Entry Four

Thank god for skype.  With it I was able to place all the necessary calls from the basement.  David had moved the beer to a corner of the basement.  It would stay fairly cold down here.  I hadn’t figured out any way to get any heat going on down there.  However, I did have a collection of space heaters in the shed that might be able to do the trick.  David came down into the room from the basement’s stairwell that lead to the side door with an armload of small heaters.  Already there was a small collection of my mothers and my own reject furniture.  Of course, I suspected that most of the party guests would be standing and jumping if I could arrange for this band to show up.

I told David to start setting up the heaters without me.  I climbed the ladder and a flight of stairs into my bedroom and pulled my old backpack, still packed for class even though I had graduated with a four year degree from a home town college more than a year ago.  Somewhere inside this bag was the little black agenda that I had used to plan Phi Life’s weekly parties.  Inside I had jotted all the numbers I would need to find enough bands to go for weeks.

I rifled through the bag looking for it.  It had to be in here somewhere.  I knew it was here.  I remembered tossing it into the bag, and since I had no need to get it out and it was so small.  I really should clean this thing out more often I thought.

But the card I hadn’t seen in years was surely in there, somewhere.  Truthfully, I think I was ashamed of it.  My hand felt a worn laminated edge.  The card reading “I want to transfer” was at the tip of my fingers.  As sad as it was that might have been the closest I had come in the last year to reaching out to anyone.  It was the closest I had come to telling what I had to say to anyone I wanted to talk to.  So I pulled it out of my bag and laid it on the table.

He puzzled over it for a minute.  Then he spoke, “I remember you transferring.  Is this how you did it?”  He stopped for a second, as if he actually expected me to answer.  “Yeah, see, this is what you can do; this is a starting point.  This is where you start.  This is how you start.  You can do this, you can beat this thing, Jack.  And by the way, my name is Connor, nice to finally meet you.”

As much as it pained me, made me feel like I was losing myself to even be there, I wanted to take his advice and encouragement to heart.  Connor was quite possibly the first person to ever reach out to me for reasons beyond himself.  His unselfishness reached out and touched me deep in my cold heart.  He wanted me to be his friend not because he needed me, but because, as I was slowly coming to realize, I needed him.

Maybe it was that unselfish nature of his being that actually made me want to make the cards.  Sure, it took days of beating myself up to come to that conclusion, but once I did, I knew it was the right thing to do.  And for the first time in the last few years, I made a goal that went beyond myself.  I wanted to talk to her.  I wanted to be able to talk to her.  I felt he could help me get to that point.

I just wanted to see her again, to talk to her, to regain what we once had and what I had truly thought I had lost forever.

Yet, there she lay, two floors down in that casket.  My hand felt a worn black leather edge.  The book whose cover read “Daily Planner” was at the tip of my fingers.  I opened it to read the inside cover page.  The words “Property of: Julius Pierce” stared back at me.  I started flipping through its pages and dog earring the ones that I would be needing downstairs.  On page 32 a name spoke to me, surrounded in childish crayon hearts and cat’s ears was the name and old phone number of Kitty, or more recently, Mrs. Kathrynne Pierce.

I still remember the night we met at one of those wild Saturday night parties.  Bob and I were on our worst behaviors, which the crowd seemed to appreciate.  Seeing us act so stupidly gave them free reign to let it all out.  All of the accumulated stressors of a week’s worth of college essays, math homework and frantic studying could all be comfortably released in such an environment.  That’s why they came every week, and that’s why I knew at least half of them would come tonight.  

If only half wanted to show up, and only half of them could show up, I would still be hosting a party of more than a hundred.  David never went to college, never was involved in the scene like I had been.  He only knew about modest parties.  I was about to show him a private party for the record books.

Kat’s face flashed through my mind.  I still think the thing that set that party off was when I threw the beer bottle across the room in joy.  The sound of the glass breaking was cathartic to so many of us that night.  Bob followed suit by tossing a chair into the air.  Despite, the loud, rolling bass and the simple punk chords, our minds froze at that exact second.  The chair turned over and over in the air, a lot of us in the scene remember thinking at that exact moment that anything was possible.  Anything, including love.

It was in that moment of enlightenment that an out of control fist connected with my jaw.  My adrenaline pushed higher as my body entered freefall.  It’s hard to say which hit the ground first, me or the chair, but I know I was still in free fall when the chair cleared the drummers head.  He drummed on, unaware, completely in the zone.  My adrenaline pushed higher.  I hit the ground at her feet.

My head hit the cold, hard tile with more force that I had expected.  It took a few seconds of pain before I could open my eyes.  I stared up at her as time seemed to freeze around me.  Instinct told me to move, to get up, shake it off and get back into the pit.  Love told me to stay, the same way you say “just five more minutes” when you first wake up in the morning.

I lay there, not deciding.  The decision to not decide was as much a decision as any other.

So I just made the cards.  I carried them around for three days before I actually had the guts to show Connor one.  “Hello,” it read.

“Hello,” she said with a smile, “are you ok?”  She must be thinking my head had hit harder than it had.  Maybe she saw the reality that I didn’t.  Only time could tell.  I lifted my head and rose to my feet.  I took her hands in mine.

