White Like Me: Reflections on Race From a Privileged Son (16 page)
Read White Like Me: Reflections on Race From a Privileged Son Online
Authors: Tim Wise
Tags: #History, #Politics, #Sociology, #Memoir, #Race
BOOK: White Like Me: Reflections on Race From a Privileged Son
6.79Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
My essay ran in the school’s “underground paper.” As a side note, any school that has an underground paper is a school with a lot of people who believe themselves to be writers (and of an especially hip and subversive type at that) against any and all evidence to the contrary—people for whom the regular school paper is too “establishment,” and whose staffs are a bunch of ass-kissers, the literary equivalent of the Pep Club. It’s a privileged concept, almost by definition, to think that what you have to say is so important that you can make your own paper, thumb your nose at the administration
and
the regular student press, and get away with publishing your truth, no matter who likes it.
and
the regular student press, and get away with publishing your truth, no matter who likes it.
Or in this case, who
doesn’t
like it. I was sitting in third period government class with Mr. McMackin—the unofficial advisor to the underground rag—when a student worker came in from the principal’s office and told me that Harry Brunson, the Assistant Principal, needed to see me. The paper had been out for roughly an hour, which meant there was little doubt it was the essay for which I was being summoned. I exited the room, as Mr. McMackin said something about the First Amendment under his breath, and headed downstairs, not knowing exactly what was going to happen.
doesn’t
like it. I was sitting in third period government class with Mr. McMackin—the unofficial advisor to the underground rag—when a student worker came in from the principal’s office and told me that Harry Brunson, the Assistant Principal, needed to see me. The paper had been out for roughly an hour, which meant there was little doubt it was the essay for which I was being summoned. I exited the room, as Mr. McMackin said something about the First Amendment under his breath, and headed downstairs, not knowing exactly what was going to happen.
When I got into Mr. Brunson’s office and he closed the door behind us, I fully expected that I was going to be suspended or in some way punished. I also knew that if so, I would finally get to track down that lawyer I’d bragged about to the principal back at Moore when I’d threatened to sue him four years earlier.
Mr. Brunson cut right to the chase.
“I wanted to speak with you about that article you wrote. What would make you say such things?” he asked.
“Well, I feel that Anton was suspended for no good reason,” I replied. “And meanwhile, Kon Moulder is walking around with a
swastika
on his jacket and nothing happens to him.”
swastika
on his jacket and nothing happens to him.”
“I didn’t know about this, this, what’d you say his name was? Kon?” Mr. Brunson said. “What does he look like?”
“He’s sort of a big guy, bald, like a skinhead. He always wears a black leather jacket, and lately it’s had a swastika on it. He’s pretty hard to miss.” I explained.
“Well, we’ll look into that,” he promised.
“Also,” I continued. “My understanding is that you were threatening to discipline anyone who signed the petition in Anton’s defense, by removing us from leadership positions in student clubs or student council. That’s even worse than the original suspension for Anton.”
“I’m not sure where you heard that, Tim, but it’s not true. We would never do that,” he assured me, though I didn’t believe him. I had heard about this threat from teachers who had become aware of the plan from conversations in the teacher’s lounge. It wasn’t just some paranoid conspiracy theory spun by disgruntled teenagers.
“Okay then, great,” I said, figuring that even if he was lying, he was now on record as opposing any such secondary punishment, so at least that much had been accomplished by the uproar.
“See Tim,” he said, leaning in towards me as if he had something of the utmost importance to impart, “We’re just concerned.”
“Concerned about what?” I asked.
Mr. Brunson sighed, and then proceeded to make the one mistake no adult should ever make with a child—letting that child know that you fear them.
“I don’t think you recognize your power,” he began. “I think you could stand on a table in the lunchroom and tell the students to burn the building down, and they just might do it.”
I laughed immediately, finding this to be the silliest thing I had ever heard, but it was apparent that he was completely serious.
“Well, I would never tell anyone to burn anything,” I replied, “but seriously, if I did that everyone would think I was nuts. They would throw food at me. I mean, honestly, I’m really not that popular.”
