A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (35 page)

So we actually saw him once, Mr. T, when we were on our way to church, saw him right there, in front of his gate, with the chain saw. Amazing. He was doing the shrubs.

How was it that we started talking about all this?
Black kids. Well, he had two daughters, and they went to the high school. So when they showed up, they immediately doubled the black student population, brought it up to four students. I think it was four.

How many kids were in your high school?
About thirteen hundred.

And this is only twenty-odd miles from Chicago.

Right, and there was actually a town to the north, maybe five miles

away, called North Chicago, which was mostly black. I think.

How do you mean, you
think?

Well, I
’
ve never been there or anything. I have been to Highland Park, that
’
s the Jewish town, and used to buy beer in Highwood, which was where all the Italian restaurants were, and where all the Mexican men who cut lawns lived. And there was a mall in Waukegan, I think—always full of sailors—and Libertyville was where the kids with the hockey haircuts lived.

So how were Mr. T
’
s girls treated?

Everyone seemed to like them, as far as I could tell. They were supposedly very nice, and kind of funny, but I didn
’
t know them at all, didn
’
t (and don
’
t) even know their names, actually—they were a year younger. They were always driving around in that white Mercedes of theirs—all customized, with those plates: Mr. T 3. But everyone liked them okay. They were Mr. T
’
s kids, after all, and as such were a source of great pride for the school, at least as far as us kids went. It was the first thing we told anyone, really. That and about
Ordinary People.

They were the only black kids?

The only other black kid I remember was a guy in my sister
’
s class, this guy Steve, whose last name I don
’
t know, never did. Not that I would really know much about anyone in my sister
’
s class, but the thing with Steve was that, because he was the only black guy in their class, he was known simply as Steve the Black Guy.

Pardon?

Yeah, to hear my sister tell it, that was basically his name in all contexts. His
handle,
if you will. He was just this average guy, not incredibly popular, but nice enough. And so people liked him, and people I guess thought it was this odd novelty that he was different, odd in the same way that it was odd how that one kid had a crewcut, or how that one girl, I forget her name, she hung out with
the basketball players—what
was
her name? She was a dwarf. But so he was Steve the Black Guy.

So this was oppressive.
How do you mean? No.

Did you like it?

Yes. I did. Many did not. Many complain about it. Many are ashamed to say that
’
s where they grew up—people in Chicago, in Champaign, can be rough when you tell them; they
’
ll bow, kiss your hand—but I won
’
t apologize for having been brought up in what was, at least in my part of town, a pretty simple suburb— trees and a creek, nice parks. It
’
s not like we had a choice, that at eight or nine, whenever, we could have left home, moved somewhere less horribly fraught with this hideous prosperity. I should say, though, that like any seemingly stable and contented context, one with a certain stability and attention to detail and respect for family—comfortable but deeply mid western, this was—at the same time, it was very quiet sometimes, oddly quiet, and underneath the quiet there was the tiniest, faintest sound, like air being let out of a narrow hole, a sound like someone screaming from worlds away, and people were dying in dark and bewildering ways.

How do you mean?

Oh, suicides, weird accidents. One kid I knew growing up was apparently in the basement poking around and a stack of wood fell on him. He suffocated. That was our first death. He was ten maybe. Then, like two years later, Ricky
’
s dad.

Ricky
’
s dad?

Ricky was one of my best friends, lived just across the creek—it
mn just
behind both of our houses—and he and Jeff Farlander and I used to do stuff together, were on the same swim team, everything. It was strange across the creek. Most of the things we did together involved some sort of vandalism, come to think of it, throwing stuff at cars—ice, rocks, crabapples, acorns, snowballs—

In retrospect I have no idea why. Did we resent the passing of these cars? We were bored, and loved the thump of a projectile hitting a passing car, truck, whatever. It kept escalating. First just the throwing of things, then, one winter, we built, using seven or eight full-size snow boulders we rolled from fresh snow, a complete snow wall in the road. We lined them up, packed them together, and watched from the bushes, giddy, giggling. It was a three-foot tall, three-foot deep wall, right on Valley Road, created, because we were very bright and the police knew our handiwork, right in front of Jeff
’
s house. It worked as designed, though, with drivers either stopping and turning around, or stupidly plowing through it, underestimating the wall
’
s depth and craftsmanship.

“
There goes the transmission,
”
Jeff would say.

“
Yep,
”
I would say, having no idea what he was talking about. I knew nothing about cars.

One summer, we went further. We had always done stuff with lighters and gasoline, lighting this or that. The usual object was to soak a tennis ball in gasoline, light it, and kick it around the street.

“
Fireball!
”
we would yell.
“
Fireball!
”
“
Fireball!
”
“
Fireball!
”

Guess what we called that game?

/
give up.

We called that game Fireball.

/
see.

But one night a fourth kid, Timmy Rogers, a rangy, stringy-haired kid a year older than us, had the idea that what we
’
d do, see, would be to take the gasoline and... pour it across the
street,
and then— But we didn
’
t have any matches. Someone would have to go home and quietly get some, not arousing suspicion. But as we were figuring out who would go, and who might have those long-stemmed barbecue matches, Timmy Rogers just took out his lighter, a tiny Bic lighter, leaned down to the gas-soaked pavement — by this point I was literally jumping out of range — and lit the thing, the whole street going up at once. Incredible, flames five feet high, the streets of Lake Forest burning! It didn
’
t last long, not at all, but long enough to attract the police, who came and poked around as we chuckled in the bushes.
We lit the street on fire!
Then we went back to Jeff
’
s and watched
Used Cars
for the sixth time.

