SHORT STORY
READ EXCERPT
“It’s romantic under the moonlight.” She persisted when I started to scratch my head.
I thought it was a great idea, but I grumbled anyway.
Our plan now was to go to the beach and lie down on the sand under the moonlight and look at the stars and to count all the voyaging ships of the night about and wonder where they’re going and what they’re carrying with them?
We walked the twelve or eleven blocks to the shore. And we sat down on the sand. Then the shore rushed in and a mist hit our faces and sprinkled little drops of water that had travelled far to reach us.
And we both had drops of water running down our faces. And it looked like were crying but we weren’t, we were happy.
Then a cold breeze came from the sea and all I could hear was the sound of crashing waves and the wind.
“Did you feel that breeze? It kissed us.” Jane said.
“Yea, I’ve felt it all my life. During summer, I’d wait around for it. And every now and then it would come and kill the heat.”
“That’s all I want to be. The breeze that flows with the wind. The cold that comes from the sea. That’s all I want to be. “
We stayed in each other’s arms for a while looking at the moon and the wind and the waves and the ships of the night.
Then we got up, shook the sand off and went to the bus stop, it was late.
We waited around for her bus and we talked and made plans about our future and at no point did we stop holding hands. Then her bus arrived and before she left, I gave her what seemed like a thousand kisses, on her lips, on her hands, on her neck, anywhere I could plant one.
Then she got on the bus and before it left, she waved goodbye. I waved back but she didn’t see me.
I don’t think I’ve ever been loved like Jane loved me that day, never felt a breeze like the one that kissed us both. I wonder sometimes what she’s doing and if she thinks about me, and if that breeze will ever touch us again.
FULL SHORT STORY
“Do you believe in love?” Jane asked me as she whispered sweetly in my ear.
“I don’t know?” I said honestly.
“Come on, you have to believe in love?’ Jane said as she put her hand casually over my lap.
“How can I believe in something, I’ve never seen, never felt, something that I only see in movies, that happen to other people.” I said. The bus rolled through the shadows resting below the palm trees.
“You’ve never felt a special way about a girl.” She said as she fixed her hair around her ear.
“I don’t think so. I don’t think it would matter anyway, maybe me I’m just one of those guys, that’s always meant to be alone, you know like one those cowboys out on the plain, they don’t need anybody, they just need a little bit of water, some shade, maybe a couple songs, but they don’t need anybody.” I said confidently.
Jane kissed my cheek and put her hand right around the back of my neck, there was something about it, something so warm, it felt like it was melting ice, like a torch guiding its way across the edge of an igloo.
“You’re not a cowboy.” Jane said.
We had skipped school and our plan was to take the mushrooms long before Francisco’s mother arrived. That way we’d still be bordering mad but under control and not loud and racing and speculative.
We had skipped school early that day, we left at nine o’clock in the morning, right after we got attendance in homeroom that way our parents didn’t know what we were doing. We had to wait around for a while because the security guards were chaining up the gate in the back parking lot, they always did this, but it never stopped us. We just waited until they left, and we would crawl under the chain link gate, like a prisoner escaping a death camp, that’s how it felt any-way. Sometimes especially after it rained, we would get mud in our faces from all that crawling, but we didn’t give a damn, freedom sweet freedom, I’ll make it an ode for thee, I’ll sing in your honor, and if my honor graces me, I’ll do it eternally.
We always did that, we skipped school and did just enough to get by without anybody noticing. I skipped school every day of the year and I never failed a single class, I really didn’t. See the trick to doing it right was, you’d ditch right after homeroom and not go to any of your other classes because teachers gossip, it’s just human nature but maybe teachers gossip a little more than normal, because after all they’re the real kids, they never wanted to grow up, so they teach and stay young forever. Anyway, it’s easy to skip, especially if you just want to pass. All you had to do was call up a buddy who went to class and was responsible and all and you’d get the homework from him and then you’d show up next class with the homework completed and with story about being sick and all, except you couldn’t show up with an “I had a flu story”, it had to be ridiculous and outrageous, the more ridiculous the better. If it was vivid and strange, they ate it up. I knew how to lie to people especially teachers, they love children most of them and all you had to do was play on their soft nature and tell them a sad story and let them be the “adult” and reprimand you as they saw fit.
