Loud Lily #2
Three weeks after my brother’s funeral I finally got out of bed, pulled on a pair of sweatpants, grabbed the keys to my dad’s Impala and put it in gear. I waited for a full fifteen minutes with the car running in the driveway listening to the G-Unit album blaring from the speakers. It was his CD.
A week ago my mom began collecting everything of his that she could find and storing it in his old room. Even though there wasn’t that much to put away, the process took three whole days. Whenever she found anything, a cigarette or a bank statement, she would hold it in her arms and talk to it. One time I thought I heard her explaining to a box of his favorite cereal what had happened. The CD must have escaped her notice.
I wasn’t a big 50 Cent fan, not even a small one. Last year, when my brother had to drive me everywhere, he would put in the CD and crank it as loud as it could go. I used to yell at him about it. I thought it was embarrassing for two middle-class white kids from the suburbs to be playing anything resembling gangster rap. We would fight over the music and I would always give up, partly because he was stronger than me and hit harder, and partly because I was afraid that he would stop paying attention to his driving. I was going through Driver’s Ed at the time and had been overexposed to the graphic films. Even now, the capacity for a city’s public transportation was a factor in my college selection.
I turned the radio off. I winced, expecting the familiar punch to the arm that didn’t come. In biology class my teacher had taught us about a strange phenomenon that occurred in amputees. After having a leg or an arm removed they would wake up feeling a hurt in the limb that was no longer there. They called it phantom pain. After a couple months the brain would readjust its nerve receptors to short out any signals being sent from the removed appendage.
I pulled out of the driveway, much faster than I should have, and almost ran into the Henderson’s mailbox when I turned the corner. I was at the bottom of the hill that our house sits atop when I saw the park.
My brother is generally a laid-back person, but he has a really nasty competitive streak when provoked. We both inherited it from my dad. When I was eleven, he started racing me to the park. For the first week I kept winning, before I started realizing how strange it was that he was always in the lead until he got to the stop sign halfway down the slope. One day, after I finished at least twenty yards ahead, I told him that our grandma must be faster than him. That was the last day I won.
I parked on the side of the road and ran up to the swing set. A couple of house-moms seemed distressed that a shirtless teenager who appeared not to have bathed recently had invaded a children’s environment. A toddler playing in the sandbox looked up from the hole he was shoveling and stared at me as I planted myself on the swing. I waved. He started to wave back before his mother, a thirty-something lady with a blue sundress and brunette hair pulled into a tight ponytail, scooped him up and walked with him to her white minivan. I had thought she was just being rude, until I felt a small drop of water hit my foot.
Pretty soon all of the children were being led away, which I thought was a shame. Having the ability to play in the rain and not look deranged is one of the definite benefits of childhood.
After we finished our foot race, my brother and I would sit on the swings and see who could go higher. Even if we had some dependable way of measuring it wouldn’t be necessary. I knew I never won this contest either. Anytime I approached a respectable height I looked down and froze. When I was twelve we were swinging and I almost reached an angle parallel with the ground when I fell off the swing and threw up in the sand. I wasn’t hurt, but five or six younger kids were pointing and laughing. I never came that close again.
It was pouring now. I started rocking my legs back and forth.
One of the best and worst things about comic books is the ability for characters to turn back time. If the Flash or Superman did something they regretted they could just run around the world in the opposite direction of the Earth’s rotation and undo whatever it is that caused their downfall. It was frustrating because it meant that there was never any real danger or anything at stake for the heroes. But at the same time, it was great because if one of your favorite characters was seriously injured it could always be undone.
Before long, I had outstripped my previous record by a significant amount. I can never be sure, but if someone had been measuring I think it would be the closest anyone ever came to going over the top. With every swing up I could feel the rain colliding into my body, tiny suicidal pellets of water. For a week I had small bruises all over my chest and back, but it didn’t hurt now. I never once looked down. After a while, whenever I hit the peak I would steal a glance at the swing to my left. It could just have been my perspective, but I thought I saw it moving.
A week ago my mom began collecting everything of his that she could find and storing it in his old room. Even though there wasn’t that much to put away, the process took three whole days. Whenever she found anything, a cigarette or a bank statement, she would hold it in her arms and talk to it. One time I thought I heard her explaining to a box of his favorite cereal what had happened. The CD must have escaped her notice.
I wasn’t a big 50 Cent fan, not even a small one. Last year, when my brother had to drive me everywhere, he would put in the CD and crank it as loud as it could go. I used to yell at him about it. I thought it was embarrassing for two middle-class white kids from the suburbs to be playing anything resembling gangster rap. We would fight over the music and I would always give up, partly because he was stronger than me and hit harder, and partly because I was afraid that he would stop paying attention to his driving. I was going through Driver’s Ed at the time and had been overexposed to the graphic films. Even now, the capacity for a city’s public transportation was a factor in my college selection.
I turned the radio off. I winced, expecting the familiar punch to the arm that didn’t come. In biology class my teacher had taught us about a strange phenomenon that occurred in amputees. After having a leg or an arm removed they would wake up feeling a hurt in the limb that was no longer there. They called it phantom pain. After a couple months the brain would readjust its nerve receptors to short out any signals being sent from the removed appendage.
I pulled out of the driveway, much faster than I should have, and almost ran into the Henderson’s mailbox when I turned the corner. I was at the bottom of the hill that our house sits atop when I saw the park.
My brother is generally a laid-back person, but he has a really nasty competitive streak when provoked. We both inherited it from my dad. When I was eleven, he started racing me to the park. For the first week I kept winning, before I started realizing how strange it was that he was always in the lead until he got to the stop sign halfway down the slope. One day, after I finished at least twenty yards ahead, I told him that our grandma must be faster than him. That was the last day I won.
I parked on the side of the road and ran up to the swing set. A couple of house-moms seemed distressed that a shirtless teenager who appeared not to have bathed recently had invaded a children’s environment. A toddler playing in the sandbox looked up from the hole he was shoveling and stared at me as I planted myself on the swing. I waved. He started to wave back before his mother, a thirty-something lady with a blue sundress and brunette hair pulled into a tight ponytail, scooped him up and walked with him to her white minivan. I had thought she was just being rude, until I felt a small drop of water hit my foot.
Pretty soon all of the children were being led away, which I thought was a shame. Having the ability to play in the rain and not look deranged is one of the definite benefits of childhood.
After we finished our foot race, my brother and I would sit on the swings and see who could go higher. Even if we had some dependable way of measuring it wouldn’t be necessary. I knew I never won this contest either. Anytime I approached a respectable height I looked down and froze. When I was twelve we were swinging and I almost reached an angle parallel with the ground when I fell off the swing and threw up in the sand. I wasn’t hurt, but five or six younger kids were pointing and laughing. I never came that close again.
It was pouring now. I started rocking my legs back and forth.
One of the best and worst things about comic books is the ability for characters to turn back time. If the Flash or Superman did something they regretted they could just run around the world in the opposite direction of the Earth’s rotation and undo whatever it is that caused their downfall. It was frustrating because it meant that there was never any real danger or anything at stake for the heroes. But at the same time, it was great because if one of your favorite characters was seriously injured it could always be undone.
Before long, I had outstripped my previous record by a significant amount. I can never be sure, but if someone had been measuring I think it would be the closest anyone ever came to going over the top. With every swing up I could feel the rain colliding into my body, tiny suicidal pellets of water. For a week I had small bruises all over my chest and back, but it didn’t hurt now. I never once looked down. After a while, whenever I hit the peak I would steal a glance at the swing to my left. It could just have been my perspective, but I thought I saw it moving.
posted by Loud Lily at 3:20 PM
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