Gawky (22 page)

But the following day nothing happened, either. Then a week went by, and then a month, then two months, and still, no one said anything about my teeth. My nickname did not become “Gums,” Chad Decker didn't wait by my locker mischievously asking me to flash my “pearly whites.” No one left me those windup 1950s teeth toys in my desk or offered me gummy candy teeth for dessert at lunch. Cecelia Rios, surprisingly, never told anyone about what happened in that drugstore. How could that be? I figured she just didn't know what to say. After all, how could she explain it?

“Uhh, she, like, gave me teeth and ate my change. I dunno, she's weird.”

To comprehend this one would need a full understanding of orthodontics at a Dr. Clott level. Cecelia didn't have time to ponder how exactly my teeth ended up in her hand and then back into my mouth, giving the impression that they were somehow connected at the root. She was too busy cheerleading, dating, and having a real social life that didn't involve Vito or Vinnie from the pot/pizza parlor.

But on the other hand, maybe she was just a nice person. Maybe she had been embarrassed some other time and understood. Perhaps even cool girls faced humiliation from time to time and weren't necessarily mean-spirited. Maybe underneath it all we were all hiding embarrassing secrets, and some of us just kept them to ourselves while others blatantly placed those secrets in the hands of others. Maybe underneath that tight-fitting sweatshirt Cecelia Rios was stuffing her bra like the rest of us. And for some reason, that thought gave me just enough hope to get through that year.

CHAPTER 13:

S
adly, my dating dry spell continued for about two more years. The most recent notable experience I'd had with a boy was my penis brush-off in Pennsylvania. I was now a junior and had no interest in anyone from high school, which worked out well because the feeling was mutual. Tan girls of average height with straight brown hair seemed to be the standard of beauty.
Friends
had started airing, and no one seemed to be lusting over Phoebe. I identified with Phoebe. We lengthy, pale vegetarians who bruised easily were on the outs. I needed to find other venues to meet people like me. My father's classic rock record collection and my brother's VHS tape of the Woodstock documentary were swiftly becoming my best friends, so I decided to branch out and start seeing live rock shows. Luckily my town was situated near two major concert venues so there were many options to see rock 'n' roll in the flesh. After all, what's the point of being a teenager in New Jersey if not to at least attempt to re-create the nights Bruce Springsteen sang about?

The best venue was the Garden State Arts Center (now the PNC Bank Arts Center), which was about ten minutes from my house. This was a humongous concert venue with stadium seating and lawn seating and it could hold 17,500 people. Huge acts like Metallica and Phish would play here during their concert season. During the off-season it was home to large-scale events like the Holiday Spectacular, something I never attended but imagined was filled with tiny dogs in Santa costumes and lots of flavored hot chocolate. The Arts Center would announce their spring-fall programming, and I would scour the long paper calendar circling all the shows I wanted to see: the Moody Blues, the Allman Brothers, the Indigo Girls, Santana, and anything that relied mostly on kick-ass guitar solos (acoustic or electric).

I didn't have a driver's license, so I had to arrange an early ride to the box office the day tickets went on sale. My friend Eli, a short boy with long hair who occasionally wore skirts to school, got himself a ride with two seniors and offered to take me along. I was never sure as to why he wore skirts sometimes. My guess was that because this was during the horrific Guns N Roses
Use Your Illusion
era when Axl Rose began wearing kilts, Eli may have misconstrued Axl's fashion statement and thought the door was wide open for women's wear in general. Eli was a great guitarist though, and lucky for me, because he was friends with the other musicians in school, he had an in for a ride. I was ecstatic; I was going to get to the Arts Center on opening day and get lawn seats to every classic rock show available. My life was changing! I had listened to rock music alone, and I had tried to play rock music—but now I was becoming a full-force live rock music connoisseur.

