When I was 8 or 9, I found a copy of John Steinbeck’s The Pearl on a shelf at my mom’s house. It was a cheap student paperback, brown but glossy, and small enough that you felt like you were reading something secret—a diary or a spell book. I took it with me to school and read it under the sycamore oaks. Spare and sure-footed as a parable, The Pearl was like if a Bible story was also Captains Courageous. When the scorpion stung the baby, Coyotito, I felt its hot barb in my flesh, too.
Steinbeck was a favorite after that, but years later, when a high school English teacher assigned Of Mice and Men, I remember peeling open the novel with a sigh of resignation. Dourly inviting us to reflect upon the mercy-killing of a disabled man by his only friend, Mrs. Something—a vapid woman with a white stripe where her scalp pared her shitty home-dyed bob—invited ambiguity where the great Californian author hadn’t sown any. Steinbeck’s villains are, as ever, the bosses, including the woman that Lennie mistakenly murders. But Mrs. Something was more interested in cross-examining Lennie’s life, scrutinizing it for value. In her classroom, naked injustice became a parlor trick or ice-breaker question. We wasted that period on the titillating sacrifice of a simpleton, instead of the evils of capitalism.
Thankfully, moral quandaries of that sort didn’t arise very often in school. There’s only so much performative pity that even wretches like Mrs. Something—who once explained that since we needed more women authors in our curriculum, she had quadrupled the number of Jane Austen novels—can puke up for stock characters like Lennie: childlike white men who are unable to stop themselves from committing sexy sex crimes against bad women. As is the case for the protagonists of Keyes’s Flowers for Algernon or Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, Of Mice and Men’s Lennie is sweet, horny, abandoned, abject, and doomed (these men are also impoverished assault victims, too, but no one seems to care about that). My teacher is a stupid person who believes human value is measured in IQ points. I’ve dozed off in more than one cold, bony desk while trying to Heimlich that particular ouroboros.
It was around then, at 15 or 16, that I began to be visited by a nightmare that I won’t describe here. It still comes around sometimes, when things aren’t going so well.
Read Part 2. David tweets at @k8bushofficial. Preorder X: A Novel, out on June 28. It just received a starred review from Publishers Weekly, so that’s pretty neat.
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