The Tragic Age (2 page)

Baseball must be the most beef-witted game ever invented.

I'm, like, eight, and Dad has made me join Little League. And they have me in this stupid uniform which comes complete with what Aldous Huxley in his dystopian novel
Brave New World
referred to as a “prole hat.” Prole, short for “proletariat.” Meaning moron. Anyway, because I'm such a reluctant ball player, they've stuck me in right field and I'm standing there with this big, stiff, brand-new, expensive glove that Dad has bought me and all I can think about is when I'll finally get to go home. And then, wouldn't you know it, some dumb, fat kid actually hits the ball and it bounces through the infield and comes right toward me. And I'm not remotely paying any kind of attention, and even if I were I wouldn't be interested, and so it goes right past me. And all my so-called teammates are screaming and their parents are screaming and Dad, who, yes, is “coaching a little baseball” and who looks even more ridiculous in his baseball uniform than I do, is screaming too.

“Billy, what's the matter with you! Goddammit, Billy! Get the goddamn ball!”

The only sane thing to do is ignore them all and so that's what I do. I just stand there, watching the dumb, fat kid run around the bases.

And now I'm seventeen and in the garage and nothing's really changed. Dad's still yelling.

“Good Christ Almighty, Billy, are you listening to me? Are you paying attention? Have you heard one goddamn word I've said?”

“Thirty,” I'll say.

“What?”

“To mow the lawn. I want thirty dollars an hour. With a three-hour minimum.”

This is called capitalism.

Dad will snort and make a face that says “You're so such an idiot, you're almost funny.” He makes this face with Mom—
Linda,
his wife, my mother—a lot.

This is called derision.

“Anything else, your majesty?”

I stare at the lawn mower. The
hand
lawn mower that he—
Gordon
—wouldn't cut his toenails with.

A couple of hours later, I'll be in our backyard, which is lush and green and beautiful, and I'll be riding around on a brand-new tractor mower, the one we've traded the hand mower in for. Dad's the kind of guy who will upgrade anything mechanical at a moment's notice and call it a good investment. And maybe it's because the thought of this annoys me or maybe it's because it really
wouldn't
be a bad thing for me to push a mower, but I'll begin driving in this random, haphazard path across the lawn, leaving crazed swathes of uncut grass behind me.

“Billy, what the hell's the matter with you! Goddammit! Billy!”

I hate money. People who make nothing but money, make nothing.

Still.

It's money that pays for the drum room.

 

2

The drum room.

The drum room is on the lower level of the house. You might call this level the basement if a basement had inlaid wood floors, lath and plaster walls, and crown moldings. Dad had the drum room professionally soundproofed because not only was the noise driving him crazy, he was convinced it was stirring up the sediment in the cases of vintage Bordeaux that he had impulsively bought to put into the walk-in, climate-controlled wine cellar that came with the house.

My set is a Pearl Masterworks series. Black pearl. Double bass drums, a twelve-inch Tama Warlord Titan snare, four rack toms, and two floor toms, all tuned at two intervals apart. The set has six Zildjian cymbals; two rock rides, two custom crash, and a high hat.

My sound system is a Lyngdorf TDAI2200 Integrated Amp and Onkyo CS5VL SACD/CD player that plugs into a Pioneer S4EX speaker system.

Drum karaoke.

The very first concert was probably people beating logs by the fire. The rhythms were the patterns that made up their natural world—wind, rain, stampeding hooves—and through these patterns, they experienced ecstasy.

What are my patterns?

Speed metal. Thrash. Ska punk. Progressive rock. Anything or anybody that makes me work. Neil Peart. Mike Portnoy. Shannon Leto of Thirty Seconds to Mars. Danny Carey of Tool. Stewart Copeland of The Police for simple precision. But my favorite drummer of all time is Avenged Sevenfold's Jimmy Sullivan aka the Reverend Tholomew Plague aka the Rev. Dead of acute drug and alcohol intoxication at the age of twenty-eight.

