Townie_ A Memoir - Andre Dubus [98]
Beside her sat Jen. She was a year younger than I was. She skipped a lot of classes and stayed in her room writing poetry and painting with watercolors or spray cans, anything she could find. She had blonde hair and wore faded cotton dresses from St. Vincent de Paul’s and she’d been her high school valedictorian, though she had to explain to me what that was. Her room was next to mine on the second floor. Sometimes I’d crawl into her bed or she’d crawl into mine, and now she sat in her bathing suit next to Wei Ling, a bright and cheerful premedical student from China who laughed a lot and studied hard, smoking cigarettes in her bedroom till late at night.
The five of us were heading to Barton Creek, a spring-fed swimming hole on the other side of Austin. All we needed was beer and ice, and just as I pulled into the lot, two frat boys climbed out of their powder blue Monte Carlo. They were both tall and well-built, their button-down shirts tucked snugly into their ironed jeans, and as we pulled up in our rusted Pinto wagon, the muffler throaty, just a bit too much exhaust seeping out the back, the driver glanced over at us like we were bugs somebody should’ve stepped on, and that’s when I noticed how he’d parked his Monte Carlo across two parking spaces, that’s when I noticed the stickers on his rear bumper: Anti-Irania Mania, and No Camel Jockeys.
They weren’t the first I’d seen. A month before, close to midnight, I’d walked home from the campus library to see a Cadillac parked in front of our house. Like so many of the cars in that neighborhood of fraternities and sororities, it was new, its silver hubcaps catching the dim light from our front porch. I saw the No Camel Jockeys sticker on the rear bumper, and I stood there looking down at it a long while.
Because of my ties to Marjan and her family, I’d studied more about Iran and its secret police, Savak, trained and supported by the United States. There were stories of men forced to watch the repeated rape of their wives, forced to watch their own children held down while fingers were broken, a hand was sawn off, or an arm. Then, on September 8, 1978, what they call Black Friday, a protesting and unarmed crowd was gunned down in Jaleh Square, and what killed them were American bullets.
In November, students climbed over the walls of the American Embassy and took control of what they called “the nest of spies for the Great Satan.” I didn’t see us all as being the Great Satan, but I thought it very reasonable that they did.
Back in Austin, Texas, fraternity boys got liquored up and cruised the streets looking for anyone with dark skin and eyes and hair, anyone who looked like a “camel jockey” or “sand nigger.” They found Ethiopians, Mexicans, a few Egyptians and Sudanese, and they beat them up, usually three or four on one. I’d hear of these attacks, and each day I walked to and from campus hoping to see one, hoping to do what I’d learned to do.
Now in the parking lot of the 7-Eleven, my pulse was thrashing between my ears and I edged the Pinto up to the rear passenger side of the powder blue Monte Carlo and stepped on the gas and scraped metal off metal the length of both cars, Wei Ling screaming, the Monte Carlo rocking in the rear view mirror as I pulled ahead, a strip of chrome hanging from it like a broken limb.
Molly was yelling, “You have no right! You have absolutely no right to do that with us in the car. Andre. Take us home right this minute!”
“Not till they come out.” My mouth was dry. I’d slipped off my seat belt so I could jump out of the car when they came back outside, those two racist, entitled pieces of shit I was going to go after. But Kourosh’s hand was on my arm.
“Andre-jahn,