This is not a story about genicons or masturbation.
Spring of ’ninety-three, I was twelve years old and my vernal girlfriend was either my last imaginary friend or the first fictional character I ever penned. Well into adulthood, I remain unsure which title is more suitable. Earlier today, explaining how an extinguished but previously long-extant obsession with screenwriter Jim Uhls’ adaptation of Palahniuk’s Fight Club had ruined for me the already overblown A Beautiful Mind,[1] I recalled her fondly.
I was a ludicrously aloof kid. Round-shouldered and gangly, I shambled about with the air of an angry drunk’s abused terrier. Except during my fleeting weekly moments on the pitcher’s mound, I lived in perpetual trepidation of the boys, my peers. Their severe haircuts belied the wholesomeness of their limpid, dim eyes and caramel skin. Off the field, I was fairly characterized by an intense diffidence; off the field, I lived in anxiousness of them, the boys, quite prudently. Hardly a day went by without incident: good days, I was spat upon, called “faggot,” or lost some garment from my already doggerel wardrobe. Bad days, Adidas Samba-shod feet stepped on my throat or kicked out in front of my shins, causing memorable stumble/falls down sandpaper-edged granite stairs. Schooldays after games were the worst: I paid for prowess on the mound[2] with exponentially increased abuse from the boys whom I’d whiffed. Once, I took a shop class two-by-four to the testes from a popular boy[3] I’d thrice fanned in his three at-bats. It was supposed to be cut into pieces for birdhouse constructions.
Perhaps improbably, I was possessed of an even more pathological interaction with the girls. I pined for them to the point it physically ached;[4] their ivory grins were miracles, their shower soap- and shampoo-induced general redolence was for me the savory bouquet of some atheist’s chrism.[5] But alas, I could only eye them unawares; were a girl’s gaze to be cast even approximately in my direction, I stared elsewhere and, if I felt particularly desperate or bold, I then ogled them peripherally.[6] On rare occasions, one would actually speak to me and I would find myself able only to bark curtly back. “How are you?” she, whoever she was, would ask. “FINE!” I’d say, then spend the rest of the day possessed by l’esprit de escalier—thinking too late of the million things I should have said. I quipped constantly for the whole classroom audience and the kids, my contemporaries, they would often laugh at my jibes (this clown routine probably made me seem genial, confident, misunderstood, and at least somewhat approachable).[7] But when forced to interact with a group smaller than, say, thirty, I panicked.
I wanted nothing more than to make them laugh, the girls. But from a distance, and en masse. Closer, or in small numbers, I seemed to want nothing more than to run from them.
If a small group of boys (up to ten of the curs) approached me and did not immediately erupt into violence, I would assume that the interaction was a (c)overtly derisive, somehow mocking one, or—as was often the case with the cleverer bullies[8]—a set-up for a grand mocking to be unfurled later; if a small group of girls (same range) approached me, I would assume that they’d been able to descry my secret, salacious musings about one of their number, and had finally come for a reckoning. To avert suspicion, I offered them (girl inquisitors) only brusque, rude, eye-contactless indifference. If I lived in anxiousness of the boys, I lived in abject fear of the girls—especially the ones by whom I was smitten. I could take a punch in the teeth. I was much more reluctant to take a punch in the soul, metaphorically speaking.
For this pathology, I blame both the household of strong-willed female authority figures in which I was raised, and the perhaps more culpable phenomenon of the stand-up comedienne. Thanks to any number of late-eighties/early-nineties anti-ingénues, I knew by age twelve that all men were good for was either failing to bring women to Orgasm, or demeaning them by talking directly to their breasts. Nevermind that I was unsure exactly where Orgasm was, or why men just didn’t look for the place on a map; I knew the inability was shameful and allegedly affixed to my Y chromosome. Before my teenage years began I’d assimilated a set of criticisms about a male generation of which I wasn’t a part and based my own intersexual interactive modus operandi upon it.[9] I was certain of only a very few facts about women:
1) Something called the White Male Paradigm had just or was about to come crashing down. This Paradigm’s prime dictum was that women were social inferiors, and this Paradigm’s prime dictum had been revealed as absolutely false. I had deduced from these facts, absorbed from where- and whomever, one ineluctable and lamentable (for me) truth: White Males, then, must be the inferior ones. The jig, it appeared, was up before I’d even had the chance to get in on the con. Even if this was not the reality, I behaved as if it were.
2) Descended from some empyrean realm, all girls were already women (all men were forever “boys”), and all women liked poetry, gold, wine, urbanity, and despised contact sport. They also apparently adored being brought to Orgasm. I could not find it in the Yellow Pages—for a while I assumed it was a fancy French bistro.
