19 September 2006 | Story
I read the first half of the story on the train to and from my dentist’s office—or rather, to and from my dentists’ offices, for I now have two dentists: a general one, if that is what those are called, and a periodontist. I liked it, the story, very much. I read the beginnings of many stories but finish very few. This one I liked but did not finish, for unknown reasons.
This morning, on my way to the bathroom, I spotted the magazine where I must have left it, on K’s desk, open to the story. I started reading again, backpedaling a few paragraphs to get re-oriented, as I continued to walk to the bathroom. There I brushed my teeth (tongue included), flossed, and gargled with a prescription rinse. I’ve been doing this twice a day for the past week on the recommendation of my periodontist, a moon-faced man who, again for unknown reasons (there are so many things I’ll never know), reminds me of Werner Herzog.
I went to this man because of bad breath. My general dentist, his sister, referred me to him, wanting to rule out gum disease as the cause of my bad breath. As mentioned, my periodontist made me think of Werner Herzog, despite being, like his sister, Chinese. After a perfunctory examination, he pronounced my gums healthy but said that my tongue seemed an odd color and prescribed the prescription rinse. At home, K said that my tongue looked almost furry to her, particularly in the back. Embarrassed, I haven’t shown her my tongue since, although I don’t believe it’s furry anymore, if it ever was. Also, K reports that my breath is fine now, so clearly the routine is working.
But this isn’t the point; the point is what happened in the bathroom. I was reading the story as I entered, and didn’t want to stop, so I completed my routine while reading. Brushing and flossing were simple enough (I placed the magazine at the edge of sink), but gargling was tricky, as I had to hold the magazine in front of my face as I periodically tilted my head back to gargle (I’ve taken to gargling in ten-second intervals). It wasn’t until I spit out the rinse, holding the magazine a foot or so to the side so I didn’t spit on the story, before I realized what I was doing. I laughed then, imagining myself as a character in a film—a man who reads compulsively as the world collapses around him—before returning to the story.
14 September 2006 | Penny
A girl I knew thirty years ago, Pennysue, just sent me a thick folder of poems I wrote when I was fifteen. Most are love poems, of the painfully unrequited variety, all addressed to her. Evidently I loved her then.
My first reaction is disbelief: “I didn’t write these things. I couldn’t have.”
Granted, the handwriting seems familiar, but the words I don’t recognize. They state, again and again, that I loved her, in the frank and desperate way one loves at that age. Could this have happened? Did I love her and forget loving her?
Then I remember a conversation I had with my father. This was during the six months or so I lived with him (a desperate move I engineered solely to escape from my first high school, where I had amassed an insurmountable number of gym make-ups, having cut gym for an entire year straight). We talked on my father’s couch, just after I hung up with Pennysue, who confessed she liked another boy, to which I cried, sobbed really, saying I only wanted her to be happy. My father overheard this part (it was a small apartment) and decided we needed to talk.
“Never take no for an answer,” he said. “Girls want you to fight for them.”
I know where we sitting when he said this, and I know he was talking about Pennysue, so I know it must be true: I loved her. This means, among other things, that the poems are mine.
The poems. I haven’t counted how many there are, but there are a lot. I wrote them in the two-month period leading up to my sixteenth birthday. I often wrote two or three a day, writing on lined paper torn from a spiral notebook (the edge of the pages are jagged). Most appear to be copied in my best hand, although some, evidently originals, are littered with cross-outs and corrections and little arrows indicating line order changes.
Also: they’re dreadful—possibly the worst poems I’ve ever read.
When Penny emailed me last week (she found me while Googling a girl we both knew, who I referenced in an Oblivio piece), she mentioned the poems in her first email. I was floored, having believed all my juvenilia lost. Further, I was amazed that Pennysue had saved these poems for thirty years. And now that I’ve read them, the mystery deepens, for they are stunningly bad: repetitive, corny, and clichéd. However—and this perhaps explains everything—there is also something beautiful in their sincerity, the sincerity of a fifteen-year-old suffering his first heartbreak.
The first poem in the pile:
A Penny For Your Thoughts
I’ve been watching the sunset
Falling behind the sea
Listening to my headset
Discovering more of me
We’ve been getting closer
I feel a need for you
You’re setting off my emotions
Running me through and through
And it’s beginning to scare me
I want you more each day
I can’t look right at you
I can’t stand feeling this way
Why can I talk to you
Tell you my deepest dreams
Show what I have inside me
Even the weakest seams
I doubt you’ll ever see this
It could change your mind
And ruin our friendship
Change the sands of time
Or maybe you know already
Maybe you always knew
Lying across the vast wasteland
I want there to just be you
01 September 2006 | Wave
Do you remember the miniature golf course behind the bowling alley on Roosevelt Boulevard? I used to go there when I was 12 or 13. It was something like two miles away. Maybe I exaggerate: a mile and a half. But it seemed really far, in the dangerous sense of far. I think I got there on my bike, the yellow Schwinn Banana Peeler, although I don’t actually remember this; it’s more a deduction. A lot of what I believe about the past is based on deductions, not memories. And then, of course, these deductions eventually turn into memories. I mean they start to seem like memories, and I forget they began as deductions, and then they really are memories in the sense that when I think about the past, I see them in my mind’s eye, as though they really happened, which, who knows, perhaps they did. I’ve probably mention this before, haven’t I?
I would play two rounds, sometimes three, but only pay for one. The trick was to skip the 18th hole, which would gobble your ball. I don’t know if the guy ever noticed what I was doing. Probably he did but didn’t care. I don’t really remember him, but I have the idea that he was old, whatever old meant then. 40? He would sit in the green hut, for lack of a better term, which was on your left as you walked in. I remember the hut. It had an opening on one side (the side facing the first hole) through which the guy would take your money and give you your ball and scorecard and pencil. The putters were around the corner.
Probably he saw what I was doing but didn’t care.
Once I finished playing, I would go next door to the Kentucky Fried Chicken (this was before they were called KFC) and have a “Special Dinner”: two pieces of chicken (a thigh and a wing?), french fries, a biscuit, and possibly a soda. It was grand.
I always went by myself. In retrospect it was important, a significant foray into the larger world, as it were. It’s no surprise, then, that whenever I pass a miniature golf course, a powerful wave of emotion surges inside me—it’s a positive feeling; happiness, basically; although it can be overwhelming at times—which, if you didn’t know the story, might seem a little bizarre.
