I am seated with my father and my Uncle in the football stands at Limestone High school. My cousin Amanda is aspiring to be a Drum major next year.  I have my glasses off. I have what may be my last meet tomorrow. Dad points out several of his former class students from Hollis. The filed looks like a piece of sheet music spattered horizontally over a sea of emerald felt. The lights are perched high overhead and yawning.

 I can still feel the chlorine on my body from twice a day workout sessions in the pool.

With my glasses off and folded inside my side pocket checkbook fashion the band is a aquatic  glob that seemingly pulsates and morphs ferrying diminutive brass stems. My father points out Amanda twice. Limestone is playing IVC and the band is performing a pregame show that includes Journey's Don't Stop Believing. I point to my father and tell him that I have several friends that are in the band including my friend Renae.

I use the word friend when describing them.

My cross-country season is all but punctuated. This is the first high school football game I have been to and it is not the school that I attend.

The game will be starting in fifteen minutes. The band egresses off the field in a sentence of limbs.

"Here, why don't you go down and say hi to your friends real quick." My father suggests. I am petrified. I don't know what I will do when I see Renae once again. I can't move. I can't believe that I am actually here at the stadium of the school I want to attend.

"Just go say hi to them," my father says, giving me a little shove."

I walk down from the top of the bleachers near the visitors end zone awaiting the bad.
Bodies are marching towards me. They are all in line. I am squinting, I am hoping to see the girl who last weekend I sat next to at the Rivermen game and endeavored to ask out only to find that the opportunity never availed itself, only to find that, at the end of the night I was in a strangers car being driven back to the only home I have ever known  with the girl I have been madly infatuated with next to my side. I see nothing. I am waiting near the end of the bleachers where the100 plus members of the band that has just finished christening the tip of their instruments in the center of the goal post.  I am waiting as what appear to be a modulating cadre in the fashioned of a Chinese dragon marches past me in a somewhat flagellating fashion. As the band members strut off the field they each swing their instrument and try to hit the middle of the upright The color blue continues top swarm around me. Limestone’s band adheres to the moniker of the Rockets and they continue to clang instruments as they march. They are walking back off the field as if they are troops. I am fully expecting David best to pull me over and signal security, asking me to leave the moment he sees me. There are several giggles. I hear someone say my voice and wonder if it perhaps might be my cousin. 

“Dave!!”

It is Kristi. She is in drum corps. She had five miniature drums arrayed out in front of her.

Kristie is still as gorgeous. Her hair is tucked beneath a blue Limestone rocket beret. I go to speak with her. I am still near sighted due the fact that my glasses are in my pocket. She lifts up her drum stick and points.

“The rest of the band is back there.”

Next I see Laura walking like a wounded battalion lugging her trombone.  She smiles and yells out my name like she is excited to see me as well.

No one ever yells out my name like they are excited to see me at Manual.

For a second I walk with Laura. She seems like she is worn out.  I wonder if Renae has called her at all over the past week and told her how awkward it was between us. I wonder if David Best  got to her. I don’t know who is coming next. There is an incessant freight train of band students dressed in military band garb walking in a sentence towards their place on the bleacher’s.

I want  to look back and find my Father and my Grandma and my Uncle Larry. 

While I am walking with Laura she points past me. She states the name of the creature I have been unremittingly seeking. She states that she will be excited that I asee her once again.

I am confused.

The I see her. She is by herself, carrying her clarinet as if it is a rifle.Even off the field she is still marching in 4/4 time

When she sees me see lets go of voice encasing my name. 

I walk up to her. She is in her Limestone Marching Rockets uniform.

I lasso my arms around her. I reel her in close.

I kiss her forehead.

I kiss it long.

                                                                   ***

 

I am seated next to  Renae with the section of the bleachers reservd for the Limestone band and she  is blushing. She is looking down at her Clarinet. She is holding it in both hands like she is about ready to give it head.I am the only person seated in the Limestone band section that is not wearing a military uniform or brandishing an instrument like a rifle. From the bleachers the illuminated field looks like a protracted Abacus. It is elongated locker room sheet music an two upsidown pitch forks planted 120 yards apart.  Helmeted high schoolers look ready to topple over in their armor.

