This story is excerpted from a book-in-progress, Utopia Has Been Postponed, about coming-of-age in Berkeley. The incident it describes was a key one in my childhood, and the story's reversal parallels the book's overall theme of moving from alienation and despair to the possibility of the sacred. The choice to present the narrative voice as chronologically appropriate (in other words, as the voice of an 11-year-old) evolved naturally through my attempts to vividly communicate the protagonist's internal experience. In this I was inspired by Frank McCourt's brilliant use of this technique in Angela's Ashes.
- Joshua Leavitt |
Grown Ups have got to be the weirdest life form possible. Take my Mom, for instance. She's transferred me to Black Pine Circle, a private school where I don't have any friends, because she thinks I need to be in a “sheltered environment” for a few years before high school starts and my hormones go crazy. I don't know what hormones are, but my Mom is obviously just like the rest of the Grown Ups. They spend most of their time worrying over nothing.
The Most Popular Boy in the sixth grade is a French guy named Jean Gabriel Henry. I don't know why he has three first names. Maybe all French kids do. When I come to school wearing my favorite purple corduroys, the ones my Mom tells me are getting too small, he says, “I didn't know there was a flood happening!” Allison Keene and the popular girls think Jean Gabriel Henry is The Funniest Guy Ever, so of course they all start laughing at me right away.
I know they're just laughing because I'm the new kid, but my face starts burning anyway. I'd like to take a big rock and smash Jean Gabriel Henry's head in, but I don't know if French kids are good at fighting. Someday, though, I'll get revenge on Jean Gabriel Henry for doing this to me. I swear it.
The only boy dumb enough to be my friend is Max Friedman, The Biggest Geek in the sixth grade, Max has black, horned rim glasses like Dennis the Menace's father, and a Prince Caspian haircut that is totally geek-like. He laughs at everything.
A couple months after school starts our class goes on a field trip to the Oakland Museum. Once we finish looking at all the boring paintings, Max and I lie down on the grass and talk about how Allison Keene and the popular girls wouldn't even think of playing with us. There's a big pile of cut grass nearby and I tell Max how the best day at camp this summer was when the boys and girls had a huge grass fight. He looks over at the popular girls, who are all sitting together making dandelion necklaces.
“Max, are you thinking what I'm thinking?”
“Yeah. I can't believe it, but I am.”
“If we try to start a grass fight with the popular girls, and they just look at us like we're idiots, then Jean Gabriel Henry will torture us for the whole rest of the year.”
“I know,” he says, looking at the popular girls again. Then he looks back at me and grins. “It's worth it.”
We come up to them casually, big handfuls of grass behind our backs, pretending to be in a loud discussion. That way we get their attention. Then, all at once, we bombard them.
They start screaming and trying to run, but they were so not expecting it that we have time to cover all of them with grass before they can even get up. We tear off, yelling, and when we turn around we see something amazing: the popular girls—every single one of them—are chasing after us.
We start grabbing more ammo as we run but pretty soon we're surrounded. Everybody's laughing while we throw grass into each other's mouths and onto each other's hair and all over each other's clothes, and there's this tickling happy feeling inside us—not just inside us, it's in the sky and trees too—and I can feel how much these girls love it that we are doing this to them, and how much we love doing it, and as the grass is flying we don't have to hide from each other that we love it anymore. That's the difference.
When the war settles down we all lie on the grass panting and smiling. Then one of the girls takes a dandelion necklace and puts it on me. Somebody else puts one on Max. They get up after that without saying anything, and me and Max just lie on our backs, covered in grass, with dandelion necklaces around our necks, looking up at the sky. I'm so happy I don't even care about getting revenge on Jean Gabriel Henry anymore.
“Isn't this great?” I whisper.
“Yeah.”
Suddenly Max starts laughing.
“What?”
“I think they have a word for what we've been doing,” he says.
“Yeah? What?”
His eyes are bright behind his glasses. “Flirting!”
Whatever you call it, it's the best thing ever.
*
Instead of the 3:30 movie there's all these dead bodies on Channel 7. They're lined up on the ground, all jammed together in a neat line, but each body has different colored clothes, so I can tell where one ends and the next one starts. The camera is moving down the row of them. The bodies keep going and going, and I can see more rows above the one the camera is focusing on. The other channels have the same pictures, too.