3) To talk to a woman was about 50% of the way to raping her.[10]
4) Regardless of all associated danger, I deeply, passionately, achingly yearned for a woman by my side.[11] This brought me 25% of the way to being a rapist.
It is a gross understatement to say that those formative years were, for me, fraught with nervous agony. By my still-glabrous twelfth year, all of my newly hirsute classmates were thirteen and had girlfriends.[12] I had my crushes: a chipper little sprite named Brianna, possessed of a bowl haircut, breasts only reluctantly blossoming, and a vast array of brightly colored, high-necked wool sweaters; a nubile brunette with caterpillar eyebrows, a dozen pairs of white stockings, and eggshell-textured olive skin; and the donnish girl with the John Lennon glasses who, upon her arrival at school, would ditch her tailored blazer, unbutton her blouse, and switch out of Mary Jane heels into more comfortable Chuck Taylor hi-tops. When she wore them unlaced and top down (the Chucks) with her tweed miniskirts, she had the blessed senselessness to also lose her stockings and sit, legs uncrossed, knees apart.[13]
These girls led fascinating lives, I was sure, but I knew I would never be a part of them. My gynephobic tendencies relegated me, in their respective realities, to the status of nebbish ghost. At best, I was the eldritch prickling at the back of their necks, the eyes they felt watching them but then could not find in the crowd.[14] Even when I stashed anonymous erasable-penned odes through the slats of their lockers, or dropped them on the seats of their assigned desks, I was a wisp, a ghost, mere spirit without form. I never signed the damned things anyways. They were golems, the girls, all form, but no spirit. No: they were, as I understood it, spirits too great to be contained by form, too amazing to be comprehended by men; so what I was left with was the idea of looming goddesses reluctantly piloting the burgeoning bodies which strained more and more at the insides of store-bought jeans and tees, which had been flat on the rack. The girls were ineffable entities; they were floral smells, mute. Nothing I could hold or hope to understand. Their expensive smiles were combination locks to which I couldn’t guess the digits.
And then, one afternoon, it occurred to me to circumvent the whole sodding mess when I was impelled to play Dr. Frankenstein and create my own.
My best friend at the time was a boy who, by all rights, should have been spending the better portion of his time kicking the crap out of me. Dirty blonde, periwinkle-eyed, with bitten nails and a starting spot on scholastic baseball, lacrosse, and football teams, Devon should have despised me—bespectacled, black-turtlenecked on occasion, clumsy, and often clad in mismatched, bargain rack windwear—in accord with the unwritten codes of every school, everywhere, throughout history. It helped that we shared an interest in Stan Lee’s X-Men, Amiga 365s, and baseball cards; that we went to different schools probably prevented some catastrophic scenario in which he would have been practically forced to bludgeon me to earn the approbation of his coevals.[15] Nevertheless, if our friendship was strained some when we stopped playing on the same extracurricular baseball team, then it was nearly torn asunder when Devon got a steady girlfriend.
Sami,[16] the little bitch, was from a family that owned the corporate entities which owned the businesses that the town’s richer oligarchs owned. You’ve heard of television? I think her family owned that. And what with this privileged childhood, against all probability, she was both sweet and fucking gorgeous to boot. Swollen lips and a waist tailor-made for gripping, she wore classy but low-cut V-neck cashmere sweaters that exposed glorious collarbones and the tiniest bit of pubescent cleavage; these sweaters quit at that tapered waist, right above her mutton-firm runner’s butt. Suddenly, instinctively, I began to understand what it was I wanted to do with these little women I lusted after. It involved close contact. Heavy breath. Heat. Sex is an instinct.
Devon, the bastard, got to grope and claw at her parts and surfaces; Devon, I imagined, was having all sorts of transcendent procedures performed on his member by her tiny, well-manicured[17]hands. Perhaps it was untrue, but even the probative evidence I’d collected was upsetting and envy provoking: they held hands, kissed on the lips, went to two dances together and, when there, actually danced. Devon had a pool and she came to swim in it and barbecue by its side. Sami went to my school, not his, but sometimes he’d skip class and drop in; then, I would see them together, braided like wicker and giggling. And anymore, when I saw Devon alone, Sami was all he discussed.
Having a girlfriend sounded like a spectacular adventure. Better even than a no-hitter or a carton of Cadbury Eggs. But, of course, I was a chary little gynephobe. So emulously, I did what any desperate and insecure sociopath would have done when faced with a compatriot’s wildly successful romance: I invented one of my own. I’ve never liked situations I can’t outsmart. I couldn’t land a Sami of my own, so I created one.
