Published Spring 2007
 
Bury the Survivors
In theory, seventh grade P.E. teachers were distributed in an equal, male-female ratio, enabling two simultaneously scheduled Health classes to subdivide and reconfigure as two single-sex groups suitable for the study of Sexual Education in the suburbs of Pittsburgh circa 1977. Due to the death of a teacher at the high school and resulting promotion and hiring intrigues, the boys of my and our neighboring class were deprived of an appropriately gendered instructor. Ours, Mr. Warner, abandoned us between units, our stack of Diet & Nutrition tests vanishing with him.
So while across the hall Mrs. Singleton handed our future procreative partners mimeographs of cross-sectioned testicles and fallopian tubes—those inexplicable ram-head diagrams—my subgroup of XY chromosomes watched car safety crash test documentaries on the Health department film projector. We tittered and clapped after each forty-five mile per hour head-on smash-up. Miss Ross rolled her eyes but said nothing. Cartoons penciled on college-ruled paper circulated between desks, most depicting Miss Ross and Mrs. Singleton in acts of lesbian bondage. Mine featured them on the hood of a moving Dodge.
The Detroit-based film-makers relished pitting American mid-size sedans against Japanese compacts, but compact on compact was acceptable, too. The Hondas and Toyotas looked like collapsed Coke cans. Each game of autopilot chicken also featured a stop-action frame frozen nanoseconds before impact. Voice-overs and yellow hand-drawn circles and arrows like NFL replays drew viewer attention to the deadliest details of the oncoming calamity: skull-shattering steering columns; fang-like window shards; the two-pronged flying headrest of death. Dummies emerged headless, limbless, disemboweled, their sexless groins mangled and strewn across surrounding asphalt.
I would like to say that the first time I had sex with another human being (not, as later discussed, Robin Shaw or Jane Celovsky) we stood naked in opposite corners of her bedroom before charging at each other at upwards of forty miles per hour and colliding in full frontal contact above her mattress. This did not happen. Moreover, someone (J. G. Ballard) has already written a novel along these lines (Crash). I have not read it. I will not read it. I have, however, rented the film, which received a special Cannes award conceived in its honor. Most audacious, I think. This places me in the unenviable position of defending the ex-horror movie director during dinner and cocktail conversation. The sex was consensual, I argue. The use of scar tissue as erogenous zone is positive, even redemptive. No one in the room but my wife is aware of the vagina-shaped scar gouging the majority of my inner left thigh.
My wife and I have never had sex in a car, though once during a drunken college game of Truth-or-Dare, she admitted to me and everyone else in my off-campus apartment—all of whom, male and female, were conspiring to remove her blouse—that she had lost her virginity in a Honda Civic, same make and model as the one I totaled while having sex with Robin Shaw's ex-best friend, Jane Celovsky. Back in the fall of 1978, Robin and Jane were across the hall with Mrs. Singleton, the dominatrix of my and my classmates' artistically challenged ids. While we were witnessing the relative benefits of shoulder belts and shatter-proof windshields, they were memorizing the number of sperm cells contained in the average ejaculation: A) 440,000; B) 1,000,000; C) 500,000,000; or D) 4,400,000,000.
This was before air bags, then a high-tech frivolity useful for pulverizing the rib cages of orangutans, a fact Robin and I acquired three years later from our tenth grade English teacher during a test review for Ethan Frome. The film starring Liam Neeson had not yet been made, so I missed the relevance. The first experimental safety cushions inflated at over one hundred miles per hour, a force great enough to explode the internal organs of a half dozen test animals. Or that's what our teacher told us. He may have been working for Detroit, too. Either way, Robin and I laughed. The whole room laughed, but it was one of those cinematic moments when she and I turned toward each other in slow motion, eyes as bright as headlights, gazes locking bumper-to-bumper. A disembodied voice should have frozen the image and scribbled arrows along Robin's scalp, at the points where surgeons would later attach metal staples to hold the fractured bone together.
