Previously in Rebel Max’s Journal 01:
By the time we made it to the home of Wes’s grandfather…Wes and Valeria had both given me an open invitation to their home for dinner as payback for my generosity.
from The Encroachment of Things (click for issue)
The first time I got a chance to really talk to Cassandra Taylor, she was sitting in her garage with the door open, and she had a knife in her hand…
from Reinforcing Collapsible Furniture (click for issue)
I finally took Wes up on his dinner offer. He was happy that I was having success finding interesting stories and invited me to his house for a dinner party. He lived in the vicinity of the Pisgah Forest, around Asheville, with his girlfriend, Valeria, and he said that he was happy to meet my girlfriend and son.
The other dinner guest was Toby, … he worked with Valeria, with the telescopes in the forest…
from On Insanity (click for issue)
No one knows who V.I.V. is but it’s something like an honor to be featured in her underground newsletter that finds its way onto magazine racks all over Ladoga before management throws them away or they’re all snatched up by curious readers who look to V.I.V. for the stories she features about noteworthy citizens of the community as well as the abuses and failures of local political and community figures. Interested people say the newsletter started showing up around the year 2000, but that could just be people romanticizing it and linking it to the turn of the century, the millennia, to give it the force of historical relevance. I wasn’t aware of V.I.V.’s newsletter until recently…
from V.I.V. is Real Part 1: This and Other Things (click for issue)
Part 2
So many months ago, my family and I were guests at a dinner party hosted by my friend Wes and his wife Valeria. Recently, I invited them both to my place in South Charlotte for dinner. My girlfriend and I decided to get food from a Colombian restaurant that we both enjoyed to honor Valeria, who Wes had told me over the phone was feeling homesick for her native country. The restaurant is walking distance from my apartment and my girlfriend and I go there often enough that we speak Spanish to the employees and owner who know us by name. They are from Colombia and they had come to Charlotte in the late nineties because it was much quieter than NY and the mother of the family was well aware of the good schools in the area that she hoped her children would take advantage of. When I told them about Valeria, they all expressed their empathy, though they traveled to Colombia at the end of each year for Christmas, but knew that if they didn’t go often, they too would feel a pull towards the Andes. They made frijoles con garra special for Valeria and when she and Wes arrived at our apartment, she was so touched at our efforts to make her feel at home that she almost cried. They brought Valeria’s coworker, Toby with them, and I had invited my friend Moises who lived in Ladoga with his family, who came as well, and Cassandra who makes custom wood pieces that she sold at Ladoga’s only unfinished furniture store. She brought her oldest daughter, Mallory, who would be leaving for Wilmington on the coast for college in the fall. I asked the old crossing guard to come, but his health was failing him and he had been on bed rest for a while.
We drank wine and nonalcoholic drinks while we waited for everyone to assemble. My apartment isn’t big enough for a tour, so Mary and I just pointed to the two bathrooms that were available and let the smokers know that the balcony was available if anyone wanted to step out. My son is younger than Moises’s daughter, but they found something to occupy themselves and before long they were running and playing throughout the apartment, even though Moises and I would tell them to keep it in the living room every fifteen minutes. Moises has a thirteen year old son who sat quietly on the couch absorbed in his phone, or tablet, honestly it was impossible to tell from the size of it.
Mary was eager to show off her skills as a hostess in hopes of impressing Wes, who had thrown an enjoyable party at his house in Asheville. Before the party, Mary had mapped out four courses for the adults and three for the kids, and as everyone talked and introduced themselves, Mary covered the bar of our kitchen with Colombian finger foods; empanadas with beef and chicken, sweet plantains, fried pork skins. And she had made little peanut butter and jelly sandwiches that she had trouble keeping my son away from; he insists on PB and J everyday. For dinner we ate family style and while the trays of meat, bowls of rice, beans, and potatoes were on the kitchen table and everyone sat around them stuffing their faces, the room was quiet. Mary eventually replaced the containers of meat with cheeses and crackers, a bowl of grapes, and we opened another bottle of wine. By that time, the small kids were playing again and the teenagers were watching tv. Wes was telling Mary about an experience that he’d had at a bookstore in Asheville some months ago, and Cassandra and I were talking about the structural integrity of the entertainment unit in the living room, and Valeria and Toby both tried to explain to Moises exactly what it was they did at their job in the forest with all those huge radio telescopes. Moises wife, Gabriella, was listening also but before long she joined in on my conversation with Cassandra.
