Both -Cides: A Revision (246 hits)
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Submitted by awj002 (View user info) at 2007-05-22 02:52:03 EDT
A substantial revision of this older draft -- http://www.ubersite.com/m/89907.
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This is based on a true story and is, therefore, about your children. It involves some shit that you won't wanna hear; more accurately, it's about your children hearing it. But before that even begins I'm gonna be a pretentious douchebag and start by writing about Nietzsche. He wrote that some people think too much about the past, others too much about the future, and that some people never think beyond the moment. I like thinking in the moment because that's when I'm the smartest motherfucker in the history of me. A person is not always smarter than they have been, but they always think they are, and I think I am. But right now I am going to use just the right number of moments remembering about myself and about your children, if it suits you that I am remember them in this way. Listen: I am your son.
I'm back in high school, shivering at the bus stop. I feel the snow inside my shoes, melting into my socks. I've got cold feet. Someone's kid says, "God, it's fucking cold," and the words go in one ear. I'm painfully aware of the cold, the ragged holes in my gloves. I'm looking at this fucking cold student, who wears no hat. He has a dirty face and shoves a cigarette into his cracked mouth, smoking half and flicking the rest away. I hate him for the waste, the pollution, the self-sacrificial trendiness of his rolled up tobacco. I wish I hadn't climbed out of bed. Less than half an hour ago I was waking to Dark Side of the Moon. Roger Waters reminded me, "Don't be afraid to care." Who is there to care about? The bus door swings open.
It's no use trying to filter out the things I don't want to see or hear, but I try. In my fierce agnosticism I believe what Waters says, that "all you touch, and all you see, is all your life will ever be." So just now I press the collar of my jacket over my ears because someone behind me is singing, "What is a juggalo? Well he ain't a phony. He'll walk up and bust a nut in your macaroni...." and that song, "What is a juggalo?" is dreadful. The first day I heard it was the first day I participated in shoplifting. It was the winter before, hanging with pair of skaters named Mike and Chris, disagreeing with their claim that ICP was the best group in history. Even at sixteen, I knew there was no excuse for subjecting one's self to that. But I went on a bike ride with these guys anyway; I was practically glued to the pedals then. We stopped at the dollar store and I bought some soda. They didn't buy shit. On the return trip, Chris removed the stolen Twizzlers and Caramel Apple Pops from his jacket. I sipped at Dr. Pepper, my partner in crime. Chris and Mike had needed me to buy something so they wouldn't be held suspect. They became two more guys with whom I refused to hang out.
Still, I got this fucked up sense of what was cool. In the springtime I took my brother to Paper Warehouse and we jacked a bunch of candy necklaces. We'd wear twenty necklaces at a time and have wars with the fuckers. You take a candy circle between your teeth and shoot it at your brother, trying to peg him in the eye, which is a simple game that can can ten bucks if you aren't into stealing. You haven't given me ten bucks, not for necklace-games.
Delinquency was there to fall back on when I felt insecure, the way it became easier to hate everybody who caused me trouble than to love anybody. There was a girl who wrote me in letters that she was going to kill herself, and I gave those letters to the principal. A few days later she told me that I might have saved her life. That felt alright, like if I had probably just met some minimum requirement for good things I had to do in my life. Later on this girl tried to kiss me, and it was my first kiss on the lips. I liked that but I didn't love her, she was heavyset and listened to the wrong kind of music. I just didn't think she should off herself.
Sorry, Nietzsche, I'll get back on track.
As I move through the hallways I avoid confrontation. Here, in front of the cafeteria entrance, is where a few months ago two girls screamed and clawed and fought, one throwing the other to the ground and slashing her face with a knife. I watched the maiming from beyond the outskirts of the fight-circle, smiling, and hoped one of the combatants would be killed. When you are young and there is nothing you can do to stop evil, you hope evil will destroy itself in a sort of civil war. There are all kinds of wars going on and you want me to feel this way about this war, and that way about that one, but you aren't there to advise on all of them. I hate the war of high school. I hate everyone in it and wish they would die. Their deaths would improve my quality of life.
