A Breeze That Blew Through Me

Em had these phenomenal eyes. They were a smoky, almost steely blue shade and radiated something a bit more sinister than warmth. She was a maze of contradictions. Her physical endowments were loved by most of the boys and hated by nearly all of the girls. And for good reason. She had a reputation as being a bit cutthroat in her rather single-minded goal of popularity. Ultimately she would wear the much coveted homecoming crown of 1995. I thought she was a big phony. Of course I had just finished Catcher In The Rye and decided anyone self-righteous must also be, in part, a phony. And yes, I see the flaws in such reasoning now.
Em quickly fell victim to my newly burgeoning sense of the social hierarchy in our high school and held a rather permanent position on my blacklist of abhorrent elitists clawing to the top of the popularity pyramid. But I knew her game and could match her punch for punch. Even when she was lobbying to have our class trip changed from an amusement park to a huge shopping mall in Chicago I held my ground. Not that it was easy. Before the crucial class officers' meeting that would decide where our class trip would be, I rallied up a motley group of allies to resist the social bourgeois of of my high school. Unfortunately most of my supporters were either males or entirely apathetic toward any and all school related issues. Em had obviously planned an all out, full frontal assault against my meager band of dissidents. She wore a tight, midriff-bearing top with a low cut neckline. During a stalemate in negotiations, Em proceeded kneel on a chair and lean over the table. Needless to say, my allies lost all sense of loyalty as her breasts nearly leapt out from underneath her top.
One ally, Craig, who ultimately ended up in the seminary three times, said nothing for the rest of the meeting. He just salivated like a dog staring at a bloody steak.
Naturally, I was appalled. Breasts or no breasts, Em was employing tactics I couldn’t counter and wouldn’t, for that matter. Instead, I just refused to give in. I crossed my arms, bit my lip and pretended not to notice her cleavage dangling right in front of me. I didn’t even care where our senior trip would ultimately be only because we’d all be intoxicated during most of it anyway. But I still had my principles. I wasn’t entirely sure what those principles were, but I was confident that refusing to be swayed by a particularly more persuasive feature of the female anatomy was one of them.
Due to my rather senseless persistence, I won the battle. We went to the amusement park on an unseasonably cold day in May and stood in the pouring rain waiting in line for the only ride that was open, the bumper cars.
My next battle was homecoming. I was determined that homecoming be cancelled and that the accomplishments of former students in their professional pursuits be celebrated in a formal dinner instead. This time my allies threw hunks of boloney sandwiches at me during lunch and told me to shut my “talkhole”. Just to add insult to injury they took pains to have me elected class representative. I would get a seat on the senior float, a tux and series of photos taken of me with a fake smile and a marinara sauce stain on my tux shirt and a date I that tried to bite my lips off at the end of the night. Just to put a little salt in my wounds, all of it would be captured for posterity in the high school yearbook.
When my mother found out one of her own would be a part of the homecoming bonanza, she unknowingly thwarted my claim to righteousness.
“So you’re on the float,” she said when I walked into the house after school one day. Her network of gossipy housewives had their own version of deep-throat working afternoons at the high school. This woman counted the float ballots and called my mother with the results long before anyone bothered to tell me about it.
“Yeah, and I’m really happy about it,” I snapped with pretentious teenage sarcasm. “I’d rather just get drunk.”
“No, you’re gonna be on that float, boy.”
“You ride the stupid float. I’m not some conformist puppet that does things just because I want to be cool. You ride the stupid float if you like it so much.”
Mom just shook her head of short curly black hair and widened her hazel eyes.
“No one in the Manning history has ever been liked by anyone. Now, we finally have someone in our family that people seem to like—you of all people—and you can’t accept it? What the hell is your problem? What about me? If you’re on that float I finally have something to brag to the girls about the next time I’m at the Christian Mother’s meeting and all of the other woman are bragging about their nice sons. No, you’re gonna be on that float otherwise you’re gonna start eating canned soup for dinner every night.”
She had me in corner. I hated canned soup and just one bowl gave me two days of diarrhea. What could I say? Mom was playing hardball and I knew I didn’t have a chance. So I gave in. I would ride the stupid float wearing the stupid tux waving a stupid wave at the stupid crowd.
Em’s guerilla tactics of short-skirts, cleavage bearing, form-fitting blouses and weekly visits to the tanner won her the crown of homecoming queen by a close margin. Naturally most of my classmates resented Em and would have preferred one of the other candidates, particularly one possessing a bit more humility. So, when the queen walked through the crowd for her customary congratulations, she was greeted with turned backs, icy stares and one tall, lanky classmate too stunned and too much of an imbecile to manage any sort of appropriate reaction.
