Feels Like the First Time (6 page)

I looked at the warm sunshine and felt myself irresistibly drawn to it. The light was so bright, I closed my eyes. When I opened them again, I was back in my darkened bedroom. I could still feel the warmth surrounding me. Mom was hovering over me, her face twisted in a sour knot.

I looked her in the eye and said, “Let I, who am a part of God, find the part of me that is a part of you.” Understandably, that didn’t calm her, and she scampered out of the room.

“I’m going to call the doctor!” she yelled.

She thought my fever was causing hallucinations, and maybe that was so. I have no way of knowing. What I felt in that room inside my head felt more real than anything I have ever experienced. I was never the same person after that fever-dream. I have seen things differently ever since.

Perspective is everything.

To this day, I don’t know where the “Let I, who am a part of God…” line came from. It felt like I was quoting someone or something when I said it, but I’ve never been able to find that quote anywhere. Maybe it was one last parting gift from my elf-self still ringing in my ears when I woke up.

Mom was freaked out by the whole experience. She had always been a big reader of New Age books, and now she was convinced her real son was gone, and I had been replaced by what her books called a “walk-in”–a spirit that joins a life partway through. I was different after I woke up, but I was still just me at the same time.

In any case, when I woke up that day, I seemed to be over the worst of the encephalitis. I stayed in bed for another week to get my strength back, but I was getting better every day.

My dresser was covered with dozens of letters and get-well cards but my bedside table was almost empty. There was a glass of water, a little lamp and the Homecoming picture of Dawn and me. It came in a little cardboard frame, and I couldn’t take my eyes off it. I looked pretty geeky in the picture, but Dawn looked so lovely it made my chest tight to look at her.

That last week in bed I spent more time pondering, “What does Dawn think about me?” than I did all other subjects combined. Before I could learn the answer, I had to regain my strength, which took until almost Christmas time. 

Feels Like the First Time

I was sure I would bounce right back from the debilitating effects of encephalitis. However, the lingering symptoms combined with a month and a half of lying in bed meant a much slower recovery than I anticipated. Luckily, I had good relationships with my teachers. They would have been justified in giving me a whole trimester of Incompletes, which would have jeopardized my graduation that spring. Instead, several of my teachers took me aside, asked me a few questions about the relevant material and then told me I was “good to go.”

Even with help from my teachers, the first few weeks of December 1977 were a whirlwind of cramming and makeup work, which left little time to pay attention to what really mattered to me those days, such as trying to get a date with Dawn.

As if I wasn’t already busy enough, we had decided this was the time to resurrect KISS II.
The band had undergone major changes over the summer. Six months earlier, Jerry, my nephew Tommy and I had all attended our first concert–KISS and Cheap Trick at the Seattle Center Coliseum.

Jerry and I had gone to the show in full KISS regalia, and we had an awesome time even before the first guitar note blew us away. KISS was on their
Love Gun
tour that summer, and Gene, Paul and Ace started the concert on illuminated risers that lifted up and hovered over the audience. The flash pots, light show and incredible energy KISS brought to a show overwhelmed us. I spent the first few minutes of the show in a hypnotic trance, repeating “unbelievable” over and over. I turned to Jerry and said, “It looks just like an album cover.” Then KISS launched into an ear-piercing rendition of
I Stole Your Love
and that ended any attempt at conversation.

Then a funny thing happened. Jerry had played Gene Simmons since the day we started KISS II, but as the concert progressed, he moved toward the center of the stage where Paul Stanley was holding court. At the same time, I found myself watching Gene even though I had always been Paul. Gene had a serpentine, sinewy energy I hadn’t been able to imagine before seeing his live performance.

Our minds were properly blown by the time the concert ended. We made our way back to the car and Jerry and I knew we had made a mistake when we first put KISS II together. Jerry should have been Paul and I should have been Gene. Jerry made a good Gene and a great Paul. At the same time, I made a horrendous Paul and a reasonably good Gene.

We started practicing our new roles as soon as school began. Then I got sick and everything ground to a halt for me. The rest of the band continued practicing in my absence, though, and Jerry got us our first gig. It was set for the Saturday after school let out for Christmas vacation.

The venue wasn’t as exciting as the ones KISS played. It was the multi-purpose room in our high school and the crowd was roughly a hundred people, but we didn’t care. Almost a year after we had first played at the Mossyrock Talent Show, KISS II was back. The rest of the world failed to take notice, but it meant a lot to us.

I don’t know how we managed to talk the school administration into letting us perform that night. School was out for Christmas break and the teachers should have all been scattering to the four winds, but we talked them into opening up the school so we could massage their brains with KISS songs played at 100 decibels.

We arrived for our show at 3 PM, which was the earliest we could convince someone to open the doors to the school. We took down all the lunch tables and chairs to open up the room. This was rock ‘n roll, and we didn’t want anyone sitting down. No one told the custodian that the greatest lip-sync tribute band in Lewis County was going to perform that night, so the furnace wasn’t on and the temperature inside was about 50 degrees. But we figured we’d heat it up through the sheer power of rock ‘n roll.

We had genuine roadies by then, which meant we talked Jeff Hunter and Craig Landes into helping set up our sparse equipment. We had two huge, borrowed speakers and a reel-to-reel tape machine. Jeff even figured out a way to make flash pots, consisting of a scary mixture of a Folgers coffee can, bare electrical wire and gunpowder. I don’t think they would have passed a fire safety inspection, but we were excited to have them.

