Young, interminably bored and seminally in love-- ah, the enuui of the mid-ninities in Appleton Wisconsin OCT 18th, 1996 (b)

The lady at the counter takes our order and is a classmate of Megan’s at good ol’ Appleton North and smiles in a friendly yet stuttered way when she sees the two of us together. I vehemently insist on paying even though Megan has told me twice already today that she has money so I shouldn’t feel compelled to pay for everything.

 

            Megan looks at me funny when I make a comment how everyone in Appleton always says the word, “eh,” in casual conversation.

 

           “You know eh? How you doing, eh. How about those Twins. Eh? You going to a movie after supper are you now, eh?’ You’ll never guess what the first letter of the alphabet is hey-there-now-don’t-cha-know, eh?”

 

            Megan laughs. When I tell her that I feel like I should ask the entire state of Wisconsin a more conspicuous vowel to get off on she looks at me funny and sort of shrugs.

 

            Our food arrives, slathered with what appears to be six different types of cheese dripping like crimped 80’s hair off the edge of the bun.

 

            “Excuse me ma’am, I believe I asked for extra cheese on mine.” I facetiously comment. Megan smiles and begins to nibble and chew holding her entrée in almost squirrel like fashion. Awkward splashes of silence have escorted our conversation ever since I landed four hours earlier. Often it feels like I am looking in the mirror, performing bad stand up routine to an audience consisting primarily of my own reflected visage.

So this is like the popular high-school hand out place in town?” I say. Megan responds by saying something like, yeah a lot of kids seem to hang out here. I respond by saying that I expect any second now to see Al from Happy days saunter pass and ask how the fish is. Megan responds to the Al from Happy days comment by stating that she doesn’t know who Al is.

 

A conversational lull follows.

 

This isn’t at all how I had anticipated it. This isn’t at all how reminiscent of the skidded vivacity and laughter as our voices tangoed across the phone wires all summer. This isn’t at all reminiscent of carbonated fueled letters, the smile found in the jaws of my mailbox sprouting the exclamatory marks on one of the greatest summers of my life. 

 

“Here,” I say, still mentally looking up my sleeves in search of an ice breaker that will be so effective Megan will abandon her seat, straddle her denim jeans across the nest of my lap and poetically pledge her unyielding love for me from here to a usurped eternity.

 

            “Let’s play a game. How about I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.”

 

            Megan tells me that she know a retarded boy who got kicked out of the Sunday school nursery for playing that game. I tell her ha ha, very funny.

 

            “Seriously,” I add, exempting to tell her that if she wants to see my heart all she has to do is look at her own reflection in the window to her imminent left.  I reach into my back pocket and take out my wallet.

 

            “I’ll show you my drivers license id then you show me yours. Here,” I say whipping out the rectangular plastic scrap that has my 16 year old youthful and healthy countenance positioned in a miniature upside down arrowhead of my home state. Megan looks at it and comments that it is a really good picture of me.

I look to the left of Megan’s half nibbled lactose saturated entrée and see her tassel-affixed keys adhered to her wallet.

 

            “Let me see yours now.” I plead.

 

“No,” Megan says abruptly. “It’s a bad picture of me. I look young.”

 

            “Comeon,” I say placing my hand on top of her hand.

 

            “You’ll be disappointed.” She says, still saying that she feels extremely uncomfortable letting me see her picture.

 

            “Come one,” I say, swiping the wallet as if performing slight of hand chicanery, flipping it open.

 

            “I doubt if you’ll be impressed by it.” Is Megan’s only response.

 

The leather wallet is brown and buttoned and as I flip the wallet open, in front of my face I feel as  if I am walking into a crime scene and showing my federal credentials to a bevy of unsuspecting witnesses. I unbutton the wallet and it gapes open in almost centerfold-like fashion. In the center of the wallet is Megan’s glossed id, showcased in front of the state of Wisconsin, the dairy state, her picture and in the northern right and corner is another picture. Diminutive, small. He has trimmed blond hair, the proverbial blonde haired blue eyes cosigning a beneficiary of opulent progenitors. He is wearing braces. He looks at least a solid two years younger than myself. The sliver smile inside his face seems to signal a look of naiveté, like he doesn’t realize just how eternal and the whimsical creature causally chomping on an open slice of a heavily cheesy Wisconsin sandwich is so precious to me.

 

            I maybe keep the wallet open for less than nano second,. A quick flip. In the winking –eclipse I realize somehow that this was the creature that Megan was saying goodbye to on that day, when I phoned her and told her I purchased the tickets. Almost six weeks ago.

 

            With every fiber reserved in my body I push up my lips, as if a professional weight lifter gunning for his own PR into a dyslexic rainbow. I tell her that it is a really good picture of her. I continue to call her Meg for some inexplicable reason.

 

            “I told you it wasn’t the best picture of me.” Megan says, as she accepts the wallet before hushing it close in a terse metallic snap as if winking in reverse.

 

            Outside I can’t help looking at the current-like fashion in which the leaves rake against the side of the building.

 

 

                                                                *

 

 

We leave Pizza King and the door to Megan’s car opens as if dual wings. I am still thinking about the blonde boy whose picture is in her wallet, the boy I can only imagine she was purportedly saying goodbye to when I called her up over a month ago telling her that I can't wait to see her, that I can't wait to trek all the way up to Bumfuck Appleton just to kiss her lips and thank her for what she has added to my life all last summer.

