Land of the Blind (5 page)

I
smoked weed every day as a kid. Not so much during the time I’m relaying now—the fifth-grade hell that Eli and I shared like some awful creation myth—but from that summer on, pretty much nonstop until the tenth grade. Looking back, those fifth-grade days were the night before battle, the last days spent in complete sobriety. I’m not sure why I offer that bit of information now except to interrupt this harsh story with the reminder that these were different and difficult times—the mid-1970s, after all—when a preteen might be expected to smoke dope every day. It is probably the least endearing and most enduring habit of a whole generation of politicians, this desire to confess, and I can’t help wondering if—in admitting fumbling around with a few joints, a smart Arkansas redneck could win two terms—I might not secure a white-trash landslide by acknowledging that I toked regularly at twelve and never had trouble inhaling, that, in fact, I carried the respectful nickname Old Iron Lung.

Still, as I said, I feel the need—perhaps the political necessity—to halt the narrative momentarily and take refuge in the time and place of all of this: the desperateness, the poverty, the harsh world in which I was raised. I would kill (once again, I acknowledge irony) to be able to report that I simply went to school and got good grades; that I sat next to Eli Boyle on the bus and demanded that he be treated with respect; that I insisted that he, in fact, did
not
smell like turds (sadly, though, he did); that I did not crave more than anything the respect of my classmates, this societal juice, this cultural cachet, this…
approval,
this immeasurable measure of popularity, not only from the suede-booted Dana Brett—love would be more defensible—but also and more importantly from the school toughs, the pubescent dictators, the dope-selling
jefes,
the Pee-Chee-carrying warlords of the Empire bus stops.

This is the only way I can think to explain what happened at the end of that school year. Throughout that year my lot was improving incrementally,
Pete Decker’s pronouncement that I was “all right” having thrown open the door to the middle of the willow tree, where the tough kids hung out, although I was still a year away from the furthest depths of the branches, where the mystical act of making out was occurring, glimpsed only as a clutch of arms and legs and sweaters and jackets and hair and the occasional flash of braces and skin.

I never tried to smoke at the bus stop again, but I continued to steal my father’s cigarettes to give to Pete Decker, who honored my new status by not demanding such bribes, but rather
accepting them with prejudice,
a fine distinction that would serve him well in his later career of Mafia capo or generalissimo of some Latin American junta.

“Whatcha got for me, Marlboro man?” he would ask.

His gift to me was allowing it to seem as if I had a choice. I would pretend to be checking to see if I had cigarettes on me. “Oh, here you go.” Then I’d stand there and nod with admiration at his stories of stealing bikes out from under little kids or shooting stray cats in garbage cans. And the midtree circle wasn’t the only new access I acquired. I crept toward the back of the bus, too, abandoning the fifth and sixth graders I used to huddle with in the front until I ended up ten rows back, next to a sweet kid named Everson, a flutter-eyed seventh grader who spent every morning bent over in his seat, rolling joints and putting them into little Sucrets cough drop boxes. He hummed songs while he did it, Southern rock tunes that I didn’t really recognize, but which were familiar enough. I guess he must’ve sold all the joints in that Sucrets box each day, because the next day he’d be at it again, rolling joints and humming. Everson was bone skinny and had long blond hair like a girl. He was nicer than the other seventh and eighth graders, though, and he seemed to get a pass from Decker and Woodbridge, I guess because he supplied them with dope.

“Where do you get the papers?” I asked.

“Stepdad’s stash,” he answered as quickly as possible so he could get back to his song and his job.

“How much does that stuff cost?”

“Ten a lid.”

“How much is a lid?”

He looked right at me and just kept humming. “Nobody knows for sure. That’s the cool thing.”

It seemed okay with Pete that I sat with Everson and one day I even held
out one of my dad’s Pall Malls to give to my new friend. He looked at it and made a face. “I hope you don’t smoke those,” Everson said.

“What do you mean?”

“Cigarettes? Disgusting. Filthy habit.” And he flipped his blond hair and went back to rolling joints.

