John

by Nathaniel Berry

Maple City Dispatch: stories from the former “Fence Capital of the World,” Adrian, MI

My friend John was the youngest of four children. His parents were very old, and I think they were done raising children by the time John came along. His oldest brother is a rocket scientist. His second oldest brother is a captain in the Air Force. His sister, a few years older than John, was a violin prodigy and received a scholarship to play at a fancy school somewhere in a big city; I never knew where. Everything I know about John’s family comes from him, and I learned a long time ago not to take him at his word.

It wasn’t always hard to be friends with John. Me and John and Martin all grew up on the same block. Middle and high school, we’d meet up at the playground behind our houses to make snow-forts, or fight with sticks. We tented out in each other’s backyards in the summertime, told ghost stories, sped through Adrian at midnight on our bicycles, or stayed up late playing Halo or Dynasty Warriors—always cooperatively, always on the highest difficulty. John and I developed a kind of telepathy critical to playing difficult video games: a subconscious shorthand, an ability to anticipate your partner’s moves and intentions that transcended the video game world.

In the real world, John lied about little things. He told me one time that his brother had bought off eBay, one of the arrows Orlando Bloom shoots in The Lord of the Rings—and that he wanted to show it to me, but obviously couldn’t. He told me that he’d hollowed out the inside of a stick and filled it with a small piece of steel to make a stick-fighting weapon that could never be broken. Later, when it broke, he took the pieces home and never talked about it again. He told me once that Dutch people were scientifically proven to be the tallest people in the world: because he was quite tall, and had a Dutch last name. 

John was always making up statistics to back up his opinions. He couldn’t simply happen be a tall individual with a Dutch last name: he had to be the end result of some equation, had to put the fact of his being beyond any doubt. He dressed exclusively in Adrian High School cross-country t-shirts and running shorts—he’d never wear anything that wasn’t bestowed on him, that wasn’t a badge of participation, a demonstration of belonging. And he tried to make us more like him. He was two years older than me, four years older than Martin. He was trying to influence us the way his older siblings must have influenced him.

You should definitely play the cello, John once told Martin. He’d never really tried to influence me as much as Martin; I wasn’t as good a sport or as good a friend. The cello is ranked the number one instrument in Orchestra: play the cello and I’ll be your mentor. And run cross-country, it’s the number one way to get respect in High School and college. And when you want a girlfriend, go to band camp and look at the Drum Line.

John met his girlfriend at band camp from, of course, the Drum Line: Ashley, an Evangelical Christian. She and John hated each other, and they dated for four years (though he was secretly in love with Lucy the whole time). John was an atheist; Ashley saw actual demons behind the eyes of people she didn’t like. John wrote Halo fan-fiction, starring an author-insert character who he made the deadliest operative in the galaxy. Ashley wrote BDSMy Inuyasha fan-fiction starring an author-insert character, who was kidnapped successively by each of the characters in Inuyasha. They broke up John’s senior year. He broke up with her, but I never saw him look more devastated and deathlike--I think he was terrified of disappointing, even people he had grown to hate. I explained to myself that his fear of disappointing other people was why he lied all the time, and that helped me be his friend.

John went to college.  John met a woman through the college’s Anime Club and they live together now, a few hours from Adrian. They might be married—I don’t know. I know John dropped out of school after about a year and a half and I don’t really know why. Now, he’s a shift manager at Meijer, working nights. I think he likes it. He’d thrive in an environment where the expectations are explicitly plotted out, where he’d have power over other people.

With old friends, you try to pick up where you left off, and it’s easy if you have a psychic bond like a filament between two poles of energy. The last time John came to visit me in Adrian, we drove around in his Oldsmobile Achieva like old times. Only on this trip he told me how much he hated the black employees he supervised, how he’d come to despise all black people. He looked to me like he was hoping I would understand him, and I felt like I wanted to throw up or punch the dashboard, and the filament between us shattered.

It’s easy to imagine the kind of man John always was: a person who makes up incredible, self-aggrandizing fantasies in order to feel like a person worthy of love and friendship. Curdling into the kind of man who’s comfortable becoming a servant of oppression. Prejudice is a drug designed for people like John, for insecure and disappointed people to cling to when their lives don’t add up to their aspirations. It is terrifying to see. It was like watching a demon take possession of John’s mind; something changed behind his eyes. I try to understand his loneliness and his bitterness — but after that last time, it was too hard for me to be his friend, and whether it’s to my shame or credit I don’t know, but I stopped trying.