Pretty much everyone I know pretends to be terrified of high school. When the subject comes up, they say: I wouldn’t go back there for $10 million. It’s when people blew their brains out. It’s when you felt searing shame about your sexual organs. It’s when you looked awful with that haircut and those clunky shoes. Not so for me. I have, and it’s humiliating to type this, kind of always wanted to go back to high school. I (and this is even more humiliating) miss it. High school is the last time it seemed that attaining a few concrete things (if I could just have sex with Shannon Scoggan and get into college) could make you happy. I guess part of the draw is the old If I knew then what I know now… (The end of that sentence being I’d get laid a lot more, actually learn about Alexander the Great, rectify all those old hurts and mistakes that have since caused warp and abscess in my psyche, and emerge a whole, happy, ready-for-adult-action human being.) But my deciding to return to high school for a month is not about having a do-over. That’s an impossibility. Hi, I’m Devin! A new student! I have a rare disorder that makes me a little bald, really cynical, and kind of scared of teenagers. Let’s go to the mall!
High school, once you’ve left it, becomes pretty mythical (I think it was mythical then, too, in the present tense—that’s partly why I liked it). But can you honestly say you even know what happened there? There’s a lot of fog and haze, and not much in the way of hard data. If you (I) could go back as an adult, it would be like a cosmologist wormholing back to the first milliseconds after the big bang, the time that determined a lot about who we are but about which we don’t know that much. You could understand what high school does to people.
After some negotiation, Shaker Heights High School in suburban Cleveland—whence I graduated in 1990—agrees to host me for the better part of a month. When I arrive, it’s the end of the year. Prom is a month away and graduation a week after that. It’s time for the ritualistic closing of chapters, when everyone is nostalgic for what they’re doing right this very second. And this gets at another reason I’m here. I will get to experience all of those things I already mourned the loss of. I’ll get butterflies on the bus as the lacrosse team heads out for their game. I’ll learn once more what a parabola is. I’ll meet all those high school types (misfits, invisibles, big black dudes) who scared the crap out of me. I’ll go to the senior prom at age 34 without being arrested.
And who wouldn’t want to do that?
ALL THE THINGS YOU EXPECT to happen when you go back to your high school, they really do happen. The school feels small. The smell (minty floor polish and starch-a-fry) drops old memories and sensations back into your body. On my first day, I see Mr. Quinones, the old hard-ass gym teacher, checking his mailbox, apparently not having ceased to exist. I kind of expect him to feel the same way: Holy shit, Devin Friedman! But Quinones looks right through me as he ambles out the door in his Bike shorts and makes for the gymnasium. Even though you ought to know better, you still sort of think everyone’s been charting your progress and thinking about you. They haven’t.
After school, day one, I wander out to the front lawn, which is a repository for students with nowhere to go. Two kids practice that Brazilian choreographed martial art. A girl with braids leads a shy kid of Indian extraction through the paces of a waltz. I head over and lean against the flagpole, pretending to talk on my cell phone. I have never been a new student at a school (except in college, where everyone’s new), and this must be what it’s like—you’re always alone, and everyone sees that you’re always alone, and that will perpetuate your being alone for the rest of your life.
At the flagpole, a kid named Frankie approaches. Frankie has long long long wavy hair that’s brushed out like a girl’s, shitkicker boots, smushed eyes. Without knowing my story, he tells me about his death-metal band. While we’re talking, Robbie (not his real name), a five-foot-two-inch sophomore, asks me if I’m a new teacher. I explain my situation, and then Frankie gets back to his band.
“Onstage, I sing like this,” Frankie says, and goes into a guttural Devil-as-he-feasts-on-your-morsels voice. “Kneel before me / the fire rains down—” Then he laughs. “I’ve had a gun to my head before.”
“Um, okay,” Robbie says. In his red golf shirt, with his feathery middle-part hair, Robbie looks like an entertainment lawyer who’s been through the shrinky machine.
Frankie keeps talking. Two years ago, his mother died in Queens, where he used to live. This was after Frankie had been addicted to LSD and every other drug you can think of and before he’d had a kid with his girlfriend. When his mother died, if I have the chronology right, he was working as a promoter for a professional wrestling organization. It’s pretty clear that it doesn’t matter to Frankie whether or not Robbie and I are listening. He’s compelled to tell his story again and again and again. Maybe because it relieves some kind of psychic pressure or because he’s blown a gasket and is no longer quite right. Before taking o, he asks if I’d like to go to an Al-Anon meeting with him. I decline. My gut says: The Al-Anon meeting is not what you’re back here to see. Though what, exactly, I am back here to see is not yet clear.
