Loganthinks

Peterson Insurance gives us a handicap of 185 pins. This is pretty much equivalent to giving our team an extra man for the night - one who is a full 50 pins better than our next highest bowler. This ghost man is represented by a little number at the bottom of the score screen above the lanes; a number which initially seems indomitable, but which flounders as the game goes on and the gap between our score and that of our opponents narrows. A good frame of reference for how well we’re doing is whether we’re still in the lead by the 8^th frame. If our opponents have caught us before then, it’s over. Otherwise it’s a race to the finish, fueled by beer and a quiet, persistent need for us to assert ourselves in the strange context of a weeknight men’s league - a world populated by middle-aged chainsmokers and leather-skinned retirees in which we represent the distant bottom slot of a 10-team food chain.

I smoke socially because of the league. The smell sticks on our skin and our clothes, down to the underwear, so that the smoke comes with us to other parts of our lives outside of this little bunker hidden out in the fields on the south side of the airport. Cigarettes are shared; the pack stays on the table with the beers and the boots and the wet winter jackets. Sometimes I catch myself smelling the crook of the joints between my middle and forefingers in class.

Dodson is the head of the Peterson Insurance team. A morose, stoop-shouldered guy, maybe in his 50’s with a salt-and-pepper moustache and eyes without whites, he bowls with a plastic device strapped to his wrist. He was the league secretary last year, which put him in charge of the day-to-day operations: scorekeeping and records, matchups and scheduling, money collection and rules disputes. A teammate of mine calls him ‘the mumbler’. He has a kind of tiredness that pulls at the space around him like gravity. It’s tiring to be near him. He sags when he stands, and I often get the impression that our presence in this league of men twice our age is a part of that weight, that we are pulling him down even as he hands me our score sheets for the week with eyes downcast and voice hidden somewhere in the wiry forest of his moustache, each of us pulling the other way, hoping to get out of the immediate sphere of each others’ company.

Dodson is a fucking prick, says Jeffe. Jeffe is a cabdriver who is round and stocky and who eats his dinner from the counter that sells jalapeño poppers and mini-corn dogs over by the bar. The lady who runs the counter brings her kids, and they spin on the stools while Jeffe eats. Jeffe’s average is one of the lowest in the league, but his roll can be measured at pitcher’s speeds. His ball lands halfway down the lanes with a hollow boom and scatters the pins like a bomb going off. His backswing makes me think the ball is going to come out at the wrong moment, flying back and lost somewhere in the atmosphere of smoke before splitting a hole into the vinyl-coated boards behind us. Like us, Jeffe drinks when he bowls.

The problem with Peterson Insurance, Jeffe says, is that they act like they don’t give a fuck.

Down the lanes, Lester picks up a split and his team cheers. Lester nods his wrinkled head and gives a stiff high five, moving with soft steps in the slow-motion speed of septuagenarian time.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen Dodson smile when he hits his rolls, Jeffe says. He rolled six strikes in a row a few weeks back and hung his head each time like he was pissed off about it.

He does that with us too, I say, but he hates our team. He didn’t count a few of our make-up games last Christmas, and he still hasn’t counted the last four wins we had against the Testrake Brothers.

In a corner by the vending machines I see Dodson sitting alone at a table, his face a mask as he pulls at the straps of his wrist device and watches the lanes.

Fucking prick, Jeffe says.

We are squeezed each Thursday night into the bar lanes, between the regular lanes on the left and the mini-golf course on the right. League starts at 9, and in the distance, on the regular lanes, open bowling begins for families with screaming kids, jittery high schoolers drinking Wild Cherry Pepsi, and 20-something toughguys who react with hyperbolic acrobatics each time their girlfriends beat them. Where the regular lanes stop there is an invisible line striped into the musty red carpet. While I drink and wait for my turn to roll, I watch the balding backs of heads in our section turn in slow and un-self conscious movements with the swaying hips of young girls as they stand up and sit down in the distance. I have no illusions about which side of the line we are on.

Returning with beer, I see Kevin Hotz through the glass doors leading out from the bar and counter to the lanes, and he is headed my way. Hotz is the heaviest man in the league, cartoonishly wide and dressed in stretch pants and a gray shirt with a cow on it that says Solon Beef Days. He sports a close-cropped haircut that curls around his ears, and his face is like a child’s face inset on the larger head of an adult, with shiny tight eyes, a tiny nose, and an elfish semi-smile that seems permanently stuck in the same position. Hotz bowls for Peterson Insurance, and besides that I know nothing about him. Holding a pitcher in one hand, I maneuver to keep the glass door open, and say how’s it going, Kevin as he passes by. Eyes fixed ahead, as if the door were automatic and had opened simply because it had sensed he wanted it to, Hotz saunters by me in silence, the tips of my shoes touching the frame of the door and my heels pressed hard against the wooden wall.

We tried to get our team sponsored once by a local falafel place. The guy who runs the restaurant is tall, and he stood in an apron stained with hummus and purple cabbage, hand-on-hips and head cocked to one side as we pitched the idea. Finally, he agreed to let us have free t-shirts, but we’d have to cover the cost of adding our logos ourselves. We drew out some ideas, but the cost was steep. We never agreed anyway. Some of us wanted names on the shirts. Some were fine without any lettering at all. One of our teammates wanted his shirt to say we clap for spares.

