23. Sweet 16

You’ll never guess who I just got off the phone with! (Or is it from? Check that.) Can’t believe it myself. To make sure I’m not asleep and dreaming I’ve pinched my and slapped face, twice, hard. Stinging pain removed all doubt. Not asleep and dreaming.
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Sit at foot of bed with racing heart and spinning head. Temples throb as does another unmentionable place - I’m at a loss to know what to make of it all. The call, I mean. What we said just now to each other on the phone. RF told me she just turned 16. Sweet 16 and never been kissed. Not by me, at least. Not so far, anyway. But now, since that call, it seems anything’s possible.
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While it’s still vivid - and as accurately as my scrambled mind will allow – what follows is a transcript of our intercourse (a little pun I throw in there, free of charge), the salient parts, the gist, if you will. However, I feel compelled to point out: It isn’t actually what was said and felt at the time, but more my perception of what was said and felt. More than that, it is only a memory of a perception. An interpretation of a memory of a perception – relative to what actually happened, which, of course, we’ll never know.
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And so on.
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Unwinding it here will help make sense of it I hope, help me believe that it really happened when I wake up in the morning, believe that my fantasizing hasn’t finally gotten the better of me. (Gotten? I’m sure I use that word all the time, but suddenly, for no reason I can think of, it just doesn’t sound right. Gotten - is it a word? Mental note: Check Dictionary. It’s like saying the word ‘pyjamas’ over and over. Eventually it loses all meaning and you begin to wonder if it really is a word at all.)
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Lying face up, back on bed, staring at the ceiling, avoiding thinking, saying the sound ‘inga’ out loud, repetitively, as you do if you did TM™ once and don’t know what to be doing with yourself now, if you know what I mean, when the phone rings. I get up and go downstairs to the kitchen. Reaching for receiver on the wall, I introduce it to my ear, saying ‘inga, inga, inga’. A disconcertingly familiar voice breathing down the fiber-optic cable, snaking its way through my cochlea and into my head. A smoky sound.
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‘Hey, Leo. What d’ya know? Rachel here.’
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Mouth a-jar, brain a-buzz, heart a-thumping, Adam’s apple a-bobbing - all I can get a hold of is the name: Rachel. Rachel Rachel Rachel Rachel Rachel… what does it mean?
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Don’t ask me!
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Rachel Ferguson? The Rachel Ferguson? Thoughts shoot into overdrive –
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couldn’t be must have dialled the wrong number but no she said my name how did she know it was me maybe she’s calling a different Leo –
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Stiff as a laid flat mannequin, sandwiched in the spongy embrace of Surprise and her evil twin, Shock, I panic and begin screaming internally, frantically. Calm down got to play it cool -
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cool wet grass cool wet grass… Cool yeah… that’s the ticket -
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think of The Fonze - think of Mr Spock - or is it Dr Spock?

