Revenge is a dish best served cold

That’s bad because the chances that I will ever get to express that horniness in the context of a fulfilling relationship with an actual other person have always seemed pretty slim. 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 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.

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 quibble 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 pheromones, 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 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.

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 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.

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 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.

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 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.

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 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 grimacing 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 ideal: 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 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?

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 picnic). 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.

There was one pretty cool one, though: Brighton Rock. Reading books can be a lot of fun when they’re not the same ones that they make you read over and over and over till you want to shoot yourself. Brighton Rock seemed pretty interesting. I opened it and read the first couple of pages. But knowing it was my dad’s book gave me a weird feeling that kept distracting me from the story, so I didn’t get too far.

Really, though, I was less interested in reading the books than I was in examining them for physical evidence. The Catcher in the Rye, CEH 1960, was the most beat up and had had the most things written and spilled in it. The others were in better shape, though some had stuff written in them as well, mostly little check marks and lines drawn next to paragraphs at the margin, with an occasional note. Someone had written “Beatles” and the word “wow,” as well as the word “HELP,” and had drawn what looked like a mushroom cloud on the inside back cover of The Crying of Lot 49, CEH 1967. Hilarious. The Seven Storey Mountain, CEH 1963, had a business card from a dry cleaner stuck between the pages, and also another little card, which appeared to be from the funeral service of someone named Timothy J. Anderson. What that told me was that my dad used to bring his books with him in inappropriate situations, like the funeral of a family member or friend, just like my mom gets mad at me for doing. And that he may have been into the midperiod Beatles and had a fine sense of irony, as well as things that occasionally needed to be dry-cleaned. Hey, I’m a regular Encyclopedia Brown.

I still couldn’t make out a lot of what was scribbled in the Catcher. In addition to underlining the Jane Gallagher back rub passage, my dad seemed to have used it as a sort of all-purpose notebook and scribble pad, jotting down this and that inside the covers and on random pages. Which makes sense if it’s something you’re always carrying around, I guess. I use the white rubber parts of my shoes for the same purpose. A lot of the scribbles looked like they might be dates, and maybe some of them were phone numbers, though I don’t know—they didn’t look like phone numbers to me. There was never much more than the numbers, either. I could understand if they were phone numbers, which you sometimes just write down when someone tells them to you for temporary purposes. I’ve got some phone numbers on my shoes that I have no idea what they are. But why would you write down dates with no identifying information, like an appointment or something? A date alone is meaningless.

Some of the pages were missing, but I doubted there was any significance to that. The book was in such bad shape I’m sure pieces of it were scattered to the far reaches of the universe by now. The scribbles that looked like words were mostly illegible and incomprehensible, but, absurdly, of the ones I could kind of make out, the word “tit” seemed to crop up a lot. What the…? All in all, there were four of them, including the “tit lib friday” on the inside front cover. One of the other books, Slan, CEH 1965, had some string in it that appeared to have been used as a bookmark and had a scrawled note that said (I think) something “4 tit” something something. Four-Tit Something Something. Great band name. Not much use in any other way.

In the end, the results of this phase of the investigation were pretty negligible. But I did know one thing: whatever my dad had been up to between the ages of twelve and eighteen, it had somehow involved tits, back rubs, and dry cleaning.

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King Dork — by Frank Portman