A very Antonio Banderas five...

A week later I will learn about a game Jackie and Nikki have been playing. A game that somehow ranks variation of male species in accordance to the midriffs of Antonio Banderas. A game where they correlate his rippled six-pack to male's they would like to bang.

It is mostly voyeurism. Crisp haired lads espied at the mall or a server at One World or Lums. The highest is a six.  Apparently Nathan is the highest in our group with a four, purportedly because Jackie was having sex with him on  the side while he was still having sex with his pregnant ex.

A week later, before I am to graduate from the institution I felt hostaged and intellectually mortgaged inside of for the past four years I will learn about what Nikki said after she left the hospital room that spring day:

"Jackie he's a five. And the only reason he's not a six is because he has a girl in his arms."


                                                

"Get well soon dave...Happy City of Orgies!!!"

 

It is the third day I am in the hospital. The pain has drastically subsided but they are still running a bevy of tests to discern what spawned the abdominal flare up.  Kristina has come in everyday after class, seated on the side of my bed, buckled in the fleshy loops of my arms. Patrick comes in at odd times, often when I am asleep, standing in the corner scrutinizing the reflection of himself in the window, lost, looking at the albino silhouette of his body accompanied by the swill and hush of traffic below.
 
 There is a clack at the door. Jackie marches in saying my name as if she has just accidentally run over a pet.  In her hand she is holding a get-well carnation like a baton. Next to her is a girl with short black hair and semi-tanned skin I have never seen before.
 
Kitty smiles and waves. The girl with the short black hair looks down, offering a shy smile into the bleached linoleum of the hospital floors. As if rehearsed Jackie begins a string of oh-my-gods-I-can't believe-you-are-in-the-hospital-what-happen-are-you-alright's before handing me the white carnation. Employing the same solicitous run-on sentence before telling me to read the tag attached to the stem of the botanical limb.
 
 It is written in  cursive. I read it aloud:
 
"Get well soon Dave--Happy City of Orgies!!!"
 
Kitty blushes and looks down in the same direction as Jackie's friend. Jackie says it is from that Walt Whitman poem that I am always quoting over cigarettes and 99cent incessant refills at Lums.  At the word 'Orgy' Patrick offers out an almost David Hale-like whoo-hoo, before adding a can you imagine a big metropolitan city like New York or something where everyone is always inside each other while riding the subway to work and shit, immediately apologizing when he realizes that Kitty is shooting his a 'this-is-uncouth-hospital conversation' scowl.
 
Jackie places her hand down on the cap of my knee. She then says the fourth vowel oh and points like a game show hostess to the black haired creature standing next to her.
 
"By the way, this is Nikki."
 
 She looks up for a second. I reach up my had and tell her it is a pleasure to meet her.
 
She smiles in my direction again. Patrick says something about maybe going outside real quick for a cigarette the girls follow. Jackie gives me a hug while simultaneously completely ignoring Kitty.
 
The trio leaves. Kitty turns into my direction and squeezes me tight.
 
"I think she's still upset with me?"
 
I ask why.
 
"The day after prom while we were at Hale's and I made you leave because everyone was underage and drinking. I think she thinks I am just up tight."
 
"You are not uptight." I tell Kitty Pekowski, reeling her in closer, kissing the back of her neck, telling her that even though I've been subjected to so much pain this week and I have more antibiotics flooded into my system than a pharmacy, it has simply, somehow, been one of the greatest weeks of my life.

"I mean, every day someone comes in and sees me. Every day you sit on the bed next to me. It makes me feel so special. I felt like shit all senior year. I've been fucked up, practically suicidal, did not think I would ever make it through the tempest to the port so to speak and here I am surrounded by everyone I love. It just makes me feel...."

I grope Kitty's waistline even tighter. I feel her smile. When I look up I see she is looking at the tag on the flower Jackie gave me. Perhaps she is wondering what the word orgy even means.




 

For Vernoica, the piano teacher's daughter, who is three years my senior...

 

Veronica keeps her bra’s in a plastic garbage can inside her closet. Lying on her bed after my piano lesson, I inquire what the plastic receptacle is used for. Quickly she tugs it out of my hands and conceals both of her limbs around it, as if tucking a football into her chest.

