Romantic Roosterprick: 19 and in love in Appleton, Wisconsin w. Celine and Jesse, Oct 19th, 1996 (d.)

 

 

We have been smoking cigars the entire night. As if verifying the clime of my personal B.O., I lower my head as if in reverence and sniff the front of my collar  in an olfactory cocaine-addled fashion feeling as if I am going down on an ashtray.

 “I’m looking forward to watching Before Sunrise again. “ Megan says, stating that she has only seen it that one time after I kept on telling her about it via our long letters.

I take a earnest puff out of my cigar as if a corgis gnawing on a slab of venison jerkey before exhaling out the window commenting aloud to my makeshift Before Sunrise Bride that its funny we combed the interior of the entire video store last night and just couldn’t seem to locate the cartridge and tonight it just seems to plow straight at us as if in three-dee and in digital sound.

 Megan responds by saying yeah that’s weird before telling me to be sure to blow my smoke out the side of the car window, she doesn’t want the interior of her vehicle to reek of heavy cigar smoke when her father takes her car to get new tires on Wed.

I crack down the side window even further. The thick October air blasts through the trapezoid orifice in currents. Every time I take a drag from the cigar I can see in the objects-appear-to-be-closer passenger mirror what looks like little amber blinks from a distant lighthouse. On the radio distillated incandescent pops and bubblegum chimes connoting the chorus of that damn Meredith Bainbridge song begins to bobble out from the plastic chin of the dashboard. I feel like showing Megan a sonogram of my vivisected heart, asking her to change the channel, even put in that damn glittery fonted, BEST MIXED TAPE I HAVE EVER HEARD tape only I realize as I continue to sporadically puff that she is swiveling her chin and singing along and all the anxiety and stilted pauses that seemingly transpired all day between us have, for the time being, all but waned.

Megan is singing about wanting to kiss your lips.

She then looks at me and smiles.

 

“I’m glad we finally found Before Sunrise after looking for it all this time. It’ll be fun to watch it together.”

 

            I smile, looking over, hoping to garner my reflection, feeling only the thick wisps of atmosphere of autumn brush against my forehead in palpable cascades of evening breath.

            In the side mirror my cigar winks at me like an illuminated elevator button.

We are going home.

 

                                                            ***

We park the car on the right hand side of the front of the garage. Megan says the word shit before saying that she wishes we had imminent access an aerosol can or something in the car to quell the scent of nicotine. Like the previous night we have been smoking the hell out of everything all day.  Megan gives me orders, tells me when she enters the door to her house just to go straight downstairs and not dawdle around engendering small talk with ye olde progenitors in case we bump into them the moment we open the front door.

 

“But I think your dad is finally warming up to me,” I amend.  Megan looks back with a scowl squeezed in her lips as if she has just tasted something bitter and coereced a smile.

 

“It’s more on me than you. “ I tell her.

 

“Yeah, but they’ll think yer a bad influence on me.”

 

I tell her that I am.  I ask her what’s wrong, yer parents don’t want you getting involved with a bad boy. I make a joke about how next time we have dinner with her parents Megan can sit on my lap while wearing a short skirt and knee high boots.  A slight smile wiggles out of her lips before her stoic mien resumes.  She says the word remember then she tells me straight downstairs. I hold the VHS of BeforeSunrise under my arm in running-back semblance and am half-way to inquiring why she even thinks that we’ll saunter into her parents we can just go straight downstairs when the door props open like an advent calendar.  Her parents’ welcoming us home, stating that its early.

 

Her father has silver hair and is smiling at me. Megan walks in first and heads straight towards the stairs.  The expression on her moms face seems to want to beckon the verbal query if us kids had a fight or something. I smile. As I’ve been doing all weekend circa my upbringing I refer to Megan’s father as Sir or Mr. Snow.

 

            “We went out for coffee then got bored so decided to rent a movie.” I say, holding up Before Sunrise like some sort of grade school accelerated reading certificate.  “We also managed not to bust any more tires.” I add, referring to myself and his youngest daughter in the third person plural pronoun.  Her father smiles at me again. It feels like I am being accepted as an honorary member of the Snow family household.  A Snowman.  I am in the process of asking the Master of the House how his evening is unfolding when I  hear scampering on the carpet upstairs as if Megan is trying to convey something to me via the muffled thumps of her feet. Fearing that her father can obviously sniff the odor of my cheapo cigars permeating out of every pore of my anatomy Megan’s voice carols down the stairs as if with wings, informing me that maybe I should go ahead and start the movie and she’ll bring down some popcorn and soda. I am in mid-sentence to her father, telling him again how much I enjoy this town when I alight the rectangular slab in my hand and point to the stairs dripping to the basement.

 

“Well, looks like I’m being beckoned.” I say.

 

Mr. Snow shoots me a look as if we are old drinking buddies.  It is indescribable. Part of him looks like he is going to make little cha-ching whihpping sounds before laughing.