Em became Pewamo-Westphalia High School’s 1995 homecoming queen but nobody cared. She just stood at the gate separating the spectators from the field in her black velvet dress with a rhinestone tiara perched amid her short, blonde hair and searched the crowd for someone that seemed happy she was queen. But the backs of spectators continued to turn away from her. I stood with several class representatives that had ridden on our class homecoming float, which had just won first prize. An excited crowd had gathered around me chatting about how well the float turned out and how distinguished we looked in our formal wear. Their effusive praise bothered me, though, as I watched Em twenty yards away and without a soul to congratulate her.
Meanwhile, the homecoming king blew kisses to the crowd gathered around him and put his football helmet back onto his head and jogged to the locker room, nearly half the student body cheering for him as he did. When he disappeared, the crowd dispersed but only a few bothered to congratulate Em.
Meanwhile, Em stood for the remainder of halftime in a widening space of empty grass searching the stands and scanning the crowd for congratulations but none came. Finally, she gave up and turned away to stare into the white light falling over the chalked lines of the football field.
I had won yet another battle with Em and at the time I was vindicated to my own satisfaction. In fact, I took Em off of the top of my blacklist and replaced her with Mrs. Smith, a typing instructor I had caught staring at my crotch during a routine whiteout application demonstration. However, I altered my initial ruling moments later when I discovered I had spilled several globs of--wouldn’t you know it--marinara sauce right over my pants’ zipper.
* * *
Months quickly passed until our final day of high school and our final blowout party as a class celebrating the end of our four years together.
While my elevated sensitivity to righteousness wouldn’t allow too many indulgences, I had somehow managed to justify binge drinking. I think it was the standard argument of, “old enough to get drafted, old enough to drink.” Still, my rationalization served its intended purpose perfectly. By 6:30 p.m. I had six shots of cheap Canadian whiskey and four domestic light beers. A few hours passed that I don’t exactly remember. In fact, I just remember blackness, like a dreamless deep sleep. When I did finally come to I was lying in the middle of a twenty-foot disc of concrete that I knew was a silo foundation. My stomach felt like it was desperate to leave my body. The other organs were less eager to exit but collectively left me feeling so poorly that I found myself begging my reluctant God to end me right there and spare me the hell of enduring another succession of dry heaves. But God was unkind that night and it would be years before I would forgive it.
Somehow I managed to prop my spinning head against either the trunk of an oak tree or a telephone pole. Either way, a mercury light was shining down over me and I was convinced the angel of death had finally heard my pleas. Ten minutes later, when no angel had shown up strumming a harp and singing like a pre-pubescent schoolboy, I made a mental note to put God at the top of my blacklist.
Another stretch of black ensued for a time and then a hand reached out and was shaking my shoulder and trying to pull my face out of the cold, wet grass. The hands weren’t quite strong enough, though, so I flung my arm underneath me and propped myself up against the tree trunk with a little help.
“Are you okay?”
My eyelids felt like they were sewn shut and my stomach was mounting another offensive.
“Pardonez moi,” I mumbled before falling over sideways to dry heave into the grass again.
For some reason I start to speak broken French whenever I drink. I don’t know why and I supposed neither did the person asking me questions.
My eyes watered with tears from the heaves but I opened them despite this and pulled myself upright again. The mercury light above must have burnt out because it was now darker.
“Hey, are you okay?” The voice asked again.
“You gotta nice voice. Sounds a lot like Princess Leah when she’s about to put a lip-lock on Hans Solo in the Ewok forest after they blow up the Death Star. Lousy Emperor…”
I looked up and saw the all too familiar outline of Em’s breasts in the moonlight and I finally knew who it was. To this day I feel guilty about identifying her in such a way. But, if she hadn’t been showing the damn things off all of the time and would have said something worth remembering during the past four years, I would have recognized her voice, instead. So, maybe I don’t feel so guilty about it.
She sat down next to me though checking the grass for any half-digested, bile soaked matter before she did so. She allowed a space of about three inches between our shoulders so we wouldn’t touch. I appreciated that. I didn’t like the idea of a fallen queen touching me. That was far too much bad karma rubbing against me for one night. Still, fallen, despised queen or not, Em was a female so I naturally began to say stupid things.
“Mon Amie, why are you not partying like…like…like you were born to do,” I asked in something between a French and Scottish accent.
Em looked at me for a moment and then realized I was kidding. She smiled and pulled a few blades of grass from the lawn.
“No one really wants me at parties anymore.”
“Not even if you wear tight shirts, ma petite fleur?” I wondered realizing only after I’d said it how cruel it was.
