There was some sort of a mix-up. Patrick’s movie started later but got out first and when they spotted Amy’s mom in the parking lot they took off together. Apparently it was only when Patrick got home that he called Mama Hale. Mama Hale called my parents who said it would be no problem.

Hale sits up front. Renae is in the backseat.

The rain is beginning to flagellate the side of out station wagon.  We take rersvoir to creek road.  It is obvious my parents seemed irked about the mix-up and having to get dressed and find their teenage son with his best friend and beautiful blond girl at going on eleven o’clock at night.

Hale says it was pretty much all Patrick’s fault.

When I return home that night dad is furious.

 

“You were out late. None of us knew where you were. You could have been stuck there all night.”

 

I tell dad it is no big deal. I tell him that we where just hanging out.

 

“And crazy Patrick McReynolds leading all of us on a goose chase.”

 

I tell Dad that it wasn’t Patrick’s fault I tell him that Sandy Hale had originally planned to pick everyone up then couldn’t make it at the last second

Dad is irked. He is blaming Patrick. I am trying to tell him that it’s not Patrick’s fault.

“Besides Patrick is moving anyway. He’ll be going to Limestone next semester because his parents believe in education.All my friends go to Limestone. It just seems the kids who go there have more of a future ahead of them than at the school where I’m attending. Hell, it seems like kids who go to Central have more of a future.”

Dad says sorry. I tell dad I could live here and use grandma’s address. I tell Dad he has worked for Limestone district since ’79.

“You can’t use grandma’s address,. That would be cheating.”

“Yeah, well you’re cheating me. I hate my high school. I feel like I don’t belong. I feel that everything there is only going to get worse. I want to go somewhere else where it feels like I have a future. I want to go to a high school where I have a group of friends to go out and hang out with on a Friday night. I want to go to a high school like the ones at the State meet where cross-country was considered a real sport and not a footnote to football..”

“Hey, its not that bad. What about Coach Ricca. What about that English teacher you like so much. It’s not that bad.”

Dad tells me that good things are coming.

Dad tells me just to wait and see. 

Dad tells me that I just don't need a girlfriend right now.

Later that night I look at the identity bracelet. It looks like a collar some rich widow would harness to the neck of her poodle like a fallen halo.

 

 

 

 

My father is pissed. He tell me that I am not allowed to see Renae again.

 

JLA doomsday

 They arrive and a thatch of interstate in eastern Ohio is Armageddon.  From the overhead aerial view it looks like yanked the cement ribbon of the right lane and pulled it out in like laying a carpet in reverse. There is billowing smoke. There is an overturned tanker instigated in flame. There is a massive 62 car pile up. There are splashes of lights from a nearby siren. Bodies a strewn dotting the side of the highway. The police are calling this creature some sort of monster man. It doesn’t appear to have any set path. It appears to be on a rampage, spawning havoc. It appears to be destroying everything that is in front of its path. A juggernaut clad in what looks like some sort of nuclear-protective spacesuit. 

Everything is emanating past the avenue frames of the page. The creature is tears and snorting. He is given the moniker of Doomsday by a dopey looking Booster Gold.Guy Gardner has a dyke-female soccer player haircut. He is searing across high way over passes The chalky granite clod is tearing apart the Justice League like junk mail. Like  shredding Valu coupons.  The Justice League is being dismantled. They are being disrobed.

Beetle is the first to succumb to his wrath. He is picked up and spiked like a football, planted like a exclamatory stalk of corn into the cement siding of a Lexco Oil refinery. He is then hurled 800 meters.  He is listless. He is not moving. He is bandied. He is bruised. Ice is yelping for Maxima to leave the group of Justice  avatars and to get him to medical help.


The team sworn to protect Justice to the continent is in need of help.

 

 

A Super man.

 

It is raining fleck of ice. Reane is cold. She is wearing her leather jacket which is damp. The moment we exited Westlake cinemas the earth is unforgiving. It is biting us opening .
We draw each other closer. We can’t seem to blink without hoisting the other in other’s face. Even Kristie and Tim who are a season couple has a look that this is getting just a little bit excessive, people.In the icy December rain after the movie we just cannot stop getting enough of each other.  It is almost as if there is something new planted in our mouths every time  our lips slip open and  embrace. The rain is covering us both like a bridal veil somehow—both Kritie and Tim have sauntered away from the group and we remain, under the oriental garden, endeavoring to peel each other open in lieu from the lips down.
 

