My Dissociative Year

In my freshman year I was friends with this guy, Chuck, who I met on the subway. But I never really knew who he was.

I had this one night class that ended at 9 pm, so I usually skipped it. But this one week I had to go because there was a quiz—for marks. The douchebag lecturer decided to give the quiz in the last 10 minutes, too. Extra miserable. I handed my quiz in and rushed out without getting back any of my marked work, so I could catch the train home.

The subway always made me nervous. There’s no other place where they’ll let hundreds of thousands of people stand within inches of a 400-tonne, speeding slab of steel. It was kind of like Secret Santa—any random person standing there next to you could be your surprise murderer. Or you could be theirs. Or, I figured more likely, they could be their own. The train pulled up and I wandered aboard.

Every time I’m on the subway I think about the morbidness and I start to feel sad for everybody. That day, I was thinking about what my friend Lee had told me on the bus one day. He said that a friend of his had been a subway driver, and the standard protocol for a jumper is to just keep on going. At those speeds, the people end up practically liquid, and there’s really nothing you can do to help. All you can do is announce that there’s gonna be a “delay due to an injury at track level”. And then call the cleaning crew.

Something grabbed me aside as I was walking around looking for a place to stand. Actually, someone. I turned around and it was Chuck, half-grinning the same way that he always did.

“Whoa, Chuck, I didn’t you see you there. How’ve you been?”

“I’ve been decent, buddy. Still carbon. How’s college?”

“Getting old. Getting old a lot sooner than I expected.”

“Hey, what doesn’t?” I nodded. You said it, man.

Chuck was this guy I’d run into a few times on the train since I’d started college. He seemed smart, I mean, he would make these clever observations about the world and then just mention them in passing like they were one-liner jokes he’d overheard. I figured that his life didn’t really present any better moments to mention those clever things. He told me to hold onto all my pay stubs, to never get involved with a girl who already had a boyfriend, and stuff like that. “Think about it, man, she’s the one cheating. If she can do it to him, she can do it to you.” Sometimes he’d tell me to stay in school, but I don’t know if he ever went himself. Yeah, I didn’t really know anything about him, but we could still take the train together.

We both got off at Yonge and went up the stairs to get on the other line. I was going northbound, and either he was too or he was following me. We talked about how the busker on that platform seemed to always be an electric guitarist of some sort. Seriously. I’d heard world music, soft rock, the Forrest Gump theme, you name it, but it was always on guitar. This particular night, it was a pale guy with dreads playing the standard classic rock program.

I said, “Do you ever think it might actually be the same guy every day, and he just changes his style really often?”

“You mean clothing style, or musical?”

“Both, I guess.”

“Maybe he has multiple personalities.” We both laughed. We went down to the other end of the platform until we couldn’t hear Under the Bridge anymore.

We talked about how much the city sort of sucked. I said, “I just started to notice this year that nobody in the city is very nice, and there’s a good reason for that. I kind of saw it coming, but I never expected it to make so much sense. It really is every man for himself.”

“You’re surprised. That’s ‘cause they tell you when you’re kids that everybody wins when you share and get along and all that. They tell you every chance they get—at school, on Sesame Street, even at the mall when the mall Santa’s there. Mall Santa always says you’ve gotta be good if you want presents. It’s all just to try and delay you from figuring out the truth, kid. That it’s a cruel world and there are no presents for good behavior. Everyone figures it out sooner or later, and then we turn into monsters. But that’s okay.” I didn’t know what to think about what he’d said. I kept waiting for him to say why it was okay that we all turn into monsters, but he just left it at that.

“I just can’t believe that they’d lie to us like that, Chuck. I’m taking a class that dabbles in game theory, and we learned about how every decision in your life has a cost and a benefit. After that class, I stopped studying with other people. I mean, why would I want to waste my time explaining something that I already understand to somebody who decided to skip class one day? It was their decision to skip, and they’ve gotta pay the cost. Anything that I can do to help would be just messing with the cost-benefit system. And I’d be paying my own cost for that, in lost time. So I just don’t talk to people about school anymore.”