Her name was Jenn and the superfluous “N”—the duplicate consonants as a single unit, actually—was crucial to establishing her character. She wasn’t some obtuse, shallow cheerleader; she was a force to be reckoned with. Jenn with two ens. In my middle school’s library, I found a yearbook from the year before my matriculation and I clipped from its pages a greyscale photograph of some girl whom I’d never met and would never meet.[18] Pin straight brown hair and chestnut eyes. A crooked smile and eyebrows like the dotless long limbs of exclamation points, gone supine. Jenn went to private school—that’s why Devon had never seen her around—and her parents, Earl and Mary Ann, were of the scowl-prone gadabout set. They were outraged by my ignominious, impoverished Barakumin-of-the-Suburbs upbringing (my family, gasp, rented), so we didn’t get to hang out much—which is why Devon might never get to meet her. He curtly went through the motions of brotherhood, Devon, when before he changed the subject, he said, “Dude, that sucks.”
We did hang out, though, Jenn and I. We would liaise at unlikely times and in unlikely places. In a K-Mart, while our mothers shopped for shoes.[19] At a War Memorial in the village square, by the cannon, just before I got to Devon’s house.[20] But most frequently, we’d rendezvous on the abandoned gravel trolley bed that ran through the poison oak-infested woods near my mother’s rented duplex. The trolley bed had played a pivotal role in my childhood and, since I was familiar with it and the neighborhoods it connected, I was able to construct an explanative scenario for Devon in which I revealed that we (Jenn and I) favored it as a meeting place because she lived in proximity to its ambages too, but in a much better part of town. My development’s superintendent had tired of dipsomaniacal white trash driving Trans-Ams up the foliage-framed footpath that crossed this trolley bed, down into the back lawns of the rental tracts kept separate by the woods, and so he had erected a rather odd looking, Brobdingnagian wooden H to make such automotive traffic difficult if not impossible.[21] This is where Jenn left her complexly folded notes for me.
Notes—plastic-bagged envelopes enclosed little origamic squares, and the whole caboodle was stuffed into a rusty coffee can, itself obscured by overhanging, wild wisteria—were our primary method of communiqué;[22] Earl worked for some obscure branch of the federal government and, thus, both incoming and outgoing phone calls at her house were probably tapped.[23] After school,[24] I dragged Devon with me to retrieve the daily epistle and, on the walk back to my house (I would cook us grilled cheese with gravy and hope for a game of catch, maybe), I read these letters in a pointedly awkward silence, or instead I read them to my friend. Scribbled in pink or purple, they were clearly the product of a girly hand—provided that this authorial girl had Parkinson’s Disease. Lowercase “I” and “j” were always dotted with circlets; a curly and painstaking script capital initiated each new paragraph. The writing showed what forgers and counterfeiters call hesitation marks and patched strokes; every letter jiggled slightly because I was trying so hard to write as another. (When he asked, I told Devon the shakiness was obviously because she wrote the notes on the school bus, duh—that was one of my very few high-quality lies) Of course, I made a big deal one afternoon of casually trying to prove to Devon that I couldn’t write in cursive[25]—while this was true, the same could more or less be said of Jenn; her ornate script capitals, though effortful, were tremulant and convoluted, like palsied balloon animal, from which the air was escaping through a pinprick.
The notes themselves were seldom more than the front and back of a page. In the text, Jenn detailed an ordinary life. She had a little sister, a sycophantic fat ballerina, whom she loathed for being the parental favorite. Her private school classes were easy for her, but she was reluctant to accept the institute’s offer to be skipped ahead because she thought she’d miss her comrades—she didn’t have many, but she cleaved to three bosom pals. I named them. She talked some about clouds and flowers and rain, mostly because that’s the sort of thing I assumed girls would talk about.[26] And she inevitably bloviated in thirty-line paeans about yours truly. About my superior intellect and osculatory prowess, about my vaunted, finely-honed, dry wit. About how I was a catch, compared to her last boyfriend: a dirty blonde, periwinkle-eyed jerk with bitten nails, who bore more than a passing resemblance to Devon and who had persisted in unwelcome efforts to get to third base[27] with Jenn, thereby sexually harassing her. Seriously.
These notes, with their myriad overlapping crisp folds, were at their finest when they were about nothing. Quotidian. When they were the inconsequential detailing of an imagined, tiny life—a life without drama, but rife with foible and peccadillo. The sort of potentially depressing minutiae that would become the bulk of my fiction, ten years afterward. I crafted entire afternoons in public parks. Two Friday night dances at her school.[28] Two pages torn from my graph paper tablet told of a Saturday morning when, while her father was on a business trip and her mother shopped for groceries with li’l sis, I accidentally gave her a wicked, vampiric hickey. This impelled the perforce wearing of turtleneck bodysuits for a whole week during the warm, late spring; she explained this away to her parents with sudden and hilarious Beatnik Phase, as prompted by the character of Maynard Krebs from The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis,[29] and for which she borrowed (but didn’t read) a copy of Ginsberg’s Howl from the public library to bolster her charade.
