By the time I caught up with the upperclassmen – Jeff, Eli, my brother, Alicia, Roach and Jago – I was livid.

“What the fuck happened to you, Jeff?”

“Cool it, buddy; security caught us by your car and we all got shat on. You guys are the only ones who made it out.”

“So I’m supposed to feel bad for you because you can’t run your fat asses fast enough across a soccer field? Where’s my bag? It was under the car this morning.”

“I don’t know.”

“Eli, where’s my bag?”

“Haven’t seen it, dude.”

Eventually someone remembered they saw security take it.

I went to the security office and asked for my bag. I figured they were going to hold it hostage until they could run me through the ringer and make me admit to ditching out. I’d get a detention or two, sure, but it would be better than replacing those books. They claimed not to have it. I had to go home and tell my parents the whole story, front to back. They were furious. They were even angrier when they got off the phone with the school, everyone at which swore not to have seen my bag.

It never turned up. I got out of having to buy a few of the books, but my parents and I had to fork over almost $100 for those I couldn’t escape. In the end, it mostly took the wind out of my absentee sails.

By the time we moved to Atlanta, schools had started cracking down on ditchers. All absences had to be accompanied by at least a parent’s note if not a doctor’s, and we were made to carry around handbooks with personal attendance records in them. All absences and tardiness were marked and initialed off by staff and faculty, in pen, and we had to check in at the end of every few weeks. Too many absences meant detention, and too many more meant expulsion. I went to all six classes five days a week. The last resort would have been to fake sick and spend an hour in the nurse’s office, but come on.

Of course, in college nobody cares about attendance; nobody gave a damn when I took a day off. Most of my classes had mandatory attendance, but those professors gave us two freebies – any more than that, and they bumped our grade down a full letter at the end of the semester. Also, I wasn’t in class from 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. straight, and the beatings decreased in Atlanta high schools and became non-existent in college so it was a much easier institution to stomach. Playtime metamorphosed from playing hookie to barhopping and students were so unafraid of teachers they brought beer to class, but the real secret weapon the schoolmasters unleashed was simply of our own aging. Near-perfect attendance records and knowledge gained from our educations became points of confidence, not shame; the loose schedule and price tag accompanying a university matriculation were enough incentive to spark in us a sense of personal responsibility.
But when we were young, we damn sure made those security guards earn their paychecks.

Moonlight Over Ephemera.

2010-11-09T16:19:00.004-05:00

from 'The Xenophobe'

The sun had set an hour before we left the house. It was summer and the world went dark around 9. My brother drove my mom’s ’93 Camry and I rode shotgun. We listened to Frank Sinatra and Sex Pistols while we drove around the mountain looking for the parking lot party. Mount Haleakala – or House of the Rising Sun, I was told – rose two miles above sea level and housed several observatories at the top. Before dawn, tourists were driven to the top of the mountain and given bicycles to ride all the way down. It took four hours.

By this time we’d moved from the south tip of the island to a small hippie town halfway up Haleakala. At that altitude the temperature was cooler, if not quite comfortable. On occasion we suffered as the mercury rose to 90, but more often the evenings and nights waned breezy and relaxing. It was a night like this that found us in search of our friends from high school. Mostly it would be my brother’s friends; mine were still a year off from partaking in any alcohol or recreational drug use.

We found it in an hour. There was a small parking lot across the street from several houses on stilts over rock faces. The lot itself was only separated from a 100-foot cliff by a modest guardrail. By the time we arrived, the street 100 feet below us was already littered with broken bottles. There wasn’t much else to do on the island; there were few concerts and fewer road trips. If you didn’t surf, skate or work, it’s likely you drank, smoked or played video games – or all three.

The muggy air thinned by degrees and our friend Jenny saw us first. She yelled to us and we made our way around the cars, talking to everyone sitting on hoods and trunks, music blaring out through windows.

I went to talk to Jenny’s car. My brother’s friends had never thought much of me and I always desperately wanted to change that. Jenny held out a bottle.

“Hey, try this.”

