The Other (2 page)

For a while, my mother sang with the Merry Mavericks—about a dozen men and women with a Peter, Paul and Mary look but an Up with People sound. They performed at Christmas in the Food Circus at the Seattle Center. My mother was a soloist. Hitting her high notes, she sounded like Judy Garland. I remember her coming off the stage dressed in red-and-green satin and taking Carol and me across the food court for caramel corn. Carol and I were glad when all of this was over, because we only liked pop tunes. In fact, the first album I bought, the summer after eighth grade, was Bread’s
On the Waters,
because “Make It with You,” sung by David Gates in falsetto, moved me. In wood shop, I built speaker cabinets out of low-grade walnut, then installed tweeters, woofers, and
de rigueur
large woofers from SpeakerLab. I traded a cousin some speakers like this for a battered drum set, and he showed me how to play the opening licks, complete with cowbell, of “Honky Tonk Woman.” For two years, I washed dishes at a Mexican restaurant for $2.65 an hour, partly to fund drum lessons from a burned-out but still-hip jazzman. I kept a fish tank in my room, went bowling sporadically, and played hockey on roller skates. I had a normal interest in girls, which I admit is a declaration dispensing with the subject, so I will add that I was the sort of hapless boy who came away from cheap encounters with the blues.

John William and I were of the generation that was slightly late for the zeal of the sixties and slightly early for disco. The most popular song, I think, in ’74, was “Takin’ Care of Business” by Bachman-Turner Overdrive, though the Doobie Brothers were also esteemed. In Seattle, white guys wore flares, shags, and Pacific Trail jackets; white girls wore sailor pants or 501 jeans and let their hair fall around their faces. We were seven when JFK was killed, twelve when King was killed, and fourteen when four students were killed at Kent State, but by the time we were old enough to fathom “the Zeitgeist” (a term getting play in ’74), there was détente, H-bomb drills were quaint, and there was no more draft. Always on the front page of the
Seattle Times
was inexplicable news, for a teen-ager, of tariffs and wage and price controls. Who cared? Gerald Ford became president in ’74 and began hitting people with golf balls, apparently, thousands of miles away from Seattle. Everything, in fact, was thousands of miles away from Seattle. It was the portal to the North Pacific. It was where you outfitted to travel in Alaska, gateway to the Last Frontier.

In ’74, though, I was the first Countryman to go to college. My father and his brothers were all nail bangers, and most of my male cousins followed suit by working in construction or the trades. They were straight-faced when I opted for college, and they’re straight-faced today about the indoor work I’ve done for twenty-seven years. I’m a high-school English teacher. I’m the sort of high-school English teacher who has an unpublished novel in his desk drawer, and not just one unpublished novel but, in boxes at home, three more in varying stages of disarray. On the upside, I have an agent named Allison Krantz, or Ally, as she signs her e-mails. We’ve never met, because Ally lives in Manhattan, though now that I’m rich and a little bit famous we’re slated to meet next month.

It’s been, for me, three decades as an unpublished writer, but I don’t mean to cast myself as a failure by saying this, because teaching, at least, has been rewarding. I’m confident I’m good at it. I think that most of my students like me, and that among my peers I have a decent reputation. I feel useful in the classroom, and, most of the time, at peace with my profession. There’s something unsurpassed, for me, about a good teaching hour or a good teaching day. So, whatever my shortcomings as a writer of fiction, I do have this—my career as an English teacher—but I will also acknowledge that, like my students, I’ve been eager for the liberty of summer.

