The suitcase is splayed open in the living room as if it is saying hello with the top of it’s nylon clasp, outfits are folded in yogi-almost origami contortions in an endeavor to cull as much space as possible—socks are turned inside out and pushed inside each other. Sweaters are folded like lowered international flags stuffed deeply at the bottom of the suitcase. I take my Reeboks to hopefully work out and the black pair I bought with Tim Flanagan early that day opting to leave my boots—the thick leather heavy anchors that scuffle my overtaxed seventy-miles a week dactyls through the interior blue of Manual hall in between the nasal yawn of classes—the boots I purchased in an autumnal night at payless and wore on all of my dates with Renae…the boots which my fifteen year old ethos have sprouted out of scuffed soles of my boots—as if the leather boot straps were potted in some masculine soil fertilized with the recalcitrant magic of maturity, I feel my body growing bones and my skull, my fingertips—the boots which serve as a conduit of growth, the boots I wore in Westlake, Friday nights in autumn with Renae Holiday, my glasses folded like a checkbook into my side pocket, my lips perched out in the feminine scent of her odor—my boots, the boots I always wear even though, by wearing sneakers during the day I could probably shave an extra two seconds off of my cross country time—my boots, I leave under the blue helm of my bed, as if waiting for me when I arrive back to the port of the pace I will be leaving from, only to find myself once again. Only to grow.I pack the teal blue sweater. I press the palms of my hands across cusps of folded denim like curtains, placed in the bottom of my suitcase, always siphoning for room. In my backpack I keep a freshly produced spray-paint sized can of Aqua Net, which I wield like a judge and a gavel, an aerosol torch which I shall lacerate across my skull hoping to chisel out my appearance, my reflected self worth.
I pack the film-laced bag Aunt Jan gave me so that my film
doesn’t get fucked up when it goes through customs.
I play Songs of Faith and Devotion, the gnarled
searing overture of the opening chords of I Feel You. I play Eric Johnson. I play
REM. I play Depeche mode’s early stuff. I play Tori Amos. I want the sound
track to my trip some how to be perfect.
I want Caribbean Blue to be the
last song I listen to before I depart.
It seems hard somehow to fathom
that after all this time I am going.
It is six o’clock in the evening
and everything feels like spring, a cool wind seems to whistle and skirt
through the house. Towards the east heavy tufts of lilac and pimento seem to
scrunch into a wad of cumulus as the earth concedes to its daily gravitational
neck tilt. I try not to think about Tim being so aloof ( as seems to be his
trademark) when I was saying goodbye to my closest friend under the joystick
penumbra shadow at Bradley park. Through the drape on the house next door I can
still make out the permy-haired silhouettes of several college girls as they
traipse into the bathroom pinch at their torsos and squat out from my periphery.
There is a knock. Mom asks me if I
am packed. She asks me if I am excited. I am listening to the 77’s. Mom tells
me that grandma should be here soon. She
tells me she is holding on to both my passport and plane tickets and that she
will give them to me once we arrive at the airport tomorrow morning.
At Avatits as always we get the large pizza and pitcher of pop. As always I bend my chin into the plate as my family prayers in public, not worrying about the looks of other patrons in the restaurant, saying grace for the sustenance they are about ready to consume.
***
The girls are excited that we are going to Avantis. Grandma enters the house and gives me a hug and again tells me how proud grandpa Lloyd would be. I lug the suitcase grandma bought me into the living room before opening it like the hood to a car. Grandma smiles and nods. I tell grandma that I have my journal and Louis L’amour’s Last of the Breed and several rolls of film in addition to my camera stowed in my parade bag. Both my suitcase and my bag already have four packages of Fig Newtons. I picture females packing for the trip, bowing like a pastel Christmas manager lawn ornament before her suitcase folding her clothes as if genuflecting before the altar of the god of the globe, folding her orchard dress like linen, her shoes, her underwear in little silk geometrical configurations. panties with little ruffled edges that look like napkins used at a Ladies tea and Bra’s folded and cupped into each other, like satellite dishes potted into each other.
