Warning sign.

It wasn't until quite late in life that I realized the name Southern Bell was a pun. It also took me a long time to learn Thanksgiving was always on a Thursday.

Swan.

Virtually every time I went to the Art Institute of Chicago, I spent a few minutes looking at Leda and its simple, swelling lines.

In 1994, Lissa and I went with Adam, a towheaded, broadshouldered aspiring filmmaker, to the opening night of "Pulp Fiction."

I still was interested in Lissa, and I asked what her favorite piece was in the Art Institute. 

"Leda," she said, as we drove over a vertiginous bump on Lake Shore Drive that sometimes made my stomach sink.

Repetition.

Eighth-grade history, which they called Social Studies, was held in a biology lab. 

Rather than sitting at desks in rows, we sat at lab tables, two students each. Mike sat to my left and shared a table with me. He took photographs for the yearbook.

Travis sat behind me. Let me preface this: I do not, as a rule, enjoy the company of people named Travis.  I do not recall if eighth-grade Travis (though by repute he had held that status for more than one year) was my first horrible Travis or just a memorable one.

But Travis he was. He wore a denim jacket and black jeans and a band T-shirt. Probably the Stones or Zeppelin or something classic-rocky because that's what Travises wore then.

And in class, he sat behind me. He didn't pay much attention to class. And he would, pretty regularly, lean forward and whisper into my ear:

"Pussy. Puuuuuuuuuuussy," he drew it out, in a long, country accent. "Pussy."

It was meant to be intimidating. And it did intimidate me. But Mike told his friends about it, and they told others, and it began to be this self-propogating in-joke of people walking up to me:

"Puuuuuuuuussy. Pussy."

Coffee table.

Ignition.

We settled in Chapel Hill the summer after fourth grade. I hadn't many friends in Florida, so I wasn't really losing much in moving, but I also didn't bring anything with me but a few weird hobbies like comic books and collecting shells.

I never was quick to make friends. When Pete and Todd, brothers from three houses down the street, cozied up to me, I was relieved.

They were a bit olive-skinned, with thick, curly heads of hair. I didn't know ethnicities. They seemed exotic.

We lighted model rockets in the baseball park behind our houses. Really, they were just fireworks, with time-delayed stage-engines of solid fuel that gave off huge plumes of sparks. When the engines burned out, you'd have to find where they were plummeting vulnerably to earth and save them before they fell into a tree, or a creek, or the road.

And that's what Pete and Todd and I did for a month and a half. Ignite rockets, watch their fiery trails, and chase them down before they crashed to earth. It was repetitive, but it was fun.

Then it stopped. And for maybe two weeks I didn't hear from either Pete or Todd. School was getting close, and while the weather was just as hot, the days seemed to be getting a bit shorter.

Todd called one day and said I should come over. I don't remember the reason, but I do remember being eager to visit someone.

I walked the three doors down to his house. Their house was yellowish and sat in a small copse. I rang the bell. He opened the door. He punched me in the stomach – the first time I ever had been punched. He laughed and closed the door. I staggered out onto the landing and went home and didn't tell anyone.

Curiosity.

My tenth grade English teacher, the one in whose class Wallace called me out, often cited Nabokov:

“Curiously enough, one cannot read a book; one can only reread it. A good reader, a major reader, and active and creative reader is a rereader.”

I like memoirs. Honest ones, fake ones, dishonest ones. The Hemingway I most re-read is "A Moveable Feast." Hemingway's kind of a jackass about people he presumably considered friends, like Gertrude Stein and Fitzgerald. He's especially weird toward the latter, in an oft-noted scene in which Fitzgerald frets about his penis.

So at my first newspaper job, I learned that my editor was a Hemingway fan, and I mentioned how much I loved "A Moveable Feast" because, while it was obviously just as calculated as Hemingway's other voices, it was different and looser and just plain funny and horrible and disloyal.

