Don't Be Rash! (But read it!)

Rash by Pete Hautman
4Q 3?P J/S


Let's jump ahead about seventy years, shall we? Let's check out the situation in the good old USSA. Because of things like the Child Safety Act of 2033, protective gear is all the rage. You don't just wear a helmet when you're biking, you wear it when you're running track, too. In fact, you might just wear it pretty much all the time, possibly along with knee and elbow pads. You can never be too safe. What sorts of things can get you in trouble with the law, even thrown in jail? Owning large dogs. Driving without a safety web. Body piercings and tattoos. Drinking alcohol. Littering. Road rage. Not taking your medication (which you take to control your moods). Not wearing your safety gear. Throwing a pencil. Shoving someone against the wall. Verbally attacking someone's physical appearance. Guess how many of those things our hero, Bo, has done? Too many.

Bo blames his troubles on his Marsten genes. His proof: five members of his family are serving time. Bo's about to make it six. You see, Bo is crazy about a girl named Maddy. They've been dating for a while, but lately she's been showing some interest in Karlohs, a guy Bo can't stand, so he desperately wants to impress her. Maybe breaking the school's record (13.3 seconds) for the 100-meter dash will do it. Unfortunately, Karlohs destroys him in the race. To make things worse, Bo loses his temper and verbally assaults Karlohs after the race. Dissing someone is a serious offense, and Bo already has two strikes against him, one for throwing that afore-mentioned pencil and one for a shoving incident. Because of the "three strikes and you're out" policy, he's teetering on the brink of being sent to prison. Then Karlohs comes down with a rash, and blames Bo for it. When the rash spreads to other students, Bo is put on home quarantine. Just when Bo thinks things can't get any worse, it does. He winds up in a fist fight with Karlohs at a local mall. That does it. It's jail time for another Marsten male. Bo soon finds himself way, way up north, in a prison run by McDonald's. (Prisons in the 2070s are run by major companies, such as McDonald's and Pepsi. The country's entire labor force comes from the prison system.) Bo is in for a rude shock. The guards use physical abuse! They verbally assault the prisoners! There are unprotected hard surfaces and sharp corners in the prison! Unheard of! People could get hurt! Welcome to the life of a nail.

Bo's life is reduced to thin white coveralls, a whale of a cellmate (400 pounds and counting), and pizza. Hour after hour of making pizza, meal after meal of eating pizza. He's going stir crazy. Then he starts to notice that there are about twenty inmates who don't have to wear the coveralls or eat pizza three meals a day. They wear jeans and gold shirts and get good stuff to eat. What's up with that? Soon enough, Bo finds out. It seems the Warden, aka The Hammer, loves the highly illegal sport of football. The Goldshirts are his football team. They're the fittest, meanest, and toughest guys in the prison. And Bo's about to become one of them. Is this a good thing? Bo's not too sure about that!

Bo's prison life takes another strange turn when Bork, an artificial intelligence program he created for school, suddenly starts showing up on the prison computers. It shouldn't be able to do that, since Bo isn't a very good programmer and Bork was barely going to get him a passing grade. But now Bork could...and does...pass for human, and he's determined to get Bo out of jail free.

Which will get Bo out of prison first, football or Bork? And will that be a good thing, or just another in a series of rash actions?

Musings: (Sorry, I didn't start marking things until I was halfway through the book!)

• Every time I read the word "Bork" it made me think of The Muppet Show and the Swedish Chef. This is a good thing (to me), and possibly not completely unintentional.

• I liked the first part of this book the most, because it was the part that really concentrated on telling us about all the ridiculous laws and procedures that have arisen in the future in the cause of keeping people safe. I'm old enough to remember when no one thought twice about a playground with swing sets on asphalt, when playgrounds still had jungle gyms, and when kids could still play tag at recess. (Yeah, there are schools that are forbidding TAG these days, for crying out loud, including California and Massachusetts.) Guess what? Even though we occasionally fell and scraped a knee (or even broke an arm), we survived to tell the tale and our parents didn't think it was a calamity. They just figured it was just something that occasionally happened when kids played. And have you seen the warning labels on products today? "Caution: Will be hot when removed from oven." Well, duhh! Isn't that why we put it in there in the first place? Ridiculous. So I just loved Hautman's taking the overprotectiveness thing over the top like this.

• A favorite paragraph: "I started thinking again about my last conversation with Bork...He claimed that I was innocent because my assault on Korlohs was an unavoidable consequence of my being human. But if that were true, then everything everybody did was unavoidable, and no one could be held responsible for anything. And if nobody could be held responsible, then who would build the roads and behead the shrimp and make the pizzas? And what would stop violent, undisciplined people like me from running rampant through society?"

• Another favorite section, but too long to quote in full: pp. 212-214. Bo is talking to Bork. "I'm not happy with you, Bork." "Explain." "You almost got me killed." Bork sat back in his chair and regarded me through his sunglasses. I was pretty sure that behind them his gold irises were spinning. After a few seconds he spoke. "You appear to be alive." "So do you," I said." (Bork is an artificial intelligence program Bo created in school.) In the rest of the conversation Bo tries to explain to Bork what acceptable odds are when putting his life in danger. Bork doesn't quite get it. Fun.

• How lame is this? It took me half the book before I realized how I should be hearing "WindO" in my head! I kept breaking the word into two distinct parts. Don't. D'oh!

