Time to Glow (Sketch Six)

            It wasn’t really anything I’d planned on. The week before, my mom – my godsend, really – had told me that a band I liked was playing at a venue not 15 minutes from my house. I rolled my eyes with adolescent apathy, but if she’d known how much I was jumping up and down inside I definitely would have been the subject of THE embarrassing story at the next family reunion.

            See, here’s the thing: my mother thought I liked this band. Secretly, I ADORED this band. Their music was so powerful, their lyrics so intense and dedicated to overcoming whatever obstacles that life laid before them. My circumstances being what they were I could identify with them very easily. A Skylit Drive did more than play instruments, more than release a couple of CD’s. Their music had – and to this day, still has – a profound impact on my life.

            And when I say I hadn’t planned on it, I didn’t just mean going to that concert. I meant falling in love with those six guys and the sound they produced. Because without Michael “Jag” Jagmin, Brian White, Kyle Simmons, Joey Wilson, Nick Miller, and Cory LaQuay, I wouldn’t be here typing this today. In fact, I wouldn’t even be in Texas.

            I would be in my family’s plot, pushing up daisies in Western Missouri with an epitaph that read “1991-2009.”

            You’re probably wondering why. I mentioned a particularly nasty breakup in my third and fourth sketches. And the reason that the ending of that relationship still resonates in my mind today is because after it ended my thoughts gradually turned to suicide. Looking back it chills me, how logically I had thought it out. How dispassionate I was towards the ending of my own life.

            But, on a night when the moon seemed hung by a noose I had my iTunes on shuffle, my letter in my pocket, and my knife against my wrist, ready to make those vertical cuts that would take away the lifeblood that coursed through veins so stubbornly. And right when I was about to make the incision, a song from A Skylit Drive came on. It was beautiful, it was haunting, and it was the only thing that could possibly have stopped me. “Breathe easy, the doctors are about to arrive,” it said. There was this frisson I couldn’t shake, this aural feeling, this sense that things were about to turn for the better.

            I couldn’t. I couldn't do it.

            All this to say – A Skylit Drive was on a pedestal in my mind. I knew one of the things I had to do before I died was to see them. And I also knew my parents would rather die than see me at this venue alone. But I’d never been to a concert without my parents before, and this was one I promised myself that I wouldn’t miss. So a couple days later I told my mother that a girl from my computer imaging class wanted to go with me, and off I went, excited beyond belief.

            It was a dingy place they were playing at. About the size of a garage, and about as sparsely furnished. Concrete floors, with no evidence of cleaning. Industrial ceilings that coughed up dust. A small stage, only about two feet high. But enough to elevate the music, to lift the noise, to raise a voice.

            I walked in, naïve, and surveyed my surroundings. The back of a tattoo parlor. I guess I shouldn’t have expected much. But my hopes returned when I saw the racks of t-shirts on the east wall. I’d never gotten a band’s t-shirt before – in my haze of happiness I’d forgotten completely that they were even sold at concerts.

            I walked over to the racks. I hemmed and I hawed. The guy stacking the shirts looked at me as I pondered my decision. Finally I tapped him on the shoulder and asked him for the one on the bottom left, in a medium.

            “Oh yeah! You like A Skylit Drive?” he said. Instantly I said yes and gushed for a few seconds about how they were my favorite band and they’d helped me through some stuff.

            To which he responded, “Thanks!”

            I was instantly confused. Why would he say thanks? Is he like a merch guy or like a roadie for them? I asked him if he hauled their gear for them or if he was their manager.

            His response will forever ring in my ears.

            “Nah, nah man. I play bass for them.”

            WHAT. WHAT. WHAT IS…WHAT.

            In some sense of the word, I fainted. In another sense, I’d just been reborn. After I could compose myself enough to tell him some of the ways he’d helped me, and listed off a few songs that really meant a lot, he then proceeded to make that night the best one of my life: “Hey, you mentioned Eris and Dysnomia? Well we’re playing that in our set. I’m gonna dedicate it to you.”

