© Robert Vellani, 1999.

Cinnamon Girl

By

Robert B. Vellani

It would not, even at its edges, have given a creak. It could have carried us all across the sky, magically soaring over Westgate like in "Peter Pan". But, Elias rocked on Claire's old brass bed as if a flaming guitar burned at his knees. He wiggled and bowed like a pixie-ish spaghetti-spine devotee before the sacrifice, his flowing blonde hair crowning his head.

"I'm a Voodoo Chile. Lord knows, I'm a Voodoo Chile. I'm standing next to a mountain, knock it down with the back of my hand," Elias howled along with the booming stereo.

Claire laughed wildly as tears streaked her mascara. My jaw ached from my nervous frozen smile. I was afraid my face might shatter. I sat stoned in the over-stuffed reading chair beneath the Escher black light poster, near the bed.

"Christ, give us a break, man!" I said to Elias, attempting to control this bedlam.

"Oh, fuck off Daniel. Claire digs it", Elias answered. And she did.

"Dig, he's the Voodoo Chile, Daniel. Right Elias?" said Claire. She pulled her hair back behind he ears and smiles at me. She wore a chestnut brown tie-died v-neck T-shirt without a bra. I tried not to stare.

"Right on, baby," said Elias triumphantly.

The music blared from Claire's expensive stereo: the one with the electric blue illuminated tuner dial. Back then, was the best you could own.

I wish I could remember now what had brought me to this room. No angel appeared with the message that I could go no further unless I had passed through some fire. Certainly, the truth of it was there was a fire raging.

It was Friday night. When Elias told me to meet him here, I expected to find some mad scene swirling around him at its center. Instead, there was a house full of auto-workers playing euchre around the kitchen table, the air blue-washed with cigarette smoke. No one watched the blaring TV in the next room. There was a lull in game as the players inspected me. I saw a photo across the room with two little girls in it, holding a cake. A woman with her hair in curlers under a blue sheer scarf pointed down the hall.

"Are you in the play with him, too?" she asks.

"No, Ma'am." I turn my back on the card game. "I'm a friend of Elias Norwood. He's here isn't he?" I step forward.

"Oh. He's here." She says dryly, as Elias appeared behind her.

"It's alright, Doris," he says. His blue eye are bloodshot.

She turns and her smiles wanes.

"Y'all keep it down in there." She leaves us in the darkened hallway.

"God, who do you think you are?" I challenged Elias.

"The Voodoo Child! Man, I've driven my car on acid in the rain - all those brake light hovering and shimmering like flaming tongues. I can do that `cause I'm back from the dead."

"Go on," said Claire, only half serious.

"You've never seen it? My zipper?" said Elias with surprise.

"I've never seen you without your clothes," Claire allowed her hand to flutter around her face like a bashful silent film ingenue, as she spoke.

"Do you want to see it Daniel?" Elias' fingers were poised on his pearl snap buttons of his denim shirt.

"I don't want to see you with your clothes off," I said.

"No? Then who would you like to see without their clothes?" Elias slid off the bed and wrapped himself over Claire. As they scuffled, Elias caught my envious look.

"God, how much do you weigh?" said Claire, casting Elias off lightly, as if he were a bedsheet.

"Man, it was my motorcycle accident. Within an inch of my heart. That's how close I was to death. And I was five! Arms up. Flying down that slide at Westgate Park. Impaled on that motorcycle handlebar." Elias said.

Claire's eyes widened. "Wow," She said, drawing out the "O" as far as her breath would allow. I had to laugh.

"That's why I never grew," said Elias.

Elias loved to tell his near death experience, as if it granted him some exceptional insight into life. He coupled his accident to Bob Dylan's motorcycle crash.

"And it left me with this Frankenstein zipper." Elias laid his hands over his sternum. Then he reached out stiffly, like a monster and shook Claire by her shoulders. Claire fell backward, giggling at Elias' imitation. Then I remember it was my heart that led me here.

Elias swung from the halyard as if to snap the school's aluminum flagpole in two. We must have been twelve years old and partners on the school Safety Patrol. I was mortified as I stood watching him. When he touched ground and shoved his rope-burned palms in my face, he cried "You next." I grabbed the rope and shot the flag to the top and tied it down, then prayed no one had seen Elias's acrobatics. Yet, an hour later my Mom, still in her nurse's whites from midnight shift, stood in the school office pleading my innocence to Sister Mary Agnes. Mrs. Norwood, Elias's mom, swept into the office, and grandly collected her son, without a word of protest. Then, my mom jerked me out of the chair and dragged me to our car.