We ended up in the same gym class in tenth grade, too, but the reappearance of Mr. Warner necessitated our separation during the perennial Sex Ed unit. Mr. Warner unzipped his pants to adjust his shirttails while informing his male charges that each one of us contained enough sperm to impregnate every woman on the face of the planet twice over. He tapped his wedding ring against the chalk tray as he vowed that he would never have sex with any woman other than his own wife, even if Farrah Fawcett or Cheryl Tiggs begged him. Why? He paused Socratically, his pelvis pressing into the chair back. Herpes. He sketched genital scar tissue on the chalkboard as his left hand hovered with an eraser. He also informed us that we would continue to masturbate after marriage and that couples have sex even during periods of estrangement. I have since found that only one of these prognoses is true.
The next week we viewed drunk driving movies suitable for co-ed audiences. Robin sat two rows over and one seat up. The girl next to her (I could say Jane Celovsky for literary convenience, but it wasn't) left the room to vomit and/or sneak a smoke in the girls' room. The bodies were less convincing than the zombies in Dawn of the Dead, but we made allowances since they were real. One guy—my wife thinks I made this up—ran over his own head. The cops are milling around while this deep-as-God voice-over assures us that the man lying on the pavement with his legs crossed and a hand resting on his chest really is dead. You couldn't see much of his face in the shadow of the wheel well, and there was nowhere near enough blood.
The miracle of video would later give these images second life in the straight-to-rental classics Faces of Death I through IV. I would be outraged by the moral depravity of my dorm mates when I recognized the-man-who-was-thrown-from-his-driver-seat-and-struck-by-his-own-vehicle while wandering only half drunk from a party busted by campus police. They were playing it on the lounge TV/VCR. "They" included my future wife. I crossed to the other side of the couch to sit accidentally beside her, cringing and chuckling in sync.
Robin was also present when Mr. Warner boldly stepped outside of his scheduled CPR lesson plan in order to provide our class with a portrait of the very recently late John Lennon, a corrective for the distortions then propagated by the hippie press. Resuscitation Annie, the school district's CPR dummy, remained on the back table, untouched for the entire fifty-two minute period. We only saw her once a year, and I had been looking forward to the reunion, as she was my first open mouth kiss. Her plastic head and torso spilled from her carrier, a red hard-shell suitcase to which her lower legless body was attached, the apparent aftermath of a bizarre ER mishap. I thought about that Star Trek episode where bulbous-brained aliens arrive at a crash site and save the lone survivor, only they've never seen a human female before and so don't know how to put her together quite right. That or the dummy was the abortive fetus of some human-luggage breeding experiment gone terribly wrong. Either way aliens were involved.
I can't remember everything that Mr. Warner said, but it galled him to see a long-haired, pot-smoking, pinko freak rock star canonized by the international media. "John Lennon took LSD," he told us. We had completed a unit on the pernicious effects of illegal drugs on the human organism the week before. Our stack of ungraded one-page essays had vanished into Mr. Warner's briefcase, presumably to be filed with our seventh grade Diet & Nutrition tests in his basement. So, I thought, here was my gym teacher, sanctioned by the state of Pennsylvania to instruct teenagers in the subtleties of hygiene and dodgeball, using his seat of authority to deliver a personal diatribe against one of the most revered men in contemporary Western culture. Of course I was too shit-stupid to say anything like that. I held my mouth open a lot and made little gasping and croaking noises as my head swiveled, dumbstruck by the lack of support and shared outrage from my slack-jawed compatriots.
Robin's neck was doing the same dance of incredulity, only I'm sure it looked cuter on her, her feathered hair sweeping on and off her shoulders as she scowled, rosy-cheeked. "But he was a pacifist!" I had missed the word "pacifist" on an English vocab quiz during the first marking period and still did not know it. We had been studying T-H-O-R-E-A-U.
