summer finale (how soon hath time)...

 
 

 It will happen when I least expect it but it will happen, even though I just broke up with Dawn Michelle. Even though I can’t figure out how she became so seemingly flippant overnight.  Even though I am entering high school in a scattered periodic table of imploded calendar squares. Even though courtesy of the vicissitudes of time I am being chauffeured in an unbidden manner past the atomic visor, the setting of the greatest summer of my life.

It will happen. Even though I failed in my quest to somehow save Kim Zmeskal.  Even though I continue to push myself athletically every day. Even though I can't stop running, can't stop configuring my elbows and arms like oscillating uneven bars.  Can't stop scampering over the gliding hills and grassy glades of Bradley park in the morning, after finishing my paper route, when the dew of the earth glistens and  leaves mossy imprints on the bottom of my sneakers.

Even though I am  involuntarily escaping down the laundry chute of the most formative summer of my life


It will happen sometime this week and it will happen when I least expect it. It will happen in spontaneous clangs with an erection hatching in the center of my chest. 

 

It will happen.

It will happen as I walk through the capitulating summer breeze in Glen Oak park, exactly 317 juvenile steps away from the Tricentennial playground is the kidney-shaped lagoon that smells like dead fish and clover. There is a pavilion and a canon that looks like it was culled from a failed Ken Burns documentary. In the center of the lagoon is a giant misty exclamatory mark that looks like someone is perennially giving head to aerie mist it seemingly engenders.

I have just broken up with Dawn Michelle. High school is in less than five days. It is my parents' 20th wedding anniversary and they are in St. Louis.  I am staying by myself in the house during the weekend so I can do the paper route. My two sisters are staying at grandmas. Today Aunt Chris picked us up for church and afterwards we had lunch and went to the zoo and, while staring at the three legged Tiger who was born that way, for some reason I had to leave, I told my aunt that I needed to walk around for a bit and I would meet her afterwards, that I had to perambulate and walk and be by myself.

 

It will happen gradually over the next couple of weeks but it will happen. Even though this summer has slipped out from underneath me, kowtowing to the intractable mandates of nature, my conscious mummified in the pigmented armor of my adolescent flesh, incarnated vowels and involuntary digestion and breath, the apparatus of the anatomy pre-ordained yet endowed, world opening as if with petals, language breathing past me in meaty chomps, it will happen the way my limbs sprouted out of the dress pants I was wearing at the first Young Columbus, my body, waking up in the air-conditioning drone of the chilled living room two summers ago, dreaming that she was on top of me dreaming that she was dictating that I place my body inside of her, drilling the molecular quilt of my atomic constitution deep inside of her as she wails, and she scratches, and she orders that I am not thrusting hard enough, that my torso is not snapping into the pubic nest between her thighs as we begin to float as one ontological sentence of enjoined limbs and my body releases itself, a thick lemon preserves coating the wan interior of my upper thighs, sticking to the UMBRO shorts I fell asleep in after soccer practice, still wearing my shin guards, scaring the shit out of me, it will happen, without me knowing it, with me somehow wanting it, with me desiring it, with myself mapping out an itinerary of everything I have ever wanted to achieve in this finite blink of being.


She will take me there. She will straddle her limbs around the albino contours of my bare waist  and rock my world and leave me all alone while yelping out a carol of loss, a molecular mortgaged appellation of sound, an introit to the only name I have ever known.

 I walk alone.

                                                                ***

 

When you are six years old you  sit in what is commonly referred to in the pre-school colloquial as crisscross apple sauce Indian style in the brick kiln of your grandmother’s house in the antique blue willow living room that looks like Fairview farms in front of your great-grandmother. She was the first story teller you will ever know. She was in her early 80’s. She has a fist-sized goiter dangling like an oversized Christmas bulb off her neck. She wears what could only be defined as smocks.

She is the most beautiful woman you will ever meet.

You spend hours in front of her varicose legs listening to her speak.                                


You sit in front of her and you listen.

She saved the headline from the Newspaper the day the Titanic went down. She can tell you about how the whole country  huddled around a wooden radio and listen to the staticky crackle of FDR’s fireside chats. She tells you that all her brothers fought in WW2 even though she was older. She tells you about working for thirty years at Hiram Walker and about certain parts of town where ladies of the streets reside.

Color television didn’t almost appear until she was in her sixties. When she was a little girl there were no telephones. She tells you about having a horse and buggy and about the first time she saw an aeroplane.

She tells you about the how everything just paused the day an astronaut walked on the moon.

Years later you will realize that your Nana would have historically been about the same age as Amaryllis

You have a special friend. She feeds you cookies even though dinner is less than an hour away. One year you are seated in front of her and she confesses where Grandma hid your EMPIRE STRIKES BACK HOTH play set you are to open on Christmas morning.

You have a friend. There is 80 years between you and it feels like less than eight months.

