We Contain Multitudes Read online

  Adorning myself to bestow myself on the first that will take me,

  Not asking the sky to come down to my good will,

  Scattering it freely forever.

  A beautiful sentiment, isn’t it, Kurl? Risky and beautiful. And, in the spirit of being real and true, I would like to divulge something Walt never could admit to directly, in his day, for fear of recriminations: I’m gay. My sexuality has never been something I’ve tried to hide.

  Does being “out” make for a thornier social life? Quite possibly. The unfortunate reality of homophobia is already announcing itself to me two weeks into the new school year. There are certain members of my cohort—certain little JOs, Kurl, in your parlance—whom I hoped might have matured over the summer and thereby lost interest in me and whatever vague and intangible threat I seem to represent to them. Instead the interest seems keener than ever. But hiding and lying takes considerable energy, too.

  Lyle, in any case, is strongly queer-positive and always wholly supportive of me. It’s another aspect of his heroism, I suppose.

  The bell has just rung, Kurl, and my hand is cramped from writing nonstop for fifty minutes straight.

  Yours truly,

  Jonathan Hopkirk

  PS: I’m enclosing Part 14 of “Song of Myself” in case the quotation above didn’t make any sense on its own. Sorry about the woolen fuzz along the creases. I’ve been carrying it in my trousers pocket for the back-to-school transition, but I’ve more or less memorized this section of the poem at this point, so I’m happy to pass it on.

  Thursday, September 10

  Dear Little JO,

  I’d never pick you out of a crowd? I mean are you sure?

  So the day after Khang hands around that second batch of sophomore letters to us I’m walking down the hall as usual. There’s a cluster of the usual little JOs. All laughing, especially the girls, and watching a couple of guys kick a book back and forth to each other across the floor. Pages flying everywhere. And there’s this one particular little JO even smaller than the others running back and forth after the book, going, Very funny, okay, joke’s over, come on guys, give it back. This high sort of squeaky voice.

  This little JO is dressed up in some kind of costume, it looks like. A white shirt with a high collar buttoned all the way up, and suspenders crossed at the back. I mean he looks like a character in a historical novel. A chimney sweep or something. I’m thinking maybe he’s in the school play, auditioning maybe, only I don’t think they do auditions until after Christmas.

  So this small guy keeps reaching down for the book one second before it’s kicked away. At one point his hand gets nailed pretty hard by one of the little JOs’ shoes but he doesn’t even pause, just shakes out his fingers and sort of scrambles across the hall to try to intercept the book again. This continues—and I have to say it’s pretty painful to watch—until Mr. Carlsen, the Business and Tech teacher, steps into the circle and picks up the book, takes a quick look at the spine and goes, Major British Poets. Young people, I fear for your generation, I really do.

  Of course all the little JOs are laughing their asses off. Except for that littlest one. His face is all flushed and he’s out of breath. He goes up to Mr. Carlsen and sort of scrapes his hair off his forehead and sticks his fists on his hips. Like after everything that’s been happening, now he’s finally found the one thing worth getting upset about. He goes, Actually, sir, I would argue that poetry has real relevance to our generation if you can learn to take the poet on his own terms.

  I mean it’s not exactly rocket science to figure out which one of the little JOs in this scenario is Jonathan Hopkirk.

  And I have to say your big confession about being gay is also not as much of a shocker as you probably thought. I figured that one out right around the line May I call you Kurl? Not to mention My passions are live music and poetry. I hate to break it to you but normal high school students don’t have passions. They don’t have mottoes and personal philosophies. They don’t have manifestos written by historical gay poets.

  You getting harassed like that in the hall? It’s probably not only about you being gay. From where I sit I would say you’re getting shoved around not for being queer as in homosexual but for being queer as in weird. I mean weird kids do have this aura to them. It’s like a smell almost. They’re stuck somewhere in their heads, in some kind of a bubble. People can’t really help themselves: They see a bubble, they want to pop it.

