the poet

I started dating the poet because he gave me a record. It was Christmas. I had been dating a neighbor of his. The boy that I had been dating was sort of an imagined victory for me. He was a cute, normal boy that everybody liked. I was the weird bookish girl who wore vintage dresses and brought fresh daisies to school. (I really did) This boy was cinematic; he had kissed me once in secret and then shown up a month later to wait for me to get off work outside of TCBY yogurt. When I did, he confessed to me that he just could not stop thinking about me and wanted to date me openly - class ring exchange and hand holding and going to the prom. Cue the John Huges soundtrack. A whole lot of normal girls wanted to date this particular guy and it felt really good to know that - poetry, prairie dresses, daisies and all - he picked me. So we went out and I tried to look past the fact that he really liked Elton John and wrote crappy notes and left little balloons on my car. I tried not to dwell on the fact that he used a whole lot of hair gel and wanted to be in a boy band. I tried to just enjoy the PERFECT HIGH SCHOOL boyfriendiness of him.

But then, on Christmas, this other boy - the poet boy - brought me a paper bag taped shut and left it on my desk without saying a word. I opened the bag, and inside was an album: the soundtrack to the movie Labyrinth.

For as long as I can remember I have been obsessed by stories of things lost and things found. Alice in Wonderland. Escape to Witch Mountain. The Secret Garden. I had loved the movie Labyrinth, but this was not common knowledge because I was a high school senior and Labyrinth was a movie with David Bowie and.....muppets. I stared at the album, speechless. I knew, suddenly, that I didn’t want to play at normal anymore. I knew that somehow, this other boy knew me in a way that nobody else did. I broke up with my yearbook boyfriend before the last bell rang that day and John, the poet, drove me home.

John was not like anyone I had ever been friends with. He was not a lovely, beautiful poet. He did not smoke pot or listen to Bau Haus. He did not draw pictures and was immune to great cinematography. Instead, he was pale, thin and angry, with the odd-for-a-seventeen-year-old countenance of someone who had spent the last ten years of their life in smoke-filled bars. His father was a cop that bootlegged VHS tapes on the side, and there was something unsettling about his house. It was always spotless; there were always lots of guns. He had three or four brothers, but when you walked in his house it was like walking into a museum. Everyone was hushed and poorly lit. It was as if one wrong move would set off the flashing lights and the alarm. I never once met his father. John was always in a hurry to leave.

John had a habit of driving fast. Too fast. Being with him was not like being with my friend Charles as we sat in the VW bug and lazily wandered through town with Cat Stevens reassuring us all along that “while the sinners sin, the children play”. When I was with John he mocked my hippie music. He insisted on playing hard music at a violently loud volume and he would drive so fast that the frame of his Ford Escort shook and he would look at me and dare me to tell him to slow down. He would dare me to be scared of him. But I never said slow down; I just prayed silently that we would both stay alive and I let him drive. I let him try to outrun whatever it was that he imagined was chasing him.

John was brilliant and dangerous. I had, up until this point, been a very good preacher’s daughter. I may have been an outcast; I may have hung out with drug addicts, but I, myself, was always just along for the ride. John hated this about me. He was constantly pushing me, making me feel inferior to him for my desire to be good, my longing to see the world as a beautiful place even in the face of his unfathomable rage and capacity for self-destruction. He said I was shallow, and it hurt. It hurt to be called shallow by the same person who knew you loved Labyrinth without you having to tell them - who saw that in you somehow. He got me to start smoking, but I just took tiny puffs and did not inhale. He kept daring me to really smoke and not just pretend. I told him I was working up to it.

One night, he took me downtown and lead me through an alley where there was a fire escape ladder. He lifted me up to the bottom rung of the ladder and told me to climb. We climbed onto the roof of the first building and he took me to the spot where you could hop across to the next roof, and the next fire escape. We climbed from roof to roof that way. The Florida night was warm and still and heavy and on top of the roofs, I felt like I was in a different world. It was breathtaking.

I looked down on the courtyard of a popular nightclub, and watched the patrons walk in and out with drinks in hand. I saw couples fight and dance and kiss. I gazed down at the beauty of an illuminated swimming pool on the lower level roof of a downtown hotel. I wished someone would come out and swim, I wished I could see a mother and child swimming in the water, the child clinging to her - its arms wrapped around her neck. I wanted to stay on the rooftops forever, looking down on the people living life below. I was stunned by it all -shaken silent by the beauty of being up so high where everything looked intentional and good.

John, however, was restless. I imagine for him, being up so high just made him have to fight the impulse to jump. He saw me doing my little wimpy cigarette puffing and he walked up to me, took my face in his hands, put his mouth on mine, and exhaled his own smoke deep into my lungs.

He took away the quiet beauty of the moment; he took away the romance of the kiss. This is how he left me: hurt, angry, and choking for air.

John managed to make a 1460 on his SAT back when 1600 was a perfect score - even after drinking an entire bottle of Vodka the night before and knocking on windows at 2am, totally wasted. He got “admission fee waived” applications from colleges everywhere. He never filled a single one out.

He wrote a bitter and cruel message in my yearbook. I gave up.

Two years later, I ran into him again and we became friends. He was drinking a whole lot, living in a tiny little apartment with a roommate that had eyes like a wolf. He was failing out of community college. I was very broken when I met him this time. I was getting ready to transfer schools and had just gotten permission to withdraw from my classes at Florida State for “mental health reasons”. Time had mellowed him; he was more sad than angry now. Time had broken me; now I was sad too.

For a few weeks before I left, we spent alot of time talking. Telling each other our stories. He apologized for having been so cruel in high school. He said that I was not shallow, that I never had been. And before I left, he gave me another present: a small glass cat with wings. One of the most meaningful gifts that anyone has ever given me.

The memory of him breaks my heart. I want to tell myself that he is okay - that just like me, he found his way out of the labyrinth.