I even had my own money to buy my tickets. Thanks to the raise I had gotten at the drugstore (I was now making $6 an hour), I no longer needed to moonlight by babysitting those vile twins. Finally, I had watched
Look Who's Talking
for the very last time. And due to a miniscule social life, I was working around the clock. I was making the equivalent
of the cash windfall I had received years ago at my surprise party. I could definitely afford a few concert tickets. Once I got these tickets in my hands, my boring '90s teenage life would be more like the '80s debauched youth I had always fantasized about. I'd worry about who would join me at these shows later. For now it was all about the music.

The morning of opening day, I waited by the bay window at 6:30
AM
sharp so all the seniors would have to do is honk. I didn't want anyone knocking on the door, causing my embarrassing dog to bark at them and then hump them gently as he escaped out the front door. I also didn't want my mother coming down in her bathrobe and offering the seniors tea. I waited eagerly until a dented black 1982 Camaro pulled up with Led Zeppelin blaring. The brakes screeched to a halt as they honked the horn a little too loudly for 6:30
AM
on a Saturday morning. Luckily my dog, and mother, didn't notice. I quietly exited the house, opened the car door, flipped the front seat forward, and tried my best to ease my too-long legs into the pint-size backseat.

“What's up?” said one of the seniors. These boys were remnants of the '80s New Jersey hair metal heyday and had long hair and black leather jackets and Marlboro Red cigarettes dangling from their mouths. They didn't give a shit about grunge music, and they'd certainly never seen the movie
Singles
. They were from the time when Skid Row and Bon Jovi hit it big and put Central Jersey on the map, before bands like Soul Asylum and Soundgarden took over and we all started dressing like high-class lumberjacks. Before I could answer their question of “What's up?” they turned up the radio, Jimmy Page blared a perfect riff, and they sped off. Eli gave me a look that said
You can thank me later
.

During the ten-minute drive to the Arts Center, I thought I was going to die about seven times. The seniors ran red lights, slammed on brakes, drove up on curbs, each time laughing harder than the last. Apparently slamming on the brakes in the middle of a four-way stop sign intersection is friggin' hilarious. I clenched my fake teeth and did
kegels so as not to pee my pants and wet the already-stained backseat. I could only imagine what the previous stains were from, and I tried not to let my mind wander too much, as I'd finally recovered from the penis brush-off.

At least the ride was invigorating. I told myself that this was probably how girls like Tawny Kitean and Jessica Hahn rolled in the '80s. I was truly living on the edge at last! And it being 6:30
AM
on a weekend in a small town, almost no one else was on the road. We soon arrived at the venue and the senior with the long black hair parked in a manner that somehow made the Camaro take up three spots.

We climbed out of the car to a reasonably empty parking lot, and to our surprise there was hardly any line. I got the feeling something was wrong, like when the Griswolds finally arrive at Walley World in National Lampoon's
Vacation
and pull in to an empty parking lot. I worried the Garden State Arts Center might also be “Closed for Renovations.” But luckily, there was no automated moose telling us we were screwed. Like the Griswolds we were the “first ones here . . . first ones here,” but unlike the Griswolds we walked up to an open ticket counter. We each purchased our tickets for the season and sauntered back to the car, feeling excited about what was to come. No major disaster, just some overzealous planning on our part. I couldn't believe there wasn't a line around the block for those Moody Blues lawn seats but no one else seemed fazed.

The drive back was equally terrifying. These guys drove like they were being chased by a 'roided-up Loch Ness monster. By the time they pulled into my parents' driveway, Eli and I were clutching each other's hands in anxiety while holding on to the “oh shit handle” usually reserved for hanging dry cleaning. The car screeched to a halt and Eli and I finally allowed ourselves to breathe. “Wow, you guys are really driving like crazy this morning, aren't you?” asked Eli, in a brave attempt to address the elephant in the Camaro.