More cheers from down by Lester’s team. They’re playing the Banana Splits, and everyone is smiling. The Splits are baby-faced undergrads with trendy haircuts, and we look at them like a cancer that is ruining the league. Like us in previous years, they enjoy the role of youngest team in the league. It doesn’t help that they are all good bowlers, and have taken every match we’ve had against them.

Lester’s white head bobs as he talks. Another guy who is even older than Lester has just bowled, keeping his arm outstretched and his right leg kicked out to one side as he waits for the ball to make it to the pins. When it hits, he drops his pose and pumps his fist with a tiny motion. A kid from the Splits high fives him on his way past, and I light a cigarette, feeling suddenly sad.

Before our last game, I sit and chat with a friend on Team From Outer Space. Team From Outer Space is rolling against a makeshift team of regulars that are sponsored by a transmission repair shop on highway 6. Back at the tables, the transmission repair team sits in a semicircle around a barrier of beer pitchers. They draw from a deck of pornographic playing cards, the deck greasy and bent with little rips and tears that sometimes censor a breast or an ass or an elbow from view.

Playing with them, set off a little to the left so that he’s almost sitting at a different table, is a guy whose name I’ve forgotten but who is famous for having lost his temper during a match last year against us. We’d managed to bowl well that night, and thanks to the beauty of the handicap league, this meant that despite their higher scores, the transmission team would all have had to bowl well above their averages to beat us. Instead, this guy missed a few of his rolls and then got frustrated and tried to quit with one game to go. When his teammates urged him to bowl again, he walked up to us, pulled his bowling ball out of his bag, and threw it as hard as he could against the floorboards at our feet. The ball made a cracking sound and stayed where it landed. Then he stood a few inches away from my face, looked directly at my eyes, and nobody said anything for a while.

I see that guy sometimes in the bar, my friend says, but he’s usually alone playing the Megatouch machine. He asked us if we needed a sub a few months ago too. I think they kicked him off their team.

My friend laughs and gets up to bowl. Standing up, I glance back at the guy who is now sitting with his chair turned around, piecing through some dirty cards while hunched over the seat back, looking through the cards in front of him towards his team’s table, his eyes squinted like he is peering across a shimmering distance.

Dodson is up to roll but I am not watching him. My teammates are slouched around me on the benches down by the lanes, each with one eye on the scoreboard above us and the other on Dodson. We are in the 3^rd and final game. We have been blown out twice, and a familiar sense of pessimism has set in, pulling us each into our personal dark silences.

Despite the grim atmosphere, we are holding on to a tenuous lead in the last frame of the night. Many of the teams around us are packing up, and the crowds in the open bowl section have thinned out. Behind us at the tables, the waitress is collecting glasses and telling a story and someone keeps shouting that’s hilarious. I hear the sound of Dodson’s first roll, but I am looking back over my shoulder, starting at Peterson Insurance as they watch the game wind down with disinterested expressions and grind their final cigarettes into ash.

A teammate leans over to me and follows my gaze. If we win this I am going to dance all around their fucking table, he says.

Why, I say, not fully listening.

Because we’re fucking due, that’s why, he says. There’s something beyond the expletive and the late-night slur in his words, a kind of hiss.

I hate losing to them as much as you do, I say.

My teammate shakes his head. He looks back at the scoreboard.

Look at them, he says. They act like this is practice. Like they are that much better than we are. Like it’s a chore to waste their valuable goddamn time bowling against us.

I almost say they are that much better, but Dodson picks up a strike and around me I hear a soft exhalation of breath like a drum beat. I turn back to the table, and I catch a glimpse of Hotz coming out of the bathroom.

He is walking in a shuffle, his stubby legs moving slowly and his arms lifted a few inches off his sides, as if for balance. Around him, the last stragglers from the open lanes are headed for the door; a big guy with his arm around a girl and a middle aged couple wearing jean jackets. Hotz walks without seeing them, his head down, body turning slightly with each step, almost like a waddle, and I feel a strange sensation as I see this balloon of a man make his way back to our side of the lanes. I wonder where he lives. I wonder who he goes home to, if someone cooks his favorite meals for him when he gets there. I wonder what his voice sounds like. I wonder if he went to Solon Beef Days, and if he wears the shirt as part of some connection to a different life outside the league and the lanes and the iron faced moustaches of Peterson Insurance.

Dodson hits his last strike, sealing our fate.

Fuck that asshole, says my teammate.