Every time you leave your great-grandmother she kisses you on the cheek.

You call your great-grandmother Nana.

Nana Grace.

 

                                                              ***

 

                                                 

I am on collecting on the second to last week in August. I knock on  the door of the white House that looks like the White House. There is no answer. When I knock again the door flaps open like the wing to a dove.

 It is the daughter. It is Mary.

 “Dave!!” Before I know it she is giving me a hug. She is asking me how it is going. I have been in love with this blonde-haired creature since the moment I saw her. Her hands are lanced around my shoulders. She is squeezing tight.

 For a second I wonder if she is drunk.

“Dave,  it’s so good to see you!!”

 I want to ask her if she is in college. I want to ask her what is happening in her life. I want to hold her close kiss her forehead and apologize for, in a weird way, not being there when her twin brother died earlier this summer.

 I wish I would have splashed more cologne on my cheek bones.

We walk to the living room. She tells me to take a seat. I sit on the couch. She sits next to me.

 She is wearing a loose neck top with a name of a band I have never heard of before.  Its drips past her shoulder I can see her the strap of her bra.

 “So Dave, “ She says, “How is your Summer. How are you?”

I don’t know what to say.

 “Life is good I start high school in a couple of weeks.”

“High school.” She flashes a smile, the most beautiful smile I have ever seen, before she tells me that she can’t believe I am starting high school.”

 I look at her bra strap. It is pink.  She has her against her chin. She is smiling.

“Yeah, I was in a play this summer.”

“A play?”

Everything I say elicits a smile from the fleshy buds of her lips. I can’t stop talking.

“Yeah. I was the antagonist. I was the bad guy. It was really cool. I started seeing this really cool girl who was like this state speech champion.”

“You have a girlfriend!!”

 I want to tell Mary that we just broke up. Mary seems excited. She is smiling.

 “Yeah, she’s a senior at Richwoods only it…”

 “And you’re only a freshman?” Mary interrupts me again.  I say yes.

“Dave you are all grown up!!!” She is excited.

 Mary screams out my name again.

“Also, I’m running cross-country at Manual. I’m really excited. Coach has already placed me on the varsity. We have a really tight team."

She screams out my name again. She calls me Dave.  There is a voice from the top of the stairs.  It is her mom. Mrs. McQuellen. She asks who her daughter is talking to.

"It's Dave mom. It's your paperboy. It's Dave mom. He's all grown up. Come down and say hello."

 

                                                             ***

I am seated on my desk in my bedroom preparing to enter high school and the world is brand new and I am thinking about Dawn Michelle  and about Anastasia Blake and cross country and my future and impending high school loves—trying not to lose myself in the sight of college girls next door floating between rooms like nylon sails.. I am seated on the brim of the desk with a giant Z slashes in the middle listen to the CURE tape I bought on my first date with Dawn Michelle trying in vain not to wish impossible things.

I am all alone. 


It would be pointless to call up Dawn. With the exception of Tim and Pat all my friends are going to Limestone which started last Tues. I think about how summer was here for what felt like an elongated eternity and now it has evaporated and now it is no more. I think about how things are changing. I think about the college girls drunk next door. I wonder what happened to Terry Inman.

 

Briefly I think about calling Anastasia just to inquire how she is doing. I wonder if she is still hanging out with Anthony.

                                         

I wish I could call up Dawn and we could have one of our intellectual discourses about cool music like we used to have when first we met. I wish I could call up lil’ Betsy and just hear her voice without her parents thinking I am some freak being in high school and calling their eight year old lisping daughter up just to offer a hello. I pick up the  cornerstone sized phonebook again and again look for what I could possibly be Pam’s number in an effort to discern her address and send her a card and thank her for everything.
 

It is the fullest summer of my life and there is no one to talk to at all.


There is a phone and there is no one left to call.




                                                                     ***

You are in the music room and you are eight years of age and you are lying dyslexically supine beneath the wooden penumbra’s of the grand piano, the piano that is large and looks like it could be hunted on safari with legs  planted on all fours. The ivory lip is an overbite with black keys. It looks like it was something shot in the sage brush of Steinway.  Golden pedals jutting like vertical udders on the floor.  The top of the piano is tilted open leaving the sight of a harpsichord. Diminutive mallets striping coiled strings in reverberating awe.

After your parents get married the first major purchase after the house was the grand piano. They didn’t have a television until five years into their marriage. They had music. They had a grand piano and two guitars and a melodica and bible studies in their house every week. They had a cool record player with albums by Tchaikovsky and Beethoven, albums by Ferrante and Teicher and Judy Collins and Bread.

 

Before my father scaled the roof planting an crooked arthritic antennae on the top of the house so that they could get reception to watch all in the family on CBS nights they had Jesus and they had music.

