Kris

Kris, possibly more than anybody else I’ve encountered, single-handedly forced me to accept not only the reality, importance and influence of my own basest desires, but also the predominately illusory nature of the object of those desires.

Kris was a waitress at my first job. She was pretty; but more importantly she was fun. I spent my shifts scheming ways for us to goof off without getting fired. We undeniably had crushes on each other, but that was irrelevant. We were both in relationships and she was a mature 14 year old, two years younger than me.

In the fall I went off to college, but we promised to keep in touch, and we actually did. We wrote each other long, soul-baring letters, filled with unfulfillment and discontent.

Several years passed. On Valentine’s Day in 1998, we both found ourselves single. I had never been to her house before. I drove for two hours down to Des Moines with a dozen roses, getting a speeding ticket on the way.

I arrived at a run-down little house down a dirt road on the north side of town. In it was Kris, her ex-boyfriend and her future boyfriend. Kris and her ex were screaming and throwing things at each other. He finally left, and we went out for Chinese and rented movies. In an effort to choose a movie reflecting my mood, I suggested we rent Deliverance, which I had never seen before. Hamlet would have been proud.

This was to be my introduction to a lifestyle hitherto fore unfamiliar to me that I can only call “white trash.” Sure, I was white and poor and lived in a little two-bedroom apartment with three roommates who had dropped out of college, worked dead-end jobs, drank Busch Light and smoked lots of weed. But we never communicated violently, talked about football, worked on cars, subscribed to Playboy or used the “n” word. This was very far from my beat-style comfort zones at the time of listening to jazz, playing chess and philosophizing.

I sat uncomfortably on a couch and watched Deliverance. Kris and her future boyfriend left, and I eventually fell asleep on the couch.

We never kept in touch in the same way after that. Now she has a husband, a career, a house in the suburbs, a kid and two little dogs. She still lives in the Des Moines area, a place I never could have stayed in and she never could have left. I imagine she has an SUV, a white picket fence and a king-sized Sleep Comfort Sleep Number bed.

I spent the subsequent years pursuing other dreams and usually finding them just as wanting. Thankfully, I am very content with my personal life and priorities today. If I wrote her a letter now, I wouldn’t know what to put in it. I suspect if she wrote me now it would have the same content as it had back then.