We leave Friday after school. The weather is blustery, overcast, clouds that look like they are in need of a mammogram. Myself, Hale and Elmore are the only males going from our church youth group. We are riding up in the Church van with Alicia Durham and Haley and my cousin Amanda. The radio is on, music splashing in tonal vibrations flooding the inside of the van. I sit in the back with Eggplant Elmore. David Hale left earlier that day. Even though I am only gone for two days I back the suitcase my grandmother bought me a month earlier, so I can break it in. I have packed jeans and shirts and three packages of Fig Newtons which I eat every day after school like manna from heaven. I am wearing my boots. I have the cool semi-fifties button down v-neck over an undershirt with a commodious side pocket where I sometimes keep my bible and picture of Renae I still keep rather inexplicably with me at all times.
Eggplant Elmore is the only other male in the vehicle We are
situated in the back of the mini-van. We float down the spaghetti curve of i-74. We float past the vacant chipped stalk of dun cornfields
“Did you hear that David best has gotten back together with
Renae?” Elmore asks me, almost rhetorically. I tell him that yeah, I guess I
heard.
“I guess they are like really madly in love with each other
and everything. They are always holding hands in the hallway.”
“Listen, I really did love that girl. There was just things
between us that weren’t working out at the time of our demise.”
Elmore says what,
like the sex.
“Dude” I am trying to say. Elmore seems like he is getting
of on my conversation.
When we were with each other we couldn’t keep our hands off
each other. I really loved her and ditto and it was just one of those things
where I did not wish her to feel encumbered since we didn’t get a chance to see
each other all that often.”
Elmore tells me that she was really a mess after we broke
up.
“She like missed a whole week of school.”
“I heard just a day.”
Elmore tells me no, it was a week.
“Plus, after she came back all she wore was black. All the
time. Black denim skirt. Black choker. Black tights. She was in mourning. She
looked really good too. The entire school knew that she was in mourning.”
We are driving in the direction of Chi-town. We are driving
in the direction of light.
“I’m glad David Best isn’t here.” I tell Elmore.
I tell him again that it would just piss me off.
I use the word piss.
He shudders.
***
The Hyatt look like a gilded alien spacecraft landed
directly outside O’hare. For being a Christian Youth Gathering it feel as if we
are headed towards Mecca rising up. I have never seen a hotel anywhere near
this big. The pterodactyl silhouette of an airplane roars past every five minutes.
When we arrive at the hotel is packed. I have never been around more crazy Lutherans. Hormonally addled with hymnals. Mr. Teske’s college roommate has a mullet and is playing with the band on the stage. Everyone is dancing. Everyone is praying. Some people are holding their hands in the air like a referee and a field goal sign supplicating in prayer. We are each given keys that looks like credit cards. Hale is walking around wearing one of his standard Hawaiian shirts that looks like he is on a perennial tour with Jimmy Buffet.
All the Lutherans in Chicago seem to have long hair.
I have never been around more people my same age of my religious affiliation in my life.
I remember that Karen Christmas is Lutheran and that she went to New Orleans with her youth group last year. For a second I think how cool it would be if I would somehow see the burgundy blonde cheekbones of the entity who triumphed last year. I wonder if I could talk to her the way I desire to communicate with the ever Tazewell county evasive Nat Pflderer. I wonder if she could relay the experience about her trip. I wonder if she could tell me that it changed her life. I wonder if she could relay about the cool people she met, how it felt to board a plane.
As I enter the first glass elevator there is a lad playing the jews harp. He is stroking it very fast. It is a group that appears to be stating that it is okay to be eccentric. That this is the place where it is okay simply to be yourself.
They are telling us one minute that
we are damned. They are telling us the next minute that we are saved.
Several bands play that night. When
the name of the Lord God is mentioned the audience erupts in applause.
I am religious. Church serves as
both the sociological and spiritual pinnacle of our week. I carry the
lime-flavored Gideon bible in my front pocket every day to curtail me from the
sin of lust. I throw away music that is deemed to be satanic. I struggle with
thinking about being alone with the college girls next door, squinting through
the vinyl blinds at night over in there apartment, watching them, through the
blinds patched over their window, get ready for bed. Every meal I have ever had
with my parents I have bent my chin into my neck and thanked god first for in
prayer.
