“Ballad for Mason Johnson”
There once was a boy who had a job feeding a robot. This might sound like a fable, or something, but it really isn’t. The boy worked at a huge factory in a small, Midwestern corn town. The factory made motors for washing machines.
Every night, from midnight to 8 a.m., the boy would pick motors off an assembly line and feed them to the robot. The robot was as big as a Coke machine, but it was mostly a mouth—a giant, gaping, metallic mouth. The motors were the size and shape of a human head, and the boy would place them onto the robot’s one, big tooth. The robot had an electric eye, which prevented it from chomping the boy’s arms off (though the boy imagined that the robot really wanted to). There was a sheet of aluminum hanging down like the robot’s apron, and each time the boy drove his knee into it, the robot’s massive jaws closed and smashed all the motor’s parts into place. The boy liked to imagine he was kneeing the robot in the balls.
He had followed his first real girlfriend to that town when she went away to college, but after one semester she decided she didn’t like the school, and wasn’t sure about the boy, and she went back home to live with her parents. The boy didn’t have any money, so he had to stay there, feeding the robot. She was a rich girl with black eyes and a surly kind of beauty, and the future he had outlined for himself was adorned with images of her trying on her engagement ring, cutting wedding cake, and holding their first born, a daughter, who, for some reason she had determined would be named “Mojabe.” Now, he was starting to seriously worry he was going to end up married to that robot.
Working at that factory scared the boy in ways he had only experienced abstractly before, in nightmares, when he was a little kid. Now the fear was concrete. The men and women who worked in the boy’s section of the factory were all soft, and round, and middle aged. They had cartons of Twinkies and Jays potato chips set up around their stations, and they spent the whole night talking to one another about one subject: the lottery. They would all go in together and buy blocks of lottery tickets. Another group on the opposite side of the factory had won $10,000 once. Some of these people had been working there nearly 20 years. All they talked about was the lottery. And overtime. They were obsessed with overtime. They couldn’t get enough of that place.
“I’d quit before that was my fate!” the boy would cry out, silently, as he fed the robot. “I would! I’d become a bum! I’d eat out of tin cans and sleep under the bridge!” But this threat felt empty, because, of course, no one was really listening.
The boy made one friend the whole time he worked there—a tall, thin, bespectacled guy about ten years older than him named Wade. Wade had studied musical composition at the University. Now he threaded wires into washing machine motors. Wade never smiled. He saw the boy who fed the robot reading a book in the break room, and they got to talking. One bright, winter morning, after they clocked out, the boy gave Wade a ride home to the spare, weathered farmhouse he rented on the outskirts of town. Wade’s wife was leaving for her job at the grocery store just as they drove up. Wade’s wife looked like Wade, with a wig on. Wade invited the boy inside for a drink, and they sat on his vinyl couch all day and drank red wine from a big jug of Carlo Rossi.
“I appreciate that job,” Wade was saying, “because of the benefits. We’re thinking of having a kid.”
Then he pulled out an old projector and started showing the boy black-and-white art films he had made with his friends. There was no sound. People danced around the farmhouse twirling umbrellas. A bald guy with round glasses played a trumpet. The boy couldn’t focus on any of it. Wade was a smart, sensitive, older guy, and now that he had him alone, the boy wanted to talk about the girl that stranded him in that town, and how desperately he missed her. He wanted to hear some magical words of advice.
Wade listened to the boy, nodding every now and then. He had been in a similar situation once. In fact…Wade reached into a desk drawer. He fussed with a cassette recorder and then a quavering acoustic guitar played notes that bled like water colors and a voice the boy recognized as Wade’s could be heard singing a song about his own lost love. “The leaves turn…” Wade sang, “your face is there.” “I don’t know why it is,” Wade sang, over and over, “I’m always thinking of you…. Think-ing of yooooou…” The tape was old, and it slowed down at certain points and distorted Wade’s voice as he lamented the fact that no matter how much time passed, he still missed the girl; but this only made the song seem all the more like the soundtrack to the boy’s own heartsick dreams.
