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CHAPTER SEVEN                                                

 

 

Question number 84 from the Open Competitive Psychological Exam for Train Operator:

 

84.  I am standing on the platform with two other employees when an intoxicated passenger approaches me, carrying a pipe.  He says he is going to kill me because the train is late.  What do I do?

a.)  I speak soothingly to him, and try to get him to see reason.

b.)  With the help of my co-workers, I try to restrain him.

c.)  I run away and call police. 

d.)  I grab the pipe from him and, if necessary, hit him with it in defense.

 

 

They gave me a yard job today.  The yard jobs all go to the veteran motormen, as you need a good twenty years of seniority to pick them, but those with less time like me get them for a day or week at a time when the veterans take sick or go on vacation. 

                This is a crazy place, Corona Yard.  Last time I was here, there were a couple guys storming in and out of the crew room, yelling at one another at the top of their lungs.  It was just after Christmas and one had returned from vacation.  The other, his partner, wanted him to take the “working end” of the move.  In the yard, people often work in teams, each taking a different end of the train they are dealing with.  On one end, the motorman will sit there, twiddling his thumbs, only charging up and operating for a few minutes whenever the other guy needs the train to pull away from the yard.  Then, the other guy will operate back into the yard, and couple and uncouple that end as needed to take pieces out and move them to other tracks or into the barn. That’s the working end. 

                Anyway, the one guy was mad because the guy who just got back from vacation was refusing to take the working end, that having been the last end he operated before vacation.  The other guy’s position was that his partner had just been on vacation for two weeks and where did he get the nerve to think it was his turn to take the head-out end??  The funny thing is yard work is the easiest gig to work around here, and for either of these guys to take maybe two and a half hour’s work wedged into another seven hours of lounging in the crew room seriously they’ve got to have a lot of distance between themselves and reality.

                “Man, those guys are really pissed,” I told an Assistant Dispatcher who was filling up his coffee pot from the hot tap at the sink. 

                One of them slammed a door. 

                “Yeah, they always going at it.  We call ‘em the Lockhorns.”

                “I guess next pick, they’ll transfer out of here,” I said, chuckling, referring to the bi-yearly selection of jobs we make, called the “pick.”  There are thousands of jobs, each different and paying at various scales.  We pick over them in order of seniority.

                He looked at me incredulously.  “They been partners here for five years!  Every pick they pick this job together.”

                That’s Corona Yard.

                Working at Transit, you don’t have to remember names.  Everyone is called “partner.”  I like to think of the term as the “citizen” of the French Revolution, the “comrade” of the Russian, or the “brother” of the civil rights movement.

                –Which would make some sense if our union wasn’t so spineless.

                Today, my partner somehow learned my first name, though, and started calling me by it straight off.  I responded in a friendly way, and next thing you know, he was trying to convert me over to some religious zealousness.  He’s a thin, rugged type, who strides around in his uniform with the pose of a matador.  He doesn’t carry a tool bag, like me.  He’s got a Bat-belt.  His radio is strapped over his chest and his new escape mask–the TA’s response to 9/11–is strapped to his thigh.  He stops in the middle of the yard, cocking his head to bring the sharp shadow of his cap’s visor over his eyes.  He clearly wants to hold me here, standing solidly, facing me, focusing on me there in the middle of the crosswalk, as he wends along a continuous stream of holy marching orders:

 

…Now, you know, don’t you, when Man tries to find a serum to inoculate a sick person from illness, he first tries it on a guinea pig to see if it’ll work.

 

But God didn’t do that. He never took a guinea pig; He did it to Himself. A good doctor will be careful with a serum.  If he don’t know whether it’ll kill or cure, he’ll take it himself first to find out before he puts it into somebody else. 

 

                As he blabs on about the glories of his god, I go from gazing into his intense, seeking glare to the contours of the rock ballast at my feet, studying their details for fossils.  I wonder if there is any good way of filling in the pocks in the toes of my oh-so comfortable work shoes.  I picture them being handed me from behind the shoemaker’s counter, all polished and new had I only not been so cheap and added a cleaning the last time they were resoled. 

 

                And God, in order to take this serum, had to be made flesh and dwell among us, a kinsman Redeemer. God had to become man, so He could take the serum. And He had His inoculation at Jordan (Amen.), when He walked out in the river by John and was baptized. And then the inoculation come down. The toxin fell from heaven like a dove, saying, “This is My beloved Son, in Whom I’m pleased to dwell in.” He was inoculated.

 

                I imagine myself just turning and walking away from him.  He might be offended, as we are partners and I am supposed to follow him since he’s the regular guy.  Then again, maybe he won’t have a problem with it. 

                I decide to stay in my place, but I tell myself not to say another word to him.  He might run out of gas.  Still, if I am going to be tortured by his diatribe…. 

                “If these stories were real—if there really was a loving God…,” I hear myself say.  “Why would he–or she, or it, or whatever–care whether or not you believed in him?  Wouldn’t he just want you to be loving?” 

                He smiles loosely, as he turns his face from me, fists on hips.  His head begins to move slowly back and forth.  “You want to know what I can’t quite get about you, Mark?” he says, revealing a disappointed, but otherwise unfazed expression.  But, he’s not all ready.  His mouth hangs open as his mind gives up on one train and picks up another.  His eyes scan the sky dramatically as a diversion.   

