Dear Kurl,
After school yesterday you pulled up to the bus stop and unrolled your window. “Where’s your bike?” you called.
It caught me off guard. “Nowhere,” I said.
“What?” you said.
“I’ll tell you later,” I said, and I felt my face get hot, so I turned away and scurried into the bus shelter, behind the map. I apologize for my extreme awkwardness-bordering-on-rudeness. But you and I don’t, technically, “tell” each other things, do we? We write them, but it would have been even more bizarre for me to say “I’ll write you all about it later.” And anyway, truth be told, I didn’t want to tell you about my bike. Its name was Nelly, a.k.a. the Fagmobile (so christened by the butcherboys the first time they saw me locking it at school). Suffice it to say that Nelly has met with a violent, homophobic death and now lies, hopefully finally at peace, in her watery grave. Drew Saarinen, whose brother Michael hangs out with Dowell, told me in Civics that they dumped Nelly in Cherry Valley. I went down there yesterday to fish her out, but she’s in the spillwater portion of the creek, half sunk in the mud and dead leaves, and those six feet of water appeared bone-shatteringly cold. I couldn’t tell from the embankment, but I imagine the butcherboys probably slashed the tires and cut the brake cables before they dumped the bike, anyhow.
Enough! On to a pleasanter topic: Today the blackboard invites us to Describe your Inner Sanctum. A portion of the class began sniggering when Ms. Khang wrote this on the board, because they’d somehow managed to read the word as scrotum. There were a lot of jokes—“Mine is wrinkly and has my balls in it”—that sort of thing. Thanks all the same, Alex Federsholm, but there’s a mental image with which I really didn’t need to be saddled.
My Inner Sanctum is my bedroom, because it houses my two most prized possessions. The first is my record player, a 1970s made-in-Holland Philips that Lyle had refurbished for me for Christmas when I was thirteen. I have a few favorite artists, of course, but Lyle’s vinyl collection is so massive that I feel as though cultivating too intense a loyalty to certain records would be premature at my age. When I get home from school, the first thing I do after taking off my shoes and backpack is head directly upstairs to my room, close the door, put on a record, and climb into my tent.
The tent is the second reason my room is my sanctuary. Instead of a bed, I sleep on a double mattress on the floor of an old army tent. Another of Lyle’s youthful castoffs, this heavy canvas-and-aluminum structure was his and my mother’s Inner Sanctum back when his band was too poor for motels, and they’d pull into whatever highway rest stop was closest to their next gig and pitch the tent on the grass. Lyle set the old beast up for me a few years ago when I was going through a period of insomnia for some reason or another, and it hasn’t come down since.
Yours truly,
Jonathan Hopkirk