I have not thought about my failed attempt at International travel since Maurice Alwuan informed me last spring that the trip was duly canceled due to terrorist threats associated with the Gulf war.
****
“What is this?” I ask Patrick, in his upstairs room
which is intrinsically an attic shared by three people with his older sister
Amy who just graduated high school having a separate room and bathroom at the
end of what looks like a knave.
The album is vinyl and belongs to his sister Amy.
The cover looks like a sea nymph stranded in a stain glass leaf. It goes by the
title of Watermark.
Patrick has been listening to Ozzy Osbourne all
summer. He will sometimes wear his Terminator 2 t-shirt for days at a time
while caroling out You Can Be Mine. He is trying to figure out a way to sneak
out of his house in mid-August to attend the midnight at Co-op in recently
relocated Campus Town.
Patrick responds to my query with his infamous Dude.
“Dude, it’s like the coolest thing ever. It’s like
this Irish chick. My sister Amy used to come home at three o’clock in the
morning on weekends and put this on and sometimes I would wake up to it and
feel all nice and relaxed.
I look at the cover of the album again. He puts on the first song. He says if I like
he can dub it for me on a blank cassette.
I tell him that would be nice.
I continue to pilfer through Amy’s albums. When I
open up one of Depeche Mode’s early albums I see a picture of Dave Gahan
applying lipstick while wearing bondage leather.
“Don’t listen to those guys, they are so gay.”
Patrick admonishes, before setting down the needle and listening to Watermark,
mandating that I lie in the center of his sister’s room with my hand behind my
head in the universal emblem of surrender and close my eyes.
***
Mornings the papers are rubber band and trussed into exclamatory diplomas. I
lumber into the dim- front porch penumbras. I slice open the screen door and
place the paper inside so that the patrons do not have to endure the chill of
the earth and can receive the bulletin through which they ontologically peruse
the narrative of the planet as chronicled and opinionated by nicotine-fitted
scribes.
I continue to walk, my paper bag bearing
the denim-faded crest of the Journal Star’s emblem around my shoulder like road
kill, like a Neanderthal man dragging back fresh kill. I am wearing my cheap
PUMA sneakers, the ones I purchased for basketball and got lambasted by the
Varsity elite because they are not Air Jordan's and are seminally tattered.
Dad is on the antipodal side of the street. When we
get to the corner of Waverly and Sherman Dad crosses over.
“Does he ever bother you?” My father inquires,
pointing to Terry Inman’s front porch.
The sunlight hits the east in a bruised velour.
I ask who. Dad points at Terry Inman’s house. In his
front lawn there is a picnic table and the ashy dregs of a bonfire. There is
also what looks like forty aluminum cans strewn throughout the lawn.
“I know he drinks a lot during the day and I know
you have to stop and collect from him and everything, I was just wondering if
he ever bothers you”
I think about Terry’s friend Angus from Australia
and how he told me they were playing Russian Roulette. I think about the stolid click reverberating from the
trigger and how I dropped my collection book.
I think about how the high school girls giggled with
their hands cupped around their lips and called me a dweeb when I left.
“You know, if he’s bothering you we can always talk
to Tom and see if he can just pay in the mail. I’m not sure if it’s safe for
you to be over there if he’s drinking all the time in the front lawn.”
I look at dad. The moment the revolver clicked in my
face there was no obligatory fast-forward of the profound events in my thirteen
years on this planet. There was only the black zero, a punctuating dot of the
slim barrel staring at me like distant yawn.
I tell Dad that he’s fine.
I tell Dad that he’s a big tipper, when in reality,
Terry is almost two months behind on his bill.
"I'm fine," I tell my father who will be cancer riddled in less than a decade, intrinsically lying to my own progenitor to protect a man used to go to our church until both his wife and son died.
"Nothing is wrong at all."
***
After Superman exposed his true telos to Louis Lane she was pensive and bit her lip and speechless and then she claimed that she always knew that her fiancé Clark Kent was superman.
That she knew from the moment she met him his identity was not of this planet.
She was aware all along.
***
A week later I go down to Manual with my best friend
David Best. We are playing tennis with his older brothers. After an hour we get
chased off the court by the Vice Lords. As we are skidding away a brick hits
the top of David’s older brother’s vehicle.
“I’m so glad I’m going to Limestone,” My best friend
says, who lives closer to Manual than I
do but on the side of Laramie that for some inexplicable reason is considered
Limestone township.
“Go home and tell your mom,” His brother Ben, who listens to cool music and got me
into Depeche Mode a few years back tells me as he drops me off.
I enter my house. I say nothing.
Nothing at all.
***
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