Warner furrowed his avuncular brow and explained the importance of supporting one's country in times of war. This was 1980. No one else in the room could have located Vietnam on any of the pull-down maps scrolled above the chalkboard. At least I assumed they were maps. The graduating class of 1950 could have taped soft porn centerfolds up there and they and the models would all be dead before the hijinks was discovered.
Warner asked, "How would you feel about your parents if they posed naked on an album cover?"
This had to be one of those trick question, like "Did you stop beating your wife yet?" or "If a plane crashed on the border of two countries, where would they bury the survivors?" All I knew was that Holden Caulfield had gunned down John Lennon on a New York sidewalk that Monday. Caulfield got out of a taxi, or Lennon did, I wasn't sure and, to be honest, didn't care, not until I noticed that Robin did. My parents listened to The Beatles, those double "Red" and "Blue" compilation albums I considered unworthy of my K-Mart radio-turntable-receiver. The previous morning when my distraught ex-hippie mother told me that Lennon had died, I said, and I quote: "So?" John Bonham asphyxiating on his own vomit had caused me more heartache. My Health notebook was camouflaged in Aerosmith and Black Sabbath stickers. I had written Rush two thousand, one hundred and twelve times in the margins of my Geometry book. I wore a Lynyrd Skynyrd t-shirt with a Confederate flag displayed across my back, shoulder to shoulder, with no cognizance that the image represented anything more than a subgenre of rock music. This is the sort of human being to whom the state of Pennsylvania was awarding driving permits.
That afternoon, my mother—after grinning and tousling my stringy locks when I demanded that she sue the high school if they did not terminate Mr. Warner's contract—drove me across town for my second driver's test. I have since stepped into a DOT building exactly once, after accumulating a critical mass of speeding points during my new highway commute, and the state of Virginia declared me a driving hazard in need of remediation. The first test question on the computer screen asked my name in multiple choice format. "A" was Jack London. "D" was Margaret Mitchell. The correct answer was "B." I don't remember what "C" was. My DOT didn't have computers back in 1980, but somehow I'd passed the permit test using only a stubby bowling pencil provided in a cardboard box on the counter. The learner's booklet was the shape and thickness of a Cliffnotes, so I felt pretty confident. A month later, my dad watched me sideswipe a Mazda in the fake intersection in the rear parking lot. The stoplight looked like the one in the miniature golf course where I played with my friends, only we'd catch our balls on the last hole and hit them over, or nearly over, the highway out front.
I did better the second time. The cop warned me to watch my rolling stops after the first turn. I hadn't wanted to insult him by actually sitting there for a half second with both ways clear, the way no one had ever done at a real stop sign ever. My mom bought me a cherry Slurpie at the 7-Eleven afterwards, same as she did when I got braces.
My hands shook that night, my first time on real roads without parental supervision. I was used to my dad sitting beside me fingering the safety brake handle, spine rigid against the seat, gut sucking shallow breaths. It was nightfall and an unforecasted rain blew in, temperatures hovering around freezing. American built headlights careened past me, with a crash test dummy braced unflinchingly behind each wheel. I held my fists at two and ten o'clock, aware that the simplest gesture, a quarter rotation of my arm, a wave, could kill or maim any number of innocents, myself included.
I thought about paraplegics, not because I imagined mangling my spine as I flipped over an embankment, but because they fascinated and horrified me: half-men, half-meat, their legs like flaccid penises arranged in and out of metal gadgets, chairs, braces, wheels. I thought about the missing half of Resuscitation Annie, a pair of legs coupled to a handbag or purse during alien triage, a walking vagina. My parents' Honda was both part and not part of me, a nerveless body I pretended to control, my limbs pumping and twisting like a puppeteer's.