“What is it?”

“Peach Schnapps.”

“What the hell is Schnapps?”

I took it and sniffed the mouth. It smelled like paint.

“You’ll love it; it’s so good,” she said, as I glassed the party through the rippled glass of the bottle. I took a swig and it felt like fire burning down my throat and lungs into my belly.

“Jesus Christ!”

“How amazing is that?”

“Keep it.” I coughed and moved on, alcoholic saliva falling out of my mouth and onto the pavement. Even still, I felt a bit fuzzy and warm and the stars twinkled a bit brighter than they had.

Lono was there. For all intents and purposes, Lono was the luckiest guy we knew. He had epilepsy and got something like $1,500 a month from the government for disability, which was enough to pay his rent and buy his groceries. Luckily for him, he lived with his girlfriend and she paid their rent so he had $1,500 a month for bills and whatever else he wanted. He was also the most reliable person we knew; I never saw a day where I couldn’t go over to his house and play video games with him.

Thomas was there too. Thomas stood six-and-a-half feet tall and had shoulder-length fire engine red hair. As far as I knew, he was full-blooded Hawaiian or close to it and I always thought he looked like Perry Farrell from Jane’s Addiction. A couple weeks prior to the parking lot party he’d had an embarrassing incident in History class. The teacher was waxing endlessly about George Washington Carver and mentioned his work with the peanut. Thomas had a mouthful of potato chips and said “I like peanuts!” but the “t” was muffled and everyone thought he said “penis.” I walked over to his car at the party while he was looking away.

“Peanuts anybody?”

“Shut up jonny.”

Everyone loved Thomas; he was nice to everybody no matter what. He was friends with the other seniors his age but he always made time to hang out with the freshmen and sophomores like me and my friends when we started at Maui High. He also lived closest to school so whenever we’d ditch, we’d go to his house and eat and watch TV before we went anywhere else.

So the parking lot was packed. Only a couple of my friends were scattered about and had been invited by the older kids. The night trod on likewise; the moonlight and one flickering streetlamp lit our adolescent debauchery as we walked around making and breaking conversations with friends from around the island. An hour in, Dome spoke up.

“Hey jonny; Jnana’s over there.” He pointed off to the side and I saw her silhouetted against the sky; she was reclined sitting on the grass beneath a large oak tree. It was then I remembered where we were; the parking lot was less than a block from her house. I hadn’t noticed her the entire time. She’d been sitting there since we arrived.

Jnana was great. She wore chest-length flowing Irish red hair. Her sister used to run around with Dome; nobody would ever talk about how it ended. I met Jnana in 8^th grade, over a year prior. She just showed up at school one day, from God knows where. That year she had a pixie cut and started taking all this shit from the locals about it.

“Ho, braddah, is that one boy or one girl?”

I thought she was unimaginably cute; she had this Pearl Jam shirt from their 2^nd album, Vs., and I could never take my eyes off her. My biggest regret on Maui was probably not becoming better friends with her faster. Underneath all my delusions of fair thinking and open-mindedness I was still too chickenshit to really open up to her. I knew the locals didn’t like her, and they didn’t like me. More than almost anything, I’d just wanted to be left alone and I was enough of a prick to pay for that shyness with friends.

But the parking lot party was all smiles. I’d slowly earned Jnana’s friendship, whether I deserved it or not, and her long hair blew in an increasingly violent wind. Dome’s voice broke my heady daydream.

“jonny?”

“What’s up?”

“I said it’s time to go talk to her, man.”

She was staring off into the distant horizon, where the valley met the Pacific and where the starlight crashed into the sea. “I don’t know, man.” I went anyway. Jenny would later say the Schnapps was helping me muster up what little bravery I could.

I tried to look impressive but apathetic walking over to Jnana.

“Hey Jnana; what’s up?”

“Hey jonny. How’s it going?”

“Good. You?”

“Good.”

