Silly Musing on a Gray Morning

Old Paint

Yesterday, I read an article in the New York Times about boarding houses.  It seems that many people are deciding to take in boarders now given the state of the economy.  I read excerpts from a turn of the century account (19th/20th) of living in boarding houses.  An estimated thirty percent of New Yorkers then resided there.  The writer had listed them by categories.  Even in its horribleness, the account made them sound interesting if not fun.  Communal living.  As gated communities have sprung up across the country in the past twenty years, as we have become more and more enamored by exclusivity, as we have built our glory mansions of isolation, as we've turned ever more to the cyberworld for our relationships. . . .  Etc.  Versus bad food, bed bugs, and cantankerous landlords.  Am I nuts?  

I think I'll go back and read some Balzac.  

Dichotomy

But I didn't see Johnny. Instead, I saw Sammy, the fellow who had beaten up our jr. high school principal. And he was pissed.

He had fallen for a girl with Jane Mansfield breasts, only she didn't look like Jane Mansfield at all. She had dirty blonde hair and was heavy with stubby legs. But somehow, one night, I ended up with her in a vacant house where a bunch of us had gone to fool around. I didn't want to be with her preferring any of the other three girls. But what I got was Jane.

Everyone was in one room or another hugging and munching, so there wasn't much else to do but the same. And so I kissed Jane and tried to explore her very big breasts which were really much larger than my mother's whose own breasts were ample. I tried slipping my fingers beneath the tight band at the bottom of the brassiere, but she didn't help. Indeed, she was resisting. And so I tried harder, kissing her more and breathing deep, hot breaths into her ear canal hoping to drive her wild with desire. And she was going crazy, moving and moaning right there on the carpet when she suddenly stopped and grabbed my hand and looked deeply into my eyes. She was trying to say something with those eyes, I thought, and I was pretty sure I knew what it was. What the fuck. I'd seen it in bad movies before.

"I love you," I heard myself say hollowly, and with that the bra was free, as was I, able to explore to my heart's content the largest breasts I would ever see in my life. 

And that was it. In a little while, we all left the house and went up the street to a fast food hang out where a little bit later I said goodbye.

Now I was faced with Sammy. I had to think fast, that was certain. It was midday and there was nowhere to run. He would kill me for sure.

"I don't like Jane," I pleaded, but as soon as I said it, I realized it would sound like an insult to a man in love.

"I mean, she's a nice girl, I like her as a friend, but I don't like her for a girlfriend." I didn't know what I was saying. I just figured the longer I talked, the better chance I had of getting out of this alive. I'd seen Sammy hit a fellow once before, and I was dead certain that if he hit me like that, my head would just explode.

"Did you feel her up?" he shouted.

"NO!" I said. "Absolutely not."

"She says you did."

What the fuck kind of girl was she, I wondered, telling him that. Was she trying to get me killed? Sure she was, I thought. That is what I get for not calling her. Then another thought came to me.

"She's just trying to make you jealous," I said. "She likes you. She just wants to see what you will do."

I could tell he liked that, but it was not certain that it would keep me from taking a beating. She couldn't like him, I thought. That is why she told him. But Jesus H. Christ, why rat on me?

"I don't want you around her any more, you hear me?" Sammy said, still puffed up but less revved. "If I hear you've called her or gone over there, I'll make you piss blood."

"No way, no way. I wouldn't do that. I wouldn't. You're my friend. I wouldn't do that to a friend."

That one is easy, I thought. That was an easy promise to keep.

Another night, same thing, only different.  This time, it was Dwayne.  Dwayne was a maniac redhead who wore a Mohawk until some of the fellows who had to cut their hair had complained that they, too, should be allowed to wear their hair the way they wanted.  After that, Dwayne just shaved his head.  It was hideous.  He was hideous.  He was two years older than I but only one grade ahead.  He was the size of a grown man with the mind of a moron.  He was either laughing or scowling, mostly the latter.  His face was incapable of any other expression.  He looked as if life puzzled him and that pissed him off.  His brow was wrinkled in angry befuddlement except when confronted with an easy task like eating a favorite food or taking a pee. 

I was standing around the burger place across the street from the high school one night when he charged up to me.  He was angry but happy that I was there, I could tell, for he was going to thump me right in front of his buddies.  It would not simply be a thumping--it would be an extended embarrassment.  And this time, I would not be able to talk my way out of it, for I had done nothing.  He was mad because his girlfriend said I was cute.  I had been at a party one night and talked to her for maybe a minute.  And that was it.  There was no defense to be made, no appeal to higher sensibilities.  For him, this was just going to be pure fun.  

A fellow I knew came over and said, "You'd better get out of here.  Dwayne's over there telling everybody he's going to kick your ass."  And so, without a moment's hesitation, I turned and began walking across a dirt lot toward the road that would take me to my house.  I was already breathing hard with embarrassment and anxiety.  I just wanted to get home.  But halfway across the darkened lot, I heard somebody yell, "Look out," and as I turned, I saw Dwayne running at me.  What was I to do?  Quickly, I broke into a sprint not knowing if I could get away, and seeing this, Dwayne made a dive at my legs.  And as he dove, the right heel of my hard shoe caught him between the eyes.  It wasn't planned, but it felt calculated, a good thump that would surely leave a lump.  I ran a few steps ahead before I turned around and pleaded, "Dwayne, I didn't mean to. . . " but he was already getting up from the sand screaming like a pillaging pirate.  This had gone wrong for him in front of his friends who were hooting in the distance, so without thinking, all my glands pumping chemicals into my system at once, I turned and ran.  I didn't know if I could outrun him, but fear had made me more than human, I think, for when I dared look back over my shoulder, he was far behind.  I didn't quit running until I was halfway home.  

Sitting in the entranceway of a church in the shadows where I could not be seen, sweaty and crashing from the aftereffects of my adrenaline overdose, I breathed the humid air and looked out on the stream of cars that passed by on the road before me.  This was bad, I thought.  I had gotten away tonight, but how long could I avoid Dwayne?  It wasn't like this would just slip his mind, that he would just forget about it and it would be done.  Everyone would be talking about it at school.  I would be humiliated.  I didn't want to go back.  Every time I got into trouble like this, I thought, it was because of some girl.  It was a pattern.  I was beginning to think that this was the part they liked.  Not the romance, not the kissing and the humping, but this--The Trouble.  Maybe they hated guys, I thought, and this was their revenge, the thumping and stomping and the crunching of bone.  

But that was not how it felt when I thought about them or when I looked at them or held their hands.  Then they were like angels who would take you to the promised land where they would nurture you and heal your wounds.  They were like all the music I had ever heard, like beautiful melodies calling from the distance.  

But I wasn't so sure just now, sitting in the darkened hallway of a church, sweaty and spent, alien and alone on a Friday night.  

The owner of the trailer park had a young daughter who hung around with Tommy's little sister, and she was the cutest girl imaginable.  She tied her hair up in little bows and smiled all the time and was in the ninth grade.  Her name was Cindy.  

Bear hung around with Russell, the guy who was dating Tommy's sister, and one night the four of them, Bear, Russell, Tommy's sister, and Cindy, were hanging out together and Bear was smitten.  He was a big guy and she was small, and it didn't make any sense at all.  But there it was.  And soon, Bear would just drive over in his souped up Rambler with Credence Clearwater Revival blasting on his eight track, and she would hop in to take a ride.  

That is how I got to know Bear.  

Bear had a sister two years younger than he who was in the tenth grade.  She was tall like Bear and had long, dark hair and a solid build.  She was a happy girl, but she was Bear's little sister and didn't hang out with our crowd, so I never thought about her much.  

That year, I had to go in for surgery to have a cyst removed and was in the hospital for a few days.  It happened that Bear's sister volunteered at that same hospital as a Candy Striper visiting rooms and handing out candies and magazines and razors.  I hadn't seen her there, but one afternoon when my parents were visiting, she walked in.  And she was stunning.  I could see it in my father's eyes.  She was nearly as tall as he and in her little candy-cane smock managed to look like a Playboy Bunny.  She was very professional and mature and came over to see if I needed anything and we chatted a bit before she left.  She turned and said goodbye to my parents and left the room.  My father's eyes were like pies when he looked at me.  He just shook his head.  