And speaking of quality of life: learning lowered it. I learned about Franco and Tito, about a couple million guys getting fucking macheted, and guys getting AIDS, and about racial profiling and sexism. If you pay attention in high school you learn that people are violent and hateful, and that strips you of trust. Of the ability to make important life decisions. Skepticism and cynicism are drilled into you just like the curse words in the hall, all the 'fucks' that still fucking litter my fucking sentences. Teachers make you wonder about the existence of true love, and God, and that other imaginary shit. They call the government into question. I start to ask myself why I'd like to see an angry black student stab another to death. Mother?
In class, I sit and play DrugWar on the calculator. I buy drugs in Amsterdam and sell them in Tijuana, making more money than Jesus Holy God unless I'm shot in the head by a dealer. Sometimes a pimp drags me into the stall of a dirty third-world airport bathroom and rapes me in the ass. I shake the calculator into submission, then come back for more. Back and forth in a reign of terror across Europe.
Six years later, I still haven't been out of the United States. I'm not sure there's anything across the pond except for old buildings
At lunchtime I plan school-wide genocide with my friends. It starts like this: some kid in a black hoodie and Misfits T-shirt yells "faggot" across the cafeteria, occasioning a comment from my friends, like, "I could shoot that guy in the face." Aldrin laughs and nods, his spikey black hair being awesome and somehow encouraging. Meanwhile, completely independent of my conversation, a shouting match starts between the black-hooded kid and someone whose social conscience requires him, or sometimes a her, to object to the use of the word "fag." Soon, because everyone should just shut up and there is no way to make them do so, we hatch a genocide plan.
There's a grenade to scatter the goths, flashbangs to create confusion, small-arms fire to decimate the remaining populus. Nick and Aaron are on World News Tonight following the atrocity, explaining why their classmates deserved to be slaughtered. "I can't explain it to you in one sentence," Aaron says to Peter fucking Jennings. The camera cuts to Nick, who says, "Everything they did was stupid and destructive." Aaron tries to talk again, but Jennings cuts the interview short. An expert in a business suit gets 30 seconds to advocate for stricter gun control. Another expert analyzes the size and shape of Nick and Aarons' brains, also for 30 seconds. Nick and Aaron look squeamish, uncertain, aimless. They look like best friends.
Really, I've never shot anyone. Most people haven't, most people won't, but a whole lot of people could. Given the right circumstances—which have nothing to do with gun availability—I probably could have. At any rate, one cannot sustain such hatred when only a year earlier he was trying his best to keep his head down and resist regression. One day it dawned on me that if every gang-banging motherfucker, every "faggot"-yelling goth, every confused and angry kid, deserves to die, then I was one of them.
Nick and I began to kill me. Repeatedly.
The first time we did it, Nick pulled the Saturn into the parking lot of Cooper High School. He found the Polaroid camera in the trunk while I scooped his sheath knife from between the seats, SOG brand with the gleaming four-inch blade, manufactured, I think, not for hunting or fishing but for disassembling human flesh and bone; so that stabbing someone was not "stabbing" or "knifing" but "sogging." Nick had started carrying the SOG after a large man in a truck tried to run him off the road. We climbed over the low fence to the football field, made our way to the snack booth, and I sat on the asphalt against the building with the SOG in one hand and a McDonald's cup in the other. Nick removed the ketchup packets from his pocket and tore them open, smearing my face and my clothes and the knife, the wall. I licked the ketchup from the edge of my lips; delicious blood. He wiped his hands on his pants and snapped the photo of my death. He handed me the Polaroid. I shook it, letting the life bleed into it, and I appeared in a whirlwind of gore. A beautiful, nauseating, complete undoing of self.
Here's the thing people don't understand, when they're asking why this kid stole this thing or that kid shot up that school. It's easy to be a shithead. It's easy to hate and hard to love. Anybody who sits through a history course knows that. Anybody who rides the bus knows that. Anybody who isn't settled into his loveseat, stroking a kitten, munching on Fritos, watching Law and Order—knows that.
You want to take me to task about it, but you better choose your battles. You have the luxury of being able to do so. You should turn your attention to that guy in the back of the bus—the one singing, "Shit piss fuck cunt cocksucker motherfucker tits fart turd and twat. I fucked your mom and I wanna suck my dad, and my momma too..." That's Blink 182, and they allow that on the buses and in the lunchrooms. Deny that kid his allowance, send that kid to counseling, tell that kid he's a savage.
This kid already knows it.
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Submitted by Mike-Mc (user info) at 2007-05-22 05:27:33 EDT (#)
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