Last summer, around the time I fell head over Dark
Martens in love with Anastasia Blake, I start enacting a daily ritual of gazing
at the reflection of my visage in the downstairs bathroom mirror. I fill the
porcelain basin of the sink with tepid water dousing what in Mme Suhr’s French class
I have just learned is the “tete” into the pool of lukewarm liquid, dousing my
head in Ostrich-seeking-vittles fashion before propping up it up and looking at
myself in the reflective slate in front of me.
I then brandish my yellow comb and begin to sculpt.
I then garb the cylinder can attacking the top of my
head for all its worth in a noxious air stream of chemical shit.
It is a half-hour before my date is scheduled to arrive. I am looking at myself in the mirror. I am acknowledging verification for my terse spit of being. I am verifying the fifteen years of being planted in the trigonometry of Midwestern corn every time I blink at my countenance in the bathroom murror. For the language I have found myself employing, never questioning, guttural sounds in an verbalized endeavor to convey something that is inside of me, never questioning, never questioning the white statue of the son of God adorned in the front of the church I attend in the Southside of Peoria every Sunday, never questioning, never questioning that there are foreign lingua francs and religions and other countries, only knowing that somehow God Blesses this country, that somehow the vernal manicured lawn of currency we barter has the Deities approval.
In whomsoever He is we trust to cement are financial backing.
I rattle the cylinder
several more times like a ceremonial Native American rain stick. It attacks my scalp in an unforgiving hiss. I
place my left palm over my nose and eyes as if I am intentionally asphyxiating
myself, thinking that even a whiff of
the noxious perfume would be detrimental to my time in my race, next Saturday
Regional when my leg is to be healed and I will vie to advance to the Sectional
a week later.
The can of Aqua Net is an aluminum silo, an aerosol scepter. It makes a
rattle when I shake it. It has organs as well as toxic chemicals gnawing in the
stratospheres of this planet. I am self-conscious about my appearance. I blast through four cans of Aqua Net a month. I hold it as if I am graffiti’ing the top
of the scalp into pyramid, a hip-hop early 90'sGiza plateau. I have a yellow comb that looks
more like a paint brush. I fill the bathroom sink with water, baptize the front
of me head into the basin whipping it back out. Because mom cuts her own hair
there are twin mirror in the bathroom bouncing reflection off each other. As I sculpt my hair I can see the front as
well as the back of my head at the same time.
My hair look more like a helmet. It is intractable. It looks like a chrome headgear for professional football or a thoroughly shellacked shell. If the sun ricochets off my scalp from the right direction while I am running around Madison golf course it is entirely possible that I can blind an incoming car motoring down Sterling Avenue as I loop around the cross country course.
I Sculpt. I splurt a streamline of noxious sideways geysers casts tendrils dissipating before hitting the surface of my scalp. I wield
my yellow comb frantically sculpting my hair.
Almost always I end up filling the sink with water again and ducking my
head in the basin, a second baptism, alighting my head up and jerking it back,
leaving Sanskrit of water pebbles to dry on the mirror and opposing wall before
brandishing the yellow comb, attacking the cap of my skull again with vigor and
intensity.
I go through a can of Aqua Net a week. The tines on
the comb I sweep through my scalp are a repository of gray gunk I have to rinse
off every other day. My pointer finger harbors an indelible callous embedded from the plastic flattop of the nozzle.
On a good day my hair won’t move even if caught in the
upstream current of a tropical Hurricane.
I have my own
look, part Brendan Fraser, part James Dean, Part Jason Priestly part Parker Lewis.
It is almost all Harry Connick Jr.
I am mama bear to fledgling cub protective as shit
about my hairspray.
The football players keep asking if they can borrow my
hairspray like bartering a relay baton after practice. Aqua Net is four dollars
a can. I bank between forty and fifty bucks a week from my route. I go through up
to six cans a month, sometimes between class I duck in the bathroom and apply a
finish.
The plosive hiss of economically perncious fumes spitting from the top
of the nozzle.
In the mirror I am trying to rehearse how to ask her out.
I am trying to learn how to convey my unadulterated devotion whose eye-lashes
resemble a butterfly ready to sprout from the dome of her rather prominent
cheekbone every time she blinks. . I am trying to state that my motives are
pure. I am envisioning asking Renae out like how I asked Dawn out last summer,
in the side wing of Peoria Players Theater.
