He was sitting in his room. That was all he was doing. There was, however, a lot that went into sitting. His synapses were firing their little pulses of information around his brain like millions of tiny fax machines; his stomach was busy sorting and reducing his last meal into usable elements; his cells were methodically reproducing themselves at a steady rate; a small cyst was patiently claiming space on his colon where it would remain, unnoticed for several years; his muscles retained the proper amount of tautness that was required for him to remain in a seated position; his perceptual organs continued to gather information from the environment; blood, bile, and phlegm continued to navigate their way through his lymphatic system... Sitting, you see, is a fairly complicated activity.
This sitting was more than just physiological. While he sat there in his room, letters he sent to friends were racing toward their destinations; his bank account continued to accumulate a modest bundle of interest; an electric meter counted out the electricity that his clock, desk light, and refrigerator eagerly sucked out of their respective wall sockets...
I could go on like this forever but I’m sure you get the idea. I won’t talk about the gravity that labored to hold him against the floor in order to prevent him from floating uncontrollably up to the ceiling; the particle motion that held his atoms together so he wouldn’t disintegrate into billions of pieces of undifferentiated matter; or any of the other things that went into sitting in that room. Instead, I’m going to focus on a small handful of information that filtered its way through the walls.
O.K., O.K., I lied when I said that he was just sitting. He was sitting and listening. Thanks to the shotty nature of the construction that went into his building, he could hear everything that was happening in his neighbor’s apartment. He knew when she was in the shower, he knew what time she woke up and went to sleep, he heard many of the messages that her friends left on her answering machine, he knew what kinds of music she liked to listen to, he knew how often she had friends over, he knew what kinds of sounds she made when she was having sex... In a way, he knew more about her than her parents or even her lovers would ever know.
Strangely, he didn’t know her name. He didn’t even know what she looked like. Because of her complicated pattern of arrivals and departures, only two occasions allowed the two of them to be in the hall at the same time. Both times he tried to look off into the distance until the crucial moment when he could slip in a cautious glance at her.
Over time, his imagination began to distort the bits of information that his eyes were able to gather. His mental picture was just inaccurate enough that if he saw her in the grocery store he wouldn’t have recognized her. In his brain she was a picture that was assembled from bits of the indifferent cheerleaders, efficient cashiers, and cheery bank clerks whose generic pleasantness he mistook for attraction.
The sounds that found their way through the wall became a constant comfort to him. He sat on his bedroom floor listening to the water as it drained out of her bath tub. He listened to the sound of her closet door being pulled open. He listened to the mechanical whine of the hair drier as it altered the arrangement of hydrogen and oxygen molecules in her hair. With each sound, he imagined an accompanying visual image.
He pictured her unclothed body. He had fallen in love with her imaginary nakedness. What did he love about her body? He loved the fact that she didn’t have a penis\; he loved every one of the 9,462 nerve endings in her body; he loved the fatty tissue that globed itself around her two mammary glands; he loved all of the 206 bones that kept her from being a shapeless, sloshy mass of flesh.
He took out a worn notebook and read the last entry:
2:05 AM = Listened to country radio station. 2:30 AM = went to bed...alone.
Below that entry he added:
Saturday, May 3rd: 11:00 AM = Woke up. 11:05 = Bath.
* * *
His name was William Lanceford. I know everything about him (I’m omniscient, for Christ’s sake). William got his start in much the same way that all of us did. He started as an egg and a sperm that had a fairly decent sense of direction. He successfully navigated his way through the usual zygote-embryo-fetus-newborn sequence and was born into the hands of Medina General Hospital’s on-call obstetrician. The whole thing was pretty uneventful. To his mother’s relief, he had the same number of fingers, toes, eyes, heads, noses, reproductive units, and mouths as all the other babies in the neonatal unit. What a joy it was to be typical (if only for a brief moment).
Steve Lanceford was out of town when his son was born. He had to learn to adjust to this little six pound bundle of liability the way an amputee has to get used to lugging around a phantom limb. He was desperately repairing gas lines for the East Ohio Gas Company when he received the call from his wife. When he heard the news he ran out to a nearby deli and bought six pounds of lunch meat just to see what it would feel like to have the weight of his newborn son hanging in his hands. He held the package of pastrami, he looked lovingly at it, his chest swelled with pride. Then, he made a few sandwiches.
William’s mother and father were separated at the time. This isn’t such a strange thing. Marriage, after all, had become a temporary state-of-being in their culture. When it came to marital strife, William’s parents were freakishly normal.
