“So the whole Dix-Neuvieme was out in force, and some of them were the reactionaries. I figured that’s just what the cops wanted – those big young fascists on their side to break skulls for them. So we were breaking their skulls. It’s hard to imagine somebody like me doing anything like that. But like I said, I wasn’t the one in control of my Liberte.
“They had been baiting us the whole way, throwing rocks and shit just like we were, only they were moving back and we were moving forward. I was crouching behind a car when a rock smashed the window above my head. I got glass in my hair then, and I looked around and saw it was one of those brown-shirts, just around the corner in an alleyway, a big fat grin on his scrawny face.
“So I got up and went after him. I knew nobody had been killed so far, but when I felt that car rumble from the rock impact, I felt like somebody had woken up that day and said to himself, “today I’m gonna kill Allen Monaghan.” My life was in danger. So I turned my sign around – I made it into a club instead of a protest slogan and went into the alley by myself.
“They wrote that nobody was killed during those riots, that that was so amazing. That gives me comfort. Because when I snuck down that alley, and that big boy peaked his head around the corner again by God I cracked him on the nose so hard I swear his face caved in.
“He fell over like a sack of bricks. There was nobody else around. He didn’t have any backup. He was too shattered to tell anybody,” Allen told his brother.
Harrison Farraday’s left leg trembled terribly. Harrison justified this habit to himself with the excuse that he had to operate the world’s smallest sewing machine, or that he had to rev the world’s smallest engine, or something terrible would happen. Or some such stupid anecdote, he thought.
Because they were viewing a video for class that day, Mr. Monaghan had to have his class in the cramped theater room upstairs. That room was ventilated by a loud fan that would’ve detracted from the video they were watching if not for its soundtrack, which was by some estimations excessively loud.
In the glow of the screen, two men stood facing each other. On stage left stood a tall American, wearing only a cowboy hat. The other man was short but toned; an acute observer could place him as Guatemalan. He was fully nude, his tussled black hair damp with sweat. Between them, their erect penises rested against each other’s; one a thick tube of uniformly pale flesh-tone that stood forward menacingly over its counterpart: a short, stubby, uncircumsized wedge that looked like it would’ve had a more comfortable time hanging downward if not for its propping against its Anglo opponent. The American was laughing, a deep, uncouth guffaw, and most of the audience had immediately made the connection that his amusement was derived from the fact that his penis was almost twice as large as the Guatemalan man’s, who himself looked away with a forced visage of vague disinterest. The video ran exactly one minute and twenty-one seconds.
Mr. Monaghan sat in the back, looking over his notes on the video. The artist was a young man living in Iowa, Harrison Farraday, who had made exactly two works similar to the one they were now watching. He was a graduate of the very department in which Monaghan taught, and his video work had received wide acclaim. None of his students had seen it before.
Monaghan loved this video. He found it so straightforward and brilliant in its commentary on Western civilization, yet was so appalling to freshman undergraduates that it immediately allowed him to pick out the students who had a chance from the hacks – those who, when called on, would discuss something besides how unbearable it was to watch a phallus or two on a video screen.
The aesthetics of the video were, to him, quite perfect. The two men stood in front of a black wall, shadows cast across their shoulders, giving perfect accentuation to their bottom halves and illuminating the relative physical similarities between the two men: both had flat stomachs littered with black hair, a distinct slouch, and both men had long, hooked noses.
Every time he heard the repetitive baritone laughter of the American, Mr. Monaghan felt he was being treated differently. While the Guatemalan man failed to produce anything visually striking for him, he felt the piece came alive in the white man’s laughter. Sometimes, he would catch the split instances where the lowest moments would reverberate off the walls and crackle over the speakers in the back, like an old seventy-six getting started under a dull needle. At other times, his ears would hone in on the upper register where, between breaths or when his laughter had run out and broke at its highest points, Monaghan would catch an element of the giggling of a child, too happy to be on camera to notice his humiliating exposure. And every time, moments later he would catch in the American’s eye a well-hidden look that said, “I hope this video doesn’t get famous.”
Outside the room a short, round girl was crouched against the wall, holding the long hem of her blue skirt over her eyes and sobbing quietly into its hand-sewn fabric.
“Jarhead!” Shelly cried in a loud slur, like the drill sergeant she was imitating, but more like the drunk person with no military experience she actually was. “What do you want to drink?
“Some of that vodka. There’s a little more in the water bottle over there.”
“Why’s it in a water bottle?”
“The cat spilled it yesterday and I tried to save some of it.”
Shelly stretched her legs out. “Have you been drinking a lot lately?”
“No. The cat spilled it, or something. I haven’t been drinking at all.”
Shelly leaned her head back lazily. “I just don’t want you to run into any trouble. Do you mind if I smoke in here?”
“Let’s go outside.”