One night, I called Bear's house to see what he was doing.  It was Friday and his sister answered the phone.  Bear wasn't there, so we chatted for a bit.  I asked her what she was doing that night and she said she didn't know.  Then I asked her if she had seen some movie that was playing just then and she said no, she hadn't.  I asked her if she would like to see it.  It may be clear to you here what she supposed I was asking by the juxtaposition of those two questions, but it never crossed my mind that she thought I was asking her out.  When she said yes, she did want to see that movie, I merely thought she meant some time and with some one, not with me.  We chatted a little while longer and then in saying goodbye, I told her that I would see her that night.  I meant that I would be over to see her brother.  

Around dark, I picked up Tommy and we drove over to Bear's house.  When I knocked on the door, his sister answered.  She was dressed for a date which was not surprising.  I was sure she dated all the time.  But in a minute it became uncomfortably clear to me that she was ready for a date WITH ME and she seemed very confused at the presence of Tommy who had figured it out and thought the whole thing hilarious until I told him I would take him home and drop him off at his house.  

Jane

But I didn't see Johnny.  Instead, I saw Sammy, the fellow who had beaten up our jr. high school principal.  And he was pissed.  

He had fallen for a girl with Jane Mansfield titties, only she didn't look like Jane Mansfield at all.  She had dirty blonde hair and was heavy with stubby legs.  But somehow one night I ended up with her in a vacant house where a bunch of us had gone to fuck around.  I didn't want to be with her preferring any of the other three girls.  But what I got was Jane.  

Everyone was in one room or another hugging and munching, so there wasn't much else but to do the same.  And so I kissed Jane and tried to explore her very big breasts which were really much larger than my mother's whose own breasts were ample.  I tried slipping my fingers beneath the tight band at the bottom of the brazier, but she didn't help.  Indeed, she was resisting.  And so I tried harder, kissing her more and breathing deep, hot breaths into her ear canal hoping to drive her wild with desire.  And she was going crazy, moving and moaning right there on the carpet when she suddenly stopped and grabbed my hand and looked deeply into my eyes.  She was trying to say something with those eyes, I thought, and I was pretty sure I knew what it was.  What the fuck.  I'd seen it in bad movies before.  

"I love you," I heard myself say hollowly, and with that the bra was free as was I to my heart's content.  She was only a teenager, but I still have never seen up close any titties bigger than those.  

And that was it.  In a little while, we all left the house and went up the street to a fast food hang out where a little bit later I said goodbye.  

Now I was faced with Sammy.  I had to think fast, that was for sure.  It was mid day and there was nowhere to run.  He would kill me for sure.  

"I don't like Jane," I pleaded, but as soon as I said it, I realized it would sound like an insult to a man in love.  

"I mean, she's a nice girl, I like her as a friend, but I don't like her for a girlfriend."  I didn't know what I was saying.  I just figured the longer I talked, the better chance I had of getting out of this alive.  I'd seen Sammy hit a fellow once before, and I was dead certain that if he hit me like that, my head would just explode.  

"Did you feel her up?" he shouted.  

"NO!" I said.  "Absolutely not."

"She says you did."  

What the fuck kind of girl was she, I wondered, telling him that.  Was she trying to get me killed? Sure she was, I thought.  That is what I get for not calling her.  Then another thought came to me.  

"She's just trying to make you jealous," I said.  "She likes you.  She just wants to see what you will do." 

I could tell he liked that, but it was not certain that it would keep me from taking a beating.  She couldn't like him, I thought.  That is why she told him.  But Jesus H. Christ, why rat on me?  

"I don't want you around her any more, you hear me?" Sammy said, still puffed up but less revved.  "If I hear you've called her or gone over there, I'll make you piss blood."  

"No way, no way.  I wouldn't do that.  I wouldn't.  You're my friend.  I wouldn't do that to a friend."  

That one is easy, I thought.  That was an easy promise to keep.  

Cindy

"What the fuck!" I was thinking,"How in the hell did I let this happen?"  

I was in the back seat with Johnny's new/old girlfriend.  I didn't know for sure.  I just knew they had a history.  Everyone had left the car, so it was just the two of us stretched out in the back seat, kissing.  She was older than I was and a lot more experienced, and she was hunching her pelvis into mine like one of the striptease artist I had seen in the Hoot Show at the county fair.  

It all started earlier that night.  We were in Donny's new car, an old Chevelle, Tommy, him, and me.  We had driven around for awhile, first to the Big Boy, then just around until we ended up at the Drive-In.  This wasn't the one in my neighborhood.  This one was even rougher and I didn't know anybody there.  On the way in, Donny had gotten into a pissing match with another car full of guys, and then somehow he had outrun them.  We had been looking over our shoulders for them ever since.  Donny had gone up to the concession stand while Tommy and I stayed in the car, and when he came back, he had three girls with him.  They piled into the car with us.  Cindy was the cutest and I ended up sitting next to her in the back seat crunched up against the window, Tommy and the other girl crushed in beside her.  Donny asked them if they wanted something to drink and broke out the Canadian Club.  These were really happy girls, happier than I had ever seen, and before long Donny asked them if they wanted to take a drive.  Sure they did.  

And so Donny put the speaker back on its hook and pulled ahead over the packed gravel hump into the next row, and that is when they saw us.  It was the guys from earlier in the night.  

"Hey motherfucker," I heard one of them yell as they all headed for their car.  Donny hit the gas sending a spray of rock and gravel flying, trying to get to the exit before they could see which way we went.  

"What the hell's going on," one of the girls asked.  

"Oh, I know those guys," said Cindy.  "They're real creeps.  You don't want to go messing around with them."  

By now we were flying down a four-lane highway, our eyes glued to the back windshield.  It was all just headlights.  You couldn't tell one car from another.  

I was already shaking and hoping I wouldn't shit my pants, but the girls were screaming with wild joy now.  They didn't care which way it went.  They were having a time.  I noticed the half moon that shone above us as I kept my nervous lookout.  

Donny cut off the highway and flew down a few streets littered with houses.  Nobody was following us, so Donny said, "Let's pull over into these woods and listen to some music.

After pouring drinks for everyone, Donny asked one of the girls to take a walk.  Tommy and the the girl he was with went out and sat on the trunk of the car.  And that is how I ended up with Cindy in the back seat of the Chevelle.  

I didn't know what I was doing, really.  Everything had happened in a flurry.  I had seen Cindy before, but she was like something from another planet, something in another league.  If I had been standing next to her, I'm sure she would never notice me, but now here I was, fully clothed, humping and grinding on her, driven by my reptile brain that spoke to instinct rather than thought.  She had her tongue in my ear and was going like a lawn mower when something started to happen.  I could feel myself losing control and tried to pull away, but she just kept after me harder and harder until I didn't know anything anymore and just quit trying.  It was warm, then cold, and it was over.  I was empty and humiliated.  

But Cindy didn't seem to mind.  When the others came back, she laughed and had another drink.  She kissed me and kissed me as I sat there in my sticky misery.  I felt soiled, fallen, dirty, and worse.  I felt silly.  

It would have been better to have fought with those fellows earlier in the night, I thought now.  Better than this and the waiting for Johnny's fury.  

Two Stories

Our football coach was a big guy who pretended to be nice but who got a kick out of picking on kids.  He was big, but he was soft, and I think he was just a bully.  One day, he decided to charge the football team with cleaning up some of the social deviance on campus.  He wanted them to put a stop to the smoking in the bathrooms.  

The bathrooms were shit holes.  It was bad enough to pee there.  The stalls had no doors and the toilets were filthy.  You would rather soil yourself than go in there.  But they were a place to smoke, and smoke we did.  The bathrooms stunk like old bars, layers of nicotine covering the walls.  Between classes, someone would post outside the bathroom to keep lookout.  If a teacher was seen coming that way, he would step in and let everybody know, and cigarettes would go into the toilets, a foot would kick the handle, and everyone would leave.  

Bob was the football team's star fullback.  Star may have been a misnomer since we didn't win a game for three years, but he started.  He was big and thick and pretty dumb, it seemed to me, but he was full of the piss and vinegar coach had poured into his ear.  One day, he came into the bathroom where everyone was smoking, and he walked up to a little guy I barely knew since he had gone to a different junior high than I and was one of those quiet, sullen boys that came from an even poorer part of town.  None of them pretended to have social skills.  They all seemed to me to be related somehow, all being thin and in some strange way old.  

