I am at my Uncles New Years eve party. My aunts house is directly across the cul-de-sac from my grandma's brick abode. The same zip code of my girlfriend. The holiday lights still heavily flicker in variegated applause. Upstairs as if always the case the piano is playing, songs are being sung. The Young Columbus contest is in three weeks and soon I will follow the yearly routine of standing in front of the music room mirror with notecards in paw, gesticulating in front of an imaginary panel of judges the reason I feel I am best suited to have earned an all expense paid trip to England. As it is with my family there are twin cardboard boxes of wine and non-alcoholic beer in the fridge.We are watching movies. Everyone is watching Batman Returns downstairs.
I feel I should be with Renae. I feel I should be next
to her.
Renae’s house is less than two miles away. Without asking permission I pick up the phone in my Aunt’s basement and dial the number in rote fashion.
Kristi answers the phone.
The sole delegate of the itty-bitty-titty committee sounds elated that I am on the opposite end. The whole gang has congregated at Renae’s. Amy and Lee and Tim and Kriti and Sarah and David.
“We can’t wait to see you Dave,” Kristi says, “When are you coming over.”
“Soon,” I say. Hopefully soon.
“Is Renae around?” I ask. ***
Renae tells me that everyone is here. She tells me that they actually watched Monty Python
and the Holy Grail twice. She tells me that that is the coolest gift ever. I look down. I left the orange collar of my Manual Cross-country jacket. I look at the manacle of the identity bracelet she gave me and of the confirmation ring with the initials DVB scribed inside.
"Listen, I don't think I'll be able to make it. I just have this family thing."
“I’m not surprised, you always say you are going to come and
then you never do.”
I tell her
that I am sorry. I tell her that I wish I could have made it.She tells me that she was just really looking
forward to seeing me on New Years and to kissing me at the gong of midnight.
“We’ll see
each other next week.” I say adding at the mall.
“Yes we
will.” Renae adds, her emotional temperature changing telling me that she cannot
wait.
I ask if I
could talk with David real quick. When he gets on the phone I ask what everyone is doing. "Having group sex." he says. There is laughter in the background.
We drive home at 1 am. Now that the grand piano is moved I am asked to move into
the music room, one room over, away from the yellow light of the window next
door and the bodies roving back and forth. School starts next week. This Friday I am suppose to meet Renae at the mall.
That Christmas My Uncle Albert gives me a cool CD by
Maureen McGovern.
“We went to see Mel Torre
when he was at the Civic center and she stole the show." My Uncle says. My Uncle is cool. He is friends with Bob of Bob and Frank and attends their parties.
I place the CD my Uncle bought me in my Cd player and think about how Renae's lips tasted like a ring pop the last time we kissed.
I wonder what it would have been like to usher her into the dawn of a new year with my lips.
I wonder when we will kiss again.
I enter the New year all alone.
He is getting pummeled and he is lonely. He is
thinking about her. He is sweating what looks like prisms. He has no clue about
the adversary rampaging through the city he has a sworn deference to protect.
He has no clue about the origins of the Ignatius granite slugging him in
battered windmill strokes. He is hitting in slow motion. He is battering the massive stalactite bulk which appeared only hours ago. His face is gnashed, fraught with welts. There are visible contusions, lavender bruises pebbled under his left eye.
Again he swings. He is leaving everything inside of
him.
the man monikered as Super has nowhere left to go.
***
“So you won’t be able to make it over New Years eve?”
“I’d like to,” I say, thinking about being in the congregation of my friends. Thinking about being around Laura and Kristi and even her drooling friend Lonnie Schwindenhammer who is all too obviously obsessed with my girlfriend and has a picture of her in his locker. I think about how cool it might be to surrounded by my friends, to enter the strike of midnight escorted with Renae’s lips, the lips I have not kissed in almost a month since we could never find a time to make-out at her father's Christmas party.
I think about how disappointed my father would become if he found out there would be no adult supervision at the party. Think about what would happened if he realized that
Renae occasionally dipped into her fathers liquor cabinet and emptied out a bottle of Schnapp.
“I’ll try to stop by.” I say.