I am trying to debate telling her that I think about her all the time. I
am trying to debate telling her that before I go to bed every night, I cradle
the fluff of my pillow into a face-sized orb and pretend that I am making our
with her fair forehead.
I want to tell her that I want to know everything
about her. I want to tell her that I am enamored with her. I want to tell her
that every time I watch the pumpkin flare of the mid-autumnal sunrise bobs in the East while I am doing my paper
route I think about the contours of her smile.
I look at myself in the mirror I begin to ponder.
I look at myself in the mirror I begin to ponder.
I don’t understand time. I don’t understand the body I
momentarily mortgage, the limbs in front of me
for some reason, flipping through pages in a school box, holding a
pencil, creating glyphs on a white sheath in an effort to communicate and be
accepted, the body, in front of me at all times, running, the sight of my arms
swinging in loose fists, knees kicking out on front periphery, seeing the front
of my shoes and my showdown, a sail to an unknown vessel leaving a transitory
port, lost in an ocean of clanging minutes unsure where I am going, gazing at
the visual bounce of my reflection in the mirror, sticking my head in the sink
again, styling my hair, thinking about Renae, unsure whatever it is manacled
inside the outfit of this flesh that desires her proximity, that feeds off
the flounced vibrato of her voice, my flesh, an interior of subway tubes and skidding
veins; organs like mufflers and digestive pipes, all conducted with the wink of
an aortic plunger, performing coronary pull-ups, furrowed brow, blood sprinting
through every vector in front of me when ever I think of the sight of her name,
flooding inside of me, desiring only to hold her close, to somehow weld this
transitory drape of flesh with hers into
a puddle of this moment in time.
Or a kiss.
Spraying Aqua Net—thinking how the name itself sounds
like a mermaid got trapped in a nautical net before being rapped by a bevvy of
scurvy laden fishermen. Thinking about
the time two summer ago when I just
started pumping copious amounts of aqua net on my scalp and Hale and I rented a
swan boat in Pekin lagoon and hale insisted on going beneath the spume of water
blasting off in fountain choreography in the center and,, how, being self-conscious
about the weather pattern of my hair, I tried backpedaling the Swan the
converse direction only when we got drenched, discerning my hair had not moved
in the slightest, astounded in my Georgetown Hoyas starter jersey Hale looked and me cagily commenting, “Duh,
that’s why they call it Aqua Net.”
I apply more Aqua Net. It is like I am at the firing
range and my automatic weapon is a hose that shoots bullets. I sculpt again. I
think about Coach Ricca. Slowly I can feel my leg starting to heal. Slowly I
can find myself ready to walk again. I
think about the pending election. I think about the only reason I am leaning
towards voting for Bush in the mock school election is because my parents have
always insisted that the Republicans were somehow hand picked by God as being
the political party of his only begotten son. I am trapped in the web of joints
and bones, enveloped in a nest of flesh, all stuck together courtesy of Aqua Net.
Renae’s mother should be arriving in fifteen minutes
to pick us up. By six o’clock the sun is already a distance memory erased from
the sandcastle dotted shoreline of childhood via stinging Alzheimer of the
chest. The leaves on the sweet gum tree in the font yard are the color of
gilded sandpaper. I continue to rake the comb through my hair. I continue to
sculpt and top mold. I slap and additional splash of English Leather on both
cheeks I received as an eighth grade graduation gift. I am becoming older. I am becoming an adult. I pillage the front closet in the atrium of our house, behind the French doors leading to the living room where my father keeps jackets from the seventies he hasn’t worn since I was born. I place on a thick wrangler leather jacket with a retro appeal labeled to the interior. As I walk out onto our enclosed porch, opening the door my father and Uncle Larry installed, sitting on the cement steps that I have crouched on since childhood, the creaky jaw of the mailbox floating over my right shoulder like a stamp on a postcard next to the digits of my house, my body unknown and new, inscrutable, the aching wonders of youth gestating in the autumnal gasp of the planet, leaves forming crinkling atolls, forming sylvan islands and archipelagos lasting only a moment in the guttural hiss of a mid-October dusk, when the streetlamps cast light in domes and forgotten spotlights and the earth is brand new, the tingling scent of a bonfire attacking the sinuses and the sight of each set of dual headlights brushes against the leaves and dead gutter mums of Sherman Avenue in your direction might somehow be ferrying the creature of your dreams.
No comments:
Post a Comment