 

Growing up you played under the grand piano. You cut our baby teeth on the legs, leaving stubbled rainbows of half-gnawed rinks into the bark of the limbs. Mother watches cousin Matthew during the week and growing up. You play re-enactments the childhood books your mother reads to you. You re-enact the box-car children with the piano serving as the vicarious train cart. Almost all of the narratives you re-create have two females and two males. In the box car children you are Henry, your sisters are Jessie and Violet and your cousin Matthew is Benny. Sometimes you play Narnia. Lately you find yourself lying on your torso as if you are sliding head first into home thinking about the girl with the red hair. The girl who is one grade ahead of you at Christ Lutheran school.The girl you played house with when it was snowing at recess and we had to leave our snow-ridden boots by the door when we entered the building. The girl who sucks on her two fingers and smiles at you from across the classroom.

For approximately three years you pray of the girl every night. After your father leaves your room and you recite Now the light has Gone away in the fashion of an echoing round.  You tell God to bless everyone then you say her name and the word especially.

You want God to especially bless the girl with the red hair.

You are lying on the floor beneath the piano. You are pressing my the center of my body on the shag carpet near the pedals. Blood seems to be sprinting across invisible interstate inside my flesh. You subtly rattle your torso. 

You feel a slight tingle.

You can’t stop thinking about her even though you know it is wrong.

I am thinking about the girl with the red hair and she is naked, stepping into her leotard to go on stage. I am embarrassed. 
  

I feel like I somehow should apologize.

A week earlier you had a dance recital for Take 5 dance studios at the ersatz-ivory bluff situated college you will one day attend.  You are not dance but a tumbler.  You do cartwheels and straddle somersaults while wearing Kelly green shorts while being applauded by an audience filled mostly of relatives.  The girl is in tap and jazz and ballet. She will be a high school cheerleader captain come two presidential elections.

 The dance recital transpires at the Hartman center. There is less than a handful of males in the entire troupe. There is no set locker room or changing area for children under ten.

You are playing outside near the exploding cranberry perennials in spring and when you  come inside you turn around and you see her.

You see the red headed girl of your dreams naked.

She is stepping into her leotard like she is trying to stomp into her own shadow. You are embarrassed. There are naked girls your own age all around you but somehow seeing her is different. She is in your school. She goes to your church. You have played house together a couple of times when it was snowing at recess.

You see her and then you turn around and stutter out. You feel you have seen something you should not have seen.

You see her naked and you can’t stop thinking about her.

And yet you can’t stop lying beneath the oak penumbra’s of the piano, the black lacquer the same color of the flimsy outfit  she was stepping out of and you can’t stop thinking about her. You are lying like you are sliding head first while trying to steal home base.  When you see her sitting on the parochial school bleachers during Sunday school you try not to look at her direction. Things have changed. You never bring it up.

 

Yet when you are all alone under the piano  in the music room you think about her.

 

And when the phone purrs and your father places it down on the receiver you know something is up.

 

When you ask he tells you simply.

 

“Nana, Grace died okay.”

 

You have just been thinking about the girl you used to pretend was eight year old wife naked.

 

And now the person who was your first story teller is no more.

                                                                           ***

 

In the atrium outside the pool at Manual the wafting nasal-pinching scent of chlorine is thick and heavy in the air. We are stretching inside this morning, the lower hemisphere of our bodies forming  lower case alphabetical emblems, Euclidean ankles popping as we sashay our hips and knees, holding postures, popping joints like oily hinges,  counting to fifteen as a group, aloud in military parlance before shifting our weight on the opposite foot.

Coach is leading us. He seems excited at the prospect of our team.

While Basketball and football trophies are guarded behind glass in the Main foyer, the black board with vestigial white lettering sits atop the pool entrance. There are record for Free Swim and diving and wrestling and gold. The TRACK/Cross country has a whole board to itself.

Jose christened the sophomore record of 16:15 on Madison gold course and then was riddled on and off with injury his Junior year. He still a tad overweight but paces evenly at sub six-minute miles with myself and Peacock.

The FROSH record is held by my second cousin I have met only once at my Great-grandmother’s funeral. Todd Brooks. He is my grandfather’s twin sister’s son. He was a beast when he was at manual although he originally went out for the team to stay in shape for wrestling and, discerning that he had a natural gift, became a legend.  He medaled at state,. Went to Bradley on a Cross-country scholarship, partied out, got fat and now is 250 and scales telephone poles installing cable.

 

He was a legend.

 

His FROSH record at Madison golf course is 16:45.

As we are leaving the atrium to commence what will be our last run before school officially begins at point at the board.  Jose notices me looking at the time.

 

“That’s your cuz, right?”

 

I get confused.

 

“Todd Brooks, the FROSH record holder, he’s your cousin, right?”

 

I had forgotten that I told Jose about Todd when I met him in early July at the cross-country picnic.

