Snow Monkey: Daniel Casebeer

Breakfast Club in Bed

I used to think that Molly Ringwald was a poor choice to play Claire

Standish in The Breakfast Club. I would have gone with someone like

Haviland Morris, but I was probably biased because I celebrated the

shower scene in Sixteen Candles as my first time with a woman. I also

used to think that Ally Sheedy should have been replaced with Winona

Ryder. Her face just bothered me, for some reason. Anyway, I spent

hours with the movie poster, that iconic piling of teen angst in the

eighties, imagining how the dynamic would have changed if Michael J.

Fox took the place of Anthony Michael Hall, if Charlie Sheen stood in

for his brother. As the years progressed, and the poster followed me

from bedroom to dorm room and back again, it occurred to me that The

Breakfast Club was more than just an artful arrangement of

stereotypes. In all honesty, even the slightest change in the

lineup—think River Phoenix in place of Judd Nelson—would have

irrevocably altered my childhood.

I can’t tell if she’s lonely or just disconnected. She has the body of

a Colombian drug mule, and I can’t adequately qualify my desire

without making obscure references to the esoteric geometry of shared

experience. I need her / to understand the difference between here and

ahora, the significance of archetypes scattered like bones on a wooden

table. Years from now, when she thinks about how much I had to drink

before I could apologize for abandoning her when all she needed was a

friend, I hope she remembers that my intentions were nothing if not

relative to the amount of work it would have required to sleep with

her / a second time.

The world’s most abundant reptile is the yellow-bellied sea snake.

With its elongated head and high set nostrils, the yellow-belly

resembles nothing so much as a sad old man. Its body is laterally

compressed, and its tail, which is usually decorated with black bars

or spots, is flattened, oar-like, to facilitate swimming across open

water. My father, who fancies himself a biologist, says that the

yellow-bellied sea snake can actually tie itself into a sliding knot

to scrape algae and barnacles from its scales. A cylindrical lung that

stretches the length of its body allows the snake to hold its breath

for hours. Long enough, my father says, to search for eels and

burrowing gobies in the shallows. Long enough for males to mate with

one of its two autonomous hemipenes. In courtship, it is up to the

female to haul her lover to the surface. Otherwise, they would both

drown, a writhing ball at the bottom of the sea.