Reginald's plane soared northward as he gazed across the clouds from his window seat. The clouds looked like… they looked like…
"Blood-sucking vampires," Reginald muttered.
The man seated next to him looked up from his magazine. "Pardon?" he asked.
"Oh, uh, nothing. Sorry," Reginald answered, and scratched the back of his neck. He had been lost in thoughts of mosquitoes. Big, bad Bolivian rain forest mosquitoes. His mission trip had taken him to a remote town in the northeastern part of the country where birds looked like birds, monkeys looked like monkeys, but the mosquitoes looked like a cross between the two, like those flying monkeys in The Wizard of Oz. Reginald scratched the top of his thigh. It's hard to focus on the Lord's work when you're scratching your epidermis like a frenzied gambling addict rubbing off lottery tickets or you're slathered in anti-itch cream like a rack of spare ribs drenched in barbecue sauce.
By focusing on cloud formations, Reginald hoped he could distract himself from his recent memories of Bolivia. His mother, Lucille, had urged him to go after Reginald returned home to Kalamazoo from his first year at Michigan Tech. To Louise, he seemed as transformed as a turkey carcass after Christmas dinner. Lucille wasn't used to her geeky boy lying on the couch for hours at a time, aimlessly clicking the TV remote like an insomniac performing data entry duties. Reginald refused to reveal the source of his pain as he clammed up tighter than a rusted out chastity belt. So, she suggested he get away from it all and join a mission trip organized by her church. Reggie had never been religious but saw the merit in "getting out of himself", like Harry Houdini extracting himself from a straitjacket before he drowned.
Little Reggie had been a perky youngster, at least until junior high rolled around. Poor Reginald's head was somewhat misshapen, like an overly inflated football, which gave his eyes the wide-set look of a goat. A posse of school bullies took one look and descended on him like a flock of crows to freshly-mangled roadkill. They made bleating noises when they passed him in the hallway and soon the whole 7th grade school wing joined in. Between class bells, the hallways resounded in a cacophony of farm noises -- cows, chickens, sheep -- like a symphony of livestock at the Iowa State Fair. The principal soon put an end to the hallway noise and was sympathetic to Lucille's pleas for help: he suspended the perpetrators caught taping to Reginald's locker a picture of a goat performing a sex act on a mildly distracted donkey.
But it was hopeless. Reginald continued to suffer the non-stop slings and arrows of adolescent barbarity. He sank further into a shame-infused depression, refused to go to school, feeling like a forgotten, dried up mushroom at the back of a refrigerator. The best course of action, all agreed, was to home-school the boy, and before long, Reginald transcended his trauma and tore into his on-line studies like a runt piglet scrambling for a teat. Lucille bought Reginald the best computer and latest software, and sitting before his keyboard and monitor, Reginald felt alive as never before in an infinite circuitry of information and unconditional acceptance.
Reginald was an only child and his father had never been in his life. He took one look at little Reggie when the boy was three months old and hit the road like a rambling man brainwashed by too many folk songs. Lucille had inherited a sizable sum from her grandmother's estate so never struggled to make ends meet. But she was afflicted with chronic attention deficit disorder and found it impossible to manage her son's academic program. At any task, she became as distracted as a hypochondriac in a leper colony. But Reginald reciprocated by taking charge: he made out the shopping lists, did the laundry, and kept her plugged into books and game shows. Lucille just adored Pat Sajak whom she imagined looked like the handsome pervert in Fifty Shades of Grey.
Reginald hardly left the house but made many friends on-line, especially in chat rooms that focused on computer code. Friends only knew him by his chat-name, "Bob Barker", and when he would enter a discussion, they would welcome him by typing in, "Come on down!" Reginald loved both the anonymity and his fellowship with his like-minded geeks. He felt fully embraced in this fair and anonymous world where it seemed everyone wore paper bags over their heads.
