Meet #6: Richwoods

 

They hail from the school in the north side of town. The school where the kids have futures. The school where all the Doctors and lawyers send their progenies. The school where kids have Advanced Placement programs and live in houses with outdoor pools and get posh vehicles on their 16th birthday. They arrive to Madison Golf course in five buses which a special shuttle for the seven varsity athletes. They all have blond hair and braces. They look like a flotilla of green smurfs.  There are green jerseys as far as the eye can see.

You could place our team in aYuGo and still have room.
 

“What it is with the schools out there is parental involvement.” Hans LoGrotto notes. “The parents want their kids to be involved in extra-curricular activities., so the parents get involved."

I want to tell Hans that four of our teammates our already fathers but I refrain.

There are controversies that for basketball especially Richwoods recruits athletes from the southside . There was an article in the paper how  a basketball recruit I sent to Christ Lutheran with who lived across the street from Aldi’s moved to a house in the north side so that he could attend Richwoods, his landlord opportunely being also the varsity basketball coach at the school.

I have just had the fastest race of my life.


 Before the race my father comes up to me again and tells me what he always tells me.

"God give you a good run."

I have already scribed 17:19 on the interior white of my arm during Mme Suhr's 6th hour French. I refrained from drinking milk or eating bread all day. I loose. I am light.This is the race. I am hopping up and down. I am taking deep and calculated breaths. I am focusing on race. Every time I close my eyes I see the tetragrammaton of neon digits forming 17:19. Every time I take a deep breath I am envisioning myself across the chute.

 This is my race.

I have worked all summer for this. I have run three times a day. There will be no wrong turns as with Woodruff and at Pekin. There will be no jostling and shit-talking as there was with Central.


There is a sense that we can do this. There is a sense that even though we are outnumbered 150-15 we can still kick their blond headed truss-funded overtly privileged ass. We do our stretches. Coach tells myself and Peacock that this team is known for boxing in and to just aim for 5:30 mile splits. He says that we are running with a more elite crowd.

"This may be a good meet for the two of you to make a statement."
 

We huddle for our pre-game ritually which has somehow morphed into Leatric asking everyone the rhetorically query of  'What side is this?' to which we echo back 'SOUTH SIDE!!!' in unison before sprinting to the start.

I nod. I say the word statement again. We line up at the start. This is the largest team we are racing against. As the gun cackles we take off.

The first 100 meters I look into the white of my arm for my said record-decimating time.  


I am drowned.

Peacock is fighting to vie for position. Almost 90 percent of the boys have semi-gelled haircuts and are wearing braces.  Their plan seems to have twenty runners go out fast the first 400 meters. I am next to Peacock. We are staying steady. We own this course. Madison park, rising up like a neo flat top above the loose shingles and working class dregs of the southside.

We own this course. We are pushing ourselves. For some reason much in the same fashion that Pekinites employed the N-bomb to address our team as a whole regardless of color, I feel like addressing Richwoods as self-righteous nepotistic economically delusional republicans, even though I know this is not true since Dawn Michelle is one of the most liberal and free thinking individuals I have ever met.

Near hole 5, 1200 meters in I am next to Peacock. The lead from Richwoods looks like Gumby. He seems to grunt an exorbitant amount when he runs. It sounds like he is having sex and having a hard time ejaculating. I am running with confidence. I am next top Peacock.  This is my third race. My third endeavor to break my cousin's record.

This is the time it will happen.

I continue to push forward. Because of Richwood’s mascot being the Knights it is impossible not to think of them as if they are guarding something while running.

The first mile is 5:14. Perhaps too fast. I am well on pace to trump my cousin’s record. Peacock is well on pace to chronicle his own Personal Best. We have emerged as the two leaders of our team in the inscrutable absence of our captain Jose.  We our fighting. Richwoods Gumby leader who won’t let us past. Every time he snaps his cleats down Peacock and myself are behind him. I look down at the 17:20 scrawled on the interior of arm.  Just listening to Gumby breath makes me want to toss an inhaler at him. As we turn behind the ELKS an unprecedented six other Green-shirts seem to be on our heels.  None of them were in the first battalion who started out the first half mile sprinting. Two go off course and sprint past myself and Peacock, getting ahead of their lead runner who is still echoing post-coital grunts. Two more are flanked on the side. Three are behind. We have a steady pace but we have slowed down. Mile number Two is 10:55.  Still fast.  My father is looking into his watching, smiling, yelling that I am doing great. Yelling that I am on course to ascertain my elusive goal. I am locked in. I look at Peacock. When we try to surge it appears that runners in front of us all but stop, form plus-signs  with their upper limbs thwarting us from advancing. Then they start running again.

