The Southside of Paradise- Chapter 7

Chapter 7 - Just Like Romeo and Juliette

      It was an auspicious moment to be sure. I had just started up the red brick stairs in front of Jill's house and my foot slipped, and I fell and bumped my right knee hard, painfully hard. I popped up quickly, looking around for witnesses, and found none. I took a deep breath to calm down and tried again.

     It was 6:30 on the nose, so I rang the bell. I was calm as hell on the outside but was shaking like a plucked string on the inside. I didn't have to wait long as the bell had hardly quit reverberating before Clark Franklin Booth his own damn self answered the door. 

       He was wearing the saddest looking pair of bermuda shorts I had ever laid eyes on. They were covered with big red, orange and purple flowers and even looking at them for a tiny bit kind of made me feel nauseous. He was also wearing a wife beater undershirt and had white underarm hair sticking out from his armpits.  His eyes were bleeding.

         He looked me over. I was cool with it. I had had mom press my t-shirt and put a crease in my clean blue jeans just for the moment. My hair was squeaky clean and tucked behind my ears. I had splashed on just enough Brut to to cover up any trace of pot smoke that might have made have made it past the hot shower.

          "Good evening, Sir! My name is Danny Wilson. I am a friend of Jills. She's expecting me I think." Those were the words that came out of my mouth, but they were nowhere near the words that were rambling around inside of my skull. Those words featured an expletive every other word.

         He didn't really say anything but just gave me a look that conveyed the idea that he thought I was a steaming pile of dog shit and then turned and called to Jill, " Jill, there is someone here to see you." With that, he turned an walked away leaving me still standing on the steps.

        Jill had been sitting on the couch in the front room and was at the door before I quit whispering to myself that Clark Booth was a big jack ass. 

" Come on in, Danny; I've been waiting." She gave me a peck on the cheek before taking my hand and leading me to the long brown leather couch.

          She looked like a million dollars in small bills. Her blonde hair looked as shiny and golden as the stuff that that Rumpelstiltskin  dude was spinning for the king.  Her languorous jade eyes made me feel things that I had never felt before. She was wearing a pair of white jean cut-offs that were cut about as high as civilization would allow, no, make that an inch higher than that. They were shorts that stirred the imagination, and they had holes in them that offered just a peek at the white with blue polka dots underwear she was wearing. 

       She sat me down and then sat almost on top of me. "I told them that you were helping me with my Lit homework, so we have to act like we are studying."

       "No, problemo. What are we really gonna be doing while we act like we are studying?" 
 
        She smiled impishly, "I don't know. I bet you I can think of something."

      "I bet you can too. In fact, I have no doubt on the subject." I leaned in and stole a quick kiss.

      Mrs. Booth picked that time to silently walk past the archway that led into the family room. She was wearing a muumuu that was just about as hideous looking as her husband's shorts and was carrying an empty glass. She walked back by a few seconds later with ice cubes brimming out of the top of the glass. She tried to be slick, but I caught her sneaking her peek.

     Jill giggled, and we started pawing each other but somehow stopped right before Clark entered the room.  He was trying to be officious but was standing on kind of shaky ground being drunk and all. "Jill, what is it that young Mr. Wilson is helping you with you tonight?"

       Jill straightened up and without missing a beat pointed to a passage in the book opened before us on the heavy oak coffee table. " Danny is helping figure out what I am going to write about in my essay on the play Cyrano De Bergerac." 

        He wasn't quite convinced so pressed a bit further, "What say you, Wilson? Are you up for the occasion?" He lisped when he pronounced my name.

       I acted like I was searching for answers then suddenly emoted, "What would you have me do? Seek for the patronage of some great man, And like a creeping vine on a tall tree crawl upward, where I cannot stand alone? No thank you! Dedicate, as others do, poems to pawnbrokers? Be a buffoon In the vile hope of teasing out a smile on some cold face?"  I felt like adding something to the effect of, "Yeah we got library cards too, and some of is can even read a little bit," but I didn't reciting the passage was enough. It was like life had served it up on a tee.
   
     I took it as a certainty that neither of them knew that I had written my own senior essay in European Literature on Rostand's play. I think at first that Clark thought I was smart-assing him because of his question. I actually believe I saw the light go on when he grasped that I was reciting lines from the play.

     It certainly sucked the wind out of his sails. Hell, it sucked the wind out of Jill's sails too. Clark stood looking at me with the gaping smile of a fish out of water. Jill did to, but her face was far to beautiful to ever be described as fishlike. Anyway, he smiled a cadaverous smile and slunk backwards out of the room.

