Against the Country Page 6

  What escapes this flytrap of a county allowed those boys I cannot say, nor do I recall which one of them was later executed by better-prepared criminals in a Richmond warehouse once the degreed hippies had either cured him or inspired him to run away. Certainly no delinquent of my acquaintance chose to settle in Goochland afterward, though that may have resulted less from a hatred of the degreed hippies than from a fear of the weedy and wooded tick nursery in which troubled teens, and troubled midwesterners, were meant to be reborn. At any rate the place tended to breed its own delinquents and had no need to adopt. It tended also to grow its own hippies, albeit of a sort who romanticized non-nonviolence, and owned guns not to hunt but because there was “a government conspiracy against pot,” and made use of their freedom from society’s “hangups” (and of their jobs at town sewage-treatment plants) to buy great heaps of cocaine and pornography and automotive equipment that almost demanded resale, and who considered bluegrass “too classical” (and the blues itself “nigger music,” where not interpreted by Lynyrd Skynyrd or the Allman Brothers Band) and were ever eager to “fight for” what they believed in, though I noticed that they kept no muscle and trusted more in mandalas and spirits than in soap and simple medicine to ward off the “bad energy” they and their college-pressed counterparts alike believed to radiate solely from town.

  The county produced its own cops too. I am told that the fat boy with whom I fought on the bus became one.

  National color wheel

  Only a dull allegiance to fashionable notions of the truth could convince me to argue that these hippies and delinquents and fat future cops and sad future relatives were somehow responsible for what befell me on my long ride through that excuseless desert. Excuseless because the sun had never managed, for all its effort, to turn the soil there entirely to ash, and so had never managed to impoverish Goochland’s impoverished to the degree one might ignore in, say, Ethiopia or the Sudan. Excuseless because the storms drawn there did not pinpoint and obliterate trailer homes as one might laugh at in, say, Missouri or Kansas or Oklahoma. Excuseless because the River James, although it made an effort to flood whenever the air warmed and a sun shower came near, displaced mostly cows and not people, and kept at all times a Richmondly course, and despite a full complement of deadly potions did not sicken and destroy the county’s residents, or deform their children, with enough enthusiasm to rival a Bhopal or a Love Canal.

  At a certain point the Goochlander comes to accept that no great drama is likely to arise and give form to the evil he perceives all around him, not because such a drama is impossible but because it has been staged already, so immense and unfinished that the eye is unable to see it for a breach or a flood or a storm or a sun. Grateful for the fact that the mosquitoes there impart nothing worse than sluggishness, and that local snakes and spiders rarely kill, and that something like water can usually be sucked up out of the gault, he seldom looks up from his toil, or from his trip to the gas station or the convenience store or the clinic or the courthouse, to consider that although this maelstrom has long since wandered off, across hills and plains and oceans and decades to claim its countless, nameless victims, the conditions under which it was whipped up in the first place still apply, and find him in the fields, and work themselves upon him as they did upon those who gave succor to this hypnotizing force in its infancy, and preached that it would be a boon to our world and not a burden on it, long before anyone thought to call it the United States of America.

  I hardly mean to imply here a regret over the foreign lives ruined by my native arms and industry, for I understand that a brown belly distended by hunger abroad allows a pink one at home to be swollen by gluttony. I understand that a piece of shrapnel through the brain of a sand dweller’s child allows a subdivision dweller’s child to acquire a piece of parchment it has not earned and probably cannot read. I understand that for every outlander tortured to death in a faraway jail cell an American retains the freedom to announce that he has taken Jesus into his heart and will not release Him until all the homosexual abortionists have been killed. My purpose is not to belittle these gains: I aim instead to shriek and point at what made them possible, to show that they are not the product of a notion one group says has been wisely expressed and another says has been utterly betrayed but were in fact spawned by something older, and hideous, and considerably more real.

  I side with those of my fellow citizens who hold that a great being, rather than a mere idea, created our nation, and inspired every principle by which it was then codified and rendered explicit, and tinted every aspect of its rampancy thereafter, from the beiges and greens of its squared georgic cells to the tars and grays of roadways made to circulate the bumper crop of idiocy grown out there; from the rainbow varices of urban centers where that idiocy is then repackaged as American pride to the domed white skull in Washington where our elected minds think no better than to turn that pride into law; from the bright red stumps of the once proud and now foreshortened soldiers formerly charged with the enforcement of said law to the duller red bricks of the country high schools where so many of these victims are recruited, and the slicker red (or orange, or black, or blue) of the paint jobs on the pickup trucks these children bankrupt themselves to buy at sixteen, and the rusted green or silver beneath which they pray at night but neglect to make a go at their homework, and the stained-glass wonders behind which they are dependably led to believe that what set the national color wheel in motion was not their own delicate pride but rather the divinity of a preacher just as prideful, and just as delicate, two millennia previous on the far side of the Mediterranean.