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No. Dr Spock’s the guy who wrote that baby book… HEY! Why are you wondering about Spock when Rachel F is on the line?
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Suddenly my voice returns from the ether and gets back into its box. ‘Rachel Ferguson… Oh yeah, Rachel. Hi. Howzit going? What’s up?’
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‘Oh, the sky, the clouds, my nipples, airplanes…’ She sighs drowsily. I wonder if she’s really said nipples or whether it’s just wishful thinking on my part. I’m going ask her to repeat herself but don’t get the chance. She asks how I am, you know, since my recent visit to the girl’s room. All right, I tell her.
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‘Cool,’ I say to back it up.
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‘Good. I told you you’d be fine. Gosh! Leo. That was the first time I’d seen you in years…’
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Yadda yadda yadda. Without an interjection, I let her talk a lot of small talk (not that I can get a word in edgewise), and lose track of time, lost in her words. Not in what she’s saying, really, but by the sheer sound of her voice. It’s kind of low, in a good way. Dark and dusky. Sultry. It has a unique quality – soothing and stirring at the same time. A sensual massage for the ears. She intimates how it’s kind of magical, ever since turning 16 – and how she feels like a whole new person, and that she’s seeing many things very differently.
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‘I just don’t feel myself anymore, if you know what I mean?’
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I thought that maybe I did know what she meant...
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Ask her what she feels now instead!
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but still can’t trust my hearing. Is it just a bad line? A good one? Provocative, I muse. Perhaps it wasn’t implied, just my inference or something.
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Cool. Just be cool.
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‘Funny you should say that,’ I say extemporaneously, clueless to what’s coming next, ‘but when I saw you last week in the hall, that’s exactly what I was thinking: how you’re like a completely different person and all.’
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‘Really? Way cool!’ A squeal and a giggle. ‘‘Cause when I saw you I thought the same thing. Like I saw you in a completely other kind of way. Or like I saw you for the first time or something. You know?’
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On a higher level I thought she was talking fresh air, basically. But, on a lower level, I felt I understand her. Simpatico. Something in her voice makes my ears burn: the beat of her words on my drums is having the most curious effect. Part of me, afraid of heading into this uncharted territory bails out right then and there, leaving the rest of me to fly on Automatic Pilot.
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Please place trays in the upright, locked position, fasten your seat belts… take up crash position… there is no pilot.
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‘Rachel?’
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‘Yeah?’
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‘Anyone ever tell you that you have the most beautiful whisper?’ I want to whisper to her, but, instead say, ‘What I want to know, is… is that old saying true?’
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‘What old saying’s that?’ Sounds like she already knows. I can hear her smiling.
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‘Sweet 16 and never been kissed,’ I tell her. Muffled sounds from the other end and I fancy she’s blushing now: picture her biting lower lip, pacing bedroom floor in shiny red shoes.
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‘There’s all different kinds of kissing,’ she breathes. ‘What kind do you have in mind?’
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And that was pretty much the flavour of our conversation, and it continued, taking on a life of its own, growing more peculiar with each sentence, all the while bringing me closer to my wildest dreams. Had I been the author of our dialogue, I wouldn’t have written it any differently, couldn’t have written it any better. It climaxed (ha ha!) in Rachel discovering that I am soon to have my 18th birthday - which got her talking about things like nature, the birds and bees, men and women, birthday suits. She ended up saying that she’d show me hers if I’d show her mine. Not acquainted with this kind of thing, my empty tongue fumbled foolishly for a response. The urge to doze off into a catnap fell upon me like a warm blanket. It was a battle to keep from slipping into sleep.
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What would the Fonze say at a time like this?
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‘Heyyy!’

22. Pen Poised

All this writing’s put me in mind of the time I made my first and last family announcement. Over dinner one Saturday evening about a year or so ago, I stood up and proclaimed: ‘I’m no longer going to be a DJ’ (eliciting sighs of relief from the folks and a look of disappointment from Judy). ‘I’m going to be a writer.’
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Jack and Mary failed to respond. Judy said it was fantastic and that I should go for it! (Whenever Judy says the word fantastic, or excellent, or wonderful, I picture them in italics.)
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‘Fiction or fact?’ Mom ventured cautiously.
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Hadn’t thought that far ahead yet. ‘Fiction,’ I said, deciding on the spot.
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‘Hobby or career?’ Dad ventured in a mildly inquisitive tone.
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Hadn’t thought that far yet, either. ‘Career,’ I said,
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And with that for the next few months I wrote like a greedy man getting paid by the word: the more I put down in a stint, the richer I felt. The fact that I hadn’t the faintest notion of what I was doing did not deter me. The sheer excitement of the idea was enough to keep me going. Without preparation, consideration or aforethought, ink flowed free and easy and I dived in from a great height headfirst.
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I’m writing with that same pen now. The ‘good-luck’ gift Judy gave me later on that very night. A wonderful gesture, really, one I’ll never forget. Brings a smile to my face whenever I think of it. The fact that it wasn’t just something she’d gone out and bought – that it was her own pen, her most cherished pen of all in fact, taken from her impressive collection of varied writing implements she keeps on the desk in her room – was what made the gesture resonate so sweetly.
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We bump into each other in the hall that links our bedrooms. She’s coming out of the bathroom as I’m going in.
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‘Well,’ she says, leaning in close to let me in on a minty secret, ‘I just thought, now that you’re becoming a writer...’ She holds the sparkling instrument out to me, bidding me take it, and when I do, she doesn’t let go at first.
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‘I want you to have this pen, Leo,’ she whispers. ‘To help you. Guide you like a compass to the inspiration you’ll need along the way, on your odyssey.’
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‘What?’ I ask, wondering if she’s kidding. She likes kidding me.
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‘No, wait – you’re odd odyssey!’
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‘My odd oddity of an odyssey!’
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‘Yes. For those barren times in the Waiting Room when you find yourself drawing a blank. Sitting solitary, staring at the ceiling. Waiting for the Time that’s known to all the artists gazing at walls, anticipating inspiration’s lightning-strike, the flash of creativity… inviting a visit from the Muse, willing words to come and ink to spill again.’ She smiles then, bold and broad, fully aware she’s just done her older brother’s brain in, and winks whimsically.

