Corey Haggard's Chest

When I was seventeen and Adrian was seventeen and we were seniors in high school, we would drive around Newtonsville and Owensville and Eastgate and Milford in his car. His car was cooler than mine, and it had blackouts on the headlights and neon lights on the dashboard. It was a lousy car to have to sit in the backseat, but it was better to look at then my Escort, so that's the way it was.

Adrian picked me up one day, picked me up first, and then we went to get Angie Nunez. We were going nowhere in particular. She got in the back and we pulled onto the street, onto Cedarville, and we started to dive away. Angie was going through her bag and she realized she'd forgotten something, her keys maybe, I don't remember. She asked Adrian to turn around and go back, so he did, pulling into the driveway at Corey Haggard's place.



Corey's house was a split-level and it always had the garage door open and it always had a Corvette or two parked out front. The Haggards were those kind of people. As Adrian pulled into his driveway he honked his horn three short times, bap-bap-bap, because Corey Haggard was harmless, but amusing. We sat in the driveway for a moment, waiting for a car to pass on the street behind us so we could get going again. There was movement in one of the windows up above, a fluttering of the curtain, and it was pulled aside to reveal Corey Haggard with a wet head and a bare chest and a smile. He had a towel wrapped around his waist.

I lived out in the country when I was a kid--there were cornfields on either side of our house and trees across the road--and even then I would draw the curtains shut if I was moving around with no shirt off, or if I was watching MTV's THE GRIND late at night. But here, but now, this Haggard was throwing the curtain aside even as he was pre-dressed, to see what the commotion was outside. Adrian honked again and Angie clapped and I said, "Wow," and we backed out into the street, yelled and gave Corey the finger, and sped away into the day.