When Devon’s Sami bought him an engraved ID bracelet,[30] it was less than a week before I found in my rusty bucket an ebon velveteen box. The resultant forty minutes during which I had to explain to a confused Devon the encyclopedia-learned significance of the silver Claddagh ring that’d been contained within were bliss for me.[31] After that, she told me that she loved me. I lacked the requisite talent to forge that particular mash note (or I was blocked because I felt doing so would be cheap/immoral) and so I told Devon that it had happened telephonically—at the mall, she had stolen away from her mother and plopped a quarter into the pay phone, and it was raining, and yada, yada, yada.
Devon extended to me the occasional olive branch in an, “I’m happy for you, dude,” or “She sounds pretty cool, man.” Either he was bored out of his wits by the persistent banality of it all or he regarded her as a legitimate if inexplicable phenomenon in my life—in the end, I tend towards believing the former, if only because it’s virtually impossible to consistently envy someone over a significant expanse of time and not eventually deform your perception of their character with festered resentment. If he was happy for me and did envy me, then by the end of the charade, I’m sure he was sick to death of my giddiness.
Regardless, neither Devon’s perception of me nor my perception of him was the problem. I maintained my Jenn legerdemain for months. A per diem letter, five days out of every seven—a mean of twenty weekly pages at two-hundred-fifty words each: my prolificity in animating a lover resulted in a novel-length and nuanced undertaking. I was, four or five fortnights in, running low on ideas. Physically writing the missives was a hand-cramping chore which had started to interfere with my pitching. Four times, I’d been caught and chastised by my mother in attempted post-midnight hegiras to secret away those epistolary baggies. And Devon’s daily presence when I retrieved them, well, had started to feel burdensome. As if he was intruding on a private moment. Sometime roundabout our eighth week of fictitious couplehood, Jenn had stopped being an act of mere chicanery, a tame chimera kept for show. In bed at night, under navy velour blankets and clutching my pink or purple pen, unfurling us, our adventures together, reveling in her sentences, had become the best part of my day, every day.[32]
Neuroscience tells us that episodic memory operates as such: an individual never remembers a given situation or occurrence. He remembers the memory. For a few fast-passing moments, there’s an initial transpiration; everything else is verisimilar approximation.[33] When sentient beings reflect, reminisce, they don’t remember what actually happened, but instead the story they’ve told themselves about what happened. In a way, any affecting event is only a catalyst for the creation of absorbing fiction; in a way, an oft-recalled prevarication is more relevant, more real, than a rarely recollected truth. A survived event, circumscribed and adumbrated by memory, is less a snapshot or photograph and more a still-life, painted over time, with considerable artistic license. What I mean to say is, really, every memory any one of us had is a story we write by and for ourselves.
A Saturday near the end of the academic term, I lulled in the anthracite passenger seat of my mother’s scarlet Mitsubishi as we returned from the grocer, or mall, or wherever. I’d been sluggish all morning, suffering a low-grade melancholia since waking, and it was only when our car was detoured, due to the reconstruction of a plow-demolished yellow speed bump, that I discovered the underlying cause. Circumventing the obstacle, my mother drove our block the long way around and, in doing so, we passed the Brobdingnagian H erected as sentinel for that derelict, gravel trolley bed. For a full thirty seconds, the time it took our carriage to reach its terminus, I was abuzz with anticipatory elation. We slammed into park on the macadam of our driveway; I fumbled wordlessly with my sun-hot seatbelt in frenzied haste to flee the vehicle and bolt toward the woods. While I fiddled with giddy fingers, I had time to think and I realized that Jenn only wrote when I had a witness and something to prove. She, like that imaginary friend of the New Testamant,[34] only appeared when two or more gathered in her name. There would be no mash note that Saturday.
I let that sun-hot buckle burn the palm that clutched it. I wanted that note. And I missed her deeply, this girl I’d made up.