"But I just watched," I cried defensively.

"Listen, Daniel, boys like Elias, they can do things you can't, because've who they are." She coaxed the rough idling engine not to stall out.

"What do you mean?" I asked. Elias seemed no different than me. A death like rattle shook the car as the motor choked. She threw back her head, exasperated.

"They can afford to play by different rules. That's all. You're trusting, just like your father," she said.

The starter motor growled as she re-started the car and backed out of the school parking lot.

Elias and I arrived at Cardinal Newman High School in 1969, but soon fell in with different crowds. Elias drifted into the edgy freak crowd in suburban Westgate. At school, he wore a ratty champagne colored wig over his long hair. They wrote an article about it in the school paper. Everyone knew. I watched as some jocks pinned Elias to the cafeteria floor during third period and played catch with his wig. Maybe I should have done more. But Elias was living by his own rules again. Elias and I were in Civics Class the day of Kent State. Everyone besides us cheered the National Guard, but only Elias spoke out. All my resistance was on the inside, just as it was in war closer to home.

You never really see how your parents change. One day they seem happy: your head lies in your mother's lap as you feign sleep as you listen to their dreams. Soon, awakened by life, they find the other unrecognizable. They live against each other, working opposing shifts by choice. With all that time on his hands, my dad discovered new friends. I was left to deliver angry communiqués to either camp. I planned my escape from home and from the kids at Newman. I studied. My mind lifted me out of Westgate and it landed that fall in a small boarding school outside of Toledo with a full scholarship.

That changed everything. I was one among equals with these farmboy scholars. I remember smoking my first cigarette, a Marlboro 100, above the stage in the gym building in the luggage/storage room. I could let go in this new world. It was a new family; a gang of friends. We'd sneak off campus to drink in small rural bars down the road from school. I'd wear my hair long, play my guitar and sing the song of myself. That trouble back home, I'd forgotten it. No. I thought I'd slipped out from under all that weight.

Yet that life found me as my senior year began. My scholarship fell through and I disappeared into that same hole. Finally, I reappeared on the wide, marble staircase at Newman to the uncomprehending stares of those I had known. In leaving I'd lost what little connection I had. Now I was even more out of place. Indian summer extended into fall that year. A thick humid air gathered by noon in the gray sky as golden, burnt orange leaves dried and fell from the trees. My walk home from Newman left me sweaty and exhausted. Once inside my house I felt like an intruder in that quiet. All the furnishings seemed possessed in that gauzy white afternoon light, alone in my Mom's house.

I spent every afternoon, asleep on the sofa, while my stack of LP’s, recorded "live" barreled electric blues down the dull copper speaker wire. My dad now lived on the east side of town with another woman. When my Mom was home I sulked in my room, mourning the loss of my old friends, strumming my Gibson guitar. My Mom brooded in the kitchen listening to "Good Time Charlie's got the Blues" on the radio, smoking and drinking a Tom Collins from a tall frosted glass. When she got like this, my night ended by carrying her upstairs to bed.

"So, Elias tells me you're a wrestler," says Claire, smiling.

"Not really," I say. "I mostly lift weights and run laps in the halls after class." I'd tried out for the team. When we scrimmaged, I'd get pinned. It didn't matter. I loved the contact, the exercise, as if that salt water might wash away my sorrow.

"I told you Claire. Daniel is your stage door Johnny," said Elias as Claire laughs.

"What?" I said, now suddenly alone.

"He's been spying on you during rehearsals." Elias waved his finger at me as if I were a naughty boy.

"I saw you once," I say, not to sound desperate. One day the empty auditorium's stage was lit when we thundered by. Between laps, flushed with sweat, I saw some student actors on stage through the small glass window in the door. I recognized Elias. He walked through a dance routine on stage with a girl I'd never seen at Newman. She was long and full with shoulder length auburn hair. As they moved, she laughed and stamped her feet, when she missed a step. It was Claire.

"As long as you didn't hear me singing..." Claire says to me.

Elias pulled the record cover from under the bed and opened it. He took his Ezy Widers and the seeds rolled into the center crease with ease. My eyes were fixed on Claire. Up close she's tomboy pretty, with the power of a farm girl. Her arms are thin and long, her hands delicate, yet her nails are chewed down to the quick.

