I am attired in my purple shirt for our second date, walking down the arteries of the West Bluff, spending more time in front of the vanity frame than I would like to admit, wearing sneakers, blue jeans, taking my glasses off and stowing them comfortably in my side pocket, walking down the same avenues and side streets I traipsed during the accelerated heat of early June, after arriving back from Madame Breton’s French class, thinking of Andrea, mentally drooling over Anastasia, ferrying my moss-colored MUSIC MAN script in front of me, working on the memorization of my lines, slicing my way down Heading avenue with a slight bob to my gait and nod to my head, trying to decipher the cadence sway and rhythm of the text I am to perform, now, the last week of July, I have turned fifteen, my first official girlfriend is seventeen, she will be eighteen in December. She has her own vehicle. She listens to music I have never heard of before. She has made it to the state speech finals the last three years, and I can think about kissing her-wading in the pond of her maraschino cherry lips; I think about how we held hands while walking around the cardboard contours of the mall as she slurped Mt. Dew and before she left we found our appendages buckled around each others' waistline, my lips finding the blithe pasture of her forehead, unable to somehow let go.
I am walking.
It is the last week of July. I have orbited the
nearest solar bulb deemed in our grunting vernacular as the sun just over
fifteen consecutive elliptical laps. With my glasses off I can still make out
the vernal tuft of the upper park. Near
the cross walk there is a sticker plastered on the lamp post endorsing Ross
Perot for president in 92.
It is like she is being swept across the creek in a early spring breeze.
It is like she is lost.
It is almost like she is waiting just for me.
***
After clawing her way back she falls down. She is flying. She is skidding. She is oscillating her petite frame through evaporating wisps of time. She is sprinting. She is launching. She is taking off. She is levitating above the earth of the mat as if with feathers. As if she is flying. As if after foundering in the first round she has found her wings. She is returning to the caliber of competition she knows she can compete at. She is contorting her body into floating musical notes. She is focused. She is ascending into the stratosphere. She is floating to an aerie nest seen only to the oscillating frame of her peripheral vision.
She has risen.
She is above.
And then it is gone.
She steps out of bounce on a landing. There is another audible gasp from the audience. She is being deducted points . She is staying in routine even though she is falling behind. She continues to launch her anatomy even though she knows she has no chance to medal. She continues to perform her routine with pulchritude and poise even though she is all alone.
She has been on the cover of Time. The cover of Newsweek. The cover of TV Guide.
After all the hype she will go home with no hardware.
She will go home alone.
***
She smiles and says 12 (as in Mt Dews), her lips crooked,
looking down, blushing, stating again that she is an addict. She then thanks me
again for the Freddie Mercury CD. Telling me that I didn't have to do that.
“Well did you like it?” I ask her with a little shrug of my
shoulders. Dawn looks down as if she is receiving some sort scholastic
accolade. There is something in the way in which she looks
down reminiscent of the method Karen Christmas looked down when she accepted
the larger Young Columbus plaque.
“Actually I didn't realize until I got home that I
don’t have a CD player.”
I look at her nonplussed. I say what with visible
stemming exclamatory branches. Dawn presses her arm into my chest and tells me
hey, its not your fault. She states that she was so elated when she saw the
rare out of print Freddie Mercury CD that she forgot her stereo doesn't have
the required equipment to properly assess its sound.“No, but one of the Dawn’s has a CD player and I can dub it on a cassette. I’m sure I’ll get a CD player shortly.”
Dawn thanks me again.
Next to the Chinese Bridge there is a one-story Pagoda. Dawn doffs her sandals and holds them in one hand. As we sit on the bench inside the Pagoda I call her Cinderella and grab her feet and begin to massage.
“I hate my feet,” Dawn says, “They look like battered planks of fish served up at Long John Silvers. I feel that my ankles are Hush Puppies half the time.”
I tell her good analogy. I continue to massage her feet. In my right pocket Dawn sees my glasses. There is the sound intermittent ping of plastic saucers being flung into metallic fountains. There is always the pungent waft of cheap weed and the reverse echoing ‘pock’ sounds of neon balls bartering over a knee-sized net in a caged concrete arena. There are picnic tables and the woods where people meet to perform efficient and quick sex acts on their lunch breaks. Dawn is holding three poetry books as a bride might a mock bouquet during a wedding rehearsal.
