Chapter 7: Reunited Again

16 June 2014

Boston was one of those places that my sure sense of direction told me was in the East. It’s funny how I never considered Florida, Georgia, the Carolinas or Virginia to be in the East, even though they all bordered the Atlantic. They were all the South, sadly lumped in with Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Tennessee. It wasn’t until I got to Maryland and Washington, DC that I felt like I was in the East. Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts embodied the very essence of East.

I’d driven up from the Delaware beaches—where I’d dipped my toes in the water of the third coast—north through New Jersey. Then I took a self-imposed detour, departing from the track of Highway 1 and staying well west of the Hudson River. I had no desire to visit New York City. People asked me on Facebook if I was going to go to Ground Zero and to send pictures of the memorial.

No.

I had no interest in seeing the place. I remembered in great detail the day of 9/11 and needed no pilgrimage to remind me. I remembered holding my little girl in my arms trying to explain to her what had happened and why everyone was so angry all the time. I had to explain to her that her little Muslim friend wasn’t a terrorist. I wish I could find the words I used to comfort her now so that I could tell them to the nation.

There’s a validity to remembering certain events to remind us not to let them happen again. Those who don’t remember history are doomed to repeat it, so they say. But I’d seen plenty of evidence that the ‘remembrance of our heritage’ in the South wasn’t to keep another civil war from breaking out, but to keep people reminded that they were part of a different country from the rest of the United States. They flew a different flag than the rest of the country, sometimes in addition to the American flag, but often by itself. The longest undefended international boundary in the world runs right through the middle of the USA. It starts on the Mason-Dixon Line. From what I’d seen throughout the South, we are still two different countries that share a government.

So, when it came to memorializing the Twin Towers attack, I couldn’t see it as something that would heal our nation. The evidence is that it keeps alive the grievance, keeps the wound open. We don’t want to heal. We want to hate. We will keep our hate alive by reminding people daily of what those bastards did to us. That’s the only way we can justify sending ten thousand more Americans to their deaths in the Middle East so the three thousand in New York won’t have died in vain. What the fuck kind of screwed up sense is that?

We’d rain death on one and a half million innocent people who had nothing to do with the attack on the Twin Towers. We’d make sure they kept their hatred alive as well.

I avoided New York City.

Instead, I immersed myself in the history of our country where pilgrims settled, where the Boston Tea Party was held, and where the Revolutionary War began. I toured old cemeteries, churches, markets, and the incredible park called the Boston Common and its adjacent Public Garden, where the Swan Boats famously ply the pond. And I sat outside a little tobacco shop and smoked a ten-dollar cigar while I watched people. Finally, I followed Massachusetts Route 2 along Commonwealth Avenue until it became U.S. Highway 20 at Boston University, a block away from Fenway Park.

A Long Time Ago: Eight-Tenths of a Mile

U.S. Highway 20 has always had a special place in my mind—maybe in my heart. It’s the longest numbered highway in the United States at nearly 3,500 miles. It runs from Boston, Massachusetts to Newport, Oregon. And it goes right through my hometown. Or it used to. Now there’s a bypass.

When I was growing up, my address was Rural Route 2. That’s it. City and State. With that address, the mail carrier could deliver our mail. He knew everyone who lived along that mail delivery route, often stopping to talk to folks and bringing Sears and Roebuck packages up to our door. I was sure he read all the picture postcards and knew everyone’s business.

It was an address, but it wasn’t a location. I couldn’t invite a friend over to play and tell him to just come to Rural Route 2. The route covered about twenty miles. So, from the time I could talk, I was told that I lived eight-tenths of a mile north of U.S. 20 on Mosquito Road. I memorized it, recited it, and dreamed about it. I had a location.

Every day of my first fifteen years, it seemed, I crossed U.S. 20. It was on the way to school, to church, to groceries, to deliver my newspapers. No matter where I wanted to go, I either crossed U.S. 20 or traveled along it. My school was on U.S. 20. The church was half a mile off. Every day I’d look up or down the McKinley Highway and wonder where it went.

This summer, I decided to find out.