  Of all this wheel’s tinctures, I say that there is none so bleak, and so powerful, as the vitamin-rich urine backing the black symbology on those enormous metal bees that continue (despite, or in possible collusion with, the pickup trucks) to ferry our sacrificial nonvirgins from home to high-school parking lot, and from high-school parking lot to patriotic field trip, and from patriotic field trip to high-school parking lot, and from high-school parking lot to pregame prayer circle, and from postgame prayer circle to hamburger joint, and from hamburger joint to high-school parking lot, and from high-school parking lot to Bible retreat (is this legal?), and from Bible retreat to hamburger joint, and from hamburger joint to high-school parking lot, and from high-school parking lot to military base (has this honestly never happened?), so that the flower of our native ignorance might be pollinated and multiplied, and its rancid dust might forever rain down upon the world.

  Bloodless composition

  Do I go too far? Is it wrong for a grown man, no longer a boy, to argue that the American schoolbus has been cruel to humanity when in fact it has not been wholly cruel to him, and regularly got him away from a panic-stricken home, and drove him on occasion to a teacher of some worth, and once even showed him an uncalled-for mercy that altered and perhaps even bettered the course of his life? What consideration is then owed this vehicle, and this situation, by one who to this day blames the vehicle, and the situation, for the very peril from which it eventually delivered him? what praise should he bestow upon an entity he knows full well to be a destroyer, by proxy if not by nature, when he finds that he himself has not been destroyed?

  Marijuana first entered this boy when he was thirteen years old, and for that I might in good conscience blame the schoolbus, or at any rate its back-road emanation. I might upbraid it as well for the fact that the boy began to attack girls a year or so after the plant’s first attack on him. A familiarity with alcohol followed the onset of the girls (or, from their perspective, the onset of the boy), and this too I lay at the beast’s accordion door. Were it not for the constant watchfulness required of him between home and school, on top of what vigil he was forced to maintain at either destination, he might have adjusted to his lot with less grief and more grace. He might have understood that in the country, and possibly even in town, alcohol was meant to precede relations between the sexes (and certainly relations between the same)
and that anyone who did not know this had failed to approach either hobby soon enough. He might have understood that such a child was bound to be left out when better-prepared students snuck off to drink in the woods that surrounded the elementary school and just about everything else in that insipid county, or when older girls, the ones who had flunked, grabbed boys of his acquaintance and forced them to simulate (or, rumor had it, actually to perform) intercourse on the multihued yet drab bathroom floors. He might have understood sooner that a natural life, such as the naturalists promote and fail to comprehend, has little to do with a moral life, such as the moralists promote and fail to comprehend. He might have understood that ten or eleven, and not a hopelessly retarded thirteen, is in fact the proper age of introduction to dope.

  I did not meet the hydroponic kind but rather what bored country children will cultivate in a clearing out back: small and pathetic plants, without sister or brother, that seemed well acclimated to the dew and the mist but surely found the sky’s unregulated heat lamp a hindrance to maturity, as did we all, and were anyway slaughtered well before they amounted to much, yanked from the earth to be dried and chopped up and fired and inhaled by higher beings whose boredom and desperation could not be undone by so spindly a remedy and could only (the boredom) be enhanced by what lethargy as the plant had to offer, or (the desperation) by what whiff of paranoia had crept up into the twigs and seeds from the awful clay below. Later encounters with industrial improvements to this weed would impress upon me the value of basic environmental controls and would secure in me the notion that I might not have troubled with the outdoor stuff at all.

  I saw no natural prototype, though, beyond the berry or the nugget of gold, for the pills these children passed among themselves, and bragged about, and fought over, and built great reputational fortunes upon, and eventually gummed and swallowed, just as I could see no rustic model, beyond the leather saddlebag or the tin bucket, for the plastic containers in which these psychotropic treats were kept. Identified from without as aspirin or Tylenol, and from within as dosages lifted from a parent’s understandable attempt to overcome the realities of the simple life by an appeal to what complicated illusions could be manufactured in town, these pills, and their counterfeit drugstore coffins, rode to school in the pockets of Levi’s jeans and the folds of Bermuda-bag purses and the anklets of Frye boots or Chuck Taylor sneakers, the idea here being not subterfuge of the usual type but rather a coyly conspicuous display such as Mr. Veblen might have appreciated, had Mr. Veblen been forced to spend two to three hours out of every day trapped with his subjects on a country schoolbus.

  Proud of their bounty, and beholden to the relief it promised from the tedium of the day, larger than I was but not correspondingly so stupid as to assume that their shoes and their purses and their jeans would be free from investigation by weary and pissed-off administrators once we got to school, these children were forever on me to act as their surrogate and their stooge. Although a refusal to smuggle their bottles risked further bodily insult, and although a pill or two gone missing would have been considered no more than fair payment for a morning’s servitude, I turned those offers down, and for that I am almost sorry. With little effort I might have cornered the pharmaceutical traffic in that sad little county, and branched out into more fetching goods, and arranged things with the idiot fat boys who were even then expanding into idiot cops, and made a place for myself in the hormonally overburdened high school, and married and impregnated (in either order) the captain of the cheerleaders, or else her best friend, and bought up one of the nice plantation houses out there, and joined a political party or both, and subsidized new uniforms for the football team every five or six years, and shaken hands at the homecoming games, and made increasing reference to the importance of Jesus Christ in my life, and paid for the upkeep on several pink churches and the biggest brown one, and so achieved a sufficient majesty, elected or appointed or stolen outright, as to allow my wrath to encompass the whole of that abominable county, the better to tax and incinerate it.

