Ben Metcalf - Against the Country

Marijuana first entered this boy when he was thirteen years old, and for that I might in good conscience blame the schoolbus, or at any rate its back-road emanation. I might upbraid it as well for the fact that the boy began to attack girls a year or so after the plant’s first attack on him. A familiarity with alcohol followed the onset of the girls (or, from their perspective, the onset of the boy), and this too I lay at the beast’s accordion door. Were it not for the constant watchfulness required of him between home and school, on top of what vigil he was forced to maintain at either destination, he might have adjusted to his lot with less grief and more grace. He might have understood that in the country, and possibly even in town, alcohol was meant to precede relations between the sexes (and certainly relations between the same) and that anyone who did not know this had failed to approach either hobby soon enough. He might have understood that such a child was bound to be left out when better-prepared students snuck off to drink in the woods that surrounded the elementary school and just about everything else in that insipid county, or when older girls, the ones who had flunked, grabbed boys of his acquaintance and forced them to simulate (or, rumor had it, actually to perform) intercourse on the multihued yet drab bathroom floors. He might have understood sooner that a natural life, such as the naturalists promote and fail to comprehend, has little to do with a moral life, such as the moralists promote and fail to comprehend. He might have understood that ten or eleven, and not a hopelessly retarded thirteen, is in fact the proper age of introduction to dope.

I did not meet the hydroponic kind but rather what bored country children will cultivate in a clearing out back: small and pathetic plants, without sister or brother, that seemed well acclimated to the dew and the mist but surely found the sky’s unregulated heat lamp a hindrance to maturity, as did we all, and were anyway slaughtered well before they amounted to much, yanked from the earth to be dried and chopped up and fired and inhaled by higher beings whose boredom and desperation could not be undone by so spindly a remedy and could only (the boredom) be enhanced by what lethargy as the plant had to offer, or (the desperation) by what whiff of paranoia had crept up into the twigs and seeds from the awful clay below. Later encounters with industrial improvements to this weed would impress upon me the value of basic environmental controls and would secure in me the notion that I might not have troubled with the outdoor stuff at all.

I saw no natural prototype, though, beyond the berry or the nugget of gold, for the pills these children passed among themselves, and bragged about, and fought over, and built great reputational fortunes upon, and eventually gummed and swallowed, just as I could see no rustic model, beyond the leather saddlebag or the tin bucket, for the plastic containers in which these psychotropic treats were kept. Identified from without as aspirin or Tylenol, and from within as dosages lifted from a parent’s understandable attempt to overcome the realities of the simple life by an appeal to what complicated illusions could be manufactured in town, these pills, and their counterfeit drugstore coffins, rode to school in the pockets of Levi’s jeans and the folds of Bermuda-bag purses and the anklets of Frye boots or Chuck Taylor sneakers, the idea here being not subterfuge of the usual type but rather a coyly conspicuous display such as Mr. Veblen might have appreciated, had Mr. Veblen been forced to spend two to three hours out of every day trapped with his subjects on a country schoolbus.

Proud of their bounty, and beholden to the relief it promised from the tedium of the day, larger than I was but not correspondingly so stupid as to assume that their shoes and their purses and their jeans would be free from investigation by weary and pissed-off administrators once we got to school, these children were forever on me to act as their surrogate and their stooge. Although a refusal to smuggle their bottles risked further bodily insult, and although a pill or two gone missing would have been considered no more than fair payment for a morning’s servitude, I turned those offers down, and for that I am almost sorry. With little effort I might have cornered the pharmaceutical traffic in that sad little county, and branched out into more fetching goods, and arranged things with the idiot fat boys who were even then expanding into idiot cops, and made a place for myself in the hormonally overburdened high school, and married and impregnated (in either order) the captain of the cheerleaders, or else her best friend, and bought up one of the nice plantation houses out there, and joined a political party or both, and subsidized new uniforms for the football team every five or six years, and shaken hands at the homecoming games, and made increasing reference to the importance of Jesus Christ in my life, and paid for the upkeep on several pink churches and the biggest brown one, and so achieved a sufficient majesty, elected or appointed or stolen outright, as to allow my wrath to encompass the whole of that abominable county, the better to tax and incinerate it.

As it was, I chose a course that won me not useful employment but only continued humiliation, and gained me no reputation except that of a naïve and unhelpful coward, and did not recommend me either to future cops or to cheerleaders, and ensured that at the football games I would be in a marching-band uniform if present at all, and that later I would be unable to attend even one of these predictable routs with a reasonable assurance that hands would be offered mine in friendship and not swung at my nut in contempt. In the end I was robbed of what spiritual consolation I might have taken from the practice of politics and real estate, and afforded no better revenge on that county, or on the people who had so willingly surrendered themselves to it, than this frail and too bloodless composition.

Then again, my decision to shun those pills did delay a personal dependence on them by nearly a decade, and it would be evil of me to pretend otherwise, or to ignore how grateful I am for that brief window in which I saw more clearly than afterward and was not always a complete bitch to everyone around me. Said window was small, yes, and painted shut, and itself dependent on what class of pill could be got hold of each day, but that it presented at twenty-three or so, when I could thoroughly enjoy its blessings, and not at thirteen or fourteen, before my pallial palate had fully formed, was a stroke I cannot help but ascribe to the American schoolbus, and all that it threatened me with, and all that it led me to attempt.

How, then, to continue along the path I have thus far hacked out of memory’s bramble? How dare I apply today’s half-remembered hatred to an object that long ago, and without apparent motive, thought to exempt me from its own? By what right do I persist in my claim that this vehicle was, and remains, worthy of a violent and selfish attack?

Let us praise, then, or sing, or at any rate take a wider view of, the great American schoolbus: 450,000 of these behemoths gone out twice each weekday with no more than three or four children slaughtered on or by them in a good year. That is a remarkable record: three or four out of a possible score of 25 million. It is a testament to the restraint of schoolbus and driver alike, especially when we consider that most of these deaths are not fiery, as the rare if dramatic schoolbus explosion would have us believe, but are due either to a child’s being crushed by the wheels of the bus, or to the fact that many of these containers hurtle down the road, in the rural areas at least, at speeds of up to forty miles an hour (fifty on a decent downgrade) without the handicap of seatbelts.