Better to drum yourself to death.

The soundproof room is small and insular and hot and it doesn't take long before I'll be dripping with sweat. A lot of times I strip down to my underwear or take my clothes off completely. My hands and bare feet blister and bleed and the blood and the sweat spot the drum heads. Drumming is the closest thing I know to mindlessness.

I would never ever play for people.

 

3

“Billy! Billy, hi!”

This is the Sunday morning that as I sit on the beach wall reading
Walden
by Henry David Thoreau, who I'm finding to be a pretentious, pedantic, sanctimonious, holier-than-thou, sheep-brained stiff, the tall, slim girl with the long, light red hair and the green eyes calls out to me. She's up on the road above the seawall. She's in running shorts and sports bra and has obviously been jogging and now she's stopped. She waves, hopping in place, the way runners do while waiting to pass out or for a traffic light to change.

My hand has gone up to cover the right side of my face, the way it always does when I'm startled or surprised. A port-wine hemangioma is a reddish to purple birthmark caused by dilated capillaries in the skin. Mine starts just to the right of my eye and spreads like a stain down and across most of my cheek.

The girl with the long, light red hair and the green eyes points at herself.

“Gretchen! Gretchen Quinn! We're back!”

Fact.

Shock is a response in the body's sympathetic nervous system. The heart jumps. Breath catches. Blood vessels in the brain contract, throwing off sparks.

The red-haired girl smiles again. She waves at me again. “See you at school!” And then she's off again, running. She has a beautiful, long stride.

I lower my hand. The side of my face pulses and feels hot. I feel as if
I'd
like a pond to run away to.

I hate it when people expect things of you. I just hate it.

 

4

“All hope abandon, ye who enter in!”

Dante Alighieri wrote
The Divine Comedy
in 1308. The most famous part describes the poet's journey through the nine circles of hell. He got it wrong.

Hell is high school.

High School High is a public school. Originally Mom and Dad wanted me to go to this big-deal private high school that cost about forty grand a year and where the students wear uniforms but I refused. I'd already gone to a big-deal private middle school that cost about fifty grand a year and I'd absolutely hated it. Being surrounded by oblivious, hormone-crazed nitwits is bad enough. Being surrounded by oblivious, hormone-crazed nitwits in identical blazers, chinos, and plaid skirts had made me want to climb an electrical tower and cauterize myself.

Still, we have a lot of well-to-do, self-entitled kids at good ol' High School High, and the ones that aren't, the ones that are mostly bused in and ignored, the social mutants, the Mexicans, and the black kids who have been recruited to play football and basketball, wish they were.

Because I wouldn't get a driver's license if they were giving them away, I ride a skateboard to school. I consider it nothing more than an acceptable means of transportation. If you ever see me hanging around a parking lot doing
ollies,
for God's sake, or attempting to destroy my testicles by sliding down a banister with the board
sideways,
please shoot me.

I will confess to the occasional game of chicken.

It's like this. At the top of a decent hill you wait until a car is coming up from the bottom. You take a moment to consider the fact that the wheel is a circular device capable of rotating on its axis. It's one of man's oldest and most important inventions. You push off, aiming down the middle of the approaching car's lane. You do a little side-to-side to establish a rhythm. The car is getting closer now and usually the driver is leaning on the horn. You go into a crouch to gain speed. The car swerves. You swerve with it. It starts to turn. Too late. You go into the grille. You hurtle forward into the windshield, which crumples with the force of your body. You're aware of the driver screaming as you're thrown up and over the roof and then you're airborne, aware of the street flying beneath you, aware of how rough it is and how much it's going to hurt your already badly broken bones when you land.

Of course, that isn't remotely what happens.