                “If I was you–I just don’t know.  Like, if I didn’t think there was a God, and I saw you on the subway.  Oh, man.  I’d see that… that Palm Pilot, that nice jacket you got on….  See that wallet in your back pocket?!”  His hands grasp handfuls of air, one over the other.  “See that?  That’d all be mine.”  His eyes are actually dreamy as he goes on beginning to describe what he’d do to women on the street, but he cuts it off as soon as he gets a look at my disapproval.  “But, luckily, Mark, I do have the Lord in my corner claiming me as his own, so I don’t feel that way.” 

                He’s already told me how he used to be a swinger before religion made him a one-woman man, so I think it’s true that some people really do need religion, but, as I’ve never had a desire to be unfaithful, nor to randomly rob and rape, I’m a little different I guess.

                “But to answer your question,” says he with way too much of a smile.  “Don’t you know?  Haven’t you heard?  God is love.  So to not believe in God is to not believe in love.”

                “Don’t let religion fool you,” I can’t keep myself from answering.  “God ain’t love.  Love is love.  God is a deity some humans worship.  Love is an ideal all humans are capable of aspiring to.  Religion wishes God was love, because love’s value is apparent — God’s value must be indoctrinated into people.” 

                He’s thinking now.  He’s probably trying to remember lines from last Sunday’s sermon.  “So you do not believe in Jesus Christ?” he asks incredulously.  “And I know you don’t, because just the miracles he performed prove his divinity.”

                “The miracles prove nature’s divinity, because the mark that identifies your prophet is his ability to operate outside nature’s laws.”  

                He agrees.  “Because he is above nature.  He is better than even nature,” he says. 

                Knowing we are both wasting our time, I slowly turn and walk away, hoping my partner follows.  Instead, he stays on his spot and calls out to me, “Mark!  Where are you going?”   

                “We’re done the move, aren’t we?!” I answer, not slackening my pace, not looking back, just offering a hand waving for him to follow.  I hope I’m not breaking any rules. 

                “Mark!  Mark!  Come back here!”

                When I return to the crew room, the door I walk in through bangs against the bathroom door.  The place is crowded with men.  I sidle in, finding a seat on a windowsill, and a Jamaican conductor follows me from the bathroom, his eyes still pinched from a lunchtime snooze he just tried washing off his face. 

                There is a train operator, the Jamaican’s partner, telling a couple switchmen how easy it was in the Buses Division before he moved to Subways.  

                “But, you can’t move up in that motherfucker,” he admits.  “If they don’t like you or if you don’t know somebody, they be in your ass every day.” 

                “Where’s this?  Home Depot?” the Jamaican asks. 

                His partner stops getting his tools together and looks at the guy like he’s from Mars.  “Home Depot?!  Who said anything about Home Depot?!” 

                The guy returns the look.  “I thought you did.  Look, you just said at Home Depot they don’t promote you.” 

                “Go back and finish your nap.  I said at the Bus Depot, not Home Depot, you crazy nigger.” 

                Not missing a beat, the Jamaican shrugs and says, “What’s the difference?  Home Depot, the Bus Depot.  Both depots.  A depot’s a depot.” 

                After we all have a laugh at that, the partner gets up, finishing his conversation, telling the switchmen, “One thing good about there, though: whatever happen, it stay right there.  You can… say, fuck somebody up real bad, and they’ll take care of it right in there.  None of this going downtown or whatever.  You try that kind of shit over here and you’ll find yourself on the street.”  

                The partners clear out.  Then, the switchmen do, too.  Now there’s just a couple of guys and me left.  These two, shirts hanging out, stocking feet up on the windowsill, are the type who return home from work just because they have to, who clearly are much too happy here.  Every crew room has a couple like this.  They’re the ones who organize fund drives to purchase the hi-def TV’s and DVD players, so that during their downtime, work can be just like home.         Suspecting my “partner” is still lurking close outside, I sit, leafing through the newspaper, trying to ignore the cinematic treat they’ve popped in.  A real-life “Ultimate” fight match starts up with sounds blaring loudly enough that even my thoughts must yield.  There are two guys in a cage,  dressed in Spandex and crotch cups crawling around in a ball, punching at one another’s heads as hard as they can.  The one of them is hammering at the back of the other one’s head, aiming at right where it meets the spine.

                I can not relate with the fun my coworkers are having.  I was always horrible when it came to fighting.  Not that I was afraid.  I was not afraid.  It was just way too much for me to take emotionally.  My heart would pump too fast and I would find I was hyperventilating, and I had a worse time fighting against my body than I had dealing with whatever pugilistic skills the other kid put up.  

                There was a kid.  Dennis Harahan.  He was one of my closest and best friends in eighth grade.  A short, stocky, red-haired boy, all belly and freckles.  We were solid buddies, but we were not best friends because there was something basically different about us that we both understood, but that I guess neither of us really thought about once.  Toward the end of eighth grade, after a year and a half of swell relations, he walked up to me in the school hallway and told me he was mad at something I said to him, and he wanted to fight.

                It was a brand-new idea.  A couple of weeks before, we’d watched as the two biggest and tallest boys in our grade school nearly killed each other fist-fighting in the street after school.  The sounds alone were disgusting–fists hitting flesh.  Dennis and I had never fought anybody.  

