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A story about everyday heroes and the good people who egg them on.
“God,” Cecilia said. “It’s him.” She gripped my hand.
Lynette leaned forward and exhaled a funnel of smoke. “You think he’s gonna call somebody out?”
“Shit yeah. Look at him.”
Everyone in the courtyard was. Tenants stood in the Langston’s windows, waiting for Esteban Dominguez to pronounce what they assumed would be his next sentence of death. He stood in the center beside the stubby bird-shit-covered fountain, staring up at the apartments, his fists clenched.
12-year-old Jeannina, who lived up on the fourth floor and whose mother wisely never let her play downstairs, yelled, “I love you ’steban!” Doubtless she was telling the truth. The ecosystem of the Langston Apartments was very sensitive. Drop someone like him into it and people immediately ran to the windows. It was better than TV.
“Lip!” he shouted. “I don’t want to do this in front of your grandpa!”
“It’s Jackie,” Lynette said. “Esteban warned him last week.”
“Come on, Lip! Get out here!”
Cecilia shook her head at Lip’s foolishness. “Kid better do it.” “He’ll never live it down, he doesn’t. He’ll be a story forever.”
“He won’t be a story. People around here are too tired to make up stories.” I took one of Cecilia’s Camels out of the box. She lit it for me with a tiny Bic that had Hawaiian flowers on it.
Lynette nodded. “They’ll make up one for Jackie, though. That’s for damn sure.”
Jackie Lipson was 16 and thought he was some kind of gangster. He lived in the Langston with his senile grandfather and his girlfriend, who’d dropped out with him the year before. They spent a lot of time at the rec center a few blocks over with the other juvenile delinquents. The only thing I ever heard about Lip was that he did a lot of graffiti. I couldn’t imagine what Esteban wanted with him.
But I almost loved Esteban, too. For as much as he liked to strike heroic poses and be looked at, he seemed to lead a charmed life. He didn’t carry weapons. People said he’d never been shot. And in his own, weird, comic book way, he was trying to make the neighborhood a better place. In all the depressing penury, he was a bright spot, bigger than life, and I’d be lying if I said that some part of me didn’t agree that he deserved the attention. Esteban got an A for effort.
The neighborhood needed someone, especially the Langston. So why not him? In order to lead a decent life, the Langston required a herculean amount of self-discipline—more than most people had. My room, for instance, had an ongoing cockroach scenario. They were large, intelligent, and had acquired a certain immunity to poison. They ate it right up. But as long as I didn’t leave out any garbage, standing water, crumbs, or have any open cuts, they treated the room as a staging area for other more critical maneuvers.
Perhaps because of this or because of something known only to them, the rats stayed out. People complained about the supposed building-wide rat infestation, but in the five months I’d been staying at the Langston, I’d never seen one. Just the pitter-patter of little feet in the kitchen at 2 AM. Otherwise, my hot water worked. My neighbors kept quiet. And I took care to be mindful of life’s merciful trade-offs.
“Hey Esteban! Hey! Over here!” Cecilia waved like she was flagging him down on the highway, leaving zig-zags of smoke in the air. She had a particular obsession with Esteban that ruled out anyone short of People or European royalty. They were destined to be together. He just didn’t know it yet.
I looked at the curling flowers tattooed on Cecilia’s forearm. She’d briefly put her hand on mine, and it had felt good in a secret way that would never show on my face. I’ll admit that was the reason I didn’t listen to my better judgment telling me now was the time to go up and deliver a speech to the roaches. When was the last time a pretty girl held my hand, even for a minute?
Esteban looked over, grinned, waved, then nodded at the Langston.
“Lip! I don’t got all day! Be a man!”
He was, without a doubt, the angriest person in Missouri, but he loved the ladies. If you nominated him for the angriest ladies’ man on the face of the planet, he might win. That was just his style. Esteban had been arrested for murder twice. But, because he lived in a different reality, some cross between the old West and 18th century Spain, where one could engage in lethal street fights and be considered a neighborhood hero instead of a killer, he got off both times. The story was he’d killed a pimp and a drug dealer. Everyone said, “Good for ’steban.”
All I knew was that he worked out a lot, didn’t seem to have gainful employment, lived with his mom on the other side of Nimcato Cemetery, and was impossibly, devastatingly handsome. At 6’3” with wavy black hair, a square jaw, and the physique of a proletarian hero in a Communist propaganda poster, Esteban seemed like he should be wearing a cape instead of starched khakis and a white dress shirt. But that was the only way I’d ever seen him. I imagined his closet: half white dress shirts, half khakis, all starched, ironed, and perfectly aligned by mom to aid him in his fight against crime.