‘I’m giving this fountain-pen to you, Leo. From time to time the ink will run dry. You’ll run dry, too. Don’t forget to put in a new cartridge.’ A sharp elbow in the ribs draws a wince and an out-loud laugh from me.

‘Emptiness always precedes the Muse, little brother.’ Her grin turns into a big smile and her mouth opens wide as she joins me in giddy laughter.

Whenever Judy shares a profound gem of insight (an almost daily occurrence) she knows she comes off sounding like an older sister setting her younger brother straight. It’s become one of our private jokes. In a way, I guess, at certain times perhaps, she probably does feel like an older sister, but she’s 2-years my junior - and a decade more mature. It’s weird. She’s also a whole lot prettier and smarter than me, I’ll gladly ‘fess up. Where I look older than my years, she looks younger than hers. Also in sharp contrast, she wields an intellect fast as a bullet, sharp as a razor - has a memory like a big-headed elephant, whereas I have trouble remembering what day it is.
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Reading my thoughts as only she can, Judy lets go of the pen and places her hand on my shoulder. ‘Make a date with Tolstoy, kiddo. Read what he wrote about writing, then you’ll understand.’ Then, on bare feet she pads down the hall and quietly closes her door, leaving me stunned and rooted to the spot, holding the shiny black and silver good luck charm she’d pressed into my hand, pondering her peculiar disposition, wondering where she got her ideas from, her funny little flashes of brilliance, marvelling at what an interesting little humanoid she’d become over the past year, ever since tossing off childhood’s pinkpyjamas and slipping into teendom’s shortsummerskirt.
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I couldn’t help but watch as some unseen force, strange and awesome, began reshaping her body and sharpening her mind.
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Thinking’s dangerous, like drugs – one thing leads to another. Like playing Barrel O’ Monkey’s. Thinking about Rachel F’s got me to thinking about Judy. Shaking my head now in the noticing of how I’d been growing more and more fond of her. Judy, I mean. I remember how it exasperated me no end at the time, and how I tried in vain to rationalise it away. Since when does an older brother feel anything but contempt and embarrassment for his younger sister? I thought of the kids from the neighborhood and at school who had younger sisters - and I had my answer: Never. It was wuss. But, back then, it just wasn’t a factor. Something about the way she was, I don’t know. Trying to put it into words is like trying to swat a fly with a string of overcooked spaghetti. Funny and futile.
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Judy’s just easy to like or something, to respect and admire. She has a way of making you feel good, making you feel like someone significant. Like a hero, maybe. I read in one of Dad’s self-help books one time: The secret of being interesting? Be interested! Judy seemed to understand this intrinsically, to know it without being aware of it. You could talk to her about anything. She was interested in everything.

21. Thinking About Not Thinking

And here I am writing I don’t know what, watching a tidal wave of neatly formed letters like boats in the Navy blue sea of ink. In a font resembling Comic Sans.