                So, I was aghast.  The thing I’d said was purely harmless.  He was misconstruing it just for the purpose of getting into a fight with me.  I took it as a joke, and told myself he was just fooling with me.

                “Yeah,” I told him.  “I’ll fight ya.  After school!”  I laughed, but he didn’t.  My eyes told him to come on along and joke, as usual, but he just stomped away.   

                He was my friend.  That was something very important to me.  Yet here I was walking home, and I found him waiting for me.  He had big fists showing, and he told me we were going to fight.  He wasn’t doing it for a show for the other kids, as there weren’t but a few younger kids around.  “Dennis–” I pleaded, as if he was insane.  

                “Come on and fight!” he raged, and he charged me.  I just dropped my books and backed away.  And then I cried.  It was the only time I ever cried in such a situation.  I guess it was because I didn’t try too hard to hold back the tears, as this was my buddy and I didn’t care if he saw.  He was being mean, and it didn’t make a bit of sense.

                And what did Dennis go on to do with his life?  He became a professional boxer.

                Another case comes to mind, a shy young lady I once met from a wealthy New Jersey family, now a marketing assistant living in Manhattan.  I was drawing out this thin, sandy-haired intellectual at a cocktail party.   

                I asked her one of my favorite questions to ask young women: “When are you going to have children?”  If they answer they aren’t interested in having kids, I usually challenge them that all women want kids but are restricted by their professional lives, and an entertaining debate surely ensues.

                But this girl retorted, “No, I don’t want kids because I know I’d be a bad mother.  I see them on the subway, and they are misbehaving, and I just feel like hitting them.”  She shook a little as she said this and I could feel her impulse just as it resided in her and I was sure I knew just how she was.   

                She did not literally want to hit these children she saw on the subway, but she felt it.  She talked more, and she admitted, hesitatingly, that she had been beaten as a child when she misbehaved.   

                When I was a Probation Officer, my job was to do a short investigation of each case shuttled to me, then draft a recommendation for sentencing.  Violent offenders would often have rap sheets to the floor, all violent offenses.  You’d very rarely see a crime that wasn’t, if you looked into it, somehow related to the criminal’s aggression.  And, for that matter, it was just as rare to see violent crime on a non-violent criminal’s sheet.

                Whenever the crime was violent, there had been corporal punishment in the criminal’s childhood.  That’s not to say the non-violent criminals were not beaten as children–plenty were–but the violent criminals could always describe violence at early, nurturing stages in their lives. 

                “She say, ’Why your homework was ripped??  Ripped?  Ripped?!  Is this Parker House roll ripped??  Is this bacon ripped?  Is your eggs ripped?’  Then she go get the cord… you know, the one that come off the back of the iron.”          

                I remember a guy from the West Indies telling me “‘Did I get physically punished?’  Shee-it, back home, they tie you to a tree.  Then they whip you with the branch.”

                Now, I am focused on my coworkers, sitting there gape-mouthed, attentive to their TV task.  I look at the phone on the counter, wondering how many moves the dispatcher gives them each day.

                “Mark!”  It is my partner calling me from just outside the building.  “Mark, you in there?!”

 

                 

March 14, 2002 

 

The name of the place is HAPPY MEXICO FUN TACO.  Rina tells me I should not expect authenticity.  Up until a year ago, it was a Chinese food joint.  Now, the narrow take-out space is still busy with Asians, but they are producing burritos, fajitas, and chimichangas. 

                Well, the 9-1-1 tape was going to prove Lori was busting into my house with her boyfriend.  At the urging of the 9-1-1 operator, Rina had recorded all the sounds of the two psychos breaking down our door.  I got both the divorce judge and the criminal court judge to sign a subpoena duces tecum, which is a demand by a court that someone produce a written or recorded record.  To my surprise, the police filed response papers seeking to quash my subpoenas.  They were two detailed motions, obviously worked up by some lawyer or law team paid for by the police to find legal reasons to stop each of these subpoenas.  The effort put into these motions was appalling, each of them about twenty pages long.  And all to stop me from getting a copy of the 9-1-1 tape of my girlfriend calling the cops for help on the night I was supposedly committing a crime.  Sure, a read of the motion papers offered loads of legal justification, but moral?  Or ethical?  Or even by common sense, there was no justification–none.  I couldn’t see how it even made any practical sense, as the judge was bound to side with me.  The only practical sense those complicated and lengthy legal papers could have served would have been, as a self-represented party I might have failed to put up a sufficient legal response had I been incapable of understanding the papers.    

                But, I put up a sufficient legal response, and, after a month and a half, after the Police Department had destroyed the master tapes, the judge ordered the DA’s Office to give me a tape of the prosecution’s copy of the recorded calls.  The tape arrived, like test results, like a letter from a loved one, like anything you’ve been needing sometimes does, in the mailbox.  It came just a day before the court date. 

                My jacket was still on.  The apartment was gloomily unlit, my tool bag dumped in the hall.  The first sound on the tape was a short second or so of me strumming my guitar.  The prosecutor can waste the taxpayers money on the lengthy prosecution of an innocent man, but when a defendant gets the court to order the prosecutor provide a copy of the tape-recorded evidence against him, he must provide the prosecutor with a blank tape.  As I was in a hurry on the last court date, I just grabbed any old unlabeled audio tape out of my drawer on the way out, and the one I grabbed had me practicing guitar. 

