What It Means To Be Civil

This is just over 15 pages.

Chapter 1


I grew up in the Nineties. Nothing much more than my family, neighbourhood and pop culture is memorable from the beginning. Of the rest, it gets interesting. One kid in my neighbourhood- he had so much confidence- he led the way. He fell on ice and had a concussion in sixth grade, 1999. Following his concussion, he’d roam the halls in school during class, cursing loudly.

Another thing that happened was the affair between President Clinton and a young intern. Around that time I watched Marilyn Manson on MTV call every one who wanted to get into heaven an asshole. Never mind the Battle of Seattle. I wouldn’t know for a decade.

The boy with the concussion was one of my first friends. One day in 1998 he put on a CD in his room. The singer growled and the guitar was in drop-d so it was all dark. The album cover was a picture of a little girl on a swing and a lurking, hook-handed shadow figure on the sand. The band spelled their name with a backwards R.

Monica Lewinksi, Korn, the Y2K Scare and the lack of puberty: this is how I entered the Millennium. And my parents divorced. My sister and I had to talk to some sort of psychologist: He asked us whom we’d rather live with.

All my friends were about to part ways as the century changed. When some of us originally got together, it seemed like we found each other safely amongst all the tight-knitted fabric of the grade. But somehow even our small knit was hard to fit into after a while. Everyone analysed each other’s shortcomings as opposed to being linked by them as we had so innocently done.

One other thing that happened before we left elementary school was the Columbine Massacre on April 20th 1999. In Colorado a couple of high school students shot up their school. In seventh grade, we had to go to the school social worker during lunch one or two times in small groups to have discussions about bullying and the like.

In year 2000 my folks had me see a psychiatrist because I barely passed seventh grade. He wears all black now, listens to gothic heavy metal and we divorced. The woman was frightening. The questions were overwhelmingly simplistic. “Do you like school?”

“I guess so.”

Apparently she was highly recommended but why was I on drugs? Yes, I paid attention, but I felt like I was on drugs.

“I don’t feel like myself.”

“How so?”

“Usually I daydream.”

“During class?”

“Yes?”

She stared at me.

One day she said to me, “Would you like to stop taking it tomorrow?”

“Tomorrow?”

“Yes. Would you like to stop?”

“Okay?” She was messing with my ego. She was good after all, because I realized I had been enjoying the victimhood of the conundrum and being released from it was threatening to my drama. This was clear to me but it was hard to admit. A daydreamy life for me then: as myself. Victory.

The fits that I had weren’t new but they were increasingly destructive, as I once even threw my amplifier at my window. Neither things broke. Every night I stayed up until three or four in the morning making comics, or pinball machines, whatever I could out of cardboard, or playing videogames all while semi-watching TV. These activities were routinely done with the intent of doing homework afterwards. Although I was tired every day, I could never sleep at night. For some time this had something to do with The Exorcist and the subtle addiction my friends and I had to horror films.

It struck me during a moment of silence in my room in eighth grade that life was once vivid but had somehow become stale, like I had crossed some line without noticing. This was a thing I tried to fathom every day as we all seemed to move along a lifeless belt.

My father at last moved out and he would see my sister and I every other Tuesday and Wednesday but it quickly turned into just him and I. He’d typically show up in jeans, a white shirt and a blazer, his hair cut nicely and his cell phone in his pocket.

“I’m so tired,” I said, watching the cars go by on the turnpike through the diner blinds.

“You seem to be always tired.”

“I am.”

“What are you eating?”

“I don’t know.”

“Do you eat breakfast?”

“No.”

“What about lunch?”

“Um. Lunch is breakfast. I get a buttered bagel and a Snapple.”

“That’s not good. Do you eat after school?”

“Usually I make like popcorn.”

“And what about dinner.”

“I’ll usually like micro-wave whatever mom leaves in the fridge, like-“

“Stop saying like.”

“What do you mean?”

“You say like for no reason in sentences.”

“I do?”

“Yes. Does your mother leave you vegetables?”

“Uh. Yea,” I shrugged.

