A BIANNUAL LITERARY MAGAZINE
The Minimalist
Excerpt from The Failure of the West
Caleb True
It is said that Carlos Kennedy Semple decided to become a musician when he heard Joey Reynolds say, in his trademark anchor’s voice: Okay, we're gonna play some, uh, some music here I think, to distract from the bloodcurdling scream of traffic reporter Jane Dornacker, who had just plummeted to her death in the Hudson River. Joey Reynolds put on the Huey Lewis hit: “Hip to be Square.” Carlos’ parents said he was in his crib on the kitchen table when the song came on, and he began to bang his pudgy fist in perfect rhythm. When Reynolds came back on to say that something had gone wrong and that maybe they should, uh, say a little prayer, little Carlos got all upset and cried until his mother found a Huey Lewis cassette and stuck it in the tape player.
Little Carlos banged on everything in the house. He banged with perfect rhythm. The world was his drumset. The late eighties were a bitch for his parents, who had to work their asses off to make ends meet. His mother made $9k a year teaching in the St. Louis Public Schools. His father was going to school to get a Master’s in Occupational Therapy because the family needed more money. They lived in a one-hundred-year-old duplex in Fox Park, St. Louis, which at the time was a crime-ridden ghetto, or was referred to as such by Carlos’ parents’ so-called friends at parties, friends whose eyes would go wide with shock and sympathy when Carlos’ parents told them they’d bought in Fox Park. Carlos’ mother could often be found peeping through the curtains at night, weighing the pros and cons of calling the police. There was a ‘problem building’ caddy corner from their duplex. The families in the building often fought each other or themselves. Their rabid sons could be found smoking dope in the alley or smashing windows. It was for this reason that Carlos Semple was not allowed to play outside.
Carlos’ mother was raised in Brooklyn. Her family was from Long Island and were all Catholic. Half of them were Irish and half were Italian. When Carlos’s maternal grandparents were married it shocked the neighborhood. They were like Montagues and Capulets, only it was the DiCiaccios and the Callahans. Carlos’s maternal grandmother, Rita DiCiaccio, had been one of the first women to pilot a military helicopter in the Pacific theatre of war, a Sikorsky R4B. Medics would load wounded men onto the chopper and she would ferry them to a hospital behind the front lines. William Callahan, Carlos’s maternal grandfather, had been a war photographer in the Pacific. He took pictures of men chasing after their own severed body parts on Wake Island and Iwo Jima and Okinawa. His preferred weapon was an M2 flamethrower. Rita and William met when Rita ferried William, with a bullet in his leg, from Okinawa to a clinic on the northern tip of Luzon. Legend has it William hobbled off his gurney, hobbled over to his field pack, extracted his camera and snapped a couple of pictures of Rita piloting the R4B, but the pictures have never been seen.
The two of them got married in 1946 and settled in Brooklyn, close to the border with Queens, close to their respective families, but not too close. Carlos’s mother had an unhappy childhood. She was beaten, showered with verbal abuse. William Callahan was a perennially failed businessman, constantly hounded by the mafia for protection money and ‘business insurance’ which he refused to pay. On the eve of his biggest potential payoff—his trucking company had just landed a postal delivery contract—the mafia dumped two hundred pounds of Domino Sugar into his fleet’s gas tanks. A few years later Rita was diagnosed with cancer and the family sold everything to move to Florida, Rita’s dying wish. Carlos’s mother had to transfer middle schools from Brooklyn to Tampa Bay. Rita died hairless and irritable. Carlos’s mother escaped to Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, where she met Carlos’s father.