Steve and Lisa Lanceford were the kind of couple who communicated almost entirely with their genitals. Steve thought that love was the sensation he felt when the cavernous vessicles in his sex organs became engorged with blood. Lisa, in turn, thought that love was the sensation she felt when the alcohol seeped into her blood system, causing her legs to became less particular about who pulled them apart.
As Lisa’s body went through the miraculous transformation of motherhood, Steve discovered that the cavernous vessicles between his legs were willing to fall in love with all kinds of women. Suddenly, every waitress, dancer, and hitchhiker became an object of his affections. He was a very loving person. Suddenly he was Jesus, Gandhi, and Mother Theresa rolled into one.
To complicate matters, Steve and Lisa’s method of communication proved to be astonishingly inefficient. Although it can be a lot of fun to relate to someone in a genital manner, it can also make banking and income taxes difficult to navigate. At times it was like trying to speak a language that was made up entirely out of verbs.
By the time William was pushed through his mother’s pelvic canal, Steve and Lisa were living in different homes. What started as a family quickly developed into two warring factions, the marriage being reduced to a mere legal technicality that both participants strove to violate.
Lisa turned out to be almost as good at parenting as she was at being a wife. She used to smack her tiny son when he cried too often or too loudly. Sometimes she would let him miss school because she didn’t have the energy to force him into his school clothes. At other times she would leave him unattended for several hours while she went to bars in an attempt to find more alcohol induced love.
One day Lisa was painfully trying to sleep through the blackness of the previous evening’s consumption when she heard a commotion outside. The neighbors at her apartment complex had just turned on the news and learned that John Kennedy had been shot while parading through Dallas, Texas. What a shame.
To Lisa, this national tragedy was an inconvenience. Thanks to the disruption in her sleep, she wasn’t going to escape her hang-over until late afternoon. Fortunately, she wasn’t the kind of woman who let hardship hold her back. She wrestled her way out of bed to pee. As soon as she was upright, an evening’s worth of fermented aphrodisiacs sloshed to the bottom of her stomach like a pile of hot lava. Suddenly, she felt as if she had spent the previous week eating flaming Brillo pads. Lisa made a couple of futile steps toward the bathroom and promptly vomited into the fish tank.
A skull-rattling bass drum in her head banged out the blood rhythm of her hang-over. Ironically, while the activities of her previous evening bludgeoned her back into bed, the President of The United States lay in Parkland Memorial Hospital with a bullet in his head, feeling no pain whatsoever. Some people are just lucky.
At twelve years old, William had basically raised himself and his mother. Most of his memories of November 22, 1963 were of damp wash rags, aspirin, and an entire day of cautiously soft-shoeing his way around his mother’s hang-over. Another memory, of a glass box full of suffocated fish, found itself neatly tucked away where only a skilled therapist could retrieve it.
Later that afternoon the police arrived. Things were happening very quickly in their policey lives. At 12:30 their president’s life escaped through a neat little hole in his head. At 2:28 (after the county had been presidented by a dead man for nearly two hours) Lyndon B. Johnson was sworn in as President of The United States. At 4:00 they were dispatched to the home of Lisa Lanceford after receiving numerous complaints from the neighbors about child abuse, truancy, and unhealthy living conditions.
William was forcibly seized by the two policemen. Lisa poured herself out of bed and screamed her anger and confusion through what was left of her hang-over. The police handed her a copy of the emergency custody papers and stormed out of the apartment with William, like a common purse-snatcher, locked in their arms.
William looked back at his mother. She stood there in her dirty underwear and her pillow-vandalized hair, yelling at the two uniformed strangers. He thought to himself, “Who will take care of her while I’m away?”.
This memory found itself firmly tucked behind the fish tank in William’s mind.
* * *
1:00 PM - 1:22 PM = Called friend.
1:30 PM = Listened to country music.
He was still sitting in his room. He was still listening to his neighbor. As time went by a remarkable amount of information collected in William’s notebooks. He kept track of his neighbor’s sleeping habits, her telephone calls, her bathing rituals... Her life was slowly becoming a tower of paper, her existence loosely bound by the misshapen spiral wires of college-ruled notebooks.
William closed his eyes and imagined her body again. He thought about the beautiful geometry, the curves and lines that made up her form. He thought about the poetry of her shapes, the history, the tryst between science and art that met at her body.
William and his unsuspecting lover, two carbon-based life forms, ran the parallel lines of their lives separated by the chalky border of plasterboard and wooden bracing. The plaster drew out the edges of their lives like chalk lines around two murder victims.
Soon the shortest distance between these two human points would be drawn. Soon, the parameters would be shattered. Soon!
