It was the ten-year anniversary of 9/11, and the Islamophobes’ fear of Sharia Law heading to our shores was ratcheted up by the coming re-election of the Kenyan, HUSSEIN Obama, who, failed vice-president nominee Sarah Palin warned her fellow rouges, was palling around with terrorists.
Racist stereotypes and prejudices, always percolating just beneath the red, white, and blue veneer, became more open, more daring, with the floodgates of social media. (A comment posted on Fox News’ website read, “there’s a nigger in the White House and he ain’t servin’ coffee.”) The American political divide was metastasizing like cancer, but had not yet exploded like the Rathbun septic tank.
Economically, the country was still coming around, steady and sure, the financial house of cards doused with fire hoses of money; locally, not so quickly, since most of the manufacturing companies had long se mudó a mexico, and service jobs were low rent.
The years had gone savage on the Castle, with graffiti, desks, and books strewn around the once stately building that now might be mistaken for an abandoned Barvarian villa a decade after World War II. The windows were the first to go--who the hell wouldn’t want to bust out one in remembrance of the time they were bullied or embarrassed or were flunked, or for any number of pubescent reasons that pissed them off back in the day?
The columns holding up on the second story balcony looked like they were carved in Pisa, a couple more degrees leaning and there would be a jumbled pile of DCHS blocking Fourth Street. The attic was now the coolest, most glorious bat house/pigeon coop anywhere, made easily accessible by the holes where the shingles and wood had rotted away completely. An alumnus craned the bell tower off for a keepsake. A mist of teenage memories floated through hallways and deserted classrooms, memories desecrated by the audacity of time.
2
It was a beautiful day for a wedding, the church decorated in colors that honored America’s birthday. The groom looked more handsome than ever in his powder-blue tuxedo; she felt like Cinderella in her white gown with lace trim, a bouquet of red roses in her hand. Both sets of parents beamed from the front row of First Christian Church filled with friends and old schoolmates. This is a match made in Heaven, the bride thought to herself, feeling light and buoyant, as if on clouds.
Reverend Jamison asked if anybody had any objections to the marriage, the couple exchanged vows and rings, and the two were pronounced man and wife. They sealed the deal with a kiss, turned around to share their joy with the congregation but were shocked to see that all their guests had skin-walked into Norway rats, and were gnawing ferociously on the pews and hymnals, splintering wood and paper everywhere. Now they were on the hunt up the aisle, hungry for some fresh red blood and white virgin flesh.
When the vermin saw the bride, they went into attack mode, scratching and crawling up and inside her dress, leaving a trail of tattered satin and flacks of arm bone as they clawed towards her veil, going for her succulent facial features—her happy wedding day countenance to be literally eaten away.
She pleaded for help from her new husband and the good reverend, but they were already chunks of minced-meat staining the chancel’s carpet, dessert-to-be for the ravenous vermin. They were no help, as the pack began nibbling out her eyeballs—the couple’s promise to each other ‘until death do we part’ lasting a mere three minutes.
Deena Webber bolted upright in bed shrieking, fighting off the mangy critters that existed only in her REM state of mind, pouring a bucket of cold sweat on that same recurring nightmare she had been suffering the past three years.
Still mostly in a dream state, she decided it was finally time to exterminate the dirty little bastards, once and for all. She got out of bed and padded down the hall with one of Ben’s shotgun at her side in the same way Sarah Winchester hunted down her ghosts victims, or Eugene Rathbun searched for a route home in the quiet of the 3AM witching hour. She was determined to find their nest and retrieve bits and scraps of her husband’s hair, skin, or bone to put inside the display case on the second-floor hallway.
With the morning sun as an alarm clock, Deena was startled awake to see that she was lying outside where the courtyard used to be before she had it bulldozed out, shotgun laying in the cool grass beside her. How the heck did I end up out here? she wondered. She remembered having the nightmare, but had assumed that she had gone back to sleep. Sleepwalking? Stress? Grief? She had better start doubling up on her nerve rx.