I am watching Dodson now too, as he raises his hand with the plastic casing strapped to the wrist and pokes his glasses back to the rim of his nose. His eyes are on the floor as he walks, and when he steps down from the hardwood lanes to the carpet, his body sags like an old spring. He doesn’t look at us as he passes with heavy steps, and suddenly I find myself thinking, why would he? What does he possibly owe us, a team of babies who walk around his lanes like it’s their secret clubhouse, a team that gets too drunk to bowl and who is maybe a month’s worth of wins behind 9^th place? I wouldn’t look at us either. Perhaps this is the one night of the week he gets to relax in a place where he can smoke and be quiet and not have to talk to anybody. Maybe this respite is the one thing he can enjoy being good at, quietly and on his own time. Maybe that gravity that sucks at the space around him isn’t about us at all; he could have bedridden wife, an invalid mother, a child with cancer. Where does he go after league, and who does he go home to?

Around me my teammates are angrily packing up their gear, and I feel a hollow kind of warmth as I watch Dodson trudge the last few feet to the table. You guys can have it, I think, as Dodson and Hotz pass by each other, two slumped shapes in the smoke. And right then, they each coolly turn and slap hands, that permanent smile on Hotz’s face twitching just a little.

From Fox News:

Many leaks of course come from people who disagree with the policies of whatever administration happens to be in office. I believe there was a time, back when men were men and smoking outdoors wasn’t prohibited, when if you had a sensitive job that required clearances and you were privy to matters of National Security, you shut your gob regardless of whether you agreed with the policies or not.

It was called, lemme’ think, I believe it was called something like "I promised when I took this job to always protect classified information that I become privy to and that’s why I’m signing these papers saying that I solemnly swear to not disclose secrets."

I believe that was the title at the top of the form.

Now, it seems that people don’t give a crap. They disagree with something and their conscience cries out "… leak a secret document… it’ll make you feel better and you can live with yourself."

Just once, I’d like their conscience to yell out "… hey moron, remember that document you signed saying you wouldn’t disclose classified information? Remember that? Huh? This is your conscience talking… quit your whinging and get back to work."

From Fox News:

The latest 'gangsta' fashion craze on the streets of urban America has created quite a stir in cities such as Philadelphia, Baltimore and New York.

The hot-selling "no snitching" T-shirts carry warnings such as "don't talk to police" and "death before dishonor.”

In street slang, snitching is informing on others — being a tattletale, fink, rat, squealer or stoolie — and has always had negative connotations among mobsters and thieves, with severe punishment possible.

Police and law-abiding citizens, including crime victims and their families, are understandably upset over the shirts.

If witnesses and informants don't speak up, criminals don't get caught and more people could be robbed, hurt or killed.

A few months ago, I went home for Christmas. Dad’s shoulder was still too weak to paddle in a canoe, so we decided to take the flatboat down to the marshes to fish. The boat sits in the alley next to our house on a trailer under a blanket of foliage. A Chinese Elm leans crookedly across the alley on that side of the house, dropping its scaly bark in the wind like a leper while acorns from the neighbors’ oak rattle in the boat’s metal hull. We took an hour to clean out the boat, only to find that the motor was busted. Because Dad lost the key to the lock that secures the motor the stern, the boat spent a weekend at the shop while we watched the skies with hopes that good weather might come again soon.

Two days before I was scheduled to leave, Dad ignored the dubious forecast and stated that ‘it’s now or never’. We got up at 4 the next morning, rigged the boat to the car and headed out on the 39 eastwards as the sky brightened slowly into a cold blue glow. Storm clouds chased us out of town, through the 9^th ward and past Jackson Barracks, through Arabi and towards the shattered fishing towns and suburban outposts that dotted the highway. With the car heater on in the dark, I slept fitfully, opening my eyes to catch my father’s face painted in the thin green light of the dashboard. His lips were moving silently, and I went back to sleep imagining that he was telling himself a story.

The motor died twice on the way out from the launch. My dad sat at the bow by the fishing gear, his face serene as I fidgeted with the choke and throttle, cursing. I couldn’t see the tiny jet of water that normally spouts from a hole in the back of the motor when it’s running, which meant water wasn’t cycling through the engine. After talking about our options, we decided to cross the main channel and fish the inlets on the far side while staying in view of passing boats in case the motor quit completely. I was uncomfortable with the possibility of being stranded, which had happened before. This part of the world is bleak, just grass and water, with the skeletal pilings of old docks and fishing camps dotting the landscape like graves. We idled into a little bay where the surface of the water was calm, sheltered from the wind by the tall marsh grasses that grew along the bank. Clouds of bugs drifted in this eddy, but we dropped our lines and cinched our hoods around our faces, watching the water.

Want an orange Dad asked me, and I shook my head. He set his fishing rod down against the rim of the boat and leaned back against the lifejackets, peeling the orange with a few quick motions. His fingers moved like a piano player’s, deft and nonchalant. The sky stayed bright gray above us, darkening out towards the gulf in menacing swells along the horizon. The wind tore across the water, and my dad closed his eyes. It’s absolutely beautiful out here he said, perhaps to himself.

The only thing we caught that day out in the marsh was our boat. After floating for hours at the mouths of inlets, we decided to pull the boat onto the bank and wander on foot in the hopes of finding better spots. The shore itself was just tall, stiff grass, strong with a paper shell that it shed like a snake as it jabbed our legs and cracked beneath our feet. The shore was also mud. It was a rich, black soil that sucked at our shoes and sometimes yielded to our weight so that we’d sink suddenly up to the knees, laughing. Dad went his way and I fished near the boat, eating a sandwich and unconsciously beginning to manifest the signs of fisherman’s defeat by sitting down and holding the fishing rod between my knees. Clouds tumbled overhead.