From the outset, we received the same raucous crowd reaction as the year before at the talent show. This time it was even better, because it lasted an hour and a half instead of just one song. I didn’t have the reputedly 7” tongue Gene did, but endless tongue exercises and sheer willpower helped me stick my tongue out a lot further. I was truly a suffering artist.

One other slight complication with this first show was that we hadn’t thought to use smokeless gunpowder. After we blew off the fire pots during
Firehouse
, a billowy haze of smoke filled the room. Standing onstage, I couldn’t see anyone past the front row. That was probably for the best, since the teachers didn’t know we were going to do that and I didn’t really want to see their expressions.

Dawn was there that night as well. I ran into her and a few of her friends before the show and I talked to them in my six-inch platform boots, costume with bat wings and a ratted-out wig with a top knot. Her friends seemed to eye me with a mixture of suspicion and awe. Being in KISS II was a whole new world for me. Although Dawn never seemed too impressed by the whole fake rock star thing, I knew it couldn’t hurt if her friends were.

Before the concert, we sent out invitations to student council members from other schools, and a few of them showed up. By the end of the relatively successful debut of the new KISS II, we had interested parties in hot spots like Onalaska and Napavine. After so many false starts, it felt like we were finally on our way.

Before we could have further adventures in KISS II, there was Christmas to worry about. Each Christmas, my family went to stay with my sister Terri and her family in Auburn. This year I was able to drive up in my Vega by myself.

Staying with Terri, Jim, and Tommy in Auburn was something like an episode of
The Beverly Hillbillies
. My step-dad was a construction worker, and Mom was a waitress. My sister and her husband held high-profile jobs in the corporate world. They had a rambling, two-story home on a hill with a view of Mt. Rainier, and it was always decorated to the nines at Christmastime. Terri and Jim were always gracious and welcoming. Terri had outdone herself getting the house ready, and had arranged to have a choir come and sing Christmas carols to us.

After three days in the big city, my step-dad couldn’t take it anymore. He and Mom packed up the Chrysler and headed back to Mossyrock. I stayed behind because I didn’t want to drive the speed limit the whole way home, and I didn’t want to risk a lecture from Mom.

Then a strange thing happened. I remembered it was Dawn’s birthday, and I couldn’t get her out of my mind. I sat in the basement and tried to play Strat-O-Matic College Football with Tommy. But between each play, my thoughts drifted to Dawn.

I had known Dawn for two and a half years by then. We spent hundreds of hours hanging out in our yards and shared one memorable slow dance on my 16
^th
birthday. We’d gone on a last minute fill-in date at Homecoming two months prior. We were friends, but at least on the surface, nothing else. And yet, I couldn’t get her out of my mind.

I had no idea why this inability to think of anything else took root at that exact moment. I only knew it was the truth. I also knew it was time for action. I needed to make something happen regardless of the consequences. I felt like I might explode if I just continued relying on fate to bail me out.

Before I left for home, I called Dawn. I dialed her number and was surprised at how nervous I was to call a girl I knew so well. After a few rings, Dawn answered.

“Hello?”

“Dawn? This is Shawn. Ummm… hey, I just remembered it’s your birthday, and I was going to go out town and see
Star Wars
tonight anyway, so I was wondering if maybe you wanted to go with me.”

I was so nervous I could feel my heart beating in my throat, but Dawn sounded as cool as ever.

“Yeah, okay. I’ll ask Mom and Dad if I can go.”

After a few seconds of muffled conversation on the other end, she said she could go.

I obsessed about Dawn and
Star Wars
on the drive home from Auburn. All I could think about was seeing her that night. It seemed that my Vega grew wings and flew me all the way home. I got back just in time to take a second shower and walk across the yard to pick Dawn up for our first real, planned, honest-to-God date.

After a complete interrogation by Walt and Colleen, we earned a stamp of approval and set out for the movie theater. Dawn was beside me like she had been so often, except now we were on a date. I was so nervous we hardly spoke on the entire drive to Centralia.

Since this was our first date, I wanted to make sure everything went smoothly. I didn’t want to be late to the movie. I hadn’t considered what would happen if we got to the theater before it was even open, though. As we pulled up to the darkened Fox Theater in Centralia, I realized the movie didn’t start for more than an hour. I recovered by acting as if this was my plan all along. I turned to Dawn and smiled weakly.

“I got us to town early because I thought you might like to drive around and look at the Christmas lights.”

She smiled and tucked her hair behind her ears. I loved it when she did that.

“Okay,” she said. Her perfume filled my senses. It was
Babe
by Faberge, and the scent was becoming as familiar as her eyes. It was paralyzing me and I seemed to have lost whatever ability to think I had ever possessed. I sat in my own car with the girl next door I knew so well, and I felt like a stranger in a strange land.

We spent twenty minutes meandering past houses decorated with thousands of red, green and blue lights. It occurred to me that maybe the two showers, three times brushing my teeth and two times gargling mouthwash weren’t enough. I pulled into 7-11 to pick up some Cinnamon Freshen-Up gum. It was my favorite gum, because it had a soft outer shell with a liquid center. The stores in Mossyrock rarely carried it, so I always picked some up when I was out town. My friends and I called it “cum gum” because it squirted when you bit down on it.