The Janitor (excerpt)
The Janitor: Or, Dostoevsky in America
by Mark Beyer
PART 1
Ernest Wain felt different this morning. Yesterday’s crude thoughts had risen overnight, hotly expanded by other, more powerful sources he’d not before imagined. And … he was happy. So he walked with pleasure up the front steps of John of Leiden High School under a cloudy April sky, disturbed that it was not sunny as forecast by that rat-bastard weatherman on the Ten-o’clock News he’d watched last night before stumbling upstairs to bed. Five more days, he remembered thinking as he drifted into sleep. No dreams came. Now, by the hands of the big round clock above the door, he was alive at 7:16 and, anyway, Midwestern weather could change everything—life and death included—in an hour. Ernest felt this deep down today. This was a year in which all sorts of change had already happened, from Franklin Village elections, and Big City construction scandals, to sports hysteria, world disasters, and all those unattainable hopes which foreign peace accords promised. But all that change had, in its own way, a familiarity that Ernest couldn’t stop himself from wondering shallowly over.
The noise of students burst over him as he walked through the open doors leading onto crowded “Main Street” where students roamed this way and that, shoulder to shoulder, hopped up on sugary drinks and sugary cereal and salty potato chips and pot and beer (“It’s never too early for a city high-schooler to drink,” was Teddy’s favorite line) and confectionery icing atop a jam-filled coffee cake from the bakery across the street and nicotine from a fast smoke in any of the alleys close to school (careful, or “Jocko” will run you down and send you to the Dean’s office before the day can even get started). Main Street’s corridor ran north-south along the entire building until it elbowed left on the north end, toward the language classrooms and down through to the PE locker rooms and field-house, or to the right on the south end, where its zigzag corridor led to the science and lab rooms have always been since the school opened nearly one hundred years ago.
Ernest came to school early today so he could walk each hallway of Leiden’s ground floor. He wanted to pass through all seven exits. He wouldn’t stop at any of them, only take notice of the crowds and groups and flow and any foot-traffic jam-ups. The position of teachers who monitored the morning rush was of particular interest. His pace was quick sometimes, slow at others. Mostly he kept up with the other kids. He read another hall clock: six minutes before first bell; plenty of time to walk the two rectangles that traced the ground floor corridors and each doorway to classrooms, administration offices, foods-class kitchens, toilets, C-10 area’s inset doorways, the nurse’s office and first-aid rooms, and a Senior Class Commons room. All was as usual; every day nearly the same and with the expectation of sheer boredom written on each student’s face as “first bell” ticked closer to reality.
A shine comes up from the smooth, polished floors. Hundreds of brown or mushroom-colored steel lockers line both walls between classroom doorways set flush into the bluish white cinder-block walls coated in glossy ceramic. The noise is a hurricane of voices; kids don’t have to yell to make this kind of racket. Ernest passed the inset entrance-way C-10 Area, where behind its quadruple doors lay carpeting to dampen the sound in which six modular classrooms, framed in plastic walls with collapsible center walls to open them out, were built the year before Ernest came to Leiden as a freshman; all surrounding an open-space area at the center of which a mini stage stood in shadow when it wasn’t being used for presentations, small-band recitals, student-council meetings, or anything else that needed some elbow room and chair space. On normal schooldays, two groups of students sat in the chairs during Homeroom period to be called upon, counted, and tallied against the full school roster by a group of women sitting behind the long counter inside the Attendance Office. No one hung around C-10 between class periods because it was over-crowded. Its newer, smaller lockers, painted a sickly pea-soup green, lined the south wall of a short hallway connecting Main Street to the back corridor known as “Skid Row.” Kids who got C-10 Area lockers hated them, and this corridor, because the smaller lockers meant that many more lockers than reasonable were packed into a hallway used otherwise by half the student body as a shortcut from the front classrooms to the back classrooms. It was a nightmare of shoulder-to-shoulder teenagers during the mornings, lunchtime periods, and after last bell. A perfect place for mayhem or terror, Ernest had noticed.
