War.

[written over a year ago, one of the first pieces I read at the creative writing club]

“And so what are you expecting from this story?” the teacher, Ms. Applebee asks Charlie, a bucktoothed freckled kid with glasses.
“Um, a hero? And um, conflict? And resolution?”
Charlie was what we called in high school, a dumbass.
“Very good, Charlie! Now everyone, let’s give Charlie a hand.”
Ms. Applebee was what we called in high school, a tool. White blouse, pink glasses, hair in a bun. A fucking control freak, always in need for attention. Teaching was the perfect job for her, and the worst depth of nightmares for her students. Well, the smart ones.
Charlie always paid attention to his beloved Ms. Applebee, and despite his tendency of being a dumbass, he received many A’s from her. While Charlie was busy being enlightened, Mike, Gordon and I skipped class and smoked pot at Coffee Park.
Coffee park.
Adjacent to the school, filled with swings, slides and sand. Coffee park. Occupied by unemployed alcoholics, drug dealers and high school teens looking for somewhere to smoke pot. That would be us. So much for a green space.
“You know, people get hooked on coffee, like addicted and shit? Thirteen cups a day and shit?” Mike was telling us, slow pace and calm tone. “Dude, coffee’s a drug too, in every single way. No wonder we get all the fuck-ups coming to this park.”
Mike was a fuck-up. His mom was rarely in the house and he didn’t want to know where she went, so he didn’t ask. Mike had little wit, little intelligence and little gusto, but also had a little potential. A little hope to break from the mold, but the good never outweighed the bad for the kid.
“Shut the fuck up,” Gordon would tell Mike.
Gordon has, what we call in real-life, an over-active ego, and had a tendency to lose his cool pretty quickly. His dad was an ex-Royal Canadian Solider, a conservative and a closet-cokehead.
I was the quiet stoner. The one who sat and watched and listened to birds chirp their songs and cars fly by. I was Zed back then. Short for a long and embarrassing name which was changed as soon as I became conscious of it. I am bitter and cold and chewing gum to get rid of pot aftertaste.
We walk back to the school, and I look back to Mike and Gordon and they’re arguing about war. Gordon, like his father, is pro-war, and believes that ‘soldiers are the reason that our country is what it is today,’ and all that other textbook bullshit propaganda. Mike, the neo-hippy that he is, is obviously the anti-war freedom fighter.
I personally don’t give a shit, as long as I’m not the one dying.
“War is an industry,” Mike would tell him. “I literally cannot wait for this war to be over, Gordon, because it will never end, making it impossible to wait. It’s just a representation of our own immoral inner conflicts, our xenophobia and especially our greed. A selfish economic, unjust, corrupt, greedy, bigoted, tyrannical, fascist…”
“Shut the FUCK up, Mike!”
And Mike would shut the fuck up for a good five minutes. A quiet five minutes.
I usually never talked, but today I spoke up.
“I think war is a representation of our own struggles, inner and outer. Our own inner wars. And warfare is just a means of getting our own hostility out on other people… a battleground for the un-profound. It’s all perspective.”
Gordon and Mike were quiet and stared, a little confused, and then Gordan said, “Look what we have here, a fucking poet.”
Whatever, I was stoned.
High school was a battle-ground. Everyone with the false belief that they had something to prove to the world. The girls who were too young for make-up and the guys who were too old for their obsession over guns and violent video games. And best of all, the so-called students with values; the high school poets with their cliché’s, the math kids with their neuroticism, the science kids with their lack of self in the world, the ambiguous high school volunteers with their community service and charities; an escape of their own self-conscious lack of morality. They’re all fucked. And by all means, so am I, but at least I know it.
We go back inside the school.
I suck at school like a Mexican hooker sucks an American customer; definitely not the correct institution for me. I fail everything except English language arts, because you have to be a moron to fail English language arts. Mike failed English language arts. Mike is a dumbass.
I read the books given to us in English, all of them. I love a few, hate a few, but indifferent about most. Catcher in the Rye was perfect, To Kill a Mockingbird was good, Lord of the Flies was a piece of shit. I read it anyway, because most people didn’t, and I understood every single word. That’s why I can judge them.
I sit back down in the back of my math class with Gordon and Mike. There are fifteen kids in the class and my teacher doesn’t even know my name. The under-achievers class, or what they call in high school, ‘special needs.’
I take out loose-leaf and write and draw and think and write and draw and think and then I throw out all of the thoughts, writings and drawings into the garbage can, purposely avoiding the recycling bin. Today, I’m thinking about my family, or lack thereof.
My mom’s a bodybuilder, and my dad was an accountant. He left us after my mom kicked his ass for undisclosed reasons. Now he’s a born again Christian, or some fucked-up voodoo shit like that. My retired body-builder mother married some man named Greg, and he is by no means my step-dad. He’s Greg the new guy, who my mother married after my father lost all of his pride. He’s a sex therapist, but I honestly doubt he’s ever had sex in his entire life, and the last thing I ever want to imagine is a virgin sex therapist fucking an ex-female body builder. This avoiding the details of them being my parental figures.
I avoid them and their home as much as possible.
After class, Mike continues to piss off Gordon with his anti-war stuff, and Mike continues to tell him to shut the fuck up.
I leave them without saying goodbye and take the bus to the Métro.
I get on the metro, onto the orange line, and I get off at Villa Maria station.
I walk out, alone, of the deep sweaty heat of the cart and walk towards the escalator, slowly carrying me up the stairs as if I were a cripple.
I hear it about five seconds or so being on the escalator, flooding distantly bouncing off the cement walls. Sirens.
Police sirens swinging around and floating. Then they stop and I am about half way up the escalator.
The sirens stop. The sirens stop and a loud terrifying gunshot is echoed. The deafening crack and the bloody screams.
I duck, squatting on the escalator, keeping my head low, resting my ear against the metal side of the escalator as it drags me up further.
Another bang. More screams.
Oh fuck oh fuck oh fuck oh fuck oh fuck.
All that’s going through my mind right now, fuck. The most powerful word in the English language, representing the role of hate, anger, lust and fear. And fear.
Oh fuck.
I hear the blurred out screams. I hear the voices yelling, “You fucking pigs.”
And other voices yelling, “Drop your weapons!”
And I hear the gun shots.
And I hear the bloody tear gas screams and spine chilling yells. Horror movie yells. Real ones.
And I stay crouched low, escalator slowly carrying me up. Slowly slowly, five meters away from the top.
Bloody fucking yells. And gun shots like hammers to the side of the head.
Like terrorism, like weapons of mass destruction, like war.
Oh fuck.
One meter away.