I try not to look at the cove to the BEST MIXED TAPE I HAVE EVER HEARD as I slam the door shut. For some reason the doors always seem to clasp shut in unison with a metallic slap.

It is autumn and it is maybe mid-forties outside in terms of registered degrees and Fahrenheit and it is somehow the perfect autumnal Friday night that always seemed to somehow evade me when I was in high school over the fumbling discourse of the past four years.

The seats automatically strap us in as if we are waiting to skydive in an unknown puddle of the stratosphere.

Megan's car starts up with a wheeze then a cough and then she takes off, again, driving as if she is somehow possessed.

The subtle swivel of my chin. The reflection in the mirror incumbent to my imminent left somehow assures me that whatever identity I have robes and masked on the nineteen progressive discourage elliptical loops around the nearest solar orb called the sun, fucking nuclear hearth, the size of which more than a million earths can easily slit inside of like a button.

 Megan seems to do a little moonwalk with her car as she wheels out of the parking lot, heading north, back in the direction of her parent's abode, makeshift suburbia, all the houses resembling a neighborhood that you can tell they barter out quality bounty come Halloween and two weeks time.

I ask her where she wants to go.

 

“Maybe we can get some cigarettes.” She says, very demurely, looking straight ahead, not looking at me in the slightest at all.

 

 

                                                                 ***

 

            To say that Megan has a cement foot behind the wheel would be an understatement. More apt an analogy would be that of a newly furbished cement overpass; a thick bulky slab fastening two polar rivers of road together. I sit back in my seat and inhale, stuffing my lips with chokes, reddish smile as she vertically cuts corners, shushing into two lanes, makes an illegal left.

 

“You drive like they do in France,” I say, as Megan’s weight shifting the wheel right without signaling.”

 

“It’s because I’m really, really nervous.” She says, hushed, saying that s he needs me to go out an buy cigarettes.

 

“What!” I say, nonplussed trying to frisk the tips of my fingers through my hair in a cool, nondescript fashion.  

 

“Nothing,” She says. Another turn. “We need cigarettes.” She mandates. “Smokes.”

 

I try telling her that I gave up smoking, even though I enjoyed it very much, for the girl of my dreams who is, incidentally, seated right next to me, pretending to be Dale Earnheart. Swallowing heavily, chewing off a leg of my own apprehensive, I step out of the car at the gas station. Declining with a swipe of my hand when she shoves three folded dollar bills in my face.

 

“It’s all good.” I say, needing to go inside and piss anyway. “What kind do you smoke?” I say, raising my eyelids slightly as I inquire.

 

“I like Lights,” She says.

 

“Marlboro okay for you baby?”

 

She nods her head in one thick solid slice as I strut, wearing my recently purchased gray sweater ruffling my hair slightly as I enter the gas station. Purchasing a gray silver pyramid pack of Marlboro Lights without slapping down my ID and having them hold it up to the ceiling and verify the date on which I was born. Asking if I could perchance borrow the keys to the Mens, outside, and I walk out, spanking the back of the pack with my palm like my friend Patrick had instructed me to do three years earlier.

 

As I walk out of the Mens to return the key Megan rolls down her window from the other side of the parking lot.

 

“Don’t forget, we also need fire.” She says, pretending like she is clicking an invisible bic with her curved thumb and knuckled fist which I initially mistake for a thumbs up.

 

I offer a nod and thumbs up back at her as I walk back into the gas station, holding out the ringed baton keychain with the words of my gender identified on it in thick block marker alphabetical slices. Returning the keychain to the cashier, I tell him that I need a lighter, and he points.

The rack of little plastic glossed lighters weight on top of the cash register, near where the receipt peels out. They look like a miniature choir loft and I pick up the first lighter I see, one that is cheap, flicking it once to make sure it works. The lighter is blue and has a sketched fourteenth century atlas of the known planet curved around it’s cylinder edges. I slap down change frisked from my pockets, offer a gruff nod and head back out into the thick autumnal night, Megan in the car, waiting for me, twisting the vehicle back into life.

 

“You got them,” She says. I nod. My contacts are in my pockets. My eyes thoroughly blistered with tiny red vines that artery through my pupils like a metropolitan expressways.   

 

“Gotta ‘em,” I say. “There was no mirror in the bathroom so I had to use the condom dispenser to verify the vagaries of my existence.

 

A slight giggle erupts from her bottom lip. A slight smile is shoved out through her mouth like her entire body is trying to say ‘I don’t know.”  I peel the plastic off of the box of Marlboro and pull out two slender white sticks, handing her one, motioning her to near me at the stoplight as I click the ATLAS lighter and watch as the flame appears as swiftly as a snap. Our heads are both simultaneously bowed as if in tribal reverence for the newly acquired element purloined form the gods. Dual shrooms of smoke lift as the car continues to go forward. Megan looks back, tapering her ash out the side window as the car ploughs into downtown Appleton.

 

“What do you think?” Megan says, smiling back at me.

 

I nod, my heading jutting up and down slightly, watching her head smile as she hushes ribbons of smoke out through her lips, the lips that once tersely brushed against mine.

