I am seated on the oak desk with the pull up hinges that my dad salvaged from his school. The desk where I still keep all of my role-playing characters. The desk where I keep explicit lyric tapes by NWA and ICE CUBE. The desk where., when I was in fifth grade, I kept a homemade montage of Alyssa Milano culled from pages of Tiger and Teen Beat.

 I have finished my second cross-country meet where I still finished in the top ten although it would have been faster had I not been determined to take their lead from the outset. To be the rabbit as Beano deemed.

Coach didn’t seem disappointed. He seemed proud. He stated with the times I am clocking this early in the season there is only one logical direction to sprout.

After the race in Canton Dad takes me out to long John Silvers.  We shovel hush puppies and kernels of battered grease into our bodies. The mall is across the street.

“I was really proud of you,” Dad says, inquiring when my next meet is even th ough they are all circled on the Church calendar on the side of the fridge.

“We have Central Tues. Coach says we are evenly matched.”

Dad says he was good that I ran the FROSH/SOPH race but he was hoping from more of a performance from the varsity.

“…that kid Peacock is pretty fast but he ran  n early the same time you did. I thought Jose would be faster.”

I nod.  Jose has been coming to practice looking worn out. Coach has pulled him aside several times and reminded him that this is his senior season. Coach h as pulled him aside several times and reminded him that this is it.

“Coach pulled Jose after the race and told him that this was his last season and that he had to be a leader.”

Dad cuts into his battered fish plank. He states that he likes Joes He says that he’s a leader.

“Yeah, he’s also  really cool guy.”

Canton

The second race is Saturday.  Canton is the first race where there is a separate FROSH-SOPH race preceding the varsity race. The canton invite. Coach has me running frosh/soph along with Hans Logrotto and Justin Poynter and the rest of the unfledged frosh. we picked up on Fee day.  The Varsity race is competitive. There are thirty schools.There are teams from Country school I have never heard of before.  Olympia and Porta and Jacksonville. 

“Just don’t start off too fast.” Coach caveats.“You can beat most of these runners but a lot of them you have never seen before and a lot of them are young cross-country runners who will just take off spring like there is no tomorrow. Just hang back til the last mile and make your move.

The gun sounds more like a snort and less like a crackle in the 

 I take off with the lead pack. Half mile in I vie for the lead. Beano yells me not top be a rabbit. I feel I can take these guys. They are my age or one year older in school. I have been busting my ass all summer. I run like I have been running all summer. Hard. Digging into the course, watching asterisks of earth flail behind my cleats.I am pushing myself. All I can think about is the course record at Manual. All I can think about is how I got off track last Tuesday and failed.

It is an arduous course. Part of it seems to be a golf course with atolls. Part of it is hills and we run next to a wooden area.  It is all junior varsity. Kids who are my age or one year older.

I pull ahead.

At the mile mark I am in the lead.

 We continue to push. Three people who were next to me slightly fall back.  I took the first mile too fast.

I can hear my mom yelling Go Manual from the sidelines.  I keep falling back. I don’t know what is happening. Teams that are running together are passing me. By the second mile mark I am 20 seconds behind the lead and am twelfth. There are 150 kids in the race.  I wish I would have played it cool the first mile.  At 1200 meters left I start picking out the runners in front of me one by one. There is a pain akin to dehydration welling in my abdomen. It feels like it is trying to cough one second and give birth the next.  I am pushing. With 400 meters left I catch three more. It is apparent I won’t finish in the top six but if I fight I can make it in the top ten. I run neck and neck with a kid Olympia at the finish line.  My time is just under 18 minutes.  Coach is writing down mile splits with his perfect handwriting. He seems pleased. He tells me good run. I  hang my head down.

I feel like I have failed.

                                                                         

It is high school and there are girls. They seemingly float between classroom doors like ballerinas with origami limbs. In high school there is girls. In high school the hallways smell of stringent disinfectant. In high school the cheerleaders where there cheerleading uniform to school every Friday for game day while members of the football squad attire themselves in numbered jerseys. 

Patrick can’t refrain from saying Dude, I really want to hit that shit every time we pass by different cadre of females.