“You always say that and you never do.” She replies.
***
“Dave!!!!” She is screaming the syllables of my
name. She is back from college on break. She is wearing a long shirt that she
slept in creeping down three inches above the prominent caps of her knees.I can only wildly surmise she is wearing
panties underneath.
I love how Mary McQuellen always seems excited to
see me.Before I know it she is
screaming my name again. She is giving me a hug.
“You’re so grown up, Dave!!!!”
I am coy. Part of my body is ready to explode. I am
trying to avert my vision in the direction of the benevolent wing that is her
smile. I have Mary’s scent flooded all over my
body. The waft of her feminine grace is different from Renae’s. Somehow I can
feel the semester at the college she has been attending out of state when she
hugged me.We are making smalls talk. Somehow the Young Columbus contest comes up.
“LONDON!!!” Mary announces the capital of England as
if I have already won the trip.
“Yeah, “ I say, I am shy.
Mrs. McCellan comes up to me. She has a beige envelope in her hand.
“I’ve been waiting for you to stop by.”
She gives me a hug as well. I can tell she is thinking about her son every time we hug.
"Here, here's that recommendation you needed for the contest. Good luck Dave. Go get 'em."
We are getting dressed up. We are going to church then we are going to grandmas where I will spend the night and then eat our traditional Christmas breakfast and open presents before going to ten o’clock service on Christmas morning. Christmas dawn is the only morn of the year where the Journal Star is not published. It is the only day of the year that I have off from my job.I am wearing the Manual jacket and my TO DAVE: LOVE RENAE ID bracelet. I am wearing my confirmation ring that my grandmother gave me with the initials DVB scrawled inside that my mom informed me that I am not to give to a girl. I have on my armor.
Like on my father’s birthday Renae is sleeping so close she could be next to me
Renae is close. She is not far. This is the one
night that I don’t have to wake up at 4:30 in the morning and do my paper
route. This is the one night I am free. Like Christ our savior I am being born.
The snow outside is the same as it was a week ago
when her parents had their holiday get together at what will one day be
Hammers. It is dusty film of chalk. Somehow I leave. Somehow I walk down Linda
Ct. into the direction of where she lives, the overhead stars trumpeting in a
pond of overhead ink, I am walking, I take a left on Tiara Strip, and then a
right when I get to Smithville rd.
The spotlight off of airport road that the air National Guard used in the cities to land oncoming craft is still oscillating. I am taking off. I don’t know how far I shall get. I don’t know what time in the morning Renae is waking up to opening gifts. I duck into alpha park I can see where Renae Holidays’s grandfather’s house has dim lit television illuminated in the living room. It is 4:45. I jog through the bulk of Alpha Park. The last time I ran through a city park at this time I was completely naked.
I only know that I need to leave.
I can feel that she somehow is waiting for me.
I walk past the Baptist church. There is a little bit of snow on the ground. I walk into what
looks like the moors of Alpha park. The stars pinwheeling out of control
overhead.
I walk around the house on Lauder ave. I rap on what I presume, from infinite late night conversations is her window again. I am looking for her. I wanted to feel her, I want to enter her body the way our lord and savior entered the planet somehow on this wintry date 2000 years ago on the purported usurped pagan holiday night.
I slide open the window as if popping open an advent calendar.
I see the James Dean poster. She is always telling
me about. There is almost an exorbitant amount of stuffed animals on her bed.
She is startled. I am hatching out of bridal dress pages that is Lutheran
small catechism. I am becoming a man.
We don’t talk. Before I know it my tongue has
entered her lips the way I bow my head and the pastor places the wafer on my tongue. We are making out hardcore just like we were two weeks ago at Westlake plaza in the icy late November rain. It feels like we are trying to morph into each other’s flesh and form an amoebic integer.
Her panties are white dappled with what looks like
budding violets.
I pull down my own boxers, get caught on the cap of
my knees, flexing my muscles. As I enter her body it feels like what I can only surmise is a plane taking off. An international flight. Going through her bedroom was customs. I am being interrogated. I am being frisked and grope, the window being a metal detector, asking me if I have anything on my body. There are jerks. Her body is a continent I have never been to before. She is biting her lip. She is punching up with her naval the same time I am pushing down. Her breath is ¾ time. It is like we are trying to weld our lower torsos into one symmetrical unit.
