Parallax

I've probably told this story before, but I like telling it.

Way back when I was but a little spawnling I went to a weird-ass religious dayschool that I was full-scholarshipped into on account of being real smart and everything, when normally you had to pay out the nose and also vote for the right people to get your kid in there. But some strings were pulled for me, by my mother's weirdo shrink who thoroughly rubbed out all of those Patient and Doctor Separation lines, I mean we house-sat for him a few times and he sold my mom a car, and he pulled the strings and I got into this school. They had a good reading program, or that's what my mother was told, and I suppose they did, because I've been devouring books like a starving woman my whole damn life. Though I probably woulda done that anyway, but maybe not so fast.

This school had everything it could possibly have to pretend that it was really a repressive British boarding school circa 1951 or so. We had a headmaster and not a principal, and we had to stand up whenever he entered a room (and the teachers too I think; I can't remember anymore) and we had fussy little uniforms with skirts and blazers, and there was a big-ass church attached to the place where we had to go to 'chapel' every morning. It also had corporal punishment, which is why I stopped going in the middle of third grade.

When classes ended for the day everyone gathered up in the front of the building and waited for their parents to pick them up, which could take a while because nobody had thought things through and the school itself was in the middle of a pretty quiet neighborhood full of houses and teeny tiny cross streets that only fit one point five station wagons (this being the time before the advent of the almighty SUV, ya dig) and so when we got done at the end of the day it took a while to get out and go home. There were teachers and staff and people standing around herding the kids this way and that way and making sure nobody got hit by an idling station wagon or that the Polar Cup guy who made a killing around there didn't get anything more than dollars from the kids.

Now, the front of the building had these two big wrought-iron gates that were closed and locked during the school day. I don't know how people came and went when they were shut, and for that matter I don't know if they were locked, but that's what we were told, I suppose to keep us from trying to go outside. When we did have outside play time it was up on top of the building, up on the second or third floor, all ringed around with something like 8 feet of cyclone fence to keep us from toppling over the edge. We got a good view of things like the garbage trucks going by and the alleys in the neighborhood and peoples' back yards, and if the air was clear then sometimes maybe you could see down to the bay, and sometimes there were dolphins.

But, downstairs at the front of the place, next to the two big heavy wrought-iron gates that may or may not have been locked, someone had brought out an old battered church pew from the chapel. If all the crowd of parents picking up kids had come and gone, and everyone had cleared out, and you were still there because your ride was late, then that's where you'd go. You'd sit down on the pew and the teachers would close but not lock the gates, and then you'd have to wait until a parent or other ride-giving person came up to claim you.

This pew didn't have a name, not officially, but my mom gave it one. She called it the Group W Bench, and back then I didn't really know why. I asked her, and she said it was from an old story, where people had to go sit and wait on a special bench when nobody else knew what to do with them. That made sense to me, and while I don't remember for sure, I know me well enough to know that probably at some point or other I piped up about "Do you want me to go sit on the Group W Bench?" one afternoon when my mother was running late in that Nova that twice caught on fire. I'm not sure if I ever said that, like I say, but I know what kind of kid I was, and it's entirely likely I mentioned it, somehow.

I don't remember my mom being late too much.

But that's not the point here, really, although whenever I hear about the Group W Bench I always think of that church pew and the big heavy wrought-iron gates locking us away from the sunshine and the trees, and five or six nervous kids waiting for someone to take them home.

The point is that this, being Thanksgiving, is a special day for us counter-culture hippie spawn, because we alone have a special Thanksgiving holiday song, and while I was heating up the roasted chicken that I ordered from the grocery store the day before (because me plus turkey would probably equal fire) and we were cracking open cans of cranberry sauce and those numtious Hawaiian rolls, I kept singing and my mom kept joining in. It's an easy little song, and it's fun to have traditions like this, with the church and the war and the marches and the benches.

You can get anything you want at Alice's restaurant
You can get anything you want at Alice's restaurant
Walk right in it's around the back
Just a half a mile from the railroad track
You can get anything you want at Alice's restaurant!

davario started it all here: "Draw yourself as a teen."

It's morphed a bit, in that people are drawing themselves now as a comparison, so that's what I did.

I still can't draw worth a damn, but it looked entertaining and I had to try. It -was- entertaining. Even if you can't draw, do this anyway. It's fun.

( Under the cut. )

What I know, what I'll never know - turn away from the light of this day
Where I've been, where I'll never go - turn around, take me back again again again

Tonight I followed my tracks from eight, nine years ago. Passed the new structures built over places I used to haunt, got lost, got confused. Told stories as I went because when bricks and the concrete are gone the stories are all I'm left with. I didn't take nearly enough pictures back then, goddamnit, and although I still have the watercolor paintings I made sitting on the side of a fountain, dipping my brushes into the algae-green water, the fountain is lost under a shopping center and everything around it is gone too like it never existed and somehow I've lost a part of myself in the process. Those paintings really sucked, anyway. Never been a painter.

What I've seen, what I'll never see again - are these eyes burning
What I need, what I'll never need - see that face with a smile at me

So we walk, and I spin my tales, and I think one place was one thing, and I think another was something else, and I know what that one was - or maybe the thing next to it - and yeah this was much cooler when it was overgrown and abandoned - and the more stories I tell it's active and it doesn't hurt, because it always does -- when you first allow something to change you, and then it goes away, it always hurts somewhere. Down that corner, yeah, one-two-three, that's where Raven was, and that reminded me of the story I didn't tell you, about the tweaked-out guy who played the Sex Pistols for me. He had an acoustic guitar, couldn't have been more than twenty, couldn't have eaten in days, and he stopped me on the street because he liked the color of my eyes and wanted to sing a song for me.

Will you learn, will you ever learn - how to live with this life
Will you need, will you never need - to be alone again

Found the one place that was more my own than all the rest of it, and I took the winding way there because I wasn't sure I wanted to see what it had become. The bricks were different and I stopped in the middle of the street. Walked up to a door I had to fight with to close. Realized the locks had changed but the handle was the same: a round handle with a battered brass tongue you pressed to open the door. The day the drought broke - it hadn't rained in months - I shucked off my shoes and stood in that doorway, lifting my arms out to feel the rain. It trapped the dust on the ground and for about half an hour until the sun dried it up everything was clean.

And maybe I'll never know, I never knew how to leave this heart behind
And what I need, what I'll never need -- see that face with a smile at me?

Remembered something else and slid my hands along the wooden frame - up, up, up, there. Deep under layers of paint I could feel them, just barely: two screw-holes in the wood, at an angle, top right and bottom left, where the mezuzah had been bolted to the door frame. It's not all gone, then, not if you know where to look, just hidden because nobody else knows or cares anymore.

If I ever get that far, won't need you anymore...

Never did go see the Pagan Saints. Think they broke up a couple of years ago.