I was having the most awesome dream of all time when my alarm clock went off. In the dream, I had been sharing ginger ales with Dean Moriarty and Sal Paradise at Vesuvio. Sal (Sal the cat’s namesake) and Dean were the main characters in Jack Kerouac’s book On the Road.
It was seven o’clock on Monday morning and I had stayed up way too late the night before, till nearly one o’clock, finishing that essay for Ms. Reese. I shut the alarm off and reached for my glasses. I had to leave in half an hour if I wanted to make it to first period on time.
A shower, teeth brushing, and toast-and-coffee later, I was out the door. Before I left I was sure to grab my favorite jacket from the hall closet, the green army one that I had snagged for three bucks at a vintage store in Oakland last year. I ran down the complex steps into the morning chill and stretched out on the dew-grazed lawn to await Carmelita. It was seven-thirty and I was right on time. If things went as they usually did on Monday mornings, she would be five minutes late. I decided that I would take advantage of this and look over my essay for Ms. Reese’s class to take note of any necessary last-minute edits—though obviously I didn’t believe in edits, not really.
I believed that every draft was a final one, a belief that I debated tirelessly with Ms. Reese. As a high school Literature and Composition teacher, she believed the opposite—that the writing process was made better by drafts and more drafts, brainstorming sessions, peer-review groups, and read-alouds. I had accepted long ago that to succeed as a student and a writer at Henley High, I would have to jump onboard with the department philosophy and partake in all these rules-and-regulations antics. So I did, but I didn’t enjoy it. First thought, best thought, like the Beats, was the only true way for me.
The work I had done the previous night read just as well this morning; I was pleased. Henley High operated on a routine daily schedule, and Ms. Reese’s eleventh grade Honors class met during first period. Junior year English was devoted entirely to intense analysis of American Literature’s greatest hits, my favorite bunch of novels and plays. Given that it was only mid-October and Ms. Reese’s syllabus traversed chronologically, we were only up to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter. But I consistently pined for twentieth century authors—F. Scott Fitzgerald, Edith Wharton, John Steinbeck, Henry Miller, James Baldwin, Flannery O’Connor, Tennessee Williams, Zora Neale Hurston—all of whom would make appearances during the second semester. Despite this preference for more modern stuff, I felt that I had done a stellar job on last night’s essay, the focus of which had been the risks of societal conformity in Puritan life. Should it be read aloud today in class, it would receive a standing O.
Suddenly Carmelita was there. She descended the complex stairs in a blue jean skirt, red flannel shirt, and sneakers, topped off by her reflective aviator shades. Car’s signature red down vest dangled from her right hand, her Allen Ginsberg tote bag, full of schoolwork, from her left. As she came forward to meet me, my gaze landed on a morning sunray where it hit her bare leg. More and more lately I had been noticing the girled-out elements of Carmelita. As she drew in closer she caught my eye, stopped abruptly, and frowned, hand on hip.
“What are you staring at, Ziv? We are later than late this morning, yet you prefer to lie in the grass and ogle gorgeous girls as they walk by?”
I felt my cheeks flush a bright red. Man, I really had to work on controlling that reaction! My cooler-than-thou rep at Henley High—a rep that came naturally but had most definitely been consciously promoted by me since freshman year—could and would not be taken from me. Carmelita, why couldn’t you stay as you were, as you had been? It felt like elements of our life scene were changing and I didn’t like it. I wished she would stop wearing that skirt at least; it would make it easier for me to stay friends with her. Just friends.
I stood up, stuffed my essay into my bag, and started walking in the direction of school. I trusted that Carmelita would follow.
“Hey wait up! I was only joking, mon amie,” she called.
Car ran up behind me, threw her arms around me, and kissed my cheek. Just friends—right. We had momentarily paused midway at a crosswalk on Telegraph Avenue and a car honked at us to stop blocking traffic. I pushed Carmelita’s arms away.
“Quit it, Car. Stop. People’ll get ideas about us. Plus, we’ll cause traffic accidents.”
“Someone got up on the wrong side of the bed this morning.”
We were silent for the next few blocks. Then suddenly I remembered my dream, the one I had been having before it morphed into the one with Sal and Dean at Vesuvio.
Carmelita had been in it.
I suddenly felt my face turn red again. This reaction was starting to become part of my ongoing behavior, which I was not a fan of.
I quickened my pace and decided that I would reflect upon it later, when I was no longer in the presence of Carmelita. Third period Physics would be a good time to do it. Mr. Robertson had promised to show us a Bill Nye the Science Guy episode that had something to do with this week’s topic. I had seen every episode of that fantastic show years earlier.