We are completely drenched. It is early December and it is raining but for some reason we are holding each other and we are warm.

Renae tells me that she is cold before offering intermittent whimpering sounds. She says that she likes being next to me. It keeps her nice and warm. It feels like we are skating. One second the snow is dandruff and the next it is diamonds. Everything is frosted over. Every fifth car in Westlake parking lot has a patron attacking the c happed glass of their windshield with the plastic tongue of a scraper.

Patrick is still nowhere in sight.  Hale is hanging out stating that his mom was going to pick us up

Kristie is going home with Tim. Renae makes an aside that it is 119 days until she gets her license and freedom, so to speak.

“I wonder what happened to Pat and Amy?” I ponder out loud.  Renae rolls her eyes and offers out a knowing Amy before muttering something unintelligible.
Hale seems like he doesn’t want to be here.  When I ask Hale if he liked the movie he said it was fine.  I can tell he is hurt that he is the only one without a date.  I tell Renae that I read in an article last week that Kurt Cobain purportedly despised this movie and refuses to have any of his music be a part of it when solicited by director Cameron Crowe

Renae stops me and we begin making out again.    


“Wait.” Renae says. Moisture in her hair.

            “I pull back. The back of manacled around her body. She nods her chin twice.

“I want to give you your Christmas present now.”

            “You don’t have to.” I say.

            “It means a lot to me.” She says

 

Renae hands me a gift. She apologizes that it's not wrapped The outside of the box has a name of a jewelry store in the mall I have tramped by dozens of time yet never gone into. I wonder what's inside. I wonder if she is trying to propose to me in reverse. As I open it up I see a gold bracelet. I hold it up. On the front of it in capital letter it reads TO DAVE followed by a colon. On the back it states in cursive Love Reane.

 "It's an identity bracelet." Renae says. "That way you can put it on and think about me."

I respond by saying that I love it. I respond by saying that I will wear it eternally. I respond by kissing the moisture in her hair, her cheekbones, her lips.

“Check this out,” I hold up the box that Renae gave me. I open it, explaining that it is an identity bracelet.

“Hale adds out a that’s nice. He then points to an idling station wagon in the parking lot.

“Hey, isn’t that your mom?”

Singles

We are seeing the flick that Dawn has told me, along with Dram Stokers Dracula, she just cannot get enough of. The soundtrack that has been a best seller in England 8 months before the movie came out. The soundtrack which Dawn Michelle has stated on numerous occasions she has blasted in the portable tape-paler in her car while chain smoking cigarettes, drinking cheap gas station coffee, driving out past Elmwood talking to the dashboard memorizing her lines for speech.

 

We are seated in the same crimson row we sat at for sister Act. Somehow Patrick and Amy are in the theatre next to us by themselves.

Behind us is an overweight  semi-balding middle-aged man who brought a trash bag in for some sort of ‘bring your own receptacle and eat all the popcorn you desire’ special.  He seems miffed that my arm is caped around Renae.  Because of the maroon décor the inside of Westlake theater looks like an aortic valve. The lights hush into a yawn. My arms are welded around Renae’s shoulder. I can feel her contours of her bra beneath my right fingers. If for some reason I can’t stop thinking about how incongruous Patrick look planted next to Amy. I wonder if they are seated in the same row. .  My hand is now completely draped around her body, fingers are snapping at each other on her lap. Her lisp taste like clover. It is more intense than our make out session when we saw Sister Act.   We hardly make it through the previews. We keep coming to each other. We keep holding each other. Somehow we have metaphysically melted past the pigmentation that is the others flesh. Somehow we are pining for more. Somehow we are scratching, we are biting, we are groping. Somehow we are being railed into each other as if with a magnet, somehow are compasses keep pointing into the direction of the others respective belt buckle.

The movie is transpiring. A beam of light shoots out from behind  us, out of a translucent skull on to the palette of the screen. 

 

The movie begins with three guttural chords trumpeting the introit to an era.

