Enzo Januzzi Scores A Cliffhanger

      "So what makes them refrigerator biscuits?" I sputter, swallowing a savory scone stuffed with spicy beef. "You keep the roll cold," she expounds, opening the refrigerator door and pulling out a dough log in the kitchenette of her tiny apartment. "Then you cut it into rounds before filling and baking." "Clever," I exclaim, unable to stop myself from then humming a song that's been stuck in my head.      It had been a month since the field trip with Freida-Mae. Term papers, final exams, moving, and what-all (aka girlfriend) had consumed her semester's end. It took running into me at a graduation party for her to recall she'd invited me to dinner. By then I'd nearly forgotten we'd been joined at the hip for one breathtaking weekend in the Blue Ridge. I'd also caught sight of an interesting new woman wearing knee-torn army pants and toting a canvas messenger bag to our shared summer class at Virginia Commonwealth. And no...

      "I'm so done with camp food," FM concludes as we drive north in the spring green tunnel of the Blue Ridge Parkway. "Next week you're coming over for Sunday supper!" "What should I bring?" I entreat, delighted to be ordered around. "A bottle of wine and a salad. I'll make refrigerator biscuits."      Food had been wretched on our field trip, the only exceptions being her bottle of Chianti and my Hershey's Special Dark that we cracked into rectangles after the midnight wrestling match. Even the pitfall traps had a pitiful yield, with only a few fire ants and blister beetles toxic to even the stoutest of birds. I was wishing there was a Gibson-Henry College course in camp cuisine as we turned east into the pine barrens along Interstate 64 heading into the gathering grey of the piedmont.      "Let's have some music," she declares, clicking on the dashboard radio and tuning away from the teacher's AM pre-set. ...

       "Come on big guy, you can do it," encourages FM under the covers, spurring me on with words and hands. "It's been a long, hard day," I moan, mortified at my lack of response. "Fine then," she hisses, curling up toward the tent wall in the faint starlight filtering through the canvas. "Your loss."      After my last premature night with Freida-Mae, I'd made the mistake of asking around the foosball table about preventative practices. Coitus interruptus, thinking of your mother, taking a deep breath, and beating off everyday were gleefully offered in quick succession, the last of which I'd already put into action.       What I'd failed to bring to the table was the unthinkable for a twenty-year-old, being unable to get it up at all. So I laid there on my back listening to FM's rhythmic breathing and the slowing chirps of crickets, finally falling into a fitful sleep to the trickle of the little stream beside our tent.   ...

      "Wine anyone?" enjoins FM uncorking a surprise bottle of Chianti to go with our camp spaghetti and pot salad. "I knew there was a reason I love you," I retort, accepting a pour into the Biology department's ceramic mug.  "Don't damn us with your faint praise," she chides with mock indignation, hanging the bottle from a branch by it's straw fiasco. "Here's to there being an us!" I chuckle, astonished to be tent camping with my muse under a starlit sky filtering through the rhododendron grove hiding our tent.       After the ledge rescue Freida-Mae had wanted to lie on the boulder to watch the night sky, but I reminded her that blacklight collection was still needed for the lower elevation site. She laid down anyway, but soon saw the research written in the stars.       We made quick work of the trail down that was now glowing in the starlight. Then she'd set to work counting insects - triple the number of aquatic fliers a...

     "Jeez FM, how'd you get down there?" I gasp peering over the edge of the most protruding of the humpback rocks. "Slipped off," she marvels, barely visible leaning into the massif from a narrow ledge. "But hey, I stuck the landing." "Very funny!" I simper shimmying closer to the void. "Can you reach my hand?" "Just fingertips," she hisses as sparks shoot between my right hand and her left. "Go get a branch!" "Can't chance it," I decide, finally asserting some authority. "I'm taking down the sheet." "Not before you count the damned bugs you're not!"      There were twenty-two gnats, fifteen mosquitoes, nine mayflies, seven small moths, three blowflies, two june beetles, and, the piece de resistance, a gangly cranefly on the sheet suspended between branches on the back side of the rock outcropping. That was a decent haul for about thirty minutes of darkness, but we expe...