I have failed with Angie LightHouse.  I have failed up to the expectations I have set for myself from the outset.

Tomorrow is my final cross-country meet.

I am still not 100 percent healed. I am still not fifty percent healed.

I am seated at a football game cheering for a school of a bunch of country kids in a district that nearly all of my family teaches for and finally, I feel like somehow I finally belong. 

Renae’s attire is navy blue and slips down to her ankles. Her waist seems to correlate to the neck of most of he peers.

"You look nice," I tell her.

.   Renae looks down into the top stem of her coronet like a bouquet and blushes.

I am lost at what to say. I want to apologize for the awkwardness of the last week. I want to tell her that I still think about her all the time.

Somehow Renae didn't ask what I was doing here when she saw me as she was walking off the field

 

“Listen, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to confuse you at all. I think you’re a beautiful person. I’m really blessed to have you in my life.”

Before she can respond I am being reeled away. It is David Best.  I am fully expecting him to ostracize me for sitting with the Limestone band.

 

Instead he pulls me aside. He is happy to see me.

“Listen, I’m sorry about the other night. Larry was pulling my chain when I was talking to him on the phone and I guess I believed him more than I should of.”

I say the word larry with a question mark and then realize that he is talking about Renae's father.

"I'm sorry if I confused you or renae. You guys are really cute together."

David is acting nothing happened. Like our phone conversation the other night never transpired.

“Anyone bro, it’s good you are here.”

He is slapping me on the back. Suddenly we are Best friends again. Suddenly there are no rifts between us.

Suddenly all is well in the world.

I get Renae to stick her clarinet inside her mouth and offer a verbal quip about how she’s pretty good at sucking which invariably makes her blush. The colors of Renae’s cheeks is the sort of sunrise that cannot be described.

On the field IVC is ahead but Limestone is coming from behind.

All of a sudden I lose myself. All of a sudden I ask her.

"So do you wanna go out?” There is a pause. The sound of two palms pressed together in mid-clap anticipating connection.

I ask Renae, for the second time.

  .

“Yes,” She says. Somehow we are dating. Somehow she is my first official girlfriend.

I am walking out of Limestone stadium. In the Bleachers Renae is blowing into her instrument as if she is giving the reed head.  The lights are white and heavy.

I feel like telling Dad that I have connected with someone.

I feel like telling him that I have a girlfriend.

Life is good.

 

The next day at school I am walking with a limp. Coach asks me how’s the leg. I lie and tell him I am at 80 % when in all actuality it is closer to 20. I lie and say that I haven’t run on it since Mattoon. Part of me wants to tell Coach that I did it. Part of me wants to tell Coach that, at three in the morning running naked I decimated the FRISH record. Part of me wants to show him my watch, which I have not yet cleared, always showing the same time as 16:41.

 

“You seem to be limping more Von Behren.”

 

Coach says to put everything on the line. He says that Regional is to be my last race. If I don’t qualify for sectional.

 

Even if you run a minute slower you should still be in the top five.

 

I do a light workout with the team. I wonder if I have betrayed  my Coach by sneaking out and running the course on my own at 3:30 in the morning.

 

 

 

“Lets do this." I tell Coach, even though I am hurting. Even though I re-activated a wound the night I laid everything on the golf course to be born again.

 Game on.

 

                                                                         ***

 

I wish I could call Dawn Michelle. I wish I could learn if she is still alive.

 

                                                                  ***

 

“What?”

 

“I think you really would like it son. I’ll take you out for dinner at LUMS first then we’ll go see Uncle Larry at the game.”

 

My father has just invited me to Limestone’s Football game Friday night. I am to sit in the Home team stands and cheer on the school I would have given my left testicle to attend.

The reason we are going to the game is because my cousin Amanda is a drum major this is the last time the band as a whole get to perform their routine.

 

I want to tell my dad with the exception of Amy everyone I hung out with last week who made me feel a part of their supposed gang is in the band. I want to tell Dad that I thought I really had a special bond with Renae and that I thought we were dating until my oldest friend, who I could have sworn was trying to set us up all summer went out of his way to

 

I want to tell dad that every night before I go to bed I think about the college girl next door slowly stripping before seeing an image of Bob’s penis clanging in the front of my face like a clamp to a bell.

