I wake up early in the morning and look out the window and dig into my back pack and reel out a carton of fig newtons, chomping down hard, taking diligent sips from the coffee I brewed in the hotel room, listening to my best friend Hale passed out early as if from a night of drinking, snoring hard, his mouth wielded ajar, his lungs rattling with all the bulk and occasional hiss of a healthy carbonator. The radiator in the room is located beneath the window like a beer gut and purrs out an ached racket emanating warmth. There is a bedtime sheet of snow outside glazed, reflecting a frosty mid-march sun as if it were a peach pebble in the canvas of white. The world seems brand new. In less than a week my glossed itinerary will arrive from Parade in a package in the mail which mom will hand to me after track practice with an excited smile beaming across her face—the itinerary telling me where I will be shuffled throughout the continent of England, what sights my vision shall imbibe, what flights I shall catch above a copse of clouds, the dream pastures I shall stroll over and finally arrive. But for now, in this hotel room, in a frosty morning in mid-march, I am all alone, my best friend asleep on the bed I recently arose from—a cup of coffee and a magazine about spiritual-charged grunge music laying next to the Chicago tribune. The sound of Airplanes leaving O’Hare in thick draughts of thrust and exhaust every ten minutes—the mechanical blitz and roar and searing overhead—wings splayed as if in balletic posture.
On the way home I flatten open the road atlas of the United States to Illinois, the state I have lived in all my life, the state which when flapped open like a centerfold and splayed down in front of my vision looks like it is about to be dissected on a lab table in some junior high biology class by some nerdy looking white kid wearing goggles over his glasses, hoisting up his scalpel wearing laytex gloves. The map is elongated liver shaped, needled with blue and red arteries that treacle down the state in a rivulet highway— blood tears going nowhere and everywhere at the same time. I think about the girl I met on the dance floor and about my maladroit dancing skills—about the mosh pit of bodies globed together in a rattled cluster of limbs and elbows and movements—the supernova of youth banging and fucking into the pre-dawn sunrise of a pending millennium—enervating and exhausting limbs in a clanging dither of noise and reverberation—a frenzied interior gallop clamoring into an orbital wad of pulsating sweat and frenzy endeavoring to become one with one another, endeavoring to become one with the searing acceleration of a culture gyrating wayward away from it’s own interior ethos—and at this spiritual assembly the youth bang their limbs together, tackling their shoulder, sliding their bodies into a mass of bellowing oneness accompanied by the music of Peal Jam—a song which reminds them what it feels like to be alive rather than the alternative.
I think about my own slip into the mosh pit, into the clamoring soil of arms and limbs in a failed endeavor to impress a female I had just met. I wonder what she thought when I slid into the frenzied puddle of youth, when I dived in my boots, my glasses folded up in my side pocket like a check book—like the green bible I ferry with me at all times to remind about the culminating temptation of lust. In the back seat of the minivan ferry us down the same sleek artery of land I am perusing over, I think about that girl I tried to impress—I think about the place where I am to travel off to, the future memories to be consummated, the sight of stammering sunsets yet to come wondering to myself if flying feels like the inner matrix of diving into a mosh pit in an endeavor to impress a curly red-headed girl you just met under the din of the dance floor, under the embryonic stutter of strobe lights, as if dancing in an agitated atomic clamor of banging-limbed youth could possibly give birth to something meaningful.
I find Bollingbrook on the map and vow to make it back there some day. Wondering if there was some sort of a way I could find the red headed angel of the dance floor once again.
***
I have my gear rolled in my locker in the basement of Manual high. A pair of flimsy aquatic running shorts, running shoes connected by the laces, a few shirts. The stain and scent of puberty; the vortex almost nautical whorl of hair foaming below my navel like a gulf stream—hair eking down the branches of my legs and arched muscles of my calves—only my chest remains bare, as we traipse, wearing flip flop sandals to eschew the accumulating pockets of mold spawning athletes foot in the shower, lathering on decade and a half year pimply flanks of flesh with layers of soap and shampoo. Jose was spotted in school the other day, still overweight, his hair longer, almost in dread locks. When I walked up to him he echoes out his familiar cinnamon smile.
Where you been brother?” I inquire.
“I’m gonna have a baby,” He says. “My girl is pregnant.”