3
Meet the Cumberlands: Wearing #10, former Dallas City Bulldog star quarterback, Keith, husband, father, and football failure: second down on the six yard line … a wide open receiver in the end zone, the ball sailing ten yards over his outstretched arms. Third down, same result. To preserve his reputation as the guy who choked, he missed the four-yard field goal try in that final Homecoming game ten years before that was still being arm-chaired around town. A legacy of going from school hero to gridiron zero because of a couple of errant passes and a really bad kick.
Enrolled at the University of Illinois for the fall semester; but dropped out by spring, his love of learning not nearly as pronounced as his new-found love for cocaine. He, like many big fish in a small pond who flounder in a larger one, came back home and got a job selling used cars in Fort Madison. He fell in love and married a bartending babe, who also happened to be a seller of his favorite powder to her customers. They got married and made the side hustle their joint business.
Debbie, 27, his wife: a Fort Madison girl smitten by the tall, lean and muscular stud at the end of the bar wearing no wedding band, who frequented the men’s room a lot and who seemed talkative and confident. An average student, with no further educational ambitions past high school, Debbie had no plans for life beyond getting through her shifts without getting busted for selling to an undercover cop. Life was meant to be enjoyed.
The couple married in 2004 and started out successfully enough, renting a nice split-level place on the bluffs behind Fort Madison, selling cars and coke like crazy. Living the high life. For a year or two, until it all started slipping away.
Their first bad business decision was to replace coke with meth--more affordable and a bigger bang; the second was Keith getting caught at work sneaking a spoonful at his desk and fired; the third, their own habits cutting deeply into their profit. Add to their new-found poverty, twins, Eddie and Emily.
Evicted from the split-level, they were scouring to find a cheap place to live when a former Bulldog teammate told him he knew of an empty place back in Dallas City at 2nd and Cottonwood Street that they might rent for a steal--just have to clean up a certain mess.
Keith Cumberland was back in his hometown, a loser the second time around, as well.
4
The Mayhews learned to stay clear of their new neighbors, as Keith Cumberland seemed to be a strung-out flaming hothead, taking a hammer to all of his wife’s car windows soon after they moved in. Add to that, Julia fixed their computer for cheap and got the bum’s rush, we’ll drop by with the money on Friday. When Jack told them then that’s when they’ll get their desktop back, they returned shortly with the money and an attitude. They might not be the type to fuck with, the Mayhews thought, especially after seeing the line of customers driving though the alley day and night—Dallas City’s newest MethDonald’s franchise.
Jack’s hearing aid worked great for his ear that still heard; Z seemed to suspect nothing, which was good because in his growing paranoia and anger over a steady stream of lost advertisers, he seemed to suspect his spouse and employees of everything--wife was cheating on him; the accountant was cooking the books, goddamn air staff was ruining the ratings, and hence, losing advertisers, although it was his boozed-up diatribes against them during afternoon drive-time that made them tear up their contracts. Z, for some dumbass reason, was biting the hand that fed him.
5
For the most part, Jack Mayhew liked Dallas City, except for the summer humidity and the freight trains that shrieked through town every fifteen minutes drowning out tv and conversations. It was the morning of August 16, 2011, and the first day of school for Julia. Before she left the bedroom, she gave Jack a kiss and an “I love you”, which sounded distant and strange, like a sexy goodbye from a minion. Weird, he thought as he went back to sleep, there must be wax in my ears. Her cartoonish, “I love you,” would be the last words he would ever hear from her.
A couple hours later, he went outside to retrieve the morning newspaper and with a train rumbling through, he heard... silence. After he dumped a full bottle of ear wax remover in his ear canals, he heard...silence. When he vacuumed the house a little later that morning he heard...silence, but oddly knew the machine was working by feeling the vibration of the electric motor. Now he was getting worried and, hell ya, he would have contacted Dr. Hanson, but phone calls, he suddenly realized, took ears that worked.
A day later, the audiologist gave Jack the full work-out, administering every audio test at his disposal, and yet his ears heard as much as his elbows did.
He was beginning to experience how odd life was when perceived by only four senses, but mostly through one—sight. Just the ride down to Quincy was a freak-out: without sound, car tires don’t slap the highway, the radio don’t play songs, Julia’s exercises in trying to have a conversation, pointless and frustrating. Worse, his eyes had to take up the sensory slack, which overloaded his brain because one of the main organs that used to organize stimuli into context was gone. Now the hope that Dr. Hanson would pull out a honeycomb-sized piece of earwax, or hell, a cockroach that had crawled up in there!--any cure!--was fading fast with every test coming back in a big fat negatory.