Back to Boston

I stopped for coffee at Starbucks, half a mile west from the terminus of U.S. 20. The mile markers on East-West U.S. Highways run from West to East. I briefly considered making a game of stopping at every Starbucks between Boston and Newport, but even I can’t drink that much coffee. Or afford it. I had a great time on the journey, camping in the Berkshires, wandering along roads that twisted and turned through villages, and trying desperately to remember a poem I’d written years ago called “Eight-tenths of a mile off 20.”

I took a week’s detour north of Albany to visit a fan who invited me to use his RV pad for a week. It was a great treat to have some relaxed company. In the evenings we sat in front of a fire and smoked a cigar. I’d never been to Upstate New York, and had a completely relaxed time.

Along much of Scenic Highway 20, I saw signs that read ‘No reservation. No separate nation.’ It seemed funny to me, though, that when I passed through a corner of the Onondaga Nation south of Syracuse, none of the cars filling at the tax-free gas station seemed to be owned by natives. And I certainly availed myself of the four-dollar cigars at the tobacco shop—the same cigars I’d purchased for ten dollars in Boston.

You might be wondering what I was doing for companionship during all this time. Well, it was true that the last time I’d had sex was in Pigeon Fucking Forge, Tennessee and I was a little gun shy, so to speak. I’d gone a lot longer than two or three months before. I figured that I could wait until I found something good.

I’d stopped at a strip club west of Boston and got a bit of a surprise. They didn’t do lap dances and had no private dance room. It was all nude, but I noticed—Hey! I was paying attention!—that all the girls were completely shaved and absolutely sealed shut. I asked one of the girls about it. Even though they weren’t allowed to touch a customer, they still came around and sat with you, hoping you’d tip them just for their gracious company.

“Seeing the slit is defined by our city council as artistic freedom. Exposing anything inside is considered pornography. Touching a customer is considered soliciting. We can have a private dance for you if we stay four feet away. And don’t show our pussies. We have a wax we use to keep ‘em closed.”

I’ll be damned.

Speaking of strippers, while I was camped at the north end of one of the Finger Lakes, I opened my email to find a message from Alice. You remember Alice? Eighteen-year-old stripper with a wet pussy who wanted to come with me?

We had, on a few occasions. I liked the girl and she liked teasing me. We’d had phone sex once or twice and just seeing her email address in my inbox sent a little jolt of electricity down my spine to my balls.

A-ri,

God! You don’t know how wet it makes me when I whisper your name. I do it while I’m fingering my clit and always end up sleeping in a wet spot. I have to be careful not to think of you when I’m on stage or the customers will get the wrong idea.

Guess what!

I graduated. I’m officially a student at the University now. Hot shit, huh? You know what you said about swinging back up to Montana when I graduated? How about it? Am I still on your list of favorite girls, Ari?

I know you’re still out in New York because I read your blog yesterday. I’ve got to say, you’ve been boring lately. You haven’t sent me a juicy email since that college girl in Florida. What have you been doing? Honey, if you’ve got six months of come backed up when you get here, we’ll never get out of bed! That’s not a bad thought, is it?

How about you just park the trailer and fly up here for a booty break?

I know. You’re on a mission to do that highway coast to coast. I looked on a map. That route goes right through Yellowstone National Park. I could join you there! I’ve never seen Old Faithful. Would you believe it?

Ari, I’m excited to join you for a week. But I’m a little scared, too. It’s like I’ve been building this fantasy in my head about what being with you would be like. I’m afraid it’s all just a fantasy and reality would suck. I’ve been following your trip long enough now to know that you aren’t an axe murderer or anything. You’re really a sweet guy. Maybe that’s what I’m most scared of. I’m not like the kind of innocent babe you deserve. And I’m not submissive like that girl Angie. Or a sex-crazed maniac like the spring break babe. I’m pretty plain and ordinary except that about a million guys have seen my breasts and looked up my twat. No. Not that many, but some days it seems like it. I could have made a career out of being a training dummy for gynecology students.

Am I too ... like ... dirty for you, Ari?

I’m not expecting anything beyond a fun week when we get together. It’s not like I’m trying to trap you or tie you down, you know. But I worry that I might not be what you expected.