* * *
Freshly yanked from his mother’s home, William was pulled through the system like a cat on a leash. He braced himself against the lawyers and the social workers, his feline resistance failing to match the brutish tugs of the system. Like a child exiting the womb, he struggled to remain where he no longer belonged.
William’s life was a crowd of memories. He could imagine all the gauzy shapes swirling around his head like a million technicolor butterflies. Knowing that he could never keep track of it all, he had always assumed that his mother would be there to keep track of it for him. Once he was removed from home, though, he felt as if he had left his childhood somewhere in that dark, cluttered apartment where his mother twisted in her bed, trying to free herself from her latest hang-over.
The social workers tried to locate William’s father to see if he could take emergency custody of his son. They had no luck. Apparently, Steve melted away like the marriage that once stretched between himself and Lisa. Rumor had it that he had been sleeping with a 16-year-old girl and that, when the girl’s father found out, Steve had to leave town in order to avoid a rather impolite shotgun blast to his head.
William ended up living with his maternal grandmother in a squinty little house along the dirtier edges of suburbia. Every Sunday Grandma Rose would don one of her favorite house dresses, tuck a stack of ancient hymnals under her arm, and head off to the Mansfield Correctional Facility where she played organ at the prison chapel. This frail, dried flower of a woman (not content to remain pressed between the pages of an old book) somehow managed to grow right into the cracks in the cement walls of the prison.
Her organ playing was like a waft of purgatory. She would pound on the keys with all of her 5’2” might while the instrument choked out its tragic melodies\; its club-footed rhythms. The praying inmates would curl into their bomb shelter kneeling positions as if they were ducking from the music that spewed out of the wounded instrument. Some of them would occasionally glance up at the organ, wondering if perhaps a flock of geese had gotten stuck in its pipes.
The organ was a cleverly disguised rehabilitation machine. Emitting moans and screams like the cries of a million crime victims, it pressed its guilt upon the congregation like a team of trained therapists. To the prisoners, Rose’s music was a celebration of tone deafness; a taste of Armageddon.
Everyone at the prison loved Rose. She used to walk around in her rust-water house dresses and her large wooden beads like a stern mother bird with a beak full of worms. She knew the names of all the inmates who attended the weekly church services. Many of them counted on her to provide a thread of information about the outside world. To them, this plain little woman with her veiny legs and her thrift store shoes was a needle of light in the utter darkness of their daily lives.
Her make-up was the cosmetic equivalent of her organ playing. She used to slop on a fresh layer of lipstick at the top of every hour. Whenever she sucked the life out of one of her endless chains of cigarettes, she would make a saucy red smear on the filter. When she ate at restaurants her lipstick would leave behind a murder scene of red silverware, red cigarette buts, and red napkins. It was a miracle that the folks at Revlon didn’t write to demand that she quit using their product in such an abusive manner; It was a miracle that circus clowns didn’t stop in mid-performance, distracted by her outlandish make-up; It was a wonder her big red lips didn’t play havoc with the traffic patterns.
Rose could be as tough as a bag full of angry pit bulls when she needed to be. She had to learn to be that way. Rumor had it that she was a quiet as a goldfish back when she was a young woman growing up in the embryonic city of Medina. It wasn’t until she married her husband, Don, that she found her voice.
Her husband, a prominent gynecologist, was very good at his job. He was also a popular guest speaker at Kiwanis meetings, where the cutting edge socialites of the community gathered to tempt the fates by sipping caffeinated beverages and addressing the critical farming issues of the day. Everyone liked Don.
Despite her husband’s competence and popularity, Rose’s marriage to him was a trial. He was the kind of father who was more comfortable being a buddy than being a parent. He used to slip Lisa a handful of change whenever Rose cut off her allowance and he seemed to really enjoy helping his daughter get away with various things that were against the house law.
Rose would often catch Don helping Lisa to sneak around the rules. It was like raising two problem children at the same time; one of them just happening to be a prominent gynecologist. This situation forced Rose into the authoritarian role of the household, obliged to consequent Lisa and as well as her husband.
Don also found himself in trouble from time to time because of his sense of humor. As it turned out, he was recklessly fond of slight-of-hand tricks:
Dr. Don: What seems to be the problem my dear?
Patient: (Lying with her feet in the stirrups) I keep experiencing a burning sensation...down there.
Dr. Don: Well, no wonder you’re having problems! (Appearing to pull a lit cigarette out of his patient’s unsuspecting sexual orifice) I suggest you limit yourself to one pack a day, sweety.