You kids have fun tonight.  He says as I pass him perilously close to nicotine-discerning scent range.  “Megan’s mother and I will be going to bed soon.”

He then smiles again in an avuncular sort of way and slaps me on the back, offering an altrusitc attaboy, smiling at me more in our terse minute long monologue more than his youngest daughter has for the accumulated duration of the entire weekend.

I head down the stairs.

More carpeted intervals are heard. Megan’s yells down that she is checking the messages on her answering machine and she will be down in all of a minute of what is commonly perceived as time.

 

As with the previous two videos we have a hard time getting the agape plastic palette to read the cartridge. As if genuflecting in front of a pastel edifice of the virgin Mary both Megan and myself drop  onto the caps of our knees and begin to blow inside the black hyphen interior of the machine. Megan makes a comment about how she just wishes that her parents would get a second VCR that would make life so much easier. We continue to blow, bent over the alighted chicanery of candles on  a trick birthday cake. We continue to blow, in unison, as one, filling the damp socks of our lungs with the breath of Megan's basement as we blow as one, into the horizontal cyclopic socket of the machine, taking deep plosive breathes as if on cue from an invisible choir director. After one final puff, Megan steps back and grabs the cartridge and plops it in.

 

“Ok, I think that should do it. Let's try it again for real now.”

 

I assent with the verbal colloquial nod of an okay.

                                                           
                                                                 ***

David do you want to like talk or something?

***

 

“Do you want to hear the story about how my friend lost her virginity?” Megan says to me on one of our all night phone conversations a year and a half later. We are on the phone. We are always on the phone. I have spent all day inside of a woman I have been seeing since December. A woman who reminds me of my mother and who is from chicago. The woman who made us wait until when she got back from Christmas break to fuck her, to lose my virginity with her. The woman who I can't stop fucking, can't stop exhaling the slight swerve of my torso inside the center of her body three hours a day in a wild time signature not yet known to mankind. I am talking to Megan a year and a half later, Megan who I never thought I would talk to again and now its like our voices can't stop french kissing into each others body via cordless telephone at the same exact time every night.

 

“ It's a really pretty story.” Megan says, talking about how her best friend lost her virginity. They were counselors at a summer camp and they went to the top floor of this two story cabin when camping out at it was a late/spring early summer night and it was raining and she gently escorted him inside of her while the rain was gently tapping into the skin of the earth.
                                                                                    

It's a beautiful story. I say to Megan.

                                                                                *** 
 

 

“Mine smells like flowers.” She later says to me, over the phone, a year later talking about her body.

 

                                                                        ***

It is the first time we have watched the movie together. We sit like we have been sitting all weekend, facing the same direction, not touching, staring straight at a screen that is feeding us images we emulate and get off on. 

 Midway through the movie Megan shuffles her head as if she wants to nest on my left blade. Outside of hugging and last night before bed Megan has acted all weekend like I have leprosy. On screen celine and Jesse are discoursing their life story over a pinball machine. Upstairs Megan's mom says that they are going to bed and wishes us a good night without coming down.

 

They are two floors above us. We have the basement entirely to ourselves.

 After all that we went through today, I can’t comprehend why Megan wants to cuddle.

            Megan is looking at me like she is expecting something. On the televised square Celine and Jesse are talking into their pinkie and thumbs respectively pretending to be someone else. I take my fingers and gently rake them across her autumnal scalp. Megan bats her eyes as if she is waiting. As if I came all the way up here. I look at her eyes again. All I can think about is the sight of my eyes earlier in the day as tears emptied from the inside of them. All I can think about is Megan’s ongoing thesis about how she feels that we are really different people. All I can think about is that I want this to last, is that she is the only entity I want to spend my life with. The person I want next to me by my side in ten years as I wake up two hours early to get some writing done. The person I want to wake up with a cup of coffee and a kiss on the forehead and welcome her to the genesis of another glorious day. The person I want to foster a family with, to grow with, to learn about spirituality with. The person I simply want to give every cell in my body for.  All this and she is in my arms right now, after a weekend of total romantic ambiguity and failure and I have no clue whatever so just to do.

The movie ends in the way in which the manner of the trip began over 35 hours ago, watching Ethan Hawk with his bag slung limp and flaccid over the back of his shoulder sauntering with his chin downtrodden and lost looking around as if he can't believe what the fuck just happened. I have had my arm around the back of Megan's shoulder like a cape during the duration of the movie. I have recanted her romantic advances, feeling that maybe in a way this is what I was supposed to do, that she wanted to be rebuffed, that she expected me to initially reject her the moment she tucker her chin into my shoulder in the fashion of a deer titling its neck at a salt lick, after she has been fucking with me for the entire day, practically giving me a verbal exegesis on how we are both two very different people, how it could never work out between us, and we are fucked from the outset, how if I would have gotten off the elevator a split second earlier or later or if my room was two doors down, or how if the girl in the purple shirt whose skin was the color of shale wouldn have somehow chilled and left me alone that first night-- somehow all of this is concurrently whirls through the back of my neck like blurred cherries in the socket of a slot machine and I don't know what the fuck I am to do.