  Sincerely,

  Adam Kurlansky

  Tuesday, September 15

  Dear Kurl,

  Drama! Scandal! Intrigue! Mystery! Guess whom I read about in the Lincoln Herald this morning? Front-page news:

  Kurl Walks! Wolvies Up 16 at ¾ Home Opener, Fullback Adam Kurlansky Quits Team, Costs Game

  I suppose it testifies to my near-total social isolation and my alienation from the culture of the school that I didn’t hear about this event until reading it in the Herald. I’m certain it officially makes me the last person at Lincoln to receive the news. The fact that my sister’s friend Bronwyn wrote the story adds irony to my ignorance, since she and Shayna undoubtedly spent half of last night talking about it and I still didn’t catch on. I haven’t yet mentioned to them that Adam Kurlansky is my assigned pen pal, I suppose because at some level we seem an unlikely match.

  Permit me to quote from the news story:

  “Coach Samuels told the Herald he is focused on keeping things positive, helping the Wolverines pull together to fill the gap left by Kurlansky. ‘I’m concerned, sure,’ he admitted. ‘But Kurl is a good kid, a fighter, a real lion. I’m sure he’ll turn it around in time to contribute this season.’ Kurlansky himself declined to comment on Friday night’s walkout. When we asked him whether we can expect him back on the field this year, his reply was simply, ‘I doubt it.’”

  I hope you won’t hold it against Bron for writing the piece. Perhaps, like me, you feel it edges into the sphere of celebrity gossip. Bronwyn Otulah-Tierney can be, at times, overzealous. She is very focused on building her portfolio for her applications to the best journalism schools in the country.

  I reread your most recent letter last night, Kurl, and I’d like to clarify one point: I never meant to imply that I get bullied only because of my sexual orientation, or even that it’s in any way mysterious to me why I get singled out. Above all it was not my intention to complain about being mistreated. Maybe I am queer as in weird, as you theorize so eloquently. But my weirdness is merely a natural by-product of having my sights set on something beyond high school, namely poetry.

  Kurl, can you truly blame me for wanting to focus on something other than my immediate surroundings? Be honest: If you could, wouldn’t you want to immerse yourself in something bigger than the squalid little torments of adolescence? Wouldn’t you want to transcend the mind-numbing boredom of, say, tenth-grade Business and Technology class? Mr. Carlsen stands up there in front of us in his Gap cords, rocking back and forth on the balls of his feet and rhapsodizing about Excel budgets and search engine optimization, and the only reason I can refrain from running out and lighting myself on fire is that my mind is elsewhere. Call it an aura; call it a bubble. I understand how it incites others to malice and torment. It drives even Shayna and Lyle crazy when they talk to me and I don’t seem to hear their voices.

  I was rereading Walt Whitman’s book Leaves of Grass last night, and I copied out these stanzas for you (enclosed). They capture the spirit of heroism I was trying to describe. Whitman is talking here about lending his spirit to humanity in general, but You shall not go down! Hang your whole weight upon me sums up my father’s steady, positive strength and his devotion to me and Shayna.

  Yours truly,

  Jonathan Hopkirk

  Thursday, September 17

  Dear Little JO,

  I guess I can tell you about heroes. Sacrifice et cetera. My dad died falling off a roof when I was ten. My uncle Viktor held up the business alone for a few years but it nearly went ba
nkrupt. So my brother Sylvan quit his job and went to work for him full-time. He was twenty or twenty-one by then and halfway through his electrician’s training, but he just dropped everything. You should see his shitty apartment. I mean I’m pretty sure all his savings went into Kurlansky Roofing and they’re not exactly making a killing. He has never said a word about any of this to me.

  The thing about heroes is they make you look at yourself. Your brother is a hero, people will say to me. Meaning my middle brother Mark actually, not Sylvan. Meaning Afghanistan. They’ll say it to me because they want to remind me. Also because according to Sylvan Mark always shrugs them off when they say stuff like that to him. No such thing as the world becoming a better place, he’ll tell them.

