Evil Origins: A Horror & Dark Fantasy Collection (110 page)

“He’s still
there,” shouted Kevin as his hand massaged the handle on the door.

Mike
shook his head and kicked at the empty beer bottles clanging at his feet. The
headlights hit the rear-view mirror and pierced my chest with an accusing
light. I slid down in the seat and pushed hard on the floorboards, anticipating
the inevitable rolling of The Beast.

“She’ll get us
out,” he said.

The bald front
tires spun on the eastbound side of College Park Drive and catapulted us
towards the stop sign at the bottom of the hill. I felt the massive V8 engine
pulling with a thunderous roar from under the hood.

I looked back at
Mike and Kevin again. Kevin shook his head, and I remember wondering what he
meant. Was he trying to tell me Evan was not going to stop at the intersection?
Was he shaking his head in disgust, accepting the fact that we were going to
end up wrapped around a tree? Was he telling me that we needed to beat the shit
out of Evan if we lived through the night?

I had only a
fraction of a second to whip my head from the view of the passenger side
window, across the dash, and beyond a giggling Evan. The industrial copper glow
of the street light painted his face in a maniacal smile. As the Buick slid
within inches of a parked car, Evan reached over and turned the shitty cassette
deck up as loud as it would go.

“Cause yer in
the jungle, baby, and yer gonna die!”

Probably, Axl.
Probably.

As we
accelerated toward the T intersection at the bottom of the hill, the red stop
sign glared at me like an evil eye. I could almost see our blood splattering
over its white border. For a fraction of a second I imagined my parents
standing over the corpse as the police pulled the sheet back. I pictured my
body lying on the floor of the living room where the Buick had landed after
vaulting across the intersection and through the window.

“Yeah, that’s my
son,” I heard my dad say.

Before my mother
could wipe her tears, the vision imploded as Evan swung The Beast through the
turn. The front end kept to the right, but the rear end of the aircraft carrier
on wheels slid into the oncoming lane. Evan whipped the steering wheel into the
spin to correct the slide and brought us back onto College Park Drive. He
yanked The Beast around another bend and up the hill onto Noel Drive. Evan
pulled into a pristine concrete driveway, cut the engine, and slid low in the
driver’s seat. Before he could yell “down,” we had followed his lead.

A second later
the Camaro blew by on College Park in pursuit of the assholes who had dumped a
Slushy on the hood of their car.

“Anyone up for
another, tonight?” Evan asked while lighting another Marlboro.

Duff’s jangly
bass line launched “It’s So Easy,” and I held on to that tune as the only
anchor of reality for the night. When Guns N’ Roses calms your nerves, you know
you are living on the edge.

***

Suburban
Pittsburgh in the 1980s represented every middle- class, white, strip-mall hell
in the United States. Situated too far west to be considered East Coast and too
far east to be considered Midwest, western Pennsylvania sits at its own vortex
of the cosmos, a nowhere place that provided no salvation to teenagers.

We all worked at
a local steakhouse that has since gone out of business. (Every place I worked
as a teenager went out of business shortly after I left. I wish I could say I
had something to do with that, but I didn’t.) We all attended the same high
school, went to the same parties, drank the same beer, and lusted after the
same chicks. Some folks recall their teenage years with fondness, while others
eternally pretend they still exist. I do neither. I look back with a sense of
awe, shocked that I did not end up dead or in jail.

One of our
friends within the circle, Matt Hanlon, became financially involved with what I
believe was a local drug dealer. Perry was a hot-tempered red-headed dude in
his mid-twenties. He lived in a split-entry home, completely furnished with a
dog. In other words, he was a god. The guy hosted parties every weekend for the
local teenagers complete with kegs in the basement, pot in the living room, and
cocaine in the bedrooms. You had to work your way up the dependency ladder.
Perry’s only house party rule was “don’t kick the dog.” You could vomit in the
middle of the kitchen and set the carpet on fire, but if you kicked the dog you
might get your own ass-kicking.

My friends and I
spent countless summer nights at Perry’s, wasted and doing shit I am not proud
to recall. Within our circle we took care of each other, but outside our group
of hooligans we respected nobody.

