By Graham Swanson
To Loren,
My childhood in Nebraska went something like this. Cold winters, no furnace, walked to and from school everyday caked in snow. My best friends were blonde kids who helped me fight the Mexican kids who hung out by the abandoned grocery store. Once we beat them up and threw their sleds over the snow drift, we moved on to the big tree hill to fight the Irish boys. All rednecks the lot of them. We righteously steered forth with hard knuckles and swift kicks. We broke their teeth and cracked the bridges of their noses. We took their pot and smoked it. We celebrated our triumph on the battlefield that day and thought ourselves akin to the Vikings of Olde washing up on shore in dragonheaded longships, dressed in silver, armed with spears and swords, becrowned by horned helmets that sparkled in the snow.
After entering the hallow streets of the big city I found myself wandering aimlessly with hopes of killing myself. They always said I’d die in the big city, but despite everything I tried, death did not find me. The creepy, worndown men addicted to alcohol or crack only had things like “God bless you” to say to me. This is because I often gave them money and food. They would never harm me. One time a man in black jumped out from the bushes to accost me. I told him I’m keeping my bike, and he ran away without a word.
Downtown streamed with bright faces and red flags high over the banks and hotels. Even the State Tower glowed red like a crimson tombstone over the tireless foot tracks of a defeated sports program. Yet they still reveled in the hopes of reclaiming the last glory from almost 30 years ago. School just started at the University. A new fleet of fresh young, wealthy faces celebrated all night. I watched the frat houses alone, casing their parking lots, looking into the windows of their sports cars. Uninvited to any occasion, no friends, all alone in this cold circle, as a helicopter from the sky scoured the dark alleys in search of a kidnapped girl.
I took my walks nearly daily. After I learned that no one would attack me, I decide to try jumping in front of cars. This is easier said than done because they have a wide field of vision and can see someone coming from quite a ways off. All my attempts ended with the vehicles slowing down at a green light so I could pass illegally.
Then I went to the tallest parking garage I could find and hung over the edge for hours every single day watching the sunset by myself. I stepped back downtown to my favorite restaurant and I lifted a Barqs root beer. Later I stole another drink from a smoothie bar. While working at a sports bar, I stole Red Bulls nightly. One day I left the parking garage and never came back. I started making friends and focusing on my school work.
As the years went on, these friends started disappearing, but the professors took notice of my work. Unfortunately, I liked to argue in class. I liked to argue with the students and the professor, even if I agreed with them. Sometimes I’d even split the class in half and get them to argue with each other. Sometimes I didn't want to say anything, so I'd get someone in the room to argue FOR me. I started doing this after some slick feminist got her student pets to do the same, and focus their hatred of white mankind onto me. It didn’t offend me because I learned a very clever technique from them. Why fight, when there’s a mob that can fight for you?
Eventually, I took the writing class of aCuban post-colonialist (named 'Franny' to her friends). Having learned my lessons in the past, I decided to stay quiet, say nothing, and lay low. Unfortunately, I sat in the front of the class. She made it very clear on the first day that she didn’t want white people in her class. She couldn’t *say that, so she said things like “no bars, no guns, no dogs, no names like “Andy”- no jeans, no cigarrettes, no horror, no sci fi- just nostuff like that. She also mention that she wanted us to write realistic material, then went on to tell us how a whale predicted the future and told her not to have children. She kicked me out of her class the next day, for no reason. I didn't speak to her. She refused to meet with me to discuss it. My adviser and the dean of student admissions took her side and helped remove me from the class.
I was so angry, that I went to 4chan, and laid the story at their feet. I gave them all her office information, including office hours and email and cell number. Then I went offline and didn’t hear back for about a year. On my 26th birthday, a bunch of strangers came to the campus of the University on the day Franny was going to give a big talk to the feminists and the post-colonialists. They stormed in and took the mic over, asking her questions about her writing career, and her old books from the 80s, asking her why she hated white people so much. Franny almost stormed off in a tearful embarrassing mess. She couldn't articulate the words she wanted to say to her friends in the audience because she was too flustered with hatred of who was asking her these questions. When she finally blew up and told the men and women asking questions to “Go Fuck yourselves!” all of them stood up.
They then marched out in single file, having bought all her books from the school bookstore, and burned them right in front of the building. A huge waving fire rose and lit up the square as dark specters added books to the flame. Her pages curled up and turned to crisps. Whips of light spiraled from the confines of the pit as flaming pieces of papers flowered out like a shower of sparks. It was flux with golden light, a ring of guardians protecting its sacred flame, the fire lit up the night and like a beacon I found it. This happened on my 26th birthday. It was the best present I’d ever gotten.
I relied on my blue bike to get me around town. Groceries, houses, mostly. After five years in school, I finally got hit by a Challenger or some expensive vehicle and the driver kept on moving. My bike broke days later, and I was walking to school. This took all damn day and I didn’t want to take the bus, even though it was probably free college students. My tooth just rotted out, and it exploded in my mouth one morning while eating. The pain kept me up for two solid days. I had no health insurance, no money (yes I had a job) so I just let it fester until I could take it no longer. I stole a bike from the dorms one night. Found a nice, expensive looking one that wasn’t locked up, and I still have it to this day. Returning the favor, as I saw it back then.
Years later after I dropped out and quit my job slinging shitty drinks, I moved to the west where I've always wanted to go. I immediately stole a weapon and sold it. This is the last thing I ever stole. Once it was over, strangers LIKED talking to me. They looked me in the eye, and appreciated what they saw as intensity or toughness. Really, I did something wrong and felt bad about it, and was internalizing what I had done, who I had betrayed, and how crazy I must have really been at that moment in time. I felt so grief stricken that I got into contact with my first love. Of course she moved on long ago, probably while we were still together, but I wondered about what she was doing, what brought her happiness, if she was even still alive.
