this one's for my friends.

AntiUtopia@aol.com
Tue, 02 Nov 1999 23:00:31 -0500 (EST) 

pass it around.

For the Real David Terry
by Jim Rovira

I remember you, a lanky kid, flushed white face
framing brown eyes betraying a certain
intensity, a certain need, a certain passion
which I read as immaturity.  I remember you,
playing Rachmaninoff in church.  Not just any
church, not the church you'd expect, not the 
Presbyterian church downtown or the Catholic
for that matter, or the big Methodist, although
they knew you there, they knew you from that time,
when you were fifteen, that time you played for the
Orlando Philharmonic Orchestra before it went 
broke, that time you made the Maestro weep at
your playing although a more experienced master
won the prize because, after all, you were only 
fifteen.  It wasn't in those churches, but in an 
Assemblies of God church, the Assemblies of
God that gave the world Jimmy Bakker and Jimmy
Swaggart, that gave the world holy laughter and
barking in the Spirit, that gave the world Benny Hinn
and his masses falling with a mere touch, that gave 
the world scores of loving people whom most will 
never know, an Assemblies of God born from LA
poverty and a black guy and a white guy 
were too stupid to know to hate each other, 
                        (even back then),
it was that Assemblies of God church, and 
it was in the worst of an Assemblies of God 
church, one meeting on the upper floor of a YMCA,
services to the smell of sweat and gym socks, 
in an awkward, L-shaped auditorium, in which 
the people in the two back rows could not see 
each other, an Assemblies of God church that 
the more mature members dubbed "Teen 
Challenge Assembly" because the pastor
and deacons were so young, so naive,
it was in this Assemblies of God church that 
you played Rachmaninoff to our bewildered eyes and
ears, in this Assemblies of God church that you
poured out the particular force of your own passion,
in this Assemblies of God church in which you, your 
mother, and later your girlfriend, who gave you sex but
not for the first time, sought to contain it, your mother, 
that scared waif, that poor woman whose husband
cheated and wanted her to understand, that woman
scared to talk or think, that woman who learned to,
somehow, teach our children while she was losing 
her own despite her best efforts.  Did I mention your 
sister?  I remember her too.  I will not mention her.
(and I could not tell you more by saying so)
I remember you playing Rachmaninoff, I remember 
your mother telling us that you, only maybe sixteen 
at the time although, I am afraid to say, probably 
much younger, were seduced by the only piano
instructor around Orlando able to teach you, even
though you had been seeing her since you were 
ten, and we all wondered just when that started
happening, and what was buried in your tortured, 
passionate heart.  I remember you because I 
found out, in a roundabout way, that today, this
day, this very Tuesday, was one godfuckingdamn
year after your death.  Please forgive me.  It's not
that we didn't love you enough.  It's that we couldn't.