Students continue to collect around the school, released from duty but unwilling to leave the action. Over to our left, at the building exit now called the Skater Door, the black-T-shirt wearers are massing, pulling rail-slides, walking with their arms dangling listlessly and their heads bent, laughing heh-heh-heh at inside jokes, letting their hair fall down in front of their faces in protective cascades. Meanwhile, at the other end of the school, near the exit now apparently called the Black Door, the elements of self-identified black culture gather in large, boisterous numbers, attended to by four or five security guards in golf shirts, with biceps and tats bared, wearing earpieces. A white Crown Vic with a SHAKER decal on the door is parked askew, police-style, up on the grass, and a grizzled, white-maned security guy in drugstore wraparounds perches, arms folded, up on the hood, like David Starsky.
Robbie, following my gaze, says, “There aren’t really that many more black people than white people. It’s just that they’re bigger and louder than we are. Did they have security guards when you went here?”
This’ll come up a lot in my month here. Is it the same as it used to be? On day one, I can say: Hell if I know. The school certainly couldn’t look any less dierent. S.H.H.S. is the high school my father attended, class of ’60, and my grandfather before him, class of ’30 (my mom went here, too), and they’d all say it looks pretty much the same. It still produces metrics that look impressive in school-system literature: Dozens of kids shipped off to Ivies every year, perennial bumper crops of National Merit semifinalists, a rare vision of supposedly happy integration. But to answer Robbie’s question: No, they didn’t have security when I was here. Maybe that’s what my friends’ parents mean when I see them at the grocery store and tell them what I’m up to and they say, It’s not like it used to be. Which is probably code for: There are too many black people now.
When Frankie leaves, Robbie and I sit on a grassy berm among a group of kids he sometimes hangs out with. No one talks very much. A girl peels apart blades of grass, and a boy colors in the sole of his shoe with a Bic pen. In a few minutes, a tiny kid in baggy shorts with a dreamy look in his eye floats over.
“This is Len. He’s gay,” Robbie says when the boy sits down cross-legged, his feet way too big for his body and shod in flip-flops, which everyone here wears, even when it’s thirty degrees and raining.
Len (not his real name) looks over and says, “I’m a homosexual.” Then everyone laughs but doesn’t look at him. Now, that is something that never happened when I was here.
DAY TWO, THE CAFETERIA: two lunch lines, two dozen Formica tables. A snack-bar section’s been added since ’90, dealing in frozen desserts and soft pretzels served with big squirts of bright orange brake fluid. I spot Robbie and Len at a table as I’m exiting the food line and I make a beeline for them, relieved to have a destination instead of wandering around for ten minutes with an idiotic grin on my face.
In class, it’s been hard to suss out social status just by eyeballing a kid. Coolness might be self-evident to a student, but to me there’s no single variable to look for—certain handsome boys have been pointed out as losers; other, dorky-looking kids are apparently popular. But in the cafeteria, I can see who’s waving what flag. Some types I’ve seen before: the punks with their Sex Pistols T-shirts and bad skin; the Hacky Sack–ing throwback hippies who wear hemp and lack political referent; the thug-lites in their white Air Force 1s; the preps with their popped collars; the hyperinvolved instrument-playing union-organizing antitobacco-lobbying Darfur-protesting kids who already have their applications in to Wesleyan; the extreme misfits, who appear physically stricken, faces frozen in fearful smiles and arms wrapped around themselves like they’ve just dropped naked from the sky into northern Mongolia.
There are other groups, though, that have to be explained to me: the emo boys in their girl pants and eye makeup; the white lesbians with their studded belts and shaved heads; the black lesbians who dress like (male) thug-lites; the multihandicapped, as they are now called, who must have been shunted off somewhere in the ’80s before whatever court order mainstreamed them, now wheeled through the halls by gentle bearded male teachers; the “bike punks,” who ride bicycles to espouse discontent with the petro-industrial complex and are likely to be vegans. Not only are the gradations of groups sometimes imperceptible even to people who are in them, they’re as easily changed as (literally) a T-shirt. What’s important, it seems to me, is for a kid to have some kind of identity to protect him from feeling too personally scrutinized, to have a table he can sit at instead of wandering around with an idiotic grin on his face, trying not to drop his tray and run home screaming.
Robbie and Len are part of a subgroup I’d call Freshmen Who Are Light-Years from Ever Touching a Boob. (Though I can personally attest: There’s extra-special relativity that applies in high school, and light-years can be traversed in a single summer if you get lucky, as I did.) The Light-Years kids sometimes don’t seem to be actual friends with one another; they’re more like strangers who happen to have ended up on the same life raft. And they never talk about the social goings-on at S.H.H.S. Today, for instance, the subject is Tom Cruise’s baby weirdness.
