Jason Frank had come over to my family’s house for a sleepover and when we were walking to the corner store he said we should throw rocks at house across the fence. It was the first of many incidents in which I was led to believe not to trust people with two first names.
Bret Robert John. Patrick Henry. Tom Henry. Charles Christopher.
I kept my head down and dug in the dirt with the toe of an untied shoe. Jason Frank picked up rocks and threw them, hardly made it over the fence, building a small pile on the other side.
‘Don’t be such a pussy.’ He said.
‘I’m just hungry.’ I told him.
‘Of course you are, you are also a pussy.” Jason Frank had heard his dad call another dad a pussy during a game in Essex last weekend and had begun saying it to everyone. His eye still had a little purple teardrop at the corner from his mother’s spaghetti spoon when he called her a pussy for not making meatballs.
To appease him, I started throwing rocks at a wooden shack that was property of the Burlington Parks and Recreation. Every rock chipped off a chunk of green paint, leaving behind a patch mark of a grey tin. Audibly it was much more satisfying, each resounding shot echoing through the park.
There we were, back to back, with child’s arms throwing stones. Jason Frank’s pile of rocks was building in height still.
“Pretty soon you will have made them a nice little stone terrace, eh Jason?”
“Fuck you pussy.” Jason was an emotional thunder ball. Stemming from his small stature and the hugeness of his head. His own father called him Jupiter. My dad called him Frankenhead, my mom called him a spaz. The spaz part was true, and carried over into his adult life, when he became the first police officer in the country to kill someone with a taser. ‘Liberally Applied’ was what they called it in the newspaper. He blasted someone for fifteen minutes outside of the theater after Terminator 2.
‘I’m not a pussy.’ I said back, firing another stone off of the hut.
‘Yes you are, my dad said so.’ Jason said.
‘Fuck that, your dad is an drunk.’ I told him
Jason smashed one knobby fist into the space under my nostrils, pushing the tip of my nose straight up and knocking me to the ground. I looked to him with a pure and astonished ‘What the fuck was that’ type face. My nose wasn’t bleeding, but I held my hand there anyway. I had stumbled back a good fifteen feet from him, about seventy feet from the house. In my hand was another stone.
It was round, a bit bigger than a golf ball. Smooth, with a lip on top that my pointer finger fit into perfectly. I rose from the ground and crow hopped, bouncing up with my right foot and stepping forward slightly with my left and bringing my arm around over the top of my head, the rock in a perfectly straight line with my right leg and my left arm crossed across my chest with my elbow cocked and palm facing outward and I let the rock fly while snapping my left arm down and landing with both feet under me and it was a fucking laser beam that flew past Jason Frank and about a foot over the fence and as it increased in velocity the sun shined down on us bright for a second and Jason watched it pass over his head, turning at his very strong neck that held his very big head he watched it sail past while shielding the sun from his eyes.
I knew what was going to happen before he did and turned on my heels while bending my legs for those crucial first few step and it felt like I was running in slow motion as I heard the shatter come. I looked over my shoulder and a patio door was blown to pieces and a man stood looking out through the glass.
Jason said, ‘holy shit.’
The man in the window didn’t say anything but he took one step through that window with the look of chase all over him.
Then we were running, all of us, with me in the lead and Window man at the back with Jason slowly dragging his head in between us, I knew the neighborhood but Jason didn’t and I thought that if I could slow down to him I could pull him in the direction in which we would lose our pursuer and disappear into the neighborhood somewhere.
I put the brakes on and Jason impressed me by being only about twenty feet behind me. But he looked fucking horrible. His eyes were all puffy like he was crying, his mouth was wet and pink and snot was coming out of his nose.
He spoke in bursts. ‘As… As…’ we were wasting time and the Window man was running at full speed.
‘Come on Jason, we are fucked.’
‘I… can… I… can’t…’ he fumbled around in his pockets. ‘Asthma… asthma…’
‘Shit.’ This was before asthma had started killing children who got pushed to hard at football practice. Then he did the unthinkable. He took a knee. Then I took off.
The Window man had gained a lot of ground and I was running my hardest, the ground switched from loose pebbles and concrete to the long wet grass and I pulled each knee up and made sure not to kick too hard and slip. If I could make it a little bit farther I could lose him and he knew that.
He didn’t say a word out loud, just silently and quickly trailed me. Then, I made the move.
I side hopped never breaking stride through a place were the branches were not very thick and when I hit the ground I jammed my heels into the dirt, I was surrounded on all sides by tall privacy trees that lines our neighborhood, two rows of thick pines in which the light didn’t shine through. I dug in and took off in the other direction and watched the man pass me in the other direction.
He was walking, Jason stood at his side laughing.
I stopped and watched them. Following them from the other side of the trees. Jason took big pulls from the inhaler and never looked back. He was leading him right to my house.
I kept following them while I cut through a neighbor’s yard. I watched as they walked up onto my parent’s porch and rang the doorbell.
I felt the first betrayal of a boy with two first names. I looked around on the ground for two more rocks.
Friday, October 17, 2008
how to leave for prep school.
Well, you probably already got the letter. Crisp and ominous in a crème colored envelope with the texture of prestige and printed on stiff paper, tri-folded and searingly congratulatory with the stamp of Shattuck Saint-Mary’s Preparatory Academy across the top. Your first thought upon pulling it from the mail box might have been to file it away in your closet, in the checkered Vans shoebox alongside the interim report cards (that your parents still don’t know you receive) and anything else kept secret, the box itself brimming with secrets that are no good for anyone.
And yeah, your stomach probably dropped as everything you had been readying for all summer began to come to a head. The trip that you took to Meriden, New Hampshire with your father to visit Kimball Union Academy, where you crossed the campus back and forth listening to a ‘haircut every week’ gentleman in black track pants and an orange polo shirt say things to you and your father, words like “foster” and “nurture” and “environment” and “responsibility” and “boys” and “men” while you tried to roll your blue oxford dress shirt up at the bottom to make it appear tucked in the heat made the evenly manicured grass swirl around your feet. Those words that were repeated to you in every interview that you did, across all the schools you visit in New England. Taft, Phillips Exeter, Vermont Academy
You left and drove down the long main street counting how many things there weren’t in the small town, seeing the forest through the trees all to well at this point. You looked at your father the whole drive there, trying through some kind of father son telepathy to let him know that you didn’t want this.