After a while, I heard a motor rumble by in the distance, and stood up to see a small trawler chugging up the canal towards the launch. I turned my attention back to my bobber in the water, which was doing nothing, until I heard a soft rushing noise as the wake kicked up along the shore, curling along the grass to meet me. At this point, the surge of water lifted the boat up off the grass, and in one moment it was floating out into the channel. My dad, who was making his way back through the grass, shouted YOU BETTER GET THAT FUCKER and without thinking I plunged in after the boat. The muck at the shoreline held on to my legs, and for a moment I went completely underwater, caught in the bottom and flailing to get myself free. I managed, and swam after the boat, which was spinning in the wind and headed for open water. Between the noise of the wind and water in my ears, I could hear Dad shouting from the shore, but I wasn’t able to climb into the boat. Eventually, after a lot of cursing, I pulled it in.

With the boat retrieved, my dad set about tearing up stalks of grass with a knife and carving out a space for me to sit down. I stripped out of my wet gear and hovered next to him in the wind as he tore up newspaper and started a small fire. The grass was wet, producing a thick white smoke that stung my eyes but kept the bugs away, and I stood in my underwear over the fire, dripping while dad laughed and joked and congratulated me on my swim.

The belly and chest of an apple frozen in my front yard. Snow is quilted on the lawns, piled against the windows in rolls. It’s the kind of cold that freezes the snot in your nose. It burns the skin, creeps through the walls. It cuts through my coat, frosting the inside of the windows on the bus ride home.

Logan has moved in, a new dog’s life in a new arrangement of rooms, now without the view from the porch and the squirrels on the telephone wires. She waits for dinner plates. She sleeps near the bed, huffing. She won’t drink the water unless it’s filtered from the tap. She tastes Iowa.

The card in front of me is titled “green”. Beneath these letters, there is a drawing of a man with glasses hunched in front of a computer. He is skinny, with long hands and big feet, and next to him there is a printer producing a ribbon of paper that runs onto the floor. The man looks perplexed. Moving clockwise around the card, there are also pictures of a microscope, a featureless woman reading in a library, a chessboard with an impossible arrangement of pieces, a silhouette of Sherlock Holmes, a silhouette of Rodin’s The Thinker, and a large numerical display of the cubed root of 125. At the center of all these images is a green triangle, with the question WHY? inset in cartoon bubble letters.

It is Saturday morning. The girls sitting in front of me smell like shampoo, and the kid sitting to my left chews on his lip and jiggles the table with his leg. The clock on the wall is the kind that ticks loud enough to be heard when everybody stops talking. The room echoes with the soft shuffling of plastic cards, the squeak of pens, and heavy, nasal sighs of consternation. A very large man with back problems who sits behind me keeps getting out of his chair and limping around the open area by the doors. Our group leaders eye him from the front of the room, but they don’t object. Out of the corner of my eye I see him pause at the window, the dark skin of his cheeks lit up with the cloudcover light from the parking lot. I scribble some numbers on my Real Colors scoring sheet, and sit back, my eyes also on the parking lot and the dull white world outside.

During a smoke break, I get to sit on a bench and listen to the rest of the group discuss the color card exercise. These breaks are the only times that we are permitted to leave the building, and I come out despite the chill to get the smell of carpet cleaner and stale air out of my lungs. The younger kids kick pebbles and smoke quickly, their arms hanging loose and their ruddy faces smiling as they curse and spit into the hedgerow. The older smokers sit along the wall, watching the kids and inhaling practiced, measured breaths. One of our group leaders comes out to smoke, and the conversation quickly turns back to the color cards.

“What if none of the colors match up with who we think we are?” asks a kid who could easily be the youngest of the group. He has soft, puffy features, and wears a bright blue hoodie pulled tightly around his face. I’ve forgotten his name, but his was the only drug related arrest out of all of us. On our first night, after most of the group shared their arrest stories, this kid stood up, greeted the class, and told everyone that he’d taken a few hits of acid, stolen some liquor from a minimart, hit a car on his way out of the parking lot and eventually crashed his parent’s Buick into a fence before the cops finally caught him. His story was received with reverence by the rest of the group; groans and sharp draws of breath. He’d absorbed this reaction with a look that wavered between embarrassment and pride.

“You aren’t supposed to know which card is exactly you,” says the group leader, lighting an unfiltered cigarette, “you’re just supposed to use the pictures to guess which color you think you are.”

“I guess that makes me orange,” says a girl huddled in the crowd. A few others laugh and agree. The orange card has a picture of a sports car on it, along with a jet fighter, an astronaut, a dance party, and the words GO FOR IT typed in an exaggerated font. An older guy who is sitting by the bushes smiles when she smiles, watching her smoke.

“Well,” says the group leader, “you’ll get a chance to see how well you know yourself later on. In the next step you take a quiz, and when you add your scores up with how you’ve ranked your color cards, you might be surprised.”

