One day I saw somebody getting beaten with a baseball bat. It wasn’t as neat looking as one might assume, I suppose. Whenever I see a real person getting beaten by a baseball bat on the news or even when a fake person gets beaten in a movie or television show it is usually a very interesting thing to watch. When I saw it up close it really wasn’t that neat at all, though. I guess that maybe the people who made it onto TV and movies beating people with baseball bats are probably better at it than high school students. They must know how to do it properly; there’s probably all sorts of crazy subtleties us kids would know absolutely nothing about when it comes to beating people for show.

Maybe I just didn’t get too great of a look. My view was kind of obscured, now that I think about it, everybody gathered around the thing so damn quickly that I only got to see the first few moments of it. I didn’t see the any actual contact between the baseball bat and the person who was being beaten. It would have been more interesting if I had had a better seat, probably. The actual contact is a far more interesting thing to see than just the beginning of the scuffle and the bat being brought up and then down for several strokes. I couldn’t even hear a scream, and on the television you always hear a scream.

When I was little I was sitting over at my friend’s house, and my friends were also my neighbours. My family had just moved into the house next door and my sister and I befriended the young Jehovah’s Witnesses who lived just across the lawn. I was a friend of the two boys who lived there, Dustin and Jeremy, who were two and one year older than myself, respectively. My sister was a friend of the girl who lived there, Heather, who was a year older than her. We looked up to the Jehovah’s Witnesses next door, my sister and I, because they were older than us and they were our friends. We ran like lemmings toward the faint light of sapient guidance as soon as we hopped off the U-haul, they had open arms.

We had only lived next door to the Jehovah’s witnesses for a few weeks. It was summer, and there were no other kids in the neighbourhood, so we had been playing together on a daily basis since the very first day we moved in. The two boys taught me all I had to know about my new town; everything that they knew and wanted to tell me. I was filled in on all the folklore I had missed out on by not living in the town my whole life prior. I was told of the interesting characters I would meet when I started school, the evil, godless neighbours that we lived near, and which supermarkets you should go to for shop or play. They taught during the course of playing, and so I learned as we played. We would play tag, but instead of someone being “it,” someone would be “Billy” or “David” or a reference to some other local child folk character that I should want to be running from. It’s the ‘them or us’ mentality that keeps children growing healthy and strong, fuck the vitamins.

I was sitting at their house, in their living room, and we had just eaten supper. Their mother, who was to die three years, eight months and seven days before I saw a person getting beaten with a baseball bat and precisely six years after this day in which we were all sitting around, had made us a tasty meat and cabbage dish called simply “stuff.” My own mother was a superior cook, I would say, but she could never make “stuff” quite the way their mother did. It was very tasty and we had all eaten a lot of it and we were very stuffed and tired after a long day of playing.

We were watching television. Something on the FOX network, not that the program we were watching made any difference. It was a commercial break and I had just re-claimed my sitting spot in front of the television after taking a drinking glass to the kitchen sink. I was always sure to keep their house neat and tidy. They were so much cleaner than our family.

I sat down right as a FOX news brief was coming on. They had news briefs between programs and during commercial breaks because they didn’t have a nightly news program like the other networks. We would have been watching something else if we were at my house, because I had cable and the Jehovah’s witnesses did not. I had only watched the FOX network when I was at their house and the only news I had seen since moving in next door was the news briefs on between FOX programs. This news brief was about some people who had just been shot in a Luby’s Cafeteria in Texas.

The news voice gave the briefest of possible descriptions of the incident. “Twenty three people die in a massacre at a small Texas cafeteria, the gunman is still at large this is (somebody) for FOX news.”

“Great!” one of the neighbour boys exclaimed. “I hope Starr was there.”

“Did she say she was going there?” I asked.

“She was going to Texas. She might have been there.”

We all agreed that we hoped she had been massacred and let it drop at that. I already knew who Starr was from their teachings and I didn’t feel any need to speak of the possibility of her being dead any further. I hoped that she had been shot, and that was enough. She was described as an all-around icky person, and I had just been told two days before that that she had gone to Texas with her mother, who was a teacher at some school that I should hope to never go to.