If you had a flu without a note, you’d get sent to the principal’s office, but if you told them that your mom got drunk and beat you and you didn’t want to come to school with the bruises or that you had a tropical disease and that you didn’t have health insurance, they felt sorry for you, they really did.
Anyway, we left through the back parking lot of our high school. We jumped under the gate and quickly dashed to the public golf course across our school that was both our hangout and safe spot against prying eyes and cops. We were always dodging cops, there’s enough of them in Miami Beach to drive you mad. Miami Beach cops, Florida State troopers, Miami Dade County Public School cops because despite all our independent and brooding airs we were still children and very much susceptible to the dangers of the outside world, we really were. We even had to dodge the Fish, Wildlife and Game cops that hung around protecting the peacocks and shit.
Anyway, we had skipped school and went to the “tree”, which was a giant tree in the deep left corner of the golf course surrounded by a chain link fence, right by the Scott Rakow youth center, this was as our home away from home, more of a home really than school ever was.
We had a clean mattress there and everything and occasionally if you were on the run from school security or the school’s cops, you could go there and take a long nap and laugh at the thought of them looking for you across the course in their ridiculous golf carts.
We arrived there and we found our friend Elaim, who’s dad was a rabbi and lived across the street. It was me, that is John, like the John the Baptist, Francisco, Therese, and Davis, who was me and Francisco’s best friend. We formed a sort of trio together, we always got together and smoked pot and discussed films and literature. And Davis was also Francisco’s musical partner at the time. They were in a duo called “Art Monk” and they were recording the single of an album they never completed called “Rotting Mother”. The song went like this “she’s a rotting mother…rotting mother”, it was catchy, it really was.
Elaim was with two friends of his, a skinny pasty looking guy that looked like an undercover alien if I ever saw one and a short kid with bright dyed red hair. They were very weird but very friendly in their own way.
And Jane was also there, a truly beautiful girl with tan olive brown skin and hazel eyes and short brown hair that made her look a little bit like a boy.
I liked her a lot, in fact I had even started to write poetry just to articulate how I liked her, just to put it down on paper so it could make sense because it didn’t make any sense in my head. In my head it was all just soft sweet nothings.
And I knew she might like me as well because two years earlier, after a party she kissed me on Francisco’s brown leather couch and she told me she wanted to make it, while Francisco and Davis were asleep in the other room. She said she wanted to make it because she read in a newspaper article that all real women do it and that she wanted to do it for the first time with someone she liked a lot and that she had chosen me, of all people.
But I was young; and I didn’t know how to make it, not really and I was also high on Marijuana for the first time in my life, so I said no and then we both went to sleep on the brown leather couch. Something I regret a lot because it would have been a helluva story to tell my grandchildren.
Anyway, we said hello to each other and shook hands like the good children our parents had raised us to be and then we start dragging hits out of Elaim’s water pipe, bong if you want to be short about it.
Then we started drinking “booty whisky” which was actually cheap rum mixed with Gatorade. Elaim had stolen both from his kitchen about a week ago and he had stashed it at the “tree” and every now and then we got really fucked up. Since it was very early and so damn hot, we decided to do exactly that.
I don’t remember exactly everything that happened, I remember when we started drinking, Elaim’s friends went back to school, because they had a test and even though they were high they wanted to pass it.
After they left, it all got a lot chummier and drunker. We started telling each we loved one another, and we drank and smoked; and it was all fun and fine. At one point we all got very hungry after a couple of hours of bumming, so we decided to go back to school to eat the school lunch because it was free.
We snuck back into school and we never stopped drinking, since the booze was in Gatorade bottles and it looked like liquid candy, we just pretended we were athletes; and everything was fine. We even ran into the vice principal in the lunch line at the cafeteria and I grabbed and shook his hand and told him he was grand; and I asked him if I could be his intern next semester and he said yes, can you believe that?