Sometimes, I look across the rows of students—particularly when they’re silently taking a test—and tell myself that they’re all enigmas. They look enigmatic to me, at least, even though I’ve listened to their voices and read their essays. Who are they really? is a question that surfaces in me unbidden at these moments. Of course, they come in a wide range. I try to be open to them all, because they’re young and tender, but, inevitably, some touch me more than others. Personally, I’m drawn to the young person with a metaphysical complaint, the one upset by the meaninglessness of life who wants to do something about it urgently. Is there something wrong with that obsession? Let me borrow a sappy phrase that’s richer for being curtailed—
Oh, to be young.
To still be one’s own hero. To still be untainted, and yearning, without anything muddled yet, toward some ostensibly attainable cosmic goal. That, in a way, was my friend John William, which is not to say he was morally irreproachable. Quite the opposite. He stole things. He threw rocks through windows. He damaged what he could. Yet, if I had to sum him up in a way you would recognize, as someone from your own school, a type, I wouldn’t use the term “juvenile delinquent.” I would call him, instead, the brooder in the back row. The rich kid who hates and loves himself equally. The contrarian who hears his conscience calling in the same way schizophrenics hear voices, so that, for him, there’s no not listening.

A week after losing that race to John William, I saw him again, this time at Green Lake. I was doing what I often did on Saturdays in high school—running the promenade, and passing every runner I saw until I found one who wanted to race. I looked forward to these episodes of aggression toward strangers, but what I didn’t see was how self-defeating my compulsion was, this looking for someone to lose to. I was doing this when John William ran up alongside me, upright but with hair in his eyes, and said, “Not you again.”

We slowed. There were people pushing strollers, kids feeding ducks, joggers, walkers, and bicylists. I said, “Are you a fag?”

“No.”

“Just a rich bastard.”

“Let’s race to the bathhouse.”

He picked up his pace, so did I, and we ran grimly, forcing anyone coming toward us out of our way. I lost, and when I’d caught my breath, shortly after he did, I said, “How much did you pay for those shoes?”

We watched girls go by and made comments. We jumped into the lake. John William had dope in his car, which was also full of fast-food wrappers and empty chocolate-milk cartons. We went over to Beth’s Cafe, bloodshot and reeking, ate like pigs, and then bought two bottles of MD 20/20 at a place on Ravenna Boulevard that didn’t card people. Later that night, John William drove the wrong way down a one-way street. Around two in the morning, we stole onto the grounds of the Seattle Center with the idea of wading in pools there and collecting coins. By day, the center could be crowded with visitors to the Space Needle—that self-consciously futuristic 605-foot tower which, as Seattle’s most popular tourist attraction, presides over the north end of its skyline like a moored UFO—the amusement park, the science exhibits, the Flag Pavilion, or the Monorail, but on this night it was rain-racked and so utterly deserted as to feel menacing. John William and I jogged past the locked-down barker booths with their giant pink teddy bear and faux-feather boa prizes, then stopped to toke by the Food Circus. On our left, the three legs of the Needle held up its rotating restaurant, their surfaces lit from below by floodlights. I told John William that the Needle’s observation deck reminded me of a mushroom, and his answer was “I hate the Space Needle.”

“Me, too.”

“I hate this whole place.”

“So do I.”

We jogged on, passing a closed sno-cone booth and the dark Exhibition Hall, where about twelve years before, at the Century 21 Exposition, I’d taken a simulated space flight in the Spacearium with my parents and Carol. At the pools that John William and I planned to pick clean of change, on the far side of the Flag Pavilion and in the courtyard of the Pacific Science Center, the fountains had all been turned off for the night, but the water surfaces were so roiled by raindrops that the coins below, in wee-hour city light, shimmered like cinematic pirate booty. I have to describe this place not as I think of it now—as a museum I’ve visited with my sons to enhance their appreciation of science (and, on the way out of the exhibits on dinosaurs or computers, to watch them, with paternal sentiment, make wishes and toss pennies)—but as it appeared to me that night, when I was a teen-ager on the cusp of petty crime. Those pools sat under neo-Gothic arches higher than a lot of downtown buildings, arches reminiscent of the flying buttresses I’d seen in photographs of cathedrals. If you live in a place devoid of much architectural interest, such arches can impress you. They impressed me. They might have been something from M. C. Escher in a slightly less hallucinatory mood than usual. Those vaulting, fretted complications full of latticed interstices, and as delicate and stout as whalebone overhead, gave the courtyard of pools an extraterrestrial ambience, or at least the quality of a dreamworld.