She looked at me for a moment, her eyes welling up with tears and then looked away. That’s when I first really noticed her eyes.
“Drunk Guy apologizes. Drunk Guy forgot his tranquilizers this morning. Can’t help it.”
Still feeling guilty about what I had said, I half ripped off a chunk of my t-shirt.
“Drunk Guy offers t-shirt to wipe tears and blow nose with. Drunk Guy jackass. Drunk Guy very sorry.”
Em took the semi-square patch from my shirt, trying to find a patch of fabric that wasn’t soaked with beer or sweat. When she did she dabbed her eyes a few times and handed the cotton and polyester hunk of cloth back to me.
“I won’t blow my nose into it if you stop calling yourself Drunk Guy.”
I took the fabric puzzled as to why she didn’t like the “Drunk Guy” thing.
“Sorry, I just like to refer to myself in the third person when I’m drinking. Makes me feel tough, I guess. I try to divert attention from my inability to regulate my alcohol consumption with sophomoric humor. Just wait until I start in on the fart jokes.”
Em smiled and even laughed a little. I noticed her eyes again.
“Mes amie, you actually get my humor. We must become platonic friends for that reason exclusively.”
Em plucked another clump of grass and threw it a few feet up into the air.
“Why aren’t we friends now?”
I began to consider the question a bit more soberly. There was a warm breeze that night and even with my nerves dulled by alcohol, I could feel the gentle force of it pushing softly against me. The touch of it upon my face was light and comforting.
“Because you’re you and I’m me and we’ve always been too busy being who are.”
I had no idea what I had just said. I think I had heard it in a Nirvana song and I only remembered it because it never made sense to me. Em pondered it for a moment before she made any conclusions.
“That seems like a pretty flimsy reason for not being friends. I think you don’t like me because you know about all of the crap I’ve pulled in high school.”
“Bingo, give the lady her prize. A new bowling ball!” I proclaimed with my best game-show announcer affect. “You probably don’t like me because you, like everyone else, assume I’m either gay or neutered. Sorry. That was weird.”
Em laughed again and the sound of it put me more at ease. Any girl that laughs at my bad jokes, I had decided, was either saintly or having a bad acid trip. I was hoping Em was saintly.
“Maybe if we had been friends I wouldn’t have done all of those stupid things.”
“And maybe I wouldn’t have scared off so many cute girls,” I replied with enough seriousness to betray the amount of truth in that statement.
Em just laughed again.
“I don’t know if I could have ever have spoken to you when you were sober,” she said.
I was trying to think of a succinct, timely response when I just blurted out, “You have the prettiest eyes…even when I’m drunk they’re dang pretty. Pretty, pretty, pretty,” I confessed.
There was an awkward pause during which I almost apologized. Rather than saying something to ease the awkwardness of the situation, I babbled.
“It’s not that you don’t look good in tight shirts. You look very good. In fact, I’ve noticed you in tight shirts and thought you looked pretty damn hot. But everyone just said, ‘hey, there goes that hot body, Em.’ That’s how we knew you. The body. I guess we really didn’t know you, though. We definitely didn’t care about you. We just saw the hot body. You never let yourself become a real person around us.”
Em continued to stare directly into my eyes and her attention caused me to struggle with the words.
“We should have become friends,” she repeated.
I thought about this just long enough to feel a strange energy surge through my body. My head began to clear but I didn’t lose my nerve and I couldn’t look away.
“Let’s be friends. Emily and Christopher, friends forever. We’ll bake brownies and go to the mall and talk on the phone and watch Beverly Hills 90210 together while we eat chocolate ice cream. It’ll be great, mes amie.”
She didn’t laugh. She just sat there staring at the silvery moonlight falling on the leaves of the trees and along the grassy field around us.
“We can be friends,” I conceded. “That’s all I’m saying.”
“Good, now I at least have one friend at this party.”
I completely hated myself. Em was sent by God to mock me. I could see him sitting on his heavenly throne stroking his infinitely long beard with a cute angel whispering in his ear and giggling. It was staring down at me, the pretentious little nasal drip of a human being that I was, chuckling at my chronically conflicted intentions. And every once in awhile it probably said, “take that you little piss ant.”
Or, he was saying, “What do I have to do? I throw this emotionally vulnerable girl in your lap and you’re sitting there making bad jokes between dry heaves? Find your own good fortune. As a God, I’m getting annoyed at your moral conundrums. I don’t even spend as much time mulling over every decision. Grab her and kiss her like a man and swallow your two-fisted puritan pride!”
“Chris? Why are you shaking?”