She is telling me that it hurts .
I plant the cap of my knee between the apertures of her thighs.The moment I drill myself out of her body her nails bite into my lower ass. She is feeding me into herself. She is telling me not to stop. She is telling me to keep doing what I am doing.She is biting her teeth. She tells me that we need to be quiet because her father likes to get up at 4 in the morning and help himself to a couple of beers before he goes back to sleep.
As Christ is being born, as Christmas carols are being pledged at midnight mass on Saint Anthony’s church I find myself inside of her. I can’t believe how wet she is.It is like her body is a fountain and I am being baptized by the church of her loins
She is telling me that it hurts but in a good way.
The whole time the poster of James dean is almost
looking down at me. Reane’s lips are a hyphen. She kisses in ardent bites of
flesh when we are kissing. As I am inside Renae I can see my jeans, sloughs, looking like a denim barnacle. I can see the Gideon bible is in my jeans, protruding like a smartphone come twenty years of accelerated time. Her body arches and jilts the moment I enter her. She is biting her bottom lip. It is like she is tying to swallow something invisible. Sweat is jet skiing in tears off the top of her brow. I am hurting her. Her lips seem to be performing rose petal calisthenics. My body is planted inside of her. I need to pull out.
I am naked.
I keep my identity bracelet on.
I wonder if this would have happened had I gone home
with Renae the night after her father’s Christmas party at Saunders, the night
when we were supposed to have the whole house to ourselves after he cousin Ian
went to sleep.
Grandma has cable. I turn MTV at three o’clock in the
morning. The Christmas tree is an emerald pyramid that looks as if it has just
been torched. My siblings and cousins have finally fallen to bed. I am
exhausted. Grandma will be up in less than an hour in order to start Christmas
breakfast, in order to cook the German klausen with the melted prunes in the
center and the egg and sausage casserole she makes every year. There will be
feasting and wine will be drunk by the adults and everyone will look at me
funny as I continue to drown cups of coffee as if it is some sort of contest.
There is bad comedy on MTV followed by Alternative
Nation, the only time of the day MTV still plays music videos.
He has dreadlocks. His waist-width is that of a
syringe. He is rocking. People are falling down the stairs. He is falling down the stairs the say I can’t help but imagining falling down the rococo opening in the center of Reane’s boy like being errantly tossed down a well. He wants something
more than juts someone than tersely to hold. He wants someone to bang into.
He
wants someone to shove.
The entire league has fallen like clothes pins.Superman is hurt. He is scathed. He is drained. He is looking at fellow superheroes of Justice and Grace being wheeled on gurneys into ambulances. There are fire trucks and smoke. The National Guard has been called in. No one can halt the Mass called Doomsday.
No one is coming close.
The last member of the league to fall is Maxima. She
is a warrior. She is tag teaming the seething bulb of chaos from behind with
Superman thrashing in front. They are the two most powerful entities on the
planet. Maxima petitioned Superman if they would like to mate to engender a
genetic superior species. Now they are battling a Juggernaut cancer threatening
to obliterate corporeal life on the planet. Maxima will tackle him from behind.
She will place him in a choke hold. She will get tossed. She will instigate
sparks igniting a fuel-based explosion. She will be wiped out.
The creature will toddle in rampage towards the city
of Metropolis.
The fight will be Superman’s and Superman’s alone.
The piano movers are hefty. They are built like Moais statues
from Easter Island. They spread apart the French doors in the Music room. A man
with side burns get down on all fours and begins to attack the faux ebony
pillar we used to gnaw on as kids. The movers are all clad in red hoodies. They are disassembling the legs. They place a mat
around the top of the piano as if a blanket to a horse. They are manipulating
the instrument. It is Christmas eve, morning. There is Christmas music playing. We are listening to
George Winston. There is Amy Grant's Christmas. There was more snow outside during the State Cross-Country championship
than there on the ground on Christmas eve.