At the beginning of third hour cool Joe Thomas asks us if we have any question about the material

The next class period Cool Joe Thomas continues to talk about his bowling league and some lady named Marge. He talks how he was growing up in southern Illinois he one time ate 20 hot dogs in a row then went out back to discreetly vomit so he could eat five more hot dogs and beat the fat boy down the street in some sort of neighborhood hot dog challenge. He talks about how  there was a bum in his neighborhood who was homeless and always passed out. He asks if we read the material and requests that we hold up our notes. He inquires if any of us caught NOVA last night. He asks if saw MY COUSIN VINNY when it was out in the theatre last summer and says that that shit cracks him up. He curses and doesn’t apologize. He says that he has been trying to diet which has been hard since he had to entertain some sort of Scientific dudes speaking at ICC and that Jumer’s purported has one hell of a Cheese cake and how can you say no.

He refers to his student in the plural as quote, people. He says that us people need to spend at least one h our a night on every subject if we wish to succeed. He says that he is the faculty advisor

He ends the class period about asking us if we have any questions.    

The cute girl who responds to the appellation of Angelina Lighthouse is sitting on both her legs. She swivels her barstool lab chair in my direction.

“For next class period read and take notes on the next 50 pages.”

I am concentrated almost solely on the upcoming race in Canton this weekend.

Math is making absolutely no sense. It is like we are trying to diagram sentences in Sanskrit. Mrs. Peabody keeps on belittling us asking why none of us have seen this before. She states that she is not going to go back and teach remedial Algebra.

The first week three students’ drop out of Mrs. Peabody’s class.

Mrs. Peabody makes a note to convey to us that it is not her fault if the institution we previously attended, parochial as it was, lagged behind in state standards.

She reminds us that we are enriched students we should have had this stuff by now and this is just a refresher prologue to the rest of the semester so to speak. 

I feel like raising my hand. I feel like telling her that we took advanced 8^th grade algebra and that all of us were A students at Christ Lutheran and it wasn’t just a cookie walk, a lot of us had to struggle.

Only I refrain.

She is talking out of control. There are binomials and trinomials and quadratic equations. There are no chalk boards in Mrs. Peabody’s class room. Only white board with a marker.  She is talking very fast. It is like she has something to prove.  The majority of the class is just looking back at her and nodding.

I have never felt more lost in my life.

The next morning in Home room the announcements crackle on the side of the loud speaker.  They talk about the Manual cross-country team defeating Woodruff and Farmington in a dual meet. They mention Peacock’s name as the overall winner as well as my   name and Jose's .

When they mention my name Madame stops and looks at me before addressing me as Raoul and inquires something in francais. I pick at the statement. I can tell that she’s saying something like

“You never told us you were an athlete.”

“Oui.” I respond, trying to act like it is no big deal.

Oui.

First Meet...

The final bell punctuating Mme Suhr's sixth hour sounds like a funeral dirge, the oak on the classroom doors blasting opening, student’s rushing into the lockers, exchanging books. Sprinting to vectors of the school for extracurricular actives and athletics, a line leading into the downstairs locker room.The first meet is a dual meet, against both Farmington and Woodruff.  A couple of years ago Woodruff was a powerhouse. I think about Digreggorio who said he has run Cross-country for them the past three years. Coach uses the word fledgling. He  says that they are both fledgling programs and that this should be a solid opening match against us.

I look at my cousin’s record one more time before leaving the locker room and heading up the Hans Lagrotto hill, up to Madison Golf course where we will wait for the opposing teams to arrive in yellow buses, exiting in droves.

“Good Luck Von Behren." Coach Tells me. "Just run like you’ve been running in practice and everything will be aright.”

There are appx. 30 spectators. My parents are watching along with my grandmother and two sisters. As he did every time I ran a race in  Junior high, before my track meets, my father pulls me aside, shields his arm around my bare shoulder and tells me the same phrase.

“God give you a good run.”

We are doing warm-ups. We do 100 yard sprints. We are getting psyched. We have our team. 

There is the plenary announcement of five minutes. There are flags connected like a regatta to stakes forming the chute where we will finish. The neon digit of the clock winds down to zero and then starts fresh with the crackle of the gun. Beano’s mom is watching him as is his girlfriend who attended CLS with me and is only a Freshman. When Beano’s mom tells us to “knock em dead, guys,” he looks the other direction and pretends he doesn’t see her. Hans Lagrotto father is a professor at Bradley and arrives wearing a smoking jacket and tie. We give each other  knuckle dabs before lining up and going all out, all seven of us, forming a sentence of knee-caps and short-shorts glues to the interior paste of our thighs, each of us, on Jose’s lead taking off, firing off into the coniferous meadow blur that is Madison golf, each of us hulking, inhaling, sucking it up, giving one final thrust as a team before gathering in a tetrahedron of shoulder blades and brotherhood, Jose leading us the first time, some of us clad in almost monkish warmups, each forms a plank with our hand, Jose saying the word Manual in twin  elongated syllables the fourteen other members of our teams responded by intoning RAMS. We do the ritual several times in a row before start clapping as one, a carousel of sweats and spikes and tank tops, ready for our first race of the season.

