charise

Bowling is for Thursday night. Bowling. Nay the sport of kings yet the boon of restless souls in a home town, to exercise body and mouth alike between ten white pins and and a few brown longnecks. Bowwwww-ling. Booyeah.

Her gaze became fixed, the fruit fly in resin, even though I could swear she'd never looked my way.

As an unspoken code we try to keep this a guys night, about half are married, group therapy, now available without prescription. We have a couple of leaguers but the rest of us can hold our own. My average is creeping up into the high hundreds, although in a twelve-lane venue it's getting harder to concentrate on the game lately.

Slender build, honey sun-bleached drapeage, either natural curls brushed out or maybe last spring's perm and some kind of button-up top, and there's bound to be a couple spares beneath those baggy diamond-hipped jeans the girls wear nowadays. She means business, rolls with a considerate kind of confidence and a prose from beyond her years, doesn't leave many standing. A couple of her decisive strikes have given me pause while lining up my own shots. There are always the same four gals in her group.

One night Harry, our bald-headed grandad, catches me looking and word gets around. After nailing a sweet Brooklyn strike in the third frame he gets an arm around my shoulders.

"Intelligence reports have confirmed she's been sneakin' some peeks too, champ." I just shake my head and sneer.

Next couple of frames are kinda rough so an offering is taken for another round, my turn to represent. Right before I embark someone bumps my arm and for some reason I look up just as she's headed for the restroom.

Brown eyes, that shouldn't be, by some counts at least, or maybe it's the game throwing off my gyro. After we pass I wonder if I can ever believe what I just saw. She had whispered "hi"after I smiled, as if under distress before ducking into the latrine. At the counter, awaiting the tray of fresh troops, I actually wonder if I should warn the other women not to go in there for a while.

Instead, it seems the place is kinda sparse tonight, probably the cider fest drawing most of the folks with rugrats.

On the return trip she emerges and smiles this time, nearly choking on a giggle.

All clear, I thought.

We finish the night with scorecards no better or worse than any other. I get home and things feel different, taking a moment to get my bearings as if the furniture had moved. After a shower and shave Carson seems a bit more chipper than usual. Good for him.

Next week the ladies are a no-show and things feel normal yet, I'll allow, a tad empty. Then a special league event forces a break, but finally it's all in place again, she wears a thin sky-blue cardigan, not that I notice. Lately I'd worked up to an 18 pounder and tonight I hit some kind of stride with the thing, landing on a not-too-shabby 216 once the dust settles. Didn't pay for any food or drink that night, and the resulting hubbub earned us a visit from the ladies league who had started a frame or two ahead of us.

"My name's Charise," she assures me with a dainty handshake, somehow grossly out of phase with all the cannonballs fired from that arm somewhere in the annals of my periphery. Her name is Charise. The world around us is of grins and glances, it knows what I know.

"So you're from around here?" It turns out yes and no, as the story unfolds I get the hint of a greater conspiracy from far beyond our respective teams, our poor tired mothers, the silhouette pros of the sport, double agents extraordinaire, leap from the upper walls and draw their sidearms, taking aim from behind pool tables, hold it right there Mister Bond, how kind of you to pay us a veesit. She talks fast, almost frantically, as if there's an egg timer on the bill of my ball cap. New intelligence is in, the eyes are brown, all sources confirm, dark binary stars to planetary freckles, and the (orange?) blush makes it all hard to parse. I gradually perceive her aroma, a finely-tuned ratio of powder, perspiration and AquaNet.

Conversations extend into the parking lot to be punctuated by slamming doors. I sit and take a few deep breaths over the steering wheel of my '82 Cutlass, staring into what's left of the sunset over the shopping centers. The car is just starting to produce upholstery dander, having sat outside every day of its life, the dust dances in twilight with the sweet autumn air.

Her name is Charise. It may just as well be dammit.

world where

Shed a sea of blood and the world is better, for every noble cause under the sun, all of which are right. Why dream? Deputy Fife takes aim. With a lone bullet gonna make Mayberry a place where one can break wind without some dooshjob redneck stealing headlines about his lack of wit. We bash each other over the head with a book while healing whispers proximity, old white men in suits selectively adapt a mute button, and that once proud sense of belonging shrivels into a maudlin caricature of itself, ridiculously wanton in its attempt to exhume former glory. Now Barn' done got excited and shot the floor again. Drag 'em in here and turn 'em into one of us. Compunction is a tsunami caused by an epic event no one remembers. We cannot change so they must. Go us. For God's sake we blow up fruit stands to keep the dream alive. Better put Otis back in the cell before he starts making sense. Dreams are for dreaming.

three dragons

Many years ago a person emerged from the autumn fog with some long leashes and said look over there, and when I looked over there I felt the leashes slip into my hand, then there I stood with three dragons. I had no clue what their names were.