After the piano is moved we will open presents since we always open presents on Christmas eve morning at our house and celebrated Christmas morning at Grandmas.
The movers are hefty. They are wrapping music. They are removing the legs. They are dissecting the slab of wood that brought joy.
I wonder what Renae is doing right now
Once the piano is moved we will no longer have a music
room. My sister Jenn will move downstairs and have her own room. I will move
into the piano room, the rom with the full-sized mirror that I used the last two years to rehearse my Young Columbus speech. I will move my writing desk and my television and Sega Genesis and CD player into the new bedroom. I will have a chandelier. I will have a larger closet. I will continue to listen to enya every night while chiseling out my speech for the incumbent Young Columbus. I will refrain from peeking across the voyeuristic canyon between houses at the college girl next door who squeezed my hand when I somehow met her at Bradley library.
The movers come in. I am thinking about Renae. I am wondering when she is
leaving for Chicago.
Dad has played a trick on my sister Jenn telling her that the large horizontal package under the tree is a guitar for me. It has my name on it. It is actually an expensive keyboard for Jenn. Dad tells Jenn to help me open the package. When she does she is florid. She smiles at a man who has a decade left of time on this planet.
Mom hands me the last gift stating that this is for me. It is to be my main gift.
Normally there is an order form that somehow gets circulated around campus. Mom made the coat. Perhaps because our family is always on a budget. Perhaps because Dad assist with the paper route so that he will have gas and coffee money. She made the coats herself.. She worked at in while I was in school hiding it in her closet next to the upstairs bathroom.
The cross country letters are beautiful. They are pumpkin orange. It is beautiful. It is my armor. It looks like there is no moon. It black with flaring orange embedded around the collar and the cuffs of the sleeves.
My name is branded in cursive font above my right nipple. On the opposite side is the year I will graduate. 96. It is larger than the usual font.
On the back of the jacket there is Manual Rams shaped like a rainbow.
“It’s her father’s company Christmas party.” I tell my mom.
I tell my mom that it is taking place at what used to be Saunders, my fathers
favorite stop for breakfast, where he takes my Uncle Larry, his brother, on his
birthday every year, Saunders, which is now a bar.
“A bar?” My
mother says. You can almost see the question mark dangling at the end of her
sentence.
“It’s just
a company Christmas party.” I reply in my innocuous patois.
“You know,”
My mom begins to talk to me and then pauses, “If they get too drunk you can
always call grandma or us and we’ll be happy to pick you up.”
“I don’t
think they drink that much.” I add, trying not to repress the image of Renae
driving her dad home drunk up the cement swerved of Smithville hill.
“Just wear
your seatbelt.” My mom says.
“I will,” I
add, probably noting that I own
“Wear your
seatbelt.” My mom says again.
***
“We don’t have to stay for the whole party.” Renae says,
during one of our afternoon make-out I-love-you-so-much honey sessions over the
phone “If you like mom can just drive us back to our house and we can watch
movies until the party is over.”
“Yeah,” I
think to myself, wondering what it must be like to be all alone with Renae in
the house she has lived in all her life.
As we are talking to each other it is snowing. Renae
tells me to make a wish.
“You are my snow angel.” I tell her.
Renae tells me that I make her melt, especially when
we make out.
I’ll see you soon, I tell her.
She purchased me a golden bracelet. I still have not gotten a Christmas gift for her.
I will see her soon.
**
“It’ll really be no big deal,” Renae adds. David was always
over here after band almost every night.” She says, alluding to Best, all I can
think about is that there rapport is no where near as physical as our rapport.
All I can think about is last year on the orange ramp I told Ben and Andy that
I couldn’t believe that David only gave his girlfriend a sweater and didn’t
kiss her. All I can think about is how last year my heart stood petrified in
pulse as I ogled the picture of her on Dave’s mom secretary desk. I think about
all this and wonder somehow what would happen if Renae and I are on the same
couch together, the aquatic blue glower of the television splashing late night
shadows against our foreheads, her parents no where in sight, my body inching
towards the clad denim of her thighs.
