The House Across the Street

By R. K. Byers

The book’s theme concerns a young adolescent boy growing up and discovering the world of sex and love. His success and failures result in his creating his own choices, sometimes against his own character leanings, often in accordance with his changing biology. During this period, he sporadically stands apart and examines what is happening as if out of time, analyzing its sense and nonsense from a different dimension.

The sociological and psychological implications alone make this book an exciting read, something akin to Carl Jung meeting Max Weber. In addition, the theological difficulties from the day take on a life of their own, explaining how some of us ended up where we are today. The philosophical issues of the day, too, take on a humorous new life in this seminal work. Whether you grew up in the age or not, boy or girl, it’s difficult not being able to walk next to him and understand oneself in a very new way.

Mr. Byers tells stories with the buoyancy of Thomas Wolfe, the subtle quirkiness of William Faulkner and the grace of Flannery O’Connor. Even in its heaviest moments, you never want to put the work down, caught as one is between wondering whether where it is headed and wishing it would go in another direction. Anyone curious about the sixties, especially how the era affected their beliefs as well as the present age, would enjoy reading this book.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Sep 26, 2019
• ISBN: 9781728324142

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© 2019 R. K. Byers. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

Published by AuthorHouse 08/26/2019

ISBN: 978-1-7283-2415-9 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-7283-2414-2 (e)

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Contents

Dedication

Chapter 1     Trisha and Me

Chapter 2     The Fireworks King

Chapter 3     The Fireworks King

Chapter 4     The Fireworks King

Chapter 5     The Motivation of Adolescence

Chapter 6     The Ballad of Donna Lynn Miller

Chapter 7     The Ballad of Donna Lynn Miller

Chapter 8     The Ballad of Donna Lynn Miller

Chapter 9     The Ballad of Donna Lynn Miller

Chapter 10   The Line of Fire

Chapter 11   The Music of the Spheres

Chapter 12   The Transparency of Virtue

Chapter 13   Dialectic Revolutions

Chapter 14   Crisscrossing Christine

Chapter 15   Bumps of the Road

Chapter 16   Home Coming

Chapter 17   Full Circle

Chapter 18   Another Conscience

Chapter 19   The Quality of Dreams

Chapter 20   The Rules for War

Chapter 21   Spring Can Really

Chapter 22   The Derivation of Zero

Dedication

The purpose of good literature is to raise the spirit up and lift it out of the general activities of daily life in which we tend to become inured. Literature must do so much more than entertain, especially in freeing each of us so that we may soar away and look back down, insecure and yet challenged with a sense of awe concerning our collective drive to live. Indeed, it is not entertainment but the ability of walking outside oneself that good literature seeks to accomplish. In doing so, the reader is able to evaluate, reevaluate, and alter his own life to better advantage, hopefully. Indeed if good literature should do anything at all, it should leave the reader changed in his core by the experience, not with information, but the knowledge that he is able to move forward in life on a better path. I pray only that this is good literature, however marginal this work may be.

There is truth in fiction far greater than what is able to be conveyed by non-fiction. These are moments when we read something and wonder just how far away we all are as human beings from one another, even running around, spending time between here and the grave. Truth in this fashion is not a collection of facts, but a new way of thinking and, hence, seeing which we may now inculcate. I pray that there is some truth in this book too. One only succeeds through inspiration. To find the exclusive bond which allows us the best part of our humanity is to be able to love. There can be no higher achievement.

I wish to thank several people who have supported me in not only writing this but getting it published. The manuscript has been languishing in a drawer for twenty years, its ideas lolling about in my brain for much longer. This book would probably never have seen the light of day had it not been for these. I first wish to thank my wife, Margery, for her steadfast support and dealing with my volatile moodiness, my friend, Kathleen Farrell for reading the manuscript and her constant encouragement when I wanted to stop, my editor, Suzanne Ammerman, and Buddy Dow who finally convinced me to publish. I am grateful in being able to complete the task at hand and it is only with their help that I have done so..

This is a work of fiction and each of the characters is fictional, although the story takes place in Northern Virginia where I grew up. Any resemblance to anyone living or dead is purely coincidental.

Ronald K. Byers

August, 2019

For Margery.

She endures it all.

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Chapter 1

TRISHA AND ME

The house across the street was always an enigma to me because as far as I was concerned, that’s where the Lewises lived. I was five when we moved in and they moved in about the same time. The way you learn about something is always, to some odd degree, the way things are. My dad always told me that they owned the place, even when they moved away to Texas. It was the Lewises’ house and that was that. I’m not sure your mind can ever comprehend where the heart refuses to give up.

Col. Lewis was a big boomy guy who impressed me with his hearty laugh and his big smiles when my parents had parties. Mrs. Lewis was a pleasant woman with a Texas drawl that just sounded friendly before you knew what she was saying; I remember her personality complementing Col. Lewis perfectly in a support role, like so many military wives of the age, not lacking in her own personality. Their son, Greg, a bit my junior and, at that age, hardly worthy of my contempt, was the apple of their eye. For some reason or other, I remember him being a very happy kid, someone who received more attention for his natural good nature than did I. He was always happy to see almost everyone. Their younger son was still a toddler, but one over which the mothers fawned and cooed. His name was Teddy, I think.