The cigarette was good. I never bought them, but my lunch break friendship with Lynette and Cecilia was giving me lung cancer anyway. Still, there’s something incredibly pleasant about a social smoke. If you can control yourself, put yourself on a meter, all kinds of drugs can be enjoyed, even the coffin nails. My grandma, who smoked one pack of Luckys a month, used to say nobody who smokes once a day is a smoker. By that definition, she wasn’t. And now neither was I. But most people can’t regulate. Most people run like wild dogs over the hills. Grandma said that, too.
“You think he’s some undercover cop?” Lynette winked then glanced at Cecilia.
“You mean like Charles Bronson or some shit?”
“Chuck Norris back in the day.”
“Maybe,” I said. “Like in The Octagon. Maybe he knows kung-fu. Catch a bullet in his teeth.”
“Nah, that was The Last Dragon,” Lynette said. “Maybe The 36 Chambers of Shaolin.”
Esteban pointed up at a window. “There you are, you little shit! You want me to come up and pull you out?”
Cecilia groped for her pack of cigarettes. I slid the pack against her hand. She didn’t notice right away. Then she extracted a fresh cigarette with two fingers, keeping her eyes on the drama, a smile on her face.
Far above, there was a faint high-pitched cry, as if muffled by several mattresses, the ghetto version of “The Princess and the Pea” where the pea talks shit: “Ima kill you, bitch!”
That was all Esteban needed. He ran for the Langston’s lobby.
“I don’t know,” I said. “You sure that wasn’t Buckaroo Banzai?”
“You both need to shut the hell up.” Cecilia turned back and frowned at each of us in turn.
Lynette grinned. “Buckaroo Banzai was a classic, man.”
The Langston Apartments was a dirty place, no doubt about it. It was dirty from the William Lucy House next door on the western side, a skid row nursing home like you’ve never seen. Dirty because clean is next to impossible in places like these. Clean living and the downward spiral don’t mix. And I knew someday there would be an accounting, some kind of judgment that would clear it all away.
It wouldn’t come from the street, from the likes of Esteban Dominguez. Instead, the good people of Hauberk, Missouri, would simply kick the tenants out and tear the structure down. Put up mirrored glass, a Pilates studio, a bistro with garden seating. They’d install an uncomfortable college girl dressed in black to remind you that a reservation is necessary. Then the sorrows of the Langston would be gone forever, along with the unfortunates who called it home. For the moment, however, they all still lived there, locked tight on that downward spiral.
“Lunch break’s almost over.” Cecilia sighed, flicked ash onto the table.
“Shit,” Lynette said. “We can be a little late. Nobody’s gonna die.”
The days were still warm. Because I’d studied English in school, I now had a job in a call center that required my presence four nights a week. I spent afternoons reading in the courtyard, mocking the world at lunchtime with Lynette and Cecilia, who were care nurses in William Lucy House. They were the hardest cases I’d ever met. They regularly egged each other on, competing to see who could be the toughest, coldest, most cynical misanthrope on the block.
Today, however, was special. It was as if the gods had preordained it to be particularly awful. I suppose this is because the downward spiral is a spiral and some days are therefore better than others. As soon as I saw Esteban Dominguez walk through the courtyard’s open wrought iron gates, I knew this wouldn’t be good. And now he was in there, doing something horrific to Lip, cleaning up the neighborhood.
No matter how they tried to erase the Langston, even if they burned it down and shot the ashes into space, the sense of it, the sheer echo of its presence, would linger like the scent of something rotten.
“What about all those old folks shambling around like Day of the Dead?”
Cecilia rolled her eyes, took a drag, blew smoke in my face. “They’re like bumper cars. They just go bump up on everything.”
“Then we put them back in their rooms,” Lynette said.
“Yeah. They get tired bumping up on tables and chairs.”
By now, everybody in the building or the surrounding area, even some of the residents of William Lucy House, had come out to watch. With the exception of Art the drug dealer across the courtyard, Esteban might have hospitalized or otherwise exiled every other dealer, pimp, or toy gang member south of 32nd Street. Maybe Lip was the only one left. But he wasn’t really a gang member. He was just a dumb kid.
Art sat all day, hoodie up, across the brick courtyard at the farthest patio table, blinking into his cell phone. Lost souls came in through the courtyard’s wide-open gates on a regular basis, did a hand-off with him, and were out in a flash. Nobody cared. Few noticed. His side of the courtyard was dark for half of every day because the U-Pack-It Self Storage facility on the eastern side blocked out the sun.
I absently watched the torment on his face as he no doubt considered making a run for the gates while Esteban was up in the Langston delivering justice to a 16-year-old. Art’s perplexed expression and little mustard beard seemed to float in the shadows, illuminated in his hood by his phone’s screen, like a monk discovering the Grail. He was definitely discovering something. But what Art had come into this life to learn, only he could know. Maybe not even him. Shadows on shadows that September afternoon in the Langston Apartments. And nobody knew what lurked in the hearts of men, least of all the men.
