A Woman Who Has Everything She Wants

A Woman Who Has Everything She Wants by Brian Fechter

Yellow, pink, and soft orange roses Poke through the green tissue paper in her hand. She likes to watch passion melt into Aromas of deep dark candle light.

Harry Connick Jr. duets with Sinatra On a grand piano by the doorway, And paintings of Van Gough and Picasso Fill the night's emptiness.

Her lips yearn for affection, And burn with desire. Her cute laugh rises through the air, Like her whispers paint impression.

Her legs are strong and sensual, Like her heartbeats echo in the shadows. Her figure is a silhouette That points the direction to bliss.

Her supreme beauty sings, "I crave a long, robust kiss." She strokes her fingertips Through her mane dreaming.

Time to her is a precious child, Building castles made of sand, Playing on a summer's day, Smiling wider than the sky.

The stars that twinkle in her eyes Serenade her secret garden. She holds an ecstasy of ballads Floating on a gondola through Venice.

The Girl by Rebecca Bloch

the girl

forced

down,

like a

slammed

ball

tennis

volley,

in

is

HIT by the boy who is Romeo to everyone but her. and she can't remember if it was sooner or later that he changed, or that she changed. she fades slowly: her once irridescent glow, now dull, unpolished metal, as her soul travels round and round in a hamster wheel of confinement. losing herself on the rocks by the ocean, she can only see the green light beckoning her in one direction-- into the black hole. and because her friends have all taken permanent vacations to tropical paradises, away from confrontation and conflict, she is totally isolated, a canary in a cave mine,

suffocating.

Untitled by Birch Miller

Joe Rivers by John Helling

I didn't think very much of my hometown when I lived in it. My hometown was different from most in that when you opened a window, no sound came through. Neighbors, only a few yards away, were mostly strangers. Only wind in the dead leaves broke the silence (Not in a poetic way, but almost like a person's strange vocalizations on the edge of a troubled sleep). When a car would drive by, it would do so with the utmost respect for the tranquility that draped the residential street, never topping 30 and never turning the radio up loud enough to hear from the backseat. When two pedestrians passed each other on the sidewalk (a rare occurrence), a smile and a faint "hello" served as diplomacy enough. The dogs didn't even bark once the sunlight started to fade. In a way it was peaceful, but in another it was disconcerting. If "Leave it to Beaver" had run for 250 years and the actors reproduced asexually, this would be the end product.

Some children were born in a larger city and were moved by their parents. In their formative years they were taught to look both ways before they crossed the street, but in this town it usually didn't matter, and they could cross at a run. Lemonade stands were a big waste of time. Imagine.

We did however, for what it's worth, all grow up in relative peace. There was no war, no Depression, no nuclear threat to disturb our idyllic games. The biggest encroachment on our mental isolation was Operation Desert Storm, whose codename alone was sufficient to convince us that this was a worthy battle. It appealed to our childish sense of clannishness; it triggered our first feelings of patriotism. But otherwise, on a day-to-day basis, in the mornings there were cartoons, in the afternoons there were peanut butter sandwiches and wading pools, and in the evenings there was that wonderful bedtime barbiturate, the sitcom. It was in this blind, not so much mindless as unquestioning repetition that our mental capacities were formed, and according to this pattern that we learned to rely on the fact that life has order, is categorical, and can easily be broken down into parts. This later turned out to be unhealthy as well as largely untrue, but who knew? The children certainly didn't. We grew up with a completely false conception of existence, as we found out later. But at the time we didn't really mind.

People in this town worked in factories, and it reflected in their lives. They all decked their houses in knickknack-y crap that was either cross-stitched or had a religious slogan on it (such as "Bless this Mess" or "Christians do it for God." Occasionally the townspeople were able to combine these two categories into one great and mighty decoration, which usually took the form of a throw pillow). They hung pictures of themselves and of their children on the walls of their homes, as if to remind themselves daily that they existed, and that this was where they did so. There was also usually a large wooden cabinet whose doors had glass panels that displayed various ornate plates, cups, and bowls. It was obvious where these peoples' loyalties lay. Christianity and consumerism were bred into them. It was charming, kind of. It was like if you make Kool-Aid with three times as much sugar as you're supposed to use. It's a very specific taste.