Many years later I saw a young man getting beaten with a baseball bat and for some reason I thought of the Jehovah’s witnesses and what on Earth they may have been up to all these years since. I hadn’t seen any of them since they’re mother died and even then it was a very brief encounter. Two days after her funeral I ran into one of the boys at Osco, which is the supermarket he had taught me to shop at, we exchanged hellos and I walked away. I didn’t know what to say to a boy whose mother had just died, and I didn’t want to say the wrong thing.

The young man who was beating the other young man was pulled away by a very, very large teacher and escorted off. I didn’t recognize him. The young man being beaten was able to walk into police custody of his own strength just a few moments after that. I didn’t recognize him, either. Then I sat down and got back to drinking my pop.

“That was kind of fucked up.” Matthew said as soon as he thought everybody was up for listening to him again. I was ready to get back to speaking; I had just finished thinking about the Jehovah’s Witnesses.

“Yes it was.” I replied.

And like that the whole cafeteria got back to its usual state of blurred noise, only now my head, and presumably the heads of most of my fellow classmates, were buzzing ferociously. Hundreds of conversations being poured into one ear, the poetry that each one may have contained being lost, transformed into one human-machine noise. If there is nothing in the forest besides forest the forest will hear but not understand itself.

Everybody was having the same conversation, too, but I couldn’t pick one out from the other. That is, of course, except for the conversation being had at my table.

“Was that…” Trace asked, swallowing some food. He always ate school food, no matter what it may have been. The sick bastard. “…was that because of that shit you were telling me about?”

“Me?” I asked, pointing at myself. Hearing my own voice was a little strange; it broke through the buzzing of my head differently than the voice of Trace.

“Yeah, you.”

“ I don’t fucking know. What the fuck just happened?”

“That guy came running in, hid behind Trace’s chair, ran over there and then I saw him getting hit with a bat.” Emily kicked in. She was always very good at simple explanations, even when a simple explanation was not what was being asked for.

“I mean, who was that? I didn’t know those guys.” I said.

“I don’t fucking know, you’re the one with the inside track on this kind of shit.” Trace ripped in. He wanted answers as bad as I did, and he was really hoping I had some.
And by god, he was right. I did have an inside track, for once. At least I was supposed to. The day before the beating I had been summoned to the office during my last period of the day via a pink slip brought directly to my desk by a main office crony. That was odd. My school’s system of office summonsing was simple. If someone needed to talk to you, be it for informational or disciplinary reasons, a pink slip was brought to the classroom and delivered to the teacher by a student who worked for the office one period out of the day for half of a class credit. Not a bad gig, actually. But you never received informational pink slips late in the day; if they needed you to sign something or fill out some sort of slip or something along those lines they would call you down first or second period. You only got pink slipped after third hour if you needed to be disciplined. I hadn’t done anything.

The slip said that I wasn’t needed in the office until a time my teacher felt was at her earliest convenience, which wasn’t until the end of class because we were giving speeches. My speech was about the history, effects, and legality of Opium. I flashed before the class pictures from the world book enlarged by the library Xerox machine. The pictures were of emaciated Chinese men who did nothing with their lives but lay on their sides and smoke opium. One of the pictures was of a man who was balancing a very large cat on his stomach while he was smoking his opium. I explained to the class that his entire world consisted of his opium and his kitty cat and that I almost envied him for it. My speech was written as it was delivered. That was two days before.

Now I had to sit quietly while everyone else was giving their speeches and think about what on earth I could possibly have done to warrant a pink slip brought straight to my person. A pink slip so very important that they would forgo giving it to the teacher, nonetheless. Maybe somebody confused me for someone else. That or they had just found out about something I had done a while ago. It couldn’t have been an emergency. If my mom had just lost thirty percent of her face in a car accident they would have called me down right away, over the intercom. I was in trouble for something and I didn’t know what and that can be very unnerving. I spent the last twenty minutes of class fidgeting.