I guess I’ll never know if we don’t get together. I’m ready and willing if you are. College classes start August 25th. Let me know.

Kisses,

Alice

I sent her an immediate note to meet me in Cody, Wyoming on August 16th. I might have to rush through a bit of the trip, but I wasn’t going to pass up a week with Alice.

I still had seven weeks before that and in the middle of it was the class reunion for St. Joe Valley High, the school I never graduated from.

The class I graduated with at Tippecanoe Valley High School wouldn’t be getting together again officially this year, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t take a little detour and see some old friends.

As I drove across Ohio, on what was absolutely the worst maintained portion of the entire route, the scenery started to look more and more familiar. By the time I crossed into Indiana, which happened to mean crossing under the toll road at the same time, I actually started singing ‘Back Home Again in Indiana.’

I took a detour south to visit the Auburn-Cord-Duesenberg Museum in Auburn—fabulous cars of yesteryear’s rich and famous in an Art Deco showroom—but I kept moving my campsite farther and farther west until I was camped at the lake where Jessica had proven so friendly. I spent an entire afternoon there watching the kids in the water. There were a few nice bikini bodies, mostly on the moms of kids who were in the water. It was pleasant, but no one really seemed to be having the fun that I remembered having.

I entertained nostalgic thoughts of buying the old homestead on Mosquito Road—now completely overgrown with trees—and setting up a parking slab, well, and septic where I could park the trailer for a couple summer months each year. There was a kind of romance to it as I thought about writing Living Next Door to Heaven and all the fun I’d had with the kids I grew up with. Sort of. It wasn’t really them, of course. And Brian certainly wasn’t me. I wasn’t that smart. I wasn’t that athletic. I certainly didn’t have all those friends. Like Alice, I’d built a fantasy and reality fell far short.

A Long Time Ago: Unwanted Childhood

I won’t say I had a miserable childhood. I’d have to say that, if anything, I was oblivious to my childhood. I’d blocked out all memories until I was fifteen, but when I started writing LNDtH, they started emerging, through a fantasy lens. Underneath it all, I was a lonely, insecure kid, just like any other kid. With the others on my section of Mosquito Road, I played softball in the summer, but we really didn’t have much other contact. Carl had been my best friend, but most of what we did together was because our families were together or we were in church together. Cassie and I quit meeting in the woods and playing in the freshly plowed fields sometime before third grade. I don’t know what happened. We just sort of went different ways.

I always liked redheaded Liz next door on the other side from Cassie, but about sixth grade she moved away and some people bought her house and planted all the field with blueberries.

And Hannah. Well, her dad was transferred after sixth grade. How far away didn’t make a difference. I was twelve years old. I’d seen her at my mother’s funeral fifteen years ago. She gave me a hug. Somewhere in my files, maybe buried beneath an old manuscript, I had her phone number. I’d had a severe crush on her in grade school. After she moved, I blew her a kiss out my window each night before I went to bed. For years.

Out of all the kids, I was the religious one. At least that’s the way it felt. I went to church on Sunday morning, Sunday evening, and Wednesday evening. And any other time something was happening at the church. Yes, I really did have a sixteen-year perfect attendance pin for Sunday School. And I won every ‘sword drill’ the Sunday School teachers could toss at us. I went to what I found out years later was a mainstream liberal church. I didn’t know that. But I once visited a conservative Bible church with a cousin and they were all impressed that I could find verses or simply recite them from my Bible and that I could say the names of all the books of the Bible in order. I produced my first play in the sanctuary of our church for Easter when I was in seventh grade.

To cap off my feeling of being isolated and looked down upon, we were poor. When I think about the other families along Mosquito Road, I think we were all a little below median income. Of course, that wasn’t even a word that was used back then. I keep trying to put it all in a better light, but I can’t find kindling.

Things like my dad being on strike for several months a year when the union contract came up for renewal. Eating government surplus peanut butter, dried eggs, and cheese. Going to Chicago every other month to visit an aunt who worked for a soup company and gave us unlabeled cans. My dad taking a temporary job at a bakery and bringing home a sack of expired bread and sweet rolls twice a week. We’d rummage through the top third of the bag and stuff ourselves with the sweet things. The bottom two thirds of the bag were so smashed together that we dished it out to feed the dogs.

