Writer’s Block is RVA Magazine’s series highlighting contemporary writers working in Richmond and across the Commonwealth. We feature original poems, short stories, or essays. Just real voices writing right now.
“Big Flame is Gonna Break My Heart in Two” by Richmond writer Nate Waggoner drifts through the blur of early college years, where friendships, parties, and half-formed relationships collide into something harder to shake than it should be.
Waggoner’s work has appeared in Barrelhouse, Electric Lit, Peach Mag, and elsewhere, and he runs the Wild at Heart reading series at Gallery5.
If you’d like to be featured, send your work to hello@rvamag.com with the subject line “Writer’s Block.”
Big Flame is Gonna Break My Heart in Two
By Nate Waggoner
When I think about freshman year of college, sometimes I am shocked in retrospect by what we did. Not that we did one shocking thing in particular worse than other college students exactly, more just our general social practice, which consisted of my boys Greg and James and me joining other students we vaguely knew and roving the neighborhood in search of strangers’ houses at which to party. Some of these strange houses belonged to fraternities, but others were a rung below, if you can imagine: those of adult men now graduated who every weekend would stock their filthy, Boondock Saints-themed homes with cases of Coors and tubs full of a dark red substance, strong and sweet. My greed for the beers; these men saying, “Who do you know here?”
One of our fellow wandering revelers was a taller-than-me metalhead named Lucretia Moss, who could recite the entirety of “Albuquerque,” Weird Al’s eleven-minute absurdist album-closer from 1999’s Running with Scissors. One night she joined us to watch the Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode with Santa Claus Conquers the Martians, and she made me a tile-printed giant poster of Kimar, the Martian overlord, out of printer paper, and she brought it to my dorm room and hung it up on the wall. The ritualistic mp3 exchange in her bedroom at the Honors Dorm, her dancing to “Fire” by The Crazy World of Arthur Brown while we pregamed. Hot Hot Heat. Hot Fuss.
I was too cowardly at the time, too scared of getting in trouble, to break up with my girlfriend from high school, Carli, who went to a harder college to get into an hour away. And Lucretia was the devoted side-piece of a boy in her hometown who was locally famous for his enormous genitals.
I just liked listening to her talk so much. She would talk and talk and talk, stories about the boys from high school, about her friends here, about her relationship with her mom. In between working not very hard on essays about “Barn Burning” by William Faulkner and “Heat” by Joyce Carol Oates, to go to the dining hall and eat a burger and a slice of pizza and a salad and fries and pudding and listen to her say funny things and look at her black hair and big green eyes, what more could you ask for?
I broke up with Carli. I made playlists about it. Greg and James urged me to move on but I did not want to be with anyone but Lucretia, who anyway was now making plans to transfer to a harder-to-get-into school an hour away.
One night at one of these parties, she made out with Caleb, one of the louder and more obnoxious party hosts, who had a swooping blonde emo haircut and a son somewhere. I knew about the making out because he posted about it on her Facebook wall.
Someone in the exurbs of Washington, D.C. in the early eighties is born and goes on to develop an inhumanly large penis, a love pentagram becomes a hexagon of desire, and a neurosis develops in my brain that I still live with. I wonder how it affects Lucretia now. I wonder if she and her wife fight about it.
I wonder, too, about my students, who are right now working not very hard on essays about the symbolism in Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing. I’m horrified to think that in a few years, they, too, may roam the streets in droves in search of men who would beckon them in with free beers and vats of vile juice. I wonder when they will learn about how adults yearn and yearn and never stop yearning, how we love this pain so much, how it makes everything richer and more colorful, how our lives are dulled without it.
One night that summer, James and Greg and I went to jump off a rope swing tied to a railroad track bridge and into the black waters of a river that is said to contain brain-eating bacteria from all the sewage that gets dumped in it every year. Caleb was there. Before getting on the rope, he finished a cigarette and tossed it down where I was swimming and it hit me in the shoulder and I yelled, “OW, YOU FUCKER!” The burn didn’t leave a mark and the cigarette disappeared quickly into the abyss.
Photo by Peter Buck
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