Feels Like the First Time (13 page)

Instead, I took the coward’s way out. I buried my head in the sand and hoped fate would save me. With the trip just a few days away, no divine intervention had emerged, and it was too late to change anything, so I was preparing to go.

With all that on my plate, I knew I would never be able to get plenty of rest like the doctor had said. I took the antibiotics and muddled through the best I could.

Graduations are a bittersweet occasion anyway, but strep throat made mine impossible to enjoy. Standing in the fading sunshine outside our school gymnasium with the twenty-seven other graduates of Mossyrock High School class of ’78 took the wind out of our sails. There seemed to be a common look in all our eyes: we were scared to death. Just a few days earlier, we had all been anxious as hell for this moment to arrive so we could find our destinies. Now, on the eve of that happening, it seemed that we would have preferred the hallowed halls of Mossyrock High. At least, that was how I felt.

That wasn’t an option though, so we were nervously preparing to go through with the ceremony. Several of the boys in the class had bragged they were going to graduate without wearing pants underneath their robes, but all of us were fully clothed. As we entered, we wished we were wearing anything other than heavy graduation robes. Inside the gym it felt as hot as surface of the sun.

During the thirteen years we had gone through the Mossyrock educational system, we hadn’t been the most unified class. But on this night we were the model of solidarity. As we marched into the gym, at least a few of us were solemnly singing, “graduate, graduate, dance to the music” to the tune of Three Dog Night’s
Celebrate.

My primary focus was to make it through the ceremony without passing out again. I’m happy to say I accomplished that modest goal. I even managed to snag a couple of scholarships and made it to the podium and back without tripping over my robe.

As I walked to the podium to get my diploma, I looked out over the packed audience. I saw Mom and my step-dad, my sister Terri, and, toward the front, Dawn and my nephew Tommy, cheering loudly.

I could feel my perspective changing. I looked at Dawn and my throat tightened and tears welled in my eyes. Since I was leaving first for Alaska and then the University of Washington, it was hard to imagine what was next for us. I didn’t want anything to change. I had been so happy being with Dawn these past months. But, change rarely asks permission before arriving.

At that moment, Tommy must have said something funny to Dawn, because the concerned look on her face changed into her sunny smile, and everything was right with the world again.

When the ceremony was over, Terri threw me the keys to her brand new Lincoln Continental.

“Bring her back in one piece, okay?” As cool as it was to have Dawn beside me in a shiny new Lincoln with a full tank of gas, and as much as I would have liked to party until the early morning hours, I was so sick I was home in bed by 10 PM.

I spent the next day packing for my flight to Alaska. Our flight left early in the morning. Since it took two hours to drive from Mossyrock to Sea-Tac Airport, we had to leave well before sunrise.

Of course, Dawn and I spent that last day together. That night, Dawn and I sat in our side yard again just as we had so many times before. This time, there was a knot in my stomach, and sadness behind our smiles. Finally, after staying out as late as we could, I walked her to her door. With one last lingering kiss, she was gone. Watching her front door close softly behind her, I felt so alone. Since our magical night at Hollywood Hollywood, we had only grown closer, but that was the moment our separation felt real.

Jerry’s mom was going to be pulling into the driveway to pick me up in just a few hours. But I had no intention of trying to sleep. Instead, I sat at our kitchen table and got out one of my school notebooks. I wrote to Dawn with songs. It’s always been the language that expressed my feelings best.

The first thing I did was write out a list of the songs we had listened to over the preceding months. Naturally, a simple listing of our important songs was not enough for me. Beside each song I wrote a note–where we were when we first heard the song, why I loved it, or why it would make me think of her forever.

Then, I tore out some sheets of notebook paper and stapled them along three sides, leaving just the top open. I wrote the lyrics from Heatwave’s
Always and Forever
on the front and slipped the 45 we had danced to on Prom night inside.

I did the same thing with Peter, Paul and Mary’s version of John Denver’s
Leaving on a Jet Plane,
which felt completely appropriate to me
.

I took the two records, the list of songs, and some bad poetry I had written since we’d been a couple, and put them together. I slipped quietly across the yard and passed under her bedroom window. I left everything on the top step of her front porch. I knew she would find it first thing the next day.

I was completely miserable. I had a strong premonition that I would lose her forever if I left. Jerry had been my best friend for ten years, and we’d been planning this trip and all the fun we were going to have for so long, there was no way I could let him down either.

Long before sunrise, I was waiting with my suitcase on my front porch when Jerry and his Mom drove quietly into my driveway. With no sleep at all and a heavy heart, I set off on what had once seemed like the adventure of a lifetime.

We flew into Anchorage, changed planes, and got on a puddle jumper that flew us to Kodiak. We thought my brother Mick was going to meet us and take us to the boat, where we were going to be working. But when we got off the plane at the tiny airport, we couldn’t find him.

We made our way to the harbor and even managed to find the boat we were supposed to be staying on. There were only two small problems. The boat was in dry-dock, and there was still no Mick. By then it was getting late. I hadn’t slept in two days and we were exhausted. We climbed aboard the boat, found a bunk and crashed.

We tracked Mick down the next day and he told us there had been some problems with the boat we had planned to work on for the summer, leaving it in dry-dock. Mick needed to make money, so he signed on with a different boat, one with no jobs and no room for us on that boat. The good news was that he said it was alright for us to crash on the dry-docked boat for a while.

