Mickey And Delia (2) They continued on up the street away from the main drag back toward the freeway. Along the opposite lane came a police car with its top red lights on and turning. “Funny,” Delia began, “the police in Richmond drive with their lights on sometimes. One of them got behind me the other day, it scared the hell out of me.” “Yeah that’s really strange,” agreed Mickey who watched people pulling over to the side of the road as the police car drove along seemingly not in a hurry and without its siren on. They drove on to the next house and the next until there was only Delia and Mickey in the car. “Do you want to do anything?” Delia asked him. He told her he had to go home to dinner and told her about the car accident so she drove more slowly. In front of Mickey's house they exchanged phone numbers and he promised to call her the next day. They looked at each other for a minute then they moved close together and kissed. They looked at each other and then kissed again more passionately and then she stopped. Mickey got out of the car on wobbly legs and said a final good night. He walked backward toward his house and tripped over a bush in his front yard causing Delia to laugh. She drove off and Mickey walked into the house feeling light and strange. He could faintly smell her scent on himself. Saturday 10-29-1966 The next day Mickey called Delia in the afternoon. After dinner he walked over to her house. He was seated formally in the front room on the couch. Her parents were in separate chairs and Delia was on the other end of the couch. Delia’s mother was thin and smoked incessantly but she was kind. Her father was a metal worker, basic but friendly. Mickey was introduced to Jack the orange cat who was so stupid that sometimes he got lost inside of the house. The interview began and Mickey told them he had no real major at school and he liked to write poetry. Both of the parents said that ‘D’ was special, that she got up in the morning and went out to watch the sun rise. Delia smiled faintly at this but mostly she seemed distant and business like to Mickey. They said that ‘D’ was very religious and read and studied a lot. Mickey looked at her speculatively. He had never met anyone before who got up early to experience the ‘spiritual benefits’ of a sunrise. Eventually Delia asked Mickey if he would like to go for a walk and he agreed. He said goodbye to her parents and they left the house. “God I had to get out of there, my parents drive me crazy sometimes. They think I am too good. Have you ever been up to the reservoir before?” she asked him. “No,” he answered. “Come on, let’s go up there.” She led the way, it seemed with a deliberate purpose. She had on a dark leather coat and her black leather hat. He had on blue jeans, a plaid shirt, the light work boots that he usually wore and a light jacket that made him shiver in the cold wind. As they walked he noticed that he was a head taller than she was. He could see that she parted her hair in the middle of her scalp. “Why do you go look at the sunrise?” Mickey asked her. She looked kind of pained. “I don’t always, they were making a big thing out of it but it’s like a spiritual thing for me. I don’t know, the sun rises and I laugh and feel happy. It's a special time of the day.” They walked a few blocks along the road to a field and then they climbed a fence and hiked up a steep hill covered with long wild grass. When they reached the top of the hill Delia was out of breath. The old reservoir made a large barrier wall all the way around the top of the hill. The old rusty fence around the reservoir had a hole in it and Mickey squeezed through. He climbed up the rotting metal ladder set into the wall and looked into the empty reservoir. He considered climbing down into it but Delia cautioned him that the ladder inside was so decrepit that it might break and there was no other way out. He climbed back down the ladder and came back through the fence and stood looking at Delia. She made a sudden predatory move toward him and he involuntarily backed up. She turned angrily, it was dark and the air was fraught with tension as the wind blew her hair wildly around her face. Mickey was trying to fathom this woman and her motivations. She had a crazed look on her face and he wondered if she was going to rape him. Suddenly she turned and ran down the hill screaming. ‘Shit’, Mickey thought, seeing his chance at losing his virginity fly away due to his own timidity. He followed after her down the steep hill. She was running at a heedless breakneck speed and he was afraid that she would get hurt. At the bottom of the hill he caught up with her. Her face seemed to be going through contortions as if the muscles under her skin were moving spasmodically. He stared at her intently, her face looked fat and placid, then happy, then worried, then she appeared crazy and then evil. She began to babble madly, he wondered if she was schizophrenic. He decided that he had better get her home and took her hand and deliberately started walking in the direction of her house. “Are you all right?” he asked worried. “I’m sorry,” she sobbed. “The doctors keep giving me these pills to