High School Drama

When I was a senior in high school, I had the devoted attention of a very brilliant boy. To say that I loved him is almost a tautology, because I don’t know what “I” or “love” meant to me before him. It was forged in our relationship -- he pushing me to be a truer friend, a more honest thinker, a braver adventurer.

A year ahead of me in school, he had preceded me to college and we had the idea that I would follow him there. He was an artist -- showered me with cards and sketches daily. In our little crew, he had been the guy whose house everybody crashed at, and what identity I ever had in school was based largely on being adored by that guy.

Inevitably, when it came time for me to decide on a school, I had done him so powerfully wrong that I couldn’t see being on the same campus as him. He won’t speak to me to this day.

The inevitable was a boy also brilliant, but younger and much less worldly, given to hiding under a dingy hat and scribbling furiously in his notebook. Taking up with him benefited neither of us. I gained an audience for my antics, but lost integrity. He lost the comfort of his “island” and gained only notebook fodder.

Notebooks which, I should note, we turned in weekly to our AP English teacher. That woman never looked at me the same.

One eve, when snow had cancelled the next day's classes, I trudged through the snow to the scribbler's house. His family must never have known the likes of me before. All they knew was that their son had been ripped from the bosom of his family and come back saying strange things. "Did you know, Dad, that language is a virus from outer space? Pass the peas."

I had gone with some vague notion of defending my intentions, which were not really all that defensible. "I mean to play with your son's head, if that's all right. No point, really, just idleness."

I was ejected; Scribbler, in a fury, insisted on running me to my friend M's house. The car slid on the ice and into a cement mailbox. It was just a fender-bender, really. It could have happened to anyone in the weather. But it transformed the whole affair into something much more epic. Me, ringing M's doorbell that night. "S. thinks he's James Dean. Tried to kill us both. Can I sleep here?"

I rediscovered him in our high school’s latest round of reunion frenzy. I am pleased to note that he has found happiness in family life and academia, albeit his blogs have a familiar twinge of discontent. That too is comforting. Our lives basically track along the same Bourgeois-Bohemian lines.

I had become very comfortable with the notion that these two lives I had ruined were the great unfinished business of my life. And now I feel that it’s long past time I got over myself. What little I can gleam from cyber-stalking the artist, he seems to be living a glamorous single life, which seems to suit him so well that I can’t see where our relationship would have gone. And the scribbler’s life also suits him. His angst has mellowed to a perfectly sensible melancholia; and he is accomplished, whether he will admit it or no.

And of course deep in the background of this story is the man who would become my husband, off at college, being done wrong by his own high school senior girlfriend.

As unprecedented as our little scandal must have seemed at the time, it was all already written. A cliché, really. And in the end, we all just became who we were.

Gay militants in my basement, part II

The first thing they tell parents at those college orientation things is try not to make any dramatic life changes when they first leave home. But of course that is when everybody makes their dramatic life changes, and my parents were no exception. No sooner had I stickygummed my posters, than they divorced and sold the house. They split custody of the buses, with one going to my father’s condo and one to my mother’s townhouse, which was a new build. Thus did I find myself in the awkward position of telling our busdriver I really did live here but I was not quite sure which house.

I go to check on my father and stepmother (then his girlfriend) concerned – I admit it – that they might be uncomfortable about the proposition. My first trip home – can you imagine that phone call? Yeah, college is great,… yeah, classes are hard, sure, yeah, here’s the thing…

Well, of course they were gracious, so shame on me for not giving them credit (In my defense, in the years that followed, we had quite a few discussions about matters of sexual orientation that were, to say the least, not productive. Yet, for all that, difficult to say where stepmother really stands. Cagey, that one.)

Stepmother has cooked up a storm. Dad has cornered my friend. Let’s call her Grace Jones, as she had that haircut and that righteous demeanor. He’s bought a CD player and one CD – the Star Wars soundtrack – in order best to demonstrate the surround-sound feature. When all is said and done, the only observation he will make about the whole event will be how impressive he found her. This will blow my mind. Not that she doesn’t kick *ss. She totally does. But I had to see my dad in a whole new light knowing that he got how kick *ss Grace was.

Come the day of the march, we all bus and metro into DC, in our home-made pink triangle shirts, building excitement with each new group that boards, placards and flyers in hand. Whereupon my high school bud, Turtleduck, absconds with my erstwhile boyfriend, and they spend the day museum-hopping OR WHATEVER instead of experiencing the transformative moment. There, see? It ended happy for poor Fosco. How’s that, Turtleduck?

How two busloads of gay militants got in my basement

In honor of Pride Month (which actually is celebrated in April around these parts, because June is too $%^$%&* hot), I will recount this tale of gay pride in the Reagan era. Picture, if you will, 1987. Culture Club is on MTV, "As Is" is on cable, Matthew Broderick (Ferris Bueller himself) co-stars in Harvey Fierstein's "Torch Song Trilogy." This is a long and rambling story, with something of a point, I think, if you bear with me. It's my Alice's Restaurant.

When I was in my first semester at college and I wanted very badly for everybody to love me all at once, I kept to a pattern that I had established in high school, which was this: The way into any group is to identify the most accessible boy and kiss him. While even then I would have freely admitted this was not the most progressive of social strategies, it was nonetheless indisputably effective. It’s really the same skill as picking off the weakest antelope.

It was Fosco’s misfortune that the herd I happened to be stalking was this misfit band of Illuminatus-spouting elves and wizards who dwelled in the coveted on-campus cottage we referred to simply as brown house.

I call him Fosco because “Fosco Tolkien” is the name I got just now when I put his real name in the hobbit name generator at http://www.chriswetherell.com/hobbit/. Clever thing that. Apparently, my hobbit name is Myrtle Smallburrows of Sandydowns. Stealthily, did this Sandydowns temptress come to exercise dominion over poor Fosco of brown house.

Then, to compound my fault, I not only used him for whatever I thought I would gain from the companionship of these woodland creatures, but I also made him do all of my typing. We had vax back then, and I didn’t even know how to log on and make the vax do my bidding in the first place, let alone type. Oh yes, by moonlight I did creep into brown house and shove the handwritten pages of my latest oeuvre into the face of poor Fosco, who – dutiful hobbit -- would churn them out by deadline.

But that was only the beginning of the woes that acquaintance with me would bring him.

Now my true heart’s yearning was an upperclassman who looked like Jim Morrison and dressed like James Dean, with a “Live fast; Die pretty” demeanor not at all befitting his status as my resident adviser. Chivalric was my unrequited love. That he was gay and quite militant only just made him all the more deliciously tragique, as he would allude to narrow escapes from AIDS and bashers alike.

Don’t get me wrong. It was not for him, or not for him alone, that I joined the gay student group on campus. No, I actually did share a very heartfelt kinship with its members as a fellow “invisible minority.” Plus, they were awesome – fierce and self-assured and worldly. They were Stonewall. They were ACTUP, which had only just formed. And inviting – did I mention I wanted the world to love me?

Our big project was we were going to the LGBT March on Washington – the first national march since 1979 and the first display of the AIDS quilt. I wouldn’t have missed it. Also, for me it had the added appeal of a cheap trip home. Eventually there were two busloads of us – and all of them were going to camp out in my basement. Even Fosco had been coaxed to leave the shire, thinking to charm the girlfriend’s parents.