The View from Hawthorne Heights
Sandy Fisher’s backpack had patches on it that said things like Kill All Fascists and Parental Advisory: Explicit Lyrics. She wore thrift-store jeans and Che Guevara t-shirts before they were mass-produced by Urban Outfitters a few years later. Her father was an adjunct history professor at Bergen Community College, the next town over, and her mother had died when she was a kid, I’m not sure how. She carried a copy of A People’s History of the United States with her wherever she went. She was reading it one September morning in our Algebra II class, a class I’d flunked twice. Being a senior, I felt a little more confident about talking to girls now—if anyone rejected me I’d be out of here by spring anyway—so I turned to her and asked, “What’s that about? The book?”
I thought she was annoyed at me for interrupting her, but it turned out she was just lost in whichever chapter she’d been reading. She smiled and tilted the cover up so I could see it. “Ever heard of it?”
“No,” I said. “I’m reading…” What was there to say? “I’ve never seen anyone read a history book in their spare time.”
“Well,” she tried to explain. “It’s a history book and it’s not one. It’s about how the history textbooks we usually read are trying to sell us a way of seeing the world that’s imperialist.”
I’d never heard of anything like that. Our school’s textbooks had fading covers and yellowed pages and taught history so dryly I couldn’t get past one sentence, but I’d never thought that they were trying to make a point. They had end-of-chapter reader response questions that just asked about dates and people’s names. Our teachers handed them to us about as unceremoniously as if they were blank stacks of printer paper.
“It’s less pretentious than it sounds,” she said, off of my blank expression.
“Hey,” I said. “They’re letting us leave at lunch to get food from anywhere we want in town. The seniors, I mean.” This was a major privilege the school offered its upperclassmen: if you had a car, you didn’t have to subject yourself to the cafeteria’s famously awful meals, months-old frozen pizza or slippery garlic pasta overcooked in vats of tap water. “I’m going downtown to pick something up.” My lines didn’t get much smoother back then. “Want me to grab you something?”
“Sure,” she said. “Can you get me a joint?”
I smiled. “You think you can sneak out to the parking lot fifth period? We can hotbox my car.”
“Which one’s your car?”
“The electric blue ’93 Chevy Cavalier with the dent in the side.”
She looked up from her book and batted her eyelids at me cartoonishly like an old-fashioned movie star, making fun of me, I think. “I feel like a princess,” she said.
Ms. Doherty, our math teacher, stood up and I thought she’d yell at us, but as usual, she just wrote Ten Minutes Left on the board, as though we couldn’t just look at the clock. I couldn’t remember what we were even supposed to be working on. Ms. Doherty had gone through a nasty and public divorce that summer and cared even less about the math lessons than we did.
When she sat back down, Sandy tapped me on the shoulder and said, “Hey, can my friend Caitlin come too? At lunch?”
“Caitlin Cilestro?” I asked, though there was no need to: the two were inseparable, and I knew asking Sandy meant Caitlin would be there too. I didn’t mind. Caitlin was cool.
When Sandy said yes, that Caitlin, I said, “More the merrier. It’s a beautiful September morning. It’ll be a beautiful September afternoon.”
And then Jon Lockhart popped his head into the classroom. Lockhart was one of those guys who isn’t happy unless he’s telling you something no one else knows, even if it turns out to be untrue: who cheated on who, which teacher just got fired, that kind of thing. He had that same anxious look on his face, like he had to pee, which meant he had something especially juicy. “Hey,” he said to the class. Ms. Doherty barely acknowledged the interruption. “A plane just flew into the Twin Towers.”
. . .
I didn’t believe him, because a. it was Jon Lockhart, and b. the details were a bit fuzzy: a crash happened. One plane, maybe two. An accident, maybe not. I wrote it off as bullshit until I walked into second period, my film class, where the faculty tech guy, Mr. Esposito, sat watching a rabbit-eared box set with footage of chaos and a smoke-filled sky.
“Come on in,” he said when he noticed our whole class waiting at the door, unsure of what to do.
The footage was surreal. Every channel played the moment the planes crashed on a loop, then haphazardly cut that with live coverage and commentary, so it was difficult to tell whether more buildings were getting demolished. The anchors narrated but weren’t saying much, with nothing conclusive to report. It became clearer by the minute that this was no accident, if only because the odds were pretty low that two planes would crash by mistake in the same place on the same day only minutes apart, but everyone on TV was careful not to draw any conclusions.
