Andrew Sullivan - Waste

“I am never driving that fucking skinhead home again.”

Jamie tossed the gun into the trunk. He was going to need a tarp.

Moses never told his friends that true skinheads didn’t shave their heads. Sure, their hair was short, but real skinheads were never truly bald. They got a one or a two buzz from their mother’s electric razor in a small apartment on a council estate where they lived with senile grandmothers and their father’s ashes on the mantel. They rolled their pants up over their boots and had tiny crosses tattooed on their foreheads. Some of them, at least — Moses knew that much. They loved Sham 69 and the smell of tobacco and they flipped you off with two fingers, not one.

He’d found pictures in the library after a few months hanging around in the Triple K parking lot. The library was a way station filled with busted spines and strange stains underneath the microfiche readers where the old men lingered. The teeth were what surprised him. All the photos were black-and-white pictures from soccer games and riots. The teeth looked so white. Some of them were even straight. The English were supposed to have the worst teeth. Moses had spent his nights naked in the motel bathroom prying his jaw open and examining his mouth.

He knew his teeth weren’t white enough and his hair was too short.

“You never said it was abandoned,” Logan said.

“I didn’t say anything,” Moses said. “It was four fucking years ago.”

The moon led the way. Moses walked through the grounds of the old hospital with his friends trailing behind him. They didn’t have a flashlight. Most of the windows were broken. Moses chucked a rock at a remaining pane. He didn’t get a chance to see his face in its reflection. A few scattered tags marked the territory of teenagers who’d made the pilgrimage before them. The Larkhill Institute for Mental Health had only been shut down for four years, but it could have been decades. A lack of funding and a receding population in the city had sent hospital finances spiraling down until basic maintenance became a problem. It was at this point the provincial government stepped in to transition many of the faltering patients into new facilities. Many were reassessed and allowed to return to their homes and families. Elvira Moon had only been at LIMH for a few weeks before she was released and welcomed back to work. Two weeks later she quit taking her medication, and after a month she was quietly released from the company. That was when she started buying up all the busted dogs.

“You really think she would come back? We could barely even find it,” Logan said. “Place is like the end of the Earth. Is she a homing pigeon? Caw!”

The boys had parked the car on the road out front before hopping over the chain-link fence. Six buildings leaned out over the grounds. I LOVE YOU TERESA was spray-painted in purple across the front door of the administrative offices. Someone had tagged FAGGOT underneath it in neon green. The letters looped over one another. Moses felt bad for Teresa, but he kept walking. Maybe the rain would wash it away. It was too cold to stop.

“Let’s just hold up, all right. Ruining my jacket on all the fuckin’ branches,” B. Rex said.

“Don’t be a little Jew, B. Rex,” Logan laughed. “You got the cash to buy a new one.”

Logan was the one who clung to it the hardest. Not just the haircut, but all of it — all the speeches and the heritage movements. That was the sneaky way to say it, according to B. Rex. A heritage movement — the phrase was a dog whistle. Only those attuned to its frequency would pick up the necessary meaning.

Moses provided the rhetoric for the boys, words he found in pamphlets and Ayn Rand newsletters left on the bedside tables of slumbering women in the Dynasty. He found missives from the businessmen who never tipped and brought plastic sheet covers for the motel beds. Moses gathered inspiration as he and his mother fled the ghosts of group homes and observation wards, stumbling from one motel to the next. Even at school, Moses found the words he needed scrawled into the cafeteria tables, sprayed inside bathroom stalls and dangling unsaid from the upturned corners of his teachers’ mouths. Moses didn’t need all those words, but he held onto them like usedup batteries. Drained of their power, but still filled with the necessary acid. He spat them out in large gobs.

“Fuck you, Logan,” B. Rex said. “Can’t even see out here. And I don’t like leavin’ the car out by the road like that. It’s like a big sign for the cops. Like, hey, look, somebody’s home!”

“I’m not the one who stomped the old lady’s face,” Logan said. “You know that, right? You remember that, Moses?”

They weren’t going to be like the KKK. It wasn’t about blacks or Catholics or fags. That was too easy. Back at the motel, Moses had stayed up late and listened to old men talk about weekly lynchings in the Southern states. He saw the photos of children posing beside the bodies of flayed black men. The kids’ grins revealed gap-toothed smiles. It made him sick, but he kept watching on the blurry satellite channels the motel got for free. He watched until he didn’t feel sick anymore, and then he watched it again.

“She was asking for it. She…she…”

“You fucking killed her, Moses,” Logan said. “Now we ain’t going to say anything…but like, you can’t say it didn’t happen. You took the bitch out. It was cold, man.”

“I didn’t do it like that,” Moses said. “I wasn’t the one who started whaling on her. She was an old lady, she didn’t even — she shouldn’t have been there.”

“Well, I just threw a few punches,” Logan said. “B. Rex can back me up; I just threw some punches, that’s all. I didn’t kill nobody.”

Moses wanted action. B. Rex lent them old books by angry white men from the States and neo-Nazi pamphlets his dad had hidden in the garage. They laughed at the overblown fears and words like sandnigger and camel jockey. Moses knew this wasn’t what he wanted, but it was a place to start. It was filled with all the fear they had; it spoke to those little angry bits they hadn’t organized into thoughts yet. Madison Grant, David Lane, and Frazier Glenn Miller Jr. made them laugh, but Moses could repeat some of their speeches word for word.

“You threw more than fucking punches,” Moses said. “She was on the goddamn floor!”

B. Rex didn’t say anything. He kept poking at the holes in his jacket.

“I didn’t finish it though. I didn’t go crazy just ’cause some old lady came into my house,” Logan said. “It wasn’t even your house anymore. You don’t live there now, Moses, you know?”

“Then just go home. Go home, Logan. Oh wait, you fucking can’t, can you? No one is fucking coming home. Get that through your fucking head. You got something better to do tonight, go ahead, but you’ll be walking. And it’s a long fucking walk.”

“So what, I’m supposed to live in a motel with you and your crazy-ass mother?”

It wasn’t Elvira’s fault either. She might have prayed to Bill Cosby and loved her bowling balls like children, but she never hurt him. She didn’t call him stupid or mock his high voice, or ask when his balls were going to drop. She still knew who he was sometimes. Elvira wasn’t the reason for any of this, and neither was Ted Moon. He was just an envelope full of weird promises and lipstick kisses on napkins and postcards. He was just dust and fucking hawks circling the city and waiting for Moses to die. Ted Moon could do whatever he liked. Moses didn’t write him back, and he wasn’t dying any time soon.

“She’s fine, she’s not even…she’s not that crazy. You haven’t even seen her yet.”