1991 (c).

  It is 1991 and music is changing. The chords seem to bruise against the frets of an incumbent decade in the residual ache of a war in a far odd place we purportedly won that no one understands why we entered in the first place. It is the early 90’s and music is changing. KZ93 has a two hour segment every Friday night called channel Z where they play music that is big in record stores off college campuses, bands with names like Belly and R.E.M and the Lemonheads and Weezer, music that seems to have less glitter and more emotional merit, guttural thrashing feedback tattooed to the off-kilter gnarling echo of each  overtly watted-out 12-string.

It is mid 1991 and Republicans have ruled Capitol Hill for a decade.

 

It is 1991 and every night on tv there are pictures of a man from Los Angeles getting pummeled by night-stick wielding law enforcement officers.

It is early 90’s and rap is becoming more sociably acceptable artistic medium. More raw. Patches arriving in the lower left hand corner of albums warning suburban parents of the explicitly vulgar contents barking behind the cover, kicking, espousing certain tautologies of the street with every ripped cadence and bass-saturated subwoofed enhanced beat

It is mid 1991 and everyone seems to be either diagnosed or dying from AIDS. Freddie Mercury. Magic Johnson. Greg Louganis.

 

It is 1991 and the New Kids on the block are getting kind of fucking old. As are hair metal bands.

 

It is 1991 and my friend Joey Neltner and I arrive at Co-cop in Campus town, We listen to the wicked bravado of 3rd Bass. We listen to the political pandering’s and  insight of Kool Moe Dee. We listen to QueenLatifah and Yo-Yo. We listen to MC Lyte and are down with OPP, wildly speculating what the third P really does in fact stand for.

We listen to LL Cool J, combing the sandpaper hinges of the soon-to-be-torn-down wooden play ground for an around the way girl.

On a whim Joey dare’s me to purchase Amerikkka’s  Most Wanted by Ice Cube, a parental advisory album and they sell it to me sans blink thinking I am 18.  Next thing I know my hard-wrought Young Columbus failed paper route money is purchasing flimsy cassettes featuring trumpeting four-letter expletives.  The Geto Boys. DOC. 2-short.When DJ Quik’s SWEET BLACK PUSSY comes out everyone in the 7^th grade classroom at Christ Lutheran School on Star street is seemingly handing me blank cassettes on which I can dub the album.  It is the early 90’s and music is changing. Compact Discs arrive in stores locked in a vertical rectangular box where, at Co-Op, one is encouraged to remove the CD recycling the receptacle on the spot.

In late May NWA’s latest album arrives with a police-cordoned murder scene gracing the cover. To this day, Alwayz into Something ranks as perhaps the most pure narrative track lost in a lower income lifestyle that I have ever heard, especially when Dre gesticulates in gangsta patois about feeling like a failure his entire life due to the sociological gravity of his surroundings.

 

I go to school in the South Side of Peoria and I just can't help but somehow concur.

 

 

                                                                        ***

            I am about ready to convene with my 8^th grade year. My best friend aptly named David Best is starting his freshman year at Limestone.  Dave just cannot stop talking the fuck about how cool band camp is.

 

            “We were out in the sun all day working on our routine.” He says. “Sometimes eight or nine hours a day, just covered with sweat.

 

“So what was the best part about band camp?”  I add, thinking about the ensuing ennui that will inevitably be the welcome mat of my friend’s post-adolescent prattle.

 

 

            “Probably coming back with a girlfriend.” Dave says.

 

“What’s your girlfriend’s name?” I ask the best friend from my youth.

 

            “Kristie.” Dave says, excited though still with a calm monotone answering my queries about the discourse of her feminine ferrotype follow suite: She is blonde, tall, plays in the percussion session of the marching rockets and has graduated from Oak Grove East, starting Limestone with Dave this autumn as well.

 

            “Kristi.” I say again, thinking.

 

            “She’s a member of the itty-bitty tittie committee.” David says, making a moniker, referring to the size of her chest.

 

I try to tell Dave that is no very polite. He continues to laugh. He talks about how they spent all day blowing into the

 I want to know how far my best friend from childhood made it with this creature. He tells me that they haven’t kissed.

No, but its official. We are definitely going out. We talked on the phone for like three hours last night. She is definitely my girlfriend.

 

I ask her what she smells like. I ask if she smells like a plum orchard.

 

“No,” David says, telling me that she pretty much just more or less smells like any other girl.

 

It is autumn of my eight grade year.  Holly Lyons and I reign as co-captains of the school Safety patrol. I stay after school every day, a neon orange strip vested across the northern hemisphere of my anatomy shepherding knee-cap sized falsetto blaring moppets into the chrome orchard of tinted mini-vans and hubcapless station wagons. It is still one year into the nineteen nineties and, almost in tandem with the puberty and youth, everything is changing.

 

It is 1991 and I am training for my first half-marathon held the second Saturday of October, running my ten mile course after school, circling an elliptical romp in Bradley park, running down Nebraska, siphoning over to Glen oak park, running a dilapidated loop before sprinting home.

 

It is 1991 and Music is changing.  There are riots when Metallica’s self-titled album deemed the BLACK album due to its nocturnal countenance hits the stands,  with the Gadsden flag, coiled snake forming a masonic pyramid above the DONT TREAD ON ME mantra, lead singer James Hetfield looking like a civil war confederate vet, performing in front of over a million people at Tushino airfield in Russia as part of the last leg of the Monsters of Rock tour, monickered the First free concert of the Western World.

 

Fifteen days later an album by a freshly formed band out of Seattle with a raucous baritone-brimmed lead singer will hit the stands, naming their album simply 10, the number of guitar wielding appendages their limbs bear.