We ate our lunch, which was great, fried chicken and fries, but it wasn’t really fried chicken, it was grilled chicken they made to look fried because there were too many fat kids at our school, and they didn’t want obesity to have a foothold. But still it was chicken; and it was good and greasy.
We ate our lunch and then we went to the football field of our school where we ran into the old crowd and we all smoked until our eyes were red and our stories were told. Elaim needed to study for a test so he bought some ecstasy and snorted it while we jumped the fence.
We left school again and went to the “tree”, where we smoked more and drank “booty whisky”.
Then something unexpected happened, we ran out of weed, so Jane pulled out her pack of Marlboro Reds and we all smoked those like good little cowboys and cowgirls.
And then the school bell rang and we all quickly stumbled to take our school buses home except for Elaim, who lived across the street from school, he went home, and I didn’t see him again for another three weeks. Apparently, he got caught snorting the rest of that ecstasy and his parents sent him on a retreat.
The plan was to take the “cheese-bus” home and then meet up at Francisco’s in an hour and take the mushrooms, which was great for me because I only lived a block away from him, that’s how we became friends in the first place, merely out of proximity and convenience.
Everybody took their respective buses home, except Jane who lived far away and took the city bus to school. She didn’t want to go all the way home and asked if I could get her into my bus and then we could wait around for a bit and go to Francisco’s. I jumped at the idea, this was intimacy, this was the first step to genuine romance. I asked my bus Driver lady about it.
She was black and very much liked me because I knew about soul music and we would sing verses from Al Green’s “Let’s stay together” to each other every morning when we first saw one another, we did this because one day I discovered she was listening to it on the radio very low and I started singing to it and we’ve been friends ever since. But she was a smart old woman and knew I did drugs and stuff I wasn’t supposed to, she would call me her “problem child” like the Muddy Waters lyric. But we got along fine, and she said I could bring my girlfriend on board. That killed me. If only she was my girlfriend, but she wasn’t, but I really wanted her to be, I really did.
We boarded the bus, she sat next to the window and I sat next to her. The bus took off and as custom as soon as the bus took off and steered away from the prying eyes of teachers and faculty. The kids in the back of the bus began to smoke cigars wrapped with marijuana, that they had rolled in during their last class or at lunch. You could smell it from the front row, they didn’t even lower the windows anymore, it was mad. I knew who it was too, it was Pablo and his crew. These were the type of kids that couldn’t wait to get high, they couldn’t wait to get home. These were the type of kids that rolled blunts during lectures and had vaporizers to get stoned during class. Which was a real kick, I had Pablo in a few classes, and we would get really drippy, and the smell was so mild, that the teacher would smell it occasionally, but it would just smell like popcorn, like someone had eaten burnt popcorn and farted it out of their ass, it was mad.
Jane got mad when she smelled it. “Why are they smoking that here, it’s not respectful?”
See Jane was the type of girl that didn’t get into any trouble at all, she was too pretty for that. Other than today, I’d never seen her cut class. She preferred to read books and escape lectures that way. I like to read books now and again but honestly, I prefer television or sneaking into movies, I’m sorry if that offends the good government types that pay 11.50 and eat their popcorn with their mouth closed so they don’t make any noise for everybody else.
I don’t pay for anything, I’m a bum, I really am. I don’t even pay for food, I eat my mother’s cooking and whenever she gives me money, I spend it on drugs.
Anyway, I read the old books now and again but sometimes words on the page just look so damn boring and inanimate. They made me read this book in my English literature class, which really pissed me off, I wanted regular English so I can cut and take it easy but apparently, I’m smart or whatever so they put me in higher classes than most. Anyway, they made me read “Traumnovelle” by Arthur Schnitzler, which I didn’t understand at all, why the hell did he have to go to that party, and why didn’t he pick up a girl there or why was the mask on his bed beside his wife? I didn’t make any sense, it really didn’t. But also, this semester we read a book that resonated with me a lot, “On the road” by Jack. See the thing about Jack is he writes something, and he means it too, he doesn’t get caught up in all that speculative cloud talk writers like. I can never stand that, say what you mean or don’t say it at all. I hate writers that write books like a jigsaw, so you have to decipher them just to understand or appreciate whatever the hell it is they’re talking about. I can never stand that.