Ten or twelve weeks after they’d made their original overtures, Devon and Sami broke it off and, of course shortly thereafter, so did Jenn and I.[35] I feigned heartbreak so virulent that I felt compelled to take a day off from school.[36] When within the few final weeks of the school year Devon scored a second girlfriend (this one a nauseous blonde Baywatch type with UV bed skin, blue-colored contact lenses and French-tipped acrylic spikes affixed to each digit), he stopped calling entirely; this schism more or less thrilled me. He was a lousy best friend, generally pompous, often demeaning, and usually controlling; he was third or fourth in a line of similarly mean-spirited and intransigent guy buddies which extended unbroken for more than a decade, resulting from some latent desire to replace my absent father, and resulting in the man I eventually became: incorrigible loner dubious of the actual reality of friendship-with-a-capital-F. Devon was a dunderpate looking for a sidekick to validate him and, as such, he resembled most of the folks with whom, out of loneliness, I’d paired myself during my childhood, with whom I would pair myself throughout my entire young adulthood.[37] When my mother pointed out that he had stopped calling, I realized that he was simply a guy who found me amusing enough, like a conical party hat, that he could tolerate me at the substantial length required for host benefit in a parasitic relationship. After he stopped coming by or phoning, I forgot him almost immediately. I required a significantly longer time to forget about Jenn.
[1] After what I would ballpark as two-hundred screenings of Fight Club, I was conditioned in the Pavlovian sense to expect that at least one character in any given film was wholly a figment of some other character’s imagination. In the case of A Beautiful Mind, if one is from the outset vigilantly dubious of Paul Bettany’s Charles-the-Roommate character’s reality, the whole film is pretty much shot. If anyone watched that hype-machine-spawned mediocrity twice (which I doubt), it’s actually pretty obvious that Bettany’s antagonist is phantasmal. [BACK]
[2] Now granted I did wreck my arm throwing it, but my semi-sidearm, flop-wristed curveball looked more like a fishing bobber trolling behind a speedboat than a straightforward pitch. Unpredictable and even occasionally wild, it had motion on it like a fifty mph wiffle-ball and was either unhittable or turned into a lazy ground ball to third base. Since I can’t play any more and it feels more like that kid was someone else entirely, I feel no compunction saying immodestly that I was a pretty damned good pitcher. [BACK]
[3] The particular brand of bullying I suffered went as such: abuse by less than two boys was only doled out quickly in situations where the authority figure had briefly averted his or her eyes and, as such, any retaliation would coincide with the returning glance, and make me appear culpable aggressor. But physical beatings were usually administered by dyad or trio; more inventive cruelties (the swirlie, the golden shower, a full-pate “tarring” with Clearasil) were administered by one Alpha with a small mob to restrain me, intended piñata, and back him. This is because bullies are nervous cowards who happen to be genetically gifted with either charisma or mammoth physical size. Until I was fourteen and actually received a meet-me-under-the-willow-trees-at-three-o’clock type challenge, I never really got to fight back. That, I think, caused more long-term damage than the beatings. [BACK]
[4] Not there, you guttersnipes. In my chest. And, well, maybe a little bit there. [BACK]
[5] Plus, unless you’re maladaptively evolved, a gay man, or a heterosexual woman, girlsweat just smells sort of wonderful. [BACK]
[6] Assigned seating in middle school classrooms sometimes found my desk stationed adjacent to the then-recipient of my intense and quasi-religious puppy love (I always had at least one in every classroom). For weeks at a time, when such was the case, I would return home at days’ end with intense headaches from so much immobile-necked peripheral leering. You try a six-hour sidelong glare. [BACK]
[7] Often, these wide-audience quips were self-deprecatory. I’d learned the simultaneously attention drawing/diffusing tactic from an episode of Full House—the worst sitcom ever filmed—in which Uncle Joey advises awkward Stephanie to become a class clown, to make fun of herself thus preempting the jibes of her more aggressive peers. Eminem learned the same trick in his film 8 Mile. Not that Em was around back then, but it’s sort of horrifying to think that, for twelve-year-old me, Stephanie Tanner was and Marshall Mathers would have been a role model. [BACK]
[8] Elementary and middle schools are very probably the way many comic book villains have come into being—most of those responsible for the production of comic books are grown-up nerds. Shyamalan, in Unbreakable, explains that there are two types of comic villain: “the soldier-villain who fights the hero with his hands, and then there’s the real threat. The brilliant and evil arch-enemy who fights the hero with his mind. Institutional corridors breed both and I can recall five or six Bully-Masterminds who hatched schemes to emotionally ruin me, only sometimes assisted by the roving cats’-paws who would trip me down flights of stairs, chip my teeth, lock me in lockers, or attempt to drown me in toilets.
