Songs of Faith and Depeche Mode,, willy, and the last classroom on earth (mired Maundy Thursday a.)...

It is the last day of classes on this planet. My last day of classes before spring break. The last day of classes before I leave for England next Tuesday.  In addition to the week off courteous of Spring Break I will be missing the following week of classes. It is the last day of school I am backstroking from class to class.  I can’t get Depeche Mode’s first single from Songs of Faith and Devotion out from the upper deck of my skull, the searing guttural amphetamine-draped illegal u-turn wheel-squealing screeches at the outset of the song feel like they are cutting into my chest. I am feeling something. It is like badger scraping my ribcage with tetanus-riddled claws. Digging for something not yet found. The song is ridiculous when compared to Blasphemous Rumors or to Somebody. There is an almost Middle Eastern Persian drumbeat. When Dave Gahan carols out that This is the dawning of our Love I misintuit it as This is the Dawning of Allah. It feels like David Koresh’s New Jerusalem we see in a minute frame next to Tom Brokaw’s stuttering visage surrounding by tanks every night in the pixilated altar in our living room is beginning to rise   A paradise of pedophiles and drifters and wayfarers. A paradise for those who yearn to become more than they already are. Creating flesh. There is fracas. The world gestating into being with gradual tympanic lava-fused blasts of light.  Reptiles thrice the size of Caterpillar artillery lugging armored slimes of what passes as flesh, somehow human being developing in syncopation to the subtle tic of the cosmos, over millions of year, only to be cast sinful, only to be born damned, only to praise an ineffable being in the scattered pebbled constellations of everything that is above, only the remove the petal of procreating virility christening themselves as Jehovah’s chosen race. Only to find everything they are looking for in the correlating burnt out chakra of the other. 

                                              

Only somehow to rise again.

Feeling all that. Feeling that I am leaving. Feeling that whatever molecular nest of cells I am sloughing I will never get back. My frontal lobe, a country mail box stapled to the oscillating front of the disco-scented or that is my brain, learning to see the world in a new way.

The first bell is clamoring broken shrills. The last day of earth.  I am being swallowed in the punctuating metallic amens on the locker. I am wishing I somehow possessed the stamina to beat the lad from Woodruff whose great-grandfather has a statue christened to his atheist beliefs in Glen Oak Park.

I am leaving. I am feeling everything inside my chest. I am leaving the last day of classes of the inscrutable mist of unknown only to leave everything I have ever felt, only to rise again.

It is the last days of classes. It is Maunday Thursday.

Christ is coming again.

                                                                              ****

        

People have been talking about my pending trip. Eric Bushman asks me when I am scheduled to leave during early bird health. Coach Fauser remains mute looking over baseball stats. As does Madame Suhr, the large picture of my visage in tandem with the sylvan streaks of Big Ben on the  bulletin board next to the mot de jour during Home Room. In first hour study hall I ignore the older kids and focus on extrapolating algebraic equations. Second hour we have a test on the civil war. I keep looking at Desta. I look at Joy Pennel who is wearing white shorts that skid and yield less than two inches beneath her torso. Jasmine the Jewish girl with half-a railway bar for limbs and the highest GPA in the school makes a joke about fitting in my suitcase which leads me to quickly envision her sans jeans, legs configured in stiff Euclidean angles propping out of my suitcase the moment I arrive to my hotel room in Stratford-upon-Avon in the manner of a stripper and a birthday cake at a Shriners retirement party.

I walk around in a daze, spangles of light dripping from the far end of the hallway.

The bell reverberates. Scuttle of books being alighted. I walk toward the door. Coach Mann in all his inimitable dignity makes a motion for me to halt as I exit his classroom.

 “David, a word.”

            I nod.  Coach Manninoi is again pensive as students shuffle past him he nods in tempo. Once the room clears he smiles.

“You aced that last test. The class should send you a bouquet and thank you, the grading curve is just a little higher thanks to you and all your hard work.”

I look down. World History is the only class I might be considered somewhat of a savant in. Coach Mann pats my shoulder and tells me not to worry. It’s a good thing. They’ll study harder. They’ll be coerced to remember more of the stuff come mid life. I nod. I  think about how professional Coach Mann's office looks in the locker room. I remember how he always goes down after class and fires up a cigarette before extinguishing it après dual puffs before he talks to the varsity team about warming up. I remember how he asked me to stand up I front of the classroom after I won the YC contest informing the class that they had a celebrity and future world traveler in their midst.