Most of the times, whenever we had cookouts or parties, the kids would come too and we would manage to eat what we called family style, although we did not know any families who would suffer such chaos on a regular basis. It was a bizarre affair where we learned to eat such delicacies as oysters or crabs from the Chesapeake Bay or even on one occasion, lobsters flown in from Maine, courtesy of our military friends with a need for flight time. My parents always had a keg of beer which perched itself on a platform in the laundry room filled with ice. It was our duty, as kids, to retrieve the beer in these cute little copper colored tin mugs. My brother and I, as hosts of our parties so to speak, were instructed about how to draw a beer properly. We had to pump the keg manually, which was kind of fun, because it reminded us of a bicycle pump. Unfortunately, there was nothing to see expand so we often pumped more than we should. We got the hang of it pretty quickly, especially when we made a mistake and drew too much of the foam. Dad called the top foam the head of the beer, which sounded funny. It still does, come to think of it, but we learned how to make a proper draught in short order. Part of childhood contentment was learning how to enjoy praise.

On several special occasions, we were even allowed to sip the beer, but as I recall, no one of my group thought it was worth drinking, except for my brother. I will never forget when, at age fifteen, he was allowed to have an entire can of beer after a particularly arduous day working on the lawn. Even if it did demonstrate peerage with the adults somewhat, I thought it was rotten tasting stuff, hardly worth the trouble of drinking. My father laughed when I told him that. I stuck to the wonderful bottles of Coca Cola.

Dad was never one to go overboard on premium beer brands, always sticking with Rheingold or National Bohemian. To be fair, even when it was at someone else’s house for a party, I don’t think it was the very best beer available. We got the family beer from Pittsburgh, which was Duquesne, later sold to Iron City, around the holidays. It never tasted all that much better to me, but I would sneak a taste because, after all, it was the holidays.

Hence, as no one ever got premium beer in the kegs, maybe my introduction to beer in this fashion was not the very best. I still learned what a draught of beer was. Dad never realized it, but his penury probably delayed my loss of brain cells for several years. It’s too bad, in some ways, that I ever discovered that beer didn’t have to taste like Clydesdale sweat.

We knew a lot of people in the military in my young life, most of them providing me with an almost endless supply of playmates through the years and my parents a happy supply of adults with whom to drink and converse. I hardly noticed that they all moved away for the most part within the first ten years that we lived there, those guests replaced by my mother’s friends from school where she taught or one-night guests of my father’s work. It was a warm way in which to grow up, despite all the normal atrocities associated with family maturation.

We were sort of in at the inception of our neighborhood, the roads still being primarily dirt in 1956 and the road towards Washington, D.C. where everyone went in the mornings was a two lane ribbon without stoplights. It went on that way for some eight miles, at least until one reached the next town and then onto the big road that seemingly everyone drove towards the great civilization of Washington. It puzzled me at the time as to why we lived so far from Dad’s job and the fact that everyone else did the same just made it more puzzling. It was something about living in the suburbs and, had I understood, I might have accepted it. Alas, I did not understand and life went on without that part of my brain being filled. For the record, I didn’t understand why anyone wanted to live where it got cold either, but that’s another story altogether. I knew we lived in what we called the suburbs, but what that meant or signified was lost on me, except that we lived a long way from Dad’s work. The word suburb always had some sort of onerous sound to it, as if someone one knew had just grown a beard while you weren’t looking. Nevertheless, when one is told he is fortunate, then one accepts it for two reasons: first, I had nothing in the way of comparison except people starving in other parts of the world Mother was always on about and second, it was a good time not to contradict one’s parents. It just made life harmonious.

The Fergustons moved into the Lewises’ house around June when I was twelve. They only stayed for a year, much to my disappointment. They had two kids, a boy named Greene, and a girl named Patricia. We were in Junior High together. He was in eighth grade and she was starting seventh with me. Seventh grade was all about the bewilderment of missing some rules that most everyone else had received. Some of us had a worse time than others.

I remember when my friend Albert came over and we saw someone mowing the Lewises’ lawn. Albert said he looked stuck up. We watched him mow the scraggly yard for a while, standing at the base of our driveway, idly throwing rocks into the drainage ditch. Finally, when he shut off the lawnmower, someone said Hi! and that started it all. I think we talked about rocks. Greene was flamboyant. I will never forget him signing the inside of one of his textbooks as Greene Ferguston, the Great! with one of those crossed flourishes underneath his name. My parents would have killed me had I done anything except printed my name carefully in each of mine. I often wondered how he got that very odd name or whether his mother had been ill when she named him. Because they were both adopted, no one was rude enough to ask.

Greene introduced his sister to us. I liked Patricia a lot, probably because she was the only girl in the whole world I could talk to without getting really sweaty and uncomfortable. Her voice was like music to me, a stark contrast to the general boyishness of my friends and the kid-ness of the girls I had known thus far. In addition, she didn’t think I was a jerk. I wished they had stayed because Trish, as she liked to be called, used to like to talk to me. I was okay when I was once in her presence, but coming into her presence was difficult. Yes, she lived only across the street, but the long walk across that cul-de-sac was like displaying my feelings to the entire world. That didn’t come easily to me, as it was akin to declaring a new and growing need in my life for the female sex. Having it radiate inside of me so desperately for the rest of the time only made me believe others could see it more clearly.