We harry over the subtle mounds abutting the side of the Golf course directly above the gun range.  There is no reason Peacock and myself cannot go one two even though we are locked in.
Several other of the blonde haired truss-fund Richwoods fucks are trying to block us.  Gumby is getting further ahead.
 

Peacock and myself shoot past one blonde the three  blonde haired and braces as lads we begin to push. At this moment the record is mine to lose. One of the blonde headed lads flings is arm out as we blast past.  Peacock is behind me as we curve towards the brick avenues and six-figure homes dotting Manor parkway.  Gumby is trying to place a surge in, still sounding like he is huffing asbestos.

I kick . I am next to him. At this pace I am easily around 16:30. I am ready to decimate the FROSH record my cousin set in 83 when he entered Manual to be a Wrestler and his Coach told him he should just take Cross Country to shed a few pounds and he ended up finding his high school calling.

I bite my lip and look down.  Sexually frustrated Gumby is directly ahead. The turn towards the finish line where we make a parabolic skitter across the actual Golf course is upcoming at hole 5.

The last time I was in this position was the first race. The last time I was running with Jose and Peacock and went ahead instead of turning I went an extra hundred meters which cost me not only first place but also the record.

 I wonder how many of these kids see nothing but green every time they privy into their bank account.,  I wonder how many will

At the half mile mark, near hole 5 I am fourth.  For a second it seems like even though I have been playing catch up through a forest of Green jerseys that I can catch them. For a second it seems like I will be able to not only snap but obliterate  my cousin’s record of 17:20.  I look at Peacock. Gumby is cursing under his agape lips in plosive breaths. Its like Peacock knows that I have to do what I need to do.

It's like he knows that this is my time.

For a minute I take the lead. For a minute the only thing I am focused on is quashing those digits. For a minute I am pushing myself knowing exactly where the turn is, ready for the home stretch,
 

Everything happens at hole five along the brick contours of Manor Parkway.

Everything happens at hole five where we turn to cut across the golf course and head home.

 

 

                                              

 

A second before it happens I see Kim Zmeskal’s pale countenance and her saltine thighs. I see her falling off the La Sagrad Familia and I am trying to catch her.  I am performing wind-sprints across the inky swill of the Atlantic, finding her petite frame in Barcelona.

I am running to her and she is falling only I cannot catch her. 

I the moment I fall it feels like she is falling next to me, off the balance beam in Barcelona. At the moment it feels like we are simultaneously both writhing, keening in incontrovertible pain

                    

 

Peacock is the first to look back. . I am stomping the ground as if I am trying to put on a vicarious conflagration set to my anatomy. I grimace. The side of my right leg feels like it is being snapped and  plucked from the interior ligament of my thigh before being whittled with a potato peeler commonly reserved for obscure Irish Castration rituals.. I have been running with my father since I was five years old. The first time we went running was around Madison golf course. I t was in November and he was wearing socks on his hands for gloves.

I have never experience a pain this seething.

 Peacocks looks back. I make a motion for him to go. For him to haul ass. For him to say fuck all these hoity-toity rich kids on the North side of town with their coifed blonde hair and their braces. Just keep going.

 I swat at him.  While Peacock is by my side Gumby and three kids soar past. I swat at Peacock again. I don’t know what is wrong. I am digging down everything that is inside of me. I am fighting. I am running with a limp. It feels like my leg in anvil. For every step I take it drags it is holding me back.

 

 

I watch Peacock’s back shoot forward trying to catch sexually-frustrated Gumby.

 

I am wobbly. I am not stopping. Behind me are a bastion of encroaching green shirts.  Every time I set my foot down there is a burn. I snort several times oblivious that I am sucking up icy tears.

 

My last race at Morton and I had competed the course at this time. Now I still have half mile left to go.  

When I try to move I fall.

It feels like I am down for over an hour. When I look up I am being stampeded over by a European sea of Green Shirted lads, none of whom have stopped to help. I try to move. A pain screeches up through my leg. I look behind. Logrotto is making a turn at hole 5.

It is a blanket of Green. It is flooding at it is everywhere. It looks like pine forest trying to swim.

They all have blonde hair. The sun ricocheting off the top of their scalps.

It seems unreal. An animated shag carpet of plowing emerald. I can’t go the speed I would like. 

                                   

 

I get up. Even though I can't walk I am determined to finish the race.

