The Beginning by the River

My dad had a respectable leather-brown neck from a lifetime of outdoor work. He had creases around his eyes that could hold water in the rain, and he had a permanent crimp in his hair from his hat.

During the summer I turned eighteen, my older brother started getting the same tan and the same crimp because he went to work for the same construction company as Dad.

I didn't want to be like them.

I spent the summer playing baseball with my friends and sneaking into the movie theatre on days when it was too hot outside. We got cheap beer from the gas station on the highway because the Pakistani guy who owned it never carded, and we drove down to the river to drink and look at stars and come up with plans for a better life.

And on the first day of school I met Helena.

My senior year, I was on the varsity team, and I made the jokes in the classroom that even the teachers smiled at. I was tall enough to look down the girls' tops, and Helena wore this thin teeshirt under her sweater instead of a bra, and I wished I'd had a summer job just so I'd have a car just so I could take her out and feel her up.

But I made the best of the situation and smiled at her, and she smiled at me. From then on she sat with me and my friends at lunch and under the tree after school while we waited for our rides home. 

She listened to our plans for a better life, our dreams for futures that held skylines full of skyscrapers instead of endless trees. 

It turned out her dad had lived in Gilmer his whole life as well, but her mom had taken off with her when she was just a toddler. Now her mother was remarried, and Helena was back with her dad. Lucky me.

Unlucky me: when I asked her out one afternoon while we huddled with the crowd on the covered walkway after school, she turned me down because her father didn’t allow her to date anyone more than a year older.

She was a junior, and I was a senior, and the fourteen months that separated our ages was utterly inconsequential, as far as I was concerned. She fidgeted with her fingertips and looked down at our shoes. “I’ll be seventeen in a few days, and then I can say yes,” she informed me in her small voice. 

On that first Friday in September I leaned down and kissed her in the middle of the crowd. I kissed her soft top lip and then I straightened up and watched her brown eyes flutter open.

“Let me take you out on your birthday then,” I said.

Her eyes shifted left and right and she bit her lip in thought. “Okay, but only if you promise to act like it isn’t my birthday at all. Don’t tell anybody it’s my birthday. I hate that.”

I laughed at her, and she watched my face, clearly waiting for me to agree, but she laughed too. I tried to kiss her again, but she shoved a hand in front of her mouth to block me. “Okay, Helena,” I agreed. “No birthday. Just a date. When is it?”

“Next Friday.” She let me kiss her again, and neither of us had noticed that the crowd had dispersed and the momentary downpour had eased up to a standard drizzle.

***

"Jay, I need to borrow your car."

"No." My brother always answered unequivocably, so I was not surpirsed. His mouth was full of pastrami on rye, so his sunburnt cheeks looked like two tomatoes.

"Come on. I got a date."

"Why don't you take her out on your bicycle?"

"I'll wash it and wax it and fill the tank."

He paused mid chew.

"Is she a cheerleader or something?"

"Better."

I got the keys from him and borrowed twenty bucks from Dad. His eyes crinkled up when I told him I had a date. Mom pretended not to notice that I left the house at seven in my best jeans, but I saw her smile.

It's not that I hadn't dated before -- it's just that I'd never done it right before. Usually I walked a girl home after school and made out with her in her back yard until her folks came home. Or all summer long, there was a fair bit of fooling around down by the river with whoever would show up. Or after a game the gang would all go to the Denny's in Cedarville and then split off into pairs. 

I’d made it to third base with Jessica that way and then rounded home with Lauren, but she wanted to wear my class ring. Needless to say I stopped sitting beside her at Denny’s and then she came up to me outside of Mr. Lanner’s room on the following Tuesday and asked if we were breaking up. Her nose was all red and her eyes were all watery, and I said “We were never going out.” She punched me in the chest and then for weeks she shot me dirty looks.

Helena's house was at the end of Hill Street, a full two blocks past where the sidewalks stopped. The street kept going over the hill, but I, personally, had never been that far. I always took Elm to get over the hill.

I pulled up out front and the crabgrass caught my sneaker on my way to the door. She opened it before I could even ring the bell.

Her lips, which I had kissed two and a quarter hours earlier were covered in some sparkly gloss and her hair looked smooth and I could still see down her top.

She wore a pale bra that made her tits very round, and I could see that the clasp was right there in her cleavage.

"Hi."

"Hi."

We didn't kiss or touch. She didn't invite me in. She just smiled and then stepped past me and walked to Jay's careworn blue Saab without tripping over the crabgrass.

