The Fiction of Owen Thomas

The Lion Trees

A Novel

 

David: Excerpt A

“Who is the most important historical figure you can name?” 

They stare at me, bright and twinkling with attention.  Soaking me in.  Assessing me. Measuring me against the others.  And I am ready for them.

I sit on the edge of the desk and swing my leg, looking from face to face, letting them take stock before getting down to business.  The first-day energy is palpable.  Fresh, young, hungry minds.  I roll a stick of chalk from one palm to the other like dice. They blink at me.

“Don’t be shy, folks.  No judgment here.  Who do you think is the most important historical figure of all time?”

Swing, swing, swing.  Roll, roll, roll.  Blink, blink.

“Anybody.  Anybody at all.  Don’t all dive in at once.”

Blink, blink. 

“How about you . . . over in the back there . . . what’s your name?”  I look at my seating chart.  “Ashley?  What do you think, Ashley?”

She is startled.  I smile and nod.  I am reassuring.  I am encouraging.  I am everything a teacher must be. A guide.  A shepherd.  I turn to the virgin green board behind me with a quickness and uncoiling energy that makes them jump. Beneath “Mr. Johns” I dramatically click chalk to slate, poised to write.  A display of trusting servitude.  A humble scribe. 

I wait.  I wait.

“Madonna,” she says, finally, with a pop of gum for punctuation.

“M…” I write the first letter and turn. “Mother of Christ?” I ask, hopefully.  I am an optimistic person.

Ashley screws up her face, rapidly cocooning her forefinger in a spiraling strand of purple glop. “Huh?”

So maybe I’m not an optimistic person.  I think of myself as an optimistic person, which is really very different than actual optimism.  The irony is, my self-concept as an optimistic person may be the only true claim I have to actual optimism.  Every morning I come to consciousness with this belief – this understanding—of who I am today.  I stretch and I yawn and I swing my feet from the bed to the floor and so it begins.  I am an optimistic person. I feel optimistic.  People are basically good.  My life is a communion with well-intentioned souls.  Everything is, more or less, as it should be.  Yesterday did not happen. History is a fiction. Each day I am reborn. 

Reborn, apparently, into a life plagued by some cruel, recurring amnesia.  Because yesterday did, in fact, happen.  And so did the day before yesterday.  And the day before that.

“You mean . . . Madonna . . . the, um . . .”

“Yeah.  You know . . . Madonna.” Ashley says this with enough self-evident incredulity to level mountains.  Her neon-frosted eyes roll over and down to a girl in the next row – Brittany Kline, according to my seating chart—who shrugs back at Ashley uncomprehendingly.

“Okay.  Madonna.”  The name goes on the board.  I am unphased.  I am young and hip and rolling with it.  “Why Madonna?”  I roll up my sleeves and cross my arms. I am in the trenches.

On the front lines, making a difference.

“It’s not like I listen to her now or anything cuz she’s totally old and everything, but she’s like totally opened a lot of doors for women in this culture and around the world by empowering them to express their sexuality and taking a stand and everything like that.”

Bad start.  That’s all.  Luck of the draw.  This will get better.  I keep moving.

“Okay.  Okay.  Fair enough.” I arch the chalk through the air from left hand to right.  “Let’s get some more names on the board.  Give me someone important that goes way, way back. Let’s go waaaaaayyyyy back.  Pull out all the stops. Whaddaya got?  Mr. Onaya . . . go for it.  Who’s your favorite historical figure?”

“George Washington.”

“Yes!”  Bam! On the board!  I’m rolling.  “Who’s next? Ms. Kent. Lemme have it.”

“Abraham Lincoln.”

“Okay.  Good.  Good.  Next.  Alicia . . . who’s your favorite?” 

“George Washington.”

“We already have him.”

“Yeah, but he’s my favorite.”

“Okay, good.  But give me some other important historical figure I can put up here so we can talk about what makes them influential today.”

“But I like George Wa. . .”

“You don’t have to like the person, you just have to think they played an important role historically.”

“Abraham Lincoln.”

I underline the name that, like George Washington’s, is already on the board.  The p.s.i. between my molars is beginning to show in my temples.  “Try again.”

“Indiana Jones.”

