Korê in New York

What happens when a kid refuses to leave the past behind? What happens when the past won't go away? Read on and don't worry about the emotional damage.

1. Stars in their Heads

   “Ooooooh yeah! It looks beautiful!” cried Chin from the front of the stage where she looked like she was about to fall off, and Chin stood there without a harness. A big, wide stage was after all not a batten high in the air. Chin stood before the silhouette of the New York skyline. It was just one silhouette but it had landed perfectly.

   “OK, Kore, cue  up the music and let’s go!” she called out.

   The first bars of Manhattan Skyline began to play. The song had been in a movie before either of us were born. The movie was called Saturday Night Fever and it had been somewhat revolutionary for older grownups like RoAnn and Mom. Dad in an email to me from parts unknown said he hardly remembered it, but “dance music” had never been his thing.

   I ran the lighting program. The projector put the silhouettes in all the right places. Now all we needed was the dance troupe, but the troupe was having their lunch break somewhere saner. They were actually eating. I empited the dregs of my Dr. Pepper in front of my locker as I got my books for my afternoon class.

   Drama club on Thursday was mostly sitting around and studying. I had plenty of that to do. I wore the safety harness just in case. I owed Chin and promised to do any batten work if she needed it or to help her in any way since she had helped me so much at lunch by standing in so I could get the program straight. Two days of hard work was longer than anything should have taken, and this was my first time being person up front and in the booth.

   This was also Chin’s first time. I watched her small group with their horrible play about marital discord. It didn’t sound quite like my parents fighting, but their fights as I remembered them had been what I now realized was psychobabble. In my seven and eight year old brain they had been big, ugly words, like silver missiles armed with lethal barbs. I won’t say what I compared those barbs too, but I thought of it now and laughed.

   “You’re fucking smiling, Bihar, you must be up to something,” Javonovich quipped. He was a senior. He was going to Renseleer Polytechnic Institue “far away from the fucking city,” he said with a smile. “No riots. Engineers, folks who are serious about their fucking work,” but right now Javonovich could take it a bit easier, being that his bright future was made. No one’s bright future is ever made, I thought.

   “I’m busy,” I told Javonovich.

   “Yeah, but you’re thinking about something.”

   “I think every day, what’s the fucking big deal?”

   “Yeah, but you don’t smile every fucking day. You’re always so fucking depressed, I could swear you are an emo or something and that scares me.”

   “She’s no fucking emo,” Micah snarled. “She’s a girrrrrrrl.”

   “It’s fucking private,” I answered.

   “Like fucking private parts?” Javonovich goaded me.

   Just then the fight on the stage fell silent and we were plunged from our shadowy realm in the wings into semi darkness. “Fuck!” complained Javonovich.

   I put down my books, grabbed the tool belt, and a spare bulb in a box with handles made from a plastic bag, made for the ladder to batten three. The big, hot, spot had blown. Down below the leading man in Chin’s group and the director were chewing a new one into Javonovich and Micah. “I thought you had those lights tested!”

   “The lights are fucking old pieces of shit.”

   “Why arent’ they being fixed?”

   “They are, that was Wang’s best friend climbing up to do it. You’re crew person won’t get her hands dirty.”

   I just kept climbing. Not only was the bulb on the big spot blown, but I decided to check its wires. It had been too soon for the bulb to blow that violently. Fortunately, someone below had put on the emergency lights for me so I could see what I was doing. I had to strip and splice wires while everyone else waited around. Below I could hear the director for Chin’s group abusing his cast in a nasty voice that reminded me of Philip, the boy with leather pants and a psychological exemption from dress code, at Houghton. I pushed away the memory and kept working.

   Then I backed away down the batten. I couldn’t drop the box because the stage was full or was it. “Heads up!” I called out.

   “She’s going to drop an empty cardboard box. Get out of the fucking way!” Javonovich interpreted.

   I dropped the box. “Test please!” called out Chin who could speak for herself.

