Wind Chimes (Part 1)

I was jittery during my very first flight, and decided to write a letter to a female I'd left behind in Detroit. We had spent the night together the day before. Writing kept me busy, distracted from concentrating on my fear seeing clouds so close for the first time. It worked too. End of summer affair letters written by new flyers are probably terribly common, now that I think about it.

A bespectacled, prune wrinkled, dark-skinned old man in a slightly younger station wagon picked me up after landing at the Birmingham Airport. The school picked us up rather. I was joined by another passenger that had just gotten in from California. The little fellow slept the whole ride. It took us about an hour to arrive from Alabama's biggest city through the heavily wooded I-20 to the oldest Historic Black College in the state, Talladega College. The acclaimed racetrack was not in sight. I wondered if travelers that frequented the track ever gazed upon the college.

As we turned left on Battle Street toward the men’s dorm, I saw a young woman who seemed annoyed at having to halt at the small town's main street. Her hair was done up in a small bun; her body and stance magnificent. This track girl (it was obvious) was wearing a pink pleated wife-beater and wash-faded pink denim. Unbidden energy heaved my stomach into my chest - an unexpected surprise countdown to three. When we parked around the corner in front of Ish Hall though, I forgot about her. I was finally here.

Before I even finished unpacking, I went to find the library. I'd been a rabid library rat for a long time. My roommate hadn't arrived yet, so I piled my stuff on the bed near the door and not the window before I left. I'm not sure why. Outside, that August heat was so shocking that I altered my sidewalk course to crunch some dry grass, acorn shells, and twigs under my feet to hide from the sun. Tree shade never got so much appreciation from me. I walked around and asked around. Savery Library was locked. I beat on that heavy door with hasty impatience. The head librarian Mrs. Dates, a dark woman whose sweet perfume and earth-tone red lipstick made me overlook the jheri-curl, was quite impressed.

"Normally..." she said leaning into the open oak door. "You need school I.D. to take out books. I’m intrigued. You came right here and knocked on the door. No freshman has ever done that." She smiled and put her hand on mine. She was hot, not really pretty, but hot. We spoke a bit and she let me check out some stuff to get me through the week. "Bye now," she said, closing the door. It was all very sweet and southern, but suspect, like a house made of candy. Outside, it occurred to me that she was wearing "Pink" by Victoria's Secret. That girl in Detroit wore the same perfume. To this day, it's still my favorite.

Benches and large, painted stones were all over campus. The benches were green and pink, or red and white, or blue and white. They belonged to the different sororities. The stones were red and white, or purple and gold, or white and blue. They belonged to the frats, except the Alpha's black and gold stone, which displayed a large fountain under the post office.

The next day, I was reading on the pink and green bench near the cafeteria, twisting my stubbornly soft hair. "You had such good hair," moms told me over the summer. "Now you done messed it up. You look like a monkey."

Suddenly, my ever twisting fingers were snatched from my head. Walking by, the dark track angel that stopped my breath couldn't resist a violent pull. I looked up from my book mad as hell and felt my face split when I saw who it was. "You're doing it wrong," she stressed.

"This my second time," I said. “I know what I‘m doing.”

She was slim, bony even, but her large breasts heaved and her arms were tighter than ropes. Her stare was so hard, her eyes nearly crossed locking mine. Her friends stood ahead of her and waited impatiently. Echoes of her exotic accent slid over my neck and scalp. She dropped my arm and stalked off to dinner, grunting in frustration. Obviously, she was used to being heeded. Immediately. Picking me out as she did felt like a sign after that jolting glance the day before. The nappy hair she used my own hand to jerk out flowed away on the only open breeze I felt that day.

The week went fast. Freshman math and English placement tests were taken. There were welcome parties that the resident assistant's were throwing. After one of those parties, I pimped back to my room in my nice new summer job money clothes and started bitch screaming when I saw a giant cockroach upside down on my door. Inordinately high pitched, that scream. All out of proportion of reasonable temporary fright. I had never seen such a large roach before. It awakened a prehistoric hysteria in me. I mean, this roach had giant helipad wings and shit. Michigan roaches tend to run when you turn the light on. Alabama roaches tell you to turn that damn thing off, I'm trying to chill. Big Gil came from his room in a tattered blue robe, smashed the house guest primly with a house shoe, and told me goodnight.

"I thought you was about somethin' man," he said, closing his door. Gil was from Eutaw, Alabama. E-U-T-A-W.

We dressed up for the last party of orientation week - a formal. When the campus got in full swing, there would be parties thrown by the Greek organizations almost every weekend. The gym, the cafeteria, or the dance hall upstairs of the post office. The boys played football in front of Shores Hall or basketball in the gym while the girls sat and watched us. The boys watched and baited girls swishing by as we sat or leaned on the low wall that stretched from the southwest Battle street corner at the campus' center past the post office for maybe a block. Spades in the dorm lobbies was accompanied by prodigious shit talking and neophyte spectators. Games and perches.

I did some snooping. Her name was Simone.

Watching her from the wall, I noticed that she didn't swish sideways so much as stretch forth. "Remember me," I said, pretending to pull my hair out.

"Yes. Your hair still looks dirty the way you're doing it. I can't stand for you to mess it up."