lose weight, I am not losing weight but I sure am getting my homework done. The teachers love me. I wasn’t losing weight so the doctors gave me more amphetamines. They give me so much amphetamine I can’t sleep at night! They had to prescribe sleeping pills to me so I could get to sleep! It’s driving me crazy, I hate doctors!” she yelled at the world in general. She was mad and seething with rage. Mickey felt like he had a wild animal on his hands and he had to take some control over the situation. He led her back home slowly and calmly asked her questions, letting her work off her rage and anger. "I don't believe science can save us from the mess science is making of the world," she said at one point. When they reached the door of her house he excused himself and said he had to go home even though it was early. “Will I see you again?” she asked shamed by her behavior. He smiled. “Sure, if you like,” he said and left. He felt confused. Did he want to get involved with someone who could change personalities like that? Was she crazy or was she just playing with him? He had an intellectual interest in insane women but encountering the real thing was another matter. He felt as if he had entered an alternate world where there were no road maps. ‘Why can’t anything just be simple?’ he asked himself in frustration. Walking home from Delia’s he took a short cut. His parents lived on top of a hill and it was shorter to walk up the field in the back of the steep hill rather than walk around the front of the hill on the paved roads. As he cut through the suburban streets lined with houses made from basically the same half a dozen plans he heard some loud rock and roll music coming from a house a block or two away. He walked out of his way to pass the place. An older kid came out onto the front porch and yelled to Mickey, “Hey, come on in!” “Oh I shouldn’t, I don’t know anyone here.” “That’s all right, come meet some people.” Mickey’s feeling of having entered Wonderland continued strongly. He wandered through the party in the living room as if he were in an unreal dream. He met people and bummed a cigarette and drank a small amount of beer. A record that was new to him was playing on the primitive stereo, it was the Out of Our Heads album by the Rolling Stones. He had never heard a Stones album before. He was enjoying himself amongst strangers but about an hour later he left the party. “Come back anytime,” they shouted to him. He promised that he would but he knew that he would never return. He was not very social, he considered it a waste of time. He walked home amazed, nothing like this night had ever happened to him before. It was a magical world out there where one’s sense or sensibilities could be changed in an instant. Every little house held a different world where people did things and they could be whoever or whatever they wanted to be, except for him. He had to go back home and be his parent’s first child. Sunday 10-30-1966 Late Sunday afternoon Mickey’s mother opened the door to his room and said, “There’s a girl on the phone for you.” She had a look of intense puzzled scrutiny on her face. Girls had been calling him up occasionally, quite unlike her day. She had never called up a boyfriend when she was young, it just was not done. He walked to where the one phone in the house was, the kitchen. His father was at the table reading the newspaper and his mother was fussing around the kitchen sink. He picked up the receiver and said, “Hello,” and the eagerness in his voice surprised him. “Hi, it’s me, Delia. I’d kind of like to make up for last night, would you like to go to a movie with me?” “I’d like to but I don’t have any money,” Mickey answered with some disappointment. “I’ll pay, I’ll drive.” “Just a minute.” He asked his mother, “Can I go to the movies with Delia?” “Who is Delia?” questioned his mother after putting down her cigarette. “I met her Friday at Ginn’s party.” “Who is Gin…, oh never mind. Yes, I suppose so.” His mother sounded exasperated as she picked up her cigarette and had a puff. “She said she’d pay,” Mickey said hopefully but his mother just raised her eyebrows. Mickey’s mother looked at his father who shrugged. She made a snap decision in the overly serious manner that she could work up. “You can go, but I’ll pay. It’s not right for her to pay for you, I am not sure this is on the up and up.” “She said I can go,” Mickey said happily to Delia. “Oh good, we should be back early enough. I don’t remember exactly where you live.” “I’ll walk over there and you can drive me home.” “Ok, meet you here.” Mickey hung up the phone and his mother said, “Here’s five dollars and don’t be home too late, remember you have school tomorrow.” “Ok.” He got a coat and left the house through the sliding glass door in the dinning room, climbed over the back yard fence and walked down the back of the steep hill. He showed up at Delia’s doorstep and she drove them to Berkeley. She told him about her red haired friend Tom who she used to talk to at school but now that he had moved to Berkeley she did not see him much. She talked about her old boy friend Mark who was married now. He had left her when she was sixteen