A reporter comes on, talking in a fake TV voice, saying Jonestown is The Worst Case Of Mass Suicide ever reported. I didn't know there was such a thing as Mass Suicide. One Grown Up killing himself seems like a pretty dumb thing to do, but a whole bunch of Grown Ups killing themselves all together is too weird, especially since Grown Ups always act like they know everything and you should just be quiet and do what they say. My mom says she worries about me, but no kids would ever commit mass suicide. The Grown Ups are the ones she should be worrying about.
The next morning the front page of the San Francisco Chronicle says FOUR HUNDRED STOOD IN LINE TO DIE. There's a picture of the throne where the Reverend Jim Jones, leader of The People's Temple, used to sit.
The throne is really just a wood chair with a pillow on it. There are lots of dead bodies in front of it. Their feet hang over the edge of a wood deck. Above the throne is a sign with big letters that says “Those Who Do Not Remember The Past Are Condemned To Repeat It.” I look at the dead bodies again. Maybe it would be better to just go ahead and repeat the past.
The only part of the San Francisco Chronicle I've ever read before is the comics section, but now I look at the article under the headline and read:
The death toll at Jonestown grew to 406 last night from the mass suicides and killings that began Saturday when the babies at the People's Temple settlement were lined up and given cups of purple Kool-Aid laced with cyanide.
I've never heard of cyanide before, but I can tell from the sound what it is.
On the bus ride to school I watch the trees and houses going by through the window. The thing I don't get is giving poison to babies. What were those Grown Ups thinking? And where were the babies' parents?
I wish I could be lying down in the grass, looking up at leaves on branches instead of sitting on this bus thinking about babies being poisoned. But the bus keeps moving. I can't just get off.
Maybe the babies' parents were right there when it happened. Maybe—I don't want to think about this, but I can't help it—maybe their parents were even the ones who gave the babies Kool-Aid with cyanide. As soon as I think about this, I know it's true. I can usually tell about stuff like that.
Giant pine trees are going by outside the window. Were there trees at the People's Temple in Jonestown? Did the mass suicide people look up at them while they were dying?
At Black Pine Circle we talk about how we're never going to drink Kool-Aid again. During recess me and Max do this joke where we come running up to other kids and yell, “HEY, KOOL-AID!” and then fall down dead. It's pretty funny. The teachers don't think so, though.
Every morning I read about Jim Jones and The People's Temple in the San Francisco Chronicle. Then, a week later, there's a new headline: CITY HALL MURDERS: MOSCONE, MILK SLAIN—MAYOR WAS HIT 4 TIMES. I read how Dan White, this guy who used to be a policeman, walked into City Hall and shot the mayor of San Francisco and another gay guy to death. On the front page Dan White is wearing a tie and a fancy vest as the police take him to jail.
When the trial happens a few months later, my father says that Dan White pleading “Temporary Insanity” is a bad joke. They call it “The Twinkie Defense” because Dan White's lawyers say that he was crazy from eating junk food all the time, especially Twinkies. In the end Dan White gets a maximum of eight years in prison, with possible parole in five years. Now my father says it's not just a bad joke, it's a travesty, whatever that is. At school we say that if you drink Kool-Aid you'll kill yourself, but if you eat Twinkies you'll kill somebody else.
*
After the grass fight at the park, things change. Allison Keene, The Most Popular Girl, starts talking to me, and Jean Gabriel Henry starts letting me play four-square with him at recess. I still haven't forgotten what he did to me, though. I'm still going to get revenge.
By the time our class camping trip happens, near the end of the year, I've become one of the popular boys. My mom decided to come on the trip as a parent chaperone. I don't know if it's because some Grown Ups do crazy things, like give cyanide to their babies and kill the Mayor of San Francisco, or because she's sick of fighting with my dad. I don't think it's just because she likes camping trips.
On the second day Max and I are next to the river, skipping stones.
“I think you're just as popular as Jean Gabriel Henry,” says Max. “I bet you could even go out with Allison Keene.”
“She would never go out with me. Besides, she's too fake.”
“What do you mean?”
“Her laugh is, like, totally fake. She just does it to try to look cool or whatever. I told her that.”
