The Waiting

 A boy singing a rhyme walks by a girl, but he's invisible.
Do you remember their names? ZZ Hallock who made pets out of boys. Jennifer Beebe, Deanna Santana. Everyone told me how brave I was when I asked her out! Those two girls with two first names Tanya Kim and Teresa George. Salina Danes, who went through boys like Socrates went through boys.
And all those girls we dated who lived on River Road! Sometimes it felt like we were the road!
Sophie Lilla, who let us see her breasts! Comrade, I long to return to those generous breasts. But we only get fifteen minutes of female attention in this life, and we blew it!
“I'm not a piece of meat!” Sophie said.
Do you remember the waiting?
“Your first task is to wait,” they said, and I remember thinking to myself I can't believe how lucky I am they're letting me wait!
“How much longer do you think we ought to wait?” we said.
“Couple of weeks, maybe, maybe longer,” we said, waiting beside ten thousand freaks like a second-comer.
There was a time we had hope for breakfast and supper, in spite of Francis Bacon!
We were the boys trying to show girls the kingdom of speed.
“Why don’t we just wait?” girls said thinking we’re still in the slow old days. Even boys like Nate Champion, coming out on the losing end, winners of all kinds losing. I know for a fact he’s the poet who wrote “Why doe wee neede them?” in the bathroom stall.
The waiting for girls, the waiting in between girls. Waiting for girls like they’re the divine whirlwind, girls I told my hot wishes to, and they laughed!
Memorizing Shakespeare for these girls! Trying to use the language of persuasion, getting rejected time after time.
Then we started smoking and swearing.
“Where did you learn how to talk like that?” girls said.
“You can read in the devil's dictionary!” we said.
The school counselors spoke to us like we’re young poets. “You need to love the waiting, have patience with the waiting, try to love the waiting like a locked room.”
And just when we had all we could stand of waiting, a girl would come and save one of us! So that we knew it was possible.
Girls who know we’re waiting for them! Girls who think the waiting is true love. Girls singing their songs of experience right in our faces, their leching songs! Girls who know everything and have done everything, who dress and behave like women. Girls who grew up eating fast-forward food. Girls who have eaten the King’s bread! Girls who don’t care to do anything but kiss. Girls who want us to see their panties, making us want to live!
“Just don't touch them!” girls said.
Girls who have eaten from the tree but won't share the fruit, girls with a Great Wall of China around them, a thing called chastity, and carefully built defenses, such as three-personed gods. Girls talking to us just to make men old-enough-to-be-their-father jealous. Girls who made eunuchs out of us. Girls who have the power to change the dullest boy into a man. Girls who say “maybe” instead of a simple yes or no—girls who used us up with the waiting!
Deidre Campana and her young sister, two girls spreading the gospel of beauty. Anna Ray and Charlie Dana, who knew how to handle snakes, girls toying with serpents! Girls who at first fought over us, then combined forces, and destroyed us.
Walking down the back streets like horses on their way to the glue factory, walking to these girl's houses. Houses with their backwoods farms, where they squeeze cider. The nerve of these girls who won't let us in! Somehow the door of Lana Amada seems closed to us forever.
Chasing girls all the way to Green Creek, which they’re too afraid to cross. Running to the blueberry fields. “Do you need blueberries?” the sign said outside Sodini Blueberries. Girls dragging us into the blueberry fields and the broiling sun.
Boys walking down Simonelli Road, Peterson Road, Orshal Road, searching for girls. Searching for girls in the country even, country bumpkins.
“Never put all your eggs in one basket,” we said, even courting those rich girls who live on Robinhood Court.
Not enough girls to go around, I remember Heini Rams and Ted Leach fighting over Caitlin Klaustermeier, plunging knives into each other!
Taking a picnic to Snug Harbor, then sneaking off with Cicely Muldoon to Devil's Kitchen where she teases us. Stephanie Sternberg takes us all the way down Mills Avenue where they're still raising chickens, to Sally’s celery fields.
“Isn’t this pretty?” she said.
Sidney Swanson rides on the front of our bicycle to Lorenson Road where they breed Alaskan malamutes with those icy blue eyes, to the Hidden Creek Farm at Orient Point where they raise black-pied pigs known for their foraging abilities.
“This is where I get off,” she said.
When we’re totally defeated we roamed the lost woods between Buys Road and Horton Road praying to see skinny Minnie Suarez walking her dog.
I remember getting the surprise of our lives at Mosquito Grove. Susie Longnecker squatting before hundreds of people, finally a girl who can’t wait!
Girls with names like mountains we will never climb. Florangela Davila! Larissa Feguson! Jeannie Wagenmaker! Girls so far above me, I don’t even dare whisper their names. Girls with flagrant names, like Laurie Woolover and Cynthia Leach and Peggy Eden and Alyce Hasseldahl and Susie Pure and Stephanie Outhwaite and Kara Van Slyck.
Girls who dick around with us! Girls who are cocksure of themselves. Girls who scream for ice scream. Taking girls to Bernier’s ice cream, where the sign said, “Here's where you get the best ice cream.”
Parties where girls acted disgracefully, where we let girls throw up on us, where we waited for them to remember they threw up on us.
“I don’t remember it,” girls said.
Watching the girls outside Birdland the way Mr. Bonnett watches us take showers after gym class. Girls walking with a swing and a smirk, wanting to meet us at the hidden barn on Black Creek Road. Promising to meet us at the foot of the forest, and never showing!
Letting girls push us into the greasy water at Sovacool’s Grove. Letting them abuse us. Girls treating us like dogs, we're glad to be their dogs. I saw Tracy Grosvenor once leading a boy along the Kitchi-mokon-o-bing River, he was on his hands and knees!