My theory is that all optimists are, of necessity, “historically challenged.” Optimism is a kind of dementia caused by a weakness of memory.  A pleasant by-product of a serious mental deficiency.  Optimists are not to be admired or emulated.  They are to be pitied.  Wiley Coyote was an optimist.

“Okay.  Indiana Jones.  Not a real person, but what the hell.” 

Indy goes on the board in a hard, sharp fray of fractured chalk next to the name that does not refer to the Holy Mother of God.

“Who else?  Let’s just go down the seating chart. Brian?  Give me your best.”

“George Washington.”

“Dean?”

“Abraham Lincoln.”

“Kevin?”

“The Pope.”

“Which Pope?”

“I thought there was only one.”

My problem is that I have too good a grip on the past.  This is probably why I am a history teacher and certainly why I am an optimist of the ephemeral, masochistic variety.  This is why Tilly tells me I need to learn to “let go and move on.”  This is why I am possessed of my most generous spirit, and I am the most likely to forgive, and I am the most philosophically sanguine, when I am too groggy or inebriated to remember life as it existed the day before.  This is why every day is a “new day” only for a little while; like a rental sprayed with that “new car” fragrance certain to wear off in a couple of hours. The smell of cigarettes and body odor is in that thing to stay. But such is the stench of history.

“Why don’t I just put down Pope as a generic title rather than a particular person.  Kashawnda Davis, you’re next.”

“Jesus.”

“Francis?”

“Jesus.”

“Bill.”

“Yeah.  I’ll have to go with Jesus too, Mr. Johns.”

So, in a way, getting up in the morning believing that you are willing to start clean is optimism.  It is a tiny, highly-perched, crystalline sort of optimism.  Bright, precious and exceedingly delicate.  Please, no touching the optimism! Back away from the optimism! I wake up thinking my optimism is the real deal. I feel good about the world and about me in it.  Maybe for about an hour and a half or so. While I take a shower and drink my coffee and feed my fish and drive to work. 

Then I start coming into contact with other humans.  That is when everything goes, inevitably, straight to shit. 

“Dirk?”

“Michael Jordan.”

In the end, optimism is simply faith.  Not faith in God so much as faith in the living. And faith – in the living or in God—requires more patience and suspended disbelief than my battered psyche can possibly endure. 

“Sean.”

“Burt Reynolds.”

“Shannon?”

“Gumby.”

It is 10:37 in the morning on the first day of school.  They are young and perky and brimming with the future of our species.  One by one, I want to rip their hearts out of their chests. 
Did I say crystalline?  My optimism is not crystalline.  My optimism is origami.  And reality, my reality anyway, is a monsoon.

“Brittany?  Yes, you.”

“Mozart.”

“Excuse me?”

“Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.”

Hmm.  I turn and write the name and then turn back. She is smiling.  Attentive.  Beaming at me. Her friend Ashley – of the Madonna Historical Society—is amused, twirling her gum. But this one —Brittany was it? – There is something different here.  There is a connection between teacher and student that I have not felt anywhere else in the room.  She is tall for her age.  A breadth of shoulder is developing.  She stands out from her peers in all directions.  In the face there is just a hint of the coming woman.  And yet, she is all girl.  There is a violin case beneath her desk.

“Mozart. Interesting.  Why Mozart?”

“Because he was a genius.”

“Okay.  So?  Being a genius automatically gets you on the list of important historical figures?”

“No.  It’s not what you’ve got, Mr. Johns.  It’s how you use it.”  The class picks up on her, presumably, unintended innuendo. She does not react or break her gaze.  I silence the sniggering with a hand.

“And how did Mozart use his genius, Brittany?”

“To make the world beautiful in a way no one ever had before.”

She is honest and clean and eager.  She smiles a purity of potential that is the reason I get up in the morning and come to this place. She makes up for all of them.  My God, how hope does spring eternal.

David: Excerpt B

For eight o’clock on a Monday night, Billy Rocks is crawling with people.  I am surprised at this, and then surprised at being surprised.  Billy Rocks is always crawling. I suppose that what really surprises me is not that everyone is here – the parking lot is always full—, but that this is where everyone wants to be.  Everyone who is here is actually here on purpose.  It would make more sense if these people had been yanked off the streets and plucked out of their homes and sucked out of the shopping malls and movie theaters by some malevolent force – al Quaida or the Scientologists—and then imprisoned inside Billy Rocks as hostages.  That would be just a little easier to swallow than the idea that people – human beings—come here of their own volition; that Billy Rocks beat out every other place that there is to be.

