Fiction: Scratch That

It seems like it’s always right as your favorite song is about to break open into the full chorus, during that little pre-chorus that really gets your mouth watering or ears tingling that the CD starts to skip. The anthemic lyrics never come. Instead, you’re stuck with that one word you really don’t care about. Maybe that word on repeat is the or dream. Maybe it’s even love. You just don’t care. Anyway, you take out the CD and look at its surface, hoping that you’ll just find a little piece of schmutz that you can wipe away. But no, it’s a scratch. Maybe you then remember you accidentally dropped the disc a week ago. Maybe you don’t know where the scratch came from at all. Honestly, I’ve had to buy London Calling three times already, and I just refuse to buy it again. Out of principle. Then again, that principle isn’t going to help in this situation, because at the moment you have a big scratch scarring the reflective surface of the CD you really want to listen to, and it isn’t going anywhere (the scratch or the song).

That’s sort of how it was with Felix Landers. Felix was a real nice kid, really sincere. And he got along with everyone. We all liked him a lot, but he was one of those kids that would be categorized as “scarred.” We all knew Felix’s story even though it wasn’t Felix who told us about it (we never brought it up with Felix either). It was an unfortunate fact about an unfortunate kid. I can’t even say how we first heard about it for sure, because no one really felt comfortable talking about it (I still don’t). It was just out there.

Without going into too much detail, I’ll just say that some very bad men did a very bad thing around a very young Felix. These bad men then proceeded to make sure (convince) Felix hadn’t seen that very bad thing, when in fact Felix had. It should go without saying that it’s not especially easy to convince someone that they didn’t see something that they had. And I don’t think I need to appeal to cultural references such as the Who’s Tommy to convince you that successfully convincing someone of something like that could be quite traumatic for a child. It would leave lasting psychological effects. And it did.

But like I said, we all really liked Felix. We just had to be careful around him with certain things. Felix didn’t like being asked certain types of questions. Actually, it’s not that it was a matter of liking or not liking, more like Felix couldn’t handle being asked certain types of questions.

One weekend, Larry Perkes met up with a bunch of us to play basketball in the park and either he was just a little too excited and careless or he didn’t realize Felix was around (Felix did have a way of shrinking to the back of large groups), when he said “I saw Terminator last night. It was awesome. Did you guys see it?” We all answered at once, each of us stating how we had seen it a week ago or hadn’t gotten around to it yet but planned on it. As the chorus died down, however, we heard Felix from the back:

I didn’t see it. I didn’t see it. I didn’t see it. I didn’t see it. I didn’t see it. I didn’t see it. I didn’t see it. I didn’t see it. I didn’t see it. I didn’t see it.

And he wasn’t stopping. He was stuck in this loop. It was something that happened when he was asked about seeing something. It was one of those things he couldn’t handle. Literally. We all knew why. And it was problematic for us because (a) nobody wants to see someone, especially a friend, go into that sort of state, (b) it reminded us all about Felix’s past, which was emotionally disturbing for us other kids, and (c) we didn’t really know if Felix had seen the movie, so those of who had not seen it yet (like me and Ray Rohr) didn’t know whether we should invite him or not when we did go.

*

For the time being, the only thing I can do about my London Calling problem is smack my CD player. This gets the laser inside to start reading the information after the scratched part. Even though I may miss a part of the chorus (maybe even the really good part), the alternative is to be stuck listening to that pre-chorus lead-in forever.

And it was the same with Felix. It was clear that he wasn’t going to snap out of it by himself. So in situations like this one, where Larry Perkes asked if Felix had seen Terminator, we had to give Felix a little nudge to get him going again, to break his cycle. Actually it was more of a punch. And it worked. Felix snapped out of it and we broke down into two teams of four like nothing happened. My team ended up winning that day though not by my own merit (I did try hard).

Still it was times like that that we all sort of silently reaffirmed our friendship commitment to be more careful around Felix. We had no problem playfully punching each other during sports and Felix never complained about us hitting him too hard or at all (I think he knew we were just trying to help, that is, if he knew we had hit him at all), but we always felt bad when we had to punch Felix like that. I mean, honestly, the kid had been through enough. Don’t you think?

~josh

Autoscopy #1: It's the Coffee Talking

I’ve never been much of a coffee drinker. Not that I have any particular problems with the drink, other than it sometimes giving me a mild case of sour stomach (or what I understand to be sour stomach) and diarrhea. And it’s not an issue with taste either, because I’ve always liked coffee flavored sucking candies and coffee ice cream. Sometimes I think that I may even like coffee more than those people that drink it regularly. I know plenty of people that discuss different roasts, the advantages of cone filters over flat filters, and the best places to grab a cup of coffee in just about every major city in the USA, but I’m always surprised by just how much sugar they dump into their cups. That’s right: I may be only a casual coffee drinker, if that, but I take it with no sugar and just a splash of milk.

The point is that coffee is just fine, but I’ve never depended on it to get me—or keep me—moving. In the morning, to wake up, I take a shower. Or I don’t. Either way I get up. And while it’s not the fear of becoming a caffeine junky that has kept me from a regular coffee routine, there are a number of things that I’m happy that I don’t have to deal with: (a) I can only assume that on Yom Kippur when all those Jews in synagogue are fasting and haven’t had their morning fix, the resulting trembling and shaking makes them a little nervous about their pending atonement; (b) when I’m in a bad mood, I can blame other people, rather than blaming myself for forgetting to set my alarm and running out of the house without time for a coffee; (c) I don’t feel compelled to talk about coffee all the time; (d) similarly, I don’t assume other people want to hear me talk about coffee all the time (but hopefully enough to read this essay).