   Down went the lights and on came the spot. I climbed down. I felt light headed. Javonovich was waiting for me. “Beautiful work, Bihar, fucking beautiful. You always gonig to work for Chin.”

   “She helped me get the projector straight at lunch,” I explained. Even tough talking Javonovich could understand a work trade. I watched Chin’s troop stage a mock fight with lots of crying and pain. I thought of the night Barry finally bailed. I think Mom cried. I know Kyril watched sports on TV and said nothing. Even then, I knew to avoid him. Was I afraid of him? Did I just have nothing to say? I remember thinking: “ugly.”

   I dug out my books and tried not to listen to the mock fighting on stage. That play must give the kids in that troop nightmares or else they all go home to tranquil, two parent families, I thought.

   I reached Main Hall around seven thirty in the evening. We were just going to meet up and go home. Nervy needed her dinner, a shower, and then bed. The rest of us had work we could do at home and… I saw the huge, outdoor stage, complete with lighting on the sidewalk near the main entrance which was open for night classes. The crowd was thick enough to almost stop business, but blue shirted, ECBAS volunteers kept a passage through it at one point wide enough to allow entrance and exit. Business went on and so too did the show.

   Caren Fish, last falls, American Hot Teen Model, was lecturing on parental abuse. “You don’t have to listen to your parents just because they’re older. In fact, many of them have learned the WRONG lessons. Parents can be abusive like Dr. Testa.”

   At the name Dr. Testa, the crowd which was made mostly of kids booed and hissed. It was a large crowd and it looked a bit young for Columbia students.

   I backed away toward the bodega. I wracked my brains. Where could one park buses in this part of the city? I walked several blocks before I found them. I was not looking for the drivers. I wondered if they still talked about whipping kids into shape or whupping their butts. Did I wish they had done it? Would it have been effective? At a certain point abuse cancels love. I thought of Kyril. I thought of my own family where RoAnn had stopped long before that point.

   Instead I wanted something else, something old that I hoped wouldn’t be there. The license plates on the buses were from all over. Some were from Florida. One was from Texas, another was from Tennessee. The diesel fumes from idling engines made me sick.

   I knew I had to look for the drivers. I found them in a coffee shop that was still open and where a tired Latino counterman glanced through the plate glass looking for hordes of returning kids so he no longer had to be “too busy.” The drivers sat at the old wooden counter, drinking third rate coffee in blue paper cups with a Greek design on them.

   They came in all shapes and sizes, including a female driver with a mouse brown bun. She aws overweight and wore a dark green uniform with a burnt orange t-shirt beneath it for warmth or a personal touch. I liked that. I asked where she was from and she mentioned I town I did not recognize. “It’s in Massachussetts up near Lee.”

   “Did you drive all the way from there?” I asked.

   “No, my run was from Grenwhich in Connecticut. You come in on one of the buses?”

   I handed the driver my business card.

   “You’re one of the enemy here,” she said.

   “No I’m not. This is Columbia University,” I smiled.

   “Yeah but that crowd outside. It could turn ugly.”

   “It’s just a bunch of spoiled kids,” said a lean faced African American bus driver.

   “Yeah, but the spoiled kids have taken over,” a small yellow faced driver answered.

   “Excuse me,” I asked, “but did any one drive in from Scraton, Pennsylvania?”

   “Are you lost?” the female driver from Massachusetts asked.

   “No, I have relatives in Scranton.”

   “She can’t be lost. She’s from Brookly,” said a fat, pasty faced driver with a crew cut.

   “Yeah, I drove in from Scranton. What d’you want to  know, young lady?”

   “I’d like to know if a Barry Blunt was on the bus. He’d be one of the adult chaperones.”

   “You mean Barry, the football coach, back when there was football?” asked the driver.

   “The one and only,” I replied.

