from Rider: [8. Dropouts]

Dropouts

Mace had the kind of courage you could easily mistake

for brawn. I don’t know why I call it courage.

Sure, he stood up to greasers. And didn’t visibly fret

on the days when his report card made hard fact

of what was already apparent from his absences.

Yet Mace was gifted with an uninflected quickness, a fine

intelligence of his own despair, a knowledge—

as he gunned the engine of his once white ’58 Chevy,

with a four-on-the-floor he’d installed himself,

to climb higher into the hills above the city—

of where nowhere was…

Light shadow cutting brusquely across the canyons—

Like everyone else in our class, Mace was a year

older than me. He had stubble on his chin.

I dragged a razor up and down my cheeks

to inspire fast, early growth.

“Don’t shave your jowls,” friends warned,

knowing I overdid everything,

“or you’ll grow hair there later.”

Later was a word I disdained, its insistence

on the future tense, postponement—

life on the back burner.

Mace seemed incapable of worry.

His coolness and insouciance made girls stare.

He was always brushing back the shock of raven-

black hair that fell over his right eyebrow.

The same teacher who sent me lickety split

to the principal’s office

would lean over Mace’s desk and whisper

warmly, compassionately in his ear.

They would nod together. I could fill in every blank.

“What’s the matter Richard?”

“Nothing.” “If you’re having trouble,”

this is where the whispering grew most intense,

“I want you to feel you can talk to me as a friend.

Your work in class is so good, you have so much ability,

Richard…”

Mace would never protest, never defend himself.

Indignation was a country where he’d never been.

“You may hate me,” I thought, praying she would not

double the insult of the absence of her concern

for me with a glance in my direction,

“but deep down Mace and I are the same.”

Mace and I were running into the same problem

at the same time. Mathematical

wizards that we were we couldn’t solve

advanced algebraic equations in our head;

we were vexed by an added integer.

We had gotten this far without lifting a pencil.

History was being sold to us as a dead language

of fixed events and we wouldn’t buy.

What is a fact, I wondered, and I could see

the same question wrinkling Mace’s brow.

Mace’s problems weren’t academic. His disgust thrummed

like telephone wires in the wind, even his saturnine

presence was deceptive, like his beat-up Chevy

with its secret store of power concealed under the hood.

Mace too began the year in the front row,

placed there on the strength of pure ability.

He sank slowly, buoyed as I was, by the one

assigned book we read, Great Expectations.

Mace attended to his tasks in the classroom.

I dreamt of escape via the window’s easy access.

There were unknown roads to be driven, gulleys

to be plumbed; girls: a world of lovely distractions.

For all the years I lived in Salt Lake City

I can’t remember seeing a single bird.

I felt watched in Salt Lake City ever since

that first day when the old geezer stepped

out of the shadows, on a street vast and empty

and without verticals, to reprimand my Double-

mint gum wrapper for lighting in the gutter.

But only around the time of Hitchcock’s The Birds

did I start to withdraw from sight.

I was keen to see The Birds the Wednesday

afternoon it opened and I wanted the other—“good”—“Mark R.,”

the irreproachable blond Mormon angel everyone loved, to join us.

Our growling engine brought his mother to the porch.

The sun glared on her helmet of curlers.

Mark had “homework and chores,” she said, he “can’t come down.”

But he had already descended. And stood framed in the doorway.

I couldn’t get accustomed to the light

in the trampled meadows around his house,

the glow of dandelions, thistles, weeds.

Mark’s red cheeks reeked of aspiration and I could read

his thoughts: why couldn’t I wait until night?

Why was I dragging myself down?

Why skip history and rifle assembly?

The movie would wait.

But I would not. I was keen,

and, seeking a purging terror to cleanse

me of my dread, I sat alone with Mace

in the vast empty theater alive to each

click and flicker in the projection room,

and the radiant impalpable dust

caught in the unstinting beam;

released from the limits of our world

until the screeching stopped

and, looked at askance by strangers,

we stepped into an iron dark

which held no trace of the light we’d left.

I forked over whatever change I had

to fuel each day’s free-wheeling splendor.

One morning, knowing Mace was down to smoking butts,

I brought a pack of my mother’s Kents

as an offering. Mace scorned them.

He only smoked Marlboros.

Yet later, desperate and broke in the maze

of roads through the hills overlooking the city,

he broke off the filters and smoked in silence.

I was used to doing the talking

for the two of us but this was different.

He pulled up besides a long driveway.

A vaulted roof jutted above columns of tall firs.

This was where he lived. He’d be

“a sec”—he had “some smokes” stashed in a drawer.

I followed him past the plaster jockey and the massy trees

toward an opulent, utterly contemporary house,

fronted by oak door and gold bell-knocker,

angular, white, high-ceilinged, skylit…

Our apartment could have fit into the living room…

Now I understood: Mace lived in the clouds.

Though I couldn’t see beyond the back yard

through the landscaping I knew what the view

must be like: that was the reason to live there;

for the nights, when the city, innocent as it was,

still blazed through its grid of interlocking lights.

On May Day, Mace and I, long ago tossed

out of R.O.T.C. for “insubordination,”

but required to attend the final show-of-arms

sat together in the bleachers,

in splendid isolation, and watched

as the rule-followers—led

by the many-striped, other Mark R.—

in their woolen khaki uniforms,

shouldering their M 1 rifles,

dropped like flies in the insuperable heat.