“They kept the placenta,” the one who’s (not) named Chris says. He is small, has braces and a pair of red suspenders I bet his mom told him would make him unique. “I
think they ate the placenta.”
“Yeah,” Robbie says. He’s drinking something bottled under the Nesquick label called a Cookies ’n Milk Milkshake that will surely kill him dead. “Wait, Tom Cruise ate afterbirth?”
I’d like to talk to Len about his sexual orientation, but the topic, or any topic filed under What’s Really Going On Here, doesn’t come up. And it’s not like you can just ask him about it at lunch. Unless you can. I have no idea. But in the midst of the Baby Suri talk, Len says to me, “The one guy who’s really out is Ben. You know Ben?”
I do not.
A few minutes later, Robbie turns to me and nods toward a kid who’s sitting across the table from him. The boy in question has a wispy pre-stache and is hunched, anxiously stu∞ng cheez balls into his mouth. Robbie says: “Of all the fat kids who sit at this table, only he is annoying.” Mr. Wispy looks up from the cheez balls, wearing an expression like he’s on the other side of a one-way mirror, knows someone’s looking at him but can’t say why. I don’t understand why he doesn’t pop Robbie in the face, or at least roll his eyes or something. He just stus more puballs into his mouth.
Not five minutes later, I am exiting the cafeteria with Robbie, negotiating the second-floor hallway northbound, when a blue candy-coated projectile strikes me, with possibly malevolent force, right in the bald spot. An M&M. Without stopping, I shoot a look to see if anyone’s laughing at me. The hallway teems. A crowd gathers around either a fledgling fight or good-natured horseplay and then disperses again, turbulence in the flow. I feel liquid shame filling the vessel from my shoes on up. Whatever it is that keeps me from saying something (something like Tell me who the fuck threw that or I start killing one kid an hour until my demands are met), I can’t immediately identify.
I know that Robbie realizes I just got pegged in the head by an M&M. You can tell by looking at him. But he doesn’t say anything, and so neither do I. The silent pact of the weak. But I resent him for having been witness to this. I remember what it feels like to hate the sight of the people you hang out with (like another overweight freshman feeding himself cheez balls) because they remind you of yourself.
SOME OF WHAT they tell you on Dateline NBC and in Newsweek and all the other YOUTH CRISIS media outlets is true. I met a girl who said she had sex in sixth grade. There’s a rumor that the freshmen are big fans of the “rainbow party” (where each girl puts on a dierent-colored lipstick, and the boy with the most rings of color on his Johnson is declared the winner). The administration had to block in-school access to MySpace (easily the most important social tool in high school) because it is such a gossip accelerator. I met kids who were taking Adderall, were diagnosed “cutters,” were enrolled in anger-management courses. They’ve started locking the doors during school hours since Columbine. And in every classroom, next to the telephone, there is now a crisis guidebook with easy thumb tabs, for, among others: Death, Disruptive behavior, Student unrest, Hostage situation, Intruder, Shooting, Suicidal statements or actions, Suspicious parcel.
The point of all those YOUTH CRISIS stories is that teenagers aren’t teenagers anymore, like they used to be, back when we walked to school and went to sock hops; they are illiterate sex-crazed meth addicts who are overscheduled and have too much money and free Anytime Minutes—except when they’re poor and on the other side of the tech divide. And that’s basically bullshit, with some exceptions. Just about everyone I met had been exposed to pot and liquor but not much else, had lost (or planned on losing) his virginity around the same time we did back in ’90. Everyone could read, most paid attention, some were brilliant, lots didn’t have e-mail or a computer. The whole time I’m here, I almost never open the door to an unused classroom and find kids snorting Concerta, playing Grand Theft Auto, or building pipe bombs. But who can blame us adults for being freaked out? It’s hard to know what to do with all the information we have stored about the dangers of youth. So we get (hyper) vigilant. It’s like how, when one kid suocates on dry-cleaning plastic, thereafter every single piece of dry-cleaning plastic has to proclaim its lethality. We feel the need to protect our children by informing them of every possible horrible eventuality. And then we wonder why they need medication.
By week two, the kids in my classes know who I am, stop staring at me, and forget I’m even here—the fate of all adults, who don’t really count because they’re not in the bubble (more on that later). I take notes on what seems important. Today, May 6, I relearn what the Atlantic Charter is, am reminded of the dierence between deciduous and coniferous. In English class, there is a mysterious circle on the board that says CIRCLE OF TRUST over it and a single dot outside of it labeled KEVIN. In honors chemistry, I record an exchange:
MR. GAINFORD (THE TEACHER): So now we’ll see how to determine if a precipitate will be formed.