and she had blown up like a blimp. Mickey tried to listen attentively and ask appropriate and discreet questions. He was trying to understand, trying to pick up a few clues to her multifaceted personality. Tonight she looked very feminine, self possessed and confident, apparently happy to have someone to talk to. They went to an art theater on College Way in Berkeley, he had never been there before. They saw the English movie Morgan, it was about a crazy young man who identifies with animals. He was on trial because he kept harassing his wife who had a new boy friend. It was a really crazy movie and Mickey loved it because it was a psychological study of a personality who defied authority. At one point Morgan said, “I do not recognize this court,” and Delia related to that quite strongly. She liked the idea of an individual dismissing the whole establishment. They drove home on a mental high from the movie, talking with subdued amazement. Delia parked a few houses down from Mickey’s. “Well I guess I should go,” Mickey said somewhat reluctantly. “Yes, you should.” She looked at him, she was woman. They looked at each other for a few seconds more, then quickly moved toward each other and kissed passionately. Mickey held her tight and she became very emotional and sighed. They separated and looked at each other in awe, mouths tingling they kissed again. She rubbed her soft lips up and down his mouth. Her tongue explored his mouth and he caressed her tongue with his. He put his tongue in her mouth and she began sucking it. He had never experienced this before and as he tried to withdraw it she sucked on his tongue harder and he could not move it. In desperation he put a hand on her left breast, partly to push her away and partly to get her involved with something other than his tongue. His immediate thought was that her breast was much larger than his hand. She responded to this mauling by becoming even more passionate and sucked his tongue even harder. Finally she let go of his tongue and almost melted into him, then she withdrew. “I must go,” she said, looking embarrassed and shy. “Will I see you again?” he asked. “Surely,” she answered. He got out of the car and he was so unsteady that his feet had a hard time finding the ground. Monday 10-31-1966 On Monday Mickey was spending another long mind dulling day at the sprawling one story De Anza High School. He hated the place and its snotty egotistical middle class children who were as mean as they were ignorant. That was why he liked the people on the lawn, they believed in things like Civil Rights and protesting the war. They were as close to the type of politics he liked as he could get in this school. He had Physical Education the first thing that morning. He hated P.E. in the morning when it was cold and he had to run around in shorts. The P.E. teachers acted like mean drill sergeants. It was their belligerent attitude that turned Mickey off to anything that they offered. It seemed to Mickey that the way the teachers ordered the students around was similar to boot camp. It was as if the teachers were training the students to behave like soldiers who would obey any authoritarian order without question. Drama class was about the only bright spot in Mickey’s day. He could act a bit like himself for awhile, yet he felt constrained and inhibited around his fellow students. He loved his teacher Deana, she was like an oasis in this desert of suburban personalities. He could never figure out how she got there because she seemed so different from all the other teachers. She was tall and slim and had a lovely face that flexibly changed for whatever part she was playing. She had cold perfect features and could fall into any character instantly and she played them all with style in a hip and worldly fashion. She seemed a natural for light comedy and bedroom farce as the straight female foil. Mickey felt like an outsider in class, he was really a shy person and had difficulties with acting. He felt that the teacher rejected him and the improvisations that he tried were heavily criticized. It was not that he was really disliked, just ignored as inconsequential. Maybe he was not a very good actor but it was the only class he wanted to try to do well in and it was important to him. Deana announced that they were going to do The Madwoman of Challiot for the school play and Mickey would be the student director. This was news to him and made him glad that she thought he could handle the responsibility. On the other hand he thought he was a bad choice because he had no experience in directing and did not really want to do it. He had never wanted to be in charge and was never asked if he wanted to be the director. He did not like telling people what to do, he just wanted to be someone in the background. Mickey was secretly upset because he thought that it might be a ploy by his teacher to keep him off of the stage. He had the lead part of Earnest in the school production of Arsenic and Old Lace the year before and he was afraid that he did not do it well enough. He had a difficult time projecting his voice as he normally spoke very softly. Then also there had been the problem