early summer 1992...

Graduation is two days away. The eighth graders have half-days. When we leave we somersault the aluminum legs of the desks on top of each other for the summer months as if the desk tops are dry-humping in the arid humidity of the empty August classroom.

Sixty percent of us are attending Manual.  

There is a phone call from my aunt. She tells me that there is a play happening at Peoria Players as part of Community Children’s Theatre. Her son Matthew my cousin already has a stolid lead in the chorus and she inquires if I would like to be involved.

“Apparently some of the cast has dropped out. We can’t guarantee that you will have a speaking role but they are looking for kids around your age to perform.”

 

I ask my Aunt what the play is called.  She says it is called Music Man.

 

The Music Man, I muse to myself.

A play I have never heard of before.


                                                                            ***



Before graduation I use a half-can of Aqua Net on my hair.
 
 
At graduation we line up in a row of human sentences in front of the alter of that inscrutable deity we call our God like proverbial dusks  waiting to be blasted and shot via a double-barrel femur into the aching choke of reality.

 
Before the fortuitous audition for Music Man I splurt through almost a whole can.


                                                                              ***

As if squinting into to antipodal end of a Kalidescope capable of optically traversing the vagaries of time in a single wink or, if you were somehow capable of peeling back the curtains of calendric days twenty-two years almost to the date you would see a young lad with almost cinnamon tan skin and hair that looks thoroughly schlackled waiting for his aunt on the front steps of the only house he has ever known next to the Sweet Gum Tree his grandfather planted fourteen years ago when he was born. A vehicle pulls up in a whisper ; locks sprout up as a side door seemingly swallows him. In the car is his Aunt Chris and his cousin Matthew. Sprinkled selections from Andrew Lloyd Weber musicals are playing over the car stereo. His cousin Matthew is holding a green book the size of the Commencement bulletin of his eighth grade graduation two nights ago.
 

Continue top peek  in a kinky voyeuristic key-hole like fashion and you will easily be able to assay that this young man is skinny, very self-conscious, keeps folding his glasses and placing them in his side pocket.

For some reason every two seconds he feels the compelling urge to look in the side window and verify that his thoroughly intractable aqua-netted hair is still adamantly in place.

The vehicle swerves from Western, shoots down Main street near the end, where, it deposits the twin lads at the pack parking lot of a modern Church overlooking the East Bluff.

 He is the outsider. He doesn’t know if he belongs. The room is flooded with laughter and giggles. He sits next to his cousin Matthew. Apparently one of the actors who is part of some sort of Barber shop quarter with his cousin comes up and asks the shiny haired lad is he is the new tenor. The bulk of the kids are under ten

A girl comes up to him. She smiles. She inquires if he is the new tenor.
 
As she walks up to him she appears to be clad in an auric drape of lavender.
 
Later with his glasses on, he will discern it is only the color if her smile.

Her hair is black, the color of freshly brewed European coffee, swaying in drips past the lithe knobs of her shoulders. She is wearing denim bibs.  Her cheeks seem to perform a callisthenic push up before transitioning into the light spring shade of a pomegranate every time she smiles.

More kids continue to seep into he hall where the rehearsal is set to begin. The room is being flooded with the onset of puberty. The room is giving birth to the pastel breeze of spring.

A girl who the boy-who-seems-overtly self-conscious about his hair and glasses remembers from Take 5 dance studio who lived net to west Bluff Christian church is wearing a top hat with a beige corsage winking in the center. These are the voices of youth, carbonated and pubescent, The avg. age individual room the room has harbored pubic hair around respective genital torso for less than half-a decade, even if even that.

 

Her face is caramel flavored with coifed crop-hair. Apparently she has been on a Soap Opera in the early 80’s.  She is lanky. There is a high-pitched cackle glued to the chimes of her laugh. She calls him over. 
 
She is vivacious. Her laugh fills the room n a spume of life.
 
She is the director.