When Bob told him to put out the cigarette, he just looked at Bob expressionless like an Eastern European who hadn't learned English but didn't want anyone to know.  Then he took a drag off his cigarette and slowly blew the smoke into Bob's nostrils.  Drawing himself up into a controlled rage, Bob took the cigarette from the boy's hand and threw it in the toilet.  And then the little fellow, without expression or effort, swung his bony fist and caught Bob right on the nose.  Bob didn't understand what had happened at first, his hand reaching up to staunch the flow of blood, his eyes circling around every which way.  Then, almost crying, he shouted, "You broke my nose," and reached for some non-existent toilet paper.  Finding neither that nor any sympathy or help, he quickly made for the door.  

And, as if nothing had happened, our boy lit up another cigarette.  It was nothing to him, you could tell.  Worse things than that probably happened to him every day.  

After that, the vigilante thing was over.  

The biology teacher was a little guy with a big dome of a head that was afflicted with male-patterned baldness.  He had bucked teeth which he tried to disguise by wearing a thick, oversized mustache.  The result was that he looked like a chipmunk.  

He had no luck with students who thought of him as a caricature more than person, so when he talked, nobody troubled themselves with listening.  His class was a lesson in futility.  When he tried to lecture, the room was noisy, everyone talking at once, occasionally someone putting up a hand to ask something ridiculous. "Mr. Bagger, do flowers have penises?"  And so he would quickly give up and assign some reading and a list of questions we were supposed to answer.  And  then, sitting above us at his teacher's station, he would bury his nose in a book and try to ignore the anarchy around him.  

One day, someone had constructed a paper airplane.  It was an awful airplane that would not fly at all.  If you threw it left, it went right.  If you threw it up, it went down.  Eventually, it landed on my desk.  Now it was my turn, and being a show off, I made a great act of straightening the nose and creasing the wings as if all of that would make it more aerodynamic.  And then I made a few practice feints in the direction of Old Bagger's bald dome.  And suddenly everyone was encouraging me.  "Do it, do it," they whispered with bright glee.  Knowing that the plane could never cover the distance between Bagger and me, I thought what the hell, and so drawing my hand back, I brought it forth with great vigor.  

The moment it left my hand, I knew I was in terrible trouble.  It felt as if it had jets attached to the wings.  I could hear it cutting the air as it picked up velocity.  Nothing in my experience had ever gone faster, truer, straighter.  From the moment it left my fingertips to the moment it smacked his head with an audible thud was no more than a microsecond.  It took even less time for the entire class to shout out in glee.  Everyone howled with the thrill of it, to see such a thing, but just as quickly, as Bagger looked up, his face a mask of confusion and rage, they went silent.  It was as if someone had pulled the plug on the laugh machine.  

Bagger stared out across the space that separated him from us now, authority growing on him as quickly as the lump that was swelling on the top of his head.  You couldn't believe the thing as it grew before your eyes, a swelling white mass with a bright red center on top.  It was like watching a cartoon.  

"Who threw that airplane?" he queried in a low, gravelly voice.  Nobody said anything.  But slowly, all eyes turned slowly to me.  No one was going to tell, but nobody was going to take the fall for this, either.  

"Did you throw this airplane?" he asked me.  

Scared, I couldn't speak.  I simply nodded my head.  And with that, he walked me to the principal's office.  

There is little point in telling the rest of it.  I got into trouble, but only a little.  I had to apologize to Bagger in front of the class, and that was that.  I know he was dissatisfied, but I had a feeling that the principal had no more use for him than the rest of us did.  

I've often wondered why these two stories are conjoined in my memory.  Why should I remember them together?  In truth, I don't know, but that is how they always come, one following the other.  Perhaps they are paired to draw some distinction between me and the other kids, all of them.  Or perhaps it is to remind myself that I was like them.  I have never figured it out.  

Nor can I today.  I have no profound conclusion.  It is just that.  

Escape Artist

Tommy and I had become escape artists of sorts.  It was, I think now, our major skill.  Whenever something bad happened, we were able to slip back into the shadows, to just disappear.  I was even learning how to talk out loud so that only the person to whom I was speaking could hear me.  That is what I thought.  We watched a lot of action shows.  People were always running away, escaping something.  It was a theme.  James Bond wasn't the toughest guy in the room.  He just knew how to get away.  My dreams then were full of that.  I was always being chased by something ominous, but night after night it never caught up with me.  

It happened in real life, too.  One night, we heard about a rumble that was going to happen at the high school.  We followed some friends in my car and pulled into the back parking lot.  By the time we arrived, there must have been thirty cars.  People were standing about everywhere.  Just then, the police showed up, three cars of county sheriffs.  When one of them approached us, I looked at him and asked, "Hey, what's going on?"  "What are you doing here?" he asked back.  "We just saw a bunch of cars pulling in and stopped by to see what was happening," I said, looking bewildered.  "You boys get out of here," he told us, and we agreed.  Our friends who weren't so lucky told us that they took everybody's names and hauled some of the fellows in.   

But we were free and happy, laughing our way through the night.  

We learned how to read situations and people, too.  There were some very dangerous characters who were beginning to hang around and they were like mad dogs.  Things would be going along fine and then some twisted gene would assert itself and there would be instant trouble. We watched the hierarchies form, one pandering to another.  "Hey, motherfucker, you want some shit," Judson said to Tommy one night as we leaned against the cars drinking beer.  Nobody was sure what had happened, and maybe it was something and maybe it wasn't.  But Tommy quick as lightening said, "No thanks, Judson, I just ate."  Judson liked that one.  

It was more difficult, though, to escape the things that had a hold on you, the things you were expected to want and did want but did not want, too.  A new girl moved into the trailer park.  Her name was Marie.  She lived with her mother in a rundown trailer by the park entrance, one they rented and did not own.  Marie was in the tenth grade and had a pretty face and all the guys in the trailer park were about her.  But she was not glamorous at all.  Her clothes were poor, her hair a little ratty.  But she was nice and I used to see her at school and we talked there a little from time to time.  

One Friday night we were all together drinking in the park as usual.  I sat talking to Maria and was beginning to feel warm when I noticed her looking at me with dreamy eyes.  She was sweet, I thought, and tender, too.  And in that moment, I liked her.  And so we walked away from the crowd and down to the lake, just walking and talking, and she surprised me when she took my hand.  And, as they say, there was nothing to do but to take her up in a kiss.  I could taste the Canadian Club and Coke on her tongue, sweet and bitter at once and she kissed me with an enthusiasm that was a promise.  We walked to a spot in the woods where no one could see us and lay down on a flat square of ground littered with leaves.  I did what teenage boys do, sticking a tongue in her ear and feeling a breast, and there was no resistance.  I knew what I was supposed to do next, but I hesitated.  If I did this, it would be my first time, and I was scared.  Dutifully, though, I moved my hand down her stomach and into her waistband, and suddenly she was quivering.  It wasn't just a little tremor, but her whole body seemed to convulse. She struggled to control it, but it was an involuntary reaction.  She was scared, I thought, trying to control my own shivers.  And then I sat up.  "You don't want to do this, do you?" I asked.  She said nothing, but looked at me with liquid eyes.  "We don't have to do this.  I don't want to do this here like this anyway."  And then we both stood up.  

Walking back to the group, she took my hand.  She was sweet, I thought, and I was a hero.  But that was the only one of the things I was thinking about.  There were others.  I knew I had been scared and I knew I had not wanted to do that.  And it ate at me.  What was wrong with me, I wondered?  Why was I scared?  What would I say if I were asked about it?  

When we got back to the group, it was clear that everyone assumed that we had consummated our affair.  And for the moment, I was OK with that.  

Later, I walked her back to her trailer.  I kissed her and said goodnight.  When the door closed, I was glad.  I was glad to be back in my car, glad to put on the samba music, glad to feel the cool night air flowing over my skin.  Glad to be away.  I was now as I was when the night started.  Unscathed.  I had escaped.  