What does this have to do with Ricky
’
s dad?

Oh. It was a clear day, in the early summer. I was at home, building a Martian city out of Legos, matching it to the intricate architectural plans I had drawn out in my sketchbook, next to my drawings of flying dinosaurs and friendly aliens with big feet. I had all the foundations laid out, on the gray cratered baseplates I had gotten for my birthday. Then Jeff called and said we had better go over to Ricky
’
s because something terrible had happened.

“
What happened?
”

“
Ricky
’
s dad doused himself with gasoline and lit a match and then ran around the yard on fire, and then stopped running and then had died right there, in front of the house.
”

I told my mom, then walked down the street to the dead end part, jumped across the creek where it was shallow, went over to Jeff
’
s, and then we walked to Ricky
’
s. He was in the family room, watching TV. His family room was like ours, wood paneled and dark. He said hi. We said hi. There was one of the early music video shows on—this was before MTV—and they were showing a video for a Bob Dylan song called
“
Jokerman.
”
We liked the video. There were things hurtling toward the screen, like in 3-D. I had just started reading
Rolling Stone,
and had heard of this Bob Dylan, and knew if I was to know anything I had to know and like Bob Dylan, and so I really wanted to like the song, but then Ricky beat me to it.

“
I like this song,
”
Ricky said.

I was kind of pissed. I decided to let it go.

Ricky
’
s two little sisters, much younger, floated in and out of the room from time to time. We watched more TV, sitting close to it.

“
What did it look like?
”
Jeff asked. I couldn
’
t believe he asked.

“
You know what it looked like?
”
Ricky said.
“
It was like at the end of
Raiders of the Lost Ark.
”

We knew just the part, the very end, where the Nazis open the Ark of the Covenant and the spirits come out, the spirits that are at first pleasant and beautiful but then turn angry, and flames come from the Ark and kill all the Nazis, impaling them with stiff ropes of fire where they stand, and then the head Nazis, one by one, melt like wax dummies, the skin then cartilage then blood running off their skulls, in order, like differently colored waters. It both terrified and fascinated us.

Wow, we thought.
Raiders of the Lost Ark.

We sat with Ricky, sat there for a while watching TV, and then got bored and went out into the front yard to see if there were any marks anywhere on the grass, or blood or anything. But there was nothing. The lawn looked perfect, lush and green.

And why are you telling me this?

I don
’
t know. These are the stories I tell. Isn
’
t that what you
’
re looking for? These terrible deaths tearing through this pristine community, all the more strange and tragic given the context, the incongruity—

So tell me something: This isn
’
t really a transcript of the interview, is it?
No.

It
’
s not much like the actual interview at all, is it?
Not that much, no.

This is a device, this interview style. Manufactured and fake.
It is.

It
’
s a good device, though. Kind of a catchall for a bunch of anecdotes that

would be too awkward to force together otherwise.

Yes.

And the point of the anecdotes again?

Well, the point of the stuff about Lake Forest should be fairly obvious. It grounds us in a certain world, in a world that will be familiar to many people, especially those who
’
ve had the privilege of seeing
Ordinary People,
with Timothy Hutton in a breakthrough role. Best Picture, 1980. The passages describing suicides are formative experiences, of course, which foreshadow both my assumption that I and those I know can be reasonably expected to die in absurd and dramatic ways, and also foreshadows things that happen in the second half of the book. The stuff about race and ethnicity is supposed to make clear the kind of context we grew up in, where there was an incredible sort of homogeneity, where we were deeply embedded into that, in contrast to Toph and me in Berkeley, where there
’
s this outrageous kind of diversity, though within which, ironically enough, we still feel very strange, outside the mainstream—so that
’
s about inclusion and exclusion. The anecdote about Sarah—

Sarah? Who
’
s Sarah?

Oh. I meant to get that in earlier. Let me do that quickly:

We found out about my mom
’
s situation, in between my junior and senior years in college, having been gathered by Dad in the family room. That summer was just a mess. I did some weird things, that summer and that fall. Lots of just simple drinking -based things, and some breaking of things, the clawing at the walls while dreaming, and I started going home from parties in strange
cars, drinking with not-good friends. One humid summer night I went to this one party, at this guy Andrew Wagner
’
s place. He lived in an old wooden house, across the highway, kind of remote, and he used to have these massive parties, the outdoor sort that were hard to have in Lake Forest, with so many alert and vigilant police officers at work. And I went there with Marny and a bunch of her friends—they figure in a little later, when I go back home to look for my parents—and drank a lot, keg beer in shiny red cups, the thick kind with the white inside. Soon—it seemed soon, but probably wasn
’
t—the people I came with were leaving. Marny asked me if I wanted a ride, but I said no, that I was talking to Jeff Farlander, that I
’
d stay. I was talking to Farlander for the first time in years. We had grown up together; I had stayed at his house for days at a time. His house was the first place we went when things were bad at home, his mother was the closest thing to an aunt—