TAFKAP the Love Symbol

We lined up to get in Donnie’s Corvette, gray not red, the summer after we graduated, high on weed and the liquor we stole from our parent’s bars and refrigerators. He’d blast out of the high school parking lot where we partied in summer, our friends’ junker cars behind. Prince shrieked and wailed all over the middle class, elm-shaded streets. Fathers shifted in their sleep and mumbled shut up. Mothers prowled the rooms counting their children in their beds. We sang along in blurry drunk voices, the Corvette screaming down the streets of our Midwest suburb, all neon red, yellow, green, and blue with fast food restaurants and pizza joints, smell of grease and humidity crawling all over us. We scrounged up dimes and quarters for French fries and cigarettes and shoplifted Hershey kisses and Reese’s candy bars, jumping into our cars like we were Bonnies and Clydes. We spread blankets and towels on the green lawn of a deserted industrial park outside of town, shell-shocked windows watching us like stray dogs. Prince was our sex dust, our get-out-of-town card, our fountain of youth. We wanted to freeze, cherry-ripe statues sprawled half naked and panting. We wanted to shoot into the future where we’d have money in the bank, alcohol whenever we wanted it, and penthouse apartments in NYC and San Francisco. Prince’s voice, falsetto satin and baritone velvet pushed and pulled us like we were a tug-of-war rope. We slept, a tangled pile of firm flesh and satisfied desire until the stars dimmed and the horizon turned to pink. When we slunk into our houses, our parents told us to get our asses to work and then come straight home. We showered off the grass but the velvet and satin still thrummed on our skin. That was our last summer. That was our first summer. Our paradise. Our purgatory.