Noah Cicero - The Collected Works of Noah Cicero Vol. II

“Chang, this guy is a fucking asshole,” I say.

“He is a fucking madman.”

Charlene thinks he’s an idiot too.

The man comes out and says, “You two giving up yet?”

“No,” Chang says, and I yell, “Three more shots of Jack.”

Three more shots get poured.

Everything is blurry now and I’m crazy drunk.

But I can see the man struggle.

He doesn’t look good.

He’s wobbling.

He’s dizzy.

He stumbles to the door and we can hear him vomiting in the parking lot.

We’ve won the drinking match.

I say to Chang, “I think we should kick his fucking face in for Jimmy.”

Chang looks at me and says, “Yes, we should.”

We go outside with fists clenched.

The man who owns the bar yells, “Yes, fuck that bastard up.”

We’re outside.

It’s night.

The moon is beautiful tonight.

The man is on his knees, vomiting on the ground.

“Should we kick him while he’s down,” Chang says.

“Yes, without a doubt we should kick him while he’s down.”

Chang runs and kicks him in the cheek.

The man falls.

I kick him in the ribs repeatedly.

The man grabs his stomach.

Chang punches him in the face.

The man vomits all over himself.

I step on his nuts.

He grabs his nuts, vomit oozing out of his mouth.

His shirt is covered in vomit.

He lies on the ground, wriggling in pain, yelling obscenities about communists.

We laugh and I say, “Why don’t you pick yourself up by your bootstraps, fuck-face.”

Then Chang gives him a good kick to the head and the man starts to cry like a little bitch.

I look down at him and say, “That’s Youngstown, motherfucker.”

Chang looks at me and says, “We need to get out of here.”

We stroll to the car and take off down the highway drunk as fuck.

I wake up in a tent at a campground a little ways into Nebraska.

Chang is sleeping.

He looks like a little mentally ill Asian baby.

I don’t wake him up.

I go outside the tent and there it is.

Nebraska.

The campground is surrounded by cornfields.

There is no corn though.

You can see little bits of green popping out of the ground.

But it is too early in the season.

The fields are bare and stretch on for miles.

I have never seen the sky so big.

I’ve never seen so much while standing in one single spot.

It is beautiful.

The cornfields stretch out and encompass my view like looking at the ocean.

It is peaceful.

I sit on a picnic table and light a cigarette.

It feels good to be here.

I’m not sure where I am.

Somewhere in Nebraska.

It is nice to be in Nebraska.

The air smells good.

I don’t recall ever getting a chance to smell fresh air.

In Youngstown, the air is not fresh.

If you leave a clean cup out to catch rain or snow, black soot is always left in the cup. Left over from the steel mills burning coal.

There probably isn’t any black soot in the snow and rain here.

This is the prairie.

This is so cool.

Chang gets out of the tent.

He sits next to me and looks out at the prairie.

“Nebraska,” he says.

I don’t say anything.

We look at the Great Plains.

And let the breeze float over us like cool water.

It is early and the sun is shining.

Everything looks golden.

It makes me feel good inside.

“This isn’t like Youngstown,” I say.

“No,” Chang says.

We sit for a long time there.

But eventually we get up, take showers in the community bathroom, and head down the highway.

Chang is driving down I-80.

We have seen nothing but empty cornfields for the last three hours.

Chang’s face looks happy.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen the man look so happy.

He looks excited.

Chang stops at a lookout.

Which doesn’t really look out at anything but huge empty cornfields.

There are little cement seats people can sit on.

We sit down and Chang says, “There’s nothing. There’s nothing

in the way

For miles and miles nothing to see, nothing

in the way

Open land and huge sky. I’ve been so trapped.

“So trapped.

“I’ve been strangled and pushed down, held down and everyone who ever got a chance grabbed me and tied me up. They wouldn’t let me go.

“I woke up to stare at green trees and cars driving by, and the phone would ring.

“Everything always seemed so dead.

“It was dead but still coming down on me.

“Still pervading my being with structure, organization, and nonsense.

“I was down there in that little room, trapped, like a dog. Caged in. Then I came to Youngstown, and more cages. The cage of being different they put me in. The outsider cage. The weirdo cage.

“I suffered so much in that little hole at the bottom of that boat. We all suffered on that boat. But I was little, not an adult. My parents viewed it as life. But I had not been reared in misery yet. So I felt it. Then to Youngstown, then to another cage.

“I have suffered with the best of them.

“My suffering came from other people. They gave it to me, sometimes by force, sometimes I took it and made it my own.

“My family back in China were farmers. Now they sell General Tso’s Chicken to Americans in Youngstown.

“How did we end up like this?

“How did we allow such a thing to happen?

“I became so scared and tired.

“But this land. This land, I’m okay here. I don’t know if it is just the feeling of freedom I’m having being away from home or what. But I feel free here. Is feeling free such a bad thing? There is so much nothing. That is so nice to me. All this nothingness. A man like me could live here. I’ve been looking for this kind of nothingness all my life. This Nebraska. These Great Plains.

“That fight last night was fun.

“I would never have done that back home.

“But here, it seems natural to be having fun kicking somebody’s ass.

“I don’t feel

that

tension so much.

“Perhaps it’ll come back. It always comes back.

“You know how they say people are the same everywhere you go.

“Well, Nebraska has less than two million people. Yes, they are the same, the same kinds of personality types exist everywhere. But there are a lot less here. A lot less motherfuckers to deal with here.

“I think I might stay here.”

I start to think this is part of Chang’s mental illness.

That he hasn’t been taking his pills.

But his mental illness is who he is.

Chang might be nuts, but that’s Chang. Chang is nuts.

“That’s cool,” I say. “I’ll drop you at the next town.”

“No, I go from here.”

“From where? We can’t even see a house from here. There are fields for miles. Do you have any money?”

“Give me a hundred dollars and I’ll be fine.”

“That’s it? One-hundred dollars?”

“Yeah, I’m cool.”

“Okay.”

We get up and walk to the car together.

Chang fills a book bag full of random shit.

I hand him a hundred dollars.

The sun is bright and shining in both our eyes, making us squint.

Beads of sweat are going down our foreheads.

Chang looks at me and says, “You’re a good dude.”

He opens his arms and hugs me.

I hug him back.

It is a good hug.

A good strong hug.

We release our arms and I say to him, “You’re a good dude too. Good luck.”

He smiles.

He turns around and starts walking out into the endless cornfield.

I sit on a cement seat and watch him walk away.