“Do you exercise?”

“Not really.”


In high school I’d be part of the support class again. “Just for the first two years and then you can do your own thing.” It was cool with me. You went during lunch every other day to work on homework and study with the nicest staff members in school and you could daydream all you wanted. There were usually about seven of us in there and they were also the nicest students.

“No one is really liberal or conservative,” one guy said to me once at one of the tables while shaking his bottle of iced tea.

“What do you mean?”

“People are conservative about some things and liberal about other things.”

“I don’t know what I’m conservative about,” I said.

He shrugged and the woman asked if he was going to focus on his paper.


But even if high school was going to be just a bigger version of a place that felt oppressively bland, intimidating, alienating and a mirror of how small I was and awkward I could be, it was going to be different. I was going to find the people.









Chapter 2



It seemed like lots of folks really did have “best friends” or a close knit that lasted a long time. Meanwhile, some folks so obviously went from one crowd to another. And it was never from a small group to a larger one, or from the dangerous or troubled groups to the healthy safe groups. It was only the reverse. If someone changed social situations it was always rich to poor, or more neutrally, from being troubled alone to being in a troubled group. Is this accurate? Maybe it depends on how you look at it. Maybe the “normal” group was drama bound, and the “troubled” group was going to change the world.


My first love, the girl that absolutely changed my sense of identity, was Maya Grey. She was in my third period art class freshman year. She talked with her friends over their art projects and I didn’t talk to them for the whole first week. Her hair was black and not straitened. She leaned over her artwork with her face in her hand. She spoke in a calm voice to her friends about things that in my short attention span seemed pretty mature. She was also in my science class where she didn’t talk to anyone. It wasn’t obvious to me that I liked her. Maybe I didn’t. Maybe it was a subtle yet burning curiosity. Everyone was an alien life form to me except her, who seemed planted on the ground. Until I met her, I thought people were generally normal and I wasn’t, but she made it seem as though only she were normal and I was normal too deep down, and all I had to do was recognize it.

She was there on that day. It was the second week of school on a Tuesday. The principal interrupted our artwork, conversations and daydreams when he apologized for the interruption. “Our country has been attacked.” Country? Our country has been attacked? “The World Trade Center in Manhattan has been hit by two airplanes this morning. One building was hit just before nine and the other just after nine. It is believed to be a terrorist attack. This is a national emergency. If we need to we will update you with any other information. Today’s schedule is likely to be shortened as a result of this event. For now please go to your classes as scheduled until further notice.”

The next period would have been lunch but I just remember walking with Maya Gray and her friends into the crowded hall and the lunch room. A girl I knew was crying and surrounded by friends. Someone told me that her parents worked at the Trade Center and weren’t picking up their phones.

And for fifth period there was science as usual. The teacher put on the radio and we listened mutually. George W. Bush was only in his second year. He said, “We will hunt them down.” That’s all I remember him saying. “We will hunt them down.”

School was cut short and I went to one particular friend’s house for the one and only time. His six-year-old brother said to me at the door, “The plane goes into the building like this. Boom.” My friend apologized. He showed me his drum set and soon I was home on my floor watching the news. Every channel it seemed showed the same image of the towers burning at the top. As the days passed it was surreal. The reasons why it happened were not immediately interesting. That something on the historical timeline occurred was overwhelming. This meant that it was hard to adjust to being in the after. Time itself became a difficult concept. There was the before it happened, the approximate during, and the constant floating into ordinary days further and further away.

Older people were most interesting for their reactions. They could only say it was the most terrible single incident they’ve lived during. It made me wonder about the rest of the world. Our world was the one in movies. I lived less than an hour east of New York City. The more news anchors said it was terrible the more it seemed that we were lucky the whole city wasn’t on fire. But no one said that. It was curious.


“I just had a thought,” I said to Maya Gray and her friends in art class.

“I’ll mark the date,” said Stacy, who had strait red hair.

“Yea I have to stop starting my sentences with I just had a thought.”

They laughed.

