My head was spinning, so I went back to my prepared list of questions. “What did you mean when you said Wrigley wanted to quit? In the book. He kept saying he wanted to quit. Quit what?”
He raised his eyebrows and said, “Don’t you ever feel like you want to quit doing something everyone else makes you feel like you’re supposed to keep doing? Didn’t you ever just simply want to . . . stop?”
“I don’t know, I mean, I guess so,” I told him, even though I knew exactly what he meant.
A silence hung between us—like when you suddenly notice the dust motes dancing all around you in the late-afternoon sun and you wonder how the hell you didn’t notice them before.
“Why don’t we talk less about my failed attempt to be a novelist and more about you?” he finally said. “Are you a happy person?”
I’m not sure anyone had ever bothered to ask me that before, so I said “What do you mean?” to buy time and think of a clever answer.
I mean—when was the last time someone asked if you were happy and then looked you in the eyes in a way that made you feel as though they actually gave a shit about your response?
“Do you enjoy all that you are participating in?” he said.
“Like—do I want to quit anything?”
“It’s not a crime to admit such things. The Participation Gestapo isn’t hiding behind that plant over there. No Participation KGB, either. This is America. You are free to utilize freedom of speech—freedom, period. And I already know you want to quit something or you wouldn’t be so interested in my stupid little book, which is—at the end of the day, if I remember correctly—a hymn to the noble art of quitting. So let’s have it. What do you want to quit more than anything else in the world?”
“Soccer,” I said, surprising myself, although it was absolutely true. I’d hated soccer for a long time.
“Soccer. Okay. Now we’re getting somewhere. Next question: Why?”
“I don’t know.”
“Oh, I bet you do. Are you on the school team?”
I looked down at the counter, noticed the white grains of sugar scattered around the table. “I’m the captain and leading scorer.”
“So you’re good at it?”
“Sort of,” I said, even though I made the All–South Jersey Team as a sophomore, colleges were recruiting me, and scouts came to my games. But I didn’t really care about any of that. The attention was embarrassing. Made me feel like even more of a fraud.
“I bet no one ever told you this truth before, so here it is for the price of a cup of coffee.” He took a sip and then stared into my eyes before saying, “Just because you’re good at something doesn’t mean you have to do it.”
We locked eyes for a second.
He smiled like he was giving me the secret to life.
Try telling that to my coach and my father, I thought. I shook my head and then said, “I wanted to kill those little kids who were spinning around Unproductive Ted. And then I wanted to kill the kid’s dad, who throws Wrigley into the creek. And I’m not a violent person at all. I won’t even let my mom set mousetraps. Never been carded in my entire soccer career. No reds. No yellows. I’ve never wanted to kill anything before. Not even a weed or a spider. But you made me feel such intense feelings. The ending of your book made me so incredibly angry.”
Booker smirked in this awfully sad way and then looked out the window at nothing in particular. “Oh, please don’t blame me for your hatred. It was there before you cracked open my Bubblegum book. I can assure you of that. It’s in all of us. We at least need to take responsibility for our own share—especially whatever we let leak out.”
“I’m not trying to . . .” I said, but then stopped because I realized I was.
“You should read Bukowski’s ‘The Genius of the Crowd,’ ” he said, reestablishing eye contact. “That poem has a thing or two to say about hatred.”
“Who?”
“The great Charles Bukowski. Hero of nonconformists and blue-collar poets the world over.”
My family certainly wasn’t blue-collar, but I liked the sound of nonconformist.
I asked him how to spell the last name and typed the letters into my phone. Then I typed The Genius of the Crowd in, too, which I later read and loved. Reading that poem was like putting on the proper prescription glasses after bumping into walls for my entire life. Bukowski was able to sum up precisely what I had been feeling for many years, and he made it look so easy on the page.
“Be careful with the Buk’s poems,” Booker said that day in the coffee shop. “Powerful stuff. And please—whatever you do—don’t tell your parents I told you to read counterculture poetry, especially if they’re uptight types who send out family portraits as Christmas cards. Definitely don’t say a word about the Buk if they make you coordinate holiday outfits. Even non-Christmas-card-sending suburban parents tend to despise Charles Bukowski, which, of course, is why so many suburban kids love him.”
“How did you know they do that?” I asked, astonished. “My parents. The Christmas cards. Coordinating holiday outfits.”
“Far too often, people are woefully predictable. And I know many things. It’s a curse. Here’s something else I know: You are not doomed to be your parents. You can break the cycle. You can be whoever you want to be. But you will pay a price. Your parents and everyone else will punish you if you choose to be you and not them. That’s the price of your freedom. The cage is unlocked, but everyone is too scared to walk out because they whack you when you try, and they whack you hard. They want you to be scared, too. They want you to stay in the cage. But once you are a few steps beyond the trapdoor, they can’t reach you anymore, so the whacking stops. That’s another secret: They’re too afraid to follow. They adore their own cages.”