“Besides,”
Renae notes, “It’s not like we’d be all alone.”
“No,” I
add,
“No,” She
says, “My cousin Ian will be there.”
“Ian,” I
add.
“Yes, “ She
says, “My mothers sister’s son, he’s three. He’s a cutie.”
***
“And after prom they all go over to
somebody’s house and an adult stays up with them for the entire night.” My
father says, talking about my cousin’s purported itinerary for the evening.
***
“I would
have fallen in love with you.” I add, over the trapeze wire of one of our daily
mandatory endless phone conversations, “ I would have groped your hand in
public every chance I got. We would have made out on the monkey bars after
school every night.”
Renae tells
me again that I would not have liked her at all.
“To look at
my grade school graduation photo,” Renae adds, “It’s like, shit, too much make-up.”
She says before making a shriek at the sound of it.
***
I continue
to scrutinize the angular dimensions of my countenance in the mirror, my
cheekbones lathered with drops of English Leather, the cologne I got as a
graduation gift from my good friend David Hale. I shave every day though in
essence I probably could go five days without needing to pick up the stem of a
Schick My hair is thoroughly matted in its James Dean standard intractable
plateau. From the living room the holiday albums are heard chiming across the
festooned rolls of plastic pine, the scent of clover and pine and poinsettia,
the flicker of holiday lights, the feeling of being eternal, the Christmas wear
dad is trying to play a joke on my youngest sibling Jenn, informing her that
the long elongated box under the tree is a guitar for me (unbeknownst to her, a
casio keyboard).
It is the
first holiday of my high school experience and I have a beautiful girl on my
shoulder like a parrot. I still have not decided whether to go back to Reane’s
house during the interim of the party when the bulk of adults will be drinking
at the bar.
The face
that is reflected back to me from out of the glass frame of the mirror is that
of my own and, even with my glasses doffed, I can still make out cubist
contours of looming potential. I can see myself going to state next year in
cross country. I can see myself breaking the five minute barrier for the mile
this year. I see myself acting in the auditorium in front of the silhouette of
domed heads which constitutes the student body.
I see myself winning the elusive young Columbus,
going to Europe and somehow meeting the girl
of my dreams, I see myself garnering a cross-country scholarship, attending a
swanky school in the east coast, following in my fathers Rockport's and perhaps
teaching high school history. I see myself married by twenty-one, starting a
family at age 25. I see my parents becoming grandparents and dandling their
bloodlines on the caps of their knees.
I see all this looking down in the digits of my runners
watch slapped on to my wrist.
I wear my blue shirt buttoned half-way down my chest in the
fashion of a fifties grease, tucked into my pants.
I wear the boots I bought in
the mall almost two months ago that have become my best friend even though they
are Harley-Davidson heavy and one of the janitorshas heavily insinuated that they scab up the
interior linoleum of my school if scuffed the wrong way. I wear the chic thick
brown leather jacket I found in my fathers closet, the jacket I wore two weeks
in the massive make out session we had in the cold sheet of the December
rain.
The last thing I handcuff to my wrist in the identity
bracelet Renae gave me two weeks earlier, the TO DAVE: on he front reminding me
of the mono-syllables of my identity.
As I re-enter my room I think about calling Dawn Michelle
and asking her how speech is going. From outside my windows I see the college
girls who live less than ten feet away skirt through the closed blinds as if
ice skating.
Renae’s gift is already wrapped and laying on the desk where
I sat when I somehow discovered Tori Amos a month earlier. The next thing I
hear is the voice of my mother informing me that it looks like my ride is
already here.
“Just wear
your seatbelt.” My mom says, again.
***
AS if we
are being chauffeured Renae sits in the back seat of the firebird with me. Our
arms seem to envelope around each others spines when we see each other.
Although her father is behind the wheel of the car I still cup Renae’s back in
a sensual tilt and plant the petal of my lips on the side of her cheekbones in
one amorous swoop.
“I think
you know what this is,” I say, handing her the holiday wrapped parcel.
“Monty Python and the holy grail!!!” she yelps in a high
pitched exclamation of joy. In the front seat Larry makes and ill-timed quip
about it better not be an engagement ring of any kind.