I remember how, after listening to her tell me about the length of her skirt for about an hour and a half, she kissed me. It was a wonderful kiss and I wanted to do it more, believing the prelude of listening to things I didn’t understand was a one-time prelude to real teenaged action. If she had only stayed a bit longer, I might have figured out that there is always a prelude to kissing and to guys it is usually painful, usually of the unendurable variety. I became a hopeless romantic listening to songs in my basement about love. I knew there were two kinds, both lost and true, but in the latter case, I reasoned, I had Buddy Holly’s word that it would never die.

The mindless can endure the pain of relationships better than those who think about things. I’m not sure that makes us smarter but it does make us overanalyze. For the record, analysis, not being all that voluntary to the desperate mind, was just about as painful as listening to adolescent girls talk about the perfect length of their skirts. It wasn’t a prerogative of my being as much as it seemed to be a prerequisite for it. That surprised me long before I knew what the words meant.

I never really understood the idea of skirts. Yes, I knew that they used to be very long and guys once got turned on by looking at bare ankles, but that was old timey stuff and guys weren’t nearly as smart way back then, at least not like we were in our day; I mean, we had the technology and the closeness in the world that was revealing new truth every day. I believed that we were well on our way to eradicating all of man’s difficulties. If that were true, it applied tacitly to our difficulties in understanding and discovering the key to successful bilateral communication between the sexes. While it seemed to me, even being young, that the gulf between the sexes was insurmountable, the modern world was holding out solutions that the world had not seen before. All that had to be done was convince the world that Playboy could be sold right next to Superman and the Green Lantern. My mistake, if there was one singular one at that age, was to avoid checking up on whoever was supposed to be working on that issue.

For example, I never did understand anything about the fashion statement of skirts. Their very existence was a source of embarrassment and interest at the same time. After all, if one were two feet tall, what was under the skirt would be more visible. Hence, dresses and skirts of a certain length were only enticement to something we weren’t supposed to see by normal means. The oddity was that devious means applied usually resulted in adult retribution. I remember when Marc once put small mirrors on his shoes, securing them with his shoelaces. As he was several years older than I was, I thought it simply brilliant and somewhat exciting. I also remember him being grounded for about a week.

Skirts seemed to me similar to the discussion of whether a glass of water is half empty or half full. Someone discussed the issue in something I read a long time ago that made perfect sense. I will repeat it here:

Is the glass half empty or half full?

The answer depends on which direction you are going. Consider that it is a hot day and you want a cold glass of water. You fill the glass and you begin drinking. When you get to the halfway point, is the glass half full? No, it is not half full because you are in the process of emptying it. Hence it is half empty. In the similar way, suppose that you are interrupted as you are filling a glass with water, leaving half a glass. Is it half empty? No, it’s half full because you are in the process of filling it. Ultimately, you can determine how to answer this riddle by determining the direction of the operator. On the outside chance that you come upon half a glass of liquid and are unaware of anyone doing anything with it, it remains neither half empty nor half full, but merely half a glass of whatever.

In the case of skirts, well, the fact that they were shorter was a definite move in the right direction, wasn’t it? I shudder to think how many times I fell asleep thinking of the future in this regard. It’s a shame that I didn’t spend more time on understanding the quandary of coming upon the half glass of water. I should have extrapolated the advice that merely seeing a girl in a dress meant that I was not accompanying either the rise or fall of it, in any meaningful sense.

I think it is universal to all mankind to at one time or another lie in the dark rekindling old memories, dancing around things which we feel would be more or less unpleasant should we dare to open them, and yet finding some sort of obligation to be there, to live it once again, perhaps in the hope of the horror or humiliation dying away altogether forever. Yet that which is so tender and sore that at once when we poke at it gently, it releases the kind of pain which would send us away, back to a time where we might once again find we are lonely or brave enough, perhaps both go together in this way, to try some of these tender points again.

Sooner or later, one hardens his or her outer shell in order to survive. Some of us have to be continuously beaten over the head with a tire iron for a bit before we get the idea. Some, seemingly, never do. My conscious ventures into adulthood began somewhere around the summer in front of the seventh grade, back in that fading summer of adolescence. I was preparing myself for my open expression of love, unable to make much headway because other people were watching. It wasn’t just that my parents might make a remark about my girlfriend across the street, those sickeningly cute remarks all parents enjoy so much, but it was also my friends. Which of my friends was with the new picture and which was lagging behind? A few of my friends already went to high school or private school, but sometimes I gathered that they weren’t exactly on the cutting edge of being hip. No one ever wants to play tennis with someone who doesn’t play as well as you do. In fact, we always like to play with someone better.

It was the lack of rules and justifications for adulthood that were throwing me for a loop; I had the rules my parents gave me, which I tended to discard somewhat, and then there were the rules my brother emulated, some of which were beyond my comprehension, and then there were the rules we were making up as we went along. On any given day, life could become confusing in short order.

Towards the end of the summer, our family vacation still looming before me, all my neighborhood friends were still talking endlessly about our futures, unsure what we might find, but staunchly defending our pride against the inevitability of change. It was hollow bravado, but no one could admit it. Trish and I secretly were fearful, but she surprised me one day by telling me how excited she was about it, the new people and the new classes and having schedules. I was more than a little shocked that someone, with whom I had shared so much, mostly listening, had suddenly become so foreign to me. Yes, it was true that we were fundamentally unable to do anything about the change, but I had rather hoped she would be amenable to running away before we had to face such an ignominious and empty future. She was much more excited about the prospect of the changes than was I. All of a sudden, here I was alone again, reinforcing the concept upon which I had been hacking for the past several months: nothing that changed, especially these days, ever brought anything very good.