You won’t learn until some years later that he didn’t want it either.
And as for the locale, or lack thereof, push those thoughts from your head; they do not put prep schools within a long school bus ride of anything fun for a reason.
You don’t hide the letter though, this isn’t the wisdom teeth appointment thing after all, even with how much you dread the idea of high school in Minnesota, you recognize the opportunity, you understand that a nurturing environment might be the best thing for you, the responsibility, the blossoming of a boy into a man.
Ah yes, this is an important part to mention, through all of this you have wasted away your last summer as an Ann Arbor, Michigan high school student. Too worried with hockey tournaments and prep school interviews and essays and questionnaires and sharpening skates and caloric intake and chicken breasts and starched blue oxfords.
So you have two weeks left.
Go skinny-dipping at the house that Paula is housesitting in. Noa will be there too, and she’ll want to go swimming and her breasts are going to be bigger than you thought and as her pale body floats along the top of the water, you will wonder why you never… no! No time for reflection, you must move forward, you don’t have time to put in any work that you haven’t already. Pretend you know how to make White Russians and then calmly set it down as naked Paula and naked Noa lead you by the hand into a shower that is large enough for you all to do jumping jacks in.
Don’t actually do jumping jacks.
By the time you are done, Paula and Noa will have the cleanest breasts and butt cheeks in all of Washtenaw County and sometime in the future a man is going to come back to his home and wonder aloud where the other half of his bar of soap went.
Smoke a ton of dope with Paul B., every chance you get. For shits and giggles, see how much you can put into a blunt. I bet it’s a half-ounce.
Drink an entire bottle of Rum in about an hour. Puke out of the side of Kyle H.’s van right up until your driveway and then fall asleep in your own backyard. When your mom wakes you up, yelling at you from the porch, yell back to her that you are “just getting it out of your system.”
You are probably thinking, “Well, while I am out scrubbing boobs and puking on vans, shouldn’t I be concerned with packing? I mean two weeks isn’t a very long time.”
If you are worried about packing, don’t be. You will pack the last night, all night, before you leave in the morning, after you say goodbye to Abby. Packing this way is tactical; it leaves you less time to worry about the plethora of things you have to bring. If you thought about it for two whole weeks you would end up stuffing Hustlers into your penny loafers and figuring out how to pack your Wayne Gretzky Chunky Soup can collection without denting the cans or tearing the labels.
I tried to skate by without mentioning Abby; her ingredient status to this whole equation is that of anchor. She is the closest thing you know to a girlfriend, but she will really not care all that much when you leave. Not as much as you, unavoidably, will miss her. On the night before you leave you will take 13 Polaroid pictures together, she will give you a ring of hers and you will put these things into a little blue box with a snap close lid. Within two weeks of getting to school, she will break up with you while you sit on the floor in the hallway of your dorm, under the pay phone and facing a corner so no one sees you crying. You’ll enter all sixteen digits of your phone card number again to try and talk to your mom, but no one will be home including, and especially not, you.
But I am getting distracted and the look on your face is awful, time to turn it around, right the ship and go back to a time of preparation for the unknown.
Go through your room with the most meticulous of combs. Throw away said box of bad report card, the half bottle of crème de menthe that you drank at your homecoming dance? Pour it out. You learned that lesson. The empty bottles of Absolut? Put them in the bottom of the trashcan on a Thursday night. Anything you ever jerked off in or onto (socks, paper towel, gauze, a pair of Abby’s underwear) burn. In the back yard though, not in the driveway. The last thing your subdivision needs is a half pair of blackened and burned cotton panties lightly blowing down the street. Take a second to make sure everything goes up nicely, you got yourself into this mess, or maybe you got your mess into this more appropriately, save yourself the further embarrassment.
Your big box of porno? Yeah, the one in the blue Rubbermaid tub that says winter clothes on it. Get rid of it. This catalogue or your carnal taste ranging from unlabeled VHS tapes of every time you recorded something off of HBO, to all the Playboys, Hustlers, Penthouse, Club Confidential, Tail, Barely Legal, Cherry Toppers, Whack It!, MMF’s, Booty Stomp… Jesus, Booty Stomp? How did you get all this filthy erotica?
Trading? Right, anyway… You can’t even watch those tapes that you got in Sweden in The States, you’d need a Swedish VCR, you dirty packrat.
Get rid of it all. Somehow, burn it, sink it, do anything.
Because, in two months when your parents come to visit you on parents weekend, and your mom walks out to the car to get her Diet Coke, your dad is going to tell you a horror story about how they were cleaning out your room after you left so that Nana and Grandpa would have somewhere to sleep.
Your face is going to get really hot right here and you are going to feel your stomach flip itself over. This, I think, is guilt. You get this feeling when you lie, get caught lying, or know you are going to get in trouble.
He is going to tell you this awful little story about throwing everything in the room down the stairs to your mother, who waits at the bottom with her arms wide open, prepared to sort through all of her little angels knick knacks and brick-a-brack. Your Ninja Turtles and Ghostbusters, hockey cards, bug collection, baby teeth, seashells, and maybe, and she is ready for this one, that signed Hooters calendar that you got in Toronto.
He will tell you with all of his mannerisms and gestures about wrapping his hands around the box and feeling the weight inside. I mean winter clothes right? Jackets are heavy, so are sweaters. He even says that he almost didn’t throw it down the stairs towards your mother.
Curses, Father. Curses.
While it was in the hair, momentum shifting the contents and opening the lid, slingshotting everything out onto the stairs and towards mom, horrified at the deluge or pornography heading her way, a porno-lanche. She will throw up her hands and walk out the front door, done for the day.