When there was finally a lull in the onscreen discussion, Vinnie DePalma said, to no one in particular, “What do you think happened?”
The conversation didn’t really come from anyone and we all seemed to be saying the same thing, one collective voice answering its own questions: Probably got attacked. By who? Foreign country, obviously. No shit, which one? You know, that one. Which? The one that doesn’t like us. No one on TV is saying it was an attack. No one has to, it’s obvious. Let’s not panic. Seriously? Nothing’s for sure yet. Yeah, that’s why I’m panicking.
Etc. By the time the news came in that the Pentagon had been hit, around quarter to ten, we weren’t even sure whether we were supposed to change classrooms when the bell rang for third period. Our principal, Mrs. Teraciano, must have been on the same page because she announced over the PA, “All students are to remain in their current classrooms until further notice. Please do not leave school grounds for any reason until instructed.”
I had a weak moment: my gut reaction to this news was only that I probably wouldn’t be smoking in my car with the girls this afternoon. But that thought was interrupted when Mr. Esposito, almost despite himself, pointed out the window and said, “Look.”
Our North Jersey town was only a George Washington Bridgeride away from Manhattan, and one of the, if not the, only things our school had to offer was that you could see the New York City skyline from certain angles of our football field. White puffs now clotted up the cloudless blue September sky that had beckoned to all of us the whole morning. It didn’t take anyone long to realize we were looking at the aftermath of the Towers’ collapse, which we’d watched in real time only a half hour before. We crowded the window to watch in silent wonder and then I heard my name being whisper-yelled from the classroom door.
It was Sandy, who’d snuck out of her classroom to find me. Esposito was distracted so I walked to her. “I don’t think you’re supposed to leave class,” I said.
“I told them I had my period. Guy teachers don’t ask questions when you tell them that, they just let you go for as long as you want. They’re idiots.”
“Smart,” I said.
She looked over my shoulder at the window and pointed with her chin. “Pretty fucked up, huh?”
I shrugged. “No one knows what it is yet.”
“I called my dad from the pay phones,” she said. “He said he’s worried.”
“Why? You guys know someone who worked there?”
“No,” she said. “He said this is what happens. People are gonna start hanging American flags everywhere and just doing whatever the president says. He said this is how we got into Vietnam.”
“Fuck,” I said, more for lack of an articulate response than out of frustration.
She shrugged and said, “Hey, does your dad still live in Hawthorne Heights?”
He did. My father moved out four years earlier into a condo a few towns over, the kind of bachelor-pad starter-home that men in midlife crises favor: hardwood floors, skylights, mirrored bedroom doors, a hot tub on the deck. The condo complex was called Hawthorne Heights because at its cul-de-saced peak you could stand at the dead end and overlook all of lower Manhattan, not just the skyline but the harbor and partway into midtown as well. I didn’t see him much, but I’d thrown a few parties up there over the years and forgot until now that Sandy must have shown up at one or two, which is how she knew about it.
“He does,” I told her.
She smiled and played with her hemp necklace, I hoped flirtatiously. “I thought so. I thought since lunch is a no-go, maybe whenever they let us out of here you could take us up there and we could look at the City. It must be a trip to see. Maybe tonight?”
I didn’t want to see my dad, but I figured I could drive past his place to the top of the hill stealthily enough. Today of all days, no one was going to be paying close attention to anything but the TV. “Right on,” I said. “You and Caitlin?”
“Caitlin can’t come—her dad’s a first responder and she’s a little upset,” she said. “But her boyfriend wants to come, is that OK?”
“Tommy? Why does he want to come?”
“I know he’s kind of a rag, but Caitlin wants me and him to hang out more. We don’t really see eye-to-eye on much.”
