On the car
ride to drop her off at Peoria Christian my sister Jenn pelts me with questions. She wants to
know if Megan is my girlfriend. She wants to know if we are dating. She wonders
where I am staying when I arrive there.
“It’ll be a
short flight.” I tell my sister, sounding precocious as if I am use to scaling
the continents of the globe in single-engine propellers. Maybe forty-five
minutes. Enough time to have a cup of coffee and then land.
“What will
you be doing up there?” Jenny inquires. It is morning. It is autumn. People are
leaving.
“I don’t
know.” I say. “Probably just hanging out, I guess.”
I drop Jenn
off in the front of Peoria Christian school, in front of all the rich Baptist
girls with long dresses entering the building she tells me to have a great
weekend, without thinking I blast on the radio. My midterm is across the river
in less than 45 minutes. I motor past Peoria Christian and take a hard right on
to War Memorial drive, aiming for the bridge and the direction of the
institution I sometimes feel embarrass to attend into the direction of everything else I have
ever known.
***
As I arrive to campus I see Kyle standing with Russ and his
other friend outside the cement slope that leads to the cafeteria, the self
deemed Smoking deck.
“Today’s
the big day, huh?” Kyle says, tapping his cigarette out like he is swatting at
an annoying insect.
“You know
it brother. I leave right after I take the midterm.”
“You’re not
gonna leave us for a cook are you?” He inquires again. I smile. Last week I
remember looking out over the wheat flavored slants of light on the bridge and
Kyle, for some misogynistic heart-break fueled reason started addressing women
as ‘cooks’ because they should be in the kitchen cooking instead, as happening,
simultaneously sleeping with all of his friends.
I tell Kyle that she is not a cook. But she may be an angel.
"Angel with an apron instead of wings." Kyle adds, tapping the ash off his cigarette with a little snort. I tell him I will see him Monday and leave for Mr Hahn's speech midterm.
Mister Hahn encourages his students
to smoke twenty cigarettes a day, drink lots of coffee and eat red meat. He is
a cantankerous dotard. Sitting in front of the classroom with his tropical
Hawaiian mug, his knees crossed. “Next!”
his voice tolls, adopting the
hushed tenor of a passing locomotive as he heralds the arrival of the next
student waiting to give their speech. I have done three speeches in the
semester. The first one was on censorship where I commenced the Speech reading
excerpts from Ginsberg's Howl. Later on in the semester I will do speeches
based on the art of Pierre August Renoir and Paris.
In order to
take Prof. Hahn’s Midterm I miss the beginning of Prof Resnick's novel into film
class where we read books that have been transitioned into films. We start out
the year reading FOR MIICE AND MEN and then THE COLOR PURPLE. We then do Like
Water for Chocolate, Little Big Man (currently slogging through) Heart of
Darkness and then One Flew Over the Cuckoos nest. After I slap down my final
response to Prof Hahn’s week late midterm exam I rush in late to class Paul’s
class where they are watching excerpts from Little Big Man. At the end of the
class the lights are switched on and a plenary discussion ensues but mill I can
think about is that I am leaving.
As I depart
Professors Resnick's class, I drape the school bag over my head like roadkill, the
closing song from Before Sunrise strumming in my head. I walk into the hallways
shaped like turrets alone, back to my car, looking for Kyle at the Smokers
deck, only find out he is no longer there.
***
He is ready to leave.
As he enters his bedroom he see that
there is a brown sack placed with an organ donors finesse on the top of his red duffel bag with a note written in the blue-willow loop
cursive of his mothers handwriting.
He holds the note up from his mother
up to the October morning light breezing through his bedroom window. In her
handwriting I swear I see Megan older, her body hunched over a desk, circling
out sentences to her son somewhere about to go on a sojourn that he feels will
change his life forever.
Zipping open the red nylon of the
bag he stuffs the packed meal and letter into the denim intestines of jeans and
socks. It is ten am. His bus leaves in half an hour. He is going, getting ready
to leave. Getting ready to leave.
Without much of a hesitation he pick
up his red duffle bag and heap it over his shoulder. It’s a mile walk to the student center at Bradley campus
and I have a half-hour to catch the 10:30 Peoria Charter and then leave.