with the script. It had a misprint and instead of reading ‘damn it’ it had read ‘damixt’. When he practiced the part he had said ‘damixt’ for fun and when he was on stage he had said ‘damixt’ unwillingly, just as he had practiced it, and it had thrown off his timing. Mickey's was in over his head during algebra class. He had started the year in business math but had found it so boring that he insisted on being transferred to algebra. Since he got into class more than a month after it had been started he found himself so far behind that he could not get caught up. He understood that x could equal y but he could not prove it. He began to develop a mental block against proofs and abstract mathematics in general. The teacher passed him over to teach the other students who understood algebra and wanted to progress. Mickey liked to talk about physics and he understood science and liked to read science fiction but endless lessons in dissecting bell curves in three dimensions overwhelmed him to the point that he felt he could not actually master doing it. The school newspaper had come out that day with a picture of the principal on the cover. Mr. Pear was a fat bald aging man with a totalitarian type of personality. None of the students Mickey knew liked the principal. During a class that morning Mickey had discovered that he could erase parts of the picture with his pencil eraser and then he drew in bits and altered the picture until Mr. U. Pear looked like a circus clown. During lunch break Mickey ate his brown bag lunch in the cafeteria. When he finished lunch he walked down the administrative hallway on his way to the lawn. He glanced up to his left at the administrative wall where Lilly’s painting hung in a place of honor. The picture was made with light pastel scraps of paper glued onto an acrylic painting of melding soft colors and then brushed over with a substance that made everything appear to flow together. It was very simple yet pretty and somehow held together as an attractive and mysterious object for Mickey. He looked down at the other side of the hall and found a copy of the newspaper with Mr. Pear’s picture. On the spur of the moment, he flattened the paper against the right wall. In a form of Guerilla Theater he began altering the picture of Mr. Pear with his pencil. He was aware of a small crowd gathering around behind him. As he finished someone said, “You better turn around.” Mickey turned around and saw that Mr. Pear was glaring at him angrily. “Let me see that,” the portly red-faced principle demanded. “Sure,” said Mickey happily with a sincere smile. Mr. Pear stared at the picture, the crowd was in a hushed shock, they had never seen such a display of defiance before. “You’re heading down the wrong path doing this, you’re going to be in big trouble if you keep this up," he threatened. "I am keeping this,” he declared shaking the altered paper. “You may, it’s a very good likeness,” Mickey said lightly. This provoked giggles from the watchers. Mr. Pear turned on his heel and strode into his office with his back up. Mickey felt that he had somewhat won this confrontation but inside he was badly shaken and did not want his mother to be called by the principle. Mickey continued through the hall out to the patch of lawn. This was the small turf in front of the school that the longhaired, mod clothing wearing, would be intellectual, folk singing set occupied and consequently it was avoided by almost everyone else. He sat down on a short retaining wall and watched Linda talking with Francis and remembered how happy they had been when they were going together. Ginn walked toward Mickey reluctantly and handed him a note. “I didn’t want to do this but Delia said she’d kill me if I didn’t. My sister has always been over dramatic.” She huffed off and went to talk to Linda. Mickey opened the note and read it. “Dear Mickey, I hope you don’t think I am being too forward but I could not help but notice you the other day at the party. You interest me very much and I hope I can see you sometime soon, love Delia.” He thought that the note was rather redundant and behind the times and wondered if he was safe from this woman with her sister Ginn able to spy on him at school. After lunch he had English class, which bored him completely. He refused to read the old fashioned and plodding books. Vietnam was exploding into flames, Sunset Strip was having curfew riots, the music and the drugs in San Francisco were creating an underground culture and the teacher wanted him to read Billy Budd. It seemed so irrelevant to him and his times that he could not tolerate it. He got into a very detailed discussion with the teacher about what an allegory it was but when the teacher asked him to prove his statements from pages in the book the boy declined. “Why not?” asked his teacher. “I haven’t read it,” Mickey answered and suddenly the other students in class were laughing. The teacher was a very pale man from New York but at the moment he seemed to turn much paler. The teacher then slammed his book down and said, “Why haven’t you read the book?” “Because I can’t stand the prose of that era.”
Copyright © 2007 Michael Potter |