It’s not that he was a rag. It’s that Caitlin’s boyfriend was Tommy DeLuca. A senior, like me, Tommy and I grew up together but were never terribly close. He was an odd guy. He lived with his mother, a cashier at the A&P who walked with a cane, in a mobile home by the train tracks in town. It was hard to tell who his crowd was. You’d see him at parties every now and again, but he wasn’t a mainstay anywhere; he wore army fatigues and combat boots but not ironically; he played bass in a friend of mine’s band for about three weeks before quitting. During football season he’d shave his head into a mohawk and write the NY Giants logo in blue marker on his skull, but never seemed to mention the team in any conversation you ever had with him. As kids we’d sometimes dare him to eat stuff—pebbles, dirt, dog hair—when we were bored, and he’d always do it, not because of a need to please us but rather because, it seemed, he didn’t get why it was weird. But he grew nearly a foot over the summer going into senior year and a lot of the younger girls—Caitlin included, obviously—thought of him as the best-looking guy in our class (I’d overheard a few of them compare him to Heath Ledger at a party that August).
The other thing about Tommy was that his father was a Vietnam vet, an alcoholic who spent most nights doing shots of Old Crow by himself down at the town’s VFW. Tommy had been fairly easily persuaded by the Army recruiter guys who hung out in our blue-collar town’s strip mall, handing pamphlets to poor kids who needed a way to pay for their future. It wasn’t difficult to imagine Sandy and him not having much to say to each other. But today it felt obvious what they’d talk about.
. . .
They dove right in when we got to the car that evening. Tommy sat in the passenger seat, fighting with the crappy flint on my lighter to spark the joint. Sandy lay across my entire back seat, flip-flopped feet dangling out the window, an old hoodie of mine under her head for a pillow.
“You think we’ll go to war?” I asked, putting a piece of cardboard over the tape in the cassette player. It always jammed.
Sandy took the joint from Tommy and said, “Of course we will. That’s our favorite thing to do in this country. Bush is a fucking fascist.” But she said fass-ist, and I knew it was a new word for her to articulate, something she’d only until now read in the books her dad gave her.
“I hope we go to war,” Tommy said, surprising no one. “I can’t wait. I’ve been in basic training since the summer.” The open window blew ash from the joint around the car, and Tommy wiped it off his camouflage cargo pants.
“You went to basic training during peace time,” Sandy countered.
“Yeah,” I said without thinking. “Aren’t you at least a little freaked out,” and then realizing how that sounded I added, “I mean—just, you know. ‘Cause I would be.”
Tommy shook his head. “Better than sitting at home on your ass.”
Sandy shook her ass on the seat to pantomime it. “I disagree,” she said. “No one ever got hurt by watching TV and minding their own business.”
“Ever heard of Rwanda?” Tommy asked. “We didn’t do shit but sit on our asses then. You know who got hurt? Almost a million people in a hundred days.”
“Not all wars are good,” Sandy said in a pinched voice, through an inhale. I wondered whether she didn’t know about Tommy’s dad. Then I wondered whether she knew about his dad but figured that since she had a dead mom, they cancelled each other out and gave her permission to talk to him like this.
“Not all wars are bad, either,” Tommy said. “Sometimes there are things worth fighting for. If the cause is good.”
“You think this is a good cause?” Sandy said.
“Getting back at the assholes who did this?” he said, and on ‘this’ he pointed at the white sky above our heads. “Yeah, I think that counts.” He took a victory pull on the joint to emphasize the magnitude of his point, but she sat up and leaned forward.
“You don’t even know who did it yet,” she said. “You’re saying ‘these assholes’ but you don’t even know who you’re referring to. You don’t know whether it’s a country or a militant group or some random psychos with too much time on their hands. It’s just your go-to solution no matter what happened.”
I have to admit that, despite the tragedy of the day, it was a little thrilling to listen to them. It wasn’t exactly Buckley vs. Chomsky, but I’d never been part of a political argument until then, and hearing people my age make real points about something that mattered was something else.
Sandy rested her head on my seat, put her chin on my shoulder. Her hair smelled like hemp. She looked at my eyes in the rearview mirror and said, “What do you think?”
The tape I’d put in, “No Scrubs” by TLC, had finally begun working and circled the air in the car like the smoke from the joint. I took a puff and let out a laugh.
“Something funny?” Tommy said like a Vice Principal in a silent auditorium to a snickering kid.
“No, just…this song,” I said. “It’s so dumb. And this is what we’re producing. I guess I’ve just been thinking that our generation feels so, like…undefined.” Like I said, this was the first time I was talking like this and it was hard to find the right words. “Like, our parents had Vietnam,” I looked at Tommy with as much respect as I could, “as you know. And their parents had World War II. And their parents had World War I. And we just have all this peacetime and prosperity, you know?”