LUKE (A STUDENT): Gainford, Gainford. I have a question. A scientific question.
GAINFORD: Just write. Write. Precipitation determination.
LUKE: Does chocolate really kill rabbits?
GAINFORD: Experiment. Tell me what you find out.
LUKE: Because that’s what killed my friend’s rabbit, maybe.
At lunch that week, I exit the food line and decide I can’t bear being at the Light-Years from Heavy Petting table ever again. With them sitting there wadding salami sandwiches while the main undiscussed topic of their high school lives (we are unhappy but have no idea how to change our circumstances) suuses the air around them like a cloud of nerve gas. So I turn right and head away into uncharted territory. There are two cafeteria lines, and one of them is called the Black Line (this is really how people talk; as an adult, you learn to never say these things). At the half-dozen tables near that line, they have rap battles. And that’s where I will sit from now on.
The way it works, if you haven’t seen a rap battle—if you don’t have them at the Soup ’n’ Sam where you eat your low-fat corn chowder during lunch hour—is that one kid challenges another kid to a rap. The first kid freestyles a little, usually about what a dipshit the other kid is, how awesome he himself is. The second kid returns in kind, and one or the other is proclaimed the winner. Today, one kid is encouraging the one he’s battling against: “Come on, man, just say anything! It doesn’t matter how stupid it is; you just have to flow!”
Then it’s Ralf’s turn. Ralf is a tall senior with cornrows, giant white T-shirt, and 59Fifty hat (what pretty much everyone he hangs out with wears), who is louder than everyone else, meaner, and has an ego that is more easily bruised. He’s up against this kid who has a lazy eye that’s kind of distracting (take note of this, to understand the lines below). Ralf’s rap ends like this:
Can’t tell where you’re lookin’ / You’re spittin’ lies / Your eyes go both ways / You got bisexual eyes.
Every kid at the tables gets up out of their chairs at this and either yells “Oh shit!” or pretends to walk away, like they might as well just go home. The white kids down at the other end of the cafeteria look over with serious faces, unable to discern at this distance the nature of the ruckus. Dangerous or not?
I notice Miguel watching from the doorway, shaking his head. Miguel is in my oppression class. He’s stocky, mild-mannered in class, an emotional terrorist outside of class. He likes to walk up to groups of preppy white girls in the hallway and say: “Hi Katie, hi Katie, hi Katie! What time’s The OC on?” When he sees Sulaiman, an Indian kid, he likes to say, “What’s up, Akbar?” He’s a really talented artist. He also DJ’s in the cafeteria for the radio club, and everyone agrees makes the best beats in high school (beats are the music you build a rap song around). But he’ll tell you, if you give him half a chance: I’m on the outside.
I leave the rap battle, follow Miguel to an empty corridor where he sits at lunch because he likes the solitude.
“I don’t want this to sound weird,” he says, “but I just find most of the kids who go here pretty childish. And that rap they’re doing is amateur shit.”
* * *
TO PROVE HIS point, he invites me to watch him record that night in his home studio.
His mother and father rent an apartment in the part of inner-city Cleveland where we used to lock our car doors when we drove through. When I arrive that night, his dad is sitting in a pool of green light spilling from his computer, peering intently into it. I hear the sound of his mother coughing, and coughing and coughing, from another room. Miguel says he never leaves the apartment until he goes to school in the morning—if you look outside at night, the only people you see are drug dealers.
Miguel’s dad has built a recording studio into a loft space in the apartment: a new iMac, drum machine, turntables, synthesizer, a tiny recording booth with acoustic foam walls and a Plexiglas window, thousands of records acquired by buying out entire garage sales and vintage shops. Miguel’s father is a high school dropout, an autodidact, fiercely intelligent, an eager consumer of all information, who will even read Miguel’s textbooks if he finds them lying on the kitchen table. He works fulfilling shipping manifests for a screw-and-washer company in the exurbs. The studio represents his biggest investment.
“I don’t get to think at work,” he says. “I only start thinking when I get home. I did the studio because I don’t want the same thing to happen to Miguel.”
Tonight Miguel’s working on a beat he made by stripping a section from the Randy Newman song “Short People.” He’s proud of it when he plays it—a loop of that goofy ’70s piano hook overlaid with, I guess you’d call them, beats.