Not much news or culture tends to penetrate the borders of a town like this, and it showed in the mentalities of its inhabitants. The general attitude was that of staunchly conservative Christian Republicanism. Citizens who ran for office on the Democratic ticket usually did so simply because there was already a Republican candidate, thus they had no choice. Elections therefore were for the most part simply for show, as there was never really a true contest. The general populous of the town had a good, healthy fear of God, liberalism, communism, socialism, gun control, rock n' roll, homosexuality, and the youth culture. All this, they thought, was perfectly in the pink. In their eyes, they were as well adjusted as they could be, and their children were growing up in a middle-class Utopia. Nothing was changing, therefore nothing needed to be changed, therefore everything was perfect! Those lucky people.

The children harbored no such illusions, though. Once we had escaped the happy acceptance that pacifies the youth, some of us began to understand certain things (Others were not so lucky, and clung indignantly to the symbols of their formative years. Many voted Republican, even more turned into beer drinkers. The even less fortunate decided to attend college in their hometown.). We understood that what we had been taught about our own sexuality was a ridiculous lie. Thanks to the Internet, to which parents had not yet found a satisfactory way to plug up, we teenagers found out that genitals were not dirty, sex was not a misuse of two people's bodies, and masturbation was perfectly normal, even healthy. All of the sudden we understood that there were more religious choices than Baptist vs. Southern Baptist. Some of them didn't even have a God, in the way that we understood Him. It was crazy! No one punished the followers of these religions for misbehaving; they just followed rules for the hell of it! It was unbelievable. It was unreal. Yet there it was, written down for anyone to see. And, for the first time in the as yet short lives of these children, the borders of the world weren't the borders of the neighbor's yard, or the walls of the school, or even the boundaries of the town itself. In fact, upon examination, there didn't really seem to be any kind of limits at all. And when we thought about it, we couldn't remember exactly why we had such a firm belief in their existence in the first place. Obviously someone had lied to us, and we were angry about this for quite a long time.

The lucky few that realized this fact didn't tell many people; because when they did they were immediately labeled by the supervision as punks and could no longer count on the freedom that the rest of the herd enjoyed because of their mindless bleating. If they didn't make noises of acceptance from time to time, or if they couldn't at least refrain from making noises of disbelief and disagreement, the heavy hand of righteous control seemed to slap their faces more and more often.

I started playing electric guitar when I was 16, and immediately started trying to form bands. At the time there were only a handful of local bands, only two could really be counted on, Duck Tape and Kiss Ernie. The others were really just a group of people who would form into kind of revolving door musical entities, gave themselves names like "Homo," "The Burnt-Faced Lobsters," or "10,000 Mop Boys Locked in a Box with Elvis," then break up, repeating this cycle over and over again with little consequence. I started playing in these bands and making new friends. I started branching out into what

I recognized as a separate universe, a universe in which the cool people were unathletic, drove old beat-up cars, and shopped second hand. To me, this was the pinnacle of all Bohemia. This made up for my being born 13 years after Woodstock into a town that never seemed to have heard of it. These people became my intellectual and philosophical role models.

