The November Criminals

For Rebecca

There is no negator who is not famished for some catastrophic
yes.

—E. M. CIORAN
,
The Trouble with Being Born

I
.

Y
OU’VE ASKED ME TO EXPLAIN
what my best and worst qualities are. So let me begin by saying that it’s hard, ladies and gentlemen, for me to consider myself a bad person. I mean, I experience
qualms
, sometimes more serious and sometimes less. Everyone, even a real champion of immorality, sees himself as good. Or as working for the good, no matter if his actions—looked at one by one—are transparently self-serving, murderous, etc. Kind of a strong argument against the value of terms like
good
or bad. People feel this way even now, in 1999, when we’re all supposed to be repenting and wailing and gnashing our teeth. But you can’t go through life without making any distinctions. And selling small-to-medium amounts of weed to safe, calm rich kids (which I spent much of my spare time these past four years doing) is not a behavior
worth
agonizing over. That would make it seem too important, you know? I don’t even need the money.

Nonetheless—judged by my actions—I
am
a bad person. Let’s get that clear, so you don’t have any misconceptions. For more than one-fifth of my life to date, I was a drug dealer, albeit a minor one, and a client of more successful, higher-volume drug dealers, who are in turn clients of bigger firms, and so on and so on until infinity. Grim, right? Human, but grim. I owned a digital pharmacy scale. An expensive black safe, which at the peak of my prosperity contained $12,380 in four shoe boxes, the cash organized in bundles by denomination. (How lame is that!) A gun, although that was a later acquisition. A suspicious supply of Biggie-brand plastic bags. A pager. All the sordid, dead-giveaway equipment.

I am eighteen years and five days old. I live in a tree-heavy upper-middle-class neighborhood in Washington, D.C., with my father, who makes clay pots. He also teaches classes at our city’s semi-renowned art academy, the Cochrane Institute. Classes about how to make clay pots. My name is Addison Schacht, if you can believe it: my dead mother’s dead father was named Addison. Because I am an unknown quantity, I am unpopular, even now, my last year, in my class at John F. Kennedy Senior High School. How unknown, you ask? I could not, under pain of death, tell you where a single member of my class wants to attend college, that’s how little I have to do with them. I have no extracurricular activities beyond the study of Latin and the collection of offensive jokes about the Holocaust. I live on X Street, on the Xth floor, I weigh X pounds. What do you want? An index of my soul? My dick measurements? I could give them; I’m not
ashamed
or anything. But would they help you understand? This whole involved and stupefying story has been gnawing away at me, though. Which is why I’m writing it. To like
unburden
myself. I’ve wasted enough time. And I’m not unintelligent; don’t think that. On every practice test I took, my scores were identical to what I ended up getting on the real SAT: 770 verbal and 650 math. This is from three sets of results. How’s
that
for precision? On my battery of Advanced Placement tests, I scored three fives and two fours. I’ve got nothing else. Except for one silver and one gold medal on the National Latin Exam. Latin literature is devoid of most human feeling, but I’m still proud of my medals: my teachers have been a goddamn embarrassment.

Selling weed did not figure in my list of permanent plans when I started four years ago, right after I arrived at Kennedy. Just a little, at first. But it was easy, and more challenging than my classwork. It also gave me a foothold in the school’s
ecology
, which I wouldn’t otherwise have discovered. I didn’t think overmuch about it. People wanted it, they came to expect I could provide it, and then I found myself the proprietor of a small but flourishing business. I promised myself that I’d stop when I graduated. Just for practical reasons. And I
did
manage to stop doing it, even before my target date. This was not out of volition. Circumstance played its usual forceful role, in the form of a classmate of mine named Kevin Broadus.

