Song of Fire

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Song: “Deserted House” by Jon O’Bergh
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Desire is a deserted house, walls leaning in, windows broken, wallpaper peeling from the drywall. You don’t see it like that at the time. It’s only afterward that you notice, when the one you desire turns away, refuses to kiss you in that way again. I’m following the boy from the carwash through the thick, tall brush that grows higher than either of us. We reach a dilapidated farmhouse in the middle of a field. Traffic noise from a street concealed just beyond a grove of orange trees hovers in the air with the buzz of cicadas. The house is being dismantled: sections of flooring have been cut out, revealing the crawlspace below; planks and plaster are strewn about; the ceiling has been cut away, revealing the slope of the roof where slits of blue sky spy on us. We clear a space on the dusty floor. Much later the field will be paved over with a shopping center, and I will smile at the irony of sitting in a restaurant on perhaps the very spot where he laid his head on my shoulder and turned his face to kiss me. The place is long gone, but desire cannot be so easily paved over.

I’m awakened by the sound of a mower. The gardener with the dark, curly hair is out there again. I go to my bedroom window and look down, watching him. He has removed his shirt, and sweat glistens on his lean back. He’s four years older than me, probably a senior in high school. I don’t know how I know this, because I know nothing about him. He is a cipher into which I can pour all my bottled up, unspoken longings. There are a scattering of brown freckles along his shoulders. We will never speak; I’m sure he doesn’t even know that a boy lives here in this house. He works for the townhouse association gardening just this one summer, then vanishes, but his image is branded in my memory.

When I was eight, I saw the John Ford movie Wagon Master, about two cowboys who help guide a wagon train across the prairie. The lead character was a polite, dark-haired cowboy named Travis, who was accompanied by his fair-haired friend Sandy. My parents dropped me off each night at a kid’s arcade at one of the Lake Tahoe resorts, ladening me with a bucket of nickels while they went off to gamble with my aunt and uncle. This one evening I stayed in the small theater and watched the movie over and over, memorizing the way Travis tipped his hat, imaging that I was his buddy. For a week I imitated Travis’ gentlemanly drawl. My parents did not comment on this sudden change in my speech.

The summer after I turned 15, my parents sent me back to rural Michigan to stay with my sister Joan. With the help of Joan’s step-daughter, who was two years my senior, I got a job working as an usher at a summer stock playhouse, a converted barn located at a crossroads. At intermission, we sold cokes from an open-air tent lined with bales of hay.

The final play that summer was Boys in the Band, which had been a hit on Broadway. I sat through every performance that week, watching from my seat in the back of the theater. The characters play a humiliating game where they are each challenged to make a phone call to the one individual they have deeply loved and confess their desire. Even at that inexperienced age, the story of desire that is not returned seemed vividly familiar, and I imagined a solitary future stretching out before me.

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