Doctor Hanson gave him the diagnosis via paper and pen: we don’t know why or how, he wrote, but sometimes hearing just goes out overnight. We have concluded all tests and cannot find any reason why you should lose all functioning hearing. This will most likely mean permanent and profound deafness. I am deeply sorry.
Jack stared at the message. “Hell no! Come on, Dr. Hanson! I really need my goddamn ears!” he pleaded, loudly. “I’m on the radio. What the fuck am I suppose to do now?” He wiped away tears and tried to let the shock soak in.
“Not half-deaf anymore, but totally and unequivocally, full-deaf?” he shouted. “Are you fucking kidding me? As in no more sounds, voices, music, birds, tv, radio, trains, cars, animals, whispers, I love you’s, or laughter? No fucking way!” It was too damn weird for him knowing that he was even talking—his lips were moving, but without the luxury of actual sound waves reaching his auditory nerve, no sound was coming out. A deaf deejay? Fuck me!” Jack’s boisterous invectives raised eyebrows in the waiting room.
Dr. Hanson scribbled: You will have to leave your deejay job--what’s it been, 20 years? Retire. File for unemployment, start the paperwork for getting Supplemental Security Income, SSI--you’ll find all the details at the government website. You will need proof of deafness which our office will provide. And I highly suggest learning American Sign Language.
Jack, now and forever fully dependent on his retinas, nerves, tongue, and septum to glean information, couldn’t force himself to look away from the pad--the words retire, disabled, proof of deafness and learn American Sign Language might as well have been splashed in photons on a Times Square billboard. Now Julia and the specialist began a full-out discussion between the two--and Jack felt alone, isolated, frustrated, and depressed when he saw their lips moving but with their talking on mute and neither one of them looking his way. Ignored for the first of a million times.
“Hello? Anybody remember me?” he asked, his voice breaking. His new social dilemma of being left out of every conversation would come to be like being stranded alone in a Nevada ghost town while everybody else was living large in Vegas, because the first thing deafness steals is the ability to communicate with anybody.
“Yeah, sorry,” he thought his wife mouthed when she finally acknowledged his presence.
Yeah, me, too, Jack thought to himself as the two kept discussing options. I assume they’re discussing options, fuck it, all I hear is the buzz of tinnitus in my head; for all know they could be exchanging muffin recipes.
He didn’t know the appointment was over until Julia grabbed him by the shirtsleeve—his new cue—and led him over to shake hands with the bearer of silent news. Jack had no clue what the fuck was going on, and wondered what the ASL signs were for “so long, and thanks for nothing” as he gave Dr. Hanson a fuck-you-very-much look and an insincere handshake, then slumped out into his new reticent world.
Jack bulked like a dog near bathwater in the middle of the parking lot, pissed, sad, and scared, and turned back around to face the clinic. When he flipped off the whole fucking building to release his percolating frustration, disbelief, and apprehension of having to serve a life-sentence in aural solitaire, a yellow butterfly fluttered down and perched on his outstretched middle finger.
6
The day was just starting out. Now they had to stop off at the station and tell Z the good news—as if he cared about anybody but his vodka-soaked self. Walking into the lobby with the music blasting, Jack supposed, because he could feel the vibrations shaking his breastbone, it was as quiet as a church library on a Monday morning. He went into the studio, Z cued a tune clocking in at 9:08--great for convos and long bathroom breaks--and turned the volume down, Jack assumed. “Well Fat, what’s the verdict?” he asked. “Are you still with me or not?”
He stared back blankly, not having a clue what was just said. “I am totally stone-cold deaf and will never hear again, man.” Another zap of unbelief ripped through his psyche. “I’m done.”
“Noticed you’ve been losing it lately, was wondering what your fucking problem might be. Well, shit, that really sucks, Fat. We had a good run, but I suppose all good things must come to an end. What are you planni--”
“Uh . . . you don’t seem to understand. I can’t hear shit. You’re wasting your air yakking because I can’t understand a single word you’re saying!” he interrupted. “I AM FUCKING DEAF!” he shouted in frustration. (People who keep chattering away even AFTER he prefaced every conversation with the heads-up I‘m deaf would become Jack’s number one earless pet peeve). “You’ll have to write things down on paper.”
