A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (34 page)

Oh look at her. More than I want to be on Laura
’
s show I want to settle down with her, to raise a family with her, on ten or so acres on the North Carolina coast. We
’
ll have a dog named Skipper. We
’
ll cook together, for her parents, for the neighbors. Have a crowd of kids that look not like me but like her, with strong, delicate features, that wonderful nose—

“
Okay,
”
she says, sitting down behind the video camera.

The tape starts, the red light, everything.

“
Where did you grow up?
”
she asks.

“
Oh. I know this. A little suburb of Chicago, Lake Forest. It
’
s about thirty miles north—
“

“
I know Lake Forest.
”

“
Really?
”
I say, feeling a format change coming, one where quotation marks fall away and a simple interview turns into something else, something
entirely so much more.
“
It
’
s just a little suburb, about seventeen thousand people. I
’
m surprised that—
“

Please. Lake Forest is one of these towns, like Greenwich or Scarsdale
—/
mean, isn
’
t this one of the wealthiest towns in America?
Is it? I guess it is. I guess. I don
’
t know. But I didn
’
t know any rich people. We weren
’
t rich. My friends
’
parents were teachers, sold medical supplies, ran frame shops... My parents drove used cars,
my mother bought all of our clothes at Marshall
’
s. That kind of thing. We were on what I guess would have been the town
’
s lower socioeconomic half.

What did your parents do?

My mother didn
’
t work until I was about twelve. Then she was a teacher. Montessori. My father was a lawyer, a commodities-oriented lawyer in Chicago. Futures trading.

And your siblings?

My sister
’
s in law school at Cal. My brother Bill works at a think

tank in L.A.

What does that mean?

Well, he started out at the Heritage Foundation, traveling eastern Europe, advising the former Soviet republics, whatever they
’
re called, on conversion to free-market economies, et cetera et cetera. Then he wrote a book about downsizing government here, at the local level. It
’
s called
Revolution at the Roots: Making Government Smaller, Better, and Closer to Home.
You should see it. It
’
s even got a quote from Newt Gingrich right there on the cover; something to the effect that all Americans, if they
’
re good Americans, should read this book.

take it you two don
’
t talk politics much.
No, not too much.

And did you have money growing up?

I don
’
t know. Sometimes. Sometimes not. We were never really lacking for anything, but my mom had a way of making us feel like we were just scraping by.
“
You
’
re driving us to the poorhouse!
”
she would yell, usually to our dad but also to anyone, to no one in particular. We never really knew what was going on, but it would be
ridiculous to complain. We lived in a house in this nice town, had our own bedrooms, clothes, food, toys, went on vacation in Florida—though we always drove, mind you. We all worked from the time we were thirteen or so, all summer, Bill and I cut lawns, Beth was up at the Baskin-Robbins in brown cords, of course had to buy our own sad, short-lived used cars, Rabbits and rusty Camaros, all went to public schools, state schools for college. So no, I wouldn
’
t think of us as having much money—there was certainly never anything saved, we found that out when they died...

Hmm.

So am I on?

What do you mean?

Did I make the show? Am I on?

Wait a second. We just started.
Oh.

So did you feel different
—
were there social divisions based on wealth?
Hardly. But if there were, it was an inverse relationship. The kids who acted and dressed like they had money were outcasts, were pitied, weren
’
t really allowed to be popular. It
’
s just like anywhere—children in public schools are trained, have it pounded into them by their peers, that to stand out is to attract possibly unfavorable attention. So being obviously wealthy was the same as being too tall, too fat, having a boil on your neck. We all gravitated toward the middle. This was the case all through school—the richest kids were usually seen as the wannabes, were the most desperate, were constantly throwing parties to get the attention of kids whom everyone really envied, like the guy on the football team who lived in the old wooden house behind the high school. The popular kids drove trucks, bought the shittiest cars, had
parents who were divorced or drunk or both, who lived far from the areas considered desirable. The rich kids, like the ones whose shirts were always tucked in, whose hair was always just so, or those who went to the private schools in town, were considered hopeless, troubled, eccentric. I mean, can you imagine being in a town like Lake Forest, with these excellent public schools—and still blowing ten grand a year to send your kid to a school called Country Day? These were the freaks. You know what we called that school?

No.

It
was pretty funny.

What did you call it?
Country Gay.

Country
Gay.
Get it? Country
Gay?

This was a fairly intolerant town.

Homogeneous, yes; intolerant, no. It was overwhelmingly white, of course, but racism of any kind—at least outwardly expressed—is kind of gauche, so we basically grew up without any sense of prejudice, firsthand or even in the abstract. With the kind of wealth and isolation we had from societal sorts of issues—crime, outside of the vandalism perpetrated by me and my friends, was unheard of—the town was free to see those kinds of things as a kind of entertainment—wrestling matches being contested by other people, in other places. The only instance I ever knew of any truly bigoted stuff was when I was in grade school and this one thin, geek-looking kid with glasses moved in down the street and on the corner, and in his room he hung one of those flags, the southern flag... ^

The Confederate flag.

