It's the new playground in Glen Oak Park. The playground that was designed to commemorate the 300th anniversary of appropriating white European syphilitic settlers in this area code. The playground that looks like MC Escher decided to fuck with Lincoln Logs after reading a first hand account of the French and Indian War. The fort which was named Creve Coeur which means "Cry of the heart" or "Wounded heart." Creve Coeur which is now a trailer trash suburb across the river boasting one of highest Sex-offender pedophile to citizen ratio in the state. The playground, on the other side of the river, is a labyrinthine nest of battlements and wobbly suspensions bridges and self-contained monkey bars and an historically incongruous wooden Caterpillar bulldozer, purportedly placed because Caterpillar forked over a large loose sum of change for the finished product and wished to be immortalized for their donation in a whittled stump of wood. There are enjoining sylvan parapets allowing fire-hydrant sized moppets access to frolic and skim the circumference of the fort. There are watch towers and turrets with teenage initials added by lower case t's and a moat made out of vestigial tires and a makeshift dungeon for preschool POW's that has an alternative escape entry.
Of course there are slides.
It is the Versailles of playgrounds. The newspaper covered the grand opening. The word Tri-centennial seems misleading since America just celebrated its bicentennial sixteen years prior when all except Tim were practicing pint-sized football punts in the womb.
"Dude, let's go." Patrick, who just got a new overdue ten-speed has been saying, even though we live on the opposite bluff, even though we mainly just ride around the leaf-ridden arteries of West Peoria and Bradley park environs and (occasionally) bungee bike on the 70 degree slant down Ligonier Hill near Manual. The last day of 7th grade we rode our bikes down Laramie, through the Trewyn trails, down South West Adams, past the auto junkyard with cranes that have skeletal brontosaurus necks, into Bartonville to see Hale and then, after a tip from an anonymous a they we were spotted, received Hell from progenitors upon returning home."Dude, we are going." says Patrick.
It is the second week of August. The beginning of high school and the post-pubescent prologue to the rest of our collective lives are less than two weeks away. It is 9:15 in the morning. I have already done my paper route plus run six miles with the team.
"It'll be about 11 miles round trip. I've run to Glen Oak before. It'll probably take us a half hour or so to get out there."
Patrick is vain about the new ten-speed he recently procured. I have a ten-speed I have owned for a year. Tim is still on the same BMX he has had since sixth grade even though he will be a senior in high school come two weeks time. Patrick claims that if Tim didn't fuck around so much getting his Drivers' license we would have been there by now. Tim says he is up for anything. Patrick notes that it will probably take longer to get out their with Tim's pussy bike trying to play Tour de France with the big boys.
"Let's Go," I say leaving Downs Circle, leaving the domestic port of Casa McReynolds, taking a right on Sterling, pedaling past the Franciscan center, near the bars of the sewerage drainage Patrick jettisoned the gas station bathroom condom I bought him on a trip with Hale back from Wisconsin Dells, taking a right on Heading avenue leaving behind everything we have ever known.
***
***
We cut through the six-figure homes that pass for bootlegging mansions in the Uplands, biking down Columbia Terrace, the statue of CC, an oversized joystick dwindling behind us like the yawn of a skyskraper, crossing University, Patrick pushing ahead, leaving Tim behind as we breeze past the brick stump of Columbia school, taking a stolid left at the social-demarcating boundaries at Sheridan, Patrick continues ahead, Tim just now veering left, looking like he is using bicycle safety sign language from the distance of the I-74 overpass, traffic below pawing at the interstate veins as if being reeled into looming penumbras of downtown Peoria. Near where Sheridan kisses Nebraska I stop Pat and tell him we should wait up for Tim who it is clear is on this sojourn is the caboose.
“Let Tim get his own 10 speed,” Patrick says, patting his bike as if it wielded reproductive organs.
Patrick makes little grumbling sounds under his breath. He rides on the side-walk. He pops several wheelies. He dismounts his bike and punts at the kickstand, lays on the grass in front of the abandon plasma donation center and feigns he is taking a nap. When Tim turns the corner he is out of breath., treacles of sweat boogie boarding down the top of his brow dripping off in plops.
“Pat quit patronizing Tim man. You know he’s just gonna torture you in his campaign.”
***
Almost a year and a half earlier it was the three of us only we all had BMX's and it was the end of March when we found ourselves at the back of St. Mary's Cemetery in West Peoria. We decided to explore into the unknown, dipping into the subtle creek and the woods abutting the back of the park. We have abandoned our bicycles in a self-hewed nest near the back of the cemetery. We push past the initial exclamatory barks of thin trees, hike through damp leaves, leftover foliage from last autumn, the ruffled soles of our sneakers leaving Mountain top imprints dented into the soggy topography of the earth. Everything is melting in lapsed colors of caramel and muddy taupe. The sky is the color of the ruffled fringe border on a Susan B. Anthony dollar. Silver and heavy. Breeze pecks more than whips. The earth is beginning to thaw and we are exploring. We walk into a damp corn field. 50 yards away their is an inexplicable pink silo.
We walk 400 meters. We are behind Krogers on Madison Park. We are behind the golf course where I will run Cross Country races in two years time.
There is a fence 12 feet high containing what I intuit primarily at first to be a shuffleboard court. Patrick begins to go crazy. He is frenetically pogoing up and down.
There is a fence 12 feet high containing what I intuit primarily at first to be a shuffleboard court. Patrick begins to go crazy. He is frenetically pogoing up and down.
On the ground there is what looks like plastic confetti.
"No, Dave dude, do you know what this is?"
I tell him no. Tim is scrutinizing the en-caged area with his head tilted into his shoulder blade.
"Wait, do you know what this is?"
I stop. I walk near. Patrick cannot even speak he looks like he is ready to explode.