After I retrieved Robin at her house, we parked behind her old elementary school and performed sexual acts which at that time may still have been termed heavy petting. When my average ejaculation of 500 million sperm shot into her hands, I rammed my elbow into the car horn. Robin laughed so hard she peed herself. She was with me the following Saturday too, when every channel on the car stereo went dead for exactly one minute in tribute to John Lennon. Robin was driving. She spun the dial. "It's like World War III," she said.
I had no idea what she meant but now realize that she knew something about the electromagnetic pulses produced by nuclear explosions. If Russia was attacking and a flock of intercontinental missiles were colliding over downtown Pittsburgh—which would have been the case even if Soviet intelligence had bothered to report that the entire steel industry had rusted out during the seventies—the brakes and power steering in her father's Ford would have cut off, and we would have plunged over the hillside into a tree or a telephone pole or, if lucky, into the creek to drown, clawing at the automatic locks as our oxygen plumed through the cracks in the shatterproof windshield.
Of course I didn't know any of that and so had the luxury of fantasizing the two of us, the lone survivors in the vast wasteland of western Pennsylvania, foraging in dead people's refrigerators and joyriding for decades to come. We were somehow immune to radiation, or, better, thrived on it, our latent mutant genes blossoming in the tailored environment. We would domesticate giant cockroaches and harvest the land, which would glow at night, bright metallic pinks and indigos, as we rolled in bed, conceiving our half-human offspring.
"Imagine" came on immediately afterwards.
I want to say that I know a lot of people who died in cars, but it's probably no more than some national average. Two were not accidents—or one definitely wasn't. Lindsey Baker, junior year, was found in her garage, locked inside her father's idling Porsche. Her last unconscious act was to defecate in her pink taffeta dress, the one she hadn't worn to the prom because her boyfriend, a senior lacrosse player, broke up with her the day before. Jerry Myers was more ambiguous. The lack of skid marks beside the bridge guide rail didn't prove anything. I'd known him by sight, a freckled redhead, but our high school was big, almost a thousand per grade. Another batch of three or four clustered around commencements. One of the graduation parties was converted into a funeral reception. I attended but left early.
My first funeral was an uncle's, one of my dad's brothers. I couldn't have been much more than five and don't remember it. That was back when the speed limits on the new interstates were a hundred and fifty or so. Once while I was skidding matchbox cars down a track on our staircase, watching them twirl against the dented wall on the bottom curve, my dad stopped and stared. It was just like that, he said, cars catapulting off exit ramps, the drivers' senses calibrated for the wrong planet, as if gravity had cut off and we were all flung through our living room windows. I crouched there, frozen, the next matchbox suspended in my fingers.
I have since seen a man thrown from a car, on I-81, about five miles from my exit. It was morning, a light fog, my head tuning in and out of Morning Edition, when I looked up, blinked, unable to register the image: a grey sedan, rolling sideways, bouncing along the median grass, maybe a quarter mile ahead. It looked unusual but not as unusual as it should have. On the third roll, the driver popped out. I pretended that he could be okay, safe from the rolling rubble, a gear spinning loose from the highway's machinery. I was the first to drive through his shards. The asphalt sparkled.
Robin Shaw did not die that way, but her best friend Jane Celovsky did. I started dating Jane two days after Robin broke up with me during oral sex in the front seat of my mother's new K-Car. Our Honda was in the shop again. Robin was mad at me about something, an inextricable string of somethings which my brain still refuses to recollect. We broke up at school. The shouting match attracted both teachers on cafeteria duty, one of whom escorted me to the vice principal's office to sit out the rest of lunch while Robin sobbed in the girls' room. Our vice principal, a former gym teacher and golfing buddy of Mr. Warner, never appeared, so the office secretary sent me to Social Studies with a late pass.
So imagine my surprise when Robin phoned that night saying she wanted to talk, in person, she said. She'd lost her driving privileges that week, so I had to come over, the five minutes between houses providing me time to prepare a series of incoherent but oddly sincere apologies to try on her depending on how the conversation unfolded. Robin didn't want anything to do with them. She told me to drive. It was early spring and the windows were down which made it impossible to speak except in brief, squinting shouts as Robin's hair slapped at her cheeks.
