Wind Chimes

I was jittery during my very first flight, and decided to write a letter to a female I'd left behind. We spent the night together the day before. Writing kept me busy, distracted from concentrating on my fear of 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 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 San Diego. 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 nowhere in sight. I wondered if travelers that frequented the famous Talladega racetrack 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, which cut right through the campus. 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, 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 shocking. I altered my sidewalk course to crunch some dry grass, acorn shells, and twigs under my feet to hide from the sun. Tree shade has never received so much appreciation. 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 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."

My ever twisting fingers were snatched from my head. Walking by, the dark track angel 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 defined; tighter than ropes. Her stare was so hard, her eyes nearly crossed locking mine. Echoes of her exotic accent slid over my neck and scalp, as her friends waited impatiently a few paces ahead. 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 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 eat. 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 with his country syrup voice, 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 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 off her like young star 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 (nobody wanted to see that).

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 into 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 his own life as the price, just for the chance to get to the queen. Drones don’t even have stings; the chase is the only reason any of them are alive. It is said you can hear the “pop” on the ground as their genitalia, seed and lives become 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 other 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. I felt 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. Where was her English class? Get her used to seeing me. Or just 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. “Is it alright if I join you,” he asked us.

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 decent exit.

You might be wondering, why doesn't this fool just make a move dammit? I don’t have much of an answer. "All men walk the path of a dog," she said once. Getting roasted in that oven of distrustful scrutiny was not a real option to me. My strategy first was to disprove her canine assumptions about me. Unfortunately, she began to see me more as a friend or a relative and said so often, perhaps to parry an advance in advance. I felt like I was sinking in friend zone quicksand and did not foresee this development.

Her voice sounded like wind chimes. Furious when the wind was up too high, and melodic when the air was blowing just right. Like little mink lined bells. She was from Charleston, S.C., and her accent was Southern, French, and Caribbean all at once - geechi. Patois. As if she spent her formative years traveling back and forth from Jamaica to France every other day. Alabama didn’t change her accent in any way, just like the Hollywood stars from foreign countries that remain linguistically static over the course of their careers, their accents somehow impervious to environmental influence.

After a spades game at the men’s dorm, I made a gentleman’s bet with my friend Terry that I could carry Wind Chimes to her dorm on my shoulders quicker than he could carry his partner Luann, who was even slighter than Simone. The girls were game. Amen.

We gained a huge lead. Simone, her hands gripping my long hair, her thighs around my neck, squealed as I wobbled and pretended to fall sideways.

“Stop it!” She yelled, laughing.

“Remember that cake you shoved in my face?”

“Ok, ok. I’m sorry,” she said. “I need a favor.”

“Tell me what you need.”

“You do papers, right? I really need this A. Will you help me?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Temptress.”

“Tight ass.”

Typing/correcting papers for people was how I was making extra income by late September. I had gotten into the habit of sharpening ideas and style on papers instead of just correcting grammar, reshaping other students' essays. I knew it wasn't exactly ethical, but the way a paying student's face looked as I transformed or excavated their ideas was warm hug gratifying. Business wasn't exactly booming and I was learning. I didn't charge her and she didn't offer me anything. I assumed she was used to negotiating business with men in this way, that temptress (I had called her that a couple of times after the dance that was just a dance and she responded each time by calling me a tight ass).

It was great. She sat right next to me and boy, did I show out. I would have paid for the privilege. Her grammar was more inscrutable than her accent. For instance, she might pronounce "falling" as "fallening" which was excusable, but then she'd spell it the way she pronounced it. Despite her inability to keep her work from drifting out to sea sometimes, you could hear her voice, her accent as you read her work. You could hear hurricanes, and barefoot laughter, and pecans dropping from trees. You'd feel the burning sun and smell the ocean surf. You'd see tall weeds waving on the sand as amateurs forced clams open. She had lots of power, lots of voice, and plenty of off-road traveling.

I basked in the glow of her trust. Essentially, the second paper she drafted me into working on was just notes and I banged it out just as fast. For a third time, she came to me in November, after Thanksgiving break. I was exiting the cafe as she was entering. I was probably on my way to wait behind some wall or bush to glimpse her walking by, but she had been hunting for me, ruining her down pat schedule.

"I need help for one more paper," she said. Her voice had a hypnotic cooing quality. The fur-lined bells voice was used to slide you into her determined directives.

Being treated like a sucker never felt so good, but I already possessed a secret stash of humiliation and it was starting to create an odor. It was like wearing mildewed clothes - if you think you smell it, then you know you smell it, and you can only deny the truth for so long as you hide in a corner. I wanted to say, I'll do anything you want for the rest of my life. Just let me sit and look at you for a sweet little while. Out loud I said, "Ok. But I think you're starting to take advantage of our friendship."

