Eight year old short story, found, along with the crinkled origami of her digits in an empty Doc Marten shoe box....circa 1998

--It will come when it comes, she tells me, not a modicum before the moment is due.

It is intermission. The patter of palms taper off into golf claps as bustling men and women alight from rumpled seat cushions, elbowing toward the lobby. A serpentine line forms outside of the ladies room while men respectively smile and nod and stretch, popping knee-caps, loosening the knotted pentagon of their ties, grousing about the heat. Backstage you once again feel like a novice. You feel inept. You feel like no one in the house full understands what you were trying to say. There are the obligatory compliments and salutary sniggers from the company and cast who would swear on the Gideon bible that you are good. They say you are really good. They use the word verisimilitude in your review. They use the word superlative. They pat you on the back when you pass them by. They keep the ticket stubs from your performances thumbtacked on a bulletin board at home. People like you. Really, they do.

Backstage there is always warm Pepsi in Styrofoam cups and volunteers who look
like Keebler elves squeaking into the dressing rooms, holding up a splayed palm to indicate the dwindle of minutes, the lapse of time, the foil of your furlough. All around you the heads and necks of cast members hurtle in and out of costumes. Girls in bra's quibble over eyeliner and mascara. Males mired in a ring of collar sweat falter to put on their own makeup, unless, of course, they are gay which Dougie Shriner-the actor who portrays your best friend David Hale-obviously is. Every other Thurs day night at one am Doug doffs his boxers and dons his kleenex-chocked D-size brassiere and Lycra jumper to become Vanity, the Virgin Queen. Vanity rubs her taut ass and slouched surrogate tits in front of oglers— a bespectacled bevy of middle-age queers who fawn and foam at the mouth every time she lip's syncs anything by Macy Gray. Vanity once got arrested for peeing standing up in the girls bathroom stall at Perkins, an event which Dougie Shriner somehow regards as a personal violation on behalf of his own womanhood.

In the dressing room everything smells like hairspray, you think, as Vannie Hallmark,your on-stage romantic lead, swaggers past you trying hard to be noticed; arching her shoulders and curving her back like she an underwear model. Vannie Hallmark is very intelligent and very beautiful. She is a spume of blonde tresses and an oracle of intrigue. Her lips look like a Clinique hyphen and her angular features are origami delicate. Off stage she tells those who tip their hats and query that yes, it really was her on page twenty-two of the September Victoria Secret catalogue modeling the petite bra's that unbuckle from the front and are such a bitch for most males to get undone. Vannie's pallid countenance is highly reminiscent of a diminutive espresso shot-glass. Her nose is configured like a light-switch, beseeching Vannie with an eternal aura of unbidden arrogance and uppity pride.

In Act one, scene seven, your first tete-a-tete with Vannie, whose stage name is just V.,as in the Pynchon novel. The scene takes place in a rather lethargic looking college classroom at a private college located somewhere in the Midwest burrowed like a mole in a middle-sized town which houses minor league franchises and smells like pee. Both of you are falling madly-kicking-and-screaming-clicking your heals together-in love, which is rather unfortunate because the two of you study English at a school built for budding Engineer students and rich kids from Chicago who drive $20,000 cars, have short haircuts and wear Greek emblems on their chest.

You first descry her rapturous beauty in a writing class. She was Midas with a
ballpoint pen, turning ink into golden paragraphs strewn with bucolic beauty, ushering forth stories of her rustic upbringing and the perpetual loss of being both, alas, miserably beautiful and miserably gifted at the same time.

On stage you tell her that her prose is so beautiful that reading it gave your heart an erection. Off stage you endeavor to cozen a kiss, but she just sighs audibly as if expected, turns the other cheek and truckles to the vagaries of the director, whom you revile. On stage the Professor, who in this production is from India with a pearly smile, laughs at your erection witticism, commenting that it was duly-appropriate for his class session that her incendiary prose only made your heart erect and nothing else. The heads in the class room hop forward in laughter like kernels in an air popper. The audience is on the floor.

The first onstage kiss is performed in front of the backdrop known as the Silver
Vagina. The Silver Vagina is a ubiquitous stage backdrop since it towers directly in front of the C.D.library. Somewhere in his cliff notes on the origin of your script, the director has written that once a year, preferably between the months of November through February, a gaudy frat boy with short hair and sideburns ends up getting his tongue stuck to the metallic contours of the monument. The library staff always snaps a Polaroid before calling the fire trucks.

You should have told the director from the outset that there was just no way in hell
that this rapport would work out, even though by act two, scene '3 Vannie and you are
biting into each other like twinkles, groping beneath restaurant tablecloths, and yes, even talking about rings and receptions. The audience loves this- salivating like a Pavlovian Chihuahua at even the notion that sex would be performed onstage, publicly, in front of an audience whose programs tell them the real names of the cast members and what their hobbies are.

As the elfkin-pygmy holds up a peace sign in front of you, you wonder, just for a
moment, if any or all of this is real.

Backstage you amble through the curtains of mangy costumes searching for a moment of solitude, seclusion, and possibly a few puffs on a cigarette before the actress who portrays your on- stage Mother clumps into your shadow and charmingly chides your vice with maternal detriment. Your stage Mom is built like a milkjug. You stamp out your smoke and surreptitiously slush warm Pepsi around the inside your lips, swallowing when the penisu1a shaped dungarees of the director eclipses your imminent view. His gruffness is apparent and he verbally berates that on stage you were opaque and that your whole body delved into an asphyxiated stutter whenever the spotlight landed on top of you.

“It was as if the spotlight end-capsualated you rather than emancipated you, Da-vid"
He reams, once again exhibiting his proclivity toward double-entendres when he
pronounces your first name. The directors last name should be Lambaste. He says that you fucked up again. That your knee's knocked together like abacus beads. That your voice was reticent. Your solo, sour. He asks you if you are coy? Are you fucking coy? Did you know what you are, he inquires. Do you even know what role YOU are suppose to be playing?

Do you boy?

As Vannie's right-triangular nose struts past you on her way to stage left the Director tilts his neck to check out her ass and then smiles to himself shaking his head left to right once and makes an 'ummmm' sound. The pending act out Herod's Harrod when it comes to tumult. In this act Vannie will leave you and then come back. Then you will leave Vannie and then come back. Then eventually both of you will leave and you will get in a car wreck and almost die.

You remember once getting broadsided by a cement truck. You had monopolized the
semester slathered in a rueful dither, working third shift. You were an exhaust pipe of enervation. Your tank was always on E your debilitated and stressed vision was the color of a stoplight from fatigue and scholastic duress. You felt blessed beyond a collegiate measure if you got four hours a sleep a night. Crashing at Four a.m. and car pooling back to campus with your Mom at seven thirty. You remember lying supine in the stretcher while the ambulance attendant said the word extricate into his shoulder 'radio over and over again. You remember feeling manacled and marred by images of yourself wanting not to be yourself anymore. You remember wanting to unstrap yourself and leave. Just to leave. Your eyes drape shut and then sprout open. Your brain feels like a slot machine
whose eyeballs keep reeling blurred images of fruits into the back of its head. You wish you were situated in an antipodal location. In fact, maybe you are.


* * * * * * * * *


"When it comes, if it ever comes, I want to feel real. Mostly I just feel like a bladder most of the time. That's why I did it. I had to prove to myself that I was more than just a urinary emission. More than just a faucet. I wanted all the pain and loneliness to be accounted for something. I wanted to watch it drip out of me. I didn't think prozac was an opportune plumber. And going to school counseling and adolescent therapy on Wednesday evenings during Lent sure as fuck did nothing to cloy or clog my vacuity. I was nothing but a bladder. A hot water bottle. That's all."

"So this is why you did it?" Her voice is inquisitive, straightforward and sounds like ahandbell Your shrink has this annoying proclivity of raising her vocal resonance at the end of every sentence. She is trying to sound professional. This is what they taught her to do in grad school. They taught her to sound professional They taught her to sound fake. As if it were really somehow a possibility for her to empathized with you. To commiserate with your trauma. To just understand where you are coming from. You think that true empathy is impossible.

"I wanted my depression to be accountable for something," You tell her, not looking
into her eyes, "I needed a receipt for my sack of sadness. I wanted to see just what it was I had purchased and why the product wasn't working. I wanted to lash into my own investigation. I needed to unplug my item and look for impediments. With each
welt I was probing myself for errors. I wanted to be like every other product. I wanted to have a function. To have a purpose. I didn't want to be saddled down in my own deluded dystopia."

"David, what would you say championed your march into masochism?" she says
again, gesticulating with her arms, trying-to sound like she is on an afternoon talk show. You decide it best to humor her, after all she graduated from a prestigious University and dates a man who has one of those simple, forgettable one-syllable names and who flippantly peruses through every section of the paper except the Sports: and the funnies.


