Something About IT

By Sean Gilbert

The Red Bible. This is how the book seems to brand itself now, having lost its stylized plastic cover. The one revealing it not to be a big red Bible but, in fact, a book called It by someone named Stephen King. Without the vibrant plastic cover with the red balloon and cartoonish fonts, the big red Bible has now, in fact, become just that. It isn’t that underneath the old cover there was “HOLY BIBLE” stamped onto the dark red in gold. The front and back are blank. It’s really the width of the book: 1156 pages total. Then that smooth, unadorned, front-and-back hardcover face. These qualities lend the book a sense of sturdiness and sensibility. Like a Bible, it almost seems self-assured, sitting up there on its shelf. 

Perhaps, the “Red Brick” would be a better name for it. The few times I’ve foolishly attempted to travel with the book, it certainly handled like a brick. Pulling it down from the shelf, its weight always surprised me; causing me to sometimes drop it. I eventually decided I wouldn’t be reading it anywhere but at home. Still, I think the name Red Bible is far more fitting. I think they both tell a good story, have substantial fanbases, and have different interpretations. From a certain point of view, IT is a coming-of-age story about childhood joy and trauma; and how they both follow you into adulthood. From another, it’s just another strange, and at times grotesque, adventure from the recesses of Stephen King’s mind. 

To get a sense of who I was at that time, I read the book and where my interpretation stemmed from: I have to think about the circumstances. What do I remember? Why did I read that book? What led me to read that book?  

“You’ll float too!” 

Everyone was saying it for a few months in middle school, circa 2016-2017. For reference, the latest iteration of the movie IT came out September 8, 2017.  There was that one Halloween when everyone was either Pennywise or a brutally maimed Georgie. Every girl was obsessed with either Jack Dylan Grazer or Finn Wolfhard, having just moved on from Jacob Sartorius and his “Sweatshirt.” Oh, and then there were those killer clown sightings. Danielle Bregoli was on, or going to be on, Doctor Phil and become the “Cash me outside” girl. I had a red iPhone 8. Donald Trump was elected to the presidency. I transferred to a different middle school for 8th grade. 

I transferred to a different middle school for 8th grade. That seems like a good place to start.

I have a history of switching schools. Having gone from a small parochial elementary school where I had known everyone since preschool — it closed down in third grade — to another small parochial school, to a large public school for 6th grade where I knew almost no one, weighed heavily on my psyche. Still, I resigned myself to the change in setting. My mother had told me that I would be getting a “superior” education at my new school. That my future would be “more secure.” I still remember the first day and the first person I spoke to there. I remember what I wore and that it was warm (I checked my mom’s old Facebook account for confirmation). I remember how anxious I was as I approached the school in my mom’s car. The passenger window faced the side of my destiny. We got there early. It was desolate. It looked something like a jail cell in my eyes. It was something about the architecture. The fact that the building was a block long but the entrance doors were small metal ones in the center with tightly meshed bars across the windows, doors that looked like once they closed they would never open again. 

As usual, my mom had been trying to accommodate for how nervous I clearly was — I had been struggling with near sickening social anxiety at the time — by coaxing me into the process herself and telling me that everything would be fine. I wanted to stay in the car. I knew I had to leave the car. She had work that morning. I wished she could have gone in with me.

Somehow, the inside was worse: dim verging on dark, big yellow bricks formed the walls, and pale fluorescent lighting. The abstract artwork styles, a varicolored mix of shapes and somewhat recognizable figures painted on random walls and across the cafeteria created an uncanny valley effect. With that sense, I could now call American public school brutalism attempting to rebrand itself as something of an “aspirational” space; but that only made it seem more clearly like a sterile, derelict box. I walked into the cafeteria. It was mostly empty still. I sat down at a table near the entrance and went on my phone. I was probably sweating. It was cold there, but it’s just something I still tend to do when I get nervous. I remember the first person who spoke to me. The way he spoke and the way he said certain things was unfamiliar to me. Responding, I tripped on my words and tried to emulate how he spoke, but mostly it was awkward silence. I have always struggled with finding something to say: I think that characterizes much of my early formative years constantly switching environments as an introvert. Never comfortable. Silence. I soon started hearing things I would later be all too familiar with.      

“Why doesn’t he talk?”

“He never speaks.”

Although I eventually found a group of friends, I would have to leave the school before 8th grade. I had hardly changed, yet the perception of me by my classmates most definitely had.

“Why does he talk like that?”

“I don’t want to hear him speak.”