After a heavy
bout of drinking, we would meet at our place of employment, the local
steakhouse, and knock on the back door that led into the kitchen. The produce
delivery guy left hundreds of pounds of potatoes inside the door. We would fill
our baseball caps with the brown projectiles and throw them over the hillside
of the parking lot, where they dropped onto the cars below. A tire screech or
horn would send us running back inside the restaurant.

Instead of going
to senior prom, five of us decided to get a case of malt liquor and a bag of
weed and get fucked up in the woods behind my house. Following our normal
Friday evening schedule, we arrived in the parking lot of the beer distributor (in
Pennsylvania you can buy two six-packs of beer at a bar. Anything more, such as
a case or keg, has to be purchased at a beer distributor, sort of like an
alcoholic’s wet dream. But real) waiting for an older young guy we could
approach for the transaction. We sent Pat out to ask the guy to buy us beer, as
Pat was our whipping boy. He was the one in our crew who we would hurt for our
own recreation. I have never met someone so accident prone as Pat. He broke his
leg walking down the street. The guy stepped off the curb and we heard his
femur snap. As you can imagine, Pat provided hours of grisly entertainment.

So we sent Pat
to ask a guy to buy us beer. A case of Coors Light cost about twelve dollars,
and we would hand the guy a twenty with the understanding that he could make
eight dollars for the thirty-second transaction. In 1989 we rarely had someone
turn us down. Scary.

Pat stood next
to the door and accepted the case of beer our unknown new friend had just
purchased. He raised the case over his head and shouted, “I’ve got the beer,”
like some kind of retarded bull fighter. Little did we know that the LCB (the
Liquor Control Board exists only to bust underage drinkers) was sitting in a
car while monitoring the entire transaction. We waved at Pat through the back
window of The Beast as they put him in cuffs.

Evan owned The
Beast. I think it was a Buick, but it was hard to tell. The rust mingled with
the fading brown paint to give the car a nice shit tone. The windows on the
passenger side did not work, and the door on the driver side did not open. Evan
tied the exhaust pipe to the frame with a coat hanger and had to start the
engine with a screwdriver. Whenever the weather dropped below thirty-seven
degrees, The Beast would only shift into D2 with a top speed of twenty-three
miles per hour. On rare occasions, Evan had to drive it in reverse. The tape
deck/radio sat in the gaping maw of the huge dashboard, and the copilot had to
be ready at all times. Right turns made with considerable speed would throw the
entire tape deck from the dash. We cranked Iron Maiden’s
Powerslave
to
help mask the horrendous sounds spewing from the undercarriage.

Shortly after
Evan got the car from his old man, a truck driver and one tough dude, he
started playing Chase. The rules of the game were simple. The passengers in the
belly of The Beast screamed insults or threw things (only from a seat where the
windows rolled down) at other motorists in order to get them to chase The
Beast. Evan would then sandbag our escape. He would let the pursuers get close
enough for us to see their poor attempts at a moustache before slamming the
accelerator to the floor and hoping the thermometer read thirty-eight degrees.
The Chase would last until Evan lost the other car. And he always did.

Using the Western
definition of Karma, one might say that I have reaped what I have sown. As a
teacher, I was shown the same disrespect that I showed to the world as a thin,
tall, scraggly-haired “burn out” (my wife would argue that I don’t look much
different today) in 1989.

***

There has been a
decline in the acceptance of educated opinions delivered by professionals. If
you do not believe me, I can draw a line graph to prove it. When I was a kid,
my parents accepted whatever opinion was proffered to them by a professional,
whether it was from an auto mechanic, dentist, or priest. This is the same kind
of blind gullibility that has led us into Vietnam, Iraq, and
American Idol
.
However, the pendulum has now swung in the other direction.

Thanks to the
internet, everyone knows fucking everything. Every monkey with Wi-Fi thinks he
can Google the answer to life’s greatest mysteries. I hate to pop the dot-com
bubble yet again, but most of the stuff posted online is either (1) clinically
frightening or (2) bullshit (mostly number 2 (#2, exactly)). The value on a
“professional opinion” has plummeted, and nowhere is that more apparent than in
education.