The Stomping

More people began to show up at the trailer park, fellows I had heard of but had never been around before, mostly older than I.  Russell was the fellow who had saved me from a beating one night when he told my antagonist that my father was a karate instructor, and that I would show him his heart before he died.  He was stocky and had a contagious smile, and he started seeing Tommy's little sister.  Russell was more mischievous than evil, but he was still disturbed by the death of his older brother in Vietnam, and sometimes his brooding character made him dangerous.  But he liked Tommy's sister who was only fifteen, and so he was nice to Tommy and by extension, me.  

Donny had gotten wild after his sister got pregnant.  She had always protected him in a way.  Guys were nice to him because of Adair.  But with her gone, he was on his own.  

Donny began dealing drugs on a small scale to people who came to the park.  First it was pot and speed, but then it was acid.  I was convinced already that people as mean and ignorant as many of the people hanging about with him should not be given acid.  It was bound to get ugly.  But hits were cheap and Donny was a promoter, and things got progressively worse.  

There was a middle-aged couple who lived in the park that Tommy used to visit with because the man was a musician.  He gave clarinet lessons and played part time in a jazz band and had a wickedly subtle sense of humor.  One day, Tommy and I were talking to him in the small yard outside his trailer, and in the middle of a sentence he stopped and pointed to a pile of shit in the dirt and said, "Look!" and suddenly started to laugh.  We all laughed with vigor, though I couldn't understand why.  Obviously, the absurdity of it stayed with me.  

The couple had a son who came home from Vietnam and was staying with them for awhile while he got his feet under him.  He was a big guy, huge, really, tall and strong and handsome in a way that made you think of Elvis.  And he started hanging around.  All he talked about was Vietnam, about the prostitutes and about death, every story somehow grim no matter what mirth he tried to inject.  All the stories were bragging, but they were something else, too.  He had been subjected and we had not, and that was the unspoken point of it all.  He drank as he talked, and that, as for so many others who had been to war, was his therapy.  

It was Friday night and Donny had a bunch of acid and he had given some to Big Elvis.  There was a big group of us drinking with some girls up by the railroad tracks, some of them new to the scene.  Only Donny and Big Elvis were tripping, and everyone was keeping one wary eye on them all night.  

Then something happened.  I'm not sure what exactly, but Big Elvis had done something that made one of the girls cry.  And that is when Bear stepped in.  Bear was a big, good natured guy who liked fixing up cars.  He was bigger than the rest of us, but he looked about three quarters the size of Big Elvis.  Bear said something to him and suddenly they were standing eyeball to eyeball.  Bear looked nervous, but there was a big circle around them now.  There was only one direction this thing could head.  Then unexpectedly Bear said, "OK," and began taking off his pants.  He was stripping down to his boxers to fight.  I didn't know if he thought that is what they were named for or what, but in the tense horror of what was about to happen, even then, the craziness of it wouldn't leave me.  I looked at Tommy and we both began to laugh.  But Bear had already started bouncing up and down on his toes and stepped in to throw a jab.  He didn't connect with anything, but it was encouraging.  Huffing and puffing, he did it again and then again.  Nothing.  Then Big Elvis stepped in and caught him with a punch that made everybody wince, and with it, he had broken one of Bear's front teeth. "Shit," Bear cried out, and suddenly his friend came running in and tackled Big Elvis around the waist.  We all knew if he got up, there would be no stopping him, and suddenly, without a word, everyone was on top of him kicking and punching and yelling at him to stay down.  In truth, most of the blows were not landing in the cluster of punches, but then Bear rushed in and gave Elvis a might kick to the ribs in the manner of a football punt, and you could see his foot make the ribs go concave for a second like a comma.  Big Elvis, though, was not staying down, and when he got up, he just stood looking at the crowd.  He looked at everyone individually taking in each face.  "I know you," he said, pointing his finger at each and every person.  "I know who you are and I will get you, each of you.  You will pay for this. . . . "  Now Tommy and I had slithered into the background and were certain we out of the light, invisible, maybe.  What had happened here was hideous and we were certain there would be a reckoning we wanted no part of.  

And just then, as Big Elvis stood pointing at the gathered crowd, a police car pulled up.  "What's going on here," said the first of two policemen jumping from the squad car.  Nobody said anything.  And then the girl who had been crying stepped up and said, "He tried to molest me," gesturing to Big Elvis.  And that was it.  Before anything else could happen, they had handcuffed him and put him in the back of the car.  

As usual, Tommy and I took the opportunity to slither off into the darkness, passing between some trailers and around the park until we could stand at a distance on the opposite side looking like two fellows who had just stepped out to see what was going on.  We could see but could not hear which was fine with us.  When everything had ended, the squad car pulled past us with Big Elvis inside.  Wanting to be away from it all, we got into my car and slid off to the Big Boy. 

The next day, Donny came over and said we needed to go bail Big Elvis out of jail.  His father had given Donny the money and would come with us to sign.  And so we did.  Elvis looked rough and tired when he got into the car, and he was placid on the ride back to his parent's trailer.  

"You're good guys," he said.  "You're my friends.  Shit, I'm glad to be out of there."  

I tried to imagine what his night was like, locked up in a cell with other criminals, he tripping his brains out, visions of feet and elbows and fists filling his brain.  

He only stayed with his parents in the park a little longer, then he was gone.  I had avoided seeing him again which was easy for me since I didn't live there.  When he left, I was glad.  But we still had Donny who thought the whole affair something spectacular.  He told the story over and over again, but it was impossible to exaggerate what had happened.  A group stomping is just too horrible a thing, but he was set on making anyone who had not been there feel they had missed something special.  Donny was happy.  He had enjoyed it.  That is just how he was.  

Interview with an Artist

(photo by Shelby Lee Adams)

I stumbled across this a couple of days ago and got excited.  It will provide some reading in the mornings for a while.  I wrote to the blog's author, Timothy Morehead, and he gave me permission to post his site here.  

The photo is by Shelby Lee Adams.  His blog site is a miracle.  I am sick with envy over those photographs.  The photography, of course, is only part of it.  It is the ability to approach the people and to get them to participate in making the photographs that is the absolute talent.  As I wrote on Mr. Morehead's site in response to the article, " I look at the photographs and try to imagine Mr. Adams saying, 'Could we get the entire family around the gutted pig? Let’s put grandma up front if it’s OK. She looks so pretty in that dress.'”  

The photographs are of a part of America most of us do not encounter fully.  For some of us, it is a matter of proximity.  For others, it is a matter of selection.  And for that reason, the images are exotic, not in the sense that Paul Theroux writes about it in his introduction to the book Exotic Postcards, but rather as the exotic distanced by volition.  There is no romanticizing here.  

Mr. Adams has captured a part of the American heritage that is, for the most part, ignored.  Take a look.  I'd be interested in knowing what you think.  

After Adair got married, Donny seemed to get worse.  He was always a trouble maker, the fellow who would try to start a fight with strangers as long as he was in a group.  He was greasy in other ways, too.  

A Practical Life

When Johnny showed up, Adair went mad. The fellow from Alabama hadn't been around for awhile and then there was Johnny. He was just the sort you'd think. He had dark hair and olive skin and wore an old leather jacket like a movie star. All the girls liked him--at least the bad ones--and Adair was not immune to his particular qualities. Johnny had an entourage of guys who followed him around, guys who were willing to take a fall for him, and that's just what happened, though how bad it was, you will have to judge for yourself.

When Adair got pregnant, everyone knew it was Johnny's baby, but everyone also knew that he wanted nothing to do with it. And just like that, Johnny was gone. One of the boys who hung out with him, though, was smitten with Adair, and he began to court her. He was not the sort of guy she would normally have picked. He was tall and skinny in a southern way that looked malnourished, and when he spoke, which was rarely most of the time, the southern Mississippi dialect was so thick he was barely understandable. He was shy and unassuming until he drank, but then a switch went off in him and he became a different person, one, I thought, he preferred. After a beer or two, he would begin to get loud and aggressive. Everyone was an asshole then, and he was willing to fight any sonofabitch who didn't like it. On a normal day, you would think anyone could take him, but when he got drunk, you couldn't be so sure. Sometimes late at night when he could barely stand straight, he would begin to lunge at the crowd swinging wildly with his long arms twirling like Cesna propellers, and everyone would get out of his way.

