By Oliver Hunt
Dear People of the Future-
Dear People of the Future-
-Or, if aliens from space take over, Dear Aliens-
-Or, if all that’s left are cockroaches, and they can read English, then Dear Cockroaches-
This is my own personal time capsule. In it, you should find one Zero bar, one Twix bar, half a pack of watermelon Hubba Bubba, a Marshmallow Peep, an issue of Swank, an issue of Fangoria with Freddie Kreuger on the cover, a pocket knife, a plastic skull, a Chinese star, a blue and turquoise rabbit’s foot, a cassette copy of the Beat Street soundtrack (Vol. 2), a cassette copy of Whodini’s Escape album, a beta copy of Enter the Ninja, a Clash t-shirt, a pair of checkered Vans, a shotgun shell, a valentine and a speckled blue pebble. We had to do time capsules as a project at school, but this one is my own.
To be honest, I think shit like this is pretty gay-
By the way, you guys don’t mind if I curse, do you? Tough shit if you do. What are you going to do? Spank me? Suspend me? Call my mom? Wash my mouth out with soap?
Anyway, like I was saying, I think shit like this is pretty gay. Like, with the time capsule project at school, my teacher, Mrs. Lunahan, wouldn’t let me put any of my stuff in it. Then she told me she was giving me an F on the project because I didn’t participate. I told her I tried to, but any time I tried to give her something for the capsule she’d tell me it was inappropriate. She said it was my job, as a student, to find something appropriate, and it wasn’t her fault if I couldn’t grasp what is and isn’t right for the capsule. Mrs. Lunahan’s a bitch.
You should see some of the shit they put in the class capsule instead: Issues of Time and Newsweek, Star Wars and GI Joe toys, barrettes, baby shoes, baby pictures, school pictures, Transformers, Dr. Seuss and Shel Silverstein books, a videotape of the Challenger blowing up…I mean, Andrea Murphy got to put a valentine in the time capsule, but when I tried to Mrs. Lunahan said, “We already have Andrea’s valentine, we don’t need another one.”
So Mrs. Lunahan can suck it, and so can Andrea Murphy, and so can that school.
Oh yeah, I guess I should tell you. My name is Louis Trumball, and where you found this used to be some woods in Evanston , Illinois
I’m fourteen and in the seventh grade at Chute Jr. High. This is my second time going through the seventh grade, because I got held back. That’s not really normal, but it’s kind of normal. Anyway, it’s not like I invented it.
The kids here think I’m dumb. I don’t care, fuck them. I never liked them and they never liked me. Even in preschool and kindergarten I had to fight with them all the time, just to get a turn on the swing set or the merry-go-round. In kindergarten, my only friend was a girl named Lisa. I don’t remember her last name, I don’t care. One day, on the playground, she told me she couldn’t be my friend anymore because none of the other kids liked me. Except on my birthday, when my mom gave me cupcakes to pass around to the other kids, she said I can be Louie’s friend today because he has cupcakes. Yeah, maybe I’m supposed to be dumb, and bad, but I figured out all the other kids that day.
I wouldn’t want to be like the smart kids, or the kids who are supposed to be smart, anyway. You should see the tests they have to take. They’ve got, like, a million of those bubbles that they have to scribble in with number-two pencils. And their parents don’t let them do anything. I used to try to play with Jeffery Morrow, but whenever I went over to his house he’d say I can’t play. I have about a million pieces of homework that I have to do, or I’m grounded.
I guess it’s cool for them that they get to go off to another school, where they work on art projects and stuff. Still, they’re always being taken to these places, where they’re always getting tested for something. Maybe they’re being trained to be spies or agents or something. I mean, I’d be just as good as that as they are, but damn if I wouldn’t want to go through all that. I mean, they get grounded if they get a B in a class.
So, yeah, if people think you’re dumb they give you simple classes and kind of let you do your own thing. Oh sure, they kind of hover over you, to make sure you’re not gonna set their garbage cans on fire (again), but they don’t expect anything from you. They just want to pass you down and be done with you. I’m cool with that. Even if I bomb everything in seventh grade again they’ll pass me on to eighth. I’ll probably turn sixteen in the eighth grade, then I’ll drop out. That’s if I even keep going.
Okay, the stuff in the box. Yeah, I stole the Twix, Zero and Hubba Bubba. I also stole the Fangoria, but I found the Swank in the woods as I was coming out here to bury everything else. Yes, I looked through it first. So the fuck what?
The pocket knife was mine when my dad wanted me to be in the Boy Scouts. On my first campout, though, I pulled it on this kid named John Graham because he knocked me down and took my canteen. I slashed across and cut his jacket open. He got cut a little too, but not too bad. Anyway, I got kicked out of the scouts and my dad took my knife. I snuck into his room while he was asleep in the living room and took it back. I knew I wasn’t going to keep it. I also stole twenty dollars out of my mom’s purse, and I sent away for a cherry switch-blade, so I don’t really need this knife.
The shotgun shell is my dad’s. He used to want me to hunt with him, but I hated hunting. I mean, getting up all extra-ass early, on a Saturday? To walk around in the mud, and sit in a dark and depressing duck blind, and squawk into a dumb duck call? Fuck that.
Yeah, my dad’s pretty lame, and he’s a dick to boot.