“I’m not going to college, I decided that. So I got to eat off this music shit,” he says. “In high school, people are inside the bubble. White kids are concerned with being popular and what people think about them—their polo shirts, Starbucks coffee, foreign cars, popped collars, Birkenstocks. Most of the black people are just basically like the white people. They’re inside the bubble, too. That’s life for them. Period. It’s not that way for me.”
It would make sense that Miguel would see himself outside the closed sociopsychological experiment of S.H.H.S. Miguel hasn’t been sealed off from the world the way we think kids are supposed to be. “I went to kindergarten in Hawaii, and then my family moved to Shaker,” he tells me. “After first grade, we moved to Solon. Then I lived in Atlanta for, like, eight years. In Decatur. No, it wasn’t Decatur. Man, I lived everywhere. My parents didn’t have a lot of money. So we were staying in, like, low-end houses. In Atlanta public schools, it was like they didn’t require you to do any work, like, none at all. So when I went to Catholic school, I didn’t understand what was going on. I failed sixth grade. I guess that was okay. Then, after that, my mom got one of those traveling jobs. And my dad, he joined the circus, sold cotton candy. It was kind of weird. So he sent me to my grandmother’s house in Shaker. And I lived with her and my two cousins for, like, a couple months. I was 12, 13, and I missed my parents a lot. Eventually, my dad came back. Then my mom came back, and it was all of us. Then we moved to East Cleveland, with my great-grandparents and Uncle Crook. That’s what we called him. He was living with my great-grandparents and stealing their checks. My great-grandmother had Alzheimer’s, and my great-grandfather was blind. Man, my dad would have to use, like, a whole bottle of bleach every day to try to clean that place up. My great-grandfather had those—what do you call those little portable toilet things? And he couldn’t see, so he would just crap everywhere. And my great-grandmother would take her diaper off, smear crap everywhere. We weren’t paying any rent, so we were able to save a lot of money and buy a lot of the equipment for the studio that I needed. That we needed. I knew that’s what we had to do, so we did it. And then we moved to this place about a year ago.”
I’d always assumed that the defining principle of high school is: lack of perspective. Shaker Heights is supposed to be the knowable universe, and everything else an extension of it. I’m not sure I could have survived high school if I had had any sense of perspective.
* * *
I, AS MIGUEL would say, was in the bubble. I was so in the bubble I didn’t even know there was a bubble. There is an incident I remember, when I went to a party at Nicky Murray’s house. It was basically the first party I ever went to in high school. I remember worrying about what I should wear, and I remember putting mousse in my hair. Don’t fuck with me on this; it was 1987, and you were putting mousse in your hair, too, or you should have been. I wasn’t actually invited to the party. I was brought by my friend Mike Dawson, who was cooler than me and for some reason shouldered the social liability of being my entrée into worlds I did not know but was desperate, like freaky desperate, to gain entry to.
Everyone brought a six-pack of Busch Light to the party, and even though I didn’t have any beer, I kept looping back to look in the crisper or whatever to pretend to look for beer. I was on one of my phantom beer runs when I felt an arm around my shoulder. It was the arm of one Major Harrison. That’s his real name. Major: forty-five feet tall, ripped, living over in the black section of town in a house he never let anyone see the inside of. He cocked his head and looked at me.
“Your name’s Devin, right?”
I didn’t say anything. Maybe I blinked.
“Why are you here?” he said. “No one likes you.”
I haven’t cried, like cried cried, in about ten or fifteen years, and I can’t even imagine what it must feel like to be overwhelmed by the impulse to weep. But I know it started out powerfully as I lay there under Nicky’s family dining table, and I know it just escalated from there. I was crying because what Major Harrison said—why are you here? no one likes you—had been playing in a loop inside my head since I was old enough to form thoughts. But I was also crying because I’d started crying right in the middle of a party. Because how would I ever live that down? I was crying because I was crying because I was crying.
“Dude, do you want a glass of water?” Mike’s voice said.
Wail.
“Dude,” he said, “are you gay?”
Wail!
“It’s okay. It’s totally okay if you’re gay.”
I got up and opened the front door and took off down the street, figuring in split-second hindsight that this must definitely be what you’d do if you were hiding your gayness. The secret truth that I am pretty much a priori a loser is something I carried around with me wherever I went for the rest of my tenure as a student, the way the president carries around the “football,” if in fact they haven’t updated that technology. Only more than a briefcase with launch codes, it felt like I was carrying around my actual self: a two-foot-tall hair-covered frog-faced weeping me who lived inside my chest and pulled all the levers. I fed him furtively and tried to comfort him when he cried but wished he would die so I could bury him in the backyard. This is the person who accidentally showed himself at Nicky’s party. When I got “popular” later, I figured that everyone had somehow been hypnotized into forgetting that what Major Harrison said that night was essentially true, and apparent at a glance. And fuck if I was going to somehow remind them.
