Much has happened. I’m gonna need to use prose to move this along.
October 2nd was a typical Sunday. Woke up late, no time for a shower, went to church, went to work. I was getting used to the idea of working a piss poor job every weekend. But I had a few schemes. I ran them through my mind as I shelved worn books covered in plastic, touched by many hands. Trying to use ambition to get me through a boring day. Fiction MacCombe, Fiction Mead, Fiction Miller, Fiction Morrisso, does Mac go before Mc? I’ve forgotten again. Just look on the shelves for the established pattern. Then all of a sudden, a boy.
“Excuse me, ma’am, can you help me? See, I’m trying to apply for these grants and scholarships but I don’t really know what I’m supposed to do…”
He calls me ma’am because he knows I work there, not because he is young, though he most decidedly is. I know what he needs before he gets through the first sentence of his spiel, and I know that his efforts will likely be fruitless. He says something about the FAFSA, pronounced “fasfa.” Someone at some technical school has told him about it. His speech is hard, flavored with black culture but natural, not forced. He’s wearing oversized everything. I can see the markings of the top of an ornamented cross on his neck. He is freckled and blue eyed, and as young as he probably is, his facial expressions are boyish and pronounced. The adult, modern American version of Oliver Twist. I’m of little use to him, and I have a sneaking suspicion that his motives to come and find me are dubious. He doesn’t know how I old I am, nor how young I know he probably is. All in all he is a welcome diversion from the monotony, so I walk with him to his computer.
In my mind I’ve already resolved to be nice, but not to show any indication that he could actually “talk” to me. I don’t want him embarrassing himself. In my three years at the library I’ve seen many male approaches. Still, I respected him for having a legitimate reason for striking up a conversation. ”I saw you and I figured you’ve been to college,” he says. We look up websites for scholarships. I can see him eyeing me in my peripheral, so I know my instincts were right, yet again. I began to steel my resolve for the inevitable. On one website he starts to enter his age. At first I don’t even want to look. But I can’t help it. What year were you born? He uses the scroll menu, finds 1989. Selects it. It takes me a minute to do the math. Inside my soul laughs. My guard is now low enough for a kitty cat to walk past, b/c he’s already gotten like five strikes against him, 1 and 2/3 outs. ”He’s cute, I’ll give him that,” I thought. ”Maybe if I was still in high school.” My adolescent self apparently thought every boy who refused to wear their pants properly was a secret genius. The lady next to us suggests some of the giant scholarship books we have in the library. I know well where they are and he follows me to them.
“Can I tell you something?” Here it is, I think.
“Sure,” I say, not looking up from the shelves.
“You are like, gorgeous, for real,” he begins.
“What?!” I reply in playful disbelief. Not b/c I think me being gorgeous is old news or anything, I genuinely didn’t know exactly what he was going to say. He does this about two more times, once saying “I can’t believe you’re not married, are you married?”
“No,” I reply.
“How??”
“I’m as confused as you,” I say, without looking at him.
“So, when’s the last time you’ve been on a date?” he asks.
“Can’t remember,” I say, without looking at him. He gets back on the computer to look up scholarships specifically for Native Americans. ”Will you help me?” he asks. I agree. He says he is part Native American. He also tells me he has children and that he is on parole. All of this I take in stride; I have no intentions of judging him yet I also know this is absolutely the last time we will ever see each other. He shows me a picture of one of his children, he is enthusiastic. ”Do you have kids?” he asks. ”No,” I say. He is puzzled by this, I can sense it is mixed slightly with pity. His response makes me think. He shows me a picture of one of his brothers, who is lighter than me but still clearly African American. It intrigues me slightly. He starts to speak of his fascination with kids, which I at first thought was perhaps for my benefit but then realized it was sincere. I took a glance at him as he talked, so as not to be rude. I was surprised at how expressive his face was. His eyes were busying themselves with being blue. I did that nanosecond life thing that I think only women do, but I could be wrong. Thinking about my life spent looking back at those eyes. I considered my future husband, which at this point was merely a two dimensional ghost of a written list. In my mind I pencil in, under features, “blue eyes? freckles?” I know he is going to ask me out. I have to admit, he’s made an impression. I plan to be reluctant in saying no, even to tell him how cute he is, as a parting consolation.
