Futureproof (9 page)

April

The riots are in full swing in L.A. and everywhere. The news is having a field day. Cities all over the country are erupting in violence and looting. Splinter keeps insisting that we go downtown and fuck some shit up, but I don't know—it seems like a good way to get incarcerated for a long time and for no discernible reason. He goes anyway and returns to Animal Mother's that night with a brand-new set of golf clubs.

I don't see the point, though. I figure, why shit where you eat? It makes no sense. These looters aren't going after the oppressors by hitting up the rich neighborhoods. They're destroying their
own
back-yards. It makes no fucking sense. But I've realized that this is what The Man wants. He
wants
us to kill each other. This makes The Man happy. Why expend money and manpower on keeping the poor people down if we'll do it ourselves?

I tell Splinter my theory a few days after the last rioter has gone home. We're sitting in the square in Little 5 Points. All the whacked-out hippies and punks and social outcasts of the Atlanta “scene” hang down here. Every store in the area has some variety of “X-treme” hair dye and sells t-shirts emblazoned with underground rock band logos. We come down here for a slice of pizza, with a side order of rabble-rousing from tripping hippies of the left-wing political persuasion.

“Dude,” Splinter says, “have you not seen
Do the Right Thing
?”

“Of course I've seen
Do the Right Thing
. What's that got to do with anything?”

“What's that got to do with anything? Do you forget that Mookie—”

“Don't even. I
know
,” I say, cutting Splinter off mid-sentence. “Mookie starts the riot after Radio Raheem gets killed by the cops and he initiates the burning down of the pizza parlor. That made no fucking logical sense.”

“Of course it made sense, man. The Italian assholes that ran that fucking pizza joint gave no respect to the black people and it was a predominantly black neighborhood. That's fucked up.”

“Fuck that, man. They were pissed that Sal wouldn't put any pictures of black people on his wall. And why should he have to put pictures of them on his wall? Like he said, it's his goddam restaurant. And if they want black people's pictures on a wall they can open their own fucking restaurants. Even
Black Boy
says as much. That's the great thing about that book. It's equal opportunity pissed at
all
the idiots.”

“That's easy for Sal to say. He already has a restaurant. The black people don't have shit.”

“Well, I'm sure at one point Sal didn't have shit, either. It's called
work
. If you want anything in life, you have to work for it.”

“Nobody's ever let the black man get nothing. They'll let 'em work for $5.15 an hour and that's about it.”

“So the Italians had it easier?”

“I don't fucking know if the Italians had it easier or not. I'm just saying nobody is going to give a black man a loan to open a fucking Pizza Hut.”

“Maybe not, but what's that got to do with burning the fucking place down? Just because they can't get a loan to open their own pizza joint, they gotta burn another guy's restaurant down?”

“Yes. They do. Don't shake your head at me, dude. Look, if you are living in fucking squalor and always have to keep coming back to this asshole Italian every time you want a fucking slice of pizza…that shit just rots with you. It turns your insides out. This motherfucker has moved into your neighborhood and opened the restaurant you never had a chance to open in the first place. Would that not piss you off?” He hocks up a loog, spits right past my head into the bushes.

“Yeah, it would piss me off…but I wouldn't feel like I had to burn his whole goddam place down because of that fact. Ruining his livelihood isn't going to make me any better off.”

“That's the problem with you nonrevolutionaries,” Splinter says. “You can't see into the future at all. You can't see that until some eggs are broken…” He lights a cigarette, squints to keep the smoke from his eyes. “…there will be no progress made. What this country needed was a good dose of chaos. Re-level the playing field—let everybody start off equal.” Splinter kicks back, lets his head hang over the side of the bench, takes a long, proud drag from his Newport.

“Oh, yeah,” I say. “You're real fucking revolutionary. You and your revolutionary golf clubs.”

“One less white dude is going to take up acres of perfectly good land so that he can play a stupid game. Land that minorities could be moving onto.”

“What, are you going to use them?”

“Fuck no, I'm gonna sell 'em at a pawn shop.”

“You idiot. White people will get 'em anyway. I don't know any fucking Mexican golfers.”