The vast majority of me honestly hopes that those five or six kids will, at some point, have to watch their own children die as kindergarteners in school shootings. Then I think about the oblation-toddlers involved and feel momentarily guilty before I remember that, with parents like that, they’d probably just grow up to be jackleg bullies themselves. If this appalls you, Reader, I offer by way of explanation another comic book: Alan Moore’s V for Vendetta: “What was done to me was monstrous…and it created a monster.” One mastermind cornered me outside of a bathroom, while his friend lured the girl on whom I had a crush down the same hallway. And when I was distracted by the sight of her, another minion pulled down my pants and underwear while the mastermind struck me in the face with the ceramic top of a toilet tank, bloodying my nose and chipping my tooth. I was eleven. I believe I told my mother I lost that tooth when I slipped on ice, walking the dog, so she wouldn’t get involved and make things worse.
Perhaps my lingering hatred cannot be condoned, but it should easily be understood. [BACK]
[9] This not only led me to a holy terror of looking at breasts, but also to me mailing copies of Byron’s “She Walks in Beauty” to the home of a relatively popular girl during my seventh-grade year. The latter was prompted by something Judd Hirsch’s character did on either Taxi or the short-lived Dear John. I had assumed that my offer of this poem (NB: even then I could only approximate intimacy on the page) would A) reveal me as cultured and deep, unlike the boorish “minutemen” I’d learned that all other boys were, and B) cause her to swoon and love me forever, anon. I’ll bet Reader can guess how this turned out for me. [BACK]
[10] 1991 saw the pervasive demotic dissemination of the legal term “sexual harassment,” courtesy of Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas, and a talking pubic hair who spoke from atop a can of Coke. This did not help my timidity. If talking to a woman was halfway to rape, then surely it was always one mistaken utterance from sexual harassment. One “You look pretty today” would lead directly into a very public trial. Yikes. [BACK]
[11] I wasn’t 100% certain why I wanted this so badly. I knew I wanted something to do with their skin, even though I’d never even seen a copy of Playboy. I wanted to do what those “minutemen” could not, though I thought Clitoris was an acne medication. And, even after walking through the boring halls of the local shopping mall, I could not find Orgasm to save my life. [BACK]
[12] And such was my induction to the reality that the biggest jerk in the room will always bed the woman you covet. A few years later, I’d learn that she (the woman), when you eventually got to know her, would often turn out to be a colossal disappointment: dimwitted, materialistic; a sexual mercenary of sorts, off to whoever was the current high bidder. After getting to know her, you understood why she was with the prick: they deserved each other. A central hypothesis of a later engaged-in social experiment—predicated upon the first part of this realization—would fail: just being a wantonly malicious and reckless jerk doesn’t win women over and, if it does, the women it wins are the same sort of despicable idiots. I waver on the relative superiority of being nice and single, or acting like an asshole so I can date an idiot, and at least not be alone. [BACK]
[13] I think her parents both held positions as Deans of Medicine or were otherwise engaged in some equivalently inkhorn office. They dressed her like a little fascist librarian and I always found it strange and titillating that, despite the expensive and Republican-Victorian wardrobe, her underwear were still always winsomely detailed with cartoon characters (Smurfs, Minnie Mouse) on the days she wore her proto-adult miniskirts. [BACK]
[14] I’m still bad about eye contact with people I don’t know. Someone once suggested that this means I’m autistic; I didn’t know whether to feel relieved to have an excuse or say, “You know what? Fuck you, I’m not developmentally handicapped.” Regardless, over the years I’ve taken some comfort in discovering that Schopenhauer considered the refusal to make eye contact an excellent power play. Worse about it with women than men, I expect the fact that I tend not to look directly at women is actually very likely an unconsciously observed primary causative factor for the always popular theory that I’m gay. [BACK]
[15] He grew up to look exactly like Brad Pitt—no joke—and caused whole high school classrooms of ladies to swoon, but I later heard that he’d been expelled from somewhere because of gratuitous public use of the word “nigger.” Once again, proving the theory: the asshole gets the girl. [BACK]
[16] She died of Hodgkin’s Disease when we were sophomores in high school. It was my first taste of the disingenuousness of idiots in the face of death. The human need for drama, videlicet: people who didn’t know her pretended to be devastated so that other people who didn’t care, but were pretending to, would pretend to comfort them. Everyone hugged everyone else and there was a sort of competition for who could pretend to be the most distraught. By the end of that school year, her legend had grown such that Sami had putatively, at some point previous to her death, dated approximately ¾ths of the male student body—touching them so profoundly that their hearts still belonged to her, and they were lost in the wake of her passing, unsure of whether they could ever love again. So they said. Most of them, shortly after her demise, found themselves “learning to love again” between the comforting thighs of a new girl, initially impressed by their sentimentality, and the dance went on.
