Junior year of high school: it was the best of lies, it was the worst of lies. It was the age of truths and the epoch of lies. Things that I previously thought were true felt like lies, and the lies that I told myself ended up being true. Sounds confusing, right? It was to me, too, but then I read The Importance of Being Earnest.
From the moment I read it, I adored Oscar Wilde’s play. I loved how it toyed with the conventional boy-must-overcome-obstacles-to-love-girl trope, balancing humor with tension. Wilde exposes the paradox of being true to yourself while wanting to be someone else (because who hasn’t wanted to be someone else?). The protagonist, Jack, pretends to be someone named Ernest; his love interest is infatuated with him only because of the name Ernest. It’s Wilde at his superficial and satirical best. Jack’s best friend crashes his country home and also pretends to be Ernest. Hilarity ensues! Mistaken identities! Secret adoption! And in a Wildean twist, the play resolves the comedy by having the biggest lie become true. In the course of lying about his name being Ernest, Jack finds out that his real name is Ernest at the play’s end. Marriage! Families reunited! Truths and lies are the same!
That was my junior year, and it was a bewildering one for me, too, but we should start at the beginning. It started out easily enough.
This was the truth: I was an asshole punk.
“Dude—check ’em out. This one’s yours, Phuc.” Pauly opened up his backpack stuffed full of T-shirts.
I couldn’t believe it. “No fucking way.”
Liam was stunned. “You made these?! Holy shit, dude. I can’t believe you made shirts. Is that … is that a pig on there?” Liam stripped off his Powell-Peralta skeleton-ripper T-shirt and put the new one on immediately.
We had convened, as many skaters as possible, at the Dickinson College library wall, and Pauly was handing out T-shirts that he had made. On the T-shirts he had drawn with permanent marker a crudely shaped pig and above the drawing, he wrote THE RUNNING OF THE PIGS—1989. The pig drawing, a grotesque slurry of Porky Pig, Elmer Fudd, with a dash of Garfield, doffed a policeman’s hat.
“This year is going to be the best one yet. These shirts are fucking awesome, Pauly.” Dylan was ready, his Pigs T-shirt pulled on over his clothes. Pauly beamed.
With stone benches, handrails, and high stairs, the Dickinson campus was a skater’s dream, and in turn, we skaters were the campus’s nightmare. We flouted all the posted signs that bellowed NO SKATEBOARDING. For the past three summers, we had convened on its campus daily to skate and conduct ourselves like the local louts. We would harass the nerds who went to the summertime enrichment camp, and try to pick up the ballerinas who went to ballet camp. We yelled at both groups from a distance, and the effect was equally fruitless to both. The nerds and the ballerinas thought we were townie assholes, and they were right.
The Running of the Pigs was our annual tradition, begun in the summer between eighth and ninth grade; 1989 was our third Running, and for us, it officially kicked off the summer. We would gather in the middle of the day on Dickinson’s campus and skate around until the campus police gave chase. We would skate away, and they of course would pursue us. Police cars would pull up, and we would disperse in one direction as a whole unit, as preplanned by the group. Rather than scattering in all directions, the unity of the large group enticed the officers to follow, which they always did. Since we were on skateboards, at some point, we would cut off on foot over a patchy piece of lawn or leap over a stone wall where the patrol cars couldn’t follow. At that point, the officers would stop their cars and continue their hot pursuit on foot, running after us, keys jangling, walkie-talkies squawking their locations, yelling and running and running and running until their personal resolve and/or cardiovascular health deadened their sprint to a trot, which was usually a ten- to fifteen-yard run.
If you could provoke a campus officer to get out of his car, the skate crew yawped with wild, boorish cheers because you had successfully run the pig. It was a stupid, intensely hilarious prank, and it lasted only about fifteen minutes before security gave up and we skated off to do other things of varying legality (hopping fences to skate a loading dock, figuring out who could buy beer, stealing snacks from the gas station). It would be a summer of lite malfeasance.
But first, we had to run the pigs.
1989’s Running of the Pigs was off to a tremendous start. We brandished official T-shirts this year, an auspicious omen. We took turns at the handrail, and right on cue, campus security showed up. Squad cars—four of them this year! Running over the steps along the campus walkway toward a low wall, we jumped over the wall and had shaken the pigs. No one had run a pig yet, taunting them as we could. But then as Pauly and I rounded a corner, an extra security officer on foot grabbed Pauly in a bear hug.
Fuck.
I stopped to see what I could do, but he had grabbed Pauly’s board, too.
And then I felt my right arm twist behind my back as a second officer lunged and caught me. The pigs were striking back this year. We were fucked.
Downstairs, in the campus security office, Pauly and I clanged into metal folding chairs. We had never seen this part of the Hub building, and if it were not for the red-faced security officer in front of us, it would have looked like any other Spartan windowless air-conditioned office.
“You two are going to be in a heap of trouble.” The officer wielded a clipboard in front of him with some mystery paperwork, apparently the requisition for the aforementioned heap of trouble. “Are you kids the ones who have been stealing clothes from the dorm dryers, too?” We were.
“Of course not. What would I do with a pair of acid-washed girl’s jeans?” Pauly was provoking the officer because he had, in fact, stolen acid-washed girl’s jeans a few months earlier. I sat woodenly upright so that my Running of the Pigs shirt could be clearly seen. I had not been addressed yet, but I was eyeing both of our confiscated skateboards behind his desk.
“What are your names? We’re going to call your parents and have them come pick you up. We’ll discuss filing charges with the Carlisle Police Department for trespassing. Big trouble.” This was not going to go well for me. What was I going to tell my parents? From the coarse straw of reality, my mind was spinning all the golden yarns for why I was arrested by campus police.
Thank God for Pauly, who spoke up. “You’ve caught me before, so you can save yourself the trouble of filling out that sheet. You guys already have a sheet for me.”
“We do? What’s your name?”
“Tony. Tony Hawk.” I looked at Pauly. Did he just say Tony … Fucking … Hawk? Tony Hawk was the most famous pro skater of all time. I pretended to rub my face in remorse but held my hand over my mouth to hide the grin, because I had the privilege of being arrested with Tony Hawk.