 

“You should be able to get hat record then. The way you’ve been running it should be no problem.”

 

Jose smiles. He says that after I break my cousin’s record his SOPH record has my name on it.

                                                                          ***

The next day I scout out the house verifying that Marge’s car is absent from the chipped gravel of the driveway. I offer thee knuckle-rapts on the door as if we have somehow already instituted a secret handshake. The door opens. Tina looks half a sleep. She has a mousey smile. The room is permeated with dissipating puffs of freshly exhaled cannabis.

I smile back. I can’t help wishing that Tina were somehow Dawn.



                                     

Tina is smoking weed. She is wearing ripped jean shorts an another custom made T that has Grover from Sesame street smoking a joint, making an inane aside about everything being near and far.

Tina offers the chrome hitter in my direction.  I hold up my hand and politely tell her no thanks.

I sit down on the couch next to her.

Tina tells me that she is glad I came back after the other night.

“You missed the drama though. Marge can’t stand Earl and both Celeste and I did a pretty good job at lying that we were just swimming by ourselves until she found earl’s t-shirt crinkled up on the patio and we played dumb.”

 
I ask Tina how Celeste is doing. Tina says oh, she’s grounded.


“It’s really no big deal. Marge is always grounding her then forgetting about it.” Tina says that she’ll see celeste when school starts next week

“It’s crazy, I actually broke up with my girlfriend last night.”

 

“You did?” Tina’s shirt is tight. I swear I can make out her nipples squinting at me across Grover’s forehead. Because we were half-naked five nights ago it’s impossible for me to remotely blink in her direction w/out envisioning what she looks like sans bra and panties. 

“Yeah, over the phone. It’s confusing. I really liked her. I thought we really had something special.”

Tina looks at me. She fires up her hitter and hold in my direction.

"So you need solace," She says.

"What's that?"

"Someone to hold you when the person you are madly in love with us nowhere to be found."




                                                           ***

 

Even though you are only eight years of age when you first hear of your great-grandmother’s demise you take off walking by yourself. You walk down Sherman, taking a left at the Newly vacant 7-11 at the corner of Western, you stomp past the gun shop that looks like a 1800’s Saloon, past the Get-a-way that has a strict male-only fraternity like short hair dress code where you need to be buzzed in, you walk past Thompsons food and Buzzies Ice Cream and Lums and Mr.. Donuts, Pepe Taco and Pizza Hut are on the other side of the street. You walk past the urine-stained eyebrows of McDonalds, past the two  glass enclosed telephone booths which always remind you of superman, past your dance studio, past Convenient store where you buy Garbage Pail Kids.

You are eight years old and your prince valiant mid-eighties haircut shuffles into the etch-o-sketch haze of your already nearsighted vision.

 

You are lost. Perhaps if you hadn’t been underneath the grand piano, pressing your torso into the cheap carpet, thinking about t even though your great-grandmother was 88 years old, you somehow contributed in her death.

 

You walk. The spring light hits the side of your face in a bouquet of broken shingles.

You are eight years old.

You have seen your red-headed dream girl naked.

 You are all alone.

 

                                                                         

                                                                              ***

“Well hey!!” I stop at Bob and Frank’s.  They comment that they keep seeing me running around the neighborhood in my flimsy shorts. Sometimes they just address me as sexy.

 

 “When does cross country start?”

 I tell them my first race is Sept first. I tell them I am nervous. I tell them I have still been running three to four times a day.

 “My goal is just to make regional as a Freshman. It’s one tier below state. If I could just make regional as a freshman I feel that I would have accomplished something.”

“What about that girl you were dating?”

 For a minute I am nonplussed. I think they are talking about Tina. Then I realize that last time I collected from Bob and Frank they were asking me what proverbial lock room base I slid into after my initial date with Dawn Michelle.   

 “Well I kinda broke up with her.”

Bob and Frank let go of a simultaneous long phonetically dilapidated whaaaaaa.

 “It just wasn’t working out. She’s a Senior at Richwoods and I’m a incoming Freshman at Manual. I decided just to focus on academics and running

Bob looks at me. He is a good fifteen years younger than his cousin Frank. His skin is tanned, the color of rotisserie chicken. 

 

 “So you broke her heart?”

 I want to say no. I want to say that I thought Dawn’s reaction would be less flippant when I accumulated the courage to call her up and tell her that I think it’s best if we see other people. Right when I start to justify my actions Bob and Frank continue slapping me on the back like old drinking buddies.

“You broke her heart didn’t you? She’s at home now probably thinking about you in those flimsy runner shorts you wear emotionally pining that you were next to her.”

 Bob and Frank are laughing uncontrollably. Frank fires up a cigarette and makes an nautical reference about there be many fishies in the sea.

 

“Plus you have high school coming up. I mean, I reckon’ there’d be some hot girls at Manual.”