The girl smiles at him and says nothing, and a few people talk quietly about the football games that they are missing. The group leader finishes his cigarette and stretches. He is the quieter of the two leaders, both of whom are ex-marines, and his wrinkled skin is leather brown and splotchy like old parchment. He opens the door, and one by one we step back into the hotel, past the cop in the hall and back into the stale, silent conference room.

My roommate for the weekend is a former ultimate fighter. We were paired up Friday night, guys with guys, girls with girls, and assigned the rooms in which we are locked after 10pm. After we were all given our roommates and room keys, he came over to where I was sitting and said he was glad he didn’t get stuck with any of the weirdos. His name is Greg.

Greg has been concussed eleven times, ten of which came while fighting. His record was 14-2, and he got out of the sport after his second and final loss. He said he’d blacked out for days at a time after that fight. He also said that quitting gave him the motivation he needed to stop taking steroids, which he’d been consuming for years during his training. He isn’t tall as much as he is broad, with shoulders that roll in a thick, even curve from his neck to his arms. He has a bent nose, thinning hair, and blue eyes inset on a round, soft face. He smiles whenever he talks. After fighting, he went back to community college and studied for an Associates’ degree in business management. He now owns a coffee shop in Solon with his girlfriend, and despite a shaky first year, his business is going well. Greg is 24 years old.

After the smoke break we watch a video, hosted by a psychologist with a gray streak seemingly painted into his hair. His voice has the pulsing, earnest tone of my mother when she is pretending to be patient with my father. The psychologist sounds almost happy when he over-annunciates phrases like “tolerance-level”, “state-dependent learning”, and “likelihood of fatality”.

Our host guides us through an equation that reads: “Brain/Body/Biology + Choices = Outcome.” This equation is apparently a centerpiece of the course, because we come back to it each time our group leaders stop talking and turn on the video. The other centerpiece is a graphic showing an androgynous human figure with lines intersecting the body at the knees, waist, and chest. The lines demarcate what our host describes as “phases of addiction”, numbering 1 to 4 from bottom to top. We are constantly reminded of the symptoms of these phases and of their relationship to the progression of Alcoholism. Our androgynous figure moves from total abstinence to trying a drink at parties to social dependence to psychological dependence to something dark and awful that takes over its entire biology. My eyes are often fixated on the shaded, head-level “phase 4”, known as the “trigger level” and the point of no return. On a quiz we’d taken earlier, a question asked: “Have you ever had a feeling of guilt or remorse after drinking or drug use?” Later I’d learned that answering yes to this question put me at “Phase 3” of addiction. I keep looking at that figure as it stands limply behind the dividing lines and the clinical lettering. I draw an ugly face on it, and watch it as it watches me from the paper. Next to me a guy is drawing pictures of machine guns in the white spaces of his manual.

Our meals are catered by a local Hy-Vee, and they are good. Greg sits next to me during our lunch break and eats his spaghetti, salad, garlic bread and cheesecake before I can take more than a few bites. While he goes for more, I eat and watch the people clustered around the tables in little groups, chewing and talking, some laughing and spitting crumbs and bits of marinara sauce. The atmosphere is relaxed, the room is so warm that the windows have begun to fog, and the vacant, guarded looks on people’s faces from the previous night have been replaced by weary smiles and boredom. Some of the girls are wearing sweatsuits and pajama pants, and most do not have makeup on. Greg returns with his plate and a Styrofoam cup.

“The spaghetti is awesome,” he says, “but I can’t believe this shit passes for coffee.”

When we arrived at the hotel for this program we came in ones and twos, all strangers and each of us easy to spot because of the red registration papers in our hands, or because of our careful body language. I had been early, and I sat in an armchair next to a gas fireplace and watched as members of our group came through the door and gingerly approached the front desk, whispering to the check-in lady and glancing around the lobby. Two policeman stood in a corner with their hands on their hips, eyeing us with bored expressions. A girl whose name I have forgotten sat near me and joked nervously about what we might expect from the coming weekend. Her smile was weak and her eyes were large, and I didn’t have much to say to make her feel better. I took out my packet of papers and studied the sheet titled OWI Lockdown Program Guidelines.

Cash, credit cards, and personal checks are not accepted; please pre-pay with a certified check or money order. You should have no expectation of privacy during the weekend; we can at any time search your room or re-administer a breathalyzer test. Smoking in the rooms is not allowed. You will not be allowed any visitors during the weekend. You will not be allowed any trips to your room during the day. You will be expected to be in the seminar room unless otherwise instructed. There will not be much free time. If you have any special diets or needs, we need to know about them prior to your arrival. Cellphones and Computers will be confiscated until the end of the weekend. Remember, for many participants this weekend also counts as two days of jail time. If you feel we are being too restrictive, we invite you to try the alternative.

Saturday night we finish our Real Colors exercises, and total up our scores. The main factor in our scores is a quiz in which we rank our likely responses to questions and scenarios. All the questions have four answers, and our most likely answer gets four points, the next likely gets three, and so on. The quality or strength I can be counted on to display is: a) courage b) intelligence c) understanding d) responsibility.

