Free Exile on Kalamazoo Street by Michael Loyd Gray Page A

after those things, when all the regrets and morality rushed back into me like roaring tide, filling me up so much differently than Whiskey River had, other song titles from Exile on Main Street came to me. Those titles were like ominous Burma-Shave signs alongside a foggy road full of twists and turns, and song titles like “Turd on the Run,” “Soul Survivor,” “Torn and Frayed,” “Rip This Joint,” and “Stop Breaking Down,” rushed toward me. They battered themselves against me, and somehow those titles became like voices that succeeded in breaking through the tidal wave of Whiskey River for just a moment, but just long enough. Like the Stones holed up in the basement of a house in southern France to make that classic album, I realized I would have to hole up in my house and become an exile, too.
    * * *
    There was a girl, and there’s always a love interest, if a story or a life is interesting at all. This girl was also a student, my student—not Elsa, but a former student, which is an important distinction to make because it was risky and even dangerous to have an affair with a student, which, of course, only intensified the experience and stoked our desires—made them more feverish—and made the girl even more desirable. There was desire enough, and the spark between us had been real enough, despite the years between us.
    The girl’s name was Marla. The first time I saw her, as she slipped past me through the door into class, I had only a fleeting glance at her face, at her raven hair thick and unruly on her head and shoulders, and I rather thought she might be part Asian, vaguely Polynesian, perhaps. She turned out to be merely Irish, Catholic, and Republican, but with a glow about her, an aura. When we were in sight of each other, it was as though gravity intensified and somehow pulled us together instead of merely keeping us planted on the ground. Gravity kept us from flying off into space and instead we flew into each other. We merged. And at first, gravity was enough. Later, it just made it harder for us to float apart.
    Marla was always late, no matter the occasion. I learned to add two hours to any time she had agreed to as her time to materialize. And always, despite the two extra hours, I was excited when she finally appeared and my frustration melted away immediately. She would smile, tell me how wonderful I was, and I would have waited for as long as it took. She was a woman of twenty-two, but a girl nonetheless, because despite the glow, the aura of promise and spirit, she proved unable to fly, and she was instead the butterfly that sat on a purple flower perpetually flexing fragile wings of yellow and black. She never revealed me to her mother, and when she called her mother to say she would be spending a night in Kalamazoo, she lied, saying she would be with friends. Marla couldn’t make decisive moves to advance her life. I often wondered why the flirtation happened at all and why it ever blossomed into something much more. I concluded, years later, that fate had created the flirtation—a test, I suppose, a trial for me to endure and survive and perhaps even gain strength from, to gain some sort of perspective on relationships and the flirtatious capriciousness of love. After Marla, I was courted by Whiskey River, seduced by Whiskey River, honeymooned with Whiskey River.
    My second book was about Marla, disguised as best as I could as fiction. It apparently fooled enough people, but it was not as good as my first book, and in the end I was the real fool because she left me. That sounds dramatic, but the reality was less so. In our final conversation, on the sidewalk in front of the college library, we spoke reasonably.
    â€œYou were always there,” Marla said.
    â€œWhere else would I be?” I said.
    Then she turned, slowly, sadly, and my last look at her, seared deeply into my memory and soul, was of her back and long dark