I give him a book of grants and scholarship information to take home and ask if he has a library card. ”Will you help me get one?” he asks. I tell him they can help him at the desk. After there is no further reason for us to interact, he extends a lifeline. ”So, if I gave you my number, would you call it?”
As planned, I reluctantly said, “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
Quick tell him he’s cute! You like the freckles! My mind was unusually frantic, as if him letting him walk away before he knew that would be a lifelong regret. I said, “I mean… you’re cute and everything, but you’re just too young.”
He was indignant. ”How old are you?”
“Guess,” I said. ”28.” he said. I was surprised. I didn’t think he was prepared for me to be as old as I was. Later he told me he really wasn’t prepared, he was just swinging for the fences.
“Close,” I said. ”29.” He was undeterred.
“See I think that’s messed up, you never know I might be more mature than you.”
On and on he campaigned. By the end I was considering giving him a chance, not b/c what he was saying had particular merit– which it did– but mostly because I was clearly attracted to him. And he was very interested in me. To be honest, well…I won’t be graphic. But we’ll say I was starting to physically react to him. Okay? And we were just talking. About nothing. And even after he’d walked away, and I’d gone back to the m’s where I’d left off, I was smiley and giggly and reliving it and forming a narrative to tell my friends. From where I stood I could see him at the desk filling out his library card form. He could’ve easily spotted me, which I would’ve been okay with, but he never did. A few minutes went by. I started to wonder if he was ever coming back over. Suddenly I realized that the thought of me never seeing him again, or never having a reason to, was very depressing. But that was just my poor, underutilized ovaries talking, I reasoned. Besides, he seemed like the type to come back. Even if it wasn’t this afternoon. He’d be back. But I was suddenly not willing to wait to find out. The whole incident was notably different, and my mind dismissed it all as shock, a starving man’s reaction to sudden bread. I did my usual “calm down girl, this is the last thing you need,” meditation to myself, whenever important things in life start happening near me but nothing ever comes of it. It calmed me down a bit, I even started to forget about it a little.
“Wussup killa,” I hear behind me.
Really? This guy is for real.
I flashed him a smile that was part flirt and part thankfulness. I really was going to have something to talk about! He gave me a piece of paper with his name and number on it and said I should call it if I wanted to hang out or talk or whatever.
“Shouldn’t you be getting my number?” I asked. He explained that it’s better that I call him when I want, rather than him have the pressure of trying to reach me.
“You want to holler at me? You can call me.” I didn’t hate it. I respected it.
“Aiight,” I said, doing my best to be street. I spent the remaining hour thinking of how I would tell the story to Christina. And my mom! Good lord. Couldn’t wait to hear her reaction. When I first told them, it was purely for entertainment value. Not so much that he was this joke to me, but just that to me, to anyone I knew, he was the embodiment of trouble, and I knew the irony of it made a good story. I never hinted at any intentions I had to actually pursue the thing. I figured I still had the will power to at least help him with whatever he was pursuing, especially if I kept reciting those five strikes he had against him to myself. Still…I’d never been attracted to someone that fast, that easily, over so little. Trouble. My friends were enthusiastic though. ”Go for it, girl!” Christina said. When I told my mom she made me bust, not burst, out laughing. She was about to respond with her typical protective mother spiel, but then she sighed a sigh of aged wisdom and a knowing about life. ”Whatever,” she simply said. Marini chastised me particularly, for about…two hours, we talked. She’s dealing with a not quite exact but similar situation right now. Long story short, I started to rethink how I was approaching the entire scenario. The only thing that changed was how I thought about what I would inevitably do, which was call him.
I think that’s where I need to stop. It’s already way long and it’s taken me a few hours to get those last three paragraphs out, b/c we’ve been hanging out downstairs watching Netflix. I told him the entire blog was about him. He said, “nobody’s trying to read that long ass shit.” I simply said, somebody will.
Oh yeah. His name is Axel. As in “Axl” Rose. And yes, his mother specifically named him after Axl Rose. Except with an “e.”
End of part 1
Cheesus….