A Love Supreme

 

 

Wade Simoneaux would never forgive me.  He’d thrown the first boy/girl party of the school year and I had promised him that I was a sure thing. When the games turned to Seven Minutes in Heaven, as they surely would, our deal was that I would eagerly go down to the basement with him and return to our friends, seven minutes later, my lipstick smeared and a smile on my face.  Wade wanted to be popular in 7th grade and was certain our fake make out session would erase his reputation as a nerdy hick with questionable sexual preferences.

 

But downstairs in the basement, Wade’s big brother, Brian, was listening to Coltrane, and Wade soon discovered that my ‘word’ was fluid and my heart was corruptible.  I sat down in his mama’s red leather bean bag chair and spent the rest of the night listening to the as-yet unscratched album of "A Love Supreme", and, Wade went back upstairs to the party alone.  The only one of us whose reputation changed that night was mine; I was now the ‘slut who stuffed her bra and made out with older drug addicts'.  I happily took the hit in the name of “A Love Supreme.”

 

Brian ran away from home the next night because his mama wouldn’t let him go see Jerry Lee Lewis at the Saenger in New Orleans.  And I ran away from the Simoneaux house with his precious vinyl of “A Love Supreme.” Coltrane saw me through my parents’ divorce and stayed with me those endless nights on the roof of our house, above the chaos, looking for UFOs, when words weren’t even worth it.