Besides the group in art class that became friends of mine, two people came right to me. The first was Suzie. When I closed my locker she was standing right there holding her books in front of her plead skirt and her black dress shoes were tightly together. There was green and pink highlighter in her blonde pigtails, her blue tank top was dull and blank, and her stockings were torn. She was smiling. “Hi,” she said.

“Hi.”

“My friend wanted me to tell you hi.”

“Okay. Who are you?”

“Suzie. Who are you?”

“Pink.”

“Hi Pink. Bye.”


The other was Joel. He hung around all the metal heads and punks in the back of the cafeteria everyday where I was when not in support class. He was wearing a Disturbed band t-shirt when he walked right up to me where I sat on the radiator and asked, “What bands are you into?”

“Well,” I said. “I’ve been listening to Led Zeppelin everyday.”

“I love Zep man. You play any instruments?”

“Guitar. Not well.”

“Cool. I want to get a bass. You want to hang out after school?”

“Sure.”

That was the first time I walked over the creek that ran behind the school, which led into a concrete sewer opening covered in graffiti. He had Disturbed and Slipknot posters on his walls and we listened to Led Zeppelin. The carpet ran up one of his walls to his ceiling and was peeled over in one corner. There was a burn mark shaped like an iron. “I’d kind of like to get out of here before my dad gets home,” he said. “Do you ever hang out in town?”

“You mean like where the movie theatre is?”

“Yea. Some people hang out there on Friday night. We can walk there from here.”

“Okay.”

This is where I met Kurt. On Friday night, there were folks that went to town for the movie theatre or the ice cream place, there were the folks that went into the pool hall, and then there were the folks like us. There were two little kids in the Chinese food place, a brother and sister. They drew pictures on one of the tables; they sat on crates behind the counter, and sometimes they came out and played near us. On the corner outside the Chinese food place was where some folks who looked like metal heads and punks hung out. They sometimes had a small radio playing old punk music on it. They sometimes sat on the sidewalk and talked about Bush and Al-Qaeda and all that. There were mohawks and liberty spikes and chains and black boots and piercings of all sorts but Kurt was rather subtle. He just wore jeans cuffed at the bottom, a white t-shirt and a beanie cap. The first thing he said to me was, “Hey man could I punch you?”

“No.”

“It’s nothing personal. Just one.”

“Hey. Lay off him,” said this older girl Erika who was real tough looking and engaged to this long haired Asian dude who was also real tough looking and always gave me the pound greeting, knuckles to knuckles.

Someone said, “Hey. I think I’m going to go to QYP to get free condoms. Anyone want to come?”

“What do you mean come?”

“I’m not going to QYP bro.”

“What’s QYP?” I asked Joel.

“Queer Youth Pride. It’s around the corner.”

“I don’t want to go by myself man. What if I get in a fight?”

“You’re all pussies,” said Kurt. “I’ll get the condoms.” He put his hands in his tight pockets and walked away.

There were five of us from the corner in a small room but not including Erica and her fiancé because people older than twenty-one were not supposed to be there. There were a few other people in there including one real quiet guy from school named Brian. The facilitator was a woman in her older twenties who asked us questions. “So what are different ways that people could get STDs?”

“From fucking,” said Kurt.

“Right. Anything in which fluids could get from one body to another.”

“Like kissing?” someone said.

“More likely if someone has a cut in their mouth.”

“What about sharing a drink?”

“It’s pretty much the same case however you could get other contagious things. Any other questions? Okay. So drugs and alcohol. What are some reasons that people get high?”

A girl in a big jacket said, “It’s everywhere. How do you not get high when drugs are all around you? I’m like on my way to school and as soon as I step out my door someone offers me a bag.”

“Okay. So it’s available and it’s tempting. What else?”

“It’s an escape,” someone said.

We walked out with paper bags full of condoms and dental dams. It was getting dark. In front of the little brick building was a small crowd of gothic teenagers. One of them was Maya Gray. “What are you doing here?” she said.

“My friends wanted to go to the orientation.”

“Oh good. Now you can just come in when you want.”