In order to survive her husband’s humor, Rose had to grow a shell over the sensitive areas of her psyche. Over time, she became as tough as a nail bomb. By the time her husband passed away she had enough emotional strength to crush a beer can with a single muscular swing of her mood. She was so strong, in fact, that she dealt with the loss of her husband the way a car deals with the loss of a muffler: She just kept going.
William had to compress his self-sufficient lifestyle into the walls of Grandma Rose’s demands. The concrete boundaries of the Mansfield Correctional Facility were no match for the fortress that she erected around her grandson’s unruliness.
He didn’t know it, but this structure was everything that William needed. Up until that time he had never learned how to live up to expectations. All his mother ever expected was for him to keep quiet and away. Instead of being consistent with her punishments, Lisa punished her son with the same kind of randomness that a tornado uses when it decides which houses to obliterate and which houses to leave untouched.
Grandma Rose, on the other hand, gladly took on the enormous task of teaching William the relationship between actions and consequences. She was determined to keep this boy from turning out like her daughter. In William, she saw the chance to compensate for the inconsistent parenting that she had to dole out when she “shared” parenting duties with her husband. It was actually a relief not to have Don around, undoing her authority behind her back.
Rose methodically composed a set of rules and consequences for her grandson. At first, William beat his frustrations against the walls of this new structure. Over time, though, he found himself taking on a new shape that seemed to fit comfortably within the confines of his grandmother’s home. Like an expert gardener, Rose dutifully yanked out every weed from William’s personality. In response, William flourished like an award winning entry at the county fair. For a while, anyway.
This brief moment of stability found itself interrupted when Rose became ill. After years of torturing melodies out of the organ at the Mansfield Correctional Facility, her heart had taken on the rhythms of her music (which is to say that she developed a fairly severe case of arrhythmia). William tried to nurse his grandmother back to health but, once again, the damp wash cloths, aspirins, and the old soft shoe were paired with police, social workers, and judges.
* * *
2:23 PM = Called another friend.
He was sitting in his room. He was listening. While the common wall that separated William and his neighbor continued to transmit information into the pile of notebooks, William’s head continued to crackle with little sparks of thought. As he sat and listened to his neighbor talking on the phone a new thought occurred to him:
“If I can hear everything that happens in her apartment, she must be able to hear everything that happens in mine”
Thought is actually a chemical process. Once this new chemical was introduced to the stew, the whole recipe changed. William started thinking about all the things that his neighbor must have known about him. She must have known a million little intimate things that nobody else could possibly have known. Excitement rushed through his body like panic through a crowded movie theater. The chemical reaction of thought produced a dangerous potion in his head.
For months he had been collecting information into his notebooks. It wasn’t until this moment, however, that he understood why he had been doing it. Unbeknownst to himself, he was courting his neighbor through the wall that seperated/connected them. It was a romance forged in plasterboard.
William decided to penetrate the barriers that sealed him off from his love. He listened to her voice coming through the walls as he formulated his plan. He decided that he would sneak into her apartment and leave a little note on her pillow. He thought this little move would enable him to meet the woman who held his future in her hands. At the same time, he knew that it would enable her to meet the man of her dreams. In this, he was killing two birds with one stone; In this, he was killing a whole flock of birds with one stone. Christ, he could have killed an entire species of birds with this stone.
Soon the two neighbors would meet in the flesh. Soon!
* * *
With his grandmother’s health on hold, William had to be placed in an emergency foster home. It was a numbing experience for him. After having his life pulled out from under him for the second time, he decided that it was time to allow the door in his heart to rust itself shut.
William simply lost the desire to play the games that everyone else around him was playing. After all, he didn’t fit into society the way other people did. He felt like a priest with a hard-on; like a monk with a car phone; like a nun with a taste for leather... Resigning himself to this fact, William turned himself against the various foster families that opened their homes to him. It just seemed easier to reject people before they could reject him.
Not wanting to make the mistake of growing roots in unreliable soil again, William decided that he would do everything in his power to disrupt the lives of his foster families. There was no reason to be cooperative with them. He made a habit of making unreasonable demands, of taking anything that didn’t belong to him, and of running away when he was consequented for his behaviors.
It wasn’t long before he realized that two thirds of all parenting is a simple, powerless bluff. This realization was very liberating to him. Suddenly, all the borders that were laid around him became transparent. Suddenly, he felt like a dog on a broken leash. As this sense of freedom took root in William’s mind, he began to take delight in probing the boundaries of his anger. He began punctuating his sentences with the sound of shattered glass and broken plaster. In no time at all, William had managed to violate every window and wall in the foster home in his struggle to maintain control of the house. Who would have ever imagined that anger could be so much fun? To their surprise, his foster parents found themselves longing for the days when he limited himself to being a mere nightmare.