Is it any wonder that we kids found school fearful and grotesque? It wasn’t that we didn’t want to know something or other. Heck, had we had the method, we would have learned almost anything and been glad about it. It frankly just seemed that education, as our parents called it, so involved abasing one’s personality beneath all of the other people who existed on the face of the earth. This world consisted, for the most part, of the people in the classes we had at school. It was bad enough that we had personalities with quirks that embarrassed us even in our private moments, but to find or discover that we had a personality not in accordance with the new world into which we were being thrust was especially excruciating. When that new world became our peer group, it was unbearable.

Most of the time as an adolescent, I felt confused. I wasn’t sure exactly what I was often confused about but it was like riding on a road where there were sudden unpaved sections. The oddity of it was that although you knew you were likely to get off the main track when the road kind of disappeared, you never knew exactly how to get back. In addition, there is something engrained in the human psyche that says one should never retrace one’s tracks because you will be in danger of suffering the agony of repeating the same mistake or, worse, making a completely separate and further humiliating error. Why is it that one seems to become far more insecure after committing some really bonehead mistake?

On top of that, there was a worse part of adolescence; think of being on the main road and never searching what you were passing on either side. Just because someone made the road before didn’t make it the right one. Think of civil rights as an example. My parents were brought up in decent families but they certainly passed on their distrust of certain ethnicities. Of course, people who were from Poland were tolerated, for example, especially when they were well educated, but usually they received the moniker dumb Pollock at some time or another. It was like waiting for self realization in many ways. Naturally, my grandfather’s country club was restricted. It took me several years to understand exactly what this meant. We can only thank the Lord that these places didn’t restrict the clubs from letting the Negroes work there. If they had, there wouldn’t have been any table busboys or general gofers. As I grew up with all the prejudices in place, it was considered one of the advantages of just having been white. No one had to tell me that just getting by was a terrible ordeal in life. I tended to agree with my parental monitors that ceding rights to others not presently included in the grand scheme of things could hardly be seen as an improvement in the way things were intended to work. Even then I could understand that there were only so many benefits to go around. If we started passing them out to everyone, soon there wouldn’t be enough for the people who really deserved them. That was an example of having been on the highway too long because it was nice and smooth and pleasant. Sometimes one had to get off the road to discover what was right.

The worst part of adolescence was, and for any age, so it seems to me now, the times in which one recognized that the way was wrong but you took it anyway because, in some odd way shape or form, it was going to give you something which life had somehow denied us. As I have said before, that’s why adolescent boys hunted for the elusive prophylactic machine in the dirty men’s rooms of out of the way gas stations. It’s also where the parable tends to break down, because we didn’t know which way we were headed, knew it was something wrong, and almost undeniably, we knew we would get farther away from what was true the farther we went down that path. The only thing waiting at the end of it was attaining that small piece of information most men call knowledge and being able to hold it just out of reach of everyone else one found, except, of course, the few degenerate peers who might also be as stupid as you to believe that knowledge could ever be approximated by information. The realization of this sadness passes for either depression or politics. Lawyers have figured out a way to make money from both; the successful ones are immune from anything which gets in the way of their ego.

Seventh grade was all about something like missing some rules that most everyone else had received. Unable or perhaps unwilling to make the change, I felt myself retreating into the kinds of behavior I knew better. This usually involved some overly enthusiastic display of passion for an event, but I had decided that success is all about doing what one does best. Whoever invented that advice never had to go through the seventh grade. I was initially spurred by those around me who had not made a successful break with the past. This included almost all of my cohorts from the neighborhood and several of my friends from my elementary school. I began to notice, however, two things: first, no one in my entire neighborhood was considered very cool and second, some people I had known for many years now were beginning to act a bit different. Both of these were serious, but I recognized that separating myself from the misfits was a change I was going to make, even if it broke my heart. Trish was in my same grade, but for some reason or another, she wasn’t in any of my classes, unlike my other friends. Taylor and Mark shared the same schedule and we took a few classes together. Additionally we hung around together in the morning in the cafeteria. We were all herded into the cafeteria in the mornings. We secreted ourselves back in a little corner at one of the tables Where Hank Klee, an eighth grader who lived across the street from Taylor, indoctrinated us into the world of becoming adults. He was the one who told us first about the phantom prophylactic machines.

In seventh grade, it was a minor consolation to be royalty among misfits. I expected that who I was and what I knew would carry me at least some part of the way into a better social situation. Frankly, learning about sex in those early morning hours listening to lurid tales told by Hank when I was still sleepy gave me a hollow feeling in the pit of my stomach. If we expressed anything to do with disbelief, Hank knew how to quickly quell that rebellion. There was a huge gulf between the seventh and eighth graders and I was happy to be getting any advice, even advice that caused me to be embarrassed when I was in the presence of girls now. I feared that they would be able to see the inspired lust in my eyes for them as a sex object. In a primal direct way, something I was quickly learning was ineffective for producing a desired effect, I wanted girls to know and share my newly discovered lusts. In some social way, I was humiliated by even knowing what little I knew and was certain that everyone else knew these things too. Hence inter-sexual social relationships became next to impossible simply because they involved my unbridled sexual proclivity, albeit unschooled and highly inaccurate, and on the other hand, a more biological and romantic desire of any girl. I wisely concluded that I wanted to conceal my knowledge from everyone. Oddly enough, other boys I knew, those who I was sure knew what I knew, well, they must have made the same promise to not mention it to anyone else either. Of course, this did nothing to preclude the whisperings and lurid tales we told each other in the early mornings or after school, but it was prohibited in mixed company. It was really a kind of macabre dance with shadows of the underbelly of life: our knowledge of lust became the barrier to any culmination of that same lust. My greatest confusion was the connection between Richie Valens and my lascivious expanding lust. I was forced to calculate ethical and social differential equations without understanding the meaning of constants.

