Missing the Big Picture (3 page)

As the summer of 1995 drew to a close, Eric’s father and his siblings rented out a camp at a local lake near the beach. Labor Day weekend was a big gathering for Eric’s extended family, and I was happy to find out I was invited. Upon arriving, Eric and I went to the beach, where Eric told me that he had just masturbated for the first time the day before. I didn’t reach puberty until tenth grade, so I would often lie and say I was masturbating, but I really wasn’t. It was the only topic Eric would talk about that weekend.

The next morning I fell into the bathtub really hard, and the sound echoed through the house. A couple of Eric’s aunts rushed into the bathroom because they were worried that I might have passed out. Luckily, I survived with minor injuries. One night the whole family had clams for supper. I accidently started chewing on a shell. One of Eric’s aunts ordered me to spit it out, and in front of at least fifteen people, I gagged it up. The last night the family was there, Eric’s two uncles were drunk and got into a fight. A couple of Eric’s cousins got up out of bed to try to stop the fight and I tried to do the same, but Eric yelled from his bed, “Luke, sit down! You’re not going to do shit.”

It was still a fun weekend.

The following week I entered the seventh grade. I spent most of my afternoons with Eric and Gary. Gary loved to throw huge Super Bowl parties. In 1996, the Dallas Cowboys would win, but I wouldn’t know this until later because Eric and Gary decided to put me in a cardboard box, big enough for a Christmas tree, and throw me into the closet during the final two minutes of the game.

A typical Saturday night for my friends and me would be going out for pizza, then staying overnight at Gary’s house watching episodes of
Red Shoe Diaries
, a soft-core porn series, until the wee hours of the morning. One sleepover, Eric and I had to share the same bed. Gary always had to fall asleep listening to music, which irritated Eric immensely. About three o’clock in the morning, after everyone had fallen asleep, I awoke to Eric putting on his shoes. I asked where he was going, and Eric replied that he was going home because the radio was too loud. After Eric left, I was still awake, so I just decided to turn off the radio. I could never understand why Eric just didn’t turn off the radio while Gary was asleep.

My house was another place where we would spend the night. At one party, Eric and everybody else started throwing Jenga pieces at one another. Even though Eric had a morning paper route, he would stay overnight and my mother would wake up early Saturday mornings and help him deliver the papers. Eric was always ungrateful, though, and never acknowledged my mother’s help, which made me extremely mad at Eric. I never said anything to him, though.

Seventh grade was also the year I decided to join the cross-country running team at school. I have no idea why I did this, as I wasn’t athletic at all. I was consistent in most of my races—out of one hundred boys or so, I almost always came in last. Eric was on the team for a short period of time but then faked spraining his ankle so he didn’t have to compete. I remember one race in which I was battling for last place with this wheezing, overweight boy. I decided to cut across a playground. The overweight boy started yelling, “He cut! He’s a cheater!” Nobody could hear us. The next track meet he came up to me and said, “You better not cut here.”

Later that season, I got to go down to Manhattan College and compete. Once again, I came in last place. As I was running down the hill, I fell and scraped my knees and elbows. Then I was surprised to hear a rush of noise behind me, thinking,
I didn’t notice anybody after me.
The girls’ race had started fifteen minutes after ours, and I was being ambushed by a bunch of female track athletes. I made it across the finish line, bleeding.

The highlight of seventh grade was my thirteenth birthday party. My mother told me that since I was a teenager now, I should invite some girls. Her only fear was that we would play a kissing game like Spin the Bottle or Seven Minutes in Heaven, and she would have to break it up. Her fear didn’t come true, though, since we had a massive food fight instead of a make-out contest. Gary threw a mini-bagel dog at one of the girls, and it ended up in her overalls. “Well, at least now you have something there!” Gary screamed at her. Seventh-grade boys could be so cruel.

Other highlights of the night included orange soda spilling all over the carpet; my cousin ripping Eric’s jeans so that Eric had two huge holes in them by the time he left; kids breaking two pool sticks; and somebody anonymously picking his nose and leaving it on the cellar door to dry. I yelled at everybody, “Nobody is leaving this party until I found out who put his booger on my door!” Nobody ever admitted to it, but it was rumored that Greg, another friend of Eric and Gary’s, was the culprit. I had met Greg a year earlier. He was very small and energetic, and was known for his intelligence and the rattail he wore down his neck. In twelfth grade, only weeks before we were supposed to graduate, I got up the courage to ask Greg if he actually did pick his nose and put it on my door. Once again, even five years later, Greg said, “It was dry already.”

