CHAPTER 30
CHILDREN OF THE UNIVERSE
I’ve decided to change my name again. Mike was fine for junior high but now that I’m in high school, it sounds childish and so I start telling my new teachers to call me by my given name, the one Mom gave me that would be uniquely my own, so I could be a child of the universe. Mikel. It’s strange to hear the name coming from the mouths of my teachers and it feels like an affectation at first because all my junior high friends, Drew, Ryan, Stephen Perkins, insist on calling me Mike.
By the time I finish my first semester of ninth grade at Westchester High School, the report card that Bonnie puts on the fridge reads five As and one B. I don’t know what I thought school would be. Boring, I suppose. I thought it would be something I did like the standards I had to write when I got busted ditching school in junior high, a kind of repetitive punishment that I accepted because it was either do that or become a Dope Fiend.
But it wasn’t like that at all. There was a pretty girl named Laura Dorset who sat in the front of my honors English class. She had sandy blond hair and a tiny nose tilted up just like a little ski jump. She wore leg warmers and a big white belt that covered her impossibly small waist. Most days I sat in the back and watched her and when we got to the unit on The Scarlet Letter by Hawthorne and our teacher, Mrs. Chavez, asked the class about the A stitched across the chest of Hester Prynne, Laura Dorset raised her hand and said very seriously that she thought the A stood for “able” and not “adulteress, as was her punishment.” Something turned in me, to see this pretty girl taking the book so seriously. She put her hand down and the discussion moved on and for the first time in my life I did homework that night.
One sentence stood out to me as I read on the edge of my bed. I marked the page: “No man, for any considerable period, can wear one face to himself, and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be the true.” It made me think of the Secret Place, the place I hide with Robert Smith. I know this face. I’ve learned not to tell anyone at school about Synanon or Dad in prison or Paul dying or Mom in the bed staring up at the ceiling.
It’s a mask, this face you create for others, one you hide behind as you laugh at jokes you don’t understand and skip uncomfortable details, entire years of your life, as if they simply didn’t happen.
I brought up the quote in our next discussion, raising my hand in class for the first time in my life, my heart pounding trying to sound serious, keeping an eye on Laura Dorset. Mrs. Chavez said I hit the major theme on its head and she wrote it on the blackboard for the class.
Next was Lord of the Flies, then Of Mice and Men. I wondered how the authors dreamed these stories up. It seemed like writers have the most important job in the world, to make books, to create a connection, a kind of telepathy between two minds in which one can inhabit the other. It doesn’t seem like a thing that exists in the real world, to be an artist. The only careers we ever hear about are doctor or teacher or lawyer or banker or engineer. What does a writer do all day? Where does he pick up his paycheck? How does he even start? There are no answers.
I was shocked, as surprised as I’ve ever been about anything in my life, to find I liked school. I liked the books and the discussions in English. I liked learning about ancient civilizations in history class. I liked science with our microscopes and cell diagrams, the mystery of life explained. I was fascinated. What started as a kind of future goal quickly became something I loved for its own sake.
I would find myself up at eleven or midnight reading on the bed or taking notes from a textbook. Dad would lean in with a glass of milk and some crackers, shaking his head. “How’s it going in here? You going blind from all this reading yet?” I would point to the book and he would nod and leave me with my studies.
Some nights he seemed proud and others he seemed almost confused. I knew I couldn’t ask him for help with geometry or an essay, the way the other kids from class could, the ones whose parents had college degrees. And very quickly, after my first few report cards, a new feeling began to emerge over this, a shame like Dad was something to be hidden, something I had to fight against if I wanted to go to college. Because that was all I cared about, getting out, getting into college, finding a way to do something new. And being a Jollett man, the very thing that made me feel dangerous and cool, like I could flout all rules and conventions, suddenly felt like a liability and college—for a Jollett man whose uncles, brother and father had all been addicts who’d gone to jail—was nothing but a pipe dream.
* * *
WHEN WE GET to Black Boy, I work up the nerve to ask Laura Dorset on a date. To my surprise, she says yes. The class discussions all week center on how Richard Wright’s family treats his ambition like a dangerous thing, so he learns to hide it. In the rural South at the turn of the century that ambition could get him killed. Still, he’s driven to move up, to find a better station in life. I can’t help but be inspired, to think if he can face the horrors he had to face, I can at least stay up late studying. Tanisha Campbell says this is how it’s always been and that white people don’t understand struggle because they don’t have to deal with being poor, with living on food stamps in a broken home or a father in prison.
When Wright’s mother tells him she wants to die, his body goes blank, his feelings frozen inside him while she lies still in the bed. This teaches him to be suspicious of joy, a feeling like he had to keep moving in order to escape the nameless fate trying to overtake him. I am breathless because that is exactly how I felt in Oregon when Mom would go into her depressions. I want so badly to be on whatever team Richard Wright is on. I know he faced things I never will, that I have the advantage of this white face I can wear like a mask, that when teachers or cops or my peers look at me, they don’t see the food stamps and heroin and lineage of men who’ve gone to prison, all they see is my blond hair and my green eyes, the picture of a suburban white boy. And that Tanisha Campbell and my black peers, no matter how focused on the future they are, no matter how safe, settled, upwardly mobile their home lives are, when authority figures see a black teenager, what they see is a million stereotypes. So I know Richard Wright and I are very different and I am lucky in this way. But still, the feeling I have when I read the book is one of being seen. I recognize something of myself in his private world and his private thoughts. I admire him and I wish so much we could be friends, that his locker was near mine and we could have lunch together.
Laura and I pass notes between classes all week and before long I ask her to be my girlfriend, leaning in to her locker, the air thick with the smell of her perfume, my heart pounding as I place my hand on that tiny waist and stare at that little ski jump nose.
She says yes and it feels like the crashing of a thunderhead, this new world I glimpse at the edge of her locker in the E Building of Westchester High School beneath the flight path of those rumbling jets. Within a couple weeks, we are spending every minute together, holding hands in the hallways, staying up late to talk on the phone while I read her the lyrics to “Just Like Heaven” by the Cure. We eat lunch alone on the edge of campus, away from prying eyes, a great romance taking place beneath the eaves of the school library. A universe in a raindrop.