Crystalline Summer

Twenty years old, 4:00 in the morning, a Thursday in late July and I’m scrambling to finish John Irving’s masturbatory A Prayer for Owen Meany. Irving has landed me with a treble hook straight through my lower lip. Tomorrow’s workday is meaningless. All my life is wrapped up in this book, this paperback inscribed inside the cover with a missive from the friend who bought it for me two summers prior. Books are such telling gifts, aren’t they? I’ve over a hundred-and-fifty pages left but I’m not sleeping until I reach the last page and triumphantly fastball the book into the wall opposite my bunk-bed. I occupy the bottom bunk along with a dozen Coca-Cola bottles and a stack of books and a tape deck alarm clock next to a 24-cassette edition of the Complete Riverside Recordings of Thelonious Monk checked out earlier that summer from the library; my unfolded laundry occupies the top. It’s a temporary apartment. I’ve hung up my plant but my posters remain rolled.

I had a cigarette with Pete Norman earlier that night. He was about to punch in for the third shift at the Admiral gas station; his breakfast was my dinner. We’d seen very little of each other that summer which is how it happens when your shifts are scattered. We made loose plans to wake and bake and catch up when he punched out. A cigarette contract. I was looking forward to finishing my book and Pete’s visit. At 6:00 a.m. the sun violated the horizon and I prayed for Owen along with John and triumphantly threw the finished book with all my upper-body might into the wall opposite my bed where it landed with a THUD and bounced into the pile of that summer’s reading haul. Pete would be knocking in a half-hour and I set my alarm and shut my eyes and slept the sleep of the dead for twenty-nine minutes.

Pete knocked and I opened the door and ate two of the donuts he’d brought while putting on a pot of Maxwell House. He packed one bowl and then another and we settled on my crappy VHS copy of the fifties dystopic nuclear parable THEM! James Whitmore from the Miracle Grow ads fought off the giant ants and the two of us slipped into a Jamaican coma until I had to get up and put a blanket on Pete and head into the office.

I return to this often. This particular day/night. This borderless twenty-four hours of summer. You figure out a way to bottle this moment and it’s dandelion wine. It’s candy machine money at the swimming pool. It’s the biggest kite on the hill. It’s the Doppler-effect of ice-cream truck chimes bouncing off the pavement and the brick houses coupled with the ridiculous childhood riches of a five-dollar bill. Crystalline summer.

Give me your hungry, your tired, your poor. I’ll piss on ‘em.
That’s what the Statue of Bigotry says.
Your poor huddled masses–
Let’s club 'em to death
And get it over with and just dump 'em on the boulevard.

-Lou Reed, Dirty Blvd (New York, 1989)