letters from the future by dune loring
Have you ever gotten the feeling that everybody has been abducted by aliens and replaced, except you? I have.
The School. I waltzed up to the front door at school, and I thought the WWF had taken over, and wrestlers were working the high school as security guards who were ready to punch you out. I stopped a minute, pinched myself, to see if I was at home asleep. No such luck. The guards were checking for weapons and attitudes. I was gun-less, knife-less, but I still had a buzz and an attitude. A big, ugly, redneck guard shouted, "New rules!"
"Huh?" I spoke. I burped too, gas, beer.
"New rules in dress!" the wrestler-looking, fat boy growled. "Don't look different! Don't look weird!"
Of course, I am summarizing what he said. The quotes are for the benefit of literary reading types who like to see things in quotes.
Overnight the school had imposed a new dress code: No hats, no caps for boys or girls. No trench coats. Nothing black. Bright colors too bright were out too. No red and purple. Nothing disruptive. No jewelry. Kids with pierce ears and noses were told not to draw attention to themselves. Those with tattoos were told to cover them up with long sleeves and closed collars. The guard sent kids home for "being dressed funny."
"You're dressed funny, boy, get!"
One kid, Jacob Ely, federal judge Malcolm Ely's son, was told to take off "that Jewish cap!"
When Jacob objected, the guard screamed, "I told you, you are dressed funny! Go home and change!"
Luckily for the school board, just as the fat guard was about to arrest and handcuff Jacob for not leaving fast enough, the principal, Mr. Price, came running forth, yelling --
"His cap is okay!"
"Okay?" asked the guard.
"Yes!"
"Okay ..."the guard mumbled.
Mr. Price went back to do what ever it was that he did. The school only black kid, Rufus Jones, was stopped. Rufus had a gold front tooth. The guard growled at Rufus. "What did I tell you about jewelry, boy? Show no gold, no brass or tin either."
"My tooth?"
"Take it out or you don't come in."
"I can't take out my tooth!"
"Why not? Is it a gang sign?"
"No!"
"Do you sell drugs, boy?"
"No!"
"You fit the drug selling profile. What are you doing here anyhow?"
"I go to this school."
"You won't sell no drugs here. While I'm here."
"I don't sell drugs!"
"Do you use drugs?"
"No!"
"If I were colored, I might be tempted to use drugs." The guard sneered. "But I wouldn't!"
Rufus yelled, "I'm going to report you!"
"Report me? Because I won't let you sell drugs here?"
Rufus took a deep sigh. "I have a book report that is due."
"You are not coming in here looking like that," the guard said.
"I have a make-up test to take."
"Boy, I don't want to hear your problems. I have a job to do."
Rufus put his hands in his mouth and yanked out his gold tooth. The guard smiled. Rufus kept quiet. The guard spoke. "Put that tooth away, boy."
Rufus put the gold tooth in his shirt pocket.
The guard nodded. "Now you don't look like a gang banger."
"Yes, sir."
"You look like you belong someplace."
"Yes, sir."
"Boy, now you're acting white."
Rufus gulped.
The guard continued, "Just remember that when you're inside to keep acting white."
Rufus went into the school. Then my turn with the guard came. He stared at me. I grinned. I belched again, beer gas. That morning I rinsed with mouth wash. I'd been chewing gun. I swallowed it just as my turn came.
The guard sneered, "Who you trying to fool, boy?"
I grinned. He could tell that I was not quite there yet. I was still hungover, a little bit, back at the one hundred and one yard line. He could see how blurry my baby-blues were and that they weren't quite there yet either. This guy I was certain had been where I was, many times.
He said, almost like a big sloppy brother, "C'mon inside, boy. I hope you learn something."
I grinned again and waltzed pass him.
After kids began disappearing into the Internet, the entire world turned upside down. First, there were so many guards at the school, carrying shotguns, operating metal detectors, patting kids down and doing body searches, and with an attitude that said: kids, we rather that you stay out, drop out, than come in here. The guards at the door told kids: "No guns, no knives, no stick pins --girls, no bobby pins. Nothing sharp." I expected to be issued a pencil with rubber on both ends. And why not? Who needed a pencil? Not to write! I mean, if a kid wrote something, he ran the risk of getting jacked up by the guards, the teachers, the principal, and the guidance counselor, and being forced to defend himself and prove that what he wrote was in no way a threat or incorrect. And a kid certainly didn't need a pencil to do math!