“The woman is a genius,” I told Gabriella and Cassandra dismissed it. “She only does that because it’s true,” I said.
“Did I hear them right over there, those two work with telescopes that hear space?” Cassandra asked, changing the subject to Toby and Valeria.
“It’s something like that,” Gabriella said, “but that’s how Moises understands it. Valeria said they received transmission from satellites and probes that they already have out there in space.”
“I don’t think I ever knew a real scientist before, unless you count my science teachers from school.” Cassandra said with amazement.
We focused our attentions on Valeria who was explaining to Moises the project she was working on.
“There has been a probe in close orbit to Jupiter’s moon Europa for decades now, recording relevant telemetry to transmit back to my computers that gives me workable data to construct models of the moon’s density and composition. It is not taking pictures, it is recording data that will allow me to refine pictures that are taken through other means. I can see a spot on the moon and determine from the numbers the cause of the spot; is it an aberration on the photograph, a change in wind patterns of the atmosphere, an eruption of some sort? Our telescopes and others like it help everyone understand the picture more precisely.”
Moises, Cassandra, Gabriella and myself nodded silently. I understood what she was saying but I can’t imagine understanding numbers and measurements well enough that I could use them to provide insight into a photograph.
“So, why do we need to know what’s happening on Jupiter?” Moises asked. “I understand exploring space if we’re looking for another planet to live on or something, but we can’t live on Jupiter, right?”
“You’re right and that’s a valid point, but we’re talking about Jupiter’s moon Europa,” Toby explained, “which we study in order to better identify habitable zones that can exists not only on planets, but on the moons of planets and possibly even asteroids. Europa is full of water and what we believe to be an ocean under a surface of ice, and it is very possible that life exists there because we have organisms on Earth that thrive in comparable environments. And even though we don’t currently do this, some theorize that once we identify these zones, it may be possible to cultivate them into a habitat for humans if we need to vacate earth.”
“I can’t help but think of it as a useless endeavor, Toby. If conditions on Earth become so bad that the choice to vacate the planet is our only viable solution for survival, then we are already doomed. We are decades, maybe centuries, away from developing technology fast enough to retreat to the next available, habitable zone. And if we cultivate zones too close to Earth then the calamity that lead to the evacuation is likely to affect habitable zones within the maximum traveling distance that human technology can take us before we expire on the journey. It is false hope until we learn warp speed.”
Valeria and Toby went back and forth for a while and we watched them like a very slow tennis match. I think I agreed with Valeria that the real value in studying Europa was to understand our own environment better because, “it is all the same material, all the same processes, but under different conditions, which can unlock some secret to make life on Earth better, with astute observation of course,” but she said many other things that went right over my head.
Cassandra and Moises liked what Toby was saying.
“I don’t wanna pretend that I understood everything you said, but Earth can quit on us before the space we can travel to gives out. And if it does, it makes sense to have alternatives. I want my tax money to pay for that kind of practical stuff.” Cassandra was pretty adamant. “And to be watching out for asteroids, make sure we don’t get hit by surprise.”
“What if we did have to evacuate earth, though?” Moises asked. “How many people could we really take?”
Both Toby and Valeria agreed that if humans evacuated, it would only be a small fraction of the total population.
“Are they scaring you with space talk?” Wes interrupted as he pulled a chair close to Valeria.
“It’s cool,” Mallory said from the bar in the kitchen. She took us all by surprise. “Are you gonna go to Europa, Valeria?”
“Oh, no, NASA would never let me do that. I am a brain, not a body.” Valeria laughed. “I wish I was clever enough to take credit for that, but my boss said that to me and Toby.”
“At least I can eat anything I want,” Toby said, grabbing his belly that was hugged tight by the buttons on his shirt.
Everyone laughed.
“Tell me you got a chance to read the first issue of This and Other Things.” Wes said suddenly. I told him that I hadn’t. I knew about it from talking to people who had seen it back in the fall of 1997, though none of them had saved it. “It’s online Max. I sent you the link!” Wes said excitedly. “The Hassan family added it to their son’s digital tombstone recently. I guess they had it floating around and uploaded it. Read it Max.”
“This and Other Things?” Gabriella asked. “I feel like I know that from somewhere. Mo, you remember when that kid from a few houses down got shot in the Bottoms, back in like 2011? His brother was a drug dealer. After he died that whole area was tense, black people and brown people fighting each other. I was scared to leave the house.”