They will find the report cards too, but since you are already at a prep school hundreds of miles away, a punishment seems a bit redundant at this point.
So, we have all of that taken care of. I suppose packing is next.
Don’t bring anything of value, sentimental or financial.
Don’t bring a bathing suit.
Bring towels, lots of them.
Bring an edge, a chip on your shoulder. Bring a sneer and an attitude. Don’t bring trust, you might be able to get that there. Bring secrets, so you have something to keep to yourself. Bring soap and a toothbrush, for sure. Get a hot pot, something to boil water. Shitty blankets and sheets to match, not your favorite pillow or any expectations. Black, Maroon, and White polo shirts, two pairs of Docker’s Khakis, and a pair of Sperry Topsiders.
Hey, relax. I know it sounds bad. That’s why you don’t bring expectation. When you come out of it, you’ll come out stronger.
And you only go to prep school for two days. The day you drive through the prestigious stone arch and the day you drive out with your diploma.
Hey, and talk to that girl behind you in the health services line on the first day, she will make fun of your name and you will make fun of hers.
She might save your life one day.
Ok kid, keep your head up, your shoulders squared and your knuckles forward and you’ll be alright.
I promise.
And yeah, your stomach probably dropped as everything you had been readying for all summer began to come to a head. The trip that you took to Meriden, New Hampshire with your father to visit Kimball Union Academy, where you crossed the campus back and forth listening to a ‘haircut every week’ gentleman in black track pants and an orange polo shirt say things to you and your father, words like “foster” and “nurture” and “environment” and “responsibility” and “boys” and “men” while you tried to roll your blue oxford dress shirt up at the bottom to make it appear tucked in the heat made the evenly manicured grass swirl around your feet. Those words that were repeated to you in every interview that you did, across all the schools you visit in New England. Taft, Phillips Exeter, Vermont Academy
You left and drove down the long main street counting how many things there weren’t in the small town, seeing the forest through the trees all to well at this point. You looked at your father the whole drive there, trying through some kind of father son telepathy to let him know that you didn’t want this.
You won’t learn until some years later that he didn’t want it either.
And as for the locale, or lack thereof, push those thoughts from your head; they do not put prep schools within a long school bus ride of anything fun for a reason.
You don’t hide the letter though, this isn’t the wisdom teeth appointment thing after all, even with how much you dread the idea of high school in Minnesota, you recognize the opportunity, you understand that a nurturing environment might be the best thing for you, the responsibility, the blossoming of a boy into a man.
Ah yes, this is an important part to mention, through all of this you have wasted away your last summer as an Ann Arbor, Michigan high school student. Too worried with hockey tournaments and prep school interviews and essays and questionnaires and sharpening skates and caloric intake and chicken breasts and starched blue oxfords.
So you have two weeks left.
Go skinny-dipping at the house that Paula is housesitting in. Noa will be there too, and she’ll want to go swimming and her breasts are going to be bigger than you thought and as her pale body floats along the top of the water, you will wonder why you never… no! No time for reflection, you must move forward, you don’t have time to put in any work that you haven’t already. Pretend you know how to make White Russians and then calmly set it down as naked Paula and naked Noa lead you by the hand into a shower that is large enough for you all to do jumping jacks in.
Don’t actually do jumping jacks.
By the time you are done, Paula and Noa will have the cleanest breasts and butt cheeks in all of Washtenaw County and sometime in the future a man is going to come back to his home and wonder aloud where the other half of his bar of soap went.
Smoke a ton of dope with Paul B., every chance you get. For shits and giggles, see how much you can put into a blunt. I bet it’s a half-ounce.
Drink an entire bottle of Rum in about an hour. Puke out of the side of Kyle H.’s van right up until your driveway and then fall asleep in your own backyard. When your mom wakes you up, yelling at you from the porch, yell back to her that you are “just getting it out of your system.”
You are probably thinking, “Well, while I am out scrubbing boobs and puking on vans, shouldn’t I be concerned with packing? I mean two weeks isn’t a very long time.”
If you are worried about packing, don’t be. You will pack the last night, all night, before you leave in the morning, after you say goodbye to Abby. Packing this way is tactical; it leaves you less time to worry about the plethora of things you have to bring. If you thought about it for two whole weeks you would end up stuffing Hustlers into your penny loafers and figuring out how to pack your Wayne Gretzky Chunky Soup can collection without denting the cans or tearing the labels.
I tried to skate by without mentioning Abby; her ingredient status to this whole equation is that of anchor. She is the closest thing you know to a girlfriend, but she will really not care all that much when you leave. Not as much as you, unavoidably, will miss her. On the night before you leave you will take 13 Polaroid pictures together, she will give you a ring of hers and you will put these things into a little blue box with a snap close lid. Within two weeks of getting to school, she will break up with you while you sit on the floor in the hallway of your dorm, under the pay phone and facing a corner so no one sees you crying. You’ll enter all sixteen digits of your phone card number again to try and talk to your mom, but no one will be home including, and especially not, you.
But I am getting distracted and the look on your face is awful, time to turn it around, right the ship and go back to a time of preparation for the unknown.
Go through your room with the most meticulous of combs. Throw away said box of bad report card, the half bottle of crème de menthe that you drank at your homecoming dance? Pour it out. You learned that lesson. The empty bottles of Absolut? Put them in the bottom of the trashcan on a Thursday night. Anything you ever jerked off in or onto (socks, paper towel, gauze, a pair of Abby’s underwear) burn. In the back yard though, not in the driveway. The last thing your subdivision needs is a half pair of blackened and burned cotton panties lightly blowing down the street. Take a second to make sure everything goes up nicely, you got yourself into this mess, or maybe you got your mess into this more appropriately, save yourself the further embarrassment.
