It shouldn’t have come as a surprise that I had so much trouble writing songs. They always say, “Write what you know.” And that was the problem: I didn’t know anything.
The following morning, Sam Hellerman dropped something on my desk in homeroom. It was the “Thinking of Suicide?” pamphlet from the Student Resource Area. (They have a whole wall of poorly written, amusingly illustrated pamphlets to help students sort through their problems. The titles are always in the form of a question, like “Pregnant?” or
“Drugs and/or Alcohol Addiction or STD?” “Thinking of Suicide?” is our favorite, though.)
“Oh, Ralphie,” I said, because sometimes we call each other Ralphie. “Is it that obvious?”
This was a running joke between Sam Hellerman and me.
He would pick up one of the suicide pamphlets and bring it over and I’d say, “how did you know?” And he’d say something like “killing yourself is a cry for help, you know.” And I’d say, “but isn’t death just a part of life?” “Yeah,” he’d say,
“it’s usually the last part.” It passes the time.
But this time around, my mind wasn’t on the hilarious banter. Instead, I was looking at the extremely familiar cover of the pamphlet as though seeing it for the first time.
“Thinking of Suicide?” has this great drawing of a retro girl in 56
a sweater and a short plaid skirt with her calves apart and her knees together and her stack of schoolbooks falling out of her arms. The expression on her face is supposed to be anguished, but she has her mouth open as though in surprise and to me she has always looked pretty sexy. Her glasses are on the floor near one of her clumsily drawn Mary Janes, which seems kind of sexy, too, for some reason. Glasses have always turned me on. It’s one of my favorite pictures, and we had already used it for several album covers (most recently for the Underpants Machine, me on guitar, Sam Sam the Piper’s Son on bass and bottle rockets, first album We Will Bury You. ) What I was thinking, though, for the first time was, this would make a pretty good song. All I had to do was give the girl a name and feel sorry for myself while pretending to be her. And figure out some lyrics and chords and stuff. It was worth a shot, anyway.
I was distracted for the rest of the day, wishing I had my guitar with me so I could play around with suicide song ideas.
It was frustrating. On the other hand, it did give me something interesting to think about while Mr. Schtuppe was trying to teach us how to mispronounce words from Catcher in the Rye.
But then my world was plunged into darkness.
We were in PE sitting in the lanai, boys on one side and girls on the other, listening to some lady give a speech on what she called Rape Prevention, but what was really more like a list of dating dos and don’ts. Do be passive and tentative at all times. Don’t try to persuade anyone to do anything or not to do anything, nor allow yourself to be persuaded to do anything or not to do anything of any kind at any time under any circumstances. Do recoil from human contact at the first sign of discomfort or awkwardness. Don’t go out with anyone anywhere if there’s a slight chance that drugs or alcohol will be or 57
have ever been consumed by anyone in the vicinity. Realistic stuff like that. And remember, girls, if a boy does something you don’t like, you can always poke him in the eyes with your index and middle fingers, thrusting upward under glasses if necessary.
I noticed some of the girls laughing and pointing my way, plus making these little pained grimaces. I knew that I had to be the person they were pointing and laughing and grimac-ing at. I just didn’t know specifically why.
Later that day in Band, Scott Erdman, who is kind of going out with Molli Miklazewski, one of the girls in that PE
period, told me that she had told him that they were laughing because they thought they could see my balls. That’s totally believable, because, as I’ve explained, they force you to wear these extremely small blue and white George Michael shorts in PE, and not only do they make you look completely gay but they’re not very effective at fulfilling the minimum requirement for a below-the-waist garment as I see it, which is, if nothing else, to cover the genitals. I guess it works out okay for George Michael, but for me it was far from ideaclass="underline" if you sit a certain way, like Indian style in the lanai, there’s always a chance that something will peek out, and I guess that’s what happened.
Not only that, but Scott Erdman said that Molli Miklazewski specifically made a point of saying that it’s not seeing just anyone’s balls per se that grossed them all out.
The girls in her circle, she wanted to emphasize, quite enjoy seeing someone’s balls in many situations. Sometimes they see a person’s balls and throw a big party in the spirit of reverent and enthusiastic ball admiration. Whether it’s gross and makes them want to throw up or not is all dependent on whose balls they are. Now, maybe she was saying this in part just to make sure Scott Erdman knew that she felt okay about 58
his balls, but the message was clear. The entire second-period sophomore girls’ PE class thought my balls were uniquely and supremely beneath contempt. Great.
Never mind about the date-rape prevention from this end, Ms. Rimbaud. I got you covered. There will be no dating, school district approved or not, going on in the general vicinity of my balls for a long, long time.
But the Lord never closes a door without opening a window, and on the bright side, it could have been much, much worse, as this would have been the perfect opportunity for someone to propose a groundbreakingly embarrassing new nickname. But fortunately, just at the point when the discussion in the band room would have reached the all-important nickname development stage, in walked Pierre Butterfly Cameroon.
Needless to say, Pierre Butterfly Cameroon is cursed with one of the worst names ever misguidedly foisted upon a poor, defenseless kid by adoring, clueless, hippie parents. He’s also the shortest kid in school (another wonderful gift from the Whole Earth Mom and Dad: stunted growth owing to a protein-free vegan diet in his formative years). Plus, he had been insane enough back in elementary school to have chosen to play the flute rather than some more gender-appropriate instrument, so when he walked in someone lifted him by the legs of his jeans and shook him upside down till he fell out of his pants and hit his head on a saxophone case and lay there crying in his underwear and everyone started chanting, “Get a belt! Get a belt!” So my balls were forgotten in the excitement. Like I said, doors and windows.
So I guess I ended up having a slight change of attitude about that CHS party. I mean, I was kind of looking forward to it, suddenly. It had disaster written all over it, but really, how much worse could anything get?
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TITS, BAC K RU B S, AN D DRY C LEAN I NG
I had, of course, brought all the CEH books up to my room right after I found them at the beginning of that week. I had cased out the Catcher pretty thoroughly, but it wasn’t till the Thursday just before the party that I got around to examining the rest of them closely as a set. Sam Hellerman had had to skip band practice to do something with his parents (an obligation I wouldn’t wish on a dog—his parents are no pic-nic). I was on my own. So I put on Rocket to Russia and began to go through them.
A couple of the books were familiar from school as Catcher in the Rye alternates or runners-up. That is, if Catcher is for any reason unable to perform its official duties, they make you read one of the other ones instead. There was A Separate Peace, which is about this irritating guy who keeps trying to make this other irritating guy fall and break his leg until he finally does and ends up dying. And there was Lord of the Flies, which is kind of like Hillmont High School meets Gilligan’s Island, except that the goons in charge are prissy English schoolboys instead of normal red-blooded American alpha psychopaths.