I looked at the building behind me. “I guess so.” The punks were walking down the street without me. “Hey, I want to talk to you about something. Do you want to go for a walk real quick?”

“Okay.”

On the other side of the block, in front of the movie theatre I asked, “Do you want to go out with me some time?”

“No Pink. I kind of have a boyfriend.”

“Oh.”

“We should talk online though.”


We were regular buddies then on AOL Instant Messenger.

DreamXvapor: Pink I don’t want to go school anymore.

LIrampage87: Don’t you at least partly like going?

DreamXvapor: Okay. I like art class. Except I try not to hear the stuff Dante Michaels says.

Dante Michaels was a big, athletic guy with a shaved head and earrings. He could usually be seen with a group of pretty girls and heard flirting or making an obnoxious remark, like the time he said to me in art, “Pink your fingernails, are you some kind of transvestite or what’s up?”

One of the girls near him said, “Leave him alone Dante. He’s just experimenting.”

LIrampage: What does he say to you?

DreamXvapor: He doesn’t talk to me. It’s just that -not that he’s much different than the majority of the school- but it’s how everything that’s not cool is gay. It doesn’t seem as naïve when he says it. He says things about Jews too.

LIrampage87: That’s lame.

DreamXvapor: Yea. Not to just narrow it down to him. Sometimes it’s just waking up in the morning. I don’t want to do the whole thing again.


Queer Youth Pride was one big, dim room with a stage. There were usually about twenty to thirty people inside. The first time I went in I saw Stacy, who usually looked pretty ordinary but at QYP her hair was in pigtails and she had multicolour glitter on her cheeks and a sparkly, tight black shirt and a skirt. It was very dark inside and little, white lights were circling around the room. The song “Closer” by Nine Inch Nails was playing.

The oldest person was Lee, a guy that dressed real tough but loved Janis Joplin. He was twenty-one. He read poetry on the stage and he was Janis for the drag show. He was a rather large fellow covered in a wig, beads, feathers, and the whole thing. “Come on and take it!” His big feet stomped on the wooden stage. “Take another little piece of my heart now baby…” He was one of Maya’s best friends.

DreamXvapor: Lee is sort of making feel out of sorts.

LIrampage87: Why?

DreamXvapor: Just something he said to this girl wasn’t right.

LIrampage87: What about?

DreamXvapor: Well I’m not saying what she did was right either…


As the students gathered by the door in the art room waiting for the period to end, Dante said to his friends, “I hate that kid. He’s so gay. He’s such a faggot I want to kill him.”

“Hey Dante,” said Maya.

He turned to her. “What?”

“Can you please not use the word gay like that or call someone a faggot ever?”

“I wasn’t talking to you.”

“I was right here. No one wants to hear those words.”

“Listen girl. I don’t know you.”

Ms. MacCauley said, “Hey. Dante. As long as you’re in this classroom you are not to use those words. Maya is right. It’s offensive.”

Maya crossed her arms and Dante looked at her slyly. “Are we cool?”

“No. You think because you’re so big you can just talk about people like that. I want you to apologize.”

“To who? I don’t care what you think.”

“Apologize to me because my friends are gay and have to deal with bigots like you everyday.”

“Okay. I’m sorry.”


As summer came I left on a plane to Southern California. My aunt had just produced a children’s album for the mentally disabled and invited my cousins and I to tour with her to street fares and schools. While my aunt played acoustic guitar and sang, the rest of us sang too, played bongos, used props and one time I wore a Hula skirt at a street fare playing the maracas. We ate at Fifties styled burger joints and went to one of her students’ birthday parties. Our countless inside jokes resurfaced again and again. Sometimes we just hung around her house and at real subtle moments my aunt could tackle deeper subjects.

“I just stopped believing is all,” I said in the passenger seat of her truck one day as we passed by distant mountains and open landscape. Some folks were in the other truck and my cousins were sleeping in the back.

“That’s not too unordinary.” She spoke real casually. “But sometimes you look around at nature and say, ‘well, where did the mountains come from and the rivers, and all of that?’”

And later we pulled onto her street and her neighbour asked me, “What made you paint your fingernails?”