I knew my classmates avoided me. I suspected that I smelled bad. We didn’t have indoor plumbing until I was in seventh grade. Taking a bath required pouring boiling water into a copper tub in the living room, near the stove. Before the plumbing was connected in our new indoor bathroom, I got to sleep in the bathtub.

When Mom got her teaching certificate and a job offer to teach second grade about fifty miles away, we moved. It was between my freshman and sophomore years in high school. I turned away from Mishawaka and swore I’d never go back. I even focused my mind on forgetting everything about my first fifteen years, and until I started writing Living Next Door to Heaven, I’d been successful.

Our old house was condemned and torn down the next year. It about killed my dad. He’d built it with his own hands and put every nail into the siding. It just wasn’t very good.

Back to Indiana

Why was I even considering buying the old homestead? The property I remembered as being all open fields with a little maple grove in the back connecting it to the other properties was all overgrown with trees. Big trees, eight or ten inches across. How could that be? Two new houses with long drives occupied the field where Cassie and I followed her father’s plow and broke dirt clods with our toes. The apple trees my father planted were hidden among the hardwoods that had grown up around them. The huge oak trees where I played on a tire swing had been cut down to make way for the power lines that served the new houses. I took a video and sent it to my daughter and she reminded me I’d been gone for over forty years.

I drove down Mosquito Road and wondered where everyone I knew had gone. I knew Cassie lived in Florida. I’d heard Carl was in Detroit. I drove past his house and saw his older brother, Mitch, outside. For unknown reasons, I stopped and we chatted for a while.

Mitch, being four years older than any of the rest of us, hadn’t been as central to the play group. But he’d turned out to be a jovial, if rather conservative, soul who recognized me right away. We talked for a couple of hours over coffee with his dad. He even called Betts and had me talk to her. She’d had a rough time over the past year with breast cancer, but she and her husband were still hanging in there. She said she was happy to hear from me. I tried calling Carl, but Mitch warned me that Carl didn’t answer his phone if he didn’t recognize who was calling. I sent a text message and a couple days later got a response that just said he couldn’t make it to the reunion.

I gave Mitch my card and he said that I needed to drive down to his farm south of Bloomington and camp there. I promised to do that right after the reunion. He got a kick out of the fact that I wrote erotic romances and said he was going to read some of them. I never thought that he might read Living Next Door to Heaven.

One thing Betts said got to me. I asked her if she attended any SJV reunions.

“No. Why would I go back to see them? I never had any friends there. Nobody liked us, Ari. They still don’t,” she said.

Why? Why would I want to go back and live in a place where nobody liked me? Why was I even going to the reunion? What made me think I was the only one no one liked? Why was I romanticizing my childhood?

I wondered absently if Betts still remembered the two of us playing doctor and touching each other’s privates.

I couldn’t believe how nervous I was about going to a stupid reunion. I’d looked through that old yearbook and tried to identify people I might know. One image jumped out at me. Brenda—who I always considered to be a bubbly person, even though she wasn’t one of the cheerleaders in real life—looked sad in her picture. Yes, she’d been an early bloomer and the fantasy of every boy in junior high. But in her freshman yearbook picture she just looked sad and maybe a little frightened. It’s weird what you think you remember and something contradicts the memories. Perhaps she, too, made up stories about an idyllic youth in Indiana.

I went shopping and bought a pair of slacks and a shirt for the party. I had a nice sport coat that in my big business days I’d had tailored for myself in Singapore. I donned my plantation hat and decided I looked as good as it was going to get. I was in town hours early and spent time at the Studebaker Museum wondering which of the cars my father had helped assemble. Finally, I walked to the banquet hall where the reunion was.

“Oh! You’re Aroslav! I don’t know if we ever met. I was from a different junior high than you, so we only overlapped for a year in high school. Welcome!” The speaker was our class representative, Sarah. She was nice and when she said she’d show me a table where I should sit, she wheeled herself ahead of me. A wheelchair? “Sorry I’m a little slow navigating through the crowd,” Sarah said. “It’s muscular dystrophy. I can still get up and walk a little, but I’ve put so much weight on that it hurts my legs. Look! There’s Cassie!”