“That’s right, kid. Next step after disillusionment is to stop trusting anyone.”

“Maybe I should have gone to Western or something. I think small town people are less likely to be assholes to you because they know they’re gonna have to see you again.”

“Nope. Not gonna make a difference, kid. A couple of guys I work with, I see them every day and they still act like jerks every day. It’s just human behavior.”

“But I think that the city’s a bit worse. The city’s where everybody in a 300-mile radius goes when they have nowhere left to go. Drifters, grifters, fight clubbers, anyone can be as much of a jerk as they want and still fly under the radar.” I suddenly thought of one of my douchebag wake-up calls from the previous week. “Last week I was taking the train during rush hour and a couple of stupid high schoolers tried to pickpocket the front pocket of my backpack. They were just digging around right behind my back while I tried to find enough room to turn around.”

“I hope you don’t keep your wallet in there, kid.”

“Wallet never loses contact with my body. The benefits outweigh the effort.” With pride, I patted the inner pocket of my jacket.

“Good on you, kid.” I nodded in appreciation. “But you’re wrong. You see, people in small towns are just as bad. ‘Cause the people from the city who leave the city, they’re even bigger losers. They grow up and realize they can’t make it in the big pond, so they move out to some podunk town where you can leave people gaping just by pretending to pull your thumb off.” With a sarcastic smile, he demonstrated the magic thumb trick.

“No kidding. I haven’t seen that trick since summer camp when I was 9. Blew my mind back then, for about two seconds until I figured it out.”

“Yep. Those small towns are full of lowlifes who couldn’t stand the competition in the city. It happens more than you’d think. And then you’ve also got the townies and the hicks who never had the guts or the brains to even get to the city. That’s the kind of people you’ll find in Hicksville. They’ve only got like, 2 cops patrolling an entire county out there. Imagine the sick things that people get away with.” This made a lot of sense. I thought about that kid from Colorado who was on the news a year or two ago. He shot his mom and stepdad for making him pause Counterstrike to take out the garbage. The cops arrested him like, a week later. He was twelve.

We sat in silence as I thought about the monsters that people become. Maybe Chuck was thinking too; I don’t know. It sounded like both of our ideas were generally true, about the city and the country both being full of jerks. But how could this be?

“Wait, Chuck. I think we’re both right about that, but I’m taking a class on predicate logic and it just can’t be. If everyone in the city is a jerk because it’s the city, and everyone in the small towns is a jerk because they can be, then from those assumptions we could conclude that everybody in the universe is a jerk. Even your favorite person in the world, doesn’t matter who it is, they’re a monster. It’s ludicrous!”

“That’s the point. Look into it, kid, and you’ll find out that’s the truth.” Chuck was actually so honest that he sounded crazy.

“Then are we both monsters, too?” I threw it out there. I made a gun with my hands and pretended to murder him in good humor.

“Yep. But maybe admitting it makes us a little better than everyone else.”

I went home and I thought about all of my childhood heroes. Throw out the ones that were fictional, and I had left was Harry Houdini and Kurt Cobain . A professional con man and a bipolar junkie. It was true, only unreal people like Spider-man could do no wrong. People always say that kids need real life heroes, so they can learn about the real world instead of believing that a radioactive spider could make you amazing. But do they ever think that maybe the world sucks so much that we need made-up heroes in order to grow up right? You could tell a kid for years that Spider-man was real; teach them that responsibility is cool. It would be like a band-aid lie to hold their innocence until they found out that absolutely everything was a lie. If we can lie to others for their own good, then maybe we can lie to ourselves for our own good. And, maybe admitting it makes it a little bit better.

I saw Chuck a few more times that semester, and then less and less as the years went by. I eventually settled on a career that I could bear doing for the rest of my life. I decided that I’d be happy as long as I could think. That decision actually came from something that Chuck said one day, something about how having choices actually makes people less happy. Anyway, it made a lot of sense to me that Chuck went away. It meant that I was leaving that part. I’d sort of figured out why it’s okay that we’re all monsters—something that Chuck could never say.