" remembering arizona "

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there was this girl in high school i met during the summer or 96 i think. her name was treva jackson and she kicked ass. she moved to albany from arizona with her dad, and was the sort of girl that was just bout-it.

she had these great hands; the kind that just were smooth and powerful, the fingernails cut so close to the skin that there was not a trace of visible white, like she could grip the life out from your body. she painted her nails a crimson red, and they were never even, and always chipped by the next day. she punched my arm with a varying frequency and this made her instantly likeable.

everyone labeled her right away, as albany kids will often do to those not from out of our sometimes all-too-incestual lot of kids, but i thought she was suprisingly intuitive and had a bohemian sense of calm confidence with the ability to cross boundry lines, until no one could place who she was, or what she was about. this was her eloquent sense of immediate and lasting grace.

needless to say, i liked the cut of her jib, and the jib, it was beautiful.

i remember some of the best times i had with this girl, was during afterschool hours. i know this seems like it's going to get graphic, but that never happened. we would go to safeway's, the one at the old el cerrito plaza before they tore it down and replaced it with the middle american strip mall design with that clock that just seems so out of place, at steal bottles of jim bean, jose cuervo gold, and what ever else was readily pocketable, then scurry into the dark of the night and drink until we were drunk with the streets of albany. sometimes my fellow trumpeteer daniel waugh would come along for the walks, and we would all carouse around our square-mile burg, doing everything and nothing all at once. it was rad.

immature, dangerous, illegal, and self-reprehensible? sure, maybe. but i was 14, 15, or 16 at the time, i had no idea of those concepts. all i knew is that i would cut band practice, which for a time was held at night after school, and just revel in the nearly endless energy of this strange alluring arizoniac female. she was just so chock full of delight and has the most curious laugh. of course i leaned, but she obviously was looking for something else. so, i was just satisfied to be her friend.

in retrospect, there are times when you can actually project that the time you have with someone is going to end. i knew when i met her, that she would be gone soon enough; a girl like this doesn't just stick around because she's an apparition. a ghost of a person that i once held conversations with, living in the brimming cup of my memory. and that''s okay.

i am glad i met her, because she taught me that people don't always have to live by the rules and can still rock out/party-hearty without actually breaking the law...too much. if anything else, she showed me that there was definitely a box, and taught me how to step outside of it and see the world with open eyes.

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