Note: This story was dynamically reformatted for online reading convenience.
 
 15 ...you don't really want to know just how far its gone, just leave well
enough alone...  Dirty Laundry (Don Henley)
   The grass in the complex seemed especially fertile that summer, pushing
up out of the earth at what felt like a ridiculous rate.  I was mowing some
part of the grounds almost every other day, pausing once in a while as Rose
brought me ice water or lemonade.  Part of the time I saw her watching me
mow, keeping her eye on my shirtless circuit of the grounds, but there were
long chunks of time when she was off by herself.  It didn't take me long to
learn she had been going to my room to listen to my music.  On an
especially humid evening a couple of weeks before school started, she
showed me what she had been doing all that time she was alone with my
tapes; she had been organizing them for me, cleaning up and matching
cassettes to cases, re-labeling the dubbed ones and cataloging everything.
She had created a mix tape, and she used both the tape and a tennis racket
to put on an air guitar show.  I sat on the common room couch and watched
her prance and caress the "guitar" through a set that consisted of the
Stones' "Gimme Shelter" (crackling with tension), Cheap Trick's Budokan
version of "I Want You To Want Me" (necessarily calling to mind thousands
of preteen Japanese girls who were all dying (dying, dying, dying) to rush
the stage in a wave), Jerry Lee Lewis doing "Great Balls of Fire" (for
which song she temporarily put down the "guitar" and pulled up a chair to
use the coffee table as an air piano; at the point in the song where Jerry
Lee jumps up and knocks his piano bench flying, Rose jumped up and kicked
the chair back with such violence that it made me jump in my seat), and Don
Henley's "Dirty Laundry".  My God.  Her performance of "Dirty Laundry" was
the single most erotic thing I have ever seen.  In my entire life.  I mean
that quite literally, I have never seen any performance, by any other
person, before or since, that was more charged with sexual energy.  When
the song reached the first guitar solo, I actually stopped breathing for a
moment at the wonder of it all.  As the solo started, Rose was swinging her
hips from side to side with the "guitar" slung low between her legs, her
fingers moving in an amazing show of dexterity that I could almost believe
would produce the sounds I was hearing if she actually had a guitar in her
hands.  Then she shifted to pumping her hips front to back, still stroking
the neck, making love to the damn thing.  I couldn't believe what I was
seeing and suspected I was hallucinating it; she was openly humping the
body of the "guitar", and her fingers seemed to have given up on imitating
fret positions, choosing instead to stroke the neck as if she were gripping
a phallus.  As the solo rolled on, she did a strange little mincing dance
step from right to left, then whirled and moved back from left to right in
a duckwalk that was a perfect imitation of Chuck Berry; it was touching and
hilarious and savagely sexy all at once, and it was all being done for me,
a private audience of one.  As the solo rolled to a close, she ran forward
and dropped down, sliding the last few inches on her knees and holding the
"guitar" upright between her legs as if it were something she were
worshipping.  That performance is acidly etched in my head, and I can
recall any moment of it any time I want to simply by closing my eyes; and
of course, whenever that song comes on the radio now, I have to turn away,
lest I get too distracted to continue whatever it is I'm doing.  When the
set was over, sweat was pouring from every part of her body, and she came
over to collapse on the couch.
   "My God," I murmured, "that was unbelievable!  You look like you're
dying, let me get you a drink." As she took the cold root beer from my
hand, deliberately touching my fingers to do so, she looked up at me
without moving her head.
   "Yeah, I've never done four songs in a row before," she grinned, "guess
I need to build up a little more stamina." I plopped down next to her,
wiping her face with a towel I'd brought over, and fanning her with it. 
"I'm so hot and sweaty," she panted, "you must think I look like some gross
pig." No, I answered, your steaming hot sweaty body makes me think of
things, but pigs aren't one of them.  Then aloud, I said, "It's summer, you
goof, you're supposed to be hot and sweaty.  Trust me, you're beautiful."
   "So you liked it?" Her grin told me she knew she didn't need to ask.
   "Yeah, but Rose, I'm a little worried about contamination.  I mean, I
don't want to take you away from the kind of music kids your age listen to.
I don't want you to grow up older than you should be." She sat forward at
that and put her hands on her hips.
   "Waitaminute.  When these songs first came out, kids my age listened to
them then, didn't they?" she demanded.  I had to nod my head.  "Well, this
music was okay for kids then, so it must be okay now, right?" As I started
to protest, she held up a hand.  "Besides, it goes both ways.  You listen
to my music, right?" Again, all I could do was nod my head.  "Well then,
trust me.  'They say that a hero can save us, I'm not gonna stand here and
wait'..." she sang with a gentle drawing out motion of her hands as
encouragement to me, and I picked it up, "I'll hold on to the wings of the
eagles," and then we finished together, "Watch as we all fly away." She
reached over and grabbed hold of my shirt sleeve, and for a vertiginous few
seconds, I was forcibly reminded of the first time Lilly had grabbed my
shirt; and then she was climbing onto my lap, straddling my leg and leaning
right down into my face in her earnestness.  "And get this," she insisted,
laying a hand on my chest, "even though you hate a lot of Disney's recent
slop, we both liked 'The Goofy Movie', right?  Right.  And I know we both
liked that Powerline song ('Tevin Campbell' I corrected silently), I-2-I,
for the same reason.  C'mon, you know what it is, say it." Rolling my eyes
theatrically, I muttered something about the bass line.  "That's it!" she
beamed, "that fat, phat bass line." With a slowly dawning sense of
recognition, I realized that I had heard it that time; the difference
between fat and phat.  My slowly spreading foolish grin told her she had
won this round.
  
rj_chapter15