Three years and a dozen failed foster placements later, William was a changed person. His grandmother’s failing heart and his mother’s failing...everything...made it impossible for him to return home. By this time, the little garden in his personality that his grandmother had once maintained with such care had become choked with weeds.
Frustrated, his social worker filed unruly charges against him. She was tired of dumping him on unsuspecting foster homes with the hope that they would be able to tolerate his incorrigible behavior. She was tired of seeing families drop out of the foster care program after William had tormented every maternal instinct out of them.
When he tried to test this new boundary by running away from his foster family, he was brought to court for violating the terms of his probation. He had crossed one line too many this time. In place of the usual lecture from his social worker, he was sentenced to two weeks in a detention home.
William spent most of his time in the DH keeping to himself. If you and I could have opened his cranial vault and peered into that three pound bundle of thought, however, we would have found that he was a young man who was full of emptiness (or empty of fullness). He spent all his time being wall-to-wall with thoughts of his mother and grandmother. He felt completely betrayed by them. He felt like an abandoned house that was left at the mercy of the neighborhood vandals.
William had numerous opportunities to change his situation in a positive way. These opportunities, however, were wasted on him. William was the type of person who was more likely to sit, resentfully, through a terrible T.V. program than to get up and change the channel.
There was a kid named Nick at the detention home. Nick had the seductive quality in his personality that made people want to do what he said. Even the staff tended to clear pathways for him between the rules of the facility. They knew that if they displeased him the entire detention home population would become out of control. Much to their concern, they had to play the same kind of bluffing games that most parents were forced to endure.
Nick was a Messiah of sorts. One day he would become a powerful politician with a reputation for being tough on crime. He would also become known for being a bit of a philanderer. Nick had a long way to go between the concrete walls of the detention home and the silky beds of his numerous infidelities.
Nick could see the proverbial writing on the wall. The only problem was that he was hopelessly dyslexic. As a result, he often found himself leading his followers down one-way streets against the traffic of reasonable thought. Years later this quality would win him an entire series of elections.
The other kids followed their dyslexic Jesus with the kind of unquestioning obedience that often results in human sacrifices, wars, and bad hair styles. Nick, a painfully skinny kid with pitted skin and mournful teeth, was especially adept at using his unmatched eyes to his advantage. One eye was like a patch of sky with a touch of milk poured into it. The other eye was like a bottle of cheap Mexican beer. He combined these two colorful spheres to draw attention away from the realities that obstructed his path.
William was looking for something big and frightening that he could attach himself to so that he could give his anger a voice. Nick provided this for him. While William’s social skills were like bad grammar, Nick’s were pure literature. Nick’s words were like a perfect mathematical language; each sentence a little poetic equation. He could hold the attention of his audience the way a junkie holds a favorite needle.
Nick was the undisputed leader of the facility. There was, however, a give-and-take in this situation. He knew that he could only control the crowd if he was using all the right tools. These tools could be located by reading the crowd and figuring out what it was that they wanted to hear. In this way the crowd controlled him. After getting to know the other kids in the DH, Nick decided that the proper tools were rebellion and destruction.
William found himself transfixed by Nick’s delinquent gospel; his charisma; his hypnotic, mismatched eyes... Nick had come up with a plan. Gathering together a group of his most useful followers (four disciples, one female and three males), he invited them to be part of his vision.
Virtually every kid in the facility knew of the plan. Some of the staff may have even known about it. Despite this, nobody tried to bring it to an end. That was how powerful Nick’s influence was over the detention home.
During the recreation period (a time chosen because it was the only point in the day in which males and females were allowed to be together in the commons), two kids started a choreographed fight in a far corner of the facility. With this planned distraction in place, Nick and his four followers fell comfortably into their chosen roles.
It was William’s job to disable the hall guard. He had hoped that the guard would be one of the staff members who he could really enjoy hurting. This wasn’t the case. As he turned the corner to confront the guard, he found himself face to face with Mr. Steve.
The staff never used their last names around the kids. In a marriage of respect and confidentiality, they were known as “Mr. Mark”, “Mrs. Colleen” and so on. These were the types of things that made up daily life in lock-up.
Mr. Steve was actually the most popular staff member in the detention home. He used to smuggle cigarettes into the facility for the kids and he often pretended not to notice when the males and females snuck little affections to each other during the recreation period. He was the kind of employee who was a dream for the kids and a nightmare for the personnel department.