Indeed, Cassie Clinton Jones was standing by a table and waving at us. I looked around at the general condition of people at this reunion and Cassie looked spectacular. She’d chosen an off-the-shoulder party dress that made her look fifteen years younger than anyone else at the party.

“Ari! We saved you a seat with us,” she said as she gave me a hug. She introduced me to the other eight at the table, three of whom were spouses to others. I didn’t even recognize the names of the others who had supposedly been in my class. I looked around the room and saw a few people who I recognized vaguely, but wasn’t sure who they were. Still, the party seemed to be a time where we were introducing ourselves. I handed out business cards with both author names on them. Some of these people would recognize the settings and a few might think they recognized someone I described, but they’d never really know. The fantasies were way too distant from the realities.

There was one guy I spotted and resolved to go visit with. Josh was sitting at a table with four couples and an empty chair. He looked alone. Like me.

There was dinner. There were drinks. And there was music. Some of the worst music I could remember from my school days. Cassie threw up her hands.

“Nobody is going to dance to any of this. We didn’t dance to it when we were in school. I’ll be right back,” Cassie said as she headed toward the DJ. Cassie always had a strong personality. She was naturally a cheerleader. The next song the DJ played was a gentle ballad. Cassie was back at my side.

“Come on, Ari. Dance with me. We’ll be teens for a while.”

What she meant was that she’d wrap her arms around my neck and lay her head on my chest while I held her and we swayed to the music. Putting my arms around her, though, meant that I was holding her bare shoulder in my hand. It felt good. Really good.

“This is nice, Cassie. I don’t think we ever got this close since second grade,” I said.

“I used to hold your hand when we walked in the woods,” she said. “Did I really hurt you, Ari? I cried when I read the scene in the woods.”

“Oh, god, Cassie! Don’t tell me you’re reading that stuff. It’s not real. It’s just fantasy stuff,” I said. I was a little panicked. Even my older sister had thought the things I wrote about were real. As if.

“I was just going to peek at it a little. I mean, it’s not like I read erotic romances every day. Then you started posting that new story right after I saw you in Florida. It all seemed so familiar. So, I kept looking for new chapters. And then, there I was. I didn’t recognize my character at all until Brian and Cassie started meeting in the woods to play. And suddenly I remembered you and I used to go play in the woods. Then in the story I ran away and Brian was really hurt and I was crying and I found so many memories just flooding out of my eyes. I remembered the last time we went walking in the woods. Remember those teens who saw us and called us boyfriend and girlfriend? You know, it took me a long time, but I finally figured out they’d been messing around and we interrupted them. But after that walk, I just never went back there with you again. We still played ball sometimes, but I didn’t really do that very often. And I got to wondering if I really hurt you. I didn’t mean to.”

Wow! What a speech. The DJ went into another ballad and the dance floor was filling with couples. It was exactly the kind of music we needed. Cassie kept her arms wrapped around my neck, hugging her face to my shoulder.

“Cassie, we were eight or nine years old. I was becoming a stinky boy and you became ... an even more beautiful and perfect girl. You were popular. I knew what I was. I didn’t even become fully a human being until I was forty,” I laughed. Cassie laughed, too.

“Silly. Nobody’s human until they are at least forty. I’m so glad you let me rejoin the group. Who am I going to end up with? You? I’m dying to know.” I considered and then nodded my head toward the table in the corner. Josh was sucking on a beer. It looked like everyone else at the table was on the dance floor. “Really? Josh? Hmm. He was always kind of geeky and quiet. Nice, I guess, but I never really knew him well in school. I hear his wife is really sick. Maybe dying.”

“Damn. That’s a shame. I’m going to talk to him. I just haven’t gotten over there yet,” I said.

“Ari, that reminds me of something. Please don’t be offended.”

“What?” I looked down at her and she raised her eyes to meet mine. I almost kissed her, but we were on a dance floor and even if no one remembered me, everyone knew Cassie.