Kevin was this quiet, stocky kid, a marching-band geek. I didn’t really know him, except to nod at between classes. And because he was one of the handful of black kids in the Gifted and Talented Program, I was just sort of
aware
of him. At least until our junior year, when, about five months before the brutal events occurred that got his name in the papers, Kevin did something that I found …
admirable
is maybe the best word. Or not admirable, because it’s presumptuous to admire someone you don’t speak to on a regular basis. But uncompromising. It happened in February. Ms. Prather, our English teacher last year, was going on and on in this artificial way about what’s called “black history.” February, as I’m sure you know, is Black History Month, an occasion of much wariness and nervous self-congratulation among the teachers in the Gifted and Talented Program here at Kennedy. We learn, every year, the same tired story, like a long round in a game: the founders were hypocrites, the Three-Fifths Compromise was bad, the
Dred Scott
decision was bad, Frederick Douglass good, Booker T. Washington bad, Tuskegee Experiment bad, Tuskegee Airmen good, Langston Hughes good, jazz good, and we’re all still racists today. Thanks for playing! It’s like this compressed version of American history, one that fails to do justice to all the complex nonsense that people get up to in political life, and also fails completely to convey any real sense of how awful life must have been (and in a lot of ways still is) in America for slaves and their descendants. It’s like a gesture. I don’t know how else to describe it.

So: we were talking about Music and Its Relation to African American Literature. And Ms. Prather was in the spitty middle of her oration about how great it was that African American literature was not
constrained
in the way the other literature of its time was, how it was
filled with a new and vital energy, a rhythmic current
. A lot of the kids in my class nodded along, some of them actually convinced. And after she had reached her crescendo, waving her hands and making her voice throb, after she had her little like orgasm or whatever, she stopped and looked at Kevin and said, “But let’s ask our resident musician. Don’t you agree, Mr. Broadus?” I wish I could communicate the hideous empty quiet that followed her remark. Everyone craned around in their wooden chair-desk combo sets to stare at Kevin, who gazed at his hands. The afternoon sun slanted down and blanked out his glasses. And he said, “Not particularly.” That’s all. Ms. Prather stood with her hands lifted and her mouth open. She looked hurt, wobbly-eyed at Kevin’s betrayal. The silence persisted. Then Ms. Prather sighed and said, “Well, it’s generally
accepted
, Kevin.” More silence. Kevin spoke again. “Yeah, but if it’s accepted, why did you ask me.” Someone spluttered a laugh into cupped hands. Ms. Prather had literally nothing to say. So she repeated herself. As though Kevin did not exist. And we continued with our lesson. This is the only clear memory I have of Kevin speaking in class. Again, I don’t want to presume and call it admirable. But it demonstrated real brassiness of balls, in my opinion. I wanted to congratulate him, but he lost himself among the sighing after-class crowd before I could. It’s lucky, I guess: that would have been a kind of presumption, too.

Kennedy is a segregated school, I should mention. Not because black kids are less able or whatever, but because—and I’m
theorizing
here—because my neighborhood and the other neighborhoods that provide it with its white students are filled with the kind of parents who
just love
black people—in the abstract. And Kennedy is majority black, by a considerable margin. And they (the neighborhood parents, I mean) all originally wanted their kids to go to private school, anyway. So all these ex-hippie history and English teachers at Kennedy like twenty years ago set up this little 90 percent white school
inside
Kennedy, the Gifted and Talented Program, and they let in six black kids or so every year to balm their consciences, and set up pantomimes like Black History Month and Diversity Outreach (which is just as horrifyingly inept as its name suggests). Although if they had consciences would they have set up these internal divisions in the first place? But whatever. Kevin stood out because of all these accidents, these circumstances. Through no fault of his own he was visible. He played in the marching band, like I said: baritone saxophone. And he worked after school at Second Mate Stubb’s, which is a nationwide chain of coffee shops. Their coffee, their whole scheme, is reliable and mediocre, so the artfucky kids at Kennedy mock Stubb’s. Which seems unjust. Reliable mediocrity, I’ve decided, is the most important thing for the continuation of human existence. We can’t get by on Romantic disaster. We would die of exhaustion.