Carlos’s father was raised in the suburbs of St. Louis. Carlos’s paternal grandparents—Abe and Vivian Semple—were, respectively, a pastor and a homemaker. They were classic postwar white people living off corn on the softly rolling hillsides of the suburban middle west. Carlos’s father’s father did charity work in the inner city, and through these activities Carlos’s father made many black friends, an uncommon occurrence for a suburban white St. Louis boy in the days before school deseg programs. The black kids taught Carlos’ father to ‘bop,’ to walk with a certain swooping flair, and showed him what rock ‘n’ roll was. Thus did Carlos’ father, at the age of thirteen or so, begin to grow apart from the rest of his siblings. He bought a Zanella motorcycle, for instance. He and his partner-in-crime, a dark-haired boy from Pagedale, would ride their motorcycles around St. Louis county and smoke dope. Though Carlos’s father did become president of the student body in high school, it was less a sign of school pride than an exercise of privilege. Said Carlos’s father: he did it because he felt like it; because he knew he could win. Carlos’s father and his best friend from Pagedale graduated summa cum laude and went away to Oberlin College on scholarship. They traveled the world. Back in St. Louis, Carlos’s father settled in a crummy apartment in University City and played in folk bands around the Loop. He wrote articles for Wired magazine, articles that, for the most part, paid his rent. His first article for the magazine was about Indian temple music. His angle, in the article, was that the music was an unintentional antimodern critique. He became a regular contributor and was allowed great latitude in his writing. Later on, Carlos’s father did a sort-of follow-up article about the musical ceremony at Ankola temple in India on the occasion of the 1980 total eclipse.
One day, Carlos’s folk band played a gig at Brando’s in the Loop. Carlos’s mother was in the audience. After the gig Carlos’s father asked her to a party, where they did some dancing—not the ‘bop’ Carlos’s father had learned in the inner city, but a kind of quasi-swing/ballroom-type dancing common among white middle-aged baby boomers at the time. To rock music, yes, but with the forms of dancing perfected by their parents’ generation—the passable, functional yet inferior imitations of black Lindy Hop variations. Carlos’s father charmed the pants off this Washington University student from Brooklyn by way of Tampa.
They moved into the duplex in Fox Park. Carlos’ nursery housed his father’s record collection. While Carlos’s mother worked, Carlos’s father would sit himself in the nursery, type out articles for Wired, and play his records. His favorite records were Iggy Pop’s Lust for Life, Frank Zappa’s Apostrophe(‘), John Lennon’s Double Fantasy, and Jimi Hendrix’s Axis: Bold as Love. These, along with Santana’s Abraxas, provided the backdrop noise for Carlos’s development. Where there was no more pumping heart, no more blood-rushing whirr in acoustical amnion, there was instead the intro to Iggy Pop’s “Penetration.” There was the Scarlatti-esque extended guitar solo on Zappa’s “Montana.” There were John Lennon’s double-, triple-, and quadruple-tracked guitar solos, the sound of which scared little Carlos half to death. And there was the reprise on Axis, phased heavily in and out, and this was the closest-ever musical representation of the amnion. Carlos was, of course, not conscious of this; suffice to say that, as an infant, he would get very pensive when the song came on. The only thing on Abraxas that appealed to little Carlos was “Incident at Neshabur,” which had no lyrics. Greg Rolie’s voice on “Black Magic Woman” put little Carlos to sleep. Eventually Carlos’s father caught on to the effects different music had on his child, and so he began to play with him, in this way, all day long. Carlos’s father would say: How about this? and put on some early Christian choral music. Carlos would sob uncontrollably.
Interestingly enough, Carlos would stop crying if his father turned the volume way up, but then the neighbors would bang on the wall and he’d have to turn it down again. And Carlos’s tears would return. His father would choose another record. Prince’s Dirty Mind had a confounding effect on little Carlos. First, on “Dirty Mind” little Carlos would sort of roll from side to side, laughing his ass off. Then, on “When You Were Mine,” little Carlos would stare at the ceiling and slowly, very slowly, look like he was going to bawl hard, until, eventually, around 3:02 minutes in, he would burst into tears. It was back-forth, back-forth on this album, little Carlos wildly approving of “Dirty Mind,” “Do It All Night,” “Uptown” and “Head,” and finding the rest of the album profoundly disturbing. Sometimes Carlos’ father would have a former bandmate over for some jamming or to smoke a joint and he’d put on Prince’s “Dirty Mind” and they would joke about how little Carlos was a discriminating critic of “The Minneapolis Sound.” Carlos’ father would laugh and say: You should have seen him grooving to Huey Lewis. And his friends would fold their arms and say: What’s his favorite album, then? And Carlos’ father would say: I dunno, let’s find out. Turns out, the only song little Carlos liked, and ever would like by Huey Lewis, was “Hip to be Square.” And he never understood why.