I opened the door for her, and then somehow I was in the car and it was running and we were rolling over the hill, and I had no idea what to do next.

"Would you like to eat?"

"Sure."

"Any preferences?"

Helena picked at the blue nail polish on her thumb and scrunched her nose in thought. "There aren't many choices. D'you think the diner will be crazy tonight?"

"On a Friday? Sure."

I turned right on Seventh Street and then another right to get back to the middle of town. We passed a place called Antonio's with colored lights on the patio, but I'd never been there, and Jay told me it made him sick, so I didn't even slow down as we drove by.

Sure enough, the gravel lot surrounding the diner was full. Half our classmates were inside. This was the place for couples to be seen, and I wasn't sure how comfortable Helena looked with that.

"We could order sandwiches to go, or something. If you like," I offered.

"It's just," she turned fully in her seat to look at me. "I've never been on a real date, and it's so loud in there we won't even be able to talk, and chances are ten people would join our table, and then it wouldn't really be a date at all."

She made a very good point.

The faded red banner hanging on the side rail of the wheelchair ramp advertised "GR8 FOOD 2GO" so I dialed that number and we watched through the plate glass as Milton in the white paper hat from 1950 answered the phone and yelled at me.

"I want to make an order to pick up." I stared at Helena as I spoke. "Uhhh, a club sandwich and," I raised my brows at her, and she vigorously nodded. "Two club sandwiches and potato chips and two lemonades?" Helena smiled. "And a slice of pie. The pie of the day."

Milton repeated it back to me in his gruff voice and told me it would be ten minutes and thirteen eighty-seven.

And then it was just me and Helena in the Saab and the semi-quiet.

"If you were a breakfast cereal, which one would you be?" she asked.

I laughed because that was just so unexpected and odd. "What?

"Cereal."

"Where'd you come up with a question like that?"

I pulled one of her hands into mine because she had a little pile of blue flakes in her lap from the nail polish she'd peeled off, and I wanted her to be calm and comfortable with me.

"Well," she said. "There was this show on TV that suggested this question and answer thing for a first date. You know, to get rid of the awkward."

I squeezed her hand a little. Her fingertips were cool and slightly moist. "What's awkward about this? You've already seen me eat at lunch for the past few weeks, and you've already heard Tyson's story about when I broke my nose playing roller hockey, and I've already told you that I'm gonna shake the dust of this little town and be somebody someplace else.  There's no awkward."

She nodded at me, sort of timidly, and with her free hand she was still using her index finger to scrape at her thumb.

"Honeycomb."

Her eyes shot up to mine.

"What?"

"I'd be Honeycomb because it's big and tough and crunchy,” I declared with a straight face.

“But if you let it sit in the milk too long, it goes mushy,” she teased.

“No! It stays sharp on the outside. But in a way that makes you want more." With my hand over my heart, 

I made my voice as deeply sincere as possible until we were both cracking up.

“And it’s sweet.”

She laughed, and I realized for the first time that I'd never really heard that before. Not at the lunch table or under the tree or in between classes or at the pep rallies. I'd never heard Helena do anything more than giggle timidly, and it made me stare at her glossy lips and try to memorize everything.

We watched Milton pile stuff into a white paper bag, and Helena said she’d be Cheerios because they’re steadfast and trustworthy. I gave her a look and told her no seventeen year old should aspire to be steadfast or trustworthy, and then I went in to get the bag from Milton. And as we drove aimlessly we traded ideas on what each other should aspire to be.

“You should be the girl that pops out of cakes.”

“You should be a train conductor,” she countered.

I laughed, “You know, that’s funny because I’ve been saving for years to travel after graduation—before I go to college. I’m gonna buy the Amtrak pass and see the whole continent.” I looked over to Helena's bright eyes and smiled, hardly noticing that my directionless driving was taking us to the river.

“You really hate it here, don’t you?” she asked, with this echo of sadness in her tone.

I sighed and pulled the parking break because we were at the levee and the river spread out below us, and a light fog hung right over the water. “I don’t hate it. I just know it. I’ve never been anywhere else. Ever. I know every inch of everywhere you can go in a four hour drive from my house. And if I don’t get to see more soon, I’ll implode.” With my elbow on the doorframe and my head in the palm of my hand, I spilled all this to a girl I’d only known a little while. “I already feel this atrophy.”

Then I felt another hand on my face. 