"It's firing range. Those are bullet shells. Plus clay pigeons. Plus firing targets that look like turban clad cutouts of Iraqi Terrorists."
I am the cautious one. I am offering a
caveat.
Maybe we shouldn’t go in.
Patrick refers to me as Dude.
“I mean, dude, what are they gonna do. All we are gonna do is go
inside and get some bullet shells and some clay pigeons. What are they gonna
arrest us for really if you think about it." I look back at Patrick. I pause, gazing at the fence and its NO Trespassing patch.
I tell Patrick that he has a point.
I tell Patrick that we should go for it.
***
"This is fucking Bad ass." Patrick says.
The playground looks like a floating wooden ship. An island all to itself. An arboraceous oil rig rising above the nest of an ocean of brown grass and sand.
“Dude,” Patrick says, aloud.
“Dude.”
Tim has yet to make the turn from Nebraska onto Proctor.
We arrive at the fort-shaped playground there is a sign that says this playground is reserved for patrons under twelve years of age which Patrick replies to by flipping it the bird. Patrick immediately takes up running up the, crossing the suspension bridge. He can’t go five minutes without making a joke about how Tim is the caboose. How he is so far behind.
We get lost inside the hollowed out turrets and the battlements. Instead of mulch the surface is covered with some kind of noveau child-friendly rubber foam that looks like petrified sperm.
Patrick says that this is fucking Bad Ass again before retreating backwards up the curlie-cue slide. He scales to a top of a look-outpost and tells Peoria to kiss my hairy white ass. He reaches in his sock and fishes out a cigarette he has filched earlier in the day. He then picks up a random stick and pretends to be firing away, saying BLAM! after every shot.
"I should come here some time with Dawn. She would totally dig the cultural significance of this place."
I can’t seem to mention five minutes without alluding that I have a girlfriend who is into cool music and will be starting her senior year at the high school where kids have futures.
"You totally made her feel uncomfortable. I tell
Patrick. “I literally thought she was going to break up with me or not ask to
see me again based on the uncouth rudiments of you mannerisms alone.”
Pat burps. He says excuse me Merriam Webster. He tells me that I’ve been spend too much time with her.
She looks like an RS You B.
“What?”
“A Royal Stuck Up Bitch,”
“Patrick!!!”
“Well she does. She goes to Richwoods and she’s into
literature. They’re all stuck up bitches out there.”
“You didn’t have to eat her pizza sub.”
“You didn’t have to eat her pizza sub.”
Patrick shrugs. He makes little blam sounds from the top of the fort. When he sees Tim finally pedaling into view he suggests we hide and ambush him.
"Patrick!"
"Come on, it'll be fun."
******
Patrick is going up and
down, he is trying to get inside the firing range. Tim's anatomical width is
the size of a stripper pole. He finds an aperture where the fences overlap.
Somehow he is able to slide himself in.
It seems to infuriate
Patrick even more that Tim is the first inside. It is like he is envious
of the inhabitant in the zoo.
"I think I can get in." I say. The fence is nine feet tall.
It’s not hard to scale. Once I get to the top I swivel on leg in from t of the
other. I crawl backwards and then leap up and if into the air, my shoes prance
in a tuft of dirt.
Patrick looks like every
molecular cell is numerical ticking backwards and some sort of nuclear
implosion is all but imminent. He tries to wedge
through the femur sized gap where Tim slipped through getting one
shoulder blade In before yelping back in disdain.. He tried clambering the
webbed aluminum yanking his anatomy up the chrome of the fence, getting half
way before stuttering back down.
“Damn!!”
Tim is making fun of
Pat. I have more or less accepted the realization that Patrick will never be
able to enter the arena of our trigger-happy playground. There is something tribesman
in the way Patrick is pogroming up and down with flailed fists. Due to his
innate Irish heritage it is impossible not to make the correlation that he
looks sort of like the Notre Dame Fighting Irish Leprechaun icon.
He is pouncing up and
down.
“Maybe you can slide
down underneath.” Tim points.
The bottom of the fence
is about 15 inches. Patrick’s waistline is a solid 28 and a half inches.
He is nothing but pugnacity and pudge for an irascible Irish-bred 7th grader.
Without giving a second
thought Patrick slides himself under the front gate. He is clawing. He is
salivating. It is like he is trying to
re-enter the womb through the bottom of a barbed wire fence.
When he is half-way
beneath he is stuck. He can’t move. Tim starts to taunt him. After three more
minutes of jeers both Tim and myself will grasp one of Patrick’s abnormally hirsute
arms and tug as hard as we possibly can.
More than anything else
he just wants to be inside.
***
"Die Fucker. Blam!!!!"
Patrick is getting trigger happy with an imaginary artillery. Tim just swipes his head back and forth.
“Bout time you made it,” Patrick holds the branch just below his waist and starts making thrusting sounds, yelling out high school here I come.
Sweat seems to be parachuting down Tim’s face. It is hot. He goes over to the green water fountain where the water always seems to be ten degrees warmer than the current temperature outside. I ask Tim if he is oaky. I ask Tim what he thinks about playground. Tim asks how long we have been here to which Patrick stretches his hands and yawns.
"Oh, I don’t know. We’ve only been here for forty-five minutes. Kinda boring after you’ve been here for so long."
"Oh, I don’t know. We’ve only been here for forty-five minutes. Kinda boring after you’ve been here for so long."
Patrick hoists his rifle stick above his head
and starts humming the Olympic theme song. I am lost wondering in the flips of
Kim Zmeskal, what will happen to her career after Barcelona.
Tim asks where do you ass-fuckers suggest we go? The Glen Oak zoo? I suggest that maybe we can just pedal through Springdale cemetery and maybe stop at Emo's and get a malt before heading home.