Sometimes I dream of a world where everyone is capable of saying, when a stranger dies, “It’s terrible in theory, but I didn’t know them and thus don’t care.” I had no deep reaction to the events of September 11th and, evolutionarily speaking, that’s about the reaction I should have had—I didn’t know anyone at all, I’d never been to/wanted to go to that city, I didn’t fear for my own safety or the safety of my loved ones. I, like most people, was possessed of no evolutionary incentive to give a shit about those strangers (every countryman, in a nation so large and diverse, does not count as kith). And the nation at large did a much more grandiose version of what my then-peers did when Sami kicked it. Thanks to a speech or two from atop a pile of rubble, that dance went on for a while, too. And in both cases, they made special magnetic ribbons for the bumpers of SUVs and sedans. [BACK]
[17] By well-manicured I mean unbitten and not tawdrily polished. To this day, I despise the aesthetic/symbolic horrors that nail salons perpetrate upon American women and so should any forward-thinking feminist. Were it up to me, all women would have close-cut, unpainted, real fingernails, not pink, plastic, vestigial claws with white tips which historically symbolize her inability to work or provide for herself. [BACK]
[18] I was actually a bit unsettled when, two years later (in my first experience of Freudian unheimlich), a girl named Jenn (doubled postalveolar nasal and all) transferred into my school. She bore at least a 60% visual similarity to my Jenn and I suffered an intense crush on her for some years based, I think, solely on this fact. We (the real girl and I) had nothing in common and would have made lousy friends, much less lovers. I’m not sure if we ever spoke. [BACK]
[19] Devon either didn’t mention or didn’t notice the incongruousness of a wealthy woman shopping for shoes in a K-Mart, like my mother had to. [BACK]
[20] This is how I know that it’s impossible to leave a plausibly placed lipstick stain on your own collar unless you take the damned shirt off first. Why a tween was shirtless and wearing lipstick while straddling a Civil War-era cannon was probably a question on the lips of any number of passersby that day. And, in its overt NAMBLA-brand homoeroticism, maybe on the minds of a few pederasts that evening. [BACK]
[21] If this isn’t clear enough, here’s how the area was laid out: call the Trolley Bed horizontal Line A and surround it with two parallel shaded areas, Woods B and C. Woods B—above Line A on your mental graph—backed up onto a rental development of similarly built, but palette-swapped townhouses called Suburban Slum D. Woods C—below Line A—abutted Slum E: an identical, but newer (and vinyl-sided, as opposed to beshingled) tract of townhouses. I lived in Suburban Slum E. Connecting Slums D and E was a footpath, half a mile in length, that ran perpendicular to Line A, the Trolley Bed. Drunken idiots had made idle sport of racing their IROC-Zs and Dodge Darts up the hill that led to Line A from Slum D, down that footpath through the woods and out into the backyards of homes in Slum E. Or vice versa. After the erection of the Brobdingnagian H, only motorcyclists, ATV riders and snowmobilers could so recreate (which they did at great speed, and this was probably more dangerous).
On my side of Line A, but ten miles down, there existed some of the most fabulously ostentatious homes I’ve seen outside of film. This, I posited, was where Jenn lived. Ironically, I recall later discovering that this area actually was where Sami had lived. That Devon never mentioned such a thing, though he was a laconic chap, makes me wonder if he was wise to my little snow-job from day one. [BACK]
[22] Does this seem a bit much? I didn’t want rain or prying eyes to ruin what usually took me the lion’s share of an evening (after the 7pm ST: TNG reruns) for me to create. Remember, at the time I saw this as the most viable way for me to acquire anything resembling companionship. Of course I was protective of the notes: they were self-medication. My imagination was the first drug I ever abused. [BACK]
[23] Given details like this, if Devon wasn’t wise to the whole snow-job from day one, I’d say it’s likely he was mildly retarded. [BACK]
[24] I was nothing if not thorough: Jenn went to a local all-girls school with a phone-verified hour earlier dismissal time than either Devon’s or my public school. Jenn had just time to get off her bus, jog down the trolley bed, plant a note, and return home before her mother arrived, fresh from yoga, or ballet, or tennis, or whatever the deuce I had her bourgeois mother doing in the early afternoon. [BACK]
[25] I suggested this obtrusive and odd experiment in the middle of a catch, apropos of nothing and, if Devon knew what was going on, it made me look pathetic. If he didn’t, this display probably made me look batshit mad. “Hey, put down your mitt now. I can’t write in cursive. Come see.” [BACK]