 

I have not spoken with Renae or David Best since last Sunday when all hell imploded in an Armageddon morel.

 

“Dad listen, I should really just stay home and rest. I have the meet the next day.”

 

I point to my leg.

 

“How about this. Since it is senior night they have the band performing their show before the game. We can go watch the game and then leave at halftime.”

 

I don’t want to go.  I don’t want Renae to think I am stalking her or David to remind me about what an idiot I was that I thought, for a moment I was dating rhe girl of my dreams.

My dad tells me come on. He tells me it will be fun.

 

Besides, a lot of your friends go to Limestone.

 

I look back at my father and smile.

 

 

                                                                 

Debate #3

The next night I go over to Bob and Frank’s house to watch the last debate.  They both have their pants on when they open the door.

 

My parents like that I am friends with Bob and Frank. Frank work with my Uncle Albert down at city hall.

 

We made some popcorn and brewed a pot of coffee for you.

 

The coffee again tastes syrupy like it did the night before.

Unlike the second debate the candidates are hiding their genitals behind a podium. It is a different debate. It is somber.  Clinton continues to truckle towards the kite strings toward the middle class.  Bush is attacking issues of character left and right. Ross Perot has his own charm. He loks like the Napoleon you wanted to win waterloo.

I ask Bob and Frank who they want to win the debate.

"All the candidates are good but we really like they Clinton guy. He's more liberal and open minded."

My leg hurts. I have iced it all day. I am thinking about the time I finally chronicled on the gold course the other night. I am thinking about the college girl slowly removing her attire next door.

I have not spoken with either Renae or David Best all week.

“Your hanging out here so much maybe you should move on in.”

They laugh.  My parents are staunch republicans. I am trying to remain open minded Midway through the debate Frank is rubbing his forefinger against my thigh.  When I cross my legs trying to be sophisticated while watching the debates he stops.

In the middle of the debate Bob gets up and heads to the bathroom. When I get up to get a java refill I see a bottle of something called Khalua next to the coffee pot.  As I walk back into he living room I see that Bob has left the door open in the bathroom. He is taking his clothes off. He is completely naked. I wonder if he forgot to close the door.

 

I go back into the living room and sit opposite Frank.

I tell him I should probably being going home now.


Frank says after one more cup of coffee.


I agree.


It's hard not to laugh when Bob and Frank our around.

Meet number...

When I arrive at the starting line it is 3:15 in the morning.  There is no Renae Holiday even though I swear we somehow connected the other night. There is no chance of my name being seen in the pool atrium as the FROSH record holder even though I could have easily achieved the time earlier in the season. With two C’s and two teachers who, if you place them side by side would resemble the number ten my academic transcript is indubitably marred. I don’t know why my purported best friend aptly named David Best had to fucking transition into Benedict Arnold when he found out I was dating Renae.

It is 3:20 in the morning. It is still dark.  The sort of wintery licorice dark. The remnants of a bonfire or leaves being incinerated illegally hang strong in the air.

I take off my sweat pants. I remove my hoodie.

With the exception of my cleats and sport swatch I am completely naked.

In my right hand I hold my cousin Todd Brooks number from when he ran state  when he was a senior. Somehow it is a talisman.  I wad it up into a palm-sides fist. I clear my Runners World watch to all zeros. Somewhere I hear what sounds like birds beginning to chirp. I look down into the body that somehow, like my best friend, has betrayed me.

The moment I press the start button I take off in a roar.

It is a week after Columbus. There has been no advertisement concerning the next Young Columbus.

I am running the course around Madison golf course one final time. My breath is forming transient cartoon bubbles of smoke signals in front of me. I am moving. With the exception of my socks, shoes and watch I am completely naked. My penis slapping the white of my thigh in almost 4/4 time signature. I continue to push.  Implacable darkness has completely enveloped the course. The most visible I will be is when I run along Sterling avenue. I stay maybe five feet in from the road, knowing full well if a conical pair of illuminated headlights glare in my direction I will have to duck into the golf course.

I am running faster. I look down at my watch. My first mile is 5:30. I have had faster first miles. My testicles are poached in the crisp autumnal air. There is the sound of streetlamps hissing which I am only all to familiar with from being a paperboy.  


