“What about those crazy fanatics with the funny hats?”
“Well… I’m not sure I would really call them fanatics, Rose,” I start, annoyed. In Korean, there is a word—dapjeongneo—for when someone asks you a question and has already decided the answer they want to hear from you and are waiting for you to say it. I know she wants us to make fun of the Hasids. But Rose hasn’t talked to me in five years, years that were intensely transformative for me, so her expectations are going to be very off. “Remember the group of communists you used to hang out with? They seemed like fanatics to me.”
Rose’s shoulders deflate a little. “Wanting everyone to get their fair share is not extreme,” she says flatly.
“Okay… and who decides what’s fair? You?”
“Common sense decides! No one needs a billion dollars. Especially not when there are so many poor people suffering in the world. In this day and age, with how much money America has, we can all afford some more equality.”
“Oh boy. Equality. Now that is a loaded word.” I lean back on the bench and take a long, deep breath. This is not the conversation I want to be having, and yet, I can’t help myself. “If you haven’t noticed, nothing is equal in life, other than in mathematics. That is where the word originated, back in the 1400s. Latin. Identical in amount or portion. Uniform in size or shape.”
“Well, yeah, that’s the problem, don’t you think?”
“No. The problem is that ‘equal’ can’t be applied to people, because people are never identical. Except twins, I guess, but even then, there are studies…” I pause. “It really reminds me of the story of Sodom and Gomorrah. Do you know it?”
“What?” Rose gasps. She drops her cigarette on the ground and grinds it down with her shoe. “No. You know I never read the Bible.” Rose spits out bible like it’s a dirty word. In Riverwest, it is a dirty word. Here, the only religion is counter-culture—which, if anything, is merely an absence of culture, not a replacement with another. A vacuum that sucks in everything around it.
“Never mind,” I say. I should probably have shut my mouth back when she mentioned crazy people in funny hats. If I start talking religion in Riverwest, I won’t make it through the day. I imagine a crowd of torch-holding anarchists throwing me out onto the Humboldt Avenue bridge, where artsy Riverwest turns into the college-partying East Side. Even when I lived here, I barely talked to anyone about religion, or politics for that matter. Not because I disagreed, more because I didn’t care. I didn’t care about anything—that was the problem. It was what you found at the bottom of the vacuum. Nihilism sucked you in with its ideologies, but it kept you with its existential crisis, its replacement of meaning with parties and the everyday dramas of your neighbors. It’s easy to get lost in these things for years, for decades even. A person could get lost forever, looking for something, when she doesn’t know what it is she’s looking for.
“Um, okay,” Rose starts, as if she is talking to a crazy person. “Have you thought about getting a snake?”
I turn to face her, my face morphed into confusion before I can stop it. “What? Why?”
“Well you need one, like, desperately. Your energy is really dark right now.” She does not explain how a snake could change my energy from dark to light, not that it would make the sentiment more logical in my eyes. She simply scowls at me, then glances down at her wrist, where there is a large tattoo of a bass sticking out from under a thick plastic watch, and abruptly stands up. “Shit. I’m late for band practice,” she says. “I really have to go. We’re playing later at Bremen if you want to check it out! The band is kicking ass lately.”
“Who? The Silver Plague?”
Rose scoffs, as if spitting out a bad egg. “No, The Langston Hughers. The Silver Plague was getting too famous. I had to quit that shit.”
“Why?” I ask, puzzled. I know that famous in Milwaukee only means people in Milwaukee know who you are, not that you’re touring or making money; nevertheless, it only makes her statement more puzzling to me.
“I don’t know,” she says, looking to the sky, her mouth set deep in contemplation before turning up a little at the edges, as if she is proud of the answer she’s come up with. “Maybe I’m scared of success or something. Sellouts are so lame.”
I open my mouth, then close it again.
“Anyway,” says Rose, the smirk from her face gone. “You know I’m not one for deep thoughts. I’ll leave that to people like you.” She starts walking off, but I stand, blocking her exit on the sidewalk.
“Wait.” It suddenly occurs to me why I’m here, and it’s not to convince anyone about the deeper meaning of bible stories or discuss local music. “You ever see my sister around?”
Rose begins adjusting the large plaid knit wrap over her shoulders until it’s essentially covering all of her skin, like a shield. A shield from me. “Uh, yeah, sometimes.”
“Where?” I ask, stiffening.
Rose keeps looking down at the sidewalk, which is covered in cigarette butts and wet coffee sleeves, before stealing a glance in my direction.
“I don’t know, just around.”
“Rose.”
My old friend sighs. A flash of something dark—worried, maybe? Jealous?—passes through her, and I suddenly wonder if my dad isn’t being paranoid at all. “I really don’t remember,” Rose says. She lights another cigarette from a pack in her shawl.
“Are you sure?”
Rose crosses her arms over her chest as if warming herself, but I know it’s an instinctively defensive move. Against me. Probably all that Krav Maga I’d been learning in Israel making its presence known without my realizing it; fighting is all muscle memory, after all. Had I ever been so meek? It’s hard for me to imagine. Still, I sit back down and try to relax my posture as much as I can. I practically slouch right out of my chair.
“You should check out Valhalla,” she finally tells me. “That’s where everyone her age goes.”
I almost laugh. “Valhalla?”
“Plato’s Cave?” she tries, her eyes bright and amused.
I shake my head.
“…The Blue House?”
“Oh. The Blue House,” I say, remembering the blue-and-white duplex across the street from an abandoned basketball court. How could I forget the revolving door of punk houses in Riverwest? I used to spend half my free time at them. They were always changing location or name, but they were all the same: messy, overcrowded duplexes full of cigarette smoke and sticky-beer floors, and way too many people living there than could be legal. Local bands screaming from basements every other night, while bonfires burned high in the yard. The feeling of camaraderie enforced by vast amounts of alcohol and the fact you all lived in the same mile radius. At one point, it was the closest I’d ever come to some sort of religion. Only now that I’ve experienced true religion do I realize how immensely far away it was from one. The connection I’d felt hadn’t been real; I never talked to any of those people again.
“Anything else you can tell me?” I pry. But Rose merely breaks eye contact and hugs me again—a light, casual-type of hug now, one reserved for strangers—then turns on her bright red cowboy-booted heels.
“No, sorry, Mash. Good luck, okay?”
Then she disappears down the street without another word, and I have no choice but to go, too.