Even in college, I didn’t really rely on coffee to get through those long nights in the library. And that usually made me the odd man out, considering everyone else was either on caffeine, taurine, adderall, or some combination thereof. When I would start to lose focus, I’d stretch my legs under the table to get my blood going. If that didn’t work I would take a walk to the water fountain. If that didn’t work I would go to the other water fountain, the one that was plugged in and dispensed cold water, cold water being all the more effective. And if that didn’t work, I would skip a couple pages and try again. After all, if David Hume had anything important to say in those fifty pages, he probably would have said it already.



While I would categorize my relationship to coffee as one of admiration at a distance, energy drinks like Red Bull, Amp, Rockstar, Sparks, Crunkjuice, etc. are a whole other story. I think they are scary. They not only have a whole lot of caffeine, but all kinds of other chemicals. While taurine, one of the active ingredients, may not actually be a synthetic version of bull testosterone as some rumors indicate, the notion is just a little too juicy to ignore completely. And the thought of needing a dose of testosterone just to be able to read my Foucault always seemed to say something strange about my masculinity: man up, don’t be a pussy, concentrate on those fucking power structures, bitch-ass.

Not to say that I haven’t ever had an energy drink. I have. In college I played on my school’s competitive ultimate Frisbee club team. Besides daily practice sessions, we would play in weekend-long tournaments throughout the northeast. For reasons that I never understood, even in the Spring when daylight hours were long, tournament organizers always insisted on starting these games at what seemed to be the crack of dawn, which meant we had to wake up before dawn to make the sometimes two-hour commute.

Tournament days were without exception exhausting, even when I didn’t get much game time. It was certainly exhausting when I did get a lot of game time and had to run around chasing a plastic disc and people for four games each lasting around an hour and a half. And if you made it to the tournament finals, you got to play in a fifth game (great).

So it shouldn’t be surprising that most players rely on energy drinks to give them just what the drinks advertise: energy. It also shouldn’t be surprising that at some point, the upperclassmen looked at me nearly passed out on the side line and took pity on me by passing me one of their cans. It wasn’t peer pressure or anything like that, and it’s not like in Major League Baseball where teammates make you take steroids for the good of the team. To me, this seemed like some sage advice from my captains. So, without much thought I opened the can and downed the thing.

It didn’t take very long to kick in. I’ve described the feeling as suddenly having this deep urge to dance, bumping and grinding with some female, while simultaneously punching some dude in the face, repeatedly. And that’s how they sent me onto the field. That was game mentality.

We were playing Brandeis University. They were an okay team, nothing particularly special. We had played them before and I even knew some of the kids on their team from summer camp.

Within the first few possessions, I jumped over a Brandeis player to knock down a deep pass. On my way up I had made a little contact with the Brandeis player, just enough for him to know I was there. When he called a foul, I started yelling at him:
—You should be ashamed of that call. Really ashamed.
The Brandeis player, short, pimpled, and wearing athletic goggles, tried to explain how I fouled him. I replied very simply:
—That was some pussy shit!
When he told me to calm down, I didn’t:
—Go fuck yourself!
He asked me not to curse. The conversation ended with me saying the following:
—At least I’m better looking than you!
That’s sort of the way the remainder of the game went. When I caught a goal, I took a little extra time to stand over the Brandeis player guarding me. When I guarded someone, I would whisper to them that they had no chance. I tried to stare down their entire sideline. I barked. I stuck my chest out. And I laughed at them. When they dropped a disc. When they threw a bad pass. When their cleats didn’t hold in the mud. When they spoke or looked at me. I just started laughing.

A few hours after the game, after I could once again feel the exhaustion in my body and all the muscles I had pulled over the course of the day finally made themselves known to me, I thought back on what had happened during the game. That was weird, I thought. While everything that happened during the game seemed appropriate at the time, I couldn’t help but think about how out of character it actually was for me. Normally, I’m much more the kind of guy that rolls my eyes or (silently) sneers at the guy talking, talking not whispering, on his cell phone in the library. The guy who would rather stew in my seat and wait it out, rather than confront the inconsiderate guy. But the outright aggression I showed in that game: that wasn’t me. That’s not how I see myself, and that’s not who I want to be or ever wanted to be for that matter. I remember the kids like that. I couldn’t stand them.

So who was it?


Red bulls may not be laced with testosterone, but it certainly made me act in this hyper-masculine way. But what does that say about my actual masculinity? I suppose no more than the fact that I’m writing this on a beach in San Francisco no less than 15 yards from many naked men. And no less than the fact that when that girl in the bikini walked past me, the best I could do was muster a sort-of smile.

Maybe if I were raised on caffeine, I’d be a totally different person. If I were a routine coffee drinker, I would have more interest in working out. Maybe there’s a whole would-be me out there in an alternate universe, with a cup of coffee in one hand and some one-night fling in the other. Maybe I would have played varsity basketball. If only I grew up with a little more caffeine in my system, slipped into my diet a little more steadily, I would have had a more pronounced jaw line.


For my 7th grade science fair project, I did one of those experiments your teacher recommends to you from a book. My partner and I took a bunch of mealworms and split them up into four groups. Keeping one as our control, we gave the other groups increasing amounts of “no doze” pills in their food. The group that received the most caffeine literally bounced off of the walls of their container. Not jumping. Bouncing. They were all dead within a day or so.

Come to think of it, I guess I should take that experiment as reassuring. Those mealworms didn’t become anymore masculine. They were just in a mosh pit for no reason. I should really rethink the whole thing. Maybe it has nothing to do with masculinity. How could caffeine do that anyway? Maybe over caffeination doesn’t make me “hyper-masculine” it just makes me a “hyper-asshole.”

~josh