He soared in his studies, and after he mastered rote requirements, he begged his on-line instructors for extra credit and college level work. Reginald scored at the 99th percentile on his ACT and SATs, and his on-line teachers praised him in letters of reference that sounded like the pronouncements of used car salesmen. Reginald received full-ride scholarships from Cal Tech, MIT, and Michigan Tech, and ultimately chose the latter. College with all its social interactions scared him, and imagined he could find solace by retreating to an ice cave on the Lake Superior shore. He would think of himself as Nanook of the North, swaddled in a seal skin coat, alone and satisfied that a sufficiency of whale blubber had been stashed away.
Reginald had walked onto the campus in Houghton as anxious as a hemophiliac working in a glass factory, but he soon found that the social scene in college was as far from junior high as Pluto is from the sun. In a matter of weeks, he verily skipped to his classes and immersed himself into academia like a chunk of bread plunged into a pot of cheese fondue. Reginald got A's on tests, A's on papers, A's for attendance, and A's with extra credit. He gave himself an A for Attaboy! He made the dean's list and envisioned a power career in Silicon Valley. And in February, he and his roommate, Silvio, visited the ice caves on Lake Superior, and Reginald had to chuckle as he recalled an image of himself, hunkered alone within an icy room, like a freezing monk in a freezing monastery, wishing the outside world would just stay away.
April arose like a gentle crocus with its wisp of light blue hope that the glacier known as the U.P. would one day melt away. It also marked the day of the Fool. Reginald had an hour for lunch and took a seat at the busy Bunyon Cafeteria with his tray of sloppy joe's, buttered corn, and chocolate milk. As he munched away, a girl took a seat directly across from him with her tray of salad, crackers, and tomato juice. In a few moments, their eyes locked like two forefingers stuck together in one of those tubular Chinese finger traps. They stopped chewing mid-bite as though their faces had seized up in simultaneous power outages. From that moment forward, they became inseparable.
Was it love? Whatever it was, Reginald went from scholastic superstar to love-stoked earthworm. Before, he had never even had a date, and now he clung to this girl, Anna, like burnt honey-baked ham drippings to a roasting pan. They teased, they cuddled, and when apart, Reginald's thumbs ached from the non-stop texting. And lord, how they screwed, as though they were the Kama Sutra creators, and performed for hours like a couple of conjoined contortionists in a carnival sideshow.
To say Reginald was a bit obsessed would be like claiming the only cockroach on the counter is the only cockroach in the kitchen. And how, alongside this new extra curriculum, did his schoolwork fare? He quit going to class. He quit his assignments. In a single mouthful of buttered corn, he quit caring about college altogether. It's not that he gave up, but felt commanded suddenly by an all-consuming calling, like one of the dead pursuing human flesh in an episode of that popular TV series on Sunday nights.
At the end of the semester, with their summer separation looming, Reginald wrote Anna an impassioned poem of devotion. He entitled it, "Anna and My Banana". She was shell-shocked. Upon her second reading, she looked as though her emotional garden, so lovingly cultivated, had just been plowed under by a procession of water buffaloes. For Reginald to reduce their incredible love to crass images of cucumbers, zucchini and, yes, kumquats, well, she felt as crushed as a discarded baby stroller in a garbage truck. Anna tore up the poem, threw the confetti into Reginald's face, and stormed away.
Reginald felt as wanted as a stubborn turd that floats up after an unsuccessful toilet flush. He trudged up to his dorm room and buried his head in his pillow. Silvio soon returned from his last final exam, and seeing his roommate whimpering and all balled up on his bed, said, "Whazamata, amigo? Dot chica Anna, how you say?, she cut off ze balls of you?"
Reginald pulled the pillow from his head, peered at his roommate, and stammered, "S-s-s-si."
"Well, dot Anna, you know I always say, she's no good for you. And you write dot poetry all night. She doesn't like it?"
Reginald just stared up at the ceiling like a corpse prepped for an embalming.
"Well, amigo, here you go. You got mail. Maybe good news, yes?" Silvio said, and placed a letter on Reginald's chest.
It took Reginald a while to gather energy to open the letter. It was from the dean's office. It reported that he had flunked every class in his second semester and in order to continue at the university, he had to re-apply with a full explanation as to why he failed. This news struck Reginald with all the impact of a spitball trying to divert an asteroid careening towards Earth.