“Well, popular or not, I’m telling you, you have an ability to persuade,” he said. “Last year when we had the presidential debate, I saw what happened. We’ve got twelve hundred students, and you got a standing ovation from two-thirds of them.”
“Yeah but I was pretending to be Walter Mondale,” I explained. “I mean, they were probably just grateful that I hadn’t delivered the speech the way he would have.”
“No, that’s not it, Tim. I’m telling you. It’s a real ability you have, but you have to be careful with it,” he said, eyes locked on mine, apparently convinced that the revolution was just around the corner, and that I was Hillsboro’s own Lenin, just returned from the Finland Station.
“Okay, well, is that it?” I asked, still floored by the seeming absurdity of the exchange.
“That’ll be all,” he replied.
And with that, I left the principal’s office, knowing in ways I hadn’t before what I wanted to do with my life. My road was becoming clear.
But as so often happens, there would be a detour.
THE SCHOOL YEAR
was winding down. Prom was done, and weekends from mid-May until the end of the semester in early June were filled with parties. Though only a junior, I was suffering a pretty serious case of senioritis, more or less phoning in the remainder of my work, limping to the academic finish line and looking forward to summer, at which point I’d be going to debate camp in Washington, D.C.
was winding down. Prom was done, and weekends from mid-May until the end of the semester in early June were filled with parties. Though only a junior, I was suffering a pretty serious case of senioritis, more or less phoning in the remainder of my work, limping to the academic finish line and looking forward to summer, at which point I’d be going to debate camp in Washington, D.C.
The party for Saturday night, May 18, 1985, had been promoted all over campus the previous week. Fliers were everywhere, meaning that basically everyone was invited. It was going to be huge, and frankly, I needed the release. The week before, I had learned that my father was having an affair with a bartender at the dinner theatre where he had been doing the warm-up and running the lights for the current production. I’d learned of it by accident when one of the other employees at the theatre said something about their relationship to me after a show I’d gone to see there, assuming I knew already. I hadn’t.
I’d gone home that night from the theatre angry, less about the affair than the fact that once again, my father was so drunk he could barely function. He had mumbled through the warm-up and made several lighting mistakes during the play. I was upset about the fact that he was cheating on my mom, of course. But I always figured he probably had been, so perhaps the lack of surprise at the official confirmation of what I’d long suspected led me to more or less shrug it off. When he stumbled in later that night, he woke me to apologize, not for being three sheets to the wind (he never apologized for that, nor even seemed to recognize the impact his alcoholism had on me), but rather for the affair. He’d thought that was why I stormed out of the theatre parking lot after the show, rather than hang out for a while as I sometimes did.
I didn’t say anything. It was late and I didn’t want to get into the real cause for my anger. I just wanted to go back to bed. My dad asked if I was going to tell mom about the affair. I said no, that it wasn’t my job; it was his, and I thought he should do it soon if he intended to continue the relationship with Debbie. If he was done with the affair, I actually said he shouldn’t tell her, because all that would do is hurt mom, while doing nothing to make amends; it would be for his benefit, his expiation of guilt and little else.
He didn’t say anything to her that week about the affair, and I kept it under my hat, as I’d promised. By the time the week had ended, and I was gearing up for the party, I was glad for the ability to blow off some quickly building steam.
As it turned out, the party was pretty lame; lots of people, yes, but more or less just standing around drinking punch made with pure grain alcohol. I had one glass of the stuff and was almost immediately reminded of the last time I had made that mistake. It had been several months before, when having consumed five such glasses along with two beers and a rum and coke, I wound up puking all over the back of someone’s car I didn’t even know who’d offered to give me a ride home. Done with the punch, and remembering why I’d sworn never to drink that swill again, but not wanting to leave the party, I volunteered to go with a few other people, get some cash, and make a beer run.