I think about wanting to leave some place where I haven’t left inside. I think about going—abandoning everything I have ever known and seen and stealing a sunset. I picture myself in the Louvre with Karen Christmas, looking at art, the architectural configuration she stated that she could spend eternity inside. I think about porcelain interior topography of her palm, the latitudinal and longitude stretch of each mark resembling what I picture jet streams in heaven would resemble. I picture her smile as we abandon the Louvre and walk down the arteries of the Seine. She is wearing a beret a beige trench coat and that dress. As we walk I can feel the svelte origami-contours of her fingers slip into my arms.
“Here,” My father takes the coiled strip of silk, metes it and then inflicts a tourniquet around his own neck, lancing the tips of his own fingers into his neck, reeling the serpent out towards him in a complicated gesture of sign-language before the tie is cosigned with an aura of dignitary semblance. Dad then loosens the tie from near his Adam’s apple as if he is holding up a trout before handing the limp silk accouterment to me, where I am to attire this choking tassel around my neck as we meet with those of high esteem as if an ordained requite before meeting them had something to do with stepping up to the docket and playing a game of international hangman. There is a pair of dockers and buttoned up shirt mom keeps on a hanger, draped to the interior of the suitcase. There is the long L-train like zipper swerving around the contours of the thick, rectangular instrument.
My velour suitcase is packed. Triangular-gold toed socks are punched-inside out into diminutive fists. pack my collar shirts; the checkered shirt I wear untucked in the aquarium-hued tiled hallways of Manual High-- that place where I am leaving, my thick belts, denim jeans so blue that they look like they could serve as a conducive inhabitance for corral reef. AQUA Net, of course, my hair thoroughly sculpted in a cement ramp. Two combs (including the gunky sallow brills of the yellow comb), toothbrush and paste.
I pack the 3 rolls of fresh film in my newly inquired Parade backpack. I have the outfit I am to wear already laid out on my desk like a fresh kill. I’ll wear the Banana Republic turtleneck I received from Uncle Larry last Christmas. The slacks I have draped over the back of my chair. I sleep in a pair of running shorts and I am ready to leave. I am ready to fly for the first time. I am ready to abandon myself to that place and to see what I have never before seen. The suitcase remains upright and parked next to the French doors, an overweight nylon rectangular vessel as if anticipating it’s own individual sojourn, the husked leather handle curved up like a taupe rainbow anxious for me to grapple it take somewhere I have never been before.
Grandma asks me again if I am all packed.
Father tells me that it is time to go.
Grandma asks me again if I am all packed.
Father tells me that it is time to go.
.
At Avatits as always we get the large pizza and pitcher of pop. As always I bend my chin into the plate as my family prayers in public, not worrying about the looks of other patrons in the restaurant, saying grace for the sustenance they are about ready to consume.
Dad prays with his head down pressing his fingers into his forehead. We tuck our chins. We are maybe the only party of six with
clenched fists so that the chalky-whites of our knuckles our visible. Our collective
chins are tucked into our respective necks as if we are trying to balance a
piece of fruit in place. Father is praying, He is thanking the only deity she
has ever known for the saucer of meat and cheese placed in front of us, His
prayers scratch into the dry wall of the ceiling. He is reminding his Heavenly
Father who rose again from the dead last Sunday to bless these victuals to our
body and to help us keep our thoughts planted firmly on you with a capital why.
His voice then shifts mode as he addresses his father as Heavenly supplicating
that he watch over David on the special trip he is to have. That he keeps her
son safe as well as all the other young men and women safe; that his mind will
be enriched .
All of us including grandma say Amen in unison.
It is spring. The sky is stippled with sprinkles of lavender and rosemary at the setting of dusk, the sun winking availing a golden token of longing.