The security officer was relieved not to have to fill out more paperwork. “Hawk? Like the bird?”
“It might be under Anthony, I guess. Anthony Hawk.” Pauly could not suppress being a wiseass.
The campus officer picked up the phone. In the muffled trill of the phone ring, cradling the receiver with his elbows on the table, the officer scribbled other notes on the arrest report.
No answer on the other line. “God damn it … I’ll be back.” He stood up and stormed out.
Pauly and I looked at each other, and we both swiveled our heads in disbelief. We were alone in the room, the student center’s central-air vent making a frosty wheeze. We listened closely but didn’t hear the officer in any adjoining room. The office door was open. Wide-open. Our skateboards lay there behind the desk. I knew what Pauly was thinking because I had the same plan.
RUN.
Our gazes connected with a desperate click before he leapt out of his seat, with me barely a breath behind. The metal folding chairs screeched as they skittered on the linoleum from the force of our leap, and I winced knowing that the noise had given us away. In two long steps we were behind the desk with our skateboards in hand, and without making another sound, we were shoulder to shoulder, sprinting out of the office, up the stairs, running as fast and as quietly as we could.
Outside the office, the vending machines blinked a blurring wall of COKEPEPSIDORITOSCHEETOS as we rocketed by them and up the stairs. The summer silence of the building amplified the panicked thudding of our Vans. Through the student commons, our sneakers yipped on newly waxed floors, and we strained for the door at the end of the hall that led to the outside. We thought we heard the jingle of security keys behind us. Fuck. It was a straight shot down the hall, and we were hurtling at top velocity.
For no good reason, I started yelling like a moron. “GOGOGOGOGOGO!” I was laughing from terror and audacity, the sunlight outdoors in our view. The double doors throttled as we threw our bodies into the crash bars. The sunlight burned us as we squinted and stumbled, blind from the air-conditioned fluorescent bowels of the Hub building. I heard the loud clack of Pauly’s board. We were wheels down. Across the campus. Behind the dumpsters. Down a walkway.
Furiously kicking up Louther Street, we skated and skated and skated. Pauly was making a strange whining giggle, which made me laugh even more as we both kicked away on our boards, hee-hawing like a couple of asses.
We wove an extra zigzag, cutting down alleys and up the wrong way of one-way streets until we got to Liam and Dylan’s house, our rally point.
Shawn spied us a block away. “What happened? I thought you guys were right behind us?”
I was heaving from our biathlon of Sprinting and Skating, a goddamn Olympic effort. Gold medal. Pauly was still laughing, lips moving, no words coming.
“What happened to you two?” Everyone was pressing us for details, since we had missed the rendezvous at the 7-Eleven.
I was doubled over. “Dude … we got caught … by the pigs.”
“What?!”
“Yeah … but we fucking escaped.…”
“What?!”
“Yeah … escaped … ask … ask … Anthony Hawk over there.” I pointed at Pauly, who, upon hearing the name Anthony Hawk, hooted even harder, his tears glittering in the June sun.
We spilled the story of our detention and escape to the crew (Pauly and I dramatized various parts and dialogue in our midsummer’s afternoon comedy), and they were speechless except for a series of punctuating profanities: “Are you fucking kidding?” and “No fucking way!”
Dylan confirmed that a few officers had, indeed, chased the crew on foot. Mission accomplished. The summer of 1989 was off to a spectacular start. We had run the pigs.
In June I quit my job at the Coral Reef in the mall and got a job at the Bosler Library as a library page. Kevin, the Coral Reef manager, had started limiting how much reading and homework I was doing at the Reef, and if I couldn’t be paid to read or to do my homework, then I was inclined to get a job that seemed less servile and a little more dignified. My parents (my father especially), always aware of our perception among our family, were excited at the apparent prestige of working at a library as opposed to a Tiki-themed smoothie bar in a dying mall. They told all my relatives on the phone and at gatherings that I was working at the Bosler Library now. I thought it sounded impressive, too, but the truth was that I perused books and thumbed through all the magazines I wanted, and I got paid to do it. A few of my friends had landed jobs pumping gas, dishwashing, or landscaping, but the library was tailored for me and my goal to read more books and authors.
Through the summer, in the absence of assigned books for English, I read more works by authors we’d already read (including Dickens, Hawthorne, Emerson) or just randomly picked up novels that seemed to be in heavy circulation that summer of 1989 (Tom Robbins was a highlight).
With an official, engraved name tag that said Phuc Tran, Library Page, I filled the screechy steel book cart, reshelved returned books quickly for twenty minutes, and wandered the stacks for forty minutes, all out of the library marms’ sight. It was glorious. The smell of oaken shelves. Well-thumbed hardbacks. The deep canyons of paperbacks. The solitude.
I strolled in the towers of tomes, walking in the stacks like Thoreau walked the woods, memorizing the Dewey decimal system, helping various library patrons find a book on plumbing, a guide to North American birds, the novels of Gay Talese (whose name always made me unexpectedly thankful that my name was Phuc). I wasn’t the best or most diligent page, but I was certain that I loved working at the library more than the other two pages. Emotional investment counted for something, right?
In late June, I got a big assignment. Janet, one of the librarians, showed me to the basement. “We’re having the annual discards sale at the end of the month, and we need to move all these onto the first floor.” The basement bulged with cardboard boxes full of books. Hardcovers mostly. Heavy, heavy hardcover books. “We’ve been pulling books and records off the shelves for the past year to sell—these are books that have not been checked out in over three years. We need to make room for new acquisitions.”
“Holy smokes! That’s a lot of books.”
“It’s a good fund-raiser for the library and a nice way to send the books off with people who want them. We need these upstairs by the end of the month. Claire has a bad knee, and many of these boxes are too heavy for the staff to carry, so it’s up to you.” She didn’t ask me—she declared that it was my task, skirting around the obvious statement that the all-female staff was asking me, the fifteen-year-old boy, to do the heavy lifting.
