Knockout Games (3 page)

And it was like that for the next couple weeks. Nobody talked to me unless they were talking
at
me. Seemed as if everyone had grown up together in the Tower Grove area and as the official outsider, I was pretty much a target.

The only blond-haired boy in school saw me eating alone one day and stopped to talk. It was only when I saw his friends cracking up behind him that I understood he wasn't really asking me out to the upcoming Halloween dance.

Keep your eyes on the ground and don't talk to anyone
became my new motto.

Mrs. Lee noticed I wasn't drawing in art class. She dropped a book on my desk. “Maybe your thing isn't drawing but some other medium.”

The book was called
Video Art
. On the cover was a huge lens with an eye on it staring straight at me.

“So if you aren't going to make art today, at least you can
read
about some other forms. Maybe it'll inspire you.” She tapped her finger on the cover of the book.

She headed back to the others and I put my head on my desk to close my eyes. I used to draw all the time. I'd spend days drawing these humongous
Where's Waldo-
like murals—you know, the ones so packed with people and places that you could just disappear into it. I even won a school art contest once. But then my family started to crash. One day, I just stared at that paper and nothing came out. It's been like that ever since.

I cracked open the book. The first picture I saw was of John Lennon. There was a picture of him and next to it was a picture of his butt! I shut the book quick. Mrs. Lee gave me a sly look.

After a minute, I opened it up again. I noticed a DVD inside the book cover. I don't know why but when Mrs. Lee turned away, I shoved the book into my backpack.

After school, Mom and I barely saw each other because the only shift she could get in her new job was the night shift. I felt like I was basically living alone and she was just dropping by for visits. To make up for it, she made me keep the Skype connection open on my computer so she could check in on me, and I could see her in the lab where she worked. That was the only way she'd do it. And even though I was fifteen, she made me connect at 10 p.m. when I was supposed to go to bed, just so she could watch me brush my teeth and hit the lights. I'd fall asleep to the glow of the computer, my mom staring into a microscope in an empty room on the other side.

My face time with Mom every day was a quick breakfast when she came home and before I caught the bus to school. And then an early dinner, around 4:30, when the reverse happened. We tried to have normal conversations but it always started with
So what's going on at school today?
or ended with
How was school today?
And when she caught on that school was a nightmare, she stopped asking, which left nothing for us to talk about.

I knew she felt the same way about her job, so I tried to be good. She worked for a genetics lab, mostly staring through a microscope all night, searching for faulty chromosomes (so couples would know who was coming up short in the baby making department, I guess). She dreamed of doing cancer research, but this is what she got stuck with for now.

The night I watched the DVD I took from art class changed everything. The John Lennon stuff was something he did with his wife Yoko. One video was an hour of him just smiling. It seemed stupid at first, but something about having John gaze at you for so long got under my skin. Another film, they shot over three hundred people's butts and that film was shown in museums! I didn't know you could do that kind of thing.

The DVD had all kinds of video pieces from the seventies and eighties up until YouTube. Then I got it. Capturing everyday life and showing it in unusual ways—that was performance art.

I dug my video camera out of a box but I wasn't sure what to shoot. I liked holding it, though. It was all shiny and new and empty—a virgin waiting for something to happen. OK, maybe that's a bit dramatic, but I could picture the empty flash card in there, inviting me to put something on it. I remembered having that feeling every time I grabbed a blank piece of paper and how happy it made me after I covered every inch of that whiteness with something I'd created. It was a record of what I saw and how I saw it.

Now I just needed something to shoot.

4

I was sitting on the back stoop after a bad day at school, when I spotted a huge anthill in the dirt next to the stairs. Something about them made me angry all of a sudden. There were hundreds of them going about their business, day in and day out, doing their jobs, back and forth, back and forth. They never complained, never fell out of line. I wanted to step on them for it. I don't know why; it was just some primal thing, I guess. Put them out of their misery.

I stomped on a few and watched the panic set in. Suddenly, it was each ant for itself, struggling to flee the pandemonium. I'd upset the natural order.

It felt good.

It reminded me of one of those old monster movies. Only I was Godzilla.

I got out my camera again, and this time, I knew what to do. Watching those art vids on the DVD gave me ideas. So I began shooting a monster movie with me as Godzilla and the ants as the ones who got in the way. Godzilla stomped out all the ants, even the ones trying to escape. It was horrific and because my macro mode made it look cool, in super slo-mo, it was also kind of poetic.

I cut it together on my computer to some Japanese soundtrack remix I downloaded. It came out
good
. So I wanted to do some more. I started shooting a lot of weird stuff I saw around the neighborhood, just wandering around the overgrown lots and abandoned houses. I'd record them and make up stories about who lived there and what happened to them:
Lost his job and life savings. Robbed a bank and is on the run. Drug dealer/crack house raided by the cops. Family one day mysteriously disappeare
d . . .
dead and buried?
More likely is they just moved to the burbs like everyone else and nobody ever replaced them. It was as if somebody stomped on a few St. Louis ants, so the rest scattered.

During lunch break one day at school, I noticed that people behaved a lot like ants too—they were just bigger and wore clothes. We stood in line for food, shuffled back and forth to class, accepted our place in the clique order of things.

Every once in a while, someone broke free—dressed differently, skipped class, acted out against the Queen Bees. They'd get stomped for it—by teachers, school cops, bullies. And for those few moments, chaos broke free—students stopped what they were doing and refused to look away. They couldn't help it.

My camera had a good optical zoom, so I just started filming all this—especially the ones breaking the rules. Hiding behind my camera, I'd see all kinds of things. A couple making out by their lockers. A girl being hassled by Mr. Jamison for dressing too racy. The white kids trying to act black. Black kids crunking in the parking lot. Gay boys and goths getting in each other's faces. Nerds texting when they weren't supposed to. Staff cruising the halls looking for trouble. . . .

“What do you think you're doing?”

I panned my camera to the oversized head of Mr. Jamison, who was staring me down. His one crooked eye was checking out my camera.

“I'm just . . . filming.”

“You can't just go around filming people here without their knowledge.”

I blinked. “It's just . . . a class project. For Mrs. Lee. I'm not going to upload it or anything. I can stop. If you want.”

He eyed me suspiciously. At least I think he did.

“If I see that camera again, I'll take it.”

I nodded, put it away in my backpack.

Ant. Get back in line.

That Destiny Jones watched this go down and saw a way to get even for her phone. When she caught me filming one of her friends at lunch, she walked by and just snatched the camera out of my hands. She turned the camera on me.

“You know the rules: no cameras in school!” she said.

“Give it back.” I tried to act calm.

“Hey, it took me three days to get
my
phone back,” she said. “I think I can make some videos of my own for a few days.”

“Give it back,” I said again.

“Or what? You can't tell Mrs. Lee; she'll keep it.”

“I said—”

She cut me off. “Uh, oh, she getting mad. She gonna turn into a one hitter-quitter!”

Her friends all thought that was funny. One of them piped in. “I wouldn't fight her if I was you. D here's a real boxer. She even took out one of them female cops in the ring at the Rec Center last week.”

I didn't want to fight. I never hit anybody and I wasn't about to start now. I just wanted my camera back.

Destiny stepped up for a close-up. “Oh, I can see your veins popping with this zoom—”

I grabbed at the camera before she could finish her sentence. Next thing I knew, we were rolling on the ground, holding onto that thing like it was made of gold. Students came running, yelling “Fight!” and suddenly it was a scene from some jailhouse movie. I grabbed at her hair; she was trying to rip off my shirt. The kids loved it, but I didn't care. That camera was mine—