She was speechless.

"Meet me at the lab tonight," I said.

Why did I say that? Don't laugh, but I think it was because I had quit masturbating and had so much more energy and bluster. Thinking about sex was almost profane now, because I wasn't worthy to even imagine sex with her, and didn't want to imagine it with anyone else. Obsession was blurring, blunting, and burning my biology all at once. The extra energy went into my studies. Perhaps she really wanted to respect me, but she could go either way on that one. That one was up to me, I had learned.

In 1990, during my fifth year of high school, I was accepted by the only college to which I applied: a small Black College in Alabama. Having gone through three schools, I graduated H.S. with a 1.49 overall grade point average, not even a D plus, and my upper-lower class household was cheerful and not too sad to be rid of me. I didn't blame them. Raising me could not have been easy.

My failure in school was the result of my long rebellion against systems or authority of any kind. I didn’t know where I fit. I educated myself by reading Twain in Algebra, or getting into crap cutting school hours. But I worked hard in my senior year, did ok on the SAT, and wrote a letter begging Talladega to gentrify me by acceptance for quality matriculation into their hallowed institution. Yeah, that was some crunchy garbage right there and my letter probably sounded just like it, but I still stumbled through somehow.

Also, I was a 19 year old virgin. I know. I'm as surprised as you are. I knew where everything went. I had plenty of opportunity, but I’ll just say that my teenage years were a bit too laden with personal, emotional, and psychological baggage for me to lift such heavy equipment and use it properly. Also, despite how frustratingly trite this wheezing sentiment reads during personal recollections, I’ll still type it out: it was a much more innocent time.

Anyway, accomplishment is what I felt I needed - academic before sexual achievement if it came to that. Some plank to walk on and really stand up straight, as I was also a virgin to academic success. Despite this ebony sweet I was so stuck on, my main focus was for class and even if it all got mixed up, it still worked. I got around my embarrassment of sexual purity by telling people that I was a virgin whenever talk of sex came up, and guess what? Nobody believed me. They thought I was joking. Then I might say, "I'm waiting until I'm married." As I remember, that one really stoked the laughter. I actually got props for being a gentleman by the campus Negro League of Horniness. I look at a girl's ass when she walks by, some joker says, "I thought you was a virgin?" Ha. Bastard.

Another thing I remember, while I was stalking Simone, I was being stalked. Dig that. A girl named Jumill pulled me aside early during the formal freshman orientation gig, which was maybe five days after my plane landed. We visited some shadowy bushes. They lit the campus up much better the next year, and that was probably the last time those bushes were visited during Freshman Orientation Week.

Coy as beige silk, Jumill scanned my face and said, "I noticed you before."

We petted and she told me her family was African royalty exiled to Australia. I went along with this fantasy. It was liars' courtesy. Maybe she would believe my steaming pile of crap later. And she was letting me get a few feels in, right? Later, a teacher introduced her as Australian. Turns out she was really from Atlanta. She had wild hair, which turned out to be an aboriginal wig that some human penis snatched off her in front of everybody at the pool one night. Missed that one. To me, her worst feature wasn't her wild lies that clothed an abysmal self-image, her outrageously bold antics or the furious onset of late adolescent dementia. The worst thing about her was her desert tundra lips. They were hard and crusty, as if they were embedded with gravel. I never kissed her again after that.

Jumill did something strange to me that night. She awakened an energetic awareness on an area just beyond my skin. She shushed me when I was asking for details about her past and told me to close my eyes. This wonderful, electric calm waved over my face. I opened my eyes and she was slowly stroking the air in contours millimeters from my skin. Her eyes were closed. It was a pleasant spiritual moment before we skulked back to the party. Her almost touch was a lost sensation for me, like it was something I felt before I was even conceived. Sweet peace is what some church folk might call it.

Apparently, I had some early buzz in the girl's dorm. I heard that Jumill was claiming me. That's my boyfriend, loud and clear. Marking territory. It's understandable - I mean if an Atlanta girl can tell you without blinking that she's Afro-Australian (on the surface, I think she really believed it), it's not such a stretch for her to think you're her boyfriend after a half hour of clumsy groping. Still, I tried to be this strange social refugee's friend. I was a strange refugee myself, and wouldn't have it any other way, even if I did have to slap her hands away from mine in public from time to time. We were both on the edge of an oasis, only I was sure it was a mirage.