            I could have melted through the floor with all the joy in my soul. The feeling was indescribable. It was as though I was being frozen and immolated entirely at the same time. I was too excited to cry, too stunned to emote. The most I could squeak out was a “Thank…” and then I just stood there, foolishly, like a mannequin.

            He asked me my name and then whisked himself backstage. Then the opening bands came on and for a few minutes I almost forgot about the monolith of memory that still jutted out of my brain. But then Cory LaQuay, the drummer for A Skylit Drive, came out. And I actually recognized him from the music videos. I yelled his name and ran on over. We got to talking and I’d mentioned that I’d played drums for a couple months. To top all that had previously happened, he asked if I wanted to go backstage with him to see his drum kit.

            It was beautiful. I’ll never forget the shine, because I don’t know whether it came from the glitter on the drums or the tears in my eyes.

            It was one of the best nights of my life. I’ll never forget it. And the story continued to write itself even after that. I’ve left details out, but I went into that concert a boy and I came out a man.

            It’s a night I’ll never forget. The first time I saw Waco use me and spit me out better for it, as opposed to worse. I was polished, glorious like the sun.

            I don’t believe I’ve ever thanked my mother so much as when I got home that night.

Sixth Meeting with Pedro

Our last meeting.

Our last chance.

I was struck by how fond I’d grown of Pedro. How quickly he and I had related, how lucky I was to have someone in my age group as opposed to someone who was 50 and just wanted to talk about the good old days. Perhaps most importantly, how he and I had grown close. We cared now, about each other’s well-being. Where we’d go, who we’d be friends with. If you asked me why, I couldn’t really tell you. But I did. Friendships, in my experience, are like gems: they’re formed by time and pressure, and they might start out crude but they end up beautiful.

So it was, so it is, so it goes.

Pedro and I sat down, both of us with smiles pasted onto our faces. I could tell he was dreading this as much as I was. He seemed weary. I seemed weary. If you’d asked me how I’d felt at that moment, I’d have told you that I was an empty sack of potatoes, or the clothes that someone died in. I wasn’t dead, nor was I giving the appearance of such. But I was drained. There wasn’t enough time left. Vaguely, the Twilight Zone episode popped into the projector screen inside my forehead. “But there was time now!” the little man wailed, and I couldn’t help but feel the resignation he felt. J. Alfred Prufrock talked about how there will be time, time to turn back and descend the stair. There was no time anymore. L’esprit d’escalier had already washed over me, flooded like the banks of the Nile in irrigation season. I was overcome by all the things I could have said, should have said. I should have been someone different.

I barely registered Pedro talking, and I leaned in to focus. He spoke about how he was applying to a bunch of Texas colleges, and that his ACT was next week. I was worried for him, and I expressed worry. He quickly told me he’d be fine – I caught his insecurity behind his eyes but I let it go. It wasn’t something I could fix anymore. I wasn’t tasked with it anyway.

He asked me what my plans were for summer. I told him I was studying abroad in Japan and he started talking for a few minutes about how he loved Japanese animation and how a kid in his English class was from Japan but went back after a couple of months. He asked me to say something in Japanese. I came back with “Koko suwatteiru hito wa shinsetsu de atatakakute kiree desu.” He asked me what I’d said. I lied and told him it was about the weather.

I’d really just complimented him, several times over. But guys don’t say that kind of stuff to each other.

Why was I getting this sentimental? Wasn’t it only temporary? I didn’t know. I still don’t. But as the clock ticked closer to the time that he’d told me he needed to leave, I kept hearing Eliot’s bartender in The Waste Land calling to me, matter-of-factly but with a tinge of irritation.

Tick. HURRY UP PLEASE IT’S TIME

Tick. HURRY UP PLEASE IT’S TIME

Tick. HURRY UP PLEASE IT’S

HURRY UP PLEASE

HURRY UP

HURRY

“Well, my ride is here.” Pedro said. I snapped back into focus.