When I finished parking in the far corner of the dirt field behind her elementary school, she said, "I want you to do something." She had this really weird smile on, the angle of the moon through her window slicing it right in half.
"What?"
"Pull your pants down."
My laugh was weak and high-pitched. "Why, you want to cut my balls off?"
"Pull them down."
I had never seen Robin or any other teenage girl naked, as was the norm for sexual experiences between adolescents in the suburbs of Pittsburgh circa 1981. Groping occurred initially through and then underneath articles of clothing, with a minimum of buttons, zippers and clasps unfastened. Threat of interruption was the primary organizing principle. The swaths of female flesh I did glimpse were shrouded in shadow and framed by fabric, the way surgeons expose only the areas they are working on. My operating distance was inches, one myopic blur after the next. My partners saw less. A scar the size and shape of an elephant's vagina engulfed my inner left thigh. It was grotesque, freakish, the reason for sweat pants on ninety degree gym days. I positioned myself at corner lockers and appeared in my next classes ripe with sweat. Robin had no idea the scar was there and never would.
I obeyed, careful to push the belt loops of my jeans only an inch below my hipbones. She told me to pull the boxers down, too, so I did. I was breathing pretty hard. Robin slid over and leaned her ear against my chest. This was my first experience with this particular sexual act. I had seen pictures, those water-logged magazines after my prepubescent friends and I made the mistake of burying them in Baggies behind my back hedge. The pages emerged rank and wrinkled, the photographs fading as though overexposed, water stains blurring the expanses of flesh.
Robin sat up. "Okay," she said, "take me home."
She hadn't so much as breathed on me. I thought she had glimpsed my thigh and drawn back repulsed, but her grin was too smug. This had been the plan. I forgot how to work the car ignition and the zipper on my jeans, jamming them both. The next morning, a third grade gym class would find their right field gouged by tire marks.
K-Cars were not designed for speed or power, or looks for that matter—ours was beige—but like anything else moving downhill, velocity is inevitable. In a suburb carved from peaks and bluffs, it doesn't take long to double a speed limit. Robin clutched her door handle as her foot rose against the dash. In accidents, it's the passenger who's got the bigger problems, no steering wheel to grip, a wide open plunge in front of her. Robin didn't say anything, didn't look at me. She might have been braced in the front of a roller coaster, the operator day dreaming beside the ticket booth far far away.
It doesn't mean anything to say that I considered spinning the wheel and flinging us against someone's front oak. The word "considered" is misleading. It was a notion that happened to me, a sensation like any other. Our brains weren't calibrated to think at those speeds. The unit test for Ethan Frome included the question: "When the sled struck the tree: A) both Ethan and Mattie were killed; B) Mattie was killed and Ethan was maimed; C) Mattie was maimed and Ethan was killed; or D) both Ethan and Mattie were maimed." I'd gotten it wrong.
When we arrived at Robin's curb, she turned and glared at me, her breasts working her blouse up and down, but she said nothing. If I said anything, I don't remember it. She left the passenger door open, so I had to get out and close it myself.
The first girl to see my scar was not Robin Shaw or Jane Celovsky but my future wife five years later—her, plus two or three other girls still in my bedroom at the time. I may not have known their names then either. Someone other than my roommate was face down on his bedspread, oblivious to the empty Miller Lite cans heaped around him. The rest of us were still playing Truth-of-Dare.
I have no idea why, but when my turn came around again, my wife—we were dating then, or almost—looked me dead in the eyes and asked: "Have you ever fucked a retarded girl?"
There were snorts and chuckles, though no more disconcerting than most sitcom laugh tracks. I could have said no and been truthful in a Clintonian sense. I was a virgin through Reagan's first term. She waited, with her shirt balled on the desk behind her, a Dare of the previous round. Her bra was white and a little dingy, but less revealing than most bikini tops. We'd gone out a couple times, had kissed, but that was it. I liked her a lot.
