Read an Excerpt
Falling Room
By Eli Hastings
University of Nebraska Press
Copyright © 2006
University of Nebraska PressAll right reserved.
ISBN: 0-8032-7364-9
Chapter One
Burlington Northern
I used to pull my clock under the blankets with me. I slept with my
head covered, so I was sure to hear the alarm as one a.m. arrived.
Instantly awake, I slipped from my bed and dressed. My mother and
stepfather slumbered just above, so stealth was important. With recollected
adrenaline burning in my chest, I entered the night tentative
and slow, caressing the window's hinge closed.
In the Buick, I lit a Marlboro as 1:30 crawled onto the dashboard
clock. The overpass at 145th dropped shadow across my hood like
a gateway-Seattle officially ended here, and I began stretching
the car out, slicing into the heart of what I thought of as "the sinister
suburbs." This was ironic, of course, because the era of grunge,
heroin, and the fetishes of self-loathing and psychic pain were in
full swing in Seattle. I lived, in fact, a short five blocks from Nirvana's
Kurt Cobain (and his suicide), but among my crowd the darkest
we got was some of Led Zeppelin's weirder tunes. The "Seattle Scene"
was unrolling all around us, but it held sway, mainly, among twenty-and
thirty-somethings-and many were transplants from other
places. We remained, mainly, happily oblivious with our classic rock
and hip-hop, sucking down malt liquor in city parks. Youwere more
likely to find adherents to this subculture of the city among the
suburbs' spoiled or angry adolescents-some of them the "victims"
of their parents' white flight, but more often lifelong residents.
The social contrast between the concrete grids of the city
and tree-lined, quiet avenues caused many of these kids to feel soft,
and thus they had much more to prove-and, usually, more resources
to prove it with. Out in this warped periphery there was
violence and drugs-but rarely for money. These kids were into
darkness for the sake of darkness. As fathers sat around country
club tables, clutching cocktails and congratulating themselves on
their promotions, their teens ventured off into sub-urbanity, carrying
with them dangerous things: complexes and boredom. They
attended family suppers raging high on LSD, they bumped lines before
math tests, and like teens almost anywhere, they forged alliances
and feuds sometimes with blood.
My best friend, Dean, was now among these kids.
I swung off the interstate and slipped into the pack of luxury vehicles
and family wagons moving leisurely up the hills. I caught
the end of a yellow light and flew across Route 99, the long strip of
sleaze that finally, decisively, marked the border to better living. A
moment later I wound down Dean's woodsy avenue, weaving between
yellow lane markers. His hillside home pulled itself around
a bend, nearly indistinguishable from the other massive cedar houses.
Except for the occupants. On the top and third floor, I could see the
purple throb of his younger sister's black light, under the glare
of which there was no telling what might be transpiring. His
mother's bedside lamp winked meekly a floor below, as I knew it
would until her daughter's activity ceased and Dean returned home
with a whisper of sliding glass.
Dean and I figured his mother's hope was that the move to this
neighborhood would wean him off mischief, steer him into football,
science, and college. That it would purge his mind of the
strange ideas and voices-the functional schizophrenia-that
everyone quietly knew cursed his father. In the end, it did not. Recently
we had endured an afternoon that was to change everything.
That vile Tuesday in the middle of winter had broken me
down and just plain broken my best friend-though he'd already
been bound for it. To recap:
At eleven a.m. I split my city high school and drive fast to the suburbs,
where I join Dean and eat three hits of acid on a cold, windy
beach. At first there is merely the occasional hallucination-a figure
in a rocking chair that, upon scrutiny, turns out to be empty
and moved by gusts. But then it gets weird. Dean, sucking on his
cigarettes in the hungry way he has, tells me of a kid at school who
unnerves him, deeply, though he cannot say why.
We're wandering a slippery stretch of stones under a bridge. Spray
painted on a concrete pillar: tool. Who writes that? I ask, to which
Dean says Chris Woolman-the dude I was just telling you about.
That's odd. We move on through the nightmare colors of the day,
dodging humanity, smoking and chopping up our theories of God.
Driving back to his house, we come upon two kids walking the center
of the road. They wave us over. Dean knows them and curses. They
climb into my back seat, uninvited. They say Hey man this CD is
the shit, gotta hear it man. At Dean's house they play the music. It
is the metronome of a gun being cocked and unintelligible commands.
It is horrible. Dean asks who it is. It's Tool, they tell us,
grooving heads to the nonmusic. Dean and I look at each other, beg
each other, simultaneously, to ask and not to ask: Where'd you
get it? One of the kids looks up. It's Chris's man, you know, Chris
Woolman's. Dean pushes stop. The music does not stop. Dean unplugs
the stereo and is shocked, painfully, by the cord. He holds his
wrist and I watch a certain cloud cross his gaze.
The events of that day, however, made our present escapade-and
all those to come after it-feel so much more appealing, so much
more important.
I slipped in, negotiated the black room by rote, and shook Dean
from his nest of porn, pillows, and ash. He rose, already dressed,
and moonshine bloomed on his grin. We wasted no time slipping
back out into the night.
