for Kathy Meckenwell
The ecstasy levels built into my time with Kathy were dead-ended, also, by being too unreliable, too jumpy. It’s just that at first Kathy & I didn’t notice. I was let loose of the bondage with and to Cheltenham High School; Kathy had been more or less happy at North Penn. Yet, here we were in State College, ready to do what was incumbent upon us to do. Kathy, a stout blonde who alternated between jubilation and self-abnegating catatonia, had met me on the North Halls basketball courts one night while a party rocked the place. We improvised a routine and a place: down into the piano room in the Runkle basement. We took each other’s virginity eagerly, avidly, without really noticing, and the meat of the matter was just adventure, passing the time, more adventure. I dealt with Kathy’s self-abusive moods by playing therapist, to the extent that I could, and the semester swung around us. My roommate gone, we pushed the two beds in my dorm room together to continue our investigations. The sex itself was clumsy, yet strangely clean of transgression; like a couple of kids using a see-saw or on a calliope. There was a place we couldn’t go about depth and a bridge we couldn’t cross into the richer straits of passion. She bit my neck and left a purple bruise. The girls in my classes laughed at me, but I was a taken in young man. It’s just that Kathy was somewhere else. Her real life remained in Lansdale, and she knew it. And with her camera, which she used with great acumen. I was at least noteworthy, other than for having taken her virginity (and she mine), for being a good photo subject, with my wild hair, baby face, and ragamuffin habits. We were preoccupied away from each other, and the feeling I later had with Jena, that presence, was missing. All of which was present in us as we distractedly banged away at each other.
photo by Kelly McCabe, State College, Pennsylvania, 1994
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