But Adair was in trouble, and she knew it. It would be no good to live in a trailer with your parents raising a young baby. She was smart enough to know that. And soon she began to be seen with him, riding in his car on weekends, going to movies or to eat at some fast food restaurant. After that, it was said that she was pregnant and that it was by him. And maybe he began to believe it himself, for he was proud enough. Mostly, though, he was happy to have Adair, a girl who in normal circumstances would never have noticed him.

Before the baby was born, they got married. He had a job working at a construction supply house in the shipping department, and they bought their own trailer in another park across town. It was a nice trailer and Adair kept it clean. The trailer had a screened-in porch where they sat in the evenings after dinner, and when the baby came, they named her Shawnee after Adair's grandmother. Later, they got a small dog, a Chihuahua, that liked to bark, and Adair's husband quit drinking. They got to know the neighbors who thought they were nice.

And so they settled down to life, a married couple with a trailer, a child, and a dog. I guess some things just work out for the best.

Sympathetic Fallacy

The first day of Spring here was beautiful.  Heartbreaking.  It came while I was on vacation, and I was grateful.  

You no longer need to be envious.  I go back to work today, unready, unprepared.  I've rested, but resting has only just begun to make me restful.  I still have a long way to go.  Working in Vacationland is no different than merely working.  

The Sympathetic Fallacy tries to validate itself today.  I woke in the dark to the sound of rain.  It will rain for a few days.  Gray.  The sun is gone.  Life mimics art.  

It is this swinging of things--seasons, emotions--that colors a world.  Yours.  Mine.  I have enjoyed some beauty.  It could not last.  

Brute

Brutes. They had no consciences that I could tell. We shared no sensibility. Why was I there? I was, and I watched in rapt amazement. But many things happened when I wasn't there.

Judson was thick and mean. How he began to show up, I'm not sure. At sixteen, he got a job as a bouncer in a bowling alley bar in a rough part of town. He could walk into any liquor store and make a purchase without getting carded. He looked thirty-five and was addicted to violence.

It was spring break. I wasn't there, but Donny was and he reported the incident a hundred times without contradiction. Donny and Judson and some other fellows had gone over to see the college girls and had gone to The Texan, a hotel renowned for partying. It was the place where you could dive from a few of the rooms' balconies directly into the pool. If you were lucky. Donny had parked his car on the beach side of the hotel and they were all sitting on the trunk watching the cars drive by on the great white sandy beach that had once served as a stretch of track for a stock car race that later became the Daytona 500. According to Donny, Judson was in a good mood, drinking beer and chatting with everyone who came by in what passed, for him, as an amiable manner, and everyone was just beginning to relax thinking this might be a fun day. But then a carload of boys with New York tags drove by and Judson, meaning no harm, yelled out, "Hey New Yorkers." The driver hit the breaks and brought the car to a dead halt, then leaned out the window and spat, "What did you say monkey-face?" In truth, Judson did look like apish, and the near truth of the statement may have added the extra juice that set him off. Judson, Donny said, jumped off the trunk of the car, still smiling that big smile he had been wearing all day, and walked over to the driver's side.

"What did you say?"

"Fuck you, monkey boy," the driver said in his New York accent.

And with that Judson stepped away from the car as if to let the driver get out. And just as the fellow opened the door and swung his legs to the ground, Judson leaped putting his full weight and strength against the car door so that it closed sickeningly on the fellow's shins. The fellow from New York let out a terrible scream, Donny said, and Judson opened the door and did it again. Donny said you could hear the crunching of the bones. Then leaning against the door, Judson hit the boy in the face and broke his nose, then stepped back and looked at the other's in the car.

"Jesus, what happened to him,? he queried with an innocent look on his face. "You'd better get him to a hospital." The fellow lay unconscious on the seat. And according to Donny, the fellows just pulled him in and one of them got behind the wheel and drove away.

And that was Judson at spring break.

I was there on another night when things went haywire. Tommy had made friends with a young man who had a pretty wife and a baby. He had moved down from the north and was working at the Lays Potato Chip factory. He had only been in town a couple of months and was living in the smallest of trailers right next to the train tracks that ran next to the highway. He was older than us, though, so he liked to tell stories about his youth in the north, tell us of all the heroic things he had done, cool things that would impress us. The stories got tiresome, especially for his wife, and so he took to coming over to the trailer where we all drank on the weekends to hang out with us.

One night, Judson showed up. He hadn't met the man from the north yet, and as he told his great Northern tales, Judson just listened, watching the teller all the time.

Everyone had gotten drunk and things were getting rowdy, and Donny had done something that the man from the north felt best to chastise him for in a loud and superior way, an action, I think, that Judson had been waiting for. I watched Judson, for I knew something was coming, watched him as he began to sway from side to side, taking breathes in deep, audible draughts. The man from the north was sitting on the couch in the small living room of the trailer and Judson was standing by the door. It was crowded already, but when Judson crossed the three feet between them, everything seemed to shrink.

"You're a tough guy, aren't you?" Judson asked.

"No, no, I'm not tough," he said suddenly realizing the situation.

"Yes you are. All night long I've listened to you tell stories about how tough you are." Judson was in another place now, the swaying becoming more and more exaggerated. And then--Boom!--without warning, Judson crashed his big, meaty fist into the side of the fellow's nose. It was sickening. You could hear the bone snap and see the blood fly from the nostrils. Suddenly everyone was calling his name. "Judson, Judson, c'mon man, c'mon, let's go outside," but Judson just stood over the man on the couch who had drawn himself into a little, protective ball, quivering, waiting for the next blow. Judson said nothing, then turned and walked outside.

Tommy got a towel from the bathroom and handed it to the man with the broken nose who suddenly looked small, tiny almost, his eyes lost as if taking in an alien landscape for the first time. I looked at Tommy. We knew then that everything he had told us was a lie.

Suddenly the door flew open and Judson walked back in with the other guys gently whining his name. "Judson," they whispered, "hey, Judson." But Judson walked back to where he stood when he delivered the mighty blow. The man from the north, the impostor, covered his head, quivering, sobbing.

"What happened to you, man?" Judson whispered in an almost loving voice. "Hey, what happened to you? Who hit you?"

I thought that Judson would hit him again and steeled myself against seeing it, but he merely turned to the kitchen and poured another drink, then went back outside with the others.

I never saw the fellow from the north after that. Tommy said he moved the next week. He was going home.

Automotive

We fool ourselves. Sometimes we just open the door and its all gone. No matter how much attention we try to pay and what we try to know, we allow ourselves to think the good times are going to last.

Everybody's youth is a dream, a form of chemical madness.
(F. Scott Fitzgerald)

Eleventh grade began much like the tenth, only with much less trepidation. We were juniors and the gap began to grow between those who were headed somewhere and those who were not. I noticed that the prom queens and junior achievers were all in the same classes. I had fallen into another category. And it stung. I was smart, smarter than most of the kids in the "finer" classes now, athletes and cheerleaders and student government officers. But I was not socializing well, I guessed. It was a lesson in such things. The coursework became emptier, class time filled with laughter and outrageous behavior. There really was no reason to go to school, I thought. No reason at all.

Tommy had gotten a job in a gas station. He was one of two employees who worked for an old cracker named Les, a tall, stooped, thin man with a low, gravelly voice. But he didn't say much. He moved slowly, not because he was old but by nature and habit. His hands were knobby and cracked from working on cars, his ears too large for his head. But he was nice to Tommy to whom he gave much responsibility. Tommy was learning to be a minor mechanic and was able to do most of the rudimentary things. I'd pull in and he'd have a car up on the lift changing the oil and lubing the joints. He'd run out to put gas in my car and talk for a few minutes, then he'd be back at it.

Before long, Les had Tommy working the night shift, so after dinner, he had the place to himself. There wasn't much business then, so I'd come in and sit with him in the office and shoot the breeze until he closed up at nine. Sometimes I'd go over to Arthur Treacher's Fish and Chips or to the Arby's and get dinner for the two of us. It felt good to sit there in the office watching the sparse traffic drive down the highway surrounded by tires and cans of forty weight and wiper blades and road maps as the sun went down. I wanted to grow up, I thought, to be on my own and live in moments like these just feeling the life around you, to make money and decide how to spend it and to be left alone.

