I am walking across the street with Karen Corvalis and Holly Pinsol, across a littered Starr Street, gnashed bottles of forties, scattered glass, bushels of sodden paper whistling past like errant straw in a ghost town. Yet somehow it is spring. Somehow our bodies our opening up in accordance with the planetary rotations; opening up and unzipping and planting. I can smell both Holly Pinssol and Karen Corvalis as we walk across the street. An almost completely evaporated heap of snow the color of a dead tooth melts flaccidly in the Church parking lot. The color of the sky matches the pools of blue found in Holly’s eyelids, matches the thick blue lettering spelling out the words ‘COMET’ and ‘CHEERLEADER’ on the back of Karen’s Varsity jacket, a cursive coma proclaiming the year ’92 in italics as we walk across the street, passing the same mail box I have passed every Sunday, into the same, squatting brick pillar, the church I have called home, the Church where Mom directs the bell choir at and aunt Linn directs the grown up and youth choirs. Walking across the street with two girls I have known practically since my years could be chronicled by the dactyls on one childhood paw. I have known these girls longer than I have known the function of the parts of my body. We were all stems in the same kindergarten orchard. Know, we are starting to blossom. Our limbs are growing. Bristled patches of fuzz scrape beneath and around certain limbs and opening of our bodies, leaving our genitals with the feeling of a nest waiting for a bird to come and hatch. But know, we are crossing
To Sprout.
Karen is walking very extremely straight, almost as if she is trying to balance the King James on the top of her head. Holly strolls casually, and I am in between, being the bulls-eye of petty insult and flirtatious smirks. My hair is petrified, my brown glasses still saddle the slope of my nose as if my entire face were a carousel. I am walking with Karen and Holly, when Karen turns towards me, offering out a rogue smile, pasty freckles squirting out form the side of her cheeks as she says to me.
“You know what the difference between me and you is Dave?”
I walk. Try to change the subject. The door to the community room is readily approaching. In seconds we will enter the community room and we will hang up our respective attire on thick skeletal hangars, we will unbuckle the thick hearses that carry the bells. The males generally are consigned the larger, heavy, lower octave handled gavels, while the females, Holly and Karen and Corrine, are granted the light, budding handle, swigging the bronze casting, penetrating the petite clapper inside like they are trying to squeeze a scrotum. The girls have been gossiping about 90210, Brenda is about ready to loose her virginity. I’ve been trying to chisel out my hair so that it looks like one of the televised celebrities. Been trying to let my sideburns sprout to deem me with an even greater aura of maturity. Still we walk. I in my high tops, the girls, in their white cheerleading tennis shoes; laughing. The top of Karen’s hair is permed and fritz into a puffed spume giving it the appearance of the bottom of a waterfall. The remainder of her hair is also neatly trimmed and slightly curves and thick and sleeks sexily down her back. She looks to me again, a look in her eyes as if she is about ready to stamp her foot down in disapproval, wondering why it is taking me so long to answer her query. Holly’s face being operated by invisible strings, pulling her lips back into a smile, a slight cherry red also giving her the appearance of a blush the same exact color of the cheap wine my father buys in a box he sips at sporadically that lasts him the duration of the entire new year.
As she opens her mouth to respond, Karen still looks dissatisfied. I think of the gushing water trickling into the grated sewer opening. I walk straight ahead hearing her comments.
***
I am driving Laurie home drunk and all she is telling me is
that she lives for passion.
“What do
you live for?” I ask her, my hand planted and handcuffed and squeezed around
her fist as my left hand cups the wheel in a knuckled grip. I pass through a
dangling stoplight that is pausing between yellow and red. I switch lanes very
cautiously, trying to follow Dave, in his topless BMW, who is ahead of me right
now.
“I live for
art and beauty.” Laurie is saying, in her cool, menthol voice. “I like for
passion. Anything that makers another person become a better human being.
When we
arrive home there are two shadows peeping out of the side vertical window near
the door. I freeze the SUV in park, switch off the lights and avail the
passenger door for her, giving her one final embrace, helping her clamber up
the stairs, watching as she picks up her purse and the scuttles into the door,
telling me goodnight, bourbon breath and sexy.