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Birds twittering have replaced dog barking.
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Exhausted and exasperated by this out-of-the-blue outpouring, I stare at the page and consider the one’s I’ve just deflowered. Words from a David Lynch movie I saw last week at Mikey’s comes to mind. I can almost hear them now, whispered in stereo, in a begging dark voice conjured up by Isabella Rossellini. ‘He put his disease in me.’ That’s what these pages might say if they could talk.
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Look at all the words! This has to be a record. I haven’t spoken – or written - more than half a dozen words at a time ever since The Accident.
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The music on the radio is bugging me. Time to change the channel.
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This song – it’s familiar. From a movie or something. I know the words and sing along, with a slight change to the lyrics:

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I feel it in my bowels

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I feel it in my toes

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Death is all around me

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And so the feeling grows...

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Fountain pen noses forward, struggling stoically across the page, bleeding trails of shiny blueblack blood.
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I am going to die soon. My number has been called. I’m up to bat, but no three swings this time – I’m already out for the count. Death is in the neighbourhood, and we still have that date. When? I’m not sure, but it feels like it’ll be soon enough. I’d guess that the odds of seeing my 18th birthday – nearly two weeks away – are, at best, fifty-fifty. A toss of a coin.

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A roll of the die.


Tired now. Time for Sleep. Until tomorrow then… if I’m still here.

19. Flesh In The Inkpot

I’m beginning to feel a little more like myself again (or less like somebody else) but damnit! I fear my grades this year. Have this sinking feeling I didn’t do well in Geography. Like Math and History and Art (and practically every other subject save English), Geography does not come easily to me. In fact, it doesn’t come at all. How are you supposed to know where everywhere is when you don’t even know where you are?
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With every page I tear from my Far Side calendar another day stares me in the face, another 24-hour box and I’m still I’m not used to it. So sure I’d be gone by now.

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Still here. And days go by. They sneak up on you. Paranoid and self-pitying. I’m pathetic. Like a soldier on his belly feeling hard done by, I crawled through the minefield of exams, trying to do my best, under the circumstances, as I was.
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Laughable. I’d studied long and hard only to find I’d been studying the wrong things. And there’s a lesson there, right? Studying is one thing: studying the right things is another thing all together.
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Completely.
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No doubt all the examiners will conspire against me. Failing is inescapable. For the record, here and now let it be said: I tried but couldn’t take it as seriously as some of my teachers (and Dad) would have liked. Take my math teacher for example. He’d actually have you believe that your life won’t be worth living if you don’t get a good grade in the subject. Mikey says Mr Tully (a mad Irishman no less) has gone a theory too far. ‘One more wafer-thin theorem, sir? - and his mind falls into itself, like a house hit by a wrecking ball. He fought in ‘Nam, you know. Still suffers flashbacks and all,’ Mikey told me in earnest.
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‘Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean that everyone isn’t out to get you,’ I informed him.
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Jim Morrison once lamented, This is the strangest life I’ve ever known.
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I know what he means.
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18. Senseless Ceaselss Sentences

Birdsong and blue light: harbingers of a new day dawning.

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Poked head around Dad’s door a few minutes ago to find him conked out on top of his bed fully dressed - not having bothered to shed clothes or shoes or get beneath covers. He was sawing logs to beat the band: jagged Z’s flying from his airholes like sparks. Even now with head submerged in pillows I can’t seem to drown out the drone...
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Which brings me back to where I started: here in bed, an outcast from the Land of Nod, writing in this advanced birthday present, auditorally challenged by an intermittent ticking and/or clicking (and often the ragged barking of a dog) that may or may not exist.