One night hanging out at Crawford Hall right after Freshman Orientation, Jumill poured water on my silk shirt in front of the lobby crowd. Just to do it. I walked away with my head up, not worrying about what I couldn't control. Wind Chimes ran up to me not half a block later and smeared white cake in my face and ran past. Classes had just started. This was my payback for doing my hair the way I wanted? My anger got the better of me and I turned around to share some frosting with her, but the Bradford brothers, Ken and Kevin, interceded and stood between us, protecting her. She made a face at me. I glared at her and left, leaving her with the drone brothers.

Sometime before the dance that's just a dance, Simone asked me if I knew what Jumill was saying about me on the Girl's Gossip Network (GGN - check your local listings). It was a crisp day in early September. That shocking Alabama heat was starting to abate. Fire ants and giant roaches were beginning to hide.

"No," I lied. This was the first civil conversation she ever started with me.

"She says you are all hers."

"Not true," I said. “You want to get some lunch with me? My treat.“

‘The Inn’ was housed in the same building as the post office/bookstore. The center of campus. With the peeling floor tile, anachronistic jukebox, and dirty tables, it was still better than the cafeteria.

Watching her eat a grilled cheese with pickles and mustard on top was difficult, while I just played with my chili fries, my appetite suddenly on a milk carton, my stomach doing cute little puppy back flips. She went at Jumill's lunacy mercilessly and interspersed her diatribe with the dream of modeling someday. Simone even carried fashion magazines in her bag for inspiration. I was doubtful because she was only 5'6" with slightly oversized knees and she was a bit hairy around her shoulders and legs. But if you think I said that out loud, you'd be certifiably curayzee. It was hard to get a word in, but she was suppurating with clear, feverishly funny observations and charmed gravity, so I didn't chalk it as a negative. I could listen to her all day, giving me moments I would never forget. Moments that still refuse to hide, even if I can‘t remember exactly what she said.

Already easy within my own unfamiliar depths, she didn't need to ask me about me after asking me about Jumill. My own potholes of character felt exposed. I made a dim mental note then and there to hide my aspirations better with jaunty distractions and bigger walls until the time was right. The order was automatic and retreated to get busy in whatever dusty office such thoughts go to get the job done; assist in the construction of her friend zone illusion. I was convinced that if she could sniff out my feelings, she would fly away from me. I still am.

I wouldn't make the mistake of my later predecessors. She was lava hot bathwater, and I knew I would have to sink in slowly, until I was on my back and everything was under except the most mountainous and hilly topography of my face and nether regions. This torrid baptism could make me clean.

So I kept being where she would be. Hi. Her friends became my friends and so on. The blend of our personality formed the nucleus. Our attraction was spreading. In public she shared my lap with Lashawn. I was safe to flirt with.

Midway into the semester, after I unwrapped my coveted new Polo wire frames, I dressed up to celebrate. I wore this white dinner jacket, jeans, and a dress shirt with light brown beads instead of a tie. Blushing and pulling her books up to her face, she said, "...so cute." She was walking so fast, I would have had to chase her to make her repeat it.

By December, because of our closeness, she took to telling people that we were just friends. Since I was a guy, nobody said anything to me. I was careful about avoiding a position of rejection, playing my initial strategy, but encountering wrinkles. If I wasn't careful...the game would be lost. After any misstep, I was convinced whatever comfort between us would fade.

Wind Chimes asked me about my virginity one day as I conveniently strolled past. She was wearing this short denim skirt over thermal underwear. I liked.

“When are you leaving for Thanksgiving Break,” she asked.

I said, “I’m not.”

This sudden pity slid across her face. “You’ll be the only one on campus.”

“I know.”

“That is so lonely and…weird. I’ll think about you when I get home.”

“Do that.”

“I’ll miss you.”

Not enough, I thought. “I’ll miss me too,” I said. What an ambiguous, jerky thing to say. That order to keep up the barriers was bucking for a promotion. I turned to leave, but she cut through my barrier easily.

"Are you really a virgin," she asked showing me her eye roll.

She stood at the top of the teacher's office stairs, the full late sun fading orange behind her. By this time, she was damn near running the recruiting office. It was getting chilly out. Dusk in mid-November can be chilly even in Alabama and no one was around to notice the heavy clouds changing colors.

I hadn't told her that half-joke offering of sexual nullity, but the campus talks, especially a pre-Cambrian campus without internet access, the penurious absence of phones in the rooms, and cable which was still one year away in 1990. "Well, you know, freshmen don't get visitation privileges until second semester," I said.

"I'm serious," she pouted, hiding her copious breasts with some files. That "I'm serious" left no room for screwing around, no matter how cute the pout. I looked down. I looked up.