                So, it began with the guitar, then, a long pause, I guess as the police tape was looping through its leader.  Then you could hear the clerk droning off the 9-1-1 operator’s ID number, the “channel” the call was recorded on, then the time of day and tape position.  As I scribbled these details down on a slip pulled hastily from the back of a library book, I heard the little two-second bit of pandemonium, evidently a snippet of Rina’s first call for help. 

                Rina called 9-1-1 twice that night.  The first time, she identified herself and told the operator what was going on.  Then she threw herself against the door, dropping the phone and disconnecting the call.  Shortly after, once we got the front door closed and the deadbolt thrown, Rina placed a second 9-1-1 call.  She gave me the phone, and I spoke to the operator a while before the police arrived. 

                So, here, the first call was gone, just a garbled bit of noise.  Then, the second call was introduced by the police operator, and there was Rina, asking for help.  As the operator is typing in the information, you can hear her tell me, “She’s a psycho, Mark!” and I respond, “Too much, too much,” as I gasp for breath.  Then you can hear me get on the line and begin to talk to the operator, but, after I start to tell what was going on, the tape goes blank.   

                So, the second call, too, was abbreviated.  But, at least there was enough to prove there was a fight going on, which would prove Lori’s claim I just punched her during an argument over the kids to be a lie. 

                Then the police operator sounds again, introducing a third 9-1-1 call.  And it is Lori’s voice, sounding calm, almost sedated.  “What is the nature of the emergency?” the operator asks. 

                “My husband won’t give me my kids,” her voice drones. 

                The operator types this in and asks some other things, then, as if it were an afterthought, Lori says, in the same low, slow monotone, “Oh.  And he hit me.” 

                This demonstrated that, just after the incident, Lori was not talking like the victim of a sudden attack by me, as she had portrayed it, but like a person who had failed to get what she wanted.

                I noticed the answering machine was blinking, but I left it alone.  I stuck a cup of coffee in the microwave and then hung my jacket and bag up on the wall.

                I took the coffee back out to the livingroom, turned on the lamp, rewound the tape, and played it again.  Just a bit of me playing guitar; then, a space; then, the operator’s voice, then that little bit of the first call. 

                But, just before that little bit was another little bit–a littler little bit–a tiny little teeny bit about a quarter of a second long of my guitar jangling again, just enough to make itself known–just enough to say, “Hey, Mark–this is where that stinking, dirty Assistant District Attorney stopped taping and fast-forwarded through your phone call so you wouldn’t think it existed, leaving that snippet.  There was no doubt about it: it was my guitar, and since the DA does not have my guitar or the peculiar jing-jang sound only my lame-o guitar work can produce, there is no doubt that the tape recorder was stopped just at the crucial sounds that were to destroy the DA’s case, and restarted with that tiny little piece of tape in-between untouched, as anyone who tape records stuff knows full-well happens if you don’t rewind first. 

                That dirty, rotten….  I really can’t believe it.  I mean, what am I?  A Soviet spy?!  And what are they?  Who the hell are they?  What type of person would do what they have done?  I….  What is there to say?  What world am I living in?  Why am I an enemy of the state?  Why have I had my children taken from me, spent 65 hours in jail, and been fighting a legal battle that is, on its face, legally moot?! 

                And then, like every last corner of this world is in perfect synchronicity, I absent-mindedly pressed the answering machine button. 

                “Mark.  Four-thousand, nine-hundred, and nine dollars is missing from our bank account and is on its way to Lori.  Fourteen checks bounced.  Fourteen.  I’m on my way to the sheriff’s office now.”  Click.  

                Rina went to the sheriff and found Lori had been able to get an order from the judge to seize all our money to pay for back child support for the period when the kids were living equally with both of us.  That is in addition to the thousand bucks they take from my pay every month. 

                There is a lesson I find here, and at other times during this process.  When my hands are overwhelmed with way too many battles, it surprises me how easily I can allow that particular battle–”the money battle,” let’s call it–to slip from my grasp.  Money then turns up as just that–money–coin, paper, credit, unspent, unused. Not dreams to come true, nor possibilities to realize, but just plain old money.  To hell with it.  When you get that in the face, you know you are living close to what is real, integral, essential.   

                I place our order and watch my little family sitting in the Trooper.  Nicholas is with head down, over the latest 1970’s comic book I Ebayed-in on his behalf.  Tali is on the other side, her head up straight, talking to Rina, who is reclined in the front.  When my eyes tire from the street glare, I turn back and watch these Asian-Americans earning their living.   

                It is a continuous effort they put in, turning from one shelf to another, then to the deep fry, then to the pastry machine.  Their hands work without pause, but with a bit of casual flare.  They don’t converse, they don’t smoke cigarettes or stop to slurp coffee.  They just earn.  A small picnic table in the front holds a pretty, young worker who chews a snack with hungry eyes, her neck bent over her sushi, her attention on some empty spot midair.  A colorful Chinese newspaper is tucked beside the table. 

                The phone rings and only one worker flinches.  He takes the order, plowing through the confusing language barrier unabashedly, whether it be English-to-Chinese, or Spanish-to-English-to-Chinese, a pencil wiggling in his grip.