  Mark’s earned it for sure. He was deployed just after his eighteenth birthday. I mean he was a few months younger than I am now. Even Uncle Vik shuts right up when Mark’s around.

  I don’t know about those poems you keep sending me. That last one especially. I dilate you with tremendous breath or whatever? I don’t know if Walt Whitman is really who you want to model yourself after. I have to say he comes across as sort of a douche. I could do without all the poems.

  The thing about heroes is that they ask without asking: What about you? What are you waiting for?

  I would have to tell them I’m actually waiting for nothing.

  Sincerely,

  Adam Kurlansky

  Monday, September 21

  Dear Kurl,

  Will you permit me a random observation on the group of little JOs who’ve taken to habitually hassling me (I call them, collectively, the butcherboys)? It’s difficult for me to focus on any other letter-writing topic when, just before class, my satchel was co-opted by the butcherboys and flung onto the roof of the school.

  You may or may not have noticed a certain little JO named Christopher Dowell in the group. Now, there’s a young man who, you can be sure, will never earn himself a cool nickname. In my experience, it’s always the one in the group whose own position is most precarious, the one who walks the thin, thin line between insider and outcast—you can count on it, it’ll be him who hits the hardest, who laughs the loudest. The other butcherboys don’t particularly care whether I live or die, but this one, this Dowell—he’s the one who really hates me. Because Dowell knows, and he knows I know, that he’s a lot closer to being like me than his so-called friends are.

  I was sorry to read about your father passing away. I hadn’t realized we’d both lost a parent; in an oblique, circumstantial way, this gives us something in common.

  You sounded somewhat depressed in your last letter. I hope you’re not regretting your decision to stop playing football? I am going to assume, Kurl, that if you want to share with me your reasons for quitting the football team in such a dramatic and precipitous manner, you will. I’m curious, of course. But as I sat there earlier today in Math, rereading Bron’s Herald story under my desk, I suddenly thought about what it must be like for you, at school and maybe at home, too, being continually judged for your actions and asked to explain yourself to everyone.

  Please don’t feel any obligation to explain anything to me. My point is quite the opposite: I want to invite you to feel free to use the space of these letters to talk about things that actually interest you, to muse about the topics that dominate your thoughts when you’re alone. We might as well take advantage of the fact that we don’t owe each other anything, that no one else is ever going to read what we’re writing, that it’s just me and you and whatever we feel like saying.

  Let me be the first to enact this advice. Here is what I’m currently thinking: If you’ve concluded that Walt Whitman is, in your words, a douche, then you’ve failed to properly appreciate the extent to which he threw himself, body and soul, into the workaday life of nineteenth-century New York City. I’m enclosing a few photocopied pages of “Song of Myself.” Have a look at the sheer variety of the types of people and activities he describes. The fishing boats, the funeral, the washerwomen, the beehives, the church choir—all on one page of the poem. Maybe you can give me your interpretation of it, and then in my next letter I’ll share with you what I think it means. We’ll both be wrong and right.

  Poetry’s like that, Kurl: slippery and coy. It means different things to different readers. You shouldn’t feel embarrassed if it makes you nervous. You’re not alone in that reaction. Look at Mr. Carlsen. He’d rather see Major British Poets being kicked down the hallway than read, let alone discussed, studied, cherished.

  Yours truly,

  Jonathan Hopkirk

  Wednesday, September 23

  Dear Little JO,

  This is a bonus letter for you since we’re actually supposed to be researching our topic for a PSA slide show in Khang’s class. Public service announcement. The captivating sort of stuff you get to do in Twelfth Grade Applied English.

  In case you’re dying of curiosity though, my PSA is on Explosive Emergency Situations. I’ve been reading quite a lot about the Taliban, al-Qaeda, and ISIL in Afghanistan since my brother Mark came back. He doesn’t talk about it but there’s a lot online. Since the US withdrawal, all three of these groups are getting involved in infighting and jostling for power. During Mark’s deployment, though, I think it was mostly the Taliban.