"You’re singing just fine. Quit worrying." Elias says, then sings, "I am seventeen going on eighteen..." and Claire joins in with, "I am sixteen going on seventeen," then finished in slow harmony, "I'll take care of you."

"You want a beer, Daniel?" she smiles as she says my name.

"Think you can get some from your Mom?" Elias asks her.

"I think I can." Claire rises and leaves the room.

Elias rolls a joint, and he looks up at me and says, "What did you tell your Mom?"

Since my return to Westgate, Elias had been calling my house. My Mom carefully monitored who called, where I went at night and with whom. I'd been ducking Elias at Newman, not wanting to complicate my life. But after I saw him with Claire, I sought him out.

"I thought you'd forgotten who I was," Elias said, as I waited under the hall clock near his locker.

"No. Sorry I didn't call," I said.

"Man, you want some of these?" Elias removed his hand from his pocket full of tiny blue pills. "They're my Mom's prescription. They don't do anything when you first take them but the next day you feel awesome."

I asked him about Claire.

"What are you doing tonight?" he asked.

Elias was so reviled at Newman, I didn't want to be seen with him. The bell for my next class was about to ring.

"I'll call you," I said.

"I don't want you running around with Elias Norwood," proclaimed my Mom.

That afternoon as I approached our house, I'd seen my Dad drive off in his black Impala. Once inside I found my Mom in tears and fixing a drink.

"I'm not doing anything with Elias Norwood." I lied.

"Then why did he call and leave you this." She waved a small white sheet from our message pad in my face. "You're two of a kind you and your father," she said. She lit a cigarette. "Neither of you can lie for the life of you." She crumpled the paper and left it on the table and took her drink and the ashtray into the living room.

I never knew what to expect when I got home. I pocketed the note and joined her in the living room. Neither of us spoke. I sat and watched her anger drain into her frosted glass.

"Tonight that youth group meets downtown at the Cathedral. You might meet some nice kids there," Mom said. She'd clipped an article out of the Catholic Times the week before and left it taped to a Tupperware container of soup in our refrigerator. The article told of folksongs and bull sessions with teens from all over the city. It did sound better than my room.

"You have to do something with yourself." she said after a pause. "He had too much time alone and he didn't stay true. To himself or me. I see you in every boy who's on my floor at Mount Carmel." She was looking right in my eyes. "You don't know how far you can be led astray. They'll reel you in like a fish. And, they'll talk you into doing things...I just cannot warn you about. that's your father, too". She stubbed out her cigarette and shook the ice in her drink. It sound like the pills in a brown plastic container on her hospital ward.

I was sorry for my Mom, at home alone in the afternoon, drinking. I hated her confidences. All it gave me was an acid-y stomach, too rich moments of reliance, as I thought of ways to please her. Later, up in my room, I decided to go to the Cathedral.

Downtown was empty. I was surprised to see the Nixon re-election headquarters active. No one went back downtown after dark. The heart raced as I imagined what might happen. It would be tonight: I'd meet a mystery girl. She'd have a real family, one that lived in a nice neighborhood. We'd date, fall in love. Her parents would love my Mom, and me too. It was that first crisp October night so the sweetest of all possibilities drifted on the chilled air. She'd hear me, this mystery girl, play my guitar and sing. "I wanna live with a Cinnamon Girl/ I could be happy, for the rest of my life/ with a Cinnamon Girl". It would break her heart. I'd reveal my exotic past, how I once attended a boarding school, and like a storybook character, "step inside, open wide, it's The Loner".

Bright landscape lights glared against St. John's Cathedral's burnt yellow sandstone. It was dark behind the stained glass. As I pulled around back, I imagined a gang of kids hanging out, waiting for friends - new friends like me. I passed once and saw no one. In my excitement, I was too early to make the stunning entrance I planned. As I circled the empty City Hall and the grand Loews Movie Theater, I questioned my nerve to barge in on this group and make them want to be my friends.

I drove back, parking several blocks away on the street. A well-dressed couple - same age as my parents - got out of a cab in front of the Sheraton Hotel. My mom was wrong. My suede hippie boots resounded off the cold concrete. I could keep my word. I knew who I was.