My editor, Hank, remembered none of this. His "Feast" was a genteel romp through 1920's Paris, all clinking glasses and literary ambition. He didn't remember the scene in the urinal, which to me would be like remembering "The Scarlet Letter" as a book about an island with genetically recreated dinosaurs.

A week later, he wrote a column for the paper's leisure section about having recently re-read "A Moveable Feast." He said he now found it distasteful and childish and unworthy of Hemingway.

Shuttle.

When school was out on holidays, the Chapel Hill YMCA had an all-day program so parents who worked could send their children to the Y rather than hire a babysitter.

On Memorial Day in ninth grade, I met Janeane. It was kismet. We had a sudden bond. We talked about basketball, and books, and our parents, and our friends, and how both of us had hair that turned blonde in the summer and how neither of us really understood why those Coca-Cola rugby shirts were suddenly so popular.

It was a swift and sudden attachment, formed as we rode next to one another in a YMCA van that was picking up and dropping off children, all of whom we ignored in favor of one another's attention.

There were two junior high schools in Chapel Hill at the time, and she went to the one that I did not. We promised to see one another again, in the fall, when school started.

I only ever saw her passing in the hallway. We never spoke again.

Retention.

Gisele lived up the street and around the corner, across the street from where our bus stopped in third and fourth grades. She was a quiet girl with perfect skin and thick brown hair.

She kept her bicycle clean to a degree that was uncommon among the third graders I knew. She had a younger sister who was something of a slob.

She wasn't a strong personality, but we loved visiting her house because her yard was closest to a small creek that snaked its way through our neighborhood, behind some houses and beside others.

We'd spend hours in her creekbed building dams with large, flat rocks. We'd move outward in increasing circles looking for more and more rocks to shore against the dam. Once rocks became too hard to find, or once the daily Florida thunderstorm happened, we'd dry off and come inside and her mother and slobby sister would make cinnamon toast.

I have tried to find Gisele on the internet, but she shares a name with a popular porn actress, making it difficult to pick out information about the real Gisele from the flood of porn Giseles.

Asymmetrical tabby.

You give love, they feel oxytocin or, in this case, epinephrine. FICKLE.

Folded in quarters.

In tenth grade I shared an English class with Wallace, kind of a loud, arty dreamboat. He was smart and ambitious. He wore heavy black boots and tight white band T-shirts and kept his hair shaved close.

He had a coterie of girls: artistic, scarily thin, smoking cigarettes. They were appealing women
but not a popular crowd, per se. They were distant and self-contained; appealing for their distance, like mannequins with poetry journals.

Wallace had ideas and opinions and was literate. I wasn't those things, though I had a lot of loud opinions. I read popular nonfiction and watched a lot of television. Newspapers held my interest more than class, and more often than not I had a section of newspaper folded into quarters underneath my textbooks.

And one day, Wallace called me out. I had said something, or disagreed with something he had said, or made some sort of asinine joke at our teacher's expense. As near as I can remember, he said: 

"Your opinion would mean more if you put the damn newspaper away and had actually read the book."

And he was right. He's now a successful fiction writer. He also has led, I gather, quite the adventurous life.

Undying.

My mother has this sign in her house. She finds the sentiment reassuring. I find it vaguely menacing.

Thighs.

I've been fat forever. Only once have I ever lost a significant amount of weight.

I wanted to know what it was like to be desired, to be looked at for more than the half second it takes to see a fat person. So I ate a bowl of shredded wheat each day. I ran about 3 miles a day in the Chicago winter. I lost about 55 pounds in a month and a half or so, maybe two.

It provoked an attack of kidney stones that sent me to the hospital. I put the weight back on within eight months.

I really don't have any memory of people looking at me differently, but I remember being able to run my hands up my thighs and think: These are not offensive.

Minors.

One morning at breakfast in college, Carol breezed into the dining hall, dropped her purse on the floor, put her tray on the table and said:

"Damn if I ever smoke crack again."

Best entrance line ever. She also sometimes said, "I need to fuck En Vogue."

