H. of Writing, I. Births, cont.

The fact of Charles Anthony Jung's illegitimate birth is fitting, if harrowing, enough of a place to begin if one were so inclined, regardless of such inclination being vigilant or circumspect, serious or whimsical. By at least one considered viewpoint, he is a weapon: the offspring of something that should never have even remotely tasted existence yet by definite, seemingly unpredictable yet inevitable in the bare presence of themselves, shot thru fate fashion into time & place as to where it could not be reversed from that course. 

He was, if you will, born to exact noble, liberating revenge on his sinful creator. Charles Anthony Jung stood on a bridge between two western (likely California) cities of an evening in early August, 2036. He had creditcards with at least half a dozen different names on them. He didn't carry social security cards, of any sort: he memorized a select list for those rare occasions when such a dummy was necessary or useful. He had three or four favorite i.d.s -- from southern states and the southwestern Illinois one. People described him with various tattoos -- pirate tattoos, biker tattoos, Jesus tattoos, devil/Satan tattoos -- on & on like that, you know? He had no tattoos. No piercings. Not even as a kid. He'd occasionally let girls play with his hair in high school, put weird sprays and gels in there. NO dye. Nothing like that. Nail polish if she smelled nice and you knew why they wanted to hold your fingers and mark-up the sensitive little shell ones where he'd rhythmically, with thick breath in his throat move his eyes to sift through the details of hers like a thief looking for diamonds in sugar.... 

He stood on the bridge, twenty-three years old. He had this thought to go to Brooklyn. No wanted ties. No family there. Like Mischa before the train conductor in the anarchic past. Like Laura in Arkansas, at some anti-serious, indominantly-random crossroads on that continent, through discoveries, through slavery, through the twisted wills of the living & the dead, the long-forgotten promises, and the seeds of marble pillars quick as wolves, down fierce, flat to the ground,rails not only and completely cut & laid to their daily existence, nee`soft & renewable & possessing some quiet, gestaltic ruler or tool that whispered a further, more-graceful-yet object of sustained harmony indivisible from that last immovable presence of itself. And he charted some psychological course to Brooklyn. 

**** 

2018. Turning the Big 5. If there isn't a snapshot on somebody's digital camera somewhere surely there is some small, yet real-enough memory of Charles Anthony with the five fingers/thumb of his right hand spread wide. Fair-toned. Nothing outlandish or abnormally distinctive. His features then, as now, with the lingering smugness of a proud, excited youth. Strangely polite, through and through. His teachers, without exception, either spoke about him with a barely concealed hostility (bordering on passionate enmity) or they were in a quick minority of those that remembered the child with a joy close to greed for the un-earned, priceless emotion that all but painted the rooms they were standing in with rainbow blood. 

2028. He had some...inexplicable rules about not dating anyone the first couple years girls started asking questions that way. Perhaps the credit goes to manners. Perhaps to something more vulgar or embarrassing. But in either case the result was the same: He exercised a severe patience that gradually spoke to the questions he was being asked. He was clueless, socially deaf to the wants and approach of the most bitterly sarcastic girls; then, as the layers of dull camouflage eroded with the gravity of their phony kindness he'd grow angry. With nice girls, with their butterscotch voices draped over the careful rise, pitch of their words, he'd feel his body pledging itself towards something between the two parties, take the few words his mind was able to 'hear' and select and keep the conversation going. 

He went on his first date a few weeks before he turned 16. Her name was Ann McPatrick. She was in the same Physics class as Charles Anthony at the James Kinderhook School in Northern California. She had brown hair that made it to just-above the base of her neck. Smart eyes, wellfed cheeks and so forth: a face he wanted to touch more & more as they stiffly made their simple banter and banalities.... He took her to the movies, with the plan to get some food and/or coffee afterwards.... Nothing beyond the predictable.... At coffee, with about two dozen related, semi-related, quasi-related, and utterly anti-tangential questions spread like a mushroom-shell in his puberty-saturated brain -- he took a few at random. 

"Do you think you'd ever want to be an astronaut?" 

She moved in the booth, a little closer to the wall. She did something with the silverware on the napkin. Her eyes stopped on the placemat. "I'd have to be incredibly sure about it first." 

"Yeah. That makes sense." He said, "I don't know. I get a lot of ideas. They come really fast so they don't always make sense." 

"It makes sense," she said, playing with the placemat. "I'm okay with math I'm just not really comfortable with it: you need to know those equations like you know your letters and shapes and I get a little..." 

Listening. "Stuck." 

"Yeah...like my brain freezes, and if I stay with one thing too long without going anywhere, either I skip around and get more lost, or I force myself to try to solve the problem and if I don't get it... Math makes me think sometimes that I need to talk to a therapist." 

He laughed at that. And she laughed at his laughter. 

The coffee arrived, and they ordered some food, and the conversation went generally, casually down the path of all things concerned with madness/insanity and the tenth grade and a little less than an hour later -- most of the food gone, the space filled with busy sweat and the little buzzing echoes of their remembered words -- Charles Anthony said, "You good?" "I'm good," and he called the waiter for their bill, paid it, so forth... 

They dated until the senior year of high school without serious incident. As graduation drew near, the notion of the relationship being permanent proved a somewhat damning obstacle. They'd had sex, many times, and she was giving and he was sensitive until it was time to be brave and aggressive; and they navigated, as partners, the social trials of being a couple in the world after Me, Too and (for lack of what else to call it) the Temporary Virginity Crisis looming, facetiously mocking over all of it...and each had something warmer than respect yet less-than the dopamine-shot of infatuation for the other... It was a sad, yet necessary day for both to acknowledge what had ended. 

They spoke, at infrequent intervals. In the hallways at school. Supermarkets, department stores. It was light,without being superficial. Abbreviated, without being hurried. 

He often masturbated to memories of her. 

He never saw her again after that year. 

****