It
might not happen until later this week but somehow it will happen. It will be late
at night, the air-conditioner droning in the living room when my sisters have
just rented and are watching Father of The Bride and I spend the night upstairs
using the phone in my parents’ bedroom making plans to meet Dawn Michelle the
following week, it will happen after the college girls move in next door and I espy their silhouette
hovering like wraiths behind sealed window shades, it will happen after I talk
to David Best and listen as he blathers on about band camp and how he is having
problems with Reane Holiday, stating they are somehow better off as friends, it
will happen after I have purchased my first CD or meet my cool new history and
English and French teachers at Manual, it will happen after all of this, the
mornings I spend looking at my second cousin’s Todd Brooks cross country
records on the board near the perennially echo and flounce of volley balls in
the rubber gym, it’ll happen soon, before I have ingested my first cup of
coffee but after y first cross-country race, it’ll happen in the moments in
sleep, nocturnal decades before my mom flicks the light on informing me that it
is time for me to start my route, the moment when dreams escape and plop,
whirring from my psyche and I am falling, looking back in the dog days of an
eclipsed Indian Summer reminiscing,
thinking about how this was the summer that life felt brand new once again.
It’ll happen in that blink of time where I will hear Pam calling my name again,
I will think of Stacia and how the way the time signature of her smile made me
feel and then I will hear Pam’s voice, the almost cackle, stating Charlie,
calling me baby, stating that you were good tonight baby, calling me by my real
name.
This is our final performance. For a directors gift we have purchased a four foot high thank you card we are surreptitiously smuggling around, each of us autographing for the director. We also found a director chair that looks like Pam is directing a show off a Hollywood set.
Apparently we collected 120. Even the adults are impressed that the kids could collect so much money.
After the performance we are meeting at Shakeys on University for a cast party.
This is the last time I will ever have my make-up done by Dawn. I think about how she blew me a kiss the last time. I sat in front of her porcelain visage. I am the only male who doesn’t do his own make-up.
Stacia walks past, every time Stacia sees me making
the make-up lady laugh she for some reason feels compelled to lift her nose.
I am determined to ask Dawn out by the end of the production. To get her seven digits of her phone number. To stay in touch. To somehow bunt the persona of my psyche into the infield of her forehead.
To have something in my life that is a pillar of
flesh, and emotional crutch, someone I sentimentally get off on every time I
hear the resonance of her voice kiss my earlobe over the phone.
That I want to smells the autumn in her hair come three months time.
That I
want her in my life as I leave the pier
of the adolescent and walk into the unknown annals of high school.
That after being inexorably hung up on Stacia and thinking she
was somehow the one or drooling over Andrea in the though of her cheerleading costume
there is something different about my rapport with Dawn.
That I have three hours to ask her out. Three hours to somehow convey to her that I really enjoy the labyrinthine hours lost in the dip and sway of our conversation.
An infinite conversation and it
seems like we are somehow just getting started.
Before our final performance Pam again asks us to
hold hand onstage. We don’t pray. We
form a circle on stage holding hands as if we are playing a game of Red
rover. About twenty kids are absent from
the stage. There are rumors that some of the kids are not allowed to talk with
Pam because of the New Age shit she purportedly performs before each
production.
We are squeezing each other hands tight. Although we
are not requested, several Pik-a-dilly ladies have their eyes welded shut and
look like they are trying to defecate after going on a three day cheese binge.
Pam doesn’t say the word God. Several kids are taking deep breath. Much of the
kids who are absent appear to be under the age of ten. I feel like I am the
only one with my eyes open, the only one not pensively looking down at a graveside funeral. I can’t see Betsy. On stage left, close to
where I normally converse with Dawn the overweight soccer mom with the
clipboard and the bad perm has her hands splayed out as if she is trying to
quell and oncoming semi.
It is like we are corporeal conduits to everything
Pam is saying. There is tingling vibration pinching our respective hands.
“I just want you to know how proud myself and Miss
Jana are about all the hard work you have put in over the last two months. I want you to know that you are all special
and that, whether you are performing or seated in the audience, the glory of
the theatre will always be here for you, to hold you if you need a friend, to
make you laugh when you feel lonely, the theater will always be part of
the narrative magic of our culture and now,
each and every one of you are part of this magic called life and it has
been nothing short of an honor me, the director, and Miss Jana , the accompanist to
watch each of you grow and develop not only on stage but also in your own
personal ambitions and callings.”
