I, YOUNG CYRANO PART II

From the conclusion of Part I:

“Yes. A whirlwind romance. Lasted a couple of weeks. And then, poof! It was over. Done with. Gone with the wind.

Turned out I was kind of… boring, apparently.

But for me, it was plus yardage: I had had a girlfriend! It was kinda like me belonging to a new and exclusive club.

What would come next?”

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Part II:

(just a little flashback tidbit)

Kind of… boring? Unlikely, but possible I suppose. But it did feel kinda like belonging to a new and exclusive club. My whole outlook and attitude had gotten a much-needed shot in the arm. Now I was a little more like…

So ME? Yeah. I’ve had girlfriends.

(I’d had that girlfriend.)

It felt like a major step in the ending of the sad little Charlie Brown chapter of my non-love-life. Like moving forward.

I mean, like before Lynette, I was just another one of those immature and annoying lookitME! LookitME! little snakes-and-snails-and-puppy-dogs’-tails SHOW-offs, whenever some cute girl happened to be around.

For instance, up through third and fourth grades, I’d been Roy Rogers’ biggest fan. In fact my very first bedroom pin-up wall poster was Roy Rogers on his rearing palomino, Trigger.

I mean, I loved everything Roy Rogers. In fact, I wanted to BE Roy Rogers. So when I caught Roy doing some trick-riding on Trigger in one of his movies, I just had to emulate him.

Of course I didn’t have a horse. But I did have a bike named Trigger. So…

I lived up on Pleasant Street, a street that sloped gently downward past our house, meaning you could easily get a good down-hill coasting going on your bicycle. That slope became my training area. And the best trick-riding I ever saw in the Roy Rogers movies was him securing a firm, two-fisted grip on the saddle horn, while getting Trigger galloping at a very fast gallop. Then… wonder of all wonders…

Holding on tight and using that horn as a fixed fulcrum, Roy would launch himself right up out of the saddle, swing his hips and legs down to the left of Trigger’s flank, bounce his boots off the ground there, swing his entire body back up to sail right over the empty saddle only to drop himself down again (off to the right side this time), bounce his boots off the ground on that side, swing himself back up over the saddle once again, and then right back down to the left… and, you know, just repeat that flip-flop maneuver over and over a few more times, left and right, left and right before smoothly just dropping his holy little cowboy butt comfortably right back down in the saddle just like nothing had ever happened.

I know that’s all very hard to imagine, unless you’ve seen it done. But what might be even more difficult to picture is little-fourth-grade-moi coasting my bike at a good clip down over Pleasant Street’s little hill and performing that exact, same stunt! I mean it.

It took a month or more of practice. I had to begin first with the bike at a stand-still, me just holding onto the handlebars and practicing leaping back and forth over the bicycle’s seat. Once I got my balance down pretty pat, I began to up the ante by doing the same thing with the bike slowly moving. Then it was just a matter of increasing my speed day-by-day. And you know what? It became easy after a while. I got good at it. I swear I did.

And lo, Pleasant Street was suddenly blessed with its very own junior Roy Rogers Daily Wild West Show. I mean, damn, I was frickin’ rodeo-ready! (You remember how Tom Selleck was always saying, “This isn’t my first rodeo” on those idiotic Reverse Mortgage commercials? Well this was… my first rodeo, of sorts.)

So it wasn’t totally unusual for the occasional lucky Dover-Foxcroft pedestrian or automobile passenger to get to witness The Amazing One-Trick-Pony Cowpoke fearlessly barreling hell-bent-for-leather down Pleasant Street on any given day at any given time throughout summer vacation.

And I was so proud of myself. Not to mention magnanimously delighted to ever-so-generously perform this daily feat gratis (although I surely would’ve charged admission if I could have thought of a way to pull it off). But each and every time I was lucky enough to have an audience, I could console myself by just imagining all the exclamations of wonder going on inside the minds of those passers-by:

My God! Would you look at that kid! He’s not only BRAVE, he’s extremely SKILLED!

A kid like that? I mean, HE’S GOING PLACES, you know?

Well, all I can say is… you couldn’t PAY me to try something like that!

(And from all the sweet little back-seat daughters):

And he’s SO CUTE, too.

Heck, MY stupid boyfriend can’t do daring tricks like that!

I bet he’s got A ZILLION girlfriends, though!

(OK, yes, I admit it. I did seem to have a little of The-Christmas-Story’s ‘Ralphie’ in me back then.)

RALPHIE of The Christmas Story

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So anyway— one late sunny morning, I was flying down the road for my third performance of the day. And just as I’d leapt off the seat to begin the ol’ left-to-right-to-left-to-right, a musical little voice off up ahead to my left cried out, “Wow! Look at you, Tommy!”

