Kapiolani Community College
Diamond Journal 2003Fall

Jaded
Kawehi Haug

I think I may have thought that the explosion was pretty – sort of like fireworks – a grand, Walt Disney World celebration of brave heroes in bright orange moon suits. A woman with glasses too large for her face is watching with pride as her husband and his friends are blown to pieces. She’s still smiling, clapping, watching the show. I wonder if she knows that NASA is not in the business of fireworks and fanfare. I wonder if she knows...there! Now she knows. And in one moment, that felt like a hundred, the lady with the big glasses opens her smiling mouth and lets out a gut wrenching scream that I can’t hear through the TV in my small private school classroom. But I know what she’s saying. Oh my god, oh my god.

I want to say it with her, over and over again until I understand, but I can’t take the Lord’s name in vain – it’s against the rules. But I don’t want to say it in vain, I want to say it in earnest – oh my God, why? I want to scream it out loud with the woman whose husband is floating back to earth two weeks too soon.

It is 1986. I am nine years old and my world has just ended. I remember that my dad’s world ended when Kennedy was killed. He told me about it once. Riding in the back of a big American car with his mom, the Canadian bride of an Air Force man, crying and crying, her perfect Donna Reed make-up bleeding all over a pack of Kleenex.

Kids don’t like to see adults cry – it means things are bad. The world is ugly and hopeless. But it wasn’t...until the lady with the big glasses and the dead astronauts...until my grandma’s streaky mascara and the murdered president.

It is 1986. I am nine years old and I am shocked. I feel unsafe and wobbly, like one of those slippery newborn horses on a National Geographic special. It is the last time I’ll feel that way.

Over the years, I’ll leave America at least twice a year. Maybe I only left once in 1989 but I made up for it in 1990. I left four times. By my nineteenth birthday, I will have been to 23 countries – some of them more than once.

Over the years, I’ll see a lot – perhaps too much. And the more I see, the less I’ll feel. The more I see, the more I’ll tolerate. The more I tolerate, the more I can see and on it goes until eventually I become a perfect study in austerity. I will lose a very basic human quality – the ability to be shocked. I’ll just lose it – not like you lose your glasses or car keys – more like losing your mind.

It is summer in the formidable city of Bogota. It’s not hot and damp like the summers I know – it’s cold and damp – and gray. The sky, the buildings, the streets, the faces on the slum-women of the invaciones – all gray. I befriend three young street kids who hold filthy rags soaked in paint thinner up to their faces and breathe until they’re just high enough to be funny. And they are funny. I enjoy them. We don’t understand each other when we talk. I don’t speak much Spanish – just the basics: ¿Dónde está el ba?o? ¿Cómo se llama? (I like to know the name of the person who is doing me the service of directing me to the bathroom); and my three amigos have learned one word in English: yes. They say it over and over again, laughing and breathing into their rags and laughing some more. Yes, yes, yes. Lived here long? Yes! How old are you? Yes! How about that soccer team. Not bad, huh? Yes! We all smile and nod and we like it.

Every night at around ten, we take the bus to the inner city and get out across the street from a neon restaurant. I can hear shouting and singing and wheezy, old-man laughter. We stand outside and wait for the boys. They’ll come – they always do. There they are! Brown and barefoot, their comfort rags in hand, with a few hundred other kids who own the city streets after dark. The ocean of orphans moves toward us, our fine coats and Eddie Bauer scarf and glove sets a beacon in the grayness. I feel overdressed, but the street kids don’t seem to mind. They laugh and touch my white skin and pinch my rosy, doughy cheeks. I give the littlest boy my gloves. I know they’ll stink of paint thinner when he gives them back, so I let him keep them; he needs them more than I do anyway, he’s just a baby. A raggedy, runny-nosed, barefoot, motherless, chemical sniffing baby. I ask our three boys if they know anything about the small one’s family: Is he an orphan? Yes! I know they’re right. They bob their heads and laugh and I want to cry. Then all at once, we’re alone – three street kids and a band of well-dressed gringos. We’ll spend the night together, like we always do – drinking coffee and eating bread and butter in a dingy coffee shop that only agrees to serve my friends because they’re our guests.

My mom sews each of my three friends a bag to carry their rags and other belongings so they don’t have to be burdened down with all the stuff that they don’t actually own. My mom’s dreams become haunted with orphan boys screaming her name through the dark alleys of Colombia. I cry when she tells me about it – not frantic, breathless crying – just silent, somber tears of resignation.
And the more I see, the less I’ll feel...

It is winter in Manila. There is no cool, crisp breeze. No clean, white snow. Just heat. Stifling, clingy, oppressive, wet heat. I sleep under a rainbow colored mosquito net. The rainbow is supposed to make me like it better; make me think that I’m a princess under a canopy. It works.

