Let me be the first to enact this advice. Here is what I’m currently thinking: If you’ve concluded that Walt Whitman is, in your words, a douche, then you’ve failed to properly appreciate the extent to which he threw himself, body and soul, into the workaday life of nineteenth-century New York City. I’m enclosing a few photocopied pages of “Song of Myself.” Have a look at the sheer variety of the types of people and activities he describes. The fishing boats, the funeral, the washerwomen, the beehives, the church choir—all on one page of the poem. Maybe you can give me your interpretation of it, and then in my next letter I’ll share with you what I think it means. We’ll both be wrong and right.
Poetry’s like that, Kurl: slippery and coy. It means different things to different readers. You shouldn’t feel embarrassed if it makes you nervous. You’re not alone in that reaction. Look at Mr. Carlsen. He’d rather see Major British Poets being kicked down the hallway than read, let alone discussed, studied, cherished.
Yours truly,
Jonathan Hopkirk
Wednesday, September 23
Dear Little JO,
This is a bonus letter for you since we’re actually supposed to be researching our topic for a PSA slide show in Khang’s class. Public service announcement. The captivating sort of stuff you get to do in Twelfth Grade Applied English.
In case you’re dying of curiosity though, my PSA is on Explosive Emergency Situations. I’ve been reading quite a lot about the Taliban, al-Qaeda, and ISIL in Afghanistan since my brother Mark came back. He doesn’t talk about it but there’s a lot online. Since the US withdrawal, all three of these groups are getting involved in infighting and jostling for power. During Mark’s deployment, though, I think it was mostly the Taliban.
So there’s this dog walker who walks his dogs past my bus stop in the morning. He has a skin graft stitched down over a missing eye and a sideways scar from his nose to his ear area. The ear is also missing. It’s a combat injury for sure. He’s about the same age as my brother but I haven’t asked. I mean what if they knew each other over there but hated each other? What if this guy is upset because Mark didn’t get hurt nearly as bad as him? You never know with veterans.
What made me think of this dog-walking veteran after reading your letter is that he attracts comments from people. People see that he isn’t paying attention. That he’s talking to himself or whatever. I’m not saying you do that, but he’s got that aura I was talking about. He’s in that bubble. So people say things to each other about him, for kicks. You can see them laughing at him. I don’t know. It’s not respectful considering his sacrifice but that’s how people are.
From what I can tell the basic difference between suicide bombers and US military personnel is that the suicide bombers would prefer to die and the US soldiers would prefer not to. Now that the US troops are mostly drawn down, the Taliban is focusing on political and civilian targets. You can make yourself a list of Taliban strategies just by reading the news. An example of a Taliban strategy is: Drive a car bomb into a loaded bus. This just happened recently in Kabul.
Another Taliban strategy: Enter an elementary school in Logar and open fire. That’s the province where Mark was deployed, at least at the start. I don’t know where they sent him after the first year.
It’s sort of ironic I’ve been reading about all this insurgency stuff because when we were younger Mark always used to turn the news off. He’d switch Mom’s radio in the kitchen from her news station to Top 40. Adam, he’d say, let’s not be the type of people who believe everything we hear on the news.
None of this will make it into my PSA assignment. I’m just writing it down because you said to write what I’m thinking about. I mean you’re sort of right. People keep asking me about the football team and what my problem is and when I’m coming back. Meanwhile what I’m thinking about is a Taliban strategy: Knock out the streetlights at a specific intersection. When the political motorcade stops there, send three suicide bombers diving under the police trucks.
I’m not saying this is the sort of thing I really want to be thinking about all the time. It just happens to be on my mind. It makes me think football and school and my uncle et cetera aren’t worth worrying about all that much.
Sincerely,
AK
PS: I think your sister and her friend Bronwyn are both in Math with me this year. Bron was in Physics with me last year too. I mean she’s hard to forget with the fact that she always asks the teachers about stuff like their hidden bias and unspoken assumptions.
Tuesday, September 29
Dear Kurl,
Instead of writing about my “primary influences” as Ms. Khang suggests, I’d like to take this opportunity to answer the question you asked me yesterday at lunch. “Why aren’t you sitting at the gay table?” you said, and you pointed at a table way across the room, beside the composting/recycling sorting station, where a heavily pierced eleventh grader was making out with her Goth girlfriend. Two or three freshmen were also over there, hunched miserably over laptop screens. It was hard to say whether they knew it was the gay table or not. Shayna and Bron call it the Gable, and its eradication is one of Bron’s pet causes. She points to the existence of the Gable as an example of social apartheid, the formalization of hierarchy, and the perpetuation of power imbalances. I’m sure you didn’t intend your suggestion that I go sit at the Gable as an insult or a slur of any kind, Kurl, even if it does unfortunately stand out in my mind now, in retrospect, as the first and only sentence spoken aloud between the two of us. Your tone was exasperated in a way I recognized from many of my conversations with Shayna on this same general topic. An elder-sibling impatience.
My difficulties, before your appearance in the cafeteria, had resulted from simple mathematics. There were more of the butcherboys than there were seats left at my table. Naturally I was in the middle of taking my first sip of milk when I got the classic hip-to-shoulder nudge from behind. It was Christopher Dowell who made first contact, and my milk spilled all over my vintage poplin shirt. “Move, fudge-packer,” Liam VanSyke ordered me. “This is our table.”
I attempted the Stonewall Maneuver, named after the great gay-rights moment in American history but in reality nothing more than behaving as if one is a wall made of stone. I stared down at my tray, unwrapped my tuna wrap, bit into said tuna wrap, and commenced chewing.
“You deaf?” Maya Keeler picked up what was left of my milk and poured it over the tuna wrap. Maya is the blond girl who isn’t more than an inch or so taller than me. I can’t fathom why, but it appears that she may currently be romantically involved with Dowell. In any case, Maya seems to have emerged, in these first few weeks of sophomore year, as the butcherboys’ mastermind, the brains behind the whole operation. She’s the one, for instance, who engineered the poetry-anthology soccer game you witnessed a couple of weeks ago. Just before Dowell knocked the book from my hand, it was Maya’s voice behind me saying, “There, check it. Right there.”
But let us return to the scene at hand. Phase two of the Jonathan Hopkirk Defensive Plan: Look for Rescue. I took a quick, surreptitious scan of the cafeteria for a lunchroom monitor, but of course the butcherboys had already done that before they moved in on me. No one wants a detention, let alone a mandatory anti-bullying essay assignment. Even I am not worth that hassle.