Tomorrow's Not Too Likely

This is the piece I mentioned in the previous post. My chapbook-to-be, "Relationships I Might Have Had," will consist of poems grounded by prose passages that introduce thematic series. "Tomorrow's Not Too Likely" opens a two-piece section dealing with unexpected intimacy. Consider this something of a preview.

Jew camp. The second one I attended, where I spent two years on staff, separated my shoulder playing a field game with 8-year-olds, first had my penis touched with no protection (she was eight-teen ... promise!), and met a NFTY legend with a third testicle that glowed in the dark. This same cat once had the opportunity to watch porn with Jessica Biel and passed because he was too high; I'd be mad at him, but he already hates himself. It was where my best friend was a basketball-loving rap aficionado from Larchmont with an affinity for Buddy Holly glasses and his strawberry-blond Jew-fro, and where I developed an inexplicably mutually unrequited crush on a girl because we both loved Newsies and she once let me explain the baseball box score without letting on that she knew everything I was talking about. If I die famous enough for anyone to care, she's got the single-biggest collection of letters I've handwritten.

You meet people that matter -- none moreso than Rachel, who I've only known for two summers and two weeks, but have loved all along. I know this because I care. From every bad decision she's made or considered to her now being married with a munchkin, I miss her. Every female character, every unnamed "you," has elements of her traced into the sketch.

By December 2005, I was seven months out of school, working at Barnes & Noble, unable to get on anywhere as a sports journalist, and Rachel and I hadn't seen each other in person for more than two years. She made me join MySpace. Our phone and IM connection was furious, often daily, though there would be lapses of maybe a month, when life got in the way on either end. During one of these protracted pauses, I purged. Spewed every inkling of a thought about why she never went away and why it would matter to me if she did. I projected multiple pages of poetry across blank paper, left with two distinct pieces: one, the raw, unfiltered, unprintable, raggedy translation of unfinished thought; the other, a nearly complete, crystallized recapturing of our entire relationship. Something in the length of the latter caught my eye, and I discovered that aloud, it was three minutes long, with a distinct rhythm and occasional rhyme. "Committing Coolness" was my first piece to fit the conventions of slam.

Two years later, I was mentally preparing for a move from Oneonta, a college town that you could call sleepy if the bar scene wasn't so hardcore. Saved by spoken word, I had spent the summer hanging out with Sierra five days a week and sometimes seven. I'd call her when I got off work, and we'd pretend other options existed before agreeing that yes, we'd be down to play pool at the Oak, that diviest of dive bars we only loved because they hosted our slams and hired our poets. Or at least TJ and Joe. Si would order cranberry vodka by the glass, and I'd trade a tenner for a pitcher of Hennepin, locally brewed Belgian-style wheat beer heavy enough to fill you and -- at 7.7-percent alcohol by volume -- ensure an early night.

Saturdays I'd drop by the coffeeshop in the morning and grab some combination of a bagel with flavored cream cheese and a large cup of coffee deliciousness that tangoed in opposition to the weather; hot during those frozen upstate winters, and iced in the summer. Set up in a corner, preferably by the window even if it meant taking up more space than I should've, I wrote letters. To my Jew camp Newsies crush, to my one friend in the Army and to whoever else took the time to take up mine during that 19-month exile upstate. We'd chat whenever Sierra made a round, though if I got bored early I'd flirt with her co-workers because that's how I roll. Trading compliments for discounts never did no damage to any tip jar I was around.

Eventually, I'd leave them the afternoon and roam a roundabout route back to my one-bedroom apartment, twice the size and half the cost of the 2-BR fourth-floor walkup I write this in, making sure to pass the library and scout for something new, pretending this would be the time I'd actually follow through on checking out the French and German books to hammer home the language education I dropped out on early; never quite conversational, but always able to get around. Time ticked off 'til Si was done, and I'd amble around the corner, four houses down and two blocks over to her second-story sectional, fingers wrapped around the soggy cardboard handle to a 30-rack of something a step above Schlitz. (When I pre-emptively e-mailed a mentor for advice about surviving as a 20-something city kid in small town America, his two-word reply was: "Drink ... heavily.")

After greeting her and a co-worker or two, sometimes our friend Dan and occasionally Si's cousin, we'd each take one in hand, put four in the freezer and the rest in the fridge, snagging the plastic Solo cups from atop it as we headed out to her porch. There, overlooking a street that only occasionally featured cars, across from a meathead frathouse-that-wasn't, we played beer pong using a table I'd salvaged from a neighbor's front yard. It extended from the doorway, adjacent to the wall, leaving just enough space for a person to stand on the far side; she hung a curtain to curtail the number of balls that began to litter the yard below. Swirled circles of paint marked the setup, and six cups up meant starting. The sun would set on the far side of the house and we'd switch to cards, never a soul sober enough to remember every rule to Kings.

But with friends dwindling as they explored other options and my job stagnating, I knew my time in town wasn't long. Having been through this before, it struck me that the hardest goodbye was going to be the one I was most accustomed to making. So I started writing to Sierra. And as though the poem took its own leap into broader context, it never stopped being for her. "Leaving" is a love letter to every connection we've ever made with someone we weren't expecting to. You don't always get to keep the contact, but the memories forged are rarely forgotten. "Committing Coolness" is a testament to the latter, and for that reason, it follows "Leaving" here.

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