“Here,”
Renae says, as she hoists up several cd’s for the party. There is the Cure’s
Wish and mixed up. There is Nirvana’s Nevermind. There is Stone temple Pilots
and Pearl Jam’s TEN and the Shakespeare sister CD she bought a few weeks ago at
the mall.
“Do you
like Black Crowes?” She asks, alighting a copy of Amorecia
“They're okay.” I say.
“I
thought you told me the other night on the phone that you really liked them.”
“Yeah,”
I add, not being familiar with any of the black crows tunes. “I guess they are
not bad indeed.”
***
Renae’s grandfather’s apartment is three blocks away from
the brick shoe box of my own grandmothers house, two blocks in the direction of the
kow towing harvesting corn, the vacant field that seems to stretch for lavender
light years in the directions of my father’s school. Even though it is only
Larry driving the fire bird the two of us both sit in the back seat, the
sensual odor of her body seems to greet me in lusty stalks of exclamation. As we enter the house Renae’s grandfather seems seminally hunched over as if in a human question mark. She still has the cd’s cusped in her hands as if she is waiting to mail a package. His right arm seems to be sore. Renae walks over to where he is seated bows in the fashion in which the acolytes bow at my church after they have finished illuminating the wicks in front of the altar, kissing the side of his face, wishing him a merry Christmas.
I sit back with Larry who is cracking one liners looking at
the back of Reane’s Limestone jacket. It reads LIMESTONE: MARCHING BAND.
I look down at the bracelet she gave me two weeks ago and
smile.
“And who might you be, young man.” Her grandfather says rising, his
wounded arm outstretched like a grade school flag.
“This is
Dave,” Renae says. That smile bleeding across her lips.
Renae’s
grandfather tells me that he has a sore hand but that it isn’t sore enough to
shake the hand of a man who is fortunate enough to date his good looking granddaughter.
I address
him as sir. I tell him that it is a pleasure meeting him sir. Like his progeny
he tells me not to call him sir. Her tells me to call him Larry senior.
“Larry
too,” I add, the continental slab of my hand squeezed in his palm.
“It’s nice
to meet you Dave.” He says, the flash of glory sewn into his granddaughters
lips reminds me of the time I crashed in on Renae when she was playing with the
band at a football game.
“You have a
good looking girlfriend.” Her grandfather notes.
“Yes, “ I
agree, before verbally responding to him that I am a very wealthy man indeed.
***
The bar
feels like sandpaper as we enter it, the hard scathing waft of nicotine, the
smell of expired shots, the odor of beer entering every pore in my body. Renae
has her cd’s free in one hand, my hand cuffed in the other.
“The party
if over here, in the back room.” She notes.
We sit at the back of the bar in a
table seat that could pass for a church pew. Renae is drinking a coke, I am
keeping with my adult semblance and ordered a cup of coffee the waitress who
refers to me as hun had to brew special just for me. Renae’s stereo is seated
on the buffet table at the front of the dining room. Slowly patrons begin to
sway in and out, laughing, wishing each other a happy holiday, chinking alcoholic
scepters, buying each other rounds. I am almost always introduced as Renae’s
Dave to employees of her fathers company.
“I like
this place.” I tell her, taking a swig of my coffee.
Renae’s
head seems to bow in concurrence, before adding that its too bad were not old
enough to drink, at least in public as she shuffles through her Cd’s and plays
the Cure Wish telling me that her dad has always liked this one for some
reason.
“So is this
the bar you had to drive your dad home from that one time?” I ask
Renae tells
me it has been more than just that one time and to keep it down because his
employees don’t realize how much of a lush he is.
“At least
he seems to be a funny drunk. I mean, its not like he’s punching holes in the
side of his bedroom or anything.”
Renae makes
a crooked look with her lips. Her mom has just entered the establishment a long
with her aunt and her three year old cousin. As has been the case the first two
times I have seen her, her mom is wearing ass-tight jeans and, for a woman in
what I could only speculate is in her late thirties, looks pretty damn good.