I had no idea what I was going through and I remember blushing a lot and being filled with ennui and angst, although it’s unfair to apply words that legitimate to the confusion a budding teenager feels. For some reason or other, I would feel like not doing homework pretty often. That in itself was a confusion of emotions which I have a difficult time explaining. Things just didn’t get done, usually as I listened to my parents watching TV in the living room. TV and music were so opposed to most of what my life was all about. Learning things didn’t seem necessary if love would fix all the hurts. If this was the way God made us, why wasn’t that good enough for everyone else?

In math class, I had a tall man named Mr. Warner as a teacher. He was tall and had a long and serious face, with a deep voice, reminding us of the guy from the TV show, Car 54, Where Are You? He seemed to have no sense of humor whatsoever. From his point of view, teaching math to seventh graders, I can see why he was humorless; he must have known he was in a reincarnation that was punishing him for abominable deeds in a previous life.

The book we had was a softback text. I have forgotten the name of it, but the cover was yellow. I remember feeling very distinctly that having a textbook without a hard cover made me feel cheated. The fact that it was yellow didn’t help very much. It was as though neither the textbook, the class and, therefore me, was to be taken seriously. The book, it told us, was temporary. I made the serious logical mistake of concluding that it would somehow go away.

We studied some odd things in math that year. It was the beginning of what they called the new math. Mostly it meant that parents couldn’t understand it either. We studied how numbers could have different bases. At first it sounded like a game, but, as in most things pertaining to math, it was using a word you thought you understood, only to find out they were using it in some bizarre manner. I think we started off with base two and three. My mind blew a fuse when we hit base twelve and has never recovered. The entire discussion of base sixteen was surreal.

I remember one day, just before lunch, that Mr. Warner was asking various people to answer questions on the homework. He called on me for some reason or other. Usually he was astute enough to know that I didn’t have a clue, but he must have been feeling like he was obliged to give me a chance at redemption that day. I hadn’t gotten the message that this might ever happen, having become content with whatever it was he would give me for a grade. I had stared at the homework the night before, stared at my paper, and discovered how uncomfortable I was. I became aware, suddenly, as I sometimes did, of the horror of being me, stuck, alive in a torturous setting, a rock around the sun. I was acutely aware that I was here, sitting in my chair, sitting in my room, looking out the window into the cold night, unable to extricate myself from the terror of being so uncomfortable, sad and alone. All I could hear in my head, besides the drone of the TV a few rooms away was the lament of the Everly Brothers bidding a sad goodbye to love. I prayed against hope, wondering what magic might save me from this horror of reading a book I had negated and would continue to negate, against all evidence to the contrary. I hated the sound of pencils being sharpened, but loved the smell. I hated the clutch of the tiny stick in my fingers, the cold rough paper and the maddening feel it made against my right hand, my inability to make some few scratches and be done with it all. I was boiling mad inside with all the different things I was feeling, anger, emptiness, and terror. My one artistic sense said that I had but one primal scream allotted to me, and that, once being used, would either net me severe behavioral strictures within my own home or a place in a hospital for mental deficients. Deciding then, trembling with my inability to go in a single direction, the driving wheels pointed in a thousand different dimensional vectors, I heard Stan Getz’ lonely lament from Desifinado. It was a name I had to practice just to pronounce. No one seemed interested in such things other than my brother who encouraged me. It would echo in my mind like a heroin fix, after which I would return to the agony of the TV in the living room. Math remained undone.

I had worked my way, somehow over the last semester, into the far back of the class against the wall. I wasn’t the farthest back but it was clear that the people he wanted to see and talk to were close to him. Smiling bright girls and a few boys would raise their hands dutifully talking about things that seemed like a bad dream to me. Not knowing what they were saying caused me more confusion than I can possibly relate. Proper responses were both a nightmare and sickening to me.

Michael, what is the answer to number eight?

I had started the homework but had petered out far before number eight. However, I had glimpsed the answer of the person in the seat in front of me. He was trying to show me but I became oblivious due to the shock of being asked. As was usual when asked a question, I felt like I was completely exposed in front of the entire world. It was twelve point something. Someone pulled the breaker to the thought process.

I answered, Twelve! as best as I could bluff. I couldn’t take another day of humiliation in front of the entire class that I was an idiot and had no idea what they were talking about. I had no idea what twelve meant any more. I also knew that there were several decimal places required for the answer which I didn’t have. It was always possible that the dumbest answer would be good enough.

For some reason or other that day Mr. Warner didn’t think the dumbest answer on the face of the earth was good enough humiliation. Had it been enough, I would have been cool, especially with the kids who were sitting in the back corner of the room for the same reasons as me. We were all rebels, albeit secret ones, because the status quo tyrant pro tem issued quick and painful retribution. I waited and stared at the number I had penciled into the pages of the soft cover yellow book of nonsense. I reasoned that I was lucky to have a pencil.

