Ritual and Routine

It was in high school that I really began to miss class.  In the fall, I got the Hong Kong flu and was hospitalized for a week.  I stayed home from school longer.  And I liked it.  I didn't like being sick, but I liked staying home all day alone to read and watch TV.  And so a pattern began. 

Like most kids, I watched a lot of TV.  I liked some of the shows, of course, but now I think that it was the ritual that enamored me most, the predictability of it.  You knew what would happen and when.  You had time to anticipate and prepare.  During the week, daytime television never altered.  Every day was the same, and it was lovely, really, a wonderful, non-wavering existence shared with unseen thousands, floating through the day again and again and again.  At night, however, the circadian rhythm was longer, each night a variant with its own emotional cycle repeated weekly.  There was never any thought of skipping TV.  It was like religion, promising us something beyond the mundane existence of our boring lives.  You could count on it.  It had authority.  It was there.  

And there were reasons why that was preferable.  

I went to high school during the day, but the night was another thing.  My friends were dangerous and unpredictable.  There was no rhythm to what they did.  It was all unfettered random behavior.  One night, at the pool hall, they had a girl.  She was a marginal character, someone who didn't seem right, an older girl from a poor family.  She could often be seen just walking around by herself.  It was not something that the other girls would do.  But this night she was with the boys at the pool hall and there was beer out back in Randy's car, and so fellows kept slipping through the rear door.  And soon, someone came in and said that everyone was having their turn with the girl, that she was lying in the back seat of Randy's car.  And curiosity drove me to go out and see.  

It was awful.  Everyone was standing around with beer cans in their hands and twisted grins upon their faces.  When anyone spoke, they spat out some wisecrack that would provoke hilarity from the group but which had no real humor.  It was dangerous there in the dark, the car parked close to the back of the cement block rear wall of the building mere feet from the stretch of woods that ran a jagged maze to the drive-in theater.  But I stood there awhile and watched the ugly scene not knowing what to do as the boys drank harder, the conversations become more hideous and brash.  

When I could, I moved back inside, then out the front door making my way home.  I was frightened no doubt, but something else, too.  There was always that, the duality of feeling when you knew a thing was not right,  but the excitement of knowing it, too.  And the other thing, the unintended excitement of guilty feelings that accompany the knowledge, perverse and corrupt, the desire to be as close to the fire as possible without getting burned, the desire to get close to the edge while still tethered to something unbreakable.