As he raised a chair over his head, William felt a little squish of guilt running through his body. It wasn’t enough to stop him, though. He had become skilled at locking off the emotions that were troublesome to him in moments of violence.
The first hit had a wet, doughy feel to it as the chair leg bounced off of Mr. Steve’s upper back. The second and third hits, though, had a more solid tone to them as the body of the chair came down squarely on the poor man’s head.
William continued to bring the chair down on Mr. Steve over and over again until Nick and another boy finally succeeded in plunging a table through one of the windows. Unobstructed, Nick and his four followers stepped through the shattered opening, their bodies still rattling with adrenaline.
Nick hot-wired a car from the staff parking lot. He felt so powerful; so free. Excitement roared through the five runners as they raced out onto the freeway, blissfully ignoring the fact that they had nowhere to go. Their pilgrimage took them down the elated dirt roads in search of a stretch of open freeway.
As time went on, they started to prod their brains for hiding places. There just didn’t seem to be anywhere that would have them. It seemed odd to be on such a big planet and to have so few places to go. Over time, the realization that their little plan could have been thought out a little more carefully began to soak it’s way through their enthusiasm.
The stolen car, a high-mileage Ford, raced aimlessly down interstate 76. It passed an endless procession of other cars, each stuffed with the pasts, presents, and futures of its passengers. The Ford passed a big, expensive luxury car that contained the Medina Hospital obstetrician who assisted in William’s birth. Fortunately, William looked quite different from the last time that the Doctor saw him.
The obstetrician had been retired for a couple of years at the time. In order to fill the holes in his day that were left when he retired, this gentle man became a master gardener. The same man who used to pull children out of their mothers spent his remaining years pulling prize winning vegetables out of the earth.
The aimless Ford passed a young couple who were married only a week earlier. Although they were still in the nape of their marriage, the wife was looking at her husband out of the corner of her eye, wondering how much longer she could tolerate living with him. Fortunately, her doubts would prove to be meaningless. She would go on to spend her entire life with him. In that time he would cheat on her once and she would cheat on him twice. In the end, he would be the one who held her eighty-year-old hand as a rampant cancer escorted her out of her hospital bed and into the next world.
The carload of runaway kids passed an ancient station wagon that contained a middle-aged housewife. Although she didn’t know it at the time, the woman was only a few hours away from her death. She was headed home where she was about to start dinner, take out the trash, and, then, suffer a massive brain aneurysm.
The kids were completely unaware of the lives that shared the freeway with them. Some of them busied themselves by arguing about where they should take their newfound (and perplexing) freedom. Others were sifting through the debris in the car that betrayed meaningless little secrets about its owner.
In the glove compartment they found ticket stubs from a musical, a pair of badly scratched sun glasses, a bottle of mosquito repellent, three dried-up pens, and an envelope with a grocery list scribbled on it’s back. As is usually the case, there were no gloves in the glove compartment. On the floor in the back of the car they found a rusted bicycle chain, another pen, a State of Florida road map, a rust sodden mitten, three pennies, and a nickel. Each item was like a little totem in the life of car’s owner.
After driving around aimlessly for three hours, the car ran out of gas. Nick herded his followers into the woods that butted up against the freeway. He didn’t really know what to do next but he knew that if he was going to remain in control it was important for him to be as decisive as possible.
Nick split his followers into two groups. He explained that they would be more efficient in finding shelter if they scoped out the area separately and, then, regrouped back at the car a few hours later. Although he didn’t know it at the time, he would never see the other group or the car again.
In one group were two boys who William never really got to know. The other group was made up of William, Nick, and a girl named Della. Della was at the detention home because she beat up her mother in an argument over who would be doing the dishes that evening.
Della was the kind of girl who would have made a great man’s man. She was simply too brutish and aggressive to live up to the feminine ideals. There were few things in this world that were more satisfying to this young woman than the feeling of burying her fist into the soft tissues of another person’s face.
Despite all of these masculine traits, Della was still remarkably sexual. It was all part of her celebration of everything masculine. She loved the male form as much as she loved the male lifestyle. In her brain, sex was a predatory sport. It was her sexuality, in fact, that inspired Nick to put her into his side of the divided group.
Night was closing in around Nick, Della, and William as they entered the woods. Slathering themselves with hijacked mosquito repellent, they disappeared into the greenery like a patallion of ground forces invading a foreign country. They became lost almost immediately.
Realizing that he wasn’t going to be able to find his way back to the car, Nick told Della and William that the real reason he broke the group into two pieces was because he wanted to cut away the dead wood. He boasted about tricking the two other kids into thinking that they would be meeting back at the car. William struggled to believe Nick’s lie.