Did you round your answer? Mr. Warner asked after a few moments.

I stared at the book and hoped he would go away. My penciled answer looked pathetic, but cool people can’t feel bad. It was true that my handwriting had become worse. I now wished I had done my homework. I looked at the directions to the problem and saw that it required at least two decimal places. I had given none. I made a quick vow to do better that night if I got through this.

Michael, I asked you a question!

The girls in the class giggled, some of the boys following suit like the dogs they were. I turned a deep crimson. If life kept treating me like I needed another lesson in humiliation, why did I want to avoid it so deeply?

Mr. Warner repeated himself, more sternly this time. Michael! I asked you a question! He emphasized the last word. I began to sweat. I thought of standing up and shouting my pain, but my legs were locked under that stupid desk. I looked up for a moment and said, Yes! before looking back down with new interest at the depressing book with questions I could not and would not answer. If I had a temporary book, then my experiences here should be temporary also. All of this would just go by in some miniscule amount of time. I knew that to be true.

Instead, the opposite occurred. Time ceased to move forwards and began to run laterally. The tape replayed itself in my head, of course, but options began to fan out on every side. I was amazed at the variety of paralysis and hopelessness to which I could be subjected, but it was, in one instant, seemingly infinite. I would never be the Village idiot for a moment, but forever. The echo of my failure would never be erased, I could never atone, I could seek no solace from the pain of it. I would endure this moment to my grave and then some. Not only had I become stupid and dull witted, but I transferred that essence into all of my past. It was like an ice age traveling through my memories of my entire life and it froze everything out of time, tainting it not with as I might have liked, with a beautiful frosty white, but with the cold wet rainy unpleasance one feels just before being soaked by a storm of sleet.

I hated my early morning classes, mostly because they were multiple classes with the same teacher, History, English and whatever other torture they could fit into the course of seventh grade torture. That was the infamous Mrs. Chowalter. She was a middle aged woman who spoke with a Virginia twang in her voice and had a very dry sense of humor. When we were excused for a break between English and History, or however she decided to use the day, we were excused to go to the lavatory which she pronounced majestically as the LAV-ra-tory. I used to meet my neighborhood friends from a sister class like our own a few doors down, intent on the same objectives in the washroom and make snide remarks about us being excused to go to the LAB-ra-tory where we were going to mix some chemicals." Taylor always used to think that was pretty funny stuff and used to do an imitation of a mad scientist mixing chemicals, rubbing his hands together. We would laugh, at the same time making fun of Mrs. Chowalter. The cooler kids ignored us. Invariably I would note that my micturation was a very deep yellow and smelled somewhat like the Captain Crunch cereal I had for breakfast. I mentioned it once or twice to Taylor and Mark, who also lived in the neighborhood for the past two years. His father was a marine and very strict. They were in another class because they had French and I had selected Spanish.

Two days a week we would have Spanish with Mr. Bartille, a nervous somewhat pudgy little man who carried a Wollensack tape recorder. He always looked like he was bothered by something or other and would occasionally tell us stories. Once, as I recall, he told us about being in Panama at a friend’s house and using the familiar form of you with someone he had just met. He told us how he had apologized profusely and how the lady had smiled and forgiven him, saying how she understood. He took about five minutes, repeating himself on occasion about his embarrassment, to tell a story that was worth about thirty seconds. We didn’t care because it was one more thing where we didn’t have to perform like trained seals.

Maybe it was ultimately valuable because I do remember the story. It would have been better, of course, if that information were all that useful in this day. When I attempted to use the formal form when I lived in Miami, people, especially mature women would say, Oh that makes me sound so old! Please use the familiar form with me. Nevertheless, I remember old Mr. Bartille telling us such wonderful stories. We wondered whether there were something seriously wrong with him that he had to come to our class rather than us going to his class. Foreign languages were like that in Junior High School, but he seemed somehow lower in our esteem because he didn’t have enough status to rate a classroom.

Hence we learned about the dangers of using the wrong forms of words when visiting other countries. I can recall making a mental note never to leave the United States. We learned dialogues in Spanish. I was embarrassed to say my own name when we had to introduce ourselves in Spanish. For some reason or other, saying my own name aloud was humiliating. Most of the people who learned Spanish like that can probably still recite the dialogues without knowing very much. The same idiots who designed that must have chosen the throw-away textbook in math.

I sat in the front of the row right in the middle of the room. Howard sat on the right side of me and Jon sat behind me. Some girl sat on my left. She was in one of the lesser cliques with two other girls, none of them particularly attractive. There seemed no point in getting to know her for any reason although we occasionally smiled at each other. My parents insisted I learn manners for reasons I did not comprehend. Most of my manners consisted in keeping my mouth shut when I felt like saying something. I’m not entirely sure that was a good or bad thing in seventh grade, but it would be an excellent thing for adults.

Sitting in the front row, made me extra self-conscious, but rarely kept me from daydreaming, from which Mrs. Chowalter would call me back unpleasantly. The girls would giggle when she did that. The girls giggled at just about anything where they could inflict their pejoratives on anyone without retribution. That classroom was the farthest classroom down that hallway on the second floor. It felt like we were on outpost number nine.