“Are you sure?” I asked. I was gripping the armrest so hard my knuckles were white.

“Yeah. I have to…” he trailed off. I nodded, staring at the floor.

HURRY UP PLEASE IT’S TIME

He gave me a handshake. And then he vanished.

Fifth Meeting With Pedro

It had become apparent to me, over the course of our many conversations and awkward rushed handshakes on-campus, that Pedro and I were different from most conversational partners. His grasp on English was tentative, but the way he spoke made him sound as though he had lived here a long time and only spoke Portuguese with his mother and father at home. In many cases, it was disconcerting – here I’d been expecting to speak slowly and enunciate every word I’d said, and Pedro was colloquially cursing like a sailor with more and more proficiency with each passing visit. Brazil and America were different, but I’d realized that really the differences were negligible. You could say that the USA was more developed, and that (perhaps to Pedro’s eyes, I wouldn’t really know) the girls were prettier here. But for the most part, I came into my fifth meeting with the awareness that what we both had to offer was similar. We were two edges of the same Westernized sword. The only difference was I’d been tempered with living at the root. I was pure spring water, and he was tap water drawn through a Brita filter.

In short, we had recognized in each other some semblance of ourselves.

We met at the coffee shop, I in my usual band t-shirt and jeans and he in his usual muted pastel polo. He gave me a handshake and I returned it, but we both knew this was just a formality. After our routine discussion of the weather, the monotony of which almost seemed hyphenated (so-how-about-that-weather-really-hot-isn’t-it yeah-it’s-just-ridiculous-it-must-be-in-the-thirties [insert mental math to convert Celsius degrees into Fahrenheit coupled with a pithy proverb about how we’re all suffering under the same sun]), it was time to get down to business.

There was less to discuss than there had been before Spring Break, really. It was unexpected – neither of us had seen each other since mid-march, and yet we sat there for minutes on end in complete silence. Intermittently my phone would vibrate and I knew I’d have to check it: it’d be one of the probationary members for my fraternity trying to schedule a meeting. I respected them, but I also respected Pedro’s time.

The bus passed by, imperceptibly, and a thought popped into my head. “How long does it take you to get here, on the bus?” I asked.

Pedro smiled and nodded, his facial expression warm yet stoic. I was given the impression of the old mountain sage with the wisdom of eternity being posed a question that could have been answered by Google. He responded “About an hour, usually. The bus stops a lot.”
            That I hadn’t expected. “Jeez! An hour, round-trip?”

“What is round-trip?” Pedro asked. I explained it to him and he shook his head no. “Each time, is two hours.”

He takes two and a half hours out of his day to come and visit…and I thought I was pressed for time.

I dwelled on that and he asked me about my road-trip I’d taken for Spring Break with my roommates. I gave him the details – how we’d taken two days of nonstop driving to get there, the time we’d spent at Disney World, the novelty amusement park we’d stopped at on the recommendation of the manager of my favorite band, how the storm passing over Mississippi and Alabama cut into our drive time so badly that we had to take an extra day on our journey home. I showed him the photos we’d taken, the memories we’d shared.

Apparently that was all he needed. He looked at the photos, said “Good,” and rose to leave. I checked my watch – 30 minutes had already passed.

I shook his hand, almost numb. What sacrifices had I made for him?

And just like that, he was gone, carried on the breeze out the door. And I knew I shouldn’t call after him, knew that my schedule wouldn’t permit it, knew I wouldn’t have time to talk any longer. But as the door shut, I blurted out “Wait.”
            He didn’t hear me.

Adelphia, Alive (Sketch Five)

I stepped out of the airplane to one of the smallest terminals I’d ever seen. Despite my consternation, I knew my exact purpose; why I was there, so to speak. To put it mildly, my dreams were in the dwindling hours from beginning their road to fruition. I breathed in the hope that smog brings with it and did my best not to cough. My shoes were shined, my eyes bleary but excited. I’d discovered the promise of the metropolis; the lure was finally apparent to me. After the frantic promulgating of my intentions, after the scheduling and rescheduling and shattering and repair of my ambition, I had finally arrived in New York City.