I sat next to her for a minute. Away from the cheap jokes and anecdotes of the bottle-and-joint party to our left, we could hear the trees rustling in the wind. I looked down at the grass. Jnana had taken her shoes off and her bare feet were nestled into the ground. Her dark dress was a shadow on her and for the only time that year, it suddenly started to pour rain.

It started as a heavy mist and by the time everyone could organize carpools and run to them it was a monsoon. My brother and I jumped into the Camry and rode off back down south towards our house.

The rain fell so hard we maxed out the speed of the windshield wipers and visibility was still less than 30 feet. “Man, we are so fucked.”

“Shut up; shut up!”

As we adjusted to the mayhem, we realized we were lost. We were headed in the right direction, but the street names and buildings were alien. “Where are we?”

“I don’t know; be quiet.”

We turned the music down and traversed narrow streets while clouds pissed on us triumphantly. Things got quiet; we only heard the spatter of the rain and the windshield wipers. Neither of us talked. I thought about Jnana, her dress and bare feet amplified by the moonlight. Then I was screaming.

“Jesus, look out!”

A large white owl was beating his wings in a slow flight across the street. My brother tried to yell “Owl!” but his mouth had been closed and it caught him by surprise, so it came out “Ndyowl!” and I ducked my head down by the passenger glove compartment.

I heard a high-pitched thud. The owl’s feet caught the upper driver’s side corner of the windshield. I kept my head down for a moment, buried under my arms, and finally released and looked around. My brother had done the same and wasn’t watching the road.

“Drive, dumbass!”
And he did. We got home and I crashed, dressed, into bed, and the cheap liquor and various smokes wafted into my nose as I fell asleep, and I dreamed of owls and grass blowing in a violent wind.

Eidolon.

2010-09-30T17:19:00.004-04:00

Unpublished

I knelt at the bank of the Hudson River and plunged my hand in. The icy water refreshed my sweaty palm at first and splashed my hand cold. In the reflection was the grey Poughkeepsie sky in October, the changing autumn leaves and some kind of man with his headphones on and his hand stuck in the water. Systematically the daemons crept up my back and over my shoulders.

“jonny - if you ever come back to New York I’ll be waiting here to kick your fucking ass.”

The cold water began to sting my hand. It started at the fingertips and crawled up to bite my knuckles. Why am I here?

“I overheard these two girls at dinner the other night talking about this poor shmuck they knew who was clearly getting screwed over by his girlfriend. I mean, I didn’t think they were talking about you at first, but they said he moved here from Atlanta and had to leave the state suddenly over Christmas break…”

By the time the freeze coiled around my wrist, it had dulled to a throbbing pain. I could see my fingers were purple through the refraction of the water. What possessed me to fly back to New York?

I’d received an open-ended plane ticket in 2007 after having to break an earlier commitment and I’d just moved to Virginia three months before. I didn’t know anybody anywhere except my brother, who lived and worked in New York City.

I got to the airport in Richmond and parked my car in long-term parking. It took so long to park my car I almost missed my flight and ended up sprinting with my luggage to the terminal. From Richmond you go straight up the East Coast at 35,000 feet and if you’re afraid of flying, you need cash for the drink cart. You fly into either JFK or LaGuardia and they unleash you into the city from there to do to it what you wish.

My phone rang and I jerked my hand out of the water to answer it. The ripples distorted my face, six years older than its last gaze into the Hudson, and my ride said she was waiting for me out front.

When I got off the plane in New York City it took two subway transfers to get to my brother’s office in Soho. On my way I realized I was in New York, the one place on Earth where you can say essentially what you want in public and nobody will pay attention. I turned to a businessman next to me with a big grin on my face and said “I’m riding on the bus.” One more story for the kids back home.

I got off at Canal St. and we set my bag in his office and got lunch at a nearby bar. After we got caught up he went back to his office and I exited his building to trudge around Manhattan.

I found a cigarette in my bag before I left and when I hit the street I saw two girls smoking. “Got a light?” They wouldn’t let them on the plane.

“Just use this,” one girl said to me and held up her cigarette. I grabbed the butt and lit my cigarette and she started screaming. “And you touched the fucking butt?! My God, just keep it for Christ’s sake. Un-fucking-believable.”