*
“Laurie’s
husband drinks a bottle of Beefeaters and smokes two packs a day.” Dave says.
“I never smoke when Vanessa is around,” I tell Celina, as I
take her unlit stem and light it with that of my own. Celina confessed that she
doesn’t either and offers a giggle before inhaling, stating, in her ever
high-pitched vocal chime that sometimes Love can be rather hard up at times.
***
“Do you want to come in and see my bedroom.” I ask Celina,
for no apparent reason at all, explaining to her that I think she would like my
library. Celina smiles. Together we empty out of the side of her vehicle and I
unlock the door to the brick building that looks like a chimney santa clause
might get stuck in around the holidays, the house where just eight months
earlier my granmother was swallowed by cancer, the house where my father
entered puberty and crawled under the kitchen counter to talk to my mom when first they started courting. The car
doors snap to a sneeze and we stamp out the tendrils of our cigarettes together
in the front driveway.
***
Our bodies form acute angles, like a door slightly opening
into a crevice as I hand her the books I think she might like to peruse.
“This looks
interesting,” Celina notes as she holds Amy Bloom in her hand in the fashion of
just receiving a church bulletin on Christmas eve.”
“Here, you
have to read this also. You have to read George Suanders’ Civilwarland in Bad
Decline. It will changer your live. I fucking swear.”
Celina lets
out an abbreviated hmmmm as I hand her the slim text.
“Seriously,
“ I note, “I can’t recommend this book highly enough.”
Celina
holds both the volumes in her delicate porcelain china like hands. A silence
drips between us. The smell of her body empties into my body like steam from a
carafe. Suddenly I want to throw myself into the piquant archway of her cherry
lips. I want to enter to mouth and ski down the slope of her tongue. I want
parachute into the discreet canvases of her being, unfold the flaps of her arms
like an unopened valentine, sprint with her somehow inside of me.
Celina is
looking down into the bushel of texts I have planted in her hand like she is
thinking the same thing. Like she is waiting for me to kiss her. Like she is
waiting for me to make the first move, to instigate the narrative of months of
stealthily lurking behind the slender back of Vanessa, waiting every second to
be alone and sedate our sensual passions for the unerring thrust of each
others’ respective loins.
“Come
here.” I tell Celina, the woman with the short crisp black hair who with her
cheeks look like something our of a 1920ish Ed Hoepper vignette, holding my hands in the fashion of three and
nine, as if I am ready to steer a vessel into the inscrutable unknown thrush of
ecstasy and yearning.
I hold her
hands and slowly we sway as if in a tempo, a waltz, a song.
*****
“The difference between us Dave is that you have a Dick, I have something for Dicks.” She says, still walking. The water continues to pour back into the earth in slight polluted trickles. We are arriving early for bell choir.
“I
eventually found out that I needed it. I just needed it all the time. And my
husband just didn’t know how to give it to me the way I wanted it.” Laurie
says.
*
There is a
silence as we enter the living room. For some reason Lady decides to swallow
her bark. Celina is next to me. All I can think about right now is holding her.
All I can think about is what Vanessa would think if she realized my intention.
That I want to ingest my limbs around Celina and take her inside of me. Buckle
my every joint around her and just hold her, perhaps even more.
“Here,” I
say, leading her into my bedroom, the bed Vanessa’s indentation has been seeded
into. I hand her a few books by George Saunders. I hand her a book by Amy Bloomwhich she will say she enjoyed better. I hand her all of these objects in lieu
of what I really want to hand her.
She accepts
the books and nods and says thank you in a cozy curtsey lipped fashion. We
adjourn to the living room. Although it is almost February we still have not
dismembered the plastic Christmas tree. The serpentine lights have not been
plugged in since epiphany. The bulbs dangle slightly on the ersatz pine like
earrings on a dead person. Before I can readily calculate my every emotion,
both of our arms are fastened around each other and Celina is tugging me toward
her just as ardently as I am heaving her towards me.
We are both wearing think denim
jeans. I can smell the sunrise on her cheeks. Feel the splash of perfume
that is on her neck. I picture Vanessa looking at me now the same way I look at
Vanessa after she has read one of her brilliant stories in class.