 

            “Veronica, no I’m serious. What’s in this?” I inquire.

 

            “No!!” She says again, almost laughing. “There is nothing of your concern. I tackle her. I tickle her. The sibling rivalry that has always existed between us manifests itself in giggles and blushes. She is smiling. She knows something I do not know. There is something she cradles in her arm like a newborn that she does not want me to see. Something she possesses she does not want me to know about. A secret. Something that, maybe if I would take her behind her house, where no one can see us, maybe if I can take her someplace where the two of us would be all alone. Maybe she would show me. Maybe she would open up; maybe she would unzip. Maybe she would explain to me how things are, show me how life is a continuation process; explain to me vital stages of development. Maybe, if I could just get her alone for a minute. She would show all that to me. It would be like the dream I had about her in fifth grade; the dream which leads me hard and sore inside, my torso trying to mount the sheets all on their own. The dream where the two of us are in her room and she is explaining to me, telling me that “yes, ok, I will show you but…” disgusted at my query, still realizing that I need to know. Seeing  her reflection in my thick brown glasses that looks like our own wooden RCA as she slowly tugs near her waist and peels, showing me everything she feels that I need to know, even if she disapproves of it; even is she feels that it is wrongs, she still unbuckles and unzips and wriggles, pointing at her underwear as she did almost as decade before, she then slides her panties down to her ankles. She then tells me that I am slowed to do anything I want.

Rosemary Hospital Jamboree

The diagnoses is acute pancreatitis which is weird because the doctors claim it is mostly found in alcoholics and as of my 18 years on this planet you have slammed less than maybe thirty consecutive beers. I have not had anything alcoholic in semblance since I was in Germany six weeks ago on Easter Sunday and all of your classmates went crazy buying the only kind of beer that was available in the gas station across the street from your hotel, the beer that had little consecutive S’s above the nozzle when you opened the bottle, the beer that tasted like a lactating skunk and everyone in the room claimed they were getting drunk and peeing off the balcony and stumbling around until you scrutinized the label and saw what you believed to be the German word for alcoholic followed by the word Nein and you made a salient point of noting to your cohorts that this beer is non-alcoholic and that is the reason the noisome peddler at the gas station seemed to proud to sell it and everyone in the room sobered up real quick.

It is more than likely a misdiagnosis. There are  translucent tubes threaded i to your body. When you walk to the bathroom to the stalk ferrying your IV follows you in tandem like the chrome shadow of death.  When you wake up in the morning there is a middle-aged African American nursing assistant who  gives you a sponge bath and then hands you the sponge informing you to attend to your ‘Guy parts.”

You smile.

                                                                                    ***

My eyes seem to crack open as if I am hatching from a strip of black ice. Everything is dotted with tar dolloped with sips of color and then there is movement accompanied by stuttered wisps of animation.  Mom is telling me that everything is going to be okay and that I had some sort of flare up and that the doctors are nonplussed as to what precipitated the cause of such abdominal duress. The gruff almost sentiment sight of my further in his taupe pants and Rockport shoes is standing next to my mom. A physician comes in and presses on certain vectors of my lower tummy like he is performing CPR, inquiring if the pressure points he is pressing down on seemingly inflicts pain. I close my eyes again and it is night. I body surfed through what I will look back as being senior year in high school and the last week I will spend in the grilled sided raft of a hospital bed feeling like some sort of a castaway.

 From above the hard lights seem to squint. I hear my mother’s voice telling me Dave, I brought the books you were reading.

There is a copy of On the Road that has been my emotional crutch last semester senior year. The tattered copy of  leaves of Grass that has been my best friend since beginning junior year.

There is a spiraled notebook that I use to chronicle my poems.




                                                                     ***

The second day Kristina comes back in again after school.

 

            “Hey angel.” I say. She is wearing her dappled blonde skirt that seems to skid to a stop inches beneath her torso. She sits on the lip of the bed and I knot my arms around her waist, kisses the side of her abdomen with an audible mwah. Tell her it feels good. My mom always sways her head into her shoulder blade and smiles audibly when Kristina enters the room, asking her how she is doing, smiling again at her response when Kristina routinely informs my mom that she is doing fine.  