For the next two weeks, I spent my shifts panting and huffing the boxes from the basement, flipping every single box open to see what books weren’t being checked out. Gardner’s Art Through the Ages. Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Introduction to Philosophy. It seemed strange that the metric for the discard pile was public circulation, since they couldn’t prove that people didn’t just come to the library to read. My father certainly did that, and I did it, too, as a child—we’d come to the library to sit and read several books in an afternoon without checking anything out. But there I was now in Bosler’s bowels: a book’s circulation was its only vital statistic, the lifeblood of its relevance.
The discards were loosely organized by Dewey decimal, since a staff member had systematically gone down the aisles and pulled them. Mixed in were donations from library members. Families moved away, estates were liquidated, spring cleanings coughed up unread editions—all of this filled the bins in our alcove donation box.
And then I found the book. In an unmarked, random box, a yellowing spine caught my eye. The Lifetime Reading Plan by Clifton Fadiman.
Reading what? Plan for whom? I picked it up and looked over the cover, which claimed to be a guide to over one hundred of the greatest writers and thinkers of Western civilization’s literature. Clearly Fadiman was a humble and modest man. I flipped to the table of contents. Homer. Aeschylus. Sophocles. Dante. Machiavelli. Montaigne. Shakespeare. Descartes. Milton. Hemingway. Melville. Dickens.
Some authors I recognized, others I had never heard of. I started to skim the introduction from Fadiman. He lamented the times, the customs: the iconoclasm of the sixties, the upheaval and overthrow of social institutions, the audacity to question the Western canon. Nothing was sacred anymore. This was the result of tuning in and turning off. He bemoaned that no one was interested in being an “all-American” boy or girl anymore but declared that these books were the foundation for being “all-American.” He wrote with a zealot’s fervor. Fadiman was not soft-pedaling or excusing himself. I trembled as I read the entire introduction in the basement. He was speaking to me. All I wanted was to be well-read and all-American, and now—now I had the book.
On my next ascent to the surface, I found Janet. “Hey, Janet. Am I allowed to buy any of the discards before the public sale?”
“Of course. Did Claire not say that? And as library staff, you get half off.”
“Half off? Really?”
“Yup. For you, fifty cents for a hardback and twenty-five cents for paperback.”
I had The Reading Plan in my hand. “Could I buy this now?”
“Sure thing. Fifty cents. You can pay Claire at the end of your shift.”
I went home with The Lifetime Reading Plan jammed into my army surplus backpack.
That night, I reread Fadiman’s introduction to his lifetime reading plan, his idea that any civilized person in the Western world should read these books, that these one hundred and four books were the foundation to any educated person’s knowledge, a common touchstone with other cultured people. Fadiman’s defense of the authors and titles was unapologetic. If people called him stodgy and old-fashioned? Fuck ’em. Well, that’s not what he wrote, but that was the introduction’s tenor. This was his well-informed, well-read opinion, and if people thought that he didn’t include so-and-so author or this-and-that book or included too much of what’s-his-name: well, fuck ’em. The introduction to The Lifetime Reading Plan was unflinching and steely. I thought it was so … punk rock (for an old white guy). I liked this Clifton Fadiman.
Reading over the list of authors and titles, I girded myself. My own reading was no longer an aimless expedition in a literary wilderness. I had a map. I had a goal. I was going to start reading these books. Fadiman said that I didn’t have to read them in any particular order, that I could read what interested me or what I could get my hands on. Some of his descriptions sounded riveting and others sounded dull. Maybe I would understand a book or maybe I wouldn’t, but Fadiman encouraged me to reread the books that I didn’t grasp. Maybe they would make sense to me later in life. Good advice.
I read through the entire Lifetime Reading Plan that weekend, and at the end of the month, at our library’s discard sale, I spent my month’s aggregated paychecks (almost $150) on discarded books of all varieties: histories of art, guides to literary criticism, anthologies of poetry, Faulkner, Thurber, James, The History of the Peloponnesian War, and on and on.
By the end of the sale, I had over a dozen boxes full of books. When my father picked me up, he was simultaneously horrified and delighted. “This is a lot of books. Why did you spend your money on books that you can just check out from the library for free?”
I didn’t have a reasonable answer, and since running away, I had been keeping my conversations with my father brief. “At least I’m not spending my money on records. These books are just getting thrown away. It seemed like a good idea to buy them.”
“Thrown away?! Geez … who throws away books? I’m glad that you got them then.” To my father, I was saving books from being euthanized, preserving humanity’s accumulated wisdom and achievements from the trash heap of indifference. Back in circulation, back from the dead. He griped no more as we loaded the boxes into the car to take home.
From the driveway, Lou helped me lug all the boxes into my room.
“These are a lot of books. Are you going to read them all?” Lou thumbed through a few, intrigued by the cartoons on a Thurber cover.
“Not right away, but they’re nice to have. It’s good to be able to look things up, and I’ll try to read them all someday. I can’t possibly read all these books in one summer.”
He pawed through a few other boxes. “What are they about?”
“All sorts of things. Everything. Literature. Poetry. Art.”
“Everything?”
“Well, everything that’s interesting to me.”
Lou shrugged and went back to watching TV. I looked at my bedroom and surveyed my collection of books. I had the start of my own library. My bedroom now had a distinct, literary smell to it. I sank into my reading chair, and reread the introduction to The Lifetime Reading Plan, buoyed by Fadiman’s passion for books and ideas. This was what it meant to be educated, to be American. The Plan allowed you to be part of an intellectual conversation that was hundreds of years old, and all you needed to do was read the books. Fadiman and his books didn’t care where I was from or how much money my parents made or what language I spoke. The table was set and a seat was open for anyone willing to read the books—the books were both the invitation and the price of admission.
In between the lines of Fadiman’s introduction glittered, for me, the promise of acceptance and connection and prestige. I’d be seen as an equal, as an intellectual—and as a well-read American. I felt certain of this given what was already happening in my classes. Kids were starting to refer to me as the book guy, the literature guy, in spite of how I looked or dressed. Courtesy of a newly opened vintage store, Classic Rags, my secondhand chic of plaid blazers, leopard-print creepers, and old-man shirts didn’t connote literacy, but I was cracking their expectations (and mine) of who a so-called literature person was or looked like.