 

A month later riots record store midnight madness will again prevail when Guns-N-Roses releases Use your Illusion  I & II, over thirty recorded tracks, selling over a million units its first week, K-mart and Wal-Mart refusing to stock the album due to parental content, compounding to the allure, a 3-d lens culled picture of Raphael's School of Athens adorning the cover, capturing an assiduous note-dallying scribe seated next to a stoned out toga-clad fifth grad student, myself still running ten miles every day in preparation for my looming half-marathon, losing myself in the sidewalk scattered stain-glass leaves having an almost out-of body experience the first time I hear the mystical currents of a song simply labeled  Estranged.      

 

It is 1991 and MTV is officially a scraggily-faced ten year old.  

 

It is 1991 and Michael Jackson releases an album whose cover alone resembles an amusement park for burgeoning pedophiles and inexplicably features Mikhail Gorbachev's profile.  Michael will release a video about purportedly about human rights where at the end he ends up dry-humping his right hand before transmogrifying into a panther in a dead-end ally parking lot. MJ who will perform with Slash from Guns-n-Roses at the MTV 10 year anniversary special.  MJ's whose album will be completely dethroned from the number 1 spot in early January by a trio seeking grunge enlightenment from Seattle, christening their breakout single after a defunct deodorant, Nevermind, the reverb-resonating anthemic echo of the newfound 90's, Nirvana releasing its album  the same date in September as the Red Hot Chili Peppers Bloodsugarsexmagik, whose cover features each member of the band stationed on geometrical lateral sides, each sticking their tongues out as if they are performing cunnilingus to a the thorny stem of a single rose.

 

After twelve mile run in mid-September I call my best friend up to see how he is doing at Limestone. After several stuttered purrs he picks up speaking a rushed monotone. Sentences stream in through the pores of his lips like the exhaust from a just missed el-train in Chicago.

            “I’m sorry I can’t talk to you right now on the other line.,” He is spilling out sentences almost at the near speed of what could be disguised as light telling me uninterrupted that, “I’m talking to Renae.”

 

            “Renae.” The name slips out of my lips almost somehow in one syllable with a question mark hatched to the end.

 

            “Renae.”

Dave tells me that her last name is holiday. Renae Holiday, and that she plays clarinet in Limestone marching rockets.

I ask him what happen to Kristi, Kristi of the ‘Itty-bitty-titty committee’

Dave responds by saying that it’s a long story but they more or less broke up.

“Also it looks like I’m going to be going to homecoming with Renae.”

 “Renae.” I pronounce the syllables of her appellation again.

 The sound of her name entering my body like a bell.

                                                            ***

 

“You should really play basketball this year.” Mr. Teske tells me, informing me that I will start varsity on a team that has won the state championship for the last three consecutive years. Telling me that it will be good conditioning for Track comes spring. Telling me that I have always been known as Charlie hustle. Telling me that I had a very promising summer at basketball camp that left people talking about what an asset I would be for the team.

It is my 8^th grade year. None of my friends are on the team. I just want to enjoy it. I want to focus on my academic seeding. More than anything else I just want to run. I just want to focus on winning state this year in the mile come spring.

The half marathon is three days away. I purchase a copy of Public Enemy's Apocalypse '91...The Enemy Strikes Black the day it comes out. I hide my tapes from my parents' in a old Addidas shoebox under my bed.

I continue to run.

 

 

The night before my first half marathon I have my first kiss inside the leafy woods behind the Christian center near the mall. She is two years older and  is wearing an East Peoria 94  maroon and gold high school jacket with her name stitched in rodeo cursive on the side. She is wearing a Marky Mark and the funke bunch t-shirt. It is early October and the leaves rake with arthritic propensities against the brown wicks of chlorophyll-depleted grass. She sits down next to a aged stump near the wending creek that is always dry. One second she is complaining about being cold and I shield my right arm around her shoulder like a wing and the next second her face is hovering slow motion in my direction, her eyes burrowed above her nose like buttons. I remember is being wet and her tongue periscoping into my lips and the next second we are lying down and my body is on top of her body like I am paddling a surfboard against the brush of the incumbent tide and the next second our torsos appear to be one with the thick drapes of autumn, buckled into a dyslexic denim saddle, riding the electric pulse into the breath of something new.

 

The next day is the half marathon.  I am the youngest athlete to compete by ten years.  By the time I am thinking about her lips. Thinking about her tongue. Thinking about how overall wet her body felt. I take off too fast. I am running sub-six minute per mile.  By the time I get to the first five mile I am in third place. At seven miles I am in tenth. I lag. I begin to run out of gas.

With two miles left I can’t move. I am in tears.

My body is completely stagnant. I can’t move.

 

I am unable to finish the race.

 

Father will later ask me what happens. I think about the girl in the woods from the night before.  My entire body hurts.

I think about how wet her lips felt when she fell into my  upside-down chin.

 

I tell my father I don’t know.

 

I don't know why I failed.

 

 

 A week later my sister calls downstairs telling me that I have a phone call. I wonder if it is David Best filling me in about his Homecoming with Renae Holiday.

I pick up the phone it is my District Manager Tom Otten. He asks me how I am doing. Briefly I wonder if I will be getting chastised for letting Terry Inman go half the summer without paying.

From the opposite end of the phone I can feel Tom’s humble smile.

“Hey, I was wondering if you would like to represent us for the Young Columbus contest. I know you did if for Maurice last year and everyone was impressed. You definitely are the best in our area and I would be honored if you would represent us in the contest again this year. ”

I have the receiver of the phone planted into the slant of my chin.

I have a shot to go to France this incumbent spring once again.