This chapter is dedicated to the incomparable Mysterious Galaxy in SanDiego, California. The Mysterious Galaxy folks have had me in to signbooks every time I've been in San Diego for a conference or to teach (theClarion Writers' Workshop is based at San Diego State University innearby La Jolla, CA), and every time I show up, they pack the house.
This is a store with a loyal following of die-hard fans who know thatthey'll always be able to get great recommendations and great ideas atthe store. In summer 2007, I took my writing class from Clarion downto the store for the midnight launch of the final Harry Potter book andI've never seen such a rollicking, awesomely fun party at a store.
Mysterious Galaxy: 7051 Clairemont Mesa Blvd., Suite #302 SanDiego, CA USA 92111 +1 858 268 4747The Xnet wasn't much fun in the middle of the school-day, when allthe people who used it were in school. I had the piece of paper folded inthe back pocket of my jeans, and I threw it on the kitchen table when Igot home. I sat down in the living room and switched on the TV. I neverwatched it, but I knew that my parents did. The TV and the radio andthe newspapers were where they got all their ideas about the world.
The news was terrible. There were so many reasons to be scared.
American soldiers were dying all over the world. Not just soldiers,either. National guardsmen, who thought they were signing up to helprescue people from hurricanes, stationed overseas for years and years ofa long and endless war.
I flipped around the 24-hour news networks, one after another, aparade of officials telling us why we should be scared. A parade of pho-tos of bombs going off around the world.
I kept flipping and found myself looking at a familiar face. It was theguy who had come into the truck and spoken to Severe-Haircut womanwhen I was chained up in the back. Wearing a military uniform. The180caption identified him as Major General Graeme Sutherland, RegionalCommander, DHS.
"I hold in my hands actual literature on offer at the so-called concert inDolores Park last weekend." He held up a stack of pamphlets. There'dbeen lots of pamphleteers there, I remembered. Wherever you got agroup of people in San Francisco, you got pamphlets.
"I want you to look at these for a moment. Let me read you their titles.
WITHOUT THE CONSENT OF THE GOVERNED: A CITIZEN'S GUIDETO OVERTHROWING THE STATE. Here's one, DID THE SEPTEMBER11TH BOMBINGS REALLY HAPPEN? And another, HOW TO USETHEIR SECURITY AGAINST THEM. This literature shows us the truepurpose of the illegal gathering on Saturday night. This wasn't merely anunsafe gathering of thousands of people without proper precaution, oreven toilets. It was a recruiting rally for the enemy. It was an attempt tocorrupt children into embracing the idea that America shouldn't protectherself.
"Take this slogan, DON'T TRUST ANYONE OVER 25. What betterway to ensure that no considered, balanced, adult discussion is ever in-jected into your pro-terrorist message than to exclude adults, limitingyour group to impressionable young people?
"When police came on the scene, they found a recruitment rally forAmerica's enemies in progress. The gathering had already disrupted thenights of hundreds of residents in the area, none of whom had been con-sulted in the planning of this all night rave party.
"They ordered these people to disperse — that much is visible on allthe video — and when the revelers turned to attack them, egged on bythe musicians on stage, the police subdued them using non-lethal crowdcontrol techniques.
"The arrestees were ring-leaders and provocateurs who had led thethousands of impressionistic young people there to charge the policelines. 827 of them were taken into custody. Many of these people hadprior offenses. More than 100 of them had outstanding warrants. Theyare still in custody.
"Ladies and gentlemen, America is fighting a war on many fronts, butnowhere is she in more grave danger than she is here, at home. Whetherwe are being attacked by terrorists or those who sympathize with them."181A reporter held up a hand and said, "General Sutherland, surely you'renot saying that these children were terrorist sympathizers for attending aparty in a park?""Of course not. But when young people are brought under the influ-ence of our country's enemies, it's easy for them to end up over theirheads. Terrorists would love to recruit a fifth column to fight the war onthe home front for them. If these were my children, I'd be gravelyconcerned."Another reporter chimed in. "Surely this is just an open air concert,General? They were hardly drilling with rifles."The General produced a stack of photos and began to hold them up.