Pam lets go but for some reason all of us keep on
squeezing. Our fingers keep on biting into the dactyls of the nearest
individual next to us. It is like we are halo. We are leaving. We don’t want
this experience to end.
When we let go we clap.
***
“Hey,” I sit down next to Betsy before the last performance. She swivels her chin.
Betsy is biting her lip.
“My mom says that I shouldn’t do that. That Pam does th’eirdo things th'ometimes.:”
“Yeah,” I say, shielding my arm around her like a wing. She pushes my arm back. I tell her sorry. Betsy tells me its okay.
Her fingers form a snow cone on her chin.
“Are you religious?” I ask Betsy. She says yes. She says she is a Christian. Because of her lisp it sounds like she is stating that she is the question.
I ask her what her mom thinks is wrong with what we are doing before each show. Betsy says that she doesn’t wish to talk about it.
She says the word wish sans lisp.
I ask if I she minds if I sit next to her for a minute. Betsy says that it's a three country. We remain silent for a long time as patrons begin to fill into the theatre for what is to be our final show.
I ask if I she minds if I sit next to her for a minute. Betsy says that it's a three country. We remain silent for a long time as patrons begin to fill into the theatre for what is to be our final show.
Betsy looks like she is ready to cry.
We are ready to explode on stage.
***
On the stage of time children are flying. They are breaking into the flap of their own wings. They are dolting Dedalus feathers. Zaneeta is telling her dad that she really wants to go down on a woman just for the experience. The school board-slash-Buffalo Bills Barber shop quartet carouses on stage wearing Indian Headgear, construction helmet, Navy seamen and police officer hat respectively as well as assless chaps breaking out into a rather ABBAesque up tempo version of Lida Rose.
***
This is the last performance and children are
gliding. They are cartwheeling. They are flying. 76 glass trombones float like
ester bubbles into the welkin of the stage. It is the last performance and
children are wading. They are backstroking. They rise like trained dolphins and
backflip in the ether of eternity before snorkeling into the lip of the stage
below.
They are learning how to fly on stage.
There is a goofiness. A daffiness. Molecules of time splashing against the performance pier of our collective foreheads. There is fluidity to each line bartered. The audience is responding in cackles and waves. Pam’s voice always imminent, an octave above the masses. It is the final performance and children are flying. The spot light forming
a coppery Mayan calendar on papery cheekbones and adolescent limbs as wings as
youth floats and orbits around the pendulum of time.
It is the final performance.
Children are gliding. They are cartwheeling. The
Pikadilly ladies float upside down in the air and form a chandelier.
It is the final performance.
Children levitating like transparent quarter notes.
The Rock Island train shoots off like a chariot into the direction of the
rafter, forming circle eight, chugging infinity emblems over the forehead of
the audience that look like reading glasses. Marion the Librarian is availing
her corset and showing the audience the color of her underwear while touching
herself to the key signature of Balzac Misses Shinn counts and the fellow
members of the local Wigwam form a coup with a nearby Native American reservation,
performing reconnaissance mission on River City with fellow members of the Wan Ta Ye girls of the local Wig Wam Heeawatha clan, taking scalps at the candy
parlor.
On the stage of time children are flying. They are breaking into the flap of their own wings. They are dolting Dedalus feathers. Zaneeta is telling her dad that she really wants to go down on a woman just for the experience. The school board-slash-Buffalo Bills Barber shop quartet carouses on stage wearing Indian Headgear, construction helmet, Navy seamen and police officer hat respectively as well as assless chaps breaking out into a rather ABBAesque up tempo version of Lida Rose.
It is the last performance and children are flying.
There are jugglers and a trapeze tumbling like
caffeinated bat signals over head.
It seems incongruous to the reserved social antics
of rivers city that in all the production of MUSIC MAN a priest is not
portrayed nor is a church steeple visible in the background prop. Marcellus is clicking his heels together
using billiards balls to engender working class mobile of the solar system, and
there is hush as the Wells Fargo wagon
arrives like a flying saucer as David Cassidy comes out of the cock pit walking like he is on a Saturday Morning Fat Albert cartoon wearing
an I SHOT JR t-shirt humming the theme song to Twin peaks on a kazoo. Winthrop
is experimenting with bubblegum strips of LSD while Mrs. Paroo is touching
herself, giggling uncontrollably with H. Hills vibrating River City conductor
baton. That apparently doesn’t require batteries.