In 1996 I entered eighth grade, my last year at Sand Creek Middle School. Eighth grade would be a fun year for me, but it was filled with many conflicts. On most afternoons, my friends and I would make a routine stop at The West Albany News Center convenience store. I often had leftover lunch money and would use it to buy a Nutrageous candy bar and a Dr. Pepper. Eric would always say to me, “Geez, Luke, I never knew anybody who liked nuts as much as you do.” Eric and I started hanging out with a new kid, Dan, more often. I had known Dan since third grade. Even though Dan and Eric would spend a lot of time together, Eric had some reservations about Dan. About a year earlier, Dan and Eric got into a fight after school and Dan beat him up. Dan apologized to Eric, but Eric never really forgave him. Eric would ridicule Dan for buying a Nirvana T-shirt without ever really listening to the band’s music and for smoking cigarettes but never fully inhaling.

One reason Eric and I started to have problems in eighth grade was that Eric started smoking marijuana frequently. Eric and some of his other friends decided to attend the Halloween dance stoned. I declined their invite to smoke because I was involved in the dance’s haunted house. The haunted house took place in the school’s courtyard, and it was my duty to lie under a picnic table and trip the visitors with a rake while they walked past. When the first group of students walked past me, I was too far away from them and missed their feet, so I ran up to them and started yelling. One student grabbed the rake from me and broke it in half. That was the end of the haunted house for me.

Even when Eric and his friends were smoking up outside of school, I didn’t get involved. I was afraid to experiment with drugs because my mother threatened bodily harm if she ever found out that I had. My mother would often say, “There’s one easy way to throw your life down the toilet: smoking pot. You better never come home stoned.” I kept this promise to her, but with friends like Eric it was especially hard. The first time Eric smoked weed, which was about a week after he turned thirteen, it soon became the only thing he would talk about. I could never understand the big deal. The first time Eric got high he went to Stewart’s, a convenience store, made himself a sundae, and then threw some sprinkles over his shoulder. Even though Eric found the story hilarious, I was tired of him telling me, “Oh, you just have to try it.” Soon Eric began smoking marijuana almost every weekend, and during the week he would talk about how he was going to get high the following weekend.

Eric and I had our quarrels, but Eric and Gary started to lose contact in eighth grade. Gary and Eric had known each other since the third grade, and Eric was simply tired of hanging around him. About midway through seventh grade, Gary started to hang out with other friends. Eric and I were spending endless amounts of time together, and Eric’s new friends began to exclude Gary. Eric didn’t like hanging out with Gary anymore because he claimed that Gary was too fat, even though he had been friends with him for about five years. One time when I was hanging out with Eric and his new friends, Eric remarked, “Oh, good thing Gary isn’t here. Could he even fit into one of these seats?” Eric was becoming very mean.

One time Eric tried to convince me that all girls loved to shave themselves. I almost fell for Eric’s lie, since all we would look at was
Playboy
, and anybody who has read
Playboy
and never seen a woman’s vagina in person might come to that conclusion. Another time, when Eric and I were talking to a group of girls, one of the girls announced that her friend hadn’t yet had her period. Eric then told those girls, “Well, Luke hasn’t gotten his period yet either.” Another time our friend Al put gum in my hair as a practical joke. I couldn’t get it out and had to go to a nearby hair salon to have it removed.

Since I was upset at Eric and his other friends for teasing me, Dan and I became close that year. Dan also liked to play practical jokes, but not on me. Dan and I used to go to the shopping mall and buy fart candy and stink bombs. One time Dan set off a stink bomb in study hall. He would give the fart candy to his friends but he was careless once and left some fart candy on his kitchen table. Dan’s grandmother thought it was her pill and swallowed it. It was a practical joke gone totally wrong. Most sixty-year-old women have enough gas without the aid of fart candy, and a pill that makes people fart is the last possible thing Dan’s grandmother needed.