It is a grunge utopia. Everyone has long hair. Everyone seemingly has an appreciation for art and coffee and kick-ass tunes. Everyone is slamming their limbs into am amoebic foam of dancing called mosh. There is a close up of FOOD GIANT. There is a shot of the US premier uncut version of Brazil showing at the Neptune.

I think about Dawn Michelle and how she always referred to grunge as Skate Board music

Everyone is meeting for coffee. 

                                       

The guy behind us is making noise. He sounds like he is choking on the buttery kernels of his all-you-can-eat hefty bag popcorn. Hale is seated down at the last row. It is the same theater where a month earlier we saw last of the Mohicans and, upon leaving, saw Coach Mann crying in the back row.

We stop kissing just tersely when  8 year old Steve  is taken to the Doctor by his mid-seventies elementary school mother to learn about sex.  We fall down laughing when he pulls his playground comrades behind the side of the school and informs them, that, while ejaculating, the male shoots out a cumwad of spam.  We try not to overtly wince at the screen at the college part where everyone comes up attired as their favorite Contraceptive. The phrase, “Emotional Larceny” means absolutely nothing whatsoever to 15yr olds who have spent their entirety of their life in one giant Midwestern corn field with an occasional road.   

Somehow in the movie we pay no attention when burgeoning star and uncredited Cameron Crowe cameo Eric Stoltz adorned in mime guise offers the sage advice while smoking a cigarette looking for a club called the soda, stating that the problem about life is that love disappears.

My tongue is in her ear. Her eyes are closed. Her head is falling back. Even Tim and Kristie seem to be irked that we are sensually attacking each other in public.
   

More grunts are heard. Hale gets up when members of  TOUCH ME I’M DICK including Eddie Vedder  Hale comes back with an X-tra large Tub of pop corn and a X-large Pepsi with no ice at the scene where members of Pearl Jam are telling their lead singer to Shhh!!!! Watching a documentary on Queen  Bee apiary mating habits. Requesting Hale to take a modest slurp of his caffeinated beverage at and without making a clogged up making a clogged up toilet sound is damn near impossible and Renae shoots me a “Why doesn’t have-to-tag-along-look” by rolling her eyes up into the porcelain sheath of her fair forehead, which I kiss, responding to the volley and splash of her smile before ou lips end up falling into the other’s countenance again. The film seems to take superfluous liberties when it comes to breaking the fourth wall. There is pouches of laughter sprinkled across the theater. We laugh when Linda Powell tells Steve Dunn that A.) he has an act and that B.) not having an act is his act. We fall into sticky cement floor of the theater when Matt Dillon aka Cliff Pontier aka lead singer of the Grunge doppelganger TOUCH ME I’m DICK  optically stutters while elucidating the tonal etymology of a song titled TOUCH ME I’M DICK. We laugh When Brigit Fonda aka Janet goes in for a Breast augmentation with a budding Bill Pullman.

Steve’s super train looks like something we engendered with Legos in the fifth grade.

During the sex scene in the movie I become stiff. Part of me is saluting. Part of me is turning into an anatomical strip pole. Part of me is becoming the vertical plank of the crucifix, waiting for her limbs to be nailed horizontally across the timber and marrow of may flesh. We never have much time together. We hold each other on the phone, thought unlike Patrick’s assessment we have never, “Dude, stroked each other.” Somehow I can’t help laughing thinking about the awkward look epoxied into Amy’s lips when she first walked in with Pat. During the sex scene we hold each other even though we do not look at each other. I squeeze her hand. When the faceless interviewer interviews Xavier McDaniel and asks if there is anything else and the X-men averts his an Uncle Sam protruding finger at the camera mandating that Steve not cum yet I have no clue what he is alluding to.

Midway through the flick the lower part of my anatomy is shaped like the ubiquitous Seattle space needle. I am embarrassed. It is like I am brandishing a bouquet of flowers from below my belt for my date. Midway through the movie I whip glasses on. I am having a hard time seeing the screen.

The portentous phrase Mr. Sensitive Pony Tail guy gibe goes completely over our head. 
 