“Really,” her friend chimed in with a disappointed shake of her head. “Tourists. Let’s go back inside, Johnna.”

Embarrassed and ousted as a tourist, I bowed my head low and stalked north up the Avenue of the Americas to Prince St. and east to the KidRobot store that followed. I searched the store for small vinyl art toys and do-it-yourself action figures to take home to my wife. I settled on two neon zipper pulls in the shape of straight razors. Fall was upon us, after all.

I zigzagged northeast another few blocks to the Virgin Megastore in Union Square, whose doors would close for good less than two years later. I bought my brother a copy of Year Zero by Nine Inch Nails and left, heading for Union Square Park. Dozens of high school and college students littered the park and I sat and listened to my headphones. Radiohead’s In Rainbows had just released and I played it almost incessantly all month.

“Hey man, you got just a minute?” A boy had approached me while I stared off in the distance at the rain-slicked streets of Manhattan. I paused my music and he started a sales pitch while fiddling with the strings on his red hooded sweatshirt. “So I’m a poet and a beat-boxer and I’d like to play for you my newest creation – the Super Mario Bros. theme song. Maybe it would be worth a dollar to hear?”

“Sure thing.” I reached into my pocket and pulled out some money. “Here, take two.”

“Oh, thank you my brother. Here we go.” The boy started breakdancing and did an impeccable beatbox rendition of the music from the popular video game franchise. He started to draw a crowd and offer other performances for small change. I left him to his audience and made my way back to my brother.

We took the A C subway from Canal St. to Jay and transferred to the F, which we rode to 4^th Avenue in Brooklyn, and walked from there. My bag was heavy in my hands by the time we climbed up the stairs to his apartment. I set my bag down and changed clothes and we walked to dinner.

The neighborhood surrounding 5^th and 5^th in Park Slope, Brooklyn was one of my brother’s main haunts back then and we ate at a South American restaurant called Cocoroco. After we ordered we talked about my move to Virginia from Georgia and he got on me a bit about what I was going to do with the rest of my life. A sax and conga duo played light samba and we applauded them at every opportunity.

“You’re a college grad, bud; you don’t just want to stay in retail forever, do you?”

“Well of course not.” Our ceviche arrived in a hollowed half-coconut with a fried plantain chip sticking out of it like a sail. I broke it in half and gave one piece to my brother. “My writing is coming along alright. I’ve got almost half a book on my computer.”

“What is it?”

I unraveled my silverware from the cloth napkin, placed the napkin in my lap and scooped up a forkful of ceviche. “It’s all creative non-fiction, like that NPR, slice of American life type of shit.”

I took my first bite of ceviche. The tuna and salmon, which had marinated in a blend of citrus and pepper juices for a half day, played symphonies on my tongue.

“Well, good; is that something you want to pursue?”

“Jesus Christ; this is amazing.”

“Yeah; I told you. So are you going to try to write this stuff?”

“Yeah. Yeah, it’s a lot of fun and I seem to be alright at it. What’s in this sauce?”

“I think it’s lime, orange and maybe a bit of jalapeno or habanero. Finish your book, then what’s the next step? Hey, dinner’s coming.”

My steak was served to me and I wasn’t surprised that it was cooked and seasoned perfectly. I made my case about publishers and blogging and felt more relieved by the minute that we were getting along as well as we were. We made our way back to his apartment after dinner and went to sleep.

The next morning we rode the subway back to Soho together, utilizing the same routes and transfer as we had the way down. I’d made arrangements with an old college buddy to meet upstate on the Hudson and go to A Taste of New York. My brother and I took the F to Jay and transferred to the A C, and while we waited for the doors to close, a man in tattered clothing standing near us started yelling at someone in a seat nearby.

“Yeah, I knew it was you, you no-good raggedy-ass motherfucker,” he said. A cardinal rule of city life is minding your own business, and nobody besides us would even look at him.

