Meating the Beatles

You have to get right to the meat
when you talk about the Beatles.
My friend Tony

had Meet the Beatles
and Introducing the Beatles
in his basement.

We had sessions after school
we called “rehearsals,” singing along to them
with ukulele and tennis racket props.

Tony was a tall, blond, diabetic kid,
the center on the 6^th-grade basketball team
I was on sort of by his sufferance.

The Beatles' sound was so fresh!—
miraculous fusion of English country music
(which many even in England had probably never heard before)

and American blues mixolydian.
“We’re done,” said Ian Tyson when he heard the screams
in When I Saw Her Standing There.

Their long hair broke the arctic ice plate—
not just disrespectable, but disgraceful—
but we embarked on that perilous road.

Tony would invite me to sleep over,
and we’d sing and drink a kind of strawberry kool aid
he made made with fizzy pellets in a glass pitcher.

Like me, Tony had a foot phobia.
I remember the hatred in his older sister’s eyes
when he ordered her to get her feet off his bed.

The night I remember, we didn't
sleep in Tony’s bed,
but in a larger bed, in another basement room.

We played Boy & Girl, of course.
Tony was the boy, mostly. I remember the hard feel
of his groin against my hip.

It was easier to be the girl. Tony
generously offered me my turn to be the boy,
but I liked just lying there better.

One night there was an unpleasantness—
I had eaten a few peanuts I saw in a jar on the coffee table,
and he remarked on it when he smelled them on my breath.

I didn’t feel like admitting I had eaten them.

I was being an asshole, and Tony wouldn’t let it go.
Later, Tony was the bass player in my band, The Trojanz.