 There is a gentle ice-sculpture silence to Kristina’s presence that I find lulling, like listening to the incessant motorized swirl of traffic in the middle of the night reverberating off the sill of my window overlooking I-74 in the middle of the night, my IV stand offering chirps beckoning to be changed. 

 I have not washed my hair all week yet somehow the short crop battered above my brow grants me with the semblance of trench coat-donning Czech poet, four day no shave stubble dotted along the contours of my face. Everyone has been stopping in to see me.

Twice Patrick and Strick have come on their own and just sat in the opposite corner of the room, my eyes stuttering into morning cognizance seeing them seated  looking out the window at the gnarled and lock of interstate traffic below sipping coffee quietly asking how I am doing.

The doctor enters the room. Kitty Pekowski is still draped in my arms.

            “I always get nervous when I see teenage kids in bed together.” Kitty's face transitions into the color of cheap Kool-Aid. My mom looks at me sternly. The Doctor is scrutinizing a slate that from where I am seated looks like offensive football plays, making a circle, delineating what he thinks is wrong.

"It could have been triggered by gall stones." He inquires if I drink a lot of soda. I tell him no. I tell him I slam usually three-to-four pots of coffee a day and that I never sleep and that I stay up all night and write." 

The Doctor looks at me and then looks down as if he is reading a thermometer with his chin.

                                 

The Doctor continues blather on about medicinal jargon. Midway through his conjecture of what may of causes my flare-up Kitty stands up and straightens the hem of her dress. Without saying a word she heads to the bathroom located next to my bed, the room where I am escorted with a NA because I am plugged into a piece of intravenous machinery. The door locks in a stolid click and I can hear the marble clank of the horseshoe toilet descending. The next thing I heard is fluid trickling out of Kitty Pekowski. I try not to think about her panties wreathed around the caps of her knees, her dress flapped up like the bruise petal to a tulip. I try not to think about her vagina, releasing itself in a translucent ribbon from her body. The doctor is still looking at the large film negatives from the proceeding earlier in the day stating that my organs look funny. He asks me how often I drink and I honestly tell him that I will be nineteen in six weeks and have maybe had less than an accumulated case of beer in what constitutes my entire life.  Inside the bathroom urine is still trickling out of Kitty, tapering off in a Chinese water-torcher tempo. I try not to think about Kitty reeling off a strip of toilet paper and wading it into a carnation and swiping it between the flesh arch of her loins. I try not to think about her snapping her off-white panties back into place, padding the sides of her floral skirt down  before flicking the saluting chrome handle into a linoleum whorl.

 

The doctor is again speculating that it could be gall stones. In the bathroom I can hear her wash her hands. The paper towel dispenser sounds like it is farting as she rips a cardboard sheet from the nondescript lips of the dispenser.

The doctor continues to be befuddled. He asks if I have been under a lot of emotional stress with school. I want to tell him about how it felt like I spent last year under water. How I cried and shook every morning. How the only IV  I had pricked into the epidermal armor of my physical anatomy was that of  the black ink pen I brandished like a heroin-inflicting needle into  spiral notebooks I chronicled my every solitary thought in metered I deemed to poetic.

 When Kristina steps  out of the bathroom. I try not to look at the center of her body. She sits down on the freshly changed tissue of the bed and smiles. I kiss her forehead.

“Did you miss me?” Kitty inquires.

 I tell her yes. I tell her more than she will ever know.

                                                                  ***

Later that night, after Kitty has left, I think about what it would have been like if I would have followed he into the bathroom. I think about what she would have done if, while she was seated on the toilet with her skirt flapped up and her panties subtlety twisted below the caps of her knees, I wonder what she would have done if I would have whipped it out, if I would have unearthed the stiff wand of my Y-chromosome. I wonder if she would look at it like a baton. Like a fleshy bouquet, would she have coward, or would she have bitten into me with her nails and ingested me into her lips.

Later in the morning I grapple my tattered copy of on the road. In the center of the book mom has wedged a letter I received in the mail.

It is from Megan.

It is a Hallmark card.

The cover features two kids the size of good year tires dressed up in their grandparents clothing holding the stem of an illuminated rose.

