Let Me Sleep It's Christmas Time--1997 (i)

Gray clouds lay aimlessly scattered like abandon jigsaw pieces over brisk denim patches of December sky fifteen minutes prior to dusk. I strutted across Bradley Quad, a half-smile chiseled above my chin, the memory of her lips soaked into my chest, Karen the Fern cupped firmly in the grip of my icy paws.

The winter sun squinted and swelled and swirled into an orange thumbprint as students, fatigued from finals, jittery-eyed from caffeine, lugged back packs and suitcases through the student center en route to suburbia while my thoughts oscillated around the girl I had just held; the girl I had just said goodbye to--the girl who would be flying down to South Padre to see her parents. The girl whose skin was cinnamon tan and whose flesh sprouted into an orchard of hidden scents every time the magnetism of our bodies clinked into an embrace.

I wore my ersatz camel colored trench coat; a checkered scarf loosely tossed around my neck flapped in the cool winter breeze like a minor league pennant. Beneath the coat I layered GAP sweaters; tattered corduroy jeans--a hemp necklace furnished by my ex-girlfriend Allison itched its way around the stump of my neck spawning a love rash for a wayward soul like an artists signature etched into his mock masterpiece.

My hair was cut short and was dyed strawberry blonde. On a good day my hair adapted the tint and hue of a brassy highschool band instrument; a Green Day reject. A palsied punk rocker looking for his next up-tempo frenzied venue. A boy in search of a thickly chorded soil of human bodies from hence to mosh through his every mangled emotions.

It was December. It was 1997. I was twenty years old and, outside of the assurance of a steady menial waged paycheck every Friday, had no clue where the fuck I was going with my life.

The previous autumn brought the ill-time demise of Princess Diana. I was a sophomore at a local commumity college--Illinois Central College--"ICC" (Ick)--Two years prior I had graduated from one of the worst high schools in the state. Manual High--where my Father had briefly attened in the early sixties. It was the same building where my grandmother's locker was trashed because she showed favor to the "colored" folk. The same building where my pack-a-day grandfather dropped out of in the heat of the depression working as a printmaker's apprentice before enlisting in World War two.

Although my ACT was well above the school's avg. of 14.7, I was suicidal for three-fourths of my junior and senior year. Back then a change of scenery would have altered the status quo of my life today--but living in south side working class poverty, witnessing academia as a sort of joke--gradually gave me the ability to laugh; the capacity to find joy in suffering--the drive to become something other than a sorry-ass statistic--the wisdom to discern that so much of our lives depends solely on the topography of our birth; the financial proclivities of our parents; the realization that, even the worst high school America has to offer is better than 95 percent of the schools currently functioning on our globe.

I was twenty years old and was living alone with my parents. My two siblings (one was still in high school) had already left town, enrolled in prestigious bording schools. I was the self-deemed scribe of the house hold. A writer; a workaholic-- a Starbucks addled saint. I had job slaving over a cash wrap, scanning barcodes into a computer, informing yuppie customers how much they purportedly saved.

It was the autumn rich with books. Thomas Pynchon's MASON and DIXON. Don Dellilo's UNDERWORLD. Rick Moody's PURPLE AMERICA. I kept a copy of James Joyce's ULYSSES in the corner of my writing desk, along with DAVID FOSTER WALLACE's INFINITE JEST--the book that I felt already said everything I was trying to say.

There was also philosophy: William James' Variety of a Religious Experience; Wittgenstein's Tractatus and Philosophical Investigations. One night in late November, a found myself smoking clove cigarettes, listening to Ani DiFranco's "Both Hands" I highlighted a passage of out Wittgenstein's Tractatus:

If eternity is understood not by endless temporal duration, but by timelessness; than he who lives in the moment lives eternally.

I ran ten miles everyday, got through a pack of camel filters in two. I noticed how the hard slant of autumnal light cast geometical patterns against the sidewalk and eighteenth century architecture of Moss Avenue.

I was trying to write a book--a compoiste of every toy-train simple sentence my dual-decade aged eyesight had ever perused. The novel was written in ghetto slang (back then I called slang patois) was all about Basketball and Opera (?) and was, for the most part, completely unreadable.

As my creative writing teacher, Craig Shurtliff, at ICC was wont to critique. I came into the class pawning a Kerouac stream-o-piss-conscious finesse. The portly novels that influenced me then, The VISIONS of CODY, the James Joyce's, the William Gaddiss', the Gravity's Rainbow--
the books I thought that were important and that mattered; the books that differentiated from the mass market populartiy of the Grisham's, the Creighton's and the King's, the books that
qualified as leet-turh-ah-ture were for the most part unreadable tomes of arrogance, ensuring tenure for a select few academic dweebs unable to endure the carp and cavil of some other low-life critiquing their own creative tithe.