***

 

As we collectively fire up our first cigarette we slice down the window to what would be  equatorial length. The earth seems to enter us like some sort of a rake in translucent prongs of lavender longing. The stars are jisming overhead. I ask Megan if she can feel it. The tangible crispness of the planet, autumn, the golden-hued acorn swansong, I ask Megan if she can feel it as I take another drag and think about the books I have read in over the last three months, the greatest summer of my life. I think about Trainspotting and I about Jack Kerouac and being on the road and tramping across Iowa and getting lost in the dizzying overhead array of stars while taking swigs of Irish whiskey from the back of a mason jar. I think about life and my novel into film class and the sigh of my spiral notebooks looking like something that has been wounded and shot as I arrive home everyday after classes and alight a random ink pen out of the coffee cup I purloined from LUMS and begin to scratch inky hieroglyphs into the albino thin-veined scratched of the page, I think about all this as I smoke my Marlboro Light, smoking it because Megan smokes lights and she is petite and she is cute when she smokes.

The thick draught of autumn seems to enter the side of the window as if currents.

 

"I need to stop by my friend Bob's house. I told him I would stop by tonight and just say hi. You will really like him."

I tell her that any friend of hers is a brother of mine. I fling my arm over the side of Megan’s shoulder. She remains unresponsive. She takes another drag. The cherry off the stem of her cigarette seems to be winking at me as if from across the antipodal corner of a bar.

I feel the crispness of the earth and the incipience of another autumn, the autumn where every Friday seems to give birth to a sunset that is somehow golden and timeless.

Megan breezes past three consecutive stop signs sans coming to a complete halt. She is driving as if she is nervous, trying to pass some sort of state licensed test. My fingers seem to eke out to endeavor to grasp any part of her fingery-dactyls. She continues to look forward.

The vehicle accelerates. She tells me that she thinks I am really going to like her friend Bob. He is a really cool guy.

 

“You will really like him,” Megan assures me, telling me that he is well read. I tell Megan that I think she is well read. That I think she is brilliant. That I think she doesn't award herself no give herself credit for just how intelligence she is.

Megan will look back at me and inform me that I am just saying that. That I probably say that to all the girls.

“Besides,” Megan says, before informing me just how reportedly smart my ex-girlfriend was in Peoria.

I tell her yes. I then tell her that I just couldn't stand being around her because Kitty Pekowski was such a goody-too-shoes.

Megan doesn't respond.

 

 

Bob has hair that looks like he could be in a tribute band for the Beatles if duly performed by hemp-riddled hobbits. Megan tells me that he dropped out of high school a year ago but that he is working on garnering his GED at Fox Valley community college. Megan tells me that he is a recovering alcoholic and that both Bob and his progenitor have been attending local twelve-step meetings.

They live in an area of Appleton known as the Mills since, purportedly, that is the area where all the paper Mills used to be located. When we arrive Bob is on the back picnic table smoking a cigarette his father is next to him. He comes up and gives Megan a hug. He then stretches out his hand like a plank in my direction.

“This is my friend I was telling you about. My friend from Illinois. My friend who writes all those poems.”

 

We shake hands. Even though Megan has said it was okay if I fly up to visit her she still seems self-conscious as if she doesn't know exactly what to do with me.

 

“You’re  the poet?” His chin and neck lolling like a highly trained otter and a beach ball.

 I tell him I have been known to scribe a verse or two in my day. Megan looks back at me and tells me not to be so modest.

     “David,” she says, “That’s all you do all the time is write. You should see the letters he writes me. They take forever to read.”

Bob says that he doesn't have much time. That he is supposed to be going out with some friends and doing tea. He places a cigarette in his mouth. Megan shoots me an insinuating when in Rome look with her eyelids. I pad down my side pockets as if frisking myself and fling her the pack.

 

“Here,” Megan says, I squint. She has two cigarettes planted in her mouth like tusks. I ask her what she is doing.

 

 

“I was going to light it for you.” She says. “I was going to light the cigarette for you.”

 

            “What, did we just have sex?” I ask, spawning a grin on the crevices of her friend’s visage. Megan remains nonchalant, almost a trifle offended at the onset of my wanna-be-witty commentary.

Megan puts a cigarette in her mouth and fires it up and then hands it to me already lit with the docility of a fourth grader and a crayon.  I smile, wedge the cigarette in my mouth like an alumni of D-day.

 

We continue to talk about art and books. I note that Bob also is addressing Megan as Meg.  I ask Bob what books he has read. He hasn’t read Jack Kerouac but he has perused Hesse. We talk about just how plain fucking cool Siddhartha is. Almost is unison we both quote the mantra THE TRUE PROFESSION OF MAN IS TO FIND HIS WAY TO HIMSELF.  We then talk about Movies. I add Before Sunset. Bob brings up Midnight Cowboy and What's Eating Gilbert Grape. 

 
“I love what’s eating Gilbert Grape. Have you read the original book?” He inquires before asking if I realize that the reason Johnny Depp died his hair red for that flick was because he was paying homage to a childhood friend named Bones, who had red hair who he used to hang out with in a trailer park in Saratoga Florida. Bones who once saved Johnny when his body was inadvertently alighted with flame when the two of them were planning to run away and be fire blowers in a traveling carnival.