I shrugged. When he left I said, “Why do people feel like they should acknowledge the little things people do?”

She said, “People just get concerned. Sometimes when people wear all black or look eccentric it could be a sign for problems that they might have at home or from their past.”

Although I hadn’t used a computer almost for the entire month I was in California, I went on AIM a few days before I went home.

DreamXvapor: I have to warn you that Peter wants to hurt you.

Peter, Maya’s ex-boyfriend, was from another town. He was a target for the punks to talk trash about because he wore big, black high tops. He wore heavy black eyeliner on his dark brown skin. He was into Cradle of Filth, one of the most haunting bands I’d ever heard.

It stung, knowing that I couldn’t go back to QYP when I got home without dealing with him.


But back in New York it happened soon. Even Joel said in town, “Peter wants to fight you.”

“I’m going anyway.”

“I’ll come with you.”

A big athletic guy in a sports shirt came by and pound-greeted Joel. “What’s up Joel?”

“Hey Travis. This is Pink.”

“What’s good Pink? What you guys up to?”

“Just going to QYP,” said Joel.

“Oh that place?” He nodded. “Okay. No doubt. Never been there.”

“You don’t have to be gay.”

“Yea I know but I got to meet a friend at the pool hall. I’ll catch you guys later.”


As we walked through the crowded hall, Peter stood right next to me. “Hey Pink. I want to fight you.” It was his first words to me ever. “Just wait til you come outside.”

As he walked away I looked at Joel. “Well I’ll just have to walk outside soon enough.”

“Dude,” he said. “Wait in here. I’ll call you in ten minutes.”

When I walked outside, Peter nodded to me and turned from his friends. Joel walked up with Travis. Peter walked slowly forward as I stood facing him with my hands on my hips. He interlocked his fingers and grinned. “Are you afraid?”

I looked at Travis.

“Yo,” said Travis. “I’ll knock you right out. Leave him alone.”

Peter looked back at me. “You can’t stand up for yourself? You can hit me first.”

“Hey Pink,” said Maya softly behind me.

I turned and looked at her. “Hey.” My heartbeat was so hard I could hear it as I turned back to Peter. There was a general circle around us now. “I’m not going to fight you,” I said.

“I just want to hit you once, Pink.”

“Why do you want to hit me?”

“Just want to.”

“Does it have to do with someone else?”

“No man. Just want to hit you.”

I looked at the ground for a moment. My awareness was entirely saturated with Maya’s presence. “It’s because I’m smaller than you,” I finally said. “It’s because you don’t know me and I haven’t been coming here very long. Or it’s because you want Maya to see how defenceless I am well now she can see it but my friends are my defence. I’m coming back here,” I said. “Maybe you’ll hit me next time but I like this place and I have friends here and if you don’t like me it’s too bad.” I turned and walked away with Joel, Travis, Maya and her friend.








Chapter 3


“How many times do you go number two in a day?” asked a doctor when I was nine.

“Six?”

“Six times!”

“…”

“Normal is one or two times.”

“Maybe three times.”

“Which is it?”

“Maybe four?”

So I took medicine for three and a half years. I’m not sure why I stopped but no one noticed. That summer of 02’, I began going to the bathroom more
frequently and losing blood. No one found out about that either and I thought it would go away.

By the winter of tenth grade I hung out with Joel every weekend, I was officially in love with Maya, my favourite band was Type-O-Negative, a goth band, and I weighed eighty-five pounds. Someone told me I was used as an example in a psychology class because I wore a spiked collar and eyeliner. This is when I let my hair grow. This was the year we read To Kill a Mockingbird and Catcher in the Rye.

My mother’s boyfriend moved in with us and he got me a job. He was from the North Shore. He was a foot taller than me and had a voice ten octaves lower than mine but he was younger than my mother. My mother was high strung and Bruce was laid back. His basic friendliness made me want to be closed off and mean.

“Your mother’s a couple French fries short of a picnic,” he would joke. I would quietly look away.