That’s what life in the bubble is like. And the bubble (believing S.H.H.S. and its inhabitants make up the entire universe) may be the major cause of both pleasure and pain in high school. On one hand, it makes every tiny good thing that happens—every party, every note passed, every glance, every touchdown—feel important and thrilling. On the other hand, Columbine doesn’t happen without it. Things in adult life don’t matter like they did in high school, for better or worse. And when I say I miss high school, that’s what I’m talking about.
* * *
THE LAST WEEK I’m at S.H.H.S., I’m talking to Ben, the “out” kid, after oppression class, where we were learning about control fallacies. I tell him how, a week ago, I went to an all-black party at a motel where nobody drank and everyone danced. I also tell him about the wrap party for the theater program’s spring show, where people mostly hugged and spoke like they were still onstage. But, I say, I still haven’t gone to any parties like the ones I remember from yesteryear. He texts me later to tell me people are going to Jackson’s tonight.
Jackson is a senior, affliated with the preppy-stoner faction of the popular white kids. When I show up at his house, all is dim and quiet. His mom is crashed out in her quarters in some dark territory of the house, which has its own ballroom, but which is also in a state of decline. Piles of clothes by a hall table. Chip bags cluttered around the well-used small appliances in the kitchen. My guess is that refurbishment, and resumption of normal adult life, awaits once young Jackson packs off to the University of Rochester in the fall.
The whole party is crammed into Jackson’s room, which is really a suite. In the front room, there’s a TV the size of a small refrigerated truck, showing the NBA playoffs. A stereo sits on the ratty carpet. Behind a tie-dyed sheet, in the little room where Jackson sleeps, twenty or thirty kids are piled on the bed and floor, engaged in a snuggle party, a mass PG-rated grope. I don’t go in there. Out in a corner of the main room, two people lie intertwined on a daybed, gazing into eyes, speaking in an unintelligible hum right into each other’s mouths. The whities here like to talk to each other in adopted black-speak, just like we used to do, only it’s now a generation removed and demands some translation. Mary (fake name), wearing a fleece and a woven indigenous-to-somewhere purse, says, “I’m funna [going to] chief [get high].” Larry (fake name), in response, says, “Let’s chief, then. You ready to bounce [go]?” The two of them go out to Larry’s car to smoke weed.
The boys and girls at Jackson’s don’t talk to each other all that much, and the junior girls and senior girls hate each other. But when Ben arrives, he crosses all boundaries. Ben’s a handsome, slightly chubby kid who prefers polo shirts with popped collars and jeans rolled up to the calf. He’s a singer and tap dancer and wants, deep down, to be an actor. He’s also the one capital-G gay kid at school, the outest of the out, the president of the Gay-Straight Alliance, and as such is a subgroup of one, able to mix with boys, girls, girl-boys, whatever.
We sit on the floor, and he tells me about coming out. It was fifth grade, after his Spice Girls obsession, after he made his own platform shoes. His family had driven out to Toledo for his grandmother’s funeral. It had been a long day, six hours back and forth in the Highlander doing fifty-five over the terminal moraine west of Cleveland. He turned to his mother and said, “I’m gay.” She looked at him and said, “I know.” Then she started crying. He doesn’t really know why—she wasn’t upset, or even surprised. He hugged her around the waist for a while, and then they went to a barbecue. He came out to his friends later, in seventh grade.
“Why’d you do it right then, with your mom?” I say.
He looks at me funny. “Um, it just kind of happened.”
He’s still at the age when your own actions can be a mystery, and a mystery you’re not even that interested in.
The strange thing is that coming out made his life easier. Fifth and sixth grade were the worst years of his life. Between just about every class, someone would call him a faggot or a pussy. Boys would come up to him in the hall and punch him—other kids would only steal a micro-glance, like even watching might be reason enough for them to get punched, too. He couldn’t eat lunch or pay attention in math because he was consumed with the dread of entering the gym-class locker room. Males, in general, were the worst—and more specifically the preppy males. If only there could be a world of all girls, he thought, I might be happy. There were moments when he thought about killing himself. A psychologist diagnosed him with depression freshman year. And then, one day on the way to lunch, for reasons unknown, he tells his friend Meredith that he’s gay, and, like, overnight… No one screams faggot when he turns the corner into a hallway. He gets invited to parties. He can sit in math class with his pink calculator and his quilted, flowered pen bag without danger of upsetting the social equilibrium. I guess it’s not homosexuality that’s upsetting to teenage boys. It’s something else. Maybe the not knowing. It makes people angry to watch someone try, and fail, to fit in. You can run into problems when you don’t have a knowable, categorizable identity. You know how at the end of The Breakfast Club, when Anthony Michael Hall says in the letter: You see us as you want to see us, as the nerd, the jock, etc.? That shit was trenchant. Except that those identities weren’t, like, foisted upon us by the unit principal; we clung to them so as not to disappear.