Ever since multifarious viewing of Hudson Hawke on Showtime Patrick has been on an inexplicable How-come-you-always-have-time-to-purchase-a-cappuccino-but-never-have-time-to-drink-one kick even though he normally just takes a swig and like Hale, hands it in my direction to finish.
“How are we going to get there?”
We can just go down Proctor and pedal down War
Memorial. It shouldn’t take too long. Probably only about another five, six
miles if even that.
Patrick frisks the side pocket of his
and from his socks filters out another smoke he claims to have purloined from his mother’s
weekly stash of Benson and Hedges.
"Look. We are all the way out here and it's not even noon. We might as well just go for it. Besides, if we get to University and we are exhausted we can just duck in behind Landmark and take he Flumes to Bradley park and be home in two minutes." All agree.
We dish out our bikes from the nearby bush and straddle. Before we leave Patrick takes his stick and starts
carving the sand beneath the slide. At first I Think he is carving his
initials. Then I realizing he is scrawling all giant shaped vulgarities as if
stranded on a desert island chiseling an oversized SOS out in the sand.
He is writing the F-word.
“Patrick!!!”
There is a crooked tooth grin glued to his face.
“That’s not cool man. There’s little kids on this
playground everyday who use the slide and they are going to get exposed to
something prematurely all because you felt the need to mark your territory.”
I go back. I am going to efface the FUCK
configuration with a swipe of my foot.
Tim halts me.
There is something rather Pontius Pilate about Tim when he says what he has written, he has written.
We straddle our bikes and continue to ride.
***
There is no set chorus in the song. Ice picks over guitar riffs punctuating human loss in poignant unforgiving stanzas channeling the stampede of sorrow that is all mankind. There is thrash and there is wailing and there is an aortic caterwaul and there are drips of hurt, the sound of watching her exit your skin for the last time. There is musical carnage. The tectonic grumbling of a new found apocalypse. A book of Revelation sense of destruction. The feeling that you have failed in everything you have ever tried to accomplish on the continental scalp and topography of this planet. A miscarriage inside the pulse of your chest about the child you never thought you would conceive clad in the poetic placenta of your every wished for dream. There is a gallop. A tin foil march. The drum beat reminiscent of civil war prelude to gangrene and ash from canon fodder. Limbs strewn over the battlefield of late-20’s. Instruction to fire while watching every one around you topple in a mop of severed limbs. Watching everything you have ever believed in be snatched away from you in a dissipating cumulus of psychological cobalt.
There is thrashing.
There is night.
All is gone.
There is night.
All is gone.
Patrick is going crazy. In a manner of scattered seconds his pockets have surfeited with vacuous gun shells. He is bobbing up and down. He is picking up clay pigeons that have been serrated by bullets into triangles.
He finds a target practice sheet shaped like Saddam Hussein. He is making explosives BLAM! sounds with the tips of his fingers. He is stating take that Iraqi fucker.
“This is so fucking cool man.”
He is picking up more shells.
I ask Patrick if he is having fun.
“ Dude, man. I’m never going to leave."
***
We pedal down Proctor, past Springdale cemetery with graves dating back to the Revolutionary War, taking a hard left at Emo's, crossing the road, turning left at the whiskey-nosed clown.
We skirt down War Memorial, the whole time Tim is once again
dragging behind, the whole time Patrick looks back and continues to make prenatal labor inducing faces.
We are pedaling on the side of the road even though there isn’t a sidewalk. At
the intersection of University I look back and see Tim a good 200 meters
behind.
“Maybe we should wait up for him.”
Patrick turns back to Tim and makes the rhinoceros emblem with his fingers again.
“We should wait up for him man, the lights red
anyway.”
"Look, we can go," Patrick pushes out between opposing
streams of traffic. He then waves his hand over his shoulder like we are on a reconnaissance
mission. I follow his inky shadow. When we look back Tim is nowhere to be
found.
Patrick makes an almost uncouth comment stating that
the irony is Tim, since his vessel lacks gears that shift, is pedaling twice as
hard and he is still way the hell back there.
“Pat man we definitely have to wait up for him.”
We are near the fat wooden pagoda looking
establishment that houses Cheddars.
"We're almost there. Lets go."
We pass the spaghetti clover of 474 followed by
several chain motels that are known in the Peoria underground to house frequent
escort services. We pedal past the apartment complex that looks like the
bucolic British hamlet out of Safety Dance. We pass the Christian Center where
I had my first kiss last autumn on junior high night and where Patrick felt
compelled to interrupt during a hard core torso-rattling dry-hump session where
I was about ready to slide unfledged spike into third base, hold out his hand
and congratulate me.
Patrick has inexplicably been referring to his new twelve speed as ol’ Betsy here. He ploughs ahead, pedaling in the middle of the four lane interstate popping wheelies on the cement sand barge, riding in the middle of the interstate until cars begins to beep.
Patrick has inexplicably been referring to his new twelve speed as ol’ Betsy here. He ploughs ahead, pedaling in the middle of the four lane interstate popping wheelies on the cement sand barge, riding in the middle of the interstate until cars begins to beep.
The mall
seems to float into view.
The day is humid and overcast. It feels like we are imprisoned inside a helium tank. The Mall seems to levitate as if on a grisly carpet into view. War Memorial is pretty much a cement carpet. Patrick shifts gears and suggests that we ford across the interstate and before we know it we are driving along 70 mph missiles blitzkrieging next to us.
The day is humid and overcast. It feels like we are imprisoned inside a helium tank. The Mall seems to levitate as if on a grisly carpet into view. War Memorial is pretty much a cement carpet. Patrick shifts gears and suggests that we ford across the interstate and before we know it we are driving along 70 mph missiles blitzkrieging next to us.
“I love this.” Patrick says, as he rides sans hands,
holding up middle fingers from both hands like fuck-you wings as we glide into the parking lot, Tim nowhere to be found.