There was more smoke than talk as I whipped the car through
the rain. The moon spiked off the road and multiplied itself in each
bead of water sliding across the windshield. The Pacific suddenly
flattened the horizon into a line and we parked in a cul-de-sac. We
crossed the road and hopped the guardrail, over boulders and onto
the railroad tracks that ran parallel to the water. We checked the oil
silos a quarter mile down the beach for security patrols. But there
was no one.
We walked the shoreline, the tide working constantly to suck out
evidence of our footprints. We toked on a joint and talked fast, constructing
flawed philosophies, getting tangled up in each other's
words, losing track, we were sure, of invaluable revelations every
few minutes.
Then a small tremor came through the air. We perceived it at the
same instant and stopped, turning north. A half-mile away, a yellow
light splashed and began to spread across the bulging white
flank of the oil silo. Our eyes met briefly, we dropped our smokes
in the surf and sprinted across loose sand, scrambled up the gravel
embankment and onto the tracks.
The Burlington Northern materialized and as it lumbered around
the bend its one headlight swung into our eyes. It charged a few
dozen yards before the conductor saw us. That deep bleat, impossibly
loud, lifted-a horn blast against the percussion of the engine.
Steel screamed once as if the conductor, suddenly convinced of our
insanity, had given a futile pull on the brakes. The boxcars leaned
crazily and clanked. The air smelled of coal and metal and grew
suddenly hot. I swallowed and erased the sweat on my brow with a
sleeve. Dean shifted his legs. The horn lifted again, higher pitched,
frantic, gobbling up the distance. And then the metal grid over the
headlight appeared like a crosshairs before us. Our eyes watered and
the train blurred. Then Dean touched my arm. And we launched
ourselves sideways and skyward, twisting away, tumbling down the
gravel, coming to rest in a tangle of driftwood. We leaped up, hurling
stones at the boxcars, sparks exploding where they struck. We
howled in rapture and lit cigarettes to await the next one.
This was the era of Bush Sr. I knew things in drastically reduced
ways: that thousands of people were dying for oil; that my mother
wept over it; that some abstract machine of war chugged forward
anyway, undeterred. Coming from a lair of left-wing activism I was, as
a kid, brought to protests and introduced to the rhetoric of nonviolence,
unity, to the responsibility to fight injustice that comes
with privilege. It was not a coincidence that my mother had moved
to what was nearly the most distant point in the continental U.S.
from her home in South Carolina. She had fled the confines of
thought and kin that had kept her stifled in Dixie and flew into the
ranks of the antinuclear-and, then, antiwar-movement, where
she eventually found my stepfather. Her white blonde hair, sun-weathered
skin, and the slow curl of her southern accent (I always
visualized her words as cursive) may have stood out some in Seattle,
but she felt less strange there regardless. Thanks to her, early
on, I was plugged into indignation, as an appliance to an outlet.
This era followed the committal of my first love to a hospital because
her refusal to eat was eroding, day by day, her ability to live.
Dozens of meals in the rising twilight, watching as she tried to
bring a spoon to her thin lips, me tense and insistent and finally
flinging plates against walls and storming through late-summer
streets smoking furiously. Later, she dropped folded slices of notebook
paper from a psychiatric window that whirled and fell to my
cold hands. Please, baby, save me or kill me, I don't care. I can't stay here.
I was stopped by linebacker orderlies at the entrance.
At the risk of melodrama, I will say that in the dead chatter of
those boxcars, the steel on steel, the baritone labor of the engine,
the wail of the horn, mortars buckled the walls of homes half a
world away, and my mother wept. I will say that the hospital pa
crackled, announcing my half-drunken presence to security, that
there were the veiled and unveiled pleas of salvation and mercy from a
girl I loved. But the freight was avoidable. It was conquerable. And it
was sweet in the way that victory is as the caboose disintegrated
into the south, leaving me gulping icy air and feeling alive.
Dean and I both came from families divorced from and cynical of
religion. As a requisite part of rebellion, we spun toward the occult
and vague spirituality. We ingested a lot of questionable jars of
chunky fungi, laced our minds with a lot of LSD, and smoked a lot
of the Northwest's strongest grass. We also stayed awake for long
stretches, welcoming the hallucinations and strange streaks of
inspiration that sleeplessness brings (later I would hear that sleep
deprivation causes psychosis-figures). But we did these things,
in major part, because we earnestly wanted to know God, wanted
to image Him against the falsity of the rest our lives. I wouldn't
claim that we glimpsed the thinnest sliver of Him in the shuddering
seconds in front of those trains, but I will claim this: it was a
taste of faith. We did not wish for death. We loved life-we were
thrilled and fascinated by it, irrespective of its pains. As the freight
thundered headlong toward us, as we trembled and touched one
another's elbows lightly, shifting on our legs, as tears were pushed
from our eyes by the fury of what was coming, we believed as
deeply as I've believed anything since that we would live. We were
teaching the spectators in ourselves, the parts of us that needed to
watch and have everything proven. We were teaching ourselves to
be as courageous as we would ever need to be-more than we'd ever
need to be. We were reinventing ourselves as strong so that we could
walk forward into a life that was getting brasher by the day.