       "What the hell, Danny! I'm impressed. I was scared you were going to quote some Beatle lyrics or something and you come out with that. You've really read Cyrano De Bergerac?" She was grinning from ear to ear.

        That smile made me feel good, too good, I guess, for me to have caught the slight and not so well hidden insult in her statement. " I did an essay on the play myself when I had Stinson my senior year."

         "You had Stinson? My sister told me stories about that class. She was supposed to be one of the best Literature teachers in the whole state. She said only smart kids got into that class. Ooh, my Danny is smart one," she teased.

       " She lived up to being a legend. She was my favorite teacher." I tried to downplay it a bit. "I learned a lot, a lot."

        "What did you write your essay about?" Jill asked. There was a little bit of suspicion in her eyes. It was like she had found out something abut me that changed the whole nature of our relationship.

       "I took the easy way out and wrote about the contrast between inner beauty and outer beauty with Roxanne being the judge between the two. If I had it to do over, I would change it to something more insightful, the better to impress Ms. Stinson." A tiny hint of sadness washed through my mind at the thought that I had not done my best work for the old lady.

           " Did you know, my name is Roxanne?"

            " Jill Roxanne?"

            "No, silly, Roxanne Jillian Adams. Clark adopted me."

            Well, did you know that my middle name is Cyrano?"

           "No Way!"

          "Not really, I'm fucking with you."

          Jill burst out into the most joyous laughter at the joke. It made me feel like a jester on Mount Olympus who had just made the whole Greek pantheon spit wine out of their noses. 

        When she finally stopped, she asked, " You said that you would write about a better topic if you had to do it over again. What would you write about?"

          "This is so damned weird," I was shaking my head as I spoke, "I was just talking to Dean about this earlier today. I have been reading some criticism about the play, and the author stated that Cyrano wasn't much of a real hero as heroes go."

       "That's utter bullshit," Jill blurted. " He's the poster boy of Romantic heroes. How many heroes can kill a man while at the same time composing a poem to the woman they love?"

     "The guy said he wasn't heroic enough because he never told Roxanne the whole truth, that he hid behind his sense of honor to avoid the good chance that she would be repulsed by his looks."

       "That's a bunch of crap too, " She was getting was a little too worked up on the issue. " She would have loved him anyway."

       " Can you be so sure?" What if I showed up on your door with a nose as long as my foot. Would you even let me in?"

       She started to blurt out, "Yes," but she hesitated and then grew quiet. She looked embarrassed and dropped her gaze down to the beige carpet.

         Suddenly, her head snapped back up with a radiant smile on across her glowing face. "But you don't, Danny. You have a very fine nose. It's perfect in fact." With that, she gave me a long kiss on the lips unworried that her parents might walk back in. 

     "I create and collect them though." She looked up at me with those languorous but puzzled green eyes. "I manufacture hideous looking proboscises and hide them in my closet."

    Jill giggled. "But you would tell me the truth before I went and locked myself away in a nunnery, wouldn't you? You'd tell me before I sold my soul for some material beauty like.....," she searched for an answer.

     " Like Mickey Porcine?" The words struck her like a slap; her cheeks reddened, and her eyes were set aflame.

    "That's not fair, Danny. I am with you now. That should mean something," she spoke defiantly.

   I knew I had thoughtlessly hurt her feelings, but that eventuality was preying heavily on my mind, " I'm sorry baby. That was unkind. I will so tell you everything before I let you go become a nun. I will parade my flaws before you one by one for closer inspection."

     "Good. I am so happy that you would do that for me."

     " I am doing it partially for myself as well. I will need to know that the ground below will bear the weight. I've been prowling around like a swamp creature most of my life, and I'm so fucking tired of walking in mire up to my ankles."

       She looked at me oddly then smiled and kissed me again. Like she meant it. Like she was making up for the absence of a first name and for the long suffering sadness of her fictional namesake.

        At nine o'clock I left but not before some more heavy petting action on the front step. Screw the solid earth, I was on a cloud. I floated above the sidewalk down to the street where my car was parked, a blue and white '58 Impala. I had polished her up special for this night. On another night, I would have thought that Ol Blue cleaned up kind of nice. But not this night.

This night, my thoughts were so concerned with visions of heaven that I had completely let down my guard and didn't even noticed that Mickey and the twin dumbasses from hell were hiding in the road behind my clean and shiny car.