Dad says that the reason I wasn’t allowed to win the young Columbus
***
The Saturday after I lose the Young Columbus for the
second year in a row I call up my best friend David Best. He has three way
calling. He normally avg.’s talking to his girlfriend Renae Holiday for three
hours every day.
I have never heard Renae’s voice. I have never seen
her smile in person. The closet reference I have to the person who is my best
friend’s sweetheart is the homecoming picture in Ms. Best’s office.
***
“Well hey!!!” Bob and Frank the cousins who live on
Moss avenue answer the door. They invite me in.
I tell them yeah. I tell them it was my second year
entering the contest. I tell them that I worked my ass off on the speech and
they am still somewhat bummed that I
wasn’t able to win and that I feel like I have failed for the second year in a
row.
‘You’re still out number one paper boy.” Bob tells
me, laughing, slapping me on the back like we are old drinking buddies.
Inside their teacup sized house one room is dedicated to a 70’s country singer I have never heard of before named Dottie West. They told me that they followed Dottie all around the country in the seventies and that Frank, the older one who kind of looks like Teddy Ruxpin used to sing duets with her from time to time in Dallas.
“Here, listen to this.” Bob says, removing an album from the sleeve.
The moment they put it is they are both looking in different
direction smiling.
***
It is the onset of spring and I am running. I try not to
spend too much time looking at Karen Christmas in the chorus of OKLAHOMA
“I saw you in the paper,” The blonde hair girl who
lives in the house that looks like the White House on Moss Avenue whose name is
Mary says to me.
“My parents just want you to know that they are
really proud of you. Dad always says that you are the best paperboy we have
ever had.”
She is smiling. She is looking straight at me. She
has a twin brother who plays hockey.
There is confetti on her front porch. The twins have
just graduated from high school and there was a celebration.
"My parents aren’t home, but they should be home
within the next half-hour or so. You are more than welcome to hang out until
they arrive."
I wonder if she knows I have a drooling crush on
her. I wonder if she knows that I wake up with vision of her clad in her
underwear smiling at me.
I wonder if she just thinks that I am just some kid.
I have just spent the last hour at Bob and Frank’s
where they always tip the hell out of me listening to music.
“You are more than welcome just to hang out. I
mean…”
Mary is wearing stretch pants with visible panty lines. She has her hair in a
side ponytail.
I look down. I am holding my collection book above
my crotch.
I have been fantasizing over her since sixth grade.
“I have more houses I need to collect from,” I say, pushing
my glasses into my forehead.
She looks down. She seems somewhat disappointed.
I tell her goodbye. She smiles looking down.
As I walk down the street, past Bob and Frank’s,
towards \the Polish pipefitter with the sexually frustrated wife who tends bar
part times and Duffy’s I think about what might have happened had I stayed.
I wonder if I could have, like when I talk to my
best friend David Best and he verbally transcribe to his girlfriend make her
laugh
And perhaps, even though she is five years older,
make her smile,
For the second weekend in a row I call my best
friend David Best knowing that he is talking with Renae Holiday. For the second weekend
in a row I continue to say things that I think are somewhat inane and somewhat
witty For the second weekend in a row I
tell my best friend something crazy and then he puts me on hold with a isolated
click and siphons over to the second line, relaying verbatim the crazy sentence
I just told him.
He then clicks over.
"She thinks you are
really funny."
***
On Wednesdays dad takes me to Meinen field where I work on my mile time. I try not to envision
Karen’s parents' helping her pack as I my arms configure into right
angles my fists, drumming in syncopated lapse past my torso as I orbit the
Meinen field, my father promulgated splits as I glide past him, my vision focus
and acute, as I continue to row into the 400 meter set, as I continue to run
into a future where I have no clue where I am going. My first mile split of the
year was 5:45 in the beginning of march. It seems likely I will peak in the
5:20’s. I push myself every day after school.
Fathers justification for why I failed to win the trip for a
second time in the row stems around the theology that God simply didn’t want me
to win it this year.
“Good thing are coming.” My father says. “Track is coming.
Graduation is coming. Good things are going to happen to you. Just you wait and
see.”