 Her name , he will later learn, is Pam.

                                                                         ***

 

There is a succinct manner of equipoise and grace in which Pam conducts herself, caroling the words company as the entire cast of the play mills in front of her in a city skyline of youthful appendages and smiles, Pam, discussing with the oily haired accompanist which parts of the script we will be rehearsing tonight as a whole.  From what I can intuit with my glasses still folded in my pocket it appears that we are somewhere still ironing out the mechanics of Act one.  The method in which Pam orchestrates her  arms looks like she is saying welcome in a foreign language. She presses her fingers together like star fish and tells everyone to take a deep breath and have a productive and creative rehearsal. The skyline of bodies then scatters in disparate direction, some with the accompanist, some with a assistant director to go over lines.   A stream of folding chairs are being grouped together forming two concise rows.  

 

“Have you ever acted before?” She inquires. I am still obsessed with the girl with the long black hair.
 
I tell her that for the last two years I had the lead in the grade school play. One year I was even Sid Slickster the devious Mayor in the Pied Piper and wore a variegated seventies jacket and high waters and the audience exploded into fits of laugher when I strutted out onto the stage.

 

“We need a Charlie, would you like to be Charlie?”

 

I have no clue who Charlie is. I have no clue who any of the characters in the musical are supposed to be.

 

“ Oh baby you are the villain. You are the antagonist. You want to expose the hero as being a peddler and a fraud—Oh,” Pam says, looking up with a scowl, ‘You have to be mean.”

Pam hisses at me when she instructs me to be mean.
 

I tell her I can be mean. She hands me a skinny lime-colored book.

Tonight is your audition then.

She looks back to me and smiles. 

                                                                             ***

The train is scheduled to leave for River City. We sit in twin rows reciting lines. Although I have yet to intuit it we are purportedly pretending to be moving, to be chugging, to be leaving to a place we have never been before. While the chompy narrative continues we jerk up and down in staccato jilts stating look, what you talk, what do ya talk, what do you give.

I have no clue what I am doing. I fumble over my lines. I think about the last show I was in and how my Aunt would tell me just to put everything on stage and see what happens. I say something and spin around and point and can hear Pam say the words yes and good.
 
 
At the end of the scene of the understudy for the protagonist hops off the train and into a carousel world of music and light.
 



                                                                 ****

At the end of the audition I go back up to Pam. She is conferring with the accompanist. As I hand her the book she tells me to keep it.

She tells me sugar, no, you got the part.

Sometimes the director calls people sugar.

                                                              ****

I meet the fellow actors.  There is an actor who is part of the barber shop quartet named James who has an inexplicable white ruffle in his hair.  Several of the actors who are eleven or twelve seemed to have speaking parts.

The portly mayor and the Irish mom whose name is from Washington.  The affable Sidekick to Harold Hill goes by the name Marcellus on stage and off his name is the same as mine. He is also from Washington.

Again I try to be witty. It seems crazy that the thespians in Washington Il would travel thirty minutes to perform Children Theatre.

“What did they do hold auditions after the Cherry festival?”

David Laughs. He tells me welcome aboard. His brother Brian is shaped like a bowling pin which adamantly refuses to topple.

“So, you are the new Charlie.” He says. There seems to be a bit of spite attached to his sentence, as if he were vying for the part

“Yeah,  this is weird. I’ve never been around more people from Washington before. Maybe we should do a musical adaptation of the annual State of the union address.

Brian tells me that that’s Washington, Illinois not dee-sea. I tell him I was just messing with him. He grabs his labels.

For some reason he feels delegated to speak for the company of actors as a while.

The female lead won’t be in for the next week due to some sort of prior engagement but apparently she is hot.
 
A boy who looks like an animated fire hydrant comes up to me and tells me I look like the brother off of some botanical NBC television show I have never heard of before.

The Mayor’s wife is a senior at Notre Dame. The majority of the Piccadilly ladies seem to be from around Peoria heights.