                I think of their lives.  They own their own business.  They probably own their own home. I picture a late-model van zooming them all to some happy picnic, a seat belt apiece.  Still, I can’t picture this place ever being closed. 

                What a life.  How could you work so consistently, diligently in such a country as ours?  Our country is about lifestyle, who I am, who you are.  These people have no life.  And, I don’t care how much they work, they aren’t going to be securing any great fortune any time fast.  I fork over my money, a few more dollars than I expected.  Dollars.  Gathering it up in such a way, where there is no identity, that kind of money is worthless to me.  I’d rather pass on such a dream. 

                                                                  

 

March 18, 2002 

 

I am learning not to say things can get no worse. 

                Last week, I went to pick the kids up after-school for our night, and Lori had already picked them up.  I returned home with a dire apprehension, and riffled through my papers. 

                I had missed a court date.  Between my many Criminal Court, Appeals Court, and Supreme Court dates, I had lost track of one, this being the first time I’d ever missed a court date.  I called Lobis’s courtroom and the clerk informed me Lobis had ruled in my absence to take away all my visitation but for 4 hours on Saturday and a Monday evening dinner with the kids.  Before the day was out, I was in the court with an order to show cause to have the visitation order set back right, and she gave it a court date for the following week, which meant I wouldn’t get the kids for my weekend that week. 

                So then, today was the court date, and I lined up outside the courthouse a half hour early, knowing what the lines are like for the metal detectors, and careful not to give the judge the slightest excuse to hurt me further.  After a fifteen minute wait, I passed through, having to check my Walkman with Security, the officer pointing to a sign explaining that nothing with recording capabilities was allowed.  The sign was haphazardly duct-taped across the beaux arts marble-paneled entryway.

                I was just telling myself to keep cool.  Fast forward a few hours, a few days, everything will be fine.  Why stress it now?  My legs did not agree, though, nor my fingertips fumbling for the elevator button.  

                Practicing her usual gall, the child support queen did not show.  She sent her boyfriend in her place.  Taking a look at the side of his head, I puzzled, just for a second, over what objections I might raise to him standing in for her, but the issue of restoring my visitation was dominating my mind.

                The judge made her usual plodding way to her bench, and I had to hold myself still, but the tedious formalities eventually gave way to my moment to explain and request my visitation order be restored.  The Guardian Ad Litem jumped right in at my first breath with her agency’s opinion, as always, that, for the sake of the children, I should be restricted to supervised visitation at her agency’s offices.  I guess they get a nice paycheck from the state for that supervised visitation deal.  

                A little dizzy with worry, I focused my eyes on the judge’s nameplate, mentally blocking out the rest of the room.  The judge told me she had taken the visitation away because I had not yet seen the social worker, or “forensic,” as she called him, not because I failed to make the court date.  I reminded her that he wanted thousands of dollars, which I flat out didn’t have. 

                She thought about that a bit, and then asked if I would be willing to pay on a payment plan.  I responded, of course I could do that–though taking my visitation away for the purpose of coercing me into a legal act like giving testimony to the Agency for the Defathering of Children was not the same as doing something “in the interests of the children,” a phrase she used that had a particularly corrupt and nauseating sound to it, because I knew it to be a lie, that she and I both knew she would never be held accountable by any “checks and balances” or “balance of power” they taught us about in the ninth grade, that it was a lie for the stenographer’s ears and any appeals court that wanted to justify her actions, but that it was a lie as corrupt and untouchable as one spit forth by any judge of the Old South, content as a pig in a sty, elevated to her esteemed position by her dependable mulishness, by the fact that she would never get her ass far enough out of the mud to knock against the fence.

                And this realization threw in my face the fact that there was nothing happening here that had to do with justice or law, that I was just being screwed. 

                Then, hearing I was willing to pay on the payment plan, she ordered a new court date four months away.  Four months away.  She ordered a continuation of the amputation order–the four hours and a dinner a week.  Four hours and a dinner each week.  Then she banged her gavel, settled her neck in between her shoulders, crossed her arms, and watched for my response. 

                “You fil-thy scum,” was my response. 

                I was shaking like a leaf with anger.  All the papers in my arms fell on the floor.  The court officers came over and handcuffed me, very slowly and hesitantly, applying the handcuffs loosely.  Maybe they thought I was being shafted, that it actually should be legal for a man in my position to walk straight up to the bench and spit in that pig’s face, tell her to fuck herself, and walk off into the sunset with his kids. 

                Or maybe they just thought I was pathetic. 

                And I thought I heard the female court clerk think, justifying her judge, “I guess you should have chosen a different woman to marry.” 

                There was a place I would go when I was a teenager, after we moved to Paoli, a town that in those days was hanging on to the very edge of the Philadelphia area—any farther and you were in Pennsylvania Dutch country.  Out there I was all alone, but that was okay because the town was surrounded by woods and I had a Labrador retriever named Sam and a clandestine smoking habit.  At the end of our street there was a soggy meadow, willow trees branching out overhead, but spacious and merely grassy at foot.  It was the perfect shady refuge, always breezy and cool.  I’d sit on the rocky remains of an old foundation and watch Sam chase the odors at full speed, whipping by me as he checked in on his way from one hill to the other, vanishing in the foliage, but making all the noise of a street sweeper.