“Maybe so. But at least Titleist didn't get the money from 'em. As far as I'm concerned, that's a victory.”

“You're an idiot.”

“Fuck you, dude. Tool of The Man.”

“Me?”

“Yeah, you. You fucking buy into all that bullshit they sell. ‘Don't fuck up the neighborhoods. Don't trash the stores.' They keep us poor folk down by making us take the little piece-of-shit carrots they dangle in front of us,” Splinter says.

“And it's so much better when we destroy that much, isn't it? Now, instead of having a goddam convenience store where you can get milk or a beer in the middle of the night, there's a charred shell of a building and no way to get a fucking pack of cigarettes because we decided to show everybody our anger by ruining our own neighborhood. That makes no fucking sense.”

A hippie reeking of patchouli asks if we have a cigarette. He takes mine, the nonmenthol.

“Nobody in power will ever relinquish that power willingly, my friend,” Splinter continues. “We, the downtrodden, must take it.” I hate it when he calls me “my friend.” I ruthlessly counter his ignorance.

“By rioting we're showing The Man that he does, in fact, have as much power as we feared. And more. We're showing The Man that we, the poor, are fucking animals, that we deserve to have nothing.”

“Because everything we have is worthless!”

“Fuck that. The people that
make
something for themselves,
that bust their asses in one bullshit job or another, are the ones that will make it, that will rise above.”

“I never asked for a handout. I wanted a hand
up
,” Splinter says.

“You're so fucking cliché.”

“Maybe so. But at least I get laid more than you.”

“My ass.”

“I wouldn't touch your ass with Flick's dick.”

“Fuck you.”

“No, my friend,” Splinter enunciates elegantly, “fuck you.”

I smack him upside the head, snap him out of his illusions of moral victory.

“Ow, fucker! You're a fucker!”

We stop talking to watch a hot hippie girl walk by. In typical Little 5 Points hippie fashion, she's not wearing a bra and sports only a wife-beater in the crisp spring air. Her nipples are hard. We can see everything. A moment passes, a fresh moment with just a hint of breeze.

“I love spring,” I say.

“Me fucking too,” says Splinter.

June

I'm staying with Splinter at his “aunt's” house so that we can spend the summer hanging out. Our chief goals will be to get

1. laid
   
2. wasted.
   

Splinter's aunt is a total nutjob. She used to be his uncle.
She
used to be a
he.
She's totally mannish, has the jawline, the muscular arms, the bitchy faggot attitude.

“You knew her when she was a he?” I ask Splinter at the picnic table behind the apartment. We go out there every morning around 11 and smoke after we wake up. This morning we have a little weed, too.

“Yeah. Her name used to be Eddie,” Splinter says, like it's nothing.

“Is that not fucking weird to you, man?”

“It was at first but now I guess I'm used to it. It's just like being around Eddie—except now he always wears dresses and has tits.”

I shake my head. “I don't know, man. That shit freaks me out.”

“Why, dude? So Aunt Tina used to be a man. Tina used to have a dick and she now has a manufactured vagina…yeah, you're right,” Splinter says with a laugh, “that
is
fucked up. But I never liked him either way, so it makes no difference to me.”

“My point is that she changed an integral part of her humanity. Altered forever. That would be like getting the words ‘I hate children' tattooed on your forehead or something.”

“Yeah. I know, man. She's fucked up. But she says she was born a woman, just didn't come with the right parts.”

“She's some kind of fucking aberration of nature. Like a turtle with two heads. Or the lobster boy we saw in that magazine Lana had, with the claws for hands and everything? Goddam! Let's get out of here,” I say, stubbing out the joint. “I want to see if Lana is up at the mall yet.”

“What is it with you and her? She's blown everybody in the fucking food court,” Splinter says.

“As long as she hasn't blown you, I'm good. She's a beautiful, amazing person.”

“Whatever, dude.” Splinter lights a butt as we walk to the bus stop. We pass it back and forth. I hate menthol cigarettes.

