Richard Young and the Fury of White Men.

The Question of Modernity. America’s Bastard Children

Kamas, UT

 

Richard didn’t want to hurt anyone. He didn’t want to kill or even seriously maim or injure anyone. But he wanted to make a point. He’d tried writing letters to politicians. Going back to school. Seeing a therapist. Working hard. But the son-of-a-bitch of life just kept coming at him. Whether it was the devil or God, he did not know. But he was being tested. That was for goddamn sure. And he was not sure if he could survive the current trial for much longer. His mind, like the truck he was currently driving through the mountains, would occasionally slip into another gear.

He rolled up the dirt driveway, the daylight fading. Piles of firewood surrounded his home in the Uinta forest. He thought about how he could light them all and turn his entire A-frame house into a funeral pyre, with him inside. A forest fire generally sparked interest in the life of the person who started it.

See? That’s exactly the kind of shit he never used to think about.

Suicide? Death? Fire? Yet it seemed to him as though the entire world was already burning.

Richard grabbed his bag and got out of the truck. A “Don’t Tread on Me” sticker and a military veteran sticker both plastered on the back window. He threw all his crap inside, pissed, and then decided to split some firewood before the sun went down. He grabbed his axe from the shed, and then placed a log on top of a larger swath of wood, a section of a larger felled tree that served as a chopping block. Richard brought the axe down quickly, severing the log into two split pieces. Then he grabbed another one.

The final straw in this so-called life for Richard was a hospital bill in the amount of $499. It had arrived last week. This bill was for a total of three psychotherapy sessions he’d had done in the summer. Three! Each one containing three separate charges—an intake fee ($115), psychotherapy for thirty minutes ($89), plus an office visit charge ($39). His insurance had covered one session ($89), not much in the grand scheme of things, but the bill still totaled to $410. There was no way Richard could pay that shit. This did not even include the cost of Richard’s prescription, which he was running out of. Alas, no more meds for Richard. No more cognitive behavioral therapy. No more lifetime integration. No PTSD counseling. There was no money for it. He’d tried counseling, so you couldn’t say he hadn’t tried, and was swiftly tossed out of it. He tried to go to the VA, but well, the VA was fucked. He thought about shooting up the entire insurance agency along with the psychiatrist’s office, but no, it was too reactionary. They were pawns in the larger systems of things.

Richard split two more logs. Sweat coursed from the top of his shaved head, through his army-green bandana, and cascaded over his chin and into his thick black beard where it was caught for a second, held, and then fell to the ground, splattering into a million molecules. Hitting the ground like the desert camo and brown bodies of men he’d seen collapse in the Mesopotamic sun years ago in America’s longest running war.

Richard had enlisted in 2008 just after he finished high school. The economy was terrible and there were no fresh job prospects. “Go to college, take out loans,” they all said. He was glad he hadn’t. Richard might not have loved working manual labor or in the service industry, but at least he didn’t have student loans.

Splitting wood soothed Richard. He had an anger in his body. Sometimes he felt like this anger would be the death of him. It was why his marriage had fallen apart, why he’d been discharged from the military, why his son and daughter wouldn’t talk to him. Even though he had a gas-powered log splitter that made the work easier and more efficient, Richard would often use his axe. That this wood brought in some money, as sold to local campers and fishermen on their way to Mirror Lake, didn’t hurt.

A rusted motorcycle—a softail Harley—sat strangled in weeds in Richard’s front yard under a carport. He had bought the motorcycle not expecting to lose his job. That was well over a decade ago. He’d been a chef in his previous life, before that Chinese virus had shuttered the economy. Then he worked construction, but the company he worked for had gone clean under, all new construction ground to a halt. As the economy withered, the housing project they were working on sat dead empty for five years. The green forest slowly overgrew it, just like his motorcycle. Large boulders rolled down the hill and smashed into the skeletal framing and, still, the house just fucking sat there. He drove by one time and the only signs of life he found were needles, spoons, and used condoms. The decimation of rural America was nearly complete. Who cared? Not the politicians, that was for goddamn sure.

Jobs then came and went for Richard. He lost his health care one year and could no longer obtain pain pills for his back or anti-anxiety meds. Money was thin, sometimes nonexistent.

