CHAPTER THIRTEEN

In which I attempt to turn my life around but only make myself dizzy

 

On my first night in Hazing, at the motel where we were staying while we looked for a house to rent, I was laying in bed staring at the ceiling, thinking about the books I wrote and the sword I made, and the Weirry Clan, which was a club I started for people who wanted to sit in the dark and say magic spells, and nobody wanted to be in it but me, and the war with Stripper, who was the nerdiest kid in school and probably would have become my best friend if McDoodle hadn’t decided we had to be at war with him, and Scharee Hines, and Jock Hill, and spitwads the size of golf balls that smelled like enchiladas since English class came right after lunch, and hamburgers that got somebody in trouble because they turned out to be made out of horse meat, and the cow meat hamburgers that came along after they got things straightened out down at the School Meals Program Purchasing Department, which tasted just like the horse meat burgers, and walking past Davy Hunyak’s house and shrieking out his name, like this:  Day-VEEEEE!, and teaching myself how to bind books, and hiking in the Sandia mountains outside of town, and watching my brother make puppet heads out of rubber, and calligraphizing a magic spell and climbing up on the roof to hide it under some shingles, and trying to shoot baskets with my brother Dirk till he got mad and wouldn’t play anymore, and after several hours all those things sort of rolled themselves up into a ball and I went to sleep and just for the fun of it, let’s say that I then proceeded to have this dream.

I go into this small room, and there’s all these wires all over the place, and they’re all hooked up to different places.  Some of the wires are glowing red hot.  They all have words on them, either “good boy” or “bad boy.”  I see that some of the “bad boy” wires are hooked up to “good boy” plugs, and vice versa, and these switched wires are the red hot glowing ones.  I try to figure out how to unplug them and get them plugged into the right place, but the hot wires hurt my hand.  I take off my hat, and wrap it around the wires to use as a hot pad like my Mama has in the kitchen, but before I get more than two or three of the wires switched around, my hat is in ashes.  I take off one of my sneakers and try to use it for a glove, but the smell of burning rubber and toe jam makes me want to throw up, and the molten rubber burns my hand.

And funny thing was, when I woke up in my bed in the motel, my fingers really were stuck together.

Life at the motel was simple and perfect, like every other time my family was without its accumulation of reminders of our actual history.  My brother Dirk and I played Frisbee in the motel swimming pool all day, except when we were out looking at houses and shopping for new school clothes, and I got a suntan on my legs for the first time in my life, which I used to go in the bathroom and admire for long minutes, along with the peachfuzz which was sprouting out of my chin, of which I was infinitely proud.

One thing I knew was, since Scharee Hines was not here for me to try to impress, it would no longer be necessary for me to wear my funny hat and mess up my hair and untuck my shirt and put a goofy look on my face, because no one in Hazing, Kansas knew anything about me and therefore didn’t expect me to behave in this fashion, and therefore I was not under pressure to perform in that way.  I was going to be cool from now on, the distinguished author of two whole novels.  I even let my Mama talk me into wearing flared trousers like everybody else, which I’d avoided till now because I thought anything that looked fashionable on everybody else would just  make me look stupid.

I was to start high school at Hazing’s brand new high school which was barely built and had never been used before.  This led to the interesting and unusual experience of me not being the only one who was completely lost on the first day of school.  Hazing High School South was composed of three big circular pods with classrooms lined up around the perimeter of the circles, and a big Commons area in between them full of tables and chairs where we ate lunch and where students could go hang out between classes or when they didn’t go to class at all.  There we were on our first day, wandering around with maps in our hands, trying to figure out where we were, watching the flares on the bottom end of our trouser legs flaring out in the wind as we strode in great big circles, lost as hell.  This school was missing three things:  one was windows and one was walls between classrooms.  We were told that these things had been left out on purpose, because we were guinea pigs and we were being experimented on by the Model School Program, which is something that someone dreamed up who was too stoned to actually get a job teaching.

And that was the third thing that was missing from Hazing High School South.  Ask anybody from my high school graduating class, and they will all tell you the same thing:  there was no teaching.  The Model School Program was designed to prove that kids could fail to learn at their own pace, so there were no lectures, no note-taking, and all you had to do to get the grade you decided you were willing to settle for was to find the answers to the test in the book, because the test questions were all given out beforehand, and then once you got those few unconnected facts halfway lodged in your brain, you could take the test and forget about it.  There were no finals to take, no speeches to give, and in the four years I went there I only took homework home about a dozen times.  Those few exceptions were only because some of the teachers didn’t fully appreciate the genius of the new system and would occasionally make us do something.

The reason there were only rolling partitions and no walls between classes was twofold.  First of all, since there was no lecturing, the only noise that was heard between rooms was that of teachers screaming at us to shut up and stick our noses into our books.  Second, it was common for the teachers in a department to push partitions out of the way and combine large areas into what was called a “study hall.”  This made it possible for groups of students to “study” together, so the teachers who weren’t on study hall patrol could stay in their little partitioned-off classroom areas and get some sleep.  The students who stayed in the classrooms to study alone were not going to do anything to keep the teacher awake.