Someone started screaming incoherently out one of the open windows. A little girl. Could have been Jeannina, but there was no way to tell. Lots of families lived in the Langston. Then a single shoe, an old, ripped up Nike running shoe, sailed out and bounced next to the concrete fountain. A comment. Some kind of omen.
Lynette giggled. “It’s on now.”
That it was.
I hoped the next thing to come flying out wouldn’t be Lip and wondered if anything went balls-up like this over at William Lucy House when the bumping finally stopped and one of the residents had a moment of hideous clarity.
From my interactions with Lynette and Cecilia, I’d come to understand the nursing home next door was place to pay grandma back for all those years of criticism and meddling. Undead geriatrics shuffled into the apartments’ courtyard, two or three a day, not knowing where they were, heavily medicated or needing to be, sometimes covered in their own feces.
Nobody wants to end up like that. At least, nobody wants to know they’ve ended up like that. And so, as they wandered in, staring down at the courtyard’s broken bricks, muttering at the sky or at the dry concrete fountain filled with trash, I liked to remind myself that there must be a modicum of grace left in the world. If you’re going to spend your last days talking to stones and covered in shit, better to think you’re somewhere else. Or not to think at all.
It took Esteban approximately five minutes to pull Lip down the stairs and out into the courtyard. Esteban’s white dress shirt was ripped open, exposing his perfectly sculpted hairless chest. Lip’s girlfriend, Susan, who I imagined was always up there doing high school dropout stuff, came out, too.
She’d caught something in the eye, a streak of blood smeared down her cheek. But that didn’t stop her from shrieking. Susan was clearly a master shrieker. She sounded like some kind of flightless waterfowl at the time of year when they pick fights with each other and pound their wings on the surface of the river.
In the present case, Susan was pounding on Esteban’s shoulder with her right hand while she kept her left fixed in a death grip of Lip’s hair—Lip, who was screaming, “Ima kill you” over and over, rather unconvincingly, I thought. Esteban had Lip in a headlock, his other hand tangled in the front of Susan’s sweatshirt to keep her at arm’s length and prevent her from being able to hit him in the face.
They came lurching out like a highly mutated, six-legged beast that shouldn’t exist, but, due to the inhumanity of post-industrial life, the spiritual pollutedness of the Langston, and the essential radiant evil at the heart of urban Hauberk, they screamed, they staggered, they forced themselves toward that Nike running shoe like destiny.
And the onlookers cheered. Cecilia and Lynette cheered the loudest. It didn’t matter whether Lip deserved this. He was going to get it, which made people happy, their own pain alleviated for a brief moment of someone else’s: straight-up Schadenfreude in the afternoon.
Esteban had done this exact thing before. I’d been sitting in the courtyard the day he dragged out Timon Washington and beat him senseless with a heavy rubber dildo in front of his screaming mother. Whether the dildo belonged to Esteban, Timon, Timon’s mother, or to some other unnamed party was never decided.
Why the beating took place also remained mysterious. People cheered nonetheless. They simply concluded that Timon had it coming. Misbehave and you get the dildo. Bread and circuses. Public lashings. Picnicking at Bedlam to watch the tormented lunatics act like beasts. Nothing new.
Timon left town after that. You don’t get your face rearranged with a sex toy in public without the next step being a bus trip. Someone gave Esteban a sack of oranges to thank him. Jeannina professed her love. He was a hero.
Just like today. He kicked Susan about five feet to the side. She landed on her knees and fell over, still shrieking with a handful of her boyfriend’s hair. She couldn’t stand up and just assumed the fetal position. Meanwhile, Lip was trying to struggle out of the headlock. But Esteban was bigger. He’d been an athlete at Hauberk Technical High (baseball, but still) and had about a foot-and-a-half and 60 pounds on the kid. Now that he didn’t have to deal with Susan, he could reinforce the headlock with his free hand.
“Fuck him up!” Cecilia screamed, then plucked a stray bit of tobacco off her tongue.
“Yeah!” Lynette added, coughing, shaking her head. “Do it ’steban, you hunky stud!”
She was red in the face from laughter. She looked like a demonic chain-smoking leprechaun. Whether she was laughing at Cecilia, at the sad drama unfolding in the courtyard, or merely at the vicissitudes of life that had conspired to bring such absurdity to bear in this particular time and place was unclear. Reasons didn’t matter. Quality entertainment did.
I felt like I should do something, but what could I do? Esteban was now punching Lip in the face while holding him steady in the headlock, and one of those things was making the kid purple. I didn’t know how to fight. And for all I knew, Lip really had done some shit.