I rummaged through my books and picked one out. Up first to bat: Faulkner. First name? William. I didn’t know who this person was. As I Lay Dying. What was this about? I was about to find out.
That weekend, Liam called to see if I wanted to go out. I lied and said that my parents wouldn’t allow me, but in fact I hadn’t even asked for permission to go. I knew that Liam just wanted to drink and get shit-faced at Scully’s apartment, but I was starting to question what that would do for me anymore in the long term. We were about to enter eleventh grade, and then we were graduating the following year.
For the first time, I began to face the deflating and disappointing reality: my punk crew didn’t have any real or reasonable aspirations for getting out of Carlisle. We all talked about leaving, but that refrain of “leaving Carlisle” was a broken chorus. Few of us were actually laying the foundation to get out, choosing instead to focus on getting laid or drunk.
My scholarly appearance was garnering more attention from other students and some teachers, but outside of school, my crew was still my crew. Going to shows. Getting wasted. Occasionally skating. Our cycle of skating, drinking, and going to shows was a plan for Saturday or for next week, but what about next year? And the year after that?
I realized that I needed a long-term farsighted plan, and I saw Fadiman as the knockout in my one-two combination. By reading through the books covered in The Plan, I’d hopefully gain some knowledge and, at the very least, sound smart, and maybe this might help me get into a good school after graduation. Then I could finally leave Carlisle and go to college. If reading a few dozen books made me the literature guy, being able to talk about all the lifetime reading plan books seemed to have endless potential. I’d be able to name-drop so many writers and their works without even actually reading them. Molière. Descartes. Marx. I read The Lifetime Reading Plan and its book synopses again.
Those two quarters for Fadiman’s Plan were the best I ever spent.
Like many Smiths fans, I was introduced to Oscar Wilde through Morrissey’s lyrics. I was also introduced to Keats and Yeats the same way. On the Smiths’ magnum opus, The Queen Is Dead, Morrissey makes allusions to Keats, Yeats, and Wilde, and now that I had an anthology of English poetry, I could read the poems that Morrissey read, see what he saw, feel what stirred him. Our crew was divided on the Smiths, half of us declaring that they were horrible and sounded like suicidal Muppets and the other half of us loving them and Morrissey’s misery.
I would never meet Morrissey, but at least we read and enjoyed the same things, connected by poetry and prose. Just as Fadiman promised, that was the power of literature, and beyond that promise of connection, I adored Wilde’s writing—his plays, essays, novellas.
I savored his aphoristic precision, his ruthless satire, and irreverent humor, but above all, his courage to fuck with Victorian morality—he was punk rock in the same way that Thoreau, Emerson, and other intellectual renegades were punk rock. Victorians said go right. Wilde went left.
I bought and read Wilde’s complete works and then devoured Richard Ellmann’s biography of him. From there, I read other writers who had influenced him—Ruskin, Pater, and Huysmans. I referred to or quoted Wilde every chance I had in English class.
That October my English teacher, Mrs. Krebs, pulled me aside after class. “You like Wilde, right?” She had a sharp, toothy smirk and a breezy sarcasm.
“Yeah, just a little. I’ve only read everything he’s written.”
“Oh, so you probably don’t care that Messiah College is putting on a production of The Importance of Being Earnest, right?”
“Really?” Sarcastic cease-fire. This was my favorite play by Wilde.
“Yes, really. You, of all people, should go.” From her pine-green planner, she produced a small flyer with Messiah College’s theater production schedule.
I looked it over. “Thanks, Jane.” She shook her head when I said Jane.
“You’re welcome. And for the umpteenth time, that’s Mrs. Krebs to you.”
A few weeks passed, and Mrs. Krebs checked in again about the play. “Are you going to see Earnest this week?”
“Oh, I can’t. I don’t have my driver’s license yet, and I don’t think any of my friends can take me.” The first part was true, but the second part was a lie. The truth was, I didn’t want to ask any of my friends to take me. The punk crew sitting through a production of The Importance of Being Earnest at Messiah College? No way. “But I did reread the play though. It would have been great to see it—thanks again for letting me know.”
She frowned. “What if I took you?”
“Huh?” My heart fluttered both at the prospect of seeing the play and going with my favorite teacher.
“Would that be okay with your parents?”
“Yeah, I’m sure it would be. But, uh, you really wouldn’t mind driving me?”
“No, of course not. It just seems wrong that you won’t see this play after everything I’ve heard from you about Wilde this and Wilde that.”
I laughed. “He’s very quotable. I can’t help it. ‘The only thing more forgettable than a quotable person is an unquotable person.’”
“Did he say that?”
“No, I made that up.”
Her eyes crinkled and we laughed.
Mrs. Krebs picked me up after dinner on Wednesday night. Under the impression that I had won an award or had been deemed worthy of some honor, my father insisted on accompanying me out of the house and thanked Mrs. Krebs for taking me to the play. “Oh, it’s really my pleasure—I know how much Phuc loves Oscar Wilde.” My father bowed dumbly.
The production was done in period costume, and the actors’ theatrical accents varied from Scottish to bad British to a loud, accentless stage voice. The walls of the set swayed when the doors closed. The woman who played the elderly aunt was clearly in her early twenties. Was it amateurish and uneven? Yes. But was I disappointed? No. In fact, I was exhilarated.
Wilde’s words thundered as they flew from actors’ mouths. I laughed at every joke that I thought I had gotten and laughed even harder at the jokes that I had missed in my reading. I had been a starved boy who had filled himself by reading the menu, and now, at the play, I was feasting on the real experience.
When the cast bowed, Mrs. Krebs and I stood and clapped, long and loud.
On the ride home, Mrs. Krebs switched off the radio. “Wasn’t that great?”
“That was … so amazing. Thank you so much for taking me.” Could she see the tears in my eyes?
“What did you think of it? I haven’t read Earnest in a while.”
“Um … I thought it was great. I was surprised by how quickly the actors spoke—the dialogue sounded so much better than it did when I read it myself.”