My bed is on the top floor of a two story house, two blocks away from the city dump. In the morning, the stench of rotting, discarded life leeches into my house and meets me where I’m sleeping under the rainbow. I’m used to it now, it’s familiar and comforting. It reminds me of Alma. I visit Alma everyday – sometimes she’ll come to my place, but mostly I go to her. I walk through miles of smoldering trash until I reach her home. Her home is a shack made from tin and cardboard and wood and anything else that the rich folks throw away. Her home is the city dump. She lives there with thousands of other families who are happy that they don’t live on the streets. There are shops and small businesses nestled in the waste. I even had a garbage dump manicure once. Baby, the nail lady, painted the tips of my sheltered, unhardened fingers with red and white stripes. My hands looked beautiful. Baby doesn’t get to paint often, because if you live on the dump you don’t want to use your pretty hands to rake through burning trash. Alma likes my hands. She wraps her tiny one around my finger and puts it in her mouth. For a split second I’m worried about the germs – hands are one of the dirtiest things and mine have seen better days – but then I remember that she lives in trash and I let her suckle my finger. Alma’s mom tells us that she’s sick. Little Alma has no appetite and I think to myself that I wouldn’t either if the view from my kitchen was the county garbage heap.

I bring her rice and leftover pansit from home. I hold her and play with her and she starts to eat for me. Alma and I play together everyday on the Philippine mountain of trash and I love her and I want to bring her home to sleep with me under the rainbow. I want to save her and heal her and make her eat and eat until she’s more than just limbs, but she dies anyway. I ask my mom if it hurts to starve to death. She says she thinks that it’s a pretty painless way to go and I feel better.

And the more I see, the more I’ll tolerate...

It is April in Albania. I’m visiting a village about three hours drive from our home in the city. My dad said that if the roads were decent, we would have made it here in an hour, but the roads are just paths; widened desert trails that go on forever. I always wonder how we make it to these remote mountain villages without reading maps and following street signs. I suppose the landmarks differ as the trail lengthens and perhaps the blackberry bush at the bottom of that last hill is as good a sign as any. The driver must have known that turning right at the bush would lead us to where we wanted to be.

The village is quiet and deflated. We all instinctively know that chatty conversation is inappropriate and we keep our voices at a whisper. We move slowly as if any sudden motion will be misinterpreted as disrespect for the pervasive heaviness that lingers over the stone rooftops of the village shacks and moves through the barren, abortive fields. We walk together to the home of a woman who is waiting for her five children to die. Her shack is dark and empty except for bundles of wrapped flesh and bone that lay on the floor in the icy clutches of death. My eyes are taking their time adjusting to the fuzzy light and I can barely make out the five bodies. My mom tells my dad that they won’t make it and I’m not sure how I feel about the prognosis. I think of all things they’ll miss in this world if they depart early; and then I think of all the things they won’t miss. And then I think to myself that they’re probably better off dead.
I’m surprised by my blatant acceptance of something so cruel.

Back in town I think about the five lifeless bundles and for a moment wonder how they are. Dead, I’m sure. And I don’t wonder again for a very long time.

The more I tolerate, the more I can see...

It is fall, winter, spring, summer and fall again in Berlin. I’m here because I think my friends are safer with me around. They’ve been seduced by needles and pipes, bottles and sex. We’ve known each other all of our lives and if they’re going down, I won’t try to stop them, but I’ll be here with them. I want to be here, I choose this life. My dad tells me that it’s not normal to feel comfortable in such offensive conditions, but I don’t really understand what he means by normal. The house we stay in is lined with addicts and drunks hoping to hang on long enough to promise to never be so stupid again. I weave through the sea of Dr. Martens and blue hair until I reach the spot where my purple sleeping bag lay. My bag reminds me of where I could be: at home in suburbia with thick carpet lining the floor instead of post-binge punk kids who think this is the time of their lives. A nice couple with a baby lives near me, just about two meters away. Sometimes we talk like good neighbors do, but mostly they sleep and I watch out for the baby. Sophia, the precious little drug baby, is a household favorite. She’s chubby and pink and happier than most people in the house. Sometimes I look at her and wonder if her parents would miss her if I took her away. She belongs with people who can buy her booties and sing her lullabies. She should be tucked into a bed with pink sheets and velvet toys. But her parents love her when they’re sober, so maybe she’s okay. I’m often sickened by my own thoughts, because sometimes I catch myself thinking that things could be worse for baby Sophia, that she could be on the streets. I wonder when street life became my measuring stick.

I become a perfect study in austerity...

The cops called, Dave’s been in a serious accident...Matt hung himself...Your grandfather has Alzheimer’s...Mom’s in the hospital...New York City’s being attacked...

What?

‘ What’? What do you mean ‘what’?

I mean...oh.