As for me, it was a welcome relief to find myself in a school where, like on Pleasure Island in the Pinocchio story, you could do anything you wanted, because no one cared what grade you got, and therefore only a few extremely neurotic individuals, who the teachers referred to as “self-motivated,” bothered to get A’s.  These were the same students who joined clubs and organizations and ran for class president and went to parties and dances and all that other grisly unpleasantness that I had refused to get involved with ever since I quit the Cub Scouts.  So with nothing better to do, I proceeded to grow my own set of donkey ears and used my time in class to daydream, write poetry, stare at girls, and whatever else I could think of to stay awake.  I easily kept a B average by memorizing the answers to pre-packaged tests that could have been passed by any chimpanzee, and spent the rest of my time worrying about how I was going to turn my life around from what it had become in Albuquerque.

What I finally decided was that if I was going to be mistaken for a regular person, I’d have to go out for sports.  Since I still couldn’t picture myself doing anything extremely mainstream like basketball or football, even though the jocks in Hazing were a couple notches less macho than the jocks in Albuquerque had been, I waited for track season to roll around, and when I heard about a meeting for those who wanted to be on the team, I went to the locker room where Coach Andy was telling fifteen other guys and me about running long distances.  This was confusing since all I knew about running long distances was from Albuquerque where our PE coaches had just gotten out of the army and our punishment when we were rowdy, or when the coach woke up with a hangover, or when he just needed some time to sit in his office and think, was to run a mile in the desert heat.  Wesley Poteet almost let them kill him in this way until he finally was forced to admit to the coach that the reason he kept collapsing in the middle of class was that he had a really bad case of asthma, and that one big fat sweaty kid always puked, and some of the more independent and resourceful kids found ways of cutting whole blocks out of the route around the school and the shopping mall and the vacant lot where the mile run was supposed to take place, and me, I would get bored on those long runs and all my joints hurt and I couldn’t breathe.

So here’s Coach Andy talking about running this and running that, and then after he said all that, and hadn’t said anything about the high jump or the javelin toss or the pole vault or any of that other stuff, he told us we were all crazy for wanting to go out for cross-country running and sent us out into the cold winter air to start getting into shape.  So there I was, running through strange neighborhoods and down long endless roads out halfway into the country, and I put two and two together and figured out that the real track season hadn’t actually started yet, it’s just that the cross-country people had to start early because they were in an extra big hurry to get out there and feel some pain.  As the poster on the locker room wall said, If you don’t kill yourself in practice, your opponent will kill you in competition.

Not being the sort of person to want to disappoint Coach Andy by backing out of something I’d gotten into by mistake, and noticing that the other guys on the cross-country team were all a little strange like me, I just kept running, and hating every minute of it, except when Coach Andy would find us out on our route somewhere, get out of his car and make us hop up and down on one foot for two blocks while he sang, Here comes Peter Cottontail, hopping down the bunny trail, hippity hoppity, etc., etc.  That was kind of fun, because it was like someone gave a shit whether you lived or died.  But unlike the nearly impossible one-mile run that was assigned as punishment back in Albuquerque, we were expected to run several miles every day after school.  For the first few days I actually felt good after it was all over, and my Mama would give me extra food and attention like I was a warrior just home from whacking off all my enemies’ heads with a sword.  But as the miles of running dragged on day after day, something funny started happening.

I’d be running along, trying hard to breathe the way Coach Andy told us to breathe but not sure I’d heard him quite right, when my joints would start to hurt.  First one set of joints, then another, until I had excruciating pain in my hips, my knees, and my ankles, and I’m not so sure my elbows, shoulders, wrists and neck were feeling all that great either.  The pain kept getting worse and worse until finally, I had to walk back the rest of the way, wondering what the hell was wrong with me.  It reminded me of the time, back in grade school, when I got a pain in my knee that made it impossible for me to run, and how mad my Mama got at the doctor because he said there wasn’t anything wrong with me.  Once Coach Andy came by in his car and saw me walking so he asked if I was all right, and I nodded my head yes and started pretending to run again.  When his car was out of sight I slowed down to my normal limp, and by the time I was back at school, I had lost interest in using sports as my vehicle for embracing normality.  When the real track season started I tried to get into high jump, but the other guy who was interested in high jump was 6’ 4”, and there was some conflict as to how high the bar needed to be set for us to practice effectively.  With the first competition coming up soon, I realized I was in the wrong place and stopped going to practice altogether.  No one missed me; as a matter of fact, the main track coach didn’t know my name.

Since my brother Dirk was my only friend for the first year that we lived in Hazing, it was inevitable that he would fall prey to the pressure I thus put on him and use me as a scapegoat for the increased pressure he experienced at the onset of his own manhood.

Since shooting baskets in the driveway was about the only thing I could get him to do with me, the driveway became the arena for our final row.