Trying to

Time  turns  to Trickery  when
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the   Sandman’s  on  Vacation
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Seconds    last    for    Minutes
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Square Hours  lose their Shape

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Even thought writing poetry’s not my thing – any wonder? – the four lines above came out of nowhere flashing across mind’s sky like forked lightning. Wrote themselves. Don’t know what they mean. Not quite a poem, really, I guess, but a promising start nonetheless, even though I’ll more than likely never finish it.
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I have an acute aversion to endings – and a perversion for adorable bottoms. Female ones!
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Stomach, tight as a steel drum, pangs with hunger. Time to check on Dad, so I’ll grab a snack while I’m up. See if he’s all right, that he’s still breathing and all. Sometimes in his sleep, he forgets to breathe, like he’s dead for about a minute, then, suddenly, Autopilot kicks in, and he gasps. It’s a fairly rare condition he’s got, I read in Reader’s Digest, and supposedly not too serious - not life or death anyway – unless you fail to catch your breath. The grumpiness the morning after a breathless night is the only downside, when he’s so irritable and groggy and you know he didn’t catch a wink of sleep and he has to drink coffee all day to stay awake.

Discovered a device online last week, it comes in a little black case and you hook yourself up to some tubes before going to bed. It senses when you fail to breathe and somehow gives you a kind of jump-start.

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There are pages and pages of glowing testimonials from people all over the world. I’d like to get him one for Christmas, but it’s not cheap. Even if I start saving right away, I’d have to ask for my allowance to be doubled. Either that or get a weekend job.
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Anyhow, if he’s asleep, I think I’ll relieve him of a cigarette. I’ve got that funny taste in the back of my throat like an itch that can only be scratched with nicotine. Mikey calls it a nic-fit. If there’s more than ten in the pack, I’ll steal two. If I get caught, I’ll tell him that I’m only trying to lengthen his life and to shutup and go back to sleep.
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God, I wish I could shutup and go back to sleep.
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17. About Moving

Don’t feel like going home after my workout in Jim’s Gym just now, and as the library’s open late again this evening, I think I’ll drop in and take a load off.
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The place is empty save for the bespectacled librarian sitting behind the check-out desk over by the exit. The lenses in her tortoise-rimmed glasses are so thick that I think of an owl every time I look at her. An owl with cataracts. I wonder how she can see at all. The tip of her long, pointed nose goes back and forth across the pages of the book she’s holding close to her face. A bony finger, cold as a popsicle, traces a line up my back. It sounds weird, I know, but I’d bet my last buck that she isn’t reading with her eyes. It’s her nose: she’s smelling the words. Sniffing out meaning.

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I turn away, disturbed, and listen to the silence shining out like a flashlight in reverse, lighting up the nothing that’s there in the darkness. I’m slowly coming to realise that this moving to Ireland business is for real. My life is about to change again, in oh so many ways, my independence seems to vanish in the haze. Beyond all recognition.
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Again.
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Help!
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Was I just innocently thinking Dad was working his jaw for the exercise? Yes, and why not? Lost count long ago of all the times he’s said we were going to move ‘back home’. Been saying it as far back as memory goes. But this time, the signs are screaming his seriousness. Already the house is on the market, and just yesterday he gave his boss the bullet. I thought he’d just won the lottery he was so excited.
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‘I just walked right up to the old bastard and told him he was fired!’ Dad wailed. ‘Then I turned my back, stuck out my butt, and sashayed out of his office with this stapled to the back of my jacket!’ He smiled electrically, holding a sprig of dead mistletoe up for my inspection. ‘I’m going to frame it,’ he said.
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We passed each other on the path between the frontdoor and the gardengate this afternoon when I got back from a run. I saw the For Sale sign for the first time. I gazed at it, knocked off balance, and noticed that it was listing to one side. I pointed this out to Dad.
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‘The sign’s about to fall over,’ I said.
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He stopped in his tracks and turned his attention to the wooden stake in earnest consideration. ‘Yep.’ He scratched his head. ‘That’s a bad sign.’

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I thought I heard him snigger under his breath as he walked away. I don’t know where he went… but he’s still gone.