Bob elbows. We are laughing. Hanging out with Bob and Frank is different from hanging out with Tim and Pat or even David Best. They are both adults and they treat me like I am their same age.

 "Well you’re an official adult now. You are going to have to come to our parties.”

 “Yeah, Frank says, “We’ll get you drunk.” 

I want to tell them that I don’t drink but the next thing I know everyone is laughing.

 

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

 

                                                              ***

 

It is burrowed. It has been ensconced in the scalp of the planet for  100,000 years. It is incubating. It is gestating its wrath inside the womb of the earth. It is kicking. It is trying to hatch from a yolk of dirt and top soil. It is reverberating with the intensity of 100,000 tympani’s.

It is waiting to wrought havoc, It is waiting to decimate everything in its path. It is waiting to seemingly obliterate the pulse of everything that is justice and enduring.

It is waiting to be reborn so that it can destroy.

                                                  

                                                                   ***

You don’t cry during the funeral. You don’t cry when the family with all the cousins meet in the parking lot of Davidson-Fulton in the Southside of Peoria. At the visitation the immediate family arrives first. Grandma is crying. There are eight cousins. The adults seem to have expected this. Nana is lying in front of you on a marble plinth, inside a half-opened finely burnished wooden casket that for some reason reminds you of the log ride at six flags. The cousins range from ages 3-9. Your family is close. They do all the music at the Lutheran church in the Southside of Peoria the bulk of your family has been members of for almost a century.

 The top of Nana’s body is adorned in a wreath of flowers. It is like the upper portion of her body is sprouting of our a garden of plastic carnations. The adults are explaining death to their progeny. When your aunt Chris asks your cousin Matthew where Nana is now he points in the direction of the off-colored funeral ceiling tile and says heaven. You are the second oldest of all the cousins. You were the closest to Nan. None of your others cousins used to sit and just ask her to speak and listen her stories.  You are the only one who threw a tantrum when you didn’t get a chance to see her because your aunt told your mom she was to sick to be seen by little kids

 

One of your cousins is potty-training and is telling your mom in the funeral home that she just went ockie-in-the-potty.

 
The vicar performs the funeral for my great-grandmother because Pastor Schudde is on vacation. After the service the burial is in the farm town Kewanee, about an hour away. Your great grandmother is buried in the cemetery where her parents who immigrated from Germany are buried. Her father was a farmer. He gave 500 dollars to start St. Paul’ Lutheran church in Kewanee and, as my great-grandmother would tell you in one of our long conversations 500 dollars was a lot of money back in  1910.

You don’t cry when the casket is being planted into the crunchy lip of the planet. You don’t cry  when the vicar offers a spiritual aside about ashes returning to ashes, when he supplicated to  whatever bearded-deity there is and chants about commending nan’s spirit into they hand.

You start to tickle your cousin Amanda who is eleventh months older and then inquire if she has ants in her pants and your father, who is always humbled and reserved, tells you very vehemently to knock it off.

You don’t cry at the obligatory meal held in the parochial gymnasium basketball court  as you help yourself to the platters of meat and chesses and the adults sip coffee brewed in a chrome urn commonly reserved for Sunday school.

 

You don’t cry at all.

You are eight years old. You had to repeat first grade because you were an avg student at best and couldn’t read the blurred Mathematica crosses and subtracting hyphens Miss Heinz tattoos in chalk across the black board. At least once a week you stay in from recess because doing your math homework is like jumping into an esoteric puddle of daunting integers. Your handwriting is slovenly scrawled across the page.  You can’t seem to give the answer the teacher is looking for. Ironically  you are in love with a girl named Tina who is in second grade and whom you follow around like an unwanted shadow just because. A year later you will get held back and get glasses the size of abandoned RCA televisions and you will get teased relentlessly with last names like Bowman and Bushman and Douchebag. You feel all alone. Your fourth grade year an overweight lad bearing the last name of Hale who just started attending the church across the street arrives and you become best friends and take the meat of the harassment together. A year later an Irish boy with  home-hair cut, bad teeth and irascible temper will arrive and the three of your will simply be one.

You don’t cry at all at the funeral or at the gravesite or at the obligatory dinner afterwards.

You would taste the salt excreted from the lens of your own body.

 You would see your future blinked before you in the prismatic drops of tears skinning down your shin and again be all alone because the person who taught you about story telling is no longer here.

You are eight years old and you don’t cry.

 

                                                                       ***

“Listen, I got to  tell you something. I feel bad about this but lied to you  about something.”

Tina asks me what I lied about. She says dawn and for a still-life second I think she is alluding to sunrise.

“No. Dawn is real. She is valid. She is real person whom I connected with and who now no longer exists even though she is still a viable corporeal being.”

Tina looks at me as if to comment what have I been smoking.