We keep on kissing. It is like everything we have ever planted in the northern hemisphere of each others body is something new  and succulent and warm. We keep on kissing. Every time I feel that I have an erection I press down at the Gideon bible in my right pocket, my penis is a vicar standing up for the word of the Lord. The portly man behind us dips into his vat of popcorn making static sounds when he chews.  I squeeze her hand. Kristie and Tim are still seated next to each other without holding each other. They look like they could be seated in tandem chairs inside a dentist office. That that is a very nice hat and I don’t mean that in an Eddie Haskell sort of way. That I just want to find someone who will say bless you after I sneeze. When Steve tells Janet that in a parallel universe we are probably scorching lovers I kiss Renae again.  We make out one final time. We end when there is a knock on the door witnessing Linda Powel coming back to Steve Dunn.

When a disheveled Steve asks Linda what took her so long she smiles commenting that she was stuck in traffic.

The garage door starts to orgasm in the last scene. Even David Hale, even the portly man behind us with the hefty garbage bag fraught with popcorn begins to fall apart in sheets of laughter.

Some how we are banking for more

After we make out Renae looks down as if she is looking for the stem of a plucked flower.  Much to the chagrin of my loyal friend Hale who insists that Renae does this with every lad in a football jacket. Much to the popcorn crunching disdain of the portly man behind us. We keep falling inside each other lips wondering where the stratospheric carefree topple will lead us, tugging at each others body like a ripcord to a parachute, watching us fall open into each other’s splayed limbs wondering when we will arrive.

christmas Northwoods mall...Early December '92

 

 

 

I am waiting all by myself, listening to the echoing clatter of my boots as I tramp around the lower atrium of the mall, near KB toys tore thinking about how last summer Dawn Michelle and I inadvertently knocked over a waterfall display of Treasure Trolls before nonchalantly evacuating the store. There is an arctic dip in temperature—somewhere Patrick has spent the hours leading up to early dusk listening to Metallica and looking into the mirror before Mama McReynolds called upstairs, telling him its time to go in five minutes—the blue McReynolds mini-van that comfortably seats eight will cruise through the damp leafy avenues of West Peoria, hanging a hard right on Martin Luther King Dr., skirting just above the precipice of the south end as a child on a balance beam, tumbling down Harmon Highway, forming a clover and escaping into the feral vastness of Creek road where college kids smoke dope and go skinny dipping in the summer, all the while Patrick, giddy with excitement, telling his mom how he has been talking with Amy an average of four hours a night and how she just can’t wait to meet him, while all the while his mother stares at her own reflection in the windshield and smiles like she is sipping Bailey’s and watching an Irish Sunset, informing her nearest and dearest first born named after the emerald saint that she met her own husband in high school via blind date—Patrick raking his fingers across the top of his head once again, lowering the overhead visor-like flap so that he can peer in the rectangular mirror, his cheeks lathered with some alchemical musk he found in his father’s bedroom while filching two of his moms Bensons and Hedges, the kind where he always removes the menthol from out of the filter first because he can’t stand the goddamn taste of clover in his mouth when he smokes, hoping to fire up the cigarettes somehow post-coitally. As the Mcreynolds carriage turns off of creek road and creeps up the bulbous hills of lower Bartonville Helen comments about how nice it is that Patrick is having friends from Limestone to socialize with the move pending and everything. Three beeps and Hale is seen taking his sweet little ol’ time walking out to the van,  Patrick, steps out and tells Hale to sit in front next to the Queen bee, nudging Hale in the ribs so that he can be in back and see the Lady’s. Hale will comment that he saw Renae today and she just plain scowled at him between classes while Amy asked how Dave’s cute friend Pat was. Somehow I can see all this as I look into the blue jello-mold of the fountain, holiday carols chirping overhead through the PA of the mall, trying not to dwell on the memory of the college girl next door dancing through her bedroom window with what looked like some kind of African mating ritual in her tight jeans, squatting with the caps of her knees out and thrusting her pelvis in meted intervals all the while I crouch on my desk with an aortic Z slabbed in the center, the desk where I keep my role-playing utensils and hide underwear ads from the Sunday paper, trying to marshal my thoughts with each of the light blue splashes, the pool fraught with buttons of copper and nickel and steel, trying to picture the smile on Renae’s face as I turn around the moment she walks into the lower level of the mall.

 

 

                    ***

 

 

 

As I wake up Sunday morning my father has a smile on his face.