But it's my book ( scribed 10 yrs ago exactly t'day)....

 

 

 

 

methodist

You wake up in the middle of the night twenty-four hours after prom and you are vomiting a pool of crimson. Your side feels like something is jutting and kicking and trying to give birth through your abdomen in succinct little gnaws. You can’t stand up straight. You can’t move.  Your hand is pressed into your side as if you are pantomiming a little tea cup and spout.

The moment you stand your legs give out. You tell your mom you don’t know what’s wrong. Your mothers suggest appendicitis. Your father suggests indigestion. Today is the senior class picnic at Bradley park and you really didn’t want to go in the first place. You can’t stand up. You fall back to sleep. It is spring but the atmosphere outside is the color of hand-me down argyle socks.  Mother keeps padding a rag on the top of your forehead. She inquires if you are having trouble urinating thinking that perhaps maybe you have gall stones. You think about Doc Horndasch, your personal OSF shrink who has pretty much glided you though the finish line of senior year. You think about Mr. Washer the school social worker who has become your best friends. You think about how everyday in senior high school you wore black turtle necks to manual and felt like you were treading underwater, ferrying a copy of Walt Whitman and Anne Sexton, hunched over like a prehistoric cocoon, sipping from my Mister Donuts coffee mug.   You think about how every morning you couldn’t get out of your room without listening to Morrissey’s WHY DON’T YOU FIND OUT FOR YOURSELF from Vauxhall and I. You think about how Boys for Pele was supposed to be your savior and how (after being pushed back for six months) when you purchased a copy of it from Co-op in Campus town you were seminally disappointed.

 

 

The day continues to bleed ribbon s of gray. You think about Hale’s grandfather who died six weeks ago and how you jipped school to be with him and m he asked you if you thought he was going to heaven because he didn’t go to church before saying FUCK IT, handing you a Dutch Master, informing you that he is smoking in the house. It feels like various rodents and hepatitis-ridden marsupials  are endeavoring to hatch from the side of your body as you are wheeled into the shushing doors of Methodist emergency care. Your mom is scribbling out a slate as if she is being petitioned for an autograph by roadies. You are lysing supine in a gurney that is skeletal cold and wobbly. A nurse whose mouth is so white it looks like she just gargled with a vat of bleach prodding various serpentine tubes into the side of your right arm informing you that it was do nothing short of assuage the seething pierce echoing half past your naval.  The doctor is wheeling you into a room that is extra-large, telling you that you will have the commodious room all to yourself. You blink several times. You think about two days ago how you didn’t just dance with Kitty Pekowski you more or less waded across the wooden glint of the ersatz dancefloor.  You think about how much you like kissing her even though she is introverted and coy yet Valedictorian of her class. You think about Germany and Neuschwanstein and smoking black Russian at Lums.

Briefly you think about making out with Megan Snow at the youth gathering in Chicago on St. Patrick’s day.

You wonder what Appleton Wisconsin looks like.

 You topple down into a blinking trapezoid while staring up at the heard lights of the room above. You can hear the mellifluous chime of your sister who has just learned to drive as she enters the room and asks your progenitors if her older brother David is going to be okay.

..If you really want to know...

         

 

“…And if you really want to know on December tenth I first had sex with him.” Rachel Holiday continues to drive, looking out the front windshield. There is a heavy autumnal gale slapping against the side of the car. Her foot accelerates the vessel to 80 mph. She seems irritable. I place my hand up against the window, watching as drops accumulate in little glucose

 

“Did you wear a condom?” I inquire. Looking at her by way of her reflection in the tear smeared windshield. I can see her eyes seemingly blink as the wipers swipe back and forth, as if waving goodbye to us in a very weird way. Rachel switches lane without slapping down her signaler, nods her chin as if to indicate, yes, she was safe.

 

“And it hurt like hell.” Rachel Holiday says, without me inquiring. She is still driving, driving very fast. Two eternal years ago, when Rachel’s father would pick us up mother would just request that I wear my seat belt in the car. Rachel is driving fast,  her friend still kissing her bumper, driving fast, on the interstate telling me all about Lee, telling me how in love with Lee she still is.