I didn’t ride the regular bus home in the afternoons. In the fall I played flag football, and in the winter basketball. Except for the great prematurely bearded quarterback Kenny Dale, I was the only guy from my neighborhood who played sports, and so the only people on the activities bus to Empire were me and Everson, who told the teachers he was staying after school for drama and the school paper, but who actually sold the last of his dope to the football team. The bus would cruise past the high school, then the junior high, then come pick up us elementary school kids, and I’d sit in the seat in front of Everson, who never hummed or had anything to say in the afternoons, since his joints were all rolled and sold. He just stared out the window, like Eli.

So I never had to see what Eli endured in the afternoon bus rides, only in the mornings. And in those mornings, while it may sound unlikely and defensive, I began to try to protect him from Pete Decker. Sometimes I saved my cigarettes until Eli arrived at the bus stop, hoping I could distract Pete. Other times I picked up a rock and threw it at a passing car, hoping I could interest Pete in some cruelty that didn’t involve knocking Eli down or wedging his briefs in his shithole. But Pete was relentless; he continued to torment Eli, dropping burning cigarettes in his backpack, flicking his ears, and, at least once a week, giving him a wedgie. One day in the winter, Pete reached in Eli’s pants to yank on his underwear and immediately withdrew his hand. “Oh, that’s sick!” he yelled, and he hauled off and decked Eli, knocking his glasses off and dropping him to the ground. “He isn’t wearing any underwear!” On the bus that day, I watched Eli’s reflection in the window and I swear I saw him smile a little bit.

I think it was the underwear thing that upped the ante for Pete. He actually began walking up the block to meet Eli, taking the backpack off his shoulder and spreading all the books and papers as he walked back to the bus stop, Eli bent at that crooked waist in his flannel shirt, picking up his things and limping along toward the bus stop in his corrective shoes, pausing to push his glasses back up on his nose.

In the spring I turned out for baseball, but on the first day I forgot to wear a cup and a line drive short hopped me in the nutsack and I had to go to emergency, where the doctor told my mom I had a twisted testicle and would have to take the baseball season off, or at least until my right nut reacquired its flesh color. So I started wearing special underwear and riding the bus home right after school, where I got to see the second half of Eli Boyle’s nightmare. Pete treated him the same way at 3:00
P.M
. that he had at 7:20 in the morning, calling him names, making fun of his clothes, knocking him down. It was about that time, in the spring, that Pete Decker decided he was tired of beating Eli up and that someone else needed to beat up Eli. Me.

He talked about it for a couple of days, telling me things that Eli had allegedly said about me, that I was a fairy and a fruitcake and that I had humped my own grandma. I remember wondering, if I were a fairy, would I want to hump my grandma?

I managed to avoid fighting those first days, saying that Eli wasn’t worth it, or I didn’t want to get snot on my fists, stuff like that. But Pete kept bringing it up, saying that if I didn’t fight Eli people would assume it was because I was his boyfriend. Still, I avoided it. And every day Pete would hover over me. “When are you gonna fight that punk? He’s making you look stupid.”

One morning, sitting next to Everson, I leaned over and asked what he would do.

“I don’t fight,” he said, without looking up from the joint in his lap.

“Why not?”

“No one expects me to.”

“Why?”

He shrugged. “Against my nature.”

“If I don’t beat up Eli, then Pete’s gonna kill me.”

“Yeah,” he said. “It works that way.”

At recess, I sought out the lovely Dana Brett, who had impressed me with her courage and humanity when she didn’t scoot her desk away from Eli’s that day. I explained to her my dilemma, without looking up into her angelic face, her Nestlé’s brown eyes. She listened patiently, while a few feet away the other girls in our class asked questions of romance to a Magic Eight Ball. She would always be unlike those other girls, more measured and rational.

“Are you afraid of him?” Dana asked when I’d explained my problem.

“Eli? Of course not.”

“Well,” she said, the long lashes flashing down once on those big, round eyes, “then you better fight. If you don’t, they’re gonna say you’re a puss.”