Jerry and I had $95 between us, our leftover booty from graduation. That was no small sum in 1978, but we knew our funds wouldn’t hold out long. We needed to find employment in a hurry. We were going broke, living on a small boat with no power or running water. We could afford to feed ourselves for three or four more days, if we were careful.

The next day, we found work at a fish processing plant. It was every bit as exciting as it sounds. Jerry and I were the only non-Filipinos working at the fish processing plant. We quickly learned to cuss in Tagalog or whatever dialect they were speaking. The only English words the other workers spoke were “hey, fish” and it’s polar opposite “ho, fish.” Each phrase could mean a wide variety of things, depending on the circumstances.

The trip had gone nothing like we planned. Still, if I hadn’t been so head-over-heels in love with Dawn, it could have been another grand adventure for Jerry and me. But, I was obsessed with Dawn, and I grew more miserable every day. Asleep or awake, she was all I could think about.

After a few days, I skipped a meal and used the money to call her. The long distance rates from Alaska to Washington were about a dollar a minute, so I knew we couldn’t talk long. I was hoping the comfort of hearing her voice would ease my mind. Instead, the sound of her voice on the other end of the line made me feel worse. The mature, reasonable thing to do would have been to bite the bullet, repress my feelings, and continue to work at the fish processing plant until something better came along. I was neither mature nor reasonable.

On the eighth day of our trip, we were at the Kodiak library for a free screening of
Blazing Saddles
. It was the ideal movie to take our mind off our troubles. Halfway through, I leaned over and whispered to Jerry, “I’m leaving.”

He looked at me with confusion, and I realized he wasn’t sure I meant that I was leaving the screening or leaving Alaska. But I didn’t care. I got up and left my friend in the darkness. I was packed and ready to go by the time Jerry returned to the boat. I was planning on catching the last ferry back to Seward on the mainland, and then hoped to catch a ride back to Anchorage and a flight home.

I tried to talk Jerry into coming home with me, but he had no interest in bailing on our adventure. Although he was doing his best to understand, he was miffed that I was deserting him like this. He told me so and he was completely right. We talked for hours on the boat that night about our hopes and dreams. It would be the last meaningful conversation we would have for many years.

I quickly ferried to the mainland, caught up with Mick’s wife in Seward, and talked her into giving me a ride into Anchorage. I turned my end-of-summer ticket into a right-now ticket, and I was winging my way back to Seattle several months ahead of schedule.

When I touched down, I called Terri at work and asked her if she would mind picking me up at the airport so I could go to her house and take a shower. It had been a week since I had seen either hot water or a bar of soap. I definitely felt sorry for the people sitting next to me on the flight home. Terri, being the best big sister ever, dropped everything she was doing, picked me up at the airport, and took me to her house so I could shower and wash my clothes. Then she went the extra 100 miles and gave me a ride all the way to Mossyrock.

It was early evening by the time we got home. I was so fired up to see Dawn I almost couldn’t stand it. But, I couldn’t just stroll across the yard and knock on Dawn’s front door. I sent Tommy over to Dawn’s first, to talk with her and to commiserate over my long absence that summer. After he was inside for a few minutes, I slipped behind the wheel of the Vega and gave my world-famous–in my own mind–
Love Gun
rat-a-tat-tat on my horn. This was always my subtle way of letting Dawn know I was home.

Dawn threw her front door open and scrambled down the porch steps, wanting to see who had the nerve to play a practical joke on her. The angry look on her face gave me the impression that she tore outside to kick somebody’s butt. However, when she saw me, she sprinted across the yard and flew into my arms. I held her fiercely for a long, quiet moment, and everything was right again.

Tommy, Dawn and I walked across the yard and stepped inside the house to see Colleen. But I was caught off guard by her cold glare. For some unknown reason, she was angry at me.

I couldn’t have known what she saw from her perspective–the boy next door cancelling his summer plans simply to spend time with her young daughter. In the end, Colleen’s opinion wasn’t important to me. Nothing seemed important now that I was in Dawn’s presence again, soaking her in.

Colleen overwhelmed me with questions. She wanted to know why I was home again so soon after leaving for the entire summer. She wanted to know what my plans were now that I was home. The answers seemed obvious, and I didn’t have anything to add. I think Dawn was a little surprised by her mom’s reaction as well, but she didn’t pay her any attention.

“Dawn. Shawn. I want to let you know that things are going to be different now. We’ve been much too lenient with you, but that’s going to change.”

We listened in silence.

“There are rules to be obeyed, and if they aren’t there will be consequences. Do you understand that? You will be seeing less of each other. You will have curfews, and if you miss them, you won’t be allowed to see each other at all.”

I nodded numbly. Dawn glared at her. The three of us headed outside to hang out together. The overwhelming elation at seeing Dawn began to feel hollow. I had graduated, was preparing to leave for college and had plenty of freedom. Dawn was getting ready to enter her sophomore year. She was under the complete control of her parents.

Between ourselves, Dawn and I considered ourselves to be equals. To the rest of the world, we weren’t. This discrepancy between how we saw ourselves and how others perceived us would lead to one difficulty after another. 

Instead of spending June on a crab boat in the Aleutian Islands, I was landlocked yet completely adrift in Mossyrock. I had quit my job working on the farm, since I had planned on being gone for two months. It turned out that horse manure waits for no man, so there was no job waiting for me when I returned. I was broke and unemployed, but happy to be back with Dawn.