The overhead sky heralds a
light blue aquatic flavor and could pass for the color of an icepack as He
gropes the knob to the front door several time sand twist it, verifying it is
locked, slamming the screen door hushed behind him, leaving the only
shingled-hut cosigning domestic shelter he has ever known marching, as if in a
daze, the solid mile to the bud depot, quoting Walt Whitman to himself as he
passes the sweet gum tree his Granpa Lloyd planted in his front yard the summer
the born, the tree whose leaves always remain vernal and green until what seems
like damn near the week before thanksgiving, when an ice begins to graze and
permeate across the front of morning windshield's in the fashion of an arctic
contagion. The leaves are the color of stainless earrings and still cling to
the majority of the trees only their sockets where crooked branches prevail. He
continues to walk, down Cedar St. pass the church where I attended pre-school,
my bag still slung over my shoulder as if some sort of prosthetic taking a
solid left on Barker walking past Video Adventures, past Champs West, past LUMS
where surely this weekend everyone he knows and loves in this world will
congregate around corner old oak table and chain smoke and write insipid
teen-angst riddled poetry while performing mock Tarrentino impressions.
***
The bus driver ferrying luggage
into the bottom of the Peoria
"How much is it?” I inquire. The
bus driver tells me that depends and then asks if I have a student ID. I do. It
turns out I get a three dollar discount.
When the bus slinks off of I-74 and
skids into Bloomington-Normal I become perplexed. The bus fills over the
allowed vacancy in Bloomington
I continue to write. There is no room. Everyone is belly-button to belly-button in the aisles.
Two hours later half the bus will empty out at Joliet and the Oak Brook. At the back of the charter it is just myself and the girl in
the red hat. Thirty minutes ago there was standing room only and the promising
thespian just wouldn’t shut the fuck up. Now its the two us, one seat in front
of the other.
She smiles.
I smile. We talk about music. She tells me that her parents used to get dressed up to go to the lyric Opera.
When I exit the bus I shake the classy ladies hand goodbye.
She wishes me good luck on my writing.
I smile.
***
He tells me that he is an old widower and its nice to have someone to talk to on this flight.
Below the vernal quilt of Wisconsin
I look down in the slate in front of me and ask him if he
would like to hear a poem the vowels of her heart inspired. He says sure and
nods. The whole time I am reading he has his pointer, middle finger and thumb
configured into his chin as if he is about ready to offer a snap. His eyes seem
to look up and over across the prowl of his glasses. When I am done he looks
back at me and nods. He tells me that its pretty good. I nod.
"Sounds kinda crazy but I actually spent an afternoon just talking to them, telling them what I've been up to all these years."
He continues to talk. The captain makes an announcement over the PA on the plane that will later be known as a skipper, simply
because it shoots off from the runway at
O’hare performs an aerial parabolic skip, arches steady before decrescdendoing, the runway
seems like a rolled out carpet from another world splattered out, the sound of the airplane is the sound of sex, there is light and ear-plopping descencion and there is light and there is Wisconsin and the terminal that looks like a diorama contsructed out of a shoebox and the feeling burrowed inside the chest that inside she is watching you arrive from above.
That she is watching you arrive from inside.
For reason unbeknownst to mankind I feel almost impelled to
make some sort of small talk.
“This bus sure filters out fast.” I assess. She nods. She says that she
normally takes the bus home three or four times a semester and that I should
see it around the holidays.
Her hair is black and fashionably cut. Her forehead looks
like unblemished snow culled from a chirstmas morning tv special vignette.
Snow, the color of Megan’s last name.
She is classy. Business class sexy. When asked she responds
that her major is marketing. She asks me if I am going home from classes. I tell her that I am flying out of O'hare to chase something I'm not sure exists.
She smiles.
“I wanted to be an art major though. I really like going to
the Art Institute of Chicago. I love looking at all of the Monet’s”
I smile. We talk about music. She tells me that her parents used to get dressed up to go to the lyric Opera.
I look again at the classy black haired girl, past her
reflection in the lens of the Peoria charter I can see the Holiday Inn where
Megan and I first met, almost exactly seven calendar months to the day, the
hotel where David Best told me to re-call her up and tell me she was a handsome
black man, the hotel where we met for coffee and I pretended I knew how to
decipher the pink-hued cuneiform creases found in the interior of her left
palm, the hotel where we got into a petty argument over wanting to go line
dancing an then separated with a feeling that I would never talk with her again
until the phone reverberated that night and we embraced after hours in the
hallway and it seemed like we would somehow never let go.
When I exit the bus I shake the classy ladies hand goodbye.
She wishes me good luck on my writing.
I smile.