He repeated on paper what he had just expressed and added So, what are you going to do now???
“My ear guy told me to file for a government benefits program designed to help aged and disabled people who have little or no income coming in. He said it would take a while after they received the paperwork to start getting benefits, but I was assured of it because deafness automatically qualifies as a shoo-in. Ain’t I lucky?” His eyeballs got moist again. “Uh . . We were discussing on the way over here if...maybe...you could front us some cash--a loan, of course, until we start receiving it. You know, car and house payments, bills, and of course, we like to eat, now and again.” He was hoping to see a spark of sympathy from his old friend.
He knew the answer just by the context of Z’s expressions and by watching his lips move fast as he was explaining why. Pad, he instructed and pointed to his new communication device, a spiral notebook.
Just keepin my head above water here. Fucking ad people cant sell shit. Sorry, man, I’m tapped, Z penned quickly. Gotta go-----songs fading. Then offered a lukewarm and insincere handclasp. “Good luck,″ he mouthed and swiveled back to the mixing board.
“And that was Skynyrd’s Free Bird--my rocking farewell to our big-assed feathered friend, Fatboy.” Long beat. “He just informed me that he was leaving W*** and is winging it back to Los Angeles,” Z told his listeners. Longer beat. “Love ya, my compadre grande. If you ever change your mind, you are welcome back any time.”
He gulped from his glass. “Before leaving, Fat told me to thank you all for gorging heartily from his rock buffet. And on a personal note, thanks for spinning, my friend. If there’s anything you need let me know,” he offered, fakely choking up on-air. “Should we never meet again, Fatboy, rocka, rocka, rocka!” He keyed the next CD, emptied his tumbler, and segued into the next song.
Fatboy flying back to LA. Newsflash, asshole: Fatboy is 6 foot, one-inch tall, weighs 160 pounds sopping wet, his name is Jack and he lives a quiet life--a very goddamn quiet life—in Dallas City, Illinois, a very goddamn quiet town with very goddamn quiet freight trains running through it every goddamn fifteen minutes.
7
On Becoming an American
Despite John Lennon’s admonition to imagine there’s no countries, there are. It seems in Homo sapiens’ evolution, staking out land masses and turning them into an abstract concept of nations, each with their individual abstract concepts of patriotism, religion, politics, and money became the norm. This creates a cohesive bond among a diverse group of humans, now working for the “good of the nation”. Leaders are elected (or not) to perpetuate a sense of exceptionalism, and to manufacture a divide of “us versus them” which mostly gives the rich more richness, built on the blood, sweat, and tears of the poor and working classes, and the raping of natural resoursces. It really depends on the designation of the soil who the masses will revere. Consider this:
In the 1850s, the Russian empire badly needed money after being defeated by France and Britain in the Crimean War, so Tzar Alexander II set a purchase price of the land they called Alyeska up for sale for a price of $7.2 million ($133 million in 2020), or about 2 cents per acre. On March 30, 1867, the area twice as large as Texas (and a hundred times colder) became United States territory; in 1959, the 49th state. Today the people there proudly call themselves Americans. Several military bases are based there to protect the United States from potential invasions from its former owner.
But, had Russia kept Alyeska and its toehold into North America, the people there would still be flying the red, white, and blue, not of stars and stripes, but of three equally proportioned rectangles; they would be getting choked up over the State Anthem of the Russian Federation instead of the Star-Spangled Banner; Soviet military bases would be trained on a potential attack from their enemy in the lower 49 continental states called America. One’s patriotism to whom, to what, and why is simply a matter of who ‘owns’ the land at that moment in history. It is learned collective propaganda.
Every nation has its own myths, societal mores, and identity, and its citizens are expected to defend it with heart, soul and life--nothing to kill or die for--so it will remain that nation with its exceptional orthodox myths, mores, and identity intact. Immigres’ old culture fades into the new when they pledge citizenship to their newly adopted country, and slowly assimilate to the new ways of their new ‘homeland’.