"It's true," I admitted.

"That's cool. Me too. I didn't want to be a notch in some punk’s belt."

She went back inside. Wow. After dinner, when I was hanging around her office with her girl Lashawn, she unveiled her plan to be deflowered by some anonymous, future lucky contestant over Spring Break. They were picking up an earlier conversation about future plans. "If I can't kill the guy after we do it," she said. "I can at least never see him again."

I knew I would have to work faster. Spring Break was mere months away, and she was out to ruin herself.

What else. What else. I'm pretty sure my boy Terry (Ted) told her I wanted her, and some of her friends were pushing her in my direction. I wasn't sure how it worked for other girls, but it wasn't their permission she needed.

Terry was my same opposite. He was a math major, while I studied English. We were the same height and weight but proportioned completely different. Even our skin tone was at different extremes. And he didn’t keep secrets as much as wait for good moments to drop them.

About mid-semester, we were going to the store when he brought up Jumill.

“What about her,” I said. “We just friends.”

“You know she like you. You like the only key that can open her lock. I’m telling you.”

“That’s not a room I want to enter.”

“So you don’t care if I talk to her then?”

“Nope,” I said. “But I’m pretty sure she holding out for me, buddy.”

“I don’t know.”

“I’m pretty sure.”

“Look. We already did it,” said Ted. “She was crying over you on my shoulder, then she asked me to be her you. That girl is crazy. But you’re the key.”

“And you did it?“

He nodded.

I was amazed. “I’m the key? Even for you?”

“For whoever.”

Ted claimed to have bedded Jumill in the library. I saw no need to bother with forgiveness; I didn’t care. In December, he was talking to WC in the cafeteria. I saw her huge eyes grow wider, but I didn't know what they were talking about. Later, I was kicking it at the girls' dorm. We were on the edge of that hectic time known as Finals Week, when so many students go home sick because their immune systems crash after so much fervid cramming.

We were in the Crawford lobby with her girls when her peripheral friend, Shavonda, said, meaning me, "You like him, don't you?"

"He is just a friend." Wind Chimes wanted to demonstrate how disgusting it was to bring someone up from the friend waiting lobby to the penthouse, for my benefit and anybody watching. "Sort of like a Ken doll. He looks all good on the outside, but when you pull down the pants, nothing."

Ouch. In the parlance of local culture, I was hurting. Lashawn might say, after looking at the D minus on your exam, "Yo’ test is hurting, girl!" About your wrinkled clothes, Doc might say, "Man, your pants is hurting."

Ted had been bugging lately about my interest in her, which I never admitted during those friendly interrogations. Apparently, waiting for confirmation was too lengthy a process. A thought slowly solidified in my mind. I would crush my good friend Terry into dust. But I didn't do anything. What choice did I have? To go after him would be to admit my guarded obsession and allow it visiting privileges far past the surface of my consciousness, to explore any of several realities that frightened the pants off me. I was hurting.

The next night, I had gotten a phone call on the third floor payphone while I was snack shopping at the store. It was Simone, Kevin Bradford told me. The sky was dark. This mad intuition that something terrible had happened to her sent me sprinting to Crawford and paging her like a maniac. WC came downstairs eating a bag of corn chips casually, like she didn't do anything wrong by calling me and me not being there. She was crazy. I wanted her locked up. My heart and lungs were just settling down, and I ran 2 miles 4 or 5 mornings a week back then. The freshman boys' and girls' dorms were located at the exact opposite ends of the campus.

"What's wrong? You ok?"

"I'm fine," she intoned.

"Well, why did you call me?" The dorm mother abandoned her magazine and peered at me through the glass. I must have looked insane. "I thought you broke your arm or something!"

"No, I was just making sure you were studying and not slacking off with your stupid friends."

I grabbed her arm, careful not to upset her corn chips. In a low voice, I said, "Don't ever scare me like that again."

Grabbing her and whispering was what I did when I felt I was drifting away from her, from myself, like the dance that was just a dance. It felt less mysterious this time though. Maybe because she was facing me.

Spraying corn chip mush from her mouth, she laughed right in my face and I turned away to depart and maybe save a little loose change dignity for later. It might have been enough to buy a half-eaten donut. Coughing and swallowing, she asked me to wait while she got her coat. She couldn’t let such a good laugh walk away without her. She broke it off with Tim the next day.

Two mornings later the Wind Chimes family showed up to take her home for Winter Break. Mother Wind Chimes, sister, and young brother. His name was Othello. They would be soaking in the campus until late afternoon. As mother and sister went exploring, WC came by our dorm with Othello. She was giving one of her killer shoulder rubs to Tim's roommate in the lobby (she did things like that, eager to express her freedom I suppose, brazen).