I pay the cover and shoulder my way through an oily, smoke-laced clot of humanity just inside the front door. It’s been at least a year since I’ve been to Billy Rocks and I feel as though I have never left.  This is the same depressing mob I had to shoulder my way through when I last left.

The air is acrid and screaming with Electric Mayhem, the aptly named house band.  This is the same band that has always played a regular gig at Billy Rocks, although Electric Mayhem has been its name for only about five years.  The band wanted a clean break from a bad image and so it changed its name.  The bad image had been cultivated by its bass-playing founder who stupidly negotiated a crank sale with an undercover police officer and then accidentally shot off his own hand in the ensuing melee.  So much for playing the bass.  Back in those heady days the boys of Electric Mayhem went by the name Sonic Hurl.  I am an undiscerning neophyte when it comes to amplified retching, but the music – I say this in the loosest sense of that word—sounds about the same to me.

The short hallway from the entrance empties into a large circular room that is writhing and pulsing with people, all of them on the make for someone or something.  Billy Rocks has it all: gay and straight, glam, punk, head-bangers, leather and flesh, heels and boots, tattoos and ties.  Well, not really a lot of ties, but tattoos everywhere.  Small ones, big ones, line drawings, multi-color, glow-in-the dark, ankles, shoulders, torsos, butterflies, hearts, skulls, flags.  The next Bill Gates will be the person who patents a quick and painless tattoo removal technology for all of the soon-to-be middle age assholes who now count on being young, drunk and attractive forever. 

I thread my way between three women shouting and laughing at each other over their drinks.  They choke off their conversation long enough to let me through but re-erupt in laughter once I have passed.  One of the women has eyebrows over-sewn with metal wire.  The other has a ring through her lip.

Tattoos and body metal.  Everywhere.

We are well on our way to Shrapnel Nation.  Six out of every ten people I see has something obnoxious rammed through some part of the face.  The third woman in the group looks clean and attractive, but the scary part is that piercing has become so common—not yet mainstream but so solidly ensconced in the suburbs of mainstream—that I can no longer identify the women who have clitoral pierces simply by looking at them.  It used to be easy, like spotting lesbians or Republicans.  Social acceptance, however, leads headlong into seamless integration and then deviance, old deviance, simply melts away.  The men who have chosen to invest in scrotum bars are still a snap to pick out of a crowd, but I suspect that is changing too. 

To make matters worse, considerably worse, I feel shallow and judgmental for begrudging the acceptance of these skin-staining, body-piercing self-mutilators.  I am a product of the tyranny of politically correct sensibilities – drowning in the backwash of the civil rights movement and the sexual revolution.  Judge not anyone or anything, lest ye be branded a bigoted, small-minded asshole who is probably also a racist. My condemnatory faculties have been hobbled by my sense of self-loathing for having such an inhibited and conventional perspective that I cannot see the value or beauty in punching extra holes in my face and genitalia so that I might thread them with iron ornamentation.  Who the Hell am I to judge?  My choices are the product of my upbringing, which is a product of my parents’ socio-economic and cultural strata which they, in turn, inherited from their landed Caucasian forbearers and which is not something I should be arrogantly waving under the nose rings and nipple propellers of the common-sensically challenged. 

I so want to be the judgmental prick I fear I really am.

David: Excerpt C

“Oh, come on you big baby.  Here, I’ll eat it.”

I feed her the broken shell in bits and crumbs, each bite requiring that the flesh of her lips encase the tips of my fingers.  At the last of it she is sucking gently and using her tongue to pry them open.  It is a game, but a game rapidly losing its humor.  I can feel that rising sense of urgency and the seriousness I associate with high-stakes endeavors and things that I want just a little too much to be either healthy or realistic. She smells like soy sauce and spicy oil and pikake and her breath is on my face like a wet cloud.  She kisses me and my hands find her clumsily, our torsos cruelly twisted to face each other on my sagging couch, our legs splayed beneath an array Pink Pagoda boxes scattered across the long, low antique table my mother could no longer stand in her living room. 