We passed Weir’s Weird Ice Cream Shop and I got a sudden and strong hankering for a scoop of their famed Cedar Sage Chocolate flavor. I made a mental note to go straight there after school ended. I needed to get myself together. The news of the impending poetry club, a potential increase of Wren-dom in my life, and now my unavoidable shift in Carmelita-vibes, were all a lot to deal with. Oftentimes Weir’s was the only place to go to sort everything out.
Car knew me well. She saw me eyeing Weir’s and asked, “Wanna grab a cone later?”
I couldn’t look her in the eye to respond but shrugged my shoulders and replied, in an attempt at nonchalance, “Dunno, maybe.”
We were a block away from school now and had become part of the throngs that approached Henley High’s front entrance from all directions. Most students walked, like us, or rode their bikes to school. As we got closer, I saw Wren chaining her bike up to the main bike rack. Her bike was a sky-blue color, with neon flower designs hand-painted all over it. She rode it to and from school and her home in North Berkeley Hills, a swank section of town with killer bay views. Rumor had it that she and her dad lived in this hippie dream house with a record collection that rivaled that of Napoleon’s Record Shop on University Avenue.
I momentarily considered approaching Wren and asking her about the poetry club, but I didn’t want to seem overeager so decided against it. First period Lit would start in ten minutes anyway and I would probably hear about it then. Plus, I could see Tyler Jacoby coming over to me with a stack of records and didn’t want to leave him hanging.
Tyler was my best friend at Henley High, apart from Carmelita. He was totally wild, with brown hair that grew and stuck out every which way, and a denim jacket with music buttons that he practically lived in. Tyler insisted on wearing his purple-lensed Beatles-style sunglasses twenty-four seven, even though he’d received detention more than ten times for doing it at school. Tyler was a total music fiend and super into collecting vintage records. I had known him since freshman year, when we had been partnered up in Biology Lab. Neither of us cared an ounce about anything science-y, other than star constellations, but Henley High had thus far failed to introduce Astronomy into the curriculum. Our mutual disinterest bonded us, as we’d spent lectures surveying each other’s lists of top ten albums, top five musical acts from the early 1990s, and other such lists. It was this same mutual disinterest that had dragged us both to the chopping block when we received failing midterm grades in Bio on our progress reports.
Both of us being semi-nerds, Tyler and I made a pact that we would lock up our record collections and forego all list-making until the end of the semester. We would study, seriously, all of our Bio coursework until after the final exam. It soon became clear that Tyler had been speaking most literally about the lock-up. The following Saturday he showed up at my house with the hugest padlock and bike chain I’d ever seen and proceeded to pack up all of my records into a cardboard box, lock them up, and throw the key out into my mom’s peony garden. It was a lot of fun trying to find that key when the summer began and Tyler and I were once again free men, free to listen to as many records as we pleased. It took us three and a half days to find it.
Tyler and I were audiophiles and Holy Vinylists; thus, we were against listening to music via any means other than vinyl records and live performances. All of those online music streaming sites and illegal downloads altered what Tyler called “the ideal sound.”
About once a month, usually on a Monday morning, Tyler arrived at school with five or six albums to lend me, most of which I had never heard of. He worked part-time at Napoleon’s and had set up a sort of library-loan deal with Napoleon himself so that he didn’t have to blow all his dough on record purchases. When I pointed out that this was a similar method to many of our friends who downloaded music online, in that none of us was paying for it, Tyler insisted that I was wrong.
“We’re on the level. What you’re talking about, amigo, is straight-up stealing. And that is never, ever, cool,” he had told me.
I agreed, of course.
This particular Monday morning, Tyler shoved a stack of jazz records into my arms. He was chewing on a toothpick and wearing his purple-lensed shades, as he always was. Tyler was a true individual kid. I surveyed the records, some of whose cardboard covers were half-disintegrated.
“Thanks, Tyler.”
“You got it, Ziv. Good weekend?”
I thought about the question as Carmelita watched me with a raised eyebrow. She was used to me thinking too hard about simple and common-place questions.
“Yeah, not bad. We went to North Beach yesterday, hit up City Lights. Saw Bobcat at Vesuvio. He says hi.”
Tyler grinned and chewed on his toothpick as he answered.
“Bobby! Oh man, I miss him. It’s been way too long since I’ve been to North Beach. Got to get back there soon. These Napoleon shifts have been taking over my life. Hey Car, how goes it?”