***
The first fort Creve Couer lasted less than a month. When Henri Di Toni and Sieur De La Salle went up river the remaining seven members of the expedition who had built the fort mutinied, pillaging ammunition and tools and food before heading North, leaving the fort vacant. It was destroyed by those who built it, much like the city of Peoria 300 years later, polluted and pillaged by those who have inhabited the fort of its dwelling only a short period of what is perceived as time.
***
We
handcuff our bikes together using my parents’ bike lock that looks like a
chastity belt from the late 70’s.
“Let’s
wait for Tim.” I tell Patrick. “I think I saw him as we were skidding across
University.”
“Yes,
but wait.” Patrick starts to almost inexplicably quote Hudson Hawke commenting
on how come you always have time to purchase a cappuccino but never have time
to drink one. We rush inside the mall at the Hardees formally Farrels
entrance between Montgomery Ward and Famous Barr, swamped in a mettle of
commerce. Girls with excessive hairspray that is crimped and looks like a side
order of curly fries jut past us wearing tight stone washed jeans that come up
past their waistline clacking boots as if they are evincing a court ordered
sentence.
The last time I was at the mall was two-and half weeks ago with Dawn when she sipped what seemed like a crate of Mountain Dew and I bought her Freddie Mercury and the Cure’s new album and we seeming flirted over a fumbling waterfall of Treasure Trolls.
“We
should really go back outside and wait for Tim. He doesn’t know the combination
to the locks. He’ll probably be really confused when he gets here and
looks for our bikes and doesn’t find us.
Patrick
tells me that dude, this will only take a second.
He
stops into Gloria Jeans. He orders a large Cappuccino with whip cream and
sprinkles. The model-t ford espresso maker sounds like it is passing gas after
drinking beer at a JFL chili cook off fundraiser as it concocts
his libation.
Patrick
takes a swig. A foam mustache applauds his upper lip where part
of an intractable goatee will stand come three years time.
“Okay,
you have your drink we have to find Tim.”
Patrick
says fuck Tim. He says let Tim find us.
“I’m
gonna go outside and look for Tim. I’m sure he will be waiting.”
Patrick
takes another draught of his cappuccino. He tells me once I find Tim to find
him in the arcade.
I go outside and wait near the
non-smoking section of Hardees window for Tim. I wait five minutes. There is
nothing. It seems improbable that he would have fallen this far behind. I walk
to War Memorial and place my hand like a visor over my brow staring East. Still
there is nothing.
Tim is nowhere to be seen.
I walk back inside the lower level Montgomery
Wards entrance. I see Patrick walking up to me grumbling something about
being kicked out of Aladdin's for using vulgarity.
"I told the lady if she didn't like
hearing the word Fuck go play video games across the street at Chuck E. Cheese.
Jesus. How was I supposed to know she was a nun. She looked like a
lesbian."
Patrick hands me his cappuccino. It looks
like all he did was stick his tongue in the cream on top of the
concoction.
"Tim's still not outside. I'm worried
about him."
Patrick says that Tim is fine, he probably
just had to stop at a gas station or something and take a shit. As we
are walking out of Montgomery Wards Patrick casually picks up a pair of
sunglasses off the sunglasses kiosk near the counter and places them above his
head.
"Pat man that’s theft.”
"Dude, it’ no big deal." Patrick says to
me, talking out the side of his mouth. "Just keep walking and be
cool."
"Pat man if you need sunglasses I'd be
happy to buy you the pair."
Patrick tells me to hush. He mumbles
something unintelligible out about sticking it to the man.
When we get to the water fountain Patrick says coast clear.
"Pat, man, come'on."
Pat says what? He begins to blather on about cooperate plutocracy ending with a besides, we rode all the way out here, we deserve a victory trophy. I tell Patrick that I'm gonna go back outside and wait for Tim. He holds me back and tells me I can't.
"I"m gonna need you for my next plan,"
I ask him what his next plan entails. Patrick stops like he is soliciting an old medicine man tonic promising perennially potency down in the cellar so to speak.
"Dude, what if I told you I know how to get us some tits."
I ask Patrick what he means.
“All we gotta do is go into B. Dalton and you ask
for something at the counter. I then nonchalantly pick up a Playboy
at the magazine rack and shove it under my shirt and then we walk
out, nonchalantly."
Pat tells me that dude, he has done before. I want to ask
Patrick when he started using the word nonchalant as an adverb.
“Besides, all the magazines they don’t sell they just rip
the cover off to send back to the publisher while throwing the actual magazine
away. We'll actually be using the magazine for something constructive like
ogling mounds of naked flesh.”
I give Patrick a look telling him to stop it.
"Besides, when else are you gonna get a chance to see a
girl naked? I've seen your RSUB girlfriend and she looks like she has the
bible wedged so far up her ass that when you spread her legs to go down on her the
congregation stands up for the reading of the Gospel."
I stammer Patrick's name out loud. He is laughing.
"Dawn's cool. She's a lady of character. Besides, she's agnostic."
"She has egg-nog tits?"
"Patrick!!!”
"Once Tim finds out that you filched those sunglasses your ass are going to be grass.”
Patrick says that Tim won’t be finding out since he
plans on walking out a different door from the one he came in. As we enter
the bookstore a lady with a bad perm and mole-like glasses is
behind the counter. I walk up to the counter and look down. Patrick is idling
in the corner near where the PLAYBOY/PENTHOUSE are kept in the magazine
waterfall. When the lady asks if there is anything she can help me find I
inquire about the latest Stephen King. As she point to the back my peripheral
vision spots Patrick pinching the top of the imprisoned
plastic periodical. The next time I look back Patrick is plucking at his
waistline as if he ready to take a piss. Without saying a word to the lady at
the counter I turn around and quickly walk out. Patrick shoots me a look like
what the hell that am I doing. I swear I can hear him telling me to
be nonchalant as I leave.
