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.

For my mother, who didn't ask for her pen to be duly returned....

 

I remember mom telling me that the first time she ever met anyone who was HIV-positive was when she was attending one of her Christian Conferences down at the Civic center and the person ahead of her in line asked for a pen. Some how they got on the subject of HIV and AIDS and somehow it leaked out that the gentlemen standing in line ahead of my mother just so happened to be HIV positive himself, and that his lover, whose impediment had developed into AIDS had given him the virus, so gay men (human beings) became dominoes, fumbling from a chain reaction, bending over, unable to get up.  Mom said that this was the first and only time she had ever met or touched anyone who was HIV positive.

 

            She didn’t ask for the pen back.

 

 

                                                                      ***

 

 

Matt Brown ruffles my head every morning. “Your head looks like a seat cushion for a big, gaudy fag to squat on.” He says smiling. My eyes droop shut, my body is enervated from pumping copious amounts of alcohol through my veins the night before. The brass hue and cactus texture of my hair grants me the appearance of a lopsided philharmonic trombonist crashing through his windshield with his instrument perched at his lips. Matt peels back the crusty strands  of hair and kisses my forehead, informing me that he loves me. Telling me that he loves me, before he goes to work, helping patients who are HIV +.

 

 

                                                                          ***

 

“I love you Damian.” I tell him. His pants drip down the side of his legs, and we are walking down back to Larry and Carries, my eyes, as are often the case, because of both my contacts and my allergies, are bubbled red in the iris.

 

            “What was up with you and that girl back there,” He says.

 

            “I liked her name. I think she was afraid of me though.”

 

            “You were acting all over her like that because of her name,” Demian looks back at me. It is three am, cars continue to whiz past, occasionally swerving.

 

            “Yeah,” I say, commenting perfectly with the heavy ruffle in my corduroy jeans. “I was into her because of her name.”

 

            Damian pauses. His eyes appear to be a canopy drooped over a sunset somewhere else.

 

            “But, Dave. You’re just like you were last year. Just like you were last year when you were with Misty.”

 

            “I pause, and reply by saying, ‘meaning’ with my voice perched an octave to form a question.

 

            “Meaning what was going on last summer with you and Misty. That’s how I wanted to spend last summer, you know I had plans.” A cool drip has mopped over the surface. We pass a high school, we pass Roosevelt Avenue. We are walking, not exactly knowing for sure exactly where we are going. We know the general direction. We know that Carry has the back side door held slightly ajar. We know that as soon as we arrive, we sill stumble, I will let Damian lull himself to sleep with the sounds of David Sanchez saxophone still blaring heavily inside his thoughts. And I will fall asleep, once again, all alone, wondering where the girl of my dreams is-wondering what she is doing right now…………….

 

 

                                                                           ***

 

“I’m disappointed in you, Dave.” Mother is saying again, sitting on the edge of her mattress, as if stranded with her feet dangling over the edge of a peer cutting into a nuclear Lake. “I’m disappointed in you she says again. I’m disappointed in you. On my way to work I slam the door shut and get into my car. My spine, sprouting up like a beanstalk out of my shoulder, curving into a question mark shape as it wraps around my brain. Wondering why, just why, things have to be so fucking difficult at times.  If they would have wanted me to live a more Christian Life, then they had the option to send me to a more Christian school during the formative years of my life when I felt absolutely no love at all and my parents were very interested in sending me to shrinks and putting me on medication but not very interested in helping my overall, academic future by sending me to a school that would be considered overall quote ‘conducive’ to academia. This, then, perhaps, depriving me of, from a formative years, me as a person, truncating my ambition from seeing what I am ever quote, ‘capable’ of achieving as both a person and a functioning human being in this lifetime. Everything mom and dad would have ever wanted for me to have accomplish immediately gets hauled around on my shoulders because I harbor sincere thoughts of killing myself every time I see a telephone pole picturing a noose tied around it like a clown’s tie and my neck fumbling back and forth, a fish pulled out of water that is now used for bait to catch other hapless inhabitants. 

 

I feel like telling my parents' that I have nowhere to go.

