Hanging Out, Then Hanging Back

During most of my freshman year at Pacelli High School, my best friends Jim and Mark and I gathered every morning before school at the DX gas station two blocks away. We smoked, swore, drank a Coke or an Orange Crush, gobbled down some Junior Mints or Milk Duds, and assured each other we had not done any homework or studied for any upcoming tests. After school, we again convened at the DX station to discuss the day’s events, repeating the morning’s activities, with the exception of gobbling down Eskimo Pies and Drumsticks instead of candy. Of course, our parents did not permit us to smoke or swear, and, with what we considered puritanical zeal, monitored our homework, studying, and consumption of junk food. It was those very strictures, of course, that made the DX station such a liberating place for us—a mosh pit of indulgence, transgression, and impetuosity. And presiding over that scene of prodigality, its chief practitioner and enabler, and, for us, its chief attraction, was the station manager, Barney Zandiski.

Physically, Barney was a short, powerfully built, floridly complected man who bore an uncanny resemblance to Popeye: same squinty eye, same large jutting chin, same muscled forearms. Philosophically, he subscribed to Popeye’s existential credo: “I am what I am and that’s all that I am.” And what Barney was was lavishly profane, blushlessly crude, flamboyantly insensitive, and incandescently outrageous. Barney conducted a blustery, non-stop discourse of complaint and criticism, where little was worthy of veneration or respect, where little beyond his own pronouncements held any claim to authority, where an I’m-nobody’s-fool irony heaped scorn on the scantest expression of sincerity or earnestness or sentiment, where all enshrined cultural pieties and conventional standards of social behavior were hammered wafer-thin on the anvil of a sneer and a jeer, where a proud ignorance robustly mocked the supposed dreamy impracticality of intellectual interest or pursuit, where impugning others was a practiced performance, formidable, forensic, frictionless—a running narrative in which the number of Anglo Saxon words referring to sex, genitalia, or excrement stood in equal measure to those that did not, robust profanity in a frenzy of replicability. Barney was a blue-streak poet and a mean-streak cynic, a peerless rhetorician of convulsive shock and voluptuous irreverence. And we were his disciples.

Oh, Barney could be charming with customers, contracting himself into a knot of courteous servility when pumping their gas, checking their oil, and squeegeeing their windshields. He was invariably hospitable and ingratiating with those who ventured inside to purchase a soda or cigarettes or new wiper blades or a quart or two of oil. But once they left, the mockery began: how they looked, what they wore, how they spoke or acted—laced with lewd misogyny and envenomed misandrogy. We listened and looked at each other, eyes and mouths rounded, and then we laughed, and that laughter carried out the door and over the shake-roofed optometrist’s office across the street and on south to the outlying villages of Plover and Whiting. Barney was mesmerizing, shamanic. We harvested his vitriol and parboiled it into ours. We were his disciples.

The reason is no mystery. Barney was a reprieve from the orderly, homogenized, carefully scripted, authority-dominated upbringing that characterized our home lives and our Catholic-school lives. In the DX station those cinctures loosened and fell away. We felt free, truant from resolutely middle-class expectations; felt resistant and contestatory and conspiratorial and subversive. We were unrepentant prodigal sons, fugitives, outliers, outlaws mustered safe in our Hole in the Wall hideout. Barney permitted us this experience, encouraged it, and we let him created us in his own image, let him make us silhouettes against the glare of his unabashed, ungarmented expression of himself.

One day, though, something in me changed. I suddenly saw Barney’s outrage merely as an undisciplined howl, centrifugal and irrational, all sound and fury against something, anything, everything, devoid of significance. His irreverence was simply irreverence; his crudity, grotesque; his rancor, indigent transgressivity—not emancipating, not in rebellion against restraints, but firmly encoiled within them, lashing out with the desperate knowledge of the futility of lashing out. I remembered the look on people’s faces, in their eyes, when they came into the station: ill-at-ease, awkward, discomfited, embarrassed under our unblinkingly judgmental gaze. I felt shame, felt ashamed, shameful, shameless.

It happens like that sometimes, maturity. An abrupt awakening. No Descartes spending six days disassembling and recreating his understanding of what is true and what illusion. Rather, a page turns, a shutter opens, a shaft of eclipsed sunlight flares, a melody unexpectedly changes its key from subtonic to tonic. The physical development of maturity is easily charted: the voice deepens, shirt sleeves and pant legs unaccountably shorten, shoes shrink, hair sprouts in all kinds of untoward places. But cognitively is comes with a rush and something clicks, a puzzle you did not know you were working on suddenly fits its own pieces into place.

What I intuited but did not yet know how to express was this: Our tiny DX gang took a puerile satisfaction of shock for shock’s sake. We wanted sovereignty over ourselves, but, of course, we had ceded it to Barney, experienced it through him, by him, in him. And Barney was a man of unexamined opinion, a man who asserted confidently because he understood and imagined so little that was otherwise, a man for whom the boldness and volume of an opinion masked his largely unrecognized awareness that it lacked any claim of place in the cross-fertilizing conversation where ideas are critically examined, augmented, altered, and always judged. He was a man who scorned and yearned, scorned because he yearned to be other than what George Eliot called “a small hungry shivering self.” He was a man who needed a rapt audience, needed a validating group of listeners. We thought we needed Barney, but I suspect the truth is, he needed us more.