Skid Row got its name for its narrow profile, older feel, and shabby looking walls (latex paint over rough cinder-block; nothing to show off to visitors back there) that were often food stained, and the poor overhead lighting, making the entire length seem more city back-alley than suburban high school. The side corridors could be run between one end and the other inside of six seconds, if he needed to do that four-times-twenty-four-hours from now, thought Ernest. Every step let Ernest feel the steak knife, secured in its scabbard, slap against his calf beneath his pant leg. Five days from today he would march without the knife – his weapons of choice far more deadly in an immediate and final way of expression for his purposes. The thought made him flush.
At sixteen Ernest’s head is long, vaguely triangular from hairline to chin, with that thin skin of his tween years long gone before he’d noticed the change. Nevertheless, he looks in the mirror each morning and evening and he sees a monkey in a tree. To the world he’s a “gangling youth.” His JV tennis coach, Mr Fink, said to him one day at the side of the tennis courts, that those two words mean the same thing. Mr Fink liked to wear bolo ties with a white shirt to team matches. Ernest had a similar tie, one he wore just once, the day his Uncle Michael gave it to him for eight-grade graduation; Uncle Mike was part Apache, but Ernest never understood the connection, as the bolo came from the Hopi and Navajo cultures. But the tie looked good on Mr Fink, a fireplug kind’a guy with bushy black hair and thick forearms (also hairy) from decades of playing tennis. Ernest wanted to grow another couple inches. He’d like to be a big guy, and burly, someday. Maybe grow a lumberjack beard. Looking around as he continued to make his reconnoiter walk, he saw himself as a sixteen-year-old as just one in the crowd, so far as looks go. So this would change as well, soon. He’s near enough to his seventeenth birthday to help him feel that beyond-teen-angst possibility was within grasp. Maybe that would change soon, too.
His classmates mostly carried their books in hand, having first dropped off jackets and backpacks into their lockers. A solid twenty-percent still carried backpacks, Ernest noticed, slung easily over one shoulder. Some of the backpacks were bulky, stuffed full – books, notebooks, water bottles, folders, who knows what else. And that was what he liked to see. Is one or ten just as I am, he wondered, making soft eyesight on the place and people and situation, after so many weeks of careful reconnoiter? No one looked at him, or was looking at him. Everyone was glancing one way or another, and sometimes trying two directions at once, nodding hello or saying “Hi” to a friend, taking long looks at pretty girls and passing over the fat girls, taking long looks at cute guys and sneering (low evil laughter) at pimply tall skinny ones or fat boys already munching on candy bars. They don’t see him as the guy who’s got the idea, the guy hatching a plan, the guy who’s set his timetable into motion. Ernest’s backpack was also filled today, not so yesterday or Tuesday, but was, too, back on Monday. These variations of backpack size and heft were to be noticed and not noticed; uniformity too, in walking pace, in watching and observing, in saying “Hi” to the right people or just nodding to acquaintances (We all have plenty expendables there, he thought), and so then with his backpack he was just part of the crowd, just one among 1,927 students – before adding teachers and staff. This was the beauty of his plan.
“Johnny, hey!” he said to a passing friend. He heard the returned “Hey!” brush the back of his hair. Ernest recognized many more students than he actually knew. There were dozens he had never laid eyes on – freshmen or seniors, they were. His own fellow juniors he knew by sight, mostly, and a good one-third of the sophomores, too, along with many others he knew by name from shared academic classes and gym class or after-school sports (tomorrow he had a tennis tournament between three out-of-conference schools), plus extra-curricular clubs (he showed up for chess every other week; he used to sit in on Spanish Club twice a month last year, when Mary Simpson was his so-called girlfriend; and Junior Rep earlier this year only just to see if he could be a part of the political structure — he struck out here because of the cliques that ran the show despite a teacher mentor placed on the advisory board to look out for just such exclusions). There was nothing wrong with losing interest in a club or activity, especially when you didn’t find a real friend to make it more interesting. The clubs didn’t suck, and weren’t filled with assholes. They bored him. Boring, tedious, risible. He probably bored them as well.