Fluorescent lighting has a way of distorting and twisting faces to where we no longer seem to resemble ourselves. The ancient Greeks often defined monsters by this parameter, the perversion of the natural. Centaurs: not fully horse, yet not fully man. Hydras: one single snake body, yet dozens of heads. In that dim hallway light we all seemed to become monsters. Mentally too, we seemed to become monsters. Innocent children carrying jaded hearts. Warped faces and minds sparring as if it were Lord of the Flies. Each trek from class to the next class was an exhibition of monsters. Mocking. Taunting.  I suppose I must have also seemed like a monster to them.

By then, every morning before school I woke up with a knot in my stomach. I was already breathing heavily by the time my mom came into my room, turned on the light and sat down near me on my bed. She would rub my head and my arms gently as I pretended to still be asleep as I waited for it; I know it’s coming, I know it’s coming, I know it’s coming: “Wake up Sean, it’s time for school.” 

 I’m sick. I have to be sick. I couldn’t sleep. I didn’t get any sleep. Every morning was an exercise in excuses. She is my mother, but she is also a Caribbean woman. No accent anymore, but still all the vigor. Coaxing and doting finally gave way to:

“You have to go to school. You don’t have a choice!” 

“I’m not leaving until you get ready!” 

So on the — what is it? — Third or fourth time she called me, I would halfheartedly brush my teeth and barely brush my hair and then throw on my clothes and shoes that I hated because people at school hated them. Then, I put in the contacts that I sometimes carelessly slept in and that ruined my eyes because I hated my glasses because people at school hated my glasses.   

“Try to have a good day, Sean.” 

She would sometimes say this after giving me a hug, if she had the time for that, because our before-school tradition sometimes became too intense and dragged on for too long for anything but me running to catch the school bus and her running to the car to get to work on time. Did I tell you about the time I missed it and she drove me to the next stop?  

 As the long yellow bus approached where children from our neighborhood would wait, my fight-or-flight instinct kicked in. Would my mom know if I just went back inside and didn’t go to school? Then, during class, what would happen if I just left school? Could I convince the school nurse I had to go home? How do I get out of afterschool today? Though I really loved Lego Robotics at the time, it was clear to me that some of the Lego Robotics team really didn’t love me. 

Soon though, all good and bad things must come to an end. I would walk out of the dark into the afternoon sunshine in those first few warm weeks of September and October on the days I had no afterschool, and the inhuman visages I was accustomed to cowering before melted away beneath the sun into friends, family, and people. Then up into the long yellow bus, but careful, don’t go to a row too far back because even the monsters had homes to go back to and they all sat back there, so you sat all the way up there and the rocking of the bus always made you tired and your face pressed hard against the warm brown — I could have sworn it was leather back then — vinyl of the seat. Sweet dreams. 

 

Something About IT: Part II

 

That dream I had. I don’t remember it now, but still, I know its contents. I know it’s something I would have dreamt about in those years even before I finally picked up the Red Bible. Now, the Red Bible is a constant and tangible reminder that I did chase a dream in those years. One that the protagonists of the book — Ben, Richie, Mike, Beverly, Stan, Bill, Eddie and I — all shared: Acceptance. Companionship. Freedom to be ourselves. Freedom from the monsters. Any one of my dreams could have been theirs. Any one of their dreams could have been my own.

“He had finally fallen asleep and dreamed he was playing baseball with the other boys in the vacant lot behind Tracker Brothers’ Truck Depot. He had just hit a bases -clearing home run, swinging from his heels and getting every inch of that little honey, and his cheering teammates met him in a mob at home plate.”

That was Ben Hanscom’s dream. Yet, I can envision it,  “remember” it even,  as if it were mine. How it began. Ended. As if me and all the characters were intimately connected in reality by our very souls.  

Richie Tozier came up to me after the crowd dispersed. Nice hit, Jackie Robinson. Ha-Ha, I responded back, making sure to sound as sarcastic as possible because I loved to hate Richie’s endless stream of jokes. Where’s Bill? With your mom, Richie beamed back. I pretended like I was going to hit him with my baseball bat. We both laughed. Bill came up to us and wanted to know what was so funny. It had been a great day. Bev had come to watch the game and gave me the biggest hug. Mike too, he had practically suffocated me. We went over to Ben’s house after but left because his mom was always so weird about all the little things kids did. On nice days like these we were never bored, the seven of us. We went from store to store looking for who was playing Buddy Holly. Then we left once Bev started swooning about Buddy Holly. Peggy Sue, we’d call her, teasing.

“I think this is your stop?!”