***
The next night I verify that Marge’s car is out of
the driveway. I go three houses down and knock on the back fence. Tina is alone,
worshiping the sun. She is wearing sunglasses and her hair is braided and
pulled back.
When I say her name she looks up at me and smiles.
"I felt like I really pissed her off, you know being
here. That things will be awkward so to speak when I come and collect from
her.”
Tina takes a drag from her hitter. She swipes her
head back and forth in a redundant fashion.
“Marge adores you. Even when she’s drunk. Hell, the
reason she even noticed you in the first place was because Marge pointed at you
while you were working and said look, that young kid has a job and is spending
his summer working and not worshiping the sun all day next to the pool.She yelled at me when she saw us fooling around the
other day and said I was I trying to
corrupt that nice young boy who had his shit together.”
“She yells at you a lot?”
Tina takes another drag.
“I mean, its no big deal really. It just almost is
what it is.”
There is silence between us. Tina splashes water in my direction. She then grins as if she is hiding something.
There is silence between us. Tina splashes water in my direction. She then grins as if she is hiding something.
“You know, if you want to see what I look like naked
the offer still stands.”
I look back at Tina. There is a smile on her face.
For a second it looks like her arms are bending behind her lower hemisphere of
her back and she is tugging at an invisible stage curtain string.
There is then laughter.
She grabs both of my hands.
She grabs both of my hands.
***
I leave the book store. I find a payphone and deposit quarters. Dawn lives less than five minutes away. Maybe
she can come and save me. Maybe she can pick me up and I can topple my ten
speed in the back of her station wagon and we can just go for a drive in the
country and blast Concrete Blonde I can leave all this drama.
There are three purrs.
When the phone picks up it is one of her younger
twin brothers.
I ask him if his sister is home.
He tells me no. Sorry she is not here right now.
Only I don’t hear it that way .
It sounds
like
“Know. Sorry she is not hear write now.”
***
I go outside. Tim is sweaty. He is worn out. For some reason he is carrying his bike like a broken surf board under his right arm. I flag him over. I show Tim where to park his vessel. I unlock the bikes before wheedling the lock through the spokes once again.
“Where’s Patrick?” Tim Inquires. I refrain from telling him that Patrick had already robbed two stores.
“He went to Aladdin’s then got kicked out.”
Tim is drenched with sweat. His BO has it own succinct waft. I ask if I can buy him a soda or something. He looks at me as if he just survived his own personal sojourn through some nondescript rung of Hades.
“Do you know where the water faucet is at?”
I tell him where it is. He struts inside the air-conditioned unit of commerce out of breath, sweat spilling from brow. It looks as if every pore has struck translucent oil.
When he finds the water faucet he dips his entire head in as if he is trying to baptize himself.
As if he is trying to be reborn.
***
***
I am in JR’s music store sipping the cappuccino that
Patrick purchased and because of an unfledged palette only licked the cream and
took two swigs. When I graduated eighth
grade I received a Mall gift certificate from Mrs. Reinhardt who was head of
the Safety Patrol which I was the captain of my 8th grade year which
I spent on Anthrax tapes. Now I am holding
up Metallica. I have money in my pocket to purchase the black album which the pictures
of the coiled snake and the don’t tread on me emblem in the lower right hand
corner. The last time I was in this store I bought Dawn Michelle the Freddie
Mercury CD she wanted and treated myself to the Cure’s Wish which I can’t stop
listening to night after night.
Soon this summer will be gone.
Soon this summer will be gone.
I slide out the imprisoned black cassette. Just as I
am walking towards the counter to make my purchase I feel a yank on my arm.
It is Tim. He is a born again Christian. Somehow he
always feels compelled to talk like he is condemning me.
“Come, Metallica is not for you.”
We walk out the exit door near the Hardees. We have
been inside the mall for only fifteen minutes even though it seemed like it
took forever for us to get here.
Now it is time to leave.
***
The third part of the song commences with a piano interlude, ivory bubbling up from the spring of the earth in dyslexic tear drops. The human heart thawing after the bitter winter of isolation and hurt. The Chance to be reborn. The world animated again, baptized ascension baited and hooked from the deepest echelons of hurt. A steady duet with the piano and guitar leading like Virgil to Dante, through a nesting purgatorial spiral, moving upward against the rash of the elements, the electric synaptic flutter of ionized particles dancing above, knowing you are headed into that halo, the aerie Xanadu, leaving everything you have ever known only to be that which you had set forth to somehow become.
***
Outside the mall I unlock the master lock emancipating our vessels.
We take off. Patrick asks where do we want to go now that we are out here. Tim says
we might as well go over to Toys R us since it is across the street. We are next to Famous Barr. As we pedal there
is a gaseous pause. Patrick falling behind, his bike tilting into the gravel of
Northwoods mall parking lot.
Patrick's back tire has atrophied. It is flat.
Patrick begins to curse.
Tim begins to point. He starts to laugh before mentioning something about Karma being a bitch.
Patrick begins to curse.
Tim begins to point. He starts to laugh before mentioning something about Karma being a bitch.
Patrick alights the handle bars of his newly purchased
10 speed over his head and slams it down like Moses breaking a copy of the first
edition. He begins to scream. He is caroling out the word fuck. He is kicking
the side of his bike.
Tim can’t stop letting Pat have it. He is saying
that his prosthetic pecker is impotent. He starts popping wheelies. Patrick’s
face looks like a bruised plum. He is cursing. He is screaming out fuck and
shit. He is stating how his bike is completely worthless.
Tim glides past him and pops another no handed
wheelie.
"It's a fucking flat man and we're way out here what the fuck are we gonna do?"