I am backstage watching people float. When Harold
Hill is tried for fraud and being a two bit thimble rigger Mayor Shinn arrives
on stage wearing a toga the color of Lent with Vaseline on his visible nipples
and laurel leaves in his hair and inquires if the people of River City want
Hill or Barabbas before washing his hands with a baby butt wipe and then
pinning it to his toga like a corsage.
We are particles sifting through the esophageal glass neck of the eternal egg
timer that is the pubescent algebra of
this experience of time only to find
ourselves deteriorated remnants of an unknown substance, grounded in a heap of
listless finely ground feed corn still-life and not moving until the end of time.
It is the end. A fire and brimstone symphony of
voices. Songs I will never perform again.
I am off stage. I am next to Dawn. Her unrolled cigarette
paper skin and her raspberry lips and the way she is into cool music and kicks
ass performing dramatic monologues.
I am trying to control all tis with an NES advantage
with dyslexic buttons. I am witnessing the decimation and the
creation. Sun flower stalks sprouting as Harold Hill is lugging a giant sized
plus –sign on stage while the foot bridge transmogrifies into the tree of life.
Both Jenny and Couri panty lines are visible beneath their Grecian urn drape
and they re circling the tree of life
counter clockwise with two Hara Krishna’s, one disgruntled Klingon looking
Sherpa and one overweight Shriner in a Klaxon go cart that bleeps out the
Marseille overtime they circle the tree counter clockwise.
There is pell mell and there is anarchy and there is
death and there is light. I am looking
for Pam in the corner I see what looks like Enya wearing pajamas with a red S
in the center sucking on a pacifier cowering next to a prescription vial of
peanut M & Ms.
Next to me on
Stage left Dawn begins to strip. She is peeling
her top off and unzipping her jeans, kicking off her sandals. She is slicing
her underwear down past the latitudinal caps of her knees. She reaches back and pinches off her bra
watching like a little kid is floats off in the form of a butterfly into the rafter
above.
The River City Boys band is an overweight polka band
sobbing into Tubas. The next blink they transmogrify into a mariachi band and
there is a piñata of a piccolo. The next blink they all have army haircuts and
robes and sound like the Vienna boys choir. The next second they are playing
hand bells while clogging.
Winthrop is playing a saw with a bow. Tony Djillas
has his hands full with a Theremin.
Dawn has Botticelli Birth of Venus hips which almost
makes you want to dry hump a sea shell.
Her clothes are on the floor, in a lagoon of fabric
and she is naked and she is blowing me a kiss, much in the same fashion she
blew me a kiss without using her palms the
third night of the production.
As Hill is being crucified on the bark of what Pontius
Shinn had delineated as a tar and feather Baobab tree The cast of the production
walk out in the center of the stage wearing Benedictine rob es and start
humming the second half finale to the marriage of Figaro.
When she emerges she is different.
Stage right Dawn is a swan. There is a horse saddle
with stirrups on her back and she is communicating with me via Morse code
by blinking her eyes.
The backdrop of Rivercity IA is deconstructing
itself. The ersatz Billiard sign and
candy kitchen and Livery stable are tittering and begin to crumble into flecks
of drywall and ash. The stage is
rattling as if it is a tilt-a-whirl at the HOI fair. The statue of Miser
Madison who was purportedly Marion the Librarian’s first initial love is
wearing panty hose and penny loafers and a three corner groping a globe like he is ready to dunk it and a
protractor and is pointing the opposite direction then he should.
An avalanche of anvils commences pelting the stage
in an erratic seasonal hail. This is the final performance and a death and
rebirth, an apocalypse and a book of genesis, a coming and a going, a life ever
lasting amen.
Dawn lowers her neck. She wants me to mount her. She
wants me to harness her. She wants me to dig my testicles into her feathery
back like spurs. River City has become New Bloomosalem based on the Pythagorean geometry
where there are a Parthenon spires and battlements and byzantine flavored domes and
somehow astronomical grids every thing
squared equals a plurality of voices begins to rise like gilded teeth,
shaded stalactites fusing from the bottom of the stage.