                Finishing my smoke, I’d climb the hill after him—a hill that crested to a pine forest, feet-deep in needles.  I’d sprawl on my back into the fragrant, soft crush and watch the sky rolling over the branches, and I’d ruminate on girls. 

                That was a spot.  It wasn’t just a place, but a time and an age.  Odds are the whole area is overbuilt today, but even if it would be just the same, it would never serve as a sanctuary for me again.  As an adult, I think I am too well defined for such obscurity.  And my time has all been assigned.  To my dying day. 

                Anyhow, that spot belongs to a kid.

                The court officers did let me go and here I escape, I guess lucky to be free.         She took me from my kids all but totally this time for the reason that is infinitely clear to me: so that when she gives me back the slop she had already cut me down to, I’ll be happy. 

                There are cases in the media today, cases where famous people snap under the pressure of custody battles.  What takes away the inhibitions of these powder kegs is not a mystery to me.  I am thankful that, absent inhibitions, I only call people bad names.

                The injustice infringes on my primal security.  Arguments by people acting on the state’s behalf mean nothing, as the injustice is facially apparent and cannot be excused away.  My mind responds to the loss with an impulse to seek some direct, forceful solution, as anyone might upon finding a burglar in their home or a rat in their cupboard.

                Not many would argue that the guy, a few years back, who shot and killed the sexual molester of his seven-year-old son was a murderer.  But people just don’t get why parents find it so hard to sit on their hands while the state scrapes us out of our own children’s lives. 

                I will fight a battle I am beginning to know I will lose.  Still, I will not make it easy for them.  Thinking of mostly any other man in my position, I can see a million reasons why he will never find himself in this battle, but voluntarily, rather than forcibly, saddled for life with the loss, or, in particularly tragic cases, forced into a position where he takes some desperate actions that only sink him further.

                Of course, if everyone in my position did fight, there would be no need to fight. 

                So are the opinions of a troublemaker.

                Early in grammar school, I was rejected by the other kids.  To the hysterical delight of my brothers, they nicknamed me “pollution” because I used the big word, complaining about environmental issues.  Though I have no memory of it, I wouldn’t be surprised if they treated me so poorly because I told them to pick up litter or criticized them for being unaware.  I’ve always been overly critical of others–not because I resent them, but because I need them to change for there to be any hope for my extreme positions.  My dream of a litter-free schoolyard, for instance, was never realized.

                I was alone then, pretty much, through the end of grammar school–with a brief respite just before sixth grade graduation when I inadvertently found popularity by fighting the class bully.  The bully became my friend, more than even the victims I liberated. 

                Then, my mother finally sent me to Catholic school.

                As the new kid, I made lots of friends.  I was particularly popular because I stood up to the persecution of the tougher nuns, facing off in the seventh grade with Sister George Mary, a big, tough bitch who punched and slapped at will. 

                Then, in the eighth grade, I came to reassess Sister George in the shadow of a new, more inherently evil nun.

                Sister Agnes was a nasty little tyrant who hated my guts from the first question I asked, from the first contradiction I spoke, from the first smirk the muscles in my face exercised.  It was no time before she had assigned me a punitive front-row seat where I had to watch her lizard-like, habit-wrapped mug and beady little hatred-filled eyeballs up close.  Then, a couple of months later, to the back of the room she sent me, exclaiming her disgust with me to my classmates.  She looked for excuses to punish me, to keep me from a class trip, or take something from me.  And she loved to use me as an excuse to punish the class–she wanted them to hate me too.

                Once I realized she was out to get me, I found ways to even the score.  I’d gaze out the window with my mouth open as she whittled through a grammar lesson, and, of course, the second she spotted that, she’d mutter a question.  “Mark Crane–give me a prepositional phrase.” The whole class would quietly turn.  I’d take a moment, my eyes studying a passing cloud. 

                “To a T.”–an expression my father liked to use.   

                She’d ask me about things she’d “heard” about me, things she’d learned from her wretched little spy, Constance, her class pet, a prissy little kiss-ass tattletale who spoke with an affected tone always, and who, today, if there is a god in heaven, is burning in hell, and, if there isn’t, Constance is surely a lawyer making sense of things that are senseless and cruel. 

                Sr. Agnes went to my best friend Eddie Berry’s parents and told them I was too bad an influence for Eddie to associate with.  That was a hateful thing to do considering how close I was to Eddie.   

                I called him on the phone so much his parents said I couldn’t call.  I taught him how to smoke, we had backyard camp outs, and we spent every free hour together.  I confided in Eddie all about my secret love for Debby Houston, a pure crystal of beauty, and I turned him on to the Beatles.  We called the radio station every time we were in his room and asked them to play “Back in the USSR.”  We went through his parent’s booze when they weren’t home and experimented with green liqueur.  He showed me how to use his father’s bullet-cartridging press.  We roamed every last inch of our town and the woods and the train yards beyond, climbing up and down a tremendously deep train trestle with delicious peril to ourselves.

                Eddie was a short, withdrawn type of kid who did not make a lot of eye contact from under thick black brows.  The nuns had to yell at him to speak up, which was something he’d always rather not do, considering his voice was small and squeaky.  Sometimes it seemed he had to absolutely bark just to get enough breath into his voice box.  He was an easy friend to make over there hanging out on the edges of the playground, and he was thrilled with me and all the crazy shit I did.

