Without students, a school is a lonely little place. Sure, the halls are quiet and I’m getting work done. But there’s no energy, no kerfuffle.
Let me rest this summer, and then bring on the kerfuffle.
There’s a man on the corner, preternaturally creepy. He was a creep when he was five years old, this is his destiny. As if to make the inner creep explicit, he chooses to wear trench coats and parts his hair heavily down the middle. His smell, if you get too close (sometimes you do), is too sweet. Like bananas. He is a banana man.
He says, “I’ll turn you on, sonny, to something strong.”
You are tempted to respond because the words are familiar to you in some sort of deep and primal way. Only your friends are running ahead and shrieking and they have the money for the now’n'laters, and your mother told you not to anyway. I’ll turn you on, sonny, to something strong. Who said that? Who said that?
He says, “You want something special? I can turn you on.”
Really? Really?
He tells you his story. He’s from Nebraska. He calls himself a flatlander. He rode out across the country in a bus. When he was seven he saw his first miracle: Jesus Christ appearing to him above his bed one night and telling him to walk out into the snow toward the North Pole. Heaven is the North Pole, said Jesus. The creep says he mixed up Santa Claus and God all the time. “I came out west, I did the opposite,” says the creep. “I guess I’m in hell.”
The creep lives above the A&P. He has too many goldfish in not enough bowls. They swim around and around and bump into each other, silver and orange flashes, desperate to escape the confines of the bowl that they don’t know is there anyway except as a boundary. The way anyone understands a boundary, inside or outside it. The apartment smells fishy but still sweet, like the creep.
What are you doing here? What are you doing here?
The creep lights a cigarette and seems to be waiting for something. You have seven quarters in your pocket, all destined for a quart of milk. There is only half light, as if someone had split the sun in half. The cigarette smoke fills the room and hangs there. You can see it. You move in it, and there’s a path behind you.
Now that you think about it, the words he said — I’ll turn you on, sonny, to something strong — is from a song about being blinded in light, you remember it now, and you’re aware that you’re in the creep’s apartment and that he is not doing anything but smoking, and even that is enough to make you different forever. You are different forever. It has happened.
Summer can now start.
Give me a reason.
We had two Labradors: Maggie and Rocco. They were brother and sister, litter mates. They had never spent more than a day apart in their lives.
When Maggie died that Christmas, Rocco spent months shuffling around the house, claws clacking on the hardwood, looking for her. In corners, beneath tables, as if she were hiding, as if all this time, she was playing a game.
Even after my parents moved and the house was new and there was no memory of her there, Rocco wandered around sniffing for Maggie.
She’s here somewhere, he thought. One day I’ll find her.
In London, they stayed at a rag-bag hotel in Bayswater called the Julius Caesar, its glass front door buttoning with bullet holes like pores. The room had one bed; he was game but slept on the floor. The first night they bought English lager and a hunk of Stilton, drank the beer warm and later took turns bending over the rim of the toilet. In the morning, she woke up first and used all the towels.
They were backpackers, dumb with luck and a wriggling lust that had not yet surfaced. Instead they illusioned friendship.
At Piccadilly Circus, they stood by while a pigeon was crushed under a double-decker. What was left of it: a flat gray-feathered wallet. One wing stood up like a salute. She was horrified; he laughed like this: ha ha ha ha ha.
They were poor enough to walk everywhere. When it rained they wandered through boutiques and pretended interest in scarves, umbrellas, English DVDs. That day in the British Museum, all day. That day in Hyde Park stretched out on the grass, hungry and burning for each other, and the rain began to fall, and he held her hand and traced a map of the Underground there.
At the hotel, they took turns in front of the space heater but got colds anyway.
An empty week — he still camped on the floor but at night they sniffled together and touched their snotty fingers and of all things, she wanted the long length of him beside her but couldn’t bring herself to say it. Finally she opened the fold of blankets and he crawled in next to her. His body fit the shape the her body made. His left hand rested somewhere above her bellybutton; his right arm dead under the weight of her head.
They ran out of money in ten days.
He went to Australia, she went to California, each seeking warmer air. Four months and now he is standing still on a street corner in Sydney, his eyes filled with southern sun, because her English cucumber smell has come out of nowhere even though she is on the other side of the world. Four months and now she is stuck in Los Angeles traffic and thirsty for gray air.
So: morning becomes like anything else, un-novel. A year ago, early was noon. Now sunrise is more common, and early birds, and newer street traffic, idling morning commute buses and the dump truck.
If only I knew where the cat was.
Three words for thee: proud man’s contumely.
(I know it’s a cliche, Shakespeare, but it’s such a good cliche. Plus he made up the cliche. So he wasn’t a cliche. I’m going to say cliche again. Cliche.)