On weekends, the trailer park became a hang out. Some older fellows had rented a trailer in the park and so we all went there to drink. And things would get out of hand. One night when everyone was drunk, we drove back into the park from somewhere, and Eddie was riding on the hood of Frankie's car. We were driving out into the woods that bordered the park and ran down to the lake. Eddie thought it would be funny to drive to the edge of the water and hit the brakes and throw Eddie in, but it didn't work out quite right for just there the lake had no discernible edge but only became a lake after forming as a slough, so before Frankie knew it, he had hit the water at about thirty miles an hour, water flying up in big wings all about the car. He was in about halfway up the doors before the car finally stopped, Eddie indeed thrown from the hood into the dark waters. I was driving behind him with a car load of guys when it happened, and we all hooted at once to see it, great flumes of water shooting up into the night. It was a wonderful privilege, I thought. Who had ever seen such a thing before?

When they had all gotten out and made their way to shore, I was amazed at how calm Frankie seemed. Perhaps it was shock, I don't know, but he simply wanted a ride to the phone booth to call a tow truck. A tow truck, I thought!? How in the hell was a tow truck going to pull his car out? But later that night, after wading out and attaching a big grappling hook on a cable to the car's chassis, with everybody in the water trying to push, they were able to pull the car back to shore. Jesus, I thought, anything is possible.

Somehow, Tommy and I seemed to escape everything. We saw it all every time without getting scathed. It was wondrous, all of it, and it formed the fodder of our conversations as we sat in the fading light eating our fish and chips, safely ensconced among the office paraphernalia, happy and fulfilled, the full sensation of life about us.

Away from Home

Sophomore year was over.  I hadn't even bothered to order a yearbook.  I did not participate in the annual love fest.  Two more years.  That is what I was thinking.  Two more years.  

Tommy and I had begun playing acoustic guitars together.  It was an outgrowth of playing with his father's country music band, maybe, and a practical matter as well.  We were practicing harmonies and learning to play all over fret board.  We were Simon and Garfunkle, we thought.  We would be famous.

But as soon as school was over, I had to go away.  For part of the summer, I was going to the coast to stay with my aunt and uncle.  I would help my uncle in the afternoons with the odd jobs he had, mowing lawns and painting houses.  The big thing was that I got to take my car.  My parents drove over in their car with me to make certain I got there alright, but when the weekend was over, they were gone.  And suddenly, I thought, I was an adult.  I would not be reliant on my relatives.  I would have a car.   

I was not very good at the work thing.  I hated it.  I would go with my uncle to big estates with acres and acres of lawn and walk the mower around for what seemed eternity while my uncle edged and weeded and did the other odd things.  One day, he told me that one of his clients, an old woman who lived on the water, had said something about my hair.  He wanted me to cut it.  I had no stomach for that, but he called my parents and they told me I would have to.  I would have to cut my hair for what?  To walk behind a mower in the heat of the afternoon, to do something I didn't care to do at all?  

The good thing was that I could escape after working.  Each afternoon, I would get into my car and drive to a rocky point surrounded by white, sandy beaches and blue-green water for as far as you could see.  I would sit there and dream uninterrupted about the life going on about me, about the yachts and mansions and beautiful, sophisticated women.  

I knew no one but my relatives, so at night I sat with my aunt and played cards or board games which she loved, and we would drink ice cream floats made with some strawberry flavored pop you could only get in Ohio.  She kept it stashed under her bed and made a big deal out of getting it on those special nights.  

My aunt was pregnant and expecting while I was there.  This was her third child, unplanned and unexpected coming late in her reproductive life, and it all seemed odd to me, for I had known her my whole life as the mother of two children slightly younger than I.  Weird things could happen in the world, I thought, things unexpected.  

My uncle had contracted with a neighbor to paint his house.  The man suffered from polio, and his legs were withered, but he swam every day and looked as though he worked out with weights, and he was gruff and didn't take to me at all.  When he talked to me, everything he said sounded like a dog growling or worse.  

The house was old and wooden and the paint had cracked and peeled, so we would have to scrape it.  My uncle gave me a sander and showed me how to take the paint down to the wood faring the sides so that it was smooth.  He wanted me to start the next day while he was at work.  

And so the next day, miserable as I could be, I took the sander and began to work.  I had never done anything like this before.  I had two jobs in my life, one selling magazine subscriptions and the other working in a record store.  I mowed the yard at my house, sometimes, and whined enough when my father wanted me to help him work on the car or around the house that he had taken to not asking me at all.  But here I was standing in the sun, my shoulders aching, listening to the sander as it buzzed and whirred its awful song.  

When my uncle came after work, he went nuts.  My sanding skills were not very good, I guess, and I had put little pits in the wood all over one side of the house, sanded concavities that looked like bomb craters on a World War II battlefield.  

My uncle finished the job alone.  

Which was fine with me.  Now I had more time to go to the beach and sit alone on the rocks and dream.  

When my aunt had her baby, my parents came over to see.  My summer "vacation" had come to an end, and when they left, I went with them.  

But I had figured out a new skill while I was away.  I had discovered how to pick a guitar with my fingers rather than merely strumming it with a pick.  And I couldn't wait to show Tommy.  

A few days after coming home, Apollo 11 was scheduled to land upon the moon's surface, and I, like everyone else, was fascinated.  It was like all those science fiction movies come true, I thought, like The Incredible Journey and Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea and 2001: A Space Odyssey combined.  There was hope!  One could leave his life and find adventure, I thought.  One didn't have to remain in the same place forever.  That night, I stayed up with my father's 8mm film camera watching TV, and I filmed everything.  I would, I thought, capture the moment forever.  

A month later, something else happened that would change the world as much or more.  We were all talking about it.  I had a car, I thought.  Maybe I should go.  

Sophomore Philosophy

Gray morning. It rained in the night. I woke before dawn midway through my spring vacation. What haunts us, I wonder, as I look out across the neighborhood and see house lights casting their yellow glow. Work, time, money? It is that, of course, but it is something else, too. Surely men and women who live outside the reaches of technology, without bosses or jobs (are there such places any more?) wake in the night unable to sleep. The Rat, I think. It is always gnawing at us. We try to feed The Rat.

OK.  The Story Continued.

My most productive time that year was in the movie theater.  Most of that time was spent alone.  Movies seemed to pour like rain from the sky and everything was changing.  There were still the traditional war and cowboy movies and plenty of thrillers.  John Wayne won the Academy Award that year for his performance in True Grit, beating out both Dustin Hoffman and John Voigt, but it was Midnight Cowboy that won the Best Picture Award, the only X-rated film ever to receive that honor.  The juxtaposition of the two things defined the year.  Sean Connery was replaced by George Lazenby as James Bond in On Her Majesty's Secret Service.  Cowboy movies looked more like Butch Cassady and the Sundance Kid and Paint Your Wagon than The Guns of the Magnificent Seven.  And the explicit violence of The Wild Bunch was shocking.  

But it wasn't about cowboys and violence that I was really concerned.  It was the other thing, the thing that played itself out in a new way in movies now, in films like Age of Consent, and Goodbye, Columbus, Last Summer and Women in Love, and John and Mary and Bob, Carol, Ted and Alice.  And of course Fellini's Satyricon.  After the riots in Chicago in 1968 where parents saw policemen brutally beating young protesters at the Democratic National 

Convention, America's social fabric had finally come apart.  Sure, Vietnam had polarized the nation, but Chicago seemed to be the straw.  To my horror, my mother had taken to wearing mini-skirts in crazed paisley patterns.  The revolution wasn't all good.  

But I tried not to think about that as I sat in dark theaters watching revolution unfold on the screen.  Even Don Knotts and Tony Randall were trying to be cool in movies like The Love God and Hello Down There.  And Omar Sharif and Jack Palance made a movie about the revolutionary Che in a film by that title.  Hip new writers were coming to the movies, too, in films like Goodbye, Columbus and The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.  There were racial films like Medium Cool and Putney Swope, radical films like If and Z.  

And it was good to be young as youth gained permission to enter the adult world of sex.  I watched Cher play an underaged runaway who gets into sexual trouble in Chastity.  Charles Bronson starred in Lola whose tagline read "a middle aged writer of pornographic novels meets and falls in love with a sixteen year old school girl. This alone is cause for concern but when the couple get married and move to America, the trouble (and fun) really begins."  Even James Mason invested his own money to make Age of Consent in which he plays a painter who falls in love with his underaged model on an island down under.  

