"That's my shoe"
Over several hundred miles ago Edwards and I were just high school boys with the outline of a vision of a dream of a nightmare. On an early fall afternoon in my junior year, notes were scattered in my art portfolio hinting about knowledge, wisdom, and abstractions of the female form. Edwards was playing the role of a student aid to our overly friendly and often with child high school art teacher. He was more along the lines of the Pavlovian aid that blushed on command. Those rosy cheeks were the pride and joy of the beginning afternoon in the high school routine. We both immigrated away from a math course based on the premise of preparing us for college, however, the course was mostly aimed at keeping the seedy element at bay and manageable in one place while the affects of massive carbohydrate loaded meals brought lethargy on adolescent minds.
No doubt cosmic forces were aligning from those chance encounters and notes that later surfaced in the spring before my graduation from junior college. Then a totally unaware Engineering student with writing tendencies placed on a back shelf, I found myself in a reunion of sorts with Edwards. Over the dry wit of the girl next to me who never fully bought into the whole brazier culture, Edwards and myself found new expressways to decadence. Skipping college classes became a way of life for both of us in those days. Warm sun and dried fairways gave more than ample excuse for guzzling beers and practicing our slice. There were also the chemical components of playing outside of college. It was a time of experimentation, and finding the most obscure path of travel and what in the blazes would we care anyway; it was only junior college. The thirteenth grade of our formal education lay open as a fertile playground for any one with enough sense to show up the class before any exam. . . .
These were the back lighting to every conversation we had amassed by becoming roommates at college. The decision that would take us over and up through the frozen tundra of the West, over and up across the fertile lands of the South, and over and up into every tittie-bar, no matter how drunken, cracked-out, or pregnant the dancers. When I entered the dorm room on the fourth floor and saw Edwards conversing with my roommate, Wetback, with the Weezer ball cap turned backwards; there was a glint of naive mischief alight around his stubbly goatee. A mental note, if you ever arrive at your place and Edwards is waiting for you make a mental note to call your neighbors to watch any animals or plants that may need attention. Especially if he's carrying that ratty-old off white gym bag, that gym bag is a portent of nights that run into weeks and the only sounds after the party ends are "Stairway to Heaven" leaking out of four inch speakers and the dull thud of leather that can only be described in terms of, "Do you hear that? That's my shoe."