The male lead will be in Saturday.

“You know him,” My cousin Matthew says, perturbed that I got a speaking lead.

“He went to Christ Lutheran and graduated three years ago. His name is Jumanee.”
 
 
 Behind me I hear a voice calling me Charlie. With my glasses off she looks like a lavender smudge even though she is not wearing a hint of purple.
 
It is the girl who was so convivial and who welcomed me the moment I entered not knowing where I was.

 

There is something about her smile that magnetically whirls the part of my chest into the direction of the ceiling.

 

I don’t think I told you my name. I’m Anastasia, but everyone calls me Stacia.

 

“Anastasia?” I say.

 “Yes, Anastacia  Blake.” She grapples my hand and gives it a little squeeze.

Her smile seems to echo, illuminate off the amphitheater of her forehead.

 

I try to tell her my first name but I am lost in the pulse of her fingertips.

“I really looking forward to working with you, Char-lee.” She says

There is something about the way she says Charlie that sounds like the rising sun over an impressionistic pond.

 

She then swats my shoulder in jest.

“Oh, by the way? Where do you go to school at?” I inquire.

She tells me that she has just finished up her freshman year at Washington.

 

Washington, I say to myself.

Washington.

 

 
Part of me is levitating as I enter the back seat of my aunt’s car.
 
I am fifteen years old and I am an anvil salesman I have no idea what an anvil is used for other than a ploy used by a Looney caricatured ornithological species to flatten a Wiley coyote, sill, I am an anvil salesman and it is the happiest I have ever been on bulb of this planet.

 

                                                                   ***

Because I am taking French in high school dad has enrolled me in a College for Kids class at the local community college where I will attend classes three times a week.

The first day father accompanies me on the bus and rides with me, reading a Louis L’Amour novel, showing me how to request a flimsy rectangular strip of paper and transfer below the hill.

 

The class is the entire month of June. I am to take the bus by myself and work on my French.

 

The first  morning Madame Breton enters the classroom cradling her cup of tea in one hand in an almost baton like fashion, a series of notebooks tucked beneath her other arm . The bulk of my attention is focused on the sleepy countenanced girl with the dirty bangs and soil under her eyes who hails from the country and who is somehow alluring. I sit down next to her and wish her a good morning. She  smiles in a fashion not quite reminiscent of a post-coital hardcore honeymoon suite yawn. Madame Breton wears long denim skirt that is not emblematic of apostolic Christianity in the slightest. She begins her French lessons by slurring a series of nearly unpronounceable semi-nasal syllable with velocity of a Parisian metro train.

After the first break we introduce each other, in French, saying Jim Lapel.
 
 

We go around the room and introduce ourselves. Everyone’s name the teacher says in francias  before asking if we can them repeat it. I repeatedly have trouble saying the word “Daveed.” The teacher with hair so gold it could pass almost as copper begins to orchestrate her wrist as if she is cueing the woodwinds to arpeggio. Jenay is seated next to me. The teacher has commented at least twice that she has a really pretty French name. When Jenay smiles it feels like her entire face is trying to backstroke into a blush into her skull.

For some reason every time I look at her I think of Brenda from 90210, my hair sleekly sculpted back into a petrified nesty plateau above my skull, the two of us, seated in tandem, conjugating French genders together.

 

There is a kid named Ian who has  and who has dark hair and is seriously into Axl Rose and who apparently plays hockey with Madame Breton’s oldest son. There is a lad who wears googly-eyed spectacles and an H. Ross Perot t-shirt. There are two African-American girls, one who looked up into the sky dome of her eyes and said the word, “Jesus” when she was trying to conjugate a verb which in turn made Madame mutter out something in francais that sounded like an incantation before telling the girl politely not to say that word in her class ever again. Class is three times a week. On Monday Madame shows us pictures of disparate French cathedrals before asking how many of us attended church on Sunday. 