I asked, "Before or after?"
The kid next to me snorted. "Before or after what?"
My wife never broke eye contact. Maybe my roommate had told her. The story was one of my drinking night standards. I asked, "Do you mean did I fuck her before or after she was retarded?"
She said, "After."
I said, "No."
The circle moved on, so I didn't have to explain that when Robin Shaw showed up at school a month after the accident, it had looked like an act to me, the kind of miming my friends and I used to do behind the Special Ed kids on the elementary school playground. She smiled at everyone, or everything, her eyes jammed at two o'clock as her chin pumped a slow, constant nod. She wore a Pirates baseball cap with her hair shorter on one side. The vice principal didn't dare tell her aide to remove it. When she walked, her left leg kept searching for the first step of a staircase that wasn't there.
I lost my pants on the next round and had to wear them wrapped around my head like a turban for the rest of the game, not that anybody noticed, with my desk lamp angled at my thigh. The scar glowed. Its gored edges looked wet, as if it might open, the lips of flesh still swollen. Only my wife kept looking. Everyone else's eyes jerked back like headlights that had drifted over a pair of yellow lines. She shifted her chair, a milk crate, next to mine and asked if she could touch it. She never moved her hand away. The room was clearing out by then anyway.
The day after Robin showed up at school, I got suspended for suggesting to Mr. Warner that he do something anatomically impossible. It took me another week to visit Robin's house. I called first, started explaining to Mrs. Shaw who I was when she cut me off. After dinner would be a fine time, she said.
My dad drove me. A shadow in the living room curtains darkened as he pressed the doorbell. Robin didn't look over when I came in, but she seemed aware of me, her twitches increasing as Mrs. Shaw sat me beside her on the couch. We used to fool around on it. It had a view of the road, the corner where cars fishtailed if it so much as sprinkled. We used to watch them skid against the sidewalk, betting on which would make it onto her lawn. Her dad had stopped planting new bushes. If there had been a real accident, we would have been heroes, the first to dial 911. Robin even had a CPR certificate awarded by the paramedic who taught a week of Warner's classes.
Robin's hand brushed my arm a few times, as if reaching for something in the dark, surprised to find me there each time. Mrs. Shaw kept prompting her, and me, trying to warm us up. I said something about Health class, though not our fantasy plots against Mr. Warner, variations on property damage, pouring sugar in his gas tank, spray painting obscenities across his hood, wadding the tail pipe with sculpting clay from the art room. Mrs. Shaw asked me about math class, probably thinking Robin and I had been in it together, but she was honors. Once when we were driving, a pheasant slammed into the Honda, and Robin calculated the height it ricocheted based on our speed and the angle of the windshield. All I could see was the dirt outline of its feathers etched on the glass.
Everyone was staring, waiting for the two lovebirds to kiss and make up. Mrs. Shaw had positioned a plate of yellow sandwich cookies on our end of the coffee table. I could smell my body, the sweat seeping up from my shirt collar. I could smell her, too, but it was wrong, all detergents and chemicals, something scoured clean in a hospital lavatory. She looked like Robin, for the most part. It wasn't that she'd gotten the junkie surgeon who'd stitched my leg up with knitting needles when I was eleven. Close up, I could see a red line along her scalp, just in front of the hat rim, and that was it. But the resemblance was only familial, a genetic link. I was sitting next to Robin's sister or young aunt or her own child somehow, the product of a rape or near abortion, half-human at best.
My heart was moving pretty fast now. Mrs. Shaw kept asking Robin questions, reminding her about me, coaxing her, and I would have to look at her, trying not to focus, trying not to shove the embroidered pillow over her face as she sat there gagging on the same syllable. When she did turn toward me, her hand reached into my lap and pinched my penis. It was probably an accident, a fluke movement, not some memory or instinct, but I jerked, panicked, tried to shove her arm back. My hand may have hit her face, but not so hard that it left a mark, I mean a bruise.