Carmelita pocketed her aviators and smiled. “It goes, Tyler, it certainly goes.”
The morning warning bell rang then, urging all remaining students, us included, to get the heck inside a classroom within the next five minutes if we didn’t want to get a late-date on our permanent records. Three of those in a semester and a kid would be facing detention, which meant early-morning Saturday school cleanup sessions. Nobody wanted that.
Tyler, Carmelita, and I hurried inside and toward our locker section at the end of the first-floor hall-way. It was the best spot in the school and the three of us had sought it out on the first day of classes this year. Locker assignments at Henley High worked as an every-man-for-himself sort of deal each year. A student could claim any locker as his own by throwing a lock on it.
As I gathered the necessary books for my morning classes, I saw Tyler unlock a secondary locker next to his own. In it appeared to be dozens more records. He gazed at the stacks, patted them lovingly, sighed in satisfaction, and then relocked them up.
“How long before somebody realizes you’re locker-hogging?”
“How long does infinity last? Because that’s how long it’ll be before somebody realizes.”
“You awe me.”
“Thank you, man, thank you.”
“Do you even have a record player here at Henley to use those records? Can’t you leave them at home?”
“I like having them close by. Plus, it makes for easy transit to and from Napoleon’s when I do my afterschool shifts.”
“You guys do know that the Internet exists, right?” Carmelita asked. “And that any song you could think of would be obtainable within its dimensions? I mean—do you even have cellphones?”
“Of course we do,” I replied, because we did. I had an iPhone but I tried not to overuse it. Tyler had an old-school flip-phone and refused to utilize its internet functions. He didn’t even have a Facebook account. He only had an email account because Henley High made it mandatory for school-related communications. Tyler was my role model for what we called “timeless existence.” Tyler aimed to live in a way that could easily be transferred to another era, past or future. Direct experience. This was modeled after some of the Beat writers’ philosophies. Tyler was not one hundred percent realistic. But he was one hundred percent into time travel.
The real first period bell rang and Tyler and I ran to the nearby classroom where Ms. Reese held her Lit lectures. We took our seats next to Carmelita in the second row near the window. Ms. Reese’s classroom was set up in such a way as to encourage mental relaxation—or so she said. All of the seats were mismatched armchairs, dining room chairs, and even a few ottomans. On the walls, in addition to the student work being showcased on rotation, there were posters of the books that we would be reading during the semester, and great black and white photographs of old San Francisco.
Ms. Reese had an awesome past. She used to live on the Mojave Desert and wrote two novels and a play—by hand, on scraps of paper—while she was there. One night, right when she was finishing the play, an intense desert wind came along and blew all of her pages out into oblivion. She said that she wept for four hours, then pulled herself together, packed up all of her junk, and split. She hitchhiked to Berkeley and never looked back. Now she was our teacher and was engaged to a sculptor who was getting to be pretty famous, or so she told us. Ms. Reese had also published three other books since her desert experience, but I felt that the desert story summed up her character pretty well. If that catastrophe had happened to me and my books, I might not have been so cool and calm.
I took my essay out of my bag, along with my Lit notebook, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, and my favorite pen. Ms. Reese came into the room and began to write the daily plan on the dry erase board. I was trying to decipher her untidy scrawl when I felt a soft tap on my back. I turned around to see.
It was Wren. She looked beautiful wearing a Doors t-shirt, and her long dark curls were swept up with a large white gardenia.
“Hey, Hunter. Your hair looks extra-neat today.” She smiled wide.
And it began again—my face burned in what I imagined to be a crimson hue. I cleared my throat to distract her.
“Oh, thanks, thanks a lot. I uh—washed it, I guess.” This was true, I had washed it this morning. Sal the Cat was my witness.
Tyler turned to survey the scene. He kept silent but offered me a raised eyebrow—a reminder to keep it extra-cool. I changed topics.
“So, is it true you’re starting a poetry club? Or Ms. Reese is? Or something like that?”
Wren raised her eyebrow and turned to go sit on her ottoman, saying to me, “Well you’ll just have to wait and see, won’t you?”
Tyler nudged me hard in the ribs. “Beware of the hippified hipstress, my man.”
I didn’t quite know how to respond; I wasn’t sure what was going on myself. It seemed that A) a new and exciting writing outlet was in the process of forming at Henley High, and B) Wren may or may not have been openly flirting with me. If these two storylines intersected, I could turn out to be one lucky man.