There is a short haired blonde girl with cheeks that are pasty tinged with a hint of scarlet.  Her best friend seems to be a short almost mushroom shaped dwarf who never smiles at me and will later attend the  same school as the majority of my friends. It is maybe the second class period when I notice her. After talking about death metal with Ian and cracking cheap purloined one-liners to Jenay (who Madame Breton keeps on noting has the most beautiful French name). Her bangs somehow seem to shuffle into the pasty dip of her countenance every time she smiles, emitting an almost rainbow like fragrance from a face so white it looks like it could be adorned in a French mime attire.

If feels like we are chewing the inside of our respective tongues every time we speak.
 
 
                                                             ***


I go home and look at my lime-colored book. I am in the first scene where I am trumped by the protagonist and I am not in the play again until the second act. I am the antagonist. I am the salesman who is trying to thwart the chicanery of the purported Prof Harold Hill. I open my book and begin to attack my lines. The script is always scrolled in my back pocket I rehearse the lines when I wake up, as I count the number of papers and insert them into my paperboy bag. I mentally rehearse the lines as I go running every morning, my first tour of Bradley park, the pocked sound of neon orbs being bartered from the emerald geometry of the tennis courts below. It seems like for some inexplicable reason my first eight lines consist solely of the phrase, “But he doesn’t know the territory!!!” as we sit in a row of chairs, a vicarious train jerking our shoulders back and forth in rackety freight train 

After I deliver my final territorial assault the train comes to one final decimating shriek and our shoulders

A conductor who is the size of a Goodyear tire struts past informing everyone that the next stop is River City Iowa. The stage curtain is still closed behind us. I give a soliloquy, a cracker-barrel caveat pertaining to the nefarious antics of Prof. Harold Hill.

                                           

 

At the end it turns out that Harold Hill is directly behind me, he turns over the opposite side of his suitcase showing his name before scampering out of the side of the vicarious freight train.

 

There is a brazen prelude followed by a lifting of the stage curtain.

 

 There is a brass dissonance followed by hiccupping clangs.

The most beautiful sounds I have ever heard

                                                                   ***

"People who speak French always sound like they are speaking with a wad of shit in their mouths."

My friend Patrick McReynolds tells me later that summer when I try introducing myself en francais to him.
 
 

                                                                         ***

This is the first day I am to ride the bus by myself, picking me up  on the corner of Moss and Cedar, a block simply from that only home I have ever known.  Down the street I can see her walking as if being reeled in from a cloud. Her hair is taupe in hue, her legs traipsing as if they are manufactured out of scissors.  She is attired in a lavender tank top and jeans and white sneakers the color of shale which somehow correlates with the color of her off-tan flesh, I am waiting for the bus, the pea colored script for Music man clutched in my own fingers in the same fashion in which I wield the blue Lutheran worship in church every Sunday morning of my life in entirety.

I try not to make eye contact. I try to think about how fast I anticipate my pending mile time to be in cross country this coming autumn. I think about how running is my existence. How in four years time I fully anticipate to be in the Olympics, to have met the love of my life who is surely a fellow gymnast.

For some reasons she idles next to me.

"Hi," She says, "Are you waiting for the bus?"

I look down. I don't know what to say. I can't understand why this sandy-haired stranger with the notebooks is socializing with me.

She introduces herself as Laurie. I barter my first name. I ask her where she is going. Noticing her notebooks I ask if she has summer school or something. She smiles back.

"I'm taking a poetry class that is only offered in the summer down at my high school."

"I'll be going to Manual in the fall." I tell her, adding that I am really excited to be leaving Christ Lutheran.
 
She makes a look as if to say, oh, you are only a freshman.
 

“Do you like poetry?”  Her hair is sandy in a fashion it is almost gray. Almost as if in lieu of oil a minor prophet anointed her head with an overturned car ashtray.