That’s my main criticism with that son of a bitch that wrote the bible or whatever, for King James’s court. Everything he writes is in parables and so damn cryptic. I read his books even though they’re not assigned because I love the way he uses language and words and all, it’s very expressive, it really is. And his books get really sexy too. But I don’t know what the hell it is he’s saying, “so foul and fair, a day, I have not seen”. That doesn’t make any sense, it really doesn’t. I would say it like this, “the day was both shitty and lovely”, that makes sense. “So foul and fair”, that’s just cryptic speculative cloud talk bullshit. I can’t stand it; his books get me so mad sometimes I just want to throw them out of the fucking window. That’s what happened to me with old Macbeth, it got me so bothered I had to throw the damn thing out of the window. But then I cooled down a bit and I wanted to know how it ended so I had to go down during the rain and pick it out of the mud and finish it.
Anyway, we were on the school bus headed home. And Jane was looking outside the window watching the crowds go by and then she turned towards me and we sort of struck up a conversation. She started talking about a dream she had last night, and I was in the dream, we were in a white room filled with red roses and I gave her one and as soon as she received it, we turned into streaks of light and roamed the infinity of the cosmos together. And then she woke up, except she was still in a dream and she got up out of her bed and her room looked normal like it would in real life but when she opened the door that led to the hall she was in a funeral parlor. And there was two men with masks on, and a dead body between them with a white linen covering it. And the two men talked and laughed like they were regular Moes and Joes down by the river. And then they removed the white linen covering the deceased’s face and it was her. And then she became the dead woman. And she couldn’t move but she could see the masked men touch her and laugh at her. And then she woke up, screaming, in a dark room, in the middle of the night.
And that was the end of her story and she was looking at me like she wanted me to say something. But I didn’t know what to say, that was the strangest thing someone had ever said to me in confidence.
Despite all the mushrooms I’d taken and books I’ve read, I knew nothing about dream logic.
But I looked into her eyes and I saw the pain she felt. And I grabbed her silky-smooth hand, and I gave it a squeeze. And then she fell into my arms and gave me a hug, and I gave her a hug and we just stayed like that, wordless, in each other’s arms, the rest of the way home. And for a minute there, while she held me close and tight and I could feel her heartbeat onto mine, I felt immortal.
The bus pulled into the stop, everybody got out, including the no goods in the back. And the bus driver gave them a hell of a lip, she told them that she knew what they were doing in the back, that she wasn’t born yesterday and that she had her day in the sun; and she knew what it smelled like.
And that the next time they tried any of that fast stuff she would simply pull over to the side of the road, lock the doors so nobody could get out and call up her brother who was a Dade county sheriff. Man, they were scared, they kept apologizing and denying at the same time. It was mad.
We were the last ones to get off the bus despite the fact we were in the early rows. I said goodbye to the old woman. She pinched my cheek and said “good-luck”. I gave her a look like “I don’t know what the hell it is you’re talking about?”, but then she stared singing a line from the old reverend Green, “I am so in love with you, darling you know it’s true, it’s all right with me.”
And then she closed the door and speed off, and then I knew what the hell it she was talking about, she was smart as hell.
And then we started walking the half block to my house. And then Jane did something so strange I still can’t believe it; she grabbed my hand like it was nobody’s business. And there we were holding hands walking down the street, it was mad.
And then we got to my house, but she said didn’t want to be inside. And she suggested that we go to the bay right by my house because she had a big bag of weed and she wanted to smoke it all, because it was her brother’s bag, and she didn’t like him much. Especially after he had gotten a scholarship to play baseball at Harvard and walked around with a false air to him.
I had met her brother and personally I thought he was an idiot. I had him in my history class, we were the same age and Jane was a year younger. He didn’t even know who Abraham Lincoln was, he really didn’t, you can’t make that up. To me, the fact that he got into any school at all, is totally amazing.
