Somewhere In The Neighborhood Of Love

She was teenage ugly, thin as a rail, wore thick glasses, had a posture like a deformed tree and psoriasis that at times looked like a half-fried pieces of bacon glued to her body. This skin disease she suffered, psoriasis, caused scabs and welts and rashes at the elbows, knees, and neck, causing her to constantly scratch like a nervous monkey, a monkey who never seemed to reach that itch. In this semi-tropical climate, she dressed in long sleeve shirts and tights and turtlenecks to hide her skin eruptions and scratching shame.

Always the constant scratching... so much so that at times I thought her itching was not only external but internal, an itch coming from a desire to relieve a devilish craving so deep, so unreachable that it hurt me to watch her scratch at skin so young and beautiful.

Her skin, hidden from view, ashamed, buried in clothing....

Her brother, Randy Mattingly, was my best friend, and as such, I was forced to be kind to itchy-scratchy little sister, Brianna. She was a brat most times, but she just wanted our attentions. It's not like I went out of my way to befriend her, but neither did I taunt her. Randy constantly taunted and teased her, sibling rivalry in action 24/7. But he always made it up to her in ways I never understood.

I always rooted for Randy when they fought tooth and nail, but under it all I wanted them to stop, to make-up and get along like normal brothers and sisters should. But what did I know? I was an only child. They were far from normal. But it was love, brother - sister love. She made the effort to show love. She always tried to see the good in Randy, in me.

We lived in the same neighborhood, friends and neighbors to the end of time we told each other. However, we were neighbors of the back fence variety, with no roads directly connecting our houses. To reach Randy's house was a three-block trek, always under curious neighbor eyes, always passing in front of their well-manured gardens and stately homes on the cement sidewalk mazes of our suburban existence.

This circuitous sidewalk route did not hamper us, as Randy and I just knocked out boards of the adjacent fence and created a secret passageway hidden behind the trunk of a thick oak tree. Young boys are driven to stay in touch, to pass secrets, to exchange new finds and constantly reinforce boyhood friendship to form a strong bond that should last a lifetime.

Solid friendships never to be torn asunder... like brothers, like sisters... friends can and should be loved...

A boyhood friend--- every man has one and it is an essential part of growing up. Randy and I shared everything and almost every moment of our waking hours. Inseparable. Surf adventures, hiking till we dropped, camp outs in backyards, first drink of hard liquor, first smoke, first joint, first kisses---of girls that is- at the Golden State movie theatre, but, ha-ha, it was the same girl! We did everything together and always in some tribal manner, in some ancient connection between young men coming of age. But there was one thing I was ashamed of and hid from Randy and his younger sister Brianna.

Randy's mom---I was in love with her. I was in love with Rose Mattingly. It was a love that made me ache and lay awake nights in dreams and fantasies of her beauty. She was beautiful. She was perfect. She was my dream lover!

I didn't look at her as the mother of my best friend, but as a physical entity that slyly activated hormones I had yet to understand, reconcile and truly experience in full. I felt my boy-body change when thinking about her, when smelling her pass closely, and when she touched my shoulder or arm I felt my body buzz of an unknown electricity, in that over-activating place, between my legs.

An erection was more common than not, and one in her presence was embarrassing, not always hidden from her, and that in itself was invigorating and wonderful. In some odd way, I thought it was the first pulls of a true love happening to me. I wanted her to share in my joy. I couldn't help it... she smiled... she shared my joy in so many ways....

I called her ma'am and always helped her with anything she was doing, but I constantly fantasized about getting her alone whenever I came in proximity to her perfectly shaped female form. For at thirty- four, she still moved and lived in the body of a constantly giggling and exuberant seventeen-year-old ingénue delighting in her virginity.

These were not debased, degrading fantasies of a teenage boy coming up behind her and pulling off a sexy apron, whipping off a flimsy sundress and having my way. I wanted her in a four-poster bed, in a romantic place with the mood and music of love playing in the background, wanted to be in a long-term relationship and I wanted children by this woman. Oh, it was odd and queer and at times I had to tell myself to cool it, to shed these fantasies, knowing in my puritan mind that no boy wants to settle down at such a tender age with his best friend's mother.

Was this love normal? At fourteen, I had no idea what was normal. My masturbation fantasies always ended with her smiling crazy and screaming after an intense physical climax --- desire for her was far beyond my ability to comprehend love and romance or sex. It just was.

Was I ashamed... yes! Did I care? No! I only wanted to look into her eyes while I lay upon her, inside her, discovering her....

Being embarrassed at my feeling for her at social situations, at back-yard barbeques and high school functions, I hid my desires, but constantly showered my affections on her, always hoping she would respond. Flowers, special gifts on holidays and always a complementing word on her appearance brought her smiles closer to me.

Skinny itchy-scratchy thing of a daughter Brianna saw it. She saw it from day one and I was so afraid she would reveal it to Rose. I was afraid of what she knew, fearing she would use it against me and tell her brother or her father.