Which brings us to “forced patriotism”--inciteful tactics used by racist cops and corrupt politicians to raise the hate vs. the “commies” in Hollywood, “dirty” hippies on college campuses, “lazy” minorities, atheists, athletes who raise a black-gloved fist or kneel, and everybody else who doesn’t “rally ’round the flag, boys.” Raising such hysteria versus those “who despise America” further inflame the “true patriots who so deeply love God and country” and who proudly display a flag pin on their lapels as proof.
“Forced patriotism” can also come to indigenous people who are deemed “enemies of the state” in the form of indoctrination: in the Far East, for instance, there are re-education/internment camps in Xinjiang, an autonomous territory in China, for Uyghurs, a Turkic Muslim ethnic group originating from and culturally affiliated with the general region of Central and East Asia; in America there were Indian boarding schools, the stated purpose to “kill the Indian, save the man.” The truth about the brutality of such Indian boarding schools has largely been written out of American high school history books.
The boarding school experience for Indian children began in 1860 when the Bureau of Indian Affairs established the first on the Yakima Indian Reservation in the state of Washington. These schools were part of a plan devised by well-intentioned, eastern reformers whose goal was to use education as a tool to “assimilate” Indian tribes into the mainstream of the “American way of life,” a Protestant ideology that began forming in the mid-19th century.
Indian youth would be taken from their villages, and then taught the importance of private property, material wealth, monogamous nuclear families, and Jesus. The reformers assumed that it was necessary to “civilize” them by accepting white men’s beliefs and value systems. Boarding schools, they imagined, were the ideal instrument for absorbing people and ideologies that stood in the way of Manifest Destiny.
Over the course of a century, hundreds of thousands of Native American children were removed from their homes and families and placed in such boarding schools operated by the federal government and churches. By 1900, there were 20,000 children in these schools; by 1926, that number had more than tripled, with nearly 83% of Indian school-age children attending them. Enrollment reached its highest point a decade later; in 1973, 60,000 Indian children are estimated to have been enrolled in one. In the early 21st century, about two dozen off-reservation boarding schools still operate, but funding for them has declined.
The indoctrination load of the Indian boarding schools was immersed in Anglo-Saxon/American culture, of course. Christian, English-language names replaced their ‘heathen’ ones. Obviously, conversion to the religion was deemed essential, so they were expected to develop a curriculum of religious instruction, placing emphasis on the commands from the Bible. Implanting ideas of sin and a sense of guilt were to be a part of Sunday schools. And no religion too.
As is often the case, reality sorely missed the ideal. The Native children that were voluntarily or forcibly removed from their homes, families, and communities during this time were taken to schools many states away and were made to wear identical uniforms, were punished for speaking their native language, were banned from acting in any way that might be seen to represent traditional or cultural practices, and were stripped of traditional clothing, hair and personal belongings and behaviors reflective of their native culture.
They suffered physical, sexual, cultural, and spiritual abuse and neglect, and experienced treatment that in many cases constituted torture simply for speaking ‘Indian’. Many children never returned home, while many died of tuberculosis and other diseases and were buried in unmarked graves. Their fates have yet to be accounted for by the U.S. government.
In 1978, President Jimmy Carter signed the Indian Child Welfare Act, giving Native American parents the legal right to refuse their child’s placement in an Indian boarding school. Damning evidence related to years of abuses of students in the off-reservation indoctrination centers contributed to the enactment of the legislation that Congress passed after hearing testimony about life there.
In the summer of 2021, a caravan carrying the bodies of nine disinterred Native American youths who died more than a century ago made its way across the continental United States en route to the Rosebud Sioux tribal lands in South Dakota.
The nine children died between 1880 and 1910 at the government-run Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania, an institution that housed some 10,000 indigenous students and forced them to become American citizens.
“We want our children home no matter how long it takes,” U.S. Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, the first Native American to serve in a cabinet position, said at a ceremony at what is now the US Army’s Carlisle Barracks, which contains some 180 graves of students from the Carlisle Indian Industrial School. “We’re here today and we are going to take our children home,” Eagle Bear said at the ceremony in Pennsylvania to retrieve the bodies.
Imagine all the people living life in peace.
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