Tim says see ya and acts like he is leaving. Patrick can't stop cursing and stamping his foot down on the side of the vehicle. Tim states that the reason Patrick's tire is limp is because it matches his cock. Several adults walk past muffling their hands over their children's ears.
Thinking that Patrick has already picked off eyewear and light-porn I suggest we get the hell out of here.
"And where do you suggest we go, Einstein?"
Tim says how about Limp Tire Cock shop. Patrick grabs the half-finished cappuccino from my right hand and hurls it in Tim's direction. Tim ducks. The beverage hits the side of an unassuming Volvo.
"Shit."
"Fuck!!!"
"Patrick come on. Let's just get out of here. We'll get your bike fixed. Let's go. Remember, nonchalant."
Patrick whips the sunglasses he stole from Montgomery Wards out of his side pocket and onto his face. Due to the presence of light-porn stowed under his shirt and upper pants he is walking semi-hunched over as if he has an appendicitis.
Tim continues to roast Patrick, nearly all of Tim's jabs somehow correlate Patrick's unit to the deflation of his front tire.
"Remember Patrick. Nonchalant. Just be nonchalant."
"Fuck."
***
“You listen to gangsta rapper it’s nigger-nigger this. Nigger-nigger that.”
The water in the pool is slinking up to my kneecaps. We are seated on the edge, near where the diving board used to be. We are splashing each other.
There is a moment of quietude. I have called Dawn three times since Patrick inadvertently digested part of her Pizza sub. She has not returned any of my calls.
In the pool our reflection is distilled back at us in winking aquatic wrinkles that somehow appear glazed.
“I’m really glad I met you,” I tell Tina, groping her hand.
“It’s been a really crazy summer. There’s been a lot of people I thought I was really close to and it turned out I wasn’t really all that close with any of them at all.”
Tina takes another hit of whatever it is she is smoking, blowing it in my direction after each breath.
“Too bad we’re going to different high schools. I really would have liked to have had lunch with you and see you between classes” I say, momentarily forgetting that I prevaricated, telling her that I was going to be a Junior instead of a Freshman.
“Yeah, I’m at Central and your living it up down the hills with all those niggers.”
“What!?!”
“I’m at Central and you are down and Manual with all those thugs, gang bangers and niggers. I mean you’ve already been there two years, I don’t understand how you put up with them.”
“Don’t call them that!”
Tina says what? Thug?
I say no, the other word.
I say no, the other word.
“Nigger?”
“Yeah, that’s just pejorative as shit. Don’t say that word.”
“Why, it's just a word.”
I begin to get irate. I can’t explain it.
Tina says I don’t say it. She says that they call themselves that.
I tell her that’s different and that she knows it. Just, please, you can say any other word in front of me, just don’t say that word.
Tina looks back at me. Overhead the moon sprinkles it’s light into the pool in circles and beams.
"Okay," Tina says, thinking I am two years older.
"I don't know how you do it down there. I really don't."
***
The three of us walk our bikes across Sterling
Avenue. We head in the direction of Toys R Us. Midway across Sterling Tim
straddles his BMX and begins to pop wheelies even though traffic unforgivingly jousts at us from both directions.
When we get to West Lake I say wait. Both Tim and
Pat pause.
“There’s a Tuffy Muffler over there behind Denny’s.
Maybe we can go over there and tell the guys that you have a flat and maybe
they have some sort of adhesive or something to fix it up.”
We walk into the grisly knave of the muffler shop where
vehicles are hoisted above ground using retractable metal pillars. A worker
comes out wearing a patch over one eye and smoking a Pall Mall. I have thirty
dollars in my pocket. If somehow it comes to more we will have to call home and have a very disgruntled parent complain about driving all the way out here just to pick up their dumb kid.
The man with the eye-patch and the beard looks at
the bike like it is something he just fished out of the gulf. I point to Patrick, he gulps as he tried to explain the situation.
“Hold on a second,” He says.
He comes back. The Cyclops inquires who the bike
belongs to. He then asks if he can take the bike into the back room for a second.
Patrick nods.
When the Cyclops dissipates in the back Tim says
that that guy looks seedy and states that in his professional opinion Patrick
will probably never see that bike again. Patrick says fuck. The tv in the waiting room is showing static. I try to make a joke stating I am watching CNN Hoth to which none of my nerdy colleagues laugh.
Pat walks up and pours himself a Styrofoam cup of coffee, filling it half way with sugar. Tim asks Pat what he is doing. Pat says that he is a paying customer so he might as well enjoy a cup on the house so to speak.
The Cyclops brings the bike back out.
“I patched it up and put some air into it the back
tire. It should be fine as long as you just ride straight home.
I want to tell the Cyclops that home is another 3 1/2
miles away and that we have to cut through the woods only I refrain.
"How much do we owe you ?’ I say, pulling out my
wallet
The Cyclops smiles. I have a ten dollar bill in my
hand.
“It’s on the house. Just you kids be careful. Don’t ride over any
shards of glass or anything.”
Patrick is giddy. He makes what looks like a Ranger
Rick boy scout pledge and says that he promises we won’t.
I reach out and shake the Cyclops hand. He smile
before taking another drag
“You kids be careful out there. It’s hot out there today. Make
sure you are hydrated and drink lots of water. Sometimes it’s a long way home.”
***
The piano interlude is punctuated with a chord that
sounds like spring, dappled with instrumental thaw and melodic dew, the naked feminine body
of the planet genuflecting as if in dereference, as if in prayer, with her ass
poached into the compass of flesh, the thrust of her pelvis, her eyes snapping,
waiting to be fucked, waiting to modulate and change something you leave inside
her, something you forget, something that escaped from you in a series of
gravitational bursts, the feeling of sweat percolating off the bridge of your
brow, the feeling that this exhausting seminally fogged window pain of reality
somehow just isn’t about you, the feeling that your body is bipedal peripatetic
casket of ashes, the feeling that you are disintegrating at the same time you
are giving birth and the same time you are leaving yourself, at the same time
you are being born.