Bob says that he knows all that already. He looks at his watch. Part of him seems stressed. He tells Meg listen I got to go Meg, he refers to her as Meg. He then inquires what the two of us are up to this evening. Megan notes probably not much.

"We're probably just going to go out and rent some videos and ten go to Peggy's or something."

Megan says that she tried contacting someone I have never heard of before to get us some booze only that he wasn't available. Bob states that he never had a problem with what he refers to as the sauce, it was always just smoking weed and losing his job get spot-tested that made him decide to clean up.

"At least I still have these, " He says, tapering off an ash from his Marlboro Red. "They can't test you and take your job away for these."

I smile. We shake hands. He tells Meg it was really good to se her. He then turns towards me.

"I'll check out Jack Kerouac. I'm kinda waiting for something momentous in my life to occur. Maybe I'll just go on a random road trip and chase someone from my past and have a copy of ON THE ROAD nestled in the passenger seat beside me. Yeah, that would be so perfect. Have a copy of Jack Kerouac beside me while I am driving chasing the girl of my dream seeing her breath reflected in the windshield I front of me."

I look down an ash my own smoke. I want to say something about irony.

I refrain.

Megan hugs Bob goodbye. She tells me that we need to go now.

                                                                   

                                                                                ***



                 

p.s. I watched before sunrise. It was sooooo good. We will have to watch it together someday.

 

                                                                          ***

 

We scurry through the neon labyrinth of the locally owned Video store looking for Before Sunrise. Megan says that she knows that they have it at Blockbuster only she has a thirty-something dollar fine and doesn’t have the funds to pay it right now. She pauses after she says that, as if waiting for me to volunteer to once again pay it for her so she can snap at me. I remain silent and peruse through the empty cartridge cases. We look in drama. We look in Indie films. We look in foreign films. For some reason we look in comedy. We shuffle movie cartridges, peeling the back like an enlarged advent calendar in hopes that maybe it is burrowed somewhere in the wrong location. For some reason it never occurs to us to waltz up to the counter and ask the overweight manager if perhaps, he has this movie somewhere in his kiosk.

             “I don’t see it.” She says. I agree. We begin to talk about what other movies we should rent. Immediately we agree on Dead Poets Society. As we begin to optically skulk through the remainder of the store I turn around and see Bob who we left all of fifteen minutes ago enter the establishment, purportedly with the friends he is scheduled to have tea with.

            “Go Gilbert Grape.” I say, swinging my fist fashion of a clamp to a bell. Bob is with a fellow bohemian dressed lad with low collar jeans. Between them is a girl with orange dreadlocks wearing a knitted scarf who for some reason Megan doesn’t make eye contacts.

 

           “What are you guys renting?” I hold up the flick. He nods his head and says nice before walking to the back of the store.

 

            “We could probably do tea with them if your want. They seem pretty cool. I don’t think they’d mind if we tagged along.”

 

            Megan becomes silent. Says she knows a place to take me where we can get caffeinated but lets just hurry up and get another movie and get out of here. We pick up newly released Nutty Professor which Megan says she has yet to see. I’m in the midst of doing my Dave Chappelle “Women be shopping” speech when Megan pulls out a twenty dollar bill from the wallet that contains my Norwegian nemesis face.

 

            “I’m paying for this.” She says.

 

             The manager scans each individual video with a little explicit bleep into the jutting tongue of the cash register.

 

 

                                                            ***

 

That was probably my most vivid memory of that trip, Megan will tell me, in a miniature window frame that allows me to talk to her. Every time she writes something scribbled cursive furls across the bottom of the frame like a coastal wave informing me that Megan is Typing.

 For some reason I can hear the snug mellifluous alto of her voice like a translucent bell every time she types even though I have not spoken  with her voice-a-voice since August, 2002, when picked her up and twirled her around like a pinwheel and then watched her leave.

 

                                                                        ***

 The moment we leave the parking lot of the  video store Megan begins driving out of control. A whisked dash of leaves scatter behind the muffler of her vehicle like asterisk in cartoons. I notice that the BEST MIX TAPE I HAVE EVER HEARD, is no longer sitting in the ash tray. She continues to drive in an almost furious panic. It is mid-October and it is autumn. The stars seem more vivid in the north Midwest then they are in the city on the river from where I hail. In the cool late-night atmosphere of autumn the stars resemble a chandelier that has been half broken and scratched across the dark surface of a very black canvas called night. We are driving. Megan turns corners sharply, obliquely, the gentle configurations of her palms cutting across the surface of the earth in angles, stops signs are breezed through in a gust of motion bearing a confetti of leaves. She adjusts the nozzle of the radio even louder. Occasionally I allow my left hand to errantly brush up against the shore of her wrist or denim torso covering of her hip. She drives fast, possessed, almost as if cognizant of something deeper as her foot thunders the pedal of the gas, scurrying the motorized carriage through a slat of spilled concrete, subtle curb, a random lawn. There is what sounds like the soundtrack to a firing range towards the right of my knee-cap. There is a jerk and skid and the sound of random wheezing and then a pause.

 

A tire has blown out. Maybe two.

 

We are stranded somewhere in bumfuck Appleton Wisconsin at the ends of the earth.