Helena’s hand was warm and firm and I looked at her. Her eyes were sympathetic as she scooted up onto her knees and tugged on me so she could kiss me. We made out until our mouths were uncomfortably sticky and dry, and we needed to pull the lemonades out of the white paper bag.

I withdrew the old quilt from Jay's trunk and tried to ignore the crusty patch that my knuckles dragged over as I spread it out for a picnic on the dewey grass. I made sure to put my wet shoes on the disgusting part of the blanket. 

The sky was remarkably clear, and we made each other laugh by misidentifying late-summer constellations as we ate. Neither of us really knew anything other than the Big Dipper.

Helena put potato chips on her sandwich, and every bite was full of crunch and crumbs. She made me take a bite from her messy hands, and forced me to admit it was delicious. She teased and laughed, and used her magic to erase all that mental malaise I’d dragged to her birthday party. 

I was enchanted and enraptured and determined to memorize the moment. I stared at every morsel of skin my eyes could reach. When dinner was done, I kissed and groped her as much as she would allow. I sniffed her neck and hair and clothes, and even though parts of her smelled like me and my own stale saliva because I’d licked her, I memorized that too because it was still kinda hot. We didn’t round second base, but I felt high anyway—just from an innocent date that surely bore the Daddy Seal of Approval.

When I dropped her at her door four minutes before curfew, I wondered if, when I was old-- like ten years down the road-- if I would really remember it just the way it happened.

The Apartment

She began to wake when the rumble of the engine disappeared, subtracting the white noise that had lulled her. The taxi driver was already pulling her bags from the trunk, causing her to scurry all of a sudden to gather her handbag and wallet. Once the cab pulled away, Jessica was left standing outside a moderately tall building with a crumbling facade that vaguely harkened to the regality of the nation's earliest days.

The trouble, as she stood on the too-quiet street surrounded by her smart set of matching luggage, gathering glances from men who loitered to smoke in doorways before and behind her, was that Jess had absolutely no idea of how to move from that spot. There was too much for her to carry in too unfamiliar a place.

She was on the verge of panicked tears when the building's door opened and two young men walked out into the heavy, damp wind. They stopped in front of her, assessing her and her trousseau.

"You going in there?" the taller one asked.

Muddled with apprehension, she took a moment to scan the pollution-stained building, the dented sign on the corner, the address on the torn awning behind the guy's head. Everything pointed to her being at the right address, but she couldn't convince herself now that she was in right place. Still, she'd come this far, and the wind kept slapping her coat collar into her face, so she nodded.

"Want help?" he asked.

This time she nodded without a pause.

The tall man thrust his right hand at her, "Chris, 3C."

"Oh," her hand in his, her feeling of shame at her helplessness, and her new uncertainty about her plans made her oddly shy. "Oh, um, Jessica, 5J."

He smiled. She hadn't let go of his hand. "Damn," he said cheerfully, "I was hoping to avoid the stairs." He pulled his hand free and, with smile still in place, he hefted the garment bag over his shoulder and grabbed the largest suitcase in his right hand. That left the rolling case, overnight bag, and the small case she already clutched next to her purse. The other man grabbed the overnight bag, settled it atop the roller, and pulled a key from his pocket. He used some complicated maneuver to jar the door open then he held it wide.

Chris, 3C, stood near the door, laden with the bags so heavy that Jess hadn't been able to lift them herself at the airport. She stared at him a moment before realizing he was waiting for her. "Ladies first," was implied in the smirk on his face. At that moment, at that smirk, Jessica suddenly saw how uncommonly handsome he was.

She went in. The smell hit her immediately and she halted, nearly causing the two men to tumble in the foyer. The dazzled smile fell from her face. The odors of a dozen decades of cooking, of wretched humanity, of sex, of questionable plumbing, assaulted her. Chris pushed in behind her so the other guy could follow.

"You get used to it." Chris's chin pointed toward the right, "Stairs over there."

She paused yet again. "But where's the elevator?"

The guy with the rolling bag snorted. Chris shouldered past her and shoved the stairway door open with an elbow.

She scurried behind him, afraid to be left alone in the fetid vestibule.

The staircase was narrow and steep. She watched the men ahead of her take the steps two at a time. Her shorter legs and unfamiliarity with close, stuffy staircases left her lagging behind.

The men waited for Jessica to produce the key. She'd received it in a padded envelope the week before when she was still in her parents' home, enjoying her vision of the wild city full of promise and of her mission to live like "regular people." This fantasy was romanticized, and when she opened the door to the furnished flat she'd rented sight-unseen, she realized just how unromantic the reality might turn out to be.