We punctuate our pre-meet ritual by inexplicably letting go of a woof before cantering back to the starting line where, as is cursory, we shake hands with our opponents.

I have worked all summer for this.

 We line-up at the start and together forming a run on sentence of youthful limbs.  

There is a crack of a gun and the stampede of pattering feet. thrust into the green welcome matt of the planet.




                                                                           ***

Cross country is man against the earth. There is no rubber sphere to jostle like a vestigial globe through the aperture of an end zone or hoop. There is no dugout or signs. There are no plays or time outs or commercials. There is the topography of the earth, the abutted atolls of golf courses and highly manicured city parks. There is the fresh morning blanket of grass, wet with adolescent dreams of the earth sticking in clods and asterisks to the bottom of cleats.    In cross-country your adversary is the coastline of time. Time with its unforgiving bastions of age and pain, time removing a sprinkle of cells from the frame of your body into an inevitable cairn of ash.

Time abrasive, the planet that will one day hold fallen oxygen of your anatomy.

 Cross country is man jousting against the skin of the the earth, hurling himself into the subatomic vacuum of space in front of him sprinting like hell to skim seconds off of the one variable that one day will swallow him whole.

                                                                       ***

We break into the first 200 yards forming solitary herd. I am next to Peacock and Jose. From Coach Ricca’s periphery on the grassy knolls I can only imagine that he group looks like some sort of arrowhead slowly beginning to disperse in pointillism inflection. I lag behind. Peacock tells me to get up here. I am next to my mentor, the Mexican with the flattop, at the half-mile mark we have more than segregated ourselves from the park. We hit the corer of Madison parkway and Sterling, taking a right. Coach is ahead with the Coach from Woodruff reading splits from his stop watch.

Our first mile clocks out at 5:32. I am on course to break my cousin’s record.

At a mile and a half it is clear no one is going to touch us.  We run together. We take turns leading.  We are forming an errant trinity .For some reason Jose keeps looking back. Near the gingerbread clubhouse I look back and see that we are almost a minute ahead of our nearest competitors.  I can see Hans LaGrotto and Beano behind me.  Briefly I break away from Jose and Peacock and fall behind. I can hear Randy mandating that I get up next to him. I look down.  There is a constant metronome splatter to the rhythm of my cleats gnawing into the perimeter of the golf course. I push on. I meet up, It is the three of us again. The freshman and the two seniors. The veterans and the pleab. 

The sun is the color of a pitcher of domestic ale and the three of us, running as one,  pushing our way down Martin Luther King drive, like ships, both Jose  and Randy are sailing into the port of the finish chute.

We are three ships and we are each going are separate direction, each destined for ports unknown.

I am a freshman. This is my inaugural race. As we skim the sand trap behind the Elks Club Jose is gently in front of me.    

We hit the second mile slower but we are still well ahead of the pack.

Coach is looking down into his stopwatch which looks like it has ears. He is reading out 11:48. 11:49, 11:50, 11:51.   We are trying to quash time. We are trying to skitter past the vicissitudes of blinking hyphen at the finish line.We are trying to quash the intractable dominance of time.

My mom is screaming louder. It seems weird to hear her cheer the name of my high school

For a minute I take the lead. 

For a minute the only thing I am focused on is the digits at the finish line, three minutes left of the race. If I push it here and get ahead and kick the last 400 meters like I have never kicked before I should be able to come close to eclipsing my cousin’s record, finding my name heralding in diminutive white-block lettering in the lapsing echo of the pool atrium of the new school I have somehow found myself attending.

 

At roughly hole 5 I take off without looking behind.  There is a half-mile left. I turn wide and beginning a push counting 200 steps, breaking into a surge.

I hear both Peacock and Jose screaming out my name. At first I think that they are cheering me on. That they understand my quest, why I feel the need to surge ahead and empty everything that is inside of me on the forgotten felt of Madison Golf Course during the first race.

I take the lead. I break away. I can feel myself floating first across the flagged arteries of the chute, can feel myself looking up at the neon digits heralding the results of my time.  The group is one, I’m not trying to break free but it feels like Jose and Randy gradually being reeled back by vicarious reins.