Windows ran along the one side of the classroom. Nothing much was on the shelves there, not like in sixth grade when you felt a bit in touch with your classmates who had brought or made things that sat there for a term, creatively demonstrating at least their humanity. Now it was serious because nothing was there that didn’t apply to school. One of the most heinous things there was a big box with colored cards that was supposed to help you decide what you could be when you grew up. I was a mediocre student and it was decided that I had the mental capacity to be a social worker. Somehow that didn’t enthuse me very much. We were supposed to consult that box from time to time for something or other. No one did unless the teacher handed us a card to read. I felt embarrassed.

The girls wore dresses and giggled a lot and talked in little groups. The girls fell easily, it seemed to me, into various levels of prominence and importance. Each morning or sometimes during the class break, they would huddle into pre-assigned areas within a classroom or sometimes the hallway, waiting for people to walk by. One would then point, nod, motion, say something and they would all giggle, as if on command. Their behavior must have seemed bizarre, even to them. Only the outcasts, of which there were few, were worse off than the boys. I remember a few loner girls who were beneath their contempt. I even caught myself feeling sorry for a girl who had been the subject of Alpha male and female ridicule. Part of the rules of being a Gamma or Delta (there was a wide and deep chasm between Alphas and the next level which omitted ever being designated a Beta) included picking up ridicule from the Alpha families and carrying it to the next level. Unless one did this effectively, either by looks or actions or words, one could be inviting ridicule upon oneself.

I cannot recall the particular peccadillo she committed, but I remember who she was and how she looked as they heaped derision on her, like monkeys throwing their own poop at the zoo. Her name was Jewell; she sat right behind Eddie, a definite Delta but a good friend and fellow ball-player. The Alphas huddled in the center back of the room and tossed epithets and taunts at her when she returned to the classroom. Mrs. Chowalter was away for some unknown reason. Evidently this was the continuation of something that had happened earlier in the hall. Jewell must have tried to fight back. The derision was heavy and fierce.

Most of these things were hardly dirty by modern standards. All of the words were clean, no one spoke with obscenities, but in a world where one person upsets the sensibilities of the top of the social power structure, insults came hard and fast. I remember looking up as Jewell walked back into the room, hearing the first shots of derisive laughter fired at her and began to grin, ready to race my immature insult support engine immediately. It wasn’t that I discovered that I looked down on people when I came into the seventh grade, but I discovered that failure to support the upper echelons could easily lead to being on the butt-end oneself. The only thing worse was the horror of being all alone and terrified that the derision would never end, not tomorrow nor the next week nor the next year. The latter was driven home well enough if I hadn’t learned it before.

The whole thing was made ever so much easier because Mrs. Chowalter didn’t much care for Jewell either and wryly humiliated her feeble efforts at whatever we were studying at the time. Mrs. Chowalter, in a great ostentatious display of teaching, would magnanimously choose some of the poorer performing students when she felt the class needed a demonstration in self-humiliation. She would select the person very carefully, a slow smile spreading on those pain-inflicting lips, her eyes like an eagle looking for just that innocent returned look or the head turned purposely away because he or she did not know the answer, having insulted the regally-assigned work, by failing to complete it. Her gaze would scan her realm carefully, smiling with the momentary delight she reserved for those who could do no wrong, like my friend Jon behind me or Carolyn in the back row. Carolyn was one of the unique personalities who was so quietly radiant and beautiful, in personality and spirit, that I could easily excuse her having completed the material. Even when she marked words wrong on my spelling test, I could not fault her because she was following Mrs. Chowalter’s instructions.

But Mrs. Chowalter continued and found, invariably, the weakest of all her victims on any given day. I certainly shared that selection on occasion, although I learned not to look away early. Looking down or away was an invitation to being dragged into the arena and humiliated. But certain people can’t take that kind of humiliation very well; Jewell was one of them. She wasn’t all that smart, about on par with me, although at the time I would have rated her a bit lower. Jewell never did master the art of appearing less guilty than she was. If she hadn’t done her work, there was no lying in her face. What she felt was who she was, unlike the thespian acts of desperation in which I learned to turn my mask into my face. Perhaps that day Mrs. Chowalter had set off the turn of events when, striking at the one she knew would provide her merriment in an humiliating response, she invited the common invocation of scorn from the entire class. I honestly do not recall what preceded the public castigation of Jewell, but suddenly something in me rebelled like nothing ever had before. That first tear, that thin, kind of pretty, girl with the almost straight hair, hair with a slight flip just above her shoulders, hair of a medium brown pulled back across her forehead to her right, hair that moved in rhythm as she walked down the halls, that girl with the pretty smile and sparkling eyes had been cast into the pit of Gehenna.

Even though I was forced to be immobile, my feet glued in place to the cold beige tile beside my desk, not knowing what I would have done had I been able to run to her aid, I knew that I was certainly unwilling to nobly deflect the Alpha deprecations from her onto my own head. I was neither that brave nor that honorable. But there is a point in each of our lives when we have displayed for us, in all of the glorious colors of absurdity that life can muster, an event so wrong and so distasteful that we realize that we must never again take part in such a thing, lest we willingly sign our own eternal damnation with our own blood. This was such a moment. As unable as I was to right the wrong being done, the chain of events encouraged by the adults and in reaction to all of the internal and external frustrations of the new rules of behavior to which we were now subordinated, one realizes that he or she has a future obligation to reach out and prevent another event like this from happening again. It is eternally engraved with all of the righteousness of everything humans have ever held dear. Tragedy occurs because someone somewhere did not desire the foresight to prevent that occurrence of evil. Odd as it is, adults come to twist the righteousness into their own way of persuasion, and that is so hideous as to boil my blood even these many long years. Mrs. Chowalter knew that humiliating others produced an amusement for her twisted little punishments to perform. To be fair, ultimately, she acted like and was no more guilty in her performance than, say, Pontius Pilate.