Of Time and Faking It

     Filmmakers are able to capture and convey the illusion of a heart-stopping moment. They can make time stand still by precise placement of light and echo of sound. But you can only appreciate the genius of the scene if you've experienced it in real life and you have some basis for judging the realism of the acting, direction, cinematography, and sound.

     There are, as well, rare moments when the relativity of time is so vivid in real life that one feels that it could be swatted out of the way or dragged into focus with the right amount of concentration. Certain aspects of one’s environment slow down; others blur. Still other things fade out altogether like light left behind by a speeding spacecraft.

     By Sunday, I felt weary from long days of lingering rain and cool air. Heavy fog snuck in my open window and tumbled into bed with me while the sun clawed its way over the horizon. A few optimistic songbirds cheered the rising light, but blanketing clouds and sharp pellets of spring mist soon scattered both the sun and sound. Another day arrived amidst the whispers of wetted leaves.

     The morning fell away, quick and heavy, like wet cardboard left beneath an open window. I felt the tacky, damp uncomfortable scraps of soggy air, and my shoulders shuddered to slough the feeling off as duty set my pace.

     I swallowed pills for my breakfast before heading out in hope that some small sliver of the uninvited feelings might be waylaid and distracted if I could only clear or cloud my mind. I used drugs as a coward uses a blindfold before the firing squad.

     The odd thing about relativity is that it also offers safe harbor.

     I settled into a bizarre routine that day. I felt detached from my surroundings: detached from the ground I walked on, detached from my own skin. And though I was still compelled to greet the same people on the street that I always greeted, half of them looked through me. The other half was yet again divided between those who smiled and said hello (as ever) and those who scowled.

     Throughout, my mind revolved around an ache in my chest while my ears echoed with all my unsaid words, all my unshed scales. I’d hardly ate or paused or slept from the swirl in my brain, but through pain came clarity. I would take it as a lens through which to henceforth examine my life.

     Thus I went about my business examining each action, habit, and process and pushed myself to wonder if I were faking it. Was I faking my way through scant and skimpy meals, through roughshod work, through each very ordinary conversation that punctuated the hours? Did I genuinely care about the health of every person that I how-do-you-do’d? Did that even really matter?

     When I got home again, exhausted, I slept all the rest of the afternoon. Early in the evening, before twilight, I woke heavy and sluggish and absolutely ravenous. I lay suspended outside of time and place for several moments as each sense processed the world around me. The smell of damp air and the familiar musty mattress, the sound of chickadees chasing each other around the feeder- spreading seed on the ground for squirrels to enjoy - and the aches of a weary body too long at rest: stiff neck, slow knees, and a dull need to pee. I felt my sticky tongue drag against my lips as I rolled over onto my back and scratched my stomach.

     Moments later, before I knew I had decided to get up, I found myself in the bathroom with one long narrow window high up on the wall. Through it I could count the tarrying clouds on a single hand. All the pinks and reds and oranges lit them up like neon petals floating across the sky. The light dimmed as evening gathered her skirts for a sweeping exit over the edge of the horizon, ducking out to offer me privacy and stillness.

Dr. E's Last Stand

The doc turned out to be a bent-over antique of a man with a tidy moustache and pungent aftershave.

Dr. E was about eighty.

I asked if he needed to see a chiropractor because, I swear, his torso was bent at 45 degrees as he shuffled around.

But man, was he cool.

He had that wisdom bred from keen intelligence piled with decades of human experience.

“Back in my real life,” he told me, “I was a cardiologist. I never intended to retire.”

He left it hanging there for me to draw my own conclusion that a man bent at a 45 degree angle wasn’t fit to perform cardio-thoracic surgery for obvious reasons.

He said he’d fallen off a roof fourteen years ago, and his vertebrae from the middle of his back downward were fused together.

No chiropractic work would fix that.

But undaunted by this crippling tragedy, he found a place for himself assessing the general health of patients sent to this little psych hospital.

You didn’t just show up and check in, you had to be admitted. So that was Dr. E’s place now. He worked in the middle of the night in the middle of the week at M---, assessing the craziness of all manner of crazies.

I liked him, liked talking to him. He spoke about “the dark ages when they piped in sunlight” to the lecture halls when he was in med-school. We may have exchanged a comment about Gunsmoke; his moustache was reminiscent of Doc Adams, but his bald head was all Montgomery Burns.