“What did she say?”
“She looked at me funny and then she goes, `What do you mean?' So I go, `You know what I mean. You laugh when you don't really mean it.' So she goes, `No I don't!' and then she laughs that way and I go, `See? You just did it' and she goes, `Did what?' and I go, `Laughed when you didn't really mean it' and she goes, `No I didn't!' and I go, `Yes you did!' and she goes, `I didn't even laugh!' and then she laughed that way again and I go, `Yes, you did, and now you just did it again' and she goes, `No I didn't.' ”
Max is laughing. “OK, OK, I get the idea.”
“I hate it when people are fake.”
It's almost time for dinner, so we start back to the campsite. Max goes toward his tent and I keep walking toward the main fire pit. Maybe Max is right, maybe I really am as popular as Jean Gabriel Henry. Maybe I could play a prank on him, something that would make him look like a total fool, because of what he did to me. On the path up ahead of me, I see Paul wearing an Indian suit.
Paul is by far The Biggest Geek in the whole class. At the beginning of the year Max was The Biggest Geek, but when Paul joined the class later on, he even made Max look slick. Paul was the new kid and The Biggest Geek all rolled into one. Even though he's a geek, Max is lovable, but Paul is just hopeless. Even after Jean Gabriel and Mark Dutton told him there was going to be a party at Lauren Posner's house, and that she really wanted him to come, and he got all dressed up and his Mom took him over to her house, and Lauren totally freaked out because there wasn't a party, and even after we got him to bark like a dog in front of Allison Keene and she almost threw up, and even after we convinced him to put live pollywogs in our teacher's desk and he got sent to the Principal's office, after all that, he still does things like wear an Indian suit on a class camping trip.
And now, to top it all off, he's smiling at me like I'm his friend or something. What's it going to take for him to get the message?
“Hey, Tonto, cool Indian suit.”
Paul stops smiling. He turns away and walks on the path ahead of me.
“I bet you're going to be really popular wearing that thing around. Did you find that at the clothes store in the geek section or what?”
Now Paul stops. He stands there for a second, his back to me. Then he turns around. His face is twitching and his eyes look funny. Suddenly he's yelling.
“Don't you know it hurts my feelings when you say things like that? How do you think it makes me feel?”
His blue eyes start pouring out tears, and his whole body is shaking, but it's like his voice is totally separate from his body and is talking right through him. I'm just staring.
“How do you think I feel?” he screams, so shrill that I jump. I can't stop looking at him, even though he looks so crazy that I feel like I can't stand to look at him for one second more.
“Do you think I like being called a geek and a retard? Do you think I like everyone laughing at me behind my back and saying, `There goes Paul, the freak? It's easy for you because everyone likes you, you're popular, you can say what you want and nobody cares if it's stupid or not. But how do you think I feel?”
He's not supposed to say things like this. I'm trying to figure out how to make him stop but, all of a sudden there's a shaky feeling in my stomach. It's like there was a delayed reaction from when he said what he said to when it got to me, but now it did.
I'm staring at Paul, who looks like he's about to explode into a million pieces. His chest is heaving, he's waiting for me to say something back, but the quivery feeling inside me is getting stronger and I'm frozen all at the same time. He looks at me like, You're not even going to say anything? Then he lets out this noise, like a wounded dog, and runs off in his Indian suit.
I stand there, looking around to see if some Grown Up saw the whole thing and can tell me what you do when something like this happens. There's only trees though.
Something has gone totally wrong. Instead of getting revenge on Jean Gabriel Henry for what he did to me when I was the new kid, I ended up taking revenge on Paul, who never did anything to me, and who was actually the new kid himself. Is being popular some kind of disease that automatically gives you amnesia about all the times when you were unpopular? I can still see Paul's blond curls, the Indian headband with the bent feather coming out of it, and the desperate look in his blue eyes as he screams at me.
Now the tears are rolling down my cheeks, and I don't care how popular I am or how many girls like me. I stumble along not caring where I'm going, and pretty soon I'm back in the main camp. I walk into the center circle under the tarp and all the Grown Ups jump up and gather around. They're asking if I hurt myself, if I got stung by a bee, if I got bit by a snake, if, if, if, and I don't say anything, don't make any sound, the tears just keep coming. The Grown Ups go get my Mom, who puts her arms around me, but I don't care about that.
