Me and the Boys at the Forest Preserve

I grew up in a sliver of suburb, a town as narrow and as useful
as a shoehorn. Men could be found
who, for nothing—or almost nothing, were willing
to prostitute their majority and buy
quarts of beer for underage girls like me. Laura was not afraid
to ask them, walking, nonchalant, past Armenetti’s Liquor. Say, she’d coo, to a passing
stranger, Would you do me a little flavor?
They always said yes. They made me nervous.

Later, when I could buy my own beer,
I drove into neighboring suburbs and fell
deliberately in with bad company, hanging out
at the Forest Preserve. I attracted a circle
of moody boys, who had pitted skin, who moved
without grace. To them, I was an angel, a great beauty.
To me, they were Franz Kafka, or
at least vaguely Kafkaesque.

Like Kafka, these boys
all lived at home, fixating on their inadequacies,
their cold or absent fathers, ubiquitous mothers. Like Kafka, they
were afraid to say boo (unless
they were loaded: drink gave them courage
as it gave me beauty).
Unlike Franz Kafka, none of them grew up
to be among the most influential literary
figures of the century despite their morbid tempers. None of them
broke off, repeatedly, engagements to young
Czechoslovak women of good family, or asked Max Brod to never,
never publish their manuscripts.

They, and I, grew up to be alcoholics
(with homes and without); we grew up to recover
one way or another, to graduate
to sobriety, or death; and our beds, dead or sober,
drunk or alive, to cradle the marvelous
insects we wake up to find ourselves now.

Karen Wurl