at my hairline. Me having a kid. And the mother of my child raped. And me knowing who did it and trying to be normal.
When she hung up I tossed the cell onto the coffee table, picked up my gun, rose and headed toward the shower. I had shined off my classes yesterday, but my conscience nagged. I had paid the money; I had bragged that I would make something of myself. Jill didn’t want to see me this morning anyway and I was going to start upending tables and smashing windows if I just sat here. What the hell.
Blackmer’s extension of Morse Junior College in Del Mar was held in what had once been the city post office—an old building that would shudder and crumble and crush us all to death if there happened to be an earthquake of any magnitude. No big loss. I sat in the back, my pummeled face clean shaven, my hair combed, and nobody spent too much time looking at me. I was at a desk that might have been manufactured in 1962, staring at Ms. Hatley-Lester—the self-assured, crewcut, flat-chested instructor—as she droned on in a masculine monotone about how our whole reality was manufactured by the “controlled mass media.” The class was called Twenty-First Century Social Problems with a textbook of the same name that I had paid thirty bucks for, and its aim was to let me know that, by the way, pal, you’re a slave. There is no government, there’s nobody looking out for you, there’s just a bunch of demonic power players pulling strings, consolidating power, butchering children. Sometimes she showed us documentaries that were at once so convincing and logical, and so opposed to everything I thought I knew, that I came away feeling like my own name might be a lie.
Today, after the introductory monologue, the room was darkened and an old video tape, that must have been shown to dozens of classes to date, was popped into a VCR that lived on a wheeled metal stand with “MJC” stencilled onto it. The subject of the movie was going to be the invasion of Panama in the ’80s and the disparity between what had actually happened and what our filthy, sick-minded, hell-spawned excuse for a government and its lapdog media told us had happened.
The movie got underway. There was a silhouette of a woman and the quiet sound of her speaking whatever language they speak in Panama , and then the translator’s voice overlapping at full volume, “The shooting began at
midnight
. . .”
I couldn’t sit still. I didn’t disbelieve the documentary and I wasn’t offended by it, I just didn’t give a shit. I was thinking about having a kid in a few short months. I was thinking of walking around with Jill when her stomach grew round and heavy, and then walking with a stroller in front of us, and then me acting out the role of father for the next two decades and always looking at my family and remembering, knowing .
I had something growing in me too, expanding in my chest and in my braincase so I had to shut my eyes tight and try to catch my breath. But it wouldn’t stop. It was taking on a more distinct shape, moment by moment, and now it was starting to kick.
I grabbed up my book and notepad and stood. I didn’t look around, just floated toward the door and then I was in the bright hallway, moving toward the exit. I patted my pocket, not my right but my left, and squeezed my hand around the knuckles through the material of my jacket.
Somewhere along the way, living in this town most of my life, I acquired the knowledge of where Owen Ferguson’s family lived. It was an old Victorian from Blackmer’s heyday, now decaying in a decaying neighborhood on Third Street . I had passed the place a thousand times over the years and I always thought of Owen when I did. Six or eight years ago, when Owen himself had lived here, I used to see him coming or going, maybe leaning up against his lowered car outside, his body pressed against that of a girl with brown skin and hair frozen stiff and tall by Aqua
When she hung up I tossed the cell onto the coffee table, picked up my gun, rose and headed toward the shower. I had shined off my classes yesterday, but my conscience nagged. I had paid the money; I had bragged that I would make something of myself. Jill didn’t want to see me this morning anyway and I was going to start upending tables and smashing windows if I just sat here. What the hell.
Blackmer’s extension of Morse Junior College in Del Mar was held in what had once been the city post office—an old building that would shudder and crumble and crush us all to death if there happened to be an earthquake of any magnitude. No big loss. I sat in the back, my pummeled face clean shaven, my hair combed, and nobody spent too much time looking at me. I was at a desk that might have been manufactured in 1962, staring at Ms. Hatley-Lester—the self-assured, crewcut, flat-chested instructor—as she droned on in a masculine monotone about how our whole reality was manufactured by the “controlled mass media.” The class was called Twenty-First Century Social Problems with a textbook of the same name that I had paid thirty bucks for, and its aim was to let me know that, by the way, pal, you’re a slave. There is no government, there’s nobody looking out for you, there’s just a bunch of demonic power players pulling strings, consolidating power, butchering children. Sometimes she showed us documentaries that were at once so convincing and logical, and so opposed to everything I thought I knew, that I came away feeling like my own name might be a lie.
Today, after the introductory monologue, the room was darkened and an old video tape, that must have been shown to dozens of classes to date, was popped into a VCR that lived on a wheeled metal stand with “MJC” stencilled onto it. The subject of the movie was going to be the invasion of Panama in the ’80s and the disparity between what had actually happened and what our filthy, sick-minded, hell-spawned excuse for a government and its lapdog media told us had happened.
The movie got underway. There was a silhouette of a woman and the quiet sound of her speaking whatever language they speak in Panama , and then the translator’s voice overlapping at full volume, “The shooting began at
midnight
. . .”
I couldn’t sit still. I didn’t disbelieve the documentary and I wasn’t offended by it, I just didn’t give a shit. I was thinking about having a kid in a few short months. I was thinking of walking around with Jill when her stomach grew round and heavy, and then walking with a stroller in front of us, and then me acting out the role of father for the next two decades and always looking at my family and remembering, knowing .
I had something growing in me too, expanding in my chest and in my braincase so I had to shut my eyes tight and try to catch my breath. But it wouldn’t stop. It was taking on a more distinct shape, moment by moment, and now it was starting to kick.
I grabbed up my book and notepad and stood. I didn’t look around, just floated toward the door and then I was in the bright hallway, moving toward the exit. I patted my pocket, not my right but my left, and squeezed my hand around the knuckles through the material of my jacket.
Somewhere along the way, living in this town most of my life, I acquired the knowledge of where Owen Ferguson’s family lived. It was an old Victorian from Blackmer’s heyday, now decaying in a decaying neighborhood on Third Street . I had passed the place a thousand times over the years and I always thought of Owen when I did. Six or eight years ago, when Owen himself had lived here, I used to see him coming or going, maybe leaning up against his lowered car outside, his body pressed against that of a girl with brown skin and hair frozen stiff and tall by Aqua
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