***
As we leave Westlake Center Patrick no longer vies to get ahead. Our vessels are healed, a patched trinity of ships, casting sails with our shadows, drifting into the unknown ocean away from the nautical port of our youth into something inscrutable and unknown.
High school is in less than ten days.
We pedal south into the direction where we first
began. We pedal past Pizza Inn and Theo’s
on the opposite side of the street. We continue to ride. Patrick is not
thrusting ahead. Tim has refrained from letting him have it. We are riding on
three separate carriages and somehow we are one. Somehow this crazy journey to
find the tri-centennial playground was all about itself. Somehow it was all about each other.
We continue to ride.
Patrick takes out a another smoke he stole from his mother
earlier in the week and fires it up even though he is only 14 years of age. Tim
who always talks about cancer rates in non-smokers refrains from admonishing him
.
.
As we pedal we have found our brotherhood again.
It is going on three o’clock in the afternoon. With the exception of the cappuccino I
slurped at the mall I have had nothing to eat since breakfast.
I ask my compatriots if they are hungry. Taco Bell
sits on the edge of Newman Gold course. I look at my brothers.
I tell them I have money in my pocket.
I tell them I will buy.
***
I apologize to Tina. I can tell she is still irked. Tina said its no big deal. She says every one is entitled to his/ her own opinion.
The moon looks like fungus-ridden toe-nail overhead, its reflection boomeranging back to us in the pool.
"Marge will be here shortly. You should probably go. She'd flip out if she caught us together two nights in a row."
"Okay, again, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to snap at you the way I did. It's just that something about that word gets under my skin."
Tina takes another hit and remains cold. She thanks me again for stopping by. I remember how awkward it was saying goodbye to Dawn after Patrick gorged on her pizza sub and how she hasn't returned any of my calls since. I feel like maybe I should give Tina a hug goodbye. I feel that maybe I have marred our friendship since I snapped at her for saying that word.
"Okay," Tina says, I feel her resin saturated lips on my cheek.
Dawn, my purported girlfriend with the drop-dead vocabulary has never initiated anything close to that.
"I'm really sorry again," I say, as I head toward the back alley entrance, "Maybe I can come over tomorrow and we can go swimming or something."
Tina takes another drag.
"I'm always going swimming, " She replies, "I'm really a mermaid," Tina amends, "Even when I'm out of the pool part of me is always just a lil' bit wet."
***
As Patrick plows the first Taco through his lips he makes
the keen observation by proclaiming that if God had intended man not to eat Pussy
he wouldn't have made it look like a Taco. It meaning pussy. Tim says the word gross with his
mouth open and begins to chant incantations at Patrick, claiming he is socially
demented.
We are boys. We have been traveling all day. We are
feasting. We are victorious. We have conquered together. Hot
sauce in what looks like STD clinic lube packages is ripped open and generously
splurted. Patrick says that he always feels like he is King Montezuma of
ancient Aztec tribes every time he eats Mexican food because two hours later he
invariably finds himself on the porcelain throne, if you know what I mean. Tim
looks nonplussed. We continue to feast. In less than five minutes thirty
tacos have been reduced to less than nine. Patrick takes hard core swigs of his
drink, goes back to the drink counter and makes a graveyard, which also prompts
Tim to make additional open mouthed ewe sounds
We have three miles until we get home and a healthy
chunk of that is coasting down Sterling Hill.
Somehow, through the scramble of calendar squares constituting this
crazy summer, it feels like we have accomplished something sacred together.
I free
the bicycles from their combination inducing manacle. Patrick is
laughing out of control. Tim is waving his hand in front of his
rather-pronounced nostril like he is waving goodbye to someone sideways after
taking a shot of lemon juice.
As we enter the parking lot I attack the lock on
the bike like I am trying to prick open a bra that opens in front.
Patrick lifts one leg and publicly announces that he plans
on farting Canadian style before ripping one, laughing uncontrollably.
"Wait, I can fart voluntarily.”
Spontaneous but if on cue Patrick straddles the
almost banana-bike cushion of Tim’s hand me down BMX, closes his eyes, scrunches
his face and blasts an encore on Tim’s seat.
Tim explodes. He launches At Patrick. He is
moherfucker. He is a used thrift store dildo.
Patrick’s face is the color of Hawaiian Kool-Aid. He is still laughing uncontrollably,.They are on the ground.
I leap on the both of them like we are trying to
recover a recently fumbled football. Patrick’s Playboy falls out like a scroll
from the inside of one of his pants leg.
.
That we are here for a very short time in the evaporating egg-timer of the universe.
We are not here very long.
But we are here.
Patrick kicks me in the nads.
"Fucker," He says, with a toothy grin.
***
We mount are bikes ready to head home. Tim asks how far. I say it is just down Sterling then we cut through the Nuclear Woods behind Nate's house and back home. A little more than three miles.
The bulk of our sojourn is competed.
Then it happens. Against all cosmological vagaries of logic--it happens again. Right when we are wheeling our way out of Taco Bell parking lot, taking a left on Sterling. Tim has started out ahead of us all. There is the sound of concrete scraping against metal and Patrick is cursing. He is screaming fuck. He is screaming not again. He has dismounted his bike and is calling ol' Betsy here as piece of shit.
"It go flat again?" I inquire. Only it is not the front tire. It is the back. The tire that the pirate patched up at Westlake center is still fine.
"FUCK!!!" Patrick shrieks.
Tim has backpedaled. Inconceivably Pat's opposite tire that now has a flat. Tim falls off his bike laughing.