“I just wanted to wish you a safe and healthy trip overseas. It will change your life. You really do seem to have an appreciation for the world and for history and I’m so thankful you get this opportunity to go.”

I smile. The third hour period class is filtering in. I am embarrassed. I want to tell him thank you. In a way, I just don’t know what to say.

             His arm protrudes in my direction. I greet it with my own.

He squeezes it and tells me to have a great trip again.

“Think of your old high school history teacher when you see Trafalgar square.” He notes. He then gives me a wink.

I then tell him thank you.

I tell him I will.

I call him Coach as I walk out his classroom.

                                                                                  ***

Cool Joe Thomas fails to mention my trip at all during third hour.  He again tilts his head looking at me askance when I hold out Louis L'Amour Last of the Breed during USSR. The majority of the class is reading Grisham or Creighton. If students have nothing to read Cool Joe Thomas assigns them to look at a heap of National Geographic from the seventies. Fourth hour convenes with Mr. Reents  sitting on his desk. His legs are spread apart. His smile just seems to drip off of his face. We have our weekly vocab test. We spend some  time discussing current events. The situation is Bosnia and Somalia. We discuss Clinton's first hundred days in office. Mr. Reents then looks at the oracular clock on the wall.

"Being the last day of class before spring break and being that one of your classmates is spending his break overseas I thought I thought I would go over some British idioms to assist him with his trip. This is mostly for David,” Mr. Reents says to me, unfolding the origami-creases of a paper and wielding them apart. Sitting on the edge of his desk like a leprechaun, a sanguine smile breached on his cheeks.

  “One idiom you will hear incessantly is bugger. They like to say ‘Bugger all’ instead of eff-it. Does anyone know what a Bugger is?”

 A bruised smile is leaking into Mr. Reents face. None of us in the classroom has ever heard this term before.

“A bugger is someone who has anal sex.”

The class is laughing. Andrew  Brinker is in stitches. For some reason I am taking this exercise seriously and taking notes. Mr. Reents says that the British vernacular Cheers! Has nothing to do with a drinking or norm paying his overdue tab and is more a sentiment of endearment, akin to thank you. A Broilli is an umbrella. The London Underground subway is referred to as the tube. Mr. Reents then says that a popular term is ‘taking the piss’ and that it is a euphemism of sarcasm. He says that often times you’ll hear the British people pun Richard the III stating a piss, a piss, my Kingdom for a piss.

There are more terms I am learning. An elevator is called a lift. Instead of an exit sign I can expect to see signs readings WAY OUT. Car park is the American equivalent of a parking lot.

The whole class is laughing, falling apart in skittles.

Mr. Reents tells us that cigarettes are called fags and that its not uncommon to be in a five star restaurant with a no smoking sign and hear the waiter say that he is just going to pop out for a fag. There is more laughter. 
One common one you will see all the time are signs for W.C. A W.C. is a bathroom. It is a water closet.

Mr. Reents looks down on his crinkled piece of paper and says that he is saving the best for last.

"The last thing you need to know is a Willy."  He asks if anyone knows what a willy means on the British isle there is silence.

 A Willy is a penis.

The class is laughing. Several girls blush. Mr. Reents makes it a point to say that the British Press had a field day when the movie Free Willy was released.

The class is laughing. Andre Brinker tells me to make sure that I don't accidentally play with my good friend Willy in front of any blokes in case I inadvertently fire up a fag. I have one last class for the day. As I walk up I thank Mr. Reents for taking the time edify the class entirety on the British colloquialism.

He is smiling at me. There is a warmth on his lips.

"Hey, and thanks for writing that letter too. And for helping me out while preparing for that speech. I really appreciate it."

"David you are going to come back a changed man . You are going to lose your Midwestern hymen. You are going to come back a world traveler. "

We hug again. I can smell the coffee brewed in his room on his breath. Warm coffee.

It was the tightest hug I have given anyone since the last time I held Renae in the January rain and said goodbye.  It is a tight ug. I want to reel into the warmth pumpkin belly of my mentor.

"We'll see you overseas in a couple of days."