To recap from my earlier post, I’d been met with antipathy and even outright hostility when my flight to NYC had been cancelled earlier in the month. I don’t know if I mentioned it but the airline attendant had called me “kid” when I’d tried to get on another flight that night. But I was never one to rest on my laurels and take my circumstances for granted. The second my feet were back in Texas, I signed up for another audition time. And this time, we checked the weather.

Touchdown, take my black leather bag the size of a large cat onto the street, into the taxi line. Take the taxi with the Middle-Eastern stereotype over the bridge and into Manhattan. Marvel at the bridges, the billboards, the buildings, the vast gray. Get out at my hotel, let my jaw drop as I see how close it is to Times Square. Walk around as my room is prepared, take photos of anything I can see that accurately portrays the grit and the organic quality of the city around me. I can feel the structures breathe. I hear the streetlights sigh. This is a city in love with its own status without being egotistical. It’s like life – it’s the Universe experiencing itself.

I get in my room. It strikes me at first – all this for $100 a night? – but then the true squalor (or as my mom would put it, coziness) revealed itself. It was a radiator, not a thermostat. No mirror in the bathroom. The grandiose view of a nudist old woman across the alleyway. The TV that had no channels except static. The chipping of paint on the wall. Most aggravatingly, the pillow with “Wanna?” written on it in lipstick that the hotel staff had only flipped over instead of cleaned. Thank God there were two beds, because there was no way I was using that one. I wondered if there was a place that offered a Lysol bath. I would have bought the works right then.

But time was running short. I whipped out my iPhone, looked up Eleanor of Aquitaine, the legends surrounding Charlemagne, the genealogy of First Ladies, Latin root words, broadcasting legends. Nothing too permanent. Only the transitory.

After a quick shower and three coats of deodorant I walked out onto the street at 5:00 EST to hail a cab. I was showered, I was dressed like a young professional – by God, I was ready.

It was then that I learned the impossibility of hailing a cab in the middle of rush hour in Times Square. I knew the audition was at 5:45 and they wanted us to be there 15 minutes early to cut down on time. The minutes dragged on; it was 5:15. I was sweating bullets. My deodorant was somehow starting to fail me already. In my panicked state I found a pedicab – a bicycle with a seat attached to the back of it – told the driver the address I had to get to, and hoped he’d get me there in one piece.

The next 15 minutes were some of the most terrifying of my life. He weaved in and out through traffic, he ran red lights, he missed cars by inches. We were almost hit twice. In fact he got the wrong address three times. To his credit, he biked all the way across Central Park in two minutes flat. By the time I got there I was just happy to be alive. I gave him the money numbly (later I realized just how badly he’d ripped me off) and got in line.

Surrounded by game-show enthusiasts, we quickly fell to chatting. I learned in seconds how much of a novice I was – everyone around me was on their fourth or fifth audition, and the woman standing next to me had won $30,000 on Jeopardy! once. I became a shrinking violet, the color of my lavender shirt. What was I thinking, coming here? What was I doing?

They ushered us into the room, with all of the fanfare of their daily routine. They gave us each beige folders, every one with a Sharpied number on the corner. They told us that the folders contained our audition tests. “It’s thirty questions and you have ten minutes.”

WHAT.
            “Good luck, your test starts now.” Beep. And just like that the nerves I’d been gulping down as though they were bile exploded out of my pencil. I tore into that test like a diabetic third-grader lunging for a Snickers bar.

The buffalo was on what coin for four years? The quarter, why not.

Negeta catania, commonly known as catnip, is what kind of plant? …fuckin’ …lettuce, I have no idea.

What was the occupation of the protagonist in the Fountainhead? This was perhaps my proudest moment. I’d never read Ayn Rand’s trilogy, but I knew enough to know that she’d be more obtuse than to make her allegories obvious. With that I ruled out B. Judge and C. Politician. That left A. Surgeon and D. Architect. Torn between one and the other I knew it was a guess, so I went for the more left-field choice of Surgeon and found out later from the philosophy professor sitting across the table from me that I was right.