She knows every drug you have ever done and the name of every girl you have ever
written poetry for. She knows all about you. About your dyslexia. She knows how words
swim on the page and scatter like guppies in a fish tank when you try to :make sense out of them. She knows how, for you, reading is a quote 'motherfucker' -yet reading and writing is the one predilection you love above all else. How every word you encounter you bleed over, in one sense or another. She knows how books are your best friends. She knows that when you were sixteen you used to trundle beneath the glowering street globes which align Moss Avenue nursing a cigar and quoting 'The Love Song Of J. Alfred Prufrock' by heart. She knows that in highschool you did more 'shrooms than a Mario Brother. She recalls the warmth in which you told her that, in high school every Saturday afternoon you would make it a point to lay on your bed and listen to the Texaco Opera live broadcasts from the Met. She remembers you telling her how you would fall asleep with the radio on and wake up harboring wet dreams of Cecilia Bartoli's succuelnt soporano-thinking that she may be the closest Dante-inflamed vision of the Beatrice you could ever experience. She knows that you lost your virginity on Bloomsday, 1997,on a rest stop off of 1-74 to a girl whose name was ironically Molly. She remembers the way you described. Molly to her. Molly was a bluestocking bandanna granola cruncher who wore ankle-length khaki skirts, sandals and studied philosophy in Urbana. She knew all about Derrida and Levinas and kissed with her entire face entering yours. She remembers the way you tersely recounted loosing your virginity. Not the act in itself, but what followed: How Molly closed her eyes and untucked her bottom lip and wailed O MYGOD O MYGOD O MY GOD three times in a row without a comma—her eyelids opening and closing the way a garage door opens and then closes. And how afterwards you held each other like how lovers in Rodin statues clasp each other ad infinitum. Then, chain smoking a clove cigarette, Molly told David that out of every human mating, every time a ovum is germinated by a sperm and fertilization occurs, that there were 53,000,000,000,000succinctly diverse possible fetus ramifications and that all of us are one out of 53 trillion (that night she drew the twelve zero's on his naked chest) different possible ferrotypes of what is possible.

All this the shrink knows and still she does not know much.

"When I was 16 I carved the word POET into my chest with the severed glass neck of
the Jack Daniels bottle I had recently smashed., like a captain christening a ship's maiden
voyage, on the lip of the porcelain sink in the bathroom. "


She says the word yes three times in a row and then asks me how it felt at the time.


"Actually, it felt good. It felt like I was letting something out of me that I had kept
cached in me for so long. It was not mawkish or maudlin-like how in high school I would
attire myself in black raiments, telling my teachers that I wore black on the outside because black was how I felt within. No, itwas more like-here, try this analogy. The mother in labor who suffers exorbitantly to deliver. She frees hersel£ in other words, so that her child, intrinsically part of her-will be severed yet nursed. Kept inside it will kill them both.

The silence in the room impels your lips to continue.


"I had felt like a thing for so long. Not a person but a thing. There's a difference. I
didn't know how a human being was suppose to feel. I knew how loneliness felt. Loneliness was being all the same and yet not. I knew what it felt like to feel-all alone. I remember in fourth grade cowering in the back of my closet hoping I would find my Cair Paraval But it was all the same. Like Narnia before Aslan. It was always winter and never Christmas.

"So I ripped into my own flesh with Prufrock Claws. I wanted to verify my validity as
a human being. I cut deep to assuage the loneliness-to assuage the fuckin' ennui. I cut to prove to my own self that my loneliness was different than the loneliness promulgated by producers and brought to you by yearly automotives and household provisions. I needed to unplug, rewire, and then plug myself back in with so much electrical force and frisson that there wouldn't be a doubt left in my mind about who I was or what I was. Just that I was. It's pretty profound if you stop and think about it."

“What else?” She interrogates.

She wants to know. Everybody wants to know. David, will you tell her? Will you be a big boy for once? Do you have the fucking balls?

Your chest is now a helium balloon that has lifted far from its stratosphere and is about ready to….

"When I was either six or eight, old enough to toddle down to the 7-11by myself and watch older boys play pac-man, I was sexually abused. His name was Frank. He was friends with Dad. Dad wanted us to call him Uncle Frank All of us did. Uncle Frank shaved big head every other day so it was bowling ball smooth. He had an earring and talked like he was black. Mom used to say he looked like Mr. Clean. Mister he was, Clean was debatable."

She nods her head like a hand puppet and gestures you to continue.

"He and Dad worked during the week at a factory North of town putting together
tractor parts and smoking dope in the break room. On weekends, when my sister Beverly
would relentlessly chase me around the house with naked Barbie dolls, Dad and Uncle
Frank would hunker in front of the RCA in their undershirts yelling at us to shut the fuck up, adjusting the Y-shaped antenna and guzzling case after case of Strolls Lager which they called ‘Regal Shorts' always snorting out a wheeze as if astounded by their sozzled ingenuity. Oh, and by the way, my parents still don't have a fucking clue about what spawn my lachrymose. So don't tell.

'Frank and I and Dad were all buddies. We were all pals. We were the guys. Men. We
would all watch football games together. We would an say the words' Aw shit' in unison when the quarter back was sac'd. Some days we would wrestle on the front lawn and on other days Frank would place me on his shoulders augmenting my height, enabling me to toss the ball over the brim of the hoop. Frank and I would arm wrestle on the coffee table and Frank would always let me win. Clutching his wrist in feigned pain as t discarded my
shirt, distended my biceps like Hulk Hogan and asked everybody in the house "What's ya
Gonna do?" doing my damndest to emulate Hulk's throaty inflection. I remember Frank
trying not to laugh when Dad called Mom a Pussy and said she had a Watermelon for an
Ass. Mom was attired in her mauve leotard and strawberry legwarmers counting to four and doing jumping jacks in front of Jane Fonda. Dad said that Mom looked like she was treading water when she exercised and Mom after Dad had passed out, went outside and emptied the air out of Dad's tires, blaming it on the Vice Lords down the street."

Good stories too often have no beginning and no endings….

“One Autumn afternoon-and I succinctly recall it being Autumn -Dad had long since
succumbed to his inebriated snore and Mom was showing Bev and Emily Zubar down the
street pictures of her homecoming dress and her high school sweet heart, who looked like
Ted Koeppel—I can't recall the year exactly but soda pop still came in the glass bottles with long translucent necks and Resees Pieces were the posh juvenile sugar rush . It was around the time my Uncle Larry got his arm caught in the elevator door at Sears. Around the time I overheard my Aunt Vera, who had a moustache and a birds nest perm, tell my Mom that she wouldn't mind giving Reverend Kopenski a blowjob during the epistle reading on Sunday. It was somewhere around the time Dad and Uncle Frank stopped drinking Strohs and started gulping Budweiser—giving me the moniker Bud Light Around this time, the year my Dad couldn't afford to get me an Atari for Christmas even though Santa said I would—the year Mom taught Bev to keep her legs crossed when she sat with Aunt Vera in church this was the year Uncle Frank would invite me into the bathroom to watch him pee."

“…..”

'It was what men who were Buddies did together. he said. I remember the way he
held his out in front of me. I remember not knowing what to think. He made a sordid and sick analogy about Gepatto and Pinocchio, which I'llomit here because even now, close to a decade later, I am still haunted by his advances. Can still vividly recall how his fingers felt like icicles beneath the button of my pants. How he would snap the elastic band on my underwear leaving rosemary patches on my skin. How he would smile a sandpaper smile when he did this. I can still remember him asking me sick questions about it. I remember wondering why his had a moustache and mine didn’t. I remember him asking me to pet his like Donna Lapis invited me to pet her hamster, Alfonso, who bit me. I remembered feeling scared after the first time this happened. I remember feeling dirty about out secret. I remember wanting to tell mom and dad but instead I hid in the closet with Bev’s naked Barbie clinging to it like a rosary. I remember crying. I remember feeling like it was somehow all my fault.”

She pushes out a breath and inquires how long it lasted.

“Years,” You say. “It lasted for years.”

The day my best friend lil’ Robbie Coover from west Moreland got hit by a Schwann’s truck while trying to cross the street on his pogo ball, Frank took me out for ice cream and then touched me. The day I set the school record for most accelerated reader points in the month of March, Frank stuck my finger so far up my ass that I bled. The day mommy and Dad came home from the bible retreat with shorter haircuts, cleaning out their liqueur cabinets in the name of Christ, Uncle Frank picked me up from Boy Scouts and took the long way home.

“On and off for five or six years, I would come home from Uncle Frank’s house with cum-stains the size of Kennedy-halves on my corduroys. I would cry. The world didn’t make sense. I didn’t want to have his phallic in my face. I didn’t want to have my squeezed like it was some kind of stress relief putty. I didn’t want to ask if I could take off my clothes while frank flashed shots at me. I didn’t want to be myself anymore. Eventually, I didn’t even want to be and after a while I simply wasn’t.

Somewhere else a Keebler elf flips you the bird without being vindictive in anyway, shape or form.

You ask her if she mind if you cry in front of her, just for a moment.

“It’s not that I’m weak, just tender,” you amend….

When I was 17 I got a job tutoring phonics at Common Place to little black boys with very white eyes who sang songs about black Jesus and wore one hundred dollar Jordans.
One day at lunch I went for a walk. The wooden telephone polls seemed to be a continuous stream of cyper-optical crucifixes. I saw him shadowed beneath the hung head of a hollow street lamp. He was withered and wore make-up. He was sitting on a bug stop whose placard was the color of a finger nail and flouted Dukakis and Benson in '88. He was drinking what I could only imagine to be a 40 of either Strohs or Budweiser wrapped in a brown paper bag. He looked off in one direction at nothing in particular. His limbs looked like a dead tree in Autumn. His eggshell eyebal1s blinked into the vacant avenues of the South Side. A GLAD trash bag stuffed with prodigal aluminum sat next to him. He looked exactly like how I felt for so many years. He looked all alone.

It will comes when it comes, she said to me. It will come when it comes.

And as I walked up next to him and sat down on the bench ( he didn't seem to recognize me-it had been nearly six year since the Union strike and Dad's Christianity) I wanted to tell him that I too was a Christian. As I put my arm around him. my palm on the shoulder of big tattered jacket, I wanted to tell him that all of big come-stains had been washed clean in blood of the Lamb. I wanted to tell him that what he did to me didn't matter because sin blinds everyone from the truth. As I marshaled my right arm around big waist reeling him now into my chest. I wanted to tell him that I had forgiven big icy gropes, forgiven the way he touched and tangled my formative body. Wanted to tell him that it was over. That it was all in the past. That I had grown out of it like the underwear I grew out of whose elastic he snapped.

As my arms now fully extended big cane-like semblance, I wanted to tell him that all
was right in the world and that I even loved him.