There was no romantic fantasy. We got into it. Immediately began attacking each other. All of these thoughts and feelings she kept to herself and never told me. I told about how she had an unfinished tiger tattoo on her back, and how she quit school two weeks before graduation (it was a private school her mom was paying for!) And she wanted more freedom, so she joined the army. Dear girl, you do what you are told to do in the army. Stupid city girl. I got her to calm down by reciting Serbian war songs to her. If you don't know anything about the Serbians, they’ve lost every war they ever had, and during the Uprisings in the 90s, they utilized musical propaganda to smooth out the war crimes. These songs are usually racist, combative, and threatening. They worked. It got the American army girl to send me nudes with kissy captions.
We never met up because of the chaos of the Coronavirus. I spent three months isolated in the dark, a black hole opened over my head, and from it spilled forth black clouds and demon warriors descended to the earth in heavy war trucks. They showed me the truth.
She came back to my hometown around the same time I did but she told me nothing. Word gets around, gossip gets around. There are no coincidences only omens. The love I felt for her is gone, and with it went my love for many things. Such are the principles of nature, the cycles of stars and planets and black cosmic specks. Agony breeds agony, missteps close pathways, and there’s always another bastard who needs a good punch to the throat. Like this methhead I see wandering the streets. He’s got kids, baby mammas, exchanges tattoos for drugs and sex. He’s scrawny, sickly, ugly, and dumb as sack of bricks. His crackhead girlfriends won't save his life, he cheats on them all the time. I'm no criminal, but If I had to start anyplace Id begin right there.
I saw him one winter night walking under the train bridge in the crackhood side of town. I drove a truck onto the sidewalk and stopped it right in front of him. When I got out I pinned him against a column, punched him in the ribs until he coughed up blood, and told him that for now on, if he’s buying meth, he’s going to buy it from me. For now on this is how it's going to be. I have a destiny, a bright future, and reason to live. For some reason, I never felt more alive, happier, and I kept hitting him until he fell to the ground. I dropped my heels on him over and over until he stopped moving. I bent down, and listened to the wind of his chest.
His heart still beat. He still breathed.
My first thought was to drop him off at the DRUG CONSOLING office downtown. They help people get clean. Good people doing honest good work. Yet it also occurred to me as it also began to snow, that things like this happen to addicts all the time. They get into a fight, they pass out, and the snow covers them up until springtide. I climbed into my truck and left.
Months later I get a job at the town tree nursery. I nurse saplings, and plant them in a tree farm. It’s been here since before dirt roads. It’s been owned by so many families that the name is becoming a joke. Julrick-Wuckol-Henry-Hassenroethe-Kriefels-Snyder Arbor Farm. Try saying that at a dinner party fifty times. It’s not unordinary for old women to work here or people fresh off the boat trying to make a living of things. We even host field trips full of children and teachers to come learn about the local arbor industry. On those days I stay in my office and let the others do the talking.
It was a long day, and the field trip arrived, so I sat in the dark watching the children from my window. I could hear the cacophony and the endless clamor of screaming children flood the building. I get interrupted by someone coming in the door. It's not my boss, it's not one of the ladies, it's an old fat man in a dorky sunhat. He just enters and sits in my office. I offer to tell him about what we do here, perhaps get him a job, but he says “I already know everything.” He goes on and on and on and on about bones under the earth and how difficult it is to hide them from the government. Half a million dollar fossil found in the earth, and the federal authority takes a share. Then he broke down into tears when I asked his name. “Mr. Hassenroethe” He managed to spit out, shaking my hand. “My son was getting into drugs. We kicked him out of the house because he wouldn’t get clean. He went to stay with his druggie friends, they beat him up, and left him in the snow. He froze to death 6 blocks away from our house.”
I froze in my seat, lowered my jaw, leaned forward, but inside a race horse gate lifted.
He continued “My son had such a bright future. He could've done anything. A doctor. A psychologist. A movie director… and he promised us he'd get clean so many times….”
I asked the old man to stop it, stop rambling about some dead man that had nothing to do with me. The more he talked about it, the more I saw his scratched-up face, and the more I heard the raspy breaths fainting like steam. I rose my fists and demanded that he shut the hell up, but he didn’t. He kept whining and crying like the man I beat to death. He even started scratching his face, picking at scabs, shuddering from the cold as the ancient wind of a Viking Winter blew in from the window.
No. Before my eyes, his face transformed from the old fossil baron to the droopy spacey face of the man I put down so so long ago. It couldn’t be the same person, I told him, It cant be! I felt the explosion of euphoria as the man before me looked exactly like him. Even wearing the same knitted cap and mittens shivering in the cold moonlight.
My instincts kicked in and I wasted no time beating the living shit out of the methhead again. I crashed his head into the window and beat him down with a paper weight. Not two seconds later, the methhead comes back and is standing in my doorway screaming like woman. I beat the shit out of him too. More and more crackheads start running down the halls towards the school bus. I grabbed as many as I can and beat them down with a fire extinguisher. More and more of the exact same methheads tried to run out the door but they moved too slow, like children, and so I clobbered them good. More and more swarmed the room, they packed the walls, they came in from the windows, from the doors, from the ceiling. I heard the little Viking songs my mother sung to me as a child as I wielded my weapon and ignored their cries, frozen in a moment.