"These are pictures that officers took with infra-red cameras before mov-ing in." He held them next to his face and paged through them one at atime. They showed people dancing really rough, some people gettingcrushed or stepped on. Then they moved into sex stuff by the trees, a girlwith three guys, two guys necking together. "There were children asyoung as ten years old at this event. A deadly cocktail of drugs, propa-ganda and music resulted in dozens of injuries. It's a wonder thereweren't any deaths."I switched the TV off. They made it look like it had been a riot. If myparents thought I'd been there, they'd have strapped me to my bed for amonth and only let me out afterward wearing a tracking collar.
Speaking of which, they were going to be pissed when they found outI'd been suspended.
They didn't take it well. Dad wanted to ground me, but Mom and Italked him out of it.
"You know that vice-principal has had it in for Marcus for years,"Mom said. "The last time we met him you cursed him for an hour after-ward. I think the word 'asshole' was mentioned repeatedly."Dad shook his head. "Disrupting a class to argue against the Depart-ment of Homeland Security —""It's a social studies class, Dad," I said. I was beyond caring anymore,but I felt like if Mom was going to stick up for me, I should help her out.
"We were talking about the DHS. Isn't debate supposed to be healthy?""Look, son," he said. He'd taking to calling me "son" a lot. It made mefeel like he'd stopped thinking of me as a person and switched to think-ing of me as a kind of half-formed larva that needed to be guided out of182adolescence. I hated it. "You're going to have to learn to live with the factthat we live in a different world today. You have every right to speakyour mind of course, but you have to be prepared for the consequencesof doing so. You have to face the fact that there are people who are hurt-ing, who aren't going to want to argue the finer points of Constitutionallaw when their lives are at stakes. We're in a lifeboat now, and onceyou're in the lifeboat, no one wants to hear about how mean the captainis being."I barely restrained myself from rolling my eyes.
"I've been assigned two weeks of independent study, writing one pa-per for each of my subjects, using the city for my background — a his-tory paper, a social studies paper, an English paper, a physics paper. Itbeats sitting around at home watching television."Dad looked hard at me, like he suspected I was up to something, thennodded. I said goodnight to them and went up to my room. I fired upmy Xbox and opened a word-processor and started to brainstorm ideasfor my papers. Why not? It really was better than sitting around at home.
I ended up IMing with Ange for quite a while that night. She was sym-pathetic about everything and told me she'd help me with my papers if Iwanted to meet her after school the next night. I knew where her schoolwas — she went to the same school as Van — and it was all the way overin the East Bay, where I hadn't visited since the bombs went.
I was really excited at the prospect of seeing her again. Every nightsince the party, I'd gone to bed thinking of two things: the sight of thecrowd charging the police lines and the feeling of the side of her breastunder her shirt as we leaned against the pillar. She was amazing. I'd nev-er been with a girl as… aggressive as her before. It had always been meputting the moves on and them pushing me away. I got the feeling thatAnge was as much of a horn-dog as I was. It was a tantalizing notion.
I slept soundly that night, with exciting dreams of me and Ange andwhat we might do if we found ourselves in a secluded spot somewhere.
The next day, I set out to work on my papers. San Francisco is a goodplace to write about. History? Sure, it's there, from the Gold Rush to theWWII shipyards, the Japanese internment camps, the invention of thePC. Physics? The Exploratorium has the coolest exhibits of any museumI've ever been to. I took a perverse satisfaction in the exhibits on soil li-quefaction during big quakes. English? Jack London, Beat Poets, science183fiction writers like Pat Murphy and Rudy Rucker. Social studies? TheFree Speech Movement, Cesar Chavez, gay rights, feminism, anti-warmovement…I've always loved just learning stuff for its own sake. Just to be smarterabout the world around me. I could do that just by walking around thecity. I decided I'd do an English paper about the Beats first. City Lightsbooks had a great library in an upstairs room where Alan Ginsberg andhis buddies had created their radical druggy poetry. The one we'd readin English class was Howl and I would never forget the opening lines,they gave me shivers down my back:
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hyster-ical naked,dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angryfix,angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to thestarry dynamo in the machinery of night…I liked the way he ran those words all together, "starving hysterical na-ked." I knew how that felt. And "best minds of my generation" made methink hard too. It made me remember the park and the police and the gasfalling. They busted Ginsberg for obscenity over Howl — all about a lineabout gay sex that would hardly have caused us to blink an eye today. Itmade me happy somehow, knowing that we'd made some progress.