There is a pain in my stress fracture. I am ignoring it. I am pushing ahead.

I am thinking of Peacock. I am thinking about the FORSH record that I somehow failed to glean. I am thinking about Jose in the parking lot looking lost after the meet that was supposed to be his swan song to a glorious career. I am biting the wad of paper that is my cousin’s number from the state meet twelve years earlier. I wish I could understand just what happened to Dawn Michelle. I try not to think that she is pregnant and moved out with that loser she gave head to three weeks ago.

Somehow I feel if I run fast enough around Madison golf course that I can get the sight of Bob and his gangly penis out of my imminent vision. My own cock looks like an apparition . It is floating. It is beating a Zulu tempo against the upper white of my loins.

I am naked. I am fifteen years of age. I am a freshman in high school and everything I touch disintegrates.

I run behind the ELKS club and behind the club house. I am pushing along Martin Luther King Drive when I hear what sounds like gunshots, note being able to discern if it is coming from the hood or from the shooting range behind Kroger. I continue to press forward. As I glance down at my watch at the two mile mark I am at a respectable 11:11. A quick calculation in my head discerns that I have run the second mile just ten second slower than the first.  As I look for the final half loop I pass my clothes, a plateau of cloth, I am kicking. All I have to do is run the last mile in six minutes.  All I have to do is go all out the last half mile and the record if mine, if not in the scoreboard, in the bare nakedness of my head, in the pinned atrium of my fifteen year old soul.

 

At hole five it happens.

My right leg is giving out. It hurt like shit after Mattoon. It ached the whole weekend when Dawn was telling me all about going down on High school drop outs and Renae was duly relaying to me the narrative transcript of Beverly Hills 90210. I am pushing myself. Right turn, at the exact moment I went the wrong direction in my germinal meet vs. Woodruff, I explode in pants and grunts.My right leg is burning. It feels like it is going to crack into two. I turn. I stall, wince. I have less than half a mile left.  I’m not letting hole 5 fuck with me again.

Down manor parkway an early bird is nursing a cup of coffee while walking a Retriever. The dog starts to bark. Somehow I can hear the atavistic drum of my ancestors as I take off sprinting. Somehow I see myself a la Coach Mann as a Neanderthal man hunting and gathering, running in the fire.

 

The sun in the east is an orange streamer quivering over a pond of ink.

 

I am lashing out. I lunging forward. I flagellating my arms into my chest. I am refraining to mentally submit to the poignant twinge throbbing as if it is ready to snap and somehow erupt on the leg that has given out on me on this very course. I am pushing myself.  My penis, dangling mid-thigh, the neck equine neck of a horse that has been trained to sprint out the starting gate past the clubhouse turn. I am cursing. I am fighting. My penis is no longer slapping a rhapsodic melody against my thighs. It is 35 degrees outside. I run possessed. The sweat has trickled on my bare chest and has caked into ice.  . I push. I motor. I pee a little. I spit. I cry. I wail. I am shouting caterwauling louder than I have ever screamed before, I am asking for forgiveness. I am supplicating to be damned. I am asking whatever deity there is to fuck me up the ass with every transgression known to mankind and then to hold me afterwards only to find myself all alone in this egg-timer called life, called youth, called freshman year of high school.

 

At the end of my scream I swear I hear a snap.  I hobble. I cross the line while pressing the stop button on my wrist.

 

I look at the blue lens of my watch before letting go of a final caterwaul, an eruption of sound atomically hitting the coastline of the known universe for the first time.

 

My time says 16:39. Dogs are barking. The chapped horizon is lavender, blossoming in the east.  I am taking deep breaths.

 

I am in pain.

 

I am bleeding with joy.

The Voyeur

 I look at the desk with a Z in the center I will write my first poem on someday.  I crack open my algebra book, unsure what to study. I crack open Cool Joe Thomas’ Biology book and take notes on selected pages I will never be tested on.  That night I prop my leg up and make a cup of instant coffee. That night I think about Renae Howard. . I wonder  how I can go about telling her that I think about her all the time even though I go to a high school in the shit side of town.