I wasn't a particular fan of Pete Hautman's until a year or so ago. That doesn't mean I didn't like his books. I just hadn't read many of them. Then I read Sweetblood, which has an interesting take on (among other things) what vampires really are. Then I read Invisible, which is a completely different kind of book. I'd heard a lot about Mr. Was, so I ordered and read that. Another completely different kind of book (and a little mind-boggling, too, what with the time travel and figuring out who's who!). Then I read Godless. You guessed it - different again. (I mean, who thinks about worshipping water towers? And how many people could take that and make it logical and thought-provoking, as well as fun?) I enjoy the places Hautman's books take me, almost always with a sense of humor and always more than just a good story. Rash follows that path. In my book, Hautman is always worth a read.

RAIDER'S NIGHT by Robert Lipsyte

Raider's Night by Robert Lipsyte
4Q, S (Senior High School)
Strong language, drinking, language, sexual situations, and a graphic scene of sexual hazing


Peer pressure. Father pressure. The pressure to be the best. Steroids. Knowing what's right and having the courage to do it. "You have to get past the past to go forward." Being a leader means being responsible to and for others, even when you don't want to be. Whew. This book covers a lot of ground, and it's not pretty. But it is involving reading.

Matt Rydek is co-captain of the Nearmount football team. Matt's a good player, though he can never be good enough for his father. Truth to tell, Matt would rather play baseball, but according to his father, he has to play football, because that's where the scholarship prospects are. The co-captaincy is bait to get him to accept losing baseball. Another truth to tell: Matt would say "Scr*w the scholarship, I'd rather play baseball" if only he dared to outright defy his father. But he only dares to defy his father in little ways, because his father is not a man who takes defiance well. But Matt does try to be a good captain. He leads the workouts in the gym intelligently, and when tempers flare, Matt is good at keeping things from exploding. And tempers do tend to flare in this book, in part because Matt and the rest of the team are regular juicers at the gym. Once their workout is finished, they all troop into the gym owner's office, drop their shorts, and get their steroid shots. The steroids help bulk them up, but are the side effects worth it? Matt thinks they are.

Matt can't wait to get away to football camp. A whole week away from both his father and his girlfriend. A whole week of nothing but football and the guys. But things go terribly wrong at camp. There's a new guy, a sophomore tight end, who is really good. This is not good news for Ramp, the other co-captain, who is also a tight end. The trouble is, Ramp isn't all that good, and he can see that Chris is going to be a threat. And so Ramp (who is also pumped up on steroids, besides just being a garden variety jerk) decides to make things difficult for Chris. He humiliates him at every opportunity and tries his best to make him look bad as often as possible. And then he really crosses the line. Hazing of freshman isn't supposed to happen, but coaches know it does and many of them look the other way. It's no different for the Raiders. Chris isn't a freshman, but Ramp maneuvers things so that Chris is right with the freshmen when the hazing begins on Raiders Pride Night, the last night of camp. Though Matt has been able to keep Ramp more or less in line until now, this time, there's not much he can do without making things worse for Chris. But Matt has no idea just how far Ramp intends to take his harassment. When Ramp brutally takes the hazing to a sexual level, neither Matt nor the rest of his crew can react in time to prevent it. As horrific as that night is, what happens...or doesn't happen...after that night could be considered even worse.

Chris keeps trying to get in touch with Matt, but Matt can't face him. He doesn't know what he should say or do, and he really doesn't want to do anything. He wishes the whole mess would just go away. It's pretty clear to see that the coaches and even his dad know that something happened on Raiders Night. It's also pretty clear that they don't want to know the details. It's obvious that they just want Matt to help keep the lid on things. All his life, Matt's been told that team comes first. You do what's good for the team, even if it isn't good for you. Steroids are bad, but you need to be big to make the team bigger? You take the steroids. Hazing is bad, but it "helps to build team spirit"? You go along with the hazing. A teammate does something seriously harmful or against the law? Cover it up. You don't blow the whistle on a teammate. The team comes first. So he ignores Chris's calls and emails.

Matt doesn't want the responsibility. He never wanted to be captain in the first place. He doesn't know what to do or how to handle something this big. Maybe if he just pretends that nothing happened, nothing will happen. But life doesn't work that way. Matt didn't think things could get any worse, but they do.

There's a reason why Pete Hautman's books get starred reviews. He can tackle tough issues, but in a very approachable way. That being said, this is a quick read, but it's not an easy read. These are not easy subjects, and they are not presented glibly. This is a book that will at various times make you feel angry, helpless, repulsed, shocked, and sorry. You'll read it and hate some of the characters, particularly the adults who look the other way when they know rotten things are going down. Ultimately, I liked Matt and felt for him, even when I was upset about some of his decisions. It would be a fascinating discussion to sit in a room with a bunch of people and talk about Matt's actions in this book. Just what is he responsible for and why? Is he a likable character or culpably spineless? And it would be interesting to hear people's take on the parents and coaches, as well as Matt's teammates, some of whom are the epitome of the privileged athlete who run roughshod over any "lesser" beings and some of whom are waiting for someone to lead them in the right direction. Raider's Night is a book I think I'm going to have a pretty difficult time getting out of my head.

Edited to include a link to a column Robert Lipsyte wrote for ESPN Magazine about reactions to this book and the issues it raises.