 I make the final swerve. There is 1000 meters left. I begin to kick. To pick it up. I can feel myself accelerating. I can feel myself plowing ahead. There is a sand trap and then the final stretch. As I take a left I hear Peacock’s voice from behind me.

“Dave, wrong way, man. other side, “ I am confused. I am halfway around the sand trap, I realized that I have gotten of course. Rather than circling the entire dome of the egg-shaped sand trap I back pedal, before a moon walk. The golfers are looking at me like what’s that boy doing. I have gotten off-track. As I skid back on course Peacock has taken a healthy lead. 

I catch Jose in a few strokes.

“Thought we lost you for a moment.”

There is laugher. Peacock is blasting ahead. I continue to push.  Cheers erupt from the finish. I look at the neon digits heralding my time. I am close. I am ten seconds off. While this is my first official meet I should have known the course better since I have been training on it all summer.

I can hear the nasal octaves of my mothers voice chanting secular hosanna’s in the crowd. I can see my father, A smile beaming below the brow of his derby cap.  I can see where Peacock has already shotgunned through the chute and is bent over his hands welded on his hips out of breath.

Jose and I finish at the same exact time, though the paper the next day will list that I am a second ahead of him  As I bend over I feel Jose’s hand massaging the back of my neck telling me good run.

As I look behind me I see Hans Lagrotto finish strong. Followed by Beano and Quaynor. Our top five has swept the top five from the two opposing school.My time is 18:02. Just over six minute miles. Had I not had gotten off course and had to hustle to get back to my teammates I might I have had a shot at breaking the record. 

Have I not gotten off course I might have won the race.

Our teammates are giving each other hugs. Coach says he can't imagine a first race where a Freshman almost won. 

There is botherhood. We are doing cool-downs. We have swept both Woodruff and Farmington. The season is just beginning. Our team is starting to weld as one. We feel like we are immoral.

I still have three more shots to break my cousin's record FROSH record of 17:20. I still have two months to prove my worth as an athletic asset to squad I have wanted to be a part of since I started running when I was six years old.

It is the only dual meet our team will win all year.

A chance for immortality...

 

It is after early bird PE. I make it a point to walk with Patrick near the rubber gym, past the weight room, past the yellow film negative tile coating the science hall way where labs are equipped with gas lines and there are Bunsen burners and sinks and dead rodents of varying degrees and the wafting intellectual noisome scent of Formaldehyde achingly hangs in the air. The only class Patrick and myself do not have together is Early Bird PE, where he is taking Freshman requisite Health in that time frame.

 

Patrick seems to look at me like what do you want. I tell him wait. He inquires how things are transpiring with that  hot blonde.

“Dude man, she has an ass. I would totally hit that shit.”

This is what I wanted to show you.”  I point at the record board. There is the freshman record held by my cousin.

“My first meet is tonight bro. This is what I’m gunning for. A shot an immortality.”

Patrick says that its just a fucking bulletin board.

“Yeah but if I get the record I get my name on the board.

"Well whoop-dee-fucking-shit."

Manual, first day freshman year (epilogue)

                                    

The day before the race we take it easy.  We form Euclidean triangles with our body as we stretch in front of the school.  We have a light three-mile workout, We forgo weights. We have a quiet mile and a half cool down.  Coach tells us to relax. Coach tells us to focus on the race.


 After practice after the first day I go back and look at the record board once again.  I look at the Cross-country FROSH record I feel destined to decimate. I see my second cousin’s record. Our meet  is in three days. I know I can eclipse it. I should have no trouble.

I hear a familiar voice.

“Hey man!!”

It is Anthony. Jumanee. Harold Hill from the Music Man last summer.

He come over. We give each other a hug.

Anthony smiles. He addresses me as Mr. Freshman. He asks me how Mr. Freshman is enjoying his first couple of  days of high school so far.

I tell him its great. I tell him I have all enriched classes.

‘Dude, it’s so good to see you man!! You ever see anyone else from Music Man?”

I wonder if he still hangs out with the Washington enclave. I wonder if he still goes out late at night with Anastasia and the two of them dry hump and she gets grounded.

“No. I haven’t seen any of them since the cast party and you?

“I kind of dated Dawn Michelle for a while.”

“The make-up lady?”

“Yeah. She used to help you with your changes.”

Anthony smiles. He says dude she was hot.

“Yeah, she's really cool. We dated for the remainder of the summer."

I ask Anthony if he has any plans to do theater at Manual. 

"No man. I just pretty much do shows in the summer. I direct Gospel choir and am the drum major for the band and we're prepping to go to New Orleans in a couple of months.