I had no idea what she was talking about but she had interrupted God so it must have been important. I looked at my hands and realized I couldn’t feel them anymore. In fact, I couldn’t feel anything. Of course I was wearing a half torn shirt and it was about fifty degrees outside. I wondered if I was cold and that was the big problem.
“My God, you’re freezing, Chris,” Em said confirming my suspicions.
She helped me to my unsteady feet and led me into the house. We walked through the kitchen but the faces blurred until they were unfamiliar or, perhaps, just unimportant. They watched us as if I were a priest being led into a whorehouse by a madam. Most of them were probably relieved at finally having some blackmail material on me. And then my stomach churned again. I sidestepped Em and wobbly sprinted up the steps and into the upstairs bathroom. When I was finished I ambled out of the bathroom and Em led me to a spot on the floor of a bedroom where a heat vent pushed warm air upward. I sat down directly in front of the warm rush, the goose flesh over my torso and arms subsiding. She took my hands and stroked them softly in hers.
As she did I wondered if I should tell her my hands had been vomited on, had clung desperately to a toilet seat and had sifted through dirt and grass for a set of lost keys. Instead I hoped the alcohol that had been spilled on them had killed or intoxicated whatever bacteria lingered and kept my mouth shut on the matter of germs.
“I didn’t vote for you,” I confessed.
She laughed before she said, “I didn’t think you had.”
“I would now, though.”
She stopped rubbing my hands and just held them for a moment. It was dark in the room but I could hear her muffled sobs.
“I saw you standing there alone waiting for someone and I just stood there. I should have congratulated you. After all, you were a queen.”
She didn’t say anything for a few minutes.
“It was horrible. I thought everyone would be happy for me. And I thought my Dad would be proud of me and that he would be there and he would say, ‘there’s my daughter,’” she managed between restrained sobs.
I held onto her hands a little tighter.
“You can never plan a perfect night.”
I didn’t really know what that meant either until years later.
“This has been a pretty good night, though,” she said as I tore another dry hunk of fabric from my T-shirt.
“The first half wasn’t so good for me but the second half has been great. Here, you can blow your nose on this,” I said handing the dry piece of fabric to her.
Em took it and wiped her nose with it.
“It smells like paint thinner,” she said through the fabric.
“That’s just dried up Canadian whiskey. That’s funny because it tastes like paint thinner.”
She stood up and found a small wastebasket in a corner of the room, threw the balled up hunk of fabric into it and then came and sat down next to me. This time her shoulder touched mine. She took my hands into hers and continued to rub them even though they were warm again.
“Thanks for coming out to check on me.”
Em turned to me and smiled, “It worked out for both of us.”
I drew one of my hands from between hers and wrapped it around her shoulders. As I did, she placed her head gently on my shoulder. Once we both settled next to each other, the words grew meaningless in the shadow of the moment. We just sat in the dark and quiet enjoying our moment together.
I can still recall how it felt to touch Em that night. There was no burden of lust or a need for selfish gratification. The real essence of each touch was purely sublime and it seemed that night had stretched for years. In a night she had become a confidant and a kindred spirit who had shared something with me we didn’t often share, yet we had begun the night practically as strangers. But she decided to check on me, the boy that never respected her, and kept my hands and my heart warm at a time when both had grown numb from the cold world.
Yet she had begun the night as my adversary.
Even now, years later, I can only articulate my eyes opening up to her humanity and compassion as feeling like a warm breeze not blowing into me, but rather blowing through me, almost to my core. Maybe it was the alcohol, maybe it was just two people realizing each other in ways they had never thought they could and maybe it was just a perfect moment. To put it into words, though, is futile. I’m certain it is something one has to have experience in one’s own time with one’s perspective free of pretense and expectation.
Em was stronger than I could ever hope to be. She looked past all that I wasn’t and pushed aside what she knew was coldness and cynicism. On that night she only cared that I was safe and warm. Now I look back, long since warmed toward the world, and I see that it was that night that I began to see beyond mistakes and perceptions of those people I only thought I understood. I learned I have no real enemies, just strangers that walk the same world as I do and finding themselves just as afraid of it as I sometimes am. We have all read enough history books to see what frightened men and women sometimes do and we should know that only those that are afraid seek out an enemy and find one. Certainly we have all been afraid. We should know by now that there is no greater cure for fear than comfort and no quicker means of overcoming it than proceeding with the knowledge that others are near us.
Em and I had a moment, a truly perfect moment because for a night we forgot our fears and found some comfort in each other. Though I don’t see her anymore, I still push on knowing she and others are always near me, like a pair of warm hands on very brisk spring evening rubbing away the cold.
.