Your big box of porno? Yeah, the one in the blue Rubbermaid tub that says winter clothes on it. Get rid of it. This catalogue or your carnal taste ranging from unlabeled VHS tapes of every time you recorded something off of HBO, to all the Playboys, Hustlers, Penthouse, Club Confidential, Tail, Barely Legal, Cherry Toppers, Whack It!, MMF’s, Booty Stomp… Jesus, Booty Stomp? How did you get all this filthy erotica?
Trading? Right, anyway… You can’t even watch those tapes that you got in Sweden in The States, you’d need a Swedish VCR, you dirty packrat.
Get rid of it all. Somehow, burn it, sink it, do anything.
Because, in two months when your parents come to visit you on parents weekend, and your mom walks out to the car to get her Diet Coke, your dad is going to tell you a horror story about how they were cleaning out your room after you left so that Nana and Grandpa would have somewhere to sleep.
Your face is going to get really hot right here and you are going to feel your stomach flip itself over. This, I think, is guilt. You get this feeling when you lie, get caught lying, or know you are going to get in trouble.
He is going to tell you this awful little story about throwing everything in the room down the stairs to your mother, who waits at the bottom with her arms wide open, prepared to sort through all of her little angels knick knacks and brick-a-brack. Your Ninja Turtles and Ghostbusters, hockey cards, bug collection, baby teeth, seashells, and maybe, and she is ready for this one, that signed Hooters calendar that you got in Toronto.
He will tell you with all of his mannerisms and gestures about wrapping his hands around the box and feeling the weight inside. I mean winter clothes right? Jackets are heavy, so are sweaters. He even says that he almost didn’t throw it down the stairs towards your mother.
Curses, Father. Curses.
While it was in the hair, momentum shifting the contents and opening the lid, slingshotting everything out onto the stairs and towards mom, horrified at the deluge or pornography heading her way, a porno-lanche. She will throw up her hands and walk out the front door, done for the day.
They will find the report cards too, but since you are already at a prep school hundreds of miles away, a punishment seems a bit redundant at this point.
So, we have all of that taken care of. I suppose packing is next.
Don’t bring anything of value, sentimental or financial.
Don’t bring a bathing suit.
Bring towels, lots of them.
Bring an edge, a chip on your shoulder. Bring a sneer and an attitude. Don’t bring trust, you might be able to get that there. Bring secrets, so you have something to keep to yourself. Bring soap and a toothbrush, for sure. Get a hot pot, something to boil water. Shitty blankets and sheets to match, not your favorite pillow or any expectations. Black, Maroon, and White polo shirts, two pairs of Docker’s Khakis, and a pair of Sperry Topsiders.
Hey, relax. I know it sounds bad. That’s why you don’t bring expectation. When you come out of it, you’ll come out stronger.
And you only go to prep school for two days. The day you drive through the prestigious stone arch and the day you drive out with your diploma.
Hey, and talk to that girl behind you in the health services line on the first day, she will make fun of your name and you will make fun of hers.
She might save your life one day.
Ok kid, keep your head up, your shoulders squared and your knuckles forward and you’ll be alright.
I promise.
Wednesday, October 15, 2008
come home gentlemen.
The sky is a mute gray, the color of campfire ash and I wonder if it is always going to be like that. Trees with no leaves stretch for miles in perfect rows that can be seen as far down for as fast as the car moves. We pass cars, trucks mostly, they drive on the service road for I-60 and cut outward into the woods.
The land begins to open up towards Faribault’s west side at I-35, giant tracts of land stripped and hoping for a plot of commerce. You transfer onto the 35 and the sky gets darker, then sun setting somewhere back behind you and behind all of that gray, like it set weeks ago, months.
Driving into Faribault, Minnesota at dusk and there is no one to be seen, the town that dreaded sundown. The parking lots of the Hy-Vee Grocery and the Wal-Mart across the street sit barren and brown leaves scrape across the parking lot and meet in the middle to spin a tight circle with the dailies and leaflets. Cars sit empty deep along side streets and every light from the highway exit to the main street stands at green, ushering you along and back to school.
You pass the groceries and their parking lots and alongside the Thomas Scott Buckham Memorial Library that crawls up to the street it’s bells ringing the full cadence of 7pm. I don’t know who out there hears it.
Then the mom and pops begin to run along side the street all pushed out close to the road that used to be a main strip of the highway until I-35 was expanded in 1975. People pulling their Ford Mavericks or Delta 88’s off of the road to buy a wool blanket or get a quart of milk, a handful of candy for the backseat. The streets bright and busy in the summer with lines around the corner to ride the tilt-a-whirls built by Herbert Sellner back in the 20’s. Still made in Faribault today, they use salt sacks to simulate people before they leave the factory. You try to imagine the brightly colored people with the sun shining down on them and witnessing a future that never really came. The airy and open shops now dusty with grime and closed most of the day with cheap Thanksgiving decorations taped in the windows or pilgrims with scarecrow arms that swing on brads. The tuxedo store waits for us to have our prom and a photographer in a dim studio waits to take senior pictures for those moving on.
The liquor stores, the most per capita of any city in the country, four of them sit across from each other on the corners, divided in half by the railway tracks. Their signs swing back and forth with squeaky hinges singing sirens song for the coal men, or the turkey processors, the cannery and the plastics plant where a black smoke boils overhead.
The car moves slow down the hill past the tracks and turning at the depot to go over the ravine. The ravine with it’s ghosts of missing children and the short footsteps of men who have gone running from the correctional facility that sits out on what they used to call the State Schools land, the mental hospitals. At it’s deepest you could fall straight down the hill and no one would find you unless they fell on top of you. The ghost stories of woman luring drunk men from the edge of the trees with their red eyes and pockets full of the brittle bones of forest vermin. In a town like this, it didn’t take witches and gypsies to kill drunken men, for that they had winters and combines, heavy machinery and the occasional stray hunting round.
I can start to see the windows of dorms that sit with their backs to the ravine. The dorms of the lower school where the grades six through nine live peering out over the town and hovering at the very cusp of affluence and poverty, one glacially overtaking the other.