The tone rang and I made my way straight to the office. I was more curious than anything, to tell the truth. This was the first time I had ever been summoned, in three and a half years of going to this school, that I didn’t know preciously what the summoning was for. As I descended, along with seven hundred of my peers, the halls and stairways glowing numb from fluorescent illumination and sterile, drug-free wall paint, I blocked all the surroundings around me and remembered the first time I was ever summoned. I had been accused of carving a crude Star of David into a desk that I hadn’t even been sitting in. No matter how I pleaded, no matter how much evidence to the contrary I may have cited, no matter how much innocent I may have looked, the principal was hell bent upon punishment the moment I came into his office. Like a tale straight from Kafka; my faith in the disciplinary system of the penal colony was shattered before it ever even existed. I served two detentions and my parents paid some fifty odd dollars to have the desk re finished. I clicked from my memory and into consciousness as I arrived at the main office door.

I went straight to the secretary lady, cutting off a line of three dirty people, and slammed my pink slip onto her desk. She said not a word, just pointed me toward a wide open door. I had never been to that office before.

Yes, the head principal’s office. Big time. You didn’t come here unless you killed somebody or were in sports, two fields that were far away from anything I would ever consider doing on school grounds. Standing around the biggest wave simulator I’ve ever seen that wasn’t in a museum was the complete triumvirate of principals, from the lowly freshman head Mr. Johnson to the big man himself, Mr. Moe; who was sitting portly and proud behind an expensive-looking desk. The wave simulator was pretty.

“Take a seat, Tristan.” One of them said. If could have been any one of the three, each would have spoke in the exact same tone with the exact same voice. I was afraid, but since the seat that each one of them had an arm extended to was directly in front of the wave simulator I did not hesitate. Wave simulator was pretty.

“How you doing?” The big man, Mr. Moe, said. I wasn’t sure if he was trying to be friendly, break the ice, or if he was being sarcastic, getting ready to pull up and ask me to explain photos of my bare ass no matter what my response would have been.

“All right.” I said.

“Good. Good. Everything all right at home?” This was good. If they were mad at me they would have done some sort of good cop/bad cop routine. It sounds stupid, I know, but they actually did it now and again and it actually worked most of the time. I had heard some stories. In good cop/bad cop the same person never asks two questions in a row. Maybe they just thought my dad was beating me. Just tell them I keep falling down the stairs and let it go at that.

“All right.” I said

“That’s good, nice to hear. Anything going on with your friends?” Right about then the whole scene started to take on a surreal, David Lynch feeling. You don’t get three questions in a row from Mr. Moe unless something major was going down. Was I being interrogated? Why was everything so damned scary? The two minor principals looking dead towards me with their plastic smiles and hateful eyes, the big man asking inane questions, the wave machine moving back and forth, as if placed there to hypnotize me. My skin began to crawl.

“Not…really. They didn’t do anything, if that’s what this is about.”

“No, that’s not what this is about. At least we hope not.” My principal, Mr. Schueller stepped in. “Nothing has been going on with your friends?” Schueller’s voice was kind of soothing, I was used to him trying to fake friendly.

“Nothing major, nothing related to you guys.” I said.

“Tristan,” Schueller continued, “I like to think you and I can be straight together, right?” I nodded yes, because he really did think that, the poor bastard. He was as cool as Alex Rocco in Detroit 9000, using semi out of date slang of which he had only a vague understanding while talking to me, trying his best to make me feel like his “homie,” making damn sure not to piss me off. He was genuinely afraid of me, had been for a year and a half. Ever since my poorly-constructed “Anti CHS” website made it onto the local news and got the FBI called in…the site just poked fun at teachers, and posted some rumours which I still believe to be true. The website featured articles dealing with such topics as teachers sleeping with students, there being bodies hidden under the gym floor, and basically just urban legend stuff like that. People started to talk about the website, and those people talked to other people, and so on, and rumours about the site started up. People started to say that threats were published, which they weren’t, and the press decided to get involved. The event was pre-Columbine, thank god, but still in the middle of that rash of 1998 North American school shootings. If we lived in Bosnia, the site would have never been noticed.

I was the quiet one, always had been. High test scores but low grades, only a few friends. The recipe for violence displayed on many a daytime talk show or evening news magazine program that Mr. Schueller had watched. I would do stupid shit in the cafeteria (almost tip over a pop machine, vomit on a table for some eight dollars in change, etc), he would call me down to his office, talk to me in broken slang, not punish me, and ask me to behave.