No one was there. I circled the Cathedral several times in hopes that someone else might wander over. Finally, I went to the only door that could have led to the basement at the bottom of a short stairwell. The Teens Encounter Christ had met last Friday. A police car prowled by. I stepped quickly back to my car, angry for letting my hopes get so high and angry about my Mom's prodding me. I felt transparent: everyone in Westgate knew what an imbecile I was. Elias Norwood would never make this mistake. I was going to do something, damnit. I found a phone booth. I read the number under the halo florescent light. My thin dime slipped from my damp palm. I was too alone, so picked up my dime and dialed. Elias and I would be friends, no matter where that friendship led.

Elias sparks the match and lights the joint.

"Is Claire your girlfriend?" I ask nonchalantly.

"She's not my girlfriend," he says, and I'm caught in his gaze as he passes the joint. Tonight was the only time I'd ever smoked dope. Although uncomfortable with the ritual, I take the joint in my hand and draw in the sweet smoke. A seed explodes and sparks stream into my lap. I pop up to brush them out just as Claire returns with three Blue Ribbons.

"Daniel wants to know if you're my girlfriend," says Elias dryly.

"Boys don't mean anything to me," she says, lightly, as it were self-apparent. Each of us take a beer. She's tall enough to fit right under my arm if my arm were around her. She takes the joint from me, hits on it, then reverses it in her mouth and places her hands on Elias' shoulder. A wave of smoke billows out that Elias inhales. His head rocks back and his eyes close as he drifts away. She turns to me and I do exactly what Elias did. As she leans on my shoulders, I notice she's freckled. But I spin away quickly, too full of smoke. I cough loudly, and take a swig of my beer, spilling some on my lap.

Claire passes the joint back to Elias and starts another record. A woman soprano sings from the speakers about her "old man" accompanied by only spare piano chords.

"What were you up to earlier tonight?" Elias asks.

"Nothing. Something downtown, that's all," I say. I turn to Claire and ask, "Is that your sister in that photo in the living room." She and her sister, older I imagine, are caught, freeze frame, holding a vanilla-iced sheet cake baring a Valentine's Day heart.

"Yeah, she's living in Colorado..." Claire answers.

"Man, that's a picture you always see in someone's house," says Elias sarcastically. "It's there at the center of everything, on top of the TV, or by the ashtray on the end table, near Dad's chair. There's all the kiddies smiling out at you on Christmas, or little sister's birthday party. Those kids have outgrown the bright paper party hats. Daddy's little girl..."

Claire turns away from Elias, so he turns to me, without losing a beat.

"And Mommy's little man. Shit. They've long since been those amazing little wonders. They've grown up, man. They carry the same stink as the adults now. Shit Daniel. How many times did I get the cold shoulder from you cause Mommy says you can't come out and play?"

I lit a cigarette from Elias' pack on the floor to break his gaze.

"But, our parents keep those pictures, to prove to themselves that once it was different."

"Christ, don't be a downer," says Claire. "Leave him be."

"Sure, he's just a pussy that way." Elias rises to use the bathroom.

Stung by Elias's words, I sat and smoked. The singer wished for a river she could sail away on. It was late, but I couldn't leave after that. Even if my mom worried, I had to prove my independence. Claire removed a notebook covered with a cut-up collage of photos. She opened it. Its pages are tightly packed with colored pen drawings and poetry. I try to read but I cannot concentrate on the words.

"I don't know any poets," I say.

Claire fans through the pages, a quick blur of color, then finds what she wants. She reads: " What is life, you ask. What is death, you ask. She says its all a dirty task, they take it from you fast, for tomorrow never asks, the question you know today".

"My sister got me started on this. It helps me keep track of where I'm going," Claire says.

Elias returns and rolls another joint. Our talk rambles onto the high plains of philosophy. Elias pontificates on the travels of Siddartha.

"Dig, he was the original love child. He had a real trip!"

"Where are you going?" Claire asks of me.

"He just got back, baby," Elias answers for me.

"No, man. I want to go "further". I proclaim, having read it in a book.

I trace Claire's smile as it slowly unfolds. "Further than what?" she asks.

"He wants to go further than downtown," says Elias, as he fires up the newest joint.

"It's like Colorado, " I said. Then I said it again. "All those "O’s" , you can hear the freedom in the word."

"God. The both of you! Go on. There's plenty to do right here," declared Elias. We smoked this one down. Another record went on, this time slow blues-y music. Claire got up to use the bathroom. I watched her hip-hugging jeans, as she left.

