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{dear new boy with a flattened mohawk} km goff Dear New Boy with the Flattened Mohawk, My friend told me that you called me a spoiled rich girl. But I've gone my whole life without ever meeting a rich person, or anyone from the East Coast, except you. You're carefully stacking the old coke glasses and polishing chrome, and I know you're only doing it because you've already sucked all the nitrous oxide from the cans of whipped cream stacked in the cooler, and my presence can't be made bearable any longer. I'm a rich girl in a new house, built on "we can't afford that" and 18 hour days fueled by American dreams. You see the wrought iron railing and glass chandelier and I see the cement floors I sleep on because my bed is older than my father and the cold bare floors are more comfortable on my ruined back. I'm a rich girl in fancy shoes, Goodwill bargains for seven bucks. I'm a rich girl in an economy car! If you keep bitching about the plane ride here, I'll keep pretending that I know where the airport is, and that I hate the pitiful packet of stale peanuts and the closet of a bathroom ... I'm a rich girl from a river-rat family of Irish-Catholic refugees. My mother is from Los Angeles, though, and they taught her how to walk with books on her head. My grandma says she went to the School of Hard Knocks, and she learned to wear gloves and a hat when she worked in the fields because, like me, she tanned easily. My father said that we Hennesseys are built short and close to the ground, good for for picking potatoes, but I'm taller than he was, and we get our potatoes at the grocery store. I'm a rich girl in a tiny farming town where small minds encompass wide fields. In winter, I can see the highway lights and wonder how long it would take to walk through the cornfield to get to the exit, and I know the truckers are heading out of this Midwestern wasteland, slipping me their motel room numbers but I never call. My Minnesotan cousins joke, What's the best thing to come out of Iowa? Interstate 80 ... You've got the leather jacket I want, and the mohawk Mom won't let me have. And I never told anyone that I fell in love with you before I even met you, all the stories of Mr. Jamie Weaver sitting on a landlocked boat meeting God in a gasoline can climbing mountains and shape-shifting with a wolf skin. I've never seen a mountain, and the farmers ran the wolves out long before my father was born. Tell me about the mountain again. Tell me about the Pennsylvania forests. Tell me about the drugs you've done, the cops you've evaded, the cars you've stolen, and how you can't get chicken-corn chowder in this godforsaken state. Tell me again what you're doing here. You can't love a rich girl and I can't understand what kind of a world you're coming from if that's what I am. It makes my stomach shudder and my eyes grow bright. |
