Snowflakes In Autumn, 1a

I’m trying something new today. I’ve decided to give away at least a little bit of a novel I’ve been working on, titled Snowflakes In Autumn. It’s the touching tale of a romantic misanthrope and his slow progression from womanizing asshat into stable family man. There’s love and there’s loathing, there’s laughter and tears, and it all wraps up in a bittersweet tragedy of Oprah-level proportions. I will be posting one chapter each week, broken into five daily installments until further notice.

Snowflakes In Autumn
Chapter One, Part One

Life finally began for me after twenty-two years of preparation had failed to prepare me for anything. I was away at college and following the cliché when I lost my virginity to a girl I barely knew as a friend, much less as anything more significant. But, it was college and she was a girl and I was a boy. In the charged atmosphere of a university dorm, interlocking parts and a little tequila is all the familiarity you need between strangers.

Consequently, my first time wasn’t filled with romance and candlelight, but with a few slices of lime over a bottle of Cuervo and the wet slaps of her gay roommate’s clapping, which he did with incessant fervor every time we started to get a little too quiet. To my credit, she did not believe that it was my first sojourn into the damp and mysterious inner caverns of a woman’s body. And, to her credit, neither did I.

It’s a sad and silly thing, to consider my life starting off where my virginity ended, but that’s just how things work. We men may begin our lives in the womb, but we’re not really born until we’ve invaded the sovereign nation of another woman’s vagina. I know it sounds stupid, probably because it is. Stupid and male – but we’re all bound by the ridiculous laws of our own perception, however misguided those laws may be. I am no exception.

So, at the not-so-tender age of twenty-two and after just having had my first slippery taste of a brand new world, I was born again. I was a man now, ready and eager to go out into the wide world and stake my claim. It was a rite of passage. A game. The male code, as it were. The utterly and completely asinine set of standards and double-standards that both empower and cripple the male gender. Machismo and chivalry are nice concepts and have their place in the world, but like most games children play, they’re are only fun until someone gets hurt.

So I played the game, and I bedded the women. Night after night, girl after girl, I kept to the code, growing up a little more with each girl I loved and left. Nearly every sexual encounter I had within my first year of being “sexually active” sprang forth from the loins and lips of my very first conquest. She talked me up to her friends like I was some secret shoe sale at Macy’s, and it wasn’t long before they came sniffing around, wanting to know what all the fuss was about. I was all too happy to show them.

My journey towards that first fateful night of sexual bliss, however, began many years earlier. It was a more innocent time, and I was a more innocent age. A lot more innocent…

****

The fountainhead of what would eventually grow to become the raging, white-water river of women upon which I have spent my entire life attempting to navigate while frantically paddling to keep my little canoe from careening into jagged rocks and capsizing, was my very first girlfriend. She came into my life quite a bit earlier than my college years. It was during first grade, in fact, that she entered my world and bludgeoned my relationship passport with the unique design of her own distinctive stamp.

Her name was Shannon, and she was not at all normal. She had dark brown hair, wore coke bottle glasses, and was breaking the speed limit back when most of the kids I knew were still struggling not to poop themselves. Her legs were short. Very short. Tiny, even. I don’t remember what her condition was, or if I ever even knew, but I did know that it confined her to a wheelchair. Confined, however, is not a word that springs to mind when I remember Shannon.

Looking back now, although I didn’t know it then, it was probably her abnormality that attracted my attention – and I don’t mean her disability. She was a strange girl, full of defiance and and an independence of spirit at a time of life when normal kids are still terrified of nasty marks going on their Permanent Records. I’ve always been drawn to the weird and the wicked things of this Earth, having no truck with normality and mediocrity where I can avoid them for the soul-destroying concepts that they are. Shannon was my first taste of a wild and wondrous world beyond the sickening veil of suburbanite normalcy, and knowing her was an Education.

She was sarcastic, smart-assed, and opinionated. She teased authority and challenged everyone around her. She’d break out of the restroom line to speed down the hall and pop wheelies in her chair, the teacher running frantically behind, trying to catch up and failing miserably. She would dare the administration to punish her, and would later mock their efforts by exposing their campus authority as an impotent and toothless sort of tyranny that the rest of us need not fear. Parents hated her. Teachers were scared of her. Kids avoided her. I loved her.

Our relationship consisted of sharing a lunch table and talking in class. We would partner up for whatever time-slaying tasks our temporally murderous teacher conjured up to keep us busy each day, and I would push her down the hall – the only person she’d allow to touch her wheelchair. More often than not, she would shout orders at me to go faster, and I’d break into a run. She would then immediately either hit the breaks on both wheels, causing me to smash into the back of her chair, or on only one of them, which would send us careening ninety degrees in one direction or the other – usually whichever way would involve us crashing into other kids. Good times.

I don’t remember what happened to her, or why I never saw her again after first grade. Maybe her parents moved, or maybe the school forced her into some spirit-crushing special class. I’ll never know. All I’ll ever have of her is my memories of sailing through hallways at blistering speeds, popping wheelies and ignoring the plaintive, panicked pleas of worried teachers begging her to ‘stop misbehaving and just be normal.’ If I learned one worthwhile thing in first grade, it’s that the world needs more Shannons in it. A lot more.

Continue to Chapter One, Part Two

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