I ask Dawn what the books are. She smiles.
"These are the books for the poetry class I am taking."
.
“I’m surprised you don’t like poetry,” She says to me again. I pick up Leaves of Grass and randomly begin to flip.
"This is the female form. A divine nimbus from it from head to foot."
I try to be witty. I ask Dawn if that is her divine nimbus or if she is just happy to see me. She doesn't laugh.
"Here," She says, yanking the book from my grip. She then reads a poem on the same page. There is no locked rhythm to the stanzas. It doesn't seem like a poem really, it seems like more of a life mission statement where the poet is talking about all that really matters in this terse time pixel of existence is being surrounded by men and women and the curious odor of them and the love and acceptance and plurality that beneath the mask of the southern-genitals or the subtle hue of pigmentation of skin somehow we are all intrinsically one and that is enough and it pleases the soul well.
When Dawn is completed reading the poem there is a silence. I look down on stretch of light casting what looks like flaring octagons on the welcome mat of the grass.
"These are the books for the poetry class I am taking."
“Poe-hehts?” I say. Dawn smiles. There is a white book and a beige book she defines as being Ariel by somebody which sounds like Sylvia Plate and the Beige one is the Wasteland by someone named BS Eliot. There is a small book that looks like lit was just smuggled out of prison with the words HOWL on the cover that is the size of a coaster and looks like it was smuggled out of a prison house
.
“What’s the large one,” In inquire, still rubbing the peninsulas of flesh that is Dawn Michelle’s left foot.
“This is Walt Whitman,” She says, “This is Leaves of Grass.”
I pick up the poetry. When I ask the title of the one I keep on thinking in by Sylvia Plate I ask if it was influenced from the protagonist of the Little Mermaid. Dawn isn’t laughing.
“I’m surprised you don’t like poetry,” She says to me again. I pick up Leaves of Grass and randomly begin to flip.
"This is the female form. A divine nimbus from it from head to foot."
I try to be witty. I ask Dawn if that is her divine nimbus or if she is just happy to see me. She doesn't laugh.
"Here," She says, yanking the book from my grip. She then reads a poem on the same page. There is no locked rhythm to the stanzas. It doesn't seem like a poem really, it seems like more of a life mission statement where the poet is talking about all that really matters in this terse time pixel of existence is being surrounded by men and women and the curious odor of them and the love and acceptance and plurality that beneath the mask of the southern-genitals or the subtle hue of pigmentation of skin somehow we are all intrinsically one and that is enough and it pleases the soul well.
When Dawn is completed reading the poem there is a silence. I look down on stretch of light casting what looks like flaring octagons on the welcome mat of the grass.
Dawn looks at me and says the word so. She then squeezes my hand with her knuckles.
"That was beautiful," I say, as an amen.
***
Coach informs me that I am working too hard. He mandates that I cut back to running twice a day during the week and once a day on the weekend and take Sunday off.
“Your body is still developing. Your limbs are still growing. You need to time to rest.”
I want to tell coach that now I am chasing Kim Zemeskal. I want to tell coach that I am in a hurry. That I have been chasing the elusive finishing line my entire life.
I want to tell Coach that no matter how much I hurt I am not going to refrain from running every day. From pushing myself.
"You just don't want to burn yourself out to early." Coach says.
I smile. I tell Coach that in order to shine you have to burn.
***
“I’ve had something I’ve been meaning to inquire about for a long time but every time I broach the subject you become elusive.”
Mentally I remind myself to look up the words broach and elusive in the big beige dictionary we have on the shelf once I return home.
“You always seem so reserved about your glasses. “ I
ask her what she means. She points to my
side pocket. “I mean, your glasses. They are just glasses. I
don’t comprehend why you don’t want to be seen wearing them. I mean, it’s
really no big deal.”
I look back at Dawn again and shrug. Above the hill the Columbus statue is behind us only it is out of view. We continue to walk a loop around the lower level of par six Frisbee golf. Dawn alludes that she is only on break from class and has to get back soon. She says that she can drive me home. I am petrified to think what my parents' would think if they knew I was driving around with a senior from the opposite side of town.
