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I Don’t Want To Think About The Protocols of Zion

Aaron J. French

    When the time came to part ways with my best friend, it was inevitable—like all things in life. What happened was I went Left and he went Right.
    Harry and I grew up in Tucson, Arizona. I met him in junior high. My parents split up when I was five, and I had lived with my mother ever since. She was an ex-hippie (if there is such a thing) who effused love. Who smoked cigarettes, drank nightly, and popped morphine tabs like Tic-Tacs. Who was a vegetarian. Who was a casualty of what Wolfe called the “ME” generation.
    You see, when hippies grow up they become the adjective “hippy.” Then they realize they have to provide food for their “love child.” Those who don’t join communes join the ranks of bourgeois Americans going to work everyday, suffering the capitulation with drugs.
    Except now they have to do the drugs in private. That’s what happened to Mom. She spent her middle-aged years popping morphine pills in the bathroom, crushing ‘em on the counter, snorting ‘em, sitting on the toilet seat and staring at a closed door.
    Harry’s family was nothing like mine. For one, his parents were still together. Whereas my mom was “hippy,” Harry’s was HUGE. Scarcely left the couch. I used to help him wheel the oxygen canisters over to her. She’d sit there, wheezing, puddling, a cigarette in one hand, a Dean Koontz in the other. A horseshoe-shaped plastic tube in her nose. Fat blond hair running down her neck. That’s right: she smoked while she sipped oxygen from a metal tank.
    Once Harry brought a girl named Amanda home and introduced her to his mother. Big mistake. Amanda spread news all over school that Harry’s mom was Jabba the Hut. Kids teased him and he started getting in lots of fights. He even strangled a kid half to death with the tetherball rope.
    Of course I never hit anyone, no matter what they said about my mother or me. I was a “love child,” remember?
    But not Harry. Oh no. With his mom on the couch, his father primarily raised him. A psychologist might tell you he adopted his development during the anal-territorial stage. And Harry’s father was a cop . . . and his grandfather was a cop, and his uncles were cops . . . need I say more?
    But none of that mattered to us. Our different upbringings didn’t determine our identities. At least not yet. Recognition of stereotypes wouldn’t come until later. Through all those teenage years we were formless, impartial students of life, not ideology. You wanna know what political party we adhered to?
    The Kids Party.
    And nothing else mattered. Not a thing.
    Not until later.

* * *


    We didn’t talk about world hunger. Nor genocide. Nor poverty (though both of us were poor). Nor abortion. Nor gay marriage (though if one of us had been gay, it might’ve been an issue). Nor Islam. Nor Jesus. Nor War. Nor Terrorism. Nor the President of the United States. Nor morality. Nor capitalism. Nor communism. Nor job security. Nor wage-slavery. Nor housing bubbles. Nor Judaism (again, if one of us had been Jewish . . .). Nor the economy. Nor race distinction. Nor gender issues. Nor philosophy. Nor conscience. Nor anything that didn’t involve drugs, videos game, comic books, rap music, or girls. Those were the five Gospels, and we knew no other.
    Harry and I never went to school much. Instead we played truant. There are hundreds of dry riverbeds in Tucson, and he and I would maraud these weed-choked ravines instead of going to school.
    At thirteen, our big thing was pot. It was like fairy dust to us, and we did everything in our power to get it. Lie, cheat, steal. Didn’t matter. Oh yeah, and my mom was an ex-hippie, which meant there was a tin on the top shelf of her bookcase . . . you get the idea.
    Here’s why the days were so shitty. I’ll do me first:
    Get up at six in the morning, usually after a night of bad dreams. Hear my mom in the bathroom getting ready for work, i.e. crushing morphine tablets on the counter and snorting them through a straw. When she’d leave, I’d go take a piss and see faint powdery residue on the sink. I’d get dressed, comb my hair. We usually couldn’t afford milk, so I’d eat Cheerios with apple juice substituted. Tasted like crap. I’d head down to wait for the city bus, pay my dollar, then sit listening to some drunk maniac bemoan his ills to the world.
    Now I’ll do Harry:
    Wake up and smoke a cigarette (that’s right, Harry smoked at thirteen—was allowed to smoke at thirteen. His father claimed it was a manly habit.) Then take a shower and help Mom get her oxygen. Then fix her and his brother breakfast. His father worked night patrol, went to the bar afterwards with the fellas, and usually came stumbling in drunk about now. If he felt like it he’d whip Harry with his belt for no reason. Sometimes even whack the backs of his legs with the nightstick. Harry usually escaped the house by the skin of his teeth, then headed to school with his little brother in tow.
    Here’s why pot made it better:
    In the city reality is all around you. You have to look at the buildings, the streets, the billboards, the filling stations, the minimalls, the cars, the fast food joints. You have to see the pedestrians, who glare at you thinking hateful thoughts. In school Harry and I had to endure the suspicious gaze of the security force (who drove around in golfcarts). The burly jocks wanted to kick our asses and probably wanted to call me Fat-Tits. (Whereas I was raised by my mother and generally plump and round, Harry was raised by his father, thus stiff and erect like a penis.) All the girls laughed at us. Teachers with disaffected eyes looked at us like we were wasting their time, like we were destined to become screw-ups no matter what they did.
    But here’s why pot made it better:
    Harry and I would meet in the hall each morning before homeroom. Together we’d sneak out past the auto classes and woodshops, past the little shed where they kept the contraband, out to the rear parameter fence.
    At this point the fat security guard would notice us. Harry would holler “Run!” as the golfcart buzzed to life, then we’d sprint full speed till we got to the fence. Hit it, climb, shimmy over, drop to the sidewalk on the other side.
    By now the security guard would reach us. He’d step out and say something like, “You boys are in a lot of trouble. I know who you are, so you might as well come back over.”
    “Go get drunk in your cart,” Harry’d say.
    “Yeah,” I’d concur. “Go choke on your nightstick, filthy swine!”
    Then we’d give the poor fascist who was just doing his job the finger and flee into the riverbed.
    Mesquite trees rose from the sand like witch fingers. Pockets of tumbleweeds and other sticker plants tangled with pollen flowers and Bermuda grass. Bees and wasps and birds and the occasional coyote or javelina. Lizards and snakes and stinkbugs and paloverde beetles.
    The temperature in Arizona can reach a hundred and eighteen. At such times, the sun becomes a burning missile headed for Earth. Harry and I often removed our shirts as we walked.
    We sought refuge in sewer tunnels bored into the rocky banks. Used for runoff during the monsoons. We’d crouch in these tubular cement places and escape the heat, sitting with our backs against the wall and our legs propped up.
    Then I’d draw out the joint.
    In the tin on my mom’s bookshelf there was a metal roller, and I got good at tailoring jays, got so good there’d never be a run or a seed.
    I’d light the thing, suck in, and let the smoke burn my lungs. We’d pass it back and forth, taking turns seeing who could hold their hit in longest. I always won. What can I say, I’m the offspring of a hippy.
    Miraculous, the way it came on. One minute we were Harry and Dave, two kids sitting in the desert, ditching school, worrying about getting caught; the next we were floating away. Our consciousness expanded, everything dilated. Muons, atoms, and ions gathered around us, forming a translucent gauze, an orb, in which we were encapsulated, safe. A new reality, our own, one that belonged to us. Free of the ugliness of life. Free of the ugliness of humanity. We were liberated; we were flying; we were birds; we were masters of space-time.
    We were Kids.
    And then, when we were feeling that alive, more alive than I’ve ever felt in my life, you know what we did? We walked. Yep, that’s it. We walked and walked through a sandy river bottom. Just the two of us. Talking, laughing, telling jokes. The rest of the world nonexistent. Like conquerors of a foreign land.