“I know we can be straight.” He said “Sometimes you’ll do stuff, and I’ll call you in, and we can talk like people. Treat each other like friends, you know.” He was proving to the big man that he had done a good job with me. Trumping me up for the other two principals who had mostly just heard of me through lore. Wanted to let them know I could possibly be of some use.

“Yeah. We sure do.” I said. Mr. Moe, the big man, stood up. I had never seen him actually stand up before. He was always either sitting or standing and doing only one or the other, he was a very big man. Seeing him stand offset me, almost frightened me. He could have beat me to death with a bar of soap right then and there and I couldn’t have said anything about it. A sub header flashed before my eyes “We just called him down to talk about football, we mentioned joy powder and he exploded. I had no choice but to use the only weapon at my disposal, he wouldn’t stop coming at me until he had lost consciousness. I can only thank god that I like to keep clean.”

“Tristan,” he said, walking to the side of his desk, six eyes following him with the same quiet intent of Shiran Shiran “there’s some bad things going on right now around school. I’m sure you’ve heard about them.”

I had to think for a second, bam, it clicked. There was indeed some bad noise floating around school, and I had heard things about it. Earlier in the day someone had pulled me aside in second hour Lit to ask me my stance on an issue I had heard nothing about, something that I was to understand wasn’t very pleasant. Someone else, a young man, heard my talking about not knowing what unpleasant things had happened, so he decided to fill me in as best he could. It went (more or less) like this: “So we was at Ben’s last night. I was there with like three other people but there must have been forty people there; kegger. Nothing too fucked up going on, just a bunch of drunk motherfuckers. Some dudes was puking in the toilet and that’s all right, man, so long as you make it to the toilet, okay. I was just sitting there, like on the couch, like I said, nothing too crazy, and Ben starts screaming like a motherfucker. Just screaming, screaming, screaming. He throws this guy out, he looks real drunk, the guy, throws him out on his ass. I guess the guy puked all over Ben’s bed and shit and wouldn’t clean it up, so he just threw him out. I mean, that’s understandable, right? You don’t throw up on some dude’s bed and expect to still be welcome, and guess he wasn’t even really invited to the party, too, so that’s just wrong, okay.

“So, I leave not too much longer after that, I’m just buzzed, I got to get up early the next day. I end up going over to Tommy’s and staying there until like four, just sitting around. I forgot my jacket at the party, so I figure I’ll just go back there on my way home and pick it up. It’s got some money in it, but I know Ben’ll take pretty good care of it. So, I get done at Tommy’s, go over to Ben’s completely sober, mind you, it’s about four-thirty, after the party’s all winded down, not too many cars parked out front. I knock on his door and these two dudes open it real slow and they’re wielding bats and shit in my face. I’m just like ‘hey, I come in peace, you know.’ And they let me in, and there’s blood all over the place. I guess that dude who barfed all over Ben’s bed, his name’s Adam something, I’ve seen him before but I never really knew him, he came back with a couple of friends and fucking baseball bats and beat the shit out of some guys in the front room. They broke Phil’s legs. People are real pissed off at this shit, you know those guys, they call themselves something stupid, I can’t really remember, but they hang out at that park in Lyons, he’s one of them. So everyone’s all pissed off at all of those people, it’s all messed up. I’m serious man, some shit’s gonna happen in the next few days.”

I relayed the story to the principals. There had been three fights on campus that day (only two the entire year before that), and I figured they just wanted to know what was going on. No harm in telling them a vague story that didn’t name any names. I told them that I honestly didn’t think they had any real reason to worry, that everybody will be getting over this shortly, which I honestly did believe.

Why did they interrogate me, of all the people? Well, it would just so happen that after my website made it onto the news the underbelly of my high school’s society decided to pay me some attention. I was welcomed into their ranks, attended a few parties, and did not enjoy myself. I was the acquaintance of most everybody involved in the party beatings the day before, but I was only the friend of only a few of them. If anybody had an inside track and would be willing to name names, it would have been myself (or at least so thought the principals). They accepted that I knew nothing and let me go home. I decided to walk the whole five miles instead of getting a ride or taking the bus.

The interrogation was strange, very much so, but I didn’t think much about it that long walk home. There was snow on the ground and it was pretty cold out, but it was actually the warmest it had been in a few weeks. The overcast, windless, thirty-eight degree day was a welcome change from the sub zero temperatures of the recent past.

