nablopomo

nablopomo

I always imagined I would occupy my college days forcing myself into high jinx that I could later easily transcribe into a witty series in Harper's or at least a script for the local public access TV station to give GothManicRadioVeeJays a needed rest. But nothing I ever got into led to laughter, not even in the one-day-we'll-look-back-on-this-and-laugh sense, unless one-day means 20 years, cause I'm at 15 and counting. My days were spent accepting second-hand invitations to barbecues where the person I overheard actually being invited never showed and the barbecue was in fact a group of people passing around a bag filled with model plane epoxy.

These were all working folks, so I always felt the need to dumb myself down to their level because I didn't want to sniff their glue and come across as some intellectual uppity. Further, I didn't mention I was in college, with a solid C- average in my major (FRENCH LIT), because these boys were lifeblood of the Missouri Ozarks and I didn't want to steal their girls with my higher learning and wispy moustache and the way I smelled of exotic cheese. I successfully warded off all women, in fact, for another three years.

I stood next to the only guy who didn't seem to have any friends, because they usually mutter amusing thoughts about life in general, but mostly poaching, whether anyone is within earshot or not.

That's my wife, he said, nodding towards a girl with her legs splayed around what appeared to be a small engine repairman.

She seems nice.

We only got married so that we could get financial aid.

Oh, you're in college?

Naw. That didn't work out.

How long you been married?

4 years.

They're really going at it.

Our anniversary is coming up next month.

Which one is that? Paper?

It's wood. What kind of stuff they teachin’ you in college?

I'm sayin’.

I think his name was Fen Post. But I only think that because my soon-to-be new best friend Theron wrapped him around a fence post doing 80 one night in his Supra playing chicken with a telephone pole. The Supra and the fence post tied, and Fen nearly made a widow of his FAFSA bride, which might have been for the best so that she could carry on her lifestyle choices without the shame that was obviously causing her to take extra sniffs from the baggie.

Fen and I became very close, if only in my mind, ‘cause he reminded me that you can spend time with another man and not feel obliged to remove your clothes and wrestle. Further, he seemed like the sort of guy uncomfortable with eye contact during sex, like it would set him off on some violent baboon-attacking-his-own-reflection tantrum. He never purposefully exhaled his cigarette tokes, the smoke just sort of lingering around his nostrils like the fog of a September morn’ in some Neil Diamond song. And he reminded me that the scariest guy at glue-bang, ironically, is the one who won't partake. Sort of like that chaperone for the field day at the hands-on children museum who keeps turning up the heat in the 15-passenger van but won’t remove his trench coat.

I’ve been thinking about how that night when Fen was body-raped by that fence post it was supposed to be me in the passenger seat. For the better part of a decade, I’ve been trying to remember why it was that I stayed home that night. Did Fate have bigger plans for me that couldn’t be accomplished with the obstacle of a feeding tube and a head stent? If so, I’d like to be the first to apologize to the Heavens for not getting started yet. Here we are a decade and a half later, still tormented by problems I have yet to address in any meaningful way. I wrote a report once that forced the Department of Education to correct an error in the FAFSA, but our nation is still rife with murder and homicide and killings, and last I heard, Fen and his wife busted up over some non-school related issues, so little good I did.

It should have been me, Fen! But I suffered, too, because Theron’s dad stopped buying him sports cars after that last accident, and even though I wasn’t getting physical contact anyway, it was like getting negative physical contact riding around in Theron’s ’78 Ranchero, the one with the V-8 350, that always died when you gave it gas, but if you could somehow keep it started never failed to reach 90, which is how you want to be remembered in a Ranchero to the kids in the schoolyard, a big, brown blur. It was like living in another era, a time when people got married for all the wrong reasons, friends were held together by glue and burning your arms with cigarette butts was a perfectly acceptable way of reminding yourself that you have feelings, too.