1986

Upon a conversation with a fellow friend, I documented his thoughts and experiences and now, in the following short-short, I portray the narration of a boy growing up in a suburban town of Minnesota, circa 1986. – Enjoy!

 

In Coon Rapids, a rundown town full of mullet heads, where a happy childhood was biking on trick BMXs, listening to metal and rock, Flotsam and Jetsam, Exodus, Pantera, eating Doritos, drinking Mountain Dew on a blistering summer day, and playing boot-hockey during winter break with a worn green tennis ball in which the ball invariably hit the kid in the face and broke his glasses.

 

Mark spent a lot of time with the same kids in the days before his last year of middle school. They used a lot of rainy days reading Playboys from John’s Dad or Penthouses stolen from the local Tom Thumb.

 

Mark’s love life was his hand and himself, a lot of spunk, a Teri Weigel centerfold, and Carly, the neighbor girl with dark hair who was cute, perky, and bouncy. In Mark’s smarmy head, he imagined her and 20 thousand other girls a million times a day under the folds of his sheets; there was one, then another, and he was never stuck on just one, but was desperately trying to conceal the constant raging urgent situation in his pants, trying to avoid losing his mind, all day, every day, sitting at his desk in English Composition, or sitting at the kitchen table, unable to focus on his WWII books or listen to Anthrax or U2, the intensity of seeing their breasts and naked flesh eroding his mind. Girls were out of reach, out of touch, and he was on the outs, looking in, unable to control his thoughts. At that time, he didn’t have the sense or the brains to approach girls, so he watched in wonderment as one of his best friends, Paul Washington, occupied himself with one of their classmates, Becky Larson.

 

Paul was good with the gals and Becky was good with him. She was cute, her face glimmered and shined, her body was attractive, small, petite, and the shapes and curves of her body were alluring. She was one year older and more sophisticated than the other girls in their class, and Paul was engaged, verbal, understood music and theory, dressed well, stood out in a crowd, and yet was down to earth and was kind enough to befriend Mark and discuss music and books. Paul came to Coon Rapids from Blaine too, and the two of the them wore REM, Jane’s Addiction, U2, and Van Halen t-shirts, Levi jeans, cuffed and pinned at the bottom, beige trench coats, Converse Chuck Taylors, and sometimes a pair of Vans.

 

He thought about getting a girl naked, so he could kiss and hug her, hoping she wouldn’t notice the holes in his socks, and taking her to a private grassy knoll to engage in the scent of freshly cut grass and the sounds and whispers of an oncoming rain, the wind and the breeze pulling a dark and gray umbrella over the two of them. After the hard rain, they would sit in a dry spot beneath a tall oak, taking in the scent of dirt, grass, and night crawlers escaping the flooded grounds, and on their blanket, he would share his concerns with her, asking, “What does the future hold?” He would continue speaking of his uncertainties, which were vast, hoping she could help him gain some closure.

 

Mark, indeed was without direction, had no idea what it was to be an adult and to be on his own. What is ‘real’ life? Are all the grown men and women, factory workers? Auto mechanics? Waitresses or bar tenders?

 

He was a voracious reader, digesting S. E. Hinton’s Outsiders and Stephen King novels and short stories, books on American and European history, literature on physics and time travel, but was unable to find a mentor, someone to discuss hypotheticals and theories and love and loneliness.

 

His mother and father were pragmatic, his Dad, a mechanic, his Mom, a cashier at Sears. He could converse on practical and systematic issues and ideas with them, but Mark remained unfulfilled in some of his other questions or concerns. He wasn’t self-guided and didn’t know anything about self-direction or self-motivation. Books, in a sense, were his salvation, which addressed some of his meandering questions and concerns.

 

Early in his life, as their only child, after his parents migrated from South Dakota to Minnesota for an easier and yet more prosperous city life, away from the farm and away from the limitations of a small rural town, Mark realized his love for reading and school, which were easy escapes into fiction and stories and teachers who were alluring and boys and girls who enjoyed Mark’s presence and humor.

