Near Vana- Part II and the Cunning Fennec Fox

Continued Feeding and Caring for Bears

    
     Well Patient Reader . . .  Welcome back.  I think the next few posts will be the rest of the Heidi story and with minimal narrative such as this right here from me. 

     I call the story Near Vana for the quasi-Eastern philosophy upon which it touches.  I reference the animals, the tiger-ette of my young childhood, the bear of my adolescence, and the fennec of adulthood for reasons I think will become quite clear should you choose to read on.  Some of you surely have already figured it out.

     Again, I thank you for your patience.  I hope the reward was worth the read.  So, sans further adieu, I believe we'll carry on.  Are you ready?  Splendid!

     Thanks to the odd bureaucracy of the U.S. Military, or maybe it was just the Pacific Theatre of War . . .  or maybe it's just how Department of Defense schools work, or maybe even all of the above- you tell me- I was always at least a full year younger than my classmates.  

     I was 15 years old my sophomore year in HS, and while everyone in my class had a driver's license, I was driving illegally.  I would not turn 16 until the next October, when I would be a junior.

     Because I was lost, I thought LSD would find me.  I did not realize that all it was doing was obscuring even more the tools that would help me find my way.  So I dosed and dosed and a dosi doe . . .

     Six months after I met Heidi my Old Man pulled me out of public schools, ostensibly to help him care for my sick mother.  Mom had suffered a stroke, a sub-arachnoid hemorrhage wherein an artery in her brain exploded with the fury of an insane father.  As it turned out, I ended up, in quite the roundabout journey, taking care of the three of us.  We three fucking bears.

     His beatings would get worse, and the words he used on me became more caustic, and the burnings began.  

     But not yet, not here was any of this happening; not at this part of the Heidi narrative. 

     Heidi had handed back that pencil, gazing into my eyes, pupils surely the dilated black holes through which all matter in the universe is crushed under a great weight, gazing into my eyes with her eyes, truly as deep and blue as the sea.  How many, I wondered, ships had sunk there . . .  how many men had and would yet drown in the warm blue . . .

     There was the "I love you," and there was her laugh, sincere mirth all over her face, in her eyes, her mouth wet with it.  Yet that laugh never mocked me.

     Jesus . . . s'just a pencil . . .

     Before there was Madonna and the lacy undergarments worn over the clothes scene she made so popular, before the Vampires left Sunset for Murray-Holladay Boulevard, there was Heidi.

     Heidi was the one who wore black tights with those lacy, white ankle socks.  Shiny and tiny were the Mary Janes she clopped around in turning her from 5'3" to 5'6", little buckles gleaming . . .

     She wore tatted, lacy fabrics, always black, over the tights, and what could be generously called a camisole over a black bra that held tightly the breasts of a ballerina.

     Her blond hair was streaked with a black as black as kohl,

which I swore she wore around her eyes like an ancient Egyptian slave or Ptolemaic Pharaoh.

     Atop all of that sat a pork-pie hat, just skewed to the side like a question.

     We tried for months to be better than friends.  She knew my secrets- my sick mother and even sicker Pop.  She knew about hurting hearts and she kissed mine whenever her lips touched my chest.  We could both feel it beating, but for whom, only she knew.

     Our fumblings and our murmurs . . .  our nervous giggles . . . these, our teachers.  We explored in ships made of flesh and fear and sorrow and compassion.  Of kisses, and our hands were the waves that caressed our stony shorelines.

     I feared her body, which was both dream and mystery.  Her body and mind were the same, tender and sharp and sexy, and it was never about lust, but about loving her mind through my sense of touch.  Her body was unequaled, but there was an equal to her mind, and my mind did not fear hers.

     Without her brain, her body was ordinary . . . magical, sure, but it was her mind that brought thrill.  And at that level we were eye to eye.

     But it was one another's hearts with whom we were in love. But all I knew about I love yous was that they last about as long as it takes for a pencil to hit the floor.

Still, Heidi never forgot that “I love you,” and she never let me forget it either. She would say it instead of “thank you” every time I did something for her. Come to think of it, maybe she meant it after all . . .

She dropped acid with me once, she who before had never even drank a beer in her life. I would drink a sixer of stolen beer before I even crossed the school's threshold. She said I did it to dumb myself down for school . . . its environs, its people- teachers and students alike. Maybe this was true. I do know that it dulled the pain.

That night, trip night, had been on the books for weeks. Weeks of assurances and reassurances. Telling her that things would be OK, that nothing would ever happen to her, I wouldn't let anything happen to my Heidi.

I had brought to her basement with me the records that had saved my life: “Revolver,” “Rubber Soul,” and “The White Album,” by the Beatles. The Alan Parsons Project's “I, Robot,”

Genesis' “. . . and Then There Were Three . . .” “Who's Next,” by The Who . . .

I was the Captain and I drew the chart on this voyage into the Unknown. I knew the treacherous strait that lay between the Scylla and Charybdis . . . I had done this before . . . I was The Expert.

Later, in the deep darkness of her mind we found the doors and windows, and I so very eruditely spoke of the colors that thrummed behind them, she nodding in astonished agreement.

But there was one door behind which lay only our regrets. Her regret for what was therein; mine for turning the door latch.

Heidi said that her father only spoke to her in monosyllabic voice-over. Mumbled at her exceptional grades and that he never saw her eyes. Pretended not to hear his screaming wife.

Heidi's mom . . . the horrorshow of the house. “Nothing I do,” Heidi explained, “Is ever good enough . . . done right . . . she's an effing witch . . .” The she pulled up her tights and I saw for the first time the secret places where she cut herself. Deep and ragged the scars through which her demons fled and this was the sad thought that ran through my mind like a fault line.

Should I show her my own scars? My own bruises? I wondered there in our dilated dark. No, This pain is all about her. This Hell is hers.

Her mother used words and fists every bit as well as my Old Man did. Parental Boxing School . . . Join Now! Two for the price of one!! and Fear, the ever-present, lurking spectre in this fucking house.

“I cry myself to sleep most nights,” she whispered then, and there I was, holding her to me, overwhelmed with acid and admissions, and I managed still to keep my stupid mouth shut. How many more times, I wondered then, would I be holding her just so? And then I realized that I had broken my promise: Something did happen to her that night, and I wasn't able to protect her from it.

 . . .  to be continued . . .