God, how quickly a decade could slip by. How he wished he could just get on the motorcycle and go. But Richard didn’t want to disappear. He wanted to make an impact. A violent one. The American Way.

After thirty minutes of chopping wood, he went inside and grabbed a beer, the pain in his lower back returning. His phone dinged indicating a voicemail. Rare. He swiped up. It was a voicemail from his son, Lucas. He pressed play.

“Hi Dad, just wanted to call and say hey. Hope you’re doing okay. Haven’t heard from you in a while. I know we haven’t talked in a minute, but I got some news I’d like to share with you . . . I’m not mad at you anymore, you know. Mom and Marian might never want to see you again, but I still do. Please . . . call me back.”

He ignored the voicemail and flipped on the TV, watched the news anchors talk about some so-called “Supervolcano,” and the abundance of wildfires and evacuations. Fires in Idaho. Fires in Montana. Fires in Oregon and Washington and Colorado and California and Wyoming and British Colombia.

“An increase of lightning strikes? Global warming or climate change? Lack of clear cutting and forest mismanagement? Irresponsible campers and teenagers with fireworks?” asked one of the newscasters. Richard shrugged. It was late August. Fire season in the West. It happened every year. The media thrived on chaos.

The next segment was on the upcoming anniversary of the War in Afghanistan and a promise to continue coverage on the evacuation underway near Yellowstone. Some coverage of police and anti-fascist protests in Portland, Seattle, New York, and LA. The mention of civil war on the horizon. Richard changed the channel. He sat in the living room, alone with the blaring of commercials for antidepressants and various streaming services, Law and Order reruns washing over him.

His birthday was coming up and Richard had no plans to celebrate it.

After he was done with his first beer, Richard walked toward the kitchen to grab another one, his old Red Wings thumping on the hardwood floors. He unlaced them, leaning against the kitchen counter to do so, and grabbed another beer, bottle instead of a can, and reached into the drawer left of the sink for a bottle opener.

He’d done his best hadn’t he? Richard popped off the bottle cap and took a sip. He didn’t know anymore. He’d been a shitty father. He’d been a shitty human. He was just now realizing it. Did this self-awareness of how shitty of a person he’d been redeem him? Probably not. He wasn’t going to change. If anything, he was going to commit one last act. He was going to make someone pay attention. And then he would go away. And the world would go on. Or not. He kind of hoped it wouldn’t. He felt like something in the air was changing, the air itself close to igniting. Some ember was all it took. Or perhaps it was something new in the ground. The shifting of tectonic plates. The feeling signified disaster. Fire. Smoke. Ash. Perhaps this Supervolcano really would do everyone in. Perhaps it would be a strange mercy.

Richard didn’t want to hurt anyone. But he still wanted to make some mark on the world. Say, “I am here. I exist. I will not go quietly into the night.”

His back started to hurt, and so he walked over to another cabinet and unscrewed a white cap from an orange bottle and popped a pill of oxy into his mouth—it was, fuck, his last one?—and swallowed it with a sip of cold, foamy beer.

After all, wasn’t this conclusion of violence par for the course for men like Richard? Shouldn’t he follow suit in the same direction as other disillusioned, angry white men like him? Isn’t this what ex-military men with domestic abuse charges and anger issues and failing careers and possibly a light form of PTSD and depression were put on the path toward?

He walked back to the other drawer to put the bottle opener back inside. Lying just to the right of a roll of duct tape was a Smith & Wesson 66 Combat Magnum. He picked it up—the gun heavy and cold—and carried it with him back to his seat in front of the television.

He took a sip from his beer, held the gun up to his head. He couldn’t remember if it was loaded. He didn’t care. He’d do this often, just to remind himself that he could end it at any minute, usually after one or two nightmares.

Richard undid the safety and pulled the trigger. He heard the click of an empty chamber. His body began to slip and swirl under the influence of alcohol and poppy.

He thought of a summer in his youth when he had gone to Waterworld in Denver one summer. There was a water slide there shaped like a giant toilet bowel. You entered from up above, sliding on your butt through a long, dark tunnel before entering a swirling chamber of water that shot you around in circles, lower and lower with each spin, until you plopped out the bottom into a small pool with a tiny splash. He felt like that.

Outside, the ponderosa pines and blue spruces swayed in the wind and smoke. The haze would probably thicken throughout the week. But Richard didn’t want to hurt anyone.