The car stops at the four-way and begins to turn on Shumway Ave. named for Augusta Shumway who lost all of her property in the Chicago fire but fulfilled her promise to build a chapel for the Bishop Boys school, mailing all of her insurance checks to Henry Whipple, who was the first Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Minnesota. Now she has a road and I eat lunch in a building that bears her name.
American flags drifty idly alongside month early Virgin Mary’s at the fronts of the houses. It is two months since our greatest American tragedy and a candle flickers in every front window.
The grass is a little bit greener up here than below the ravine.
I can see the large trees that mark the entrance to our school as we coast silently along Shumway, the large stone arch rises out from in between two massive and naked Elm trees. Too my left, bordering our school is the Minnesota State Academy for the Deaf where the football huddle was invented to hide the sign language that players would give each other before plays, this was in the early 1900’s. The entire Academy is bereft of activity as we pass by and turn into the short and curved road that leads through the arch and between the trees.
Through the arch and the campus opens up wide in front of us, a large circular drive that contains a soccer field and baseball diamond, it’s backstop rusty and buckled, dog-eared at the top corners.
The first building that we pass is the non-descript home shared by Mr. Freeman and Mr. Bourdoin, physics and trigonometry respectively and carrying further on the right is the first girls dorm, Clapp. Built in the 1970’s and wearing every sign of it from it’s slanted outside windows that slope down with short angular awnings for style rather than substance. A flat roof that collects snow and water. The second floor has a shorter ceiling because it was added in haste. I start to see the first people slipping in and out of the windows and in between the drapes as we pass. An empty bench sits out front with a tarnished plague dedicated to someone’s checkbook.
A third of the way around the circle and sitting on a slight hill is the second girl’s dorm, Breck Hall, much more traditional with three floors and stacked stones for walls, lined with shrubbery around the base. The building sits on a slight hill making it difficult to see anything inside, the front door bobs open and closed slightly as if someone can’t decide to stay or go.
As you round past Breck, Shumway Hall starts, the gymnasium stairs rolling out from two enormous barn doors and onto the sidewalk. The van stops here and we pile out, I grab my one suitcase and throw it over my back, and walk along the same path the van will take. The gymnasium connects to the academic part of Shumway Hall and is further book ended by the cafeteria where it seems like every light in the place is on and as I walk by I can here the low reverb of a late dinner inside. It is around now that I feel the surrender of coming back, a relaxing feeling of giving in to four more months away from home.
This morning, before mom took me to the airport, she took me out to breakfast at the Alpha Coney, just her and I, which is something I can’t remember her ever doing. I forced myself to eat a stack of blueberry pancakes and bite back emotion. She couldn’t walk to my gate what with all the security increases and she gave me a hug and I thought about that as I looked back over the campus and past the Chapel, beyond that the houses of other teachers, far from sight and tucked into a corner of the woods with short driveways that attached to the main circular drive and beyond that the exit out of the arch you came in under.
I passed Shumway and saw my dorm, Whipple it was called. Named for the man cashing in on Augusta Shumway’s misfortune.
It is the largest of the dorms, three stories with an east and west wing. A branch jumps off at the end, giving it a slight L shape where the larger apartments jut out, the apartments for the dorm parents. The building used to be four floors, but sometime in the past there was a fire the decimated the inside and it was rebuilt to only have three. There is a small fourth floor made up of empty half rooms and thing floorboards that sit above our drop ceiling. Something walks around up there, jumping over the spaces in the rafters where it is unsafe to walk. Something whispers and laughs in the middle of the night when it is only you to hear it. Two little girls laugh down through the pipes with a cotton like ping that wafts up from the radiator.
The steps up and into are the building are those aggravating long and short steps where it appears as if they couldn’t decide whether to build a ramp or a set of stairs so they settled on an obnoxious combo where every steps plateau is about two and half feet long and they rise up only a mere two and half inches to the large steel dorms. The doors have portal windows big enough to peak out of the doors themselves open with a great bit of resistance, straining and
popping where missing rivets have left the steel sheeting bowed out.
The doors open into the Dead Hall. In the middle of the dorm, bisecting the east and west wings is a large room that rises all three floors from which a small area of each floor can be seen. The room has giant marble slabs that rise up to the ceiling and on the slabs, carved into the rock are the names of every man and woman who was killed in combat while attending the school back when religion wasn’t enough to draw students and it became military oriented. Nurses and soldiers, all broken down by war and divided by rank and the date in which they were killed in action. The names rise on each side of the room, rising high enough that they become hard to read. Most of the military tradition is gone however and the only carry over is a Rifle Drill Team that conducts practice in the gymnasium. In the dead hall, at times, you can hear argumentative whispers towards the ceiling that collect and swirl at a point up top and above the dusty and dim chandelier that hangs there, whispers of the dead coming home to the familiar.
The wet and cold feeling against your left arm, when you take a sip from a water fountain, is Dobbin. Dobbin was a black lab that lived with a family in the dorm when it was eviscerated by fire. He puts his cold nose to your arm because the fountains were put in eight inches higher than before the fire and he can no longer reach the cool pooled water on his own.
Outside, you could hear him running back and forth, touching his nose to the hot door handles before he settled and burned.
After the Dead Hall there are more short stairs to a stained blue carpet, horrible under the fluorescent lights and my room is the first in the west wing. The heavy wood door is painted brown with a silver kick plate at the bottom and a large deadbolt lock that clicks over heavy. My room is no different from the rest of them, aside from a few pictures and posters. It’s dark when I arrive and my roommate is curled atop his loft with his back to me, he waves a hand when I flick the overhead on and then off. Making my way to a small desk on the far side of the room and fumble for a lamp and turn it on and put my suitcase down against my bed.
The land begins to open up towards Faribault’s west side at I-35, giant tracts of land stripped and hoping for a plot of commerce. You transfer onto the 35 and the sky gets darker, then sun setting somewhere back behind you and behind all of that gray, like it set weeks ago, months.