That things had been even more restrictive than this before.
I lost myself in the library, reading these beautiful old editions of thebooks. I got lost in Jack Kerouac's On the Road, a novel I'd been meaningto read for a long time, and a clerk who came up to check on me noddedapprovingly and found me a cheap edition that he sold me for six bucks.
I walked into Chinatown and had dim sum buns and noodles withhot-sauce that I had previously considered to be pretty hot, but whichwould never seem anything like hot ever again, not now that I'd had anAnge special.
As the day wore on toward the afternoon, I got on the BART andswitched to a San Mateo bridge shuttle bus to bring me around to theEast Bay. I read my copy of On the Road and dug the scenery whizzingpast. On the Road is a semi-autobiographical novel about Jack Kerouac, adruggy, hard-drinking writer who goes hitchhiking around America,working crummy jobs, howling through the streets at night, meetingpeople and parting ways. Hipsters, sad-faced hobos, con-men, muggers,184scumbags and angels. There's not really a plot — Kerouac supposedlywrote it in three weeks on a long roll of paper, stoned out of his mind —only a bunch of amazing things, one thing happening after another. Hemakes friends with self-destructing people like Dean Moriarty, who gethim involved in weird schemes that never really work out, but still itworks out, if you know what I mean.
There was a rhythm to the words, it was luscious, I could hear it beingread aloud in my head. It made me want to lie down in the bed of apickup truck and wake up in a dusty little town somewhere in the cent-ral valley on the way to LA, one of those places with a gas station and adiner, and just walk out into the fields and meet people and see stuff anddo stuff.
It was a long bus ride and I must have dozed off a little — staying uplate IMing with Ange was hard on my sleep-schedule, since Mom stillexpected me down for breakfast. I woke up and changed buses and be-fore long, I was at Ange's school.
She came bounding out of the gates in her uniform — I'd never seenher in it before, it was kind of cute in a weird way, and reminded me ofVan in her uniform. She gave me a long hug and a hard kiss on thecheek.
"Hello you!" she said.
"Hiya!""Whatcha reading?"I'd been waiting for this. I'd marked the passage with a finger. "Listen:
'They danced down the streets like dingledodies, and I shambled after asI've been doing all my life after people who interest me, because the onlypeople for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad totalk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the onesthat never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn likefabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the starsand in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes"Awww!"'"She took the book and read the passage again for herself. "Wow,dingledodies! I love it! Is it all like this?"I told her about the parts I'd read, walking slowly down the sidewalkback toward the bus-stop. Once we turned the corner, she put her armaround my waist and I slung mine around her shoulder. Walking downthe street with a girl — my girlfriend? Sure, why not? — talking about185this cool book. It was heaven. Made me forget my troubles for a littlewhile.
"Marcus?"I turned around. It was Van. In my subconscious I'd expected this. Iknew because my conscious mind wasn't remotely surprised. It wasn't abig school, and they all got out at the same time. I hadn't spoken to Vanin weeks, and those weeks felt like months. We used to talk every day.
"Hey, Van," I said. I suppressed the urge to take my arm off of Ange'sshoulders. Van seemed surprised, but not angry, more ashen, shaken.
She looked closely at the two of us.
"Angela?""Hey, Vanessa," Ange said.
"What are you doing here?""I came out to get Ange," I said, trying to keep my tone neutral. I wassuddenly embarrassed to be seen with another girl.
"Oh,"............