If only that was what I told him.

Snow can wait I forgot my sweater....

Christmas morning at grandma's....

....and never brought to mind: a tear smudged induced fugue of joy reflecting the puddle of a year gone lapse

It is the morning pink eye-lidded yawn of 2008, the green g-mail chat bullet of the planet still galatcically tethered and cosmically buoyed around a winking bulb of the nearest day star socketed inside the inscrutable fabric of the universe itself. The genesis of a new slate of January snow melting in tandem following the platter of stale new years eve confetti and exclamatory countdowns en masse that would make even the stoic collective chins of NASA salute in anticipation over the toppling descent of integers pregnant with the pocked sound of champagne hiccupping free from its emerald esophagus followed by a ricochet of corks followed by dry kisses and embraces and a round of old acquaintances being forgotten followed by the (interior writhing) realization of age and the encroachment of death, the cathartic gut-dripping insight that the allotted dash of seconds granted to us as a gift to thrive and create and love and give all on the fallow scalp of this planet--this viable arboretum of intelligence and life--and that you are here optically indulging in the phonetics of this experiment of pulse and breath--that you are here, wading knee-high through this experience of existence, this time, this place, the joy, the sorrow---somehow you are (for however tersely) a part of this global collective waltz--that you are part of this tear drop trickling down the cheekbones of the planet called humanity and that your voice, your persona, your song, indeed, carries with it the most fragrant chorus sprinkled with significance and wonder.

A ritual that my family has devoutly enacted since I was about the size of an errant good year tire was that, on New Years eve, after church we would host a new years eve gala where my aunts and uncles and cousins and friends would congregate around the oak mahogany of our childhood living room; week old needles on our Christmas tree still clad in a stuttering holiday phosphorescent glow. My family would configure into a circle of elbows and limbs, not unlike those found in creative writing classes in the upper echelons of liberal education while my mother would distribute candles to each inhabitant circled in the island of bodies. One by one, each member would light his or her respective candle and talk about how God had blessed them in the last year and what their hopes and individual ambitions were for the following year. With the house still garnished in a bright holiday hue festooned with cranberry ribbons, the pine heavy scent of emerald orchards nasally associated with the last week of the year glazed with icicles, tufts of froth, darkness sputtering across the horizontal windshield of the west, caking the planet with a dazed mid-afternoon tint--in our house on new years eve there were candles, each individual very simply espousing their gratitude for yet another year of life on this planet holding the white stem of the candle chin-high as if it were some sort of microphone. After each narrative the person would swivel clock-right alighting the wick of the person next to them until the room was aglow in a halo of candle light and spilled stories--the ritual often ending with a prayer of peace, a hymn for tomorrow, a wished-for song for the world to come.


So, with lighter and candle stalk in paw, allow me to illuminate the unsinged tassel of the wick and spill out the overturned jigsaw narrative of my heart reminiscing over just what the fuck happened these last twelve months:

It was the year in which my rattled third shift eyesight would optically snap out a poloroid of my Uncle Larry escorting my youngest sister Jenn down the slim carpeted arteries of the aisle. The year in which the integer of the trinity now heralds the numerical parking meter of my existence. The year in which I stenciled the number of pages composed everyday with a different colored marker into the white Gregorian decimal cube of the calendar above my desk at work.

The year I tell everyone that my heart is occluded in metaphorical tupperware as if awaiting a transplant from the broken cogs inside my chest to the inky footprints of a page seeded in pasture of emotional exposition such is the nature of my craft.

A year when I added nearly four hundred single space pages to a novel that is simply long enough.

The year of partying every Friday night with my dear friend Scarlet. Being snowbound the weekend of Valentines day and posting a thirty foot self-engendered mural entitled "INVOCATION TO THE MUSE" on the east side of my apartment wall. The mural consisting of app. sixty playboy centerfolds, flitted together like semi-glossy pornographic Lego's. Over the discourse of a snow-occluding weekend I would scribe the name of a different ex-girlfriend or transient lovers across the sheen of the paper. Watching the name of the woman I once proposed to, the proverbial one who got away; the high school sweetheart who now has a mortgage and an SUV and three progeny; the woman who broke my heart before I found myself nearly dead in an automobile accident the next day; the ravishing song of my spiritual companion, the pulse and color and fragrant hieroglyphs of her name, now collated in a glossy fresco--a thirty foot quilt bannered on the far side of my wall during the week of Valentines day.

By the end of the week long project I was lounging in my apartment, smoking an ONYX cigar when I witnessed my mural topple like maladroit stage curtains falling down at the end of a highschool thespian production of YOU CAN'T TAKE IT WITH YOU.

It was the year of watching Devin Hester sprint and dance into the endzone in the opening return drive of a sodden Miami superbowl, calling up my friend minutes later and bating him to perform his signature disgustingly divine heterosexual male oriented Ric Flair WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

The year of hearing the radiant verbal chimes of Greta Enzer--a Unitarian, a healer, writer, actress, teacher of theatre and beauty to LA's inner-city wayward teenage age souls; a fellow wayfarer who (fuck) 14 years earlier I sat across from at a dinner-dance in Stratford-upon-Avon, the town of Shakespeare and listened acutely as she told me about her sister, who later, I would learn, would die in a car accident--the chorus of souls spilling out their every story in streams of wished for slants of winter sun.

Greta showing me her brilliant script about a woman who fucks her boyfriend while she is one her period before slathering the blood of her own body on her lovers face in post-coital feminist delight.

The year of Harold and Maud.

The year of 11 percent IPA's. Samuel Adams Brewmasters collection, Dogfishhead, JW Dundee craftpack, Hobgoblin, Deleirum, North West Microbrews, extreme beers catered from a Scottish Dean of alcohol at Rhodells, bitter, hoppy, stouty, eternal, lathering the box seats of my palette in a liquid coat of joy.

It was the year of WHEELS OF LIGHT and VIEW FROM THE CENTER OF THE UNIVERSE and Juice diets. Kabbalah. Hard core meditation with emphasis on the frontal lobe. Dream symbiosis. Deepak Chopera. Yoga. Getting off from work at three in the morning and running my fucking ass off across the arteries of the west bluff. The psychology of Carl Jung. The year of dalliances in shamanism and devotions in quantum physics--watching the metaphysical realization manifest itself in the appellation of her name perching like a half-open window sill or whimsical wardrobe in front of me, every stitch of her handwriting splashing into the shore of my poetic desire, her name, little waves, foaming and cresting across the sand barge deep within the swells of my soul.

The year of BORAT and RAMTHA and wondering what it would be like if they were both stalled downriver in a canoe.

It was the year I was humbly asked to be a visiting writer at the University I still owe thirty-thousand dollars to. The University I graduated Cum Laude from and have never opened up the manila envelope in which my diploma arrived. The university I know work third shift for--the university that (unbeknownst to them, but love the distorted irony) called up the house five hours after my fathers death and innocuously inquired for a Financial donation to augment their sordid trust fund.

A failed campaign.

My cousin Larry, the rock star, the brilliant beer-addled fellow black sheep of the wayward Bozec bloodline. Larry who was living out of his SUV and battling substance abuse. Larry who ran off over 2000 flyers to in early April protesting the (now intact) Illinois smoking ban: THIS IS NOT AFGHANISTAN:SAY NO TO THE SMOKING BAN!!!

Waking up in an aluminum nest of beer cans and cigarette butts in the peach-lining light of an early spring, sitting on my back porch with his guitar singing songs from ten years ago, breaking into a chorus of Jonny Cash tunes:

"Well I woke up Sunday morning with no place
to hold my head that didn't hurt
...And the beer I had for breakfast wasn't bad
So I had one more for dessert"

The year I was supposed to see Michelle again, at a wine tasting in Des Moines, but we failed to somehow find each other in the field of SUV's and license plates.

The year of chronicling dreams. The dream where I endured in the guest room of my mothers abode where I am watching my father die and asking Abdul'baha to save him, to which he stoically refused. The dream where I am attacked by a dog-like creature
in a county house by my girlfriends very Harry Potter Mrs. Weasleyesque matriarch--the country house I later was invited to move into with my brother Hale six months later.

The year in which I found myself wading inside the torso of a woman I blogged about two years earlier, a woman who is a breast cancer survivor, making love in the under a pocketed sprinkle of July stars, the pilsner moon and slashes of heat lighting accompanying us as if in applause.

There's no sort of sex like sex with a woman who inspires you and who has grappled death by the labels and told him to fuck off for a few more decades.

And trust me, nothing is fucking sexier than a woman who has trounced her fears and now cannot stop smiling and laughing at everything around her.

The same woman who pretended she didn't know me the night of her sisters bachelorette party. The woman who now wants nothing to do with me at all.

The out of body mediation where I find myself in reverence in a throne room telling an escort of God that I cannot bow before him alone if the person I feel one with at all times is not saddled next to me, bowing, worshiping, smiling in spiritual deference as well.

The year where my cool sister and Brother-in-law hosted a thirtieth birthday party and almost every relative showed up with a different microbrew or imported six pack in paw. My Uncle Larry giving me two glass steins and a 12 pack of sumptuous SPATEN, which I jested to his chagrin that he probably purchased at Aldis.

The dream where I go into the earth and find my father alive and crying and tears and where we embrace--the gruff scent of his chin and cheekbones pressing against the right side of my tear saturated face and simply hold him.

The year of opening day at Comiskey, casting incantations of peremnial impotency all season long as the White Sox bullpen continue to act like a Bengali whore on an american military base and "blow another one." Watching Peoria-blood and all American class act Jim Thome belt his 500th homer in indelible fashion before circling the slants of the south side diamond, fist clutched, arm alighted, circling in spumes of cheer.