In 1990, at the age of four, Little Carlos became deathly afraid that The First Gulf War would come to be fought on his doorstep; that he would be killed. Shortly thereafter, he became afraid of conscription, that on his eighteenth birthday he might be drafted into the U.S. Army and die shortly thereafter. It was little Carlos’ first intimation to live fast and die young, or to live fast because he would inevitably die young, or to live fast because the only way to get famous was to die young. He figured his days on earth were numbered. He understood, even though he could barely understand anything, that time moved very quickly when he was happy. For that reason, little Carlos decided to fill himself with fear; later on in life, Carlos came to despise fear and figured he’d fill himself with disdain, that he’d cultivate a kind of culturally refined umbrage; at the age of four, however, it was fear that took hold of little Carlos.
He was enrolled in a kindergarten in Clayton, Missouri. When the children would form into a circle to ‘play music,’ little Carlos found it most useful to—instead of generally moving towards unified rhythmic banging—perpetuate a kind of entropy the other students would fight and attempt to coopt into synchronicity. Carlos found the intermediate stage of cooption to be the most interesting. He would select his favorite instrument, which happened to be the other students’ least favorite instrument—the blue, serrated ‘rhythm sticks’—and bang them on the carpet, bang, bang, bang in carefully-placed polyrhythm against the developing collective march. The teacher would frown and try and coax little Carlos to ‘join in.’ Carlos was confused by the question; was he not playing his rhythm sticks? Were they not all playing ‘together?’ To Carlos’s young mind, he was in fact tying the whole lot of little bastards together. They, like lemmings streaming in unison towards the cliff, were marching inevitably toward uniformity. At their ripe little age—and this is not a conclusion little Carlos could have assembled in any complete form at the time—the kiddies were being taught to follow; to be the same; to come around; to adhere; to assimilate; to acquiesce; to, as it were, ‘join in.’
Little Carlos developed a taste for Legos. He’d play by himself. He’d build intergalactic warships bristling with weaponry. One of Carlos’s mighty little innovations in warship construction was to sever a Lego human being at the waist and apply the removed pants piece by the feet to the fuselage of a warship. With the pants piece’s conical inserts bent outward, they looked like angled twin gun emplacements. When the teacher would ask little Carlos to describe what he’d created—that is, when it was time to ‘Show and Tell,’ one of a number of public speaking colloquia—Carlos would start by saying the piece was ‘an Intergalactic Warship,’ then go on to say that the pilot sat here, and that the gunner sat there; here was the engine, and there was where the fire came out; and then little Carlos would spend about five minutes describing the ships armaments: at the back is a pair of laser cannons which protect the rear of the ship and can fire a concentrated laser beam at a target anywhere behind the ship; this gun on the front of the ship is aimed by the pilot and fires a proton torpedo at two-times light speed at an assailant threatening the ship from the front. The proton torpedo has enough firepower to destroy a space station or a small city. On either side of the proton torpedo is a laser cannon equally as powerful as the pair of laser cannons on the back of the ship. On the sides of the ship one will find banks of EMP disruptors—the Lego pants—which aren’t as powerful as the laser cannons or proton torpedo launcher, but have the ability to freeze an enemy ship’s controls long enough for the Intergalactic Warship to turn around and fire either the front laser cannons or the rear laser cannons or a proton torpedo at them and kill them…
The boys would be rapt; the girls would be bored.
