Pat Foran

He turns 17 and says he will do whatever it takes to convince his friends that the world — if it is, in fact, round, and if it does, indeed, turn — spins counterintuitively.

He vows to do whatever needs doing to decode the message you hear if you play Donna Summer’s “Hot Stuff” backwards.

To live long enough to prove to the beautiful soul who is his former girlfriend that he meant it when he said he would be there for her, always.

To learn Bo Derek’s deepest sex secret.

He read it in a magazine, or on the cover of one, the day before. In all CAPS, as plain as Doris Day. In Bic^® Banana yellow. Bo Derek. Her secret. The deepest.

He didn’t think himself gullible, or one to be lured in by the lurid. Not now, now that he was 17.

Not that he wasn’t interested in secrets of the sex variety. He just didn’t think it was cool that rags made up shit about famous people, or sort-of famous people.

But he kept thinking about those words, that secret. Real or not real. That there could be one. Something untold from something (not to mention someone) so unavailable. A perfect “10” with classified information! A bronzed and beautiful secret, bounding across a beach in the mosaic that is Manzanillo. In slow motion. And in corn rows. 

The possibilities, he says to himself, sitting cross-legged in his bedroom, his right index finger positioned in the middle of the Donna Summer disc, turning it counterclockwise. 

The record offers a demonic-sounding whirligig of a whoosh, as if it were saying, um did you ever actually listen to Janis Ian, or what she sang to us, what she sang to YOU, about secrets, what she sang to you about The Truth, in her song, “At 17”? 

The record had him there. He had heard Janis Ian’s song. Many times.

Hey, I’m trying! he says to the Hot Stuff disc, releasing his finger from the spinning record. I’ll do what I can to preach the possibility gospel, and the role of chance in The Truth. And I’ll keep the spinning — my spinning of it — to a minimum.

Now spinning clockwise, the record tells a tale of needing, wanting, and really, really needing a lover. As in tonight. As in this evening. As in now.

So much for secrets, the 17-year-old says.

The room heats up as Donna Summer sings. 

The life in this record — there’s so much of it, he says, thinking of his former girlfriend’s beautifully uncertain smile, her hands that can hold, gently, a heart. This record is so … real.

He imagines he no longer exists, that he’s dead to the room that is this world spinning around him.

He thinks about his friends, who no longer need convincing.

About Bo Derek, who is anything but a secret. Not even an open one. 

About beauty, which is and isn’t The Truth.

About his former girlfriend, who no longer needs proof.

Stuck in a groove, the record player needle reads the vinyl aloud in a continuous loop, Donna Summer singing and singing and singing, Hey, birthday boy — let’s not try to spin this one, ok?

He lifts the needle, removes the still-spinning record from the turntable and reaches for another disc: “Got to Be Real” by Cheryl Lynn. 

If that’s what it takes, he says.