“Yea, they made it something it wasn’t.” Moises said thoughtfully. “It was a shame that boy got shot, he definitely wasn’t involved with drugs, but he was in the wrong place. He didn’t get killed ‘cause he was Mexican though, so all the retaliation was uncalled for. People fighting over the wrong thing.”
In the summer of 2011, Ladoga was tumultuous and on the bus to school in the morning children were able to talk about the fresh, new act of violence that had happened in the Bottoms the night before. In retaliation for the 2011 murder, Mexican gang members did a drive by shooting at the house of one of the suspected shooters, but only managed to wound another innocent bystander. There were no more shootings, but fights would inevitably break out in the North side park when a ball from the basketball court would roll onto the soccer field and vice versa. Eventually, community leaders did what they could to repair race relations and violence subsided. It was the retired commander Harold Johnson who gave an impassioned speech at the community center in the Bottoms that restored some sense in the east Ladoga community. He pointed to the Hassan lynching as the recent past we were all choosing to be ignorant of. “Senseless, racial hate always leads to unnecessary death. And it festers, turns good men into monsters. Let’s be better than our worst nature, let’s not endure tragedy in vain.”
Gabriella recalled finding This and Other Things for the first time shortly after the 2011 murder. “I guess it was in a grocery store or something, but I remember seeing that front page, ‘One dead innocent black boy plus one dead innocent brown boy equals zero.’ It was true too, nobody got anything out of that.”
“My daddy would have a field day right now if he heard this.” Cassandra laughed. “He’s not the worst racist you’ll ever meet, but he ain’t open minded neither. He would say that that’s what minorities do, they sell drugs and kill each other. But I know it ain’t about that. Max, you know the barber. He told me what his life used to be like before he started making money like he is now, and he’s been through some bad times. And the one thing I notice about people who have it the worse, they usually don’t have parents around them, and I figure it seems like more bad stuff happens in places where people have less money cause the parents have less time to be real parents, too busy worrying about feeding all the mouths that’s hungry.”
“That’s part of it,” Moises said, “but it ain’t always true that Mexicans that live near or in the bottoms are broke. They got money, they parents told them how to get money, but they didn’t learn nothing else.”
Gabriella added, “I blame all this gangster culture kids get into in music or movies. They think it’s cool to kill somebody. It ain’t like mi hermano, Julio, he killed people before, he was a soldier in Iraq, but he don’t brag about it. He killed people that threatened all of us in this country, and it still haunts him to this day. People can’t understand what it’s like run for your life, to shoot somebody and watch them breathe for the last time. They think they know ‘cause of something they watched on TV or a video game or something, but that’s not what it is. Not if you talk to my brother anyway. I like free speech and everything, but we got to admit that people are desensitized and that’s why they shoot up schools and stuff. Kids get it in their head that a gun is a solution to a problem they have.”
“That’s true,” Wes said, nodding. “Everybody’s too afraid to get beat up. We’re so sensitive that we’d rather kill somebody than get beat up.”
“It’s all those trophies we got when we were young,” Toby said. He had underestimated the wine and was slurring a little. “I never got a single trophy in my life and you don’t see me causing any problems. Wes is nodding, he agrees with me.”
“I do agree,” Wes laughed. “Toby is right everyone. We got too many trophies and now we can’t deal with rejection.”
Moises said, “I didn’t get no trophies. You slow as I am you never see a trophy.”
“I got plenty, but I know I deserved them,” Mary said. “I never worked hard because someone would give me something. I got used to the promise of getting something and the disappointment of never getting what I had been promised. I worked hard because it was the only thing I could do to make sure I got what I needed and an award is somebody saying they saw me and they know how hard I was working.”
“Same here, Mary.” Gabriella said as she finished the last of the grapes. I was disappointed, but Mary refilled them, only, she gave them to Gabriella who continued eating them, holding the bowl in her hand. I was only bothered because I wanted a grape and I lost the train of the conversation trying to think of the nicest way to ask for the bowl. I thought to make a joke, but I was worried it could land wrong and derail the harmony of the room. Instead I said, “Can I get one,” which interrupted Gabriella who was in the middle of an explanation why she thought most kids today didn’t work as hard as our generation had to. “I’m sorry,” I said, slowly reaching for the bowl. Gabriella laughed and slid it in my direction.
