The November Criminals (21 page)

I told Digger everything at lunch. I didn’t care if she answered me or not. Everything I lacked time to explain to her in Sidney Memorial. About the dogfight and the money. How the Broaduses had kept it, and how I was glad. How they
had
to be the anonymous donors. I had no idea how to feel about Alex Faustner winning the prize. Although that’s what she and her ilk do: they win prizes while the wretched suffer. Right? Because they’re such altruists? Digger didn’t say anything, still. I talked at her for ten minutes without stopping, and she didn’t say anything. She had a lot of reason to doubt my deductive capacities. But she didn’t run away, either. Which I assumed meant she believed me. The crimson streak in her hair caught the light. It made her seem younger; it made her face more fragile. At least in retrospect. All I knew
then
was that it increased my serenity. I took my pear out of my lunch bag and offered it to her. That was the deal. She’d eat half and give it back. For some reason she never has pears in her house. Maybe her mother hates them. She took down about 35 percent of it in a single bite. I could just
tell
she wanted to say,
Good pear
. She did not. That’s how strong her resolve is.

The festivities were set to begin at one p.m. We walked into the assembly together, into the private G&T row, and sat next to each other and waited. I wanted her knee to graze mine. We had not yet reached that phase of relations.
This is going to be good
, I thought.
Whatever else might happen, this is going to be
memorable
. First we had the Singing Tigers, performing “Mary Don’t You Weep.” Alex didn’t complain this time, that disingenuous cunt! There were three people onstage: Dr. Karlstadt, Mr. Vanderleun, and Alex. A fucked-up, über-proud family. (Where were her parents, though?) Mr. Vanderleun explained what the whole thing was about, talked about social justice, his stump wiggling with vigor, and then introduced Alex, whom he called a “very special young woman.” He ran through her career at Kennedy, and the various encomia her teachers had bestowed on her. Someone from the band was playing the piano the whole time, these cheesy “stirring” chord progressions and recursions. Dr. Karlstadt talked a bit about … Honestly, who gives a fuck? You know how these people talk. I was clenching my fists in anticipation. Not to do violence, but just because of the unbearable tension coursing through me. Digger stared with withering skepticism at Dr. Karlstadt’s flapping scarf until she ended her content-free speech. Then we had more piano music. Alex walked up to the mike, which Dr. Karlstadt had lowered, and twiddled the screw on the side of the stand. She cleared her throat. I’m not kidding: she cleared her throat.

And then the shit-show began. Alex had chosen, for some incomprehensible reason, to write about the problems of young black men. “The violence in the ghettos is often a sign of
competition,”
was how she began. A statement that contains no meaning. And it went downhill from there. Her essay was full of fake energy. A dreadful imitation of intellectual activity. She just kept going on and on about violence and African Americans and African Americans and violence, as though all African Americans did was commit violence, suffer violence, think about violence, and as though “African Americans” constitute some ontologically single entity. No particularity—just violence! Now, everyone in the school knew that Alex had never set foot anywhere near these places whose spiritual condition she was bemoaning. That she had spoken to Kevin maybe twice. That she is one of the wealthiest people in school. And that she could not possibly have a single iota of experience to justify the amazing and horrifying generalities she was regurgitating.

African Americans are violent. This is not their fault, though
. That was the basic theme of her lecture.
My fault, and yours, and even hers, because
… Why? I guess she thinks that even now black people are the slaves of whites, and that their whole existence is defined by their reactivity to whites. Saying, in essence:
Okay, guys, so, we enslaved you once and it was the most important and decisive thing that ever happened to you and now you still are our slaves in spirit, and we pity you, so here’re some college admissions and Black History Month and my stupid speech and we’re all good. Right? We’re even now? We paid you back?
It’s the ultimate fantasy of a slave owner: to own not just the body, but the soul too. Alex’s outlook rests on that principle, whether or not she’s aware of it. Pure November Criminality, no? Alex and Vanderleun and Karlstadt and the whole disgusting system of G&T, the whole intolerable wreck and mockery of life, created and preserved as lip service to the highest progressive principles, and dedicated in actuality to the perpetuation of hatred. Hidden, covert hatred, yes. But hatred all the same. Social justice doesn’t have anything to do with Alex, or Black History Month, or Mr. Vanderleun’s lost finger. It’s synonymous with hatred. The way youth is synonymous with stupidity. Alex went on and on and on. Mr. Vanderleun eye-balled us, fiddling with his hair, pink tongue shoved out of the corner of his mouth. Like a fucking five-year-old. Dr. Karlstadt kept smoothing her scarf. The chorus seated facing us at the bottom of the stage rustled in their amethyst robes. Yawns, short and infrequent, riffled across the different sections of the auditorium. Alex had been speaking forever. Physical misery had crept into all my bones and veins, and was dragging me into some unbreakable condition of torpor. Nobody said anything. Everyone sitting near me squirmed and averted their eyes. Even Alex’s awful friends. Tehran Wall kept rubbing the bridge of his nose, in the exact way my father does when he’s too mortified to look at someone. There is some decency in the human constitution. Not mine, maybe. I mean the human constitution as a
general
proposition.

I just realized something, putting all this down. I totally forgot to tell you how Digger and I met, originally. That’s a big omission. We met in ninth grade, in the second week of class. Geometry class. Taught by Mr. Street. Who is famous at Kennedy for his lacquered-looking toupee. I mean, it sits on his head like a helmet. No single strand ever moves, but sometimes it slips back or forward a bit as a whole entity. This is what introduced me to Digger: I made a loud joke about the toupee: “Looks like the whole support structure is just coming
loose
there, Bob,” I intoned in the trembling bass of a newscaster watching some tragedy, as the hairpiece slid back. Prompted by one of Mr. Street’s too-violent head nods in the course of a proof. He heard me, as I’d meant him to, and he got purple and furious, and asked anyone else if they thought it was funny. Digger raised her hand. So we both got detention—“custodial duty,” as they call it at Kennedy. It means you have to do the work our slack-ass janitors leave undone. We spent a week picking up trash at Kennedy’s property line. Taking frequent weed-smoking breaks.