Dan and I also liked to prank people. Playing pranks was one of my favorite pastimes, and somehow my friends and I were clever enough to outsmart *69 and caller ID. Dan would usually pretend that he was this boy named Dwight, whom Dan hated, and would tell everybody that he was having a party at his house over the weekend. Some people weren’t fooled and knew it was Dan, while others fell for it and came up with excuses as to why they couldn’t attend. They must not have liked Dwight either.

Another practical joke Eric played on me happened the day after I appeared in the school play
Guys and Dolls
. The play director required that everybody in the production, whether male or female, had to wear makeup. I would never tell any of my friends that I had to wear makeup, but Eric, Gary, and Dan found out only because they were friends with the play’s makeup artist. The day after the play, I ran into Eric as he was walking to school. Eric approached me very quietly and stared at me for a few seconds. “Are you wearing makeup?” he finally asked. I didn’t even have time to answer because I immediately ran home to wash my face. It turned out that I had already washed off all of the makeup, and Eric was just teasing me. As soon as I left, Eric started laughing hysterically.

Besides teasing me for wearing makeup, my weight was another area that Eric loved to harass me about. I wasn’t much overweight, but I wasn’t that thin, either. My biggest area of fat was in my chest, which I referred to as my “chubby pecs.” Eric once said to me, “Oh, so how many rolls do you have again?” I decided to lose weight by exercising a lot and occasionally lifting weights; sometimes I chose not to eat, which was my favorite way to slim down. I lost fifteen pounds when I was fourteen, which upset my mother. Fourteen-year-old boys are supposed to be gaining weight and building muscle instead of starving themselves. My mother and I kept my weight loss a secret, since my mother thought that only girls had weight issues. I quickly found out that almost everybody, boys and girls alike, has body image problems.

Later that spring, Dan had a small gathering at his house and Eric and some of his other friends were in attendance. Eric and his new friends didn’t like Dan that much; they mostly used him for free cigarettes. They also liked playing tricks on me. They thought it would be hysterical if they pinned me down when I wasn’t looking and sprayed me with Dan’s mother’s perfume. I wanted to go home immediately and wipe it off, but the boys made me go to the mall with them instead.

Another time when the same group was hanging out at Dan’s house, we had a bicycle race. After the race began, I remember riding my bicycle and thinking, “Wow, I don’t see anybody in front of me. I’m killing this race—for the first time, I’m winning something!” Then I realized that the only reason I won was that when Dan said, “Start,” everybody ran into the house and locked me out. The only way I was allowed to reenter was to yell that I desperately wanted to make love to Janet Reno.

Still, the most entertaining time Dan and I ever had together was at a nightclub called Secrets, a teen hangout on the other side of town. Secrets would often advertise on the local radio that they would be throwing an awesome party with the “water cannon” and that there would be “no dress code.” Anybody who ever lived in the Capital District as a teenager probably spent a Saturday night or two at Secrets. It was the coolest place for a thirteen-year-old to be. The bouncers at the door would mark everybody’s hand with a magic marker. I would never wash my hands on Sunday or Monday because I wanted everybody at school to know I was at Secrets over the weekend. All of the cool kids at Sand Creek Middle School went to Secrets every Friday and Saturday night. Still, even though my friends and I were always there, we were never considered part of the cool crowd.

One night when just Dan and I were at Secrets, a girl approached me and asked if I was Carmen Missmo’s little brother. I decided to say yes just to see what the girl’s response would be. Did she love Carmen Missmo’s little brother and want to find out what he was up to, or did she secretly hate Carmen’s brother and want to be mean to him? Well, when I answered in the affirmative, the girl was actually delighted. For the entire night, I pretended to be Carmen’s little brother, Chris. The girl who asked me about Carmen was named Christine. “So, Christopher, how are you now?” she asked. I responded, “Well, actually I go by Chris now.” Christine asked me what Carmen was up to, and I made up some silly story. Christine wondered why Carmen didn’t accompany his little brother to Secrets. Pretending to be Chris, I told Christine that he was out bowling with some friends. Christine said, “Oh, I didn’t know Carmen liked to bowl.” I said, “Well, he does now.”