Three Oregon City Poems
Saturday Night Fever by Jim Harrison
My date for opening night
of Saturday Night Fever
at sold out Southgate Theater,
an eighth grader named
after a queen in the Old Testament
Wavy brown hair
past her shoulders,
a long chiseled schnoz,
gorgeous trademark
a mother would
surely amputate today.
Lissome,
long distance runner’s body.
A long distance runner,
mediocre,
but I always watched her
finish her races on the cinder track.
Parents dropped off four junior high couples,
left to drink, smoke, carouse
in a Chinese joint.
Movie rated R,
how did we get in?
It was 1977, that’s how.
Couples scattered.
The queen and I sat
in the front row,
the only time I have sat
in the front row of a movie theater.
She wore a loose, silky,
vertically-striped shirt,
white, mauve, violet,
reaching a millimeter below her navel,
top two buttons unbuttoned,
bottom two buttons unbuttoned.
When she leaned back in the seat,
angled upward to the screen,
shirt slithered.
I saw her stomach,
flat, soft, soon lit by strobe lights
flashing in the disco
where Tony tore it up.
She held a jumbo box of popcorn.
Cup of Coke rested on the sticky floor.
The opening sequence,
the greatest one in American cinematic history,
began.
I placed my right hand on the stomach.
I felt heat, perspiration.
Her breathing changed,
stomach twitched;
she didn’t look at me.
The opening was that great.
My hand remained there the entire movie,
(I hated popcorn, never drank Coke.)
gravitated upward once, not very far,
never downward.
We were in the front row after all,
surrounded by adults
who didn’t give a shit then.
We couldn’t make out in dark corners
or empty balconies,
like we always did in the weekend matinees.
I never saw a frame of Superman or Heaven Can Wait.
Why am I writing this poem about an incident
that occurred in a now razed theater a half century ago,
the paradise they paved over to put up a parking lot?
Because I was reading a novella by Jim Harrison
and the incident slithered through my mind
like her shirt did that night.
Jim Harrison’s fiction makes you recall such moments,
and he deserves a poem in the afterlife about Saturday Night Fever
inspired by his immortal writing
describing the fabrics that once clothed female bodies.
First Journal
One of those useless in-service days for Oregon City teachers.
No school Friday for sophomores in the fall of 1979.
My mom was a teacher,
so no one home.
She came over, the rally girl
with long, brown, feathered hair,
endless curious eyes,
curves like the Clackamas River.
I think we’d been going out for two weeks.
We retired to my tiny downstairs bedroom
and its appointment: Sports Illustrated covers stapled to the walls, ceiling,
Dallas Cowboy comforter,
junior high sports trophies,
piggy bank,
my beagle snoozing on the rug.
A kid’s room.
She noticed my journal,
the classic black and white composition book,
resting on my desk, open.
I had started the first journal of my life,
an irritating requirement for Beginning Journalism,
on the first day of school two months ago.
She was intrigued.
She’d never known
anyone who kept a journal.
She wanted to read it!
I had material about her!
I said yes.
She wore blue disco jeans,
and a red hooded sweatshirt
over a white bra.
Shoes?
We tumbled down on my twin bed
The first girl ever on that bed.
We began making out.
She directed my hands under the sweatshirt.
I explored.
The slats snapped, crackled, popped.
We fell with the mattress to the floor.
The beagle never woke up.
We laughed as we untangled our bodies from the bedding.
How was I going to tell my mother about the broken bed?
She wasn’t ready for that.
She still isn’t.
The rally girls left and took my journal home for the weekend.
I walked to a construction site across the street.
I didn’t see any workers around.
I sneaked into the house,
stole scrap wood,
brought boards home,
measured,
whipped out a saw,
sawed,
replaced the slats,
righted the mattress,
made the bed,
swept up the sawdust.
Within seconds, the beagle jumped on the comforter.
She returned the journal Monday.
She had written in it! Three pages!
The only time in the 249 journals written since
that anyone else but me wrote in one.
An excerpt:
Now that I’ve met Matt, I don’t see anything without him. If he decided he didn’t like me, it would totally rip me apart. I have given him my heart and all of me. It would totally destroy me if he left me.
She dumped me two weeks later.
I never wrote about it
or the broken bed slats in my journal,
but I am writing about it now,
almost a half century later,
consulting that first journal for reference.
The Coin Toss
We always went to the Oregon City bowling alley on our dates
although we never bowled a single frame.
I always flipped a quarter,
she always called it in the air.
I caught it, called it out,
and our fates began.
If I lost,
I had to sneak into the bowling alley,
sneak into the men’s restroom,
slide a quarter into a condom machine,
turn a silver knob
until a three-pack dropped to a tray below.
If she lost, same story in the women’s restroom.
Always lubed,
no preposterous purple pricklers.
We sure went to that bowling alley a lot.
What else was there to do in 1982?
After the purchase,
She fired up her brown Pinto hatchback and drove us to
the parking lot of a stone church near the John McLoughlin House.
No AM radio playing
because we always talked when she drove.
The police never rousted us.