I think we are capable of fooling ourselves in a lot of different ways. People talk about what makes a child an adult, as if there is some physical or emotional or mental threshold we cross, but I tell you this, and if you are honest with yourself you will know it is true: the thing that makes us adult is our ability to delude ourselves. That’s all. Children know what they are. Try telling a fat kid he looks good, or a child who is a bad athlete that he just needs to try harder. He knows better. But as adults, we start to believe the bullshit. We tell ourselves that cheating on our taxes isn’t really stealing and that the job candidate with long legs is really a better fit for the company. We look at our lives and pretend that we aren’t money hungry and consumed by status, that we have kept the morals and ethics of our college years, that we are healthy and not fat, distinguished and not old, that gray looks sophisticated in our hair, that it doesn’t hurt her if she doesn’t know, that it’s not really lying if he doesn’t find out, that we deserve a break now and then, that we had no choice, meant no harm, didn’t know what would happen, would take it back if we could, that we are still liberal and open minded and easygoing and not afraid. We come up with rationalizations and justifications after the fact, and then we convince ourselves that these things are
true.
We pretend we are doing the best we can.

But every man dies the death of his own making.

Me? I took a step toward being an adult that day. I told myself that if I didn’t beat Eli up, Pete Decker would pound us both. I told myself that I would go easy on Eli, that I’d pull my punches. I told myself that we would make eye contact and he would see that I didn’t really mean this, that I could do this and not actually do it, that I wasn’t beating him up, not like Pete Decker and Matt Woodbridge did, that I was different from them.
That I was different.
That is the biggest lie—that we are different than they are.

The brakes squealed on the bus and Pete was up behind me, rubbing my shoulders, extolling me, whispering random combinations of guttural words in my ear.

“Fuck up that fat dickbreath cockbite fuckball!”

“Kick that smelly fag dipshit’s ass!”

We moved along the aisle. Below our feet, the floor of the bus was lined
with a grooved rubber strip and my tennis shoes squeaked as I moved to the front of the bus. Pete hovered behind, inches from my ear: “Break his fuckin’ four-eyed, pig-nosed face!”

Such trouble has a way of congealing the passengers of a school bus, and I felt their oozy, collective eyes on me as I moved down the aisle. I was about to beat up the most pitiful kid in twelve grades. I, the kid who offered cigarettes in fealty to Pete Decker, was about to join his ranks. In their eyes, how could I be any different?

Eli was the first off, of course, and he’d begun moving in his quick crooked shuffle, bent at the waist, trying to hide in his own clothes.

“Boyle!” Pete yelled from behind me. “Hey, Boyle!” I felt Pete gently take my book bag and set it on the ground. Eli just kept moving, and Pete dispatched his two goons to run after him and drag him back. I stood under the willow tree, my mouth dry. The bus pulled away and I watched it go, the faces pressed up against the back window, kids having flooded to Pete Decker’s seat, hoping to see the first moments of our fight before the bus pulled away.

The goons dragged Eli back and pushed him toward me. Still he didn’t look up.

“Are you gonna fight, or are you a fag?” Pete asked Eli.

He didn’t answer. He stood in front of me, staring at his shoes. He shifted his weight and his leg braces clacked together.

Pete pushed Eli in the shoulder. “Come on, queer.”

I raised my fists slowly and moved forward. He looked up then, and I realized I’d never seen Eli full-on like this, from the front. He was usually looking sideways or averting his gaze or covering his mouth or looking away before you could get a fix on his face. It was egg shaped—too much forehead and chin, all the features and pimples packed in between, the black glasses, the braces on his teeth, like some perfect rendering of the collective nightmares of adolescents.

Pete Decker stepped away and it was just Eli and I squared off in the gravel between the street and Will the Hippie’s front yard. Our eyes met and I tried to let him see that I was sorry for what I had to do. He sighed.

And then he hit me. Twice. The first punch connected with my nose, the second clipped my ear. I kicked at him and caught him in the leg and he hit me again in the face, a hammer that buckled my knees and sent me sprawling,
crying, onto the ground. From my side I looked up through teary eyes to see Eli running away, crying, his knee braces rattling, Pete Decker a few steps behind. Pete caught him and dragged him to the ground and by the time I got to my feet, he was pounding on Eli. I felt my nose. It was bleeding. Twenty yards up the road, so was Eli’s. Pete just kept cocking his fist and letting Eli have it. Eli was crying for help, honking like a goose, trying to squirm away. Pete’s goons were cheering the beating their boss was delivering. Finally Pete climbed off him, opened Eli’s book bag and scattered everything, set his lunch pail on the ground and stomped it into scrap metal. Then he kicked Eli once in the side and came back toward me.