My dearest Esme--the eyelashes that launched more poems than Helen did ships to Troy over a two week period in the early haze of summer, the lavender dusk of a June evening over the eye-liner of the west replete with (seasonal) seventeen year cicadas chirping out own anthropodal oratorios in the background. Esmeralda who met me at the bus station in Joliet with her hair pinned back and a kick ass green dress that slid over her cinnamon skin-limbs of her petite poetic frame like quarter notes skimming across a the lithe rungs of classical sheet music. The rich chestnut tint of her eyes blinking in unflinching curiosity, as if trying to sop up every quark of her experience on this vessel deemed earth one astonishing blink at a time.

Esme who knew more about me than I did her when she arrived suitcase clasped in the slender tips of her fingers on the steps of my apartment early last June, her last night in P-town, en route to demolish the social hierarchal configuration of the planet in South Africa. Esmeralda who told me she has a surprise for me, mandating that I idle in the marijuana-incensed hallways of Motel six while she took a minute to "get ready," and as I waited before I entered the hotel room with thirty candles and the B'52's blaring out of a laptop--the spilled hiccup of her smile wishing me a happy birthday. Still I remember sitting in the bathtub with our clothes on (our Garden State moment), resting with her head in the center of my chest, the arteries of my heart catching dreams as they nocturnally dripped from her forehead like metaphysical ambrosia.

The year I nearly (remorsefully riddled now in retrospect) gave a copy of IRON JOHN to a bum at a bus station who was drinking water out of a dirty 2 litre bottle of Mellow Yellow, clad in an old tattered military coat, living all hours at the greyhound depot, hoping that he would look up into the gaseous wing of the bus as it hushes open to espy the limbs of a woman who mysteriously echoed into the night two years prior. Every night, he shows up at the Bus Station, waiitng for her to perhaps return.

The year of multifarious can't-enough-optical-fucking-viewings of WHAT THE BLEEP:DOWN THE RABBIT HOLE. Two copies arriving as if from disparate quantum realms on my door matt (even though I only ordered one)--the author intuiting these dual metaphysical tablets as gifts, giving them to the two wayfarer he feels most would most benefit from their insight and glow.

The year when my best friend from first grade was found murdered in his SUV, a bullet
planted in his abdomen, his eyes stalled in unblinking trance.

The year of God bless the eternal soul Danny Dalquist!!! Watching the casket containing his earthly coat sail through the mouth of St. Marks cathedral, a wooden vessel levitating on the bony pillars of fellow pallbearers. The crimson clad shirts of the soccer team lined up in a plank of lower-chinned bodies as if playing zone defense against the inevitability of an ill-timed death--the sorrow of pain of the loss of a fellow brother. The six-figured university president doing her best ersatz Jackie O. imitation. The sight of my brother Drew wreathing the thick athletic slant of his arm around a teammates neck in a dire time of sober need and loss.

The year where a former student of mine was shot and killed, probably because of his sexual orientation.

The year where I was more or less drunk all the fucking time. A weekend past naught
where I failed to ferry a 12-pack cube of liquid scepters on the blades of my shoulders (sometimes two or three), as if the alcoholic Pharaoh of my psyche were instructing me to erect a great pyramid of hedonism while my life organs whittled and hardened into sand.

"If eternity is understood by endless temporal duration

The year of youtube: staying after work and watching lectures by Joseph campbell and Richard Feynman. Laughing my ass off to vintage all in the family. Dancing around my cubicle to the popped-syncopation of late-80 bowed out power ballads.

"But by timelessness."

The year where Doctor Wynn said that the results from my MRI came make negative and that I was a healthy young man and if there was something I was hanging on to from my past that was coercing me to spend all day worshiping Bacchus by pouring insidious amounts alcoholic libations through the hatch of my lips then I should really think seriously about seeking a psychological crutch.

The year of my brothers.

The brothers who always got my back. Year in year out, what a blessing to have healthy male creative coevals, semi-hedonists and fellow virile sports saturated lovers of life. Helping my brother John move to a posh Naperville apartment one late spring afternoon and endless male-oriented discourse over the wayward pursuit of sports in the city of Chicago. Throwing back amber gauntlets of PBR with Nick the writer, brother in the pursuit of all things literary and truthful in the swelter of early august. The year of dapper David Thompson, hearing his insight and pursuit of the aesthetic, the bacchanalian, the beautiful, the culinary, the eternal.

The year of Dave Hale always having my back. Picking me up when the skinned-knee of my spirits are low.

The year of fuck the chicago cubs going to the playoffs!!!

Through the tides of light combing into the shoreline of the planet in waves--the sight of a heavy sun in winter stranded in a sea of moonlit serenity.

All this and I still don't know what a fucking kiln looks like, Sarah.

"If you wanna sing out, sing...."

Though the highlight of December was watching your eyes close as I kissed
the light snow of your winter cheek and then wished you a Merry Christmas.

"then he who lives in the moment.."

"there's a million places to go just know who you..."

"Lives eternally."

This is my torch from the eclipsed 12 months passed to you dear reader. I extend the pangs and perils, my sin and my savior, to your outstreched wick. My request for your new year is simply: Make the life you are currently leading the life you feel compelled as fuck to live. Give it all and ask for no return. Pour everything of yourself out in an effort to strecth the lips of a perfect stranger out in a meadow of smiles. Dance as if there is no tomorrow.

And if you find yourself holding her in your arms. Never fucking let go.

Happy new year, my faithful readers. Make your life joyful and unique. Cause there's a million ways to go.

You know that there are.

That time of year thou mayest in me behold.....

There is something about the morose overcoat attire of a rainy autumnal day that is lulling and serene and perfect--the sort of day that makes you pause as you internally ponder the beauty and mystery and overall inscrutable lost joy of existence. The sort of day where you look out into the wet cement lining the front of your building and find leaves shaped like variegated blotched palms smashed into the ground as you note the whistle and zip and syncopated tap of precipitation, light sheets of rain drizzling in invisible treble clefs of moisture wreathed around the back of your neck, temperature buoyed in the mid-fifties, the earth ready to nod its chin as if bracing for the inevitable goatee of frost found in the first week of November, when the sun begins its brisk topple from the steeple of noon to the silhouette and tint of a four-thirty pm dusk--the jaundice domes of traffic lights skirting across the planet peering into the elongated stretch of night as if searching for something irreparably lost--something that will never be retained.


A rainy day in autumn.

In the morning or in the late afternoon before work I sit at my computer furiously banging out sentences as if trying to make the alphabet come. As if trying to feel the quick splash and release of sound and motion of human narrative scratch into my flesh before hollering out my first name and then falling limp from exhaustion.

I wear tattered jeans and my white-sox cap (backwards). Some mornings I get back from work at 3 am, crash for three hours on my makeshift futon nest (don't ask), rise at six and attack the screen. Some mornings the oak top of my desk is littered with the amber esophagus necks of beer bottles and dirty coffee cups. For some reason I started smoking like a mother fucker over the last month--the vagabond author encroaching the coast of middle-age (NEVER!!!) trying to tame and harness his dreams. If I look into the brow of the monitor I can see the letters of her name finger scribed into the settled dust of the computer screen, like a castaway mapping out gargantuan alphabetical shapes on the shoreline with his feet hoping an overhead aerial vessel will find him before the yawn of the nocturnal tide effaces everything he has ever wanted in this world.


I realize earlier in the week my incentive for writing now stems from the tautology of perennial hope that I want to wear jeans to work when I'm thirty-five. The first two months of classes is always arduous on my body--a spill of late night hours, a series of student lectures, I become almost completely nocturnal, going to bed in the insufferable heat-nauseating swelter of mid-august and then waking up in the last week of October, an indentation to the glass frost of winter, wondering what the fuck happened. Wondering where the fuck I am. The first week of classes I barter my bohemian blood-line and become some sort of suit-toting corporate genuflecting power-point presenting toady--a charlatan with gelled hair and a dry cleaning bill.


My father would have celebrated his 60th elliptical skip around the nearest solar orb deemed the sun this last November 15th. November with its sheets of stalactite rain and day lights savings. November with its hard tufts of frost found in patches in my mothers lawn as her wayward son perpendicularly sets the skeletal rungs of a ladder against the brick side of her kiln-shaped abode, fishing the gloved tips of his fingers into the overhead lips of the gutter, removing a confetti hand full of leafy bouquet foliage, watching as it sprinkles into the pond of forgotten green below.

The first week of classes I give power point presentations (replete with Twinkies!!! Everybody loves Twinkies) to emotionally overtly over-taxed college students. I attire my limbs in chic raiments, a barter from my spiritual brother who lives in Des Moines. It's the closest dalliance I get to achieving a two-step tax-bracket increase tango with corporate America. The life I surely would have performed a kamikaze nose-dive into had I grown up five miles differ in any navigational direction and had not a tattered and fortuitous copy of Leaves of Grass snap at the tips of my fingers junior year as if the yawp and cidery beard of the bard himself were trying to teeth into the sickly white interior of my palms before scribing out what appears to be a sonnet, a tear, a half-breath, a distilled moment, all inked in the crimson jelly of my own blood.

At the incipience of each new year I forget who I am. Forget what the eddies of a fresh paragraph looks like as it is steam rolled off the paddles of my wrist and massaged into the footprints the page. I trade in the frissoned jolt and linguistic live stock of my chest for duties in the office, a change in sleep patterns. I monopolize more time worrying about bills. I phone my student loan shylocks and joust for a lower monthly payment--realizing that higher echelons of education is a commodity, a business, a fuck you up the ass with a corporate carrot for a couple of years, making me feel that paying for a purported education you busted your ass working full-time on the side to receive (while still feeling vacuous and Hungry inside) is equivalent to excavating my fathers casket, only to glaze it with a few drops of windex for lustre before incurring the tomb into the planet once again.

