I advance on a big pair of high school girls who are doing just fine without me, smoking their way up the snowy block. I edge past the one on the left, the one with the blue star on the back of one knee and the swollen bun of hair like a microcosm. The other one is saying "when you have to hold back somebody's hair it's fucking narsty I mean why don't everyone just realize you're gonna get there eventually and wear a damnass hair-tie?"
I'm past them now but I turn around and go "where did you two cools get the smokes at? Do you have great fakes or what?" They acknowledge my beard in a silent way and nothing else about me at all.
I could be a terrorist of a few particular kinds – I mean I could be a terrorizer of girls like these. All three of us all know all the choices, the optional features like if I'd talk sweet first or use a blowtorch in the end. I mean if I was that way anyway. But I'm not and I know that but do they? We're all waiting for me to clarify my denomination.
The girls are lunch breakers crosshaired by their plaid skirts as subjects of the First Church of the Holy Agony Catholic day-school. I turn away from the one with the bun who smokes her cigarette with a nervousness betraying residual innocence, and turn on the one dispensing the would-be profundities about getting away with everything. I say unto her: "hair-ties are heretical. Your hands in each others' hair is everything – touch, scent, all of it part of the baptism of your shattered memories, which are yours to raise and keep, from sown wind to reaped whirlwind they're yours. A sin like a morning-after pill or worse – a morning-before. It would destroy every potential for connection, transcendence, Godly love, responsibility, growth." I am not a terror but a minister, confronting them on behalf of the First Church of Our Halcyon Days, parish of the Anticipated Backwards Glance.
"Man a morning-before pill'd be the sweetest" my fat bunned one goes. "Me and Todd could bareback all morning long and through detention."
In an alley I run down to get away from them, two empty pints of Georgi Vodka testify from a doorstep:
the multitude of ways for people to celebrate life in tandems;
the immutable truth of all things musting to pass;
the idea of being a fisher of souls and how if you don't cast out wide at just the right time they're upstream of where you were counting on;
the radical naivete of a grown man thinking that his big ideas could be enough to scandalize or seduce a couple of modern teenagers.