“I can’t believe what you done gone and did to me you god-damn Cabbage Patch son of a bitch.” As he went on, my gaze shifted from him to the person he was yelling at and back. We noticed that he wasn’t actually screaming at anyone who was there, but rather an empty space between two people he’d never seen. “I ain’t never gonna forget yo shit, asshole. You think I’m gonna let you live this down? You got another thing comin’, bitch. You fuckin’ ass bitch.”

The doors still hadn’t closed – there was some kind of delay with the subway – and my brother gestured towards the doors with his eyes. Come on; let’s go, they said. “Excuse me, pardon us,” we said, and we slipped past the other passengers and out of the car, back to the platform, to fresher air, and got on the next car.

“Did you hear that guy?” A smirk crept across his face. “What was he saying? ‘You got-damn Cabbage Patch motherfucker!’”

“I think he just said ‘raggedy-ass bitch.’”

“Yeah, but when you or I tell this story later it’ll be ‘Cabbage Patch motherfucker.’”

“Yeah.”

We rode in silence for a minute and burst out laughing.

“You Toucan Sam wannabe punk.”

“You Charles Grodin lyin’ piece of shit.”

“It was funny, the more he talked, the more I looked at him and realized he had plenty of knife wounds on him, and some of them were fresh,” my brother said. “Probably not a guy we should be messing with.”

“Right.”

“Hey, did you hear about the Mad Stabber?”

“No,” I said.

“Well we’re starting to think that like, where the newspapers used to advertise all this great stuff to try to bring tourists, now they just broadcast these crazy stories to keep them away,” he said. “The Mad Stabber is this guy who was locked up in a psych ward in the city, and they eventually let him out.”

“Okay.”

“So he gets off the subway in Soho, walks into a restaurant, grabs a set of silverware and walks out. As soon as he grabs the knife from it, he walks down the street and starts stabbing women in the face with it!

“In the face, jonny.”

“Jesus.”

“Yeah, and the next day in the papers the headline was like ‘Mad Stabber at It Again!’ like he’s just this wacky local figure.”

“Like the kissing bandit.”

“Exactly! Or did you hear about the guy with the gas-powered hand saws?”

“No.”

“This construction company was doing some work down in the subway tunnel, and they left their tools at the site while they went and got lunch. Among other things, there were these like mini-Jaws of Life circular saws that are handheld and gas-powered.”

“Okay.”

“So some guy, I think he was fresh out of the asylum too, grabs these things, and they’re not plugged into a wall or anything so he takes one in each hand and runs screaming down the subway platform chasing people with them and trying to kill them.”

“You probably shouldn’t tell mom these stories.”

“But it’s not all bad. Did you hear about the Subway Hero?”

“Nope.”

“This guy was with his baby and some other guy had a seizure on the platform and fell onto the tracks with this subway car barreling down on him. So the Subway Hero turns to someone, points at his baby and says ‘Watch the kid’ and just jumps on this guy and pins him down flat. The subway goes over them – doesn’t hit ‘em – and he saves the dude’s life.”

When we got to Canal, my brother handed me a 20. “You need a jacket,” he said.

“Oh come on, it’s not that cold out here.”

“jonny, don’t try to be a hero. C’mon buddy, buy a jacket.”

I walked south and found a street vendor and bought a navy hoodie that said “NEW YORK” in collegiate letters for twenty dollars. I sent a picture of myself in it to my brother, who texted me back and asked what the original price was.

“It was $20; I just paid what was on the ticket.”

“You’re supposed to haggle. Locals negotiate; tourists pay full. You could’ve gotten it for $15.”

I shook my head. I was sick of feeling like a tourist. I took the A C north to Times Square and saw tourists lined up to eat at the Hard Rock Café, the Olive Garden and the McDonald’s. “A hundred cultures’ culinary achievements at your fingertips – maybe for the only time in your life – and you’re going to get a fucking Big Mac?” I asked myself.

I walked to Gray’s Papaya and had two dogs with sauerkraut and Tobasco and a Coke for four dollars. From there it was a short walk to Grand Central and I had a Seven and Seven with a couple from Germany at a bar with mood lighting.

