Monday April 12th, 1993 (a)

It is Monday April 12^th, one day after Easter Sunday, I tell Mom I can do the route by myself. In less than twenty-four hours I will be completely packed, I will be going someplace I have never been before.

 

 I will be gone.

 

I need to get a pair of shoes. I take Tim Flanagan with me. We o to KMART in Evergreen Square. We go to Taco Bell.  "You can just drop us off at Bradley park.” I tell mom, taking a slurp of my thoroughly iced Pepsi, the earth smelling like mint and fresh laid clover of baseball diamonds.  Tim and I find our picnic table near the pavilion across from the tennis courts and the Chinese bridge. We have a bucket of ten tacos between us. I have everything I need for my sojourn back home. Everything is packed.

 

            On April twelfth, 1951, Jack Kerouac began writing ON THE ROAD. He stapled the sheets together and created on big long novel. On the twelfth of April, 1993, over forty years since the initial composition, I was with Tim Flanagan, eating Taco Bell.

 

We sit on top of the picnic tables and begin to chomp into our soft shell bounty bartering packets of hot sauce between us. Tim asks if I know that Taco Bell uses the cheapest lowest grade beef possible to which I inquire is that is why they taste so good.

Tim guffaws

“It’s nice to gorge like this and not worry about it affecting the time of my mile later on in the day.”

 

Tim looks at me and shrugs, takes another chomp. Tomorrow at this time I will be one hour ahead of everyone I know. Tomorrow at this time I will be in New York city.

 

“It’s so beautiful out here. It’s like the world is somehow opening up.”

 

I continue to blather between Tim’s monotonous chomps. I want to tell Tim that when I arrive back to the states I will somehow be endowed with a greater appreciation for my terse jaunt on this planet. I want to tell Tim that I will feel enriched, that life will open up and it will be brimming with potential.

 Tim is on his fifth Taco. I am on my fourth. The top of the picnic table is littered with zany colored-cocoons that once served as taco wrappings. Taco Bell is having some sort of a special where if you eat 100 Tacos and get a card bunched you get a Rocky and Bowinkle T-shirt.

Mike Ramsey (the coolest kid in school) has three.

 

“My dad said its no problem, that as long as you arrive at the house everyday he can still give you a lift to school so you don’t miss early bird PE. He said it was really no problem as long as you arrive at the house on time.”

 

Tim takes another chomp. A group of Bradley runners in shorts so short they could almost be considered obscene clop by and turn left towards the swerve leading up to the hill near the Columbus statue.  I ask Tim if he has any plans over break. Tim again offers a stoic loll of his shoulders and then snorts with his mouth half full, explaining that he will probably go out and stay with Patrick for a couple of days and just role-play and shit.

 

“I miss Patrick. When he was at Manual it’s almost like it was Parker Lewis with the three of us always being together. I was Parker, Patrick was Mikey, and you were the nerd always taking random surfboards and steam rollers out of your military-coated trench coat.”

Tim seems to somehow agree. His nod is more of a swallow. The lower stump of his throat seems to bob and reverberate in an almost seismic way when he bites his food. He takes a gulp, swigs his Pepsi through a straw before inquiring if I am packed. He inquires if I am nervous about flying.

 

“Pretty much packed. A little nervous. More excited. I don’t think I’ll be able to sleep tonight.”

 

Tim takes unwraps the taco like the way the health director taught us to peel off a condom in health class from a banana three weeks earlier. I have caught up to him. We are both on #8 each rendering four more soft-shell tacos between us respectively.

 

There is something I need to talk to  Tim about. Something my father told me to ask him.

 

“Dad says, if you want, you can help him out with the paper route before he drives you to school while I am over seas and he’ll make sure you get paid. He says you can just show up at the house and he’ll make sure you get paid and everything.”

 

I add to Tim that a little extra cash every now and then doesn’t hurt.

 

“In fact, he says that you can just go collecting for me one week and tell everyone on my route that I am on that trip I won and that you are the surrogate paperer boy and you can keep whatever you make. It’s usually around fifty-sixty dollars.”

 

Tim nods again in the same semblance of a swallow. I want to talk about my father’s altruism. I want to tell Tim that he should assent on the spot and just do the route for a week and a half. I want to tell Tim that it will be my father who will pick up the heap of paper at 4:30 in the morning and then count them and interpolate the commercial inserts before Dad fills one bag and Tim fills the other and my father points as if on the prow of a ship at which addressed domiciles the local bulletin heralding the global events somehow pertaining to the blush and tilt of the planet.

 

I ask Tim again how about it. Tim takes another bite as if he is performing felattio and adds a we’ll see.

 

There are now two tacos left between us.

 

“You can have the last two. We’re going out to eat in a couple of hours at Avantis with grandma and then I’m going to go home and verify that I have everything packed and then I am going to try to get a few house of sleep. In a way I’ve been marking off the interior whites of calendar squares awaiting this trip for the last three years.” 

