Both -Cides of the Story (426 hits)
Category: NoneRating: 1.85 on 7 reviews (Rate this item) (V)
Submitted by awj002 (View user info) at 2006-06-30 18:33:06 EDT
I see myself shivering at the bus stop. I feel the snow inside my shoes, melting into my socks. I've got cold feet. Someone says, "God, it's fucking cold," and the words go in one ear. Saying things I already know. Painfully aware of the cold, the ragged holes in my gloves. Looking at the fucking cold student, who wears no hat, only a dirty face with a cracked mouth. Into which he shoves a cigarette. He smokes half and flicks the other away. I hate him for the waste of it, the pollution, the self-sacrificial trendiness of smoking. Spring will warm the skin and melt the snow, but it has nothing to say about bad habits or cigarette butts. Wish I hadn't climbed out of bed. Less than half an hour ago I was waking to Dark Side of the Moon, like I always do. Roger Waters reminding me, "Don't be afraid to care." How can I value the life of someone who makes it hard to breathe? 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 my best. Hear no evil, speak no evil. I sincerely believe 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 so on. The song "What is a juggalo?" is linked with crime. The first time I heard it was also the first day I (inadvertantly) participated in shoplifting. The winter before, hanging with a new crowd, Mike and Chris, disagreeing with their claim that ICP was the best group in history. Even at sixteen or seventeen, I knew there was no excuse for subjecting one's self to ICP. But I went on a bike ride with these kids anyway. On the return trip, they removed the stolen Twizzlers and Caramel Apple Pops from their jackets. I munched on the candy I'd bought fair and square, never having felt so used. They'd needed someone to buy something so they wouldn't be held suspect. Mike and Chris became two more guys with whom I refused to hang out.
The allure of deviancy, the distorted sense of what was "cool," had begun to influence my behavior. When the spring came, stupid me, I took my brother to Paper Warehouse in order to steal candy necklaces. Delinquency was always there to fall back on when I felt unsure of myself, the same way it slowly became easier to hate everybody who caused me trouble from the moment I arrived at school each day.
Keep on keeping on, I think to myself as I move through the hallways. Here, in front of the cafeteria entrance, is the spot where two young women screamed and clawed and fought, one throwing the other to the ground and slashing her face with a knife. I'd watched the maiming from beyond the outskirts of the fight-circle, smiling perhaps for the first time that day, hoping 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. You lose your concern for individual circumstance. You decide that there's nothing wrong with ceasing to value life, in all its forms, and begin to justify all sorts of things that will improve your quality of life.
Of course, during the high school years, I did a lot of learning. I learned about Franco and Tito, AIDS and racial profiling and sexism. Things that made me question the government. Speaking of quality of life, learning lowered it. If you pay attention in high school you learn that people are generally violent and hateful, which is knowledge that strips you of trust and the ability to make important life decisions. Skepticism and cynicism are drilled into you just like the curse words and the violence. They become part of your persona. They make you wonder about the existence of true love, and God, and all those things. But most of all they call into question why I'd like more than anything to see an angry black student stab another to death.
It was no small problem. I became obsessed with oppression and violence and death. In class, I'd sit and play DrugWar on the graphing calculator. I could buy drugs in Amsterdam and sell them in Tijuana, and make more money than God, unless I got myself shot in the head by a dealer. Sometimes a pimp would drag me into the stall of a dirty third-world airport bathroom and rape me in the ass. DrugWar 2 had a black-and-white, one-bit animation for that. I would frown and shake the calculator into submission. Then I'd come back for more.
Sometimes my friends and I would end up planning genocide against the student body. It'd always start like this: some kid in a black hoodie and Misfits T-shirt would yell "faggot" across the cafeteria, occasioning a comment from Nick, Josh, Joe, Craig, Aldrin or me such as, "I could shoot that guy in the face." Aldrin would laugh hysterically and nod. Meanwhile, completely independent of our conversation, a shouting match would begin between the black-hooded kid (backed by his friends) and someone whose social conscience required him or her to object to the use of the word "fag." Soon, because we wanted everyone to shut up and there was no way to make them do so, we were planning their deaths.