“I’m just fine,” I said with what must’ve been a twinkle in my eye.  I pulled her back on a whim.  Into the pit we began to spin, back and forth, our eyes locked on each others, spinning and spinning amid to chaos, lost in each other’s eyes.

Connor stared back at me.  Maybe he hadn’t been expecting me to take his advice so seriously.  But still he didn’t speak, dumbstruck.  This wasn’t the way conversation worked.  I became nervous and self conscious in a way I hadn’t felt in nearly a year.  He was supposed to talk too.  I started to sweat and looked up at him, made eye contact, fear in my eyes.  I may have seen a tear before I ran.  I ran all the way back to my dorm.

Maybe I heard him say “hello” as I was running.  Maybe it was someone else.  I wasn’t about to embarrass myself further by turning back to look if I wasn’t sure it was him.

When I got back to my solitary dorm, I realized that I had left my stuff behind in my haste.  

An hour later there was a knock at the door.

David’s voice came in from a crack as the door opened.  I sat cross legged in the floor, my black book sitting on the floor in front of me, still open to page 32.  I wiped a tear from my cheek as I heard his words.  “You found that book yet?  I’m not going to do all of the work for you down there, c’mon man.”

I still hadn’t quite come back down to Earth.  Under my breath I whispered, “no matter where you are, I can still hear you when you dream.”  I remember that song playing in her car as she drove me home that night.  She was nice enough to stay until four in the morning helping us clean up.  She was nice enough to give me a ride home after it was all over.

I remember stopping in front of the quaint little frat house owned by Alpha Theta, or more commonly the Acid Trip frat.  Though my roommate Connor and I kept our room pretty well kept, there was still the issue of having to walk through the common area.  Judging from that I’m surprised the old frat house wasn’t condemned sooner.  I heard a few months ago that the antique bathtub that occupied the main hall, the one that was filled with bong water and dead sea monkeys, had finally fallen through a rotting floor and the whole structure was condemned not to long after.

Of course, David was right, I couldn’t just keep reminiscing.  The night was still young and there was much work left to do.

I knew I had a lot of work to do, and that he was willing to try and help me, but I didn’t expect what happened next.

Connor entered my modest dorm holding my bag.  I suppose it was good that it wasn’t lost but I didn’t exactly want to see him so soon.  He dropped the bag by my desk and picked up a notepad and pencil from beside the laminating machine.  He scribbled a few words on the pad then passed it to me.

It read, “I thought you might need this.  Do you think you can show me how to make my own cards?”
 
He had a look on his face as he stared down at me as if he expected an answer.  I extended my hand for the pen.  It took him a few seconds to recognize the request but he got the message soon enough.

I wrote on the pad.  “Fine.  I guess you want to know what it’s like, huh?”

I handed him the pad and pen and he jotted his reply.  “Yes.”

“You realize it isn’t easy, especially for a guy like you.  You have to be ready to give up everything.  You need a reason to give up everything.”  He answered by tapping on his previous reply, and then took the tablet as if he had something to add.  I watched as he wrote.

“I won’t talk until you will.”

Just like that, it was no longer about me; it was no longer a personal decision.  My decisions now effected the lives of others.  He made it seem to be a selfish decision to continue, when the reason I had started this whole thing was so that no one else would have to endure my pain.  Until he came into my life, no one had wanted to.  Slowly I was realizing that even if I didn’t care about them, there were people out there who cared about me; to the point that some would take my pain on as their own in order to take a fraction of the burden off of my shoulders.

He had been a very good friend, maybe he could help me with this.

“Bob?”  I asked as the familiar number connected.  

“Pierce, is that you?  Man, it’s been forever.  What’s up man?  How’ve you been?”  The background was silent but for a droning murmur that sounded like one of those 24 hour news stations.  Times have changed, I suppose.  When I had known him well, he never cared about anything other than the here and now.  The past, the future, the country, the world; all of that was of no consequence to him.  But now I could hear a baby’s cry cutting through the near silence.  The cries grew louder and I could hear footsteps.  I guess I had never expected him to ever grow up.  Especially as fast as it seemed that he had.

“I…” I couldn’t seem to find the words.  Yes, this was Bob’s voice, but I wasn’t sure if you could still say that he was the same man I had met six years before.  Time has a way of changing everyone, I suppose.  “I was thinking about getting the whole crew together tonight for a big party; just like the old days.  What do you say?”

“Oh, oh my god.  That’s perfect…”  He tapered off.  “You don’t know how much I would love that but, Donna isn’t home and I have to take care of my daughter.  Uh, my wife Donna that is.  She went to school with us, not really a part of the scene, but you might remember her…  I’m sorry, I really wish I could.”

“You can still help.  Just call up as many people as you can that used to come to the Saturday night shows and ask them if they will show.”

“Where?”

“My place.”

“What?  You realize that this could potentially be hundreds of people?”  

“I have a big, open basement; maybe not as big as the old cafeteria, but it should accommodate quite the crowd.”

“No s**t?  I should really get out there…  Alright, I’ll start talking.”  I gave him the address and told him the party would start at nine.  I also told him to call me back when he was done, I would like to catch up with him when I had the time.