When the song was over, Wade pulled the cassette out and he stared at it strangely; the expression on Wade’s face reminded the boy of one time when he was just a little kid and his father broke an old thermometer and watched silvery balls of mercury dance in his hands—all the while telling the boy it was poison, and never to do what he was doing. After Wade put the cassette back in the desk, he said: “I’m glad I pressed ‘Record’ that day, because I’ll never be able to sing that song again. Not like that.” He shrugged. “I don’t feel that way any more. Eventually, I realized that all that pain wasn’t really about her. I was projecting my own issues on to her. If you feel like you can’t live without someone, that’s a bad sign. It really brings out the worst in a person.” Wade looked lost in thought for awhile, before adding, “My wife and I have told each other that we could live without each other. It’s an important step in the process of… human individuation.”
“Human?” the boy thought. Wade and the boy may have smoked some marijuana that day, too, because all of a sudden the boy had the crazy thought that Wade was some kind of robot who had taken him home to re-program him. He shook that wild notion off right away, but he started feeling so terrible that he drank up all the Carlo Rossi and passed out on the couch right in the middle of Wade’s lecture.
When the boy woke up, it was nighttime again. The farmhouse was dark and silent. The boy looked at his watch. The robot was waiting to be fed. He was late. He put on his jacket and hustled out to his old, dodge Duster. It was very cold out and had started to snow. The engine turned over and caught and the boy floored it and the tires kicked up gravel and he was gone. Really gone. He tore right past the factory. He never even went back to the flimsy college apartment where he had spent his nights alone, pacing the floors, smoking and listening to “Superman” by REM over and over again. He drove all through the night towards his girlfriend’s parents’ house. There was a big hole in the floorboard between the gas pedal and the brake, and snow from ghostly drifts on the empty highway blew up inside the car. He felt like he was driving a snow globe. He wrapped himself in an old blanket, but he was pretty much frozen solid by the time he was tapping on her bedroom window with a long, dead tree branch. The window finally opened and she looked shocked, but not that shocked. He crawled inside and didn’t say anything. She was warm from sleeping—he felt the heat radiating from beneath her robe, and he wanted to pull her close, but he knew she’d go cold the instant he did, so he just grabbed her bright yellow boom box with his numb and shaking hands and put in the cassette he had stolen from Wade. He had rummaged through the desk and taken it before he left. It was a shitty thing to do, but he told himself he’d go back to that town some day and return it. But he knew he probably never would. But he didn’t really care about anything but his plan. It wasn’t much of a plan, but it didn’t need to be—the song was just that beautiful. The boy pressed “play” and told the girl that he had written the song for her, and had found someone from the college to record it. “That’s me singing in the background,” he said.
She couldn’t help it—she started crying, and he knew he had her back. For awhile, anyway. In his heart, he realized now that he’d never really have her, and Wade was right, and he was nothing but a fool.
“But I can’t hear you singing,” she said, wiping away a tear.
“You have to listen really close,” he said. He didn’t know how to give up. He just wasn’t built to quit.
Don De Grazia is a full-time fiction writing professor at Columbia College Chicago, where he also earned his BA and MFA. After completing his master’s thesis, American Skin, De Grazia sent it off to London’s prestigious publisher, Jonathan Cape, who offered him a contract. In January 1998, American Skin was published in the U.K. Hailed as an American classic, the book was so highly acclaimed by critics that it caught the attention of publishers around the world, and in April 2000, American Skin was released in the U.S. by Scribner. A flood of positive reviews appeared in the New York Times Book Review, the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, Kirkus Reviews, Publishers Weekly, and the San Francisco Examiner. It is now in its fourth printing and was recently anthologized in The Outlaw Bible of American Fiction. A member of the Screenwriters Guild of America, De Grazia is currently adapting the script for American Skin. He has written for the Chicago Tribune, Chicago Reader, and other publications. He resides in Chicago, where he is at work on his second novel, Reel Shadows, a chapter of which appeared in the March 2009 issue of TriQuarterly. De Grazia is also the co-founder of Come Home Chicago, a series that celebrates our city’s unique storytelling tradition with readings and entertainment held at the legendary Underground Wonder Bar.