....But those weeks I don't know who I am but pretend that I do. Nodding my head as I watch my summer fling dissipate into the heather of autumn, commiserating with my chin, that yes, we are different people. Yes, we are good at sex but not good at dating. Yes, you are going through a divorce and need world enough and time just to inhale. With my albatross-assenting tie curtailing the circulation of my neck like a noose, I march into work, staring at my dusk reflection in tint of the door, unaware of the paunchy eyelided rubicund hummel-cheeked janitor outside on his smoke break. Refusing to make eye contact with this man who dresses in flannel, whose beer belly
bowed over his torso as if saying grace at an all you can eat truckers buffet. His hair was the color of an overturned ash tray and he proudly stowed a pack of cigarettes in his left chest pocket as if they were pack of playing cards.

As I waltzed into my palace of employment he says hello to me with a rough nod of his head. When he sees me he looks as if his face is going to treacle out into a triangle of tears. I'm selfish and solipsistic and don't want his shit. Don't want his flannel and bucket of disinfectants and mock-light sabre mop. I don't want his shit. His bowling trophies next to his framed GED in a basement apartment in the county, a taxidermied deer proudly arched above a fake fireplace where everything he has ever accomplished is displayed.

I don't want his shit, me, with my suit and my dossier and my business satchel. Don't want to hear his story. Don't want to juggle his psychological pangs. Myself, a would be writer, to engrossed in the corporate grind of my presentations to even look him in the brow and listen to this old mans story.

***

His face was the color of a pencil eraser as he approached me later in that afternoon, back at my desk. He walked with a slight limp. There were a sprinkle of
what appears to be tears dotted below his own sockets.

"I saw you in the office at your mailbox." He said. "You wouldn't by chance happen to be related to an Arthur Von Behren?"

I look back into the furrowed cardboard brow of the janitor I had deemed myself to proud to chat with before my shift.

"Yes," I say. Telling him that my name is David and that Arthur was my late father, reaching emerging my arm out like a lever from a slot machine into his direction hoping to make the acquaintance of the man I had earlier coroanted myself unworthy to associate with. As my hand remains momentarily lanced into his flannel shirt and beer belly torso, waiting with anticipation a first name and a handshake by association the man looks at me and slowly grapples my outstretched arm with both of his hands. He then begins to cry.

His name is Bob and it turns out he was worked as a janitor at the gradeschool my father taught at for thirty years, encouraging third and fourth graders to read and write up to two weeks before his death.


Bob is still holding my hand like a white homecoming rose as he tells me that my father was one of the most beautiful, caring men he had ever met. He called my father a prince and then tells me that he is honor to meet me.

My dad was the meekest individual I've ever known. He was the social antithesis of every hedonistic verity his son espouses. He never drank. Did not smoke. Lived his life with one feminine partner who completed him. He drove used shit cars. Helped anyone who needed assistance. Gave everything he could for the spiritual pulse which guided him somehow since birth.

He tithed. Taught Sunday school. Never question the belief in his faith.

He prayed.


...and yet he never judged. He was never above listening to a janitor and encouraging him. He placed a value and merit to every human life he encountered.

I think about my father, how we would have been sixty this past November. IN the nearly six years since the garment of the earthly flesh abandoned the refulgent skeleton of his spirit, he has missed the honor of escourting both of his daughters skirt down the aisle clad in winteresque sheets of white. As I walk into the bruised purple sky of the east correlating perfectly with the spattered yolk of sun, peach in hue and burning incessantly, a thermonuclear galactic hearth, snapping out branches of light to a watery bulb 90 million miles away, wondering just where the fuck the sprinkled stain glass light of autumn will shine like the dome to a stage light next--wondering, as I pad my pockets down for a smoke, as I buy another round of alcoholic nectar for every one, as I loose myself in the transient bliss of a moment with an individual whose smile reminds me of something I lost a long time ago-as her eyes fall into the pasture of her cheekbones-wondering where all this will lead me next, smiling even through my exhaustion at the possibility of change and growth and love, thinking about my father as I walk into the electric uncertainty and wished for joy of another autumn.

The next time I saw Bob, outside on his smoke break, I smiled and asked him how life was treating him.

His face seemed to light up as he tapered an ash off his cigarette and smiled.

God I love this shit!!!

http://www.bleepingherald.com/nov2007/hubble

A cantata for the season

It is autumn. The hard breath of the planet daintily skirts across the quad at the university where I work whistling out a swath of leaves the color of broken stain glass across the cement lip of buildings and the sides of stationed vehicles, autumn offering it's raked seasonal tithe via incinerated back yard bushels alighted at dusk, autumn coating the west in elongated streaks of light rippling overhead into cranberry and copper sunsets before winking out, pinning the planet beneath a brisk tent of northern stars, the temperature of the earth free falling into a whisked frost of late October.

It is autumn.

The arrival of leaves littered in entrance ways to buildings like stale confetti--the orchestration of the earth christening the success of summer, the wayward maturity from last spring and the free for all fall of the atmosphere into a frozen tundra of glass and ice, the cold December morning where the earth is the color of a doffed wedding dress and your limbs wade in the raft of dreams looking for warmth and flesh to hold in the hush of night and, if you are lucky, the sight of her eyes and the morning static of her smile

It is autumn. The televised din of HD fireplace offering a muffled roar of the masses while thickly geared titans endeavor to shuffle the oblated geometry of a football over a metric configuration of lines and inches. The flaring orb of a pumpkin jeering back at you in a chiseled smile. The stolid crunch of scarlet leaves the color of rich menstrual blood. Cardboard colored leaves staining the planet in an alchemical refulgence of joy.

At night I walk, often nursing a cheap cigarillo, ambling beneath the illuminated globes of the same street lights my shadow first flanked across a decade earlier. Thinking about my writing. Entertaining my crushes--the woman with the wild hair and boots whose been gyrating around the tip rail of intrigue, whose face lit up as if with halogen pores when I gave her my shopping bag at save-o-lot so she didn't have to endure the train wreck line of patrons (she's religious and I wonder what she thought with my cubes of stacked beer and discs of frozen pizza and carafes of gatorade, all piled in my arms as if I were participating in some sort of corporeal game of Jenga). Thinking about the woman whose lushest curtain of gray hair (induced from an infinite spill of hours lodged in the ceramic studio) inspires me to no end. Whose forehead and cheekbones look like an unblemished thatch of country snow on Christmas morning as I try not to blush while musing over our botched
verbal dalliances.

Another autumn.The skeletal rib cages and sylvan rungs of the naked tree limbs marches across every meandering distillation of your thoughts reflecting back to previous autumns--the autumn you witnessed the reflection of your short hair in a square of tint of an airplane passenger window as the aerial vehicle lowered itself into the gravity of the planet and you gazed past your reflection waiting for her to meet you at the terminal. The autumn before your fathers death where after church and Sunday dinner you would watch the first quarter of the Bears game with your father before going outside in the center of the manner and volleying the football back and forth, your father, only 53 years old and in purportedly good health, oblivious of the cancer rollercoastering through his cells, oblivious that this particular autumn will be his last.

Thinking about the autumn where, the Saturday morning after thanksgiving I turned around and saw everything I have ever wanted in this planet traipse through the doors of my local Starbucks--the morning light splash of her smile spiritually complimenting my longings, escorting my every wild pulse and wayward wanderings--the impetus of my every late-night literary binge. The blessings. The joy. The eternity.

The earth clad in the attire of autumn.

I continue to walk across a canopy of autumn, spraying my thoughts into nocturnal tint of my thirtieth autumn, the planet two-stepping with the nearest day star 90 million miles away, still dancing nonetheless, in a familiar elliptical pattern and slope.

I strut past the house where I grew up. The house where a woman who one terse spring day emptied the breath out from the hydrants of my lungs now lives inhabiting perhaps the very bedroom where i encountered Whitman and scribed sophomoric stanza into battered notebooks every afternoon at the helm of a oak desk. Snatching a green leaf from the sweet gum tree my grandfather planted in the front Yard in the house that raised me. The tree he planted in the Autumn before he died when I was only six months old. My grandfather, lover of nature and himself a painter, who worked shit jobs after the second war, who loved Jesus and trees and struggled with debt. The tree on Sherman avenue is always the last tree on the block to turn any hint of copper. It remains green and rich usually into the dead end tea-bag gray of late November. The leaves, still emerald and rich on Halloween. A miracle sweet gum tree with spiritual bark. The tree which heard my moms morning prayers and supplications for twenty-five years. The tree that refuses to wilt and turn to gold until the last possible moment before a sea of white blankets the avenues of the planet.

The tree of life.

There is a Light that Never Goes Out: A Blogg for Mark-Andrew Feaster (pt.1)

Still bloggin' out a hymn to the ten individuals who have changed my life. The following was originally composed via blogger 6-2-04 (less than 24 hours after jasna's AVA was scribed three years ago) yet was never published on blogger. That's one of the cool things about being a writer (ain't it esme??) is that, you write something you think is total shit, then via the emotional tumult and addled-alchemy of life, realize that it's not that bad.

Here's the first part for a lad whose love and encouragement and overall joy of being has given me quite a lot over the years.....

...and there is music. The pervasive shaft of stringed intonation that rises above the tempo of the page and hurdles into the dimmed corona of night. There is music; feminine octaves flirtatiously flapping away from their lower-clefted counterpoints before momentarily melting into one harmonious vessel. The conductors arms continue to flutter and sway, heaving the orchestral barge from the necks of groped instruments. He is pulling away. He is crescendoing. He is biting his lip for affect. For perhaps he knows, that after the sound has been culled from the soil of the stage, a bitter silence shall then ensue, painfully outstretching the limbs of time.