When I first saw Jason I was eight years old, I think. I came outside one early summer morning, about a year after moving to this town. It was habit back then to go straight from my bed to the outside, because the Jehovah’s Witness boys were always up and playing a good two hours before I got out of bed, and I didn’t like to be left out. I came out onto my porch, pajama’d and disheveled, let a out a cat stretch yawn and looked across the street to see the two Jehovah’s witness boys spraying their high-powered water guns at a portly young man who seemed very upset. They had module (yes, spelled “module” on the side) 100 and 200 squirt guns that they’re mother had just bought for them two weeks earlier, and I don’t think they had been without them for even a few minutes since. I used to have the best water gun on the block, which was a two-year-old module 50, and wanted badly to reclaim my thrown. The module 50 was the original high-powered water gun; the module 100 and 200 weren’t introduced until the module 50 enjoyed its legendary success, reinventing the entirety of the tired water-pistol market. I sat on my front steps and waited for them to finish. They walked over to me after Jason ran inside his house and told me we were going fishing, and I do not remember the rest of the day.

Two months after that, the Jehovah’s Witness’ father had moved the family almost three hundred miles northwest to become a fireman. The over-disciplined sack of holier-than-thou shit pulled my only friends away from me four days before my module 250 water gun arrived in the mail, a belated birthday present from a forgotten aunt on my father’s side. The module 250 was essentially the same as the module 200, same pump action and blue plastic finish, only the water tank was twice the size and the spout could move left and right while firing. I had no one to shoot with the water gun.

The only Halloween I ever celebrated with the Jehovah’s Witnesses, which was in secret of course, because they weren’t allowed holidays, was an interesting affair. Two days before the day of trick or treating, I asked their mother why they didn’t celebrate Halloween. She knew that I didn’t want to hear and wouldn’t listen to a religious answer, so she instead told me (and her children, who were sitting close by) some horror stories of Halloween hyjinks gone horribly awry. The story of a child eating a razor-laden caramel apple, the man who drove real fast down the down the street with his head lights off, picking off children one by one, and she even told an interesting tale of Halloween horror I had never heard before or since. A year ago, not too far from our town, some teenagers supposedly filled up a module 50 water gun, the same one that I had, with ammonia and went around spraying trick or treaters with it. Senseless evil, brought on only by the presence and celebration of a Pagan Holiday. One child died and several of them went blind, all because some teenagers wanted to steal their candy.

The Jehovah’s Witness boys and I recessed to the back yard. We decided that very best thing for us to do on trick-or-treat night would be to take other people’s candy. I would operate in a costume, which my atheism allowed, and they would just trail behind me in street close. I would pose as a regular trick-or-treater and search out good-looking targets to point them to. They’d corner the kid, wield my module 50, claim it was full of ammonia (of course it wouldn’t be, we didn’t want to hurt anybody), and demand their candy. If they refused, we’d just run away, if they cooperated we would get candy without having to break any religious laws.

Two days after, we were preparing for trick-or-treating in their back yard. They had decided to wield two crude Chinese Ninja throwing stars they had constructed from pop cans if our victims wouldn’t give up their candy after being threatened by ammonia. Those kids were as creatively demented as Cecil B. Demil, I swear.

We were standing in their back yard, discussing in hushed tones our plans. They were going to cover their faces in black electrical tape, as to not be recognized by our victims, and the whole plan was going to take place several blocks from our homes to lessen the chance of anybody knowing us, the candy was going to be split three ways. While we discussed, their father stumbled loudly through the front door, angry after a long day’s work at the plastics factory. He made Nerf toys for a living. We went inside, leaving the ninja stars and my module 50 lying on the ground.

Their father was stomping around the house, grasping at any straw he could find, hoping with all his might to find something he could be angry about, beside himself. He did this a lot and often times he would even do it when I was there. When I first moved next door he would be very careful to not let his temper out in while I was around, but as I grew more and more familiar he put forth less and less effort.