As we take off God the Father seems to be talking to
Harold Hill in Sign languages, stating till there was you. We circle the tip of
the cross, where Hill is wearing his conductor Hat in lieu of a crown of thorns
all the while I am telling Dawn to fly higher, all the while I am certain that
if we float to the apex of the stage we past the rafter and glens and lights, somehow
past little Betsy who is pouting ironically next to Stacia where they are
waiting for us at the top, making little pensive Raphael angel, with Hummelesque
Campbell soup kid cheeks and a mop of coppery hair, we are floating higher we
can hear the prayers, floating with gills and wings, floating higher still, as
if trapped in the resonance of a glass bell we can hear Pam talk to God, we can
hear Pam evince her gratitude, addressing me as Charlie the anvil salesman,
telling me to look down into a sea of
timelessness and gold, a sea of eternal light.
***
Off stage I spend the last production with Dawn. I still haven’t accumulated the gall to ask for her phone number, I still haven’t nonchalantly insinuated that maybe we should hang out and perhaps go to the fair next week.
There is less than 45 minutes left to the production. I still have not asked her out.
Dawn hasn’t publicly acknowledged that this is the final performance. That unless one of us shuffles the first verbal pawn there is a chance that we may not ever see each other again.
Dawn stares at me. Again we begin to talk about music. We have a cathartic preemie in our unalloyed love for Enya.
She is telling me that she saw the Pixies in concert, She is
telling me about how she wants to go to Lollapalooza. She is mentioning the
names of bands I have never heard of before. Bands that are grinding
their way into the warble of college music stations from the Pacific Northwest.
Bands with names like Pearl Jam and Luscious and Alice N Chains and Ministry and Jesus Mary Chain.
Bands with names which sound like they could be marketed in tightly vials of
Lube in Adult bookstores.
“Oh, and new emotional diva named Tori Amos. A good friend
of mine just bought the CD. She described as a post-coital feminist dildo
dynamic organic orgasm that just keeps on tingling in tempo.
I tell Dawn that I know all about Tori Amos. That I bought
her virginal album Little Earthquakes ironically the day it came out and that I
hated it even though I admittedly only listened to the first three songs.
“I thought it was going to be just like Enya. The guy at
Co-op assured me it was but when I purchased it, I just did trip into it the
way I thought I would.”
“You
should give Tori a chance again sometime. I think you would love her. She
really does have a beautiful voice. Plus she’s poignant. Plus she is riveting.
Plus her music will change your life.”
There is a kick in my shin. I know who it is. I turn the
opposite direction. There are giggles. Betsy seems to have forgiven me for
chasing around the girl from my French class the night before.
“You should really give Tori Amos a second chance. There’s a
reason the album is called Little earthquakes. It’s sentimentally Seismic.”
I am beckoned on to the stage.
When
it is time for me to kiss Summer Scott one final time I briefly contemplate
slipping her the tongue. I refrain, but as we layer out chins my lips
somehow find themselves stretching, kissing the audience-occluded vector of her
cheekbone.
I
am thinking about Dawn. I don’t want to leave Dawn Michelle. Dawn
Michelle who has seen me vexed over two different girls.
Suddenly
I feel the inexplicable propensity to ask if Dawn has a boyfriend. Suddenly I
feel the urge to inquire if she wouldn’t mind if we hung out sometime outside
the whimpering dusk of stage left.
She
throws me back in a topple. But afterwards, back stage, she is smiling.
I
go off stage again, Dawn is next to me. She is reticent. We are both looking
down. It is like she is waiting for me to say something.
“Hey—I
really like hanging out with you. I really enjoy our conversations. I feel like
I can just talk to you forever.”
Dawn
confesses the same.
Since
this is the final night and all I was wondering.
I
look down. I see Betsy. She is pogoing up and down with her knees together as
if she needs to pee. She is smiling.
I
am about ready to go on stage.
Dawn
is looking at me without blinking. Her fingers are cupped together, forming a
knob on my shoulder.
“Do
you want to go out sometime?” I ask. Very simply. Very no frills to an older
woman. To the woman who goes to Stage two and drinks cheap gin and only dances
when JUST CAN’T GET Enough is chiming out of the speakers.