Right. So this kid, who was my brother
’
s age, three years older, moved in when I was about nine, and almost immediately turned everything upside down. First, on the bus, my brother Bill saw him draw a swastika on the back of a seat. None of us had ever seen, firsthand, something like that, and thus it became the big story for a while.
An actual racist!
Then, the kid started an informal kind of club, converting—sorry, bad word—a little group of other kids from the neighborhood, and then they all started drawing swastikas on their notebooks, and using the word that people use for these purposes.

What word?

I might get it wrong. The word is kike, right?

Yes.

Is that k-y or k-i?

/
think k-i.

Huh. I would have thought k-y. But so, suddenly, that was a word kids were using. We were this enclave of civilization, suddenly corrupted by—it was backward, in a way, with the arrival of this sort of missionary of bigotry... Anyway, one of the neighborhood kids, this guy Todd Golub, was up until this time friends with the rest of the neighborhood kids, but then suddenly he was
Jewsh\
And immediately he was off-limits. Of course, I didn
’
t ever hear much of it myself. These guys were older, my brother Bill
’
s age, so I
’
d hear small bits from Bill, and even then the information was discouraged, my parents not wanting us really to know anything about it at all.
“
Bad kids,
”
my mom said, and that was that. We knew absolutely nothing. I didn
’
t know any profanity, knew nothing about sex, anything. I was twelve when I realized
“
balls
”
referred to testicles, and not the two cheeks of your butt. Don
’
t
laugh. I was terrorized for that kind of thing. At that point, I had the Catholic knowledge of my own anatomy, meaning none at all— I digress. So Bill tried to hold on to these kids as friends in some way, hoping this swastika stuff was just some temporary viral thing. But just from what I knew, I started having these elaborate fantasies about what went on in the kid
’
s house. Whenever we
’
d drive by, I
’
d crane my neck back, looking for that big Confederate flag. You could actually see it pretty easily,
it
covered the entire window of the kid
’
s room, draped so it sagged in the middle. I had no idea what to think, how deep it ran in that house, so when we drove by, I half expected to see him and his dad out in front, burning crosses, hooded men tossing nooses over tree branches. I really did. We had no frame of reference. This kid was exotic in the same way that the kids who lived in apartments were. I just had no way to process the information. Our town was rigid in many ways, in terms of the uniformity of things, the colors of skin, the makes of cars, the lushness of the lawns, but on top of that it was sort of a blank canvas so—and again, I guess this is true of any child—I was ready to quickly accept the sudden and total substitutions of all I knew to be true.

What about black kids?

We had a few. Maybe four, five at a time. Growing up, in grade school, there was Jonathan Hutchinson. He lived on Old Elm Road, an east-west thoroughfare that acted as the border between Lake Forest and Highland Park, not far from our house; he was okay. A sort of awkward kid, but nice enough. Then he moved away and for a while there weren
’
t any black kids. Then Mr. T moved in.

Mr. T?

Yeah, this was, God, I think we were in junior high, or just in high

school, and it was after
The A-Team
had been off the air for a year
or two when we heard about it—Jesus, then it was all anyone could talk about. The town was still reeling from
Ordinary People
being filmed there and all—there were all these pictures of Robert Redford at the McDonald
’
s—but we never had anyone on the level of a Mr. T. I mean, at the time he was still this massive star; I forget what he was doing right then, maybe between series or something, you know how hard that can be, but still this huge star. He moved into this enormous place on Green Bay Road, easily ten acres or so, with a gate, and a big brick wall facing the street. The place was right near town, a few doors down from our church, St. Mary
’
s.

And how was his arrival met?

We lost our brains. Our world exploded. We fucking loved it. The kids, that is. I mean,
The A-Team
had been by far our favorite show—we threw
A-Team
parties, used to run around the seventh grade cafeteria singing the theme song—
Duh duh duh DUH! Duh duh duh...dududududuhl
—while spraying the girls
’
table with imaginary fire. But our parents, I think now, in retrospect, were a bit more cautiously enthusiastic. First of all, those with money don
’
t want to seem impressed by fame, especially ill-gotten fame, which is what I assume was the thinking in T
’
s case. You don
’
t mind if I just call him T?

Not at all.

After all, this guy was a bouncer when he was discovered. And of course he didn
’
t help matters when he started cutting down all the trees.

/
think I remember this.

It made news all over. It was a scandal. Here you had this supposedly uptight white town, and then this large black man with the gold chains and the mohawk comes in and takes this chain saw, and
cuts down, literally, all but about two trees on his property—about two hundred of them, probably, all in plain daylight, by himself, with the chain saw. It was incredible. The nerve! He said he was allergic. But that didn
’
t really fly. See, this was a town that really
took pride in its trees. And for good reason; we had some nice goddamn trees. We had the signs all over:
“
Tree City, U.S.A.
”
We loved those signs. So then he cuts down all these trees and everything, and no one really knows what to say, because they want to condemn him—and some did—but the vast majority of people were kind of afraid of looking racist, or like poor sports or something—this was a place where the black janitor got a
standing ovation
when he sang
“
Deep River
”
in the talent show—so everyone eventually just sat back and watched. My dad thought the whole thing was hilarious, loved reading about the debate, giggled wildly about it.
“
Oh fantastic,
”
he
’
d say, whenever the town was being embarrassed by the Chicago newspapers. He never identified with Lake Forest, had no friends in town, didn
’
t drive the right kind of car—