Serious Poses

 

They say memory plays tricks on you. That every time you remember something some detail will change. Maybe the light, the angle, or the sound. 

I'd been hanging out every night till almost dawn for almost a week, eating and sleeping as little as I could get by with, spending the rest of my time running the streets of Wooster smoking everybody's pot and drinking everybody's beer. Wind me up and watch me go. This crazy hippie from somewhere else, somewhere real far out there. Who just popped up one day and intruded all over. What adventures I had.

I don't remember much of that one night, in big house full of middle class jock types wondering where I came from, till something set me off and I got hostile for no reason. I recall this senior yanking me up in the air by the head, yelling something at me, his thumbs digging in to my face just in front of my ears. I've been having this memory for 45 years, awake and dreaming both, and I can't keep track of the details very well  but I can say that sometimes I don't wet my pants. 

It could have been worse, there were too many witnesses, among them my girlfriend who'd sworn she was a virgin. He had every right to do worse. All he'd done to provoke me was be the handsomest, best built, most popular jock in the room. But it was only a Swiss Army knife, and I only weighed about 115# then. I even got my knife back.

After that she'd try to make me understand that it wasn't over, a few of those jocks were planning out where and when to beat me to death with their bare hands, and that she'd never live it down already, so I'd better just go. But I was too in love with her, in that desperate way crazy 15 year olds get, and it sounded way out of proportion. There no way anybody would go that far over something that trivial. I did have an idea to make it right: walk in to the next Friday's party to walk right up to him, apologize in public, thank him for not hurting me, and hand him a six pack of Michelob or something. And then leave and not bother them again.

She said not to bother with that it would only make things worse for me.

I told her if she wanted me to go away she could just tell me, there's no need to make up some boogieman story. Something like that. I don't recall her answer.

After about three days she told me to gather up my stuff from where I'd been crashing and come to her place, so I did. She had a big purse stuffed with god knows what, and more determination that I'd seen all week. 

We were running away together, right there and then, hitchhiking back to my parents; place in Baltimore, her and me. So we did, we traveled for 18 hours straight and six or seven rides, this 15 year old country girl and her scrawny hippie boyfriend. When I asked what brought that on she said she had to get me out of there before they got to me, and neither of us could afford bus tickets. 

That's not the end of the story, that was a long summer of tumult, but those are the parts I've been reliving over and over for the past twenty-odd years. And the emotions that come over me were not the ones I'd felt then, I was too strung out, but what anybody in his right mind should have felt: the shame, the gratitude, the wanting to drop dead.