"Do you have a jack." I know how to change a tire. I just need a jack.

 

Megan remains vexed. I inquire again. I ask if we are close to Casa Snow.

 

Megan tells me that she doesn't have a jack. She says that there is a spare but something happen a couple

 

  

“I’m going to go get help she says.”

I tell her again that I know how to change a tire. I tell her again that it's n big deal.

Megan seems irked. She tells me again to just give her a second. That she can find someone who can help us.


I ask her if she knows where she is at. She tells me again that she will be back in fifteen minutes. I feel almost like I am saying god-speed to her upon offering a cigarette when she leaves.

There is brisk chill to the earth, as if blanket of night will sweep heavy across the earth, bristling a film of frost over the top of all creatures like a sort of wished for inevitable.

        I have anticipated this trip all autumn. This was the trip that was suppose to stitch sentences of meaning to my 19-year sojourn on this planet and now, I find myself with an aloof friend, a severed jack, a flat-tire, everything mirroring how I feel inside at this moment right now.

I sit down on the curb and fire up a smoke. 

The autumnal stars are tangible, bleeding silver pincers of  light.


                                                                                    ***

Fifteen minutes elapse when a car idles by and stops, leaves scurrying in every which way-direction-but. A smiley- man maybe in his late forties wearing glasses gets out followed by a woman followed by a young daughter with black hair and glasses followed by Megan. They all look like they are attired in clothes bought en masse from Lands End.

 

I make the assumption that she knows these people. I will find out later that she just knocked on a door imploring for help.

“Let’s see what we have here,” The smiley-man says. Megan keeps apologizing and the man keeps on hushing her, chuckling, stating that’s what neighbors are for. Megan forms a triangle with the man’s wife and the daughter. The daughter is curtseying up and down as if she needs to pee.

 

“Here,” I say to the young girl, who is shivering, “Take my coat.” She obliges. She is maybe a Freshman at the rival high school in town. Her father is already under the bottom of the car with a jack. The mother is there too. I bend down as if performing a pushup in physical education, inquiring how I can offer any sort of assistance.

 Megan is standing back, near the young daughter who is draped in the beige cape of my light autumn coat. The father is polite and friendly to the estranged acorned-eyed ingénue who washed up on his door step and requested simply for help. The wind continues to rake through the back of our shoulders.  

 Megan tells the man that she is scheduled to get her tires rotated this WED so it should be no big deal procuring a new tire.

 

In fifteen minute the tire is changed. The smiley man keeps on stating that it is no big deal. He hands us the jack, stating that next time Megan finds herself in this vector of town she can drop it off.

 

I ask the smiley-man if I can pay him. He looks at me like he is insulted.

 

"Well that's what the good book says, right? Love thy neighbor."

 

I nod. He smiles back.

 

I tell the smiley-man yes. I tell him that I guess that's what it's all about in the end.

 

His daughter doffs my beige jacket and hands it back to me. Megan enters her vehicle and I follow, jack in paw.

 

As both vehicles peel off in contradictory directions leaves smatter in all direction, almost as if we are breezing in a ticker tape parade.

 

It feels like we should be waving to people we don't know who believe in us.

 

 

                                                                     *** 

 

Less than thirty seconds after taking off from our flat tire fiasco Megan begins to cry. I can feel her cry. Tears spooling down her cheeks. She is beginning to let go of everything that is inside of her. Her feeling are beginning to drip out.

 
            “Stop the car.” I say. “Pull over.” She obeys, slightly yanking the wheel, curving the vehicle over to the side of the road.

            “

Here,” I tell Megan. The car tire has been fixed. Megan is crying. “Pull over. Just pull over.”

 

            She pulls over. There are dual clicks conducted in unison as our seatbelts unfasten at the same time. The tinted silhouettes of our reflections as seen from our periphery migrate from both the side and passenger windows. Her face is shattered with tears and brows itself in my chest. I kiss her forehead and slowly stir her brown hair back, kissing her forehead again.

                                                                        ***

 

            “You’re so precious to me.” I say. Her body is warmth. There is a subtle shudder to her movements. I want to staple her inside of me. I don’t want to let go.

                                                                        ***


 

Adorned across the wall of Peggy’s are antique bicycles and antique tea kettles and various other antique bric-a-brac that look like they were purchased in bulk by senior citizens at a summer flea market prior to Bingo. Megan seems comfortable in the setting, though still slightly anxiety-riddled from the flat tire ordeal.

 

            “It’s no big deal baby. You said that your parents were going to put new tires on the car next week anyway. It’s all good.”

 

            Megan is acting like she doesn’t want me to scrutinize her face too closely and the note the expired stalactite salt-tendril tear stain still visible trailing like a comet under her left eye.

 

            “I like this place,” I tell her, looking at the cool girl with the short purple hair and long flowing skirt who is inquiring what us folks would like this evening. I order two café mochas. Megan makes hers a small.

 

            “This reminds me of a cool grunge café we have back home called One World although everyone is always sneaking upstairs to the bathroom to smoke grass.”

 

            Megan says yeah, her sister really likes this place. She thought I would like it.

 

            Megan remains silent. It is almost as if she doesn’t know how the discourse of our narrative should reconvene. I tell her that never would have happened in Peoria. She asks what.

