• The walk home, blood exposed, was short. Half a block or so. His mother, Bryna Collins peered out the beige burglar-barred window as soon as his key shimmied into the lock. Sure as the rain, she cried. He relished and hated the tears. They soothed and shamed him. He’d never admit to himself how very much he enjoyed this attention. Simultaneously, he loathed it … loathed himself for wanting it. One cannot accept solace and comfort or sympathy unless one first acknowledges the presence of pain. Sometimes, that was a heavy price.

    “Oh my boy,” his mother keened as the screen door slammed behind him. Finn’s backpack dropped to the floor as she grabbed the sides of his head, a gesture of both examination and embrace. “What in God’s bloody hell did they do to you?”
    “It’s OK. Just a fight.”
    “Was it those niggers on the corner?
    That word made him hesitate. She had grown up with the word. He had not. He wasn’t sure if she even realized what she had said. He decided now was not the time to broach the subject and let it lie dead between them.
    “Ganbangers,” he answered her. “Gangster Disciples.”
    “Cops should shoot ‘em down! Every one of ‘em! I’m calling the 8th district!”
    “No ma. It’s OK, just a fight.”
    A 911 call would be too much injury to bear. It would have been schoolyard law, if there were still schoolyards. There was no shame in getting you a** kicked, but there was shame in complaining about it. The law was you took your lumps, and that’s where it ended. His mother knew this and in some ways encouraged it. But the suggestion gave her power. A phone call was action. She would shed helplessness like a threadbare robe.

    “We should report it. This might not be over, you know. Those hoods can hold a grudge.”

    He marveled that she called them “hoods,” as though he got jumped by De Niro as Capone, but he felt it was over. Long gone were the days when “street gang” meant some disgruntled underachievers roving the streets for mischief. The BGD’s for example, raked in about $100 million a year in drug sales. Yeah, common knowledge on the South Side, even for a teenager. BGDs had members all over the country, now, even did political campaigns for s**t’s sake. There was no vendetta against young Finn. The jumped him partly because he wore the wrong shirt, but mostly out of boredom. “Na. It’s over ma. Don’t worry.”

    He kissed her forehead before striding, head high, into the bathroom to clean himself up. He took his shirt off before the mirror and studied his newly earned welts. He was shaking now, adrenaline fading; he felt more human. He checked the mirror again, half expecting the wounds to be gone this time. Feeling stupid, he gathered his mind enough to wash his face before curling on the ground and falling headfirst into unbidden sleep.

    He hoisted his sore a** off the floor about an hour later. His mother had gone off to work by then. Finn studied the jambalaya of bruises on his face and torso, and his heart soaked in weird witch’s brew of mingling shame and pride. Shame for his defeat, but pride that he stood back up. Sometimes it’s enough to simply not surrender, regardless of the outcome.

    He felt such a jolt when the cold water made contact with his face that for a heartbeat he thought he was back on that street taking kicks. But in the space of a breath the coolness began to soothe. His neck was a bit sore from his nap on the beige ceramic tile. He hated beige. It was a weak color, a non color. It was neutral. He lightly stomped his foot as though to punish it. “********,” he muttered. He looked like s**t and he had missed school. He couldn’t worry about that now. He desperately needed a shower.

    After his shower, he moved down the hallway towards the steps that led to his attic bedroom. Balling up his school clothes to feed the wicker laundry hamper he slid into a pair of worn jeans. He held a certain level of self-satisfaction that he had earned every tear in the faded denim.

    With nothing on TV except shitty soaps and court shows, he dumped the contents of his now rather dirty backpack onto his bed. He found his dog-eared used copy of Walden stuck awkwardly between the crumpled pages of his math book.

    Thoreau went to the woods to live deliberately, to breathe deep and suck out all the marrow of life. “That’s what they made me ******** read.” English teachers – the wanna be hippies, the I-Wish-I-Were-Byrons – they love Thoreau. They fawn over him, maybe thinking that if they do it long enough, they’ll finally hear that different drummer and say “boo” to that arrogant boss, that oppressive spouse, and run off to the hills with some hot-chick-with-glasses and write wine-washed poetry until they blow their brains out — like Hemingway, another favorite son of American “Litrichoor.”

    “I read Thoreau’s 300-page essay. He’s on to something; I’ll give him that. ‘Most men live lives of quiet desperation.’ He smelled the bullshit and pulled out. Good for him … but let’s call it what it is.”

    He fled to that stinking pond, and he did it because he could. Most people I know, they have nowhere to go. They wait out the storm that never ends. They take their punches, not because they’re brave, but because they’re trapped. No woods, no Walden, no gentle solitude punctuated by the cries of whippoorwills.

    That’s where Thoreau got it wrong: the isolation. It’s a vice. As much as it sucks, human beings have to see, touch and ******** feed off each other like vampires. Love and hate and food and drink. Quiet desperation? Their desperation is deafening. It roars. If you think it’s quiet, it’s because you can’t hear their cries over your own. Marrow runs into the earth untasted, and you can’t suck it back out by hiding in the woods like a whipped b***h.

    Finn, remembering himself, crumpled the page he had been on which he had been ripping the Transcendentalist hero a new one. He knew he couldn’t turn this in. ******** high school. “Lie or you fail.” He got a glass of water from the kitchen and wrote an A+ essay on the tradition of American self-reliance.