At least, that’s what I told myself. Another part of me—the lover, not the fighter—was watching Cecilia out the corner of my eye. She was flushed, really into it the way people get when they sit in the front row at a boxing match. They want to taste the blood, feel the sweat. They get involved.
Was there a civilized, non-lethal way I could get her that involved with me? Unlikely. I had more of a chance with Lynette the Chortling Leprechaun, which was to say, no chance at all. I thought Lynette might have been married. Cecilia probably wasn’t, but who could say? The fact that she was getting off on seeing a young man be severely beaten suggested marital involvement. Marriage often seems to produce avid boxing fans.
Susan crawled towards us and tried to stand, but couldn’t manage it and slumped down on her hip. Maybe she’d broken a knee. Cecilia leaned forward as far as she could and flicked her cigarette butt. It bounced off Susan’s forehead, but the girl didn’t notice.
“That’s not nice,” Lynette said, still grinning.
“I’m not nice,” said Cecilia.
And that was the truth. Though usually not-nice people, I said to myself, have a secret heart of gold. You just have to get to know them. Salt of the earth. Do anything for you. Right? Lip was probably like that. He probably had a great sense of humor. When he wasn’t high or threatening to kill people, he was probably a pretty cool guy, probably knew all about The Punisher and the X-Men, probably drew a lot. Most graffiti guys like to draw. And Susan was basically very pretty with long black hair that shined, almond eyes, olive skin. She probably had nieces and nephews who thought she was cool. Who wouldn’t want to drop out with a girl like that?
I wanted to say to Cecilia, “The world is a wonderful miracle and everyone is beautiful.” Instead, I watched Esteban punch Lip again and again until the kid’s face got smashed in and you couldn’t tell a bloody cheek from a bloody lump.
The headlock had probably saved his life. If his head had been against the courtyard bricks, it would have been all over but the shouting. Across the courtyard, I noticed Art slipping out the gates like a nervous lizard, grateful, no doubt, that his time had not yet come.
Esteban dropped Lip straight down like a bag of rocks and started to piece his shirt back together with what buttons remained. That’s when the applause really kicked in. I finally got off my ass and tried to help Susan up, but she just frowned, told me to fuck off, and dragged herself over to Lip, who was lying on his back with his mouth open, bleeding a lot. I sat back down.
87-year-old Martín del Rio, who lived on the second floor, owned a .357, and liked to say people could break into his place but they’d never come out, walked over to Esteban and shook his hand. I heard him say, “Estamos agradecidos. Necesitamos ayuda.” We’re grateful. We need your help. And I knew that, also, was the truth.
They looked down at Susan, her cheek resting on Lip’s chest. Then the old man clapped Esteban on the shoulder and walked back into the apartments.
Cecilia leaned over to Lynette and whispered, “Should I go say hi?”
Lynette nodded. “If you want to, now’s the time.”
“What do you think?” Cecilia said to me. “Should I do it?”
“Never stand in the way of love.” My eyes were calm, my mouth relaxed, the horrible octopus buffeting the insides of my heart with its dark tentacles remained imperceptible to the ladies of William Lucy House. Cecilia nodded as if I’d said something profound instead of a line I’d read once on a Hallmark Valentine’s Day card.
Susan was sobbing loudly and it was clear that Esteban was about to stride away triumphantly into the late afternoon. If Cecilia was going to do anything, she needed to do it now. Nancy Cortez, one of young Jeannina’s aunts, came out and handed Esteban a paper sack of potatoes. “Hey ’steban!” Jeannina called from her open window. He smiled and waved up at her. But Cecilia stayed in her chair, paralyzed, staring at him like he’d descended on a cloud.
“He’s just so beautiful.”
“For fuck’s sake.” This was turning out to be the funniest day ever for Lynette. “Just go talk to him. What are you? Ten?”
I got up again and, for a second, terror passed over Cecilia’s face when she thought I was going to bring Esteban over. But I felt like if I didn’t do something for Lip, the octopus might escape. Susan helped me roll him over. He was gurgling. When we got him on his chest, a river of blood flowed out of his mouth.
Esteban glanced at me, then turned and walked out the courtyard.
“I don’t got a car,” Susan said.
“It’s okay. I got bus money.” Everybody knew the walk-in clinic was four bus stops away down between the Providence Cinema and the Kodiak Hotel, another apartment building just like the Langston but uglier.
Windows were closing. Life was already falling back into its usual rhythm. Lynette and Cecilia didn’t want to get near Lip. So they just waved on their way back to the bumping oldies. Lynette winked, blew me a kiss.
That afternoon, sitting in the waiting room of Urgent Care next to Lip and Susan, I decided not to take any more cigarettes from Cecilia or Lynette or even to have lunch in the courtyard again. The roaches might get frisky if I brought a sandwich up to my room, but theirs was an honest frisk.