The moment is so charged and so beyond what I had expected out of this day that I do not close my eyes, which wander around the room behind her as if lost or confused; seeing but not seeing.  It is a kind of shock, I think.  An unwillingness to believe in what might still somehow be open to interpretation.  Mae rolls my lower lip between her teeth and I fumble vainly at her buttons.

“I have missed you a little, you know,” she says to me in a low groan.

Whatever I am about to say—surely something banal and pretentiously nonplussed like Just a little, huh? or something about absence making hearts fonder – whatever it was, never makes it out.  The playful lip nibbling mushrooms into a full out mashing of flesh that prevents intelligible speech.

The rest of my body responds as expected, but my eyes remain open, meandering like insomniacs as the world dreams.  I am staring across the silken, curtained plain of Mae’s hair at the dark glass eye of the television.  The eye stares back at the rapidly developing situation on my couch and reaches untold conclusions about what it sees.  Mae is a distant, undulating whitish blur in its pupil.  It asks, silently, judgmentally, if this moment is really all I had hoped it would be; if my life is really so empty as to be utterly transformed by this … this … whatever this was, a quickie? a reconciliation? nostalgia? sympathy? wine?  The television has all the answers, but it ain’t talkin’.     

Above the television is the framed poster of Nelson Mandela.  It consists of two large photos, one stacked atop the other.  In the top photo he is wearing a white shirt buttoned to the neck, looking contemplatively out the bars of a jail cell across an over-exposed landscape.  In the bottom photo he is older, standing behind a dirty green jeep, laughing uproariously as he holds a young white girl in his arms, pointing at a pride of lions lounging lazily in the shade of a distant acacia.  Separating the two photos are Mandela’s words: There is no easy walk to freedom, anywhere.

The poster had been left in the closet by the guy from whom I – and by I, I mean, my father—purchased the condo.  Mae had retrieved it one day, insisting in a pique of disgust that it replace my Bob Marley poster, which had been on the wall when she moved in and which she strangely hated.  I have since come to believe that her distaste was due more to her antipathy for reggae in general than the psychedelic tie-dye motif of the poster.  It is also possible that she associates Bob Marley with marijuana and with all of the cultural and political identity that, along with the weed itself, she takes a certain pride in rejecting. 

Not that I have ever scored enough pot as an adult to really present her with much of an opportunity.  At Tulane, long before Mae, we all but packed our pillows with the stuff, smoking brazenly at Friday night toke parties (The tokes, we called them, as in See ‘ya at the tokes?  You know it dude!  The tokes!); our chance at a rite of passage to thumb our noses at convention and to rebel against The Man; except that The Man at the time was William Jefferson Clinton and true rebellion would have meant low-carb health food and faith based monogamy; which is asking just a little too much of college kids looking for a way to dress up a cheap loss of coherence. We marveled at how easy it must have been to take Nancy Reagan for granted until she was no longer around to give simple reefer-madness some real political gravitas. 

Immediately out of college, my fond relationship with cannibis hit the skids.  I knew how to smoke it, but I never really knew how to find it – the good stuff, or, for that matter, how to pay for it.  On the rare occasions that I have had any to offer, I have tried mightily to expand Mae’s horizons.  But, invariably, her perfect conservative little nose wrinkles and her head shakes violently in opposition; as though I have asked whether she would consider growing out her pit-hair, or conserving wetlands, or trying a three-way with Noam Chomsky and Ted Kennedy. 

We have learned from painful experience not to even discuss the issue of medical marijuana.  In the last round on that subject, Mae found something unfairly accusatory and enraging about my tone, and about my totally irrelevant  “stoned-is-stoned” observations concerning her weekly craving for tumblers of neon-colored grain alcohol.  So I have learned to steer clear.  In any case, there was never really any doubt about the Marley poster coming off the wall.

When Mae left, I frequently considered replacing Mandela with Marley, reestablishing dominion over my own home.  But I could never take the Mandela poster down.  On good days, there is something so inspiring – so … optimistic—about the photographic juxtaposition, about the man confined and the man unbroken, that I cannot bring myself to put him in the closet.  On bad days, days when the little cannibals have devoured me to a nub and I seriously question my ability to teach anybody anything, there is something irresistibly dark and satisfying – something comically vengeful—at the idea that Nelson Mandela is about to swing this blonde kid by the ankles into a heap of bored and hungry lions.  Nelson laughs.  I laugh.  The poster stays.