I am waiting for the bus on my own. The first time my father went with me, making sure I made the transfer correctly. Father told me to watch out for people who are acting weird on the bus. I can't understand why this creature wants to strike up a conversation with me. 

            “No,” I tell her, “I can’t stand poetry at all.” From down the street I can make out the chrome hyphen and snarl of the city bus lumbering in my direction.

            “Well I like it.” Says the girl with the sandy-brown ashtray colored hair as she walks into the direction of Manual high with a notebook of poems.

                                                             
 
 
                                                                             ***

The second class period in a row I sit next to Jenay. The second class period in a row Madame commences the session seamlessly chatting a la francais for ten minutes even though we have no clue what she is saying. For the second class period in a row we go to around the room and introduce ourselves by pointing ingot out chest and saying the words J’ema ppelle followed by he color of our name.

For the second class period in a row Madame Breton comes in holding a cup of tea like a gavel, admonishes me when I say my name en francais, stating I need to hold my nose higher as if I am conducting a vicarious orchestra consisting entirely of kazoos.

Everyone in the French class has just graduated either seventh or eighth grade and no one will be attending my high school. Like the ensemble for Music Man they seem to be collectively culled from over the prairie stalks of the 309 area code.  Jenay is from Eureka and publically bitches about all the Apostolic Christians. Ian is from Peoria Heights. Ross Peort boy seems to be somewhere from Chillicothe.

 
We have a new a new student in our class today. Her name is Andrea.

The French teacher too informs her that she has a pretty French name.

She has the straightest back of anyone I have ever seen. It’s like her spine is some sort of a metaphysical stalk branching up into the aerie of her skull, the diaphanous black lashes of her hair draping down past the bulbs of her shoulder in one illuminated sheet.

 Somehow Andrea who missed the first day of class has superseded Jenay in being the woman I most desire to sit next too while my lips nasally contort conjugates and vowels, her body emanating with the scent of early summer basted in a lilac hint of sun tan lotion, the scent of her body leaving my olfactory senses skinny dip in a twilight pond of eternity.

During our break I walk up to Andrea and introduce myself. She looks at the green script I have optically been wading inside every free chance I get.

When she asks me what I do I tell her I’m an actor.

 

“Actually, I’m Charlie the Anvil salesman. I’m a villain. I keep people from falling madly in love.”

 

 

 
                                                                           ***

“Well hey-“ Bob answers the door. It is the second week in June. As I walk down the street to collect the air-conditioners are beginning to purr in a chorus of  muffled hums.

 

“Frank was just saying that we hadn’t seen you in a while.” I enter their house. There is a heap of International Male catalogues next to the door. Frank always comes into the living room, fires up a cigarette when he sees me, takes two puffs and then puts the cigarette out.

Frank always seems to be adjusting the center of his waist.

 

He smiles every time he sees me.  I try to be witty. I ask them how their Dotty West Shrine is doing these days. Frank then points to the center of the living room.

 

“Actually we’re thinking about building a stage and having a party?”

 

“A party?"

 

Bob says that Frank is retiring from Caterpillar after working their 30 years and for his retirement, they are thinking about transforming the dining room into a stage.

 

“It won’t be until next February, but if you like you can come to and do sound.

 

I tell them that I would be honored. Bob asks me what I’ve been doing all summer. I tell them that I have still been running every day getting ready for cross-country in the fall. I tell them that I have been training three times a day greeting ready for Steamboat and when I’m not running I’m studying French at ICC.

 

“Well, you know what they say about the French?” Bob asks me, rhetorically.

 

I say no.

 

“They really know how to use their tongue.” Bob jests, before forming a Star Trek live-long-and-prosper Vulcan sign with his fingers over his lips and squiggling his tongue up and down. Frank starts laughing. Bob breaks out in tears. I have no clue that they are talking about but following their lead I begin to laugh anyway.

 

It’s hard not to laugh and smile when Bob and Frank are around. 