“Uh ... It wouldn’t be a good idea for you to contact Hannah right now. She might think it was...”

“Oh, Cassie, please don’t tell me Hannah has been reading Heaven. You didn’t.”

“She hasn’t read it. But I sort of told her about it. She’s still one of my best friends. I hated it when she left our school and moved to Angola.”

“But she hasn’t read it,” I said, breathing a sigh of relief. I had no idea that a fifth and sixth grade crush could suddenly become such a devastatingly embarrassing thing at my age.

“No. But you know she always liked you. She told me she saw you at your mother’s funeral. And I sort of told her that you’d written a part for her as a girlfriend of the hero in a story. I wasn’t going to tell her that I’d read it because ... I’m not that kind of woman, Ari. I have morals.”

“Okay, so she already knew I had a crush on her in grade school. She isn’t reading the story, so what’s the big deal?”

“Her husband died last month,” Cassie whispered. “I think Hannah would probably want to talk to you and maybe even see you sometime, but if you contact her now, so soon ... She might think it was a little stalkerish.”

“Shit. The poor thing. We’re getting old, aren’t we, Cassie?”

“Well he was a good bit older than us, but still, it was sudden and unexpected. He seemed to be in perfectly good health one day and the next he was dead. Both her parents died last year. I mean, they were in their nineties, but still. Both parents and her husband. Do you understand, Ari?”

“Of course I do, Cassie. It’s not like Hannah and I are ever going to get together. I just feel bad for her. But I see what you mean about calling so soon out of the blue. I’ll let it ride for a while.”

“She’s got a place not far from me in Florida. She’s not full time, like me, but she spends a couple months there every winter. Maybe we’ll all get together the next time you’re down in Florida.”

I sighed. The song ended and we went back to the table so Cassie could collect another dance partner. Poor Hannah. I decided to go say hi to Josh. We’d gone to different junior highs, but we’d had several classes together as freshmen. He and Carl got along great and the three of us did just about everything together that we could.

“Hey, Josh,” I said, holding out my hand. “It’s Aroslav.” He looked at me blankly.

“I can’t quite place you,” he said. “Did we graduate the same year?”

“Well, we only really knew each other as freshmen. I moved away. You and Carl and I used to do all kinds of stuff.” Josh kind of rocked in his chair and took another swig of beer.

“I kind of remember Carl. Sometimes we played cards in the cafeteria.” He set the bottle down on the table. “Sorry I can’t place you, Aroslav. I guess I’m too distracted. Marcie said I should come tonight, but I just want to go home and be with her. She’ll miss it if I don’t sing our song to her tonight. Excuse me.” He got up and headed toward the door. I stared after him and then decided to go get another glass of wine. One of my two best friends as a freshman and he didn’t remember me at all. It was too bad about his wife. I didn’t get a chance to ask him what the problem was. This getting older sucks.

I did meet some other people I vaguely remembered. I even danced with a couple girls I remembered. Not enough to have made it into a story yet. I danced with Sarah. That was interesting. She just stood in front of her wheelchair while I held her hands and she bobbed back and forth a little. After that one song, she collapsed back into the chair.

“That was fun. I always loved to dance. I went to five proms! Just because boys who could dance asked me. You should have known me in high school, Ari. We’d have gotten along just great. I was kind of wild,” Sarah said.

“Not Ari,” Cassie laughed as she sidled up beside me. “He was perfect. He would never have done anything wild.”

“Besides which,” I said, “I was too low on the totem pole. You never would have noticed me. Nobody liked me.”

“Ari! How can you say that?” Cassie said. “Okay. I know how you can say that, but it wasn’t that nobody liked you. We were all a little afraid of you. We kind of hid everything from you.”

“You thought I’d rat you out?” I asked. I’d done stupid things, but I’d never told on my friends.

“No! You wouldn’t do that. It was more like we were afraid you’d disapprove. If you saw something that we did, we’d be too ashamed to go to school afterward. Do you see?” she asked.

“I was never a perfect little angel,” I said, scoffing at her. “I got into just as much trouble as everyone else. I just wasn’t around long enough to get caught.”