***
The morning of April 7th
I try not to think of Karen Christmas as I lumber out of bed in the distilled
nylon of five a.m. and unstrap the yellow rinds that fasten the bulk of papers
together as if I am trying to nonchalantly unhook a bra for the first time. I
try not to think about Karen Christmas as the sun is preceded by a bruised
lavender hue before rising in translucent planks of orange. I try not to think
about Karen as I count the correct number of papers before walking up to each
manicured house, the lawn fresh with a spring dew, placing each heralding
tablet into the correct spot on the porch, inside the screen door, into the
mail slot, under the welcome matt, where the patron has requested. As I reach
the end of Sherman and swing onto Sterling Avenue, a block away from the golf
course where next year my limbs will oscillate around the minty circumference
in an endeavor to shear blinking numerical hieroglyphs away from my fastest
time at the end of the chute. With my bag wielded over my shoulder as if some
kind of rogue instrument from the highlands, I try not to look past the curtain
of early a.m. mist hovering above the top of the golf course like a curtain, try
not to squint past the stalks of the tree tops, the brush strokes daubing the
pond of morning blue overhead, the emergence of clouds scattered like loose
change flattened by a freight train on a parallel track that seems to follow
itself into the vanishing swallow of the horizon—I try not to think what is
happening at the airport. How Karen’s parents are shaking hands with Jason’s
parents. I try not to think about Karen’s mother telling her to make sure that
she doesn’t lose her ticket or her passport during the layover in O’Hare. I try
not to envision Karen blushing when she shakes hand with Jason Reitzel,
mentally cogitating that he is cute.
It is April seventh and it is the
most beautiful morning I have ever seen.
A shade of pink begins to swill, mixing
with the light purple, mingling with baubles of light reflecting off of the
hushed eyelids of houses. As I continue to walk, I try not to think about Karen
looking down into her trip itinerary. I try not to think about Karen Christmas grappling
her finger tips into the back of her mothers shoulders, her little sister
looking up into her sister’s blonde bangs with unblinking curiosity and
admiration. I try not to think about all of this, as I walk up into the flat
chins of front porches, tucking the paper into their reserved seat, as the
trusting mechanic sound of a plane heavy and two miles above overhead, begins
to rattle its rehearsed gruff, sailing across tea-colored direction of the
west, into the colors of morning that is east, leaving behind only a white arching
tendril, a farewell handkerchief, signaling to those below who look up and know
where they are going that they have already left.
***
“Oh by the way,” David best says to me, “Renae wants me to tell you that she think your funny.”
David Best tells me, at Church, on Easter Sunday.
***
20 years later I lay on Santa Monica beach close the pier with Greta. I have not seen her since B. Airways flight # 175 to New York.
I have been invited by a Literary series called DIRTY LAUNDRY LIT to read my poems in a cool bar in in front of a paying audience in Hollywood.
After mute poetic perambulating I live exactly one block away from where I grew up, catty corner from the West Peoria Fire Dept where I used to pick up the papers when Maurice Alwaun was my District Manager.
It is the gig of lifetime.
We have doffed our shoes. We are talking about sex. Our bodies are splayed on the beach lying straight up at the stars, facing opposite directions, my ankles next to her forehead, like Leopold and Molly Bloom at the end of Ulysses. I quote her several of the poem I am rehearsing for the following night.
I still am not 100 percent sure where I will be crashing for the night.
I tell her I am humbled and nervous about the event.
My most salient memory of Greta was that she was just ridiculously well read and brilliant and wore cool hippie bandana's and was into theatre and spoke in complete sentences and that she was a vegetarian. Since then she has written and performed stage plays in New York, discovered chakras, and moved to Los Angeles.
I had not seen her in 20 years. I contacted her out of the blue on Mypace when I was myspacing a list of the Young Columbus winners and she responded and a fragrant friendship ensued.
She teaches English in inner city schools. She has been having a tiff with her principal about teaching the LA riots and she disapproved how Greta is teaching the section.
"Can't we all just get along?" I say, parodying Rodney King.
Greta Laughs. She is wearing a purple top hat tilted back.
Her cheek bones are also purple.
She is beautiful.
***
A week later in my second track meet of the season. Dad tells me to have a good run. I think about Karen Christmas in
Paris. I think about her walking along the River Seine. I think about her being
surrounded by a brilliant selected splotch of paper carriers culled from
throughout the country. I think her wearing that dappled dress, the way she
looked down and seemed almost embarrassed when she won the coveted sojourn in
the conference room that day, ivory slope on the back of her neck talking into
a phone, the conversation I thought I would make.