On stage there is London in the spring. A lavender sunset drips over the Thames river, smearing the clouds with a sweet plum cobbled aura. Music sprouts in perfectly branched passages, smooth, the way her body is smooth, the way the Thames is smooth, the way youth opens up and unfolds into adolescence; the way adolescence pecks its way into maturity; into reality, into a world that had always been, a world that is incessantly shifting, orbiting, dancing, bobbing a galactic nod, swiveling into the opposite direction of the nearest star.

And there is London in the spring.

Mark-Andrew is the protagonist of my youth. He bears angular-Versace features, nonchalant thick lips, gaunt chin that slightly protrudes from his visage like a ski handle, eyes that hide in them a fleck of emerald. He has blonde hair that was fashionably unkempt when first we met in 93; hair that faded into a singular dish-water ponytail in '97; hair that was trimmed shoulder length when last we said goodbye, January 2, 2000. He is three years older than me, which means that he'll be thirty (!) in October but at the time we met, when I was fifteen and he was eighteen, he seemed to be humbly awaiting coronation by James Dean as the coolest mammal ever to be called a human being.

We first met April, 13th, 1993, in Newark, NJ. We were the recipients of a contest sponsored by a swanky New York magazine called Young Columbus--a program which takes around 120 hormonally addled 12-18 year olds from across the United states, clusters them in New York City for a day, shepherds them with Ivory league counselors, wraps them on a 747 and gives them a full-out two week crash course in European culture before sending them back to their 120 respective US residencies to (hopefully) finish school; encouraging them to make a positive impact on society, labeling them as both Young ambassadors and global citizens.

The contest was a big deal and I had tried to win it the previous two years, working very hard on my speech and presentation, praying very fervidly that perhaps, my own self-centered guilt-ridden variation of a heavenly monarch would allow me to win, just this once, win this special trip. I worked on my oration, I feigned intellect. I learned how to tie a tie (sort of) and used manners. I pretended my nose was a kazoo and allowed sloppy french sentences to slip out of it and when the day of the contest arrived; when I would leave junior high mid-morning clad in a Sunday School suit and arrive at the banquet and shudder and engage in small talk with the judges and latter, give my speech--only to find out at the reception afterwards that I had, once again, struck out ignominiously. Had perhaps swung at an errant pitch when I should've been more patient. Only three kids from different vectors of Illinois were elected. The trip in '91 and '92 was to Paris. The furthest I had been preceding the trip was probably Wisconsin Dells. I couldn't tell you what constituted turbulence if a jet thruster fell in the dilapidated football field behind my highschool.

But in '93 I somehow won. I connected with the judges. I wrote a speech that seethed with alliteration and unalloyed cheesiness. "England, mythical land of pageantry and princes, Castles and Courtly conduct...yadayadayada." I made my speech about England sound more or less like a travel brochure for a B-rated Cruise line. But I won. After all this time of dreaming, I was finally leaving, I was packing up a suitcase larger than my desk at school. I was posing for a passport square down at the post office. I was traversing to that place that had always been promulgated on television (mostly on late night PBS hoity-toity masterpiece theatrical histrionics); that place I had never been to.

And there was Mark-Andrew.

He was seated behind me on the charter van outside of the terminal at Newark. I was fifteen and was almost obsequiously self-conscious of my appearance. Every morning--in an effort to emulate the heart-throb semblance of Jason Presley and Parker Lewis-- I fogged up the vanity frame in my parents bathroom frosting copious amounts of Aqua Net on my lathered skull, drilling an aerial hole in the O-zone layer directly above my head--like a sliced through nimbus. He was behind me in the charter van. Older boys. The kid from Texas with the baseball cap and the stern-mule countenance and leather cowboy boots. Preppy short haired polo-shirted Cinnamon toasted tan lads form the east coast towing luggage by Coach and Louis Vuitton. He sat on the back of the van, comfortably clad in a Suzanne Vegan 99.9 Fahrenheit degrees t-shirt, an expensive camera noosed from his neck, dangling like an infant suicide in the center of his chest. He looked so much like someone I had seen before; someone I had known before. His blonde hair slightly crept and spidered off his head.

Perhaps all true mysticism/spiritual recognition really is is that, when you look at someone for the first time you know everything about them. You feel the juddering magnetism that emanates from the sockets of their eyes, the allure of their persona, actuating the Schopenhauer maxim that you and the other are somehow one.

Requiem for a Coach (pt 2)

Coach Ricca was hollow-cheeked gaunt-eyed with a searing look of a gladiator stowed in the pockets of his eyelids. A buzzed shock of red hair adorned his scalp like a skullcap. He was a vessel of optimal health and a dominating competitor. While in his late-30's he could easily average five minutes per mile over the discourse of a 15k. I had spotted this athletic titan twice, pedaling his arms and legs in inimitable stance, the chug of his elbows in metric tandem with the smooth lapping rhythmic sway of each foot gave him the appearance of a spiky-haired human sail gliding into a dazzled sprint across a cement pond of the earth leading a herd of numerical tank-top frenzied long distant road runners through the shuttle of the finish line. He taught geometry and calculus at the south side high school I was to attend and he coached the sport in which I was expected to excel.

He was Coach.

That summer I continued to push myself into an envelope of sweat and grind. When I formally met Coach (at a cross country picnic in the park that will forever be branded "the woods between the worlds" in the ardor of my poetic psyche) his hand extended in my direction like a military salute. Thin-lipped and sincere. A man of his word and stature, he welcomed me into the cadre of athletes sporting crew cuts and knee-length shorts. There was all-state swimmer and ripped abdomen Joe Lontelli. There was straw-headed lanky strut of Hans Peacock, Gabino Andretti, his Spanish hair matted back a la pompadour sans the resurgence of a scarlet cape or bull as we kicked it before practice in his pimped out ghetto-crafted late seventies Buick, the front of which was rigged so that the hood would nod in thumped syncopation with the massive sub-woofers potted in the trunk. Together we kicked it, blaring the street soliloquies of House of Pain and Cypress Hill, waiting for our fellow teammates to arrive in the copper-haze of dawn when the athletes would form a circle of bodies and perform rote calve and thigh stretches, massaging out the aches and swells of our legs before breaking out into a lithe cantor and then strutting our limbs into a working steady pace, our heads bobbing with sweat and motion like human-sized pistons as we scaled the perimeter of Madison golf course.

There was demure-eyed Jose Martinez, the needled hair Mexican senior captain on the varsity squad whose countenance availed a gentle smile and reassuring nod at the fledgling underclassman pushing themselves through the swelter of a mid-august fifteen K, where Coach Ricca could oft be found running stride per stride with the leaders of our corporeal train of accelerating hoofs and akimbo limbs, glancing down in to the whiteness of his wrist feeding us our mile split, offering insight into the posture of our arms, correcting the rhythmic intonation of our breath, telling us when to conserve our energy and when to kick deep, mining the dregs of tenacity and endurance left inside of your flesh, as both your upper and lower apparatus spume into a windmill accelerating yourself over the wet morning dew of the earth, in search of nothing short of a finish line and a few deep swallowed breaths of stilted air thereafter.

More than any other high school sport, cross-country focuses acutely both on the individual's sole performance as well as the performance of the team overall. Untanned limbs of flesh lined up across the white hyphen of the starting line like a sentence of bodies about ready disarm it’s formation of meaning, splitting into a sprint of individual shaped letters at the sound of the starting gun. The better the performance of the higher ranking of the team, yet of the eight man varsity squad, if one runner has a bad race or is lagging behind, the team as a functioning unit suffers a deduction in points.

Half my lifetime ago, in the late July, early august sweltering heat of 1992, cross country was my whole life. I sat on the oak canvas of what would two years later serve as the desk where I would compose my first poems looking out the white square of my bedroom window absorbed by the aching shades of copper dwindling into light lavender sprinkled with autumn dusk, contemplating my future, contemplating what lay ahead, listening to the Cure's WISH (wishing impossible things), reflecting on the interior wetness a first kiss yields on the anatomy of an adolescence when your body bends behind the tinty shells of your eyelids as you experience the awkward cut opening of your mouth in hers--if only for a filched second of eternity.

The lazy-eye river town where I have exhaled the bulk of my existence is called Peoria; the genital wart of the Midwest--a discourse in paralysis; a hushed lipped boot-legging hymn to working class stagnation and wizened wished-for dreams. The high school where I attended was less of a melting pot and more of a multicultural mold-inflicted burrito--a few french fries short of an academic happy meal. My sophomore year Manual high boasted the lowest I-SAT scores in the state and the highest teen-age pregnancy rate in the nation. By my senior year they had a "Bring yer kid to school day." No shit.

Looking back fifteen years ago, I realize that the disintegration of our team was spawned by social gravity (thinking of the bleach blond uppity twats from Richwoods high, on the opulent north side of town). That a kid, an athlete, a loner, a drifter, a fucking dreamer, functions differently, sprouts differently, develops differently, grows differently depending on the social-soil from which his seed of individuality has been planted.

I remember Gabino's 14 year old girlfriend coming to me freshman year telling me that she and her boy friend had just broken up and she was three months pregnant and didn't know what to do. There was gang activity, fights in the hallway, manipulation of grades for athletes who played more recognizable sports such as football or basketball. there was our corpulent principal's bobble-headed nod that Manual was the best kept secret in the state and that everything was fine.

There was watching Hans Peacock get booted from the team for attending a local protest. The sad sighting of Jose, the former captain, in early February, overweight and with dreadlocks, dropping out of school, informing me that his high school girlfriend was pregnant and that he was working full time shit jobs to support her.

Coach Ricca never lost his equipoise, his expectations, his resilience or his underlying adamant belief in his students that they could make something of themselves. His belief in his athletes to overcome, to achieve, to give what they could of their bodies, both mentally and physically of themselves for the body of the team, for the colors of the Institution they represented.

