In the Name of Doris, Stop
When you're seventeen, and drunk on the husky, late-night flavor of your first girlfriend's voice along the wires of the telephone what else to do but steal your father's El Dorado from the drive, and cruise out to the park on Driscoll Hill? Then climb the county water tower and aerosol her name in spraycan orange a hundred feet above the town? Because only the letters of that word, DORIS, next door to yours, in yard-high, iridescent script, are amplified enough to tell the world who's playing lead guitar in the rock band of your blood. You don't consider for a moment the shock in store for you in 10 A.D., a decade after Doris, when, out for a drive on your visit home, you take the Smallville Road, look up and see RON LOVES DORIS still scorched upon the reservoir. This is how history catches up— by holding still until you bump into yourself. What makes you blush, and shove the pedal of the Mustang almost through the floor as if you wanted to spray gravel across the