He turned the corner and came into the science annex. His freshman-year locker used to be on this hallway, a big brown metal box in the wall that could fit two kids. For some reason his locker was changed the next year, although he could see many of the same kids from two years back at their lockers. Kim Green squatted in front of her open locker, collecting folders from the bottom, her head below taped-on magazine photos of George Michael and Tiffany, with a half-torn wallet-size picture of Billy Ocean; he must’a done her wrong, thought Ernest. No matter, her ass looked fine that pose. “Hi, Kim,” he thought about saying. He didn’t. He kept on walking.
“Dude … where’ve you been?” said a voice in half-whisper. Ernest looked around and saw Andy Osborne blocking his path. He hadn’t been walking.
“Just … around,” Ernest said. He couldn’t think of a good excuse. Andy was a friend. “Hey, don’t forget to return my deer antler! And soon. That’s my prize find from my kid days camping with the parents up in Wisconsin. I mean it, dude. Give it back!”
“Yeah, yeah, I’ll bring it! Oh, hey – come to chess club tomorrow. Hey, I gotta fly!” Andy scooted past Ernest and bolted between a trio of kids in front of the annex doors. Ernest looked back at Kim but she was gone. He walked on toward the emptiest part of Skid Row. Before he got to the corner he called out “Hey” to three people, gave nods to two more, and stared past the same non-specific expressions of other kids his age and younger and older. Some girls have breasts, some don’t. Some boys need a shave, while others won’t be shaving for a year or two. Some wear stylish clothes – that is, sans denim – and some are sharply dressed, like for a club dance; mostly they’re wearing clean, torn, or dirty jeans, with T-shirts showing off silkscreen images of TV show characters, or tourist attractions from around America, or concert souvenirs with REM or Van Halen or Bon Jovi or Ozzy Osbourne; some kids actually wear collared shirt and designer jeans (dark blue, with a fancy-famous-gayboy-Italian name sewn on the pocket), and lots of girls wear short or medium or long skirts and light sweaters or blouses. Pretty much everything that could be bought at Woodfield Mall or Oakbrook Shopping Center existed inside John of Leiden. Some of the girls wore repulsive shades of lipstick: Dried Bat’s Blood, Congo Native, Shoe-Shine Ochre, Skinned Bunny. His dad seemed to think he could see into women, but Ernest chuckled more at Bob Guccione’s Penthouse editorials: women were good for three things; only two if you combined “cooking” with “washing dishes.” He’d once tried this thought out at a party and, boy how the girls ripped into him (though the guys were chuckling behind their hands). He had to squirrel his way out of that one with a, Just for laughs, ladies, lighten up! No one really believes that, right?
Anyway, Ernest thought, many Leiden girls wore made-up faces just like those magazine women, so thick with that pretty-girl goo that Ernest could scrape it off with a trowel and use the putty to cover war wounds. None of the guys played with coloring, except for the garage-band rockers, who drew something like eye-liner around their lashes for that on-stage look of the fading Glam Band era. Otherwise, the only way a boy-man-child could distinguish himself around “the ladies” was to opt into some weird funky punky mod retro or post-rock or pre-rock or a trimmed-for-biz hair style: The Flop, the Caesar, the Mississippi Mudfall, The Buzz, the Hippy-stoner, The Exec, the JT (John Travolta aka Tony Manero—popular with the Italians), the Side Part, the Middle Part, The Beatles Fringe, the Surfer Bandanna, the High’n’Tight, the Mullet, the Sammy Hagar, the Ronald Reagan, the Japanese Manga. And if that weren’t enough, a few kids still wore The Freak Look. Ernest had gone through three of these, then found that his hair worked okay with a rubbing of styling gel and three finger pulls; not two, not one, not four. He thought he looked okay. That bushel’s worth of personalities worked for nearly any guy who showed courage toward a girl. Thank the Hemlock for Condom Users society for a Baby Boom-stuffed school population.