I remember my inordinately quick mind floundering for some witticism I could throw along with the multi-colored barbs being tossed her way by five or six people already when I saw the first tear fall from her eye

The real oddity was that as the boys were subject to the Alpha girl groups, ostensibly because they were the more attractive ones, Alpha girls were never subject to boys. Although the boys pretty much formed their own groups and determined how they were treated by each other, when a girl was held up or out for derision in some way by an Alpha girl group, not even the group she was in could save her. The Alpha girls made sure they made the judgment, but the effective and overt derision was carried out by the boys who needed the positive attentions of the Alpha girls. While it is true that, in a word, poop rolls downhill, it hit girls more severely than it hit boys, even those of epsilon status who had invoked severe censure. We were fortunate that the Alpha girls looked down their noses on all boys in the same way, unless, of course one happened to be of the Alpha boy stature. I spent hours each day in wonder of both the luxury of being an Alpha boy, the superiority one must feel being spoken to by the likes of the Alpha girls and, at the same time, wondering why anyone would be willing to jump through the hoops required for admission into that heavenly bastion. I not only didn’t want to act like they did, but couldn’t understand why they wanted to act that way, for the most part; it seemed especially affected and false. Looking back, I try and think that maybe this was just an excuse because I knew my mother wasn’t buying me anything called a Bass Weejun or other period fashionables. On the other hand, someone has to bumble through life marveling at how people act as they do.

The boys were mostly in two groups. One group didn’t seem to be the same as they were the previous year. Heck, I knew a lot of these people and they were acting weird on us, dressing like they cared about their appearance and trying to talk to the girls. The rest of us just looked very confused at what we knew was somehow beyond our comprehension. In truth, the second group would attempt to poke fun at the loners of the crowds as they were inadvertently ripe for ridicule. The only thing worse than being subjected to ridicule from another was having no one beneath you upon which to heap the used scorn. Sometimes you could even pick on a member of your own group for a barrage. It helped immensely with the guilt and marginally with the inflicted pain. I think that’s the way it pretty much works with the rest of mankind too.

Although it was clear, more or less, that we had moved ahead into adulthood, many of us really didn’t get the rule changes. School had changed, we were let loose to change classes, no one looked over us all day and generally we were exposed to different adult personality disorders. I wasn’t all that comfortable with the move, especially since no one had asked my opinion. Looking back, I feel my general denial of that period was quite justified and I would like to apply for an eraser for certain behavior. Moving into adulthood had been a very filthy trick. I missed having recess, which I think would be a good thing to employ even today. If I were a CEO, I would set up a jungle gym, swing set and seesaws in the company yard and give the whole place ten minutes per day to play games. Naps are a good idea too.

Sometimes I think that the only valid expression in this world is the emission of the suddenly unfettered passion of pain. To emit this one huge wail is, in itself, both pathetic and primal, and for opposite reasons. In a society which values the ability to focus on and express individual points of view, it is pathetic; it is self-indulgent, egoistic and non-denominational. It is the foundation only in the sense that meaning has failed to provide the solace one seeks.

However, in a society that has seemingly ceased to understand the transcendence of values, it is the conjoining with Frank Zappa’s Big Note, the totality of vibrations which, seemingly endless and infinite, make up a universe one step beyond Rod Serling’s realm of imagination. It is the foundation not of consciousness or perception, but a complete and spontaneous reaction to being. Instead of being inspirational, it is the devout worship of sensibility itself, displayed at the cost of continuing the guilt of that first inspiration. It is the ultimate sacrifice to oneself by oneself in a way in which denies and separates one’s very existence, if only for a moment. It is the embodiment of both the hope and desperation of isolation. It is the raised middle finger in defiance of primal sensibility.

In History class, we learned about Virginia history. I can still tell you about the noble early Americans and how they treated the Indians with great respect. I learned about the Red Letter year and how the Virginians pretty much saved western civilization by exterminating the Indians and enslaving black people because they were beneath our contempt and therefore inhuman. It must have been some other group that caused the whole scheme of things to go awry. Later that year, we learned that it was the French.

My handwriting had never been the best in the world, at least since first grade when I won all the awards except one, which was penmanship. At that time I came in second. I was unable to either explain my long slow decline into the degeneracy in which I found myself in English class. Normally a very good speller, I would leave the dot off of an i or loop it or something and the teacher would instruct the student grading my test to mark it wrong. My t’s would look like crossed l’s and be marked wrong, my e’s would be insufficiently looped and my a’s were incompletely connected. Naturally, that behavioral training taught me to retreat farther into my web of distrust and hatred towards the daily torture I felt in school. Something inside me just shut down and refused to work. At home, my parents were bothered by my moodiness and encouraged me to work harder.

I would look out the window of that classroom and see the leaden gray sky of early winter and I knew that no hope of any kind would ever exist again. Only the unimaginative would ever make it through unscathed.

I frequently saw Trisha in the hallway, usually twice a day on the way to the Band and Gym wing of the school. She always said Hi, Michael! to me with a big smile. I