She
blinks once as if changing adagio of the time-signature of the human heart.
“Yes,”
Is all she says. Very Simply.
We
embrace. Dawn is closing her eyes. I am careful not to smear the make-up she
applied to the contours of my visage on her shoulders.
I
still have one vital question to ask her.
“Can
I get your number?”
Dawn
says yeah. She grabs an errant program that does not have my part listed and writes
it down.
“Also,
if you like I can give you my MacGyver soup can number so if your in a tree
house and you need to call me you can just affix a piece of string several
times to a soup can."
I
am addled I have no clue what she is talking about. I then realize she is
trying to flirt.
“You
know MacGyver soup can. The types of soup cans you had in tree houses growing
up.”
I
am still vexed. I nod and smile.
“All
you have to do is pull the chord and wait for the opportune ting and I will be
on the opposite end.”
She
scrawls her number down. I tell her I can’t wait. I ask her if she is going to
be accompanying us to the cast party at Shakeys in a couple of hours.
From
behind the soccer mom with bad perm yelps out my name. I am late on stage.
Somehow
we are still holding each other. Dawn looks like she is in somewhat of a daze.
We are reeling each other close.
It’s
my cue. It is the second act. I am about to have my anvil-ass handed to me by
the protagonist of the production.
The
play is beginning all over again.
I
am about ready to go on stage to be voluntary pummeled by Harold Hill. I
am s’ppose to be pissed off.
I
am the happiest salesman on the anvil rusty scalp of the musical planet.
I
sprint out on stage in a tirade haranguing Harold Hill as a no good two bit
thimble-rigger. When Harold Hill mock-pummels the side of my face I step
into, voluntarily, I want to hurt. I want to have something that gives me
a bruise, a lavender continent splattered like a tattoo so that I can look in
the mirror and remember that all this somehow occurred.
I
don’t want any of this to leave.
This
reality I have somehow found myself abiding within.
I
am popped hard. I flail down then rise back up. There is bruise the size of a little
league diamond on my left cheek.
In the distilled drops of time I could feel what Pam espoused. I can feel the magic of the theatre.
I
wink.
I
think about the MacGyver soup can.
I
point and for the last time, futilely tell Harold Hill that I will get him if
it’s the last ting I do.
I
limp of stage in joy.
I
don’t want any of this to end.
Minutes
later Anthony will lead the mock river city boys band in tune
The
final scene when the band makes flatulent noises purportedly reminiscent of the
minuet in G is somehow the most beautiful sound I have ever heard.
At
the end of our final performance
applause is cracking throughout the reverberating lilt of
the theatre.
There
are bellows of encore during our last bows.
Anthony
steps up and asks for the microphone.
“We
just would like to thank our director, Miss Pam Tucker-White, for all the hard
work she did with us over the last couple of weeks and for allowing us to
express ourselves creatively on stage.”
Pattering palms taper off into golf
claps as the cast presents our director with a tangible thank you. It takes Pam
a minute to get on stage. Anthony hands her the scrolled oversized card like a
diploma. Marcellus and Mayor Shinn lift up the director chair and set it
at the foot of the stage.
This
is Pam’s moment to shine.
“Thank
you so much.” Pam is swiping tears. I remember when I first met Pam people were
saying that she had a part on an early 80’s soap opera. I remember how crazy it
felt waiting for the bus to go to French class and talking with Laurie about poetry
and finding out that Pam was her teacher.
Pam
is numinous.
She
is flagellating her arms like she is conducting the River City boys band in an
up tempo orchestral William Tell overture.
She
is humble. She then begins to point.
"I
need to confess that in the last couple of days we have had some complaints.” Pam
says. It feels like Pam is going to curse.
“We had complaints that there were
too many children on stage. We had complaints that it was a fire safety hazard.
We had complaints from many people who I considered friends that I type castes
the show. All of these complaints hurt.”
There is a pawing silence. Pam
continues.
“I tell you now, what can be more beautiful
than children learning to act and singing and dancing on stage. What can be
more beautiful than children opening up to the magic that is the world of
theatre and art at a formative young age where it will stay with them for the
rest of their life.”
The
audience implodes in a thunderous symphony of cheer.
The
radiant Pam Tucker-White.