From where the party was located, the closest ATM machine for my bank was about three miles away, in the shadow of St. Thomas Hospital, which sat up on a hill just off busy West End Avenue. So a bunch of us piled in one of the other kids’ cars and headed down the road. I hopped out when we got there, inserted my bank card, and punched in my PIN. As the machine spit out twenty dollars, I heard a car honking as it sped down the road behind me. I turned to see what the ruckus was about just in time to watch a car, its hazard lights flashing, pass by the bank and enter the turn lane for the hospital. A strange feeling came over me as I stuffed the money deep into my pockets and climbed in the car to go get the beer we had promised to bring back to the party. I didn’t say much on the way back to the festivities. Something about that car with the flashing lights, honking its horn, had unnerved me, though I couldn’t explain why.
We delivered the beer, of which I proceeded to drink one, and then, tired and still largely non-conversational, I averred that it was time I got home. I asked my friend Jon, with whom I’d shown up to the party, for a ride. He wasn’t happy to be leaving so soon, but when I told him I really needed to get home, the seriousness in my eyes and voice convinced him. Anyway, I told him, he could always come back. It would just take about twenty minutes round trip.
As I walked down the long hallway of E building at the Royal Arms—the place I had lived since I was three days old—I experienced vertigo for the first time. I was feeling dizzy, which made no sense given how little I’d had to drink. Maybe I was getting sick, I reasoned, as I put my key in the lock of our door, turned the handle on apartment E-7, and entered.
The only light on was a small lamp in the living room, putting off just enough of a glow to allow me to make out the physical presence of my mother, sitting on the sofa to the left of the table. She was lying down, propped up on a small pillow, with her left elbow up against the back of the couch, her left hand nestling her head. At my entrance to the apartment she had neither moved nor said a word. She wouldn’t look at me, instantly taking me back to that morning five years before when we had learned that Bobby Bell had been murdered. Though I am far too given to catastrophic thinking—it comes with the territory when you have an alcoholic parent about whom you worry constantly—I knew that my hunch about something being wrong was likely to prove correct.
“What?” I asked, trying to keep it simple and get it over with.
“It’s your dad,” she replied. “He’s in the hospital.”
“What happened?” I asked with a sigh.
“He overdosed after the show tonight,” she explained. “They just rushed him to the hospital an hour ago. I was waiting for you to get back to head over there. Let’s go.”
I can’t recall if my mom already knew the details of my father’s overdose before we got to the hospital, or if we only learned them upon speaking with the doctors; in any event, they weren’t hard to figure out. The overdose hadn’t been an accident. He had taken over two dozen anti-depressants, on top of a fifth of vodka. Almost immediately afterward, however, he had decided that he’d really rather not die. Panicked and regretful, he told his colleagues what he had done, at which point they had thrown him in the car and rushed to the nearest hospital, St. Thomas, which was nine miles away, up on the hill, overlooking the bank and the ATM machine where I had made my withdrawal at the very moment the car carrying him to the emergency room had passed by, lights flashing, horn honking. He had been conscious in that car, and when they got him to the hospital, he had walked in of his own accord, only to collapse in the waiting room.
When we got back to his bed in the ICU, he had a tube down his throat and was in a coma. The doctors thought he would likely make it, but it had been close. They had pumped his stomach of course, but the long-term effect of the drugs and alcohol on his body, and especially his brain function, was uncertain. On the side of his bed, sitting in plain sight on the table, was a six-inch strip of paper that had been ripped from the printout section of his heart monitor. It showed roughly ten to fifteen seconds of time, during which he had died—a flat line punctuated on either end by shallow heartbeats. It seemed a very strange thing to place next to a patient—like a macabre souvenir in case upon recovery he might like to take it home and put it in a scrapbook—but I left it there, after staring at it for what seemed like five minutes, considering what it signified.
Other books
ANOTHER KIND OF DIAMOND by Gloria Obizu
The Star King by Susan Grant
The Black Corleones 2: Love Ain't Loyal by Jones, Bella
We Are Both Mammals by G. Wulfing
A Taste for a Mate by Ryan, Carrie Ann
Guys and Trolls by Barry Lowe
Graven Images by Paul Fleischman
Her Master's Kiss 5 by Vivien Sparx
Glamour in Glass by Mary Robinette Kowal
La biblioteca perdida by A. M. Dean