---

Four of us were walking down 57th Street, near the University Club, I think. Esteban, who was Spanish, suddenly doubled over and vomited into a tree planter.

"It's fine. Heroin will do this, you know?"

I didn't.

He also once told about bringing a homeless woman back to his dorm room and smoking crack and having very abusive sex. I didn't like him.

(an intermission note)

Not everything I remember is creepy or sad. I'm told I can be funny. I will try to remember some funny things.

Fear.

In my twenties, I had a small circle of friends. We weren't adventurous. Most of our evenings were spent at one another's homes, watching television and drinking beers. We were inexperienced, safe, privileged kids fresh out of good schools.

Lea was different. She had grown up poor. She was sexually adventurous where the rest of us were not. She laughed too loud and did not take care of her hair or teeth. On nights when the rest of our group would stay home, she would go to roadhouses and sports bars. The others of us spoke patronizingly about her choices and brainstormed ways to get her to leave that life.

At the time, I felt I was protecting her by worrying about danger from men. But  I really was terrified she was having a good time; scared that at any moment that she was enjoying sex.

Sticker.

Fire door.

The windows of my corner, bottom-floor dormitory room in college faced a small parking lot. The door to the lot was a solid, heavy fire door that swung hard and closed loudly.

I was not liked, and most weekends I spent alone watching television. I was lonely, but there were people I wanted to be my friends. On Friday nights and Saturday nights, I could hear when they left for parties or dinners or plays.

I also could hear when they returned. If they were in groups, they spoke loudly. If they came back in pairs, they giggled. 

I did not sleep much on those weekends. 

On a pier.

This post was originally published at my old site.

“Something is going on and will not stop. You are outside the going on, and you are, at the same time, inside the going on. In fact, the going on is what you are. Until you can understand that these things are different but are the same, you know nothing about the nature of life. I proclaim this.”

Weird things happen — dissonant events we don't put in context or remember. Dissonance is painful.

It's said we rationalize or simply fail to remember things that don't match our other experiences. We trust our senses, but there's also this gnawing fear that we are missing something important.

I was 14 or so when the wife of one of my father's co-workers hamhandedly approached me during a corporate retreat. Maybe she was just goofing around; certainly she was drunk. But I remember almost nothing of what she said nor how she said it. 

We were at the Blockade Runner hotel in Wrightsville Beach. I sat on a bench at the end of a long, wooden pier, fishing. The sea was calm. It was after some sort of outdoor dinner. Maybe a cookout. It was dark, very dark.

Most of the adults were far from me, at the base of the pier. But she walked out a bit ahead of them, toward me at the pier, and sat uncomfortably close to me on the plank bench I was fishing from. Might have had red hair, but that could have just been how the light made it look.

She sat close. She smelled like liquor. It was the first time I remember feeling a woman's breath.

The rest of the adults soon caught up to her and pulled her away and took her to the hotel. I was embarrassed.

But I wish I could remember what she said. Or what the adults said when they coaxed her away. Or what I had said, or thought, or what the fish smelled like, even.

I suppose I could always take a guess and say they smelled fishy.

Smoking.

This piece was originally published on my old website.

Lissa liked Kundera and E.M. Forster. “Only connect.”

About a month into her first year in the dorm for transfer students, a bunch of us went to a neighborhood bar.

She talked about the years she was a nanny to a rich Chicagoan and about how she’d had to sit in the bathroom for an entire flight on his private jet. She had carried a basketball signed by Michael Jordan on her lap, in the bathroom, because there hadn’t been a seat for her.

I had smoked one cigarette before that night, one swiped from my grandmother’s brown vinyl cigarette case when I was 11. It had made me nauseated.

Lissa smoked socially, she said, which was something I had never heard of. I figured I could smoke socially. With beer, smoking was fantastic and I kind of fell into a crush with Lissa.

I drank a lot of beer that night, and she flirted with some other guy, and within a few months I sort of eventually figured out that I was never going to get anywhere with Lissa, mostly because I was awkward and unworldly.

But I smoked pretty much nonstop for 10 years.