All things related to writer Kevin Keck
Look, if you don’t like dirty words, don’t listen to this. Don’t even be tempted by the salacious tales of sordid sexual rapture! Go here instead. If you want the full audio notes, you can find that here.
This brief excerpt from my book AYTG?IM.K. references events that took place twenty years ago this week. And it’s also available as a PDF should you prefer it.
* * *
I graduated high school on Saturday, June 1, 1991. A local television reporter who was comfortable speaking with the odd delay/echo of the PA system in the football stadium gave the commencement address. It was clear by his delivery that this wasn’t his first time speaking at a graduation, and afterward I watched him casually accept an envelope from the principal and then light a cigarette at the edge of the track that ringed the football field.
After I’d shed my cap and gown I spent the better part of two hours procuring five cases of Busch Light and two fifths of George Dickel Old No. 8 and then drove with my friend T.C. south along Highway 9 all the way to Myrtle Beach.
The week prior to graduation, Jimmy Robinson, a guy who stocked shelves and bagged groceries with me at Galaxy Food Mart, imparted this gem of wisdom: “Man, if you go to Myrtle Beach and don’t get laid, then just don’t come back. Shameful.”
I didn’t know if Jimmy was full of shit or on the level. I had a lot riding on the possibility of getting laid. I’d only had two sexual partners at that point in my life, and I’d yet to have an orgasm with a woman at all. My first two encounters were abysmally mismanaged—I had no clue what I was doing, and I’m not really sure that my partners did either. Or perhaps sex with me was traumatizing to the point that they knew there was no hope: I was a bad fucker.
T.C. and I had beachfront rooms waiting for us at the Paradise Inn. Since the summer of 1991 it has become a standard policy of mine to refuse lodgings at a place that advertises itself as Eden-esque. Our room resembled the type of cell in which political prisoners are executed with a small caliber weapon. The exception was that we had a mini-fridge, though it didn’t even hold a twelve-pack.
I stayed there a single night, woke to a cold, brown shower in the morning, and then took my share of the Busch to the Hampton Inn. It was a block off the beach, but they offered a continental breakfast and a heated pool. Also, it was the only hotel with a vacant room that week.
Several friends with whom I’d graduated were also staying at the hotel, though only three of them—Jeremy and Brent and John—were people I’d actually consider close friends. Everyone else was what I might describe as first cousin friends—people who were glad to see you at a party, but they didn’t necessarily think to call and tell you it was happening.
We were all out on the beach Monday afternoon, indiscreetly drinking beer that was sweating in a Styrofoam cooler. These were the movers and shakers of my class—Megan, Elizabeth, Tessa, John, Kim, Jason T., and Laurie (who had actually graduated the year before but who wasn’t one to shy away from a good week of partying). You probably know the same names, the same types—kids who inherited beauty and wealth and the knowledge of proper forks, or at least a little class of some sort. They usually all played a sport or were on the homecoming committee or were class president. Why was I with them? I was the son of people who didn’t have indoor plumbing until well into their teens—I was a few steps from being on the right side of the tracks yet. As proof, that afternoon on the beach Megan looked at me and said:
“Kevin, why are you wearing jeans?”
Everyone within earshot paused and looked in my direction; even in the sun’s glare I could tell it was a question that had been on their tanned minds—most of these kids lived on the lake; my house was built in a field that had been a cow pasture for the previous century. But I was nonplussed. I said:
“Hey, don’t you watch Magnum, P.I.?” I was a huge Magnum fan, and for some reason I thought it was cool how he sometimes wore jeans on the beach, as if to say, I don’t dress for geography; I dress how I feel.
No one said anything, and then I began to laugh, and then everyone laughed, and someone said, “Keck, come on. We need another player for volleyball.” I leapt up and dusted the sand off my jeans. I was at least blessed with the gift of self-deprecation, and pitiful as it sometimes is, it has endeared me to plenty of people in crucial situations.
We spent the rest of the day on the beach, our heads hot and heavy from the beer and the sun. At some point I shed my jeans and lay on a towel in my boxers. When I was in high school I was constantly taking off my pants or whipping out my dick at parties. I was that guy. And of course it never got me anywhere because I was afflicted with a terrible compass when it came to finding my way with women. The presence of my dick in the middle of a conversation was greeted with a mix of revulsion and amusement, and often times downright hilarity when I attired it with a onion ring around the head, acting out the mating ritual bit from the Coneheads on Saturday Night Live. But there seemed to be genuine disappointment on the beach that day when my wiener did not emerge to look for its shadow. The facades of proper behavior were on holiday, and half drunk, half asleep, I could hears the waves of possibility crashing ever closer.
My second night at the Hampton Inn, Brent and I went down to the vending machine. I’ve forgotten our exact purpose in descending to the first floor vending area, but whatever it was it led to some sort of debate about the selection I’d made. We were standing there going back and forth when two girls walked past, and then stopped and stood there staring at us. Brent I looked back at them:
“Hey,” one of them said.
“Hey,” I said. Or Brent may have said it. It doesn’t matter because the girls said:
“What floor you on?”
“Four. You?”
“Three. Room three sixteen.”
“We’ll remember that. We’re four twenty.” Brent said.
“You’re nearly on top of us already,” one of the girls said.