 “Thing is, I lied about my age. I’m not a junior. I just graduated eighth grade a little less than three months ago. I’ve never stepped foot inside a classroom at Manual although I do run cross-country.

Tina asks me why the fuck did l lie to her. She seems truculent. She pushes me. She calls me dumb–ass.

I tell her that I said I was older because I wanted her to like me.

“But I like you. I thought you were cute. You still didn’t fucking need to lie.”

I should and nod and say that she is right. I should genuflect at the caps of her tanned-lined waist and supplicate for forgiveness. Instead, I feel like jousting.

 “It’s not like you don’t lie?” I stammer back.

 Tina asks me what I mean. I tell her that she lies to Marge all the time about who she has over at the house. I tell her that she lies by using her grandmother’s address to go to a better school while living out of the district.”

 “That’s not lying. Manual sucks. Besides who would want to go to a high school with all those damn niggers anyway.”

"Quit saying that word!" I stammer.

 

Tina is getting pissed.

 “Look at you. You have no clue how dangerous it is down there. You are going to get your ass- kicked.  You are gonna get shot.”

 

I tell her I’ve gone to school in the Southside all my life. I tell her I’m okay.

 "You don’t understand. You’re young. Those niggers will fuck with you.

“Stop using that word!!!”

 “Okay so the Gangsta Disciples will fuck with you. The Vice Lords will fuck you. Some gang that you have never heard of before will fuck with you. Things are changing. That school cares nothing about education. Even District 150 has more or less written it off.”

 

I stop. Tina is shaking. Since we were half naked two nights ago I can help but ponder what color underwear she is wearing.

"Listen. Okay, so I’m going to a Ghetto high school. I love my cross country coach. He is one of the coolest human beings I have ever met.”

 “Here’s the thing. I really wanted to go to Limestone. All my friends are going there. My dad teaches in that school district, he went to Limestone.  My grandma lives in the school district. All of my relatives in P-town live in Limestone district.  Hell, I have a cool Uncle who’s even a principal at the largest school out there.”

 

Tina is looking at me.

“The thing is I tried. I really did try to go somewhere else. I know Manual just sucks academically and there’s all theses gangs and shit but I really did try. My father wouldn’t let me use my grandma’s address.  He said it would be cheating.”



           
                                          


 

"Fine. Be a nigger lover. I don’t care."

 

I look at Tina. I ogle her cleavage for what will be the last time.

 

I have only one thing left to say to her as I turn around and head towards the door.

 

 

“Goodbye.”

 
 
                                                          ***

 

                                                                     ***

Coach times us one final time before classes begin.  Our group is small but scrappy. The trinity of Peacock, Munoz and myself push the pace. We hit each mile at 5:15 and 5:30.

 We are pushing ourselves. We are a mobile nest of limbs; we run in a stampeding clot.

The last mile is slower, we are still pushing ourselves. But the last mile is slower.  

 

Our final time over the three mile course is 16:50.

 

All I need to do is shave five seconds off in a meet and the FROSH record in mine.

 

Not far behind Leatric and Joe finish near each other, followed by Beano.

 

Our first meet is a dual meet against Farmington and Woodruff.

 

It is exactly one week from today.

 

“Nice work, gentlemen.” Coach says, stating that it looks like we’ve got ourselves a team.

 

Mentally I picture the course every night before I go to sleep.  I picture the snap of the flint gun erupting into a wisp of steam followed in tandem by the scrap of pattering hoofs trampling across the clover-scent of freshly manicured grass. I picture the first left and the slight hills near the sand pit, just up the wooded glen from the firing range where Patrick got stuck under the bottom of the fence while trying to break in and peculate gun shells. I think about the one-mile mark on Sterling avenue and the club house turn.

 

Soon this will all be happening.

 

Soon this will all be real.

 

 

                                                          ***

After I get back from practice I call Renae Holiday.  I have no clue why I am calling her with the exception that David Best keeps badgering me saying that I should and that she really wants to talk to me, even though she was total standoffish bitch when I tried to be social at the fourth of July fireworks at Glen Oak Park, even though I don't really know her at all.

 

  Her mom answers the phone.

 

When she asks who is calling I say it is David.

 

“Oh, you are Dave’s friend David.” She says, referring to Best. On the opposite side of the wire I nod.

 

“She’s not here, She’s with Laura. They’re watching Larry jump out of a plane.”

 

I have no clue who Larry is. I say oh. Her mom sounds hot. There is a lull in our conversation.

 

“Larry is Renae’s father.  He bungee jumps but he’s also into skydiving.”

 

Wow I say, her mom seems like she wants to have a conversation with me.

 

“I told Renae and Laura they could go as long as they weren’t actually in the plane with him.” She says. I don’t know how to respond, next week is band camp for Dave and co and the week after that school is set to begin.

 

“I’ll tell her you called though.  I know she’ll be really excited.”

