If Rock and Roll Were a Machine (6 page)

I became a model of behavior. Things weren't as fun, but I wasn't in trouble all the time. I thought I understood how a staked dog might feel. Lawler's questions would cruise by like fat newspaper kids on cheap bicycles, and my mind would scramble off after them like a crazed Doberman. I'd get right to the edge of the grass, my sharp little fifth-grader's intellectual fangs all shiny and dripping, poised to rip jeans and sneakers, and then I'd come to the end of the rope. I'd feel it constrict around my throat, and I couldn't shout or speak in a normal tone or even whisper. I just stayed right there at the edge of the sidewalk with my paw in the air ready to be called on. But I never got called on.

I was also never one of the kids Lawler linked arms with when the bell ended recess. I am ashamed to admit this, but I wanted to be there with him at the center of that line of people singing and having fun.

I see now that this was when sports began to mean too much to me. I couldn't get the attention I needed in class, so I started going for it all in sports. In PE class and in football after school I began playing with a vengeance. It wasn't hard for me to excel because I was bigger and more coordinated than most of the other kids. But I also had this fire. If I'd been a team player it would have been a great quality. But I wasn't. I hogged the ball, yelled at kids when they dropped passes or missed tackles, and worse—like I did in class—I just ignored the kids who didn't want to play as bad as I did.

Our football team was undefeated and I was the star. I kept my stats in a ring binder with a photo of former Seahawks quarterback Jim Zorn on the cover. I was so full of myself.

One morning late in October, not many days after 220 or so American Marines were killed in Lebanon when some Shiite Muslim drove a truck full of explosives into their compound and set it off, one of the kids in class asked Lawler what the fighting was about. The bombing was all over TV and the newspapers and on the covers of magazines. It was a good question, although one probably not too many people could have answered.

Lawler said they were fighting about religion. The Jews and the Mohammedans, he said, were in league against the Christians. He said it was only one small part of an international conspiracy by the communists and other non-Christians to take over the world. Then he wrote “conspiracy” on the board and asked if any of us knew what it meant.

I knew what “conspiracy” meant, but I didn't raise my hand because I was confused by what he'd told us. It rang false after what I'd learned on the news.

I loved the news. I read my folks'
Newsweek
cover to cover before one of them would stomp down to my room and snatch it back, and I watched
Nightline
every night in bed. A lot of times something in the news would send me to my
World Book
encyclopedias, and I'd read about it and sometimes even read on into the
related articles,
which is how I learned about Islam.

What I'd learned from watching and listening and reading was that this stuff in Lebanon, like so much of the turmoil in the Third World, was a result of a colonial power—France, in this case—
leaving a former colony without a sound government. The problem was that the Muslims didn't have fair representation.

Lawler was right about it being a religious war: The president of the country, who was a Christian, had been assassinated before he could take office, and then in retaliation Christian soldiers killed several hundred Palestinian civilians in a refugee camp. I knew the Jews had something to do with it because Israeli soldiers had let the Christians into the camp and watched them kill the unarmed Palestinians. I didn't know what the communists had to do with it, but everybody knew they were always up to no good.

Maybe if I hadn't had such a good football season and been so full of myself I never would have said anything, or maybe if I hadn't gotten so frustrated holding my paw in the air waiting for Lawler to toss me a question. For whatever reason, I couldn't keep my mouth shut. I knew all this stuff that I didn't think anyone else in the room or maybe the whole school knew, and I just couldn't keep it in.

“In the first place,” I said, “they're not called Mohammedans. They're called Muslims, and their religion is Isla—”

That's as far as I got in my discourse. Lawler was at my seat before I could close my mouth on “Islam.” In mid-stride he leaned down, grabbed each side of the writing surface of my desk-chair, and pushed it—and me—out of the row, down the aisle, and toward the back of the room.

Ours was an old school with wooden floors, and some of the boards had warped at the edges and were no longer level with the others. I felt the metal legs of the desk-chair catch on these
raised boards and rip through them. The room was silent except for the squeal of the metal legs of my desk sliding over the floor and the intermittent splintering of the board edges.

My head whiplashed when the back legs of the desk cracked into the corner of the room. Lawler jerked the front of the desk around so I was flush with the side wall and facing forward. He walked to his desk then, picked up the big dictionary, walked back and dropped it onto the writing surface from a moderate height, causing it to make a moderate and almost whimsical splat. He was smiling, and he'd been smiling down into my face all through our trip across the floor.

“Mr. Bowden,” Lawler said, “this corner is your home until you learn you are not the most important person in the room. I've got something to say to the class, and I want you to listen.” With his middle finger he flipped open the dictionary about a quarter way. “When I finish,” he said, “you are to start copying. You're familiar with the procedure.”

He walked back to the front of the room. “Class,” he said, “young Mr. Bowden has a problem. He thinks he's more important than the rest of us. He thinks he's got all the answers, and he thinks we can't wait to hear them. Young Mr. Bowden isn't going to grow up to have a happy life if he keeps on this way, because nobody's going to like him. He needs our help to change, and we're going to give him our help.”

The plan was for my classmates to help me change by making me aware when I was acting too important. Lawler instructed everyone that in this one instance they didn't have to raise their hands and wait to be called on. If anyone saw me do something
or heard me say something that suggested I thought I was more important than the rest of the class, they were to sing it right out. The class didn't take to this as fast as they took to singing with Lawler at recess, but they caught on after a while.

By Thanksgiving I quit answering questions even when I was called on. Lawler had told the class to listen for a “tone of superiority” in my voice, and a couple of kids who had never spoken up before took pleasure in this. It was a game, and everyone participated. But the novelty faded before long.