***
The last time I was in the United Airlines terminal at
O’hare was a little over three years and a gauged youth filtered generation
ago, I was saying goodbye to Justin and Chris from my sojourn in England. We
were all alone in the terminal, having traveled from London to JFK, from JFK to
LaGuardia via Shuttle bus. From Laguardia to O’hare where we found ourselves
all alone, in front of the myopic blue canvas of the televised squares blinking
the on-time and delays of arrivals and departures. I stand in front of the barometer, looking
into the outline of my own reflection, the back of my duffel bag swung over my
shoulder, squinting occasionally, trying to see if I can spot a hint of the
reflection from the boy from three and a half years ago. The boy who only was a
freshman in high school, who was waiting for the moment to be free, to fly,
waiting for his flight all alone, the boy who can now put his glasses on in
public because the girl in the flower dress is nowhere to be found.
***
The captain makes an announcement on the plane, stating that
they will be serving Starbucks coffee on this flight. I think about the college
sophomore in the long black trench coat and the red hat and picture the
suburban home in the north shore she most be going to, wondering what it looks
like festooned with Christmas lights, wondering what it must be like to hail
from a life of promise. Next to me on the aisle seat is an old man. He smiles and tells me he is just returning from Paris and France in general to see some of the places he fought in the second war.
He tells me that he is an old widower and its nice to have someone to talk to on this flight.
It is only a forty-five minute
aerial skip from the smooth cement carpet tarmac of O’hare to Appleton
Wisconsin, where it is somehow I feel inside my chest, all beginning, the
bulbous green chins of the hills below reflecting different shades of emerald
as I look down from the Window seat I requested, seeing the reflection of my
own forehead and cheekbones and sunglasses, looking past the image of my own
translucent rectangular window through the wisps of clouds skiing through the
diminutive size of the aircraft like limp white flags connoting surrender. I am
waiting for the woman I feel in my head will somehow save me. The woman who
will add meaning to my life—the seventeen year old fire hydrants sized
Scandinavian cinnamon skinned goddess of my dreams. I am flying to meet her,
wondering what she will do when she sees me. Trying not to dwell on the letter
she scribbled out after I requested my airline reservations in which she told
me that she already had a boyfriend.
“Coffee.” I say, to the stewardess
as she nods her chin and ferries a plastic chalice in front of my already
released tray. The widower sitting next to me is telling me continues
blathering on about his time in Paris
“You can’t beat Paris
“Can’t beat Paris
“I’m a poet.” I say again,
momentarily averting my eyes from the fertility of the earth into the notebook
I have been intermittently mixing my thoughts into with black pen, pronouncing
my vocation with a plosive kicked-boot “p” sound as if I am answering the
junior high query about who composed the Fall of the house of User and then
added a weak “it” to the end of the finale of the word.
Something about the way the sun is on the Seine
as it sets in the evening that makes everything around you feel as though it
were basked in a shade of cooper and light that’s the most beautiful things you
have ever seen.”
“I was in Paris
I continue to lose myself past my reflection in the window
seat. The older man next to me asks me what brings me to the Fox river valley.
I tell her that I’m going to see a girl. He crosses his legs and inquires how
long we have been dating. I tell him it’s nothing like that.
“I only met
her once. It was kind of weird how we met. She was kinda huddled down like a
cocoon at the end of the hall in this swanky suburban hotel at this youth
gathering thing in Chicago we attended last March. We’ve been writing long
letters to each other ever since. And talking on the phone. Sometimes we
pretend we go to Paris with each other on the phone. Oh, and she sends me
barney tattoos. The kind that wash off.”
He looks at me disconcerted as if trying to discern how it
is possible to traverse to Paris over the phone as well as efface tattoos. He asks me if I am nervous. I tell him I
don’t know. I tell him that she’s the sort of girl that inspires. He asks me if
I’m in love.
I tell him that I’m droolingly in love with this creature.
“It’s all
for her. I don’t think the poems would exist if it wasn’t for her.”
He asks me
why. Without waiting for my response he asks me to identify the age of my
makeshift muse.
“She’s
seventeen. I’m nineteen. I still look up to her though.”
The old man
resumes his pensive-looking stance.
"I was about your age when I was fighting over in France. I lost alot of friends. That's part of the reason I went back. I found them. They are all crosses now. All dead. All crosses."
He remains silent. He tells me that he just had to get back over there to see them one last time."I was about your age when I was fighting over in France. I lost alot of friends. That's part of the reason I went back. I found them. They are all crosses now. All dead. All crosses."
"Sounds kinda crazy but I actually spent an afternoon just talking to them, telling them what I've been up to all these years."
That she is watching you arrive from inside.
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