 

                                   

                                                                          ***

 

                        It was the moment that her face let go over every single muscle it was holding onto, unbuckled and smiled. That moment when Vanessa was walking down the staircase, each row our bodies clopping hard down, around, the staircase descending turning the corner. It was after the class period where I told her that her prose was so beautiful and so gorgeous that it gave my heart an erection.

 

            “I’m glad that was the only thing it made erect!!!” Thomas Palakeel laughing outloud, slapping his hand into the side of his knee. The class breaking out in laughter, tilting their heads back, cackling out golf ball sized hackles.

 

           

                                                                                 ***

 

 

“I will sleep with whoever I want!” She says, stammering. Tears, residual salt icicles still leak from the side of my eyes, leftover form the funeral. I tell her that she is free to do that. I inform her that our rapport, as lovely as it is, is based solely on trust, and that, even though our bodies sexually configure into one physiological heart, our bodies are still functioning separate entities. She continues to scold.

 

                                                                           ***

 

                      

 

            Dave has been in his bedroom all day watching Queer as Folk DVD. He is laconic and sips his pipe. Outfits are adjusted and we enter his 2001 Santa Fe SUV Jace got him such a good deal on. Inside the car he taps the radio nubs and twists back onto High Street. It is damp outside, the color of a tea bag thoroughly doused. He rounds the corner, turning from High onto Sheridan. The break light on his SUV nearly winks at the Stop octagon as he pushed the gas forward a block and a half, turns on Windham. Headed

He says. towards Campus town. A heavy reticence fills the car and breath begins to leak out of Dave’s throat. It is on the corner of Windham and Orange that the break like on the SUV pause for a minute and he puts the car on P. He is on my lap and tears are draining from his head.

 

            “I could be, I may be HIV positive.” He says, his face a flush of tears.

 

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.

                                               

                                                         

 

summer 2000, my life what might have been...

 

I am on top of Brook’s body, having just peeled her out of her raiments, slid her panties down around the heavy caps of her knees, falling inside of her, she holds out her hand in a halting motion, almost as if to thwart me from crossing the street. The tops of her palm pressing against my chest.

 

            “Do you have anything that even remotely resembles protection?” She inquires. I should. I should no better by now. I should realize that sex will be different from now on. I shake my head.

 

            “I’ve only been with two girls.” I say. “And both of them were virgins.”

 

            Her face let’s loose of a subtle nod. I am permitted to permeate the invisible membrane that separates us. I am allowed to enter. I am allowed to mix my fluids with her fluids. I am allowed, simply, to do anything I want.

 

                                                            *

 

            Pressing down on top of her, I am treading, trying to stay afloat, pressing down intermittently, trying to get further inside. Trying to find whatever it is that I am looking for, trying to locate the mystical orb, burrowed up inside of her, trying to take her to a place that I know I myself, will never be able to go.

 

 

                                                            *

 

            “Maybe I should teach you how to use my Dildo on me.” She says.

 

                                                                       

                                                            *

 

            This is our second endeavor. Our limbs begin to peel and frisk, our arms forming connective wiring between each other’s flesh. Her tank top is gently peeled, discarded. I can feel her bra’d bosom pressing into my chest. Our lips our simultaneously trying to swallow each other’s lips. Sucking, as if trying to drain the moisture from the others face. This is what passion is; this is what yearning is all about. Trying to observe the other inside of you completely so at that the, the pinnacle moment where all sexual yearning and longing is sated and released, you feel that you are no longer alone, no longer suffering alone in the world. You feel that you are a part of something. That this elusive mother continent are planting your flag deeply into, is, for the terse time being, home.

 

            “David,” Brook is shouting out my name like no other girl I have ever slept with has ever shouted out my name. She is older; she is making me feel like I am the only person who has ever been inside of her. She is making me feel like I am the first person who has ever showed her all of this.

 

            As if adjusting the sails on a windmill, I spin her entire body around. Her bottom breaches out and splits into a butterfly. Before I insert anything, her wrist swings between her own arched legs and grabs my cock, hoisting me into her, screaming when I enter.