And that was it.
When Brent I returned to the room the lights were out and there was a lot of giggling and laughter, and then the lights would turn on suddenly, girls would scream, and the lights would go back out. There were only two girls in the room: Tessa and Laurie. Tessa was a fierce looking girl who’d been on the softball team. She was trying to work it with every guy in there (except for me; I’d already spurned her on the back of a bus during a church youth trip) and no one was having it. When the lights were out she was thrusting guy’s hands onto her shirt; I couldn’t see but occasionally I’d hear John or Brent go, “Tessa, stop making me touch your titty!”
At one point the lights went on and there on the floor was Laurie with Jeremy’s prick out, a can of beer poised over it. Then everyone screamed, the lights were out again, and amongst the giggles and laughter were the distinct sounds of slurping.
The next night I would hook up with one of the girl’s from the vending area, a sweet dirty blond named Elizabeth who was nineteen and from Buffalo, New York. She had a younger sister who had just gotten a pet turtle, and she worried again and again about reptiles and salmonella. She was only the third girl with whom I’d had sex, but the first to talk like the girls in the pornos I’d watched. Oh, the things she said to me those two glorious nights where our bodies were the lathes upon which the moon’s bright edges were sharpened, filling the heavens with our sparks!
Well, not quite. It was really a mess. She had a clue, I didn’t, but that time with her is as clear in my mind as waking beside her yesterday, and so where is she now, with those wet words, and whom does she welcome with them? When she and her friends left at the end of that week to return to Buffalo, she gave me her address and I kept it for years. I never wrote, and in one of those dramatic attempts to break with the past that cause people to throw away love letters and yearbooks, her address got tossed out with a box of other mementos that I felt had outlived their usefulness. I can’t count the times has my heart broken over that lost address, and not because I have any romantic notion of what might have been, but rather because I want to know what is. That brief intersection with Elizabeth from Buffalo fundamentally altered the trajectory of my life. Up until then the whispering voices in my dreams had me ready to bind myself to the mast, but her song of flesh was too sweet and wondrous and I came unlashed. I’m quite certain I did nothing of the sort for her. I think I believed that I would see her again, perhaps the following summer, but how can you ever know the final moment until after the moment has passed?
Elizabeth and I were going to use the bed in my room our first night together, but Jeremy and Laurie were already romping upon it, and so we diverted to the shower. But in that sliver of light from the hall that raced across the bed I saw Laurie’s tennis-perfect legs spread beautifully, and I would never see her again.
I am interested in those occasions when we become aware of doors opening, everything sweet and sacred when you finally understand the fragility of each moment, the possibility for tenderness or terror at each click of the second hand, but, dear God, how can you live like that? It’s impossible to have that much love for the world, because then you too would stand outside the tomb of every heart, weeping consecrated tears but without the power to undo what has been written, and yet it is equally holy to watch the final door swing heavily upon its hinges, dousing our little patch of desire, steel bolts sliding shut.
I know how it ended for Laurie. It happened just a few miles from where I’m sitting now, at an intersection I pass though at least a dozen times a week. It’s a common enough ending: she didn’t look because she had the protected left turn, but her stereo was on and thus she didn’t hear the sirens of the ambulance carrying the heart-attack victim to the hospital. He was 79; she was 20, and she died right there, and his story amazingly kept on going for a while. But here’s the uncommon aspect, the twist no writer can invent: the ambulance driver was the father of Erin Monthail, the girl to whom Jeremy had lost his virginity while Van Morrison’s Moondance played through on cassette, flipping over several times as Jeremy would later point out . But Laurie could not have known that, could not have been surprised at the collision of events and metal that marked her end, and what is similarly strange is the handful of people who know that peculiar quirk to her story. I doubt too many of them reflect on it with any regularity, or possibly they don’t remember, but I do, and I am unable to fully explain why I must attest to this and other eccentricities of fate. Can God worry so meticulously over the human affairs that momentarily unite the threads of various narratives—including my own—so that some design seems to briefly materialize? Whenever I hear any song from Moondance I am flooded with remembrances, only one of which I actually witnessed: Erin on her knees in her house, alone with Jeremy and taking his prideful member in her already well practiced mouth, the bare moon glowing through the sliding glass doors that framed their silhouettes; and there is the image of the light flashing on momentarily as Laurie pours beer over Jeremy’s erect cock on the hotel floor, her cry of surprise mixed with laughter and hoots from the spectators on the beds; then there is the surreal scene of an ambulance smashing mercilessly into a small foreign car of indeterminate origin, fragile as the hollow bones of birds.
Sometimes memory is the only act of faith I can manage.
I think this was meant for one of my books. The last line alludes to Cicero (however please correct me on that if I’m wrong). I don’t know what else I might do with it, so here it is:
But I’d renounced that life and decided to forage down the same road that everyone takes: the golden road to unlimited capital accumulation. Well, not exactly like that, of course. I have a degree in poetry; clearly I am a man lacking ambition. I can speak the Esperanto of analogies and gleefully compare my nightly color to Hamlet, which means that I own a futon and an acoustic guitar and little else. I won’t be buying a BMW anytime soon, just mixing my own little portion into the GNP with that intangible commodity of education. Let the accountants dwell in the house of feasting; a wise heart is a sad place.