I listened to old Radiohead on the train ride up to Poughkeepsie and watched as the scenery turned from Manhattan to Harlem, eventually thinning out to the suburbs, and beyond that the rural landscapes of lakes, rivers and rocky hills. The train finally rolled into the station at four and I still had an hour until my ride would show up. I walked around the outside and down the hill to Main Street and into Mahoney’s Irish Pub.

Mahoney’s is a 150-year-old house converted to a Pub and Grill. It has a beautiful wooden bar downstairs and I was the first customer of the night. I sat and had two Jamesons with ginger ale and made small talk with the bartender. She was a student at a nearby university and knew the tattoo parlor 20 minutes north at the Rondout in Kingston where I’d gotten my first two tattoos in 2001.

“So why did you have to leave college up here anyway?”

I took a sip of my Jameson. “I got mono about two weeks before the semester started again. My dad and an uncle packed up my dorm for me while I sat wheezing on a chair.”

“Why didn’t you come back?”

“There was a girl up here. She got me into a lot of trouble at school.”

“There’s always a girl.”

I sent a text message to my brother to let him know I was safe upstate and I’d meet him on my way back down. I left the bar around five and walked along the banks of the Hudson. I found a spot and knelt and plunged my hand in.

When my friend called I told her where I was and ran to the nearest street to meet her. She looked terrific; she hadn’t aged a day and I gave her a big hug across the front seat as I climbed into her sedan.

“So where are we going?”

“It’s this food festival thing; they have like 40 or 50 local businesses represented and they give out free food and beer and stuff. We just have to swing by my office first.”

We drove to her office and chatted, and again I was nervous about how we’d get along. We’d had a falling out five years before that was entirely my fault. I shot my mouth off at her about this girl we knew who I’d dated briefly – I was only 19; I didn’t know anything – and we’d only started speaking again a year before I came back to New York.

We got to her office and I was proud of her for doing so well with her newspaper. A ping of jealousy set in and I found myself wishing I’d done something professional with my writing – to date I’d had a short-lived blogger job that she’d gotten me and four semesters on my school paper on my resume. She finished some paperwork while I introduced myself to her co-workers and then we drove south to the event.

Music boomed and lights flashed and we ate free sashimi and barbecue and gourmet chicken for hours. The only free drinks I could find were Mike’s Hard Lemonade and I had two or three while we talked. She photographed local culinary figures and enjoyed a free ten-minute massage and the night became a blur. I leaned in to her ear after a quick photo op and asked if she had a minute.

“Sure thing babe, one second – could you guys move closer together? Perfect!”

Click, flash.

“What’s up?”

“Look…it took me a long time to realize it, but I wanted to apologize for five years ago.”

Click, flash. “Don’t worry about it, jonny; it’s ancient history.”

“Are you sure? I know it was all my fault and I was a real shit; I’m so sorry.”

“Oh, sir, could you hold that tray a little lower? That’s great! Babe, seriously, you’ve got nothing to worry about. I wouldn’t have invited you up here if you weren’t my friend; it’s great to see you again. Did you try the sashimi yet? It’s amazing.”

Before we knew it we were late for the last train back into the city and we had to race to the station. We leapt into the car literally as the doors were closing. We caught our breaths and cooled down. The buzz of the drinks and food, the fear and anxiety of exorcising my New York demons and the serenity of righting some old wrongs were ebbing and flowing through me. I felt terrific.

We brought up the new Radiohead album and I said I had it on my mp3 player. We each took one headphone and listened to it the rest of the way back to Manhattan. “Reckoner” came on and she said “Oh, I love the part where everything drops out but the guitar and the vocals.” We rested our heads near each other’s and listened.

Her boyfriend picked us up from Grand Central and dropped me off in Soho. I took my brother’s A C and F route back to Park Slope and met him at Bar Reis. It was raining – it was always raining – and I ordered another drink. In Bar Reis they play excellent music and there’s an outdoors area in the back. I found my brother there with some friends.