Driving into Faribault, Minnesota at dusk and there is no one to be seen, the town that dreaded sundown. The parking lots of the Hy-Vee Grocery and the Wal-Mart across the street sit barren and brown leaves scrape across the parking lot and meet in the middle to spin a tight circle with the dailies and leaflets. Cars sit empty deep along side streets and every light from the highway exit to the main street stands at green, ushering you along and back to school.
You pass the groceries and their parking lots and alongside the Thomas Scott Buckham Memorial Library that crawls up to the street it’s bells ringing the full cadence of 7pm. I don’t know who out there hears it.
Then the mom and pops begin to run along side the street all pushed out close to the road that used to be a main strip of the highway until I-35 was expanded in 1975. People pulling their Ford Mavericks or Delta 88’s off of the road to buy a wool blanket or get a quart of milk, a handful of candy for the backseat. The streets bright and busy in the summer with lines around the corner to ride the tilt-a-whirls built by Herbert Sellner back in the 20’s. Still made in Faribault today, they use salt sacks to simulate people before they leave the factory. You try to imagine the brightly colored people with the sun shining down on them and witnessing a future that never really came. The airy and open shops now dusty with grime and closed most of the day with cheap Thanksgiving decorations taped in the windows or pilgrims with scarecrow arms that swing on brads. The tuxedo store waits for us to have our prom and a photographer in a dim studio waits to take senior pictures for those moving on.
The liquor stores, the most per capita of any city in the country, four of them sit across from each other on the corners, divided in half by the railway tracks. Their signs swing back and forth with squeaky hinges singing sirens song for the coal men, or the turkey processors, the cannery and the plastics plant where a black smoke boils overhead.
The car moves slow down the hill past the tracks and turning at the depot to go over the ravine. The ravine with it’s ghosts of missing children and the short footsteps of men who have gone running from the correctional facility that sits out on what they used to call the State Schools land, the mental hospitals. At it’s deepest you could fall straight down the hill and no one would find you unless they fell on top of you. The ghost stories of woman luring drunk men from the edge of the trees with their red eyes and pockets full of the brittle bones of forest vermin. In a town like this, it didn’t take witches and gypsies to kill drunken men, for that they had winters and combines, heavy machinery and the occasional stray hunting round.
I can start to see the windows of dorms that sit with their backs to the ravine. The dorms of the lower school where the grades six through nine live peering out over the town and hovering at the very cusp of affluence and poverty, one glacially overtaking the other.
The car stops at the four-way and begins to turn on Shumway Ave. named for Augusta Shumway who lost all of her property in the Chicago fire but fulfilled her promise to build a chapel for the Bishop Boys school, mailing all of her insurance checks to Henry Whipple, who was the first Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Minnesota. Now she has a road and I eat lunch in a building that bears her name.
American flags drifty idly alongside month early Virgin Mary’s at the fronts of the houses. It is two months since our greatest American tragedy and a candle flickers in every front window.
The grass is a little bit greener up here than below the ravine.
I can see the large trees that mark the entrance to our school as we coast silently along Shumway, the large stone arch rises out from in between two massive and naked Elm trees. Too my left, bordering our school is the Minnesota State Academy for the Deaf where the football huddle was invented to hide the sign language that players would give each other before plays, this was in the early 1900’s. The entire Academy is bereft of activity as we pass by and turn into the short and curved road that leads through the arch and between the trees.
Through the arch and the campus opens up wide in front of us, a large circular drive that contains a soccer field and baseball diamond, it’s backstop rusty and buckled, dog-eared at the top corners.
The first building that we pass is the non-descript home shared by Mr. Freeman and Mr. Bourdoin, physics and trigonometry respectively and carrying further on the right is the first girls dorm, Clapp. Built in the 1970’s and wearing every sign of it from it’s slanted outside windows that slope down with short angular awnings for style rather than substance. A flat roof that collects snow and water. The second floor has a shorter ceiling because it was added in haste. I start to see the first people slipping in and out of the windows and in between the drapes as we pass. An empty bench sits out front with a tarnished plague dedicated to someone’s checkbook.
A third of the way around the circle and sitting on a slight hill is the second girl’s dorm, Breck Hall, much more traditional with three floors and stacked stones for walls, lined with shrubbery around the base. The building sits on a slight hill making it difficult to see anything inside, the front door bobs open and closed slightly as if someone can’t decide to stay or go.
As you round past Breck, Shumway Hall starts, the gymnasium stairs rolling out from two enormous barn doors and onto the sidewalk. The van stops here and we pile out, I grab my one suitcase and throw it over my back, and walk along the same path the van will take. The gymnasium connects to the academic part of Shumway Hall and is further book ended by the cafeteria where it seems like every light in the place is on and as I walk by I can here the low reverb of a late dinner inside. It is around now that I feel the surrender of coming back, a relaxing feeling of giving in to four more months away from home.
This morning, before mom took me to the airport, she took me out to breakfast at the Alpha Coney, just her and I, which is something I can’t remember her ever doing. I forced myself to eat a stack of blueberry pancakes and bite back emotion. She couldn’t walk to my gate what with all the security increases and she gave me a hug and I thought about that as I looked back over the campus and past the Chapel, beyond that the houses of other teachers, far from sight and tucked into a corner of the woods with short driveways that attached to the main circular drive and beyond that the exit out of the arch you came in under.
I passed Shumway and saw my dorm, Whipple it was called. Named for the man cashing in on Augusta Shumway’s misfortune.
It is the largest of the dorms, three stories with an east and west wing. A branch jumps off at the end, giving it a slight L shape where the larger apartments jut out, the apartments for the dorm parents. The building used to be four floors, but sometime in the past there was a fire the decimated the inside and it was rebuilt to only have three. There is a small fourth floor made up of empty half rooms and thing floorboards that sit above our drop ceiling. Something walks around up there, jumping over the spaces in the rafters where it is unsafe to walk. Something whispers and laughs in the middle of the night when it is only you to hear it. Two little girls laugh down through the pipes with a cotton like ping that wafts up from the radiator.