Later tonight there is a dance in
the main ballroom.
I walk around with Eggplant and Hale. I talk to everyone I
see. I keep my glasses off and in my top pocket. People comment about my hair.
Mr. Teske says that some of the joy of the experience
of attending a youth gathering is that you get to meet fellow Lutheran
Christians from the Midwest and share your faith and experience.
I am banging my head up and down as
if in assent when I see her. She looks down semi-flushed before raising her
head and meeting my eyes. She has red hair that is frizzed. She looks back at
me and smiles.
“It’s like
this,” I say, banging my head down several times in rapid thrusting succession.
She smiles. She gives a little
quick southern-spirally head lunge volleying back the affirmative. Lights
continue to coat the floor with shades of rose and stuttering lilac. For being
a religious convention where they warn us all about the evils of premarital sex
there is something rather ominous and emancipating about allow our appendages
to rove free for a measured amounts of time on a floor pillared by two large
yawping black speakers.
We continue to talk, alternating-flashes
of light gentle yawning on the side of her face. She seems to be smiling at
everything I say. When she laughs she looks down.
A friend with black hair who looks half-Hispanic is next to
her. The girl-with-the-red hair turns to her and says something close to her
heard. She smiles back at her.
“Where are you from?”
“Bollingbrook.” It’s about an hour
south of Chicago, one of the first exits on the interstate after Joliet.
She asks me the same question. I
tell her that I am from Peoria.
“Peoria, isn’t that like close to Springfield
or something?”
The opening chords play. It sounds
like it is being played with a cloud ready to piss loose a serious tempest.
The red-headed girl bends down
close to my ear
“I love Pearl Jam.”
I nod. I have heard this song maybe
only twice before. It is different from the early 80’s synth-pop flooding into
my earlobes after school. There is something searing and raw about the
seductive narrative lilt. The boy with the bandanna I was watching earlier in
the night wildly nodding his head up and down in a fashion that looks like he
is bowing, his hair spraying in each direction every time he rises.
Close to the stage where only a few
skipped hours earlier a black female pastor from the south side of Chicago was
giving her testimony about how after she accepted Jesus Christ as her personal
Lord and Savior her life has become exponentially better students begin to
smash into each other with vigor, as if they are trying to knock each other
down and yet standing up at the same time.
“Mosh pit!” She yelps out. There is
a jostling nest of limbs clanging into each other with stirred vigor and heated
intensity. Bodies appear to be randomly flailing. The first chorus is beginning
to eke out of the lips of the speaker, Eddie Vdder connoting that somehow,
after all this time, after all this meaningless silt deemed reality, he still
finds himself here, he still finds himself alive, a fetus beneath the arboretum
of cosmic-consciousness.
“Do you want to join?” I inquire, holding
my arm out like a waiter offering patrons the wine list.
The girl
looks at me. Her skin is the color of Styrofoam, an alluring ashen, red hair
seems to furl out in a myriad of random directions that somehow looks perfect.
“You go.”
She says, sounding like a she is identifying a cheaply manufactured American
union made car. Pearl Jam is caroling gruff chords about feeling alive.
I have never officially moshed
before
I tell her okay. I do a slide-swipe
on to the dance floor. Immediately I am hit from behind by what feels like a
linebacker trying to make a high-light reel.
I am wearing the boots I bought at the mall. I begin to slid. My glasses
are still stowed in my upper right hand pocket. The Gideon bible I ferry incessantly
with me is in my front pocket.
The guitars continue to thrash. I
get hit again, I go skidding. My boots offer zero traction. I am sliding. I get
hit again. Instead of lunging back I batted to the center. My glasses
somersault out of my front pocket. I am
still sliding, as if some sort of maladroit penguin on ice, getting hit again
just as Eddie Vedder is asking the title of the song in a rhetorical fashion. I
find myself on the floor. There are more scuttling. Quickly I lift up my
glasses and slip them into my side pocket before anyone has a random heel
avails a chance to crunch them into optical shards. Lights continue to juggle
variegated slashing colors. On the floor legs are sciccorerd and arched. I feel
a hand somehow enter mine, hoisting me up. It is the dude with the long hair
and the bandana. He asks me if I am okay.