A couple of times a week Lawler pointed out my eruptions of self-importance. Since I'd quit talking in class, he noted things I did or said outside class. He described how I'd been showing off my new Eddie Bauer winter coat, for example, and asked the class if they thought it was kind of me to try to make the kids whose parents couldn't afford such a fancy coat feel envious.

I shouldn't say everyone participated. Everyone but Zimster did. This struck me as odd, because Zimster was the meanest kid I knew. And he was also smart. Sarcasm was his weapon. The only pleasure I ever saw him take in school was ridiculing other kids, reducing them—particularly pretty girls—to tears with a few slashes of his wit. He'd make fun of your looks or your clothes or stuff you said in class, and if you responded he'd just pour it on. If he ever got a peek at your mom or dad you'd hear about it the rest of the year. Nobody ever saw his folks.

I figured the opportunity to point out someone's faults would put Zimster in his glory, but he treated the whole enterprise with more than his usual contempt.

When we came back to school after Christmas vacation,
Lawler let me out of the corner. I would only speak when he asked me a question, and then I spoke every word to myself in my head before I let it out of my mouth.

A weird thing happened that spring. Lawler was the new baseball coach, and he cut me. Nearly everybody who turned out made the team, but I was among those who didn't. This isn't the weird thing I mean to speak of, but it sure rocked me. I couldn't believe it. Baseball was my sport. I played baseball better than I did anything. I was in a daze. It was like I'd separated into two kids, one of whom was always watching me and then giving me an immediate evaluation of every single thing I did, and the evaluation was always bad.

The first game was away, but the school we played was close so I rode my bike there. I'd been playing with these guys and two girls since we started T-ball, and I had to go and watch.

Our pitcher walked batter after batter. Lawler brought in the centerfielder, but he couldn't throw a strike. He tried another kid, but that kid hurt his arm. It didn't look like the top of the first would ever end. It was even embarrassing for the people watching.

This is the weird thing: Lawler walked around behind the backstop and up to where I was sitting in the bleachers. He held out the ball. “You want to pitch?” he said. I'd brought my glove with me, and I put it on and held it out. He dropped the ball in and I walked to the mound.

They bombed me. These were guys who couldn't hit me to save their mothers' lives in summer league, and they bombed me.

I was on the team after that. Lawler never said a word about
it. We had a lousy season. I never played so bad.

Lawler was moving up to teach sixth grade the next year, and he told the class that any kids who wanted could be in his class the coming fall.

I was surprised to find not one single kid from our fifth-grade class in the room on the first day of sixth grade. I thought everybody loved the guy. I was there though. Lawler had told my folks it would be best for me. He said we were making progress and that one more year would have me shaped up.

I developed a stutter that fall. Lawler called on me a lot, and it was embarrassing not to be able to whip out the answer. I could live with that, but then it got so I couldn't call plays in the huddle fast enough. We'd keep getting penalized for delay-of-game. Then I couldn't call signals at the line. I'd stand over center and think the words in my mind, but I couldn't get them out of my mouth. The other me would stand across scrimmage with the defense and watch. He could call signals like Boomer Esiason—I heard him in my mind—but I couldn't get out a single sound.

The stutter went away by the time I got to high school, but by then I didn't have much to say.

I realize that what happened to me isn't a pimple on the butt of the pain a lot of kids endure by the time they're sixteen. After serious consideration, however, I believe it's the worst thing that ever happened to me.

Gramp was sitting in a
plastic chair beside his bed when Bert walked into the room. Bert hadn't seen Gramp out of bed in a long time. He was held to the chair by a strap across his upper chest and a strap around each forearm. His head lolled to his shoulder. His eyes were open, but his face showed no expression. His lips quivered in a way that brought the word “palsy” to Bert's mind. For a while after they put Gramp in the home he would say to Bert, “All I can do is smoke.” It wasn't long before he couldn't even smoke anymore.

Gramp had just been shaved, and a tiny pearl of shave cream clung to his earlobe. His hospital gown was bunched around his waist, and his shriveled penis made Bert think of ginger root in the vegetable bin at Rosauers. His legs were the bone-thin, reptilian legs of a turkey. A stainless steel pan sat on the floor beneath the chair.

Bert walked over and pulled the gown down around his grandfather's knees. He reached out and wiped away the shave cream with his thumb, then he stepped back. The fragrance of Aqua Velva dominated the other odors
in the room, but the ineradicable stench of cigarette smoke remained.

Bert felt a hand at his elbow, and he turned as he stepped out of the doorway. “Excuse me,” the aide said.

Bert didn't know her. She was taller than Bert, and hefty. She unstrapped his grandfather, lifted him with an arm around his waist, lifted the back of his gown with that hand, wiped him, then dropped the cloth onto the floor. She picked him up in both her arms like a stout bride carrying a feeble husband over the threshold and laid him gently on the bed.

“There you go, Berty Boy,” she said as she held his arms up and snugged the sheet and blanket around his chest.

Bert opened his mouth to respond to his name. But the woman hadn't turned around. She was talking to Gramp, whose name was also Albert Bowden.

She turned from the bed, stepped back to the chair with the hole in its seat, bent and swept up the cloth and then the pan with the same hand. “You're the grandson,” she said as she crossed the room. She stopped in the doorway. “They told me you'd be coming by, but I haven't seen you.”

Her name tag said Myrtrice Clovis. Up close Bert saw how young she was. She wasn't a woman. She was a girl not much older than he. What would it be like to work in such a place? What would it be like to have to? Bert thought. What would it be like to be named Myrtrice Clovis? “I haven't been by as often,” he said. “I've had football practice.”