Eventually little Carlos made friends with a stinky, smudge-faced boy named Aaron who liked to play violent games and listen to the classical music station on the radio. They would enact scenarios in full scale that they might construct on a much smaller scale with Legos. Battles against armies—often armies composed of or involving some of the girls in their preschool, whom they liked pretending to vanquish in battle, or burn at the stake as witches, or pelt with stones, or immure indefinitely, or somehow enslave and make do their bidding. Little Carlos would go over to Aaron’s house in the Lemp neighborhood behind the Anheuser-Busch brewery. Aaron had a house and a backyard more conducive to outside play than Carlos’ duplex. Aaron’s backyard in fact spanned the backyards of all five houses on his block; Aaron’s family owned all the backyards though they didn’t own the houses, and so Carlos and Aaron had a good couple-acres to tramp around in. There was a thicket of invasive bamboo trees in one corner of the furthest yard; there was a rusting swing set in the second yard, there was an ancient porch swing with a pool of rainwater in its paint-flecked ergonomic seat, a porch swing that operated not by suspension but by some calcified, long-gone mechanical shimmy. There was an enamel tub in the vast yard. There were ailanthus trees that provided ample shade in the summer. There were many mosquitoes. The backyard became a living fantasy map, the kind one might liken to a Tolkien or C.S. Lewis fantasy map; the lawn is Archenland; the bamboo thicket, Mirkwood. Beware the exposure of Weathertop—the swingset: rickety, condemnable—it is high ground but open to aerial attack!
They would tune the radio to a classical station and turn the volume up. They would range around the yard with toy swords, killing thousands upon thousands of orcs. They would crown each other king, then assassinate each other at the last minute. Once, one of the girls from Clayton Kindergarten came over to play—her mom dropped her off for the afternoon—and Carlos and Aaron locked her in the dungeon of The Keep at Crumbling Porch. The extent of their pretending was blurred by this internment; the girl, Lucy, burst into tears after being in the darkness under the porch for ten minutes, and Aaron’s mother came running out, and Aaron and Carlos got a good scolding that day at lunch, a simple affair of Kraft Mac ‘n’ Cheese and Kool-Aid. Lucy did not visit again.
When Aaron moved away, Carlos never forgave him. My family’s moving to Bufort, said Aaron, one day at the end of a play-date.
When are you moving to Bufort? asked Carlos.
At the end of the summer.
And Aaron invited Carlos to visit the farm in Bufort. There was, if anything, a zillion times more space and potential adventures to be had on the farm in Bufort, Aaron told Carlos, but Carlos never visited. Once or twice Aaron called Carlos on the phone. His voice would sound so distant. He’d say: Hi Carlos. And Carlos would say: Hello Aaron. Aaron would say: You should come out here and visit some time. It’s really fun in Bufort. I still have all my Legos and swords and stuff but there’s a lot more space out here and it’s a lot of fun to go and hit the animals with the swords. Carlos imagined the farm in Bufort was as majestic and exciting as Aaron made it out to be; in fact, thought Carlos, Bufort probably surpassed Aaron’s advertisement; far surpassed its own name, the underwhelming, clunky-sounding name: Bufort—like a turd hitting water. The farm in Bufort was possibly the best place ever to crown each other king, to go on quests, to continue their genocide of orcs and various other fantastical subhuman species—imps, goblins, halflings, elves, trolls, dwarves, naiads—to have banquet feasts of Kool Aid and Kraft Mac ‘n’ Cheese, to strategize with Legos, to forage for herbs of immortality, to get bitten by mosquitoes, to torture and kill their female classmates. Alas, Aaron’s voice sounded so distant, and held no trace of remorse in having left Carlos, having left St. Louis. It was as if, when Aaron invited Carlos to visit the farm in Bufort, he was saying how much better Bufort was than St. Louis; it was as if Aaron were inquiring: Why don’t you come out here and live on a farm in Bufort, too? Not everyone, Carlos thought, could just move to a farm in Bufort. There probably weren’t enough farms to go around. Some people had to live in the ghetto of Fox Park in duplexes caddy-corner from unashamed imbeciles who tipple Wild Irish Rose on the berm; who chase after their wives belt-in-hand; who fire their semi-automatics skyward on New Year’s to kill the old year, to kill God. Some people, thought Carlos, had to represent.
In 1993 Carlos Semple started elementary school. He was enrolled at Cartwright Investigative Learning Center in the Tower Grove North neighborhood of St. Louis. Upon entering the first grade, Carlos was undecided—undecided as to whether he would be a bad kid or a good kid. His inclinations in kindergarten were to be different, to abstain from doing that which everyone else seemed to want to do.