* * *
IN THE THREE weeks I was here, I took honors chemistry and AP calculus; I sat for weeks in sophomore French and a class called World Experience, where I watched a kid stand silent shaking his head for ten straight minutes during his oral exam, unable to speak and unable to sit down. I went to band practice and watched a kid play a brassy horn in a T-shirt that said BAND CAMP BLOWS! and watched a teacher bang on the piano while a choirboy with a red Afro sang a rollicking show tune in the voice of a beautiful girl. I watched a movie on Harvey Milk, student-council campaign videos, part of Schindler’s List, and slides from a school trip to Paris where one boy wore a red beret the whole time (that’s gonna be fun for him to look at in ten years). I attended an assembly about race and tolerance, where every student who knew someone who’d been murdered stood up and was gazed upon by the rest of us in a hush that sucked the air out of our lungs. I watched a pitcher miss a crucial pitch and come unraveled, looking lonely and desperate to be rescued from the mound; and I watched a girl mash a choke homer to win a softball game and get carried off the field with a look on her face like her head was going to explode into a beam of joyous light. And wherever I went, I had the feeling I should be somewhere else.
There were moments when I felt like I was stumbling on the thing I was looking for, the reason I was here. It would happen as I turned the corner in the science hall or pulled up to school in the morning or walked into a party. I’d get a tingly feeling you might call hopefulness. What it was I was hoping for, I didn’t think to ask. One afternoon I was sitting on the steps in the sunlight outside the Skater Door, cutting chemistry (I cut class a lot, because otherwise I was going to do something terrible to someone). I watched a kid about my height, with brown hair, walk off down the block and climb into his friend’s car. As he drove past, and I tried to see his face, I had that hopeful, anticipatory feeling in spades. And it occurred to me that I wanted to see if this kid who looked kind of like me circa 1989 actually was me.
Everyone (maybe, maybe) has a default identity. A version of himself suspended in amber, or at least some glossy eight-by-tens, that he thinks of as his true self. For some, it’s their college self. For others, it’s when they were training for that triathlon. Or post–law school, when you worked for the Sierra Club, before you took the job as general counsel for ExxonMobil. For me, it’s high school. Specifically, age 17 to 18, post-braces, post–growth spurt, pre–back hair, when (at least as I imagine it) my heart and mind were pure. Before all the inevitable disappointment and un-brave decisions started to accrue. And at S.H.H.S., I have been like some crazy bereaved person, walking around looking for a dead relative I simply could not bear the death of. I came back here (can this be true?) hoping to follow myself around, listen to my answers in European history, watch myself flirt with Jennifer Hughes. Maybe to remind myself who I really am, because it’s pretty easy to forget sometimes.
* * *
MY LAST WEEK at S.H.H.S., I go to a party with a bunch of seniors, inconspicuously (or so I think) hanging out with Mancow and talking about how he lost fifty pounds since he started taking Adderall, along with another drug for his “rage issues.” A bonfire is burning in the backyard, and gathered around it are seniors in lawn chairs, with their hoodies up and their legs tucked under them, smoking Black & Milds. Just as (not) Stacey is like, “Aw shit, I take the exact same Adderall dosage as you!” across the fire, a girl points her finger at me and says: “Am I the only one who sees that weird older man at our party?”
Believe me, I’d been thinking the same thing: Am I the only one who notices the weird old dude at their party? Feeling that way all the time made it hard to fit in. But even when they completely forgot I was there, it didn’t get any better. Half the time I couldn’t understand what anyone was talking about. Sometimes kids would start laughing without, it seemed to me, provocation. I would get a weird, spectral, lonely feeling in class sometimes, like I was seeing these people through the wrong end of a telescope. And whenever I actually stared a kid in the eye (not easy to do with the 14-to-18 age group) during history or at lacrosse practice, I got the heebie-jeebies. They were like people I’ve seen who are on acid; their eyes betray a quickness, a drugged enthusiasm, that means they’re not seeing the same things as I am. Maybe that’s why we perpetually believe teenagers to be in YOUTH CRISIS: We can’t understand them, and that scares us. It’s not just that the door is closed. It’s that once you get spit out into adulthood, the doorway disappears. Never to be found again.