“It’s great, right? When the production is different or better than what you imagined?”
“Yeah, especially when I had just read the play. It makes me think that only reading plays but not seeing them isn’t really experiencing the play at all. At least, not as it was intended by the playwright.”
“I think you’re absolutely right—it’s like reading the sheet music for Beethoven but never hearing it played. I think you should see every play you can for that reason. Reading a play is only a half measure.”
I nodded. “So how should you really teach Shakespeare? Are you doing it wrong?”
“Maybe I am doing it wrong!” She laughed at my contrived insolence.
“No, Jane—I think you’re doing it perfectly. Seriously though. I’m being … earnest.”
She needled me, chuckling. “Well, thanks for your approval. And I don’t care if you’re riding in the front seat of my car: it’s still Mrs. Krebs to you.” The short drive home was filled with what was the significance of…? What did you think of…? Was that how you imagined…?
In the dark of the car, illuminated by teal light of the digital clock, I looked out the front passenger window. Mrs. Krebs listened to what I had to say, and she replied with thoughtfulness and care as if she were speaking to an equal. In her tone and engagement with me, I was uplifted from the lowly caste of teenagers and felt for a moment like a valued, adult counterpart. I wasn’t relegated to the back seat, as I often was in my parents’ car.
She dropped me off, the ride too short.
As I got out, I thanked her. “Well, you know what Oscar Wilde says: ‘The only thing worse than the final curtain is a vinyl curtain.’”
“I’m sure he didn’t say that. See you tomorrow.”
“Thanks again, Jane—I mean, Mrs. Krebs. It was fantastic.” I waved through the passenger window.
I entered my house, jittery and excited, sparkling from my conversation with Mrs. Krebs. Was that what it felt like to connect with another person over a shared love of something? It felt similar to how I felt after seeing bands or slamming in the pit, but it was more … electric. Seeing punk bands and moshing with your friends felt dangerous, and afterward, the adrenaline rush was a slow downshift to your heart rate’s baseline. But that was seeing a band. Having the bass line surge through you. Thrashing in unison with the audience. It was purely physical.
But seeing a play? I sat for two hours with my hands in my lap, and at the end of it, my heart raced just as breathlessly.
On top of that I felt connected and cared for by Mrs. Krebs. I felt known and seen, not for being Vietnamese but for my passions and ideas. For the first time in my life I felt deeply understood; the realness of that connection, of that brief exchange, ignited a thin, bright comet’s tail in the dark horizon of my adolescence. This connection was what Fadiman was talking about. This was the power of sharing in great literature. I felt as euphoric as I had ever felt, and I didn’t need to pound any beers or smoke any weed.
My parents asked me how the play was, and I mumbled a quick okay and made my way to my room, neglecting to share my excitement and enthusiasm with them. They hadn’t been to a play, read any Wilde, nor known about Victorian England. What did my family really know about literature or theater? Ironically, the arts were connecting me to strangers, and yet they widened the already yawning gulf between me and my family.
I sat down at my desk, still giddy, to plow through my homework, when Lou interrupted me. “How was the play?”
“Oh, it was cool. Really cool.”
“That’s so weird that Mrs. Krebs took you.”
“You think so?”
“Kind of—a teacher taking some student to a play?”
“I’m not just ‘some student.’” I mocked Lou’s dismissal.
He shrugged. “What was the play about?”
“The Importance of Being Earnest? Well…” How could I summarize the play for a thirteen-year-old? “Well, it’s about these two British guys who pretend to be people they’re not so that they can do what they want and marry who they want to marry. They’re upper-class Englishmen. Everything is kind of backward and sarcastic, so they totally obsess over things like cucumber sandwiches but make fun of things like marriage and honesty. And there’s a joke in it about being named Ernest. They both lie about being named Ernest. But at the end of the play, it turns out that one of the guys who’s been lying about being named Ernest is really named Ernest.”
“That sounds weird.”
“I didn’t do a good job of explaining. I have it here. You can read it, you know.” Lou shrugged. “I guess you could say that it’s a play about lying about who you are only to find out that the person you’re pretending to be is who you really are.”
“Still sounds weird.”
I was annoyed that Lou’s questions were sinking my buoyant mood. “I have to do homework now. Can you close the door?”
Lou lingered in the doorway. “How do you lie about who you are and then turn out to be the person you were pretending to be? That doesn’t make any sense.”
“Maybe it’ll make sense when you’re older.” I turned back to my reading. Lying about who you are? It made a lot of sense to me.
I thought about the end of the play as Jack discovers that he is, in fact, Ernest: “It is a terrible thing for a man to find out suddenly that all his life he has been speaking nothing but the truth.” The lie that he’s been telling himself and everyone is true, and it felt as though my ruse to appear well-read was becoming a reality. I had started reading books last year to appear well-read to my classmates, and in the pursuit of appearing well-read, I had begun to love the classic books.
This revelation precipitated other questions: Could I still be a punk—an outsider—while yearning to be accepted in the classroom? Could I love reading and books while being part of the punk scene? My crew was unwaveringly punk and decidedly anti-school. I didn’t know how to square my growing, bookish side with punk rock, and loving both felt like a lie, like a paradox, that only a plot twist could fix.
Authenticity was punk’s most important tenet, and I contemplated what exactly was authentic for me, a Vietnamese teenager in small-town PA.
What part of me was the real me and what was the façade? In architecture, façades were the fronts of buildings, but they were no less a part of the building than the basement or the roof. Perhaps, like its architectural meaning, my façade was my exterior but still a real part of who I was, like any building whose front hid its inner chambers and their delicate treasures far from unfeeling passersby.
In 1989, racism (and racists) came in all shades and colors. Some of it was of the red, white, and blue Confederate variety—the Rebel Stars and Bars were a regular sight in Carlisle—but other times, racism lingered in a gray area, its machinations not as easy to spot as a fluttering flag; sometimes, it was staticky and hard to make out, forcing us to wonder if what we experienced was really racism or if maybe our antennae were a little bent, out of tune, and not perfectly dialed in. The way someone looked at us, the volume at which they spoke to my parents, the compliments on the quality of my English: most of the time—no, all of the time—we nodded and smiled. We had to. It was easier that way.