 

I first met Lana when Trizden and I went to see the industrial/metal band Ministry. Of course, Trizden was taking a step down from his musical snobbiness in order to attend such a mainstream metal concert, but he was a good enough sport to come along, and with only
five or six mentions of how lame Ministry is. They were offhanded comments though, leading me to believe that he's secretly a Ministry fan. Mainstream motherfucker.

The concert hall was all chaos, loud and people everywhere. The band came onstage with four or five guitarists playing grinding chords in unison and the whole crowd lunged forward. The noise was more brutal than it ever sounds on the albums. The singer had long black dreadlocks and his microphone stand was made of a goat skeleton.

Halfway through the set Trizden yelled in my ear that he had to take a piss. I yelled back that that reminded me that I wanted a beer. We wove our way through the crowd toward the back of the hall where a girl was leaning against a wall outside the bathrooms. She was talking to a guy who was trying to walk away. She was grabbing his jacket, pleading with him not to go. He wrenched his arm away from her. She started yelling something but I couldn't make it out because it was so fucking loud. I went to her. Tears were coursing down her cheeks. Without the slightest pause she talked to me as though we'd always known each other. I liked that. And I liked that she was crying. Not that I liked that she was in obvious mental anguish but because it was such an open display of vulnerability, frailty.

From what I could gather over the din of the concert and her own broken explanations, the guy was her boyfriend or ex-boyfriend or something significant like that. She didn't know if they were over for good or not. She hoped they weren't. God, she prayed that they weren't over because she loved him so much. She loved Corey so much. Even though she betrayed him with Ricky, his best friend, she wanted him to take her back. She used to go out with Ricky before she went out with Corey. So by screwing her boyfriend's best friend, she was sort of reconciling with her ex, even if it was only to
roll around in bed for a while. But Corey wanted back what was once rightfully his alone and she was unable to give it back because she couldn't travel back in time and make it to where she never cheated on him with his best friend. She couldn't make that fact change and he couldn't live with that being the case. Her heart was torn in half and she couldn't just turn off her love. Love doesn't do that. Love doesn't just come from some kind of faucet you can turn on and off at will.

She confessed these things through interrupting sobs. I noticed that she produced far less snot than I do when I'm emotionally destroyed. I'm far less attractive than usual when I'm destitute and hate the world, but Lana was somehow more attractive than any girl I'd ever known. She was small and vulnerable and I wanted to comfort her.

I touched her cheek, pushed a tear to the side, tucked her hair behind her ear. She had the smallest, most perfect ears. She looked at me with her eyes welling. I wanted to make love to her. Badly. I
needed
to make love to her. I wanted to drown all her sorrow, suck it all into me. This was the Lana I met and fell in love with unconditionally, regardless of her penchant for food court blow jobs.

I reached down and held her hand and she told me her life. The music was so loud. Everything was in slow motion. We were underwater. We were saved. “You'll never believe,” the dreadlocked man onstage was screaming over the grind of guitars.

July

I'm tripping right now. We're all tripping. After a full day of loitering and bumming change at the mall, ten or fifteen of us headed to this girl Chris's house. Her parents are out of town and her older brother is spending the night at his girlfriend's.

Lana is acting weird and distant. I can't tell if this is because she is tripping, because I am tripping, or as she claims, because she is feeding off the energy of all the others who are on LSD like we are. The Acid is really fucking good. Two tabs in and I can already tell the Acid is really fucking good.

Chris has a massive backyard, filled with trees and life. Everyone is laughing, making their way from one person to another, asking how they are doing, if they saw this or that amazing thing.

Lana is about two hundred yards out in the darkness, literally hugging a tree.

That doesn't seem cliché to me.

She is completely and utterly
earnest
. She looks like a little woodland sprite, overcome by the beauty of nature. All of us out here are woodland sprites. We are running around in the grass and breathing in the crisp air.

This one guy, Dylan, he's some kind of surfer import from California. He has captured the interests of everyone with his radical beliefs on life. He shows a few of us how good it feels to punch tree trunks, does it a couple of times, hard, brings his scraped knuckles into the light to show us the release. His knuckles already appear bruised but somehow beautiful. I decide against trying it, though. I'm very cautious and opposed to pain unless I'm mentally destitute and without hope.