Everyone was standing, and my father's fist was clenching my arm, pulling so I had to step over the coffee table not to fall. It would have been so easy to break the bone, the joint so thin, a matter of angle and force.
Robin missed Jane Celovsky's funeral. She hadn't left the hospital yet. I should also say that Jane wasn't Robin's ex-best friend because she'd started dating me; she'd started dating me because she was Robin's ex-best friend, or was for the brief period concluding simultaneously with our––relationship isn't the right word. Liaison? Affiliation? The English language is ill adept at describing adolescent experience. It's the wrong vehicle.
We went out for two weeks, almost. Jane latched onto me to piss off Robin, a goal matching my own and which, when accomplished, dispelled any interest we had in each other. We were two compacts passing in the night. As far as totaling my parents' Civic, the thing was rusted through anyway. And we weren't technically having sex, not any variety of intercourse, so I may have led you on a bit.
A better author (John Irving) has depicted a like scene on a larger scale (The World According to Garp), in which an adulterous wife is performing oral sex in the front of her student's parked car when her husband careens into the driveway, injuring all parties and killing their son, who, at least in the movie, was not wearing a seat belt. The novel disturbs me at two levels: my wife and I no longer read/watch stories involving dead children, and Irving punished the wife more than the husband who was not only more adulterous but was driving with his lights off. It's the wife who leaves her career in the next chapter, for no very clear reason except to remove herself from the path of voracious college boys. The scene where she and her soon-to-be student lover climb into a car together was shot outside of my wife's freshman dorm, the only image in the entire movie filmed at our alma mater. That's a hard fact to check, but I bet someone could do it.
Unlike Mrs. Garp, Jane Celovsky did not bite off my penis at the moment of impact. Her mouth was nowhere in the vicinity. I was, however, distracted by the activity of her hand in my unzippered pants when I steered into a parked pick-up truck. I had to knock at the owner's front door to phone my dad. He arrived after the tow truck, the driver of which concurred with the pick-up owner's opinion that the Honda was a goner. The frame was bent diagonally, front right corner to rear left. Aside from a smear of blue paint along one edge, the pick-up was untouched, virginal. My dad didn't say anything, not even after we dropped off Jane. This was maybe a month before she died.
Robin was driving her father's Ford the night she spun off a Parkway exit ramp. She and Jane were best friends again. Robin took most of the impact against the steering column. Jane wasn't wearing a seat belt either and spilled part ways out of the open passenger window. Some kids said she was cut right in half. Over the next two years, the story would evolve to include her legs being stolen from the township morgue, in a variation of the jokes we used to tell in sixth grade about Polish men accidentally having sex with female corpses.
Robin did not attend the funeral, but most of the district faculty did. Mrs. Singleton was shaking Mr. Celovsky's hand and hugging Mrs. Celovsky as I skulked along the wall behind the table of flowers. Miss Ross had married and moved away. The service was closed coffin, a relief for me since the year before I'd seen my grandmother painted up for her viewing and had wanted to vomit and/or beat the priest's head in with a rock. Jane's casket was absurdly large, considering the lone passenger was barely 5' 2". You could have fit three or four Janes in there, more if you folded their legs over and sat on the lid to click the latches. It was the sort of trunk you use to store something for a very long time, something you have no intention of looking at again but need to know is safe.
The night I punched my brain-damaged ex-girlfriend in the face for grabbing my dick in front of our parlor of chaperones, I snuck out after my parents fell asleep. The crowbar from the trunk of my dad's new Volvo was stashed under my bed. I gumped the four miles to Mr. Warner's house with it tucked in my pant leg. Robin had acquired the address during one of our nefarious brainstorming sessions. His number was unlisted, but she had skills. I recognized his grey Dodge from the teacher's lot before checking the house number on the side of the pastel mailbox. He parked along the edge of the driveway, the one-car garage apparently reserved for his wife. I started on the taillights, then headlights, then the side windows, and finally the windshield, a crack the length of my crooked arm blossoming before the porch light burst on behind me.