My parents never used the word racism or racist to name the slights that befell us. In their minds, our occasional mistreatment rippled outward from a national animus toward the Vietnam War, the painful spasm of a country’s collective memory. We, the Trầns, just happened to be the stinging reminders of that war, and that collateral prejudice was our lot—it was the price we paid to be alive. My parents were gracious and long-suffering in their journey, believing that people weren’t racists—they just hadn’t taken the time to know us yet. More than a dozen years after our arrival in 1975, they felt that our lives were better, and they were more comfortable in Carlisle. Better Englishing. Owning a home. Good jobs. Less staring. Things were improving for them, and Lou and I almost believed it, too.
But then the skinheads came. Sort of.
Not literal skinheads but the idea of skinheads stalked the punk scene. Lou (who was becoming a junior varsity member of the skate and punk crew) and I heard about these white power skinheads almost as soon as we learned about punk rock: what they looked like, what they listened to, what to do when you met one. The Dead Kennedys’ song “Nazi Punks Fuck Off” deepened the mythology of fascism and racism in the punk scene.
White power skinheads. They had shaved heads, wore Doc Martens with white or red laces and braces (suspenders that never actually held their tight jeans up), and sported Iron Crosses (a World War II German symbol), swastikas, or other German nostalgia pinned to their flight jackets. There was a mythology about the colors of the laces and their braces, and every few months, we learned a bit more about the symbolism: red laces and braces meant that they were allied with the National Front, white laces and braces meant that they were white power, black laces and braces meant that they were unaffiliated, independent skinheads. All subcultures relied heavily on the symbolism of their uniforms, and skinhead culture was no different.
At keg parties and on curbsides, we all discussed what we would do if we ever encountered white power skins, which always resulted in some version of fighting them. We met some independent skinheads at a Doylestown show and learned about the non-racist, multiracial origins of skinhead culture in England.* Two friends in our group, Scully and Dean, shaved their heads and bought flight jackets, christening themselves skinheads. Scully was black and Dean was white and having a black skinhead (and a Vietnamese punk) in our crew made our politics clear. Our crew was not racist.
We’d heard about an organization of skinheads in the Philly and D.C. areas who actively fought the white power skins—they were called SHARPs (Skinheads Against Racial Prejudice). They drove white power skins out of their scene, beating the shit out of them at shows. Liam and I talked about how neither of us wanted to be skinheads, but we wanted a piece of that fight.
At punk shows, we were always on the lookout for white power skinheads, but the rumors that those skins would come always preceded their absence. We heard tales of white power shows in Lancaster, York, and Harrisburg, but in Carlisle and at our small shows of twenty-five or thirty kids, the skinheads were a story that we told one another to hype ourselves up, filling our minds with stories of a big bad wolf that never came. The actual fights at the shows were with other punks and asshole kids from other towns, teenage scuffles over ego and turf; the fights were never that primal fight against Nazis.
We called them Nazis, tapping into the allure of that last good war (even as we rejected all the other trappings of the Boomers). It was easy to hate Nazis. We could all envision punching Nazis, guilt-free. The Von Trapps did it. Indiana Jones did it. Surely a few skate punks in rural PA could do it, too, if the Nazis ever dared to goose-step their way into our sleepy corner of the Susquehanna Valley.
The subculture chatter about Nazi skins erupted into the national conversation when Geraldo Rivera hosted them on his talk show, conveniently airing after school on ABC. Lou and I watched, transfixed by seeing real-life Nazi skins on TV, espousing all the simplistic racist ideologies we expected. A fight broke out on the show and in the melee they broke Geraldo’s nose. Geraldo came back from the commercial break, dabbing his swollen face, blood on his shirt. Nazis—fucking Nazis!—were real.
My imagination’s gunpowder keg was stuffed full of myth and fear in addition to the real everyday racism I had endured. The Nazi skinheads were cardboard stand-ins, two-dimensional cutouts of the deeper and more complicated racism of our town, of our America. It was easy to imagine punching a Nazi and ending racism, like checking it off a cleaning list. Dust the curtains. Vacuum under the bed. Punch a Nazi.
It was against this entire backdrop that we encountered Mason.
That fall of 1989, a new kid moved in at the end of our block. He had the markings of a redneck: all denim all the time, mullet, wrestling sneakers, Metallica T-shirts, and Marlboros falling out of his pockets. He had big, boyish features on his man-sized head and a sparse hint of facial hair.
Lou and I didn’t introduce ourselves. We kept our distance from rednecks in general, but we spotted an Iron Cross on his Levi’s jacket, tucked in among buttons of Iron Maiden and Black Sabbath.
Mason hadn’t said or done anything to me, and it was too early in the school year for me to decide who needed to be punched or not, but Lou—Lou decided that Mason was a Nazi. Mason was the proverbial Nazi whom we’d been waiting to punch.
“Did you see his Iron Cross?” Lou asked, determined.
“I mean, maybe he’s a Nazi. We don’t know for sure. I’m not gonna punch someone who I suspect is a Nazi. I mean, what are you going to do: Ask him?”
We had no plan for determining what or who was racist.
Lou, however, being in eighth grade, did not hear my question’s ridiculous rhetoric. “Good idea. I will ask him. Plus, I heard from other kids on the bus that he said he was white power.”
“What? Really? That seems made-up.”
“I’m gonna ask him tomorrow. At the bus stop.”
“And then what?”
“If he says yes, I’m gonna punch him.” The logic, though simple, was airtight. Ask a Nazi, punch a Nazi. Whac-A-Mole fascism.
The next morning, Lou and I headed to the bus stop. Lou carried a roll of pennies in each hand because he heard that punching someone with rolls of pennies in your fists would hurt more. The air crackled with a late-November chill.
Mason, standing almost six feet tall, waited at the end of the street, headphones on, cheeks ruddy, his faded denim attire elongating an already thin frame, his hair still damp from a shower.