I think about this as I take off, ripping off the first lap
in a time of 1:10, biting my sneakers into the track, as if I am one with the
meted lanes, my shadow skirting in front of me, a needle orbiting galactic
vinyl , pushing myself.
I have a substantial lead. I am expected to win.
Father has been timing me at this track since third
grade. I am pissed. I am thinking of
Karen in Paris. I am thinking of the eighth grade musical and the passing of
time and the heavy- linoleum clean scent of the bleachers in Manual high
school.
I am thinking about leaving. My limbs continue to
accelerate. I have already qualified for state with my first mile time. As if
leaving for Europe, as if chasing the unbidden scent of the elusive feminine,
as if leaving the brick kiln contours of the academy I have been lodged inside
for the past decade, as if wanting more, as if with every stroke of my limbs I
am accelerating. I have done 1200 meters and I am averaging a career high 1:15
per lap. I am well under four minutes. If I can perform the last lap at even a
modicum canter I will break the elusive five minutes in the mile.
The snap of the gun indicates my final lap.
I explode. All I can see in front of me is Karen Christmas overseas.
She is at Mt. Saint-Michel, her toes naked carving tacks against the tide, she
is smiling on the tour bus as it passes under the penumbras of the Eiffel
tower, she is in a Parisian hotel room with bad plumbing and weird outlets making
a phone call to her parents’ who live half a mile from where I am running right
now, confessing to them in all candor that she is having the time of her life.
I continue to pummel my limbs in almost piston like fashion.
There seems to be a general consensus from the crowd cheering me on that I have
nothing left inside of me. For some reason I just can’t lap the lad from
cross-town Concordia, the school where Karen attended when first I met her,
instead I run next to him, as if we are in this together.
I slow down. The proximity of my nearest second place competitor is still
300 meters away. I slow down. It is like I am passing myself.
I run next to the lad at what appears to be a yawn the last
100 meters. I tell him to suck it up. I tell him that he only has one lap left.
I tell him to go get em ‘w.out taking a moment to reflect on just who the
elusive (‘em) might perhaps be.
My last lap is my slowest. I defy my signature limb-flailing
lighting fissure sprint across the finish line.
I pass with little walk. I look for my father. He is smiling
He tells me that my time is five-nineteen. The fastest I have
ever chronicled.
He is smiling. He tells me congratulations. He holds the
stop watch up like some ribbon at a 4-H fair.
I look at it and nod. It is eleven seconds faster than I
have yet to time. He is smiling. Mom is jumping up and down as if on little
pogo-stick motions. My sisters are cheering. I bend down the way I have been
coached and take a deep breath that seriously looks like I could wound whatever
is classified as oxygen simply by pursing my lips and sucking in whiffs of
reality.
Dad is smiling. I can see the silver fillings in his
teeth. I bow my head as if in deference.
Karen Christmas's flight should be arriving home in a day or two.
I have smoked my nearest competitors by over 40 seconds.
My dad smiles again. He tells me that I took the first three
laps pretty fast. Perhaps even too fast. He told me that it looked like my
lower appendages were on fire and that I was trying to stamp them out with
every forward thrust of my anatomy.
Dad tells me to save some for state in two weeks’ time. I
smile and think about Karen and wonder to myself what her forehead tastes like
when she sweats.
I wonder if I could taste what Europe taste like if somehow
I could lick the residue off her forehead.
I wonder if I could taste France.
“I didn’t run out of gas,” I tell my father. “I had more in
the tank.”
***
***
In Los Angeles pyres of detritus are burning. Plumes
of smoke billow into the atmosphere like dirty question marks. There is looting, Thousands of buildings are on fire. People hate each other. No one seems to know what is going on.
I clip out the article I deliver about this year's trip.
Karen says she could spend all day in the Louvre.
At night I run again. State is coming, I have a shot to be the fastest miler in the state for my age.
***
Two weeks later I get second in the state of Illinois. I run
my best time of five-oh-nine. The winner is from Chicago and will go to York and is six seconds ahead of me. Father is elated. Dad
tells me that he is proud of me. He tells me that no one could predicted those
athletes stemming from the rich school doting the North shore of Chicago would
be so good.
I smile.
Later that summer dad tells me that If I just would have run
my own race and not worried about all those around me that I would be the
fastest miler for my age in the state of Illinois.
That if I just focus on running my own race everything will
work out and be okay.
