the writing machine

I was beginning my sixth grade year at Parkview Elementary. I lived on Rural Route 3, in the outer ring of Chicago Suburbs, where the cornfields start. My gravel street, and the knife scratched mailboxes and biker clubs was the county line, and the barrier between Steger , a place where they used to make Pianos and Crete, a place where there were a lot of trucking companies. . An anarchic wonderland of junk cars, and overgrown grass, of dilapidated houses that the fire dept would practice burning down in the spring. What this meant to sixth grade me, was that all the kids in my neighborhood went to Crete Monee school district. Our ramshackle house, our junk cars, our overgrown grass stood alone on the Steger side of the line. I would walk the mile to school, cutting through the woods in the fall, passing old abandoned orchards, and a swamp with a plough that had been abandoned so long a tree had grown through it, passing concrete marys in electric phonebooth shrines and sheep in a fenced in yard, a million murderous dogs.

I would pass through enemy territory once I passed a place called “the coffee cup” a dirtbike jumping hill renowned for it’s almost 90 degree angle ( hence the name), and a tangle of storm sewer drains, undeveloped lots and loose piles of fill dirt and gravel. This particular wildnerness was the turf of a gang of Steger-ites that I attended school with. I don’t know that in these days of social promotion, and extracurricular tutoring and special education classes that any of you have any idea the kind of gangling, pre-adolescent sizes a group of particularly dim and failed-several-times-over sixth graders could grow to in the late eighties. Suffice to say, to my newly sixth grade eyes they were like a pack of ravenous mutants, the inbred cannibbalistic tribes of my own private “the hills have eyes” or “deliverance” They called themselves the “Steger Snakes” ( a gang name only dumb lower-middle class white kids could come up with)and had decided that, due to my height, my awkwardness, my poverty and my ability to answer questions in class that I was to be the recipient of their special attention. I was a gangly, goofy, dirty sensitive kid who cried to much. I was, in the parlance of the day, a smart ass and a pussy.Every day, I would walk past the Coffee Cup and it’s wilderness with a stomach churning trepidation, and every day, out of the tall and wheat-like grass grown all the way to seed would come one of the Snakes, to push me, to demand tribute, to play keep away with whatever library book I was trying to walk and read at the same time.

If this was a story in a movie, this would be about how I gained the courage and self respect and finally stood up for myself. It would be about how the head bully was really a crying on the inside kind of clown, and how we found our common humanity and overcame our war, or how I redeemed myself with one pure act of 100 percent american red blooded violence and cinematically kicked his ass up and down the graveled and parentless road to his chagrin, and the snakes would dissolve in contempt for his weakness, as I , magnanimously offer a hand to my wounded opponent and help hjim to his feet and encourage him to live a life of righteousness and honor from now on. This is not that kind of story.

I was cowed enough from the very real traumas in my life to believe the snakes were capable of truly horrible things, and broken and hopeless enough to believe, somehow, I deserved it.

I walked with terror past the coffee cup every day it did not snow, and got shoved around most of the time.

On a saturday, a friend of mine from across the street were attempting to convince ourselves we were courageous BMX riders, and took our bikes to the dreaded coffee cup. Jason was a weird sensitive kid from our neighborhood, his dad a loud drunk who used to rip the phones out of the wall and, who was forever working on a chopped harley trike made out of an old volswagen. Jason grew up to be a chicago cop.

Jason and I arrived at the coffee cup and the old familiar gnawing pain in the stomache arrived, but there are no snakes. We walk through the storm drains smelling of fossilized tadpoles and dead frog-water, push the bikes up the hill and come into the track. We jumped some rickety plywood ramps, rode the cup a few times, kicking off and coming out of the ravines. A guy came and tried the same things on motorcycle and promptly laid it on top of himself, the wheels still spinning crazily in the air. He was lucky not to die. We just watched.

When it was time to go, we took a path I had never noticed, and found a clearing, a few stolen lawn chairs, an old igloo cooler. On the top of the cooler was a brand new trapper keeper.with golden retrievers on it.

I opened it, and saw written in green ballpoint, in a shaky hand, the (swear-to-god) minutes of a snake meeting! THEY HAD A TREASURER, and a president, and some fucked-up hoodlum version of roberts rules of order. The main order of business seemed to be the construction of a clubhouse, including sketches, but the end result had seemed to be this circle of lawn chairs and garbage in a vacant lot, in the high and doubtless tick-filled grass.

The rest of the book was clean empty paper.

I took it by the handful and threw it up in the air, all those clean white sheets raining down on the grass and the lawn chairs, they split out in sheaves and I threw them again, endless flocks of college-ruled, three hole punched doves exploding from a magicians hat.

Paper carpeted the floor pristine and white, cicadas and crickets sawing in the tall grass.

We left, and of course the snakes found us, and I stood paralyzed while they blacked jason’s eye, an act of cowardice I could never forgive myself for. Maybe that’s why he became a cop. Years later, as a hoodlum in my early teens I would party with some of the affiliate snakes, never the general or treasurer, but footsoldiers, gone on to gangs with real names, like disciples, or counts, or kings or became petty criminals like myself, setting dumpsters on fire, drinking beer in the cornfields, dealing in stolen pills. There was never a day of reckoning for the years of terror, and I eventually grew into myself, became the kind of person that could and would black someones eye, learned how to be unafraid when walking alone. Learned how to move through the world more like a predator than prey, but I never was avenged, or saved, or redeemed from these particular monsters. The arc of the story does not work like that. We learn to be courageous because it is necessary, to protect our friends because we must, but there is no satisfying day when the old terror is put away forever. I grew, and the snakes grew and we found other ways to frighten each other. There is no magic moment of victory, but those clean white pages, falling so silently to earth, those defiant doves and the kicked over empty chairs of my enemies, the sun through the late summer grass and the sound of cicadeas, those things will be with me when I die, still a smart-ass, still a pussy.