I approach Lana but she's in the middle of one of her little episodes and won't make eye contact or even acknowledge my existence. She is so beautiful and abused.

My Lana, communicating with a tree. All I want is for her to understand that I understand her. She is hurting. This is why, as Splinter said so basely, “she's blown everyone in the food court.” But she only did that because she wanted to give them a pleasure that she can't achieve herself. Not a physical pleasure, necessarily, but a transcendent one—the pleasure people reach only by being selfless and self-sacrificing. I find her more beautiful
because
she's blown everybody in the food court. It makes me want to be with her more. I want to take care of Lana. I want to reach out to her and have her take me in, fold me under her wing as I fold her under mine.

Lana, my beautiful Lana.

I am doomed to a lifetime of yearning. I will never know love or life the way it is meant to be lived. I will never know true fulfillment—only unquenchable desire. Why is it that every time I take Acid I have to realize these things? I can't have fun without feeling guilty for being alive—for leaving my brothers at Victor's mercy. I
have abandoned those in need in order to pursue fun in a fucking field. I am not the type that loves. I am the type that fucks. I have intentionally burned myself with cigarette lighters, put the hot metal to my arm and seared in agony as my flesh lit up in heat and pressure and I could feel myself leaving this hellish place, could feel myself transcending the Garden. They know I don't really belong here with any of them. I am outside of their realm. These people, these kids here, they will go back home to their cul-de-sacs and tell their parents to fuck off and still make it to college in time for initiation to this fraternity or that sorority.

We are crowded around this television set watching cartoons, and then after that is done, even more pathetically than the last thing, we are watching two guys play fucking video games. Laughing. We are watching
somebody else
play video games.

They are in control of our every thought and emotion. We're just passing through, merely biding our time until our lives slip through our gnarled old fingers, these self-inflicted scars disappearing in the sands with our souls because in the end we were never really here in the first place.

We were never here.

We are a blip, a mass of energy dissipated in a matter of moments, a flash in the pan, a twinkle of the eye, a prehistory lost in the passing of millennia, the minutiae of nothingness, a blink, an afterthought, a shallow stream evaporated in the first light of day. We are the misunderstood. We are the unclassified the oversimplified the target market the failing demographic. We are all already dead, the untalented, the ugly, the wasted, the underused, making way for the new. We are the bleeding. We are the profusely complaining, the overfed. We are the holes. The empty. The vacant. Carved out and hollow. Blankly staring. Echoes. Not ourselves. Not anyone.

 

Lana approaches me at around 3 in the morning. She is visibly tired. My eyes feel wide as plates. I ask her again if she wants to trip, because she looks tired. She says no. I tell myself I've already fucked this whole thing up with her.

But then she says she knows that I love her and she loves me, too. She tells me that this is why she's never given me a blow job. I tell her, you know, I never wanted a blow job but I probably would have taken one if you'd offered because you are so fucking beautiful and fragile.

“Did you not want to give me one because I'm ugly?” I ask.

And she says it had nothing to do with that, not at all, you are beautiful—(
I am?
)—yes, you are, and it had nothing to do with anything aside from the fact that I knew you didn't want that from me, she says. I knew you'd never approach me like that and just from that alone, that respect for me, I knew you were different.

“I was?” I say.

“You
are
,” she says.

Well then why am I always so fucking broken? Why am I always shattered from the inside out, trying to hold this goddam thing together by the nails?

“Let's walk outside,” she says.

We leave everyone to their video game watching. Lana takes my hand and we walk to the tree she had embraced for a good hour earlier in the night. She places my hand on it and asks me what I feel.

“Close your eyes,” she says. “Tell me what you feel.”

I tell her I feel a tree. She says that that's all you have to feel is a tree. Because that's all it is. It's just a tree, Luke. It's just a fucking tree. My eyes are still closed and I'm crying and realizing that she is right. All it is is a goddam tree.

She finds my lips and we kiss and then sleep under that tree and when I wake she is still there with me, my arm curled around her shoulders, her face pressed to my chest, the sun blinding me.