I felt that Lip would be alright, eventually. Maybe this was a turning point. Someday, a dumb kid just like Lip would probably put a bullet hole in Esteban Dominguez. Of that, I was sure. I didn’t want to be around when it happened or have to go to his funeral and listen to what a great guy he was. Everybody would be sad that day, which would be as funny as it gets.
A rhetoric professor of mine used to amuse himself by saying, “The truth is always simple.” By this, he usually meant that accurate-seeming propositions are built from small assumptions, arrayed around a central premise easy to accept as common sense. The central premise is simple. The rest is usually a complex rhetorical exoskeleton designed to protect it. He didn’t believe in a single monolithic truth. A genuine sophist, he looked for the validity of persuasive discourse.
It took a while to understand that his “simple” was shorthand for this idea. But that’s how some people communicate, by elision, ellipses, implication. It gives them room to persuade, to demonstrate, to marshal sources and mould arguments without being hampered by culturally prescribed truth narratives, attestations of belief, professions of faith, declarations of what is real, what all respectable people of good character are expected to think.
I find I’ve increasingly come to resemble my teacher in this way—not in his preference for indirect expression, but in his distrust of the “true” and the “correct.” There seems to be no shortage of sacred truths and respectable opinions in the United States right now. Everyone is suddenly in church.
Maybe it’s the Coronavirus. Maybe it’s the emotional fallout from the recent protests and riots. Maybe it’s because I’m turning 47 this year—not yet old, but no longer young—that I feel like I’ve had enough. Enough newsfeed. Enough hypocrisy. Enough banal evil. Enough stupid authoritarianism and reflexive outrage. Enough identity politics. Enough lip service and moralizing. Enough monetized nostalgia. Enough sadomasochism, dread, and consequences. Enough fake performative virtue. R. Crumb was fond of asking in his underground comics, how much can one man take? I’m at a point where I feel I can answer that, at least for myself.
I’m sick of being told what’s true and false, right and wrong—as if anyone actually knows. I think I’ll need to find a mountaintop soon, or a subterranean cavern, someplace quiet, away from all the respectable people telling me what to do, what to think, and how to feel. America is obsessed with propriety but unwilling to admit it. And it’s only getting worse.
I just read about the Arctic explorer, Augustine Courtauld, who, in 1931, was trapped in a polar weather station for months. The biography made it seem like a dreadful ordeal, and I suppose it was. But the idea of that much solitude is very appealing right now. I suppose I might feel differently after months of it. Then again, maybe not. At least, in that deep isolation, I wouldn’t be waiting in line at the confessional.
For the last few days, I’ve been thinking about Mark and Patricia McCloskey, now immured forever in the pages of the New York Post, which is where I first read about them, along with every other newspaper and social media platform in existence. They are the suburban St. Louis couple who recently brandished their guns at a crowd of George Floyd protesters.
Not a very nice look.
Since first seeing the McCloskeys’ terrified vacuous expressions, I’ve felt that the fact pattern in their dumb predicament is all rhetorical exoskeleton. What really happened? Two mousy attorneys thought their house was going to be burned down by a mob and overreacted. They also happened to be white, irritating to look at, and apparently prone to making terrible decisions—just like four cops in Minneapolis not too long ago. And they could have killed someone. It seems like sheer luck they didn’t.
They said they were defending their property. They said they’d only touched their weapons twice since moving in. They said they were afraid of a “storming of the Bastille” situation (they thought of their home as an 18th century French prison?). They said they were afraid of terrorism. They said they had guns in order to keep mobsters away (The Untouchables in suburban St. Louis?). And they said they support Black Lives Matter. Of course they do.
I imagine them saying all these things in a single exhalation, without pauses, then dabbing their faces with perfumed handkerchiefs. Honestly, Valmont, it sounds like an ordeal. Howsoever did you survive it? Well, dearest, they’re called the underclass for a reason. You have to be fair with them but stern. Violence is all they truly understand. Oh, Valmont! You ravish me!
The central premise, on the other hand, is something easy to accept: white people are afraid. It dovetails nicely with the abundance of twitchy columns and articles steaming out of the New York Times, The Atlantic and, to a slightly lesser extent, The Washington Post, which often seem more like professions of faith instead of reportage: this is what good people everywhere now believe. Rich white people are dangerous. Proof positive of what we’ve been saying all along right here in St. Louis. The truth is always simple, isn’t it?
As a white moderate liberal who believes in the marketplace of ideas, humanistic inquiry, literacy programs, diversity, the possibility of equal opportunity through non-violent reform, and the continued applicability of certain quaint democratic ideals, I’ve been accused by those to my left of willingly perpetuating a racist system (as if I were something more than a nobody with a laptop). Those to my right have called me a snowflake, among other unpleasant things, and accused me of writing thoughtless garbage. I’ve even gotten a few death threats in the post-apocalyptic hellscape of Twitter, which now just seems par for the course, especially on social media.