I took charge of her seven-year old brother and bounced out, maybe just as a distraction from the fist-gnawing jealousy. For his age, he was short. After leaving Ish Hall, I began introducing him to people.

“Hey Francis,” I said. She was from Atlanta.

“Hey. Who is this?”

“This is Othello. Student Affairs asked me to give him a tour. He’s going to be attending next semester.”

“You lyin’!”

“No, really. He’s a genius. He almost scored a perfect SAT. He got the date wrong.”

Othello reached his hand up and said, “It’s a pleasure to meet you Francis. You’re pretty. I hope we see more of each other next semester.”

I let him ride on my shoulders. He didn't squeal when I pretended to stumble sideways though. Tough, well-composed little guy. We got back to Ish as more students leaked home for semester break. There was a little bustle. It was much less trouble to move out than in, unless you know you‘re not coming back.

I got Othello a three dollar, Ish Hall freshman dorm haircut for free. We bumped Grandpa, a pudgy Alabama hunchback that hated my guts. It's a strange black teenager that brags of familial relations to Robert E. Lee. He once called my nappy hair, “un-American.”

My man from Boston, Markel, set to cut the kid's hair, said, "That little man is seven Grandpa. Stop complaining. Your turn will come."

Afterward, while running through the hallway, little man bumped into some tough local scholar, and ran back to the other end of the hall, behind my legs.

“Hey! Say something when you bump into somebody,” the guy yelled.

“Fat ass,” Othello screamed over and over, ducking behind me each time.

“You need your little bad behind whupped.” He started approaching from the other end of the hall with his roommate.

“Hold up,” I shouted. “Stop acting like a little kid your damn self, man.” They actually stopped. Waving them off, I said to Othello, “Forget them, man. I‘ll show you my room. It‘s almost time for you to go.” Before you get me stomped.

He stood on my departed room dog's mattress staring out the window, hands behind his back. I was in chill mode on my bed by the door, radio fidgeting. Out of nowhere, he said, "I want you to take off my sister's panties and do things to her."

The words flowed with a gravity and total lack of ironic awareness that apparently swam in this family's blood. The most ridiculous sentence delivered with absolute lethal sincerity and accuracy. Under other circumstances I might have laughed it off, but he looked so much like Yoda he might as well have said, "Young Skywalker, my sister's panties remove and things do to her, you must." No males from my generation take Yoda lightly.

I mumbled something about that not just being up to me and, feeling this awkward elation, delivered him to his sister downstairs and hugged them both goodbye. Her mother said she could see why Simone was so attracted to me. Mother thought that I was smart and said so. I was in complete agreement.

WC said, "I'm not attracted to him. We're just friends."

Mother Wind Chimes responded, "Friendship is the basis of attraction. Lust sure isn't."

I left before the inevitable verbal hurricane flew out of control and blew me over. The next day, wearing that off white dinner jacket, gray USED jeans, a huge gold hoop in my left ear, and a goose down coat I bounced through Detroit Metro. Every final I took, I knew I completely destroyed. I thought I was the man, squared. Dressed even more ostentatiously than me, in an orange and red outfit, Tim shared the old station wagon ride to the airport from campus. He wanted to hang out while we waited for our flights. I ditched him and read a book.

Memory is something like a disgruntled pet finding it's way back. Once, my family had a cat named Roscoe. He was exceptionally intelligent. He understood people. My 2-year old nephew came to visit and he would try to imitate older folks petting that affectionate little nub, but the boy didn't pet or rub. In fact, the boy squeezed and punched until Roscoe got sick of him and went presumably to live somewhere else for a couple of weeks. Roscoe's character would never allow him to scratch a two year old. But the day after that kid left for home, Roscoe was back at the front door whining to be let in. I'm thinking he vacationed with that old woman down the street that had 50 other cats and what must have been a truckload of litter in the basement (the suck up probably answered to a different name like Chuckles or Patches or something plural), but the point is he came back. And that's how this story feels - a loved one returned. And the story begins to fix itself back into my memory, just like Roscoe insinuated himself back into our household while lurking about distrustfully, sniffing for his departed tormentor. Pretty soon, though, he got more comfortable and less jumpy. Then it was like he never left.

