Meditation on Cool

You collect leather jackets. All of them vintage 20^th Century, with patches of skulls and naked ladies, pins from heavy metal bands and biker gangs. You have never ridden a motorcycle in your life. That silly gold stud you put in your right ear during high school. It lasted three weeks. You took it out before visiting your grandfather, who would never understand jewelry on a boy.

The Atkins diet robbed your adolescent body of energy until one day you fell down the stairs, but it made you thinner, a prerequisite of being cool. Picking up your first can of beer at 14 in a gangway with miscreants. LSD. Cocaine. Quaaludes. At 16, you sold your entire comic book collection (including Spiderman #1!) to buy a pound of marijuana. Rolling joints all night, you sold them from the Jack in the Box across the street from your high school. A hard pack of Marlboros in your jean jacket pocket shone like a red badge of courage. Feigning a hatred of school to impress one group while maintaining high grades to appease another. Doing anything to fit in. A late bloomer and heavyset, you mastered the art of the put down, the burn, what they now call roasting. Honing your wits. In lieu of having a young man’s physique, your place in the group depended on it. But try as you did, cool just never happened to you. It remained ephemeral, like grace.

A stone cold fox in your grade, Katrina, once bequeathed you a backstage pass to the Judas Priest concert. It wasn’t a date. She would meet you in the parking lot behind the venue, where you smoked a joint and she pressed the coveted sticker onto your jacket. She “knew” the band and, well, those doors were not open to you. “Have fun,” she said. That was the last you saw of her. Still, you had a backstage pass, enabling you access to the bacchanal behind the curtain. At last, cool! The reality was this: you spent the entire concert standing in the corner of a dark, rank hallway smoking Marlboros, neither in the room where Katrina and the other girls were, nor by the stage where Judas Priest was. You saw the band as they marched past you, heard their English accents and smelled their leather and cologne. Observed bits and pieces of their show through a seam in the wall of amplifiers. Pushed aside by security as the group stumbled to their dressing rooms, where booze, drugs and sex undoubtedly awaited. Tantalizing. Just out of reach. Way out of reach. That backstage pass, just a silly sticker, only reinforced how uncool you really were, like headgear they give to special-needs kids.

Four decades on, you still seek coolness. You called it relevance but the concept was the same. Cool people are in the game. Cool people got laid. They get hired. Mia said coolness was trying to become what you thought others found attractive. It was, she said, a perilous pursuit. Letting others define you. Yes, but the peacock must display to attract a female. Many creatures had to put on a show. Wasn’t it only natural that humans did too? You sucked at it. Fronting might be crass but it worked. When Rex pulled up in his gold Trans Am the girls noticed him and so did the boys. He stirred the herd. He was the stag with the biggest horns.

It always eluded you. Well, almost always. That time with Michelle you were the stag. She’d chosen you, over Rex, over everyone. Once. Much later things started clicking. You were on. Your clothes fit. Women even wanted you. Then came the big jobs. Once, there was even a bidding war for your services. Once.

To be continued…

The Lake (6)

My Michelle

Her amazing body was all the ID she needed. But you were 16 years old and looked it, despite the balloon pants, tight shirt and shiny shoes she’d seduced you into wearing. She liked them on you and for her you would look stupid. Sometimes the bouncers let you in as a “favor” to Michelle. More often they did not. Either way you felt belittled. Frankly, getting in was even worse. You hated the music. And you especially hated watching all the men, twice your age, ogling Michelle at every turn.

In the beginning, Michelle had been okay simply hanging out and getting high or going to the movies but such adolescent activities clearly bored her. She was beyond it. You began stressing out over how to keep her interested in you. But with little money and less experience you had few options.

Trying to repeat the magic of that glorious afternoon you took Michelle to the lake. This time Rex was all over her, and short of getting into his car she did nothing to stop him. The other girls resented Michelle’s presence, disdaining her company, shunning her. Michelle gave two shits about them. She knew jealousy when she saw it. You were the monkey in the middle. You could not play the alpha male even if you tried.

To be continued…

The Lake (5)

My Michelle

It was as if the two of you were co-starring in a divinely written play, a pairing far removed from the inglorious hook ups taking place in the muscle cars behind you. You didn’t know if you were being watched and to your delight you didn’t care. Rex and his ilk did not matter. Michelle would remain your fantastic secret for as long as possible, that day anyway.

You walked with Michelle, holding hands, which for once did not feel strange, and arrived at an empty apartment she said belonged to her mother. Inside it was cool and dark. She left the shades down and led you into her bedroom.

To recite what transpired there would require a poet’s gift, lest it sound obscene. The two of you swallowed each other whole. Satiated, her head resting on your chest, you both drifted into a deep sleep. You didn’t know it then but this would be the only time you would ever fall asleep in a woman’s embrace.

Like a pristine bubble dangling precariously from a child’s wand, it would not last. The nirvana of that afternoon did not follow either of you into the relationship. Michelle revealed herself to be insecure and vain. All too aware of her exceptional physique and its effect on men, she vacillated between flaunting herself and retreating into a pouty shell. She liked dancing and disco music and the culture surrounding it: the clothes, nightclubs, older men, black men – all of which made you uncomfortable.

To be continued…

The Lake (4)

My Michelle

Nearly 40 years have passed since that druggy July afternoon and you can still remember the details vividly. Not just her body but everything on it: her pink velour running shorts, the canary yellow tube top, a stretchy headband, reflective aviators.

You do not rise. Michelle sits down on the grass beside you. Tiny beads of perspiration dot her upper lip. When she smiles a rivulet forms on her flushed cheek. You watch the droplet encroach places you would kiss.

“I know you from the neighborhood,” she says. “I knew I would find you here.”

That didn’t make sense. You’d never seen this girl before in your life, save for in your dreams. How did she know you? You don’t ask. A gift like this you receive without questions.

While you remember particulars from that day at the lake, the vision of Michelle, the strange miracle of her coming to you, it would be disingenuous to reiterate the dialog you shared. As if under the rapture of Psilocybin, you only know the conversation flowed like a clear stream over smooth rocks – the actual words as elusive as silvery trout slipping in and out of the sunshine.

To be continued…

“The Lake” (2)

My Michelle…

No one dared admit how scared and insecure they were about the opposite sex. Per usual, drugs and alcohol helped and hindered at the same time, blunting certain fears while exaggerating others. Weird sexual tension, tinged by frustration, laced with anger, permeated the trumped up stories and bogus laughter, as dense as the smoke pouring out of Red’s van.

You found the scene both repellent and attractive, unsure of what you were doing there yet unable to refrain from being there. You were not fully invested in the burnout culture of the lake and this made you a peripheral character. You got high. You told lies. You tried to be cool. When it wasn’t working you simply retreated to a spot on the grass, kicked back, and watched leaves rustling in the trees or cars whipping by in the distance on Lake Shore Drive.

It was at just such a moment you noticed her jogging along the bike path. Even from the vast distance the woman’s curvy silhouette stood out. There was no other way to put it she had enormous breasts, just like the centerfolds in Playboy and Hustler. Up and down they caromed. You literally saw one rise as the other fell. Completing her teen dream looks, she had long tresses of blond hair and somehow you could see every strand of it, tickling and slapping her exposed back as she ran.

She seemed like a wet dream. But she was real.

To be continued…