* * *


    Needless to say, neither of us graduated high school. But we both got our G.E.D.s. And I later enrolled in community college and got involved in writing, journalism, and activism.
    But something happened with Harry. All right, who am I kidding, something happened with me, too. I got really involved in Leftist ideology. Would’ve made my mother proud had she lived to see it. I met new people, like-minded folks. Made connections. Began carving out a career.
    But Harry didn’t possess the same intellectual prowess I did. Not that he was dumb. He was street-smart, had uncanny commonsense. He worked as a mechanic for a while, was good with machinery and auto parts. He met new people, like-minded folks. Folks I’d call provincial. Got really involved with the Right.
    He started acting different. I’d go over to his house, pet his dog, sit down, have a beer. He’d be watching some sports game and I’d feign interest. But I really wanted to discuss books, ideologies, and philosophy. Neither of us smoked pot anymore, so we’d just sort of sit there with nothing say.
    He became a born-again Christian, started talking about Jesus. I was a self-proclaimed William Blake mystic, and though there was common ground there, we couldn’t seem to find it. He’d never read the Bible, whereas I’d read two-thirds of it.
    He began making racial comments. Offhandedly at first, then pejoratively, then blatantly. He hated blacks, Asians, Mexicans—this latter especially, since we were so close to the border. After 9/11 he hated, and I mean with a passion, anyone of Arabic descent. And anyone against the War on Terror.
    I’d read about McCarthyism, but to see it actualized really spooked me. There was such hatred in him. To me, it seemed like he was blaming all his failures on other people. I had spent much of my time analyzing myself (in a metaphysical sense), but he analyzed—no, critiqued—other people, chiefly other races. Even helped the Minutemen patrol the border at gunpoint, something I couldn’t fathom doing.
    We drifted apart.
    The last time I saw him—wow, that was ten years ago now—he’d been obsessed with this book. Kept trying to show it to me. Said it held all the secrets as to why the world was the way it was. Why the money wasn’t in the hands of lower-class proletariat Caucasians; why the World Trade Towers had fallen; why there was endless war in the Middle East; why Mel Gibson was a martyr; why The Passion of the Christ was more than just a film.
    The book was called The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

* * *


    Harry died last week. A mutual friend sent me a copy of the obituary and a brief letter describing his death. Also a copy of the death certificate (Lord knows why).
    The funeral is tomorrow. I’m not sure if I’ll go.
    Of all the people he blamed for his problems, in the end he was the author of his own demise. He’d gotten behind the wheel trashed on Jack Daniel’s and wrapped his Ford around a telephone pole. He was ejected. A blade of glass cut his throat.
    I don’t want to think about Harry like that. I don’t want to think about The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, or Mein Kampf, or any of those other books he was into. I don’t want to think about him sitting on his ass watching the football game, drinking a Budweiser, condemning both the Jews and the Arabs to death.
    I don’t want to think about that.
    That wasn’t Harry, know how I know? Because I remember a time when he wasn’t any of those things. When he was just a kid with a sense of adventure and an imagination. Before the ideology. Before the politics. Before the failures. Before the hate.
    Back when he was stoned out of his mind, walking beside me through the riverbed, giggling like a schoolgirl. That’s the way I want to remember him, because, to be honest, that’s who he was underneath.
    That’s who’s underneath all of us.
    And yes, I believe that.
    I have to.
    Otherwise, I could not bear it.


��

With a nod to Harlan Ellison.



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