"Blood-sucking vampires," Reginald muttered.
The man seated next to him looked up from his magazine. "Pardon?" he asked.
"Oh, uh, nothing. Sorry," Reginald answered, and scratched the back of his neck. He had been lost in thoughts of mosquitoes. Big, bad Bolivian rain forest mosquitoes. His mission trip had taken him to a remote town in the northeastern part of the country where birds looked like birds, monkeys looked like monkeys, but the mosquitoes looked like a cross between the two, like those flying monkeys in The Wizard of Oz. Reginald scratched the top of his thigh. It's hard to focus on the Lord's work when you're scratching your epidermis like a frenzied gambling addict rubbing off lottery tickets or you're slathered in anti-itch cream like a rack of spare ribs drenched in barbecue sauce.
By focusing on cloud formations, Reginald hoped he could distract himself from his recent memories of Bolivia. His mother, Lucille, had urged him to go after Reginald returned home to Kalamazoo from his first year at Michigan Tech. To Louise, he seemed as transformed as a turkey carcass after Christmas dinner. Lucille wasn't used to her geeky boy lying on the couch for hours at a time, aimlessly clicking the TV remote like an insomniac performing data entry duties. Reginald refused to reveal the source of his pain as he clammed up tighter than a rusted out chastity belt. So, she suggested he get away from it all and join a mission trip organized by her church. Reggie had never been religious but saw the merit in "getting out of himself", like Harry Houdini extracting himself from a straitjacket before he drowned.
Little Reggie had been a perky youngster, at least until junior high rolled around. Poor Reginald's head was somewhat misshapen, like an overly inflated football, which gave his eyes the wide-set look of a goat. A posse of school bullies took one look and descended on him like a flock of crows to freshly-mangled roadkill. They made bleating noises when they passed him in the hallway and soon the whole 7th grade school wing joined in. Between class bells, the hallways resounded in a cacophony of farm noises -- cows, chickens, sheep -- like a symphony of livestock at the Iowa State Fair. The principal soon put an end to the hallway noise and was sympathetic to Lucille's pleas for help: he suspended the perpetrators caught taping to Reginald's locker a picture of a goat performing a sex act on a mildly distracted donkey.
But it was hopeless. Reginald continued to suffer the non-stop slings and arrows of adolescent barbarity. He sank further into a shame-infused depression, refused to go to school, feeling like a forgotten, dried up mushroom at the back of a refrigerator. The best course of action, all agreed, was to home-school the boy, and before long, Reginald transcended his trauma and tore into his on-line studies like a runt piglet scrambling for a teat. Lucille bought Reginald the best computer and latest software, and sitting before his keyboard and monitor, Reginald felt alive as never before in an infinite circuitry of information and unconditional acceptance.
Reginald was an only child and his father had never been in his life. He took one look at little Reggie when the boy was three months old and hit the road like a rambling man brainwashed by too many folk songs. Lucille had inherited a sizable sum from her grandmother's estate so never struggled to make ends meet. But she was afflicted with chronic attention deficit disorder and found it impossible to manage her son's academic program. At any task, she became as distracted as a hypochondriac in a leper colony. But Reginald reciprocated by taking charge: he made out the shopping lists, did the laundry, and kept her plugged into books and game shows. Lucille just adored Pat Sajak whom she imagined looked like the handsome pervert in Fifty Shades of Grey.
Reginald hardly left the house but made many friends on-line, especially in chat rooms that focused on computer code. Friends only knew him by his chat-name, "Bob Barker", and when he would enter a discussion, they would welcome him by typing in, "Come on down!" Reginald loved both the anonymity and his fellowship with his like-minded geeks. He felt fully embraced in this fair and anonymous world where it seemed everyone wore paper bags over their heads.