What I haven’t found is anyone willing to agree with me that the riots made perfect sense but the fanaticism of critical race theory does not. Kill people and their friends, families, and communities will respond in kind. They should protest. Everyone should when the police have gone feral. It’s understandable that when people feel oppressed, they’ll act out their frustration until they see changes. At least, they’ll destroy some monuments, burn some cop cars, throw the butt urn down the courthouse steps, and spray “ACAB” on the windows of the local network affiliate. Well, it’s something.
But the current woke gamesmanship being played by our corporate, managerial elite willing to indulge in the worst excesses of critical race theory in order to be on the right side of profitability is repugnant. As a fellow writer at Splice Today put it: “lots of white guilt and centering individualistic narratives of change,” a venting mechanism meant to preserve the status quo: “Class and socioeconomic privilege are preserved and movements such as Black Lives Matter and Me Too can only exist to support class status.” Put the right slogan on your T-shirt and you can have your BLM cake and eat it, too.
Maybe it’s better to say that, while I don’t know what’s true, I have a sense of what isn’t. It’s a sense that tells me certain perspectives are more profitable than others right now for celebrities, politicians, and brands. It tells me the only way positive changes come about is when people stop trying to leverage the trends, set aside their differences, and work together in the spirit of common humanity and good will. And it adds that such changes are never going to happen if you’re preoccupied trying to storm the Bastille or if you’re out on your front lawn with an AR-15, trying to defend it against the mob.
Mostly, I’m just as tired as anyone in this pathological country. Every government is somewhat horrible and evil. But I’m not interested in pulpits and commandments. I’m not trying to be virtuous or right. I’m not interested in today’s purity test. I didn’t even plan to be in the United States for more than two weeks. It’s been almost four months. I’ve had enough American exceptionalism and respectability to last me at least until our brave new police-free utopia hits its stride sometime in November.
White men are horrible, straight men are horrible, white straight suburban women are especially horrible, oven cleaner is white adjacent, history is horrible, you are horrible, look at my dog.
Racism, hillbilly violence, iconoclasm, the anarchy must be put down, but isn’t it about time, anarchy is okay, anarchy in the UK, anarchy is not about you, anarchy is you not me, Antifa burned my house down, love me.
The media sucks, IQs are dropping, the virus is rising, white scientists suck, fake news, a febrile bodily stench, take your medicine, we can never go back.
Kellyanne got a face lift, replace the skeleton with surgical titanium, love dolls are the solution, blood from a 12-year-old injected daily, who are you to judge?
I won’t take a knee, why you should take a knee, liver damage, unemployment, poverty, citizen journalism, pepper spray is not a crime, unicorn riots, win this 18-bedroom smart home in Beirut, it’s hopeless.
Inject this insect paste into your knee if you want to live, admit that you are fragile like an Easter egg, will we really make it to Easter I don’t know, buy this jade spoon embossed with the face of Benjamin Franklin before they light it on fire, racial slur, it can’t be a racial slur, banking conspiracy, violence, Kellyanne put down that puppy.
Easter apocalypse up in your grill, every day, violence, violence, violence, disease, you deserve to suffer, you don’t deserve to suffer, you deserve violence, and disease, and this delicious curbside fruit delivery, buy an intimate massager, sterilize the poor, the worst week of Trump’s life is today.
Greta Thunberg? Don’t you say a goddamn thing about Greta Thunberg.
10 best novels by cave-dwelling anabaptists, Walmart, no-touch orgasm, we replaced her knees with industrial springs and now she jumps a lot higher, Kellyanne is why we can’t have nice things.
Trump, Trump, Trump, Trumpety, Trump, Trump, don’t touch me like that while I’m sedated, the left wants aliens in your sandwich, the right wants to kill art, do you know where your Easter eggs are being dipped, can we stop with all the Trump, Biden’s in the basement, space junk will rain down fiery Mayan death upon our children.
Cops with broken hearts, shit cops don’t know the meaning of heartbreak, white fragility, cop fragility, black fragility, heartbroken asian fragility, cops gone wild, Jim Henson was a Nazi, Kellyanne is why I wear this sailor suit, it’s not okay to say these 756 words, racist orgasms, systemic orgasms, systemic racist orgasms on the dark web, but who will pay reparations to the hundreds of undocumented sidhe living in Torrance, California, it won’t be North Korea this time.
I don’t want to visit North Korea, I need the New York Times like I’ve never needed it before, hold me Kellyanne like you did on Naboo, and bring the light inside the body, it’s not a riot if it don’t got that febrile bodily stench, don’t talk to me today, Kellyanne, I need a haircut.