 

            “Those people helping you change the car tire. Knocking on someone’s door and asking for help and having them assist you like that. If you did that two blocks down the street from where I went to high school at you are likely to get shot.” 

 

“That would never happen in this town. Nothing like that would ever happen here.”

 

Megan notes with a splash of ennui, talking about being shot.

 

Our mochas arrive in unison. After Megan’s first sip she seems oblivious of the layer foam slightly coated above her upper lip. I look back and smile.

 

“What do you want to do tomorrow?” She asks before taking a second swig.

 

“We can go to door county like you suggested, or if you want we can just hang out here in town.”

 

I tell her that I really don’t care what we do or where we go.

 

            “I came here just to be with you. Whatever you want to do tomorrow is fine.” She says before adding that she really hopes that I just don’t get too bored.

 

                                                            ***

 

We arrive home that night, the twin VHS tapes ducked under my arm like a military flag after a funeral rendition of taps. Her parents meet us at the door. They  are playing bridge with the Peningtons in the other room. Inside I feel pray that their keen Wisconsin cleansed olfactory senses fail to pick up slightest scent of nicotine for fear they think their daughters wanna-be-suitor be a bad influence, harboring invidious sexual expectations, covertly slinking into her bedroom at night, slipping between the comforter and her body, pressing into her as if dry-humping a surfboard at first, feeling the reverberations of her body awaken, only slight, as she realizes that I am already half-way inside of her.

 

            “Did you kids have fun?” Her folks inquire.

 

            “Yes,’ Megan says, walking into the other room, leaving me near the door. In her hushed and reverenced mousy monotone I can hear her tell her parents that she has something to tell them as she begins to explicate the details about the tire. I can hear her tell her parents how she didn’t know what happen but the tire just somehow blew up. I can hear her parents ask her if she is ok, which she will respond yes, she is fine. I can hear her parents tell her not to worry, that she will be getting new tires this coming Wednesday anyway. When her dad asked if David helped his daughter to change the tire Megan will respond by saying, ‘He helped.’

 

            She joins me near the door.

 

            “We’re all good.” Megan says, as if we just collectively averted a midlife melt down. I stress again that it wasn’t her fault. I tell her that these things happen. Megan looks at me like she just miscarried the Christ child and says she is sorry, she was just really nervous when she was driving.

 

            “Yer’ fine!!!” I iterate again. Megan asks me which video would I like to watch first, dead Poets society or Nutty Professor.

 

            “We’ll watch the flicks in a moment,” I add, “First there is something I need to show you.”

 

                                                                                   ****

 

“Megan, hey, how’s it going? This is David. I thought you’d be in but I suppose I’ll just call you back later. I hope you had the best thanksgiving you’ve ever had. All love. Talk with you soon. Bye.” 

 

                                                                                  ****

 

 

 

He unzips the top of his red vinyl bag as if he is unzipping the body bag of a corpse. Beneath the volumes of Leaves of Grass and On the Road, the yin and yang of his every bellowing pulse, he brandished forth a crimson album, the words YOUTH  scribed on the front cover in thick black marker.

 

            “I want to show you what the inside of my heart looks like.”

 

She sits next to him, close. Her attention falling deeply into the pictorial atlas seated on their collective lap like a newborn. He begins to delineate stories to go along with the snap shots. He shows her pictures of everything that is inside of him. He shows her pictures of the plays he’s been in the last three years. Her shows her photographs of the woman who broke his heart last summer, the girl he met in London and held on the Thames river and was saving up all of his money to go see, only she got engaged and got married at the age of seventeen and invited him to still come out and see the wedding.

 

            “You’re my best friend, if you want to you can still come out and walk me down the aisle.” Is what she will say, because her father will not be in attendance.

 

            He shows her the pictures of Mattheison state park. Shows her pictures of his friend Princess. Of his friend Mark-Andrew (“The protagonist of my youth”) is what he’ll say. He shows her pictures of Mark’s ex-lover Matt Brown. He shows her pictures of David Hale. Of Patrick. Of Lums. He shows her pictures of David Strickler and of Kitty Pekowskit. She will look at the prom picture and say that she has a copy of that one and that it is the coolest prom photo ever.

 

“Everyone wants their prom photo to look like that,” Is what she will say. Before she asks if that is the girl he broke up with a couple of weeks ago. He will nod and say yes.

            He shows her vignettes of London. Snapshots of Paris. Pictures of his Grandmother. Of his mother and father. Of his two sisters. Pictures of the cool guy who looked just like slash from Guns-n-roses who crashed in the same hostile in Paris.

 

            He shows her pictures of the first girlfriend he ever had. She will say she looks hot.

 

            You respond that she was a bitch. That you broke her heart first and then she came back to you and sat on your own heart like a petrified maxi-pad. That she wished death on you.

            Every page she looks at she takes her time to scrutinize, to absorb the narrative of those she has read about in his letters.

 

            She sees her own picture near the end (surrounded by Barney tattoos and by some of the letters he has sent him). The post card of the two children dressed as adults, the postcard which she has a poster of in her bedroom.