She strode away sour, shivering at my unkempt ways. I introduced myself before letting her get away completely and got her name in a way that I hoped prevented her from knowing I already knew it. Really, she didn't seem to care.

She wasn't in any of my classes. I tested my way into honor's English and the Teacher/English Department Head/Advisor gave in when I asked to be her work/study student. Dr. Kemp's hair was a longer, more dignified version of what my twists hoped to be. I didn't find out until much later that I scored the highest on the placement test that year by almost a point out of sixteen and that score was shining in her office filing cabinet, just a few feet away. Easy discernment is seldom easy for me.

My mother told me years after I graduated, "Dr. Kemp! I remember her. She called right after you got to school. She wondered what was wrong with you." I had been accepted on an academic probationary basis. "I told her you were just lazy. She said, 'That won't be the case here, I don't think.'" Women and their secrets. I was so naive back then. I probably still am.

Simone was an alpha personality all the way. Very in demand among the boys. Confidence emanated from her like heat. Also, she possessed an artful and spontaneous consistency of character. Her looks put in mind a young Elise Neal or Karen White - those chipmunk cheeks with prominent front teeth. A darkery cute face with a big, perfect smile that could easily transmogrify into a whine or a stubborn grimace that nobody wanted to see.

At the wall's corner one warm night, I was hovering out at the edges, watching and hiding, but she made fun of me, too. Performing so well definitely didn't seem like a romantic interest more than a talented compulsion. Simone got everybody she could. She was a great actress and performed hyperbolic, yet dead on impersonations of teachers and spectators to everyone's undeniable delight before changing back to her inimitable voice and posture like it never happened. The small crowd fit well in her hands. To me, her style seemed more honest than truthful. Doing Groucho Marx's duck walk like she invented it, she impersonated this girl Jumill and grabbed me by the hand, marching me away. She told me that I had better laugh with everybody else. Despite myself, I laughed at her cruel little comedy. "I'm the queen bee," she said. "You better had."

Have you ever seen the African honeybee mating ritual? The queen flies into the air, and the male drones follow, spinning, spiraling, fighting for a chance to determine who survives the next lifetime. High stakes. Drone after drone falls during this perilous chase, back to earth defeated or dead, trying to touch the queen. The winner joins his queen in the thin dizziness and finally, after proving and depositing his only worth, he falls dead from the sky just for the privilege of mounting her for a few moments above the world. Airmailing the next generation of life with their drone lives as the price, just for the chance to get to the queen. They don’t even have stings; the chase is the only reason any of those worthless drones are alive. It is said you can hear the “pop” on the ground as their genitalia, seed, and lives become simultaneously disengaged.

Yikes.

The situation was tricky. I knew I didn’t want to be a drone, but I followed the chase closely because I really couldn‘t help it.

Instinctively, I let the others get ahead of me and laughed when they tried to touch the queen. Of course, I did cry when a couple of them experienced brief success. Just watching them, I didn‘t care who was cuddling with her or sharing her whispers. My pulse raced at any indication of her presence. Although at times, I couldn't think about anything but her and those bastard drones buzzing about. I looked at her and knew it wouldn't be so easy. Hellish slides flashed in my head of her and those others, but over the course of the semester I tried not to get too rattled. I know my paranoia, and I don't always trust it. Besides, I had already won; they could not possibly feel what I felt.

I became her friend by being where I knew she would be and then pretending she was following me. The truth was, I knew her schedule as well as she did. Better. What time she would walk past the business office on her way to eat lunch. What bush to sit near to watch her without being seen. When was her English class? Get her used to seeing me. Or, just to catch a glimpse when I needed that visual fix to quiet my gut, which was fast becoming as twisted as my knotty hair.

But those drones. There was Melvin, an upperclassman with oversized glasses and a nice car. She told me about him, "Aren't you going to congratulate me," she asked, testing me. I wished her luck in poor fate's place, went somewhere private and banged my head against a tree.

Then there was Tim, a freshman armed with a goatee squared handsome face and explosive athleticism. He already had gone through three different roommates because he never washed his clothes, but hung them on the window to air out. I told her and laughed as she confirmed it with one of his ex-roommates.

Early in the semester one night, before the aforementioned drone touches, we were talking outside a party. She was the only reason I was there. The fountain glittered with the romantic power of colored bulbs. Simone was explaining that a dance was just a dance and men don't always get it. Apparently, her hand felt inclined to emphatically twist this explanation to the campus dealer's nuts at the last party. "Big Daddy. People actually run around calling him that."

Arvin, an awkward buddy of mine, approached. He asked us, “Is it alright if I join you?”

Quickly, she said no and he left dejected. "What," she asked, shrugging her shoulders, raising her eyebrows. Ruthlessness with no regrets. "We're talking."

Despite my protestations of awkward rhythm, she eventually dragged me to the sweat drenched dance floor upstairs and began showing me that dance that was just a dance. This image of Big Daddy dirtying up his flamboyant white jogging suit on the floor clutching his swollen crotch entered my mind. Too naturally self-conscious, very pleasantly surprised, and too manipulated into showing off my bad dancing...I couldn't take it. I grabbed her around the waist, pulled her to me and urgently whispered into her ear, "I can't. Not with you."

Her body stiffened completely as I whispered. I inhaled her shampoo, dropped my hands from her waist, and walked off the floor. All things considered, it was a pretty decent exit.