Trump, please make it stop, just put me on the rocket ship, I don’t care, I just want to go.
A short short in the style of Tony Earley.
It was time for the end of the world again. We thought it was going to end in December of 2012, but in our exuberance, we’d miscalculated the date of our ultimate annihilation. Now, eight years of heartbreak and trouble later, we were informed that we’d been using the wrong calendar and that the end of the world was actually next week. The cosmic numerology seemed to work out if we took the differences between Julian and Gregorian calendars into consideration. So there was some cause for optimism.
We’d come to understand that very soon the Bolon Yokte Kuh, the nine Mayan underworld gods, would initiate an endgame scenario with the 13 Deities of Heaven, rendering the earth as naught but a pile of feathery ash expanding through the void. And we felt we were ready for that, all things considered. Though it may have seemed impulsive and irresponsible for us to get our hopes up yet again, we felt this apocalypse might be the one.
After the last armageddon came and went, we were inconsolable. We never quite got over our disappointment. So this time meant a lot. Ibrahim still had to work 15 hour days in Crown News & Liquor because his grandpa had the gout and there wasn’t enough space behind the register for the old man to sit.
Ibrahim’s girlfriend, Katrina, got trapped in the middle of a riot a few weeks earlier. Now her hair had gone bone-white and, we thought, probably would stay that way forever. She’d stopped crying, but now she stared a lot more, which made me feel uncomfortable, and sometimes her mouth hung open. Ibrahim said it was a phase, that his Uncle Maheer was like that after the war back in Beirut, but he got over it.
I lived over the shop, paid rent to grandpa, and had nothing to do with my unemployed lockdown-riot life, since all English courses at the high school were now taught by a secretary and a computer program. Therefore, I spent my nights helping Ibrahim rebuild the place while Katrina sat in a metal folding chair by the shattered cold cases and watched.
The day we heard the good news about the earth’s impending destruction, Crown News & Liquor also got custom-cut plywood to fit in the empty spaces where there had once been front window glass. So there was more than one reason to celebrate.
That night, we took off our surgical masks and had a beer together before getting back to it. Katrina was also in attendance (I mean, of course she was) with no mask, in her folding chair, staring hard.
“You’re gonna get us all covided,” I said, half kidding but not really.
Katrina looked at me, then said, very slowly, “I’m not infected.”
I nodded. Yes. Not infected.
“She speaks,” I said.
“It’s okay,” Ibrahim push-broomed a drift of shattered storefront glass into the big pile in the center of the room, where Doritos bags and Snickers bars used to sit on steel display racks. “She’s not really looking at you, bro. More like through you.”
“Through me? At what?”
He went to the door to cuss out some kids who didn’t read the sign and thought the shop was open. Then he resumed sweeping. “At the sadness.”
We’d been working on what remained of the shop for days and it looked like we hadn’t even started. Grandpa was depressed. Now his shop was in the Temporary Autonomous Zone. There were no police allowed. Hold back the Doritos and hungry arsonists might flambé you in your sleep.
“The sadness must be something.”
“It is,” Ibrahim said, looking out the door, holding the push broom with both hands like a pike designed to unhorse knights. “It really fucking is.”
Out in the street, we saw the kids get chased by three guys with bats and kitchen knives. Even if the world was finally, thankfully coming to an end, I decided I’d better look around for a gun sometime soon. The Bolon Yokte Kuh would understand.
Consider this hypothetical. You’re standing in your kitchen, cutting slices of cheese with a razor-sharp carving knife. You realize there are such things as cheese knives, but you don’t have one. For those readers currently languishing in suburban opulence, who can’t imagine someone not owning a cheese knife, I’m here to tell you such people exist, and they are probably more numerous than you have imagined.
Anyway, you’re cutting some cheese. It’s not difficult because the knife is a diamond-sharp Japanese “Zebra” blade, perfectly weighted for carving your burned pot roast, which is otherwise as uncuttable as second base. Now let’s say you drop that knife in a moment of privileged carelessness and it goes point-down through the top of your foot. Stop screaming. You’re not going to die. But there is quite a bit of blood welling up in your slipper. Better attend to that. You limp to the bathroom, whimpering and cussing, and start looking for the antiseptic.
In spite of what you plan on telling your spouse (My hand was wet. It just slipped.), you really have no idea why or how this could have happened. All you know is that it hurts. Did you deserve it? Think about this. Did you deserve to have a skewered foot?
One argument says, yes, if you hadn’t been worrying about your Bitcoin investments at that moment and whether the new walnut end tables really express your essential joie de vivre, you might have paid closer attention to what you were doing. You might have taken better care. Now small ripples of dread and frustration will radiate through your life for the next few weeks the same way pain radiates through your foot.