“The best way I can show you how I
feel for you is to love the person whom we’re both in love with.” I tell Celina
that. She squeezes tighter.
Sometime after that we say goodbye.
*
“Daveeeeeeed.” Jasna is
saying. “Daveeeed take off all my clothes.”
*
“Once I fuck a girl she’s my
property.” Jarrence is saying, his Starter cap still twisted up and to the left
like an uppity British man’s chin. Apparently he has fucked Jessica or has at
least kissed her. He is slouched on one of the pews facing the bowling lanes.
His shoes unblemished and white, resting on top of a folding chair. He walks
with a limp, as if a rival gang member has just brutally wounded him.
“Once I fuck a girl, she’s my
property.” He says again, his pants sagging as he gets up and scoots the chair
over to the opposite side of where I am standing. He scowls and grimaces and
bites his lip and lags away, looking back at me, configuring his lips so that
they look like dinner utensils, making sure I know just what he is talking
about.
*
Jessica’s rumpled jeans and autumn
foliage hair remained absent on the second Friday of November. I took a quiet,
humble excursion into the brisk, chapped cold of late autumn. My hair is wet
with long gelled matted strands brushed into a tidal wave and petrified. My
glasses remain thick, cuffed skeletal squares. Tim and Patrick are again
sauntering behind me.
Slowly, I walk near the creek. Near
the slither of crumbling earth. Near the place where Jessica lowered her body
out before mine like a welcome matt. The thatch of earth where I wiped the
soles of my fourteen years of curiosity on top of her, swiping my body
vertically on top of her body, trying to unlock her, trying to go somewhere
before where I have never been before.
This should have been my cue to myself, had I known then what I know now. This should have been my cue to reel her and Holly aside, inside the janitorial closet, the dank webbed dungeon housing a tin bucket, stale water, a scaly mop trying to balance itself, as if on tippie toes in the corner. There are light plastic nativity replica’s heaped on gravel. Mary, dressed in a margarine blue, turned upside down so that you can see the whole in her bottom where the candle goes. Miss Best will arrive in fifteen Minutes or so. There is ample time for this. Beneath her COMET jacket Karen is wearing a red tank top. She wears denim washed jeans thickly buckled by something that looks like it could be endorsed by masterlock. There is a light switch. Other than Dee Easton, the pringle-faced Church secretary, there is no one else in the building. No one knows where we are, or what we are doing.
In Europe , going into the Cathedral’s was like entering the birth canal, I will hear years later. One enters the long-narrow pew ridden plume, going to the front of the Cathedral, where the priest feeds you bread from the ovum; the inscrutable mystery. You turn around, going down the narrow plume, like you are exiting the birth canal. Leaving the Holy mother. NOTRE DAME.
We are all alone and it is spring. Dankness. Both the girls are smiling.
“Show me.” I say.
They continue to giggle. They continue to blush. Holly has a smile on her face ths size of an Olympic springboard. Karen offers a smile, too. We are inside the womb, and we are waiting to cultivate.
There is silence. My vision rotates around the entire room, eyesight oscillating like a classroom globe. Karen is semi-squatting in her denim pants. Holly is still smiling. I look at the plastic replica of the Virgin Mary kneeling. Karen responds incredulously. Still laughing.
“What?” She says.
I pause, self-consciously adjust the center of my glasses, sliding the center of my frames further up, into my forehead.
“You told me out in the parking lot that the difference between you and me is that, I have a dick, you have something for dicks.”
Both Karen and Holly smile again, nod, offering out a little yes.
“So show me,” I say, almost demanding it.
*
“I
want more,” She says, as she manacles my wrist with her fingers and slides me
into the back seat of the SUV her late-husband bought her.
*
The scent of chlorine is still heavy on Laurie’s
neck as she swings the reins of the SUV in the alleyway between the house I am
currently living in, behind the coffee house.
Much to the chagrin of my best friend I have already been inside her
once tonight.