[Insert Columbine-esque plan here, minus the shooter suicides. A grenade to scatter the goths, flashbangs to create confusion, small-arms fire to decimate the populus. Nick and Aaron on World News Tonight, explaining why their classmates deserved to be slaughtered. "They didn't know that they didn't know anything. Every action they made, ill-informed and potentially destructive. Making everyone afraid without also being afraid of themselves." The Supreme Court judges, seated at their long mahogany bench, ruling in favor of the defendants.]
It was never easy to defend my genocidally-minded discussions, except to say that we never acted on them. But I know this to be a weak defense—because we had no more power to shoot up the school than we did to exercise any other means of control. If we had, then perhaps we would have done something drastic. 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 dawns on you that if every gang-banging motherfucker, every "faggot"-yelling goth, every confused and angry kid, deserves to die, then you're one of them. In order to divert our aggressions, Nick and I began to kill me. Repeatedly.
I remember the first time it happened 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 started carrying the SOG after a large angry man in a truck tried to run him off the road one afternoon.) 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. Handed me the Polaroid. I shook it, letting the life bleed into it. Appeared in a whirlwind of gore. Beautiful, total, a complete undoing of self.
Whenever I think of my high school years, I think of Blindness. José Saramago won the Nobel Prize for Literature for his work on the novel. In Blindness a group of blind people are thrown into quarantine and left to die. Some of the blind men form a gang and rape the women. In high schools the quarantined patients are not blind, but immature, and there is no effective regulation there, either—nothing to save you from the ignorance and filth. Nothing to save you from the kid 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..." (Blink 182). Nothing to save you from hating him for planting that song in your head alongside the algebra and world lit. Nothing to save you from hating yourself.
User Reviews
Submitted by Axolotl (user info) at 2006-08-30 02:19:27 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
Can't exactly relate to that school - how old were you?
I'm 16 now, my high school is nothing like that, perhaps because it's all boys.
Submitted by PerkMan (user info) at 2006-08-30 02:01:16 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
Read my post of "I don't care where they end up". It goes along with this...
Submitted by electrictoothsyndrome (user info) at 2006-08-30 01:21:21 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
This had some really really great moments.
You definitely managed to capture the bleak, hopeless idiocy of youth and the misdirected ideas of 'cool'.
I was always a lot more clinical in my observations of my fellow classmates. To me they were like rats in my own personal laboratory. I would garner pleasure in sitting back, guessing what they'd do next, and recording whether I was right or wrong in my notebook.
Submitted by The_Cyst_Master (user info) at 2006-07-13 23:19:01 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
Word.
Submitted by rob_berg (user info) at 2006-06-30 20:20:23 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
Awesome.
I completely disagree with your concluding sentence, however. There are MANY things in life that can save you from such a useless rut of emotional condemnation.
"Hate" itself is a pretty worthless emotion- not to mention super draining and to direct that negativity inward simply makes no sense. (However, I will concede there ARE people out there worth hating... and certainly a few choice individuals who need killing.)
I suspect you are a pretty well adjusted individual, homicidal illusions aside, so I won't bother with any further pseudo-psycho babble save this: Individuals who actively (or passively) affect the general enjoyment of life and poison our collective consciousness inevitably suffer a death far worse than anything that could be manifested physically: the slow, steady disintegration of their soul.
I don't imagine many folks will make it past your opening paragraph- but for those that do a truly brilliant example of literature awaits them.
Bravo.
r.
Submitted by JonnyX (user info) at 2006-06-30 19:31:05 EDT (#)
Ranking: 1
that's a lot of angst
Submitted by williamson (user info) at 2006-06-30 19:03:54 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
I don't know what to make of this... but I enjoyed reading it.