He would start by checking every room for the slightest sign of mess, and then if that didn’t work he’d check the kitchen to see if they were out of or low on any sort of food product. If someone had eaten all the pickles while he was at work, he’d claim to be jonesin’ for a pickle and explode because of it. We hadn’t touched any food, so he was forced to venture down his final and most-dreaded course. He dug through shelves and closets looking for anything that was out of place, and something always would be. We were in the living room playing Atari (video games were evil if they were made post 1979, their mother once explained), when we heard the father’s frenzied, tenor screech from the basement. He was missing his electrical tape.

We ran outside, through their yard, and to their fence before he made his way out of the house.

“Dustin! Jeremy! Get over here.” They walked back toward the house and I followed, three steps behind. They had sense enough to throw the tape from their pockets on our way out from the house.

“Yes dad,” Dustin, the older one, said. He was trying to play dumb, and doing a very good job of it.

“You seen my electrical tape, by chance?” The father said. He had a very strange tone about himself, all the time. Like if Satan and Anthony Edwards had a child.

“Your what?” He said, playing dumb.

“My black tape?” What a deep yet nasal voice that man had. Scary.

“Oh, uhh, is that it.” He pointed toward the discarded roll, just sitting on the ground.

“Pick it up.” The father said.

Dustin bent straight over picked it up. He handed it to his father who took it slowly from his hands. He father inspected the tape, made sure not too much had been used and that it had been properly treated. He put the tape in his front pocket, slowly, raised his arm, and gave Dustin a solid smack across the face, dropping the boy to a stoop. Jeremy let out a sigh of relief, as did I. He only had one slap in him when it came to tape. Dustin stood up straight, eyes redden but without tears.

“Ask next time. You just leaving it out here because you want it to get rained on shit?” His father said. He was starting his usual post-violence justification monologue. He did this every time, I think to make sure that the kids knew that they were getting beat because of their own faults, not his.

“No, sorry.”

“That’s all right, just ask next time, and put it up when you’re done.”

“Okay.”

“All right. Be home for supper, wherever you’re going. And don’t forget--.” He stopped dead in his speech, which he wouldn’t have done if he didn’t notice the ninja star pop cans laying on the ground next to me. He wouldn’t have noticed them if I hadn’t have been there. I’ll bet one hundred dollars that he was about to say something about me, when he told them “And don’t forget—.“ I knew he was going to remind them not to forget something about me because he was looking at me.

“What’s that?” He said, pointing at me.

“What?” I said.

“I’m not talking to you.” He snapped at me. “Jeremy, by Tristan’s feet, what are those?

Jeremy bent down to pick them up and show them to his father.

“Umm, pop cans.” He said.

“What the hell did you do to them?” Father responded, waving him arm to summon the child and the pop cans for a closer inspection. Jeremy brought himself and the cans right next to his father for inspection.

“What the hell did you do to them?” He asked again.

“Turned them into Ninja stars.” Jeremy muttered toward the ground. Dustin didn’t look toward the ground when getting interrogated anymore; he had figured out that his father liked that, almost fed off it

“What?” The father demanded.

“Turned them into Ninja stars.” Dustin said, looking dead towards his father.

“Where’d you get these?” Father asked Jeremy, still looking at the ground.

“The kitchen.” Dustin answered.

“These are my pop cans you ruined?”

“Yes.”

“Get inside.”

Father hauled Jeremy in and Dustin trailed behind. As soon as they were on the porch I could hear the father yelling about how the empty cans were worth five cents each before they ruined them. I heard hitting and crying, the slaps and screams soon became repetitive, almost a tremolo. I stood outside the door for a few moments. I walked home and stayed there the rest of the evening. Our trick or treat plans had been subverted by two crudely constructed ninja stars.

I snapped out of my lucid memory to find myself sitting in the alley behind my old house, right between the house that I used to live in, before moving to a smaller home on the town’s north end, and the house that used to be the Jehovah’s Witnesses, before the father decided to be a fireman. I thought about how it was probably the work their father did, at the factory, that made him so angry. Once he started fireman training he never so much as raised his voice at them. I stood up and walked around to the side yard.

I remember the first time I really met Jason, on good terms. Five days after the Jehovah’s witnesses left town, the day after I received my module 250 water gun. I filled the gun up with that putrid ammonia that my mother had a bottle of on the back porch and went wondering about the neighbourhood to find somebody to shoot.