Cynthia
Kopkowski wrote an article for the National Education Association titled “Why
They Leave.” She cites several major factors that help explain why half of all
new teachers leave the profession within their first five years. National
standards (mostly the No Child Left Behind mandates), too little support,
student discipline, low salary, and lack of respect are a few of the factors
that make teaching difficult.

Student
discipline has become a larger issue.

Unmanageable
discipline problems mean more than a headache in the classroom. For teachers
like McCartney, they erode desire to invest time and energy in lesson plans that
make the content come alive for students. Preservice training is often of
little help, too. ‘We spent very little, if any, time on discipline,’ McCartney
says of the training she received the summer before entering the classroom. ‘I
entered the profession completely unprepared for discipline problems.’

Deciding to leave devastated McCartney, a once
optimistic and enthusiastic young teacher. ‘Gosh, it was a really big defeat,’
she says, letting out a deep breath. ‘Teaching is important, but I got to the
point where I wasn’t willing to sacrifice so much anymore.’

However, lack of
compensation and respect are really the nails in the coffin when it comes to
the premature death of a career in education.

When
Sherry Mann started teaching fifth grade this year in Carlisle, Pennsylvania,
the 39-year-old career changer was floored by how often she found herself
reaching into her own pocket to pay for classroom supplies. ‘My husband is a
software developer. He would never have to purchase his own paper.’ Thus far,
she estimates she’s spent roughly $1,000 on classroom essentials. (She’s not
alone. About 8 percent of teachers spend that annually and the average teacher
spends at least $433, according to a 2003 NEA Research study. And education
support professionals spend about $168, according to a 2007 NEA Research
report.)

Feeling that she doesn’t have all the tools or the
time she needs to do her job the way the self-confessed ‘perfectionist’ would
like weighs on Mann. ‘It’s really depressing sometimes. You get to the point
where you just can’t handle it.’

The issue of inadequate pay arises when educators like
Mann, battered by a slew of such obstacles, grow increasingly dissatisfied.
They begin to look around, says Susan Moore Johnson, a researcher with the
Harvard Graduate School of Education. ‘Other lines of work offer higher pay,
and when there’s not such a stigma attached to leaving one job and going to
another, the pay elsewhere becomes more attractive.’

Elizabeth, the young New Jersey teacher, puts it this
way: ‘You see your friends coming out of college getting jobs making the same
or more than you do for less work, and it’s tempting to go find a job that pays
more and is more relaxing.’

The bottom line for many educators, especially new
ones, is that their income doesn’t pay the rent and bills. ‘Teachers have to be
able to afford to teach,’ says Johnson. ‘Even for the most committed, the pay
has to be sufficient to live a reasonable, middle class life.’

Society has
dumped on teachers from the beginning because the first educators were women,
who until 1920 got as much respect as Native Americans or blacks. Americans are
not good at valuing diversity. It usually takes a “movement” to grant certain
segments of the population the same rights as others.

In 1776 the
Declaration of Independence stated, “We hold these truths to be self-evident,
that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with
certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit
of Happiness.” In
Rebels and Redcoats: How Britain Lost America
renowned
British military historian Richard Holmes makes radical statements about the
effectiveness of the revolution. He claims that the colonists did not hold
themselves to the same standards put forth in the Declaration. Within ten years
of creating that document, the Continental Congress met to draft a new
government without elected officials, slaves, free blacks, Native Americans, or
women. In fact, George Mason, author of the Virginia Declaration of Rights, left
the convention without signing the Constitution because it did not explicitly
state the rights of the citizen. Americans have a deep and profound history of
falling short of our own ideals.

Women (half of
the population and by far the better-looking half, I might add) have had the
right to vote in the United States for less than one hundred years. African
Americans have had it for less than fifty years. The “movement” of our
generation will be the Gay Rights one. I see no reason why homosexuals cannot
marry and be just as miserable as everyone else. The point is that whether it’s
based on skin color, salary, sex, or preference of sexual organ, we love to
hold back rights that belong to “true Americans.”