“Like I was saying, everybody learns to spoil their kids. We are taught to work hard so our kids can have things that we couldn’t when we were young. So of course they grow up feeling like they deserve something better. And some parents take fights and stuff very seriously, they don’t want their kids to get bullied. So us parents give our kids this message that they shouldn’t accept getting beat up and some kids take that message too far.”
“It always goes back to parenting,” I agreed with a mouthful of grapes.
“Does it though? If that’s the case, I should be a lot worse off than I am now,” Mary said.
“I think there are bound to be kids who do better despite bad parenting, just like the ones who do worse despite good parenting, but I think if you’re looking for an answer to the question: what’s wrong with the youth, then a good place to start looking for answers is with the parents.” I was surprised when people laughed at my observation, but I was eating grapes the entire time.
“Well said my friend.” Wes offered me a paper towel as he said it; there were juices running down my mouth. “Don’t forget,” he reminded me, “you have to check out that link. You would think that after the city endured the lynching of Yusef Hassan that people would be more sensitive to racial issues and handle things better than they did when that boy was murdered in 2011.”
“Somebody got lynched in Ladoga? When was this?” Mary asked.
“It wasn’t really a lynching in the rope and tree sense, but it technically happened in SC where a gang beating can be charged as a lynching.” Wes explained. “It happened in 1997.”
Mary echoed the year in disbelief, “1997? What happened?”
“There was a boy named Yusef Hassan who lived in the Bottoms I think. His family was from Egypt or Jordan, I can’t remember. They moved there because it was cheap but they had this butcher shop in Matthews. Yusef was a good kid from everything people knew about him, didn’t get into trouble, was extra smart, he wanted to be a doctor. He was friends with the worst mayor in the history of the US, Ellison Colston, before Colston was a murderer.”
“Oh my God,” Mary said like a reflex. It was the name, Ellison Colston. Truly the worst mayor, possibly the worst person, in the history of the US; definitely the worst person in the history of Ladoga. In 2011, Colston, who was born in Ladoga and lived in the Bottoms in his youth, was elected mayor of the city. He was relatively young, but people trusted him because he had been an amazing student at Ladoga High School and actually managed to study philosophy, politics, and economics at the University of Oxford. When he came back to Ladoga in 2009, he rented an office for the perceived purpose of practicing law in downtown (the Daily reported that Colston never saw clients in that office, though he did serve as a public defender, and when police raided the office they found plans and materials for explosives). He ran for mayor in a special election following the death of the sitting mayor; it later became clear that Colston had poisoned the man in order to speed up his plans. Colston easily won the election, he was a homegrown genius and he inspired both sides of town as an articulate, attractive black man. On the day he was sworn in, Colston detonated a bomb that killed six city officials. He’d left a note in his office that explained that he was happy to avenge the death of his friend who had died unjustly, killed by a city of people who could have prevented it. Apparently that friend was Yusef.
“Yeah,” Wes continued, “but Yusef wasn’t a terrorist or anything. He was just really opinionated and he stood up for what he thought was right. He tried to clear some drug dealers away from his house and they didn’t like the way he talked to them. They kidnapped him, drove to SC, beat him until he died, and when police caught some of them that did it, they claimed they thought he was doing something weird and they needed to protect themselves.”
“No offense, but Ladoga sounds like a dangerous place.” Toby said, leaning onto his hands, elbows rested on the table.
“It is if you’re brown or black.” Moises said.
“It is if you try to do the right thing.” Cassandra said.
“It is if you let yourself get involved with the wrong things.” Gabriella said.
The conversation never recovered from Wes’s recounting of the events of Yusef’s lynching. We were solemn for a minute and then Mary served everyone a simple dessert of ice cream and pound cake. Soon after everyone finished we noticed the time and everyone prepared to leave. The young kids had fallen asleep on the couch and Mallory rested her head on her mother’s shoulder. As everyone prepared to leave, we found reasons to linger near the door. Mallory asked Valeria more questions about her job and the two exchanged emails so that Valeria could give her updates on new developments from Europa. Moises and Gabriella commissioned Cassandra to make a crib for the baby they were expecting. Wes and Valeria helped Toby up from his seat and to the door; he looked more sleepy than drunk. Wes was sure to congratulate Mary on a wonderful party that he hoped to repeat at his home with everyone in attendance.
After everyone was gone, and Mary and I were in bed, I tried to find Wes’s link, but Mary seemed upset about something. “Who talks about a lynching at a dinner party? I like Wes, but he knows how to kill the mood.” I could only laugh.
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