The
creature who gave me a speaking-role and somehow believed in me even though I
didn’t originally audition for the part.
The person who when she was this abject fuck-up from the Southside
all she saw was gold.
***
There is more applause sounding like
cable-static as we take one more final bow and scamper off the stage at Peoria Players
Theatre for is to be the last time.
“Come
here," I lift Betsy on top of the bony rims of my shoulders as I
walk down the stairs. She is smiling.
There
is a human hedge bush of jeer. Everyone is elated. Somehow it seem like we have
done something together.
“Put
me down!” Betsy says like a direct order, as we get to bottom of the
stairs. She sprints off, into a glen of Adult limbs.
“Dave,
Dave,”
I
say hi. Dawn looks nervous.
“Look
I don’t think I will be able to meet you out at Shakeys for the cast
party.” Everyone is elated. Everyone is jostling behind each other. Everyone is
pushing.
I
don’t respond. I kiss her forehead. I kiss it long.
Behind
me everyone is pushing. I rove past Dawn in a shoulder loll of waves and
hugs and mock-drinking-brothers slaps on the back and hi-fives. there is a
unified excitement, a feeling that this amoebic blob of youth.
I can feel the back of her smile as I am swallowed by my celebratory peers.
We are at Shakeys. We prostitute the
buffet. We help ourselves to slices of pizza and battered chicken wings
and egg rolls that look like burnt uncircumcised penises. Everyone is going
back up to the trolley shaped buffet and helping themselves to flattened slabs
of lightly doctored cheese. It’s obvious from the fallen huff three tables over
that some kids had the chutzpah to pull the ol’ loosen-the-lid-on-the-parmesan-cheese
shaker crack.
There
is no need to talk with Anastasia. I sit with the conductor and my cousin and
several other of the traveling salesman. Anthony has yet to show. Summer has
several male friends with her that look like thugs.
“So
you’re going on a date with that make-up girl?” My cousin inquires.
I
tell him yeah.
“She's
a senior at Richwoods.”
I
know, I respond, thinking that I am a freshman. Thinking that everything that
will transpire in the next three months will be new to me.
As
I march back up to the buffet for what must be fourths I see Betsy, alone, off
by herself in the arcade alcove near the front of the restaurant. She is trying
to fish out a stuffed manatee from s rigged tank for a quarter a
try using metal gears.
“Hey,” I say.
She remains aloof.
“You should be enjoying the party. You
should be saying goodbye to everyone.”
Betsy
ignores me. She asks for another quarter. She continues to fish through the
slush of toys.
“Why
don’t you just grab the octopus. You can easily grab the octopus with the
pincers.”
“No,
I want the Manatee with the sun glasses.” Is all Betsy says to me.
Next
to the crane game there is Street fighter 2 and several fire hydrant sized
gumball machines. Betsy marshals the metallic pincers again. She presses the
button to make them clutch. They grab a fistful of oxygen.
I
reach into my pocket inserting another quarter into the machine
“Listen, we’re the same height now.”
Betsy
tells me yeah, but I am still seven years older than her.
“You
wanna know something else?” Betsy looks back at me. From my knees its hard to
see the plush Manatee Betsy in pinning after.
“I’m
taking Dawn out this week. I took your advice and I asked her out. She gave me
her phone number plus three MacGyver soup can tings.
“You
are taking Thawn out?
I
nod.
“On
a thate?”
I
nod again. I say yeah, on a fate. I tell Betsy I’m not exactly sure where
we are going but that we will probably meet at the mall and then maybe go to
the fair or something.
Betsy looks back at me. I am still on my knees. Before I know it Betsy’s hands are lassoed around my neck. I can feel her snug cheekbone pushed up against my face. At first I can feel her smile. The next thing I feel are drops of tears.
“You alright?”
“I’m
th’onna
miss you Tharlie. I’m th’onna miss everyone. I’ll probably
never th'ee any of these th'eople again.”
“Hey,
I’ll be seeing Dawn probably a lot now and she has a car and she babysits you
and is one of your sisters best friends so I sure we will see each other
sometime soon. Why don't you go to the buffet and get some pizza I know you
have a bunch of friends in the show that I know you will want to say
goodbye to you as well. "
“No. I don’t eat th’izza. I’m a th’egetarian.
