At school, two days later, I told all of my friends about what happened at the dance. The response was what I expected: Kyle asked, “Did you bang her?” knowing full-well that I only danced with Maria. Rick tried to drown out my story with his own, but had failed. Mike smiled like a big dope, because I knew he’d never even talked to a girl much less danced with one. Mike had so little experience with girls that he thought I exaggerated the whole story, even though I didn’t. But Paul’s reaction was different. He wasn’t like Mike. Paul was in disbelief because he knew that everything I said was true, and he couldn’t believe that I’d had yet another success with yet another girl.
“What’s her name?” Rick asked.
“Julie McCormick,” I said. Mike laughed his ass off. Rick laughed harder. Kyle laughed the hardest. Paul frowned and looked at his shoes.
My friends were in awe. I told Paul that I’d give him Lynn now that I was done with her. I know that sounds crude, but, Christ, we were guys, and we all talked that way.
It was a great lunch time that afternoon. Usually we talked about all sorts of stuff—girls, sports, teachers, whatever. But that day all we talked about was me and Maria. They kept asking me if I hooked up with her, but I responded by smiling like a Cheshire cat, letting them believe what they wanted to. I had the feeling there would be plenty of stuff to tell them during lunch time in the future.
After lunch, me and my friends walked back up to our lockers. That year, our junior year, our lockers were close to one another. So after we got our books, as usual, we hung around near the stairwell and bullshitted for a while until the bell rang. Kyle towered over all of us. He’s about six foot two or three, maybe even taller. He had dirty blonde hair that fell straight down to his shoulder blades. His face was gaunt and seldom clean-shaven. A circle of dirty blonde stubble lined the circumference of his lips nearly every day. Worse than that, Kyle's stringy hair dangled below his shirt collar, well beyond his neck. This sort of hair style breached the school's dress code. But of course, Kyle never got caught by the Brothers. Not once! He slyly tucked his hair into his collar, never raising an eyebrow from the faculty. How he managed to escape trouble through four years of high school looking like an out-of-work drummer is beyond me.
Between his gray, creaseless, slacks and shit brown shoes Kyle was a fashion train wreck. And when I say he wore this crap every day, I mean every day. He could have passed easily for the poorest kid in school. Kyle was, well, Kyle was Kyle. But the thing was, he didn’t give a shit what anyone thought of him. And he was pretty happy with the way he was. I’ve always admired Kyle for that. I always wanted to know his secret. Still do.
I remember the first time I met Kyle. It was the last day of classes during our freshman year. Mike had known Kyle since elementary school. As everyone piled out of school, Mike plucked me from the crowd outside and said, “A.J., this is Kyle. Kyle, this is A.J.” As we shook hands hello, I noticed how unkempt he was. So there I was, with this weirdo friend of a friend, lanky as hell, and all I could think to say to him was, “You have an earring.” And he sure as hell did have one, a big gold spider web earring dangling from a thin gold chain attached to his ear lobe. I think it even had a spider on it, too. I couldn’t believe that Mike was friends with such a freak. Earrings were for losers!
“No shit? I have a dick, too. Wanna see?” Kyle replied, without missing a beat. And that was that. I didn’t see him again until the beginning of our sophomore year. But whenever I spoke with Mike over the summer, he had a new Kyle story to tell me. It wasn’t until the next fall when school began that Kyle and I became friends. And how did we become friends? How did two seemingly different people manage to kindle a relationship? The answer is simple: We both thought Mike was a Pollock.
See, we were both friends with Mike. But there was no doubt that Mike was, well, a geek. He was a great guy who wouldn't harm a fly. Strange thing is, though, Mike never hung out with anyone but Kyle and me. He was a geek for hanging out with us! Correction: Us and his Mom. "Momma’s boy,” we’d always call him. And that’s precisely what Kyle heard me say under my breath one day when Mike committed one of his usual blunders. Well, it wasn’t actually a blunder, but it was typical Mike. While walking down the hall in school with him and Kyle one morning, I started belting My Way, the Elvis Presley song. As I finished the final crescendo of the song, as that final "my way" echoed down the black and blue and beige tiled hallway past Mrs. Simpkin’s English class, I turned to Mike and said: “That’s the way Elvis sang it.”
“It’s Frank Sinatra song,” he said.
“No, Pollock, it’s an Elvis song.”
“But Sinatra also sang it,” he insisted. “I heard it on my Mom's Sinatra record last week.”
Shit. He was right. I searched for a response. “Go fuck yourself, Mike!” was about all I could muster. But then, under my breath, I said, “Momma’s boy,” and laughed. Mike didn’t hear it, but Kyle’s thin lips grinned from ear to ear. From that point on, I knew that Kyle and I were going to be terrific friends. On that day we discovered a bond that would gel any two people together, no matter how dissimilar: a mutual derision for a mutual third friend.
Although both Kyle and I loved Mike like a brother, we reveled equally in his nerdiness throughout high school. Christ, we’d make fun of everything about Mike: his messed up hair, his pot belly, his sloppy clothes.
He was an easy target, but not too easy. But the other two members of my high school quintet, Paul and Rick, were the insult magnets. Mike, however, was just a tad cooler than them, so Kyle and I considered it our duty to poke fun at him.
And there was plenty about Mike to dis. He stood about six feet, taller than me, but shorter than Kyle. But while I was kind of the average-sized member of the group, and Kyle was the emaciated member, Mike was the fat one. Not rolly-polly fat, not Jeff and his sister fat, but fat nonetheless. At sixteen, before he's ever tasted beer, he had a portly beer belly. And before he'd ever felt a chick's tit, he'd grown his own little pair of A-cups, the contour of which could be seen clearly through most any shirt. At school, between those tits there hung an unstylish pencil thin tie, usually an acrylic maroon one, no matter what color shirt he wore.
If I had to summarize Mike, I'd say that looked as ridiculous as Kyle, but unlike Kyle, he longed to look like me. Kyle was happy with his appearance. His style was being out of style. But Mike wished he didn't look like himself, he tried like hell to appear cool and hip. But he was what he was, and that's what Kyle and I found so hilarious. That's why we made fun of him incessantly.
This'll sound funny, but most of all, we made fun of Mike because me and Kyle were his only friends. Our friendship is reminiscent of an adage my father used to recite: "I wouldn't join any club that would have me as a member." Applied to us, Kyle and I picked on Mike because he wasn't sophisticated enough to have any friends other than two guys who constantly ridiculed him.
When Mike wasn't being laughed at by me and Kyle, he was at home watching movies with his mother. Almost every day, especially on Mondays following a weekend full of movie-watching, Mike would try to impress the gang by citing all sorts of extraneous facts about movies he's seen. Sometimes, I'll admit, his comments were interesting.
At lunch one day when Mike announced that he'd just seen The Godfather, and that we should all go over his house that weekend and watch it with him. Reluctantly, we went. It began as a typical afternoon: Rick's Mom picked up me and Paul. Kyle, who also lived in Astoria, just walked over there around three. As usual, Mike's Mom doted all over the five of us, probably because she was so happy he had more than one friend.