I battle my way past the kids with coifed haircuts and  posh dental insurance. I battle my way past the sons of six figure income. I still can’t see Peacock. I am pushing myself even though I know I shouldn’t. I don’t know why I hurt so bad. I am thinking about my cousin's record. . The last hundred meter I pick off five of them to finish eleventh, the lowest I have finished in a dual race so far this season.

I cross the finish line limping. In a way it looks like I am skipping through the chute even though there is a grimace splattered across limp. Coach has a look of concern melted into his face. I should have perhaps pulled out of the race.  Even limping that last half mile I still beat 18:00 minutes by a tenth of second.  Had I not I would have shattered the FROSH record. Had I not the morning announcements would have said my name with a new freshman record.

The second consecutive dual race we are swept. Richwood’s goes one-two-three-four-five.  

Peacock was the only one to finish in the top ten. I am number eleven. Seven Green coats will finish before Hans and Quaynor. I don’t know what happen. This was supposed to be my race. I was supposed to be celebrating.

 I exit the chute. Peacock is bent over. As I stake a step the ground pushes up  and I face down, the scent of autumnal clover and burnt leaves somewhere distant in the air filling every pore of my body. My coach is down on one knee as if he is proposing. My father is next to him.

 I don’t know what happened. One second I was running,

I pull up next to Coach. I finish in the top ten though I am hurting.

“I don’t know what’s wrong.  Something happen after a mile and half.  It was like something popped only it didn’t. It felt like I was running on one leg the last mile and a half.

I keep apologizing even when Coach tells me to be still. I keep apologizing for failing.

Coach is taping me up. I am hobbling. I tell Coach I don’t know what is wrong. I almost broke sixteen minutes a week ago in Morton.


There will be no record even though I was well on track until the last 200 meters.

I don’t know what is wrong.

A broken frame

The next week I go back to Co-op in campus town. I get the second album. There is a picture of what looks like a gypsy wielding a sickle on the cover. It still has the skyscraper sleeve. I remove the disc out of the elongated sleeve as the hippie behind the counter pints to a receptacle reminding me to recycle.


I nod.

 While walking home I stop at Mr. DONUTs and get a large coffee with cream and sugar. The young Columbus is always the last thing  on my mind yet it is always somehow looming. It is looming when I play DepecheMode, thinking about Karen Christmas last spring, wondering what she experienced. Thinking about the rush of traffic skirting along the Champs-Elysées.

It sounds like being ensconced in an amplified cavern  before slowly being suffocated by synthesized stalactites and day-glow bulbs of light. It is the first album that martin Gore pens in its entirety and which Dave Gahan’s vocals are threaded through the entire corpus. The album begins with a breath. A plosive whisper, a secret in the shape of a cosmological tear dripping like a wished for Chinese water torcher christening drop on the frontal lobe after each track.There is a syncopated warble. There is a constant echo, yelping into a chasm, an emotional abyss, the voice ricocheting back of you being not of your own, but of a British Angel.

The title track feels like the synthesizer is overturned and it a tempest is pending, looming. It is benevolent. It came out a year before Construction time again. It came out when I still would have been in preschool, an incantation of drones, there is something still-life- muffled porcelain in he way the song SEE YOU sounds, like it is trying to traverse through the heavily rococo slits of stain glass cathedral.

 After listening to a Broken frame I still can’t move. I arrive to school an hour early to do laps in the pool. My stress fracture is not healing as plan. I can hardly walk much less run. I feel like I did at the outset of Young Columbus—it seems like the harder I want something the more it perennially eludes my grip.

                                                             

Something that will never fully arrive.

 

Coach is pleased. We do speed work around the elliptical cinders of the track. We run six miles and perform 10 400 meters sprints clocked at around a minute each in a row. The next day we run around the golf course and meet and Heading avenue where we sprint the entire duration of the block in under three minutes, rest and then sprint again the opposite direction.

 

We are getting faster. There is a ten day lull between Morton Invite and our next meet at Madison golf course vs. Richwoods.

Coach tells me to work on speed. Coach tells me that there should be no reason that I should not be able to break my cousin’s FROSH record of 17:20. He tells me to stay focused. He tells me to make sure I get eight hours of sleep every night, which mean s going to bed before nine since I get up at 4:30 for my route.

 He tells me that soon I’ll be walking into the pool atrium and see my name on the CROSS COUNTRY record board.

 I blush.

I want you to think about the race before you go to bed.  The race is yours, Von Behren.

The race is yours.

 

 I continue to bleed on top of my math book every night. I got two consecutive D pluses on the first two weekly quizzes. The next three have been solid C’s. I am fighting. Patrick says that he is dropping out of the class because he can’t stand Aron Rothman. Because he is sick of his shit. Because he feels belittled by Mrs. Peabody.

