had to stay after school. I was supposed to be frightened o f
staying after school instead o f the bomb or more than the
bomb. Adults are so awful. Their faces get all pulled and tight
and mean and they want to hit you but the law says they can’t
so they make you miserable for as long as they can and they
call your parents to say you are bad and they try to get your
parents to hit you because it’s legal and to punish you some
more. You ask them why you have to cover your ears with
your elbows and they tell you it is so your ear drums w on ’t get
hurt from the noise. They
this is the answer they come up with. I said I thought m y ear
drums would probably burn with the rest o f me so I got
punished more. I kept waiting to see them wink or smile or
laugh or something even just among themselves even though
it w ouldn’t be nice to show they knew it was crap but they
acted serious like they meant it. They kept telling you that you
were supposed to respect them but you would have had to take
stupid pills. I kept thinking about what it meant that this was
m y life and I was going to die and I thought I could say asshole
i f I wanted and face whatever w ay I wanted and I didn’t
understand w hy I couldn’t take a walk in the fucking spring air
if I wanted but I knew i f I tried they would hurt me by making
me into a juvenile delinquent which was a trick they had if you
did things they didn’t like. I kept reading Buber and tried to
say I-Thou but they were I-It material no matter how hard I
tried. I thought maybe he had never encountered anything like
them where he lived. I kept writing papers for English on
Buber’s philosophy so I could keep in touch with I-Thou even
though I was surrounded by I-It. I tried to reason it out but I
couldn’t. I mean, they were going to die too and all they could
think o f was keeping you in line and stopping you from
whispering and making you stare at a wall. I kept thinking
they were ghosts already, just dead already. Sometimes I
thought that was the answer— adults were dead people in
bodies giving stupid orders. They thought I was fresh but it
was nothing like what I felt inside. Outside I was calm. Inside I
kept screaming in m y brain: are you alive, are you zombies,
the bomb is coming, assholes. Why do we have to stand in
line? W hy aren’t we allowed to talk? Can I kiss Paul S. now?
Before I die; fast; one time? In your last fucking minute on
earth can’t you do one fucking human thing like do something
or say something or believe something or show something or
cry or laugh or teach us how to fight the Goddamn Russians or
anything,
quiet like assholes? I wanted to scream and in m y brain I
screamed, it was a real voice screaming like something so loud
it could make your head explode but I was too smart to scream