[26] Stewie Griffin, Family Guy’s urbane but psychotic infant has, on several separate occasions (none of which I can presently find to fucking cite verbatim) posited that girls, left alone, chat about “stickers,” “jelly beans,” “myspace-dot-com,” and “Morgan Freeman.” His understanding might actually have been more two-ply than mine. [BACK]
[27] In one memorable and, in retrospect, hauntingly humiliating conversation, Devon detailed to me the events of a junior high dance. He’d been slow-dancing with Sami and, allegedly, he’d fingerbanged her down the front of her jean shorts right there on the confetti-strewn gym floor. I, flummoxed, spun an extemporaneous yarn about slow-dancing with Jenn on the trolley bed, a toted boom-box nearby played Extreme’s “More Than Words” while I went knuckle-deep into her sweaty asshole (I specifically recall mentioning the sweat). Devon was more than a bit confused—I, in my porn naïveté, didn’t know enough about third base or pussy in general to realize that I could quickly emend this prevarication with a glib “I missed” or “wrong hole”—and it took me quite some time to convince him to drop the subject completely. This embarrassment is my central argument for why Human Sexuality/Anatomy classes should be taught before age thirteen. That fucking cattle skull diagram might have prevented me from feeling moronic about this invention to the present day. I had no older brother, father, or uncle; I’d never seen a woman naked: how the hell was I supposed to know anything about vagina? [BACK]
[28] Once, I went so far as to dress accordingly and have my mother drop me at the town’s other junior high (which wasn’t having a dance, though my mother believed it was), whence I took the hours-long walk home in the dark, arriving eventually to tell my mother that a friend’s dad had dropped me off. I did this so I could allude to the dance during a dinner Devon shared with my mom and I. In my mother’s head, the reference would pertain to the alleged dance to which she had taken me; in Devon’s, it would be the one I’d apprised him of earlier. The allusion was probably less subtle even than this: “Hey mom, remember that dance you drove me to last week? Yeah, that was awesome.” Still, never accuse me of not committing to a bit. [BACK]
[29] Most everything I watched on television during my youth originally aired no later than 1977 (Soap being a notable exception along with Picard’s Star Trek). When I was thirteen, my ideal woman appears to have been the diabolical and manipulative genius I wanted everyone to know I was. Of course, I couldn’t tell them, because that would entail admitting that I’d been lying to them about everything forever. Which, I think, is frowned upon. [BACK]
[30] Do kids still do this? Did kids still do this in my youth? I think there was a brief ID-bracelet revival thanks to an episode of The Wonder Years—that’s where I saw such a trinket and how I ended up with a lousy gift idea which disappointed two different real girls on two different occasions. [BACK]
[31] The shopkeep at the Irish/Celtic import shop where I purchased the prenominate ring thought I was both gay and slow-witted (“No, I’ll try it on. He, uh, she’s got the same size hands as me”). Little did he know that I was in fact so gay that I was dating myself. [BACK]
[32] Q.v.: The first sentence of this essay. This is 3,600 words about heartache and yearning, not libidinousness. [BACK]
[33] See Jonathan Franzen’s essay “My Father’s Brain” in his nonfiction collection How to Be Alone for a much more thorough, yet not medically complex, explanation of this. [BACK]
[34] Tyler Durden? Harvey the Rabbit? Aloysius Snuffleupagus? No, no—it’s Jesus. That’s the one I’m thinking of. [BACK]
[35] If I’m not mistaken, the way it ended was her father found us tongue-locked and chucked her into some far-away, religious, upstate school to keep her away from boys. The whole family might have moved to get her away from me, the love of her life. It was an almost-complete rip-off of the Milhouse/Smantha Stanky break-up depicted by the May 7th, 1992 episode of The Simpsons entitled “Bart’s Friend Falls in Love.” The episode—the ancillary story was about Homer’s accidental reception of subliminal vocabulary-builder cassettes—was and is a favorite. “Tut, tut, Gentle Marge. For in the boudoir, the gourmand metamorphosizes into the voluptuary!” [BACK]
[36] I recall being both sad that my at least slightly satisfying makebelieve (self-medication) had come to an end, but relieved that I didn’t have to strain over the necessary labors or worry about being caught anymore. Later in life, I’d feel the same conflicted, dualistic feelings every time I quit a drug, tobacco, blow, meth, whatever. [BACK]
[37] My experience with male friendship seems to indicate that all XY/XY pairings are quiet battles in which both gents vie for dominance while attempting to force the other’s submission to the role of Good-Natured Sidekick. Rephrased: most guys just want to be R2-D2 with a pleasant C-3PO that they can exploit. If this is true in the world at large and not just endemic of my lifetime of dysfunctional and exploitive “friendships,” then I wonder if gay men have as romantic relationships terrifyingly dismal pissing contests, with kissing. The idea exhausts me even hypothetically. [BACK]