 

If you drop first hour man that means that she won. Plus we won’t have every class together.”

 Patrick shrugs.

Between Mrs. Peabody and Aron Rothmann its the better of Hitler and Mussolini.

"So you're leaving?"

"Dude, I am already gone."

 

 

 

Mermaids singing each to each...

 

 

Renae tells me that no one is allowed to call her on thurs during Beverly Hills 90210 because that is when she tapes it along with Melrose place and then she takes a long shower and watches it again as she is falling asleep. Somehow I learn that Renae refers to her cadre of Limestone bandmates as :the gang” and the the ‘gang’ seems to have some sort of weird affinity towards British comedy, most noticeably Monty Python and the Holy Grail which Renae claims that she personally doesn’t have on VHS but always seems to watch it every time she goes over to Laura’s as some de facto sleepover ritual.

Somehow we talk to each other Mon, Tues and Thurs. Somehow even though we are lost in the  echoing vocals of each other’s anatomy we have not made plans to meet again. I call her after band and she calls me after Gross-Country practice respectively I tell her that I really enjoyed being with her. I tell her about my chance to achieve High School immortality by breaking the FORSH cross-country home record at my next meet .

“I really enjoyed watching school ties. I mean, Brendan Fraisier. He really has a nice ass.”

"Yes," I say, for some reason concurring, "He has a nice ass indeed." before I think to myself that perhaps I have finally found my mermaid I was looking for.

                                 
 

                                                          

Our First Quiz in Cool Joe Thomas’ class. A student in the front row raises his hand And asks if it is okay if we use our notes. Cool Joe Thomas shags his head back and forth as if he has an equine mane in lieu of a toupee and says absolutely not.  He blathers on about college and the importance of learning how to be prepared.

He has not taught any of the material. Afterwards a few students will compare their exams to what is in the text and say that some of the stuff he tested us on is not in the book at all.

You all need to be prepared, cool Joe Thomas tells us again, informing us not to worry, after the curve the class avg. is a low C.



 

                                                                        

“I thought about you in French today. We had a quiz fashion show type-thingie and I was the MC and I was really really really nervous and I thought about you behind me giving me a little back massage telling me that everything is going to be okay and it was.”

In school I am walking behind myself, arriving early, changing into my pledge of allegiance duds getting ready for PE,  hooping running laps,  pushing myself. , walking naked between the chrome phallic of overhead shower heads that seem to be ejaculating into a cup with  drizzles of water, while all the while thinking about the females next door, unpinning outfits from limbs of their body, a butterfly slapping the diaphanous scent of wings, walking behind myself in high school, lockers reverberating is distinct clang, seated in Home room, embarrassed, feigning to be brushing over conjugating French verbs as the lithe feminine voice crackles the announcement, Coach stating the success of the  Cross country team over the weekend, the bell sounding more like a nasal-mishap  board game of OPERATION as I shuffle between classes, Patrick meeting me, referring to Aron Rothman as Merde-tete, or shithhead, as we slide into the linoleum classroom of Miss Peabody where she does proofs, belittling us, informing us that we are below the state level. I think about how Dawn Michelle conveyed to me over out late night phone calls that she hasn’t taken a math class in two years and fills her afternoon taking AP English, creative writing and poetry classes, as The bell sneezes Patrick and I make a beeline out the door coughing throughout the hallway, Patrick still be unable to refrain from saying dude he wants to hit that shit every time a female saunters by, crinkling the results of our last quiz, always in the lower 70’s., entering Coach Mann’s classroom where he always looks at us like a drill Sgt at cadet graduation, a certain assenting aura of pride sunk in his eye. Other than Coach Ricca Coach Mann is the only other teacher at MHS who addresses us almost solely as gentleman. Even though we are still talking about fertile Mesopotamia in the next Coach Man gives a lecture on Zeno paradox which only half the class and a few yawning junior varsity football players pay attention to.  Between second and third hour we bathe in the current of students feeding books into the ajar hinges of their lockers, spotting Tim who always seems to walk with a seminal skip attached to his hallway gait, Patrick still routinely addressing everyone as Merde-tete or Dude-I need-to-Hit-that-shit, inquiring that I must be elated about slipping into the next classroom which is cool Joe Thomas,  which entails sitting next to hottie Angelina Lighthouse which twice, Patrick’s own unheralded histrionics kept me not only from getting to first base, but kept me from stepping up to the plate so as to sacrifice bunt so to speak, myself telling Patrick that UI am still enamored as about Renae Holiday, that I felt that we really shards something contra-sacred the other night when I groped the smooth tips of her fingers in a tub of popcorn. Pat is looking at me inquiring why I would want to hit that, stating that she was already kicking it with my bro-from-Limestone before making a snarky remark about how he never lets another brother sport fuck something he has already laid some serious pipe on, telling me that Angelina Lighthouse is hot, informing me that she wants you dude, stating all in the same fragmented sentences of thought that she’s so much hotter that that rich cunt from Richwood's I was seeing last summer which I tell Patrick not to call her that which Patrick doesn’t know that I spent three hours the night talking with Dawn Michelle.