“Hey, jonny; how was your day?”

“Really good; I went to this food tasting party for this newspaper.”

Everyone groaned. “jonny, never tell people who have been working all day that you’ve been hanging out and partying.” I cursed myself again. Stupid tourist, I thought. He introduced me to his friends and we talked for a while. Then we went back to his apartment. I felt sick from the drinks and sheer quantity of raw fish I’d eaten and the night didn’t end well.

The next day I stayed in my brother’s apartment most of the day. I walked around a few blocks and ate a sandwich at a shitty Italian restaurant and went to the Brooklyn Superhero Supply Co., which is Dave Eggers’ creative writing center for kids. They have a very Adam West Batman style and sell items like Invisibility Powder and Jet Packs and do writing seminars in a secret room in the back.

I drank two liters of water and bought and administered almost $15 in cold medications. I sat in my brother’s apartment and watched Sanford and Son reruns. His roommate got home and asked if I was ok, then he got home and asked the same. I was starting to feel like a human being again and he took me for “a real New York hot dog” before showing me his rooftop, which has the best view of lower Manhattan from Brooklyn that one could hope for.

It was dark and raining and I stood leaning on the roof access door, smoking a cigarette and listening to Electric Ladyland. I stared at the Brooklyn Bridge and as Jimi’s 2^nd solo waned and the in-studio audience clapped, a revelation swept over me thicker than the fog and the mist rising from the street.

I just didn’t belong here. There were something like 8 million New Yorkers surrounding me and I really wasn’t one of them. This is not my city, and these are not my people, I thought. I’m a suburbanite. A townie. I’m not a city kid or a cool guy. I’d seen enough hipsters in tight clothes and tourists snapping pictures of the MTV building to know what my natural habitat was, and it wasn’t in one of the five boroughs.

My fourth day in New York my brother had off work and we took the subway to Midtown and walked into the lobby of the Chelsea Hotel. I asked to go up through the halls, but if you’re not a staying guest you’re not allowed. I sat and prayed to rouse the ghost of Sid Vicious but had no luck.

Next door was El Quijote Bar and Restaurant, and we went in for brunch. I had something like Eggs Benedict and my brother ate a skillet or an omelet; I don’t remember. We stopped back by Bar Reis one more time that night and on the way home, passed by posters for Legally Blonde: The Musical and Edward Scissorhands: The Musical. We laughed at how bad we imagined them to be.

“Yeah, the funny thing is when you go to lunch afterwards and the actors are there serving you your cheeseburger,” my brother quipped. “Hilarious.”

I packed my bags and got up on my last day. My brother walked me to a popular corner for taxis and on the way we passed a building with Halloween decorations in the lobby. It was obviously low-rent housing, and one could assume it had as high a mortality rate as anywhere, but there was a plastic baby-sized skeleton in a stroller with the words “Help Me” in blood red on its bib.

“Oh, that’s horrible,” we said in unison.

The rain slowed and he flagged down a cab and told him to take me to a subway station that would lead me to my airport. I got on the wrong way in the subway and was halfway back to Manhattan before I realized it. I barely made my plane and flew back to Richmond.

I got back well after dark. It was probably 8 or 9 and the world was dry as a bone. I couldn’t find my car for over an hour and when I went to ask the girl at the ticket booth for help I could clearly see she was crying. She was pretty save for the mascara streaming down her cheeks. I asked if a shuttle were still running and if I could hop onboard for a bit while it made its rounds. She called one to my location and I asked if she was ok. She’d been having some trouble paying her bills, or with her boyfriend, or having her boyfriend help her pay bills, and she acted presentably until the shuttle pulled up and I stepped up into it. As I sat and we pulled away, I saw her erupt into tears again; she wept into closed fists and her shoulders heaved with each sob.

Segments of Flight [Tobi].

2010-01-29T00:01:00.001-05:00

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].

2010-01-22T00:01:00.001-05:00

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.

2010-01-08T19:00:00.006-05:00

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