If this music scene was like a living room that kept getting redecorated, Joe Rivers was like the wallpaper that never came down. He was always there, sometimes in the background and sometimes in the foreground, but he always added color to everything around him. His was a family of nine, all told. He lived in an old house on a street close to the center of town, a few houses away from a cement bridge that spanned some railroad tracks. The hedges were high. His father and older brother were police officers, which gave them somewhat of a celebrity status, but not really a popular one. However, Joe's apple fell far from this tree. In fact, it was more like his apple fell from the tree and was eaten by some animal that carried the seeds in his bowels out of the forest to someplace far away, shat them out, and Joe's tree grew there. And it was of a different, much more vibrant species. The Rivers were a powerful family genetically. They were all muscular, except for Joe. Joe was tall and wiry, but he wasn't gangly or awkward, at least not when he got past that special time in a boy's life where every day is like being born as a horse or a giraffe. Joe's hair was black and his eyes were blue. He was a punk in the '77 sense of the word, before it was well recorded and produced. He cut the fingers off his gloves and shook his fist at things. He incorporated metal into his fashion. This was before punk broke out again, and no one dressed like this except for Joe and his friends (and Joe's younger siblings and Joe's younger siblings' friends). In what little music scene there was in this town, Joe and his bass guitar were fixtures. He reminded me of the child Jim Morrison and Glen Danzig should have had. I wanted to be him. I still want to be him.

As I got older and took up the guitar and started to get around in some different circles, I encountered Joe more and more, and, contrary to logic, this made the mystery of his character and persona grow larger and larger. Every time I ran into him I would notice another detail that I would, from then on, try to emulate. One time I was at his sister Bekah's apartment and he burst through the door in black leather cowboy hat with an old torn-up Misfits t-shirt hanging off his bony shoulders, threw "We Are 138" on the stereo, and jumped up onto the coffee table, knocking bottles and ashtrays and pipes and candles everyplace and yelled along with the song. He was wearing a dirty cowboy hat, had a bullring in his nose, and his mustache grew all the way down to his jaw line. The sensation I experienced around people like this felt like rapid acceleration.

This momentum carried me to'a few interesting places that weren't really accessible to most of the kids in my school. Dark apartments, local band shows (always three-quarters empty), things like that. Everyone in that scene seemed like they were a little bit lost. They were trying to build lives for themselves, but it was like they were trying to build houses without drawing blueprints first and they were just sticking walls and doors and windows everywhere, confident that the finished product would be a palace, or they would lay their foundation on swamp and watch it sink into the ground, then

lay another one right on top of it. People were just floating around in the breeze. At the time, this way of life was immensely attractive to me. It was lighthearted, it was existential, and everyone who lived this way seemed like they couldn't be happier. They didn't talk about cars or scholarships or honor lists or does this make me look fat or that crap, they talked about jam sessions and new records and do you have a cigarette. They were unencumbered. This was what I wanted.

Then I went away to college. When I would come back to visit and make rounds, I started seeing signs of change. There were babies abound. Joe put his foot squarely into this trap. I went to see him with Bekah and he was living in an apartment decorated with potted plants and photographs. He seemed happy, we talked about guitars and things, but it seemed to me that he was becoming something different, he was changing as his world changed, even though he was doing it slowly. I believe that birth and death are strongly related, and I took this last encounter with Joe as strong evidence. I tried to ignore the fact that Joe was changing diapers.

Eventually, in everyone's life, you stop paying attention to the way other people are living and start looking at your own life. You become your own protagonist, instead of listening to stories about other people. This was the moment that I experienced watching Joe Rivers kiss his child on the forehead and watching the child smile back at him. When I walked back out into the evening darkness, I didn't see Joe as the Dionysus he used to be, but he was much more tangible than that legend allowed, and he was therefore greater.

It was about this time that I stopped being mad at my parents for raising me in Backwater, USA. The bad exaggerations seemed to fall away with the good. The humanization of Joe Rivers led to the humanization of my hometown as a whole. People were people, just trying to build lives for themselves. How was I different? How is anyone different? Joe wasn't shaking his fist, but he was making his child laugh. Who could argue against that change? I felt the iron claws of maturity sink into my heart.

Girl and Wire by Jorge Rios

Ar

11

unioniiboard

~ INDIANA

MEMORIAL

Volume 7 Number 1 Fall2002 I

J