Sandy lifted her chin from my shoulder and gave me a suspicious look. “So a generation is useless unless they go to war? That’s very male of you.”
“Not a war, necessarily,” I said. “But something important. Like until now the biggest story of our lifetime was Clinton getting a blow job. And maybe what happened today…I mean, it’s got us talking about stuff. That’s something, you know?”
“And all it took was someone flying a plane into a building,” Sandy said. She didn’t say it mean. The conversation was heated but we weren’t mad at each other. The pot helped with that.
“You always were a pistol,” Tommy told Sandy, and she rubbed his hair and said, in her dad’s voice, “Go to college when you get back from the army, big guy. You’re smart.”
At the base of Hawthorne Heights’ long and winding road was a police barricade. Three officers stood cross-armed between the orange-and-white-striped barriers, and one poor guy who’d drawn the short straw directed the long line of traffic away from the hill. “What the fuck?” I said as my car got closer. Tommy chucked the joint. I blasted the AC. Sandy sprayed perfume all over the car as we pulled up. We tried to keep straight faces.
An officer with a name tag that said Brock approached my window.
“Can’t come up here,” the guy said in a performatively gruff voice. “You wanna look at the City, go watch TV.”
“But I live up there,” I half-lied. “How do I get to my house?”
He didn’t seem to believe me; I’m sure he’d been hearing that all day. “I.D.?” he said, holding out his hand.
I panicked for a second. My license had my mom’s address back home on it, and I knew if I had to explain to him the complicated nature of my parents’ divorce settlement, I’d sound stoned, which I was. I fumbled around and found an envelope with my father’s address on it and matched the name to my I.D., which seemed to satisfy this Brock person, though he couldn’t help adding, for our benefit, “Go on up. Motherfuckers have been coming by here all day, just to go up there and gawk. Like they’re just sightseeing.”
I had no idea how to react but Tommy held out his hand and sad, “I understand, officer. Thank you for your service.” I caught Sandy rolling her eyes in the mirror.
Brock noticed the dog tags hanging from Tommy’s neck. They were Tommy’s father’s, but Brock mistook him for a current recruit. Brock smiled, shook his hand, and said, “Thanks for yours, son.” Tommy looked self-satisfied, his bloodshot, glassy eyes beaming, ready to mark this guy’s respect down in the win column in he and Sandy’s dispute.
Sandy, high, stuck her head out the back window and said, “Officer, settle an argument for us: are all wars good?” She began laughing before she could get the sentence out and Brock ignored her, barely able to contain his disdain. He looked back at Tommy and said, “Go get ‘em kid. Go fuck those towelheads up.”
Sandy stopped laughing. Tommy stopped grinning. The weird fusion of argument and camaraderie we’d had until then dried up almost instantly. The cops let me through and we were all quiet. I said, “Wonder if he smelled the weed.” No one wanted to talk. I turned the music back on, waited for TLC to drown out the silence, or maybe it was to linger while we still could in a moment when it was possible to listen to something mindless, which didn’t seem so bad all of a sudden.
Tommy looked out the window and said, “Guys like that are fucking assholes.”
. . .
When we reached the top, the most alarming thing about the sight was that there was nothing to see: the city was invisible behind white clouds, but the lights from Manhattan shone behind it all and gave the whole scene a sort of ethereal graveyard glow. But the officers at the base of the hill had done their job: no one was at the top of Hawthorne Heights except the three of us. Tommy spoke first. “It’s gonna be weird not seeing them anymore on the skyline. The Towers.”
We nodded.
I passed out three cigarettes and we lit them, watched the smoke from our lungs blend with the smoke in the sky.
Sandy said, “Around here, everyone’s gonna know someone…” She trailed off, but didn’t have to finish the sentence. We knew what she meant.
Ted McLoof teaches English at the University of Arizona. His work has appeared in Minnesota Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Monkeybicycle, Hobart, DIAGRAM, Kenyon Review, Louisville Review, Ninth Letter, Los Angeles Review, and elsewhere. His debut collection, ANHEDONIA, is available from Finishing Line Press; you can find it here and here, and can follow him on all sorts of social media @tedmcloof.