“This is
Ian,” Renae notes, introducing me to her cousin. I stand up and wish Miss
Holiday a cordial happy holidays.
“Please,”
She requests, reminding me, “It’s Debbie.”
The party continues. There are more rounds purchased. Renae
has hinted that once the boys start doing shots of Jagermesiter they really get
fucked up. Renae has hinted twice that she is bored and that we have made our remedial
appearance and that now it is time for the two of us to adjourn back to her
place, alone, on her couch, watching movies, with her three year old cousin
asleep in the back room. The bible is still in my front pocket. I wonder if I try if I could if, during one of our makeout sessions, I could somehow get renae’s jeans off. I wonder how far she would let me go. IN the front of the room Larry is brandishing a Coors Light introducing different employees in the company. He points the top of his beer like a nozzle in the direction of Renae’s grandfather and smiles.
“And this
is the boss man of the cooperation. Even I have to kiss ass to him.” He says to
a room fraught with cigarette smoke and with laughter. I reach my beneath the
wooden lip of the table and lose myself in the smooth grip of Reane’s touch.
“Let’s go,”
Renae alludes, telling me flat out that she is getting bored and that she can’t
stand it when they start to drink so much.
***
“And Renae also said that one of the main reasons you broke
up with her was because she didn’t have a vehicle and that you never saw her,”
Amy says to me, three weeks later, still drilling me a new asshole over the phone, telling me that I
have no clue just how hard Renae has been crying over the last weekend, telling
me that I am oblivious to the pain I caused her.
***
The three of us gradually slip into the backseat of the
Firebird. As Renae’s mother bends over to fasten Ian into his toddler car seat
I try not to overtly ogle the denim contours of her ass thinking about how hot
her daughter will undoubtedly be someday when she reaches middle age.
***
Renae’s mother is at
the helm of the wheel as we pull out of the parking lot behind Saunders.
Briefly I have a moral quandary about what is the right thing to do. If we go
to Renae’s house we could make out but Larry or Debbie might me too inebriated
to drive me home.
I want to be with Renae. I want to hold her tight cradled in
the limbs of my arms with the lights of the Christmas tree somehow jisming in
the background. I want to have a hardcore makeout session like the one we had
two weeks ago in the rain. I want to pop in Monty python and the Holy Grail and
watch the first ten minutes of it before reeling her into my body and losing my
breath in the warm pond of her lips. I want o bring up the discussion of sex,
the discussion we have both been painfully avoiding, I want to know just how
far she will let me go.
“So where
to?” Her mother inquires.
“Actually I
should probably be getting home.” I say, blathering on about having to be up
early in the morning to help my grandmother out after my paper route. I can
feel Renae’s shoulder tilt and sigh in disappointment. It would be the first
time since we started going out that we have not be able to make out.
I think about what my mother told me and I fish around for
my seatbelt.
“You and
your damn seatbelt.” I can hear a semi-disappointed Renae comment.
***
Reane’s mother asks me what we have planned for the
holidays. I tell her that we open presents on Christmas eve and then deport for
to see our relatives and then we make it back in time for the midnight service
at church. I try not to think how I am the Crucifier, with my wispy robes,
holding the cross in front of me as I herald the choir and the pastors down the
burgundy aisle, into the sanctuary, into the presence of God.
“It’ll be a
good holiday.” I say looking at Renae a smile seems to be sprouting up in her
lips. She gives me a look insinuating that I try to keep my hands off of the
lower hemisphere of her body when her mom is driving especially with her
younger cousin situated on the opposite side of her.
As I leave the Firebird I wish Renae a Merry Christmas once
again. Renae gets out of the car with me and the two of us engage in an
adult-assenting embrace. I kiss the side of her cheek. I tell her that I love
her. I tell her that, if I don’t see her, to have a merry Christmas baby. I
tell her that I will call her tomorrow.
“Thanks
again for the ride Miss Holiday.” I amend, not forgetting my manners.
“Please,”
She says sounding just a tad nonplussed, “ Call me Debbie.”
As I enter the house I can see that the light is on in the
room with the college girls right next door.
I wonder what would have happened if somehow I would have stayed.
