There were a couple of fluke hook-ups beyond the Ginger-headed Frencher, Purple Dick, and the Rocky Horror Picture Blow. They were hippies, mostly. A bong-hitter with a frizzy ponytail who used to bring his wah-wah pedal to jam sessions at the A-School Fair took me to a construction site off Heath-cote Road one night, then came on my leg in the back of his Saab. He dumped me later that week after giving me a ride to school in icy silence, the humiliation of which hurt only until I saw him shotgun a cheerleader at a party after she took a hit from a skull bong.
There was Eddie Ashe, one of those drama-club guys who wears fedoras and trenchcoats, whom I met at Tower Video. Eddie had complicated, feathered hair, and I thought he was really cool until he suffered a panic attack after ejaculating in his chinos while we made out to
Glengarry Glenn Ross
. Another tip-off that Eddie may not have been cool was his incessant talking about how much he
loved
the sweet, funky sounds of the bass guitar. He forced me to give Les Claypool “props,” and listen to that band Fishbone before suffering one final flip-out in front of me, after the Glengarry Cum Pants incident, during which he wondered if he was “maybe not scared of rejection as much as scared of, you know, acceptance?”
There was a boy from New Rochelle who felt my boobs in the vestibule of a diner, near the chalky dinner mints and the lotto-scratch-ticket machines. He smelled like tuna fish and had a mushroom haircut, but I convinced myself I was in love with him as I watched him skateboard away, unaware it was the last time I’d ever see him.
Taking these guys’ tongues in my mouth, even moments before being sloppily jilted, was sweet, distilled ecstasy. Making out brought me into another state of consciousness, even though I was just getting Grade- D play from sixteen-year-old wankers with dancing bears stickered to their rear windows. But when it didn’t work out because of myriad
duh
-fueled reasons, I was devastated. Furious. How dare he?! I hate myself! All-or-nothing stuff, with too much rage and too little perspective. You’re familiar: you were an adolescent too.
When I think today about what it was like to be a teenager, I want to go back in time just to put a warm washcloth on my fifteen-year-old forehead and hold my own hand. I have a weak spot for any movie that shows a character’s adult self going back to reassure herself as a child, including but not limited to
Drop Dead Fred
. Seriously: I will cry like a
baby
when I see old Phoebe Cates reassuring young Phoebe Cates that everything will be all right. I think it’s because I really do want to go back and tell myself that the good things about me will stay the same, and the bad things will change.
Of all the things that have changed, the biggest difference between me now and me then is that, when I was a teenager, I didn’t seem to have a sense of humor. Even in my silly thrift-shop clothes, obsessively taping episodes of
SCTV
and
Saturday Night Live
, nothing was funny about my own life to me—which is what it
really
means to have a sense of humor, comedy nerds.
And do you know why it is I didn’t have a sense of humor? It’s something I’ve figured out only recently. I was such a miserable sack of humorless gristle because I was, at the time, without a Single. Gay. Friend.
I AM
always suspicious of women who aren’t friends with at least a few gay men; it doesn’t speak well to their wit, glamour, cultural tastes, or whether it’s fun to be around them at all. It’s imperative that women keep the company of at least one gay man, not only because they make the best friends you’ll ever keep, but because the alternatives have built-in leaks. Straight male friends are mostly guys you want to sleep with or want something from professionally, and straight female friendships are incapable of
not
being wrought with jealousy and drama. Show me a woman who doesn’t have at least two former best girlfriends she now hates, and I will introduce you to a convincing tranny.
Gay men appreciate what is feminine about women, and what is funny about being feminine, which is why they appreciate funny women, and bring out the sense of humor in girls more than anybody else on earth. It is extremely important to be friends with at least one gay man, and even more so when you are in high school. If yours is the sad fate of growing up in a part of the country in which the word “fag” is used by popular kids as liberally as freshly ground pepper is by bistro waiters—or, even worse, if you are too dull to retain the interest of the smartly dressed boy in your AP history class who calls Margaret Thatcher “fierce”—then you need to learn to be your
own
gay best friend. It is the only thing that will keep you from going insane, or possibly cutting yourself, which is a cowardly plea for attention and unsightly at the beach.