                                                                      ***

This is the second day I am boarding the bus by myself . Today Laurie is wearing a shorts and is riding a bicycle with a banana seat. She pedals past, swishes her head and forms a circle eight with the spokes of her bike.

 “Hey,” she says as if floating in an aerie pirouette. She back pedals and skids next to the bus stop where I am idling.

“Hey” She says again, sandy cropped hair. “How is your French class?’

She states, I can almost perceive the interrogatory emblem  above the previously stated query as she inquires.

I don’t know what to say. I should say fine. I should say good.

I end up telling her that its not bad. I ask her how her poetry class is hanging. I verbally shudder the twin blades of my shoulders when I say the words poetry.

She smiles.

“It’s amazing. The teacher is just so passionate. There’s only four of us and one is a rapper but we feed off of each other’s positive energy.”

I look down at my feet like people praying in the congregation of my church. She flaps open a spiral notebook.

“Would you like to hear a poem? I mean, you told me you don’t like poetry and everything but I figured you might like to hear a poem, you know, when you are waiting.”

 
"What's your poem about?" I inquire, feigning interest.
 
"It's about looking at an old black and white high school yearbook and seeing a photograph of someone who looks familiar to you and falling in love with his cheekbones and then later realizing that person was your estranged father whom you have never met."
 
"Wow," I respond back, just a little bit awed.
 
 
"Here, let me read you just a stanza. We're work-shopping the poem today in class."
 
Laurie steps out  from the banana seat of her bicycle and begins to rifle through her dossier of poems. I look down. From close to the corner of Waverly an Moss and I can see the bus straggling in my direction like a constipated Brontosaurus.
 
"Listen, I'd love to hear your poems, but I got to go. My bus is coming."
 
Laurie says the fourth vowel. She looks downtrodden. She says maybe some other time then. 

 "Yes, I say, almost as if making a covenant.
 
I'm swallowed in the gaseous side of the bus. As I look out I Laurie pedaling the late-seventies banana seat bike trying to keep her balancing with her mortarboard of notebooks tucked under her arm.
 
 
I think about Laurie and her poem about seeing a photograph of someone you have known your entire life.
 
 

 
 
I think about what would happen if I would have a photograph of Anastasia or Jenay or Laurie or Andrea from my French class , clad in only their panties and how I would look at it late at night by myself when  my parents are asleep and no one is around.
                                                                           

 

                                                                             ***

After spending the afternoon with Bob and Frank I go to the White House that looks just like the White House. The house with the blonde haired girl whose is older always smiles and blushes like cheap wine cooler every time she sees me.

 

There are cars in the driveway. From the window I can see the house is full of people.

 

I ring the doorbell.

 

A lady I have never seen answers.

“May I help you young man?”

 

“Uhm, I'm just here to collect for the paper,”

 

She bobs her shoulders several times in a row and puts her finger to her lips indicating that I need to be quiet.

 

I pantomime back to her, placing my hand over my lips, thinking that perhaps they are planning a surprise party since from my youthful vantage it appears the cools husband and wife are pushing the big four-oh.

 

The lady arrives back, handing me a ten dollar bill.

 

“Just keep it," she says, before putting her finger up to her lips again and closing the door.

 

I don’t even have time to give her the corrugated receipt with the date stating that she paid.

                                                                    ***

 

“There was some girl asking about you,” my father says, when I arrive home from class.

 “She was carrying a bunch of skinny notebooks.  I was on the front porch reading and she asked when you were going to be back home.”

 I pause and think. Dad says maybe it was somebody from the play I just entered.  I tell Dad no., I tell my father that it was more than likely Laurie.

“Who’s Laurie?”  My dad asks, rather frankly.
 
"She's just some girl. She goes to Manual."
 
I tell my father that she is also a poet.
 
He nods his head and says ah, as if taking his temperature at a medical check-up

             

                                                                             

 
 
 

 
 
This is our second rehearsal. For some reason everyone refers to Jumanee as Anthony except for myself and Pam.