He soared in his studies, and after he mastered rote requirements, he begged his on-line instructors for extra credit and college level work. Reginald scored at the 99th percentile on his ACT and SATs, and his on-line teachers praised him in letters of reference that sounded like the pronouncements of used car salesmen. Reginald received full-ride scholarships from Cal Tech, MIT, and Michigan Tech, and ultimately chose the latter. College with all its social interactions scared him, and imagined he could find solace by retreating to an ice cave on the Lake Superior shore. He would think of himself as Nanook of the North, swaddled in a seal skin coat, alone and satisfied that a sufficiency of whale blubber had been stashed away.
Reginald had walked onto the campus in Houghton as anxious as a hemophiliac working in a glass factory, but he soon found that the social scene in college was as far from junior high as Pluto is from the sun. In a matter of weeks, he verily skipped to his classes and immersed himself into academia like a chunk of bread plunged into a pot of cheese fondue. Reginald got A's on tests, A's on papers, A's for attendance, and A's with extra credit. He gave himself an A for Attaboy! He made the dean's list and envisioned a power career in Silicon Valley. And in February, he and his roommate, Silvio, visited the ice caves on Lake Superior, and Reginald had to chuckle as he recalled an image of himself, hunkered alone within an icy room, like a freezing monk in a freezing monastery, wishing the outside world would just stay away.
April arose like a gentle crocus with its wisp of light blue hope that the glacier known as the U.P. would one day melt away. It also marked the day of the Fool. Reginald had an hour for lunch and took a seat at the busy Bunyon Cafeteria with his tray of sloppy joe's, buttered corn, and chocolate milk. As he munched away, a girl took a seat directly across from him with her tray of salad, crackers, and tomato juice. In a few moments, their eyes locked like two forefingers stuck together in one of those tubular Chinese finger traps. They stopped chewing mid-bite as though their faces had seized up in simultaneous power outages. From that moment forward, they became inseparable.
Was it love? Whatever it was, Reginald went from scholastic superstar to love-stoked earthworm. Before, he had never even had a date, and now he clung to this girl, Anna, like burnt honey-baked ham drippings to a roasting pan. They teased, they cuddled, and when apart, Reginald's thumbs ached from the non-stop texting. And lord, how they screwed, as though they were the Kama Sutra creators, and performed for hours like a couple of conjoined contortionists in a carnival sideshow.
To say Reginald was a bit obsessed would be like claiming the only cockroach on the counter is the only cockroach in the kitchen. And how, alongside this new extra curriculum, did his schoolwork fare? He quit going to class. He quit his assignments. In a single mouthful of buttered corn, he quit caring about college altogether. It's not that he gave up, but felt commanded suddenly by an all-consuming calling, like one of the dead pursuing human flesh in an episode of that popular TV series on Sunday nights.
At the end of the semester, with their summer separation looming, Reginald wrote Anna an impassioned poem of devotion. He entitled it, "Anna and My Banana". She was shell-shocked. Upon her second reading, she looked as though her emotional garden, so lovingly cultivated, had just been plowed under by a procession of water buffaloes. For Reginald to reduce their incredible love to crass images of cucumbers, zucchini and, yes, kumquats, well, she felt as crushed as a discarded baby stroller in a garbage truck. Anna tore up the poem, threw the confetti into Reginald's face, and stormed away.
Reginald felt as wanted as a stubborn turd that floats up after an unsuccessful toilet flush. He trudged up to his dorm room and buried his head in his pillow. Silvio soon returned from his last final exam, and seeing his roommate whimpering and all balled up on his bed, said, "Whazamata, amigo? Dot chica Anna, how you say?, she cut off ze balls of you?"
Reginald pulled the pillow from his head, peered at his roommate, and stammered, "S-s-s-si."
"Well, dot Anna, you know I always say, she's no good for you. And you write dot poetry all night. She doesn't like it?"
Reginald just stared up at the ceiling like a corpse prepped for an embalming.
"Well, amigo, here you go. You got mail. Maybe good news, yes?" Silvio said, and placed a letter on Reginald's chest.
It took Reginald a while to gather energy to open the letter. It was from the dean's office. It reported that he had flunked every class in his second semester and in order to continue at the university, he had to re-apply with a full explanation as to why he failed. This news struck Reginald with all the impact of a spitball trying to divert an asteroid careening towards Earth.