Some of Ernest’s classmates were enemies, some fewer served his ego in mild forms of friendship, while most were merely there and in the way. Not for long, he thought. Look at these two – Paul and Cody – they look like they’re up to no good. Both gave Ernest a long look, then turned away and shook their heads. Fuck you both, Ernest said inside his head, And what’s more, you cun- … hey, more pretty girls up ahead. Freshmen. Cute, accessible. But too young? Maybe-maybe-not. But they came from another town, and that required a bus. Which meant to date them he’d have to ask his parents’ permission to use the family Dodge; which meant questions, and Ernest didn’t like to answer questions of a personal nature. If he took a bus he might be able to hop on one of them to talk to one of these pretty things, but Ernest lived eight blocks away from the school doors, and school policy was clear: too far to get a home-for-lunch pass; too close to qualify for a bus drive. “Assholes in administration,” his mother had complained more than a few times. Whenever his father agreed, and maybe willingly threw in a “Bastards!” himself after a helpful and hopeful look at his wife, Ernest’s mom would cop an attitude, whereupon the household peace would be suspended till the next morning.
Ernest made quick progress down Skid Row because here’s where the Dean had set up office, beside the Attendance admin, next to the detention hall (both in-school and after-school were available) accepted chronic recalcitrants. Ernest cut to his right and went through the back doors of C-10, past pretty seniors who had, like, real breasts that sat naked to his eyes (he only had to try) under their knit tops and T-shirts. He came out onto Main Street again and checked the clock. Three minutes to first bell and … Look at this group! Dorks showing each other their Winter Dance photographs (Two months to print a five-by-seven!), holding out for praise or laughter such flashbulb frights on a snow-flake background, dark suits and bright ball gowns. They’ll probably be life insurance salesmen one day, or bank clerks, or state politicians. Ernest smirked: If only. Then he spotted Rose, whom he took on a last date two weeks ago. She broke up with him after he’d spent eleven dollars on a Chinese dinner and arcade games. Five dates they had. A record for him. Over there, eight o’clock, is Jill, nine days in love last summer; he got to see her wearing a string bikini five times, light blue and almost see through when wet; he even held her hand and brushed an arm against the side of her left breast. That was hot! No nipple, though—she’d tied the spaghetti strings so tight that there were marks across her skin after swimming in the Franklin Village public pool. Probably it was that his erection became visible sitting beside her, while he had been brushing the warm skin of their arms and legs together. That’s the real reason why she broke up with him. What had she expected? They were fifteen years old! This is what fifteen-year-old girls were supposed to like, a little affection, light petting. Do that to a fifteen-year-old boy and you’re going to see the Eiffel Tower whether you’re in France or sitting on a damp towel under the July sun.
“She’s fifth on the list,” Ernest whispered to himself, “and Rose is second.” He knew which classrooms they sat in after lunch: one-oh-eight and one-one-two. His H-hour was Noon-Plus-Three-Mintues. Oh, now that’s cold! Yes, it is! He looked about him as a banana grin laid ache to his cheek muscles. His head made a swivel motion. Here they all were, ripe ripe ripe … fruits! A group of boys, a group of girls, a group of boys, a group of girls. A teacher here, an admin there, a janitor cleaning up some puke, a pair of gym coaches (whistles swinging like loosened nooses from their necks); a concerned parent, pummeled by the noise that all these kids take for granted each day all day, leading her twin boys through into the C-10 hall. A group of boys, a group of girls … hey, I know them! “Also up to no good … girl mischief, menstrual witchiness.” And then there is this kid, and that jock, and that teacher, and the cute busty “rahs” with their pom-poms falling from their lockers (how did they get lockers all in a row?) bending over unladylike and showing their panties shaded in the school colors. Yes and over there—he’s okay; don’t like him; hate him; don’t know this one; ambivalent over that teacher; the principle can drop dead without any help from me; don’t like her, don’t like him, don’t like her, like him, like her, like her and her and her but sacrifices must be made, like him … er, no – take that back, he’s on the long list.
