Who I Was Before I Met Myself, pt. 1
written 6 Aug 2007 over a light lunch
A scruffy young boy with no idea as to whether a perm was as cool as the older kids seemed to think sat in a chair as his mother and cousin, a beauty school student, held various bottled of cleanser, dye and permanent solution in their hands. It was only supposed to be a crimp, you know – wavy up the tail end of mullet a little, like the kids who thought they were cool because they thought that Wayne and Garth were cool were doing. I sat still, wondering what was going on up there; confident in my mother. When it came time to look in the mirror, utter.fucking.horror. They had permed my entire head.
Everyone called me Jellohead for the next couple of years, presumably a crack at me looking like Bill Cosby…
“…and you can call me the Blue Devil of Love.” The words rolled off of his tongue as he smiled, smirking, reading the love note from my cousin’s desk which had been written to a girl that I also had a crush on. The reader was my friend. My cousin was my oldest friend. The fact that my cousin was writing love notes to the girl I liked had me furious. The fact that my friend was making fun of my cousin made me furious. Back then, Junior High, everything seemed to make me furious. Having no idea what recourse to take, who to be angry with, what do to with the bulging, thumping veins going blue in my forehead, I stormed out of the room and went into the bathroom down the hall to cool off. But there he was, Tony Lamoosa. He was the ultradork, everything about the word nerd oozed from his suspenders, the Christian rhetoric his father had taught him dripped from his waxy ears and his shiny, greased down hairdo flashed. I didn’t like him, probably because he was a dork and I used to be a dork and so it seemed like the tradition should have continued. But also, he was just an ass.
I fought him, in the way that 6th and 7th graders fight eachother, mostly pushing and punches that barely leave a bruise. I felt better and never really spoke to my cousin, my friend or that girl about any of it.
We were laughing as we passed the note back and forth. The teacher made us sit at the front of the classroom, though for some reason still sat us right next to each other. I suppose she realized her lack of control over the entire class, how she really had no power over us and we knew it. I felt bad about that, but I was still a kid and school was still boring enough to make me want it to be interesting. So we passed the note back and forth, each time adding a little to it. It was made out to my girlfriend, at the time. She was just a young little elementary school girl, a 5th or 6th grader, probably, and I was a year or two older. I liked her. I passed it back to him, he read what I’d written and laughed. Repeat. It wasn’t a nice note; not very nice at all. In fact, it was downright fucked up. Other than, well, that we were little kids in a private school so are use of derogatory language was minimal at best. Mostly stuff like “I’ll put your head on a pigpole” and various other phrases which we had no idea what they meant, having only seen them in cheesy 80′s movies which were probably not made for little kids like us anyway. The teacher finally yells out, trying to get us to keep quiet. I ask to go to the restroom. I get to the lockers, her locker. I look up and down the hall, reaching into my pocket for the note, panicking – “This is wrong,” I think. I swing the locker door open and slide it in.
I had a meeting with her mother, the principal, my mother, and her, later that day after school. I have never, up until that point and since, been more embarrassed and ashamed of anything I’d ever done.
All quiet on the frontier...
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