the Wakefield Doctrine

Welcome to the Wakefield Doctrine (the theory of clarks, scotts and rogers)

This is the Doctrine’s contribution to the Six Sentence Story bloghop.

It is hosted by Denise.

ed. This is one of those blog posts, more common to the earlier years of the Doctrine, prompted by a song on the radio. While one is tempted to derisively note, “A very old song,” it would be at peril of overlooking the power of the memory.

Prompt word:

COFFEE

It was still light when he woke up, a not-yet-painful glowing sunburn the only memory of the first two-thirds of a hot July day.

The kitchen table in the apartment was demonstrating it’s primary function and sole value: to serve as both a desk and, if Campbell’s Vegetable Beef soup, direct from the can qualified, food prep counter. While living on unemployment benefits can, if one has the capacity to resist the crushing weight of family expectations, peer pressure and the demands of society, be perceived as retirement-before-career, there was not an evening to lose. The nightclubs and bars, clinging to the summer shoreline like seaweed at low tide, were a thirty-minute drive, so his second stop was at a Dunkin Donuts; the first being the local package store.

‘Man does not move on caffeine alone,’ the young man smiled away the random thought that perhaps he might better spend the evening working on his writing, if not his actual resumé.

The girl, with her bare feet on the dashboard of the ’65 Bel Air wagon, interrupted his ambition with one of her own; he soon forgot all about the pain of corduroy against sunburned skin pressing against a driver’s side vinyl seat-back.

*

Welcome to the Wakefield Doctrine (the theory of clarks, scotts and rogers)

This is the Doctrine’s contribution to the Six Sentence Story bloghop

Hosted by Denise

(ed. So last week’s Six was host to a certain challenge among four of the participants. Instigated by Nick, choreographed by Denise and closed with a remarkable display of creativity by Ford it was, in a sense, a prompt within a prompt. (Nick does yeoman’s work laying out the rules for the Challenge Here.) Suffice it to say, Ford‘s Six was so good that my ambition dial got turned up to Eleven. The part of me that makes my virtual life simultaneously fun and horrible, whispered… “Hey! betcha you can’t write a Six to that song while staying in the story-world of the Six Sentence Café & Bistro… and! have some time travel in it, too!”)

ayyiiiee

Hey! Sixarians! I’ve requested and granted a one-time dispensation for breaking the rule of ‘One Six, One Post’. After the amount of work last night, I will no longer be tempted.

Hey! ceayr, sorry man, this Six? Makes some of my other narratively-ambiguous Sixes read like Hemingway playing charades. You’ve been warned.

Prompt word:

COFFEE

(early ’70s)

“When you believe in things
That you don’t understand
Then you suffer
Superstition ain’t the way, yeah.”

The Clavinet in the lead track of Talking Book, Stevie Wonder’s new album, resonating along key synaptic junctures was the perfect dance partner to entice the young man out of the half-asleep/half-awake state endemic in college dormitories during exam week.

The late Spring morning, with it’s moderate temperatures and unabashed sunshine, beckoned even the most determined end-of-semester student to rise early; the Sophomore came fully awake in a bed that seemed too narrow and a room that was, at once, normal while producing a feeling of the uncanny, like too much hashish or the memory of a lucid dream.

He was drawn back to the present by a knocking on the door that was possessed of an upward lilt that betrayed a shy enthusiasm, without thinking, he knew it was Cherie, who at the end of the previous night’s study session, promised coffee and a muffin first thing in the morning; despite this certainty, he called out, “Who is it?”

The voice that preceded the girl stepping through the doorway was that of Stacey Whitelaw, in both timbre and vocabulary,

“What the fuck is going on, where am I and why are you in a eight-by-ten room decorated with Jimi Hendrix posters;” the actual girl, now inside the room, couldn’t have been less a Miz Whitelaw, standing barely five-foot four, wearing worn blue corduroys, a Madras shirt with pearl buttons and a pair of gold wire-rim glasses.

The Sophomore felt his vision stutter, heart race and remembered a voice from his future.

 

“On a morning from a Bogart movie
In a country where they turn back time…
Don’t bother asking for explanations
She doesn’t give you time for questions
As she locks up your arm in hers.”

Rolling onto his side, the bed gave way to his left elbow and hip, while a split-second later providing a movement-facilitating push against his lower back and shoulders, the Sophomore’s head now closer to the stereo and Al Stewart; the sound of footsteps, ebbing and flowing as the staircase took at least two turns for each of the three stories of the tenement ended, and a voice, clearly without the patience for a traditional knocking strategy, filled the one-bedroom apartment.

“Open the door and tell me I haven’t climbed the stairs of a three-story tenement for nothing; I gotta say, I’m freakin out here and I hope the two times hitting my head on these fuckin slanted ceilings put me in a live-action coma,” despite lacking the sight of the owner of the voice, the young man closed his eyes in denial of the fact it belonged to Stacy Whitelaw.

Anticipating a rebound wave from the waterbed, the young man stumbled out of the bedroom, to the kitchen and stood staring at the too-often painted door, wearing only a pair of Jockey shorts and, like an elongated Ankh, a iron skeleton key around his neck, apparently the extent of the security features of the wood door; looking around the kitchen he considered remaining silent and, hopefully, unavailable.

His indecision was made moot as the door opened and a young woman, wearing a denim halter-top and dark brown hair long enough to play tag with a pair of cut-off jeans, who clearly wasn’t Stacy Whitelaw, stepped over the worn threshold and wrapped her forearms behind the young man’s neck; surprised beyond speech, he returned the embrace and their bodies insisted on moving them to the bedroom.

A timeless interval after the most timeless of physical interactions later, the dark-eyed girl locked eyes with the stunned and temporarily exhausted young man and, with a tone as sultry as her expression, said, “You know what I’d really like right now”, even as the embers in his eyes reignited, laughed, “A cup of coffee, I didn’t have time this morning.”

 

 

(early ’20s)

“Never know how much I love you
Never know how much I care
When you put your arms around me
I get a fever that’s so hard to bear.”

“Where have you been?”

Stacy Whitelaw gazed across the white-linen hills and hummocks of pillows at the Sophomore, the bed was as large as it needed to be to allow them to do whatever they wanted to do, individually and as a couple.

“Don’t you mean, ‘When have we been?'”

The young blonde woman put her hand to her mouth, a moué more of growing panic than disdain, even as the young man, his right hand on her left hip, felt the pupils of his eyes dilate as if sensing danger beyond his normal field of vision, he felt more than hear a distant roar, the sound of an approaching déjà vu-nami.

“Before we do anything, even have coffee, let’s agree to never ask each other, what the time is,” after a moment they laughed themselves into a horizontal embrace.