                Eddie’s desires were meek, and I got him to do the things that I wanted to do.  My parents brought it to my attention right away, reminding me to take the time to find out things Eddie liked to do, too.  And they told me not to interrupt so much when Eddie was speaking.

                To my credit, I understood immediately the sin of dominating my friend, and I always stressed over it some.  But even though I feared it would come to end our friendship, I couldn’t find a way to change the dynamic between us.  To make room for Eddie was to make room for something that had yet to be formed.  Yes, my ego was domineering, but Eddie didn’t really want anything. 

                My friendship with Paul isn’t a whole hell of a lot different.

                Eddie and I were walking beside Ridley Creek one Saturday afternoon when a man with a camera on a strap around his neck approached us and asked if he could take our pictures for a magazine about Indians.  He told us he would pay us $10 each.  We agreed, and walked in the woods with him.  He sent me to the creek with a towel, asking me to get it wet.  When I was climbing back up the hill with the wet rag, I saw the man hunched over Eddie’s naked body, pulling on Eddie’s penis.  Just as I picked up a large rock, the man looked up at me.  He gave me a vacant, slightly curious look, and I cowardly dropped the rock.  I stood beside my humiliated friend until the man stopped.  He gave a twenty-dollar bill to Eddie and shuffled away.

                Eddie got himself together and we climbed to the top of the trestle, from where we screamed every curse word and hateful epithet we could invent down at portions of the treetops under which we suspected the man might still be lurking.  I tried to get him to keep the money for himself, but I understood why he insisted we both spend the dirty bill together–on junk food and cartons of cigarettes.

                About a month after Sister Agnes met with Eddie’s withdrawn, pious mother and his cold father, I answered the wall phone beside the breakfast table.

                “Yo.”

                “Eddie??  What’s up?”  I glanced at my mother eating her Special K.  Early morning phone calls were unusual.

                “Yo.  I don’t wanta go to school.  Let’s skip school.”

                “Mmmm??”

                “What?  You can’t talk?” he whispered.

                “Po-ta-to.”  That was our very clever code for it isn’t safe to talk.

                “Right.  Mark, come on, we’ll have fun.  Fuck school.  Right?  Fuck school.”  Eddie was growing up.  “Ya know?  We never skipped school.  We’re eighth graders.  We’ve got to skip school once.”

                “Hmmmm,” I said, chewing on my raisin bran.  “Yes.  We were supposed to do the three questions at the end of chapter three.”

                “Meet me at the Hole,” which was one of our cigarette smoking hangouts in the woods besides the train tracks.  “You coming?”

                “Well, you know,…” I said, trying to make my intonations do all the work.

                “Well, then don’t. I really have to do it.  I’m really gonna do it.  If you don’t come, you’re gonna miss it.  Come on.  Pleeeeeese.”

                “Okay,” I told him, telling myself if timid-little Eddie could do it, there must be some angle to it that was not sinful.     

                Why Eddie needed all of a sudden that morning to skip school–something we had never talked about once–is still a mystery to me.  And, no matter how much of a little bad ass I thought myself to be, it was a broad leap for me.

                We had great fun that day, peeing off the trestle onto cars, throwing rocks at the power lines, sliding down the remnants of an old coal scuttle,… but mostly just smoking cigarettes and talking.  Eddie was a Spiderman fanatic who was sure he would be a stuntman when he grew up. Dark Shadows was his favorite TV show.  Mine was Barretta.  I wore a similar black leather cap and a brown suede leather jacket.

                The day was almost spoiled when I dropped my pencil bag off the trestle, and we had to spend an hour looking for it in the town dump below.  I was very worried because it contained an old sick note that I still had in my father’s handwriting that I only had to change the date on.  It also had a school identity card, which I cherished for the same reason any kid treasures such a thing.  

                Eddie found the bag, and when he did, I rushed to him, so relieved, so happy, and, searching my mind for the right word to express my relief, I cried, “You… darling!”

                “Darling” meant he did everything right, and I loved him dearly–the wrong word to use.  It should have been at that point that I realized I was destined to write, since any other kid would have selected a word that fit the homophobic norms of pubescent boyhood, not being so faithful to the expression of his innermost feelings.

                I’m sure “darling” was what killed our friendship, though we never spoke a word of it.  It wasn’t Sr. Agnes’s fault, however much she would have enjoyed thinking herself responsible.

                Most of the things I did that Sr. Agnes hated were unintentional, like when I questioned the visiting pastor, “Why would God send a loving person to hell just because he doesn’t believe in Him?”  She was the germ of her hatred, not me.

                She played a Carpenters record, to show she was cool, and she had a special class session just before we graduated where she closed the doors to the room and read an article about the Pagans, a motorcycle gang who the article claimed ate shit as an initiation. 

                Sr. Agnes–or “Scraggly Aggy,” as I had come to refer to her–sunk to her lowest with about a month left to go to school.  She was the English teacher, and I was pretty good at writing.  We’d read our stories to the class, and I’d always write about detectives having shoot-outs on rooftops and such, and the kids would clap, and Scraggly’d hate that worst of all because she was trying so hard all the time to get them to adore her, and she had so plainly let them all know that I was her arch-enemy. 