Anyway, it happened at the Stubb’s on Wisconsin Avenue, near M Street, where the hump of the avenue dips down toward the soapy-looking grayish water of the Potomac River. Someone came in one night and slaughtered Kevin and the other two people working there. One had a memorable name: Turquoise Tull. She was twenty-three. The other was some guy named Brandon Gambuto. The shooter just laid into them: two shots in the manager, Turquoise, one in the other guy, and twelve in Kevin, according to the salivating article. By this “feature writer” (according to his byline) for the
Post
, Archer B. Sexton. (What kind of a name is that? Its components are interchangeable, and therefore it’s nonhuman.) You know the kind of thing I mean: “Kevin Broadus was a model student at Kennedy High School. Turquoise Tull was a hardworking single mother. Brandon Gambuto was an aspiring musician. All of them died last week in what some are calling the most sensational murders in recent memory.” “These brutal killings have stunned a peaceful Northwest neighborhood.” “Lieutenant James Huang, in charge of the task force leading the investigation, offered assurances that the metropolitan police force is doing everything it can. But residents of the Second Precinct, Huang’s area of jurisdiction, remain unsettled.” Sexton discussed the copious maplike bloodstains, the lack of any robbery, the tribulations of the police. This happened the July before my senior year, this year. We were beaten over the head with the story for the worst, most blinding months of the summer, in the cruel heat and wetness for which our city is famous. For a while people were talking about
gang retaliation
. I mean, that’s what
I
thought at first, gangs or drugs. You had to figure that all the extra bullets in Kevin
meant
something. But he seemed—and I say this, as I said, without having known him well or at all—too passive to be involved in anything that would require retribution. The local reporters droned on and on about it, but they gave up their gang theory after a day or two and then talked about
senseless tragedy
.

Really? Just think about it: you’re some boring kid working a boring job, because your parents pressure you to, in a boring neighborhood. The heat and swampiness of summers here are repetitive and soul-numbing. The bored mothers, college students, and antique store owners who patronize that particular Stubb’s gaze at you with supercilious anger as they wait for their orders. Your sad-ass manager (who’s made a career out of this, which horrifies you) calls you out for errors sometimes. But she also praises you, which is in its own way worse, the pledge of some defeating mediocrity she recognizes in you and sees as kin to her own. So this goes on for a month or two, no relief in sight. It’s not torture but it’s a chafe against the restlessness that you feel now, the sense that you can encompass anything.

And then one night someone comes in—someone who looks, in theory, no different from anyone else—and shoots you. A man of average height and build, wearing dark clothes, so any blood won’t show, loose clothes, so the gun remains invisible. Older than Kevin. White, in my mental viewer, although that’s statistically improbable in D.C. He walks with a calmness in his eyes. Calling it emptiness would be stupid. He
ipso facto
has enough inner strength to plan and realize three murders, which is—if I can put it like this—more than most people ever accomplish. His hands refuse to shake. He looks around; there’s no one else in the store; he lifts his gaze up to the employees, one by one. The ordinariness of his face is incomprehensible and horrifying, as is his normal brown hair, its color borrowed from some actual person I know. As every physical facet of him is borrowed. And then, radiating his normality, he takes out the gun. What if he kills you second? What if the first shot just maims you, knocks you down? What if the sun hadn’t set? Can you imagine that? Dying on the floor of a Stubb’s with the last of a summer sunset in your eyes? At seventeen? Just when you’ve first tasted autonomy? I mean, I’ve only been having sex for about two years, and I can tell you without hesitation: losing that would hurt just as much as losing life itself. Also driving. I’m not a huge fan of it, but it’s necessary in my line of work, and other people
love
driving. And college? The prospect of green quads and unlimited drinking and fucking? Or telling off Ms. Prather, the way Kevin did?
That’s
the sweetness of autonomy.

Tragedy isn’t the word for it, in my opinion. I have no doubt that it crushed his parents—although it’s also impossible for me to understand their loss; I can
think
about it but I have no way to
grasp
it—but the real loss would be to you. To you! It’s your life! There’s something selfish about our idea of tragedy, since it depends on other people watching. I guess it’s been that way since ancient times, though, at least according to Mr. Vanderleun, the twelfth-grade English teacher, who talks about tragic irony at least three times a week, and without any apparent awareness of the colossal waste of his own life.
Senseless traged
y. Accurate, yeah, but you could describe the majority of human existence as senseless tragedy, or even existence in general, if you’re a true idealist. Kevin’s mother never went on the local news, and his father just once. Mr. Broadus, tall, bespectacled, with a slight stoop, was
begging
for the guy who did it to come forward. Though he must have known there was no chance of this happening. When public television finally got its act together,
Capitol Ideas
(perhaps the world’s most boring program) invited Archer B. Sexton, who is humpy and bald and pomegranate-flushed, onto their taupe set to talk about the case. He was identified as a feature writer/urban historian, in demure white letters hovering beneath the knot of his crimson tie. He basically repeated the points in his article, with a lot of unibrow wriggles, which look hilarious on a totally bald guy. Like a pinned caterpillar, struggling.