Here's some more, taking up where I left off in the previous post. It's pretty long and I don't really expect anyone in this forum to read it. I'm thinking it will be about 7,000 words when finished.
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They were especially transparent for Delilah because she was five when they ended. The 80s to a child like Delilah are a series of disconnected impressions that float through you; crude rotoscoping and jamboree sing-alongs and Velcro shoes. Velcro, interestingly, ceases to be “cool” around age seven, at which point only the genetically deficient members of our society continue to use it due to their complete lack of motor skills. Velcro shoes, also known as “Retard Laces”, are social poison to an enterprising seven year old.
She had a fine nose for the predictable instability of preadolescent social spasms and the total lack of conscience that all eight year olds are blessed with. She learned how to attach herself to rising stars, and cut loose the dead weight with lightening quickness. When Mary Marshlaw, the most popular girl in Ms. Phoebes’ third grade class, fell out of favor Delilah wasted no time in distancing herself. When she entered secondary school she had firmly inserted herself into the inner sanctum of the elite clique.
Much of this was predetermined for her by genetics. She had auburn hair, copper olive skin, clear eyes and a symmetrical face with delicate bone structure. Her mother, a stay at home mom with a substantial amount of disposable income, was misled into believing that satisfying material urges is a rewarding lifestyle choice. Although Delilah never realized it, she was profoundly influenced by the countless childhood excursions to the Beverly Center when her mom left her in the food court and ducked into clothing stores. I’m sure Delilah’s mother believed this was a prudent application of her fine multi-tasking skills, but what it in fact taught Delilah was that when it came time to compile her own list of life’s priorities, looking good should rank number one or two.
This is not meant as a unilateral condemnation of the fashion industry. In fact, the 11-13 year old boys at John Adams Middle School fully appreciated her fashion sense and aesthetic sensibilities. This is because during these years her childish body shed its otter-like sleekness and filled out to a semblance of proper female proportions. She was able to accurately and honestly appraise her own physical features and wear the clothes that downplayed her questionable areas while emphasizing the strengths. She would not wear the same outfit twice in the same two week period. This made her popular with the other affluent teenaged Anglo girls (and their one black friend, and one poor friend), and it made her popular with the boys for obvious biological reasons.
She entered high school with the same group of friends she’d had for the last three years. But high school is an expansive emotional and physical gestation laced with these seditious little blurbs of “feeling” which are constantly being blasted by hormonal convulsions. Delilah, with her symmetrical face, realized in less than two weeks that she could trade up from the pimply 14 year old faces of her peers to the pimply 18 year old faces of the older crowd.
The illusion of being “grown-up”, the sweet siren song of every high school experience, seduced Delilah right off the bat. Gratification of superficial desires holds a certain allure to those who don’t know any better. She lost her virginity that year to Mark Pinkle, who would go on to be voted Best Hair in the yearbook. He later dropped out of the University of California, Santa Barbara after two years and currently works in retail. The experience was not particularly memorable or pleasurable, but it was not ultimately negative. Mark tried to be gentle, but in the buffoonish way you would expect from someone named Pinkle. They broke up a month afterward, but not before Mark introduced her to pot. Backyard parties packed with people became her preferred stomping ground.
In her sophomore year she experienced an intellectual renaissance, a violent rejection of the social forces which had shaped her over the course of her life. In the imbecilic way which is the bread and butter of all youth, this rejection manifested itself as a blanket of hostility directed toward life, the universe and everything in it. This was the state our heroine found herself in when she made the acquaintance of one Peerless Pryce.
Peerless Pryce is a phenomenon of nature that rejects domestication. He was gifted with an analytical genius and a socially insoluble soul. They bumped specters seemingly at random. The social landscape in the formative years is an unstable one, a broiling tumult of convulsing chasms that open and close at random, spreading droplets of thought into streams of consciousness that whirl with a singular purposelessness tinted with frenetic energy. One of these eddies sucked our heroes into a mutual friend’s house on January 12, in the Yere of Oure Lord God Two Thowsand and Two.
This day had the providential distinction of also commemorating Delilah’s entrance into the oxygen rich atmosphere of the maternity ward at St. John’s Hospital approximately sixteen solar cycles past. Shrouded in the angst and bitterness which had come to be her identifying mantra, she downplayed the contrived symbolic importance of the day but secretly yearned to be loved for it. She was drinking an alcoholic lemonade flavoured beverage on the couch when Peerless made his entrance.
He graduated from high school in 2000 and currently lived with his mom.
The mind melts clichés and funnels the hard chaff of experience into molten hyperbole. Such is the price of our humanity. The experience of their acquaintance was typical; a timid explorative exercise, mildly cautious and gently pockmarked with soft questions about the state of contemporary music and cinema. The conversation developed a general tone of commiseration hinging on mutual acknowledgement of the lamentable conditions for general and widespread cultural decay.
This lead to a memorable and profound exchange that electrified the air between our principal particles:
DELILAH
(with melodramatic flair)
Sometimes I find it hard to get my head around some people, like, you have to smile a certain way, do certain things, be in a certain group, like certain things, to fit in. I know everyone can't like everyone else, it'd be a boring world if it was. People treat you nice cause you smile at them. They don’t know what you dream about at night. Maybe all I want is a room with nice pictures and some Christian music on a tape recorder.
A momentary pause. Only the blue light of the kitchen light falls on the house and forestage. The surrounding area shows an angry glow of scorched Earth.
PEERLESS PRYCE
(smiling)
Here's the problem. It sounds like you’re trying to be sincere in knowing people. But this isn’t what people want. It scares people. They don't want you to see their inner humanity. It’s what makes them human. You feign interest in the superficial crap that people like to talk about. You have many acquaintances but no friends and life will once again regain that state of symmetrical perfection which has eluded you since childhood. This is the life we choose for ourselves.
This lyrical gibberish descends from the Temple Mount and fills the Valley of Rintrah with mist. Delilah made up her mind then to sleep with Peerless, who had reached a similar conclusion ten minutes earlier. The budding romantic crescendo was cut short due to a miscalculation in alcohol consumption on Delilah’s part, resulting in a rather hilarious episode of projectile vomiting.
Three days later, Delilah skipped school to meet Peerless at his mom’s apartment. The husbandless Ms. Pryce worked two jobs, typically consisting of 18 hour days, a schedule which Peerless found conducive to his bachelorial pursuits. Peerless of the Pryce was less than five foot ten inches with only moderate muscle tone, but possessed of an animal magnetism that sent galvanic spasms through Delilah’s body at the first fleshy touch of his skin. His mind was epileptic, flaring with brilliant insights that diminished in the bloated shadow of unfulfilled expectations. The combined force of his presence pierced her in every point of her body simultaneously.
The corrosive properties of Delilah's juvenile anger did not dissolve her capacity for vanity. Peerless was the first human being she had ever loved (not counting, of course, the biologically obligatory love for parents and kin). The inflamed carnal love of the young hardens their unformed faces; she ached for him. She was intoxicated by an elemental process that had transmogrified her brain into a smorgasbord of deeply organic chemical reactions. She believed herself to be the most beautiful woman in the world, and he, as is only right in a properly balanced universe, was an adonis carved in the ethereal marble of the earth.