Tim takes the last tacos and remains silent by putting it in his side pocket. We disembark the bench and walk towards the side path leading p the slope bluff, passing the graffiti REM initials on the sidewalk walking towards the joystick-shaped silhouette of the Columbus statue now flooding into view. Tim asks me is this is what I wanted to clamber up the incline and I tell him yeah. He is in front for us. The statue of the man whose name will accompany me on the trip I am to set forth to disembark sixteen hours time. I tell Tim that Dad used to take us here on the day we have off of school. I tell Tim that I used to do sprints up this hill last summer ending at the statue, thinking about the summer Olympics and of Kim Zmeskal and of cross country that incumbent autumn and pushing myself in a way I never had before.

 

Tim again doesn’t reply. I ask if he would like to do the route. This time he nods and says probably. He says that he will stop by and talk to my dad the day I leave. He says the word something again. I ask him if he would like to sit with me on the cement stump on the back of the Columbus statue and look at the sun as if transmogrifies into an overhead yolk of pain. He says no. He says I need to be going or else I am going to be late to meet with my parents and grandma for dinner. I convey to him that there is still world enough and time as I sit in the blinking husk of his shadow, facing the west, the copse of sylvan bark overlooking Bradley park.

 

“Look at the sun,” I tell him.

“You’ve changed,” Tim responds.

 

I ask him what he is talking about. He responds by stating the exact same declaration again with greater emphasis on the word change. I ask him to elaborate. Tim pauses. The April sun seems to squint at us from direction of the west.

 

“It happen sometime last summer. I don’t know if it was when you started doing that play or started dating that Dawn girl. Somehow you’ve changed.”

 

            “How?” 

“You used to role-play with us. You really created some memorable characters.” Tim goes into a detailed tirade. “You used to read comic books. You used to have something that really pulsed and thumped and incubated upstairs. You used to be creative.”

“I still am creative.” I tell Tim, lost in the drip of the mid-April sun, somehow resembling a tear. Tim says my ass.

 

“Dude, I’m in high school. I want to be a professional athlete. I want to make something of myself. I want to go somewhere. I want to contribute to whatever this is we are experiencing—this atlas of reality. This globe.”

 

Tim again says the words my ass. He is a senior at Manual. He will be graduating less than a month after I get back. He will be joining the Air Force reserves shortly after.

 

“Yeah, but you used to believe in things.”

 

I role-played with you guys forever. If you forget I was the one introduced you to X-men. Its just that I’m living in reality. I don’t want everything I’ve ever wanted in this teardrop of a  lifetime to be determined some random vagary of a ten-side die.”

Tim says that its pronounced dice. I say dice plural is die. What you always did to my characters back in the day when we used to role-play all the time. You used to kill them. They are accustomed to dying. 

I sit on the cement dais of the statue. I ask Tim to sit next to me. The sun is squinting at us. It is almost four-thirty in  the evening.  Tomorrow I leave. Everything somehow is perfect.

“Just because I don’t play role-playing games or read comics all the time you say that I’ve changed.”

 

Tim nods again and says yes.

 

“You take reality too seriously. You are not the same person you were when I met you. You’ve changed.”

 

I ask him if he would like to sit down. Still he refuses. I can stop looking at the nearest nuclear orb called the sun. I can’t help losing myself in it. I want to tell Tim that I miss those days where all we did was mouth the anemic skeletons of our bikes and petal through the West Bluff pounding Mountain Dew after Mountain Dew and talking about our lives vicariously through the characters we created and the stories we told each other. I want to tell him that I feel somehow stuck here and that I am trying to leave and that for the first time in my so-called adult life I feel that I am somehow making something of myself. I want to tell him all this as the sun continues to dip offering planks of light across the lower lever of Bradley park, casting a long elongated silhouette of the navigator overhead, still holding the orb of this vessel I inhabit.

I need to be going home. We’re going to Avantis. I need to make sure everything  I need for the trip is packed.

I turn around. I ask Tim if he is coming.

Tim says no. Tim says that I shouldn't go to England. I ask Tim what I should do.

"You should turn around and look--look at the sun you can't stop talking about. Look at the sun without blinking for five whole minutes. Looks at it and see what happens. I guarantee that you will see more by looking into the sun without blinking for five whole minutes then you will see on this so-called trip you won. This trip you claim will somehow change your life."

Tim says that he fucking dares me. He tells me that he gare-ran-fucking-tees me that I will learn more about life, learn more about why I am fettered to this frame of the flesh, learn more about my cosmically brief tenure planted as a residual citizen on this planet simply by opening my eyes and going blind.

I turn around and run home.


I am meeting Ezekiel Bosch-Midden, my cohort on this trip, in the morning .

I am leaving for England in fifteen hours.

I run home from the Columbus statue in Bradley park without saying goodbye to Tim.

I run home without looking at the luminescent brass squint of the descending sun.