And then there was Easy Rider.  Somehow in one movie, Fonda combined everything-sex, drugs, revolution, adventure, and the longing to run away.  It was all there in one fucked up movie.  

That is what I did in my sophomore year.  I watched.  It wasn't all that, of course.  I still secretly got a kick out of Captain Nemo and the Underwater City, much more than I did Hello Dolly which I couldn't watch, or The Sterile Cuckoo.  And I saw The Italian Job and Downhill Racer, but it was the weirdness of movies like They Shoot Horses, Don't They that really set me off.  

The world was strange.  I already knew that, but daily my notions were being reified as I sat in the dark watching the big silver screen.

Jacqueline Bisset in The First Time 1969

Postcards from Nowhere

You can be envious for a minute.  I live in a vacationland and am on vacation.  I was going to go away, but I haven't and have decided I won't.  I'm staying home.  I will make day trips and catch up on things.  It is a relief.  I have been exhausted.  Now, each day I do things left undone.  I read and eat and exercise and fall asleep.  I have been to the studio and made some pictures.  There is an art festival this weekend.  

It is a relief having decided to stay home.  I had made no plans and going anywhere was going to be very expensive.  I've spent a life staying in run-down but aristocratic old hotels that emit a sort of shabby elegance.  In my tropical paradise, they are now all gone, torn down to make way for the new architecture.  The old romance is just that now.  

And so I loaf and feel richer.  I am going to buy myself something.  

When summer comes, you can put an end to your envy.  I will want to be where you are.  

The image above is from a shameful series toward which I am slouching.  

"Postcards from Nowhere: Desire and the Exotic Other"  

Or something like that.  Everyone has images of Paradise.  People lost their lives and fortunes seeking El Dorado.  Mythical places.  They never existed.  I can make myth, too.  I'm ready to fuel the Furnace of Desire.  I'll have to make something to replace all the things that are gone.  

Maybe they never existed.  Memory is a hell of a thing.   

Prom Night

When prom came around, I didn't even think about going.  I was too shy to ask anyone out, and I was afraid that if I did ask, the girl--whomever she was--would say 'no.'  The only girl I liked in school was Debbie from my English class, but she would have a thousand chances to pick and choose.  All around school there was much talk and preparation.  There would be a band.  The girls would buy dresses and go to beauty salons.  It would all be wonderful.  

I fell back deeper into the shadows.  

On prom night, I was in the trailer park with Tommy.  His mother and step-father were drinking with Donny and Adair's parents.  They all decided to go out to the restaurant at the fish camp on the river to drink for the night and wouldn't be back until late.  We wondered what to do.  

Donny wanted to score some pot and said he knew a black guy downtown who could get it for us.  How he knew him was a mystery to me, but none of these kids went to school, so while I sat in my desk seats from first to sixth periods, they were--well, I didn't know.  

We met the guy in a parking lot.  He was waiting for us and when Donny called him over, he jumped into the back seat of my car.  

"Hey James!"

"Hey, man, we gotta go over to this cat's place to get the shit," he said.  

"Fuck," said Donny, "I thought you'd have it on you."  

"Take it easy, man, we'll get it.  I just don't like walking around white town with that shit on me.  He said he'd meet us there at eight, so let's drive around a little and kill some time and then we'll roll on up there."  

It was the first time I'd ever driven around with a black guy before.  I didn't know any except the fellow in my math class with the red hair and the brown and the blue eyes.  Donny did most of the talking with him as he directed us up and down some border streets on the roads between the black and the white sections of town.  There was a real difference that you could see and hear and smell.  People were hanging out in groups in front of rundown buildings, large groups of men coming to life in explosions of animated excitement.  They were not at all like the laconic men I grew up around who rarely spoke and then only in quiet tones.  Everything here seemed acted out, theatrical.  Only it wasn't.  I was there.  It was real.  

After we had cruised the streets for half an hour, James said it was time, and he directed us to a building that had once been a hotel but which had been compromised by the construction of the interstate.  Now it was converted into apartments that stood seeming feet from the highway, a dirty, green four story structure.  We parked the car and entered the front door, walking past the bent and broken metal chairs that stood like exoskeletons around a littered courtyard.  We walked into the dusky, yellow light of the building's interior and immediately went up a flight of stairs.  There on the second floor was an old reception desk where an older man sat in a cloth covered chair listening to a radio.  James spoke to him and he nodded back.

"Hey pops, I'm supposed to meet Samuel here.  Is he in?"  

The man in the chair just shook his head no.  We would wait.  It was warm in the hallway and close, and somehow this gave me a drowsy sort of comfort that was a relief to the nervousness I'd carried around all night.  I stood leaning my back against a doorjamb which led into a small sitting room with a couple of chairs and a floor lamp.  From where I stood, I could peer down a long hallway with its threadbare carpet and its series of numbered doors.  One of them opened a little and a face peered out.  And then it was gone.  A minute later, a young woman stepped halfway into the hallway, keeping her other half behind the door.  She was wearing little and looked directly at me, and I felt the blood begin to rise in my neck and face.  I couldn't quit looking as she playfully moved the door back and forth, half in, half out.  She stared at me for a little bit and then positioned her leg so that I got a good look at the beauty of her inner thigh.  My head was spinning.  I seemed to be floating there in that hallway with the strange music and yellow light and the close, southern heat when she motioned me to her with a finger and stepped back inside.  I didn't even know I was walking when James grabbed me by the arm.

"What you think you're doing," he asked me? 

I just looked at him.  

"Man, you're just stupid.  She's got a guy waiting inside just for you," he said.  I just kept looking at him.  I could barely understand him.  Everything--the light, the music, the heat,his voice--had melted into one, incomprehensible sensation of life for me.  I couldn't extricate one from the other.  James laughed and said, "Man, you just wait there.  You're gonna get killed."  

Finally Samuel showed up and there was a flurry of conversation and quiet laughter and the secret exchange of money from palm to palm.  And we were done.  It was time to go.  

Everyone was heading down the stairs when I looked back at the door, back to my Sodom and Gomorra, and just before I took the first descending step, the minute I was ready to go, I saw a man maneuver into the hallway.  He was big and muscular and sweaty, and when he looked at me I felt the apocryphal cold chill wash through my veins like a dozen arctic rivers.  James had been right.  

We took James back to where we had met him and dropped him off with a lot of laughing and hand shaking, and then he was gone.  And so were we.  

Donny immediately began to roll a joint, Tommy laughing about the things we had seen, highlighting every detail with shouts of mirth.  

As we drove down the highway through the darkness and the light, I remembered it was prom night.  I thought of the kids in their rented tuxes and frilly gowns, the girls wearing their hair in prom-dos, unnaturally teased and twisted and sprayed until it made a bird's nest on top of their heads, the larval whiteness of their necks brightly shining, corsages pinned awkwardly to dress fronts, everyone dancing and sweating until the Clearasil melted and stained white collars, the smell mixing with Brut and English Leather and Hai Karate, clip-on bowties undone at the end of the evening, everyone knowing that this would remain one of the most important nights of their lives.  

Guy

Steve had been spending most of his time with his new girl, so we had not been hanging out much, but one Friday night, I went by his house. Things had changed a bit as his mother had a new boyfriend who was living there. His name was Guy. He was what you would call "slick," a salesman-type who shaved close and carefully combed back his graying hair, used lots of mouthwash and wore too much cologne. When you saw him in the daytime, he always had a big, bright-white, toothy perma-grin splattered across his face, but there was a danger in it, I thought. At night, he got drunk. Both of them did. But this fellow really couldn't hold his liquor very well and he would do awful things like pass out on the couch and then suddenly jump up to piss in the closet. One night after being out, Steve and I walked into the house to be greeted by a greasy, awful smell. Guy lay passed out on the couch in the living room, and he had shit himself badly. I'd been around drunks before, but I'd never seen anyone like this. He stayed on the couch in those shitty pants all night. In the morning, though, he showered and shaved and perfumed himself with great attention and when he emerged from the bathroom, he was just as he had been the day before. You could almost hear the sparkle in his teeth.

