PINTA PARADE

The next morning I awake at 4:40am to do my route . I am still pissed off. I wake up and do my route without my fathers help.  The final two days of the performances we have two shows each day. I have to be at the theatre at one. I think about the altercation with Stacia. I think about how she accused me of always trying to instigate drama. I think about all I really wanted to do was to somehow make peace with her, to thank her,

I wonder why she erupted. I wonder if when I enter high school the two of us will still be friends, will still talk on the phone all night.

After my route I take off for a run. I have cursory understanding of what will be the cross-country course limned around the circumference of Madison golf course, the name itself feels like it should be an estate in the play I am currently performing.

I skid the contours of the golf course. I watch out for retirees swatting clubs yipping out par and missing. I watch out for the Marshal who is 400 pounds and gliding on his golf cart like a throne. From the first Manual cross-country picnic I have learned that Beano got hit by an errant golf ball last year on this course last year. I have still been checking the creaky jowls of my mailbox everyday wondering when Coach will send out the itinerary of Summer Practices, due to convene sometime around the fifteenth this month.

For some reason I am wearing my shorts with pockets. For some reason I have 10 dollars in my pocket. For some reason I know where I need to go.

After I sprint a two mile lap around the vernal checkerboard of the golf course I sprint straight, down Manor parkway, into the intestines of west Peoria, running beneath the regal penumbras of Jumer Castle Lodge, overlooking the blue collar bin of the Southside, where I have gone to school all my life. I cross Western between the cement arc past the stucco house, dunning as if on an oblique angle past the six figure houses of Moss Avenue, the street where I ran my two mile course every day in grade school since I was in second grade, often with my father, wearing sock on my clenched hands instead of gloves when it was cold outside.

At the Pirate house on the corner of Moss and Duryea I take a left, sprinting beneath the Jenga shaped penumbras of Geisert Hall, cross the street at the intersection my Uncle Albert, a city engineer designed, kicking into Campus town, which arrives looking like it was constructed out of legos.  

It is a little after nine. Co-op records in campus town is just opening.

As always it smells like incense licorice and indifferent hygiene.


As I pick up the cassette I remember how David Best always said that Depeche Mode look gay even thought they are not.

I look at the cover. They look like they are crammed into a New Wave British phone booth in the seedy district of So ho. 

You can see Martin Gore's left nipple.




I run home  and listen to the song that Dawn told me is the only song she dances too. I listen to the entire album three times.

It sounds like somehow is sticking a vibrator into a Miss Pac man machine at Aladdin's arcade in the lower level of Northwoods mall. It sounds like somehow is gargling with a sony keyboard. It sounds like all the white noise  emanating from a  commercialized slated hearth ubiquitously dotting living rooms across every house in North America is giving breech birth to sputtering Kitchen appliances.

The album  features early tracks that are almost ten years old that were recorded and mixed when I was in pre-school.

It sounds brand new.