As I clank shut the wing to her mid-eighties economy sized station wagon Dawn looks at me again.
"So, back to your glasses."
“I don’t know.” I tell Dawn “People just started noticing me when I take my glasses off. I always wore them. I just started taking them off around the time of the play, right before I met you."
“Put them on for me,” Dawn demands, as if daring me to whip out my cock with a classroom protractor in one hand.
“No,” I tell her, stating that, with the exception of when I am in class, no one sees me with my glasses on.
Dawn shrugs. It’s like we have verbal joust.
“Nobody sees me with my glasses on.” I tell Dawn saying the word no one again. Dawn's keys offer a spastic jangle in the ignition only the car feels like it is hibernating. I try to change the subject. I don’t want to tell her that I was teased relentlessly. I don’t want to tell her how I went to a so-called Christian grade school and how Mario Rutherford and Aron Bowman somehow found a shit-stained jock strap, forced me on the ground and placed in on my head like a crown of thorns before a home game. I don’t want to tell her how all my fellow teammates left when I had flecks of someone else’s fucking feces wedged in between my glasses and my eyes, drips of shit raining on my cheek bones every time I blink and how, for some inexplicable reason, I still had my pride and refused to tell on them, not that, looking back, the teachers would have done anything anyway since the principal sort of kow towed to players on the varsity elite.
.
Dawn swivels her right arm so that the car goes into
park. Dawn’s wrist then performs a dyslexic twist and she plucks the keys from
the ignition in a subtle jingle.
“See, I can wait.” She says, as if daring me. The
center of my body is becoming tight, the center of my loins are sprouting like
a Nintendo joy stick, making my christening my testicles with the standard
appreciated BA control pad buttons. We wait for a minute. Dawn’s smile has
relented into an intransigent hyphen of flesh. Next to her I see the stereo.
Behind her I can see the back side of her hair in the reflection of the rear view mirror blonde commas dripping off the back of her scalp as well as the wooden
playground that looks as if it is made out of sandpaper they will demolish come
three years time after yuppie adults claim that it isn’t safe because some kids
keep getting splinters.
Dawn looks at me again and says that she can wait
all die. My glasses are folded in my right side pocket, saluting like a GI Joe.
“Kay,” I yield, reaching down into the side of my
jean, fishing out my glasses, taking them apart like trying to assemble a set
of gymnastic uneven bars before sliding them up the slope of the road.
Through the thick magnified lenses I can make out
Dawn’s almost uppity British chin. There is still an almost stern looked glued
to her face. Using both hands, the was
my 4th-grade optometrist mandated I place both fingers on each
temple I peel them down folding them up again and placing them back in my
pocket.
My erection has waned.
Dawn has said nothing about my magnified countenance.
Dawn has said nothing about my magnified countenance.
A jingle reverberates
as the keys wedge into the ignition and the mid-eighties station wagon she
inherited via some older sibling default rule of hierarchy rumples into life,
before she coasts free from the parking lot, past the Japanese bridge, into the
beginning of all chartered chaos that is time.
***
There are giant stalactite shadows above her and when I look at her again I notice that it is the La Sagrada Familia.
She is crying and the moment I step on the mat to carry her across the mat met morphs into an ocean I am one side of the arena in Peoria and she is hurting on the other side beneath the palatal penumbras of La Sagrada Familia almost exactly straight east in Barcelona, Spain, 3000 miles away
I take off and run.
In June I avg. 300 miles., thrashing my limbs at various speeds around the West Bluff raking in a little over 70 miles a week. At that pace it should take 43 weeks to arrive.
I doff my shoes, ready to run across the Atlantic. I feel a yank and find myself falling into my shadow, into the inky swill of currents gnawing at my feet. If she can fly over a gymnastic continent I have no trouble digging my bare cleats into the raking surf and salty tides of the ocean.
As I step into the water I begin to descend. My lips are blue. I am still pedaling my limbs and I can hear her subtle whimpers, telling me that she is lonely, supplicating for help, imploring me to hold her as I continue to move and what passes as animated bubbles exit from my lips and eventually I m no more.