In January, I took the Greyhound back to school, listening to Short Dog's in the House on my headphones the whole way down. Too $hort is the modern genius of sexual profanity. I met up with my boys and promptly experienced my second real drunk. It was much worse than the first. We only had about five bucks between the three of us that were back that early. So we got an errant upperclassman to buy us a gallon of Wild Irish Rose and Thunderbird and the four of us watched racially mixed pornography and got bombed in Terry‘s room and split up when the wine jugs ran dry. Terry went to a crowded party to sweat out the cheap wine. He was smarter than his comrades. Big Gil from Eutaw went to his room and I got invited to this junior girl's room as I swayed outside - one of my better spades partners. The room started spinning once I sat down. I threw up in her bathroom. I threw up on the way across the street to my dorm. I threw up in the men's room across from my door. I threw up in my garbage can and on the floor as I lay in bed unable to find a receptacle that wasn't so damn slippery.

The Alabama boys took care of Gil. When he puked in the water fountain, they named it Big Gil Falls (nobody else drank from that thing the whole semester) and pushed him into the shower. Ken, a special freshman in his late twenties from Birmingham, our clear elder and a former living drone, gave me some wisdom at breakfast the next day. My stomach was still quivering. "Ya'll don't know the difference between rotten grapes and fermented grapes," he said. "You cain't drink wine by the gallon when it's cheaper than milk by the gallon."

Sage advice. In my lifetime since, I've seldom been a cheap, fast, or heavy drinker - at least not all three at once.

People were congratulating me for making the Dean's list. It was posted, but I never thought to look for it. Students marveled that I could screw off so much and still get the job done academically. Presumably, they didn't even know about my semester-long proclivity for stalking. Hey, I just study hard and fast. It was nothing, really. I got lucky. The false humility couldn't begin to cover my smugness though, might have even amplified it.

WC wasn't back yet.

I became a Zeta sweetheart and we practiced to open a Zeta step show in a couple weeks.

WC wasn't back yet.

We did the show and we were almost respectable. The Zetas were fire, though. We got drunk to celebrate at Shores, the upperclassman women's dorm. It was a funny place to get drunk, considering it was the first place I had ever thrown up from alcohol. Ignoring everyone, I sat in a corner and drank the mixture of cheap gin and blue kool-aid, slowly this time, embracing liquid despondency. I never really fit at parties without a card table.

WC wasn't back yet. She wasn’t coming back.

Sad clarity washed through the blue gin as I remembered Simone. I found dark solace in that otherwise hazy tipsiness; the clarity was in the mood. I remembered one really good time: the night we took a walk on false pretenses. That cold, still night right after Thanksgiving vacation. Our night. When you're drinking right, strong depressing realizations can hit you all of a sudden and steal you from home, transporting you spiritually away from your body and time. You feel free to dub an event "our" night for the first time without anyone else's cue. My face fell slack to this strange chumminess with despair.

In November, before she broke off the playmate thing with Tim, she told me (her co-architect of subterfuge in a friend zone friend) how he would come page her at night and the signal that it was him was the message, "Bring your coat."

If I paged her the same way, I reasoned, she would think I was Tim. Indulging in a macabre chuckle while waiting outside, I imagined her anticipation as she put on that lovely earth tone lipstick. The first time I had ever paged her and it was in disguise, playing a safe gag that I could play off if it went wrong. It was a chilly wait. The grin on her face tripled when she turned the corner of the lobby entrance and saw me in Tim‘s place. Sheepishly, I opened the door for her with a firm, slow grip. Her hair was pulled back like when I first saw her at the end of summer. We walked into the cold.

From this high hill we stared down at the city lights. It was divine, like looking down on stars instead of up. We said the requisite, "It's so pretty" because we were too scared to say, "This is how God must see things." We discussed a bunch of nothings that clothed our comfortable familiarity as the wind uncovered these almost hidden antecedents of mutual affection. Then she cut deeper into the wool. Was I really a virgin, she wanted to make sure. How close did I get?

Hello.

Not answering, I lay flat on the empty sidewalk, pocketed my hands, and kept my hood up to look at the real stars in the clear sky and then she plopped her behind on my mid-section with her feet over the curb like I was a couch cushion, squeezing a few details from my personal history that flew out like dust. The message seemed to be: “I could have really hurt you and I don't like being ignored.”

So I told her I had spent the night with a girl the day before flying down but we didn't do anything much. She asked me if I'd had oral sex with my summer fling because if I did, then that was nasty. Again, I didn't answer. Shifting on top of me, she punched my solar plexus. I coughed and laughed.

Folding her knee over me, she said, "Don't ignore me."

My prodigious hood fluttered across my face like a flag planted in a windy mesa. It felt like she was melting in the cold - settling on me, her sculpted high behind on my geode belly, her fingers on my coat. I interpreted desire creasing her posture, like she was slowly lowering herself to me. This was the moment. I began to rise, but I wasn't fast enough because of how she was sitting, with one knee bent near my heart.

