Reminiscence

During those dull, restless spring days in high school one can get pissed off at the world. In this case, a friend of mine, uncannily found abhorrence in the river. A story I wrote from a little over a year ago:

So when you’re eighteen and high school is purposeless beyond clamato juice, you like home-cooked French toast and fifty cent coffee, what do you do? You go to the Palace on Main Street. Going for breakfast isn’t just a reoccurring thing for my friends and I. To truant five periods of school, as a bookish but grass-smoking staunch freshman, I would of hands down been the ultimate T.V. show kind of rebel. Lately, that’s not the case. No one – not even the office secretaries – find the breakfast club, or us five wayfarers, and what we do, aberrant.

This morning began like all others. Sleeping in way past the 7:15 tardy bell, the orange dawn retired to a new sunny sky, I finally get up, shower, comb the curls on my head down (which inevitably puff again), start for the door, turn back to retrieve my brown paper bagged lunch, and plug my dad’s ‘94 Lumina down Herminie stretch.

Breakfast was normal. No Russian spies entered, nor Iranian militants, nor senior high arch-enemies, bugbears, or any hipster-challenged bête noire. I tipped, rather substantially, and left with four friends equally as feckless and lazy. The sun was out and she curled my hair even more, thus I had something between layered hair and a Jehri curl.

For whatever insufficient and heedless reason, we went to Crabapple park. The buds on the trees were booming, and pale pink thistles and dandelions were colonized all over. I stood above Sewickly Creek on a gray weathered bridge to think, reflect, console myself in what I call desperate spiritual enlightenment, and let my friends wander the pavilions. It was then I felt poetic, like I was truly a character from Tom and Viv, ready to start a verse. Realizing no paramour was nearby, or even existent at the time, I lost interest and quickly jogged up the trail to where my friends were. Two dogwoods on each side of the trail with violet long-tubed disc florets hemmed our path back.

Where the beauty of the story goes so wrong, where all the special belle parts are begirded by hideousness, and more unpoetical with less lyric than a swine bathing in the sun-warm mud, my buddy NoName says to us, “My ass is gonna get dirty, cause I have to shit.”

I made no reply. I made no ignorant guesswork as to where he might shit. I let him be, as the bee usually finds nectar. For NoName there was no nectar, no flowers in the garden basil. There was only a bridge above Sewickly Creek. My friend shit off that bridge this morning, between the rails, white ass extended out.

Next Friday I’ll be at the Palace, eating french toast and an English muffin and taking down a fifty-cent coffee. Next Friday I’ll be thinking about shitting, and as ill-luck so possesses me, there are no lavatories at the Palace… nor bridges.

The poet dives aimlessly in whiskey
Drowning, and seeing the shit in the creek
Before death shrivels him up.