  So there’s this dog walker who walks his dogs past my bus stop in the morning. He has a skin graft stitched down over a missing eye and a sideways scar from his nose to his ear area. The ear is also missing. It’s a combat injury for sure. He’s about the same age as my brother but I haven’t asked. I mean what if they knew each other over there but hated each other? What if this guy is upset because Mark didn’t get hurt nearly as bad as him? You never know with veterans.

  What made me think of this dog-walking veteran after reading your letter is that he attracts comments from people. People see that he isn’t paying attention. That he’s talking to himself or whatever. I’m not saying you do that, but he’s got that aura I was talking about. He’s in that bubble. So people say things to each other about him, for kicks. You can see them laughing at him. I don’t know. It’s not respectful considering his sacrifice but that’s how people are.

  From what I can tell the basic difference between suicide bombers and US military personnel is that the suicide bombers would prefer to die and the US soldiers would prefer not to. Now that the US troops are mostly drawn down, the Taliban is focusing on political and civilian targets. You can make yourself a list of Taliban strategies just by reading the news. An example of a Taliban strategy is: Drive a car bomb into a loaded bus. This just happened recently in Kabul.

  Another Taliban strategy: Enter an elementary school in Logar and open fire. That’s the province where Mark was deployed, at least at the start. I don’t know where they sent him after the first year.

  It’s sort of ironic I’ve been reading about all this insurgency stuff because when we were younger Mark always used to turn the news off. He’d switch Mom’s radio in the kitchen from her news station to Top 40. Adam, he’d say, let’s not be the type of people who believe everything we hear on the news.

  None of this will make it into my PSA assignment. I’m just writing it down because you said to write what I’m thinking about. I mean you’re sort of right. People keep asking me about the football team and what my problem is and when I’m coming back. Meanwhile what I’m thinking about is a Taliban strategy: Knock out the streetlights at a specific intersection. When the political motorcade stops there, send three suicide bombers diving under the police trucks.

  I’m not saying this is the sort of thing I really want to be thinking about all the time. It just happens to be on my mind. It makes me think football and school and my uncle et cetera aren’t worth worrying about all that much.

  Sincerely,

  AK

  PS: I think your sister and her friend Bronwyn are both in Math with me this year. Bron was in Physics with me last year too. I mean she’s hard to forget with the fact that s
he always asks the teachers about stuff like their hidden bias and unspoken assumptions.

  Tuesday, September 29

  Dear Kurl,

  Instead of writing about my “primary influences” as Ms. Khang suggests, I’d like to take this opportunity to answer the question you asked me yesterday at lunch. “Why aren’t you sitting at the gay table?” you said, and you pointed at a table way across the room, beside the composting/recycling sorting station, where a heavily pierced eleventh grader was making out with her Goth girlfriend. Two or three freshmen were also over there, hunched miserably over laptop screens. It was hard to say whether they knew it was the gay table or not. Shayna and Bron call it the Gable, and its eradication is one of Bron’s pet causes. She points to the existence of the Gable as an example of social apartheid, the formalization of hierarchy, and the perpetuation of power imbalances. I’m sure you didn’t intend your suggestion that I go sit at the Gable as an insult or a slur of any kind, Kurl, even if it does unfortunately stand out in my mind now, in retrospect, as the first and only sentence spoken aloud between the two of us. Your tone was exasperated in a way I recognized from many of my conversations with Shayna on this same general topic. An elder-sibling impatience.

  My difficulties, before your appearance in the cafeteria, had resulted from simple mathematics. There were more of the butcherboys than there were seats left at my table. Naturally I was in the middle of taking my first sip of milk when I got the classic hip-to-shoulder nudge from behind. It was Christopher Dowell who made first contact, and my milk spilled all over my vintage poplin shirt. “Move, fudge-packer,” Liam VanSyke ordered me. “This is our table.”

  I attempted the Stonewall Maneuver, named after the great gay-rights moment in American history but in reality nothing more than behaving as if one is a wall made of stone. I stared down at my tray, unwrapped my tuna wrap, bit into said tuna wrap, and commenced chewing.