 

I can’t understand why Renae wants to talk with me since last time at the fireworks at Glen Oak park she acted like I didn’t exist.

 

“It’s been really nice talking with you Dave.” The voice at the other end replies. “I’ve heard a lot about you. I’m really looking forward to meeting you someday soon.”

 

I tell her the same.

 

                                                ***

After I leave Tina's I walk past Terry Inman’s house, the sun hitting half crushed aluminum cans in the front grass ricocheting in dry beams. As usual Terry is a month behind. I usual I wonder how he can always be broke if he always seems to have money for a case of beer. I have let Terry slide for a month. Every time I see him he is drunk or he is passed out.

 A lady answers the door whom I have never before seen. She is Hispanic. She asks me what I want.

 "I need to see Mr. Inman, please.” I inquire very modestly.


"Who are you?"

"I'm his paperboy. He owes me for like six weeks. Do you know how I can get in touch with him?"

The lady remains quiet.

“I’m sorry, Terry no longer lives here.”

"Do you know where I can get ahold of him?"

"I'm a social worker. Terry's in a mental hospital. he's trying to get help for his drinking."

She tells me that she will cancel the paper and have her agency send me a check. I ask when she surmises terry is going to return.

 "I don't think he's going to be moving back for a long time."


                                                                    ***

“This is crazy Coach but do you know Todd Brooks?” I inquire after our final summer practice.

 

Coach is silent. Coach says he was  freshman right around the time when he started teaching at Manual.

“He has the FROSH record.”

“Actually coach he’s my cousin.”

Coach steps back. His eyes widen in their respective sockets.

 

“Well, more like a second cousin. Kind of like my father and his mom were cousins if that makes any sense.”

“So he’s blood.” Coach atavistically inquires in more of a nod.

“Yeah, he’s family. I know he has the FROSH record.”

I tell coach I've been looking at the record every morning before practice.

 

Coach smiles.

“We’ll, he should be really honored when you eclipse it from him. The way you are running you should have no trouble at all.”

                                                              ***

“Isn’t he so grown up?” Mary exclaims, seated on the arm in the chair next to mine. I don’t want to confess that I used to fantasize about which window was hers when I first started being her paperboy.

 

Mrs. McQuellen comes in with a glass of lemonade.

 

“You should hear all about Dave’s summer mom. He’s running cross-country and was the bad guy in a play and has a girlfriend who is practically my age.”

 

I wince when she says the word my age.  From what I can speculate Mary is either starting her sophomore or junior year of college. I want to tell her we just broke up with Dawn like  minutes ago.

 Mary says that she loved Notre Dame but that she had a lot of friends who went to Manual and didn’t mind it at all. Her mom turns around and says yeah, but it was different then.

 “Just be careful down there. You’ll do fine anywhere you go. Just be careful. Promise me you’ll be careful. Promise me that if anyone messes with you you tell your parents or if you don’t feel comfortable talking with them you are free to talk with us.”

 

I tell Mrs. McQuellen thank you. Before I know it she gives me a hug.

 

I can tell she is thin about her son.

 

“Have a great year.”

 

Life is here...

                                                               ***
                                             

 

On the way back from Kewanee it happens. Driving in the brown station wagon down I-34, vernal buds of the spring corn beginning to bite into existence. Somehow then it happens. Somehow I break down. Suddenly I become the proverbial little dutch girl plodding her forefinger in the trickling leak of the village levy only to become one with the dyke. Suddenly I can’t hold it in any more. Suddenly I explode. Tears seemingly splinter from every molecular cell of my eight year old frame. Suddenly I can’t hold it any more. Suddenly I go crazy. Suddenly I start headbanging my head in the back of the station wagon. Dad pulls off the road so my mother can get into the backseat while my sister Beth clambers in front. I can’t stop crying. I can’t stop wailing that I miss Nana Grace.  Mom comes back and thrusts my forehead into the bottom of her neck. She is stroking me like I am a domestic pet. She is telling me that everything is going to be okay.

And still I can’t stop crying. I can’t stop yelping. I can’t stop screaming. I can't stop wailing.

I am out of control.

All I can think about is that I need to get back to Kewanee. All I can think about is that I want to go to the fresh earth of my great-grandmother’s grave and re-open the wooden log planted into the earth All I can think about is that I want to take the backside of a sheath of coloring paper and write her a letter. All I can think about is that I want to do something via words, via dipping the tip of a #2 pencil and carve away at the aching vacuity of the page. 

 

I want to tell her that I love her in my extremely dyslexic and acutely near-sighted handwriting.

I want to write her a letter and thrust it in her coffin and tell her that I love her in words.