 

            I continue to pound her with long, drawn out thrusts. Tears well, collect and spill inside the lids of her eyes, like a baptismal shell drooling holy water. My hair has draped over my shoulders, both of my hands are biting into her waist, ramming my torso into her as hard as I can.

 

            From behind me I can hear the hush of traffic. Zoe barks occasionally in the kitchen. The oscillating fan continues to hum thick shafts of air. If Derrick were to be spying on us at this particular moment of space and time, he would see a young boy with no biceps and chest, from behind, his bottom sugar white, thrusting into his wife, who has her legs capped apart, her ass in the air, her breasts hardening, jiggling, her voice screeching, calling out the name of Goliath’s victor. He would see all this and, like any patriarch, he would have me beheaded. He would shoot to kill. Everything I am or ever endeavored to be, he would have destroyed.

 

            I can feel a beady curtain of sweat begin to foam from the top of Brook’s brow. She continues to rattle her Torso into me. For a minute it appears as if we are rowing separate direction, flowing against the current. With her right hand, she balances herself up, her free left hand swinging down from between her legs. Biting her lip in the similar fashion of Vanessa months earlier, she pulls me even further inside of her womb, grasping on to me, coercing me to freeze, deep inside of her, in mid thrust, as her face begins to crackle.

 

            “Don’t stop. Almost there.” She wails. I can feel her face begin to crumple. A fissure cracks from her lip. Her eyes scrunch together.

 

            I press in hard again, lodging myself deeply inside her. With her free hand, she tweaks my testicles and then massages her own armor. Tells me once again, not to stop. Tells me not to stop the rhythm.

 

            My final thrust and she leaves. Her hand slightly twisting part of her clitoris like she is plucking a pedal, yet does not want to remove the petal completely. My name is spilled against the wall like a mantra and I can see our shadows fall apart; tumble down inside each other. Our bodies are fraught with sweat; we fall down, inside each other, Brook is crying. Perhaps she even thanked me afterwards.

 

                                   

                                                                        *

 

            “See David,” She says, afterwards. “We just made great love.” As my entire body falls limp, my lips bend into a smile, me lolls to the side closest to her shoulder.

 

 

Letter to the Dean of Admissions from an impecunious college student who is about to take out a mortgage on his education simply becuase he has no where else left on this planet to go...

January 05, 2004

 

David L. Pardieck

1501 W. Bradley Ave.

Peoria, IL 61625

 

 

Dear Mr. Pardieck:

 

Throughout my five-year career as a “professional student” I have been subjected to many personal and financial impediments that have greatly setback my academic progress. In 1996 I was hospitalized with an acute pancreatic flare-up and coerced into missing several weeks of school at Illinois Central College. That same year my grandfather was killed in a head on collision. The next year my grandmother and surrogate guardian fell victim to cancer and I got a full time job in order to make ends meet.

 

I arrived at Bradley in 1998, polishing my GPA with a 4.0 my first semester on campus. Always lurking around the corner with a devious smirk were the calamities and, after a fatal car-accident upstaged by ‘internal domestic drama’ I left Peoria for Illinois State University, only to be greeted with the news that my eleven year old cousin had committed suicide.

 

I took multifarious third shift jobs and ended up back in Peoria as a Teacher Assistant for District 150. However, in the early weeks of 2002, the ubiquitous cancer struck again, this time suddenly usurping the life of my father. Six months later, I arrived back on campus, destitute but determined to graduate. I was enrolled part-time and worked two full time jobs (eighty-hours a week) in order to make university payments.

 

In November 2002, my roommate was hospitalized for three months, beseeching more house payments culled from my pocketbook. After four months, my roommates and I lost our house, and I did the Bohemian thing and moved into my station wagon for two months, while simultaneously working two jobs and chiseling away at my BU credits.

 

Turbulence, trauma, and more relatives planted into the earth, I would very much like to accelerate my setbacks and rectify my collegiate trajectory by completing my B.A. as soon as possible. I understand that I have more W’s listed on my transcript than an internet address. However, I am bound and determined to graduate and will work with diligence and vigor in the accomplishment of this goal if I were granted the opportunity.

 

With gratitude,

 

 

David A. VonBehren

Impecunious college student