I wrote one kick ass short story that semester. Dropped all my other classes; decided to focus solely on writing--was certain that, of course, in a years time at least, the world would catch up to my accelerated genius and I'd be scribbling in my name, endorsing six-figure checks from New York publishing houses. My pulitzer acceptance speech was practically already penned.

The novel failed ignominously--it didn't make any sense. People seemed to grow accustomed to looking at everything I wrote with their vexing head titled heavily into their left shoulder in abstruse puzzlement.

My best friend--a writer named Patrick living in New York even told me; "You've lost the desire to be comprehensible. You've lost the will to let people understand you."

Say least my parents. The urge to write--the urge to breath and to live and to thrive--the urge for a future--for security--for a fuckin' life was nil at best. I was what I was--community college caliber-- post-modern pogo stick. Gutter drossed washed up in the middle of Illinois; yearning to heavily flap my dreams in the direction of the waning, rich autumnal dusk.

On Novemebr 17--a month before I said goodbye to the girl with the pearl smile and orchard flesh; a month before I shoveled up Karen the Fern and stood, staring at my shadow in awe across the frosty tufts of Bradley quad--I left. I left everything behind me.

Flustered by my failed shoebox vignette of a novel--I left class early, plopping my book bag into the back seat of my chevette- a clunker my grandfather in Chicago drove throughout the arteries of the city a decade before. I gunned home, shaking, sweating, trying not to look at my agitated reflection in the blue tint of the windshield. A young man on the cusp of flunking out of adulthood. A fetus witnessing the venom of its own abortion--feeling that he is leaving a place before being properly formed.

I drove. I drove as fast as the clunker would allow. 80 mph. The dilapidated muffler firing what felt like cannon fodder beneath the bumper.I drove, even though I had no where to go and worst of all, I had no way to get there. Void of the luxury of FM radio and power steering, I continued to drive.

I brewed a thermos of coffee, filled up the tank at a local gas station, bought two packs of Camel filters and a box of swischer Sweet blunts. I placed dog-earred editions of Kerouac's On the Road and Whitman's Leaves of Grass (germinal intellectual reads--both since given to females) in the passenger seat.

In life you come home empty but you still come home. A year earlier, Autumn of 96' I monopolized a journalism scholarship to serenade the love-o-my-life residing in central Wisconisin, a beautiful girl named Megan with a beautiful oak pasture forehead and short cidery hair. Things between us had punctuated in blisters and romantic welts and I came home all alone, my thoughts--my heart blanketed in the gauze of a voice that no longer wanted anything to do with me.

A week before I boarded my grandfather's clunker and left, I received a letter from Megan in the mail. When it comes to chasing the strings of your heart, writers are notorious for locating snippets of sentences and plots in the hushed smiles of scattered muses. So far I've identified three amazing, timeless females who inspire my art in the fashion of what Beatrice was to Dante; what Laura was to Petrach. I have a bond with these individuals that transcends the borders of time and vaults over the arbitrary directions of space. So it was no surprise that day when, arriving home after one of my long ten mile jaunts that I knew Megan was inside the steel jaw of the mailbox. That I could feel her bulging; could feel her tidal-wave of multi-colored sentences foaming off the shore of the lined paper. She wrote me letters in different colored markers, placing random stickers of Barney or Burt-n-Ernie throughout the cursive missive, sketching pictures of flowers on the bottom of each page.

Megan wrote about her experiences as a freshman in Decorah, Iowa. She wrote about the classes she was taking; about the writers she was discovering; about the fluids she mixed into her pettite nervous system on Friday nights.

She wrote about the hills of northern Iowa "You would love it here, David. The parks make me think of you."

Enclosed in the letter was a current photograph snapped on one of her state park hikes. Her smile splashed across the poloroid like a puddle of light--two wild lilies were placed in her hair like estranged homecoming boutenaires.

I kept Megan's letter folded in my flannel shirt pocket, in between the boxes of cigarettes, above my heart. I kept her photograph pinned above the dashboard, close to the rearview mirror. Everytime I glanced into the hyphenated reflection I would see my eyes, looking behind me, and then see her smile focused in front.

I drove and I drove. I ran stop signs, broke speed limits, forgot how to function the turn signals.
it was as if my car was a wild mustang and I was clinging on in the saddle for dear life, unaware when the vehicle would thrust me from the passengers seat.

I guzzled thick slurps of coffee. I chained smoked cigarettes, lighting a fresh stick from the alighted dregs of an expired cork. The ashtray already looked like ground zero by the time I skirted my vehicle on to the interstate wings and I continued to drive, unaware of my destination, unaware of my place in the world, cognizance only the flush of blood, the color of the sky, the feeling that the faster and the further I drove, I would somehow find myself, locate what I was looking for, find the lyrics of my song, the name of my muse, the address of my poetic yearning.