I am still on the caps of my knees when
both Stacia and Anthony walk past us into the parking lot together.
The
crane is still hovering over the caricatured Manatee wearing the
sunglasses . Every time she marshals the pincers it comes down empty.
“I
promise I will see you sometime this autumn. Maybe Dawn will babysit you and I
can tag along and we can take you out to Showbiz or something and I’ll lovingly
feed quarters into the toy machine there until you hit the manatee.”
“Th'omise?” Betsy is saying in
a way that makes me want to cry. We hug again.
“Yes,
I th'omise. I will see you again soon. Now come on. You have lots of
friends who are waiting for you. Oh, and I checked, they do have vegetarian
pizza.”
Betsy
has seemed to have forgotten all about the currency swallowing nickelodeon.
There is a smile on her face. Somehow it feels like she could be my daughter.
Somehow I don’t want her to lose her child-like innocence and her faith in
mankind or have to go through the inevitable pangs of youth as I went through
the last month wildly falling in love with someone only to watch her leech off
someone else.
“Shall
we?” I say, rising off the caps of my knees and offering Betsy my arm like a
wing. We walk back into the parlor and I point to a group of friends seated in
what is obviously the kiddie section.
She
lets go and immediately runs over to them.
I
sit in the back booth with fellow members of the river city band. Everyone is saying
goodbye. I say goodbye to Brennan and make what is either the sign for satan or
the sign for Texas long horns as I tell him to keep on listening to Death
Metal. I say goodbye to the fellow members of the school board-slash-barber
shop quartet. I find Molly, Mrs Paroo and give her a long hug. I say goodbye to Marcellus and tell Zaneeta that she was annoying as hell and that she
did an incredible job.
I
smile at Summer. She returns to her two pimping companions and ignores me even
though I can see her smile.
When
I finally bump into Anthony we give each other a complicated Southside
handshake then a hug.
“Your
face okay, brother?’ He inquires, alluding to the fact that I marched into him
in the thoroughly choreographed fight scene
“Yeah,
I did that on purpose. Sounds crazy but I wanted you to hit me. I wanted you to
break something open inside of me that has never been broken before. I wanted
your clenched fingers and the velocity of your wrist to give me something not
unlike a hickie—something I can look at a week or two from now and somehow
remember all of this.”
Anthony
smiles and nods. We don’t mention Stacia once.
“So,
I’ll see you at Manual in a couple of weeks. At Manual. It’ll be good to have a
friend who’s a senior with me being a freshman and all. “
Anthony
smiles back. We shake hands again before I
hit the buffet again and return to my seat. I am thinking how I am
already on my ninth slice of pizza. I am tabulating loading up on carbs before
going home and crashing for twelve hours and then waking up for my paper route
and going for a run. For some reason I keep thinking about the kid in my
French class who wore glasses and was always wearing the Ross Perot
T-shirt the next thing I know I hear the breeze of sentences streaming
from her lips. She is next to me. She is talking very fast. There is a blink
and there is a spume of curly neatly cropped blonde hair.
It
is Dawn.
“Okay
I can’t stay long but Dawn had to pick Betsy up and I just wanted to see you
again.”
I
lasso my arm around her shoulder. I reel her in close. I kiss her
forehead for the second time today.
“You
still have makeup on.” Dawn says.
“Normally
the first thing I do after the performance is use one of those baby buttwipes
to take it off but since I wasn’t sure
when the next time I would see you again I wanted something you put on my body
to remain with me as long as possible.”
Dawn
smiles. I can see her shoulders relax. There is still no site of Pam.
Ibid Stacia. Somehow all I care about is saying goodbye to Pam. Somehow
all I care about is thanking her personally for this experience.
Dawn informs me that I should call her
and we shall make plans. She asks if I still have the number.
“I
didn’t lose it. I also still have the three MacGyver soup can tings.”
Dawn
blushes. She says she has to go.
As
we walk out we are holding hands.
The
first person I see is Pam.
“Thank
you,” Pam says again. Talking to
me like I did her a favor by bailing her out. I want to tell her goodbye. I
want to tell her just what this summer has added to my life
The person I need to thank for granting
me this experience as a whole.
I
let go of Dawn’s hand. Pam is walking with Paula Graves who was in charge
of costumes. I need to thank Pam.