These girls like omniscient gods oblivious of suffering boys. We waited and waited, filled with animal blood. We waited days for a girl headed in the right direction. We watched Jean Marryat and Karina Shields, making holes the size of our hands in their jeans while we make our loud universal groans of lust.
Smart girls who take down those posters of male heroes over their beds.
“Don't underestimate a boy’s imagination,” their parents told them before dates. “Let him know you’re the boss. Don’t take shit from anyone.”
Innocent girls who take home-made virginity tests after each date just to make sure. Girls that would drop dead if they lost their chastity.
Christopher Shoemaker, who put the shoe on the other foot—he got all the girls! Full of confidence, lots of girlfriends. He made the girls wait! We all wanted to be him, we wanted to pull the old Uriah-the-Hittite maneuver.
Sylvia Killingsworth and Carli Dyroff, who we called “the Angels of tears,” telling us our ranking, our place in line. They keep boys like blind beggars on a string. Sometimes we feel like just one more sucker on the string! These things change a person!
Orson Fowler, who has been waiting so long he almost ceased to exist for a while. With a name like that he deserves the waiting.
And those two boys Rosaline Paschke sent away, John Dombokovits and Frank Dombokovits, they’re still living above their parents’ garage, memorizing those long unhappy verses. No one has the courage to tell them they’ve been replaced. They’ve been waiting forever!
Once upon a time there was the waiting for something better to come along. Until we were caught cheating with Emily Fotheringill and Daisy Zamora behind the Winter Sun Schoolhouse, leaving the girl in our hand for the two in the bush! Dancing with girls like Mozart dancing with his wife, like we’re in an extravagant mood. It used to work this way! Girls used to roll dice for our bones! But now the girls won’t look at us! Whispering and pointing at us, exchanging confidences and passwords.
“Karma really is a bitch,” we said.
We tried more creative approaches, we even went to church for girls! Even the church waiting for the year 2060, the year when the world will be done waiting with this sign out front that said, “They also serve who only stand and wait.” Girls whose religious fathers kept passing out those anti-masturbation tracts. And the Dutch church on Horton Road—how pretty some of those Dutch girls were!
We even searched different school districts for girls!
We went to see girl-movies for girls, waiting for girls to appear at the girl-movies, leaving the movie before it's over, nothing doing.
Then those super-girls, Nina Baym and Jane Hunt and Sarah Grimke. Julia Branch who is beautiful and has a headful of brains! Astrid Eckhorn, who is so fine we are compelled to stare at her like food, contemplating fornication. Oh boy! They look so good to us! Blame all of them for the liquor fiends with DT, the alcohol-induced crimes, waiting-induced crimes. The boys they left waiting just sit there feeling bad.
The boys making girls laugh and no more, boys who survived thus far solely on female laughter, like meat and drink, like saints living solely on the eucharist. These are fragile relationships.
Do you remember those dreams? Teenage dreams of fertility! Virgin girls swimming in the vernal pools, along with wood frogs and fairy shrimp. I dreamed I had a forest of girls, with egos fragile as porcelain, waiting behind waterfalls. Eight thousand waterfalls and eight thousand girls! But I got too greedy, causing them all to vanish.
Waiting, waiting, waiting for my female whoever she is. I can’t even see her. Waiting an eternity. Girls making us wait to teach us a lesson, playing hard to get, playing impossible to get. Girls pussy-footing around. Lori Dickneighte and Izzy Thiffault winding a sea of aimless man-boys around their fingers.
“This smacks of antique grandeur!” we said. “Why do we wait until we have no strength to live?”
Our parents telling us to wait, the point is we’re waiting. Moms who want us to wait but feel sad because we’re sad.
“Don’t lose hope,” mom said, “Maybe if you get a haircut? Change those grungy socks?”
“Don’t listen to your mother,” dad said, “I have no answer to this, but studies show being nice makes men less attractive to women.”
“Don’t tell him that!” mom said, “One must not despair. It is necessary to take heart again and new courage.”
I was raised by a perfect mother like my friend Walt, but I’m listening to dad.
Then all of us checking out the same library book for secrets “Physical Strength and How To Obtain It,” trying to get there, trying to get where we thought girls wanted us to be.
Finding new ways to use the waiting. We sin to use the waiting, we smoke and drink, frequent strip clubs where boys are left waiting until the end of time like overripe men of martyrdom. We’re starving for the sight of a woman. We see Eric Partlow, who really is part-low, who did what so few of us can do, those in the rut.
“How are you?” we said.
“I am fine, just fine. Why do you ask?” Eric said.
“Would you mind if we all had a beer together?” we said.
“Why not?”
“Here’s a toast to Della Davison and her two dimples!” we said.
“Here’s a toast to hoping she gets two pimples!” we said.
“Ha! Curse her with facial blemishes!” Partlow said.
“Do you remember we used to sit in the café and I’d say ‘Do you like that one? Do you like this one?’ And you said ‘What difference does it make?’”
“You’ve always got a bug in your ass,” Partlow said.
“Does your dad still wear those dark glasses?” we said, “Does he still have that drooping mustache? How old is he these days?”
“Everyone focuses on my dad’s age.”
“Seventy-one! How can someone keep waiting that long?” we said, “I would be pissed too! Who wouldn’t be driven mad?”
Have the God's fallen silent? People start to wonder, seeing boys cry before their mothers. No one takes us seriously, have you noticed this? Dogs cry on our behalf as we pass by with their human sort of cry. You can even hear the raven that was almost a parrot saying “Nevermore,” a sound few ears are tuned to hear.
They say it's not for us to ask the why and wherefore of our waiting.
But I’m still waiting! I've been waiting so long, I'm getting savage. The next time you hear of me I may be in jail! It might be assault and battery, at the least. Someone’s going to get hurt.