*
This is the place that he started searching for after the place he has already left. This is the exact place he has been seeking; the exact moment he has been waiting for, the place he has been writing for; the station he has been endeavoring to achieve, the place he has been longing (inside) to get to. The culmination of all of his youthful experiences he finds, underneath him, at this precise moment. The moment his body enters her body; the moment of the initial guiding and thrust and push. The moment her eyes reflect up into his forehead and he can, biting down, see his reflection exhaling, thrusting, in the acorn pad of her eyes. He is cautiously stepping into her; jockeying his body, biting his breath, trying to lead her to that place, that one place she has never been.
*
Karen is the first to comply to my mandates. She is hesitant. Holly looks at me, stating that if we are going to do this, going to reveal ourselves to each other like this, we are all going to do it together, as one. Meaning that, if they show me theirs, I am almost inevitably expected to show them mine and to initiate. Karen just looks at me. I notice the silver clasp of her belt, clasped shuts and if with braces, concealing a fold of serpentine leather, whipped thickly around her brass navel, concealing my vision, shielding my curiosity.
“OK,” Karen says, she performs a little squat, a curtsey, as her fingers pretzel a pick at the fastened belt. Holly is still smiling, almost as if she cannot believe that Karen is going to show me.
The front of her belt reeling undone, opening it’s clasped mouth in mid yawn. There is silence. Everyone’s eyes are focused acutely in the center of Karen’s jeans. A slight cling is heard as she unfastens the front of her belt altogether. Her fingers then seem to adamantly pinch at the brass orb joining her jeans. The bottom of her red tank top is slowly becoming untucked, loosely hanging down like a stage curtain at a puppet show. Karen is still smiling. Her lips seem to have sunk into the top of her teeth. Her tongue slightly lolls through the curb of her top lip. She inhales, loosening her torso and she unbuttons the eye completely. Slight horizon of silk is spotted. I know I am close.
She smiles again. I can see her zipper sever apart like broken glass as she fondles the metallic tongue down. Her panties are white, dappled with little red hearts. She looks at me and smiles. Holly lips have morphed almost into complete shock as Karen lowers the top of her underwear down with a free thumb, revealing a slightly glistening patch, a slit, the crack of the door I’ve been waiting all of my life to see.
Because of Advent and the
neon-stagnation of non-circulating shopping mall traffic there is no Junior
High Night at the Christian center in December. In January I will arrive,
having been dropped off by Becky who guns the mini Van over every sign reading
DIP. My hair still molded into a still life plateau. I abandon the van and
follow Tim and Patrick and Hale, into the side door of the Christian Center,
watching as before me, Jessica walks out. She is still wearing her East Peoria
Poms jacket with the year of her graduation stitched in the side. Her jeans are
still gray and chalked blurred and seem to sprout of her white sneakers. We are
heading in opposite directions, as if almost in separate vehicles.
I pretend not to see her.
“Hey,” She looks back, pointing her
finger at me like an umpire calling a strike. I keep walking. She is in a group
of hommies; many with mismatch pant legs and thick professional franchised caps
twisted in various directions. She yells out my name for a second time. My
vision averts, finding her shale colored face.
“You are a jerk.”
I nod. Her long, permmed nest hair
has been straightened and is considerably shorter, swayed and shopped to one
side. I keep staring at her lips. I have no clue where I put her name panted on
top of her phone digits, written in a short, pencil used to keep count of
strikes and spares with.
I look at her lips. The thick,
bandy wedge peeling up with the proximity of my breath. I remember the way her
tongue seemed to pop and stem inside my mouth like a periscope, assaying the
inside portion of my throat with a . I remember the way her eyes closed, and,
seeing her eyes closed, watching my eyes immediately closed. I remember
suggesting that we go further and her looking at me, saying ‘here’ and I acting
like why not. I remember all of this as she juts past me, reading the rainbow
arrayed alphabetical letters spelling out the name of her high school and the
name of her choice extra-curricular activity in thick cut out cloth lettering.
Watching her walk away, billowed between Jarrence’s cadre of South Siders, each
of them walking with a limp and talking with their hands. Each of them looking
at Jessica the way I looked at her moments before each of us respectively bowed
the lids of our eyes and tried to enter that the other place. The place they
told us never to go.
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