 

He is Harold Hill. I am the villain.

“How come people call you Anthony and not Jumanee?” I inquire to my former classmate, he looks down and smiles.

 

“A lot of these folks I guess aren’t used to African American names.”

 

“But it’s a beautiful name.” I tell him. He responds by saying that he’s always thought that himself.

“They are mostly good people here. There was a little drama before you showed up why the original cast member left, but there mostly good people around here.”

 

Jumanee keeps inquiring how old I am. I tell him I am fourteen and will be fifteen in a month.

Before I can ask Jumanne what the drama was Pam screechy monotone calls for places. I have not seen Anasatia today. The kid who I will learn is the conductor again says I look just like some guy named Tony from something called Blossom.

A girl name Couri who is a fellow Picadilly lady apparently has some sort of tiff with Anastasia calls her something called Trollop every time Anastasia clops past.

 

The pianist name is Miss Jana and she wears long swaying dresses and has black hair the color of motor oil leaking past her shoulders and is a Christian and smells brand new church pew. Before every performance we warm up singing head shoulders knees and toes and find myself performing various stretches while listing body part trying not to look at the bent over torso of the nearest feminine ensemble.

 

“Are you excited?” Marcellus’s brother Brian says to me.

I look at him like I have no clue what he is talking about, He tells me that the female lead, Marilyn the Librarian is going to be here today.

I respond back with an apathetic so.

 “So, haven’t you read the script?”

I tell him yeah. I know my line about not knowing the territory in the ROCK ISLAND opening scene pretty well.

“No,  in the second act. You get to make out with her.”

“Who,” I say, thinking about Anastasia's forehead, how it seems to glow.

"Summer. She plays Marilyn the Librarian. The female lead! You need to read your script." 

 

I go over my lines again. In the preamble simply titled Rock Island I have a soliloquy where I talk about the notorious no good Harold Hill. We array chairs to resemble seats in a train. After my rant the protagonist holds up a placard stenciled on his suitcase bearing his name.

 Pam corrects my lines. When some of my speech  seems dated she tells me to use a different idiom.

“Charlie!!!” She cackles, looking down, looking up smiling.

 

"Charlie Charlie Charlie…”

Pam knows me simply as Charlie. She has not called me by my real name since she handed me the script and informed me that I got the part.

Rehearsal is over. I have slept with the script every night but I feel I am not up to par with the rest of the fellow actors.

I see Anastasia again as I am waiting for my mom to show up. She is holding a birthday parent. Apparently she has a party to attend after rehearsal.
 The moment she walks in its like a vicarious idea-generating light bulb clicks on, every molecule becomes illuminated.

Hey,” She says, smiling an orchard of bliss.

 

I tell her hi. She has something that looks like origami in her hand.

 

“I just wanted to tell you that you look exactly like someone I love.”

 

I tell her that kid off of Blossom. She says.

                                

“Harry Connick Jr. I think it’s your hair.”

 

I’ve never heard of harry Connick Jr. I ask Anastasia who that is. 

“Oh, he’s just a contemporary jazz singer and pianist. Anyway, you look just like him.”

I tell her thank you. She hands me the origami and tells me ‘here,’

 

“This is for you.” She says, turning away smiling.

I decided I don’t like Jenay anymore.

I decided this summer will be all about running everyday, memorizing my script and trying to woo Anastasia.

 

                                                                          ***

 

I wait til I get home. I lodge myself in the upstairs  bathroom. I open the origami like I am  unearthing the envelope reading the winner for the latest academy award.

 

In the envelope is Anastasia’s handwriting. It is bubbly. Instead of dotting her eyes with standard bolts she uses little hearts.

 

She tells me I am cute.

 

She asks me to call her sometime.

 

Her number is at the bottom of the note.

 

It begins with 444.

 

The first three digits of Washington, Il.

