Be My Lover
Up until that spring, it seemed easier just being invisible.
1970 was pretty disjointed in the world and also at my house. My mom and my stepdad had moved; not far but it seemed like a different continent with the few friends I had too far away to visit. The doctor had taken me off the medication, who knows why, but it made me suddenly fat and irritable and a near perfect target for the kids at my new school. I wasn’t doing visitation with my old man anymore because of all the fights and getting hit a bunch when I went, and I had a perfect 0.00 long before I even know what that meant.
I was pretty good at fighting for a kid who got his ass kicked all the time. “Yea, he’s small, but he’s slow…” my gym teacher would tell the other kids.
Sitting in class I didn’t pay any attention, which the doctor said was the problem. They all had pills and solutions and places to store me and notes documenting the obvious. And nothing worth coming up for air to acknowledge. Not a goddam thing.
Except for Gretchen.
As her name implied, she was a Swedish beauty, 7th grade and all grown up to my so very not at all. All svelte to my freckled awkward. Whispering my name from the desk behind me in math class. Breathing hard. Sighing….”ooohhh….Tommmmmuh”……just because she thought it was funny to watch, because she was cruel like the rest of them. And I knew this, but still, she’d make me tremble, no. 2 pencil twitching in my hand, her warm breath on my back, her spell brutally invading even the previous sanctuary of Friday night solitary television and excessive sugar.
One day, as she used a fountain pen to write “Chris” in a heart on her jeans, she told me about the fair coming to town that weekend. I could meet her. And Chris might not come since he was in high school and might be out driving with other boys. And the carnival was right in the neighborhood she said, so I could come alone on my bike. She said seven by the tilt-a-whirl. With a wink.
Oh yes, I was there early. In acrid afternoon heat, there were the crowds and kids making out and contests and carnival food that was losing certain of its luster in comparison to other newly discovered and more difficult to attain pleasures. Growing up had taken a fair number of shots already, but this was very different – a new problem I could not solve to add to all the others I had already. Still, imagining the proposed encounter, I looked past all that, patrolling only for a glimpse of her as shadows lengthened in the thickening midway crowds.
I wandered anonymously, knowing in my gut the bitter disappointment that must be at hand, but having little experience to confirm that intuition. The sweet carnival smells wafted with the harsh reality of the moment setting in – I wasn’t gonna see anybody I knew tonight.
Not my old man, not any other friends from school since I didn’t have any friends from school. Not Chris. And certainly not her. No one from the past and nobody in the future either. I was used to having a lot of time to myself, but this thing with her and high school boys and cars and kids kissing under the Ferris wheel – well, that was all a new twist. It didn’t seem possible things could get worse but plainly, they were about to.