I was thinking, the world population is 4.4 billion, you jackass. That's 2.2 billion women, more than four times my sperm count. I was thinking about Yoko Ono standing with her husband's blood all over her clothes and the steps and the foyer floor, and the monster standing right there outside reading J. D. Salinger on the sidewalk, waiting for the cop car to come. She should have smashed his skull in. I don't care how sad and pathetic and stupid he was. I don't care that Mark David Chapman would have flunked the first question on a VDOT driving test. What kid didn't grow up thinking he was a rock star?
At their next meeting, our progressive School Board re-banned Catcher in the Rye, the only work of literature in the four-year curriculum written in the second half of the twentieth century (1951). Our English class was reading The Great Gatsby at the time, our final unit of the year. We were droning pertinent passages aloud, the one where Tom Buchanan's mistress is found after Daisy Buchanan, not Gatsby it turns out, runs her down with Gatsby's car. Our teacher went pale. The kid reading didn't notice: "... left breast was swinging loose like a flap and there was no need to listen for the heart beneath. The mouth was—"
"Stop there," he said, and he looked away from Robin's, not Jane's, desk in the front row.
This was before video, so we could only view a filmstrip of the ten-year-old movie, honestly one of the worst screenplay adaptations ever written (Francis Ford Coppola). To his credit, our teacher did not cap the year with a multiple choice test. We wrote essays. I handed in a five-paragraph analysis of the car as a destructive force symbolic of the changing world of the 1920s. He didn't believe I'd written it and demanded to see drafts and notes. They were in the back of my Health notebook interspersed with lyrics written in the style of Peter Gabriel. It wouldn't earn anyone an 'A-' today, but it's better than some of the 500 million essays downloaded from free homework websites daily now. One of my students handed in one just like it last week—the same use of my non-word "charismic."
Mr. Warner didn't get a look at me that night, and my wife never asked about my scar again or how I got it. When I brought it up later, years later, when we were both getting out of our apartment shower, the way we used to all the time before we had kids, I asked her why not. She said I would have told her if I'd wanted to, that it was my choice, something I would have to do of my own volition, not wait for it to plow into me like everything else in my life. We weren't married yet either.
The story isn't car-related, but I'll end with it anyway. I was eleven, playing on the swing set rusting in our backyard. I was too old for it but liked to climb to the center pole and inch across on my butt, my legs dangling from my shorts. I wasn't dumb enough to stand. I'd taken the chains off, so the bolts were exposed. Rainwater had cracked some of the edges, and one spot was particularly sharp and toothy, the exposed rust the same color as the faded paint. That's where I slipped.
My body rotated, spine straight as the metal pushed into me. I must have jerked and wiggled a lot before dropping head first onto the dirt patch in the lawn, where my feet used to touch when I pumped on the swing, imagining that I could reach the rooftop if I just angled my leap right. I don't remember screaming, but my mom said I did. The doctor told her, and she told me years later, that I would have bled to death if she hadn't plugged the wound. Most of my thigh was flopped open, so it wasn't a matter of applying pressure like Mr. Warner said. She had to put her whole hand in there and hold it down with her other while my dad ran back inside to phone the ambulance. I was lucky it was a Saturday.
The cuticles on both of her hands were dyed red when she was fussing with the food on my hospital tray the next day. She thought the portions were too small and inedible. I didn't tell her I ate worse in the school cafeteria five days a week. My dad was home digging up the concrete slabs anchoring the swing set in place, each two-feet deep, way past safety requirements. Mostly I remember my mother's silhouette hovering over me in the backyard, and her sobbing and screaming into my face, screaming as though enraged at me forever. |