These kids, these kids – their movements looked artificial. They looked artificial. Artificial is how they acted. Robots! Animated robots cranked up to a state of over-activity. No – machinery is too good for them! They are Skin-Bots, made machine stupid by social unconcern, just unplugged from the “wall socket” of sugary cereal and energy drinks. “All the Sugar and Twice the Caffeine” is their mantra. Ernest got a whiff of something buggy and nasty. Too much cologne rode on the air, or not enough soap used to take away yesterday’s sour odors, or a shot of perfume that will make your eyes tear like a busted water balloon; unwashed hair, Mars-red pimples, and whiteheads ready to go nuclear. So many kids had suddenly filled the corridors and hallways and open classroom doorways – like plastic ducks floating in the orbital channel at a carnival, targets to be chosen and popped, turned over, the numbered sticker on their bellies to be matched against the list painted on a blue board; most were duds, only a few awarded a cheap prize. Faces passed him going one way, the backs of hairy heads bobbing ahead. Raskolnikov would feel manic inside such a crowd, Ernest thought with some cheer. Come to think of it – and he had to smile, even bark a laugh – R felt manic merely lying on a sofa, covered by a feral-smelling blanket.
These kids here, these kids there, these kids everywhere! They don’t read … their medium is sit-com television shows. They hardly speak of anything … they have no ideas! Their God is money … they bitch and moan and demand and throw tantrums. They’re obsessed with celebrities but have no ambition. They belly-laugh over silly jokes and show glazed eyes against intelligent opinion. I’m not one of them. Cud-chewing, shit-talking, half-a-hard-on chicken shits. Raskolnikov is right to condemn the greedy, the cruel, the users & abusers. Raskolnikov is is IS – his fundament makes sense – only the select should live with the power to correct society’s wrongs and repair repair repair ‘n rid its morons of the … None of them — not one! — understand the life of the imagination. But I’ll show them just what that ….
The hall was frenzied with bodies and jostling and smelly breath and-and-and-and-and!!!! Ernest saw a guy with a square jaw and lazy eyes burst out the double doors to the Senior Commons Room, looking backwards and about to bump into him, not looking where he was going. Typical. Ernest dipped his shoulder to make the collision hurt. His shoulder bone tomahawked the kid’s flat bicep. “Ouch!” yelped the kid. Ernest heard this behind him as he snaked his way through the crowd. All of a morning’s happenstance. “Hey, look out!” a voice chased after him. Ernest lifted his middle finger and waved it over his head like an Apache’s war feather.
“Mr Wain!” The stern voice shouted his name up ahead, having risen above the noise and chatter. Ernest looked. Mr Eck’s tall frame blocked a classroom doorway. His arms lay crossed over his chest, but a thick hand stood up, a finger motioning Ernest to come away from the crowd.
Oh … oh-oh. Lucky this ISN’T the day or you’d be…he’d be...yeah mutha-fuk.... Ernest wondered whose luck he heard spoken of. He darted between several classmates and came to rest next to the English teacher and the school’s debate coach and former all-state wrestler. Not to be toyed with sans arme. Ernest’s knife rattled against his calf; just one deep knee bend and this guy is ham on rye.
“Yes, sir? Sorry, Mr Eck, I didn’t see you there.”
Mr Eck had black hair, which he combed smooth left to right, and a dense black beard trimmed neatly.
“That’s not the sign language practiced in our hallways, Ernest. Let’s clean it up.” Mr Eck spoke directly to him, and then his eyes continued their survey of Main Street.
“Um … sorry,” Ernest said loudly. Turning his head, he whispered “sort of” towards the teeming kids. He stood still, waiting for more than a reprimand—a trip to the Dean’s office, detention, a call to mom and dad. One or all for flipping some dope the bird? He was about to say something else in his defense, but the clang of the bell drowned his utterance and his thought.
“Off you go,” said Mr Eck. “You’ve been warned.”
Ernest didn’t say a word, just fled.