We continue to talk and reminisce about last summer. We laughed about the time we pummeled each other on stage 

‘I saw Pam a couple nights ago. It was random. But I saw Pam. I squeezed her arm.”

I tell Anthony that I told her thank you.

I look at my cousin's record.

                                                           

 
 
 
                                     



"And then I told her goodbye."

 

 

That  night I phone Best. David is telling me all about band competitions he is attending. He is telling me about playing under the lights during Friday night football games. He is telling me About the hot freshman flute player who sits next top him on the bus and commented that he has really well groomed fingernails.

“Manual’s pretty cool too. We have our first official Cross-Country race Tuesday. I can't wait..”

I ask Best if he ever sees Hale. He says that him and Hale aren’t exactly in the same social circle, although he tells me that he thinks he spotted him once at lunch.

"By the way, did you ever call Renae.”

“Yeah, I called her last week. Her mom answered the phone.”

‘Debbie?” Dave says addressing her mom by her first name.

“Yeah, I guess. She seemed really friendly.  Renae wasn’t there. Her mom said that she was watching her dad go sky-diving.”

“Larry.”

“Who?"

Larry’s the dad’s name.

“Her parents are really cool. They want you to call them by their first names even though they are adults. They are really hip. You should get to know them”

I tell him yeah. I tell him I will call Renae back soon.

“There’s some really cool girls at Manual though. There’s one named Angelina Lighthouse. Just beautiful creatures.”

 

 

Dave nods his head and says right.

“Are they black?”

 

“Some of them are black but it really doesn't matter. They are beautiful though. They really are.”

Dave says that there are only two black boys who go to Limestone and they both play basketball.

Sixth Hour, French, Madame Suhr

   

Sixth hour starts at 1:40 and gets out at appx. 2::25. Faces pop up earlier in the day, wink into oblivion before resurfacing in the shore of a different classroom.

In French class we are supposed to pick a French name so Madame can talk to us solely en francais. Cool Jen Phillips who is far superior than any of us picks Celine. Matt Endres picks Mattieu. Patrick, who keeps on bitching that he wishes Dist 150 would offer a  more intriguing selection of languages, like say Russian, takes the name Nikkoli.

I take the name Raoul, not only because I like it, but on KZ93 Raoul was the name of Gary Olson’s crazy dyslexic intern.

 

I am focused on the button of digits and akimbo limbs above the country I failed to attend the last two years.

I want to go running.

I want to go home to France and bite into the nipple sugar cookie splattered on the board.


I open and close the day in the classroom with the wall sized map of the country I failed to see for two years in a row.

All I really can remember from my class a la francais with Madame Breton over the summer is how to count to ten and how Andrea always smelled brand new.

I sit next to Matt Endres whom I have known since I was the size of a Goodyear tire. It is introductory a la francais.

 

You can tell back in the day she was a dish.

She speaks the most beautiful French of I have ever heard. It sounds like classical music emanating from the lips of a bird house when it exits her lips in a series of accelerated wheezes.

Unlike Madmae Breton who convened every conversation in la francais Madame starts in English. The girl who looks French with the subtle glasses who I will learn runs cross-country for the girls team is in French class.

Madame is inquiring if any of us have ever taken French before. The girl wearing the glasses said she studied it as an after school club at home. Matt raises his hand.

"I’ve had four years." He notes, his vision arrowed into the direction of Madame's kneecaps.

“Quatre ans?” Madame says, as if irked, before adding a pourquoi.  She then state sin very blatant English that you should probably be in french201.

Matt says that he went to Washington gifted.

“I had French for four years but I didn’t learn anything.”

Madame is looking at my neighbor down the street like he is lost. The cool blonde headed girl with the Metallica t-shirt  who is in almost all of my classes looks back at matt and smiles.

I raise my hand. I am the only one in the French class who is also in Madame’s home room.

She addresses me as we.

“I actually had about a month of la francais. Last summer. I took a college for kids course at ICC.”

Madame smiles.

"Madame Breton?”

I nod. Madame again says oui.

Madame Suhr is older than my parents.  I look at the French flag. I look at the atlas of the country I was denied two years in a row.

“She’s nice isn’t she?”

I nod. Madame’s smile is refulgent. She speaks French without opening her lips all the way and smiles with her cheekbones.

I think about Madame Breton. I think about how summer seemed light years ago.

I say the word we.

Meaning yes.

Falling into the reverberating chasm of sound and language again.


My first day of High school is almost stamped shut.

           We are falling into the Southside sun.