There was my own inner demons and foibles flooded with typical teen angst riddled attention salivating late-night masochism. The interior of my rattled nervous system was coursing with more anti-depressant pills than the mawkish-eyed audience at a Morrissey convert. There was introspection and solipsism and the salty taste of tears skiing down the contours of your face at night, wondering if perhaps, the experiment of my adolescence and of my life was botched from the outset and that I had somehow failed.

(Too many kids deal with this shit, and where do they go, when they are naked and drunk and can't find someone to hold them?)

In running too, I felt like a failure. Despite achieving respectable times, I slogged through Freshman year on a stress fracture inflicted on my right leg. Sophomore year the bone-fissure appeared on opposite left leg. A year later I bowed out of the thrice a day routine work-outs hoping that lighter workouts would mean less injuries. I completed the season without the season breach in my femur but sadly my times remained stagnant, unchanged. The inability to watch my dreams of being an accomplished long-distance athlete timely actuate themselves during the static discourse of those four post-pubescent emotionally addled years of high school, where so my individual development somehow gestates, creating the present day creature you become.

There was my father not knowing what to do with his beret-wearing clove cigarette dangling son, a copy of ON the Road or LEAVES OF GRASS perennially tucked under the pit of my arm like a fallen army flag cosigning parental defeat.

Gradually the realization that I wouldn't get any faster. Gradually the realization that running would not be in my future and that I had failed. By senior year, despite coach Ricca's one-on-one's and his encouragement, his stops at the house to talk to me and his unflinching belief that if I chose so, this would be my year, despite the fact that it would be my third year in a row of being captain of the Varsity squad, I didn't even go out for the team.

My career and dreams of becoming an athlete had completely calloused my ability that I would ever make anything of myself. Sporadically I started scraping up the white sand of the page at night with little inky-tears, hoping that maybe, through scribbling and shoveling around the dunes of my emotional mitigating self-worth viable human archeology, I would unearth just what was inside of me and somehow (hopefully) understand the perpetual pain and joys of the ever pulsating world around me.

It's been about 13 years and every time I pick up that shovel and start scribbling out what's left inside of me, I'm astounded as fuck by what (and more imperatively who) I find deeply stowed beneath the porcelain flesh of the page.

My late father taught me a lot about sports. In baseball he taught me never to strike out without first swinging the bat as hard as I fucking could. To never "strike out looking." In running ( and in life) he taught me to always cross the finish line with my head down as if in prayer and with my body astride in full sprint. Regardless of any sport I would play, regardless if the season was seeped in the caterwaul of glory or dotted in a string of agony and ill-timed losses my father vehemently insisted that after the last game of every season--after the final strike was called and the last time out transpired, Dad would tell me to simply go up to the coach, extend my paw and thank him for his time and mentorship.

My cross country career was punctuated in cowardice. I never thanked Coach for the hours we spent together, a galloping rehearsal of my pending road race through the sometimes lonely cross-country hills and arduous up-hill mile-splits of life. I never thanked him for the constant reassurances and gruff chin nods and attaboys. The shrill of the bell senior year was accompanied by interior psychiatric drug-hazed musings on how I might reach the next classroom without skirting past coach Ricca in the hallway.

Well Mr. Ricca, it's been well over a decade but here's me stretching out my appreciative palm teeming with nothing short of life changing gratitude and thanks in your direction.



(the future author--far right in towl, gleaning some last second insight
from his Coach. circa autumn 1993)

Thank you. Coach.

Reflection of Joy (July 6th, 1997)

The author & poetic company on his 20th birthday July 6th 1997, from left-to right, David "I've always been there for you, man" Hale; Brooke "I forget yer' last name now that yer' married" Ferraro; Matt; Margot Wllard; Patrick "The Great" Mullowney, the copper-headed author; Misty Gardens; Goth Dan; Precocious Stephanie. Bottom row Alexis (now dr.) Jordan...Summer of 1997 and everything is new and exciting and your whole life is ahead of you boy.... Pure Joy...

Just 120 whisked calendar months ago I spent the sweltering heat of July1997 stationed in front of the jutting metallic tongue of the cash register at B. Dalton Booksellers, inside the rattling central air conditioning of the mall, routinely scanning the bar codes for mass market and paper back bestsellers, fueling up on caffeine and cigarettes, staring at the lazy heliotrope of a summer sun at dusk wildly contemplating how it must feel at the end of the day to write fiction for a living, to crack into the white dry-wall of the page every morning splattering the bulk of each page with continents and splotches of lettered shadows the way dawn breaks into planet, with peach-hued blinks and splashes of nectarine from the pink-eyed east and then vision and then sight.

It was ten years ago to the day. Bill Clinton was seven months into his second term as president, nocturnally drooling over a young intern by the name of Monica. The Bulls had just won their fifth NBA championship in seven years. Logging on to the static sunrise of cyberspace entailed ten minutes of rickety white noise followed by a gulping modem tittering warble followed by more pauses and frustration and password changes and verbal "fuck-it's." It was possible ten years ago to walk fifty meters across any random populated area in the United States and not find yourself being surrounded by a swarm of human beings each with their neck tilted into their collar bones droning mantras of materialism across a dimension of wirelessness.


Ten years ago a pack of cigarettes and a gallon of gas were under two dollars each respectively.

The dual steel tendrils of the World Trade Center stood tall as an intractable testament to consumerism and culture--on early mornings if viewed from cross-town resembled a two fingered sign heralding the promise of peace.


Ten years ago Princess Di was traveling the world, squeezing the hands of victims with HIV, visiting land-mine amputees in third world countries finalizing a romantic weekend in Paris come the end of the following month.

It was the summer I dyed my hair blonde with a little help from my best friend David Hale's sister Becky, who read the directions off the side of the box in her garish high-pitched nasal din as I genuflected both knees in front of the bath tub as if in prayer bowing my neck and head into the linoleum basin as if grieving over something lost. It was the summer we drove around lost without an atlas listening to monorail techno elevator muzak of Moby and the sweet gruff guitar chords of Ani Difranco, driving through country roads, fast, smoking cigarettes not knowing where we were going but succumbing to the overall golden often Kerouac-inflicted feeling inside that we there already--that our destination and overall purpose in life had something to do the fact that we were pulsating, that we were thriving, that we were driving down the gold sprinkled dust of country roads flanked on both sides by thick emerald staffs of corn.


That we are here.

The summer of hemp necklaces and cigarette ashes. the summer I saw CHASING AMY
six times in the theatre (cackling aloud during the lesbian make out scene when two elderly crones walked out, seemingly appalled) . The summer of multifarious late night viewings of Pulp fiction and Linklater's finest and Dead Poets Society The summer of clove cigarettes and french kisses when your eyes wisp open in medias embrace only to espy her forehead and eyes hushed like petals, the bulbs of her eyes backstroking behind the pink cave of their lids, as if part of her body is wadding in a pool of emotion and that somehow your lips keeping her balanced...keeping her afloat.... the elongated interim between 19 and 21 when the bars are elusive and you find yourself loafing in coffee houses bent over a splattered corpse of opened notebooks fraught with inky veins and metaphorical arteries--the battered french fry poems of youth, trying to make sense of your life by laying tracks of words together and then reading them aloud--certain of your genius, certain of your place in life.

The summer of Walt Whitman and Hesse and Jack Kerouac, always reading, always seeking, always staring into the alphabetical pond of the page and hoping to see my reflection peeking up towards me. The summer I lugged the technicolor bound travel-luggage sized INFINITE JEST with me every where I went--as if it were a concordance for postmodern scripture. And James Joyce. And Nabokov. Writers I was sure would teach me. Writers I was sure would help me grow.


Ten years ago today was a Sunday. I arrived at the bookstore and hour and a half earlier to open up, balancing the cash registers with the papery green shingles that somehow sadly dictates our existence and place in life. I wore a tie to work and sweated in the July heat, even though the mall where my bookshop was located was heavily air conditioned. Although my profession was books, it was still basic retail--still bartering over priced commodities, still catering to the financially endowed caprices of the consumer. Still toadying up to strangers to coerce them to purchase something that don't really need so that our store could reach its corporate quota and that I would still be employed.

Memory is like a long elongated red carpet kicked from the side from a celebrity limousine like a tongue. So when I reminiscence ten years into the stream of yesterday I can see myself on that day, coming home from work, stopping off for coffee at Starbucks, arriving home, thumbing loose the constrictive pentagon from beneath my chin into two uneven jet streams of silk.

I see myself now, a decade past expired, arriving home in the Buick that would be stolen two months later, standing behind the shoulders and occiput of the brassy headed lad who ten years ago arrived at the cement lip of the house where he was conceived to celebrate twenty years on this planet with family and friends and with people he loves. The oxygen and residue of memory illuminate those whose bodies have failed them like a spotlight. When I enter the sylvan french doors of my old living room (the house where Swissy-Missy ironically lives in now) and if I squint past the back of my own twenty year old head I visually discern the acrylic wig of my grandmother is sporting, her sweet breath and cigarette paper white skin, oblivious that the cancer will reel her from all of us in a little over a year. I can see my mom, her hair darker and spumed into a gelled perm. I can smell and hear the scent of our family schnauzer Lady (deceased) snapping her grainy goatee when my friends enter the living room.

I can see my father. His beard and bespectacled scent humbly nodding at my bohemian friends bartering witticisms and artistic anarchy and small talk. The beautiful beard of my father--the twenty year old wannabe writer, completely oblivious that the he will spend the bulk of the preceding decade of his life with the bone architecture of his father underground, decaying--his spirit and humility and generosity still resonating. Still singing.