But he was very nice, in a stupid way and he got along fine.
We went to the bay and smoked for about an hour out of her little carved wooden pipe she had gotten last summer in Peru. Oh, I forget to tell you about that, her family traveled a lot because they were rich as hell. Her great grandfather was the dictator of Panama for like twenty something years and he made a lot of money when the U.S built the Panama Canal.
After about an hour of smoking and talking and laughing, suddenly out of nowhere, we started talking about the night we almost made it.
“So, why didn’t we make it that night?”
“Well, I was only thirteen and you were twelve, it just seemed a little rushed, didn’t it?”
“Yea I guess, the guy I made it with the first time, was a real asshole.”
“Yea, I know, Isaac. I can’t stand that guy.”
“Well, you know, he was really handsome. And he was a Skater. And he wore gages and listened to Punk Rock and wore skinny jeans and sunglasses. And had jet black hair like they do in the movies, when they want to show a youth, out of control. And he was a real smooth talker. We made it the first night I met him.”
“You gave it up just like that?”
“Yea, he was really smooth, you should’ve seen him. You probably would have made it with him too, the way he came on. He was too smooth. I didn’t stand a chance.”
“I can’t stand him.”
“Oh, no, he’s not that bad. He’s like you, he’s quiet, doesn’t say much. Except when he does, it’s usually something nasty. When you do, it’s usually something nice.”
Suddenly, I heard a loud ringing noise. It was my cellphone. Francisco was on the phone and he told us we could come over.
We came over, and we smoked a little bit of pot and then we took the mushrooms. Jane didn’t take any, she didn’t like the funny stuff.
The first hour was brutal, Therese got stomach sick at first but then started tripping bad, she forgot she was on mushrooms and started believing she lived in a dream like reality. Which I understand, mushrooms are like dreams, their so damn familiar and strange, they make you feel as if you’ve never been born and that you’re going to live and die during the trance, like you only existed since you took them and everything else is someone else’s life, someone else’s dreams, memories, and associations.
Therese got really wild and started yelling ridiculous shit like “where is the rain? It rains forever”, or “I am one with the sun and the moon. They came from me. I come from them”, or “Black devours the light. Let the light live. Let the light live.” She kept repeating shit like that over and over and over until it lost all meaning. And whenever we tried to calm her down and tell her to sit down and stop being mad, she would start screaming, blood curling screams. And finally, Francisco’s mom called and said she was going to be home in an hour. So, we decided, we had to get Therese out of there as soon as possible, there’s nothing we could do for her, she just had to sit in a room and scream crazy thoughts and be a little bit mad, but she couldn’t do it here.
So, we called her up a cab, and we paid for it and we talked to the driver and told him where she lived. And we told him she was a little bit drunk and mad and to not pay any attention to her. Then I gave him a tip and told him to make sure he dropped her off exactly where we told him to.
And then the car zipped down the street. One of us should have gone with her, to make sure she got home alright and everything. But honestly, we were all high and nobody wanted to deal with that. She was mad as hell. We left her with a taxi-cab driver whose name we didn’t ask and who came from a country where human life is dirt cheap.
That’s how it is among friends, we live with the guilt that is our due.
She called us over the phone the next day and said by the time she got dropped off she came out of it mostly, but it could have gone either way, it really could have. You never know with girls, there’s always predators and all.
Anyway, we went back into the house and we smoked pot and breathed a fresh air of relief. It was nice to hear silence and the crackling noises of an old house instead of screaming and the ramblings of psychedelic dementia.
Francisco’s mother came home, which was fine because she was alright with pot but not with that other stuff. So, we just pretend we were high. Then we started listening to old records, Francisco put on “Magical Mystery Tour” by The Beatles, that killed me. I hadn’t heard that album in years, since before mushrooms, since before pot, since before sex or the thought of sex, since before love or lack of love.