His tendency to fall into namecalling had grown worse, now that he no longer liked me well enough to just kick me in the shins and let it go at that.  While I tried to beat him at one-on-one, or H-O-R-S-E, or whatever we were playing, he launched two insults for every attempted basket, and according to him—though I repressed the memory of having done this—I eventually flew into a rage, rared back and threw the basketball at his head as hard as I could.

That was Dirk’s signal to start bawling like a baby, since at age eleven he still allowed himself this type of indulgent display.  My Mama must have been waiting for just this opportunity to destroy my last ounce of self-respect or whatever it is that allows one to stand up for himself, for she flew out of the house on her broomstick and proceeded to build me a new asshole, based of course on the assumption that nothing Dirk could do could ever justify anything I could do that he could use as an excuse to pretend that I had hurt him; as usual it was my fault for being bigger than him, and the point being, to me it was irrational and unacceptable that Dirk was never verbally abused for verbally abusing me, but I was always blamed when he purposely pushed me over the edge, and my instincts told me that my size had nothing to do with the obvious fact that Dirk’s willingness to lose face by crying was his guarantee that he would get to see me humiliated with all-out recrimination while he always got by with a token slap on the wrist since my Mama supposedly believed that it took two to tango.

Something snapped in me and I was no longer able or willing to tolerate being blamed for everything that was wrong with the way that Dirk and I solved our differences, not that we were ever left alone to do so.  I stormed into the basement and paced from family artifact to family artifact, visualizing how perfectly wonderful it would feel to pick up each object in turn and throw it with all my might against the floor or the wall, until I had run out of objects to destroy and the family basement, which was furnished with all our older furniture, lamps, etc., was in complete irreparable ruins.

Unable to face the consequences of actually going through with what would have been my ultimate attempt to communicate something of infinite importance to my sanity, I collapsed on the floor and writhed and swore and spat and hated until the only solution that was available to me settled deep into my bones and became unretractable.

That was the last that my brother Dirk and I had to do with each other, except for a few token lapses into companionability, for about twenty years.

Right around the time that spring was getting ready to roll around, and I still hadn’t made any friends in Hazing, I began to lose hope that my program of realizing normality would ever succeed.  Then one day as I set off on the long lonesome walk home after school, I saw some girls walking and talking and laughing together, and I went up behind them and made some funny noises, like mumbling under my breath.  They pretended they didn’t hear me, and it all came home:  I am not normal, and don’t know how to be, and there’s no use in pretending because no one will ever be fooled.  When I got home I went to my room and closed my door and lay on my bed, and I was thinking, now that I had written a book, and proven that I was useless for anything else, I might as well kill myself, when suddenly I had a realization.

For the first time in my life, I realized that the person who I thought I was, was just some sort of buildup of habits and assumptions and limitations that I’d taken on along the way, and not a cast-in-concrete kind of thing that I had to be stuck with the rest of my life.  This had never occurred to me before, though the attempt to go out for track might have been sort of an inkling in that direction.  I rolled this new idea around in my mind for awhile, and tried to imagine what it would be like to take charge of my own life, instead of being borne along by the tide of circumstance and habit.  I knew what I had to do.  I wrote a note to my parents, and put it on my Daddy’s dresser.  It said something like, I had realized that I was a screwed-up person and not only that, but I had realized that I had to do something about it, and requested that my Mama and Daddy send me to a shrink.  When my Daddy went to bed he found the note, and he came in a little later and told me that he and my Mama had talked about what my note said and they were going to look into what kind of help could be gotten for me, and then he went to bed after giving me this look like, you aren’t gonna go off and kill yourself now, are you?

There was a county mental health clinic in Hazing, sort of like the one my Daddy had helped get started up in Forward Falls when he was president of the committee that did that, and that’s where I ended up going because it was affordable.  I was in a counseling group with two boys who wanted to be juvenile delinquents when they grew up, and our counselor was a nice little old white-haired lady named Mrs. McSomething.  She was not any kind of psychiatrist or anything, and she might even have been a volunteer, though on second thought that can’t be true because she had her own office in that building, where I got to go once.  But usually we met in a conference room at a big table and played dumb dice games or something, and there was no particular benefit to going there, except for getting out of school half an hour early to make the appointment.

Once Mrs. McSomething got real creative and took us into a dark room and we sat on the floor around a colored light that went round and round, and we talked about the Vietnam war and what kind of music we liked and what we thought about this and that.  She was just starting to make me think she might have some idea what was going on when for some reason she moved a big board that was leaning up against the wall, and behind it was about 5000 big huge shiny black cockroaches.  That sort of broke the spell.

Another time she asked me to stay behind after the other two left, and she took me into her office and sat me down.  She asked me if there was anything special that I wanted help with, or if there was anything in particular that I wanted to say.  Well I suppose there was, but all I could think of was to tell her that I couldn’t get to sleep at night.  So she suggested that I drink some hot chocolate before bed, told me she liked the trousers I was wearing, and sent me on my way.  I never went back.

That’s all I have to say about the first year of high school.