Such as it was and I was. I was also cold, rain-soaked, and paranoid, but with John William I waded in, knee-high, and gathered coins. We stuffed our wet jacket pockets and worked like peasants in rice paddies. If you imagine yourself committing this crime, you’ll realize that your field of view is limited to the water immediately below your eyes and to the bottom of the pool, where the coins lie. You don’t notice much other than the positions of coins and the movements of your hands underwater to make retrievals. The truth is that in short duration this sort of harvesting is mesmerizing. If you’re only at it for twenty minutes or so, your back doesn’t hurt and you can enjoy the rhythm, the distorted view through water (and, in this case, the luminous and agitated reflection of those neo-Gothic arches, inverted and foreshortened), and the giddiness of a furtive and illegal act. There’s the further pleasure—not everyone enjoys this, and teen-agers enjoy it more often than adults—of surrendering to being soaked on a rainy night.

But I can’t explain why we were stealing coins at the Seattle Center. It makes no sense to me now, though it must have made sense to me then. I just don’t recall what that logic was, other than to say that, for my part, I was doing something John William wanted to do and, one thing leading to another, I hadn’t dropped out along the way. Maybe it was a little like manna from heaven—this scattered, free money in a deserted public place—and so all the more tantalizing. However it was, we had only an aqueous glow to work by, which meant we bent our heads farther than we might have. Intent like this on our underwater misdemeanors, we were discovered by a uniformed security guard, whom we didn’t notice until he said, to our backs, “Hey, you little long-haired shits, you’re under arrest.”

I wanted to run. We had the natural advantage of being young half-milers, and my impulse was to use it. This guard didn’t appear particularly fit. I don’t remember details other than his muttonchop sideburns and the way he kept his thumbs on his belt like a sheriff in a western, but I do remember feeling he’d have a hard time covering half a mile in two minutes. Granted, we’d be weighed down by watery clothes, but running was still the answer, from my perspective. And so, dropping the coins in my hand, I waded heavily toward a far edge. John William, though, just stood in the pool with a fistful of change while the guard pried open a sheath on his belt, pulled from it one of those giant handheld radios that were state-of-the-art for law enforcement in the seventies, raised it to his lips, and pressed the
TALK
button. “Base,” he said, and that was when John William threw change in his face, lunged for his knees, and, in pulling him into the water, dislocated his hip—although I shouldn’t say I’m certain about the injury. I just assume his hip was dislocated because the angle of his leg seemed improbable while he splashed and flailed.

We fled in water-logged shoes, and so loaded down by coins they slowed us and made my jacket bounce. I zipped my pockets along the way so as not to leave a trail of change in my wake and followed John William across the Great Northern tracks at Broad Street, and from there into the brush between Elliott Bay Park—now Myrtle Edwards Park—and the railroad bed with its bull rock and broken glass. A lot of Seattleites stand here to watch the city’s Fourth of July fireworks display, but the rest of the year it’s frequented by the transient and destitute, who for decades have rolled out their mildewed sleeping bags in the Scotch broom because no one tells them not to. That’s where we found ourselves. In the high weeds, we lay on our backs to catch our breath and let the rain pelt us. I didn’t feel stoned anymore, and my tide of juvenile adrenaline hadn’t crested—instead, I felt washed out and attentive to fresh dangers. John William, though, had his hands over his face. He was clutching his skull, his fingers in his hair, the heels of his palms against his eye sockets, and I realized that he was crying. I was silenced by it, because none of my friends or cousins cried, and neither did I, in front of people.

“I think I hurt that guy,” John William said, after a while. “Did he hit his head?”

“I couldn’t tell you.”

“Did he get out of the water?”

“I don’t know.”

“We should go back,” John William said. “I want to take him to a hospital. I have to apologize.”

“Go ahead, then.”

He cried more, which I waited out by turning away from him.

“Wishing money,” said John William, when he’d composed himself, “is the money little kids throw in the water when they’re wishing they’ll never have to die and everyone will always be happy.”

“I thought of that myself.”

“I always wished everyone could be happy when I was a kid blowing out candles. And for no death.”