Your mindset will be affected. Your spouse’s mindset will be affected. Maybe your acuity at your job will temporarily decrease. Your irritation levels with Ralph, your neighbor, when he decides to fire up the lawn mower at 5:40 AM next Sunday, may run considerably higher. You might even speak harshly to the cat—a small thing, like the cat himself, but surely not something he, as a fellow living being, deserves. You’re the one who dropped the knife, you careless dolt. There are consequences for everything. Close your mouth and own up to them. Be an adult for a change.
But another argument says, no, accidents will happen. No one wants to injure themselves and no one ever truly asks to be hurt. There are so many opportunities in modern life to harm yourself or others that it’s likely to happen, now and then, even if you aren’t naturally accident prone.
No matter how much care you take, there are acts of god; there are times you break your foot stepping off the train, even if you’re minding the gap; a tree hits your bedroom wall; a texting teenager rear-ends you 45 feet into an intersection and you almost get hit and have to wear a neck brace for a month; you drop your phone in the airport toilet; you forget your wallet at the register.
These sorts of things happen whether or not you look both ways, don’t inhale, read Consumer Reports, wear three condoms, and keep your windows triple-locked. Feeling ashamed and responsible for unforeseeable disasters is just adding insult to undeserved injury. Sit down. That’s right. Have a cookie. And tell me where it hurts.
Two good arguments: one about responsibility, the other about compassion. One is not better than the other, but here we stand on the diamond edge of that Zebra knife between them. Which one seems more persuasive on its face? Well, that depends on our emotions, doesn’t it? The argument that resonates more powerfully depends on who we are as emotional beings. The one we choose says volumes about us and very little about the event itself.
Hold that thought. Before we decide which argument style we prefer, let’s talk about how this distinction applies and let’s take it even further, foregrounding the discussion by characterizing the “baby boomers.” Because the boomers have been the deciders, standing on that diamond edge since 1946. And much of what terrifies us today was authored expressly and overtly by them choosing a flimsy kind of emotional “responsibility for the responsible” instead of the more compassionate feels—which tells us a lot about them, if not everything we need to know.
The boomers spent the precious freedoms their parents bought for them as traumatized adults in WWII and before that as traumatized children of the misunderstood, alcoholic, Silent Generation—and the boomers act like they earned it all themselves through true grit and moxie.
Actually, the boomers are the ones who economically fucked over Generation X. The boomers built the nuclear stockpiles, created the student debt crisis, lusted after Gordon Gekko and Ayn Rand, and are the ones who currently despise millennials more than any others. Well, we all despise the millennials. But still. We know who the boomers are. We’re still dealing with their fuckery.
There’s an internet catchphrase going around these days, “Ok Boomer,” which the dictionary tells us is used “often in a humorous or ironic manner, to call out or dismiss out-of-touch or close-minded opinions associated with the baby boomer generation and older people more generally.” Ah. That sounds about right for the generation that established our current ruinous, self-serving climate politics.
As Sorya Roberts puts it (quoting Michael Parenti) in “Happily Never After,” as the environment collapses, elite panic in “strong states with developed economies will succumb to a politics of xenophobia, racism, police repression, surveillance, and militarism and thus transform themselves into fortress societies while the rest of the world slips into collapse.” Isn’t that a lovely vision of the future? Most of the boomers won’t be around to see it. They’re going to die on the golf course well before that. But the rest of us might live to enjoy it. That is, if we’re the lucky ones.
In the art world, particularly in creative academia, worsening since about 1975, boomer narcissism has taken this form: there is always room for talented people. Oh, there are no jobs for you? You must not be one of the talented few (like me). Too bad. Even though, in the boomer generation, you could get a tenured position with an unpublished manuscript and no teaching experience.
“Always room for good people” is a veritable baby boomer mantra, the meritocratic fever dream of those steeped in imperial luxury, who turn beet-red when someone points out that the they got where they are because they were born into a fortunate time and place between global catastrophes; that the emperor is not a god; that the empire is not eternal; and that its luxuries were founded on a pylon of human skulls. Boomers comprise a large part of Donald Trump’s “base,” the leering retirees in the MAGA hats. And though academics generally despise 45, they conveniently overlook that he has more in common with them than any other generation.
So you’re a millennial or, hell forbid, a gen-Xer in your 40s and the socio-political-economic Zebra blade has now gone straight through your foot. Are you trying to stay interested in the impeachment? Are you crying “Why me?” when you realize that halving global greenhouse emissions by 2030 is neigh impossible at this point? Have you been taking solace in Oprah’s self-care philosophies and burning Gwyneth Paltrow’s special candle? Are you ready for what comes next? Are you one of the anointed few like dad was?
You’re not. You can’t be. But why not just pretend you are, just for a bit, after the Bactine and the Band-Aids, while the Parthenon burns?