There was a boy across the alley whose parents made their own apple juice and who always wanted my candy and who was very annoying. He walked up to me, right along side my house, right where I was, and he asked me if I would like to play with him. I told him no and shot him in the arm with the ammonia gun. He ran off crying and Jason came over to speak to me about it. I figured he was coming over to bitch about my shooting the boy who lived across the street, I figured he could use a shot in the face himself, but instead he praised me for it. We got to talking and I spent the night at his house, he was a strange lad.

I snapped out of yet another lucid memory and found myself standing in my old side yard. I walked back home, and then I called Trace at work and told him about my strange interrogation and the stories it had made me remember. He wasn’t at all interested in my memories, but the interrogation and the story of the party beating fascinated him.

The very next day, at lunch, Trace wanted to know if I had any more information. If I knew anything else about that might help him piece together what was happening with the people getting beaten with baseball bats and the party vomiting and all that jazz.

“I told you all I knew. I didn’t think people were taking this shit so seriously.” I said to him, my voice buzzing like a faulty dentist drill.

“Well, I guess they were.” He said. We were now speaking a language of almost pure buzz.

Matt buzzed up, “Is this that, whole vomiting thing, at the party.”

“I think. I assume so. I don’t really know.” I buzzed.

‘Buzz’ went the silence. ‘Buzz’ went the silence. Matt broke the silence.

“Fucked up.” Matt buzzed.

“Well,” Trace said with a slight giggle “no sense thinking about it. Just pull the sheet over your head and tell yourself it isn’t happening.” That didn’t buzz.

“Agreed.” I said. No buzz.

“Very well, what was it you were saying before being so rudely interrupted?” He asked. The buzzing was now gone.

I had to think about it, but I soon remembered what I was talking about what seemed like so very long ago. I had been so very busy the past few moments thinking back upon all the strange things that happened or I remembered happening yesterday.

“Yeah,” I said, “Those things still haven’t come in the fucking mail. They were supposed to be here a week ago.” I was referring to some semi-legal “herbal” hallucinogens I had ordered from Denmark almost a month before. It truly is a wonderful age of information in which we live.

“You e-mail the guy?” Someone asked.

“Yeah, he said it should be here any time now. Tonight, I hope.”

The tone rang, and I was as eager to get to class as I had ever been. I said my proper goodbyes to the lunch table, told Matthew and Trace that I would be going over to Matt’s house after school, and made my way straight to my classroom. There would be no need for my text, I figured. The rest of the school day would have nothing to do with books.

I have never seen, first hand or otherwise, a group of my immediate peers as excited as those in Mr. Murphy’s Criminal Justice class that day. Never. Not at a concert, a sporting event, or even graduation. Horrible violence, I aver to this day, brings out only the very best in the Young American spirit. The classroom was buzzing like a factory. Not the broken, fly zapper buzz of the lunch table, just one solid, mind-numbing buzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

The class consisted of buzzing between the students and teacher, both trying to piece together what had happened and why, all sides of the story given equal speaking time. In the end, the basic storyline was the same as what I was told just the day before. The student who was beaten was the young man who had vomited at the party and returned later with his friends, no one was quite sure as to who the beater was. The general tone of the students who had more knowledge of the situation than myself was that this whole mess was far, far from over, that we should be expecting more violence, possibly even a shooting. Everyone was just tickled pink. Buzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

A few news vans had already arrived by the end of the period. My next period had been cancelled the day before, due to an engagement the teacher simply could not break, so I was going home. I would have declined to talk to any reporters, had I been asked to do so. The halls provided the buzzing with a great, hollow-sounding residence. My head was hurting.

Jason and I used to get excited about violence. Even as short a time before as Columbine, which was just ten months prior to the day of our own, comparatively minor, beating. I suppose I just burnt myself out of cynicism sometime around my paranoid mental breakdowns of the June before. Six years of living and breathing cynicism had molded what had once been my soul into a white-hot ball the stuff. Eight months or so of paranoid misery, due mostly to the “Anti-CHS” website, led to one explosion, my soul erupting, spilling a sea of white light/white heat style pain and empathy, tears and near madness. I recovered, somehow, pulled myself up and managed into the social position I now found myself. Part of a broken clique, hated by many, excepted by some, known by few, I had two friends and only two friends that I cared to speak to, and that made me happy.