I always felt ease as I passed back across 145th, the clouds rose-colored,
the trees and mini malls giving way to more concrete and
more cars. And when I inched back through that window, dropped
muddied jeans and placed myself in the fold of sheets for an hour
before the alarm sounded again, I knew I'd rise more vital and refreshed
than anyone I knew-except for maybe Dean. Perhaps it
was all just catharsis.
And later that day, as I slouched in the back of a musty classroom,
I'd play those early-morning hours on a loop in the back
of my head. Our teachers postured half-heartedly before the chalkboard.
My peers slept, gambled, gazed out streaky windows, passed
bottles back and forth under the desks. In the midst of this, I could
even conjure a little thrill, a tingle, recalling-enough to ride
through three p.m.
Gettin' Up
"Do you write?"
From under a ball cap twisted to the side, through an exhalation
of smoke, from a face fashionably obscured, the question was asked
time and again, the mode of introduction between glassy-eyed,
beer-clutching kids knocked into a lean by the invisible heft of
hip-hop style. It was part challenge, part greeting, part aggression,
part attempted camaraderie. It might not come until one of you
noticed a crust of paint or the stray streak of marker on a knuckle.
For me, at the time when fat pens and cans of Krylon began to
bulge and rattle in folds of clothing, I was almost completely ignorant
of the hip-hop roots of graffiti. For me, it arrived with the
allure of another card of mischief to play in the game of getting
through high school.
Garfield High School slouches along the block between 22nd
and 23rd Avenues in the Central District of Seattle. It has quite a
history. Was a time-the older folks who sell you barbecue or catfish
out of faded storefronts might say-that Garfield was proud.
Quincy Jones went there, goddamit. So did Jimi Hendrix and Bruce
Lee. Then again, others will tell you, was a time that Garfield was
so dangerous some kids came, got their assignments, and retreated.
A time when knives flashed like jewelry in the halls. There
was a time when the Black Panthers made a stand and tear gas
wafted through hallways like weed smoke did in my day. It was a
place forever associated with "Blackness" and, as a result, inevitably
under the thumb of hip-hop culture. No matter that in my day
the social segregation was near-absolute, that with the exceptions
of sports, the jazz band, drug deals, and a handful of parties, racial
lines weren't much crossed outside the classroom. Hip-hop influence
was insidious even on us interlopers from Capitol Hill, Queen
Anne, or the University District.
Garfield was a word, which, if dropped in the company of suburbanite
kids, would elicit respect, fear, and envy. Actually, Garfield
wasn't any more dangerous or tense than any other school-and,
judging by statistics, was in fact a good measure safer than some
"white" schools. What was true is that it suffered more than others
from the bureaucratic neglect that plagued the Seattle School District:
the insufficient funds, tenured and listless teachers, and outdated
and minimal resources. With the exception of the Advanced
Placement classes and a handful of inspired younger instructors,
the twelve hundred students were hurried through the factory and
out into the streets of their lives. As the indolent security force realized
that a great deal went on beneath their unwatchful eyes,
they made a decision to avert them-at least until the class of 1995
was gone forever.
At any rate, we didn't mind the blind eyes that greeted us on the
stoops of that old building every morning. The license to idle the
days away in the city parks, to clown around in classes, was fine by
us. I hesitate to say, therefore, that tagging was anything more
than just another form of mischief. But because of the political
root of graffiti, I suspect there was some anger or disillusionment
in it, however unconscious.
In my fuzzy recollection, it happened all at once, though that's
surely inaccurate. It just became visible to me all at once. Bubble
letters and flat black quadrangulars, the most honed and most amateur,
the most traditional and most new school, in glossy paint pens
and traditional Marks-A-Lot, the tags piled up. They ballooned and
crashed over lockers and doors, across desks and windows, on the
bumpy cinderblock of rotting bathrooms. Liveevil!, Def, Chaos, SCM,
enigma 1, until a tsunami of letters covered much of the lead paint.
The janitors buffed the walls futilely. It was terminal.
I buffed the walls myself, in fact. One winter morning I knocked
into school an hour late, figuring I'd make a nominal appearance
in Spanish class. I stopped at a water fountain. As I wiped my mouth,
the unblemished wall in front of me proved too tempting. I was
circling the A of my ugly, huge "Chaos" when I heard an outraged
yelp. I cursed and turned from the "Ch@" to Mr. Ball, the polyester-
clad shop teacher.
"What do you think you're doing?" he demanded, already lurching
toward me. With pretended befuddlement and incredible arrogance,
I pocketed the pen.
"What? I was just trying to get this ugly tag off the wall, Ball. Chill
out-yo!" The quiet man must have had some athletic or military
training because he twisted my arm back with efficiency, extracted
the pen, and marched me to the security office with barely restrained
rage, ignoring my threats to sue him. He left me with the graying
head officer, Gus, who leisurely finished a donut, shaking his head
at me with each bite.
For the better part of an hour after school Gus marched me around
the building, every few seconds pointing at a tag.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Falling Room
by Eli Hastings
Copyright © 2006 by University of Nebraska Press.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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