Carlos’s mother dropped Carlos off at school on her way to work—in a different, shittier public school in an even ghettoer part of the city. Carlos entered the flaking green iron gates of the schoolyard, where about a thousand children his size and larger ran wild. Adults twirling whistles around their fingers patrolled the children; in the far corner there was a kickball game. In another corner of the yard, between a fenced-off power transformer and a locked gate, a group of kids played soccer with a red rubber ball.
At Cartwright, Carlos got his first taste of real fascism. At seven thirty all the adults simultaneously blew their whistles. The children, minus a sad little minority that included Carlos, all seemed to know that the whistles meant they were to retard their free-spirited entropy, retard themselves into little rows. Kickballs were stilled; soccer balls collected, frisbees slapped spinning from the air. Carlos looked around, clueless. He approached the rows, the little two-by-two lines that lost their uniformity towards the back, that all seemed to begin at predetermined spots on the pavement: all these little fasces, all these little inmates-in-training, soldiers-in-training, workers-in-training, cogs of the system learning to be in one place.
A massive, one-armed security guard named Jones strolled up and down in front of the lines, watching everybody, bobbing his head to an inaudible beat. Carlos watched Jones bobbing his head, marveling at the knotted right sleeve of his uniform. An adult passed Carlos and said: It’s time to get in your row, sweetie.
What row? said Carlos.
Whose class are you in? said the adult.
I don’t know, said Carlos, and he was escorted by the kind, whistle-toting adult to the principal’s office where he could be looked up on the school’s computer—a dirty, white, black-screened, buzzing IBM that accepted two kinds of floppy discs: the old kind and the new kind. The principal put in the new kind and waited for the booting sound to stop, then scrolled down the flickering list of names.
Carlos Simple? said the principal, not looking at Carlos.
Carlos Semple, said Carlos.
The principal looked past her reading glasses at Carlos, then looked back at the screen. She ejected the floppy disk and put another one in. She found Carlos’ class.
Room 113, she said.
The kind adult said, Come on.
Carlos followed her down a long hallway, past a glass-windowed library off to the right and a vast auditorium to the left, up a small staircase, and into the wing of the school with all the other first grade classrooms. Room 113 contained thirty other students; Carlos’ teacher was a pudgy, snow-haired lady with a wide smile and many moles. This is Mrs. Weintraub, said the kind adult. The adult brought Carlos to the desk where Mrs. Weintraub was grading papers, and in a quiet voice—for it was ‘quiet time’—the kind adult introduced Carlos. Mrs. Weintraub said thank you to the adult and Hello to Carlos. The adult left and Mrs. Weintraub told Carlos that it was ‘quiet time’ and that he could read or work on a coloring book if he wanted. She pointed out Carlos’ desk—a blank desk, part of an island of four desks in the furthest corner of the room. She said Carlos should find in the desk all the things he needed: the black, eraserless pencil; the small, mean pink eraser; the Mathematics book; the Language book; the Civics book; two journals of newsprint paper; and a box of 24 Crayola crayons. Carlos looked around at the other students. Some had their heads cradled in their arms. Some had their noses buried in slim volumes. Still others stared off into space. Carlos took a seat, closed his eyes and greeted the darkness. He listened to the silence all around him. The silence was full of sound. It was more full of sound than an entire symphony orchestra tuning up. Carlos heard a thousand sighs, including one from the breeze; he heard the sounds of automobiles outside, and of birds; of a yelling man somewhere far away; he heard the sounds of Mrs. Weintraub scratching away with a felt pen on paper that was, judging by the sound, not newsprint. Carlos heard the sounds of nearby mouth-breathers; of nearby, congested nose-breathers; he heard the slip-scrape of turning pages; and he heard the sound of his own heart beating; his own blood rushing; that whirr in his ears that would never go away so long as he was capable of hearing anything.
Caleb True's work has appeared in Ploughshares, The Sonora Review, Ninth Letter, Faultline, and elsewhere. He is seeking representation for his novel, The Failure of the West, of which this is an excerpt. He lives in Seattle and runs the boutique press Dynamo Verlag (dynamoverlag.com).