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

 

 

 

Sometime Junior year around the oak mahogany at Lums, the table littered with sheaths of bad poems and coffee carafes, ash trays and boxes of cigarettes, sometime junior year I tell Patrick Mcreynolds about my theory, about how it seems like I am always dating the same girl over and over again. That whatever it is I am chasing in one girl slips into the next. That I have only dated one migrating soul that seems to spill into the flesh of the various females I have dated.

 He looks at me, ashes his Marlboro Red and says one sentence: “Dude, you’re fucked.”

 

 

                                                                       *** 

 

                                                                                

 We are scheduled to go to prom as a group, Strickler and Andrea, myself and Kitty Pekowski. Strickler gets a discount on his tux by modeling it at school for a week. I talk with Kitty every night after school. I meet her at Lums. When she is around I refuse to fire up a cigarette in an act of courtesy. I read   her poems. I force her to listen to the Smiths. She gives me a mixed tape featuring DC Talk and Jars of Clay. She gives me a poem written in iambic-pentameter correlating her exigency to find an imminent date for prom with an overdue school report and internally fretting about the due date not realizing that the answer where in front of her the whole time from the outset.

We meet at maid rite. We meet at Lums.  I make an appointment to go to church with her.

I show her the mountainous heap of spiraled notebooks where I write informing her that sometimes I write twenty poems a day.

"All I do is come home from school and brew a pot of coffee and listen to the writers' almanac at 3:54 then ensconce myself in my bedroom and fall asleep at my writers' desk."
 
We talk about books. Kitty has read Sense and Sensibility five times this year. I have read Martin Amis's THE RACHEL PAPERS twice as many times, envisioning myself as Charles Highway.
 
"I was partying at Hale's last autumn and the b-rated 80's movie came on HBO at 3 in the morning after everyone passed out and I just had this sort of catharsis of sorts--I commiserated with protagonist. I then bought the book and I can't stop reading it."
 
I stroke an alluring finger through Kristina's straw-flavored hair. I notice the chrome square with a K dangling around her neck. I kiss her forehead. I quote her the opening stanza's of Anne Sexton's The Fortress   I tell her that her album UNDER THE PINK usurped the first line of Anne's poem. She gropes me closer.



 

"We are kinda of like Elinor and Edward only the roles are reverse" Kitty posits I ask her how so.

"You are the romantic dreamy one and i'm the one who always has a hard time trying to say what I mean."

I quote Prufrock. We have make-out sessions where her eyes fold like a napkin at a dinner party before our lips unzip each others' respective visages.

 

 

 

 

 

 

We fall asleep in a heap of limbs. When I wake up Kristina is gone.

 

The next day I realize that her chrome necklace with a K in the center is wreathed around my neck like a toppled halo . 

 

                                                                               ***

 

 

 

I ask Jeff Grebe from my church if I can come over and browse through the old collection of tuxedos he owns downstairs, the ones I wore when I was a waiter in the mother daughter banquet at CLS last fall. I pick the one that has long tails and correlates perfectly to the tuxedo pants and tuxedo shirt I wore with my thankfully defunct stint with Manual singers. I purchase the bow-tie separately. Learning well from my botched homecoming dalliance with Renae Holiday a year and a half earlier I order the corsage Kristina will have wreathed around her wrist in the frilly fashion of a stopwatch a week before the gala. Strickler is excited about it.

 

 

 

 

"I used to wear these to high school. Sometimes I would wear them with shorts."

 

"You would wear a tuxedo with shorts?"

Jeff smiles back before amending Hawaiian shorts.

"That's how we did it in the eighties. We would walk around dressed like a hybrid between a sommelier and a surfer while listening to the Smiths all day."

 

"Yeah, I was a big fan of Victor in a tutu by the Smiths'." Informing Jeff that the Smiths has been my favorite band since I returned home from Europe thee years ago.

 

"That's nice but it's Vicar in a tutu not Victor in a tutu." Jeff tells me before asking me to delineate all the appropriate details about the porcelain-laced creature I am taking to prom."

 

                                            



    

                                                                            ***
 

            “I was thinking, since we are all so poor, my mom could cook for us. You haven’t tried cooking ‘til you’ve tried her lasagna. we could pick the girls up and then go back to my house and eat. Mom will use her good china and everything. It might be cool. ”

 

            “Let me talk with Andrea. It should be fine.”

                                                                    ***

"Here,"She says, after our second date, "I want to give you something.

She takes to stairs at a time and comes back down cradling a shoebox. I ask her what this is:

"It's my story. I mean, the one that was inspired by all the Jane Austen I've been reading. I was wondering if you could take a look at it."




What’s this?” I inquire to Kitty Pekowski, a dossier wedged in my face like a bouquet.

 

“It’s my story.” She says. It looks like it was typed on a word processor. There are thirty pages that are collated in chapters by staples.

 

I know you’re a poet and all but I was wondering if you could take a gander at my manuscript and give me any insight.

I tell her I would be honored. 

Kitty asks me if I am excited about college. I tell her that it i8s really no big deal, that I am just going to ICC, the russet –flavored community college that looks like an ashtray from an overtruend aerial perspective.

 

I wish I was going somewhere else. I’m studying English. All I want to do is be a writer. All I want to do is just write all the time.”

 

I want to say fucking time only Kitty doesn’t curse. She is holding the rose I presented to her. She looks down and tells me that her mother’s name is Rose.

 

“It’s a pretty name. It reminds me of her daughter.”  I say to her. Kitty looks down and smiles.

 

 

                                                                    ***

                                                                                

 

“Our prom was in the Scottish Rite.” Vanessa continues to explicate her emotions, the country sun beating heavily into the west as if it is trying to wink out several defeated epigraphs before dropping into scattering shades of peach and yearning lavender that drape the cracker-barrel backroads of this white trash fairy tale kingdom.

 

 

            “Did you go with Robert?” I ask Vanessa. Her lips continue to remain hushed, a marble hyphen of stillness.

 

            “Fuck no.” She quickly responds, stating that she had better things to do with the interior of her loins on prom night, like waylay the Schwanns man the moxy caps of her knees.

 

Vanessa again goes on to explain how “Bobby” possessed certain distinct rubicund facial features that reminds her of a ham roll.

 

            “Celina and I were both on the prom-planning committee and we decorated the interior of the ballroom, but when it cmae to attending the actual fete, we found ourselves classically ensconced in a parking lot over looking the Illinois river reading out loud to each other stanzas of Being and Nothingness.”

 

            I continue to drive and smile. Around me is the most verdant back country green

I have ever seen.