He asked questions to determine the status of my vision, hearing, and olfactory senses:  “Keep your eyes on this.” He moved his pen around my face, back and forth, left and right, up and down. “Can you hear me?” he whispered. “Can you smell my aftershave?”

He asked if I knew who I am and where I was.

“My name is—“

“You don’t have to prove it to me,” he smiled. “Just say yes or no.”

He didn’t hit my knee with a hammer to check my reflexes, but he took out his hearing aids from both ears to put his stethoscope there instead. It was electronic, to amplify the sound, I guessed, to compensate for his poor hearing.

I watched him turn the dial at the joint where the ear thingies were held to the cold thingie.

His face was earnest and wizened as he listened to my heart. I could tell he took hearts seriously. He listened like he was experiencing an echo of Mozart himself at a piano.

That wet thud sploosh of muscle squeezing blood was his music-- his drug, even.

He’d dedicated years of study and a lifetime of experience to this organ that he could no longer touch, no longer hear with his own ears. He had to settle for brief, electronically enhanced refrains of that golden time, in between asking lunatics if they could smell him.

Poor old Dr. E.

I felt so much more comfortable talking to him than I felt the next morning with the psychiatrist.

Liza and Troy

Icy fingers easily find their wet way down the backs of our necks and proceed to reach further in attempt to claw their way under nice, warm flesh. Every shiver reminds me of the way Liza's breath against my ear trips a tremulous thrill along my spine, and I concentrate harder on matching her skipping pace, holding this morning’s Sun Times over her head, since we had ignored its forecast for rain, anyway.

Liza laughs when she tries to leap a puddle and ends up splashing street grime all up my leg, and I can't help but laugh too. She's infectious.

"When we get home, I can show you how to smoke correctly," she offers in half a shout because the sleet it threatening to destroy our newspaper now.

"What the hell is wrong with how I smoke?" I struggle to keep up when the lights of The Industrial finally come into view: the blackened penthouse looms eerily over the colored windows every other floor sports. It's as if the residents there are shouting an affirmation of life by the colors they paint their window glass and the patterns of chintz they drape over the building's vast eyes.

She waited in the doorway while I fumbled with her keys, trying to open that damned vestibule door.

"You smoke that an actor pretending to smoke, sweetie. You ought to do it like you mean it." Her voice was languid but not bored as she explained. It somehow promised patience in the coming lessons.

Yet, even Liza's patience has limits for soon she reached past my hand full of jingling keys and merely gave the entry handle a good swift shove. The door ground its way open under her expert touch and she slipped in under my arm.

But then she froze.

A sound nothing like anything I'd ever known before was tumbling down the concrete staircase. It was the moan of weariness and a growl of hunger all at once, and it ebbed and flowed in a primal rhythm.

Liza stood glued to the tiles of the vestibule, and I could see her reflection in the mirror over the mailboxes; she was transfixed in a type of hypnosis of allure.

The hunger she heard made her hungry, and the primal insistence of the music made her clench her fists and bite her lips in need.

I slammed the door, but not even the noise meant to break her captor's spell had any effect.

I took a deep breath and tugged gently on her elbow. "Liza. Liza, Liza, smoke with me."

Her shining eyes blinked and swiveled to focus on me while she patronized me with half of one of her delicious smiles.

"I have a wonderful ashtray in my room," she said.

I gave half a smile back to her and took her hand. I wondered if two half smiles equaled one whole, or were we both just mocking our own faces?

In her room, Liza kicked off her shoes and picked up a tee-shirt off her floor to dry her feet. I hung my coat on the back of her door and fished my cigarettes out of the pocket, trying not to wonder whose tee-shirt that was.

"Isn't it nice?" she asked. "Scandinavian stone," she held the grayish, dirty ash tray up for me to admire, even though it just looked like a pile of ask that had compounded upon itself for centuries.

"Nice," I said, wishing that closing her door could have closed out that music; if anything, the insidious noise now echoed through my sternum now that I was closer to it. Liza's eyes were bright, and I could tell she felt it, too. She fed on it.

"You make me so happy," Liza sighed.

"I don't make you happy. I make you smile. There's a big difference."

From last Nov.

For J&Co. 

It wasn't an easy life-not a simple world. In the old days, when there were stories and meals and wine, people wore smiles and bright colors and timepieces on their arms. In those days, folks held onto their minutes and hours, kept a close eye on them all the time, because time was the thing they valued most. I suppose when you have plenty of food, warm shelter, adoration, and cheer, you still have to think about things you don't have. People are like that-- never satisfied. Never content to be happy in a single moment.