 

All I can do is look out the window and listen.

 

 

Kitty Pekowski and Mother's Day and best friend's graduation and acute pacreatitis....

It is less than 24 hours after East Peoria's prom. It is mother’s day. Hale is graduating from Limestone. Patrick was asked to leave school five credits short after writing a short-story where the protagonist holds the school hostage and then blows them up and then (author) (Patrick) felt the need to give an autograph copy of the short story to the school social worker who deemed that he his mere presence was toxic on campus.

 

He finished his high school education at the alternative school at the Y downtown.

 

It is the first Sunday of May. Mother's day. I eat a big Mother’s day lunch. The entire family is at the house. Everyone is inquiring about Prom.

  “I didn’t know who any of the kids were, but I still had the time of my life.” I say, as if performing bad karaoke to Dirty Dancing.

 

After the meal I feel a pain in lower abdomen. It is like someone is trying to exit the interior of my anatomy with either a scalpel or a BIC pen. It is like someone is trying to whittle a caricature of Gorbachev with a Buck Knife in a vector of my anatomy I am unaware I posses beneath the hood of my navel.

Kristina comes over. Even though she has showered her hair still has the petrified oak sheen of the copious amounts of hairspray administered the night before.  We go over to Hale's house on McKinley in Bartonville. Patrick shows up still making a big deal about purportedly bot being able to attend his own graduation. Becky’s boyfriend is twenty-one and there is a cooler of Beer. Goth Dan is talking about Dungeons and Dragons with Nate. Jackie (who graduated also informs me about a bonfire at her house next Saturday and claims both Kitty and myself are amicably invited.

Everyone is with the exception of Hale and Kitty is drinking beer.  Strickler show ups sans Andrea and states that she wasn't able to attend the gala due to church tonight. Kitty seems pensive. I flagellate my forefinger in an Uncle Sam I want you to enlist fashion, commenting that the cement slabs leading up to the front porch were the first   

 

Kitty sits on my lap the same way she sat sixteen hours ago. I have drank exactly a beer and a half. I have maybe drank a total of twenty accumulated beers in my lifetime.

 

For some reason the pain in may side just won't subside. I endeavor to wash it away by slamming another Milwaukee's Best.

 

Kitty looks at me and asks me if I'm okay. Somehow I manage to tell her I am fine even though my lips transition into a scowl. Kitty doesn't drink. She informs me that she feels uncomfortable with alcohol being served and everyone being underage. Kitty makes a comment that she doesn't  mind drinking a glass of wine if its like a toast or something but just to wanting to drink to get hammered is pretty sophomoric in her opinion thank you very much.

"It's cool, we don't have to stay. We can go somewhere else and chill for a couple of hours."

Kitty looks back and gives my hand a lil' squeeze.


                                                                                ***

We find ourselves in Bradley park walking across the Chinese Bridge. There is still a searing pain in my lower right side. It feels like berm with spikes is ready to hatch. Kitty looks at me concerned.

" It's nothing.I guess I just ate too much of my mom's cooking.." I tell her, pressing my hand into my side.

My hand presses back into hers. I kiss her forehead. I kiss the slope of her neck.


"You know. Last night was amazing and everything. If for some reason we break up and decide not to date I hope we don't hate each other. I hope we're still friends. I hope we can still hang out and like really be there for each other ten years from now." 


Kitty smiles. Our palms remained welded at the wrists.  Kitty nods.

"I like you." I say very simply, followed in tandem by an eye and you, a spring zephyr emanating through the hyphen of her lips.

Twelve hours later I will be in the hospital throwing up blood and I will not be able to move.


                                                                  ***

Kitty Pekowski and the most beautiful prom dress you ever did see...April '96 (d) post prom

 

We all go to Burt’s house after the prom. Burt is the janitor at the Missionary church D’rea attends. It is also her Uncle.

“my parents know there won’t be any drinking or anything like that. Burt’s a good guy. He doesn’t mind if we hang out downstairs in his basement.

 

 

Kitty has a sports bag fraught with sweat pants and an ISU sweatshirt she will change into after prom.  the entire ride to Burt's Andrea has done nothing but bitch about her heels while seated next to Strickler. I reach over and doff Kitty's shoe, calling her Cinderella, giving her foot a massage.