I was more than a little bit surprised to add my scores up and discover that I was not a blue. By a two-point differential, the empathetic, peaceful blue had lost out to the scholarly, inquisitive green. By two points, I am more like Rodin’s The Thinker, more like the cubed root of 125 than the blue picture of a writer scribbling away at his desk. I scan back to the quiz to see which questions I might have glossed over, but the quiet, chainsmoking instructor is already coming around and picking up our scorecards. We have been in class for three hours straight, so I leave the scorecard alone, and the instructor smiles and says “I thought so,” when he passes by. This makes me a little angry.

The green group is the second smallest of the bunch. The gold group, whose card displays a clock, a government building, filing cabinets, a woman checking her watch, a dollar sign, and a banner saying Proud to Serve, has only four members. The rest of our class is mixed between blues and oranges, laughing and talking loudly on the far side of the conference room.

My group is six members strong. We are asked to compile a list of qualities that we think connect us to “green” as it is described on our cards, and our appointed captain takes a large black marker and begins to delicately write out some ideas. She is a short, stocky, soft-spoken nursing student who works somewhere at the university hospital. Next to her is an olive-skinned guy with a goatee, maybe in his mid-twenties, who has been asking a lot of questions about racial profiling in class, and who also is a painter. There is an auto mechanic who says he reads science journals, a silent guy whose clothes look dusty and who does not offer much input, and a older man who says he is studying for a business degree on the internet. We tally up our list and drink coffee until the leaders begin clapping their hands and calling for our attention.

“The most important thing about this exercise,” the fatter, more vocal group leader says, “is that you cannot change your color.” He is looking off above us as he says this, his head cocked a little to one side.

“You may doubt your color, you may think you are another color. We had a girl in here once who insisted she was an orange, but when she took the test she proved to be a gold. These tests are designed and refined by sociologists, psychologists, and behavioralists from around the country. They know more about you than you do.”

A disapproving murmur sweeps through the class, but order is soon restored and one by one the groups make their presentations. The golds talk about order, discipline, and procedure, and the time drags on. Greg is among the blues, and when they gather at the front of the room to speak they display their sheet of paper by taping it to the blackboard. Their work is scribbled in random colors and directions, the words loosely radiating out from a picture of a heart drawn in the center. Ten of them stand clustered together, unsure of who will begin. Then a woman with gray, dead eyes, who apparently is their group leader, clears her throat and speaks.

“We are imaginative, caring people,” she says, “and we can get hurt very easily.” She looks older than most of us, with creased jowls and sand colored hair that whitens at the scalp beneath a tilted cap. She wears a wool sweater that hangs off her angular frame, and she slouches against the edge of the table as she speaks.

“Some of us are poets, some of us are spiritual people. All of us know the importance of caring and community, of love and acceptance.” Her voice is thin when she says this, and her eyes remain flat, like gray glass, looking somewhere where we can’t follow her gaze. No one makes a sound. The room is uncomfortably paralyzed.

She was the one with the highest blood alcohol content at the time of arrest. When we introduced ourselves on the first night, we were asked to say who we were, and to give all the details of what brought us here. That night, the woman with the dead eyes was sitting next to another woman, also in her fifties, who had flipped her SUV while driving drunk on I-80. After her story was finished, the woman with the dead eyes stood up and said her name was Margaret, and that she was 56 and divorced. When she said that she was an alcoholic, some people in the room laughed, and when she said she was diagnosed with severe depression, the room got quiet and still. She’d been drinking by herself the afternoon before her arrest, and was driving along a highway when she realized she’d forgotten why she’d gotten into her car. She felt panicked, but didn’t know what to do. None of the passing exits looked familiar, none of the signs or the trees or the houses were anything that she knew. She drove until the sun began to set, and eventually she stopped at an off-ramp. She drank more in her car, and as it got dark she eventually fell asleep. Some time later, a truck driver nearly tore off the rear of her car, and called the police to report that he’d just hit a vehicle with no lights that was parked in the middle of a highway exit. She said that she remembered the police, but not being hit.

“All of us have love in our hearts,” she says, “but all of us are also lonely.”

When the green group finally presents our list, I sit to the far side by the window with my shoulder against the icy glass. The nursing student goes through our characteristics, talking about how we love to be intellectually stimulated and about how learning is very important to us. The orange group sits in the front rows, giggling. I see two of them exchanging phone numbers on each other’s books. It is now well after dark, and I am staring with my eyes unfocused, imagining how everyone felt just 24 hours earlier, alone in a room full of cops and strangers with criminal records. Some people were students who drank too much. Some were artists, mechanics, secretaries. I remember pieces of people’s stories from the first night, moments where I can see them in the foggy way that I remember my own arrest. I wonder if I have forgotten the mundane stories for the exciting ones. I wonder if I unconsciously exaggerated the details of my own story to fit in. I try to think about why I would have done this, and the shapes and sounds of the room blur as a chill spreads slowly down my shoulder.

