For the sheer tactile deliciousness of running my fingers over the keyboard (for the purpose of eliciting words and sentences), I’ve recently enrolled in a writing class. It’s sponsored by a hoity-toity arts complex in Beverly Hills, where all municipal institutions are required by ordinance to be hoity-toity.
The class is an offering in their “Community Outreach to Alte Kackers” program, although I think they call it something else. I’m the only he/him amid nine she/hers, including the instructor.
Each week, we are given writing prompts we can either follow faithfully or ignore to whatever degree we choose (except perhaps none measured in Celsius).
Our first assignment was to visualize a portion of the neighborhood we grew up in and let that trigger something we’d like to write about.
All our assignments will be limited to approximately 300 words, so there will be a lot of streamlining to stay within the constraints.
Here’s what came forward after envisioning a section of a block near my boyhood home. It’s a little more straightforward than the usual inanity I hope to inject more of into future assignments.
The summer before eighth grade. A new kid moves to our suburban Chicago neighborhood.
Lenny, with a long last name that’s short on vowels, and when written out looks like an orthodontist-ad “before” photo.
We become friends in the way that hanging out once or twice makes you friends at that age.
But by summer’s end, for no specific reason, we stop hanging out, only passing each other now and then in our junior-high halls after school starts up again.
In the spring semester, I go on our class trip to D.C.
We stay four to a motel room: me, Peter, Nat, and Cary. Cary’s an immature elf of a character – and in my mind-movie of how things should go, he’s the one the rest of us can pick on in that innocently brutal way boys can bond over destroying a common victim.
But this movie has a plot twist, and for reasons I can’t fathom, it is I who become the target of the other three.
So, despite the exhilaration of visiting monuments and the massive halls of Federal authority, memories are also created that for decades will be strained through a cheesecloth of childhood trauma.
Upon our return, a crushing layer gets added: Lenny has somehow found it within himself to take up with my motel-mate shtunks, and although we’d had no previous conflicts, he’s now outing himself as no longer my friend.
That following summer, while visiting Yellowstone with his dad, Lenny falls down in a river they’re fishing. His hip-waders fill with water, the current drags him under, and he drowns, becoming the first dead not-old person I’ve ever known.
My parents are on vacation, so I’m staying with my aunt and uncle when I get the news. There’s a relentless pins-and-needles feeling in my stomach every time I think about Lenny, and I can’t stop thinking about Lenny.
— — —
The best place you can ever be is HERE and NOW.
The only place you can ever be is HERE and NOW.
There is no Point B!