 

 

Andrea looks back and chuffs.

 

"You two," Is all she says.

 

                                                                    ***

 

                                                             



 

Burt is wearing an undershirt. His belly is flopping open like a dyslexic cummerbund. 18 months ago I was at post-homecoming hell with the rich kids and Renee Howard and everything was a mess.  There seems to be a hushed gentleness with each of the couples in the room. Somewto watch out for drunk drivers, here I know my  mother is praying for us to be safe, to guard us from the unerring sins of lust. 

 

There will be no sex. No one will be spending the night.  No one will be peeling the husk of each others attire off the respective limb of their three hour dancing partner in an incendiary crackle of buttons and reeled zippers. No one will be awkwardly endeavoring to enter the other person's body in maladroit thrusts and off-kilter torso's thrusts. There will be no fitting of prophylactics. No  androgynous nest of clothes. No worrying if someone from the church see you checking into a hotel room.

 

 There is only a bevy of young adults who are somehow madly attracted to each other making out, holding each other close the entire night with the lights dim, listening to a mixed-tape Andrea made for the occasion.

  

 We are listening to a mix tape in the basement. Kitty is sitting on my lap. I cannot help making out with the dome of her forehead. She has been all my lap all night. When we reach Burt's house I insist on picking her up and carrying her the 100 meters from the parked car to the front door.

 

There is all smiles. In Burt the Janitor's basement our lips attack each other in fusillades and elongated embraces On the mixed-tape James Hetfield is singing about how nothing else matters.

 

I look down at the creature basked in my arms.

 

I can't help but concur.

 

 

                                                                         ***


Later that night I arrive home. My mom is up. It is three-thirty in the morning. She is sitting in her chair with her bible open.

"I was praying for you Dave. I just wanted to make sure you made it home okay."  Mom tells me again that a lot of people get drunk on prom and then get into accidents.

"I'm real blessed you have a good group of Christian friends where you guys don't drink or anything like that."

I nod. I give her a hug and tell her goodnight while walking upstairs to my bedroom. I take my watch off and slap it down in my nightstand. I can feel kitty's breath on cheekbone. As I lie down I look at my reflection in the window overlooking Cooper.
I swear just for a moment I see the caramel translucent reflection of Megan, the girl I kissed six-weeks ago on St. Patrick's day in Chicago looking back at me.

It's like she wants me to find her again.

underwear is just like bathing suits...

 

                                                                       

 

            Inside Fallyn’s room Vanessa is posing in her underwear. Her right leg is arched in a right angle. Her nervous smile looks like two pieces of ply-wood slapped over a window during hurricane season in the Western Keys. She is wearing an unblemished very white bra that unfastens from the front and frilly panties spooled out of silk. Fallyn continues to sketch her movements with chalk. Laura, Fallyn’s roommate, juts in and smiles.

 

            “I’m making art.” Fallyn says to Laura, tracing thick outlines of Vanesa’s porcelain frame on sketch drawing paper as if preparing for her to topple over any moment and wait for the police to arrive.

 

            “Oh,” Laura says. She locks the door. Mike, her short corn chipped haired sandy side-burned boyfriend remains outside. “Underwear’s just like bathing suits.” She says.

 

            I continue to look at Vanessa. Her hair drapes the banister caps of her kness, slowly leaking down her back. Her body posture seems a tad uppity, perfectly artsy. She would feel right at home if there were a bowl of still-life plastic fruit adorning the area between her legs.

 

            Laura leaves the door careful to only open it far enough so that very little of the light escapes. Fallyn continues to hold her chalk like a four year old holds a crayon. I lok at Vanessa and wink, and she volley’s a flicker of her eyelash back at me. Together a smile is fastened between us.

 

            “Don’t get too comfortable big boy.” Fallyn says to me. “I’m gonna do you next.”