 

There are splashes of poetic scripture lodged throughout the photo album. Poems by Auden, usurped from Ethan Hawke’s soliloquy in Before Sunrise about not letting the vagaries of Time deceive you. Poems by Ginsberg, how the best minds of the generation are destroyed by madness. Passages from On The Road, Sal Paradise gesticulating in a deluge of prose how the only people for him are the mad ones.

 

On the very last page there are two photos of himself. One from Frosh year in high school. One from senior year. Each photograph he is at an airport waiting to go to a place he has never been before. He is (purposefully) wearing the same Banana Republic brown turtle neck in both snap shots. In the first panorama he looks anxious, young, the thick geometrical squares of his lenses cast parallelograms of tint across his countenance. In the second shit he older, he is wearing contact lenses, he is holding a book of poems by Whitman, the same tome that is in his backpack right now.

 

On the page he has a quote by Milton germane to the title of the album. As he slowly reads her the quote he can swear that she closes her eyes in the fashion that looks like she is making a wish over illuminated plastic wics just for a moment.

 

            “How soon hath time, the subtle thief of youth.”

 

He shows her all these and she still remains silent, occasionally nodding at everything that has ever existed in the narrative of their breath somehow still ahead of them.

 

He then tells her to hold on. He has one more thing yet to show her.

 

 

                                                             ***

 

On the back of the crimson album is a pointillism drawing of Dolphins that a woman he has a one night stand with a year ago.

        He tells her that this was done by the pastors daughter Lisa, who lives up in the feral northern state parks of Illinois. He tells her that I should look at these dolphins and think about how great her love for me is and then I never saw her again.

 

 

                                                            ***

  

            Megan has been reticent since looking at my album. I ask her very simply if she would like to hear some of my poems. Still silent and reflective she ekes out what appears to be a nod of sincerity. I reach into the hovel of my book bag and dredge out the yellow folder containing the inky scraps of my post-juvenilia emotions. I read to her five poems, a few poems from the book I wrote when I was in Europe last spring, less than a month after I met Megan. I read her the poems, “You become inside me my hearty heart flutters like a first white snow.” I read her Sojourn to Chicago, I read her poems about love and yearning and poverty and the confusion of youth. Megan’s lips remain a hyphen of flesh, occasionally she smiles, but mostly she looks in the direction of the couch where I will be sleeping come three hours, alone, lost, language brushing up against the shoreline of her chestnut visage, trying to take her someplace in lieu of the jolt and ecstasy, the totemic pining of my midriffs momentarily supplanted in my chest.

 

            I end  my serenade by reading Walt Whitman. Even though I have the poem memorized and read it to almost every girl I meet I open the book and continue to read. At the last stanza, where Whitman continues to pronounce how all things please the soul, but how being enveloped in a flurry of bleating souls pleases the soul well I slowly close the book.

 

Megan is silent for a moment before she responds, calling me David, stating that she liked my poems a lot David. That she liked my poems a lot.



 

 

Megan has a hard time for some reason getting the VCR to work. “The good VCR is upstairs,” She says, as we open up the plastic slit and respectfully take turns puffing inside the horizontal gape of the blinking machine until finally it reads the cartridge. Megan apologizes again for no reason. We snap out all the lights in the basement. We watch Nutty Professor, first, facing the same direction on the couch, laughing at the same parts, the snapping teal of the television screen yawning in our direction, flooding us with a bevy of invisible rays and particles that somehow, when stationed in close quantum proximity entertains the hell out of us. We continue to laugh. Mid-way through the movie Megan’s mom voice is heard caroling from upstairs, asking if we are alright, asking if she can see Megan for a moment. I press the pause button of the remote-controlled scepter and Megan returns back downstairs two  minutes later ferrying two plates of apple crisp left over no doubt from the Bridge party upstairs.

 

            “Mom says if you need anything else just to let her know.”

            I bite the tip of my tongue as I start to say how ‘bout her hot daughter.

            When we slip in Dead Poets Society we perform the exhaling ritual of trying to resuscitate the VCR once again as if trying to get licensed for Cardiac pulmonary resuscitation. Twice the machine sticks the black tongue of the cartridge  back out at us as if in leering jest before it reads it.

           “This movie always reminds me of you,” Megan says, “I can totally see you inspiring young minds like that some day.”

 

            I smile at her compliment. As the scattering rosebud poem ‘To the virgins, to make much of time’ is recited I grope her slight hand like a sea shell. Twice I have lassoed my arm over her shoulder, reclining mainly on the top of the couch and twice Megan has looked back at me like she doesn’t seem to mind.

 

            At the end of the movie it is nearing midnight. Megan configures her arms in alphabetical shapes as she is stretching, stating that she is tired. Megan asks me again if the sleeping accommodations are alright. I tell her everything is fine. I then tell her that it is really good seeing her again, addressing her the say Bob addressed her earlier in the evening, as Meg.

 

            “It’s really good seeing you again, Meg.”

 

            Our arms find the twin scent of the others body tightly buckled in close proximity—my wrists are completely manacled around her back, my chin tucked into the fleshly grove of her neck. Megan responds to my affection by echoing the same words I just said, conveying how good it is just to see me too. For some reason I think about the picture of her boyfriend with the crisp altar boy haircut she carries with her in her wallet next to her drivers’ license at all times. Megan is squeezing me very close, it is almost as if she feels she will sink in the pond of reality if her fingertips let go. There is then a pause and our limbs go loose. I hesitate kissing the top of her forehead goodnight. Instead I lose myself in the sight of her body and smile.