And of course I was going too fast to look at ‘myself,’ not that that would’ve made any sense, but I did look up and…

There she was! Betty-Jane Stanhope!

The very reason I’d been patiently sticking to Pleasant Street over the past week! So. She had finally, at long last, just happened outside while I was potentially enthralling the neighborhood. (I had such a crush on her.) (I mean, what boy didn’t?)

But as you will recall from a previous episode, I was pathologically shy around cute girls. Our eyes locked. And I froze. Which was when…

The handlebars suddenly strong-armed me, yanked me to the right! And WHOA! My rodeo-bronc-bicycle ka-thump-thumped! us over a shallow ditch, slamming my bum hard and pretty much sideways back down onto the seat! Somebody’s Then somebody’s driveway and lawn looked like they were flying beneath us like a rug being yanked out from under us! And Jeez, that damn maple tree trunk was coming at us like Casey Jones’ locomotive!

All that in a blink-and-a-half!

Oh. My. God!

Trigger tried to run itself right up the damn tree like a flag up a flagpole, I swear to God! The tree trunk’s roots were spread out at the base, curving out and down into the earth, providing a curved, though precarious, path for speeding wheels. So with a bone-jarring, ninety-degree change of direction, the bike went alley-oop-up! But not me.

Unfortunately, my body wasn’t built on wheels. I was a high-speed, arrow-straight vector!

Now, I swear there was a one-to-two-second, still-life Wile E. Coyote moment there… with my bike pasted to the trunk and aimed at the sky with me splayed-out-splat! like a June bug on a windshield!

Then after another blink-and-a-half, gravity deigned to peel the bike and I off the bark like a wet band-aid and dropped us in a heap onto the grass.

I mean, can you say “out-of-body experience?” Instantly transported to some Danté-esque alternate universe, I lay momentarily paralyzed and prostrated before the sadistic Pain Gods of the Gonads! Meanwhile I was being on-and-off flash-blinded in the pulsating strobes of the corpse-cold, crotch-to-brain aching!

I sorta came to fetal-positioned, sweating like a snowman in the desert, and struggling to roll myself over and crawl myself away from those torturous throes of…

“Are you alright?”

Ohmygod! There she was! Standing right over me! Staring straight down at me! At ME! What with my legs crossed bladder-tight and everything! Clutching my…

“Are you alright?”

“Unnngthhh?”

“I said, ‘Are you OK?’”

Me thinking, Oh please… just… go away! Don’t look at me! Go back inside your house! You shouldn’t be here right now. This is so… I’m so ASHAMED! I was longing to cry, but not in front of her!

I finished getting myself rolled over.

“Should I go get my mom…or… ?”

“What…?” I barely whispered, “No…no…”

“You sure?”

On my hands and knees now. Shaking. Still in a raspy whisper, “Positive.” And then, “Just… don’t!”

“Well… OK, I guess. But where are you hurt?”

Where am I…? Oh my God! Really? I couldn’t believe she just had to go and ask that! “My... knee,” I said, barely able to breathe, and wondering, Does she know? Does she know how it is with us boys? Hell, until that day, that moment, I didn’t even have a clue about just how bad the pain could really be (with, you know, ‘us boys.’) “Yeah. Think I… must’ve bruised it. My knee.”

The physical pain was so extreme, I worried about throwing up! But the embarrassment-‘pain’ was making me want to run away and hide my face. I mean, what had just happened was definitely not something you could just… explain… to a Betty-Jane Stanhope. The word, ‘unmentionable’ comes to mind. It was like… what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas, you know?

All I knew for sure was that I was going to spend the rest of my life hiding from Betty-Jane. I was a pariah, even though I hadn’t learned that word yet.

But OK, somehow I did manage to get up on my shaky legs, get my bike up on its shaky wheels, and begin the Long Limp of Infamy back to my house. Thinking to myself (as much as the severe pain could allow me to think coherently), Well, Gloria Cole knocked-me cock-eyed off a playground swing seat, and now I have to accept it that Betty-Jane probably knows something horribly unmentionable about me that she shouldn’t.

The prospect of ME ever finally getting to become some girl’s boyfriend seemed a grim impossibility.

By the way, the bike had fared much better than I had. At least there was that…

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But hah! Just imagine, though, how surprised I’d have been if I could’ve looked into some Gypsy fortune teller’s crystal ball and caught just a glimpse of the lurid, two-weeks-long, hand-holding affair I was destined to enjoy in fifth grade with my first real girlfriend, Lynette Barnes, the following year!

Although feeling pretty down and out, I somehow knew that I wasn’t quite ready to throw in the towel just yet though…

Stay tuned to join me in I, Young Cyrano Part The Last

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