After the nursing student runs out of things to say, the more vocal instructor jogs to the front of the class and asks if we’d all like to take a guess at what colors he is. This energizes people, and everyone shouts out guesses until a vote is tallied. Our vocal instructor, it turns out, is green. He takes this opportunity to give a speech about green qualities, repeating many things that have already been said, and describing how this reflects who he is. Just when it appears that we’re done, he turns, looks at me, and asks if I have anything to add. I am caught off guard, and I realize that I haven’t spoken yet. I test combinations of words in my head, trying to articulate my misgivings.

“I mean,” I start, sounding like an idiot, “we’re obviously all different even though we’re the same color. Some of us had a high green score, some didn’t. If I had answered one question differently, I’d probably be in a different group.”

There is a long silence. I am looking at the instructor and his face is passive, expectant. He has been through this hundreds of times before. I struggle for words, but already feel too far away from whatever it is about this room, these groups, and these roles that is making me uncomfortable. I try imagining our neat list of adjectives written in stiff, black-penned letters.

“Like you said, we’re all interested in intellectual stuff, but I feel differently than my group about a lot of things.”

This is not what I mean. I notice some sideways looks from my group members, and I try to think of specifics, examples, arguments.

“I like learning things, but I don’t necessarily love education.”

Jesus Christ.

A few of the oranges laugh, and I can feel my will to protest burying itself somewhere deep inside my stomach. I take a breath.

The woman with the dead eyes is staring at me, looking serene amidst her peers. They sit shoulder to shoulder, almost intimately close to each other, watching out from their blue corner. She looks strangely comfortable. The golds are passing notes in the back. The policemen are asleep. The instructors are nodding. Grinding my teeth, I scan the faces of the group, and a girl in the front whispers “It’s okay, I think you’re an orange anyways.”

There’s this movie called Red Dawn on TV. Patrick Swayze is in it, and he plays a high school jock who helps organize suburban teenagers into a guerilla resistance movement. They do this in order to fight the invading Cubans and Russians. This story exists in a fictional near-future, an extension of Regan's America. 1984.

Swayze is a tough-love helmet of hair in stonewashed jeans and a puffy vest, and he is convincing. He has to be. He has to watch over his fellow highschoolers, who have all escaped the invasion in a pickup truck with big yellow KC lights. Early on, while camped in the mountains where communists can’t find them, there is some in-fighting in Swayze’s group as to whether they should surrender and re-join their families. There’s the requisite whiny kid, who misses his parents and argues that the group can’t survive in the wilderness because they “need stuff”. Others agree, hoping for the possibility of an end to the conflict. They are bordering on mutiny when Swayze shouts: “Listen! It is World War III out there, and people are dying! You think you’re so damn smart, but you’re just a bunch of scared kids”, to which one of the defectors replies: “so what does that make you?”

Swayze hangs his head, kicks the campfire with his foot, and says: “that makes me alone.” The music conspicuously drops out. There are a few moments of silence, and then one of the kids walks gingerly over to Swayze and gives him an awkward hug. They hold each other, and someone else comes into the picture. More hugging. I hit the remote control in an automatic spasm, but whatever’s on the last channel is now on a vaguely-worded commercial for a prescription pill called FLOMAX. For guys that want to take longer drives, with fewer stops. Men with silver hair and perfect teeth sitting a little too close to each other in a convertible, laughing. I count to 5, and hit the remote again.

When I switch back, the scene is fading out with some hugging. Swayze has conquered the internal dissent by holding a strong “with me or against me” stance, and with it a powerful aura of martyrdom and determination. For the moment, hidden in the desert mountains, they are at-large and unified in their mission. They are a committed band of insurgents. Freedom fighters.

Martyrdom isn’t a topic that dominates the agenda of most American movies. Sacrifice shows up here and there, but always in some western context that is re-tooled to fit our cultural perspective. For example, somebody sacrifices their career in the fashion industry to spend more time with their children. In war movies, sacrifice is everywhere, but martyrdom is somehow out of place, somehow less efficient.
I would guess that this is because most movies, especially war movies, don’t present their icon for “evil” as something cartoonishly grotesque without also empowering the icon for “good” by releasing it from its obligations to conventional morality. That is, the good guy can (and must) kick ass. In these films, the hero doesn’t sacrifice himself exactly (since he must ultimately win the war), but he usually has his family, or his pet goat, or something precious to him sacrificed by the writers in the name providing motive... and narrative convenience.

But this movie is weird. Like that Rambo sequel where Stallone helps the Taliban fight the Russians with that annoying pro-western Arab kid and the souped-up communist super-helicopter that shows up at the end. It's not weird because Rambo doesn't kick ass and take names, because he does. Swayze does this in Red Dawn too. It’s because Stallone is helping Afghanis fire rocket propelled grenades at a tank convoy. And because Patrick Swayze leads a millitia of junior varsity football players and student council members in an ambush on a truck full of Cuban guards. It’s because the old man in a hunting jacket who plays Swayze’s dad screams “Avenge Me!” from behind the wire fence of a political re-education camp, where he is being shown, against his will, the potential benefits of switching cultural and political systems. It’s because the kids are making IEDs and sniping soldiers from distance. It’s because they have the wrong guns.

