Harley and Shauna

In town I see Harley. 

I start my day with a white chocolate mocha from the lodge, then have my free meal from Twister Creek.  I choose artichoke fritters and a chef salad and two pints of their sour beer of the week.  The sour beer tastes like apple cider vinegar but gets me buzzed.  The chef salad is an homage to my sister, who ordered them at McDonald's when we were kids, when I always ordered like a chubby happy American the cheeseburger Happy Meal with an orange soda.

I am alone on the deck in the sun, reading a book I ordered in the mail called Rat Girl by Kirsten Hersh, the lead singer of Throwing Muses.  It is a good book, a memoir that prompts me to write notes in its blank endpages.  Probably also the combination of caffeine and alcohol prompts me to write my thoughts down.

Harley leans in toward some flower boxes next to me and says, when I look over, "These are poppies!"  He's talking about a tall red flower.  I nod encouragingly.  "I've never seen poppies in real life before!" 

I laugh and say, "Really?"

"Yeah."  He stares at them some more than says, "Dozer!  Come here!"

His bully-breed dog has wandered onto the deck and is nosing around the tourists and their food, hoping for scraps.

I am familiar with Dozer, whom I have mistakenly called Bowser before.  (Blame it on too much Super Mario Bros. 3 as a child.) 

I met both Harley and Dozer down at the river at the start of the season.  Harley is twenty, sells drugs.  He's on meth and LSD and pot all at once.  He's a loose cannon who plays the guitar.  He's desperately alive, which is something I understand, but he said the night I met him, as I was walking away with a gay friend of mine, "I hope she's easy!"  Harley is not my ally and yet I recognize him.

The gossip in town is that he slammed his dog's head into the street when it was bad.  That he brought his gun down to the river one night and was shooting it off wildly, and people asked him to stop, and he wouldn't.  He throws stones for Dozer to fetch, which must be bad for Dozer's teeth.  Harley's mom works at the pizza place and last month she had a black eye.

I heard there was going to be a town meeting about him, which is what happens in a town of 800 without a police force.  I don't know if the meeting ever happened or what the results were.  People are concerned.  I see him driving his four-wheeler around drunkenly with an underage girl hanging onto his waist on the back of it. 

I am not pro-Harley.  I think he is dangerous and someone to stay away from.  If I had been at the river when he was there with his gun, I would not have been one of the ones to plead with him to put it away.  I would have left immediately.

However.  If someone is taking delight in a flower, it is my birthright/heritage/duty to let him know that I dwell in the shell-shaped Venn Diagram of flower-delight with him.

Whatever Venn Diagrams I share with Harley, I know that he is doomed.  I am not the underage girl hanging onto his waist for dear life as he careens drunk around town on a four-wheeler.  If I were to stretch out a hand to him he'd pull me down off a cliff. 

He makes me think of Shauna from elementary school, who was also doomed.

One Father's Day we were making construction paper ties on plain white paper shirts with appreciative things written on them.  This is akin to Southern Californian kids making snow-themed winter crafts, which we also did.  Our blue-collar fathers wore light blue collared shirts with embroidered nametags ironed onto them.  Most of us had never seen the snow.

The day we made the ties and shirts, Shauna told everyone her dad was Rambo and threw her in the street. 

She lived with her grandma, along with her older sister and older brother.  I think she probably never met her dad.

Once I brought, for Show and Tell, a paper from Hong Kong with my name on it in English and in Chinese characters, with a quick-stroke painting of a flower above it.  My grandma got it for me on one of her retired travels.  I left it in my desk and after recess found it torn on one side.  It was kept in plastic and someone had torn the paper through the plastic, so the plastic was bent and stretched.  Upset, I showed it to the teacher, who knew it was Shauna.  She was made to confess and say sorry.

Once I was talking with a friend of mine about a Helen Keller biography for children we'd both read and loved.  Shauna, nearby, said, "I read that too."

We exchanged glances, knowing she hadn't read it.  "What's it about?" I challenged her.

"Um... it's about a girl... and her dog..." 

My friend and I laughed.  The cover of the book was a painting of Helen Keller hugging a dog.  Of course if Shauna had read the book she'd say right away it was about a blind and deaf girl.

Once I overheard some PTA moms discussing Shauna.  "Those brown eyes... it's eerie.  It's like she knows what you're thinking."

I noted this jealously, wishing they were discussing me, wishing they were talking about my blue eyes knowing what adults are thinking.  On long car rides I used to pretend to sleep, hoping my family would discuss me as if I were not there, wanting to know what they really thought of me.

In third grade I befriended Shauna briefly.  We had a therapist-patient relationship, although that sounds absurd when you're talking about two eight-year-olds.  I don't remember what I said to her.  I only remember her periodically reporting to me, "I didn't lie at all today!" 

Or, "I lied once and it felt bad!" 

I remember nodding approvingly and encouraging her to keep trying.

I remember an unusual amount about my early childhood.  I remember the first and last names of most of the people in my elementary school classes.  I remember anecdotes about each of them.  This has prompted me to Google random ones of them throughout the years.

I Googled Shauna a few years ago and found her on a website called Jailbabes in California.  Her picture was uploaded.  She had the same knowing eyes.  She was in prison for an unspecified offense, seeking male penpals.  I thought about writing to her but didn't.  I have always been ambivalent about my weirdly good memory - embarrassed about it at times, like it indicates I have no life, like nothing noteworthy has supplanted my early childhood memories. 

I right-clicked her picture and saved it to my computer.  I wrote her an email in my head that I never sent.  I forgot about her for another couple years.

Then I saw her older sister at the library where I was working in my hometown.  I asked, "How's Shauna doing?"

Her sister gave an embarrassed laugh.  "I don't know.  Usually when people ask about Shauna it's because she owes them money, or screwed them over somehow.  I don't know where she is now.  Last I heard she was in prison."

I wanted to ask what for but knew it would be nosy, so I changed the subject and asked about the toddlers she had with her.  She was checking out a tall stack of picture books for them.  She looked stressed-out in the way of mothers with young kids, but basically happy.  Her kids also seemed happy.  She was relieved to talk about them instead of Shauna.

I befriended her, the older sister, on Facebook.  A few months later she posted information about Shauna's memorial service.  Shauna, born the same year as me, died on Thursday, March 11, 2010.  I copied and pasted the information into a Word doc and saved it.  I Googled around a little in vain, trying to find out how she'd died.  I thought about her all that afternoon and night, and the next day sent her sister a Facebook message.

"I see that Shauna passed away, and I want to tell you I'm sorry to hear it. When I heard about her passing, a memory sprang to mind I want to share with you. Once in 6th grade we were all playing Truth or Dare and someone dared her to kiss Stuart Johnson on the cheek. Nobody thought she would dare to... we were all like eleven, and that was totally scandalous... also, he was the 6th grade hottie... but she went up to him, said she had a secret to tell him, and when he leaned in to hear it, she kissed his cheek. He turned bright red and everyone just howled with laughter. I remember her grinning, totally pleased with herself.

I hope you and your family are doing well and remembering Shauna happy."

She answered my message the next day.

"Thank you."