  As it was, I chose a course that won me not useful employment but only continued humiliation, and gained me no reputation except that of a naïve and unhelpful coward, and did not recommend me either to future cops or to cheerleaders, and ensured that at the football games I would be in a marching-band uniform if present at all, and that later I would be unable to attend even one of these predictable routs with a reasonable assurance that hands would be offered mine in friendship and not swung at my nut in contempt. In the end I was robbed of what spiritual consolation I might have taken from the practice of politics and real estate, and afforded no better revenge on that county, or on the people who had so willingly surrendered themselves to it, than this frail and too bloodless composition.

  Brief window

  Then again, my decision to shun those pills did delay a personal dependence on them by nearly a decade, and it would be evil of me to pretend otherwise, or to ignore how grateful I am for that brief window in which I saw more clearly than afterward and was not always a complete bitch to everyone around me. Said window was small, yes, and painted shut, and itself dependent on what class of pill could be got hold of each day, but that it presented at twenty-three or so, when I could thoroughly enjoy its blessings, and not at thirteen or fourteen, before my pallial palate had fully formed, was a stroke I cannot help but ascribe to the American schoolbus, and all that it threatened me with, and all that it led me to attempt.

  How, then, to continue along the path I have thus far hacked out of memory’s bramble? How dare I apply today’s half-remembered hatred to an object that long ago, and without apparent motive, thought to exempt me from its own? By what right do I persist in my claim that this vehicle was, and remains, worthy of a violent and selfish attack?

  The confluence of long roads

  Let us praise, then, or sing, or at any rate take a wider view of, the great American schoolbus: 450,000 of these behemoths gone out twice each weekday with no more than three or four children slaughtered on or by them in a good year. That is a remarkable record: three or four out of a possible score of 25 million. It is a testament to the restraint of schoolbus and driver alike, especially when we consider that most of these deaths are not fiery, as the rare if dramatic schoolbus explosion would have us believe, but are due either to a child’s being crushed by the wheels of the bus, or to the fact that many of these containers hurtle down the road, in the rural areas at least, at speeds of up to forty miles an hour (fifty on a decent downgrade) without the handicap of seatbelts.

  I say again: this is a remarkable record.

  We might ask what link could be drawn between the conditions on these moveable villages and those deaths that occur later, in homes (such as the one I was stunted in) where no more than an unlocked closet door ever stands between a child and a rifle or a shotgun or both; or in schools where these guns, which apparently do not kill people themselves, arrive now and then armed with deadly children; or in bars where the prison-like atmosphere of the bus still prevails; or in prisons where the bus-like atmosphere of the bar still prevails; or in cars and trucks whose occupants have just left the bar, or the prison, and know far more about the confluence of long roads and alcohol than they ever will about the confluence of human beings and seatbelts; but we cannot establish beyond a reasonable doubt that our scholastic transport has made any deliberate effort to erase us from this Earth, or that it has been directly responsible for anything more than its own fair share of preventable murders.

  That is why I must now raise my voice in approbation of the American schoolbus. That and the luck that I was not killed on or beneath it myself, nor did I die later in a bar or a prison, or on one of those gray asphalt arteries that seem almost designed to connect these sad termini. My death was more spectacular and, as of this writing, has yet to conclude. The cause was self-abuse, and although I learned a good deal about that subject on the schoolbus I am forced to acknowledge that I might not have survived as long as
I did, and might already be confined to a hole in Goochland, or in one of its numerous imitators across this dim continent, were it not for the tutelage I received as we rumbled past those sullen pines and along those irate dirt roads.

  Do I regret that my education was not of the sort to be had from books but was more in line with the “common sense” half the nation now believes to be of greater value than the ability to read? Let me answer that I was thankful to have gained any wisdom at all out there, seeing as how little was being offered through the schools. Do I count myself a weaker student of the cornpone philosophy because, by the grace of ruined yet thoughtful parents, I came not to fear and avoid the written word but to fear and approach it? From what I saw, the country child fared no better with the land’s lesson than he did with the book’s. True, he tended to announce a mastery over the former when it was clear that he would fail at the latter, but he napped in nature’s classroom as he did in any other, and sought to get by on good attendance alone, and put the whole of his faith in a glib native cleverness he wrongly assumed was not also available to those possessed of a library card and a paid-up residence in town.

  I myself blew nearly every test the weeds administered, but out of horror I did remain awake in that place, and worked through the problem sets as best I could, and spent considerable time on the experiments, and just as I will not recognize as my superior in the field the jean-shirted fool who has removed himself from town for moral or aesthetic reasons (which are anyway the same thing) and now pens tone-deaf encomiums to the dirt, I will not bow down before the baseball-capped, goateed man-child who attaches himself by vacuum seal to the government tit yet insists that the nation’s wealth flows like a river from its pristine source (himself) to condescending town, and who will cast his vote in fury for whichever candidate most convincingly implies that Jesus hates all the tax-exempt town fags too.