Duane always thought of himself as a likable guy. He never stepped on anyone's toes, or at least tried not to. But he wouldn't call himself a wallflower either.

At last year's Christmas party he had had one too many and asked his best friend's girlfriend, Jessica, to come home with him. And when she said yes, he couldn't bring himself to wriggle into the tiger striped, strawberry edible briefs that Jessica had brought with her. Maybe it was him, that he just wasn't ready for that sort of thing. Or maybe it was out of respect for his best friend. When they were finished he had the courtesy to give her cab fare for the trip home. And when the cab came, she gave him a kiss, thanked him for a fun time, and asked him not to tell Jason, her boyfriend. Duane said he thought that would be best and waved.

So he wasn't a wallflower, or at least anecdotes like this one helped him to convince himself. What was so wrong with being a wallflower anyway? Nothing that he could come up with except that Mrs. Lane, his kindergarten teacher had once told him to stop being such a wallflower.

He had liked his kindergarten teacher until that day. Afterwards he grew to despise her. She had placed the scourge of the wallflower upon him. Worry about being a wallflower plagued him almost everyday of his life. He used it as a measure of his existence and as a guage for decision making. When he looked back on his life, he always weighed himself based on whether his actions had been wallflowerish or not. That he had been the only kid who didn't sing in the fourth grade chorus tormented him. When he was trying to decide whether to write a letter in response to a magazine article, he would think, a wallflower wouldn't write this letter, and so he would write it.

It was quite a curse that his kindergarten teacher had laid upon him. This wallflower thing was a part of him. He couldn't kick it. He tried to come up with other ways of looking at his life, but he couldn't. Not only was he saddled with the wallflower plague, but he also demeaned himself for not being able to come up with anything better. He was harnessed with a double yoke. Since he couldn't arrive at any other code for life, he figured this wallflower thing was as good as any and stuck with it.

Duane didn't like his kindergarten teacher very much anymore, but he somethimes fantasized about showering with her. He imagined her with her glasses on, and the shower water cascading off her sun-spotted shoulders and down her back. The fantasy climaxed when Sally undid her bun, shook her head gracefully, and let the long grey hair pour out of its confinement and fill up around her neck and shoulders. He never figured out why this image turned him on, but then again he never figured out a lot of things.

One of those was why his father, Vasislov, wanted him to be a ballerina. A Russian emigrant, Vasislov had an intense fascination with the ballet and had always dreamed of fathering a star ballerina. He prayed for a daughter, but when Duane was born Vasislov held on to his aspirations. From the age of two Duane had been taking ballet lessons.
Of course at that time Duane had no idea why he was doing it, because when you're two you don't know why you're doing any of the things you do. Duane wondered when this changed. Is it a sudden thing, that you realize why you do what you do, or does it happen gradually with things slowly falling into place like a giant jigsaw puzzle? At least he knew what he was doing now. And when he didn't, he had the wallflower thing to refer to.

Ballet lessons continued steadily through the years for Duane, and the years of ridicule by his peers continued to mount. Duane constantly asked his mother, Alice, to deliver him from what he thought was a sick fetish of his father's and let him quit ballet. Alice indulged Vasislov, and poor Duane donned the pink tights for another series of pirouettes.

Eventually, when Duane was fourteen, his father passed away, and he quit the ballet, much to the dismay of his mother who had promised Vasislov on his death bed to continue Duane's ballet education. Torn by sympathy for his mother's promise and his own feeling of familial betrayal, Duane collapsed under the emotional load.

For several years he sought release in music. The coronet became his passion, and he played with the fervency of one who has nothing else. What feelings he didn't drown with his tears were buried under the blaring notes of the horn that companioned him so faithfully. His attachment to the horn became so great that he gave it a name. Luana, he called it and even wrote romantically of it in his diary. He never "played the coronet" anymore; he now "touched Luana" or "took Luana for a stroll."

He bought the coronet with money earned from the grocery clerk job he took to fill the hours he had once spent at ballet. The horn served as a bittersweet paradox for Duane. It represented the essence of his betrayal to his father, because without quitting ballet he couldn't have bought the horn. At the same time the horn served as the instrument of elevation from the misery caused by quitting.

The horn eventually became a source of economic as well as emotional sustenance. After high school, Duane played blues in sleazy night clubs--dark, run-down little boxes with red velvet table cloths and sloppily molded, red glass candle lamps.

It was in a club called Eden that he met his first love, Mona. Mona was also his second love, and his third. She had a special three for one deal going, and Duane wasn't one to pass up a bargain. He couldn't afford to the way these night clubs paid him. He and Mona had a wonderful relationship full of sharing and devotion. Two days later they broke up when Duane found out that Lester, Duane's drummer, had become one of Mona's "clients."

During these freewheeling years of drunkenness and musical creation, Duane lived in a small cubicle on the east side.

When he was discovered and signed to the biggest record company in the Midwest, he rented a spacious apartment in the posh central district and furnished it with the trappings of his new lifestyle. Giant, cushioned, cupping hands were scattered throughout the living room to serve as chairs/artwork. Unintelligible oil paintings done by the Progressivist, John Frank, in his celebration of the resurgence of faux Midwesternism adorned the walls and added a barren life to the stark, black and white, art deco feel of Duane's new apartment.

With his new-found success as a springboard, Duane leapt into the hustle and turmoil of the city's chic culture. His stardom was short- lived though. When the city tabloid published an article about Duane's lower class origins, the socialites immediately spewed him from their circle.

Music wasn't enough this time to elevate Duane from his social demise, and sadly he turned to heroine as a release. Two years later, he was checked into the city morgue with a tag around his toe that read John Doe.

Back where you came from