“We are?” the senior driver asked sincerely. He then looked at his friend and they both started laughing a little too hard and a little too long. “Sorry, guys,” said the last remaining die-hard fan of hair metal, “we're on acid!” The two seniors looked at each other and laughed in a way that would only make sense if one were on acid. They got louder and softer completely in synch, pausing for seconds at a time, then starting all over again in perfect harmony. I wanted to get out of the Electric Kool-Aid Acid car, but there was no way I could sneak my giant frame out without getting one of these spawns of Timothy Leary to stop his hysterics to flip my seat forward. I had seen movies where people smashed car windows with their bare fists in order to break free from scary people like kidnappers and jewel thieves. If only that kid in
Cloak & Dagger
had thought of that, he wouldn't have gotten chloroformed by the three-fingered senior citizen.

Finally, in complete synchronicity, they stopped laughing. The driver calmly turned to the backseat to say, “We took it late last night and haven't been to sleep since. At least we were on time, right, bro?”

“Right,” I said, not sure if it was Eli or me that they were addressing as “bro.” “Thanks so much for the ride, see you around,” I said, hoping that was enough of a hint for the guy in front of me to move so I could get out. He didn't move, though, so I began pushing the passenger seat forward, along with the tripping passenger in it. At last he understood and got out of the car, allowing me to exit in a less humiliating manner than unnecessarily smashing a window with my bare fist. I looked through the backseat window at Eli just before they sped off, and he stared back with the look of a kid being shipped off to Jesus Camp for the summer. His pressed his hand against the window as one does when talking to a loved one on a prison phone, and as the car took off I hoped for the best. Now that I was safe, I was exhilarated. Being a subsidiary acid tripper was just the jolt I needed to start living the rock 'n' roll lifestyle I so desired.

The concert season started soon after and I loved finally having something to look forward to during snooze-fest civics class. The only problem was, between my drugstore salary of $6 an hour and whatever extra I had saved up babysitting the twins down the street, I actually didn't have enough money to see every single concert I had hoped to. Taxes and hidden fees had jacked up the prices just enough that I would have to cut a few out. I wanted to be hearing live classic rock music every single week—I needed the escape from the present-day trends of Counting Crows and hemp necklaces, and the weeks I didn't have tickets to a show were depressing. More and more, though, I was hearing about people I knew from school getting summer jobs at the Arts Center. If only I had been smart enough to apply for a seasonal position there. I wouldn't have had to take that ride with the acid trippers for tickets because I would be able to see all the shows for free, albeit while wearing a horrendous canary yellow and navy blue uniform. The weeks I didn't have a show to look forward to, I sat alone in the dreaded third-period lunch (who wants to eat mass-produced sloppy Joes at 10:00
AM
?), writing in my journal about how I wanted to be anywhere but here.

Then I discovered that my favorite substitute teacher, Mrs. Bernstein, moonlighted at the Arts Center as security. I loved Mrs. Bernstein. She seemed smarter than the majority of my full-time teachers, and her hard-assed-ness somehow seemed comical to me. I guess any shake-up from the day-to-day ritual of high school made me slightly happier. I bet she was great at her Arts Center job. She was short and built kind of like a potato, and I was sure that with her self-confidence and sassy sense of humor she could overcome that grotesque yellow and navy uniform. In fact, I was sure she could rock it. It seemed an appropriate position for her, as she took school security very seriously when she subbed, interrogating anyone who asked for a bathroom pass to determine whether or not he really had to “make” or if he was going to “smoke on her dime.”

In between accusing students of faking coughs so they could go to the nurse and hiding gum underneath their tongues, Mrs. Bernstein mentioned while subbing in my psychology class that she would be working security at that weekend's Tom Petty concert. I was over the moon. Tom Petty was on my B-list of acts to see, and so I hadn't sprung for a ticket, but I had been regretting that decision for weeks. Now I had hope. I knew Mrs. Bernstein liked me, as neither of us really belonged at this school, and perhaps she would sneak me in the door. I didn't want to be so gauche as to ask her ahead of time, but I thought surely she would have my back when I hit her up for a favor on the sly.