Mr Reents says, always referring to himself in the third person plural pronoun, always referring to himself in a way that makes me think that I will be seeing him sometime soon.

                              

                                                                                             ***


It is lunch and then Algebra. Mrs. Peabody is absent the week before I leave Europe. Apparently she is suffering from gall stones. We have the cool substitute teacher. The teacher who has five earrings in her left ear. The teacher who told me that she is excited about my trip.

Apparently there are only four students left in the original algebra class and none of them are getting higher than a C.

Things have changed since Patrick left.

 I have been eating lunch with Jennifer Rose Baker. The girl who always has her King James Bible with her. The Girl who is lonely and has no friends and get teased because she transferred  here. We are going over our math for the next hour.

I sit next to Jennifer Baker in the class. It is easier than ever. We are both getting A's. I tell her Listen. I tell her I have something important to share.

                                                                       ***

I am lost in the Lenten draping of Songs of Faith and Devotion. I am listening to it as I run around the elliptical skid of the track every night. I am listening to I it with my Gideon bible burrowed in my pocket. I am listening to it wondering it Renae Holiday is showering, wondering is she is lathering every feminine facet of her anatomy. I am listening to the sytnthed-soporano of Marin Gore and the avant-garde alto of Dave Gahan. I am lost. The sun rises in England seven hours earlier than it does in all of Central Illinois.

Before I wake up for my paper route I have dreams where I drowning in the inky tributary of the Thames and Big Bed is tipping its arrowheaded hat in my direction so it looks like a slim fast-picture of devil's Tower. I am drowning and the entire track team is running by on the banks of the Thames only they fail to see me. I still am lost in the opening clangorous chimes of I FEEL YOU.  As I look I see a kayak marshaled by Nat Pflederer. I reach out with intent. I yell out his name. I tell him for fuck sakes his parents are missionaries. I tell him that he lives only twenty minutes away from house. I am holding up my hand and he is paddling, whistling out a country song by Garth Brooks, pointing at my teammates on the banks of the Seine ignoring my plea for life.

As I drown I feel her legs wreathed around my torso. She is underwater. Her blonde hair is leaking into the tea-cup white of her neck. Her legs are masterlocked around my loins and she is beckoning that I enter her. She is imploring that I take her body someplace I have never been before. I am apologizing. I am telling her that I didn't mean to hurt her last January. We were giving each other Eskimo kisses when I am losing everything that is inside my anatomy. When she is telling me deeper, when she is mandating me that fucking her underwater is the only way she can fly.

I wake up with a pond of spring nectar coating the inside of my Umbros.

Somehow this is he dawning of Allah.

The dawning of our love.

The sun that refuses to rise.


                                                                             *** 

“So you won’t be here the next two weeks?” Jennifer Rose Baker asks.

I swipe my head no.  Her good china cheek bones look like they could shatter at any second.

"Next week is spring break. I leave Tues. I won’t be back until Thursday the following week. Two weeks from today.”

I try to change the subject. I don’t want to speak about my pending departure. I ask Jennifer Baker what she is doing over the holiday. She says she is going to church and then seeing her boyfriend from woodruff.

“I’ll miss you.” She says.

 I tell her that I will miss her too.

“It was really crazy. I didn’t really have too many friends when I started at Manual last fall. I’m not really even that close to anyone on the track or cross-country team. I had one close friend who transferred to the school I originally wanted to go to and one friend who is holier-than-thou and who’s graduating in a couple of weeks. I’m so glad you are here. I’m so thankful we are friends.”

Jennifer Rose Baker looks at the King James Bible next to her teal lunch tray.

I still have not told her that I ferry my Gideon Bible with me every day.

“I’m glad we are friends.”

I smile. I tell her the same.

                                                       ****

The last class is French. Since Mr. Reents' exegesis of British colloquialism I can't seem to walk down the hallway without one of my classmates inquiring if I plan on popping out for a fag.  There is a silence in Madame Suhr's classroom. She is passing back midterms. She is asking if we have any questions. In forty-five minutes school we be dismissed for break. With five minutes left Madame calls my name.

"Raoul," Madame calls me by my French name to her desk. She points to the chair reserved for the student aid. She tells me en francais to have a seat.

"Are you excited about your trip next week, Raoul?