“You know,” she said, suddenly. “Tim might get mad if he misses me.”

I experienced one of those face freezing moments where you're stuck floundering among awkward choices of behavior. She had to know I was going for it, but then a rapacious dragon stood resolutely before the seemingly delicate princess that, like all royalty, had power to destroy whatever she surveyed. This is the truth: There was a predatory monster inside of her - a literal man eater.

Angry with no right to be, I said, "Let's go back. I wouldn't want Tim to think I was taking over his route."

When we got to Crawford, she walked with me for a few more steps. Again, she asked me, "Did you eat that girl?"

“Why should it matter?”

She shivered her signature goofy shrug and said goodnight. I listened to the wind chimes in my head fade and watched her walk. There went my moment. I knew what she wanted, and I was too proud to break through. The other drones were gone. She doesn’t want Tim. That night, I fell asleep happy with my progress, knowing that there would be other chances, and dreamed that I was at her house walking perilously on the outside ledge of the second floor during a hurricane, somehow trying to save her. I knew she was from Charleston. I also knew about Hurricane Hugo, that legendary devastator of South Carolina, but I had never actually seen her house. Later, I verified that I had dreamed a good likeness. This did not surprise me.

Poof in my ears and my mind was dropped off back at this silly celebration. The music and merriment barely permeated my tiny bubble, but I climbed back as much as I could. Sitting there, cuddling plastic jug gin marinating in plastic cups and blue Kool-Aid, I knew better. All the celebration was background noise; fluorescent blah. It was over. I had blown my only chance. So I accepted it and got on with being happy being down. All I had to do was say, "Forget Tim" and admit I didn't lick the clam? The whole thing was degrading. Beneath me. Then the truth hit me. Yes, I’d had my moment, but I wasn’t man enough.

After the gig, I dragged my sad behind across the street.

That's when I saw Simone and Shavonda walking from the doors of the men's dorm. I wasn't as excited as I wanted to be, having just inaugurated the healing process while indulging in inebriated self-pity, but I made do. She was looking for me.

"I just got back," she exclaimed.

I said, “You look great.”

We squeezed into each other. For a second, I thought I was going to get that crazy intimate boyfriend hug where she jumps in my arms and puts her legs around me. I was glad she didn't because I was so tipsy she might have knocked me over. She hadn't even unpacked yet. She'd missed me and she leapt to this story about how her father didn't want to pay the bill, but finally relented just before late registration ended. She had been telling everybody at home about me. Her good friend.

That did it. I interrupted, "Let me go change. I'm sweaty from the step show."

Before she could say, "What step show," I wobbled up to my room, rinsed my mouth out, and put on some Michigan State sweat pants and the purple "team me" t-shirt my roommate had left behind. Downstairs, I fell on the lobby couch, noticing that I had forgotten to put on shoes. Wind Chimes was back, but I felt too distant somehow. I used to have to hold myself back from fawning or gaping. Now I had to struggle to listen, coming down from another planet.

Shavonda perked my ears with her first full sentence that evening. I hadn’t talked to her once since the new semester started. "She's looking for a new playmate. Have you submitted an application?"

"I'm kind of an all or nothing at all guy." I had responded in this way before and spoke to beat Simone, as if it were a race.

I smiled bitterly, grimacing as Wind Chimes said, "Shavonda. Mind your own business."

Before she left to go unpack, we agreed that I would be her first visit, and that she would share her major care package that was already on the way UPS. A sort of thank you for my help with her papers the previous semester. That "taking advantage of our friendship" phrase still affected her.

“Nobody ever said that to me before,” said Simone.

"Free food," I answered.

In my room, I lay in bed reviewing my obsession. I didn't have a crush on her. The crush on her had me. If I could give her up once though, I postulated, when I didn't know she was back, maybe I could be strong now that she is. Pride again asserted itself. If I was too cowardly to make a move... Falling asleep, I promised myself, "No more stalking. You're destroying yourself."

Speaking of stalking, Jumill had moved beyond our little world. She had pretended to slash her wrists with fake Halloween blood and tore through the campus, tearfully collapsing at "The Inn" last November. I had taken to avoiding her because it was easier than spurning her. Her parents picked her up and placed her under observation before finals. I felt somehow responsible, knowing it was crazy, but it was like she was a fake blood sacrifice somehow to my fixation with the Simone.

It was too bad, but necessary. My dramatically silent exit was planned. After tonight, I would creep out of her life as quiet and lowly as I had tiptoed in. I paged Simone. She came down and signed me in.