One sunny summer day, at their pool, she lay down next to me and said: "Having a thing for my mom is alright---"

"---For Rose? What? Are you crazy? Thing---what thing for your mom? I nev---"

"---My mother is beautiful. Every guy who sees her goes gaga. Someday I'll be as beautiful, more beautiful, so she says. Hey, guys have crushes on teachers, movie stars, on the President's wife... why not on my mom?"

Brianna smiled to me in her innocent way; bright-green eyes, calm and honest and as sincere as usual. But she scratched constantly and it was a distraction... Was she toying with me? Was it a little girl ploy? There was something unnatural about her constant scratching.

Sometimes it got so bad her face turned a bright pink and wheezy breaths arose from her skinny, veined and elongated throat. At those times, she produced an inhaler, covertly applied it to her mouth, squeezing an atomized drug into her throat and then hid the devise, as if ashamed she couldn't breathe in life like the rest of us did so easily.

I was the only male she wore her tiny bikini in front of. Why did I have her trust? She was so skinny-shy in front of everyone else. I'd broken through... I was family. She trusted me implicitly. Now I think about it, I may have been her only friend, besides her brother.

"Mom will have to adopt you as her only son someday. I think Randy is sick... I think he may die."

"Sick? Why? You're joshing me. You just want him to stop teasing you all the time. You're lying. He won't die, cause you're a poop-pa sister... he'll live to taunt you till your old and gray," I teased and chuckled.

She laughed, but there was earnestness behind her oval face, a squint of fear in her eyes. Hers was her mother's eyes and I believed in her mother.

"Mom was crying, maybe even Dad, but hiding it from me yesterday as best they could, and all day they ... they pretended everything was normal, but everything was all wrong. Late last night, I heard them talking in their bed. They didn't know I heard them, but I hear everything through the heating vents in my room."

"Yeah, I know. I've listened to you in your bed."

"What do you mean? With Randy?"

"You're a girly-girl, with desires, dreaming of rock stars and famous surfers.... Never mind what I heard and why the hell would I hear Randy in there?" I teased, but worried about my best friend, I asked, "Randy is sick? Tell me what he's sick from or I'll toss you in the pool, skinny-scratchy-monkey, little sisty-ughler."

"Don't know, but in between their sobs I heard talk about Al's disease. Whatever Al has, Randy has. Said his muscles are going to get weaker and weaker...."

"Oh bullshit, Brianna! Who is Al? Maybe it's just the Al guy who's sick. Al, is he is one of our friends?"

I picked up her feather-light frame and tossed her in the pool. I was strong as an ox and Randy was stronger than me. Randy was my friend. Best friends do not die.

But God Dammed it, what she told me was true. It took three years for Randy to die, years that sucked all the vitality out of me, out of her, out of us all, years that wasted him away until we watched him take a last painful breath in a bed that had been our boyhood fort, a place of his dreams, a place in a home where as his best friend I sat for so many years in happiness and camaraderie. It was a final place of pillows and sheets and blankets that just saw his body grow weaker, and weaker, and smaller, and smaller, until one special human being disappeared into a childhood bed and never came back.

He just couldn't catch his breath and died on me... my best friend died on me.... Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis... and he died on her....

Want me to tell you how rotten this fucking life can be? All the while, Rose had breast cancer growing in those perfect teats I craved and dreamed of and....

When God is mad, he punishes severely... but the young and perfect and wanting and needing and happy and the forward-life-yearning young are the people who suffer the collateral damage... for we must live on and on with perfect healthy bodies and hungry minds.

That day. That day Brianna found out about Rose... a day painted in me like a mordant oil of drab colors, hanging at the entrance to a mind of muted feelings, of a feeble rain, of a slick gloomy and wet sheen on a hard asphalt roadway outside our houses, of trees shedding leaves prematurely with suspended brittle branches near the top, spindly naked twig reaching out... transient ravens and crows and blackbirds weighing down thin branches....

A month after Randy was buried, Brianna and I walked home from school together, walking the long way around by Randy's cemetery plot for Brianna to place a single rose. Once home, we found her father Harold sitting out in the backyard, in the old and rusted swing set of yesterday's laughter, nurturing a bottle of Jack Daniels, crying in spurts and moaning like a hurt bear. We assumed it was grief over Randy, but inside we found Rose coddling a bottle of fancy liquor we both knew she loved, but the teetotaler in her prohibited. The fancy liquor was half gone and she was diluting the sweet taste of it with the raw and unruly taste of Tequila. Her body said resignation to a fate; her eyes simply said terror.

"I'm scared, but I don't know why" Brianna said, out of earshot of her mother.

A few moments later, when she looked into her mother's eyes, her youth seemed to leave her.

"We'll have dinner and we'll talk then," is all her mother said, and then she abruptly turned her solemn face back to the fireplace.

She was seemingly mesmerized, finding solace in the incorporeal glow of a small gas fire and a crackling fake log ignited within. Brianna, sitting next to her downtrodden mother was a study in melancholy---The young daughter sad without knowing why, yet fully alive in youth and sexuality, a mother in her prime, morose over something tragic, with her life and her love of life on the wane.