The neighborhood kids were queued up for the bus, which was still fifteen minutes away, and Mason leaned against the stop sign at the corner, his head hunched over, his Walkman blaring. Lou and I fell in line at the back, but Lou suddenly dropped his backpack and cut in front of the other kids. I followed him.
The kids protested the line-cut briefly, but when Lou and I flanked Mason, they instinctively drew a perimeter. Kids know when a fight is coming.
Lou reached up and tapped Mason on the shoulder. Mason slid his headphones off.
He looked at Lou. “Hey, what’s up?” It was friendly enough. He didn’t sound like a Nazi.
Lou wasted no time. “I heard you were a Nazi. Is that true?”
Mason seemed startled by the question’s timing at seven thirty a.m. and its lack of preamble. Lou was not fucking around with the school bus only fifteen minutes away.
“So are you? Are you a Nazi?”
We expected yes or no. No would result in a peaceable retreat. Yes would result in a punch in the face.
Mason looked at us both. “Well, I used to be.”
Used to be? What the fuck was I supposed to do with used to be? I had no idea. Used to be meant that he was no longer a Nazi, based on what I understood about verb tenses. Did that warrant a fight? I wasn’t sure what to do, even as I stood by Mason, ready for a fight. The actual fight was now a grammatical fight in my mind about …
Thwack! Lou punched him as hard as he could—the blow made Mason totter. Catching him off guard, Lou landed a few more punches in spite of his being much shorter. Mason counterpunched Lou a few times awkwardly because of the height difference, and one blow split Lou’s left eyebrow. Lou grabbed Mason’s jacket sleeve and kicked him hard in the ribs, doubling Mason over.
Mason’s nose was bleeding, and his face was red all over. Folded in half and clutching his side, he wheezed. “I don’t want to fight anymore.… What the hell, man…? What the hell was that all about?”
Lou’s brow was pouring blood down his face, and I gestured to my own brow to alert him. “You should go home and get cleaned up—there’s a lot of blood.” He touched the side of his face and looked at his hand, drenched in red. We saw the school bus approaching from the top of the hill.
Lou picked up his backpack and scowled at Mason before heading home. The bus rumbled up as Lou slipped out of sight.
Mason gathered his backpack, and the half dozen neighborhood kids, a mix of middle schoolers and underclassmen, were still standing in the fight circle, shocked into silence by the dawn’s early fight. Unsure of who was in the right, no one offered to help Mason or Lou, and they kept their distance from me, too.
The bus doors clacked open, and Carl, our bus driver, called out. “You kids okay?” We all nodded, but Mason’s bloody nose and pummeled face told a contrary tale.
Mason and I nodded. “Yeah, we’re fine.” The other kids who were at the bus stop were terrified by the scene that had erupted. I scanned the line, but they all gazed at their shoes, refusing to meet my stare. Everyone filed onto the bus in silence, maintaining the strict kid-code of secrecy.
Mason sat in the seat in front of me on the bus, and we rode to school in a tense, contorted silence. I saw his brown hair matted in front of me, drying except for the lowest ends of his mullet. His headphones had come back on, but I didn’t hear any music coming from them, and I suspected that Mason hadn’t even pressed play on his cassette player. He turned around. “Your brother’s a tough son of a bitch—he punched me really hard.”
Was he complimenting me? Complimenting Lou? Or just making the most awkward school bus conversation ever? What were you supposed to say to such a remark? I had to say something. “Well … well, don’t be a fucking Nazi.” He turned around in his seat without comment.
When I got home later that day, my parents both yelled at me. Lou sat at the kitchen table, a bandage over his black eye. He looked worse than when I had seen him that morning, the fight having settled into purple and green splotches on his face; now he also had five stitches above his eye under the bandage. I learned that he had called my dad at work that morning and told him that he needed to go to the hospital, lying about falling down or something. Eventually, when Lou’s injuries made it seem as though he had fallen down the basement stairs only on his face, he told my parents that he had gotten into a fight at the bus stop.
My mother’s anger, rarely revealed, was pointed in contrast to my father’s reticence. “Why didn’t you help your brother?! You’re his older brother! You’re supposed to protect him!”
I protested. “Wait, what? Lou was winning the fight! He won that fight. I wasn’t going to step in when he was winning!”
“That’s not the point! He’s in eighth grade! You’re his big brother! His big brother! You don’t let him get punched!”
“But he was winning!”
My father intervened. “It doesn’t matter! You let someone punch him!”
“But Lou started it!”
“You let him get beat up!” My mother wouldn’t let it rest.
Lou didn’t say a word, sitting at the table, crestfallen, waiting for dinner, which would begin after my mother was done roasting me.
I looked at him, avoiding further argument with my parents. “Dude, you’re a legend. Everyone heard about the fight. You beat up an eleventh grader! That’s what everyone’s saying.” I didn’t know how much of it my parents would appreciate, but I hoped they would take comfort in Lou’s reputation. I was proud of him.
But he felt no pride. Lou avoided engaging me and mumbled a simple, “Oh, really?” He was angry—pissed that I hadn’t jumped in with him to punch a Nazi. Betrayal. Lou had gone out there with his fists wrapped around penny rolls to crush a Nazi, and I, his older brother, stood dumbly by trying to parse the grammar Nazi.
We didn’t talk after dinner—I had homework to do, and he watched Perfect Strangers and Growing Pains, alternately icing his knuckles and his purple eye. Growing pains, indeed.
What you don’t think about when you’re planning to punch a Nazi is what to do after you’ve punched the Nazi. We still had to ride the school bus every day with Mason. The following week, on the bus in front of everyone, Mason stood up in the middle of the aisle.
“Hey, Lou and Phuc! Look!” He showed off his backpack on which he had written in black permanent marker NAZI’S FUCK OFF.
We looked at it and shrugged. I noted the misuse of the apostrophe but didn’t see the point in beating him up about his writing mechanics, too. “That’s … cool.” We still thought he was a dick for having ever been a Nazi, and now that he said he wasn’t, were we willing to leave him alone or even be neighborly to him? We didn’t know. This was far more complicated than the cartoonish justice of smashing him with the punk rock, and we didn’t know how to talk about that complexity.