“I’ll
be back in one second.” I tell Pam, escorting Dawn in the opposite direction.
We
are walking out past the machine with the rigged toy crane. Betsy is in front
of us with her sister Dawn walking toward their vehicle. She is carrying a
balloon on a stick. It looks like she is hopscotching en route to their car.
I
begin my sentence with every sappy Romantic article in every sappy romantic
teenage melodrama I have every seen.
“So,
I’ll call you this week.”
Dawn
turns and faces me like matching bookends squashed together. Her hands
are clasped together behind my waist. My palms are splayed flanking the
side of her visage. Now is not the time for a kiss. But I reel her in and kiss
her forehead.
Again.
“So,”
She
looks back at me and smiles.
Betsy sister Dawn shoots my Dawn a look
as if it say what do you see in that boy.
As
I am walking back into Shakeys pizzeria on University, early July 1992, after
kissing the parchment flavored forehead of the creature who is three years
older, the creature who goes to the same high school where Karen Christmas
attends, the creature who has the most extensive vocabulary of anyone I have
ever met and does something timeless and inscrutable to the center of my chest
every time she blinks, in that moment, as I hear the car door slam like wings
on a adolescent cherub learning to flutter, I am pressing open the door with
the 3 X 5 stain glass frame re-entering Shakeys on University as the steady
thrum of traffic whistles past, catching my reflection reflected back to me in
a myriad of stain glass colors—somehow this moment life is brand new, somehow I am
caressing life again, somehow I am thinking only of Pam thinking about grabbing
the peanut brittle thin dove shaped contour of her hand and squeezing,
squeezing it tighter than I have ever squeezed anything else on the planet and
saying thank you. Thank you for taking a shot on me. Thank you for working with
me. Thank you for figuratively speaking making me more mean and for giving me
this experience; being surrounded by the nest of these bodies, being doused by
the bulb of an fluctuating overhead light and teaching me how to create.
Thank you for teaching
me how to give.
I
am thinking about hugging her. I am thinking about holding her close for a
second and saying thank you. I am seeing myself in the prism shaped variegated
tear drops of the pyramidal stain glass, as I reach for the gilded handle
of the door only to see it flap back in my direction, my cousin Matthew
standing there, lumbering towards me.
“Come
on. We gotta go. Mom is here.”
“Where,”
I say, Matthew pointing in the direction of the parking lot as if he is saying
land ho.
My
Uncle and Aunt’s vehicle is idling in the parking lot next to where
Dawn’s friend Dawn’s car was stationed. I can tell that my Aunt saw
that I walked Dawn out and that I swirled her around before making out with the
canvas of her forehead.
“Come
on Don Juan.” Matthew says, slapping me on the back. It sounds like he is
talking about my girlfriend after she kicked ass on a speech tournament. It
sounds like he is saying Dawn won.
As
I enter the back of my aunt’s car it feels like I am being baptized again, as I
hush the door close and stare at Shakeys reflection in the windshield as
the car breakdances and swivels and pauses and takes a hard right into the
static tarmac of University, heading back home to the blue
collar bluff of West Peoria, where, later on that night, I
will run down the oblique street lamp-alighted sidewalk of Moss
avenue, sprinting past the ethereal mid-summer haze of a
succulent nostalgia of what is now lost to a future I cannot possibly
fathom, thinking about how I never got a chance to say goodbye to
Anthony or to make a vow to Stacia telling her somehow I will always love her
or grasp Pam’s hand and shake it with gratitude and sincerity and thank
her for changing my life by giving me a shot at all this--thinking about
little Betsy trying in vain to grapple the plush Manatee and getting on my
knees to be her same height in gratitude, as if I am thanking the
universe for this random experience that is now dwindling in a rectangular
rear-view mirror as I am being reeled the antipodal direction and how
everything that will ever happen to me somehow awaits unfurling in thick
tufts of a still-night July breeze when, years later, I will look at the cue
ball of the full moon and think about that summer, those human beings who have
flooded my life and are now succumbed to the vagaries of time and are married
and have progeny the same age as we were before made something of ourselves on
stage that summer ensconced in the wan dunce cap of the spot light
imprisoning the echoing pulse of our fugitive youth in one enunciated
bruised syllable teeming with loss and joy:
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