This was challenged when he got me a job. He worked at a ski store on weekends and we would ride to the next town together in his big van, The Grateful Dead on his stereo. He said to me once on the ride, “Your mother loves ya. She’s just not really great at expressing her feelings.” I crossed my arms.

First I was his assistant on sizing people for equipment; I took out trash and organized the back shelves. When it slowed down all the employees joked around. They were from the next towns over from ours. I liked them. Only one gave me a hard time: Ryan, tall, skinny Ryan who was only seventeen and always employee of the month. One time he took my slice of pizza in the back and ate it looking at me. “I hope you hate me,” he said. But some of the employees loved me, especially Tania, a skater girl at the front register. She was twenty-one. “Tell me something Pink,” she’d say.

“Way out in Galaxy 401,” I’d try to spit without thinking, “there are people just like us, only they don’t shower.”

“What if I don’t shower? Does my doppelganger shower?”

“What’s a doppelganger?”


Joel took me to his childhood best friend’s house in the next town. He was a nice guy, Leo. He lived with his sister who was a year older, and their grandmother. Part of their one-story house was a dentist office. There were several people in their basement that seemed to almost live there. The first time I smoked weed was with Joel and Maya in August, but I didn’t get high. In Leo’s basement, I smoked a bong, and got stoned. It was fun. I skipped down the street smiling. Back in the basement I hit the bong again fearlessly.

Suzie got me stoned too. It was in a small room with a bunch of people in her grade playing a Kings of the Stone Age CD. “You’ve never smoked a gravity bong?” a girl with dreadlocks asked me.

“No.”

“Then we must do a grav.”

Instantly I forgot I was even in a room, my age, my story, the year; it was just existence and wonder. The scary part was when they offered a second hit to
me. “No thanks.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yea. I’m too stoned.”


In a diner I told my father how tired I always felt. “When I stand up sometimes my vision blurs and I get dizzy.” What I didn’t tell him was about the cold November day when I forgot the keys to my house. I looked for another key in our garage, where the warm excrement fell down my leg. It was like my body was falling apart. So by December, I was in the hospital. In the waiting room of the gastroenterology department I read Go Ask Alice.


In the spring I felt physically more stable. Almost everyday I walked home from school, which was about three miles. I quit drinking soda and eating snacks at night so I could go to sleep earlier. After dark I’d go for jogs around the block.

“Where were you?” my mother said once when I got back.

“I went for a jog.”

“A jog at this time of night?”

I was confused. “Yes?”

“What’s in your pockets?”

“What do you think?”

“Let me see.”

“No.”

“How do I know you weren’t getting drugs?”

“I don’t care if you think I was getting drugs. I was going for a jog.”

“Well your very suspicious,” she said.


But now that I didn’t have to think so much about my physical survival anymore, I became extremely introverted again, and as soon as I first imagined, just as a fun daydream, killing myself, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Be it in class, or lying in bed, I tried not to think about suicide, because the thought of it made me want to do it and that in and of itself was a depressing feeling.

One time I thought about suicide in the back seat of a car, sitting in the middle next to Joel. Kurt rode the passenger seat as we went to Mcdonalds for lunch. I was generally real quiet every time, but as aware as I might have been to it’s selfishness, I imagined that my seat would be empty the next day and they’d know that only a day ago I was right there.

Kurt suddenly said to me in the Mcdonalds, “Why do you eat your fries one fry at a time?”

I shrugged and noticed there were three fries in his fingers.

One time Suzie was there. The four guys were at one table and Suzie and I were at the one next to it. “You’re not hungry?” I said.

“It’s this thing about food,” she said, taking one of my fries. “It makes you fat.”


Suzie got me into Mindless Self Indulgence. She took me to an indie techno-punk show in Brooklyn that changed our lives. She brought me to the Poetry Club meeting that spring. There were some fifteen people, mostly girls in a brightly lit classroom sharing poetry, collecting submissions for the zine and organizing the open mike night. I shared a couple of poems in the dimly lit cafeteria in front of about fifty people. It wasn’t the first time I shared a poem with a crowd. The first time was at QYP. My father, holding the zine in his hand, walked over to me where I watched The Simpsons in his living room.