In an attempted display of resourcefulness, Nick tried to start a fire. He assembled a pile of leaves and sticks but couldn’t seem to get the green wood to hold a flame. After several attempts, he had to accept the fact that he accomplished little beyond producing a considerable amount of smoke. Years later, critics would have the same thing to say about his political career.
William was starting to have his doubts about Nick. Nick was starting to have doubts about himself. Della, on the other hand, seemed to be completely taken with her leader. She kept nuzzling up against him with the kind of eroticism that a hungry house cat expresses to a refrigerator. In order to reaffirm his self-esteem, Nick started to return Della’s frattage. He started kissing her neck.
William couldn’t help but notice that he and his friends were still stuck in the woods with no plan for returning to society. All the nuzzling in the world wouldn’t fix this problem. He tried to share his realization with his fellow runaways.
The last thing that Nick needed was to be reminded of his failings. He was starting to feel like William and his realizations were nothing more than a piece of garbage that was stuck to the bottom of his shoe. They were like an eyeful of sand; They were like the neighbor’s new puppy that yelps all night long from the back yard... Nick licked Della’s neck, the sour taste of mosquito repellent filling his mouth.
Della gently unfastened Nick’s pants and reached into them. She was surprised to find that nothing productive going on down there. The stress of his little pilgrimage had left Nick as deflated as a beached blowfish.
“What’s wrong?”, Della asked, “I’m not pretty enough for you?”. Her voice was full of sudden, jagged pitch shifts like a verbal stabbing.
Suddenly, Nick began to look like a magician whose tricks had become as transparent as cellophane. He jumped to his feet, zipping and buttoning his pants. His eyes lost their exotic sheen. Bathed in panic, they started to look like the mismatched hubcaps on an abandoned car.
“Shut up! Shut up!”, he yelled back at Della. It was becoming harder and harder to remember how articulate he was capable of being.
* * *
He was sitting in his room, listening; waiting for his neighbor to leave her apartment. He was listening to her grooming patterns while his moment of neighborly contact raced closer and closer. The sounds of love crammed themselves into his ears. He listened while she rustled into and out of various outfits; while she picked through her personal belongings, looking for her car keys; while she descended the stairs, her musical key chain jangling at each step; while she stepped through the door; while she pulled the door shut; while she gently slipped the key into the lock, lacing its puzzle pattern into the tumblers...
He could feel his heart pounding against his chest like a drunk in the back of a riot wagon. While his neighbor’s shoes tapped out their leaving information in high-heeled morse code, William finished writing the note that he had intended to leave on her pillow. The note said, “I have been listening to you. You have been listening to me. It’s about time for us to meet”. Feeling satisfied with his message, William put on his shoes and left his apartment. He found his credit card and fished it around the tongue of his neighbor’s door. To his surprise, the french kiss of plastic and metal persuaded the door to pop open almost immediately.
“Jesus Christ”, he thought to himself, “these apartments are a bunch of rat boxes”. He decided that he needed to put a dead bolt on his door before some lunatic could get into his home. “There are a lot so sick people out there”, he thought.
He felt a glowing heat radiating from his stomach as the door opened and the smells from the apartment raced out to meet him. It smelled like the kind of sticky, sweet perfume that little girls are so attracted to before their tastes get more sophisticated. It smelled very naive.
William quietly shut the door behind himself and crept up the steps, into the bedroom. Despite the fact that the apartment was laid out exactly like his own, it looked remarkably different. Dried flowers and dime store art were scattered around the walls. Several little velvet and straw pictures pretended to be Chinese with their peach blossom bird motifs and their black lacquer frames. A stuffed cat, probably a childhood relic, stared stupidly into space from the corner of the bed.
William approached the bed as if it was a place of worship. The tangled, unmade pile of sheets and blankets were like a document of the young woman’s sleep. He gingerly placed the note on her pillow, sat on the bed, and turned to probe the personal items on her bedside table. He picked up a hairbrush from the dresser and examined it as if it was an archeological find, the tips of his fingers alive with static-electric excitement.
Suddenly, he heard an apocholiptic sound. It was the sound of a key entering the already unengaged lock at the front door. It was followed by the confused sound of the key discovering that its task was already completed. The door swung open. The woman entered her apartment.
