“If I had my finger on the button that would destroy the world I would be pressing that thing so HARD,” said Karl venomously.
He was walking home from school with a girl from class: “Not me,” she replied. “I love life.”
He wondered where she was coming from, for he saw nothing he loved; nothing he liked, not even money or beer, or her for that matter. He would have liked to take a baseball bat to smash in a car window. “I hate this shit hole town,” he muttered. “When I leave I’ll never come back.”
She was silent at this. Perhaps she thought he was insane, not just angry. Anyone could be angry at the age of seventeen, especially growing up in a dirty industrial town like this one. But Karl was especially angry. He scowled at times when he smoked a fag, letting it dangle from the corner of his thin lips, then strangled it between two fingers and spit roughly into the snow. He didn’t want to go home.
Home was where hell waited: two middle-aged, bored and boring people who masqueraded as parents — people with social pretensions, people whose goals in life were a bigger car, a bigger house, more damned furniture to stuff into spaces to fill the hollowness of their hearts. Karl intuited all of this without being able to put it into words, but he felt a lot was missing from life.
There was no joy in his house, nothing at home that mattered. So he read. He read a great deal. And he hung around with friends who smoked too much and drank beer while underage. They were fellow nihilists who would have liked to reduced life to rubble but, instead, they drank to destroy themselves and got into trouble with the law.
A friend of his had recently been caught after stealing a car. He had done this not for any profit, but to go joy riding along the Beach Strip in the middle of the night. The cops had caught him just before the car went off the bridge into the lake for the kid had no license and hardly knew what he was doing. He just wanted to smash the car and himself into a wall but ended up in a jail cell instead. Karl would attend his trial, just to see what happened.
Karl wandered aimlessly in the dark as snow kept gently falling. It muted all sounds, gave the world a sort of battened down existence. It made him feel he couldn’t possibly be missing anything for everyone was shut up in their homes, in their boxes, watching TV. He would have kept walking and smoking endlessly if the sludge hadn’t begun seeping into his shoes, wetting his socks. It was uncomfortable and only added to his irritation.
He had gone to see Linda last day. She was his supposed girlfriend but actually just another desperado. Linda was always trying to seduce him without knowing how. She would invite him over when her parents were out of for the evening. She would sit next to him on the couch sipping on her beer suggestively, talking nonsense, nervously.
He knew what she was up to. She was trying to get pregnant. Karl’s friends at school had warned him. Some of Linda’s girlfriends had gotten knocked up and had found meaning in life; they ended up as single moms. There was welfare, after all, and parents. Getting knocked up was a way of life for girls of Karl’s class, but he would have none of it. Parenthood was a trap. A deadly trap. Once you were in it you were history, screwed for life. No, Karl had greater ambitions. He longed for freedom. He would escape one day. But, in the meantime, he would have to put up with a lot of shit.
He liked learning but hated the atmosphere at school for he could never let his guard down. One of his classmates, Ivy, had serious mental problems. He had cornered Karl in the toilets the other day, had tried to stick a switchblade into Karl’s stomach. It nearly penetrated the skin were it not for the thickness of several layers of clothing. Ivy had chuckled and grinned like a fool: “Nearly gotcha there…” Karl would have to get hold of a knife. There might be a repetition of this madness and he would have to fight back for there was chaos at school.
The place was too big. It was the largest high school in the Commonwealth, proudly self-proclaimed in the brochure the school produced to impress god-knows-who. There were two shifts per day: one in the morning, another in the afternoon; there were two principals and vice-principals and several hundred teachers to several thousand students. The place looked like a late-Victorian factory, with large, glazed industrial windows, and thousands of lockers in the hallways that led to one-way staircases always busy until the bell rang.
The school was designed to train workers for the city’s factories, the smelters and railway car industry that provided work for generations of migrants from Europe, Russia, Italy, and elsewhere. They came for the jobs and the hope of a middle-class life: the American Dream. Karl’s Nightmare.
Karl and his entire generation was destined for the steel mills. Eventually, they would come home Friday nights like their fathers, with a lunch bucket and hard hat in hand and a cigarette in the mouth, smelling of a few from the beer parlor. They would hand over their weekly paychecks to their wives who might work at the new supermarket on the edge of town to make some extra cash for the kids.
If the men were drunk enough, there would inevitably be a scene: their wives would throw a few dishes and scream bloody murder while the men would tell them to shut the fuck up. The kids would sit silently in their bedrooms, praying the parents had forgotten of their existence.
It was a scene that played itself out endlessly and added up to Life. And those were the times the kids would steal out of the homes, very cautiously lest anyone call them to account. They would loiter in the semidarkness of alleyways, smoking cigarettes and talking of escape. They would dream of places in the sun: Mexico, Florida: I’m goanna get outta here, so far away, and I’m gonna do something… I don’t know what yet, but I’m not spending my life in this shithole.
That was Karl talking. His friends had it just as bad. Ivy was a nutter, but he had his reasons to be sure. His father had run out on his mother, left her with three kids to raise on a waitress’ salary. Strangely, the woman wasn’t bitter; she seemed resigned, like she had deserved it; that’s all there was to life and she accepted it. Of course, Ivy’s mother was a Catholic. You had to be to accept such a lousy fate.
And Linda, well she had never seen anything beyond the steel mills of the area where she lived. She had been born there among the blowing coal dust and the smog. She had no ambitions except to get knocked up, married or not.
These thoughts were going through Karl’s mind one day as he sat daydreaming in his English class. It was the end of the term and the teacher — who everyone suspected was a faggot but nice enough since he kept his hands to himself — the teacher was wandering around the class as though uttering a soliloquy, but he was talking about the students. “You. And you…” he was saying, prophetically pointing to people here and there. “You…” And then he pointed at Karl “…and you… You four are going to college.”
College?… University? Karl was momentarily in panic. College had never occurred to him. People of his type didn’t go to college. He couldn’t imagine what people did there, what they learned, what became of them. He hadn’t entertained ambitions except to get out on the road, get a job somewhere and make his way as far south as possible. College was not for immigrants.
That day was pivotal in Karl’s life. It was the day a possibility announced itself: the chance to take existence into his own hands and direct his own fate; the day to get out of the loathsome town.
It was dark by the time the afternoon shift got out of school. The snow was falling and he spotted the girl he had talked to in such a bitter mood days before. She eyed him suspiciously as he approached. She was relieved to see him smile. Karl took out a pack of cigarettes, pulled one out and, grinning, said: “Want one?”
Tags: chance, fate, opportunity, teen life