                So one lazy late spring day, when the end of school was palpable, and not a soul, even the Mother Superior, was untouched by that June malaise, Sister Agnes announced she wanted us to stand and tell what our parents did for a living.   

                Growing up, when some adult asked me what my father did for a living, I’d always answer, “He’s a writer,” of course, because, in those days, he used to write, all the time.  Then they’d ask me what he wrote for, and, of course, I’d say “The New Yorker,” since, even as a child, I knew everything he wrote was aimed at that high-class rag.  I had no idea of money, though, and I hadn’t a clue even what being “published” was.  I looked for the cartoons, and most of those I couldn’t even understand.  People were very impressed when I answered “The New Yorker,” which made sense to me, since I knew my father to be such a marvelous man. 

                But this year, I was growing up.  Somewhere midway through eighth grade,  I realized that all these years I had been saying something not only that was not true, but that, if it were true, I could brag about.  I suppose my three brothers, who’d attended the school before me, had said much the same thing.  I was just now coming to realize that there was something shameful about my old man in this area.  He was un-pub-lished.

                Sr. Agnes chose me second. 

                “My mother’s a Catholic school teacher.” 

                “Oh, yes, Mark.  We all know that.  She teaches at St. Louis’s, right?  What about your father?  What does he do?” 

                “He’s a writer,” I answered her without a pause. 

                “Oh, really?  And who does he write for?” a little smirk showing on her stupid face. 

                “The New Yorker.” 

                Her smirk neither expanded nor contracted.  She had expected everything but a brazen lie.  My eyes dared her to take it further.

                “Annnd, does he write something every month?”

                “The New Yorker is published weekly, Sister.”

                “Oh, what I meant…”

                “–Except in summer, then it’s like every two weeks or something.”

                “Well, maybe you can bring us in something he’s written.”

                I sat down.  She was still looking at me.  “Oh, sure.  I’ll bring you a whole stack of ‘em.”

                With nothing more coming to her head, she sought out her chalk holder on her desk and began dictating the week’s spelling words to us.  I glanced around at my classmates, digging through their desks for their spellers.  They didn’t yet do sarcasm. 

                Sister Agnes and I both knew where our relationship was headed–she had to kill me. 

                The special day finally came a week before graduation.  Eddie and I were taking care of the First Graders during a recess period, and I threatened to throw one of them out the window.  Now, he was a little smart-aleck who knew I wasn’t serious, and, besides, it was a first floor window that had a soft grassy lawn outside at the same level as the floor. 

                I knew he was going to tell before I said it.  I just wanted him to know as an eighth-grader I was so big and bad that I didn’t care about him telling the nuns on me.  

                So there I am swaggering down the junior-high hallway I’ve already outgrown, and here comes Sister Agnes, and I see in her eyes she has something really big on me, but I can’t imagine what it is, and she puts it to me, and I start to say, “Wha?  Oh, no, I was just kidding arou–” and she has the back of my head in her hand and she is bashing the front of my face against the large porcelain water fountain over and over, and my nose starts gushing blood, but she just keeps bashing anyway, then I fall to the floor, so she has to let go of my head, and I’m crying uncontrollably, and the Mother Superior brings me in the library, and my yellow uniform shirt is orange with blood, and the Mother Superior calls all the eighth grade girls to come and put ice on me and mop the blood off my face, and Debby Houston is there, and I’m so humiliated because I can’t stop crying.

                The school year ended with a graduation mass, followed by a dance in the small church assembly hall next door.  I brought some records and took my turn playing “Suffragette City” on the nun’s record player, impressing the other boys by showing how David Bowie fan kicks his leg up at “Wham, bam, thank you, ma’am,” something George Thompson had shown me.  I also played “Back in the USSR,” and suffered again only a little over how I’d called Eddie “darling.”

                There were Jordan almonds in little cups, cake, and fruit punch.  There was a graduation tassel we got to keep from our rental gowns with the year “76″ dangling in metallic plastic. 

                I waited all evening, trying to get up the guts to ask Debby Houston to dance, stealing glances at her eyebrow-length bangs of shimmering blonde hair at the start of every slow song, without ever having even near-enough nerve.   

                Then Sister Paul (a real warm person,) announced the last song of the night, which to my relief turned out not to be one of Aggie’s Carpenter cheese parades, but “Stairway to Heaven.”  There was nothing else to do.  I just had to.  My family was moving in with my grandmother in Upper Darby soon.  It was maybe the last time I’d see Debby Houston ever.

                I can’t even remember asking her.  All I remember is my hands on her waist, my stiff torso rocking like a pendulum, from one foot to the other, and slightly shifting my feet, so as to rotate over the course of a few dozen movements. 

                She knew and I knew that we had to have the last dance together, but the song ended before I could find a single word to say to her.  I thanked her and stepped away, and with that, grade school was ended.  I wended my way home alone, under the moonshade of leafy-branched curb trees through streets of a town I knew well enough to walk from any one spot to any other as the crow flies, soon to be a stranger in someone else’s hometown, yearning… an answer to my inexpressible romantic love, for other kids to think I was marvelous, for my father to sell a short story to “The New Yorker”–for my father to change.