She had a single too. Her roommate had gone home because she had gotten pregnant over the break. WC pointed me to the nice box and the goodies and asked me to help myself. Shavonda came in to visit the visitor. They started talking about kissing. Apparently, a kiss was telling truth to a woman with a whisper up her spine; a whisper that men never feel. At least, I never have.

WC said, "I know. It's all in the kiss. Everything you want to know."

Then they talked about various boys that they had kissed and how they had compared. Other females entered the open room, seeing what I was doing in there. They discussed parts of their bodies that began throbbing when near certain attractive men on campus. They were having a great time. If you read a raw transcript of their conversation, you would think it was raunchy. But I didn't think that at all. The context was humorous and light and honest. Although I couldn’t join in, I just knew that there wasn't much better going than being under women having a good time together. If the women are happy, everybody's happy.

Of course, the best thing about the friend zone is also the worst; females feel free around you - like you're not even there, and that's if you're lucky. Lashawn, who was also from Charleston but didn't make wind chimes or have Sha's chemistry with Simone, came in holding her belly and asked everyone present, one at a time, what one does for cramps. After asking me, she caught herself, apologized and flung herself from the room cradling her arms. WC laughed at me the loudest. Squeezing tears, one girl stumbled as she ran from the room saying she was going to pee on herself. I had finally become one of the girls. Laugh it up, I thought, crunching dry cereal. You won't have me to kick me around for much longer. I got your Ken doll right here.

Later, after the room cleared, WC was sweeping near the door. I was on one bed and Shavonda was sitting on the other, across from me.

"You need to give him a chance, girl. He's cute."

"Mind your own business. I'm not telling you again." She meant it too. Violence was all around her.

Shavonda persisted and looked at me stuffing my face. "Would you kiss her?"

"Hell yeah."

The dustpan clanged on the floor. WC dropped it, surprised. I stared out the third story window. It had gotten pretty dark outside.

“Well, then,“ she said. “Simone, you need wash money, right?”

“…Yes.”

Shavonda pulled out the money. “So is it a deal?”

Wow. I could have given her two bucks months ago, but Shavonda‘s timing was perfect.

Calling her a nosy meddler, Simone forced Sha from the room and we watched TV for the last quarter hour of Sunday visitation. I think the show was "Empty Nest." Over the public audio system, the dorm mother announced that visitation hours were up. We hugged good bye, but she held the hug gently, touching my neck and shoulders, looking me in the eyes. My hands slid down to her waist where my pinkies just barely touched the top of her behind - all by themselves. She felt wiry and strong and soft and deep. I knew what was next, but I still wanted permission. I wanted her to be open to me from herself enough to down at least a few of those walls. She called me a Ken doll.

"You can kiss me," she said. Her hard eyes softened. "I'm serious." Per usual, the phrase emerged with this brilliant musical emphasis.

I went in slow, savoring every centimeter, every instant. Finding a together rhythm, I kissed her three times very softly. Then I kissed her harder, deep and slow, diving into her recesses, tongue and lips, pushing harder than I thought I should, squeezing her, telling my tale. As strong as she was, and as slowly as I started, it's a wonder I didn't squeeze the life from her. However, I put my hand on her face near the end, my knuckles lightly stroking her cheek. I touched foreheads with her for a moment and pulled back to the position where we had finished hugging. That way she could pretend it never happened if she wanted. She looked amazed and told me something no girl had ever told me before. She blinked quick and jerked her head back suddenly and slightly, like she was trying to awaken from a dream.

"You're a good kisser," she said.

She wouldn’t lie to me. I said, "You're the expert."

She slapped my chest. “You’re just lucky I needed wash money.“

Our dance had become more than just a dance.

Never did I call her Wind Chimes. But looking back at these pages tuned by time, that was an error. Perhaps that name could've stuck somewhere outside my mind. Perhaps I was too innocent, inexperienced, self-conscious, or maybe just too selfish to make it a gift. I don’t know. I think if I had ever spoken it aloud back then, I wouldn't hear her music so much now. Reminding me; taking me back.

Whether I'm kicking puddles after a steamy rain, or running in the dark early morning, or on a beach watching the sun kiss the ocean or lake goodnight, I think I can still hear those vivid wind chimes slamming with the angry winds or tinkling in the carefree breeze. Prehensile limbs of the quiet spring to summer places that project that sound grab my imagination and memory and carry me away all the time to a past that fades more and more in color as the crinkled paper ages irrevocably.

I can still hear those sweet fingers like God himself is tickling right hand piano melodies. Sometimes, I'm almost there again.