Post Modern Romeo and Juliet

“For never was a story of more woe than this…”

She was reading from the Bible when she met her boyfriend Michael. Sitting with her best girlfriends, Misty, Tru and Viv, Tasia glanced up as he swaggered into the Christian Youth Center, looking lethal in his tight, white Tee, baggy denim jeans and hair down to there. Michael was the given name of the young girls dream and parent’s nightmare. If flags were raised and alarms sounded, as well they should have been, she was deliriously oblivious, obscured as they were by phalange flailings and the peals of giggles from her chorus of classmates. The little lamb, ripe for slaughter, willed him to take notice, and in doing so, did bid forth her own demise.

In the flesh and fresh out of reform school, probation papers still poking out his back pocket, Michael played it all cool and cocky. Like hunter seeking prey, he strutted, sniffed the air and assessed the room with his buddy Paulie. But when he spied her sitting on the bleachers on the far side of the gymnasium, so coy, forestalling inhibition, t’was Michael who became the quarry. It was at that exact moment that their peril was set in motion.

He turned to his chum, impetuously certain though helplessly smitten, and pointed her out. “Did my heart love ‘til now? Can I believe my own eyes? I never saw true beauty until I looked at her”. Paulie merely shrugged and tugged at his Dickies.
Like the tide, moved as it is by an envious moon, Michael was drawn to Tasia, pulled by her. Insanely hopeful, madly enrapt, he approached. She closed the Book in her lap with a snap to silence her glee club associates and offered a most inviting smile. Magnetic. Electric. Kinetic.

It might have continued on like that had she not broken the silence first. “Hey.” She said. “Hey.” He replied. Her chorus sniggered. “I’m Tasia.” Hypnotized and paralyzed, he closed his eyes. “Michael” he rasped. Another peal of giggles brought him back around again. “Tonight there’ll be a party over at my cousin Artie’s. I’ll pick you up at seven.” As Paulie dragged him away, Tasia thought she had died and gone to Heaven.

Later that very night, from opposite ends of town two households quite unalike in dignity, young lovers unwittingly prepared for their precarious destiny. The pastor’s daughter living in a ranch style house on a tree lined cul de sac and the beautician’s boy living in a mud and stucco hovel near the railway track, primped and posed in front of their respective bedroom mirrors. One sat primly, brushing out her hair. One hundred strokes, no more, no less. Her gaze transfixed by her own image while a Crystals’ song played in her head. The other stood shirtless and lean, bulging and flexing to strike imposing reflections. He was James Cagney, Public Enemy Number One, brandishing imaginary guns and a lethal snarl. “You’ll never take me alive, Coppers”, he mugged.

Oh so much time spent in front of their looking glasses. It only begs the question; forsooth, to whom were fortune’s fools, these lovers two, whom were they most enamored with? You reader, know the truth. It was they themselves enchanted them most. If the swain and his beloved both lived another 50 years times 50 years or perhaps 20 years or 2 years even, he likely wouldn’t remember her name and all that she would recall of her time with him would be embarrassment and shame. But for tonight, they were heady with carnal longing and expectation. Their love was mythic, epic, classic. Their desire would not be denied.

Michael was as good as his word, albeit late. But when he arrived at her door at half past seven to pick up his date, her father was not impressed. The Misfits t-shirt, eyebrow piercing and fleshy odor all offended. He refused to let the boy see his daughter. The door closed in his face, sent away, dejected. Michael thought that this was entirely unexpected.

When she discovered what her Daddy had done, the girl heart-broken and miserable ran through the house screaming, “You have no right! You don’t even know him! I hate you!” and threw herself on her bed, crying inconsolably.

“That one is trouble”, he said to his wife as he watched the hoodlum backing down the street. “No good can come of this”. Perhaps, it might be argued, he was too harsh, too quick to judge. Unlikely though. He was her father, her king and sire. He wanted only to protect his little princess. And he also knew a truth about that boy; that he was like all boys of an age. Having been a boy once himself, he understood that young men’s lurid urges were ungovernable. “My child is yet a stranger in the world” and he meant to keep it that way. He shouted back down the hallway that it was all for her own good. A door slammed. Just as likely, the father’s denial was as much for his own peace of mind.

Divine decree be damned, Michael would not so easily be deprived. To reach her by phone he tried and tried, only to be answered with, “She can’t come to the phone” and “don’t call here again!” and SLAM! His own mother, stinking of peroxide and Lambrusco, said, “Forget about that girl, she’s too good for you anyway and have you been taking your pills?” Still he believed that what must be shall be. So he opted for a different play.

Under shadowy cloak of night, he risked all to tap at her window. Rising from her bed, ethereal and waiflike, Tasia went to him. “You shouldn’t be here, it isn’t safe”, she warned. “This will be your place of death if my father finds you at my sill”. But Michael was not afraid, emboldened as he was by his desire. He would rather die than fail in it. He begged her out. She did not hesitate.

They slipped away together into the midnight murk. Under star-crossed skies, they professed sensual desires, their true love grown to excess. And they bemoaned their lot, cursing both their houses with plague. “We can never go back”, she warned. “They’ll never let us be together.”

“I dreamed a dream”, he told her. “A portent that you and I, we two alone, must make our escape together or die trying.” In haste, they agreed. It was decided. That very night, tonight, they would run. The plan they made was a desperate one.
Is love a tender thing? No. Love is amoral. You know this. Love is a violent, frantic and overwhelming force. And violent delights have violent ends. When her father discovered the empty bed and empty garage, he put his fist through a wall and vowed that he would catch those kids and the hooligan would pay. “I’m gonna kill that little SOB!” he shrieked as he dialed the police number.

The open road tempted them, called to them and coaxed them on, while The Animals blared on the radio of her father’s stolen truck. Just one last stop at the 7-Eleven for supplies before they hit out North on highway 87 to begin their time without end. “Get me a box of Chicklets, and a Cherry Coke Big Gulp, oh and a pack of Lucky’s”, she asked as she put a tongue in his ear. He smiled his big toothy smile and said, “Keep the engine running, Baby”

He was only gone a minute, back in a flash, and ready to roll. But first, one last embrace. They were too tangled in each other to notice the arrival of five Black & Whites. When they finally tore themselves apart and looked up, Michael and Tasia found themselves surrounded by an assembly of officers with guns drawn. “Step out of the vehicle with your hands up” Time stopped. A murder of crows overhead froze in mid-flight. The cashier in the convenience store held his breath and ducked behind the counter. The air, sweet with orange blossoms, became still. Michael turned to Tasia. She looked back at him. They communicated their compact and their commitment through words implied but unspoken. If all else fails, they knew that they still had the power to die. He revved the engine and slipped the vehicle into gear.

* * * * * *

Red and White lights strobe on the cab of the Toyota Land Cruiser. It was a private tomb inside which they lay in their eternal embrace, no warmth, no breath. Parting smoke and dust reveal two, mortally wounded from the bullet barrage, the hail of gunfire. Blood pools with motor oil on the asphalt beneath the truck. Behind yellow tape, an Action5 newscaster in her tight blue blazer checks the shot. The silvery haired reporter, always first on the scene, ever comfortable with tragedy and giddy at the scent of death, shoves her microphone in the face of the grieving parents to pose her question; “Who’s to blame in this tragedy, the police, Ritalin, popular media or video games?”

While there could be no agreement on fault, everyone granted that Officer Bellow’s MP5 submachine gun use was excessive. “They were good kids,” wept the girl’s father. “They didn’t deserve this”. A wreath was placed at the scene, memorial to young love, between the ice machine and the video vending booth.