As they processed our tests, everyone around me told me they were rooting for my number to be called, almost more than their own (the fact that I was Texan slipped out in line). They called out the numbers that had passed the audition test. My number was not among them.

And just like that I had a magnet and a pencil for my troubles. Was I disappointed? Yes. For about five seconds. And then I said to myself, “Y’know what? I’m in New York City tonight. The greatest city in the world. I have no excuse to not have a fantastic time this evening.” And by God did I fulfill that promise. I walked from ABC Studios back to Times Square, 20 blocks. The sky had opened up floodgates that I’d forgotten existed during the drought from earlier in the year, and I was covered in rain by the time I’d gotten my ticket for a Broadway play. After that I stepped out into Times Square and spent midnight until 2:00 that morning talking with an Australian guy named Corgan. I’ll never forget that night.

The next morning I hopped on a plane and flew back to Dallas. My journey was over. But if I ever forget a second of that trip, someone should shoot me dead because I clearly will have become so happy with life that I don’t need its remembrance, or so senile that it’s become lost from my memory. I don’t think either of those things will ever happen.

And I won’t have any reason to forget, either.

Unless my audition this summer goes better. 

The House on Mango Street - Reflection

The word “esperanza” in Spanish means “hope.” I find it only fitting that the main character in Sandra Cisneros’s The House On Mango Street has the name that simultaneously describes the optimism she feels at the beginning and the end of the novel.

Interspersing the story of Esperanza with the story of her neighbors, Cisneros paints a vivid picture of life in a Hispanic neighborhood, as well as the sexual and emotional maturing of a young Chicana girl – that is, a girl of Mexican and American descent.

I began reading The House On Mango Street in the middle of the day, when it had started raining and the world was gloomy on the outside. I figured it wouldn’t take me long to form an opinion; enough to write about it anyway. By the time I’d finished I’d found a fictional paramour – if I’d been so inclined. Her sexual maturing paralleled my own sexual maturing. Finding out about my attraction to men was a slow, a gradual thing, and not without its hardships – though nothing like what Esperanza went through.

I had many “Sally” figures in my adolescence as well. So many gay guys my age were so focused on sex. Their blood ran directly past their brains and into their crotch. What I called orgies, they called Tuesday. What I called decadent, they called boring. What I blushed at, they described how it turned them on. I knew immediately I wasn’t like most gay guys in my generation, smooth hairless hormonal boys – you couldn’t call them men, not really – who had bought into the “Logo lie”, as I’d called it: the feeling that at some point you WILL be having meaningless sex and so that’s no reason to want your virginity to be something special. Throw it away like a condom, full of the seed of regrets from the night before. Toss it aside, like the many men that tossed you aside in the morning. Once the light of day hit.

I could never ascribe to that ideology. In that regard, I’m different. I’m a 21-year-old virgin but I have no regrets about that. No qualms about saving myself for someone special. Will I be having meaningless sex eventually? Who’s to say? I can’t be one to judge my future actions. I can only judge my present, and right now I’m pretty damn happy with the decisions I’ve made. My mother told my sister the day before she started high school, “Not one high school boy is ever worth crying over. Not one.” I always listened to that. Not one high school boy was worth giving my virginity to.

Esperanza crosses the barrier between girl and woman, between darkness and light, between aimless and purposeful. I’d like to think my writing allows the same thing to happen with me as well. I used writing as an escape from my physical surroundings, from the Hell that encompassed my being when I was maturing developmentally in high school. But I also used it to project myself into fantastic situations, while Cisneros and Esperanza use their writing realistically. I just had the vision of what I should write, and I wrote it. Things that didn’t exist – things that couldn’t exist, simply because they were in my mind and for the moment they provided a recompense for what torture had been daily rained upon me by some unmerciful god.

I even drew on the strength of my parents as Esperanza drew on the strength of her elders: my parents were almost the only reason I made it through high school with the boundless optimism I still possess today.

