Newsworld

Chapter 10 Newsworld II

194 We watched it in Social Studies, then in World History. That Friday, September 14, we saw it again in a class called Life Studies. When the jet slammed into the north tower, Mr. Stolz, our teacher, squeezed the bridge of his nose pensively just like he did when he lectured about the dangers of credit-card debt. He shifted his eyes to us, his class of eleventh -grade boys, and asked how we felt about the attack. We weren’t good at talking about our feelings, though Mr. Stolz had made us read a book called The Emotional Life of Men. Our emotions were mysterious to us, the fine divisions between melancholy and depression, yearning and desire. We suspected that someday soon we’d be able to tell the difference between such things, the same way our parents could tell the difference between a good wine and a very good wine. We didn’t tell Mr. Stolz much about our lives. For example, we didn’t tell him that Jay Moore had videotaped the attack, then watched it after doing three lines of Ritalin. Nor did we tell him that Jeff Loeb’s Newsworld II 195 little brother, Seth, had laughed when he saw the first jet exploding into the tower. He’d thought it was a movie, like Independence Day. After his teacher explained that the planes were real, he cried for ten minutes before going to recess and kicking a red activity ball over the playground fence. We sat quietly, waiting for Mr. Stolz to talk to us. From previous classes we’d learned there were special scripts for talking about your feelings. For example, there were specific things you should say to a friend with a serious drug problem. But we didn’t know the script for this situation. Alan Whidden, a boy who’d been busted for steroids, said, “It makes me angry.” Mr. Stolz stood there in his starched black Tshirt and ironed jeans, regarding us with stern eyes. Harry Kessel, a JV lineman, said, “We should get whoever did this.” We were scared, but didn’t know how to say we were scared. The men in our textbook weren’t the kind of men you saw in the suburbs of Atlanta. They weren’t the kind who told their sons, “Kick some ass in the game this weekend” or, “If you’re going to do it, for god’s sake wear a rubber.” Our fathers went fishing ten times a year and rode tractor mowers around our weedy suburban lawns. They hung punching bags in our garages, the nylon casings filled with the exact amount of sand to make the bags feel like dead bodies. Initially we believed the terrorist attacks were something that happened up north, a good ways above the Mason-Dixon Line. But then our airport closed. The freeway closed, the mall closed, so did the movie theater. Lastly Newsworld draped a thick black chain across the entrance to its parking lot, right in front of the attendant booths where Jeff Sanders and Jarvis White had collected the five-dollar parking fee from tourists all summer long. A professionally printed sign announced, “National Security Closure.” Most of us worked at Newsworld, an amusement park three miles from our school. We said we hated it, but in truth we didn’t mind it 196 so much. We sold Icees and scraped gum off the sidewalk. We stole stuffed animals from the gift shops and gave them to our girlfriends. We thought the job was educational and believed it would help us get into a good college. After my evening shift I liked to walk through the park. I particularly liked The Vietnam Experience, three acres so lush you forgot you were in central Georgia, a silver mist rising from vents hidden in rocks, water dripping from irrigation hoses molded to resemble jungle vines. It was kind of creepy, the way it was laid out, the huts made of sticks, military radios and grenade launchers left beside the Main Guest Trail. Sometimes I would meet my girlfriend, Devon MacCray, in the Lost Vietnamese Village. We would make out in one of the thatched huts while a cool breeze circled around us and the soft voices of the Vietcong whispered from miniature speakers hidden in banyan trees. We’d grown up with Newsworld, the way other kids had grown up with...