As I step into the water I begin to descend. My lips are blue. I am still pedaling my limbs and I can hear her subtle whimpers, telling me that she is lonely, supplicating for help, imploring me to hold her as I continue to move and what passes as animated bubbles exit from my lips and eventually I m no more.
In Dawn's station wagon there is a single speaker stereo planted between
myself and Dawn. She presses down the play button and music from a band I have
ever heard of emanates out of the side.
“The car stereo is broken so I guess I just decided
to improvise.” Dawn notes we are driving
up Farmington rd Hill. “It’s hard to find a radio station outside Chicago that plays most
of the music I like anyway.” She states, before asking for directions to my
abode. I tell her to keep on ging straight down Western and then take a right
two blocks before Jumer’s. Mentally I tell myself that that is what I love about you, my first official girlfriend. The fact that she is into cool music and has a vestigial stereo in her car.
I still feel violated that she has seen me in my glasses.
“I love this band.” Dawn says, I ask them what their name is She tells me it is Concrete Blond before turning up the volume.
We continue to drive down past the out of sync-lights at Western and Rohmann taking a right on
Sherman. I have no clue where my parents’ are but it is clear from the lack of
traffic that they are not inside the house.
“So” I inquire, as she puts the station wagon in park.
"Wanna see where I live?”
***
The first week I am up to 140 miles per week. I am somewhere in Indiana. The next week 163. I am in Akron Ohio. I run three times a day. I run East. I can't stop pushing myself. I can't stop feeling that if I could find myself next to the jarring surf of the Atlantic ocean somehow I can find the girl in the white leotard and hold her close and that somehow her tears would be sopped and she would never fall again.
***
“This is like the messiest room I have ever seen in
my entire life.” Dawn states, she has her fingers cupped over her mouth. I
smile. I am proud at the insanitary status quo of my living quarters. She sees the contents of the drawers spilled open as if my dresser has just been fatally shot. She says several pair of athletic shorts and upside down running shoes. She sees my Nintendo and Sega stacked upon each other like a game of jenga in front of my diminutive bedroom television. She sees my poster of Ryne Sandberg and Batman Justice Digital half-peeled off the wall. She sees my stereo. I make it a point to note the music I have been listening to inspired chiefly by her tonal preferences. .
She smiles a wounded grin.
She smiles a wounded grin.
“I mean, this is like 10 times worst than my
brothers’ room and I thought they were the most
unkempt bipedal species on the planet, this is just...."
Dawn completes her sentence my offering out a
shudder. I smile. I tell her that she should see my closet. She tells me that
she thinks she should pass.
I walk her to my front porch. This is our third
date. Something should be about to transpire, something other than our tight
hugs we use to greet each other and then say goodbye.
As if a choreographed ballroom dancing move I swivel
her around facing my direction. I am talking to her in the same scripted manner
in which I have seen adolescents slowly talk to each other and pause before
making out on slightly concave screen of the television my entire life. I step close to her. The closer I get to
kissing her was when we were in the doorway of
Shakey’s during the Cast Party. Our attired genitals bump into each other and touch as I lean in. The caps of her knees thump into the middle of my shin. Our lips find ourselves trying to undress the others lips. Dawn's eyes are welded close. Mine are shocked open.
I then tell her goodbye.
I then tell her goodbye.
Throughout our jaunt in Bradley park we never skirt near the Columbus statue once.
After we kiss Dawn enters her car and closes the
door. I see her press down on the side of her car stereo, listening to Concrete
Blonde, driving far away until she is no more.
"I have perceived that to be with those I like is enough,
ReplyDeleteTo stop in company with the rest at evening is enough,
To be surrounded by beautiful curious breathing laughing flesh is enough,
To pass among them . . to touch any one . . . . to rest my arm ever so lightly round
his or her neck for a moment . . . . what is this then?
I do not ask any more delight . . . . I swim in it as in a sea.
There is something in staying close to men and women and looking on them and in
the contact and odor of them that pleases the soul well,
All things please the soul, but these please the soul well. "
Sylvia Plate courtesy of the great Don Gately...