 

"David, look!!! They finally announced it. They finally announced the trip!!!!"

Dad is holding the placard up. He is excited. I feel that entering the contest three years in a row might be considered excessive. Dad is telling me that this is my year.

The trip is to England this year. I hobble when I am on my paper route. My body is hurting. I just can’t heal.

“Do you think you will enter it, son?”

The way my father has the newspaper bag flung over his shoulder it looks like he is playing the bagpipes sans wearing checkered skirt. I don’t know how to answer him. I don’t know how to tell him that it feels like I have failed in my first season as an athlete. I don’t know how to tell Dad that I’ve already failed twice while trying to win the Young Columbus. I don’t have it in me to get the recommendations, get hyped up, dressed up, work for a month on delivering the perfect speech and then win again.

London, I think to myself.

The picture of Big Ben in the journal star looks like a deformed penis.

“I was hoping it would be Paris again. I was really hoping I would see France.:

I think about Madame Suhr and her French class. Briefly I think about ICC last summer and Madame Bretons class and Andrea who sat next to me and always smelled brand new.

“I was hoping it would be to Paris. I really wanted to see Paris. Especially now that I am taking French.”

Dad smiles. Whenever my father smiles I can see his silver fillings.

“You never know. This may be your year. London definitely is not bad.”

I tell him that I know. I walk on the other side of the street and slip papers into screen doors so the customers don’t have to g o into the frigid November cold to rad about their world upon waking up in the morning.

“You never know David,” My father says again, “This may be your year.”

“Maybe if I’m nominated I’ll enter.” I tell him.

I am walking with a limp.

I don’t know how to tell him that I don’t have it in me to fail again.

 

I am exhausted. There is a fissure whose sonogram looks like it could seriously evoke seismic-registering trembling’s. I overdid it all last summer, continuing to push myself, continuing to run three times a day, to over-exert my anatomy, to catch my cousin’s freshman cross country record, running through the swerves of Bradley park, gliding across the faraway at Madison golf course after delivering my papers, thinking about Ambra Haake, thinking about Kim Zemeskal, envisioning my body in the Olympics come four years time, myself, doing exactly what I feel called to do with my life. An athlete a runner.

 

There was Renae Holiday’s lips last night when we just couldn’t stop trying to unlock the area of each other’s respective anatomy above our chins, our mouths cut open like a welt.

 

Everything about her is warm.

 

There is the scent of coffee and the college girls who live next door and dépêche Mode and Tori Amos and enya.

 

And there is myself having nothing left inside of me, pushing myself as if paddling with my limbs. Inside, nothing left at all.

 

                    

***

She walks to me as if on stilts wearing her Limestone 95 jacket, the one that says BAND on the back. She is doing nothing but smiling.  Laura and Kritstie are next Renae. I walk up to her and embrace her body with my arms, kissing the side of her thoroughly make-upd visage, nasally lost in an ocean of pinetrees.

 

Behind Renae Patrick and Amy. Amy is a foot taller than Patrick. Patrick what looks like shoe-polished streaked across his hear. He has a crooked smile on her face. Amy has a look on her face that looks like she just missed her period.   

Patrick says that his mom just loves Amy.

 

“She practically gave us an Irish Blessing then uttered something about some St. before stating that she met my old man on a blind date.”

 

“You have to stay put for a minute.” Renae says

 

“What.”

 

I need to go pick up your Christmas gift.  Amy walks next to renae. Renae orders me to stay put and not follow her. I ask if its okay if I go upstairs to get a cappuccino.

 

I don’t know what to say to Patrick.

 “Dude man, is she fucking hot or what?”

“I utter a long overdrawn  uhm as if I am chanting a Buddhist mantra.  Patrick seems naive to the truism that Amy is a different person is person than she is on the phone. Patrick says the word dude again.

 “And your girl is hot as shit!!” He says rattling his torso, stating that if I’m not hitting that shit on a nightly basis I seriously need to have my pecker examine with a stethoscope and tweezers.

 “Fuck, I saw the picture of Renae and I knew she was hot but, fuck dude. Shit.”

I tell Patrick that I care about Renae.

 Hale seems to be a third wheel. He says that he doesn’t see what the big deal is about any of the girls since he sees them everyday between classes and they never even acknowledge him anyoldways.