My mother was waiting for me outside the school, she had been nice enough to agree to pick me up with her wacky friend so that I wouldn’t have to wait around the school for a few hours for a ride from a peer. They were very curious about the news vans and ambulances. I filled them in as best I could.

I wanted to go straight home, pass out or just plop myself in front of the TV and wait for the news to come on and tell me about the beating I had just seen a few hours before. I couldn’t, though, I was supposed to go to Matt’s house in a little under an hour and my mother and her friend were hell-bent on going to an estate sale; I had to face this day consciously.

“Did I get any mail today?” I asked my mother on our way to the estate sale, after I had just finished telling her about the beating. I wanted to know if my pills had come yet. I didn’t want to talk about the beating anymore. The beating was all she wanted to talk about though, so she quickly told me that no I didn’t get any mail today, and then started to ask me questions about the beating, questions I could have never answered. To this day, I still have not bothered to learn the names of the two main parties involved.

We arrived at the estate sale, which was about equidistant from Matt’s house and the school, deep within the downtown urban jungle I associated with so many good and bad events from the past three years. The excitement and pain of first love, the joy of first drunkenness, the white dog terror of a bad trip. All in a ten block by ten block cube, all on foot, all after school, all with someone else, never with Jason.

Jason moved away the summer before, and for the two years before that we hadn’t been very close. You’d have to go back to my fifth grade and middle school years to when Jason and I were very close. I was a total loaner, as was he. We lived across the street from each other, and he was impressed with my spraying ammonia in a little boy’s face. We watched horror movies together every day after school and then on the weekend he would come over to my house where he, my sister, and myself would play Blind Man’s Bluff.

His mother left for work everyday as soon as he got home from school, she didn’t get off until eleven at night, and by that time I would have gone home. His mother would leave him ten dollars each evening for food. We’d walk to the Jewel grocery store every night, buy two crappy microwave meals and rent a horror movie or two from their video section. Grocery stores used to have video sections back in the late eighties and early nineties, you don’t see that very often any more.

The Jewel horror section was pretty great, now that I think about it. Lots of obscure titles, stuff you just can’t find now days unless you go through the internet or mail order. An SP tape of Outlaw of Gor was worth the fifty cents for an evening, it’s not worth twenty-five dollars plus shipping online, even if you do get to own the movie for a lifetime.

Jason knew an awful lot about the Luby’s cafeteria massacre. He would explain over and over again in detail how exactly the people died. A man kicked the door of the cafeteria open with his left foot and a hail of shotgun fire soon followed. The cafeteria’s seating arrangement was tailor made for this kind of killing spree, booths lined the rectangular perimeter of the building, the attack occurred at peak business hours. Every patron unfortunate enough to be standing at the front of the restaurant was killed in the opening volley of pump-action shotgun fire. Everybody eating at the booths hit the deck, so to speak, right after the shooting began; most of them hid underneath their booths and waited to get shot.

The gunman reloaded, walked to the first booth, screamed “Is it worth it?!?” and blew away the patron hiding underneath. The gunman repeated this process with the first several booths before somebody wised up and threw a chair through a window. People evacuated their humble booths and ran toward the hole. Many escaped, twenty-some died, and the gunman was never caught.

Jason and I would recreate the massacre in his living room. At first he would never let me be the gunman, but that was okay, I enjoyed waiting to get shot. He would kick his front door open and make a loud “Boom” noise. He would walk around the room screaming “Is it worth it?!?” and then making a loud “Boom” noise. I would be hidden underneath a chair or behind a couch, waiting for him to come and kill me by making a loud “Boom” noise. It was very comfortable to hide from a pretend gunman, a certain cozy feeling filled my head and stomach when I heard the pretend others getting killed and buried my head into my arms to hide from the pretend danger. Such a comfort; feeling special, almost. In the winter, when I cannot fall asleep even after trying for hours and hours, I’ll climb out of bed and walk to the furnace control. I’ll turn it down way below fifty, jump into bed, and watch the world freeze around me. I always fall asleep soon afterwards.