The "A" Students, the college bound crowd, caught hell. All the kids with A's in math got hassled by the school. That didn't bother me. I never in my whole life aced a single math exam. All the kids into computer science were carefully watched. All the smart kids were ordered into counseling. I wasn't a computer nerd; I wasn't a smart kid, so what happened to them, didn't involve me. All the kids at school had to be careful, as to what they said, and they had to dress correctly. Kids could not look like or speak like an odd ball. Kids had to look "correctness," use the "speak correctness," be the "correct correctness," or else --counseling, suspension or expulsion, maybe a trip to the sheriff's office and to youth detention, and be held on suspicion. None of this involved me. As I mentioned last week, my dad, quoted Martin Niemoeller. Martin Niemoeller wasn't me. Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., Peter Lawford and Joey Bishop, too, were my philosophical heroes. Only Joey Bishop was still alive, and he was old. But their ideas were young and alive.
I was a kid. I was a little kid when Sammy Davis and Dean Martin died. Peter Lawford went a few years before them. When Frank Sinatra died, I was fifteen. I was grown, really. I knew myself. When Frank died, he was all over the tv, larger than life. The whole world fell over itself explaining Frank and his attitude towards life. Until then, I hadn't thought too much about him. He was retired. His music wasn't mine. I discovered him when he died. I learned that his music was cool, and he and his pals were cool dudes. Frank's main idea was that the key to life is coolness, being cool, maintaining one's cool, that sweating over things is for suckers who suck, that the hip dude looks out for himself, and by doing this enjoys his life. To be cool, all a dude needs are a smile, a drink and a chick.
My beef was with what happened to my girl. She changed completely. She had nice legs, so I put up with her. The girl never had been political. She had wanted what I wanted, to kick it back in my ride, sip a cold Bud and get a little busy with each other. But now, she wanted to protest, picket, spend time doing things that were a waste of what? Energy! We had the duty of making our sweet young years fun and happy, and cool
. My girl joined a protest group, a group of people with too much time on their hands, and helped picketed the subdivision's multiplex movie theater. She got me to picket too. How? Because of her nice legs.
I carried the biggest sign --showing off, showing her, and hoping that afterwards, I could carry her off somewhere. Her mom was on that picket line too. Her dad, who up until then never had a nice word to say to me, said: "Good to see you here, son." So, you see, I had to carry that sign with enthusiasm and devotion to the cause. The cause? My girl, her mom and dad and the fifty other people picketing were against violent flicks. My girl's parents made speeches on the picket line. Her dad said, "Hollywood and the movie industry, and this theater are all equally responsible for the violence manifested in the youth of today. Movies, like the ones shown in this theater, about kids who spend their entire lives on the Internet, are responsible for our kids disappearing into the Internet! Hollywood puts violent and wrong ideas in our children's heads, brainwash, change them, alter their minds in bad ways." My girl's mom spoke after him. She said that violent and Internet theme movies were responsible for the disappearance of three local boys.
Well, I lost a brother to the Internet. I knew movies and Hollywood weren't to blame. I was not for censorship. I knew / know censorship is bad, right? But, I was for my girl, my chick. When she started yelling that violent and Internet theme movies ought to be banned, well, I wasn't going to let her yell louder than me. Her parents were present, and it was a chance for them to see how grown-up thinking I was. I could think and yell just like them.
Was I doing anything wrong, really? Censoring --even boycotting-- is strong stuff. But wait a minute. I wasn't picketing or yelling in a crowd calling for the censoring of Socrates. Hollywood stood for nothing but making moolah. I saw that at that year's Academy Awards show. The show was about the celebration of the making of money. At the show the year before, Titanic, a flick that made a ton of money, walked off with the goose. Titanic was a chicks flick, and a guy's too. I mean, I got about all the way up my chick's leg. There was nothing on the screen that held my interest, and she was swooning over that guy in the flick, forgot completely about me and what my hand was doing. My conscious restrained me.