   “Yeah, he was on my bus. He’s one of the ones gets the kids to skip school now. I dion’t know why the district didn’t fire him, but there was a big fight about whether kids could goof off and get away with it. My wife home schools our kids now cause of it.”

   I nodded sympathetically, and wished the night outside was cold, but it was late April in New York, and nights were no longer frigid. The world could no longer drown in snow.

   On the platform of the small stage, Troy DeVilliers had the mike. Standing next to him was his new wife Bari. I thought of how last fall, the police had raided his apartment. Now Troy was really a star. “You don’t deserve to be one,” I thought.

   “I’m going to give all of you a little mathematics lesson. Don’t worry. This kind of math is useful.” Troy smirked. “Only one in every seven kids is with Young Achievers!”

   I long series of whoops and cheers went up from the bused in audience. “Kore! Kore!” a voice called out. I turned to find Ivanna and Nervy standing not far away. I edged toward them.

   “Now here in New-York-State thanks to you-know-who, it’s one in about every four kids is with Young Achievers, but you know what those kids are — a min-or-it-y. And majority rules. We rule! You can’t run a world or a college for a minority. It fails. We’ve won. We just have to keep winning….”

   My legs felt like rubber as I climbed the stairs to the third floor to find RoAnn’s office. Ivanna and Nervy were with me. “How’d you get outside to watch?” I asked my sister.

   “Mom let me,” Ivanna replied.

   “Mommy said it was not violent,” Nervy echoed. When had RoAnn turned into my youngest full sibling’s mother? The answer was probably some time since Mom had dumped her with RoAnn and Dad but mostly RoAnn.

   “I want my crayons!” Nervy demanded.

   “There’s no time for crayons. We’re going home,” RoAnn amerged from her office. “Kore did you enjoy the performance downstairs?”

   “Which performance,” I wondered.

   “No,” I replied.

   “She’s a tool,” quipped Ivanna.

   “So am I,” RoAnn quipped back to her daughter.

   “I want to draw!” Nervy protested.

   “You can’t draw. We’re going home,” RoAnn tried to discipline her newest daughter. If Ivanna could lose her step, RoAnn could become Nervy’s mother. We rode the subway in nervous silence. Nervy did get out her crayons while I set up the relish tray and made lunches. RoAnn had all ready  had Kapor’s deliver to the service desk in the basement and Ivanna went down to get sandwiches for the other half of the family. I was glad Flemming, my favorite door person, was not on duty.

   I had to call Nervy from the study for dinner. “Want to see what I made?” she asked me. Nervy was experimenting with still lifes and figure drawing. Nervy’s picture featured men and women on what clearly looked like a stage. It was a very realistic picture except for the stars coming out of everybody’s head as if they were about to explode.

   “Those are all star people on the stage,” Nervy explained, and part of me wanted to laugh, but the laugh stuck as a lump in my throat. “Yes, Troy DeVilliers, Bari DeVilliers, and Caren Fish are all stars, but that doesn’t make them good people,” I explained.

   “Awwwww…..” cut in Ivanna. “Hey I got some good news,” she added.

   “I can use some good news,” I answered. Actually now that I thought of it I had good news of my own. “I passed my audition and I start dancing at Halston Studio on Monday. I’m in the Advanced Beginner class. I’m dancing at Halston!”

   “Congratulations,” I said, and I meant it.

   That night when Nervy Worm went to bed, I asked her: “Does Ivanna have stars coming outof her head too?”

   “Not yet,” she told me. “You have to really be famous to be a star person.”

    I did not answer. I had work to do. I did not want to think about how close Barry had been or that he might be looking for Kyril. Maybe Kyril would just drive him away. Maybe I only fantasized about the past, except it really happened. Anyway, dancers have stars coming out of their feet not their heads. Nervy’s image of Troy, Bari, and Caren adorned the refridgerator door. Something about it, the symbolism, tickled RoAnn pink. RoAnn was always brave. “I’m in the study if you need me,” I told my youngest sibling. I really did have work to do.

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