He had just moved into a duplex house in Queens with a woman named Joan who I met at a Super Bowl party. Previously he was using the pullout couch and the kitchen in the office building that he co-owned with my grandfather. As much as I loved the idea of living for free somewhere and sleeping on the floor in that building, I could vaguely understand that Joan probably didn’t dig it so much. She was a quiet lady from Long Island and one time she watched the real famous Al-Qaeda beheading video on the internet with us. The main feeling I had watching the video was nervousness about how Joan felt about it. “That’s unreal,” she said, and went back to what she was doing.

“What is this poem about?” said my father.

“I’m not going to tell you.”

“Why not?”

“That would change the experience of the poem.”

“But I’m lucky to have the writer here so please. I think it’s a very good poem but I don’t get it.”

“I think you’re not supposed to get it.”


At the very end of the year the principal called an assembly. “As you all have heard, a southern Christian church group is going to be picketing outside our school tomorrow. They are protesting schools along the eastern states that have LGBTQ clubs. Now, we believe in tolerance here at this school and we try to create an atmosphere of safety. This group doesn’t represent the whole denomination of their church. They are a small group. They have the right to assembly and free speech. What I ask of you all is that you enter the building tomorrow through the side or back door. Please do not intervene with the protesters or give them any attention.”

But as we poured out of the auditorium, Maya said to me, “We’re having a counter protest.” Whether she did have the counter protest with her friends or not, it didn’t even occur to me to ask when it was; I just compared it to going in the back door in my mind, and that’s what I did: I went in the backdoor.

Meanwhile, Brian, the quiet boy who went to QYP once in a while, drew a cartoon of a small group of protesters, huddling together with fear as a larger crowd of people stood calmly around them. An art teacher asked for permission to make copies of it and at least two of my teachers put it up on the classroom walls.







Chapter 4


“They’re jealous of us,” said my father in the diner. “They hate our freedoms.”

“The whole population of Iraq and Afghanistan hates our freedoms?

“No Pink.”

“So why do we drop bombs on villages and kill children?”

“No one wants to kill children. I think you just like to take the unpopular side of things.”

“I’m not taking a side.”

“Changing the subject, are you taking your medicine?”

“What?”

“Are you taking your medicine?”

“You know, I think I got sick because of my diet. I try not to eat so much junk food all the time.”

“But you’re taking your medicine.”

“Yea, but it feels unnecessary. I did a report on genetic engineering.”

“What does that have to do with it?”

“Because it’s artificial life. It made me think about how forced things are. What’s so meaningful about taking a pill everyday for your life?”

“The doctors said you have to take it.”

“That’s not an answer to my question.”

“You’re just taking unpopular positions on things.”

“That’s not a fair response to all of my thoughts.”

“What do you want me to say?”


Mr Jurns was a tall, skinny man who loved teaching history. He was about forty when I had him in eleventh grade. Jurns was his wife's last name, which he shared as of marriage, challenging gender roles in our society. He was benign and enthusiastic. He taught Twentieth Century American history: Eugene Debbs, World War One, The Depression, The New Deal, World War Two, McCarthyism, the Cold War, counter culture...

"Pink's a hippy," this guy Ronald said.

"Pink is not a hippy," said Jurns.

"Yes he is. He wears socks and sandals."

"Pink," said Jurns. "Do you follow politics?"

"More-or-less."

"Do you know who's running in the election?"

"Kerry and that other guy."

"Dean?"

"Yea."

"Pink is a person of this era. Hippies were not defined for how they dressed; they were... layered."

"Then what is Pink?"

"Leave Pink alone."

Armond, a guy who I don't recall ever smiling, walked into the room across Jurns.

"Armond," sighed Jurns with his arms loosely at his sides, "can you please start coming in to class on time?"

"I had to take care of something."

"You see though that I have to say something when it's every day. If you miss half the class every day you're missing half the experience and you're contributing half of what you could to everyone else's experience."