Hollywood is a billionaires' show, a rich people's performance spectacle. My dad, after he saw that year's awards show, said: Hollywood is nothing. I quote my dad, "Hollywood used to get two things right: the Holocaust and the blacklist. But now -- an Italian guy makes a comedy about the Holocaust. A comedy! -- Ha! Ha! He! He! Jumpy, jumpy! --wins two awards! And the academy gives a honorary award to a dirty waterfront rat, who ratted out writers, and who supported the black list! Hollywood has surrendered its soul."
Dad did not complain, did not quote Martin Niemoeller, when he learned, later, that I was a picketer.
It seems that in time the fantastic chick you dig, the lovely honey you want to squeeze, develops a little of the Mussolini trait. She becomes pretentious, pompous. She issues orders, you know, decrees. She comes up with a grand scheme to bend you to her will. She becomes almost as meddlesome as a mom. But you know the deal. The babe is so comic. Well, this is so normal. You don't pay her any mind. But my honey became obnoxious. The comedy became a tragedy. I liked, still do, greasy cheese burgers and french fries. Most of our dates began with a stop at a burger and fries joint. I knew things were going wrong that evening she stayed in the car while I went inside to get the food. I brought her favorite burger and mine, and a jumbo size fries for us to share. I returned to the car, my arms full of bags of food, my face lit with a grin. She sat glum. She'd been glum all week. A couple of times I'd asked her why and regretted it. Her glumness wasn't my fault. I was good to her. I marched on a picket line for her!
Two evenings before the burger incident, while we sat on her front porch, I tried to get her to smile. "Why don't you smile like you use to?" I asked.
"Current events," she muttered.
"Huh?" I was bewildered.
"The news sucks," she said.
"So what?" I grinned. "The news always sucks."
I wanted to rub her legs. She wanted to have a deep conversation about how to fix the problems of the world. I misquoted Bogart. At the time, I didn't know I had. I thought: what would Frank do in a situation like this? I opened my mouth and out came Bogart. "The problems of the world don't amount to a hill of beans when personal happiness is at stake," I said. I thought I was being profound. She stared and started drilling me.
"What? What do you mean by that? Explain!"
Because I wanted to avoid a fight, my sweet honey's stares made me sweat. I smiled. She looked as though she was about to pounce on me. She gave me a look that I had only seen in my dad's stare, when I was younger and he thought I could benefit from him trying to play Socrates. My dad went at me with questions. No enlightenment, only mental entanglement, the kind that if one is not smart enough to shut the crap out, leaves a person's mind tight like a nut, in a twisted knot. Dad tangled me into a bag of his frustrations. My girl was no Socrates either. She just bugged me like she was trying to be. She had no answers. The news, the kids disappearing, the violence in the country, the lack of values in the media, filled her doe eyes with fog. My honey went Holden Caulfield on me. She took up the cause to right the world. Well, she asked me to join her on the sucker's quest to find "one pure soul in a dirty world," to help right the world, taking that up, is about as smart as when that guy in ancient Greece took a lantern and went out in the dark world looking for a honest man. Oh brother! Yes, the girl went daffy on me. She wanted us to go to meetings. She wanted me to start reading. She'd started listening to people who said they had the answers. The naive girl found nothing but stuff that made her glummer and glummer.
That evening with the burgers, she -- the little faun's eyes got so big and incredulous and demanded, "You are not going to put that stuff in you!" She decreed, "It is greasy and nasty and violent food. If they don't have a veggie sandwich get nothing."
"They don't. We're at a burger joint."
"Get nothing!"
"I have this. I paid for it."
"Toss it away."
"No. I paid for it."
"Don't come near me with that."
"You didn't say anything when I went in --"
"You don't listen!" she shouted.
I wanted to rub her legs. She was raising a sweat, on me, on herself. I thought again: What would Frank do?
"Ex-girlfriend," I said. "Get out of my car."
The female Holden Caulfield was happy to get out of my car. I drove home alone. My parents didn't noticed I'd come in early. I went to my room with a six-pack. Even my Bud didn't taste the same, made me think the brew was being weakened, watered down, by aliens whom wanted to fuzz the bite of the buzz.
[END]
5/17/99
"Letters From the Future by Dune Loring, "A Nation of Aliens", (c) Copyrighted
1999 by Buster T. Flatt, All Rights Reserved
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