 

We scuttle into Gloria Jeans.  As is routine Patrick quotes Hudson Hawk’s adage inquiring to anyone who will listen how come you always have time to buy a cappuccino but never have time to drink one. The mall is a littered with holiday garb. Human beings dressed in trench coats and stocking caps warding off the incipient snap of winter slush back and forth over roving like independent windshield wipers.

 

Patrick takes a sip of his cappuccino, a foam goatee sprouting below his chin, before commenting that he can’t believe just how hot Renae is again.

 

“I mean, maybe if you don’t mind sometime we can do the old switcheroo, giving me several elbow thrusts before I look back at him stating that I don’t think Renae desires to do the old switcheroo with anyone least alone him.

 

“Anyway, Pat, you’ve been talking with Amy every night for two weeks. Is she everything you thought she would be?”

 

Patrick says the word dude. He is wearing his stone washed jean jacket and looks like Bryan Adams. He hushed me over to the corner next to Alladins, near the orange locker where always insist on getting a locker and planting in coat inside even though we will only be at the mall for 15 minutes max.

 

“Check this out,” Patrick looks both ways as if he is ready to drop a bag of weed. He then opens up the front pocket of his jean jacket and whips out two condoms.
 

 

“Dude,”

 

Patrick says shh, don’t let Hale see or he’ll tell his mom and his mom will tell my mom.

 

“Where do you get those at?”

 

Patrick smiles and says that he has his sources. He says something about having to place his helmet on before hitting the ball out of the park and circling the bases.

 

 Judging by the look on Amy’s face when they were next to each other I have a hard time envisioning Patrick will even get to see a pitch.

 

We are fifteen years of age. Sex is called Doing it.

 

“Patrick, where are you going to Do It anyway? You guys are going to be in a movie theater.”

 

Patrick seems to stutter as he responds, telling me that dude, there are places.

 

“The movie starts in half an hour. Plus it’s a fucking ice storm outside. What are you guys gonna do? Go into the woods? Fuck next to the interstate.”

 

Patrick nods his head again commenting that dude, there are places.

 

“Besides, Amy and I are going to a different movie.”

 

“What?”

 

“Yeah, she wanted to see Sneakers instead of Singles.”

 

“What? But I thought the whole point of this was to  double date and…”

 

Patrick places the condoms into his top pocket, fastening the button where ever a ubiquitous pack of smokes will one day all too soon reside. He gives them a little tap before perusing his lips, raises his eyebrows in a certain way like he is trying to communicate something incognito without Hale knowing.

 

Hale is drinking some sort of caffeinated concoction on ice which he literally paid ten dollars for by goading the barista inside Gloria Jeans to add a shot of every single syrup behind the bar. The drink look mango even though it started out a three shots of espresso and steamed milk.  As is customary Hale takes three swigs and then shuffles the extra-large concoction in my hands, telling me to hold it for him, meaning that he wishes me to finish it.

 

Right when I am trying to communicate with Patrick while taking a swig of Hale’s house specialty I see Renae. She has a non descript brown bag from a store I have never heard of before.

 

“I had it specially made just for you. I hope you like it I can’t wait to give it to you at Christmas.”

 

Amy is looking like she just chugged something that had a rodent at the bottom. Patrick is goggle-eyed and smiling. He taps his heart where the condoms are cached. I feel any moment that he is going to break out and perform and Irish jig.;

 

“Guys, we got to get going if we are going to make the flick.”

 

I grab Renae’s hand. Patrick tries doing the same with Amy but she steps back and he pretends to be running his fingers through the slave of grease he shot through his routinely unkempt hair. Hale publically bitches and says what, no Street Fighter.

 

Both Laura, Tim and Kristie are walking ahead.

 

As we exit the upper entrance of the mall next to Garcia’s Pizza in a Pan we step out into an ice storm. The world is coated in a fresh coated December glaze.  It looks like an ice rink.  Patrick keeps trying to cavalierly shield his hand around Amy’s shoulder and waistline and Amy keeps walking ahead of him with her gloveless hands tucked under opposite shoulders. She is not looking at him at all in the eye.

I look at the way Renae's smile reflects back to me in the snow.

 

 Everything looks brand new.