But over time it's become clear that the first is Ambition. He wants it all, from being a 007 coder to bringing down the house with a 12-bar blues solo, and everything in between. Basically a would-be badass at whatever looks cool.

And then there's the one I call Aphrodite, except, well, she's not what you might expect. You know that girl from school who trips over her own toes and just can't catch a break? Yeah. After a while the "blond moments" were obviously calculated for effect but she's starting to take hints. I think.

Finally we have Allure. Al's...something else, totally unaware of what the ladies want, especially when he's got a shot. Seriously. Once you've seen an awkward teenage dragon you've seen it all.

Now, put all that together for a traipse through the park. Can't remember the last time they were all on the same page, you know, off in every direction, stopping on a whim, no stone unturned. Not sure if my insurance covers scorching but so far we've been lucky.

Still, though they wear me out and try my patience...at the end of the day they're simply irresistible. Not everyone agrees, of course, some look down their nose, because, dragons should be stuffed into a cage and not roam around causing problems, messing up the landscape and disrupting people's lives with their youthful ardor.

That bothered me at first, till one day I was shoveling some dragon doo and it flew into a disapproving eye. Then, the strangest thing happened.

I smiled.

tutelage

beauty protects the skin
skin protects the woman
yet
sometimes
there's just no place
like
vulnerability

bird legs

as for the girl
the boys talk to
but rarely
about
the one who
comes to mind
at odd moments
and somehow makes
you feel
ashamed
they say she has
bird legs
kinda stringy
not much
to grab onto
until
one evening
you both walk out
to the parking
garage
as she plays
with her
keys those eyes
make the sales pitch
the smile
seals the deal
and despite the
bird legs
her leather sleeves
gently
crackle around you
she says i'm
a compulsive liar
you say i don't
believe you
raucous blazing futility
behind a pillar
about your waist
bird legs
get
what they came for
and as you
drive home
you can't decide
whether you lost
or she won
but either way
she is the
girl
you'll never call
who walks away
on
bird legs

Revolution Day

All the pundits will suddenly be correct
You don't know how long we've waited for this
The suits and the hippies finally agree
Belly buttons and aholes everyone's got one
Pot gut accountants been tellin us for years
Who are we to disagree
Schoolyard bullies got their own undies up their crack

tlc

Being good evangelicals, we swarm to the fairgrounds that May evening, to hear Leighton Ford, in-law and close associate to Billy Graham, as he strives to redeem the word "crusade" for both infidel and faithful alike.

The youth from my church waste no time, finding solitude for its own sake, along a paved trail to a bridge at the foot of the woods. Immediately a lit cigarette and maybe a beer materialize and make their rounds as the only bona-fide couple in the group studies French.

As I stand there agaze at the surreality before me, having been heretofore excluded from such extracurriculars, she reluctantly takes a hit of the coffin nail. Later on she tells me she wasn't sure why she did, "I used to smoke but I quit," just as she'd always revealed herself to me.

So I seek refuge, not really finding it in the grandstand, next to two chicks I know by name, as usual, engulfed with inane chatter about boys and boys. And so goes the entire service, even as I see one of the party crowd mope to the makeshift altar, and the razor-sharp chill in the air keeps on cutting. It's as if everyone there knows somebody else yet I evidently don't even know myself.

Afterward, in the twilight she has a choice. Being the alpha for once, at the ripe age of thirteen, I extend my mom's offer to take her home. Somehow I just know, then she hesitantly shuns the others and comes with me as several pairs of eyes hurl their daggers. We meet her dad at the agreed place and I hug her goodbye, but not before she tells me she's kind of glad she didn't go off into the night doing God knows what.

And so the lines were drawn. Some of them blew me off for weeks to come, but she rode a horse to my house and I escorted her back on my bike one summer's day, and so it was, till just over a year later. We got the call as I lie on the couch after school, ironically, having just seen her there not two hours earlier. At least she lived through my birthday as I felt sicker and sicker, until the next day, then she was gone.

(for a friend I'll always miss)