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I don’t believe in shrinks, but – and as much as I loathe to say it and all – I think Dad should be seeing one. I try to talk to him every now and then, whenever he’s around that is, which isn’t much thesedays, and when I ask where he’s going to or coming from, he just says things like taking care of business, tying up loose ends, this and that, you know.

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But that’s just it: I don’t know. Sometimes I want to talk to him about stuff, but serendipitous synchronicity never seems to click in. And, to be honest, I’d be afraid of making him cry. Don’t misread me, I mean that in a selfish way: there’s nothing that’d trigger me quicker than to see tears rolling down his face.
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I cried once already, but I didn’t get it all out. There’s more, I know. I don’t think I’m ready yet. To cry. I don’t think Dad’s ready yet. To talk.

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And there’s nothing but time between us.

16. Spanking The Monkey

There are all kinds of ways to look at things, Uncle Brian likes to point out whenever he gets the chance. One of his ways of coping with his wife’s untimely death (what death isn’t untimely?) was to submerge himself in a torrent of Self-Help books (I think Dad turned him on to them) – and he’s been talking like one ever since. He even knows all the words to Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life, and sings it whenever he downs enough Dutch Courage.

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‘That glass of orange juice you think of as half empty,’ he told me over breakfast one morning at the end of his last visit, ‘I think of as half full.’ The radio must have been playing at the time, as I recall Phil Lynott singing the lines: This boy is cracking up, this boy has broken down.
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Sure, I thought, the glass is half full… but it’s also half empty – has to be for it to be half full, right? How does saying you only recognise one view and not the other make sense? Maybe I was being cynical. Okay. Maybe I should try and do what he suggested and alter my perspective. Create a new paradigm, as it were.
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Stand up on desk for a fresh look at things…
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And here’s another way I can look at the picture: Maybe it’s not me who’s defective in the timing-department – maybe it’s that all the other guys in my class have the problem, like they’re premature or something. Or maybe, and a lot more likely, they’re just beating their chests and boasting, lying through their teeth. Probably, for most of them anyway, beating their meat is as far as they’ve gone and everything beyond lives only in their dreams. Wet ones, no doubt.
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If I had to be one or the other, I’d choose being late than late any day: not being premature can only be a good thing, right?
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Another of Mom’s sayings comes into my head: The truth is never black and white – and there are many shades of grey. Her sayings were always right I continue to discover, so the truth about my predicament probably lies somewhere in between.
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As for last night’s sheet-soaking stint, it’s hard to know how or what I feel: reference points, at best, are limited and vague. One thought, however, keeps surfacing above all others, in a voice deep and rich and alive with inflections, and totally unlike my own. 
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Let it be the first of many.
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My own voice, curious and quiet: Why?
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Beats spanking the monkey.
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Why?
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Because, unlike spanking the monkey, it’s a Guilt-Free act. Free of morose afterthought and the frenzied checking for hairs on palms even though you know it’s just an old wives’ tale. Beats doing drugs, too - free of charge and all the nasty little side effects, like the loss of…

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Whatever.
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‘You think your feelings choose you?’ UB inquired after pouring his half-full glass of juice down his throat. ‘Doesn’t always have to be that way, you know. You can choose your feelings if you want. A man sings because he’s happy. Another man is happy because he sings. Get my drift?’

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I thought I did.

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So how do I choose to feel right now, about last night’s eruption and all? Good. I feel good about it. And I don’t feel Guilty. Why should I? I mean, a guy can’t help what he dreams about, right? So, why should I feel bad about feeling good? I had sex with RF – and, even though it was only in a dream – it was out-of-this-fucking-world! Literally.

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Sincerely. If the real thing turns out better than this, well… all I can say is (in a James Stewart voice) It’s a Wonderful Life. (Wonder if he actually said that, or was it just the name of the movie? Note: Watch it again. Don’t wait until I’m feeling suicidal. Hi ho.)

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Wonder if…

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… I am still technically a virgin

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… I can will Rachel to tiptoe into my dreams

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… she will enlighten me again tonight.

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I will you, Rachel. So, will you?

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These dreams of you, so real and so true.