It is after the movie.

There is more awkwardness. There is a terse hug goodnight. We have church in the morning.

I take off my shirt and pummel it against the wall, almost in disgust. A feeling of almost tangible peace plummets across the bare contours of my chest like a cloud, there is peace, there is the feeling that, in the immortal; words of St. Augustine, the search proved more than the discovery, there was voiceover of Rumi translator ColemanBarks conversing with Bill Moyers on PBS all those years ago, the gentle deep southern drawl of Prof Barks talking about mysticism, talking about the yearning being only for itself and somehow, in that moment, a corona of peace settles across the recalcitrant stiff oak marrow of my shoulders blades, like the holy spirit in dove guise perching across my lower neck—a feeling of unalloyed calmness dripping across the anatomy of my body. A feeling of almost joy. The feeling that I have not failed but that, in a way, everything is in front of me and this whole weekend, taking out money, going broke, flying all the way north to wisconsin, to bumfuck appleton of all places on earth, seeing the girl of my dreams, somehow was an integral part of the discovery.

It was all about getting broken and finding serenity in the shatter.

                                                                              ***


There is a moment of peace. I found peace. With my shirt off and my shadow and my heart nothingness, I found enligtenment.

I found peace.

Then there is a voice from the stairwell.

 

“David, do you want to talk or something.”
                                                                               ***


Her voice echoes again, from the far side of the room, aching out from the din silhouette of staircase, as if trying to grasp me, as if with paws.

I respond back the only way I have ever responded back to her. In the affirmative.


I place my gray shirt back on. No time to check my hair. Her voice is a mellifluous carol and for some reason is reminiscent of noah's errant dove returning to the oak lip of the ark with a olive leaf wedged between its beak. Her voice seems to stretch and echo and splash across the room and I tell her yes, I tell her that I would love to talk. She is wearing her pajama bottoms and a t-shirt with the letters DECORAH stretched across them like architecture. Like when she called me back the night in Holiday Inn after we got into a tiff when she went line dancing and then became aloof. She is wearing her retainer in her mouth. For the first time perhaps all weekend I take note of how small and petite. Like a precious moment figurine.

 She sits next to me, her legs folded sideways origami fashion under her bottom as if she is posing in a holiday nativity scene. Fumbling on romantic reflex alone I lasso my arm around her shoulder. She doesn't seem to mind. In front of us the VCR that never seems to work unless one genuflects on the caps of their knees and blows into it conch fashion is jutting the recently rewound copy of BEFORE SUNRISE back in our direction , as if in gradeschool playground tongue taunt.

"It'll be nice seeing your church tomorrow and everything." I tell Megan, not knowing exactly what to say. "I mean, I know religion is really important to you and its kinda how we met and all. It'll be nice."

Megan nods. I still am at a lost for vowels and consonants, much less a tapesty of strewn sentences. Part of me wants to tell Megan about the moment of epiphanic bliss I expreinced five minutes ago,. realizing that this crazy trip was just for itself.

Instead I begin to apologize profusely.

"Megan, I'm sorry I flew up here and read you all these crazy poems and everything. I mean, I should have been more considerate when you told me you were seeing someone."

I think about the photo of the blond fuck in the wallet. Megan has inched closer to me. The dim light of her basement reflects off her retainer.

"I mean, I guess I just wanted to figure out what this was all about. I mean, literature and life and falling drooling in love with someone's handwriting and giving everything up just to find yourelf awkwardly sititng next to them without knowing exactly what to say. Yeah, I guess I just wanted to figure out what it's all about. What Life is all about." 

Megan looks at me and blinks.

"David, you don’t have to know what you want in life. You’re only nineteen."

I nod. I can't help but think that what she has said is profound.


There is silence. There is an audible pause. I don't know what to say. I succumb to rhetoric. I ask Megan what she thinks.

“I thought,” Megan says, her entire body stranded in mid-tempo pause. “I thought, during Before Sunrise you were going to kiss me.”

 

            I look back at her.  I lasso my arm around her; squeeze her tight cogitating to myself that I will be making her uncomfortable. Thinking to myself that if I reel her close to my body that I will somehow sprout inside her. I want to anchor my limbs and arms in amorous display of everything that is inside my heart. I want buckle her close, feel the waves of her breath splashing against the banks of my countenance. I want to physically evince to her just how important she is in my life. I want plant sensual kisses along the coastline of her chin.

 

I want to never let go.

 

I want to kiss.

 

I can see Megan's face gravitating towards mine with her eyes welded hush and her chin slightly tilted.  My right arm is around her waist. There is a moment it feels like our entire anatamy is trying to enter the other's via the petals on our face, like we our trying to unlock something and there is the moment our cheekbones are pressed together like a leaf in a highschool notebook, flattened and she is pulling back, her breath stattaco, saying she just can't, apologizing, telling me that she is sorry, David.

 

She just can't.