 

We continue to hug for what seems like a solid half-minute.

 

           “It’s good seeing you again, Meg.” I say once again. She smiles. As if in an operatic round the two of us wish each other a mutual goodnight and she turns and ascends the nearby stairs.

 

I try not to think about Megan in her room, yanking her top over the nimbus that sifts above her head, unbuckling the back of her bra in one subtle pinch, zipping south and stepping out of her jeans, slicing an old t-shirt like a drape over her appendages in which to coddle up and sleep. Briefly I reflect over the fullness of the day. It seems like collected decades ago since I woke up, brewed coffee, dropped my sister off at her school and took Dr. Hahns oral communication final. It seems like decades ago since I lost myself in the parabolic hallways of ICC, humming Bach’s overture inside my head. It seems like years ago since mom gave me the lunch and sent me the letter and told me to have a wonderful time, since the bus filled up, since I fell in love with the black hair of the classy ISU student whose parents took her to the lyric opera. I think about the old man who just returned from Paris. Brandishing my pen, I flop open the black notebook that always accompanies me and begins to write, trying not to think about the image of Megan’s boyfriend, trying not to think about how she may not want me here in the fucking slightest at all…  

                                                                            ***

 

            “Just let me ask you one thing?” I inquire.  Megan’s voice is still reticent. “That night, after Thanksgiving, when you said you would call me back.” I pause at the crossroads of our conversation and each of us posses our own separate street names bearing polar One Way signs planted into the narrative cement of the discourse of our travels.

 

            “That night over Thanksgiving.” I again inquire. “I called you back. That night. Did you ever get that phone call? Did you ever get the message?”

 

    Once again our portrait becomes a still life with a bowl of shit awkward pause. Megan’s eyes seem to be looking back into me through the conch-shaped plastic phone receiver. When I was young I used to imagine little gymnasts would climb up to the side of our houses in the bluff and traverse across the phone wires, holding a horizontal javelin for balance with deliberate-tip toes from house to house. When I was in high school and suicidal I couldn’t look at a streetlight without envisioning a noose firmly knotted and tied around the stump of my neck; a thick stropping leather noose. A whip perhaps, knotted the way my father knots my ties every Sunday before church and dangling like fish bait from the end of this line was my own body. Patches of waste sullying both sides of my trousers in splotches. Veins peeling out of my neck like little sprouting rhubarb and my head contorting into a sick pumpkin grin.  I envisioned suicide by this method so much during those thickly clouded stale mayonnaise colored calendar squares of late winter my senior year when I started smoking considerable amounts of cigarettes, when I started slamming anything with the words ‘proof’ that wasn’t featured in my trigonometry book down the hatch. When I decided that I hadn’t felt alive in so long that I no longer wanted to feel. When I would go out and think about loss and depression and count the remaining calendar squares left for the day at manual High and feel like I had no fucking future-still writing everyday. Staining out every facet of my depression in blue and black ink. Slapping down poem after poem in notebooks reserved to foster my education, and education I had long ago lifted my hands in the air and around the back of my head and capitulated towards, not wanting to work for a sating grade because I was dubious of my instructors. I was dubious of life.

 

            Looking up at my imaginative body swaying in heavy pendulous motions from the curved arch of the street lamp, wanting to climb up the pole myself and sever the noose, release the sad, shit-stained soul that swung there in the autumn of my academic pursuits. Wishing to trim the fetters, unmanacle the prisoner. Wishing, simply, to jump into the river and to save him. To pull him back out of that mental morass he was treading in and to show him how fucking amazing life can be. Trying to help myself when at the same time realizing that I was also the victim of these caged illusions. I was the one hanging in a frenzied swing, a bungee chord knotted around my neck, yet I was also trying to resuscitate myself simultaneously. All the while hanging, gulping for breath; all the while I was looking up at my body form the sidewalk, realizing that I was the same person, capable of killing and continuing, both at this moment, it never even once occurred in the confines of my psyche how I reached the pinnacle of the Streetlamp. How I must have vertically saddled my limbs around the mast and mounted it, as if it were a coconut tree and I had awoken up on a foreign shore, the subtle crash and din of the waves alone communicating my status.

 

            There is no white noise. There is only a pause. Megan and I continue to offer our hearts in each other’s ear. Her voice creaks open like a canned sustenance.

 

            “I…” She stutters as if trying to remember something she has apparently forgotten. I do not inquire again. If Megan would have received my phone call that night; if she would have heard my voice droning from the answering machine next to her bed. If she would have just picked up, Janus would have still more than likely called, but I wouldn’t have noticed because I would still have been talking to her, enamored by the acorn scenery of her voice. 

 

            “Yes,” She said. I was in the room when you called me back that night.

 

            “Why didn’t you pick up?” I ask, intoning how easy such a task would surely be.

 

            “I don’t know.” She says again. The Norwegian snow angel again fluttering out of her voice as she responds. “I just…couldn’t. I knew it was you on the phone, but I just couldn’t pick up.

 

            I pause. My own phone is murmuring. It is the three in the morning. More than likely I will meet Janus’s voice on the other end when I pick up and say hello.