The car either stops, in which case you ride around it, or the car swerves and you keep going. Either way, you've won. Stupid, really. Crazy even. But here's the thing. Starting around the age of fourteen, human beings become certifiably insane. Really, they've done tests. A teenager's brain waves are the same as that of a psychotic's. They used to think this was a temporary condition, that if you made it to your twenties, you'd straighten out. But starting around the beginning of the twenty-first century, mostly due to the deleterious effects of twenty-four-hour global news coverage, not to mention the iPod, Netflix, and the Twilight Saga, young people started hitting puberty and never got over it. Ten percent of all teenagers today have been prescribed medication for depression. Eight out of every one hundred thousand teenagers commit suicide. Sixteen percent of all teenagers actively consider it. We are, as a generation, a bunch of deranged, isolated neurotics destined to live long lives of self-medicated, Internet-addicted lunacy. I'm not immune to the statistics but I do consider it a personal challenge to fight my generation's psychosis as much as possible.

And so I do.

I start by being not popular. The need for attention and celebrity based on questionable achievement is a dangerous drug. No. Better to avoid attention. Make no waves. Stay under the radar. Don't speak unless spoken to and then with as few words as possible. Do not volunteer. Do not join in. Get Bs and Cs, not As. Never raise your hand, and if called on, answer all questions with a puzzled expression. Run from the light. Keep to the shadows. Stay as far away as you can from the line of fire.

It doesn't always work.

“You haven't applied to college.”

It's the second week back from summer vacation and I've been called into the guidance office. The guidance counselor, Miss Barber, is new this year. She's young and sort of attractive and she obviously thinks she can make a difference.

She'll get over it.

Right now, though, she has my transcript up on the computer screen in front of her and she has me on the spot.

“Well?” she says. “Why is that?”

“I thought I'd take some time off,” I say.

“It seems to me you have been,” she says. “Reading and math at a college level by the fourth grade. Over the top on your S10 series in fifth grade. You hit sixth, you disappear completely.” She seems not so much puzzled as suspicious. “Care to explain?”

“It got tougher,” I say.

“Mmm,” she says. Which is a way of saying both something and nothing at the same time.

She studies the computer screen for a moment and then glances at me, eyes never quite settling on my face, not wanting to
stare.
One of the polite ones.

To consider.

We unconsciously distance ourselves from disfigurement, even when we know the condition is not contagious.

“Any ideas what you'd like to do, any plans for the future?” says Miss Barber.

“I'd like to find a deep cave and hole up in it for about eighty years,” I say.

Actually, I don't say that.

“I'm not sure yet,” I say. “But I'm working on it.”

What I'd
like
to say is that planning for the future, any future, but especially one where it's predicted that by 2050 the worldwide population will level out and start dropping as if off a precipice, is ridiculous. This is because by 2030, thanks to out-of-control birth rates, bankrupt economies, and a global lack of natural resources, fresh water, and food, people will have begun getting very busy killing one another.

Just another thing to look forward to.

Miss Barber “mmms” again. She sits back in her chair. She taps a pencil. She looks at me as if
I'm
a question she's supposed to answer. “So how are things at home,” she says. As if it's a
casual
question and not a fully charged death ray.

“Good,” I say. “Really great.”

“Get along with your parents?” she says.

“Mmm-hmm,” I say. Which is a variation on “mmm.”

“You're the only teenager I know that does,” she says. Miss Barber looks down a moment and then she looks back up at me and I know exactly what's coming.

“May I ask about your sister?”

Dorie.

I'm eleven years old and I'm in a hospital room and my twin sister, Dorie, lies in a hospital bed. Even with her hair lost to chemo, she's really beautiful. She's pale, almost translucent, unblemished. Like a Dresden doll.

Point of reference.

A Dresden doll is tiny, collectible figurine whose body is made of fabric, whose head is made of unglazed porcelain, and whose eyes are made of clear glass. Dresden is a city in Germany that was firebombed by Allied Forces at the end of World War II. A minimum of one hundred thousand people died. Most of them were civilians. Most of the civilians were women and children.

Sidebar.

Porcelain is inflammable. People aren't.

Dorie opens her eyes. It's silly how bright they are. Fever makes them this way. She sees me and smiles her Dorie smile.