“I’m fine,” I tell him. Leaving the
whisking husks of bodies finding the red headed girl again. He hands are
clasped over her lips as if she is trying to conceal a laugh. Her friend seems
embarrassed. Elmore is scuttling on the ground clapping his side pockets as if verifying he has holsters.
I am looking down.
“That was awesome.” She amends. I
ask her if she would like to join me. There still seems to be a minute of the
song left. She swings her head horizontally cosigning no. I am audacious. I
fling myself back into the ocular pit, as if as a living sacrifice to whatever
God there just so happens to be. The God I have chosen to worship by sacrificing
the one thing that met something to me so I might poetically be permitted to
traverse this cosmic orb on a spiritual meditation, a mecca traveling east in
the direction of the son bowing in beatific deference to the god of youth.
Pearl Jam continues to blare. It
feels like a gnarled tempest of shingles in steadily beginning to sprinkle and
plop.
This time I don’t fall down. This
time I brush back, not hard as first. This time I remain on my feet, lunging at
those in front of me with vigor. The dong ends with each of us nailing our
heads up and down like quarter notes of a lost symphony. The final
reverberating chord everyone breaks out in applause. It is like we have
achieved something.
I walk back over to the red-headed
girl from Bollingbrook, Illinois.
She is still smiling.
“I love how
everybody just clangs together in a mosh pit.” She says. “ I love how it is a
clanging nest of one.”
The is the first dance I have ever been to. I have never
moshed before.
The song is Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody.
There is no way to dance to this song with someone you have just met. I try to
instigate the formalities of a conversation.
As I move in closer to where she is
she seems to parachute her arms around my neck a la junior high style. We are
dancing slowly. We are the only ones wavering back and forth. The bulk of the
bodies stranded on the topography of the dance floor just sort of idle around
semi-limp there bodies rippling as if in post-coital after shock.
She tells me that she likes this song a lot too. She tells
me that she loved Wayne’s world. I do a party on Wayne imitation for her. I do
a We’re not worthy. She smiles. She giggles.
I have yet to ask her the syllables
of her name. All I know is that she is from Bolingbrook. She looks back at her
friend. Her friend gives her a look cosigning insufferable disdain. I tell her
that by the way my name is Dave. She smiles back, looks back at her friend and
offers a terse nod. Just as I am waiting for her to identify herself the second
cantata of the song kicks in, espousing
the liturgical lethargy about a poor boy whom nobodies loves, the mosh pit
remnants begin pogoing-up and down. I emulate their antics jumping in place in armature
aerobics semblance. The girl from Bolingbrook
looks at me as if I am about ready to enter a seizure.
The third movement of the song erupts the still-eyed
group who had been stagnant are suddenly animatedly charged in nuclear frisson.
My head begins to whack up and down as if I am trying to sever the impermeable
slate of reality into a broken-etch-p-sketch slate of reality. Through the fracas I belt out the lyrics. So
you think you can love me and leave me to die. The red-headed girl just looks
at me as if I am asking the question just for her.
I then grab her hand. I begin to waltz. Slowly at first.
Still singing to her about how nothing really matters. I reel her hand back, shuffling across the
wooden plane of the dance floor in a dire attempt to be debonair.
The song ends with chimes and a subtle tympanic muffle. I go
in for a hug. She steps back. She is
looking at me like I am some unbidden parasite. She was the one who seemed
anxious to dance at the beginning of the number. The one who looped her arms
around my neck in half-heavenly harness.
“Well it was really nice meeting you,” She says again, her fiend
grabbing her by the interior white of her wrist whirling her in the antipodal
direction of the stage.
I wonder what I did. The DJ is starting to play Informer by Snow, a song I despise. I look around hoping somehow to espy her smile again, The girl with the unblemished linoleum white skin and the curly red hair. The girl who is from Bollingbrook, Illinois and who seemed so excited to dance.
The girl I ventured into the random swirl of the mosh pit
for. The girl whose name I never
learned.
The girl who now is gone.
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