Now Is Not the Time to Panic(30)
“I know. I don’t think we have to take all the blame. But we have to take some of it. We really do.”
“I’ll take it,” I said. “But that’s as far as I can go with it. I’ll accept it, but I can’t change it.”
Zeke looked at me and then nodded. “I think I’m just trying to figure out how I could have made this thing and still be a good person. Like, my intentions were good, right?”
“Yes, of course,” I told him.
“And what we made was good,” he said, and he sounded a little more confident now.
“It is good,” I said. “It’s the best thing ever.”
“And so it just keeps going,” he said. “Because it’ll keep going with or without us.”
I knew he was doing this for himself, that he wanted to know that he wasn’t a bad person. And it made me love him, even as it made me feel a little bit worse about myself. Because I didn’t care if I was a bad person anymore. I just . . . I just didn’t.
AND IT SPREAD. IT’S HARD TO EXPLAIN TO ANYONE WHO DIDN’T grow up in the time before the internet how impossible this actually was, and for it to even reach me at that time meant that it was probably five times as prevalent as what I was hearing on the news or reading in the papers. This was not like a few years after that summer, when the whole chain of events was featured on Unsolved Mysteries and Hard Copy and 20/20 and before it was mentioned on Saturday Night Live, where it turned out that Harrison Ford was putting up the posters, though he blamed it on a one-armed man, and before the TV movie The Edge: The Story of the Coalfield Panic or the twenty-seven-song concept album by the Flaming Lips called Gold-Seekers in the Shantytown. This was before the streetwear company X-Large did an entire clothing line featuring the poster. This was before the Japanese streetwear company A Bathing Ape did a nearly identical clothing line featuring the poster five years later. This was before the series of articles in the New York Times about the Coalfield Panic won a Pulitzer Prize. This was before seven different people came forward to claim responsibility for the poster, before all seven of them were summarily disproven. This was before the poster had its own Wikipedia page, before there was theedgeisashantytown.com and wearefugitives.com and thelawisskinnywithhungerforus.com, which were the names of three different emo bands in the 2000s. This was before a wrestling message board said that the phrase came from a promo by the Ultimate Warrior that had never been released, and before people spent years trying to find a tape of it. This was before Urban Outfitters sold a print of the poster for forty-five dollars. This was before a famous chef in New York opened a fried chicken restaurant called Skinny with Hunger, which lasted less than a year. And before a huge contingent of citizens in a tiny Eastern European country overthrew their corrupt government, shouting, in English, “We are fugitives” as they stormed the president’s mansion, and one of the rebels, a young woman who was honestly way too pretty to be dealing with corrupt governments, held up a sign that said the same phrase for an iconic photograph that was featured on the cover of Newsweek. It was before all of that, which was much harder for me to understand than anything that happened during that summer, even though I do not understand very much about that summer, because it still feels like a dream. Because my life still feels like a dream. Because every single time that I reassure myself that what I have, the life that I’ve made, is real, I find myself automatically going back to that summer and playing it over and over and over again in my mind, and I still can’t quite tell you for sure that any of it really happened.
The only evidence is that I’m still here. And the poster is still here. And I know because I still have the original poster, with my blood and Zeke’s blood on it. And if I start to lose a sense of myself, if I start to drift outside my life, I take the original poster and I make a copy on the scanner/copier/printer in my own private office, and I go somewhere, anywhere in the entire world, and I hang it up. And I know, in that moment, that my life is real, because there’s a line from this moment all the way back to that summer, when I was sixteen, when the whole world opened up and I walked through it.
Ten
COALFIELD WAS NOTHING. THERE WAS NOTHING TO IT. IT WAS rural in the way that a lot of rural places existed in the mid-nineties, which is to say that it had a Wal-Mart and fast food and little subdivisions of houses of various levels of wealth and then fields and fields of soybeans. You would not come here unless you were visiting family or you got a job working at the Toyota factory or the air force engineering base a few towns over. What we had, everyone else had, too, and who wanted that? So it was such a strange sensation when Coalfield, because of us and whatever we’d done, became a place that mattered.
People made it a priority that summer to visit Coalfield. College kids, so handsome and tan, always a little drunk or high, showed up from Georgia and North Carolina, emptied out of cars, and just, like, walked around our town. They looked for the posters, and when they saw one, they stole it or took a picture of it. The Royal Inn, which was usually just for construction workers and weird sex stuff, was now completely full at all times, parties around the pool that the management hadn’t even bothered to fill. Old hippies in RVs showed up with coolers filled with soggy sandwiches and orange soda, and they would set up a picnic in the state park and watch everyone else either put up or pull down posters. There were teenagers from all the surrounding counties, wearing T-shirts by bands like Napalm Death and Marilyn Manson and Soundgarden and Korn, and they had our poster in their hands, and they searched for a place to hang it.