Everything and Nothing

The best summer of my life was the summer of 1991.

It was my first entire summer away in my first college apartment. I didn’t go home, back to the small town with shady streets, Hardee’s and where I’d watch VH-1’s “Stand-up Spotlight” in the basement until 3 a.m.

Instead I stayed amongst the crumbling brick buildings, the honking, the sweltering hazy days that sank into the purest nights. Campus was stripped bare; left with the stragglers like me, boys in half-shirts and bare feet criss-crossing the alleyways; girls in Birks and with sunglasses adorning black devil-may-care roots.

I was locked in the urbanity, feet not budging, like the rides at Cedar Point I’d leap into when I worked there the summer before.

Not one stone or anchor weighed me down. I was the fairy of the city Running under the soft black sky every night around 10. I ran down Summit from Chittenden to Oakland and then back again, the canopy of trees silhouetted by humming streetlights.

We lived like a coltish pack of hedonists: three of us who stayed back; a group of friends both as loose and fused as taffy. When we rolled in, there we were. When we were out, nobody blinked. We always came back. We were barely old enough to buy Milwaukee’s Beast or Strawberry Hill at the UDF on 12th, but Fletch had just turned 21 and he was our runner.

Young enough to be innocent, old enough to appreciate this shimmer and sliver of time.

I traversed the sidewalks, their patchy slabs tripping me up; every weed poking out between the cracks gave me joy. I breathed in freedom. Every morning when the sun lasered through the dirty window and pierced my eye, I jumped with excitement at the wide swath of the day’s blank canvas. At night when our clan was all around, we watched LA Law and Married with Children. MTV rotated EPIC by Faith No More and we waited for it to come back ‘round, to see that flopping fish. That fish was our communion, that summer.

No car. No phone. Untethered. There were a few days when I’d walk to my friend Dana’s on Northwood. She was house sitting for an old woman and it was just she and I, feeling very adult in a green bungalow with a sloped yard filled with orange day lilies. She baked a Cornish hen for me and we ate properly (she had visited London and said “chips” for “fries”, which I admired with non-cynical gusto.)

I danced in front of a mirror that stretched the whole wall of the apartment. I lifted cans of pears for tone and definition. I wandered past Mirror Lake. Sat on the steps of the amphitheater and had a cigarette. I hitched a ride to a rock show in Cleveland without a ticket because I knew I’d find one there. One morning my friend Katy and I saw the sun come up after a night of walking on railroad bridges and through hidden graveyards and neighborhoods, our feet balancing on the piked jagged stones that surrounded small raised yards like teeth. As the pink and yellow sunrise cast a glow on the red bricks of building facades, we turned up Lenny Kravitz' song "Fields of Joy", our arms raised and waving in the currents of the cool morning breeze as her Jetta dropped me off. The sound of music that we hear ; The blend of colors in the air...

I had a love that wasn’t cemented yet; just within arm’s reach, tendrils reaching toward each other as slow as the pace of nature. I kept his chair in my apartment, a lure to ensure his return. “Can I keep my chair in your apartment for the summer?” he’d asked, and I shouted “PLEASE?” There it sat, waiting for his autumnal reappearance, as did I. Sometimes I sat in it and pretended he was in it too. Sometimes, when there was only the sound of crickets outside in the darkness - the stillest hours of night-- he would call. Gleaming and bouncy, I leapt toward the sound. The phone on the wall.

Occasionally for a few hours during the day I talked on the phone in a little building across from the Blue Danube and North Campus Video, enticing strangers from the white pages to buy replacement windows. Just me and a lanky country boy, Gary Derby, sitting one desk apart in the sparse office. Like a soothing metronome the hours ticked away with his charming opener: "Yup ma'am, it's Gary Derby, like the Kentucky Derby," he'd croon to old ladies. As I walked there -- exactly a mile up and a mile back--I felt a swagger in my step, even for that. Everything was covered in a golden glow. That it will never come again is what made it so sweet, indeed.

I did nothing and it was everything, that summer.