"Yo, get off my back son. Just teach the fucking class."

"Please leave Armond."

Armond casually walked past Jurns with the one notebook in his hand. He slowed down before the door, turned and said, "Yo I don't need your fucking class, you tall, white fucking Mr. Jurns- what you gonna do? You fuckin punk ass." He pushed the door open with one hand. "Fuckin Jurns. Whatever." He was gone.

The class was still. There were some smiles. One girl put her hand on her mouth and bursted out some giggles making Ronald laugh and tell her to shut up.

Jurns put his hands out as to gesture for calmness. "I'm sorry that you had to experience that," he said. "I worry that you all might not fully appreciate the gravity of the situation."


Kurt’s father taught driver’s ed. Our car consisted of a really tough guy, a pretty girl, a rowdy guy that talked a lot, me, and Kurt’s father Charles. “I served in Vietnam, and I took pot in the countacultcha. So forgive me if my brain floats away once in a while. I’m a product of the Sixties. Make a left.” He pressed play and we listened to The Kinks in the sunshine.

I really dug the man and his stories. “We used to rent out staws to have potties. A pound a pot was twenty-five bucks.”

“Holy shit,” said the tough guy.

“Let’s drive to the Jones Beach Towa.”

This was spring 04, eleventh grade and I spent most of my time alone smoking, reading, walking, and writing.

Maya gave me an interesting look in the hallway at the end of the school year. As soon as we finished our last final exam, we walked to her house. In the pale lavender room, her bottom lip was soft and hard against mine. She hugged me tightly for a long time. When I got home that day I examined what just happened. It seemed I didn’t feel transformed in any way.

It was nice but it only lasted two weeks, and it ended in confusion. I didn’t want to go to town anymore and the new people who Joel was hanging out with didn’t seem to want me around. Suzie’s grade had graduated and I didn’t see her over the summer.

One night Joel called. I was stoned. He said, “Kurt’s dead.”

“Kurts dead?”

“He was hit by a car.”

“Fuck man. When?”

“A couple of hours ago.”

“Where are you?”

“I’m home. Someone just called me. I thought I’d tell you.”

“Thanks.”

We visited Kurt’s mother and Charles. A bunch of the punks, Joel and I crowded in their small, dim kitchen. Both parents were smoking cigarettes. Charles seemed like he had seen so much in his life that he wasn’t surprised. He shook his head. “I think the dumbest thing we did was give Kurty a baseball bat when he was ten. One day he broke all the lamps in the house.”

“The roof,” said the mother.

“What?”

“The roof.”

“Oh that’s right. He went on the roof and wouldn’t come down. What was he, fawteen a somethin?”


On the first day of school in twelfth grade I bumped into Stacy out on the empty sidewalk. “Hey Pink.”

“Hey Stacy.”

“Ready for one more year of this place?”

I shrugged. “Yea. I’ll make the best of it. What about you?”

She looked around and made a face of concern. “Did you hear about the football team?”

“No.”

She sat down on the curb so I sat down next to her. “The football team went on a trip a couple weeks ago and some people came back mutilated.”

“Mutilated.”

“Apparently every year older members of the team haze the new, younger players. This year someone went to the hospital.”

“So they beat him up pretty bad?”

She looked at me. “They sodomized him with a broomstick, golf balls and a pine cone.”

“Oh no.”

There was an assembly called by the principal. “Make no mistake that this tradition of hazing was not known about by the administration and it is going to be of significant commitment on our part that it stops. Unfortunately hazing is normal, in sports and in other fields of society and in all ages. We don’t want this event to be distracting to your education, but unfortunately it is not going to disappear right away. There is going to be media on our campus. You have the right to speak or not speak to the media, but we warn you that they are very likely to edit your words so that you seem to be saying what you don’t mean to. So we suggest that you don’t speak to the media for the sake of the school’s reputation but also for your own sake. We don’t want our school to be getting this attention. Most of our students are good people that do good things but we will only be recognized in this time for what a few people did. So at this time I want to emphasize the word civility. I beg you all to deeply consider what it means to be civil.”