“Evil” in Red Dawn has two faces. One face is that of the communist military. They are sadistic, cantankerous, and rarely in the mood for anything other than drinking, raping, and killing the captive civilians of Colorado. The other face is of the sympathizers who facilitate the communist takeover. These are the politicians, who are shown as hyperboles, cutting deals in back rooms and watching group executions from the sidelines in trench coats while smoking cigars. Cuban cigars. And none of them are very good looking.
The violence pops in and out of the story, and it is usually full of Clint Eastwood-style poetic justice. A local teenager who has joined the commies is shot by Swayze while trying to radio Soviet troops from a car. Bleeding all over himself and sweating with panic, he fumbles with the radio as Swayze appears by the passenger door and levels a pistol to his head. We get a close-up on the turncoat’s face, and then the camera cuts away to the wide green forest before we hear a gunshot. I actually have muted the TV at this point because I am playing the guitar, but as the picture cuts away from the car to the pine trees, “Gunshot” appears in little black and white caption letters at the bottom of the screen. It is a big moment, and I strum loudly.
Swayze and his rebel band tour the countryside in their KC truck, dodging patrols and witnessing atrocities committed by the communists. Public beatings. Mass killings while singing the national anthem. The Russians have a flair for the dramatic and the macabre. The drama then picks up with a montage, and we, the viewers, warm up to the idea that our motley crew of teenagers has now grown into a platoon of adults in the harsh gauntlet of war. Kill or be killed. The trial-by-fire coming-of-age drama that guarantees watchability because it is a story of continued violence. Our children have become soldiers. My hand is twitching on the remote, and I am beginning to think about other things than the killing going on in my television.

What time do I need to be at the bus stop tomorrow? Did I need to do laundry? What’s going on in the news?

My thumb is now tapping the “last channel” button in rhythm. Swayze’s hair, then Sportscenter. Dialogue with someone shouting, then Sportscenter. A commercial for eyedrops in which a fat man in a swimming pool tries to talk to some ladies, only to be scowled at because the chlorine has made his eyes red. Some kind of a chase scene, with a helicopter. There’s a Visene for that. Russian troops on the run. A commercial for the NASA foam mattress where a woman says “oh my god I’m going to fall asleep right here in the store.” Soldiers surrounding the rebel teenagers – close ups on everyone's faces. Clips from a cable news show hosted by someone named Glen Beck, announced over heavy synthesizer drums to be cable news’ “most provocative and hard-hitting new anchor personality”. A glitch in my cable, where everything turns to squares and pixels and people’s faces look like false-color radar.

And then bright light, the flashing of pyrotechnic powder from the muzzle of a Kalishnikov rifle, shuddering in slow motion as it bucks the pale frame of a white teenage boy, a child actor, perhaps a veteran of B-movie casting already, living somewhere in West Hollywood or Santa Monica, or perhaps even a newcomer to the big screen, living with his family in the San Fernando Valley, commuting to the set and even to school when he gets the time off, keeping in shape and keeping his spiky hair cut to just the right length so that his character looks the same; this boy with war paint on his cheeks and a drop of rubber blood on his eyebrow, squinting at the pulsing sparks with his his cheeks pulled taut, his mouth twisting between grin and grimace. Copper bullet jackets skip by, out of focus in the foreground, and the teenage boy from California, or Iowa, or Utica New York is screaming with some ineffable regurgitation of his own anger, his sixteen years of fear and angst, the weight of the news and the world and all the evil he's seen and imagined, and the director's voice is on a bullhorn in his ears telling him you are fighting for your way of life, let me see it! Kill! Kill! Kill!

I turn the TV off, and in the moment that the picture pinches into a bright static pop, I am aware that his teeth are perfectly white.

Moving out from the Womb of LA. Pragmatism. Coming off the drugs.

Time takes longer, on the roads, in the large slow skies. Little towns bleach in the heat, and brick and mortar bones sink awkwardly in the dirt along the roadside. The sun has been cooking the country for weeks. We get baked in the afternoons and blown off the road at nightfall. Missed a picture of a funnel cloud, but caught a lightning strike. The wet brown earth and the silent shaded curtain of rain that tiptoes across the landscape. We both take pictures from the mesa. She fights with me during the day and wanders outside herself in the dark, painted in dashboard green at the tips of her lips and in the glassy wetness of her eyes. We catch southern Colorado at sundown. The night comes on with loud black rain crackling the windshield and we listen to Watership Down turned all the way up through steep passes and sharp turns that bend away into nothing. The next day the earth recedes to a grassy ocean floor and we blink past rust stains on a green landscape of corn. We are in Iowa. Continents of clouds and holy light. A white roof winks at us. We drift faster in our tiny red lifeboat.

When the rabbits cross the river, they see a fish eat an insect from the surface of the water, and one says, “so it’s this way everywhere”.

On the last night, in the hot asphalt breeze, the view from our Motel 6 is an overpass and a truck lot. Heat lightning, and wind in the grass. Everything from here on out is the wilderness.