     "Did you see a dark haired woman in red shorts up there?" I call to a hiker coming down into the twilight of the valley floor. "Yeah, weird that she's hanging out a sheet at dusk," he muses, pausing to glance back at the last rays of sunlight creeping up the hill. "The call of the wild," I shrug, turning off the camp stove and slapping a lid on the bubbling SpaghettiOs.      We'd come on this field trip equipped with all the camping equipment and insect collecting supplies we might need, but nowhere in that trunk full of gear was a flashlight. Sensing that Yogi Berra's assessment of right field in Yankee Stadium as "it get's late early out there" also applied to steep hollows, I decided to go get her while the getting was still good, or at least still visible.        "FM!" I howl as I stumble up the barely discernible trail winding through progressively steeper rubble.  "Cruck cruck," echoing down from the...

      "Dang, all the campgrounds are full," Freida-Mae exclaims, pointing an unveiled arm toward the sign on the gatehouse to Shenandoah National Park. "Now what?" I worry as I turn the Ford Fairlane into a dirt pullout and wind down the window in the late afternoon heat seething up onto the ridge line. "I've got to get my project set up before dark," she frets, sweat beading on her upper lip as she unfolds a Virginia map from the glove box.  "How about we head south?" I suggest, feeling the fine hairs standing up on her forearm as I reach over and point to the green line of the Blue Ridge Parkway.      I'd finally caught up with FM in the library on the Sunday evening after her sleepover. She'd immediately asked for help with an Entomology field project, and that was all the explanation either of us needed. After reviewing the teacher's suggestions, we'd decided on a comparative survey of insect species collected in two diffe...

     "Have you seen FM?" I blurt to Deb Lew sunning on a concrete bench beside the fountain in the mounting heat of a tidewater mid-morning. "She disappeared from my room." "I hate to break this to you Enzo," she elucidates while sitting up and slipping sunglasses onto her head, "but Freida-Mae's got a girlfriend."      Just like that on a mid-May Sunday morning my illusions of heteronormativity were scattered in the spray of the Gibson-Henry fountain. In a single hour I'd discovered that a fraternity brother was becoming a sister and a new lover already had a same-sex lover.       Ours was the generation after the counterculture movement of the late 1960s. Vietnam was over, hippies had become freaks, and equal rights were filtering into even a conservative small college in the south.  Still, the coming out of non-binary friends was liberating in a way I hadn't even known I'd needed.       "Well that explains a l...

     "Morning Jyz," I greet with relief that someone I know is at the sparsely attended Sunday breakfast in the Gibby-Hank cafeteria. "It would be a good morning if this wasn't my midnight snack," he titters, a trace of bright blue on bottom eyelids and crimson at the edges of full lips. "Out all night?" I query with raised eyebrows, temporarily forgetting my dilemma.      He and I sitting together at the Delta Epsilon table was a study in contrasts: A morning person and a night owl; A shy introvert and an effusive extrovert; A straight heterosexual and, apparently, a closet cross-dresser. Pete Jyzcinski had been a mystery to his fraternity brothers for three years. He'd grow progressively despondent over weeks before disappearing for a weekend, returning recharged and ebullient. I was beginning to think he had manic depression, a term I only knew from a Jimi Hendrix song, but those traces of makeup played a different tune.      "Let's j...

       "What's...under...this...bed?" gasps Freida-Mae as the springs squeak with each thrust.  "T...V...room," I groan from under her, inching closer to bursting.  "Then let's get under the sheets," she gushes, rolling off and kicking off flip-flops. "Are you sure you don't want me to walk you home?" I query, offering one last chance to not regret it in the morning. "Oui oui," she laughs hitting the light as she unfurls a tube top over slim shoulders. "But let's keep on underpants."      It was a new experience making out with such an assertive woman. I only knew of dominance and submission as historical terms from Tess of the d'Urbervilles , an assigned book in last year's colloquy class on Literature and Film. In my experience, tops and bottoms were parts of the softball uniforms that I'd passed out in previous seasons, but at least I knew enough to go along with a good thing when it was slapping...