It’s Spring. I am laying on the ground upon a blanket and and allowing the sunshine to light up my closed eyelids with the reds and oranges of my veins. I can hear the next door neighbor spraying down large terracotta tiles. We’re experiencing rays of sunshine the likes of which I have not experienced in some time. It’s the time of year when the flowers start to bloom from their brown and dead-looking existence, when people start shedding more layers of clothing and coming out in their own bright colors. I look around more when I’m walking somewhere or riding my bike. Times like these makes me think of boys. Just all kinds of boys because it seems like so many of them are out of their winter hiding places and traversing the city streets.
I think of the chubby ones with sweet, rosy cheeked faces, just aiming to please. Or perhaps, it’s the creepy neck-chokers, who may act sweet to get their way. It could be that boy who never thought he was beautiful until he got behind a guitar and a microphone. There are the pretty boys, who have always known it, but his mama’s coddling only got him so far with women who don’t feel like changing his wet nappies. The flower-givers, penitent or expectant. The drink-buyers. The ones with stupid doe eyes. The ones with boyish charms and floppy hair.
Boys with crooked smiles and fucked up teeth. The ones with nothing to lose, on a frenetic train to the edge of a cliff. The ones whose eyes sparkle. The ones with singular loves, mad devotion, killer instincts. The ones who will talk your ear off about the most interesting things you’ve ever heard, using words that give you the tingles and slightly damp underwear.
I love thinking about them as children; imagining adult Ichabod Crane and what life path brought him to dominating asshole or cute, awkward guy with a big nose. Or he could be like cheerful Dicken, lover of animals, Pied Piper, mountain man whose dream it is to live in a cave. Or maybe a Humbert Humbert only satisfied with the youngest, freshest nymphette on the block. Even perhaps, he could be Frankenstein’s monster, articulate with longing but too ugly to think he deserves love, even from his master. What actions or fates gave force to the men they become? What innate tendencies exist in the blood, brain, or heart that created the monster and the hero?
Perhaps it is apt that they be fictional characters, complexities held within the pages of a book because who really wants to be distilled down to few words of description. But as the wind lovingly caresses bare skin, and the sun’s rays penetrate the needy epidermis, these are things of which I think. We say there is nothing new under the sun, but our hearts wish for more.
Drinkers with Writing Problems 