 

Mark accepted the offer to join the school’s gifted and talented program, which to him didn’t seem all that exceptional. He was elected to sit with students who were struggling readers, and in a sense, he became their one-on-one tutors.

 

Can’t you sit pretty today? We’re at church and you’re sitting cross-legged. Ladies don’t sit like boys. Mara wore her Sunday dress, worn, yellowed yarn and polyester-like tights to appear patterned and delicate, black xx strapped shoes on her feet, but deep within she saw nothing lady-like in her dress.

 

In sixth grade, the kids all got along. They didn’t notice castes or cliques but in a sudden sweep, they were dropped into a middle school and forced to assimilate in to a hot mess of 600 plus kids. Getting up and going to school was, at times, agonizing, and Mark played a minutia of mental tricks on himself to get his body out the door. What tricks?

 

Most of his peers were brazen and thoughtless, violent, and angry. The boys wanted to fight Mark or Ray, or someone else.

 

Fortunately, Ray, one of the popular kids sat with Mark at lunch occasionally; Ray was good for laughs and he liked Mark’s jokes and humor. Bob, Ray’s good friend, fashionable, mature, saw the good in all, also sat with Mark and Ray at times for chats on English Composition homework and papers. The two of them, Ray and Bob, were big and tall with killer mullet hair, heads high with the girls making eye contact with them. The guys digged them, and other guys wanted to fight them.

 

There was a year in which Mark fell into a lonesome spell. One of his good friends, Scott, disappeared for some time and later contacted Mark and apologized for being a jerk. Scott had spent a year tagging along with a group of kids, and said, “I was a jerk to you, and I was hanging out with these jerks. I’d rather hang out with you– not them.”

 

Since then, the two of them remained close, realizing they were good for each other. Mark believed they could be truthful and authentic, and he felt a genuine bond and sense of belongingness their pack of two.

 

The truth was, Mark feared speaking in front of groups of kids. He felt awkward and alienated and never felt comfortable.

 

Oftentimes, these fears lent to sadness and loneliness. He felt limited to Coon Rapids, his bedroom, his small collection of music, and his books, which were never enough.

 

He felt a longing for emotional closeness, sincere discussions, and close friendships, but as a teenager amidst loud and boisterous, sometimes cantankerous kids, burners who were smoking Newport’s outside the PDQ and skateboarders with umbrella haircuts like Moe in the Three Stooges.

 

He realized he was far from acquiring a genuine sense of self and was on the verge of survival because in Coon Rapids, boys were posturing, making themselves big, threatening to beat everyone up, ridiculing those who stood out or who appeared weak. Later, as Mark grew, gained broad shoulders, long legs, sinewy muscles, the kids wanted to fight him, an outcast, a well-dressed nerd as if out of a Sears catalog, dressed by my mother, wearing black rimmed glasses, corduroys, and velour shirts.

 

At the end of the school year, Mark joined Ray for a high school football game. They sat together on the bleachers, snapping their gum, and looking on, bored, apathetic, and disinterested in the players and the cheerleaders. At half time, Ray took off for a box of popcorn. He was out of sight beyond the beginning of the third quarter, and at the fourth quarter, Mark grew tired of waiting, biting his nails and sitting in thirty-degree damp air. He sat alone on the bleachers, counting the ways in which he could make a living in Minneapolis, considering Ray as a roommate what with Ray’s parents who were willing to fund Ray’s apartment until Ray landed a job.

 

The game ended, and out of Mark’s reverie was Ray who suddenly jumped out of a crowd, his shirt torn and bloodied, and in his hand, a dirty and bloodied knife.

 

Later that evening, Mark learned Ray, in defense, had knifed a boy.

 

Ray disappeared for a couple years, ending up in the Lino Lakes juvenile hall. Mark never heard from him again.

 

High school graduation came and went as did the commencement of undergraduate studies for half of Mark’s class and technical schools for the other half. Mark meandered into a motorcycle mechanics school mostly because Dad was a mechanic and because there were no other thoughts of his own, no expectations of life after high school except for getting a job and staying out of trouble.