The man in the red mercedes

I laid in the grass, my mother's voice as a soft but harsh echo from uphill of our driveway.

It was a Saturday in October, and I felt my body sink into my lawn, welcoming the small creatures and their tiny built communities to crawl and explore my starfish spread figure staring directly into the blue sea of air. I loved the feeling of sinking into my front lawn and the idea, or maybe hope, that all these small bugs, bees, ants, and other arthropods surrounded me in my silent invasion of their home. 

My house sat on a busy, well known avenue- on that framed our town's reputation for enormous wealth and bucolic homes with the kinds of families that dress in all white for the Sunday buffet at our nearby country club. I didn't mind it, and at the age of sixteen, my surrounding environment gave me the opportunities I knew I was a in a small fraction of teenagers to receive. 

I laid in our front lawn, the groomed oak trees in methodically measured distance from each other separated our yard from our neighbor's vast, sprawling front lawn of endless green with a smooth trail of gravel and limestone leading up to a gargantuan replica of what the community called "the white house". My mind was content, at times clouded with the gray clouds of thoughts that, at the time, began to invade my head without welcome or desire. I focused on the sky and setting my eyes on any fluff of cloud I could find, trying so hard that my vision burned and I enjoyed the distraction from my own thoughts.

An engine huffed- a familiar sound, and one that immediately sparked the Pavlov reaction of an eye roll from my mother. For a moment, I lifted my head up heavily, and saw Dr. Pirozzi gliding down their perfect gravel driveway in his brazen American red 1960's Mercedes convertible. his hair combed back with whatever the grooming product all of our fathers used, and silver pieces of hair beating against the sunlight as he passed me, unnoticed, while he approached the gates of his property in a crisp white polo and one elbow on the side of his car. Dr. Pirozzi didn't really have any significance to me; he was a dad just like mine, often times seen with a triage of young kids and their athletic gear, seemingly unaffected by the chaos of his family and purposely calm for his own image. For a brief moment in time, my mother had attempted to arrange a carpool with my sisters and the Pirozzi kids, having us hike over our stone wall to their great big lawn to pile in with the others for school. It was in those brief attempts that I noticed a sense of departure in his eyes. At the age of sixteen, I didn't know how adults worked to the fullest extent, but I could always pick up on a forced guise that people carried, almost as if to function within the pretense of a perfect life, all the while harboring an internal nest of malicious intent or self- deprecating thoughts. I would know, because I was one of them. Whenever I caught Dr. Pirozzi's face up close, he seemed embalmed in a visage of wealth and elite stature, but carried himself in a way that felt sleuth and distrusting to me. Perhaps I just didn't see the best in people, but even now, I've come to realize that my intuitive observations on those we think play the role, while harboring silent deviance, was most often right. 

Author's Note

I want to set the stage and common theme, voice, and dialogue of the following chapters and stories I write. I would like to start at the age of sixteen and fast forward to more poignant parts of my life that feed into a greater story. I wanted to begin with a small, almost non significant story, that sets the tone. All feedback welcome.