"She's groovy, huh?" says Elias.

"Yeah...she's got a good head," I replied. She was unlike any Newman girl. She stole my heart.

"You want to ball her?" asks Elias.

"What? Knock it off," I said.

"Shit, Daniel, it's not this big deal if she likes you. You like her?"

"Yeah, I like her. She's cool."

"Should we ask her about it." Elias says.

Claire returns. "What should you ask me?"

"Oh, man. You are too high. Nothing Claire," I say finally.

Elias stares at me. Claire extends her arm to Elias. "C'mon. Let's dance."

He rises and they dance slowly as I watch them. Elias puts his face behind Claire's. He's whispering to her, but I've melted into the chair, lost in the music. I imagine I've gone further, day-tripping down the streets of Haight-Asbury in a sunshine, with my arm around Claire.

I nodded off, because when I awake, Elias hovers over me, his shirt open. I see the thick red ridge of his zipper scar.

"She wants to dance with you, now," Elias says. He steps away and Claire reaches her hand out to me. I rise to take her hand. I can no longer tell if I'm in my skin, if perhaps my vibrating bones are still glued to the chair. As I float over to the brass bed, I feel Elias hands undoing my belt and pants. Claire steps back and removes her shirt in one motion. Her skin is freckled ivory. My pants drop to the floor as I step out of them. Elias is naked from the waist down. Claire wraps her arms around me, as I squirm out of my underwear. Her luminous body touches mine. Elias sits cross legged in the chair. I feel slippery, as if trying to swim upstream. My stomach muscles ripple as I feel a wave pass beneath the skin where Claire touches me. Claire rises above me and guides me in. I catch hold of that heat, that power. I hear Elias moaning from the chair. I rise to meet her each time, gliding like a fish. I try to stroke, but I drown all too quickly. I untangle Claire's hair from my face. Elias sits with his open palm full of semen, smiling. I roll back.

I awake with a start in the brass bed alone. Elias is gone. I hear Claire and her mother arguing in the hallway. Her mother pushes past Claire and into the room.

"You get dressed. And get out of here." She's dressed in a house robe.

I'm almost dressed, when Claire's Dad fills the doorway, in boxer shorts and tank top T-shirt.

"You wait right here," he commands me.

Dogs are barking all over the neighborhood. I feel Claire's Dad, beer-y breath on my back as we stand on the dark front porch. Deep in the house a light comes on. My Mom appears at the door and from behind the glass, she knows. I witness this harangue over me, but it sounds like dialogue from comic book balloons. They trade accusations about Claire and me. I cannot look at either of them. I'm told to go in the house. As I do so, I smell the starched white antiseptics on her uniform.

I come back downstairs about twenty minutes later. All I can make out in the living room is the dull orange glow as she draws on her cigarette. I want to apologize. I stand in the doorway; she knows I'm there.

"I'm calling your father in the morning. You can live with him."

"I know it meant something to you, cause it meant something to me."

I was about to cry. I sat in my car in the early morning rain with Claire. I'd taken the bus back to her house to get my car and I tapped on her window and she came out to join me.

"Look, you don't understand. I can't live with my dad. We can do this together". I'd constructed a fail safe plan. Claire and I would run away to Colorado. Live with her sister. I'd play my guitar. We'd live on a commune: we'd go "further" together.

"No. I doesn't mean what you think," she said, her face distracted, almost angry, "you've got to go. I'm not supposed to see anyone." She almost reached out to touch my hand, but she quickly got out of the car, before I tried to touch her once more, and ran barefooted back to her house.

There was no place left for me to go but my dad's. It was for the best. I couldn't live with my Mom's anger, the two of us alone in the house. But I didn't stay long at my dad's. I needed to escape Westgate and I did. Against everything I might have known, I ran away. And I did indeed get further out there. I drifted across the Far West, drifting through years of misadventures. I still have the pictures, from some of it. But my exile finally ended after all those years and I returned to Westgate to reclaim myself. Even though there was a fire-wall between me and my past, news did filter through: I heard Claire's sister had died.

At the funeral mass, I stood in the back of the church. Claire's family sat in the first row. As I looked around the congregation I saw Elias Norwood, in a dark suit, with short cropped hair. When they rolled the casket up the aisle, and the mourners filed out, I caught Elias's eye. He failed to recognize me. I wanted to ask him about those olden days. But, as Claire walked past, I knew that nobody remembers anything right.