Looking back, I should have been more diligent in finding a homosexual companion. I should have been Chasing Gary that whole time, instead of throwing myself at Wah-Wah Pedal and Riff Raff. My Hypothetical Gay Best Friend would have changed my outlook on my whole situation. Sure, high school was horrible and gross, and the people I went to school with, for the most part, were fugly and retarded. But what if, instead of saying to yourself over and over: “That Amy Shelov is such a dipshit—she’s never heard of the
Galapagos Islands
? What a dumb slut. I hope she gets hit by a bus,” you had the singsong sarcasm of a wry male voice cracking wise: “Wow. Amy Shelov seems really cool. You should be more like her.”
I’m not big on regret—until time travel actually exists, it seems like a waste of making yourself feel bad—but I do wish I’d played hag to my own invisible wise, gay, companion in high school; my Jiminy Faggot. I’d have kept him on my shoulder during homeroom, shushing him merrily as he complimented the teacher for wearing the same reindeer sweater two days in a row. I’d have been able to listen to his droll sniping instead of my righteous vitriol every time some Deadhead said something asinine.
And I would have had somebody around to remind me, when I was sobbing into a tuna sub while parked behind the Borders Books in the Westchester Pavilion, that things were going to one day get better. Nobody knows about the promise of a new day better than gay people and Paula Abdul. It’s what gets closeted, picked-on queer kids through junior high—the hope that around the bend, you’ll be living in a major city, pulling in disposable income from your media job, fucking a gorgeous guy who loves you, and hanging out with people who went through the same thing you did and lived to tell about it. That there’s a time that exists when you can be who you are, and who you are is fabulous. I really needed to know that, then.
I HAD
to wait until college to meet my best friend; the homosexual who would complete me. Nate came along my junior year, not a moment too soon, and taught me it’s more satisfying to laugh at idiots than to spend hours plotting their doom. Like me, he came from similarly embarrassing stock: Nate had long hair in high school, went vegan, chained himself to trees, and dressed up like Evil Ronald McDonald for a Greenpeace protest. He understood that only those who’ve been balls-deep in super-earnest ideology are really able to laugh heartily in the faces of its most orthodox devotees. It’s just a question of growing out of being sad all the time. And Nate and I had some satisfying belly laughs at the expense of the raw-foodists, transgender feminists, anticonsumerist performance artists, and assorted other East Village clucks we lived among once we’d finally found each other at NYU, in the belly of the beast. It felt so good to make fun of people for once, instead of silently hating them.
I told Nate about this time in September, after the summer between my sophomore and junior years, when I decided I was going to dress like a beatnik from then on, and showed up to high school in a black beret, clutching a copy of
Howl
like a purse. Talking to him made it all suddenly seem really funny, and not like I was airing out a sanctimonious confession of how miserable I used to be. It was such a relief. I wish Nate had been with me the whole time when I was hurting and sweating every last piece of flotsam and jetsam that sideswiped me in high school. It would have been a blessing to be reminded, in the trenches of tenth grade, that I was Kate Pierson, not Aileen Wuornos.
Nate and I made up for all the time I lost when I was in high school hanging out with nobody, and dum-dums. We’d commiserate with each other when stupid boys would disappear after making us fall for them. Girlfriends will give you a hug and a pep talk when that happens—gay friends will merrily and artfully tear the guy to pieces, pointing out his awful haircut, his terrible clothes, and the love handles you didn’t notice when you still had a crush on him. It’s very comforting to have a boy be that mean to another boy when your heart is broken, and Nate and I made merciless fun of all the people we dated who didn’t work out.
I’D KEEP
detailing the various ways in which Nate and I have made each other laugh and generally enjoyed each other’s company over the years, but I’m afraid you, as I, would want to heap generous loads of hot barf on your own lap. There’s something essentially revolting about stories about fun that was had or “you had to be there” accounts of the hilarious thing that guy did that time that end with, “We were laughing so hard, we couldn’t breathe.” They’re like the “Wow, that party last night was so fun!” kind of anecdotes. So, I’ll stop.