                                                                           ***

At night I think about Anastasia Blake. I have never known a girl from Washington Il. I think about her bangs, There is the healthy rattle of the air-conditioned in late May. I have just graduated eighth grade. I have run the mile in 5:10. My entire future is in front of me like a freshly kicked carpet from a celebrity limousine. I think about Anastasia. I think about kissing her. I think about her pomegranate forehead and the places my lips would somehow be privy to escort her. I think about all of this.

 

I think about the triumvirate 444 numerical digits that accompany the hyphen and remainder four digits before a gravid ring tone, a prologue to the sound of her voice.  

I have never had a girl just give me her phone number before.

I wonder what will happen when I call.

                                                                  





                                                                            ***
 

Later I will learn that I got the part after the original Charlie the anvil salesman, an actor entering his senior year in Pekin high school quit because Harold hill was black, telling fellow members of the city council that he would rather die than be in a play with a nigger as the hero

                                                                      .

                                                                               ***

 

The week we are scheduled to move from the church to practice at Peoria Players I receive a letter in the mail with a post address in the form of an orange nerf-colored capital M from the Manual athletic department.

It is from Coach Ricca, the cross-country coach.

There is to be a pre-season Cross-country picnic in Bradley park the last week of June.

 Steamboat is less than a week away.

The date of the picnic is on one of the few dates we don’t have rehearsals for music man.

 

The moment I get the letter I take off for a run. I go through the opening scene from Music Man. I practice scowling in the direction of Anastia who is also in that scene. I take off sprinting. I run down Western Avenue. Sprinting past the phone booths outside the crooked neon smiles of Mister Donuts. I run past McDonalds and the Gazebo that always has Gangsta Disciple Graffiti tattooed on the side.

 

I sprint past the Hardees where Take 5 dance studio used to be and the Convenient store where I got in trouble for trying to open a Playboy when I was eight.

 

I sprint past the  Democratic headquarters of Peoria with placards featuring Bill Clinton and Carol Mosely Braun in the cracked patches of the window.

 

I follow the sidewalk near where Western transitions into Main. I blast past the arched porches of the houses aligning Summit avenue.

 

I find myself in Bradley park, taking my shirt off and sticking it in the top of my shorts like a tassel or an old man’s cock dangling above a urinal. I continue to run.  Past the  Daliesque architecture of the late 70’s playground. Past the abandon shuffle board court. Past the teenage couples on blankets making out, down the first hill, cutting a sharp left, the Chinese bridge in sight.

 

Hearing the sound of tennis balls being swatted I pass the courts, past the wooden playground set and dole-eyed pavilion at the bottom of the hill where I used to have my childhood birthday party where one year Dad made a Piñata that looked like a softball and tried to get all my second grade chums to do the hokey-pokey.

 

Without looking back blast across the pi sign entrance of the Chinese bridge I take an isochronal left and push myself up the  wending tongue of the hill, the subtle cling of plastic Frisbee's being deposited in a chrome fountain escorting me like a bell. I get to the top of the hill. I see the green and white tent co-signing corn stock. I can hear the pit  tuning up for their  first performance of the season. 

I take a hard right, dash down the hill near the graffiti’s flumes, push back up close to the second baseball diamond and then down until I reach a sliver of cement.

 

There I sprint, harder than I have ever sprinted before, jostling my elbows, empting everything that is inside the molecular carafe of my anatomy until I find myself at the pinnacle, flooded under the statue of Columbus in Bradley park.

 

I think about Andrea from my French class.

 

I think about Anastaia who lives in Washington.

 

Briefly I keep on repeating to myself like round the mantra I say during the opening lines of the Music Man.

 

I keep telling everyone who asks that they don’t know the territory.

 

I wonder what Anastia's lips would taste like if I were to quaff from them like petals.

 

I am flooded under the sail of Columbus’s shadow.

 

                                                 

Life has arrived.