Kitty Pekowski and the most beautiful prom dress you ever did see...April '96 (c)

                     

She is standing at the top of the stairs, a dress hung-over eye white crimson drips off her shoulders, her hair is elegantly sprayed into an intractable bouquet of late-adolescence elegance surging with the suggestion of looming independence, he feet armored in stiletto's clacking in a muffled fashion over the carpet, as if she does not want to acknowledge my presence just yet, as if we somehow arrived prematurely for our candle-lit adorned high school rendezvous, as if I don’t only have less than ten days and counting of  Manual and the rest of my life left, the welcoming of escaping from that south side penitentiary of daily pain and the spontaneous wonder of the unknown. Strick, next to me, his tie slightly crooked, waiting for who will be his future wife, and Kristina, the woman I have known all of two weeks, shuffling up stairs, the sight of the red dress spilling off the dual mounds of her shoulders. She is agitated. She is in a hurry. She is irked that we showed up fifteen minutes early. But still looking at her in the tux I pieced together from the disheveled remnants of Jeff Grebe’s basement, the tux with tails, the studded shirt I usurped from a failed canticle of Manual singers, my hair almost waxed into perfection, standing next to my best friend watching as if in slow motion as Kristine with a K, Kristina who her friends call kitty, Kristine who stealthily lassoed the necklace around my neck when were lying supine on her couch watching French kiss, somehow espying the sight of this radiant creature preparing the body for man dressed in a black tuxedo is the most beautiful sight known to boy balancing on the precipice crags of adulthood ready to stumble into a draping shroud of oblivion, the forever unknown every time he takes hold of the cusped gentleness inherit in her left hand.



                                                                          ***


In her maternal fashion mother asks if she can say a prayer, a blessing over the slathering layers of meat sauce and noodles . Mom is saying grace. She is tahnking god ofr these find young men and women and asking God to send his protection over them as they have this important night. She is thanking her Western variation of a diety simply for everything these fine young men and women are.

 

                                                                                          ***

 

We enter the Scottish Rite in the womb of the basement. The room is festooned with pastel flavored balloons. All the girls have their hair up like thoroughly spritzed mahogany ice sculpture. Kitty and I are glued by the palms. There are several teachers serving as lifeguard chaperons, their arms crossed, a stoic impression sewed into the ridge of their lips.

 Strickler falls down mock drunk as we are walking down the stairs just to make Andrea laugh. The tables have are names on it. Music is chiming as in in pecks from the loudspeakers. I see my friend Laura from church and offer a wave.

 

This is not my prom. These are kids who live across the sliver of liquid known as the Illinois river. These are kids who attend the high school whose avg ACT score is ten points higher than the avg. ACT score at my high school.

 

This is not my prom.  The high school I attend has the highest teenage pregnancy rate in the nation. The high school I attend wins state basketball titles yet none of the athletes can get through freshman year of college because they did nothing but coast through the halls creating babies while in high school.

 

This is not my prom.  

 

Kitty seems to be looking up at me. I can't refrain from optically blinking into the dome of her forehead. She manacles my wrist as if I am about to be convicted. Slowly we begin to dance, holding each other, like holding a three month old in the community swimming pool, leading each other to the syncopated sway of the music.

 

This is not my prom. I would have given my left testicle to go to the high school across the river. I would have given my left testicle to go to a school where I wouldn't feel all alone. Where I would feel that my future encapsulated a creative kernel of hope.

 

This is not my prom, yet still I am somehow feeling a part of it.

 

With the exception of Drea and Strick and Laura from my church and the goddess draped in my arms I don't know who any of these kids are. Kitty and myself continue to sway in metronomic fashion. I can't stop making out with the sheen of her forehead. I can't stop gnawing at her eyebrows. I can't stop forming a 

 

It has nothing to do with sex. We are both Christians. I am the president of my church's youth group. there will be know need to jangle the keys of a motel room. No need to find out how far she will let me go.

 

It is not about sex. I cannot stop smiling. I cannot  refrain from lassoing the tips of my fingers behind her anatomy and picking her up, twirling her around. After every five or  dances  we sit down at the thoroughly groomed  linen of the table  

They are announcing the prom king and queen. We are seated in the corner. Kristina has remained on my lap the entire night. There is a royal court, the popular air-headed girls in school who will be overweight with six kids working in a checkout line come a decade from now are receiving applause and tiaras.

Kitty simply loafs in the trigonometry of my arms. The music begins to play. We alight from our table and dance.