The steps up and into are the building are those aggravating long and short steps where it appears as if they couldn’t decide whether to build a ramp or a set of stairs so they settled on an obnoxious combo where every steps plateau is about two and half feet long and they rise up only a mere two and half inches to the large steel dorms. The doors have portal windows big enough to peak out of the doors themselves open with a great bit of resistance, straining and
popping where missing rivets have left the steel sheeting bowed out.
The doors open into the Dead Hall. In the middle of the dorm, bisecting the east and west wings is a large room that rises all three floors from which a small area of each floor can be seen. The room has giant marble slabs that rise up to the ceiling and on the slabs, carved into the rock are the names of every man and woman who was killed in combat while attending the school back when religion wasn’t enough to draw students and it became military oriented. Nurses and soldiers, all broken down by war and divided by rank and the date in which they were killed in action. The names rise on each side of the room, rising high enough that they become hard to read. Most of the military tradition is gone however and the only carry over is a Rifle Drill Team that conducts practice in the gymnasium. In the dead hall, at times, you can hear argumentative whispers towards the ceiling that collect and swirl at a point up top and above the dusty and dim chandelier that hangs there, whispers of the dead coming home to the familiar.
The wet and cold feeling against your left arm, when you take a sip from a water fountain, is Dobbin. Dobbin was a black lab that lived with a family in the dorm when it was eviscerated by fire. He puts his cold nose to your arm because the fountains were put in eight inches higher than before the fire and he can no longer reach the cool pooled water on his own.
Outside, you could hear him running back and forth, touching his nose to the hot door handles before he settled and burned.
After the Dead Hall there are more short stairs to a stained blue carpet, horrible under the fluorescent lights and my room is the first in the west wing. The heavy wood door is painted brown with a silver kick plate at the bottom and a large deadbolt lock that clicks over heavy. My room is no different from the rest of them, aside from a few pictures and posters. It’s dark when I arrive and my roommate is curled atop his loft with his back to me, he waves a hand when I flick the overhead on and then off. Making my way to a small desk on the far side of the room and fumble for a lamp and turn it on and put my suitcase down against my bed.
through the trees.
Ratty would wake up in the middle of the night and see a dead boy sitting on his dirty laundry. A boy who had killed himself in Ratty’s room about thirty years prior, swinging from a necktie in at the top of the closet and his mom said that he came back here because this was the place he loved so much. He loved it so much that he hung himself and came back to sit in the closet that he died in at the school that no doubt drove him to his end.
Craig Hupp and I heard the choppy and distended laughs of faraway little girls come ringing up and out of our radiator one night in a cadence akin to cicadas. We listened and joked about it. Neither of us fell asleep, we just listened in the dark until the laughs turned into voices asking us why, over and over, why? They sang songs and it went from a cottony sweeping voice into something metallic and harsh and close. Craig, on the bottom bunk, started to swear into the radiator, whispering profanity and I pulled the blanket up around my chin and turned away from the noise and that was when I saw it in the far corner above a dresser. Craig saw it too and he was out of the bed and to the light switch and there, for a razor thin moment in time, everything hung still and serene around us and with no sound at all, every poster came down off the wall and fell still as death in between us.
We never put the posters back up. I don’t think we wanted to see them fall again like that, unnatural.
Kirk Golden sat studying by a lamp well after lights out, his face buried in a Spanish work book and Spence Dylan sat up in his bed pulling hair out of his chest when, with a light pop, the lamp went dark. Spencer with his long frame, his arms where almost three inches longer than they needed to be, a swimmers body more or less and with one long swing of one of those arms he flicked the wall switch on almost as soon as the lamp had gone off. Kirk sat there at his desk still, the Spanish book spread out on the floor and his eyes fixed on the light bulb that now stood on it’s end, the glass cut neatly around the end so that it now resembled a milky clear piece of fruit. The cap, the contact and the tungsten filament where still inside of the desk lamp. It sat there on its end, right side up, before it gently fell onto its side, but that’s not how it looked. It looked like someone or something gentle laid it on its side and it rolled off the table where Kirk caught it in his open hand.
Then there is that dog with his cold and sincere nose pressed to your arm, but no dog, really.
The man who sits at the foot of your bed, his weight keeping your blankets down.
There was the time I saw my first dead body. An electrical worker out in the woods, his collapsed cherry picker laid out across the concrete and dead body two hundred feet out and into the woods and collapsed over a fallen tree, his helmet a hundred feet further. It had just started to get cold for that year. Dead leaves spread out across his back like shavings of the season.
The Dead Hall with the walls cool like wet slate and up above the chandelier the dead whisper down on you.
The three boys walking back from the rink and through the upper school campus that sat between them and the lower school where the younger kids went, ninth grade and below. They were so out of breath when they got back that you couldn’t tell they were going into shock until Joey’s eyes rolled back and his head clicked off of the hallway tile. Drew said they saw a man sitting on top of the chapel, at the highest point of the roof. He was in overalls and as they approached he turned his back to them. Drew said, to the doctor, that they had carried on walking, their highlighted heads all turned up at what was there. Drew said they walked past and it, and it, he, slid off the roof and down behind them.
That was when they started into a run.
That one night though, that bad one, when Chad Mayberry heard that woman out in the woods, when it had started to get warm and he walked out of his room scratching his head and looking around. The entire north face of the building heard it next.
A woman yelling for help. Again and again and no one knew what to do. Pat Porter and his brother Zach yelled out of their window and Ernest Giovani shined a flashlight meagerly into the dark. Casey Carlisle put his hands over his ears and Mr. Seibel called 911 with his study hall clipboard shielding his eyes while he pressed them into the screen of a window.
The police came and we looked down at them in the still bare woods as their dogs barked and their flashlights cut thin swaths through the trees and rested for seconds of recognition on every tree stump or body size pile of leaves. They had walked out for a short distance when we heard it again.