That night I will try to sleep only sleep will be denied because of pain. Sleep will be denied because of light. Sleep will be denied. The night somehow I can peep in her blinders. Somehow they are ajar and casting a breath of shadow against the wall. Somehow I can see her, The girl with the blonde hair who was rattling her tors while I was watching her dance late at night.

 

I should be sleeping. I should be resting. I should be supplicating to whatever deity there is getting ready for the Regional meet. I wonder what my life would be like if I could go to Notre Dame with beautiful long-haired ashen skinned girls in checkered skirt. I wonder if we would read the books Coach Mann is always alluding to while arriving to the locker room after school and busting my ass with the fastest cross-country team in the area code.


She is wearing jeans and shirt with a giant capital M plastered in the center.  She is writing. There are no text books. I am waiting for any subtle movement. My lights are off.  I intermittently peer through my own blinds staying just far enough to the right so that

 

She is writing. She has her legs forming an upper- case A  into her breast. She is tilting her head. It looks like she  might have been crying. She is writing  She is quilling her pen across forehead of white paper, inking the thinned-veined flesh of the page with streams of emotion. She is tackling the page. It looks like she is knitting with one hand.  It feels like she is trying to blue the tip of the pen into the vacuous socket of the page.
 
She is beautiful.

 

I can’t stop staring at the college girl next door knowing that she does not know I am looking at her.

 

I can’t stop wondering about her world.

                                             

I can’t stop looking into the window. I should be studying. Precipitously I balance my left leg on the side of the bed three years earlier my father used to kneel down as we would barter prayers every night. I can’t stop looking at the enlighten square.  I can’t stop looking at the

She is still writing.  She has been writing for over an hour. Perhaps she is journaling. Perhaps she is channeling cursive sentences conveying her romantic disdain. She has her blonde hair up in a pony tail. My leg hurts. I am still balancing precipitously on the side of the bed.  Every subtle shift of her anatomy I inch closer. 

Then it happens. She is breaking free from her body.  She sets her notebook down like an overturned mortarboard.  She rises. She stretches, I have been paralyzed for  balancing precipitously with a shit appendage on the side of my bed for ballast. Then is happens. She gets up and arches her back, her arms forming a Y. Her neck looks around her head like a trained otter. She then lowers her arms and crosses them near her waist, alighting her shirt like a drape. Her skin is white. I can see the silk hyphen that is the back of her bra. Before I know it she is tucking her stomach in, pinching at the center of her jeans, shaking the lower part of her body slowly like a mermaid kicking out of a pair of fins. Her panties are green. I have never seen a woman wearing mismatched underwear before. She stretches up and out again. There is a mole on her back that looks like the state of Rhode Island. She is facing my direction. It is like she is cognizant of my adolescent pining ever though she is completely oblivious of my presence. She places both her arms behind her back, her elbows jutted out like burgeoning wings. She is facing my direction. The bra releases itself in a silk tumble. She holds it like a defeated albino eel before carelessly tossing it the corner of her room.

 

Briefly she snaps at the back of her panties. She is still facing my direction.  At first I think she will be entirely naked. At first I think she will lower the tip of her panties availing the inscrutable keyhole to some other world.  Her breasts are bulbous, ivory orbs floating below her chin. Both nipples seem crossed eyed and staring at me at the same time.

 

I continue to balance on my bed.

 

The girl takes off her pony tail holder. She traipses across the room again, this time in slow motion.  When I see her coming back to her bed I notice that she has been wearing her socks the entire time.

 

She snaps at the back of her panties once again as if swatting off a wedgie before slinking into the top of her bed, the vertical rectangle I have been peering inside of like an advent calendar hushes into a socket of blankness.

 

The lights are off in both are bedrooms. She is ten feet away from me, segregated between cheap domestic ply-wood domicile constructing architecture wearing only her panties.

 

I wonder if the tops of her fingers are traversing near the center of her anatomy.

 

I wonder if she is trying to enter herself.

 

I wonder if she feels all alone in life.

I wonder if she needs someone to hold her.

I grab the crinkled numbers belonging my cousin Todd Brooks.

 

It is three o’clock in the morning. I have an hour and a half before I need to before my father will wake me up for the paper route.

 

I leave all the lights off in the house. I skulk through the kitchen past the refrigerator.

 

I head for the door.