Overall, Mango Street was a delightful read, and I identify so easily with the character of Esperanza. I’d highly recommend it to anyone who asked about it.

WHAT IS THIS I DON'T EVEN (Growing Up in the 1950's/1960's)

Knowing that my mother was born in 1961 and that she loved fashion when she was a little girl weren’t the only reasons I picked up the Vogue that was collecting dust in the backroom shelves of the basement of the library. Yes, that was most of it. But the other, more fundamentally pathetic reason is that it was the only magazine I could find from that time period. However, much as my lack of interest in women’s fashion pervaded every corner of my mind, I knew I had to push on. For me; for historical preservation; for my grade in this class!

Opening up the issue for July 1961 – the month in which my mother was born – I couldn’t help but notice the striking similarity between this issue of Vogue and the issue I’d picked up from the 1920’s (detailed in my earlier post, “Geometrics and the Buying of Hats”). All black-and-white, with nary a hint of color except for the cover. My English major mind couldn’t help but notice the metaphor for race back then. Everything was very neatly segregated, and the idea of integration – full color – was only just coming to the foreground of the American collective.

I flipped through the articles, languidly, dispassionately, looking without registering. But then I saw something that caught my attention and refused to leave, something that, were it published today, would be seen as ridiculous, ludicrous, outlandish. Something that would be laughed out of publication, something that I couldn’t believe existed, even back in the 1960’s.

A thin woman gazed demurely back at me, her little black slip framing an equally toothpickish frame. On the other page – I double-checked to make sure I hadn’t inhaled some hallucinogenic down in the basement – the words “HOW TO GAIN WEIGHT” screamed up at me with all the subtlety of a bull in a china shop, or the Kardashians in an anywhere.

How – what – is – why – am I seriously reading this right?

                “’How to raise white peacocks, how to prevent juvenile delinquency, how to learn Coptic. . . . I can find out how to do everything but gain weight,’ complained an attractive but too thin friend who longed to round herself out.” THIS IS THE FIRST SENTENCE OF THE ARTICLE AND I’M NOT JOKING.

                I had to cover my mouth with my hand to keep from shouting incredulous profanities at the page. It was incredible. I just wanted to shout “EAT! EAT FOOD! EAT ALL THE FOOD AND THEN KEEP TELLING YOUR CHILDREN TO EAT NORMALLY UNLESS YOU WANT TO ROLL THE LITTLE BUTTERBALLS TO SCHOOL!”

                Which, of course, the article went on to mention. “The best medical advice for underweight people is – in the words of the TV commercial – ‘Double your pleasure.’ In other words, double the usual food intake by partaking of all the fattest, richest food the dieter likes best, all the favourites.” Why did they need an article to tell them this? Was nutritive science really that burgeoning of a field?

                I spent about 15 minutes reading the article and about 45 minutes biting my tongue to keep from laughing. I recalled several instances the week prior where I’d seen a woman shoving French fries down her child’s throat at a McDonald’s. Her child was weakly protesting and she just yelled “Shut up and eat your French fries! Oh you’re thirsty? Have a soda!” I can’t hope much for that child’s future. I only wonder if that woman read this article as a girl and took it way too far. I won’t hold my breath though.

                After reading the article, I closed the Vogue and I sat in thought. My mother is still a beautiful woman; not too fat, not too thin. But to know the perception of beauty in a society that touted women at the ideal weight of “not overweight but not underweight either” seems even more rigid than modern standards of “skinny skinny skinny.” It flabbergasted me. I was bamboozled. And most importantly, I was grateful for my mother’s continued sage advice (and stellar cooking) on food – eat when you’re hungry, stop when you’re full, and fresh is always best.

                Walking out of the library it occurred to me that articles like HOW TO GAIN WEIGHT are the kinds of articles that led to the distortion of beauty in American perceptions. I can only hope we move back to a more natural grace, in our actions and in our attractiveness, as soon as possible.