I’m supposed to be grounded for, like, forever. It’s really ridiculous. It’s due to my grades, mostly. My dad says he knows I’m not dumb and that I need to get on the stick.
I said sure thing dad, I’m gonna get right on that stick. He backhanded me and told me not to get smart with him. He yells at me for being dumb, tells me I’m not dumb, then tells me not to get smart. I’m pretty sure he just likes being mad at me, so that he can keep punishing me forever. He still spanks me with his fraternity paddle sometimes, then later I hear him laughing to his friends about it. He says yeah, my boy here thought he’d get a little lippy with me, so I took out my old fraternity paddle and pounded his ass pink.
So, whatever. Really, I just pretend to be grounded, but my parents are either working, or off doing something, or fighting- and when they’re fighting, they never talk about Tommy, they talk about me and what to do with me. My dad tells my mom I’m stupid and spoiled, and my mom tells my dad he rides me too hard, flies off the handle at everything, and is drunk all the time. While they’re either working, or going on fishing trips, or out playing bridge or cards, or fighting about me, I go off and do whatever I want.
At night I sneak out. I do it alone, now. I used to sneak out with my friend Carl, but he decided not to be my friend anymore. That asshole. We used to hang out at school every day, and we used to talk on the phone for hours every day after school but, I don’t know. The teachers or the other kids or his parents or my parents told him not to hang around me anymore. He told me his mom and dad said I need to be put away somewhere, and that I need help nobody there can give me, and that the other kids just don’t like me.
I knew something was up when he was supposed to meet me, at the 7-11 on Davis,
That’d be one thing. Except, now, when I sneak out, I see him coming out of the bowling alley, or the movies, with little fucks like Kenny Roland and Jim Cole. Kenny stands behind me in gym class and calls me white trash, with a white trash drunk dad and a trashy whore mom. Jim Cole told me his dad could buy and sell my tweaking unemployable dad a thousand times over, but that he and my mom weren’t worth anything. Carl doesn’t even look like he’s sneaking out, I see his mom’s car coming to pick him and whoever else up when I see him out.
I asked Carl what he was doing with those dicks, and he told me not to try to choose his friends for him. Then he told me he didn’t want to hang around me anymore. I told him he was a dick, too, like everybody else and he said fine, nobody cares what I think anyway.
That’s cool, you know. Fuck him, too. I don’t get cupcakes to pass around anymore, so that’s pretty much it for people like Carl.
See, I don’t need these people. I don’t need Carl, or my mom, or my dad, or the teachers at school.
Anyway, back to what’s in the capsule. The Clash t-shirt and the Vans belonged to my brother Tommy. The Clash were his favorite band, he used to listen to them all the time. I didn’t like them. A couple of years ago, I wanted to be a breakdancer, and The Clash were a dumb, white, English rock band.
Now I miss hearing them coming out of Tommy’s room. I miss those big dumb chords and that dumb English singing, so I kept his Clash tape. Sometimes, I listen to it on my walkman. That’s a secret, though, okay? Not like it’ll matter by the time you find all this anyway.
Anyway, Tommy hung himself. He was seventeen. I didn’t see his body or anything until the wake. I came home from school and there were all these cops and ambulances parked outside the house. Mom and Dad were sitting on the couch not saying anything, and they looked kind of like people I didn’t know.
Sometimes, I go into Tommy’s room. It’s empty now. I imagine what he looked like hanging in the closet.
This is another little secret we have, okay future people? I read books about ghosts and stuff. When I’m in Tommy’s room, sometimes I hope to see him as a ghost. I don’t know if he’d be able to talk or anything. I mean, I know this sounds totally gay, but I want to see him as a ghost, because I’m afraid I’ll forget what he looks like.
My mom went crazy and locked all of his old pictures and stuff away in a trunk, and my dad said fine, I don’t give a shit what you do.
Sometimes, in his room, I get that weird, hairs standing up on the back of my neck feeling and sometimes, like, I see these little squiggles and stuff out of the corner of my eye. I once thought I’d see what would happen if I went into his room and listened to The Clash. So, I took my walkman with The Clash tape into his room and sat in front of his closet.
I looked over, though, and I saw my mom standing there. She said, “Louie, what are you doing?”
I didn’t know what to say, so I didn’t say anything.
Now I have to go with Mom and Dad to see a psychologist once a week. She’s this weird woman who kind of looks like a lizard named Dorothy Kind. She asks me a bunch of questions about how I feel about Tommy and my Mom and Dad and school. I really don’t like talking to her. I don’t like talking to her, and she tells my Mom and Dad that I’m avoiding her questions and then they yell at me, then they yell at each other. Then I go to school and all the other kids know I have to see a psychologist and they ask, “Have you killed anybody, yet?” and Carl laughs at me like all the other kids do.
So, I’ve got a switch-blade coming in the mail, and when it gets here I’m leaving. I’ll have that switch-blade in case anybody tries anything, but I’m getting out of this shithole.
So, if you people or beings or roaches or whatever of the future find this, just know that my dad’s an asshole, my mom is okay, except she’s sad and crazy, Carl is a dick, Dorothy Kind is a creepy idiot, Tommy’s dead and Evanston
Also, those candy bars and stuff might not be very good by the time you find them, so I wouldn’t eat them. They’re just to have as, like, antiques or something, okay?
Have a nice day- Louis Trumball, Age 14, Evanston , Illinois
