Wild Nights, a writing class essay

Wild Nights--Wild Nights!
Were I with thee
Wild Nights should be
Our luxury!
(Dickinson)

“Shh, shh.” She hushed and the group giggled, anxious and giddy. She dug through her tote and pulled out a thermos with the name of her mother’s work printed along the side in the bold, cold letters pharmaceutical companies use in print ads in magazines for housewives. “Angelina’s having her seventh baby! Look how depressed you are!” The thermos is passed around our awkward circle. We’d crowded in the back of her mother’s van, the van she’d borrowed to get to my house. The taste and smell of cheap liquor was familiar by now. We were too young and felt too old and out the wide back window I looked out at the suburban neighborhood, quiet at this time of the night, and I wondered how many depressed housewives were washing the dinner dishes and letting tears fall onto their Lane Bryant blouses. How many told their husbands they weren’t in the mood and hid in the bathroom thumbing through the Newport News catalog? How long do I have until the life goes out of me? The radio hummed on in the background, almost like static, “What a drag it is getting old. Life’s just much too hard today.” (Rolling Stones, “Mother’s Little Helper”)

When the van had become too claustrophobic we burst out the doors like butterflies from a cocoon into the warm summer night and quietly, so quietly, we drunkenly fiddled with the gate until the latch gave way and across the yard we ran as far as we could. Out to behind the shed where man had dug a hole, a trench about ten feet wide and fifteen down. There was a tiny island in the middle with a tree standing up against the moonlight. A shadow of defiance. We stood on the edge and looked down at the dirt and gravel until someone was calling my name and I realized they’d all sat against the shed and someone was holding out a joint. This was the way our nights usually went. It didn’t matter the people, the only one I ever knew was her, but the situation was always the same. I’d get a call or a text and we’d meet and drink and smoke and they would talk about all the things you talk about when you’re drunk and high. It’s only teenage wasteland. (The Who, “Baba O’Riley”) But the best part of these nights was when I would fall back into the grass and look at the stars and feel numb and happy and enjoy the world spinning beneath me. My organic spaceship.

I had the joint and someone was calling me Kurt Cobain and the group laughed at my flannel and my cropped hair and the jeans I hadn’t washed all summer. They laughed at my silence and she told them to shut up, if I had anything worth saying I’d say it and it wouldn’t be their marijuana talk about Jesus and Batman and the vastness of vast-itude and they shut up pretty quickly until the munchies set in and off they went to the Wilson Farms down the street for whatever they could afford and beyond that whatever they could fit in their purses.

“They’re dumb, they’re so dumb,” she said, and I felt the ground beneath me shift as she crouched at my side. “I don’t know why I bother with them. It’s just…it is, you know?” And I guess I must have known because I nodded. She said that a lot at times like these. You know? You know? I guess I must have known a lot more than I realized I did because I never asked her to explain and she never asked me to contribute. Her job was to talk and mine was to listen and together we were supposed to be young and alive.

There was the sound of a lighter and she sucked in nicotine and tar. “I’ve always wanted to climb that tree. Let’s do it.” She stood and nudged my side with a bare foot until I opened my eyes and did as she asked. Together, her without shoes and me in old sneakers, we slid and scuffed down and across and up the dirt and by the end I had to help pull her up the other side and my jeans had a rip in the knee from falling and her feet were cut from bits of glass I hadn’t known were there. We stood at the bottom of that tree and stared up into it’s branches but I was too far gone to climb and her feet were too worn to do anything so we laid in the shadows and looked at the star and I listened to her heartbeat with my head on her breast as she sang songs from yesteryear.

“I can't get no satisfaction,
I can't get no girly action.
'Cause I try and I try and I try and I try.
I can't get no, I can't get no.”
(Rolling Stones, “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction“)

Her voice went out to the neighbors and the night and as she belted the lyrics I put my hand over her mouth and laughed and she kissed my palm and I sighed and the earth spun beneath us, hurtling us through space, and together we felt too young and too old and too small and too big and too many things that they don’t have words for. The important thing is, we felt. And that night, under the moon and the stars and huddled in the shadow of defiance, I promised myself I would always feel and god damn the supermarket magazines and the pharmaceuticals and the husbands and dishes. I was alive, and that was the way I wanted to keep it.

The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to
live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same
time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn,
burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders
across the stars and in the middle you see the blue center light pop
and everybody goes “Awww!” (Kerouac)