We all did. The cops and us. In the basement this time though. The sound rifled out from the stairwell, three stories up, strident and grating, sharply bouncing off the concrete and throwing the words hard through the hallway.
Help me.
They all came running back towards the building, their lights bobbing back towards us, throwing shadows against the building. The dogs off the leash and tearing through the leaves, leaping at the rusted basement door with their teeth gnashing.
We watched as the cops went in the door and we looked down the stair well as the dogs ran back and forth, quieter now but sniffing hard.
Down there in that basement there are tunnels to connect all of the buildings in the winter. Old tunnels, older than some of the buildings they were connected too and older still than the connections they made no longer. Giant locked doors that you dare not put your palm too went off all over the city. Hollow and empty tunnels full of cold air and history.
The cops came out of the basement and looked around at all of us, looking for a smile or a laugh to give away the joke. There was none, no laugh or smile or joke. Just scared boys, miles from home.
Craig Hupp and I heard the choppy and distended laughs of faraway little girls come ringing up and out of our radiator one night in a cadence akin to cicadas. We listened and joked about it. Neither of us fell asleep, we just listened in the dark until the laughs turned into voices asking us why, over and over, why? They sang songs and it went from a cottony sweeping voice into something metallic and harsh and close. Craig, on the bottom bunk, started to swear into the radiator, whispering profanity and I pulled the blanket up around my chin and turned away from the noise and that was when I saw it in the far corner above a dresser. Craig saw it too and he was out of the bed and to the light switch and there, for a razor thin moment in time, everything hung still and serene around us and with no sound at all, every poster came down off the wall and fell still as death in between us.
We never put the posters back up. I don’t think we wanted to see them fall again like that, unnatural.
Kirk Golden sat studying by a lamp well after lights out, his face buried in a Spanish work book and Spence Dylan sat up in his bed pulling hair out of his chest when, with a light pop, the lamp went dark. Spencer with his long frame, his arms where almost three inches longer than they needed to be, a swimmers body more or less and with one long swing of one of those arms he flicked the wall switch on almost as soon as the lamp had gone off. Kirk sat there at his desk still, the Spanish book spread out on the floor and his eyes fixed on the light bulb that now stood on it’s end, the glass cut neatly around the end so that it now resembled a milky clear piece of fruit. The cap, the contact and the tungsten filament where still inside of the desk lamp. It sat there on its end, right side up, before it gently fell onto its side, but that’s not how it looked. It looked like someone or something gentle laid it on its side and it rolled off the table where Kirk caught it in his open hand.
Then there is that dog with his cold and sincere nose pressed to your arm, but no dog, really.
The man who sits at the foot of your bed, his weight keeping your blankets down.
There was the time I saw my first dead body. An electrical worker out in the woods, his collapsed cherry picker laid out across the concrete and dead body two hundred feet out and into the woods and collapsed over a fallen tree, his helmet a hundred feet further. It had just started to get cold for that year. Dead leaves spread out across his back like shavings of the season.
The Dead Hall with the walls cool like wet slate and up above the chandelier the dead whisper down on you.
The three boys walking back from the rink and through the upper school campus that sat between them and the lower school where the younger kids went, ninth grade and below. They were so out of breath when they got back that you couldn’t tell they were going into shock until Joey’s eyes rolled back and his head clicked off of the hallway tile. Drew said they saw a man sitting on top of the chapel, at the highest point of the roof. He was in overalls and as they approached he turned his back to them. Drew said, to the doctor, that they had carried on walking, their highlighted heads all turned up at what was there. Drew said they walked past and it, and it, he, slid off the roof and down behind them.
That was when they started into a run.
That one night though, that bad one, when Chad Mayberry heard that woman out in the woods, when it had started to get warm and he walked out of his room scratching his head and looking around. The entire north face of the building heard it next.
A woman yelling for help. Again and again and no one knew what to do. Pat Porter and his brother Zach yelled out of their window and Ernest Giovani shined a flashlight meagerly into the dark. Casey Carlisle put his hands over his ears and Mr. Seibel called 911 with his study hall clipboard shielding his eyes while he pressed them into the screen of a window.
The police came and we looked down at them in the still bare woods as their dogs barked and their flashlights cut thin swaths through the trees and rested for seconds of recognition on every tree stump or body size pile of leaves. They had walked out for a short distance when we heard it again.
We all did. The cops and us. In the basement this time though. The sound rifled out from the stairwell, three stories up, strident and grating, sharply bouncing off the concrete and throwing the words hard through the hallway.
Help me.
They all came running back towards the building, their lights bobbing back towards us, throwing shadows against the building. The dogs off the leash and tearing through the leaves, leaping at the rusted basement door with their teeth gnashing.
We watched as the cops went in the door and we looked down the stair well as the dogs ran back and forth, quieter now but sniffing hard.
Down there in that basement there are tunnels to connect all of the buildings in the winter. Old tunnels, older than some of the buildings they were connected too and older still than the connections they made no longer. Giant locked doors that you dare not put your palm too went off all over the city. Hollow and empty tunnels full of cold air and history.
The cops came out of the basement and looked around at all of us, looking for a smile or a laugh to give away the joke. There was none, no laugh or smile or joke. Just scared boys, miles from home.
abreast of fresh hair.
and here we go.
a few years back, at eastern michigan, i started up this little zine called supermarkets are deathtraps. with the help of some great people i was able to make two volumes of the zine, one about zombies (i think) and one about our fathers. i think there are still a couple buried in a milkcrate in the pantry. so i thought i would throw a blog at the wall and see if it sticks.
this will be a place for my stories. a little box out there in the ether, under the bed, in the nightstand.
thanks.
a few years back, at eastern michigan, i started up this little zine called supermarkets are deathtraps. with the help of some great people i was able to make two volumes of the zine, one about zombies (i think) and one about our fathers. i think there are still a couple buried in a milkcrate in the pantry. so i thought i would throw a blog at the wall and see if it sticks.
this will be a place for my stories. a little box out there in the ether, under the bed, in the nightstand.
thanks.
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