When I arrived at the high school, I found my way to our crew’s meeting spot, which was across the street from the school so a few of them could smoke with impunity.
Philip, dragging hard to finish his breakfast Marlboro before class, broke off his conversation with the others. “How’s your brother doing? I still can’t believe he fucking beat up that Nazi prick. So fucking badass.” The other boys nodded their assent.
“Yeah, he’s okay. His face is still pretty busted up.”
“You and Lou should just shave your heads and be skinheads. Join the SHARPs.”
“Nah, that’s okay. I mean, I like Oi!* just fine … but skinheads aren’t for me.”
Philip twisted his boot on the ground to extinguish the discarded butt, baring his teeth to grin. “Yeah, but you guys could be like Asian power skinheads.” Liam chuckled at the idea, and Philip was pleased with himself at the joke. “Yeah … fucking Asian power skins! Instead of white laces and white braces, you could have … uh, you could have yellow laces and yellow braces!” Everyone laughed.
I shot back. “Why stop there? Why don’t I just have noodle laces and noodle braces?”
The whole group erupted with laughter and gave me high fives. I had won the game by hating myself most.
The bell rang for homeroom, and we lumbered across the street. Philip put his hand on my shoulder. “You know we’re just fucking with you, right? Fuck those Nazis. Racist assholes.”
I assented silently. It was easy to hate Nazis because they were racists. But us? We weren’t racists—we were the ones who fought racists. As we walked into school, I felt disappointed with myself and with my friends. If we wanted to fight white power skinheads, why did my friends also make racist jokes? And why did I have to make racist jokes about myself?
The truth was that we were against racists, but it felt like a lie sometimes, a lie that everyone told themselves—everyone including myself.
What was the lie and what was the truth?
I walked across Dickinson’s campus and found the professor’s office. I had entered one of the grand limestone buildings, and it wasn’t to vandalize or steal anything. I wasn’t there to run any pigs. I encountered a large oak door with privacy glass and his name on a placard. Professor Ralph J. Slotten. Religion.
“Helloooooo?” The door was open, and I rapped on the glass.
“Hello? Yes?” Professor Slotten, in the flesh. Tall, Norwegian-looking, piercing blue eyes set wide, large brow, a shock of white hair, and a slouch in his shoulders that looked as though he had forgotten to take the hanger out of his blazer. “Hello, young man. How may I help you?” He looked exactly as I imagined a college professor would look, and for a moment, examining his desk and framed degrees on his wall, askew but prestigious, I wondered: What the hell was I doing there?
I gathered myself. “Hi. Ummm … I’m a junior at Carlisle High School. And, uh, I’m wondering if I could audit your course? I picked up a course catalog at the Hub building and saw that you’re teaching a class on comparative Nordic and Celtic mythology. Could I audit that class?”
His glasses were so thick that I couldn’t tell whether he was looking at me or not, but his eyes seemed to meander in my vicinity. He smiled. “Ah, well, that’s interesting! I’ve never had a high school student audit a course. Why did you pick my class? Are you interested in comparative religion or mythology?”
“Well, I am definitely interested in religion and mythology. I’m interested in a lot of things—actually, I’m interested in pretty much everything. And I’m in the National Honor Society, so I’m a pretty good student, but to be honest, I just want to challenge myself more—see how I fare at the college level. I found out that a kid in my high school is taking an Ancient Greek class here at Dickinson, so I wanted to take a class here as well. But I am really curious about Celtic and Nordic mythology, and I don’t know anything about comparative studies, and if you don’t know anything about a subject, that should be the best reason to take a class on it, right?” He smiled and nodded as I rambled. “And to be totally honest: it’s the only humanities class that fits with my high school schedule.”
He laughed at my candor, flensing the truth from my shambolic introduction. “You want to keep up with that Greek boy, huh? You think you’re just as smart as he is?”
“I don’t know if I would say that. Honestly, I wouldn’t even say I’m smart. Socrates said he was the dumbest person in Athens, but by virtue of acknowledging his stupidity, he was the wisest.” I had recently read a synopsis of Plato’s Dialogues and used my newfound knowledge to impress the professor.
Professor Slotten’s face widened with delight. “Oh my goodness. Are we comparing ourselves to Socrates, then?”
“Oh God … not at all. I’m no Socrates. More like … Mediocrates.”
Laughter. An auspicious omen. “Well, very good then. You may audit the class. What is your name, my witty friend?”
“Thank you so much. Thank you. I’m Phuc.”
“Ah, Vietnamese?”
“Uh … yeah, actually. Exactly. I guess Vietnamese American, if you wanted to be totally accurate.”
“Welcome to the class, Phuc.”
He jotted down my mailing address, informing me that he would mail me a syllabus (I didn’t know what that was) and a list of books that I would need to purchase at the campus bookstore before class started. I shook Professor Slotten’s hand vigorously and thanked him again for the fourth time.
In the brittle blue of the faded January afternoon, I clomped across the Dickinson campus, whited out with piles of snow. College students, bundled and bustling to their rooms, crossed my path. I almost felt like one of them. The glow of the Hub building warmed the palette of an otherwise muted midwinter day.
I remembered the last time I went through the double doors of that building, feeling the memory’s irony. The last time I had seen those doors, I was crashing through them as Pauly and I ran away from campus security. I was one of the barbaric townies, stealing clothes from dryers and vandalizing the campus, and now Professor Slotten let me enroll in his class. I made an impassioned and earnest appeal, and he seemed to understand what I was trying to achieve—or at least, the person I was trying to be. But who was that, exactly?
I was a Vietnamese. I was an American. I was an artist. I was a reader. I was the punk townie who stole jeans from the dryers. I was the punk townie who wanted to audit a religion class.
I began to wonder why I felt like I had to choose one thing over another. I was all of these things. I was a plurality. And I was one thing, one word. I was who I said I was. I had said to Professor Slotten: I’m Phuc. I circled back to my name, the only Phuc I had ever met and the only noun I had for who I was.
Phuc. That was enough to be the sum of who I was and who I would be. And it would never be a lie. I just had to find the courage to be him and ask myself why I was afraid to be Phuc.