I immediately turned to Richie to see what he was up to now. Why had he shook my shoulder? I suddenly felt moisture on my left cheek. Then pressure against my face. I blinked and I was looking out the school bus window. 

“Oh.” 

Everyone on the bus was staring at me. I pry my face off warm vinyl now slick with saliva. Time to get off and go home. Do it again the next day. That’s really who I was in those days. A dreamer. They were too. Dreaming to escape the monsters. 

I don’t remember exactly when I began to chase that dream. I don’t remember if I read the book before or after the movie, or at the exact time I encountered either. Unfortunately, my journal is oddly silent around this time in my life. It really could have been any of the days in between 2016-2018. My mother says she bought IT when the movie came out. I don’t remember that very much. I had always thought I read it in 8th grade. Though I have an idea, I don’t remember exactly when the Red Bible actually lost its cover and became the Red Bible. When did I last put it up on that shelf? When we moved, it sat in a closet instead. That doesn’t really matter, though. The actual content of the dreams were the same before and after IT. Scenes of summer and youth. It was the context that changed. Suddenly, I wasn’t alone in those scenes. Ben, Richie, Mike, Bill, Stan, Eddie, and Bev were there, too. We were all alike in our pursuit of the dream. We didn’t have the most ideal lives, but we had each other. To the world and at school, under the fluorescent light, Ben was fat. Mike was too Black. Bill had a stutter. Bev was physically a woman too early. Eddie, a hyperactive asthmatic. Stan was too Jewish. Once the sun hits us, though, and we are no longer monsters or surrounded by monsters; we become ourselves again. Just us. Together.    

Yet, that’s never really how it ends. We always wake up from our dreams in the end. The protagonists of IT never really escaped their monsters. They just grew up. Yes — eventually leading successful lives. Productive lives. Though, in the end, they forever lost each other and that unrelenting youthful joy that bound them. Rather than face it they choose to forget the trauma and, by extension, one another. Unresolved and unhealed, their childhood wounds left them mere shells of the dreamers they once were. Beverly, in a marriage with a man all too similar to her abusive father. Ben and Richie forever at the mercy of decades old unrequited and unspoken love.  

In one of the most recent movie’s scenes taking place during their adolescence, Eddie breaks his arm and one of his peers, his longtime crush, signs the cast. Though, instead of the typical platitudes or expressions of solidarity, Eddie looks down heartbroken to see the word LOSER on it. In a powerful moment, Eddie later replaces the “S” with a “V.” LOVER. It’s symbolic of their group dynamic. Through their love of one another, they became a solid compound of indivisible, invincible atoms. Facing their world together. Unfortunately, I think I thought I was an atom all on my own in those days. Indestructible. Invincible. I must have thought I didn’t need to be a LOVER. Such a strange contradiction: as I dreamt of countless scenes of family and friends that loved me for me when, in reality, I refused to let anyone actually see within me. Perhaps I was just afraid of being hurt further. Looking back, I lost a lot of great people in those years, straining relationships until they withered or were forever altered. Sometimes, I wish I hadn’t dreamt so much. Appreciated the people who did love me. The world that was right in front of me.  Maybe, I wouldn’t have lost my best friends. Maybe, I would have more memories with my family. I desperately wish I had the answer, but I don’t. I only know when I pick up the Red Bible and it’s heavy and real and sturdy. I remember to always save a part of my heart for the people and reality that’s in front of me. To always face all the things in my life, good or bad. I don’t want to make the same mistake again.     

Of the many coming-of-age stories I explored before it or after IT — The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Catcher in the Rye, Big Nate, The Maze Runner,  or the Diary of a Wimpy Kid — none have resonated with me as much since. I don’t quite know why. There really was just something about IT. I think, perhaps, it was the time and place. The emotional connection. Whether it’s crazy or sad or both, I really did want to be in the world of Bill, Richie, Mike, Ben, Stan, Eddie, and Beverly. I wanted to be friends with them and go on adventures where we solve town secrets and kill space clowns. To be in that one summer, 1958 or 1989. In some ways, I still do. 

Though my “coming-of-age” chapter has perhaps come to a close by now, I still value the story in IT. The Red Bible, which contains that story, is a reminder of how far I have come and where I have been, as well as who I want to be. It provides a sense of grounding and a sense of honesty to my past and defines it as something I cannot change. Many, but far from all, of my experiences in my formative schooling years were difficult. Many experiences I had I consider beautiful. Being able to touch all of that at once is one reason why I hope to continue to have and keep the Red Bible, and hold the Red Bible, and learn from the Red Bible.