 

 

It happens sometime during Killing me softly. Kitty’s fair almost mideval maiden type forehead comes up at to around my erobe. I think about how when I was a kid and would say prayers with my father and after he would leave I would think about Alicia Durham and how I would be in a tuxedo and she would be adorned in a dripping silver gown and how I would employ the word gorgeous. Kitty’s hair is intractable and it looks like a stylized cactus although it is sexy

Our foreheads are welded together and I am nursing on various vectors of her frontal lobe.

It is somewhere during killing me softly I swear I see my literary hero Charles HIighway, dancing behind me with ruffled hair, a tad clumsy, buckled close to his own individual inflection of a Rachel. Charles Highway who I fell in love with the opposite way to fall in love with a literary legend, by watching the movie first and thinking about London—a book even thou author has more or less disowned and knowing somehow, my Rachel is there—the dark haired creature ofmy dreams and somehow sheis also buckled close, swaying in plosive syncopation to the tonal vowels of Lauren Hill, somehow my protagonist looks at me with Kitty Pekowski draped in my arms.

 

I swear, he fucking nods in my direction,

 

Attaboy.

 

blustery november, 1992...

The sky is the color of crinkled saran wrapt, gray and heavy and bulbous, leaves, periodically raking down  the cul-de-sac of Linda Curve. I can still somehow feel the minty breath of Renae’s lips leaving what I could only be described as pink wet footprints across the stump of my neck. It looks as if it somehow might rain. Although grandma’s coffee pot is white and late seventies and has a beakerish laboratory botched junior high school chemical feel to it (mainly because it seemingly takes what seems like forever to percolate and for some inexplicable reason need to have a quart of water added to it at all times). Grandma almost always serves Maxwell House or mail order Gevalia, but for some reason today she offers me instant coffee, handing me a see-through glass silo in which the substance is contained, instructing me to put two tea spoons of the grainy almost tobacco-like chemical compound into the a mug and dissolve it in hot water.  The coffee is different from the coffee percolated at home, the coffee pot grandma gave me which I forgot to put a filter in the first time I used. While swirling a tea spoon in the mug in the fashion of a cauldron and the first scene of MacBeth, the soil-like grains dissolve in the hot water and begin to form a cosmic vortex-like swirl, accumulating at the top of the liquid in a light Guinness-colored film. At home I always add cream to the solution before alighting the coffee mug by the porcelain lobe and chugging but with instant coffee I add only sugar and periodically sip, ingesting to me what tastes like the topography of the  earth accumulating somewhere in the back of the carpet of my tongue.

 I go outside. Dad is wearing his gray sweater with a helixed zipper up front. Although it is November and the planet is beginning to elliptically

 The wind has more of a crisp feel to it, the bulb of the planet is beginning to open at the same times the temperatures are starting to willow and wane. The ladder is propped up against the lip of the gutter at an almost 65 degree angle against the lips of the gutter, my father handing me a pair of gloves informing me that he will hold the base of the ladder as I scale to the shingled pinnacle of the same house where my father lived when he was attending the same exact hallways where reane’s locker is now.   I set my instant coffee down on the cement plank that is the side of my father’s porch after one swig and begin to alight the rungs of the latter, scaling to the top.  My hands seem to clutch and scoop up the damp potpourri of leaves, dropping them the 14 feet below with an earnest plummet as the clod of mulch splatters on the damp grass forming a cocoon.    I shovel three heaps of leafy detritus out from the veins of the rooftop before my body heads south down the wooden rungs. I then head back to the porch for another caffeinated swing as dad moves the ladder ften feet at a time around the brick circumference of grandmothers abode all the while the gray wind continues to screech past my neck, wisping foliage of autumn into the direction of my carefully matted hair.

 

“Do you think you are getting the hang if this son?” My father asks in his fourth grade instructor benevolent monotone. I nod in the affirmative. Around my family I am not dubious about my appearance. I scale up the ladder again baptizing my gloved digits into the upper lip of the gutter, all the while thinking about the lips of the woman I entered last night in Westlake parking lot in the grisly seasonal rain, the temperature pattering as if tuning for orchestral movement.

 There is a quiet desolation to the beginning of the song.