After dinner mom tells me that I need to get home and get some rest. She tells me that I have a big day tomorrow.
Everything is packed. In exactly 24 hours I will be over an
ocean I have never seen, surrounding by human beings I have never met, going
somewhere I cannot fathom.
At the end of the meal my grandmother who bought my suitcase
gives me a hug.
Her cheeks feel like a wet watermark as she presses against
the side of my face. She tells me again to have a god trip.
She tells me again that my Granpa Lloyd would be so proud.
. I smile. I am already packed. Once I get home there still is something I need yet to do before I seemingly depart.
I call. Her sexy mom picks up the phone and says hello.
I call Renae I tell her that I am going, She tells me again all about how she got her drivers' license three weeks ago. I tell her that I am leaving tomorrow morning. I ask her how she is doing. Part of me is expecting her to congratulate me. To tell me to have an amazing trip. She remains silent.
“So, are you enjoying driving? Are you enjoying this town?”
There is still more silence. She then begins to break in how she is involved with David Best.
‘David’s mom is just happy all the time.” She adds. I think about how Mrs. Best directed bell choir and how she sent me a card last summer when I was in the Music Man. Renae informs me that David’s back has been so-called killing him since he playing French horn in the school musical.
“So when he comes home you know what I’m gonna give him?”
I reply no stoically.
“I’m gonna give him a backrub. A long, one hour back rub. With oils.”
I wonder if my best friend from childhood is getting laid with the creature I for some ineffable reasons felt compelled to sacrifice in order to win the competition this year.
I look down at the golden ,manacle of my identity bracelet. I think about the night she gave it to me and how we made out in the cold rain of Westlake parking lot last autumn.
“Well I just wanted to call you and say that I’m sorry I hurt you and to thank you for last autumn. I really had an enjoyable time hanging out with you. I guess I just called to tell you goodbye before I leave on my trip tomorrow.”
Renae still has not congratulated me on winning the trip. She has not inquired what parts of the landscape I am going to see.
“Well it’s too late now.” She says again, in a high-pitched voice I want to tell her that I’m not trying to win back with her. I want to tell her that I cared for her and that subconsciously I felt that my libidinous desire to sneak into the feminine glitter of her first floor bedroom window late at night and, after falling inside the moist cave her lips and drilling my stiff torso on to her body asking her very politely if I could and having watching her lips seem to bite and her eyes blinking slowly fraught with some kind of dew before she nods as I gently lift the bottom of her night gown up to her breasts, kissing each nipple as if trying to tie my shoelaces with my teeth before reeling her panties down to past the knobby caps of her keens, past the lanky slope of her ankles as I tell her that I love her, entering stiffly at first, a tear, a graceful grimace before we find ourselves floating inside each other.
I want to tell her that I felt like my Lutheran upbringing made me feel guilty and how whatever bearded variation of a deity that my mother supplicates and prays to and lives he life for would not allow me to go on the trip unless I sacrificed the most important thing in my life, the possession I wanted most.
“I’m sorry again. I’m taking the identity bracelet with me. I’m really excited.”
Renae informs me again that my juvenile apologetics for breaking her heart are unwarranted. She tells me again that it’s too late now.
We both say goodbye. Renae doesn’t even tell me to have a good trip.
The moment I hang up the phone mom tells me that I need to go to bed. She tells me that I have a big day tomorrow.
I hug both of my parents. The suitcase I will be taking to England is next to the French doors. I enter my bedroom
The moment I hang up the phone mom tells me that I need to go to bed. She tells me that I have a big day tomorrow.
I hug both of my parents. The suitcase I will be taking to England is next to the French doors. I enter my bedroom
I close the runway of my eyes into the darkness of an eternal prayer.
I am fifteen years of age. I have no clue about the breath of the world that is to come.
I am fifteen years of age. I have no clue about the breath of the world that is to come.
No comments:
Post a Comment