It's getting dark now, and people start gathering for dinner. Some of the other kids come over to see what's going on because everyone knows I'm one of the popular boys, and the popular boys never cry. Everybody's worried about whether I'm OK, which makes me cry even harder, because the whole point is that it's not me, it's Paul. Finally my mother bends down and looks me in the eye.
“OK,” she says, “you've had a cry, and that's fine. Now I want you to tell me: What happened?”
I try to answer but when I start remembering, bolts of pain shoot up my body and stick in my throat and the tears come faster. My answers all get eaten up by pain.
My mother's still looking at me. “Did you hurt yourself?”
“No.” My breath catches in spasms. “I hurt somebody else.”
Everyone is quiet, hoping I'll keep talking.
“What do you mean?” she says.
I look around. “Where's Paul?” I stammer.
One of the parents sends two of the boys to look for him. By now all the other kids have gathered for dinner. My mother says, “We're going to sit down and wait.”
We all sit. In a couple of minutes Mark Dutton comes back with Paul, still wearing his Indian suit. People move out of the way so he can stand in the center of the circle.
As soon as I see Paul I start bawling like crazy, with sounds and everything. He's crying too. I get up and the two of us stand there, looking at each other.
I want to say something so big that it takes away all the pain we've caused him, all year long, but I know nothing I say will ever do that. Paul is still crying but it's not angry crying anymore. The more he stands there the more pain shoots around inside me because now, after everything that's happened, he's just standing there, quietly, like he's the one who knows something, who is something, and I'm the one who's a retard or a freak.
All these feelings are swimming around inside me, but I still haven't said anything. I look at Max, and at Jean Gabriel Henry, and at Allison Keene. I can see they're starting to realize that what's wrong isn't just something with me and Paul but with all of us. Some of the girls have tears in their eyes, too. Seeing that they get it even without my saying anything makes it more real. I cry harder, and the feelings swim more.
I look at Paul and he just nods. We start sobbing then. Moans are coming out of our mouths, and our bodies curl up when the waves of pain get too big. Most of the others are crying, too. The Grown Ups look at us like we've gone crazy.
After a while the waves of pain calm down and it feels like maybe I could say something. I look at Paul and tell him I'm sorry, that I never even wondered how he felt, and that something must really be wrong with me to have been so mean and not even care. He nods, his eyes filling up with tears again, and I can hear others around the circle crying more because of what I'm saying. I tell him I wish there was some way to take it all back, but I know I can't. He nods again.
All of a sudden Jean Gabriel Henry stands up and comes over. He's crying, too, and his voice is cracking, and he tells Paul he's been the meanest to him, that he's been cruel and nasty, and he says he's sorry and that he's sorry he was mean to me at first, too. Jean Gabriel Henry looks so confused and hurt by what he has done that we're all amazed. We never knew French kids could be like this.
One of the girls starts talking about how she makes fun of Paul for no reason, and that it never felt right, but that once she started it was like she couldn't stop. Other kids talk too, all saying the same kind of thing, and Paul just stands there nodding at everyone, like he knows exactly what they're going to say before they even say it. When everyone is done, he looks around the circle.
“It's OK,” he says. “I forgive all of you.”
When he says this something cracks open inside our chests. All the sadness in the world is pouring into our eleven year old bodies. We don't know how to stand what's happening, but somehow we do. Our moans go out into the big sky, with the stars all around, so that miles away people must be hearing us and wondering. It's like we're sitting on the beach, facing an ocean of pain, and the waves are crashing over us again and again and again. The ocean will never dry up, it will never go away, it will never get smaller or be fixed, so we just keep crying. We'll probably never stop.
All of a sudden I'm remembering Danny, the retarded kid from Palo Alto, and before I know what I'm doing I start telling the others about him. Danny had a lisp, and a hair lip, and he walked funny and looked funny and couldn't read like the rest of us. He would always have to leave class to go to Special Tutoring and we used to tease him about it every day but he would just laugh and smile.