I started laughing so badly I had to go to the bathroom to get it all out. In the bathroom, I turned on the light. And began to look at my reflection in the mirror. I didn’t recognize myself at all. Who was this man? I kept looking at my face and my features and the more I looked, the more I was lost. I kept seeing blue and purplish Indian patterns on my face. I kept wanting to delve into the mirror and enter that world like a surrealist film I had seen earlier that year, Jean Cocteau’s “The Blood of a Poet”. Finally, it got so bad, and my absence was so strange that Jane had to come to the bathroom to get me out.
“John what the hell are you doing?”
“I don’t know.”
“His mom is getting suspicious. You’ve been in the bathroom for half an hour. You’re going to blow the lid off this whole thing.”
“Jane, I don’t know who I am.”
“Sure, you do.”
“I don’t know who I am. I’ve been alive for fifteen years. Other than taking drugs, I have no Identity. One thing is not having but not being. I don’t know who I am Jane.”
“Sure, you do. Your name is John. Everything else is speculative cloud talk bullshit, remember?”
“Yea, I remember. It must be the mystique of this stupid drug.”
She was bringing me back, the room didn’t seem all that dark anymore, I wasn’t haunted by my reflection nor by the eyes I previously didn’t trust. She grabbed my hand and put it up against her breast so I could feel her heartbeat. And I understood what it meant, she was human and so was I. What other answers could you expect?
Then she pulled me close to her and kissed me on the lips. And then all over my neck. She wiped away every tear in my mind that I refused to show to the world outside. And then we walked out of the bathroom holding hands. Then I thought of my death and how happy I’d be that I lived a life at all.
We both sat down and kept listening to records for a while and we smoked more pot.
Then dinner was ready, and we sat at the table and we all ate. We laughed and talked about what was going on in the world.
After dinner and conversation, it became late, and Francisco’s mother told him to kindly tell us that we had to leave. And we did, except for Davis who slept over there regularly. Davis’s mom was mad as hell and would kick him out regularly, two, three times a week, like clockwork. So, he would stay over at my house or Francisco’s house regularly, he had a toothbrush in each bathroom.
Jane and I thanked Francisco’s mom for dinner, and we then said goodbye to her and our friends and left.
It was cold outside, but I felt fine, and the big leg of the trip was over.
I didn’t have a sweater, but Jane put on hers. She didn’t like the thought of me shivering, so she grabbed my arm with both of hers and rested her face on my shoulder, real close next to me so we could both share the warmth of her sweater. And we walked like that for a while. She told me she didn’t want to go home, that there isn’t much there and that she’d prefer to just walk with me. Then she got an idea, she said we should go to the beach.
“It’s romantic under the moonlight.” She persisted when I started to scratch my head.
I thought it was a great idea, but I grumbled anyway.
Our plan now was to go to the beach and lie down on the sand under the moonlight and look at the stars and to count all the voyaging ships of the night about and wonder where they’re going and what they’re carrying with them?
We walked the twelve or eleven blocks to the shore. And we sat down on the sand. Then the shore rushed in and a mist hit our faces and sprinkled little drops of water that had travelled far to reach us.
And we both had drops of water running down our faces. And it looked like were crying but we weren’t, we were happy, we really were.
Then a cold breeze came from the sea and all I could hear was the sound of crashing waves and the wind.
“Did you feel that breeze? It kissed us.”
“Yea, I’ve felt it all my life. During summer, I’d wait around for it. And every now and then it would come and kill the heat.”
“That’s all I want to be. The breeze that flows with the wind. The cold that comes from the sea. That’s all I want to be. “
We stayed in each other’s arms for a while looking at the moon and the wind and the waves and the ships of the night.
Then we got up, shook the sand off and went to the bus stop, it was late.
We waited around for her bus and we talked and made plans about our future and at no point did we stop holding hands. Then her bus arrived and before she left, I gave her what seemed like a thousand kisses, on her lips, on her hands, on her neck, anywhere I could plant one.
Then she got on the bus and before it left, she waved goodbye. I waved back but she didn’t see me.
I don’t think I’ve ever been loved like Jane loved me that day, I don’t think I’ve ever felt a breeze like the one that kissed us both. I wonder sometimes what she’s doing and if she thinks about me, and if that breeze will ever touch us again.