* * *
The sheriff’s deputy read William, Della, and Nick their rights. He also informed them of the charges that were being pressed against them. It wasn’t until this time that they realized how their fates laid scattered on the floor in front of them. Della and Nick were being charged with criminal damaging, evading arrest, grand theft auto, and a slew of other crimes. William was charged with all of these things plus one other: Attempted murder. Apparently, the staff member who received William’s diversionary blows to the head was in a hospital where he lay suspended in a coma. Although he survived the attack, Mr. Steve would never completely recover.
The only member of the runaways to be tried as an adult, William was placed in a DYS facility until he reached the age of twenty one. Although most people in these facilities actually get out much sooner than their initial sentence, he had to remain in the facility right up until his twenty first birthday. Had he chosen a less visual, a less newsworthy crime, he would have been out before his eighteenth birthday. The long sentence taught him a very important lesson: Choose your crimes carefully.
Even though he was released from the DYS facility during a time when the Viet Nam war was at full boil, he didn’t have to worry about serving his country. As it turned out, his criminal record made him ineligible to serve in the army. Apparently, the government preferred to have its killing done by a less violent portion of the population.
With no job, very few friends, and no interests, William had to make the best of his years living alone in the government assisted apartments. He tried collecting stamps, reading, drugs... Each hobby held his attention for a little while. It was a few years, though, before he developed his favorite hobby: Sitting and listening.
* * *
He was sitting and listening. It was the first time that he got to hear sounds from the female side of the common wall. Excited, he knew that his chance to meet his neighbor was at hand.
Feeling very absent minded, the woman returned home to retrieve a library book that she had neglected to grab when she left a few minutes earlier. Flustered, she wondered how she had managed to forget to lock the door when she left the apartment.
As she charged upstairs, William felt the layers of panic thickening in his body. He didn’t want to scare the woman who had for so long been the object of his desire. Quietly getting up from the bed, he tried to find a non-threatening pose that he could assume.
The woman burst into her bedroom and into an entire festival of physical gyrations. The sight of William, hopefully waving to her from the middle of the room, caused her to jump back into the wall. She released an animal-like scream that scared the hell out of her intruder. Lots of other things happened too. She wet her pants, electricity prickled down her back, her heart started flubbering wildly around her chest, she covered her ears, she fell back and pulled her legs up against her upper body...
The woman was in a fetal position. People often do this sort of thing when they are in a panic. It is a physical expression of a person’s wish to return to the safe world of his or her mother’s womb. Unfortunately, this is not a very realistic desire to have. If William’s neighbor could have returned to her mother’s womb it would have accomplished nothing except to cause her mother a considerable amount of discomfort.
William didn’t really know how to respond to this little display. He stood there, still waving, a panicked look invading his eyes.
“Hi!”, he ventured, “It’s me... William”.
William was a bit disappointed at the greeting that his neighbor had for him. As spectacular as it was, it lacked the warmth that he had expected. He was also a little disappointed to see what his neighbor really looked like.
She was a bit on the plain side. Her thighs were rather bovine for his taste and her forehead seemed to protrude a little too far ahead of her eyes. Her nose wasn’t exactly petite either. No, she didn’t look very much like he remembered.
As a couple of awkward minutes passed, the young woman realized that her odds of being sucked back into her mother’s womb were fairly low. She looked up at William, getting a good look at his face for the first time. Again, William said “Hi!” in the friendliest voice that he could muster. This time, she responded to his greeting.
“Get out!”, she said, “Get out! Get out! Get out!... Get out!”.
William thought the woman was being pretty darn rude. He moved closer in an attempt to explain the situation to her. She obviously didn’t realize the he was the man she had been listening to through her walls for all those months. It seemed that a brief explanation was in order.
Abandoning her fetal position, the young woman moved on to another coping strategy. She waited until he got within a few feet of her and then she lunged up to grab William by the throat. There was no doubt about it, she was a rude, rude woman.
William desperately tried to calm his poorly mannered attacker.
“Wait”, he said, “It’s me... William”. His voice, pinched by the panicked hands of his neighbor, made him sound as if he had been inhaling helium.
Romance is a funny thing. While William tried to straighten out his derailed passions, his neighbor grabbed one of the velvet and straw pictures off the wall and started beating him over the head with it. She was beating the love right out of him.
As he began to lose consciousness, William realized that he had made a big mistake when he entered this woman’s life. He knew that the aspirins, damp wash cloths, and the old soft shoe would inevitably be followed by the usual procession of police, judges, and social workers. He wondered if he was going to end up in the Mansfield Correctional Facility.
As William slipped out of awareness he could have sworn that he heard that ancient pipe organ wheezing out its rehabilitation like a thousand sickly bag pipers. He felt as if he was returning to the concrete walls of his grandmother’s love. He was sitting. He was listening...
