Spring Semester

She sat down on the bed, dabbing at her groin with a tissue and got back in to her slip. I rolled off the condom and wrapped it in a couple tissues and threw it away. When we were both fully dressed, we looked at each other again, smiling and she raised her arms in a partial shrug. We really didn’t know what to say. What can you say?

“I guess I’ll see you soon?” she said.
“Yeah,” I said. “Call me or something.”
“Why don’t you give me a call?”
A pause.
“If I feel like it.”
“Bye Dennis.” She walked out the door with her handbag swinging from her shoulder loosely enough that it could have spilled all over the floor.

I wanted to be something like an art gangster that past semester (Spring). I hung out with a few other dudes who knew spray painting and we went around campus at night with spray cans, spraying designs on the sides of buildings and in classrooms holding classes we hated. Then a campus cop saw us walking around and one guy, I think Jim (dumbshit), was holding his spray can in plain view. The cop said, “Hey! What are you kids up to?” And I remember saying, “Fuck, let’s run.” And we did and the fat cop hardly bothered to chase us. He yelled some shit and I heard him running, but then he stopped and I heard the crackle of his radio. He said something about these five kids, holding a can of something, etcetera. Nobody came after us, and we all dispersed at the top of Crest Hill and ran back to our dorms. From that point on, we A) tooled on Jim a lot and B) stuck to spraying places downtown, like at the abandoned train tracks under the Orono bridge, and the vacant lot at Sidberry Street. What a name, Sidberry. I picture a sleazy guy named Sid with tattoos and sunglasses smoking a cigarette and dropping trow, but the sleaziest people down there were us, and we smoked joints.