Dawn breaks CLS

 

 

They all came into the morning light in droves and in twos and in threes.

 

School convenes in the South end of Peoria and Patrick A. McReynolds stirs in his mattress, his imagination a canopy of pre-dawn vignette’s swaying metronomically with every shift of his twelve-year old body. He grunts, slurps. The slits in his eyes slowly crack open as he squints into the red-digitalized hyphens of his alarm clock. One mattress over Allan has his head burrowed beneath an assorted heap of random pillows, like he is trying to occlude his earlobes from the electronic heralding sounds of morning, nocturnally oblivious to the parade of vehicles idling two miles south, in the Southern nest valley of P-town, automobiles stirring where white splashes of early morning sunlight winks across the hoods of vehicles depositing adolescents ferrying backpacks like nylon road-kill behind the blades of their shoulders, car doors opening up like metallic wings, coughing out students dressed in jeans. The dim-dashboard tint of parental vehicles lugging progeny into the commodious parking lot of CLS, forming a migrating parabola of lumbering bumpers and license plates.

 

            In front of CLS limousines hum and camera’s flash. All star shooting guard Marcellus Buck steps out, a basketball with gold-trimmed rubber linings in one hand correlates perfectly with his Million dollar smile and golden tooth, he purportedly received from the tooth fairy principal when he was in first grade. He steps back, signs an autograph for a soccer mom a la left cleavage, hands a stack of books into the palms of pregnant girlfriend LaToya Walch and enters the school, dribbling the golden orb between his legs, forming a little-shot gun with one hand as he juts up to point guard Eric ‘The Red’ Brushman, and gives him a long-complicated handshake. Last week was the dedication for the newly refurbished gymnasium. Terrence Looney, commonly referred to as Coach M. throughout the building, hired the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, the three Tenors, the Company and cast of Broadway’s CATS and DAMN YANKEES and a good chunk of the New York Philharmonic to perform a duet with Milli Vanilli. The event was aired simultaneously on both ESPN and PBS, Coach M. claiming that all he had to do afterwards was dot the i's and cross the t’s and next thing he knows he’s featured in the Guinness book of world records for coordinating an event that was marketable to two diverse social economic extremes and deemed him the title of proprietor for World Peace in the South Side of Peoria.  Coach M. told miniature golf nerd and Junior varsity coach Rudolph Theske that he felt shortchanged for the Pulitzer and that Next year, he plans on drum majoring a parade for the Comets opener versus the Mt. Sinai Swordfishes, throughout Western Avenue.

 

As morning continues to yawn horizontal strips of orange and bright light from the direction of the east, a motorized trudge of vehicles continue to grind and halt and swerve around the parking lot of Christ Lutheran School.  You can hear an audible almost cartoonish screech as the Van ‘o Hale halts, sways back and forth, before Hale exits out, looking both ways as his mother Sandy offer out a No Problem. Cabbages McGranahan's Uncle Otto drops both her and her second cousin through divorce Larry-Lloyd Baker off in a rust-ridden lime-flavored Winnebago whose hood balances a spray-painted vignette of a splayed lotus giving birth to a meditative lavender Buddha smoking something rolled so tight it looks like it could seriously wound someone if hurled, a healthy cumulus of incense and other inhalants forming a cloud behind her as she hushes the car door shut, smiling when she sees Hale arch his eyebrows telling her to meet her in their Little hiding place in the Faculty lounge. It’s the AM and the coaches Widow at least needs eight strong refills to get her going through first period alone.

 

Whoo-hoo.

 

Meredith-Elise Willow keeps both her thick spectacles and unblemished ivory of her porcelain skin densely shielded with a phone-book thick tattered copy of Vanity Fair as her Grandmother chain smokes Winstons and talks about how lucky she got at  both the Bingo Hall and the Mens dorm last night, inquiring to a purposeful standoffish Meredith in little winks and elbow-tics to give her best to that Von Behren boy before Meredith slaps the side of the station wagon goodnight and trots into the academy feeling utterly alone in the world. A van with billowing poluthrane sheets for windows lumbers into the parking lot, depositing a purposefully pissed-lips corn-rowed Javon Worthington as well a long denim skirted Iola Clitty whose skirt slinks all the way past her penny-loafers, besmirching her the appearance of a anorexic handbell.

 

Von Behren likes his mom to drop him off in the church parking to avoid the hoi poloi of juvenilia traffic. He ambles across the street, often feigning a ghetto limp, pushing the bridge of his glasses up the ski-slope of his nose while admiring the stain glass Fro of Ghetto Jesus, holding up a half-n-half basketball planet in lieu of a cross, pondering to himself what, if anything, is wrong with the equation before scurrying between a barrage of bumper stickers and traffic horns dodging a barrage of verbally brandished “watch it kid” as he skirts past the entrance to the 50’s gymnasium and clambers up the chipped rungs of the Yellow Monkey bars in his solitude, all alone, wondering what RPG concoction  he will dish out today for Hale and Patrick, wondering to himself the title of the text Meredith has smashed into her delicate cheekbones.

 

From his periphery Von Behren can make out Hollis Lionziski, Patrick’s love interest, entering the building, her torso heavily banded by what her Father calls her Chastity lock.

 

A helicopter clips overhead, transitioning the dead grass of Logan field into a dome of brown follicles, all bowing inward as the helicopter lands and a dual-braided, plaid mini-skirted lass is escorted out by a one arm-chauffer talking into a walki-talki.  Buster arrives in a Wiener mobile shoveling lumps of Chili from what looks like a yogurt container into his lips and swallowing sans the remedial chomp.

 

 

The cherry coated streaks on the McReynolds Honda is nowhere to be found.

 

       DeJuan arrives straddled to something equine resembling Eyeore he refers to as Brighty, employing the bottom rung of the Yellow Monley bars as a makeshift hitching post, tipping the brim of his cowboy hat into the filmy ankles of his parking lot shadow. Later Dejuan is overheard telling Von Behren that his old man is prepping this weekend to audition for the Starlight musical rendition of SHANE! Lamenting to DVB that sometimes you just gotta give a nigga a chance to strut his stuff and sing his black ass off, brother.       

 

Jeremiah is dropped off in a dilapidated bumperless Buick with one mismatched tire. Aron and Mario have already stationed themselves like stiff valets in front of the entrance to the fifties gymnasium, where all the quote Losers and Ostriches have been required by tuition mandate and Synod authority to be drop offed and picked up. Jeremiah has grown so accustomed to being Ostriched that seldom now does he scream when both Aron and Mario hoist him up from his buckled car seat before ferrying him inside to the den of the nearest toilet.

 

Buster arrives in what looks sort of like a Weiner mobile driven by his agent that he claims is actually on loan from a German sausage company sponsoring the southern Austrian leg of his tour.

 

Lynnford Collins, the thirteen year old drag queen sometimes arrives on what looks like a float of Cinderella’s stagecoach on her way to the ball. Some morning Lyneford sports a plastic tiara and scepter, groping a dozen stem-clipped roses like an academy award, blowing kisses in the direction of the Varsity Elite as they congregate in a mass huddle of elbows and warm-up jerseys outside the finance to eternity Gymnasium where, much to Patrick’s observation they will somehow manage to monopolize the whole entire day.      

 

Sarge Kockout likes to arrive at 4:30 am, decked out all in camouflage in a Hummer preserved from the Gulf war era, sometimes he sees Reverend Morningwood stumbling out of the Faculty Lounge after Pinky the bartender yelled last call, once or twice Coach M and Lillian Wiltz will be groping each other, wearing New Years eve party attire.

 

The cherry streaks of the Mcreynold's Honda is still nowhere to be found.