"Fuck!!!"
Patrick picks his 10 speed up and slams it on the edge of the parking lot.
Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.
***
The song decrescendos one final time, the pattering of acidic rain on loose shingles. He is jumping into the river to many times to make it home. He is kicking
the atmospheric uterus of the skyline with Harley-Davidson cowboy boots. He is
breaking the shell of the earth in shards of pyramids and broken forties. He is
scaling the vernal periscopic stalk of an unknown flower, past cumulus that
looks like dry-tea bags. He is releasing himself in a rivulet of tears (not his
own). He is cutting himself from above and watching his blood precipitate
galleries of life beneath tattered lips of his jeans. He is getting tattoos of
St. Augustine from working class Angels with barbed wire halos. He is releasing everything left inside of him
even though he is ejaculating ashes and blood.
He is jumping into the river.
There is a payphone in the parking lot of Taco Bell near where we previously chained up our bikes. There is no one here to patch up the hole in Patrick's tire. I make the suggestion that maybe I can try calling up Dawn and she can pick us up because she has a station wagon.
Patrick scowls before commenting that there is no way in Hell that he is going to let that RSUB give him a ride home.
"Maybe if you buy her a pizza sub..."
Patrick takes his mostly ice filled Taco Bell soda cup and tosses it in my direction. He screams out the word fuck. He again kicks the side of his bike several times.
Tim is off in the corner laughing even harder.
"We can walk then. It's not that far. Maybe another three miles at most."
As was the case in the parking lot of Northwoods Mall Tim just won't let up. He is popping wheelies on his BMX. He is stating that he has owned his BMX for almost going on he believes a decade now and he never had a flat once. Hell. He never even put air in the tires. Patrick is saying bullshit.
We keep on calling. No one is home.
"Patrick seriously man, it's just not that far. We can just hoof it."
Patrick says seriously fuck that. Tim grapples the phone from Patrick and bums two quarters. He hangs up governing intent.
"Just got ahold of dad. He's pissed we're all the way out here but said that he'd pick us up in the truck in about twenty minutes."
Pat seems pissed that he has to wait.
"Listen guys, I'm just gonna ride on home. I'll call you guys tonight."
Both Patrick and Tim nod as I take off down Sterling by myself.
I say goodbye by informing them in the teenage colloquial that it has been real.
***
The song ends with a simply piano chord, a quantum pebble reverberating in the rippling
tectonic cosmic soil at the epigram of time. It is the cry of the heart. It is
the callous of the past coalescing with the hurt that tomorrow, in all it's
wizened glory will invariably concede--the people you love who will hurt you,
the lovers that will fuck you over, that people you trust will mortgage
your dreams and the tic of the your menstruating
heart will find itself alone again and again and again, jumping into the
river to be reborn, drowning in the inky swill of the past to find
its reflection in the mirrored countenance of tomorrow, the bandied staccato of
youth, resilient, no more, ever persistent, ever yelping, ever fighting to
realize that this life we all find ourselves expiring across the batting
sunrise of her eyes and you fuck the hell our of her, as bite her forehead and
breasts with the guitar calloused tip of your fingers, as you remove yourself
from the semi-moist vortex between her thighs, as you leave her tittering and
covering, slicing the denim stilts of your jeans past the caps of your knees
like scissors.
As you leave all alone.
***
Pedaling down the flank of Newman golf course I look back at
my comrades twice. The first time they look like a like the looming silhouette
of the spires cast from Gaudi’s masterpiece. The second time they look like two
keyholes smashed together. When I get to
edge of the golf course, near the green and yellow tent showcasing summer stock
at the tip of the park they are a blurred apiary nest of lost.
Still they are one.
I fall down Sterling Hill. It feels like I am unzipping
everything that is inside of me. I let
off the chrome thumb of my handle-bar breaks and fall, gliding into whatever future
awaits, accumulate speed.
I go into the Nuclear woods. The woods we always retreat
into after a night of gaming to have water gun fights while the screeching tangerine light of dawn stings the east. The woods I will later live in, behind Nate Lockwood's old house, the same house with 20 acres
of land in back where I will plant my writers desk in the woods, going out every morning with a six pack pummeling away at the rows of keys while deer totter past.
It is some sort of a sylvan uterus I am passing through.
Somehow I know that things will be different in the next couple of weeks.
Somehow I know that things will be different in the next couple of weeks.
My dad is wearing his undershirt, green shorts and socks
that creep into the bulbs of his hairy knees. He is watering moms hostas and perennials
that always seem to get uprooted because we live on the corner.
Dad smiles when he sees me.
When he asks me where I have been I tell him the truth. I
tell him we rode our bikes all the way out to Glen Oak Park to see the new playground. Then I tell him that we kind of dared each other and rode down Proctor avenue and all the way down War Memorial ave to Northwoods mall. The Patrick got a flat and we walked our bikes over to Westlake where this guy who looked like a pirate patched it up.
Then we rode home.
I neglect to inform my father of the antipodal flat or that Pat and Tim are still waiting at the taco Bell on Sterling for Old Man Flanagan to pick them up.
Dad is upset at me.
When Father is upset he calls me by my first and last name.
Then we rode home.
I neglect to inform my father of the antipodal flat or that Pat and Tim are still waiting at the taco Bell on Sterling for Old Man Flanagan to pick them up.
Dad is upset at me.
When Father is upset he calls me by my first and last name.
“Sometimes, David Von Behren, you simply go too far.”
--Written for Patrick McReynolds and Tim Flanagan, both with love and the timelessness evaporated youth and (in a weird way) for Axl Rose…
ReplyDeletephotos of the tri-centennial playground by Valena. Jackson, whom I have been blessed to traverse with as she chronicled the glory of this sunken continent with the blink of her photogenic lens...you kickeass angel...
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