It’s a thing you have to live with. In fact, before October 1 of this year, I had never even touched a girl in “that way.” And even then—but I’ll explain all that soon enough.
In youth-oriented movies and books, the guy like me often has a huge crush on a specific blond cheerleader who doesn’t know he exists and would never stoop to talking to him. Or maybe she is kind of mean to him even though she’s 51
friends with him and asks him for advice on how to get the football guy to make out with her, which drives him crazy, and so forth. Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m definitely that guy. But there isn’t any one particular girl that fits that formula, and the idea that someone like that would ever be friendly with me in any sense, even as a device to dramatize my own pain and loneliness, is rather preposterous.
But of course I do have this mousy but cute female sidekick who has been right under my nose all along, only I won’t realize how great she is till I’ve learned a few painful lessons about commitment and responsibility and what’s important in life.
Just kidding; I don’t have one of those, either. Pretty much all the girls in school are cruel and unattainable, and the great majority are also beautiful and sexy and desirable in at least some way. None are at all interested in or available to me, and why would they be? When I dream of how it would be if I were suddenly transformed into the kind of guy that does not repulse the females of our species, I don’t necessarily think of any particular girl. Pick any one; it doesn’t matter.
This whole topic is so in the realm of pure theory that we might as well call her x. Or rather xi, “i” denoting “imaginary.”
Conceivable in theory, but unrecorded by history and impossible in nature. An imaginary girl.
If it makes it easier to visualize, though, let’s say xi is, hmm, how about Kyrsten Blakeney? She’s blond and wears really short skirts. I don’t know if she’s actually a cheerleader, but she looks the part. Real foxy. Looks great poolside, chewing on an eraser, leaning over to buckle her shoe, riding a bike, eating a banana. Looks great paying a late fine at the library, taking out the recycling, buying a newspaper, playing with dogs, whatever. Nice rack. Sagittarius. Birthstone: yellow topaz.
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I find myself thinking of how I’d like to express my horniness in the context of Kyrsten Blakeney fairly often. So does practically everybody who has ever seen her—students, teachers, janitorial staff, etc.
In all the movies and books, the guy like me is totally in love with Kyrsten Blakeney and only Kyrsten Blakeney. If you forget the quaint adherence to monogamy in the realm of pure ideas, and depending on how much you want to quib-ble over fine shades of meaning in the word “love,” that’s pretty accurate and true to life. And it would be quite true, in the strictest sense, to say she is not aware of my existence.
Which is a mercy: I can’t see that I would have anything to gain from her knowledge of my existence.
In real life, I admire her from afar and quietly celebrate her beauty, just as I would do if I were playing my character in the finest, most typical teen movie or young-adult novel our civilization has to offer.
In this movie, Kyrsten Blakeney somehow discovers my hidden depths, decides she likes my eyes, smells my phero-mones, and goes crazy for my body. She decides to risk everything and shock God and country by becoming the girlfriend of a nameless, sad-sack dork like me. Society is aghast. Parents and teachers wonder where they went wrong. The president declares martial law. Meanwhile, Kyrsten and I make out in the gym at the homecoming dance while everyone stands around in a shocked, silent circle. Then she gets up on the stage and delivers this great speech to the student body, condemning them for their superficiality, insensitivity, and racism (because maybe in the movie I could be black or Filipino or Native American and handicapped, too). And when she’s finished, after a panoramic shot of the stunned, silent crowd, one person starts to clap slowly. Soon another starts to clap. Before long, they’re all clapping. They raise me 53
up on their shoulders and ride me around the gymnasium shouting, “Chi-Mo! Chi-Mo! Chi-Mo!” just like they used to in junior high, except now they mean it in a positive sense.
And my dad comes back from the dead and smiles at me from the bleachers and kisses my mom on the cheek. And as the throng hands me a check for a hundred thousand dollars and carries me out the door to my brand-new car, you hear the voice of my back-from-the-dead father saying, “I’m proud of you, boy. . . .” Kyrsten and I start driving off to Vegas to get married. She gives me a blow job on the highway under the steering wheel and kisses me on the mouth and says, “Chi-Mo, you better get used to this, because from now on you’re stuck with me. . . .”
Okay, I got a little carried away there. Take it up to right after the speech to the student body, and change me back into a white, suburban, typically abled, clever, if angry, yet somehow almost loveable mixed-up kind of weird guy.
Slightly more believable.
King Dork to wed Homecoming Princess. News at eleven. It’s a nice thought, and it turns up all the time in movies and books. The one minor problem is that in reality, it never happens. I don’t mean rarely or hardly ever. I mean it has never even come within the ball park of being even slightly close to almost happening in the whole history of high school, since the beginning of time.
Not even once.
It turns up in all those books and movies for the same reason that parents and teachers want you to read The Catcher in the Rye all the time. It’s the world as they would like it to be. It’s the fantasy that the short end of the stick somehow comes with hidden benefits that only people outside the situation can see. The fantasy that the nonentity in 54
the background is secretly the main guy who has his revenge in the end. It’s a nice thought. But it’s bogus, man. Total crap.
TOYS I N TH E ATTIC
That CHS party was just around the corner, and I was starting to dread it a little. I mean, what good could possibly come of such a thing? Still, I didn’t want to let Sam Hellerman down.
And anyway, I had more important things on my mind. Because it was starting to dawn on me: the band wasn’t going anywhere.
We really needed to take it to the next level. Sure, we had great band names and stage names and album titles, and I could play bar chords, though it would sometimes take me a little too long to switch between the E and the A one. Sam Hellerman still didn’t have his bass, but I was getting tired of waiting.
Don’t get me wrong: Liquid Malice was and is a great, great name. But without songs that are as great, it would never amount to much.
So I decided I would write some songs and we would get together to rehearse them, even if we didn’t completely have our shit together.
One thing I learned right away. It’s way easier to think up names and album covers than to write the actual songs to plug into them. I wrote this song called “Kyrsten Blakeney’s a Total Fox” only to realize that what I’d done was basically rewrite “Christine Sixteen” with new, suckier lyrics. There just aren’t any words that rhyme with Blakeney. Kyrsten does rhyme with “thirstin’,” and I was sort of proud of that one, but the fact remains that my first song set the band back several stages all on its own.
I was starting to sketch out the lyrics for a new song with 55
the tentative title “Advanced Placement Is a Scam” when Sam Hellerman finally came over. He had his clarinet and a book of Aerosmith for Reed Instruments.
He had a good point. We could start with Aerosmith and work our way up to our own tunes.
I played the chords on my guitar and Sam Hellerman played the melody line on the clarinet. It didn’t sound too bad.
Little Big Tom poked his head in and said, “Dream on!”
which I thought was a little mean.