* * *
MY LAST ACT as a temporary student was attending senior prom. At the beginning of my time here, after a lacrosse game, I started talking to these two seniors: David and Je, who introduced to me their friend Alex, the Senior Quarterback Who’s Going to Harvard Next Year. In the intervening three weeks, we hung out some. We played beer pong down in Je’s basement one night while these private-school girls drank flavored vodka. Alex told me it was cool if I wanted to go to prom with them (which I accepted, happily) and even said they could find me a date (which I declined, though that would have been funny, right? Or just creepy?).
Prom itself is held May 13, at the Crawford car museum, just like in ’90. After dancing among the Model Ts and gullwing Mercedes, we all head back to (not) Erica’s house for pre-after-prom partying, which will be followed by after-prom (held at the Jewish Community Center a town over), then by after-after-prom partying, and finally the next-day brunch.
Erica’s house is one of the tasteful mansions sitting dark and recessed on Courtland, and the basement’s been refurbished in a top-shelf way: sprawling sectional, pool table, high-output home-theater system with massive wall-mounted plasma screen. Dad comes downstairs in shirtsleeves to drop off a bowl of wedged limes for the Coronas, which are a welcome break from their normally steady diet of Natty Lite. Then Alex’s date, a sophomore (not) named Sarah—leggy and blue-eyed with a low inhibition quotient—comes down. Yesterday, in French III, one of the girls told me her dress was “totally slutty.” I read in an article about how slut has lost its meaning, and how girls say “What’s up, slut?” to each other now. I can say it means pretty much the same thing vis-à-vis this girl’s dress. Bubbalicious pink, the décolletage plunging to the navel (there was talk yesterday of double-sided tape), the hemline barely sub-vagina. Down in the basement of Erica’s house, Alex looks almost intimidated by the onslaught of flesh. He might be dominant on the football field, but he doesn’t seem socially alpha male. He comes from classic Shaker stock—good old-fashioned you-go-to-church-but-you-don’t-talk-about-it Protestants. He sits there on the beanbag chair, singing along to a rap that goes For titties, y’all better hand me somethin’—and it kind of embarrasses you to hear him using that language.
After Sarah descends the stairs, three other girls follow in black nightie-dresses. The boys watch their entrance. Not even shots of Patrón can inspire them to do more than sit mesmerized by the exposed legs and wobbly ankles in high heels and globe-like breasts (one set in particular has got to be courtesy of a surgeon) of the girls standing in a circle and singing into their Coronas. One of the girls spanks another on the ass; two of them do a stagey kiss like the one Madonna gave Britney. And where I fit into the picture: I should not even be in this room. And not just because after this song Erica falls over backward on the couch, exposing the front panel of her underpants. I could never again be excited about hanging out in a basement before I went to the JCC. Sitting on the sectional drinking a Corona, I feel like a vampire who still moves among the living but to whom food no longer tastes like much.
The JCC, for after-prom, has been papered over with fake palm fronds and streamers. The games of chance, the prize rooms, the dance floor, are presided over by parents; shy men with white hair and comfortable shoes and women waddling on swollen ankles; everyone putting on their best gregarious pit-boss act yet visibly uncomfortable in a world populated by people saying things that don’t make sense. (Welcome to high school, I think, look out for the M&M’s.) Alex puts on a pair of safety goggles and steps into a Plexiglas room where he has a minute to snatch as much Monopoly money out of the air as he can.
Then “Shoulder Lean” comes up on the speakers. The anthem of 2006. Alex heads out to the dance floor, where everyone’s gathering. All the groups and subgroups. Ben, who’d been brought by his friend, the softball player. Alex’s friends from the football team, whom he’ll grow distant from before too long. Alex’s best friend, Jeff, is a few feet away, behind his date, who’s bent at a forty-five-degree angle, grinding into him. Alex’s girlfriend, Sarah, yells soundlessly into the noise. Then everyone’s yelling, “’06! ’06! ’06!” All of them doing the jump-at-the-same-time dance. I remember that feeling, that it mattered that I was the class of ’90 instead of, like, ’91 or ’92, that we were bound together in some weird cosmic way. Are you going to tell them it’s all bullshit? Are you going to tell Alex that he’ll never be a more important figure than he is right now? That the feeling they have that they’re all going to see each other again is bogus? That this is simply a collection of adolescents listening to rap music in a community center near the highway, a little flinty light discharging for a millisecond in the darkness on the outskirts of an unimportant midwestern city? It’s not like they’d believe you anyway. I, for one, am not opening my mouth, watching them do their jumping dance, everyone screaming together: ’06! ’06! ’06! ’06! ’06!
