Vacation Stories, Part One

It is 2:30 AM and I am running through the back alleys of Mankato, Minnesota. I am running past the back doors of bars, past Gary's pizza, past abandoned gas stations.

I am running with a boy. With New Boy. He's holding my hand.

"I've been up on that roof," New Boy tells me. He points to an old storefront. "I got inside there once," he says about a house whose roof is falling in. He tightens his hand around mine. He points to far-off house. "There used to be a child-porn ring in that place."

He walks me past the police station. He points out the window in the upper left corner. "I stayed there a few times," he says. "I was pretty stupid."

I smile at him. I smile at everything he says. I can't help it--there's something about him tonight, and the way he's talking, and the things he's saying, and the way he's holding my hand. I feel like he could keep holding it for the next several hours or forever.

The way I'm feeling might have something to do with the fact that we've just come from three different bars and a strip club. I'm not even drunk. I'm just deeply amused. New Boy is, after all, the third in a string of my conservative crushes, and he's a different type of conservative than, say, Ex-Keith or the Wily Republican. Ex-Keith and Wily have approximately zero problems with going to strip clubs. New Boy, though, has reservations.

When he first joined us at the bar that night, I informed him that it was our intent to go to the strip club. His eyes widened. "Oh, I don't know," he said. "I don't know how I feel about that."

It would be New Boy's second time at a strip club. His first time involved a last day at work and his bosses buying him a combo-lap dance that involved three of the establishment's finest girls.

I found New Boy's reservation to be charming. I thought, Awww and Isn't that cute and I'm so making him go.

I told him that it was Saturday night and that Saturday night was the night they held the wet T-shirt contest. I said, "Some of the girls at this table—not me, New Boy—have performed in that very contest."

New Boy looked sick to his stomach. "What if I know one of the girls who's doing it tonight?" he asked.

I smiled. I asked him if there was anything I could do to change his mind. I rubbed his back. I smiled some more. Then I bought him a shot.

We succeeded in getting him in the door. Once inside, though, we found that the place was busy. There wasn't a table on the ground floor big enough to accommodate all of us, so we sat up in the elevated back. New Boy seemed relieved to be so far away from the stage. When he sat, he turned his body away from the stage and looked at me. "I feel sort of wrong," he said, then shaded the side of his face to block his peripheral vision. "I used to be in the church band."

The church band. My God, I was charmed.

Around this time Rachel stumbled over to me. She looked green and a little cross-eyed. "I think," she said, "I am going to puke."

Not wanting to leave Rachel to her own devices and not wanting to let her spend the night puking into the questionably-clean bathrooms of the strip club ("One time," I told New Boy on our way to the club, "I went in there to go to the bathroom and there was a stripper in there with her leg up on the counter. She was looking at her crotch. How about that?"), I had to leave New Boy alone.

Maybe he spent that time finally looking at the stage and the pliable ladies wrapping themselves around the pole, but I would guess not. I don't think his bashfulness was an act or chivalry. I think his actions were the actions of a boy who identifies his religious views simply as GOD, a boy who used to play in his church band, a boy who loves his mother and his sister a whole lot.

Later I would try to get him to watch the wet T-shirt contest ("The horse we backed won!" Katy yelled to me after the contest. She had met one of the contestants in the bathroom and helped her rip her shirt in a way that would be easy for later removal). He wouldn't. He turned his face into my shoulder even as I cooed, "Look at her, look at her. She's so pretty. Her hair is beautiful. She has such long legs."

New Boy put his hands in my hair and on my legs. "I like these," he said.

A few minutes later we moved down to the lower level—a table closer to the stage—and New Boy sneaked a few hesitant looks at the strippers, but only after I exclaimed over their use of the pole, their flexibility. "Look at that!" I would cry. "Can you believe that?"

He couldn't believe it. Not one bit. He just moved his chair closer to mine. His face was centimeters from mine. I couldn't stop looking at his eyelashes, which are quite possibly the best eyelashes in the history of eyelashes. And then he kissed me.

An hour later, he and I are going past the closed bars, the pizza places, the police station, the abandoned houses. We are stepping across gravel driveways and heading toward his house. I feel a little like perfect. I feel like it's April again and I'm walking toward his door for the first time and thinking, Let this go well.

When we get into his alley, there are people yelling from across the way. It's drunk yelling, with no purpose or focus other than the creation of noise. I see a dark shadow in an upstairs bedroom of some apartment, and that shadow is holding a large glass. The shadow yells, yells, yells, and I have the sudden urge to yell, too. It must feel good to make that noise, to call whatever you're feeling into the night.

Me, I feel like I'm home, like I've never left, like this is really, really good.

We go up New Boy's stairs, and suddenly I'm bathed in the blinding white of the motion light. It's like a spotlight. Up in the night sky there is another great spotlight—a moon just hours away from being full.

Once inside, I unzip my boots. New Boy takes off his shoes.

"It's really dirty in here," he says.

There are fry pans on the stove and empty bottles of every Summit beer ever made lined up along the counter.

"It's just fine," I say, because it is. His kitchen seems exactly the same as it did the last time I stood in it.

New Boy looks at me. It is a very serious look. "You know," he says, "I still have that piece of paper you wrote your name and number on. When PG brought you over—remember?"

I remember.

"You wrote, Jess, the strange girl who came over with PG." He leans up against his counter. "She came over the next day," he says. "She said, 'Wasn't that a very beautiful girl I brought over yesterday, New Boy? You should take her out.'"

I bury my head in my hands. I make mental note to kill PG later. But there's no time for that now, because suddenly I am under New Boy's arm and we're walking to the living room, we're sitting on the couch, I'm thinking about the full moon, I'm telling him I like his new hair, even if I do miss the curls a little bit, and then it goes and goes and goes just the way it always did, just the way I always want it to.

~~~

And now here is a vacation photo montage, part one:



Megan, Me.



JP (who's attempting a naughty sign in sign language) and Katy.



PG, Rachel, Katy, JP, Liz at the Friday night party.



Sebastian, the cutest puppy in the world.