Jalopy
  
  
 It’s not a word you hear very often,
 or did, even back when I was a kid.
 I must have learned it first from those
 Archie comic books, to me baffling,
 unfunny, but riveting as a preview
 of life down the road in high school.
  
 Well, I was a young fool.
 High school was nothing like that.
 No Jughead, hanger-on with his inexplicable 
 serrated hat, or grim Miss Grundy
 embodying Monday, or sassy and glossy
 Veronica Lodge with her sleek moneyed sneer.
 No kind but clueless lovelorn Betty
 who was perpetually blind to her own beauty.
  
 Especially no irrepressible Archie, 
 all geeked-out freckles and tomato-red hair
 but with some real spark or flare
 of talent, like skinny Mick Jagger 
 without the strut or sexual glare.
 Still, Archie fronted a band, had a car,
 and that was enough to make him a star.
 Just a paper construct. Never met one like him.
  
 After college, though, I was briefly married 
 to a red-haired guy, Jeff, who imitated 
 Ry Cooder by playing slide guitar.
 He had a rusty yellow car 
 that turned over and over but usually died
 in the driveway. There was too much to fix,
 I guess. And there I was, inside the house,
 a lovelorn bride who secretly cried,
 who tried to be kind, tried to steer
 toward a happy ending over
 the bumpy road 
 of his manic ups and downs.
  
 We could never get to a higher gear.
 I left after he claimed to be 
 addicted to me. He could not 
 metabolize his fear, and later,
 his father told me,
 he simply slid off the rails
 on an excess
 of something poisonous, 
 just as pernicious as sugar.
  
  
 Leslie Schultz