One day Guy went to jail. Steve never said why, but he was being held in what we all called the County Farm, and Steve's mother wanted us to go up and take him some things during visiting hours. I'd never been to a jail before, and I was scared. Driving up, we passed through a chain linked fence and big rolls of barbed wire. The prison itself was a low, green, cement structure in the middle of a big pasture. Many of the prisoners worked on road gangs to reduce the days they served. You would see them in their baggy tone on tone gray striped pants and shirts with big numbers stenciled across the back.  Sometimes they were joined together by ankle chains, sometimes not. They'd be in ditches along the roadside swinging scythes as they walked in unison, their eyes cast downward. We had always taken great delight in rolling down the car windows when I was a kid and singing "I've Been Working on the Chain Gang," whenever we drove by a group of them. Even now, I sometimes just laid on the horn. It looked just like a scene out of Cool Hand Luke.

We had to stand in line behind a group of other visitors as we slowly made our way to a table where a deputy was checking everybody in. When it was our turn, he asked us who we were there to see and what our relationship was to him. I was hoping he would tell me I couldn't come in, but I didn't have any luck there.  After he went through the bag of things that Steve had brought, he passed us through into a big cafeteria with long lines of tables, and we were told to sit on one side of the room against a wall. Then, after what seemed an eternity, a staunch, authoritative man in a uniform began calling names and one at a time, prisoners were led out.  After a few of them had been seated,  the names of visitors were called and  people were allowed to go over and join them.  It was all joyless.   I was sixteen and didn't belong here, I thought. My parents would have a fit if they knew I had come or even if they knew Steve's mother's boyfriend was in jail. All I wanted to do was get away, but there was no escape. Finally, Guy was finally led out and we were sent over to sit across from him at a a wooden table. He didn't look so bright. His hair was slicked back, but with water instead of grease, and he looked tired and worn in his county grays. He smiled at Steve and made some small talk in a low voice and Steve said a few things that meant nothing, and then we all shook hands and parted. I was awfully glad to be out.

After Guy got out of county, he came back to stay with Steve's mom, and a little while later, she was pregnant. It was incomprehensible to me. She had a daughter who was in her twenties and Steve was seventeen. His mother was big, bloated by bad food and liquor, and had frumpy bleached hair that most often looked like Phyllis Diller's.  And she just looked old. After Steve had gotten out of juvie, he had gone to live with her sister and her sister's husband for awhile, and you could see the difference. Steve's mother was a mess, but now at what looked like seventy years old she was pregnant. And Guy was happy.

After she had the baby, I went over to see them. Everyone was sitting around the dining room table when mom brought the baby  out swaddled in a pale blue blanket. There was much oooing and ahhhing and empty chatter, and feeling I, too, needed to proffer something, I said, "Let me see it." And like lightening, Guy's mood went black.

"Don't you say that," he spat as he quickly rose from his chair. I just looked at him. I didn't know what was wrong. Steve's sister said, "Oh, sit down, Guy, he didn't mean anything." But Guy was undeterred. "No," he said coming toward me, "No, Goddamnit, he can't say that about my baby." I had fallen down the rabbit hole, was still falling and hadn't reached the bottom, for everything was flimsy and spinning. I couldn't feel my legs.

"What did I say," I asked, looking around the room from face to face searching for a clue. Steve's mother stood there holding the baby in her fat arms saying nothing while Guy worked himself up good.  By now, the veins were beginning to stand out in his neck, his face contorted in an ugly mask of indignation and rage, white flecks of spit collecting at the corners of his mouth.

"Don't you call my baby 'it'!" he screamed, the sound emanating from some mysterious place deep in his chest. I simply stood looking at him. What was there to say? Stung with hideous embarrassment, humiliated, I couldn't find a way out. Then suddenly, he came at me like a man deranged, spilling chairs and table paraphernalia as he did. I jumped to the other side of the table unsure what to do. Jesus Christ, a grown man was trying to fight me! This was so far outside the realm of my experience that I could only think to run. I felt like a fool, but quickly I made the front door yanking it open in what seemed to me slow motion as I waited for some fatal blow to descend upon my head or neck. But then I was outside heading for my car where it was parked in the dark street already fumbling for the keys in my right pants pocket. As I fired the ignition, I looked toward the house, but there was no one in the doorway. Nobody had followed me out.

Fuck, fuck, fuck, I thought as my heart pounded in my chest like a hammer or a fist, what the hell was wrong with that guy.

I didn't know where to go. I just drove around for awhile, thinking. The world was fucked up, I thought. But then I thought again. No, the world was not fucked up, mine was. There was another world out there, I knew. They hadn't just made it up for magazines and movies and T.V. shows. All that had to come from something. I would find it, I thought. I could not live my life like this. I would have to ready myself. I would have to keep looking.

The Pain

I would clean up, I thought, and I would try out for the baseball team. I would have to cut my hair and go through that rigamarole again, but I would surely make the team. I'd been on the County Championship team just the year before.

We were in gym class playing basketball in that horrible free-for-all way that is played when one coach has sixty students. I was going after a loose ball and as I reached, another fellow, an older kid in a higher grade, got there, too, and with all his might he threw the ball in the opposite direction. My hand was still attached. The pain was searing. I couldn't move my arm. It was stuck, somehow, paralyzed. I began walking around with terrified eyes trying to figure out what had happened. The fellow who had thrown the ball just looked at me, staring into my eyes with some sort of evil satisfaction. My shoulder was dislocated. Coach called an ambulance.

At the hospital, I was put on a gurney and left in a room. I would have to wait until my mother got there, they said. She would have to sign some papers. Pain. There was nothing but pain and cold. I could feel myself on the verge of consciousness.

By the time my mother got there and the doctors showed up, the muscled in my arm had become solid. I was wheeled into a room for X-Rays where the aggrieved limb was twisted into any number of hideously rotated positions by an unemotional sadist in a white jacket after which, once again, there was the waiting.

Finally, I was given a shot. It would help the pain, the nurse told me. I waited. But relief was not quick in coming. Rather, the shot made my nose itch. Terribly. I asked my mother to scratch it, and she did, but it was no good. She said it had turned bright red. I could feel it. What the hell were they doing to me, I wondered? But things were going to get worse.

When the doctor came back, he said that my shoulder was dislocated and he would have to pull my arm and try to get the joint properly positioned in it's socket. And he did. Pull, that is. But nothing was giving. And, of course, he pulled harder until I cried out in pain. It was no use, he said without inflection. They would have to take me into surgery.

I was miserable. I had had an allergic reaction to the medicine, I was fiercely cold, and the pain in my shoulder had not receded, and I was still on a gurney.

I was prepped to be sedated. It took forever, my nose still on fire. I was in another room now, my mother somewhere else. I asked a nurse to scratch my nose for me, and she did. She was pretty, I thought, and kind, and I knew I had fallen in love.

"Just count backwards from one hundred. . . " the man who had taped the needle in my arm told me.

I began to come to in the middle of things. It was like waking yourself up in a bad dream where you hear yourself yelling. Vaguely, I was aware of a foot in my armpit, my wrist in the grasp of two urgently pulling hands. And then I went back under.

It was almost dark when we left, my arm bound up in a hospital green sling, my shoulder aching like a sonofabitch. It was my right arm. I was helpless. I couldn't drive my car, for it was a stick shift. I couldn't write. And I certainly wasn't going to be playing baseball.

When I went back to school, I had to sit out of gym, just watching the fellows from the bleachers. The boy who had dislocated my arm had been bragging. I had never really seen him before that day. He was tall and rangy and had a demented look about him. He he had no real friends, but he seemed defiant about it. I didn't know what to do. I knew I would not be getting even.

One day, one of the guys asked me if I knew who his sister was. No, I didn't even know who he was, I said. His sister, it turned out, was the one who used to walk around alone all the time, the simple one that the boys had taken behind the pool hall that evening for an outing. I had been there, and though I had not participated fully, I had seen it. I was scared. This is how things work, I thought. These are the wages of sin. There are paybacks in the universe and you must keep clean. "But I am clean," I protested. To whom, I wasn't certain. I was talking to that inner voice that would come to haunt me, the one that was me but not me, the larger me, perhaps. . . I wasn't certain. Whatever it was, though, I didn't like it. Tenth grade seemed like a loss. I was waiting to heal.