                                                                   ***

When I get home from learning about Terry Inman I see the college girls next door. They are giggling and purportedly drunk. One is wearing sunglasses and has fritzy blonde hair. The other has short black hair and is wearing a hat.  They are their arms around each other’s bodies as they are tottering up the stairs. When they get to the top the blonde haired girl falls down. She is laughing hysterically. Her legs are up in their air.  The short haired one makes the sign of a referee indicating a field goal and yells out touch down.

“The other girl is screaming. She is crying.

“I’m laughing, I’m laughing so hard I’m going to pee!!!”

Her friend falls down beside her. I am witnessing their drunken antics. They are learning how to walk on the front porch next to my house. They don’t even know that I am watching them. They don’t even know that I am here volleying the echo of their drunken oxygen less than 15 feet away.

 

                                                                             ***

I amble around the kidney shaped lagoon in Glen Oak Park. I have just broken up with Dawn.  Part of me can’t understand why she wasn’t sobbing incontrovertibly when I took a pendulous deep breath and told her that I thought it was best if we see other people. Part of me is still in awe of her dripping vocabulary, her cunning wit, the  fresh orchard scent of her smile. As I am staring at the lagoon I see my eight year old self. I am fifteen. Eight was only seven years ago but somehow it was decades because each year in grade school is fraught with decades worth of limp entitlement. I see myself walking, losing myself, sad because the person I used to sit in front of an listen to her stories is no more. Crying because my great-grandmother is no more. Crying because this is the first time in your short life that you have lost something other than a guppy that ferried a pulse.

Crying because, even though she lost her hair to Chemo the last year of her life even though she was in a nursing home, she is still the most beautiful person you have ever met.

 You see yourself at age eight. The red headed girl with the freckles whom you inadvertently saw naked  has just broken your heart by telling you that she is engaged to Joey Lyons at recess and some sort of playschool mock nuptial is transpired near the yellow monkey bars at noon. 

 

Twenty years. My parents have been married twenty years.

 

Somehow I miss Dawn Michelle. Somehow I am wishing impossible things. Somehow I wish she wouldn’t be so infatuated with Quinn and we could go somewhere the way we used to on the West side of the stage and just spent hours drowning in the rhythm and breath of the others voice.

As I continue to walk around the circumference of the lagoon accompanied by shards of
light escaping into the cracks of the west in streaks of zinfandel, the bottom thatch of the sky the color of non alcoholic Schnapps.  I walk by the cannon and think about my parents and about high school and walking around in the cool air conditioned fortress of the mall with Dawn Michelle weeks earlier and losing myself in the trip of her voice.

The fountain in the center of the lagoon is ejaculating as if it is getting paid to be a sperm donor and if I squint, through the curtain of mist I can see everyone I love is leaving and coming back.

If I squint hard enough I can see her in the mist emanating off the haze of the fountain in the lagoon.

I think about Manual. I think about Dawn Michelle pouring over manuscripts for a pending speech in her home off Big Hollow near where Barnes and Nobles will be come four years time. I think about the music I discovered over the calendric bridge of the summer, where junior high unfolds itself like an uncreased atlas into the hallways of high school. I think about old Laurie at the bus stop and how it turned out Pam was her creative writing teacher.

 

For some reason I start thinking about Karen Christmas in Paris last spring. I wonder if she has the same memories of meeting new people and then watching them yanked out from in front of her vision the minute her heart tries to grope them in caress.

I think about Pam and how I never said goodbye.

 

I stand up.  Look at my reflection in the lagoon, even though it is a lagoon it looks more like a moat. . The last time I scrutinized my reflection in an aquatic glaze Tina was next to me in her underwear. Now I am alone.

There are always several dead fish back floating near where the taupe-colored water caresses the gravel land.

Inexplicably I start quoting lines from the Music Man. Inexplicably I am Charlie the anvil salesman and my life is somewhat stuck by the gravitational pulse of the planet.

 

I am fifteen years of age.
 

 

 

I am telling myself that he doesn’t know the Territory.  I am cussing myself out. I am on the precipice of leaving everything I have ever known.  I am an asshole. I am piece of shit. I have failed at everything I have ever tried to do. I am not pushing myself to the extent of the world class athlete I feel destined to become.

I look at everything in the water of the past.

I tug at my waist. I prop open the top of my jeans. Without looking I unzip, whipping out my unit in front of the fountain that is perennially cuming. I begin to urinate on the montage of reflected images. I am draining my body into the ripples of the past. I am try to jettison everything that is inside of me.

I am trying to leave it all behind.

I am marking the territory that Harold Hill purportedly doesn’t know.

It is coming out of my body in a liquid arch. The human beings I have been madly in love with over the past three months that I am madly in love with. That I can’t stop thinking about, they are leaving me.

Even though the sun refuses to set in its totality

I think about how Pam gave me Music, not even knowing me, casting me as the antagonist in a play I have never heard of before.

I think about how this changed my life.

I grope the fleshy baton of my anatomy and give it a final shake.

 

                                          

My penis looks like it is crying.