I was one of the main ones who teased him, even though he never did anything mean to anyone, but one day at the end of Fourth Grade I was playing basketball by myself at lunch and he asked if he could play, too. For some reason I let him play with me even though he could barely pick up the ball and looked totally goofy when he tried to shoot. There was no one else around to laugh if I made fun of him, so I didn't. Danny was thanking me so much for letting him play, and smiling at me, all ready to be my friend even after the mean things I'd done to him. He was so happy that I started asking him things about his Mom and Dad and if he had any brothers and sisters, and he told me and then he asked questions about me and we ended up talking and shooting baskets together for the whole lunch period. I'd never really talked to him before but it turned out that I really liked him. Not just because I felt sorry for him, but because he was so sweet that I couldn't help it. After that I decided I was going to be Danny's friend.
I kept my promise and was friends with him for the rest of the year, but by then there was only a few weeks left of school. When we said goodbye for the summer, I told him I'd see him next year and we could play basketball together some more, and that we'd still be friends. He looked at me like it was the greatest thing anyone had ever said to him. He jumped up and down and yelled “YES!!” as loud as he could. But then, before the summer was over, I moved away to Berkeley and never saw him or even got to say goodbye, which was really sad, because Danny was The Sweetest Kid I ever met in my whole life.
Now everyone is bawling about Danny—some of the Grown Ups even have tears in their eyes—even though they never met him. By this time it's totally dark. Dinner is sitting there, waiting to be cooked, but no one wants the food. We sit looking into the fire. It'll get quiet for a while and then someone will say something, or just start crying without saying anything, and then we'll all join in. The Grown Ups try to distract us by talking about dessert, and about telling ghost stories and even about playing Spin the Bottle, but we don't care about those things. All we care about is the gigantic pain in this heart. We tell the Grown Ups to leave us alone.
They meet a little ways off to discuss things and then march back into the circle.
“Alright,” my mother announces, in a loud voice, “you have now cried about everything that you've done wrong from the time you were old to enough to walk until now. You have had a chance to cry over everything you needed to cry about, and now it's done. Over! Finished! You understand me?” She looks at each of us. On the far side of the campfire, someone begins sobbing quietly, and it ripples around the circle.
“Knock it off!” she says. “It's time to eat hot dogs now!”
The idea of letting go of this pain makes us sadder than ever, and we all start going into tears again. My mother moves around the circle and wherever the crying pops up, she orders the person to stop it on the spot. Finally she gets us quiet.
“I want to say something,” says Max. He's been totally quiet the whole time. “I haven't done anything mean to anyone, but now I wish I had so that I could feel as terrible as the rest of you!”
This makes us all cry again until we realize that it's funny and then, in the middle of crying, we start laughing.
The laughter gets really big really fast. Pretty soon we're all laughing as hard as we were crying before. The more we think about how sad we've been, the funnier it gets. How did we ever take all that crying seriously?
My mother looks at the other Grown Ups and shrugs like, At least they aren't crying anymore. On the other side of the circle, Farish says, “I'm The Ficklest Sixth Grader in the whole world!” and we all go into hysterics.
Then Max says, “Hey, guess what?”
We all say, “What?”
“We've been sitting here crying for almost three hours!”
The idea of sitting somewhere and crying for three hours is easily the most ridiculous thing any of has ever heard in our lives. Now it's like we're about to go over a waterfall into the ocean of laughter, which is even bigger than the ocean of pain.
“All right!” my mother says, sensing the direction things are going. “That's enough! I personally forbid you to keep laughing!” She looks around the circle again. “You can chuckle, you can talk, you can frown, you can sleep, you can grin, you can eat, but you cannot laugh or cry anymore!”
This is a funny thing to say, but before we can start laughing the other Grown Ups start handing out freshly cooked hot dogs. Suddenly, we're starving.
We eat ravenously, and when all the hot dogs are gone we make S'mores on the campfire. There are no thoughts in our heads, and the food tastes more real than it did ever before. The fire and the rocks and the stars and all the other kids look new to me, even though I've been looking at them every day.
I don't know how something that started out as The Most Horrible Thing Ever could end up making us all feel so much more alive, but it did. Everyone else is feeling the same way. I can tell by their eyes.
The whole rest of the night no one says a word, we just smile at each other across the circle. When it's time to go to sleep we lie down under the stars, our bodies exhausted and our hearts clean.