Brianna was all business as she made a dinner of Swedish meatballs, linguini, steamed broccoli and a salad, prepared in robotish abnormality, in movements of forced determination. During the preparation of dinner, she stopped more than once to gaze out at her torn-up and self-questioning father. He teetered in small movements; a constant back and forth in shallow swings on the old swing set. She held back tears, but murmured more than once,

"Life is so wrong, Mark. Help me be strong...."

Her parents put on a front and tried to carry on the long established routine of dinner at the usual time, with the usual smiles and with the usual prayer. A place was always set for Randy, a gesture of remembrance and love...That tension in the air that night....During the meal her parents kept their eyes locked on each other, as if trying to form a joint psychic communication to transmit to Brianna the words that just wouldn't, couldn't articulate from strained lips and hearts.

"Just tell me what is fucking going on!" Brianna finally screamed in a direct confrontation towards her father.

Harold sank down in his dining room chair, hands to eyes, sobbed and tried to hide tears that now flowed beyond his control.

"Honey, I have a tumor in my breast---"

"---Mom, I knew something was---"

"---Wait, let me finish... it is inoperable---"

"---Mom---"

"---Damn it, Brianna, let her tell you what is happening!" Her father screamed. It was the first time I'd ever seen anger in the man.

"Brianna, it is inoperable. According to the doctors, to three doctors, I have less than six months to live."

I cried, but with tears held close to my chest. You'd have thought Brianna would have shrieked out in gasping sobs and in a fitful rage of screaming and crying. But she didn't. She remained quite and just scratched at her arms, then at her neck, then her legs. She seemed to shrink and tears formed in her eyes, but they did not fall.

Brianna could only look at me with loving eyes and the resigned tip of her smile. It was the same look I saw that day by the pool, the day she allowed me to love her mother unabashedly, the day she opened her self up to me, the day she and I bonded to become much more than neighbors and casual friends.

The emotional bond between Brianna and I was of the slow drying glue variety... a slow adhesion, slow in connecting, slow setting, a fragile bonding process... but now, at this moment, our eyes came together in a stable bond. We both somehow knew it was to be a life spent together. There was no one else for her if and when Rose died. Her father, Harold, was a pure work machine, a corporate appliance programmed to functione as a workingman to provide for his family until their last dying breath. He was a man of 8 to 5, with an eternity of evening meals in taciturnity, of rustling and annoyed evening newspapers, of an early to bed and early to rise ethic, with two golf filled days on the weekends and an unrequited true love of twenty years ago that still lingered.

How many dying breaths can a man absorb before he must turn them away, tune them out of future existences and possibilities. I crumbled, withdrew into myself. Later, after I recovered, I stared over the now cold platter of Swedish meatballs into Brianna's eyes and imagined us as astronauts adrift in space, our tethers dangling far behind us, the air of life only available if we coupled up.

I looked up to the ceiling, closed my eyes and in a fantasy saw us coming together in the vast void of endless space and loneliness and separateness at a phenomenal rate of speed. Stars became streaks of light; the worlds of the pasts we knew worlds grew distant; then I tethered up to her, sharing the last of our oxygen in our known universe... it was the only possible salvation for us. When I opened my eyes she was staring at me. She could only look at me because the pain of looking at her parents, on this last day, of the day that should have been a happy and familiar family routine day... it was far too brutal for such a fragile young woman.

She did finally look at her mother, then reached out and gripped her hand. Rose smiled, knowing Brianna had found the strength to carry on. On that day, in that instant, I saw Brianna Mattingly become a woman... the woman I now wanted more than anything else in the world.

There are Greek tragedies that drag you down into complex thoughts of families and dynasties and wars and warriors... but we were only a microscopic family imbedded in the petri dish of the always-green suburbs. I infused myself onto the Mattingly family, as if part and parcel of it. I held on to them tight, my own family understanding and relinquishing me, as they were only distant participants in the life of a rebellious son that was always held at an acceptable distance. Such is life...

This is what my father said about the Mattingly's life and death curse and almost everything he encountered in his life.... Such is life. I let him live his life of such and such, for he was man devoted to my mother and I turned all my attentions and dreams and desire towards Brianna and what remained of her family.

The details of a life dying are nothing but a downward spiral of events and moments and cries and forced unnatural laughter in drama's double duty persona, its masks and disguises. We become players on that stage, we become the audience of our loved one's deaths, to boo and hiss, or champion, or laugh inwardly at, or grieve beyond grief at the decent of the final curtain.... Rose died....

The death day is a solid entity of memory, but suffused with the suspended days and nights that mark that time from a expected, yet still chilling pronouncement of death, of a once ticking clock, now frozen... After death there is a presence that lingers in the air and won't let up until the burial day.

The burial day is the day of the ifs and the buts that are God-authorized to take leave of a soul, to allow a person's body and being to be gone forever... that is if a person knows what is good for them. There is a finality that truncates and severs all thoughts of redemption and reanimation at a funeral, after seeing the object of so much love, lowered into that brown, wet dirt, fringed by Astro-turf, in air permeated with wisps of melancholic, yet soothing pastoral background music. And there are flowers; the eternal symbol of femininity, of renewal and suddenly a new awareness was born in me of those thorns on the stem below the fragile beauty of a rose... Roses for a Rose, for a rose, a rose....