 

Like Renae she has a pretty, pretty name.

 

D.M.

She seems excited when I call. She tells me that it is really good to hear my voice again. She laughs when I ask how “Big Time senior year” is transpiring. She is older and she is telling you things. She is telling me that she is staying out late on weekend nights. She is telling me about friends who have their own apartment near main street and how she is visiting them and drinking beer.  She is telling me that she is preparing for speech in a couple of weeks.  She is going through a serious life-altering Dostoevsky. She says its almost inevitable once you have read Notes From the Underground and Native Son, which she encourages you to do right away since it isn’t on DIST 150 tried to unsuccessfully ban Native son a few years back when a cool speech teacher at Woodruff tried to teach it in his advance English class.  She is telling you about poetry. She tells you that she has a leather notebook and writes a poem a day. She stressed ‘free verse.’ She tells you about Sylvia Plath. She states that after she read Daddy she thinks that she was Sylvia Plath in a prior life. She says that she has always had a rather unfounded phobia when it comes to gas stoves.

She is telling you things. She surprises you by yelling out your name and stating that it is good to hear your voice.  It has been almost six weeks since the last you spoke.

She talks about Politics. She is pro-Clinton. She is Pro-change. She is pro-choice even though she says she shouldn’t wish an abortion on her maid of honor even if she slept with her incumbent husband the night before the big day and was a bitch. She seems to talk from experience. She says that 12 years of the Reganomic maxi-pad that has been sopping up the financial fertility of our nation dry. You try to tell her that Ronald Reagan was elected when you were three and  along with Bush  are the only president you ever seeing in the wooden square in the center of the living room where occasionally afternoon programing of Mr. Rogers Neighborhood and the Polka-dot door gets interrupted by some talk show which sounds like a law firm interview the president about some conflict in either Iran or some country named Contra  She tells you that, even though she can’t officially vote until Dec and misses election she can't wait to vote. She calls voting losing her virginity behind a blue curtain. She states that she is not jingoistic but if you choose not to vote and all you do is bitch all the time you should move to a third world country where you have to wear a veil and deny you toilet paper and come back and show some  fucking gratitude.

She uses the word fuck.

She talks about music she has been listening to. She talks about how music is changing. She says that she still has the tape-recorder in her car scooters off on long-country drives past Elmwood listening to Concrete Blond. She uses the word Alternative. 

She is feeding you ideas. 

She is feeding you belief systems 

  She is telling your body where to  go.

  

Dawn tells me that she has been hanging out with people who are older. She is stating that the majority of her friends graduated three years ago.

She says that she doesn’t talk to Quinn anymore because he’s a conservative monkeycock. 

She’s talk the whole entire time in a current of stream of conscious thought. It sounds as if she needed to vent  even though she is polite and asks you how you are doing. You want to tell her about High school, how you less like a nautical entity with fins plopped in a rather large anonymous pet store tank and more like cadaver, face down, like Laura Palmer in Twin Peaks.  You want to tell her all about your year. You want to tell her about how complete you felt last summer. You .want to tell her about how you run every day in hopes of breaking the FROSH record. You want to tell her sitting behind Angelina Lighthouse in Cool Joe Thomas’ classroom. You want to tell her about the semi-date you went on last Friday with a girl from Limestone who is the most beautiful creature you have ever seen

You make a conscious choice not to bring up the name of your one friend she deems misogynistic and disgusting. 

She says the  speech team purportedly lives in Monical's PIZZA in Westlake because they have infinite coffee refills and kick ass salad and don’t car if you lounge around all night and smoke.

“You smoke?”

Dawn Michelle says yeah, but only during speech season because it stresses her out, with school and all.

I am in awe. I miss our intellectually tete-a-tete. I miss our long conversation last summer about music and art. I miss the way that she was always three years older yet never treated me like a freshman.

I don't want to tell her goodbye.