I had been so
impressed
by the look she shot me when she raised her hand to answer Mr. Street, to agree that she thought my joke was funny, which it wasn’t. She deadpanned, yeah. But this half-smile bowed her lips. This made the ingenuous blankness of her face all the more devastating. And you know what? When I turned to gauge her reaction to Alex’s speech, she was staring at me in the same way:
I cannot believe the human species is capable of this unforgivable jackassery
. I had to act. I had no idea what to do, but I had to do something. How can you refuse Digger Zeleny’s sapphire-colored imperative gaze?

Vengeance is the only fit memorial of the dead. You know who said that? This guy! Addison motherfucking Schacht. I’m not saying that the vacuity and heartlessness of Alex’s speech (which, thank God, Kevin’s parents were not in attendance to hear, at least that I could see)
justify
what I did next. My actions were theatrical and boorish. Shocking, I know. I bounced to my feet, muttering, “Excuse me,” until I reached the center aisle. Down which I began marching. I knew what I was doing would work. Yes, I had failed up until now. I knew this new idea would work
because I had no plan, just an impulse
. I was singing a funny song I know. I learned it last year, with Digger. We’d gone to see this movie at the Camelot called
The Bridge on the River Kwai
. Which is an awesome movie. About this tough-as-shit old British soldier who loses his mind. And it has this whistled march in it called “The Colonel Bogey March.” It’s kind of the theme of the movie. The old soldier uses it to keep his men disciplined and cheery. After
The Bridge on the River Kwai
ended, we went to browse in Don’t Shoot, and the old hippie owner heard me humming the song. “They made up words. During the war, you know,” he said, one finger closed in a copy of some book called
Gravity’s Rainbow
. (Retarded title, by the way.) “To the song.” I was stunned and creeped out. But Digger said, “Yeah? Let’s hear them, sir.” So he told us. And I remembered the words now, swinging my arms and knees as I struck up my “Colonel Bogey March” down the sloping aisle to the stage, where six human eyes goggled at my approach in consternation. The song goes:

Hitler

Has only one big ball

Göring

Has two but ver-ree small

Himmler’s

got something simmler

And Joseph Go-balls

Has no balls

At all
.

Pretty good, right? The owner seemed proud of it when he explained. It was a war song. A war song of the British against the Germans, from the Second World War. Pretty clever, right?

As I marched down the sloping aisle, I belted out these words in my horrible, tune-free singing voice, just
fucking up
the whole ceremony, all the piety evaporating. Mr. Vanderleun’s stump waggled in boundless fury. I got in a chorus and a half before he had the presence of mind to shout me down: “Do you have something to add, Mr. Schacht?” And I did! “Hey, Alex,” I screamed. “What’s the difference between a Jew and a loaf of bread?” The question that started it all! The eternal recurrence of the same! “That’s not
funny
, Addison,” Alex admonished into the microphone, trying her best to inject maternal dismay into her voice and producing instead the tones of some
drag queen
or something, all bulky and throaty. There was a huge silence. Dr. Karlstadt got to her feet and Mr. Vanderleun started to mumble and shout. My assault was crumbling. But then from the back I heard Digger: “I don’t know! What
is
the difference between a Jew and a loaf of bread?” And then she and I chanted in
disjointed stereo
, “A loaf of bread doesn’t scream when you put it in the oven!” “All right, all right, all right, all right,” whined Mr. Vanderleun.

Alex didn’t cry. This time. She was a
prizewinning essayist
, now. And crying does not befit such eminence. She steeled herself. Tossed her inky hair. I noticed as I glanced back up the aisle, looking into the now über-uncomfortable legions of my schoolmates, I noticed that the look on her face
reminded
me of someone. Someone I’d met recently and could not summon up. But someone nonetheless infuriating. So instead of going and sitting down, I kept singing. At the top of my horrid voice. Think of a frog being sodomized. I turned back to the seated Singing Tigers and yelled, “Come on, you fuckers!” at them. I started waving my hands:
Up, up, sing!

Nothing happened at first, except that large swaths of the audience started laughing at me. I could hear Digger howling with glee. The more people laughed the more frantically I waved, and eventually to my amazement a few Singing Tigers took up the song, and then a few more, and then they were
all
on their feet roaring along with me, with this unknown miserable boy, this child, they were singing the stirring trivial song in their mingled voices, masking my horrible screech. Dr. Karlstadt’s face was now the same gull color as her scarf, and Mr. Vanderleun was on his feet, and those not singing along just
barraged
me and Alex and the whole disastrous show with whistles, yells, and catcalls. Nobody could do anything to shut us up. Their authority, their pukey authority, was for the moment suspended. I didn’t know any of the Singing Tigers. I didn’t know any of the people in the upper rows. I didn’t know their names or their hopes or their vices. And I knew that they thought I was ridiculous, absurd, pathetic, frail. Yet we sang together, out of boredom, out of disgust with piety, out of the innate adolescent impulse to lawlessness and disorder. For three solid, rousing choruses of “The Colonel Bogey March,” Hitler’s Testicles edition:

Hitler

Has only one big ball

Göring

Has two but ver-ree small

Himmlers

got something simmler

And Joseph Go-balls

Has no balls

At all
.