I spend every weekend shuffled throughout the state whose map I examined in the back seat of Jeff Grebe’s car on the way back from the youth congress, thinking about the woman with the orange hair, thinking about the mosh pit and the boots I was wearing, the boots which served as my identity in the hallways of high school—the boots which everyone comments and looks at me and says that they like as I strut past, as I begin to squeeze through the shoe size locker odor of masculinity, of manhood, of youth. As I begin to fish out truths from my denim back pocket. As I begin to knock—as I begin to more or less, search. Looking in the hallways after school, a zipped blur of limbs and meted breath, running through the hallways, my shadow casting an elongated prancing shadow after school, as the yolk of the late January sun seems to linger in the pocket of sky longer each night—granting the world the appearance of motion, of velocity—more hairs have sprouted around the ash pit of my loins. I still think about Renae every night. Still think about Dawn kimble. Still flying in the hallways, the measured patter of my sneakers against the interior linoleum of the school. Still arriving home after school, splattering my textbooks on my mattress. Still conjugating French verbs and listening to Depeche mode and to the cure and Guns-n-roses Use your Illusion 2 in my bedroom every night. I started the school year secluded in the corner room and have now, moved into the room with the French doors with the full mirror abutting the closet door like a interior entrance into your own reflection world—a portal into the realm of dual and opposite where there is no shadow, only the perfect mirrored symmetric reflection of everything you have become. I can still see the college girls next door as they enter the frame of their restroom loosening the brass knot near their waist before their vision is occluded as they squat to relieve themselves. I still duck on my shins every night and bow my entire body as if I am a pastel shepherd in a nativity scene at church, asking for strength—asking that my mile split become abbreviated and that I may set some sort of school record to Christian and verify my existence in this realm of being. I still wake up and guzzle copious amounts of coffee in the kitchen, before school, after dad has escorted me on the paper route; the gruff hirsute countenance of my father in the morning, waltzing in a January cap and coat, directly across from me step my step. My father who gets me beckons me up by flicking the switch on in my bedroom as we marshal the bundles across to our front porch, counting the number of inky headlines, verifying there are enough for our patrons. My father, who has risen with me every morning , not complaining, not admonishing and not accepting any of the shared pay. Skirting the horizontal suburban avenues of Sherman and Moss, dual flanking parallelograms of sidewalks abutted with numerical brick mortgages and manicured lawns. My father, walking with me, using the second paper route bag, walking up in his fourth grade teacher gait to each house, slipping the paper into the mailbox, into the screen door, or under the welcome matt. My father, every morning, modest, unpaid, seemingly happy to help his son out in his dream to get overseas. My father, who in less than ten years will be horizontally shoved into a casket, his body layered into a pasture of earth three gravestones over from where my grandmother will be laid. My father, waking every morning not complaining, simply out of love for his eldest son.
One morning my sister Jenn, sixth grade, lumbers into my room and tells me that she arose out of her slumber this morning to the music of REM. To the song Nightswimming.
***
We hustle through the aquatic dim of the hallways after school as one exhaling herd, as a pack, as a unit of kneecaps and roving limbs, beaded droplets of perspiration forming a sentence of lined abacuses wet with dots on the top of our brow, slowly skiing down the pasture of our cheekbones and chin as we continue our gallop, through different vectors of the school—a smashed unit. It is a month after winning the contest, one month after rising in the sea of conference rooms slapped palms at the sound of my name being acknowledged as the recipient of the award. One month after becoming accustomed to hands lanced in my direction to shake. One month after all this, and still I am leaving, to be on a trip that will change my life with a group of half-paperboys and half-writers.
Every day I check the creaky jowls of our mailbox, wondering when I shall receive more from Parade. The trip is always a constant, the first thing I see as my eyelids wield open absorbing the nauseating static of morning as I dress and accompany my father down the illuminated streetlamp-fizz cool breeze of morning. Brewing coffee in the kitchen and waiting as my siblings rouse and dress and stumble down into the dining room. I am an athlete. I am healthy, incessantly configuring methods to shave extra lashed digits off the time of my mile. My world revolving around the galactic orbit of a track, my fists and elbows forming a rhythm, a syncopated melody sub woofer of my heart, constantly seeking a swift revelation of validation for the intellectual fetus I am becoming.
I look around and wonder where the fuck I am.
The stampede is whittled down every week. The regime for practice, for discipline, for respect. Each week the content of someones locker is split open and disemboweled. Some weeks a new troop joins our constant sprint around the hallways. Come two weeks the weather will have subsided so we can rehearse our mile times outside, but for now, the mounds of snow and frost curtail our swagger from modulating outside the heated incubation of the hallways.
I am waiting. Waiting for more news. Wondering beneath the bony skeletal planks guarding my chest if the trip will actually transpire. Wondering if it wasn’t some dream dipped in the frost of a late January windshield haze. Looking at the calendar mom has posted above the phone near the mirrored dining room buffet, watching as the heralding names of months cosigning meted increments of boxed time—the time signature for the globe, flipping over the names of heralding months—the frost of February, the eclipsing dew of late March, wondering when April will in fact arrive and what magic the locked calendar squares will unravel themselves to contain once I am to hop scotch to that place in time, discern the panoramic vista and wonder in awe, as the blank geometrical package slowly becomes illuminated in a pastel dawn covering, as the vistas and trees and vernal countryside fuse up like spring, inside the calendar squares, inside my chest, a place we are yet to get to, a moment we have anticipated experiencing all of our collected life like a dream we somehow forget to remember when it mattered to us the most.