This is life ten years ago. Patrick Mullowney, my playwright friend from NYU is telling anyone who will listen about the play he is composing. David Hale is romping around the living room laughing with heavily accented yawps. Sprite sized Aleixis is playing with my dog. There is Goth Dan who is sitting in the corner, nodding, trying to put on a Sisters of Mercy Cd. There is Misty Gardens who studies philosophy and ebullient lilly-eyed Stephanie who is a sophomore at IMSA.

They have all come to celebrate.


Misty clanks shut the bathroom door to change out of her work clothes. Two weekends ago Misty and I watched the dip of the June sunset lower itself into the manhole of the western sky together. We had driven in the country after work chain smoking and talking about part time jobs and life. We kissed and held each other in our underwear as thick barges of drizzling ionized light slowly dwindled into copper and then into tint and then into crickets and stars. Misty is leaving for Campaign in a month and has made it very clear that dating seriously is out of the question. For our own good.

Hale, being the jovial best friend he is, has made it lucidly clear that since things with myself and Misty are moot for the remainder of the summer he plans on stepping in and showing Misty what a real David tastes like. Laughing afterwards in his thumping guffaw, asking myself if impotency has set in on the genesis of my new year. When I mention to Hale that Misty isn't into having anything serious, she is just looking to have a good time Hale flashes a smile, echoes out his signature whew-hoo and tells me straight up that he thinks he has just met the woman of his dreams.

More friends continue to wend their way into the living room where I took my first steps. There is Matt and Brooke whose face is so white and gorgeous that is looks like a tear fallen from the socket of a china doll. And then there is Margot, the women I have been pursuing since Misty Gardens, entering the door, smiling.

Later that night in celebration we smash tables together at the coffee shop we congregate on a daily basis. There is a freight train full of Bohemians and witt. patrick Mullowney's laughter is ricocheting around the restaurant. Hale is smoking a pipe, leaning perilously close to Misty's shoulder watching her face blush in laughter after every retort.

There are clove cigarette and there are endless carafes of coffee. When my friends inquire about my birthday I blather off puddles of poetic dross. I quote Milton's How soon hath time, the subtle thief of youth. I plagiarize Charles Highway, the uppity smart-ass protagonist in Martin Amis' THE RACHEL PAPERS, quoting how 20 may not be the beginning of adulthood but it irreparably constitutes the end of youth.

Looking back now, ten years, I see a sea of joy, the laughing heads of those I love all stationed around smashed together at a table at our favorite coffeehouse that was torn down six years ago. I think about the potential and the love and the yearning and the future each individual seated around me, swathed in a plume of smoke, thought that he or she might inherit.

I think about the people I have lost in the last ten years. I think about holding my fathers hands on his death bed, singing Lutheran hymns to my grandmother in her last hours.

I think about love and the women I have loved. The ones that have hurt me and the ones I live with every day and the ones who fill me and complete some part of me.

Looking back at the congregation of young hedonists and artists, I turn my head now and think about the next ten years. There will be loss and hurt and pain.

There will be death and seperation and arguements that seem so fucking signficant at the time that will later transition into pettiness....

But there will also be laughter. and growth.... and Love....

and plenty of wished for joy in the narrative song.

the writer age ten (tanned)

Requiem for Coach Ricca (pt 1)

There is perhaps no greater monosyllabic word in the English language connoting such solemn respect and veneration among the heterosexual north American ESPN-sports saturated cheap domestic beer beast renown throughout the planet as the male species than that of the word Coach. You can feel the towering respect such a word carries with it as you bite down into the side of your cheeks prior to its pronunciation, your lips forming what looks like triangular offense as your tongue lunges stagnant near the sky dome of your mouth, a raw breeze of sound kicking it's way out from the locker room of your lips, like a homecoming football team locomoting it's way on to the field, the final "ch" sound mirroring the foaming chant of a highschool stadium Friday nights in late autumn under stalks of stadium light and a brisk dip in the temperature.

Coach.

The sideline silhouette. The clipboard. The stop watch. The whistle. The stoic-chinned countenance demanding both respect and results. The flashed look of seriousness or disappointment expressed from the distance of the court or field. The spewed mantras of seasonal performance expectations and self-goals. The one individual whose status will marshal your talent, fledged your attributes into accolades and sweat the living sin out from your brow. The one individual who will coerce your anatomy into pushing itself past the mental hurdle of what you thought was possible.

The Vince Lombardi's. The Coach K's. The no-non-shit antics of Scott Skiles (I have a photo of Scott Skiles scowling at me from above the metaphysical bleachers of my writing desk; the words NO-SICK DAYS NO NON-SHIT....GET TO WORK BOY!!! etched above.)

The thick lipped Charlies Wies' and implacable Bobby Knights.

The one individual who will create you. The individual who will immortalize you. The individual who will lead you to glory and weld you into the man of character you were destined to somehow become.

The one who will lead you into the sun.

COACH.

***

The first half of my life I was an athlete. I ran seventy miles a week, my coltish limbs kicking a blurred cycle of motion beneath my torso as both my arms formed tight right angles gliding into a steady sprint, coursing the curtain call of my puberty and early-adolescence in a weighted series of quickly snapped footsteps and exhaled pants as I jetted across the topography of my youth in a steady gallop of limbs and arms skiing past the grandiose thick eye-lash windexed houses of Moss Avenue, residue from a bootleg era, sprinting around the coiffed perimeter of Madison golf course careful to avoid the lumbering silhouettes of late-middle aged golfers lugging their stalks of clubs like a fresh kill. I ran circles around the affluent timed sprinkler lawns of West Peoria, each street guarded with a sentinel of mini-vans and the chiropractic spines of basketball hoops. I ran through the gangsta-graffiti'd flotsam and jetsam of the south side, unaware that the thirty seconds it took to dip down the hilly gravel slope of either Western or Ligonier served as a sociological fissure, an arbiter of class and status discerning if you would make it in this world or if not. I ran through the leafy foliage of Bradley park, the golden timeless leaves in autumn breezing behind the back heel of my stride in a flurry of wisped crunches, across the Chinese bridge, the cratered amphitheater barren of it's summer stock tent come the genesis of fall, when high-school students don jerseys and flimsy shorts and cleats after class and take to the hard soil of the earth, a herd of athletes all running cross-country, all roving their feet over the scalp of the planet, accumulating the velocity to push harder, to run faster to quash the blinking hyphenated digits of the clock at the finish line: to pour out simply what is inside of you and find out what is left.

And then pour that out too in a draught of sacrifice and sweat.

My father ran for leisure, noncompetively. He ran everyday after standing in front of fourth graders. He boasted a waddle to his run and always ran with a demure smile sketched into his face. When I was real young I would run with my father. I remember my father pretending to have invisible buttons on the top of his curved fist he would press, making jet engine thruster sounds, claiming that they were accelerators and could make him run faster near the end of the finish line. One of the joys of my dad (as my sister Jenn pointed out in his eulogy) was that, near the end of the finish line when we were young and he would run with us, he would always let his young kids take the lead and finish ahead of him.

An emotional memory for me was dad, telling his eight year old son during the half-way point turn around of their four mile route was that, "Every step after this gets you a little bit closer to home, son. Just a little bit closer to home."

Running was deeply seeped in the blood type of our family genes. Our summer weekends were monopolized chartering the family station wagon wending our way through the arteries of Illinois highways hitting up a variety of mid-summer festival road races peppered across the state, accompanied usually with my Aunt and Uncle and their four slim tanned daughters--all boobless and lanky and all runners. My Uncle ran marathons and was a beast in local 5k's. I can remember running my first four mile race when I was in second grade. By the time I was ten I could run a six minute mile. By the time I graduated from eighth grade I was on the verge of breaking the junior high elusive five minute mile and was the second fastest miler in the state for my age.

I played baseball and Tennis during the summer. Laced up cleats and swatted around a soccer ball employing only the symmetry of the lower portion of my body in the spring and fall. Stayed late after school and worked on draining my free throws in the winter. But it was running where I had my gift. It would be the twin stems of my legs that would ferry me into the future as an athlete. The bone and tissue and muscle of my interior leg and thighs served as my promising rod and staff into a heralding future of promise. The crack of my ankles in the early morning--the rote machinery of my torso, the lapsed rhythm of my breath, the feeling of sweat trickling down my brow--the feeling of pushing yourself past a interior-manacled barrier of what you thought was impossible.

***

I met Coach Ricca the summer of 1992, exactly half my lifetime ago. I had just graduated from eighth grade. My individual mile time averaged out near the low five minute single digit area code. I ran three times a day. A three mile skid in the morning. A vigorous hill workout under the hammer of midday sun at noon. And a pleasant 4-6 mile trod at night. I kept tallies of my daily workout evaluations, performed squats and dips in my bedroom to the music of Guns-n-roses and Nirvana, plastered note cards heralding never give up maxims all over my bedroom wall. I can still remember how the earth felt that summer and spring. Can still remember the grainy taste of caffeine splashed inside my lips, trying to be more adult and not scowl at the then revolting taste. I remember the the cool melody of the sky at 5:30 in the morning when pastel shades of light pink drip into a morning haze of copper in the east when street lamps fizzle into a pre-dawn hush as I kicked my way into the future scaling the latitude and longitude of the city that had reared me for the first decade and a half of my life. It was the summer of the '92 Barcelona Olympics. I pushed myself harder. Poetically plotted how I would seduce fellow precocious Olympian Kim Zmeskal (it was hard to write a poem that rhymes with her last name). I mapped out a trajectory of personal goals set for myself over the next four years; how I would be damned if I wasn't a world class athlete. If I wasn't employing the calcium of my bones to their optimal capacity I simply did not wish to be.

At night I capitulated to the caps of both my knees, the dual bony knobs functioning as joints for the plants of my legs; the vessels that would ferry me in my quest for glory. I prayed with the fervor of saints angels that my own biased waspish variation of a God would assist the fuck out of me.

It was that summer I met Coach Ricca.