But Nate was the kind of present you get from someplace good, like
Tiffany & Co.
or the
SkyMall
catalog, and I felt like I could finally relax once he came along; like he was a harbinger of all good things, coming soon. I wish I could go back,
Drop Dead Fred
style, and tell Ol’ Teenage Beatnik Me that soon enough she’d burst from her emo chrysalis to attract wonderful gay guys from all walks of life. I’d introduce her to Nate and his boyfriend, and tell her that I’d one day be in the company of the most intelligent, funny, and culturally well-versed people in the world, who totally got me and loved me unconditionally. That I’d have friends like him who were actually rooting for me to find love and success and weren’t looking to undermine my efforts with their own intentions, like girlfriends can do. And if the crabby teenager version of me still wouldn’t stop pouting, I’d defer to Nate, who would tell her that at least I stopped sucking hippie cock before my twenties started. That ought to shut her up.
twin cities
W
hen I was fifteen years old, I began exchanging letters and phone calls with a seventeen-year-old boy named Tom, who lived in Eden Prairie, Minnesota. Tom was funny and charming in a way I wasn’t familiar with, and he gave me a glimpse into that distinctly Midwestern kind of polite awkwardness. Friendly with a twist of something missing; warm with a gust of cold. Tom and I connected nerdily on the Internet when it was still budding and dewy, like peach fuzz on a newborn’s hiney, during one of the loneliest times I remember being alive.
I WAS
new to high school and desperate to make friends at the time, so I joined the Women’s Issues Club, whose after-school meetings offered various activities fueled by feminist intention. For example, one afternoon we would look for sexist ads in fashion magazines and write letters in ballpoint pen on notebook paper to the calculating Neanderthals behind the offensive Love’s Baby Soft “beautiful girls wear our perfume” campaign. And other times, we would just eat chips and complain.
One girl from the club, Reem, walked with a cane and had coarse, woolly hair she wore in a ponytail that lay slack atop the enormous backpack she strapped to both shoulders. She was Lebanese and misanthropic and she liked industrial music and puns. Reem was also one of the first people I met who was interested in the Web in its early stages. She was virtuosic with Prodigy e-mail, Netscape browsers, and Usenet, a message board with newsgroups for people around the world who shared common interests, like sci-fi and avoiding parties.
Reem had met her long-distance boyfriend, Duncan, from a newsgroup devoted to the band Throbbing Gristle. Duncan, a thin, Tim Burton stop-motion puppet of a boy, was moving to New York from Michigan to attend SVA after meeting Reem IRL (in real life) and falling hard. I was intrigued by the idea of the Internet as a shopping destination for a long-distance-turned-real-life boyfriend, and, as I mentioned, desperate to make friends, because fifteen is the worst age for everybody in the world to be, unless you are Miley Cyrus.
Reem invited me to her house one day after school, and together we dicked around with her computer. She showed me postings from the Usenet groups she subscribed to, and I asked her whether there was a newsgroup for They Might Be Giants, my favorite band at the time. Nerd alert? Oh,
you bet
. In retrospect, asking whether They Might Be Giants had an early Web presence is like asking Tom Sizemore if he could introduce you to a prostitute.
Reem pulled up a screen, then scooted aside as I hungrily perused the musings of similarly affectioned geeks across the nation. Before the Internet, I was hitting the microfiche to get my geek fix, printing out obsession- relevant articles in blue-gray ink from the archives of the Public Library. But now I was being exposed to an online community that offered instant access to both information and
similarly minded fans!
Quarts of dopamine flooded the tissues of my lizard brain.
I begged Reem to print out posts from three threads of my choosing on her old-fashioned printer paper with the holes on both sides so I could take the Internet home with me and read it in bed. Kind, Lebanese, awkward, acne-plagued, Duncan-beloved Reem did just that. And at home, I pored over those posts like I was looking for a job.
I found something better. One of the guys from the newsgroup, this fellow Tom from Minnesota, had weighed in on a thread and closed his communication with a quote from a
Kids in the Hall
sketch. I got his reference all the way from Scarsdale and nearly fell out of my bed in paroxysms of camaraderie.