•
It was never a course of thought for him to believe that he had all the answers. Sometimes, though, he could anticipate the question. That was different, a making which rarely led to any solid answer. Only, now he felt an understanding of life that stood behind his thoughts. Not hidden, or fittingly blended into the loose frame holding up his thought-to-be-ordered self. Life did make sense to him, far more than less, the chores and thesis writing. Back then it was the thinking and being alone with his thoughts alone in his room alone at the family supper table that held an impenetrable silence as tough to chew as the oven bake-bake-baked beef roast. Because of life’s sense-making, Ernest also felt all had slowed to a pace which he could negotiate. Back then one had to learn the maps of noise and silence to learn the best, safest, routes into their centers where the hearts to each lay like dead pets, curled up and ready for burying in a backyard-dug grave. Then came—so much later but not too late—the Q&As, the emotions of six-billion people (or seven), the everyday notions of need. All of these became intrinsic to the way he chose to see the world as an adult. This, too, was not an answer; it lay as his hypothesis. Sometimes, he wished that he had had just a tenth of this mental capacity as a teenager. Because that day was when reality became a part of all those other words he’d used to describe what the awed saw of life: astonishment, doubt, credulity, fallacy.
•
Raskolnikov would not have accepted that reprimand so easily. But R was all reaction by that point in the story; from the opening pages, really, though little did the reader know. No reasoning was left to him but to hold his nerves together, okay at first, untied later. See here: the reasonable murderer holds the notion that life moves along and around him, unaffected by the thoughts of one man. Arrogance of position has no place in the plan. When the time comes for him to do as he sees is his right, and (many would say) is his obligation and duty, the determinism shifts to....
“Ernest? Ernest!”
He was watching his pencil move, the pink eraser on the end nearest him had been rubbed half away, but at an acute angle, so that the other half remained untouched. A sheet of notebook paper sat unblemished by notes, or even doodles of dogs or race cars or flowers or daggers or clouds with lightning bolts sticking up (more than down) out of them, as he’d seen his classmates make a mess of their note paper. The blue line on his sheet, which suggested a left margin, was not as sharp on this sheet as on the sheets in his spiral notebooks. The desktop on which his bare arms rested was cold. He heard titters from the girls, sighs from the man-children.
“What was that, Miss Goodman?” he said. He lifted his eyes to look at his algebra teacher, a woman of average height who always held a stick of white chalk in her right hand. Other colors she held with the left: blue for addition signs and yellow for subtraction and green for multiplication, these lay in the well at the base of the blackboard. Somewhere under thirty years old, Miss Goodman was a thin woman with small breasts and a narrow, flat ass. But she knew how to wear make-up, he thought, a dusting of this and a brush of that, and there she was! A faerie, especially with her cute nose. She always wore fitted pants and tight blouses, colorful and tight. Her hair was blond and shoulder length, cut in some layered way that seemed out of fashion.
“The math problem, Mr Wain,” she said. “On the board? Come up and solve it for the class, please.” She held a book in one hand, the same book Ernest had open on the top left edge of his desk. Hers was thicker because it had all the answers. Tough job, this teaching gig, he thought.
Ernest squinted at the blackboard from his fourth-row seat. On it she’d written a standard formula where x was surrounded by numbers and mathematical signs, a couple of parentheses, and one number squared. He stood up, then hesitated. He pointed at himself and then at the board, giving Miss Goodman an inquiring look. He was giving her the option of passing over him. She squeezed her eyes, not bothering to nod. He walked to board and found a piece of white chalk among the other colors. The formula let him ignore the yawns behind him, the scraping chair feet, a peal of laughter. He pressed the chalk to the board and made some marks.
The third line toward the solution was just coming into his mind when a rattling sound rushed down the hallway. He stepped back from the blackboard and turned toward the class, as someone said, “Did anyone else just hear–” Yes, Ernest thought, he had heard … two more pops came, and three more in a quick series, like someone knew his armament, and then a burst of something high energy. The class sat frozen in their seats, except for everyone’s eyes, which Ernest watched move toward the door and the window and between each other. Ernest thought of his knife. Suddenly big guys, athletes, slid from their seats.
Miss Goodman’s voice shook. “Everybody stay where you’re at.” She took a step toward the door, stopped, took another — screams came in from the hallway — POP-POP-POP burst behind the wall. Miss Goodman crouched herself to the floor.
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