I feel that she wants me to respond to her en francis.  I try. I tell her Je suis pumped. She smiles back. She asks me when I am leaving town.

"I'll be gone Tuesday and won't be back until two weeks from today."

"Are you packed?"

"A little.  I'm mostly going to be packing this weekend."

Madame looks at me. The bell is about to ring.

  “David,” Madame says as I am in the door transitioning into the aquatic tile hallway as if she wants to speak to me because I have failed to properly conjugate my French verbs, as if I have failed to nassally mold the bouquet of sound into a flash sneeze evince the sound of whizzed joy. But no, she omits all this, calling me David instead of Raoul.

“David,” She says a look of honesty, a look of sincerity, a look of unparrelled seriousness poured into her face as her left hand taps my shoulder like a wand giving it a little squeeze.

“Have a great time.” She says.

A great time.

I walk out of her classroom. There still is one thing more I need to do before I leave.

                                                       

                                                                   ***

 

There is no track practice after school. Instead I go down to my locker and change, placing my aquatic shorts, pulling back my leg in stretches. I am hoping to see Coach Ricca so that I have a chance to thank him. So that I have a chance to say goodbye before I leave for overseas.

Coach is the last person I want to see, the last person I need to thank before I go for one final run and say goodbye.

The locker room is empty. There are practices next week starting Monday. I will miss four meets when I am gone.

There is a rustle and a light at the far end of the hallway, a exclamatory draped shadow encroaches in my direction.  I have been waiting to have this heart to heart hardon with Coach ever since I met him. I am waiting to shake his hand and to evince my unyielding gratitude. I am waiting to thank him for writing that letter of support and to thank him for being a mentor. I am waiting to tell him that I fully anticipate working harder than anyone in the history of the cross-country program. I want to confess to him just how truly blessed I feel to have him as a mentor. As a teacher. As a coach.

As A friend.

As I walk I near I realize it is not Coach Ricca but rather Coach Winkler.

“Von Behren. There’s no practice tonight, what cha’ hell are you doing down here?”

“I’m going for a final run before I leave for overseas.”

Coach is chewing tobacco. Occasionally he spit. I wonder what he is doing down here. I wonder where Coach Ricca is at.

“Good race yesterday. You shouldn’t have sprinted in the goddamn middle. You would have won both those races had you just run your own race and not tried to be so gung-ho.”

I tell Coach Winkler that I know. I tell Coach Winkler thank you.

“So you’re working out today?”

I tell him yeah. I tell him that I need to go for one final run. I tell him not to worry, that I’m wearing my gear home and that I have my wallet with me so that I don’t need to stop back in the locker room once I am done.

“I just wanted to have one final work out. You know, I’m leaving for that trip in a couple of days and I wanted to have one long workout before I go.”

Coach iterates that he’s proud of me but that I damn well better bring my gear when I go overseas. He states that even though I’m only a freshman I’m his ace long distance runner and that they have plans for my future.

“Just run your own race and don’t sprint n the Goddam middle anymore. That kids Ingersoll isn’t all that. You just should have run your own race.”

I look down into the freshly laced lilacs of the shoetrings on my sneakers and tell him that I know.

“Where’s Ricca at?

Coach Ricca always walks like a sentinel with his empty thermos down to the locker room after class. He is always the first Coach strut into urine-riddled scent of the locker room after classes.

“Ricca left early today. Apparently he had to get out of town to see his folks in the quad city.”

I look down. All I wanted to do was to thank my mentor and say goodbye before I leave. All I wanted to do was to apologize for not beating Woodruff.  All I wanted to do was have a man-to-man talk with him to thank him for everything he has gone out of his way to help me with over the discourse of the last year. I remember when I won the trip I had my mom drop me off at Manual just so I could tell coach. Now I can’t even thank him.

I can’t even say goodbye before I leave.

I thank Coach Winkler and turn around heading for the side door when the nasal shrill of his voice slaps the side of my head like an alarm clock.

“Hey Von Behren. Just how far are you planning on running today?”

I don’t know. I tell Coach Winkler. Probably ten miles. Probably longer. Maybe I’ll run to the Atlantic Ocean and, if I can sprint fast enough, defy the gravitational seatbelt of physics and skim across the lid of the ocean like a the cosmic puddle of spit. I tell Coach Winkler that I don’t know how far I am going but I am going far.

Far.