R/T/M (6 page)

     Apparently I was a genius so the next year they sent me to a special program for geniuses.

     Like Bart Simpson in that Simpsons episode.

     I’d go to my regular school and then I’d get onto a small bus and we’d get dropped off at a different school.

     Ironically, the gifted program was held at a school which was mostly for retarded kids.

     All of the city’s misfit kids got quarantined in the same place.

     The instructor was a lithe woman with long jet black hair and glasses who always wore black, so of course I thought she looked like The Baroness which I thought was pretty cool.

     There was no structure and we were constantly working on “projects” and watching educational movies on a little 8mm projector.

     The girl I sent the “I’d love to fuck you.”
letter to was in the gifted program too.

     That was a little awkward.

     Since the grading was unconventional I got passed up into sixth grade.

     The city didn’t renew the gifted program so the next year I was thrown back in with all of the other kids.

    
In sixth grade I fell in love.   Twice.

     One was a blonde
-haired, warm blue-eyed girl in my class.

     I think she liked me too
if how she expressed her interest was prank-calling me.

     When I got my copy of the class picture at the end of the year I kept it underneath my pillow and I kissed her picture every night.

     Her parents moved them away and I never saw her again.

     The other one was a little more complicated.

     For some inexplicable reason I was really good at spelling.

     I won my school’s big spelling bee, and I went on to the citywide spelling bee.

     The last two kids were me and a thin black haired girl with big glasses.

     I fell for her hard.

     She had glasses, I had glasses.   We were both good spellers.

     I figured it was fate.

     The event was hosted in a cafeteria.

     She got the word cafeteria.

     I saw her look around frantically trying to find the word in the room.

     Maybe on a sign or something.

     She spelled it “cafateria”.

     She misspelled cafeteria in a cafeteria.

     I’m sure that she was a
ware of the inherent irony of the situation.

     I spelled it correctly so I won.

     Of course the girl fucking hated me from that day on.

     If I had known anything about anything I would have misspelled the word and let her win.

     But I was confused.   I wanted to win the spelling bee and I wanted the girl to like me.

     I figured I’d probably never see the girl again so I went for it.

     The next day in school the principal came into the classroom with a big bouquet of balloons.

     I fucking knew they were for me.

     I was so embarrassed.

     Since I spent all of my grammar school years in the same school, my reputation from kindergarten had followed me all the way to the sixth grade.

     I was still isolated in a desk away from all the other kids.

     All of the other kids resented me for the attention I was getting and I didn’t want any of it.

     I didn’t want the fucking balloons.   I just wanted to disappear.

     I ended up going to the statewide spelling bee and getting tripped up by “tandem”.

     I spelled it “tandom” like “kingdom”.

     Why the fuck should I have known what tandem meant?   Much less how it was spelled.

     I figured things out, even though no adult would tell you anything directly.   They wouldn’t tell you what to do or how to act, but they sure gave you some heavy looks when you did something you weren’t supposed to.   And that was how you learned.   Social pressure.   Guilt.

     I managed to stay out of serious trouble, not being retarded or genetically predisposed to perverse compulsions.    I had my first kiss in seventh grade on Halloween night.   The obese best-friend of the girl that my friend Billy was seeing.   It was sweet and exhilarating.   But nothing else really came of it.

     I dated in high school when I could.

     Maybe dating was easy for some people.

     I could never figure the whole thing out.

     You met a girl you liked.   You probably went to the same school or knew some of the same people.   You got the message that you liked her over to her one way or another.

     Maybe she liked you.   Maybe she didn’t.

     If you liked each other you talked on the phone too much and made plans to hang out without adult supervision.   I didn’t have a car so I had to set it up so that the girl and I could be alone at either her parent’s place, my parent’s place, or the home of some mutual acquaintance.   It was never easy and it took a lot of lying and sneaking around.   I missed a lot of curfews and caught a lot of heat, but there was always a friend whose parent’s didn’t care what they did, whose house I could crash at for a few days until the intensity of my mom’s anger dulled from a raging fire back to smoldering embers.   In the end, she was more worried about my being missing for days rather than missing curfew, so in time she just let it go.   She just gave up and let me figure things out on my own.

     So you figured out how to be alone with the girl.   Maybe you got around to kissing and making out and fooling around.   If she hadn’t been fucked up by the male members of her family
, or some scumbag asshole rapacious ex-boyfriend who forced his way with her, or religious brainwashing then maybe you got around to having sex.

     But since neither of you really knew what you were doing it probably wasn’t very good.

     But it was the big thing.   The thing that everyone everywhere was always talking about.

     So even if it wasn’t very good, you did it anyways, figuring that eventually you’d get the hang of it.

     I lost my virginity at seventeen, which seemed a little old at the time.   There was a girl in the “remedial” classes that liked me.   She was pretty enough and in pretty good shape.   We started hanging out.   She was obviously a little slow.   Just a step behind.   Not like she was full-blown retarded.   Just slow.   I went over her house.   Her room looked like the room of a girl a few years younger than the both of us.   She had Barbie dolls and My Little Ponies and slap bracelets and colorful plastic costume jewelry strewn all over the place.   She had a pink plastic radio/tape player and she put in a Gloria Estefan tape and sang along with it.   It was kind of creepy.

     We hung out for about a month and then it happened.   My mom was out someplace for the night so I had the place to myself.   I made sure I had a condom and invited the girl over.   I started in with the “backrub” ice-breaker and things moved forward quickly.   I was excited.   Nervous.   I didn’t know if it would work.   We went to my room and sat on the bed and we took each other’s clothes off.   I’d never put a condom on.   I
figured it out and we were on our way.   We went through the motions in missionary in almost complete silence aside from our breathing and the rustling of the sheets and the sound of our skins brushing against each other.   I was numb.   My dick was like a foreign object attached to my body.   Like the way that the inside of a pimple feels like it’s something that is inside of you, but not part of you, which causes you to worry that spot until you finally get the dead, infected cells out of your over-burdened pore.   Like an ingrown hair or a scab.   Maybe that’s what sexual desire is most similar to.   Like scab you can’t resist picking at or an itch you can’t resist scratching.

     I was so focused on the idea of finally having sex that I wasn’t able to relax enough to enjoy it.   I don’t remember if she was enjoying herself.   I was too focused on what I was doing, and the whole thing was pretty awkward.   After a couple hours she had probably dried out because of the condom and when she couldn’t stand anymore she asked me to stop.   I thought I did a good job.   I didn’t come right away.   I didn’t come at all.   I outlasted her, so I guess I won.   So this is what sex is.   It all seemed so over-rated.   The relative importan
ce so inflated to the actuality of the event.

     Girls and I ran hot and cold in high school.   There were dry spells and wet spells.

     In high school, girls and sex were very confusing.   The girls I would go steady with wouldn’t have sex with me and the girls I had sex with wouldn’t go steady with me.   That was just how it was.

     Capricious youth.

     That two hour marathon the first time?   That was misleading.

     Sex would last either two hours or two minutes.   I didn’t really find my stride until college.

     I remember once I had sex with my girl-friend’s friend because she was willing and easy and my girl-friend wasn’t giving it up.   The friend of the girlfriend came over the house and after an hour or so we both knew what was up.   Kissing and whatnot.   She wouldn’t take her shirt off.   She protested that it was wrong, I agreed, but then we did it anyway.   I got the condom on and got my dick in her and three strokes in I blew it.   Awkward and embarrassing for everyone in the room.   She went on to date my friend Dan and then ratted me out to the girlfriend when I started dating my friend Dan’s friend at the same time.   I wasn’t being an asshole.   I liked them both.   I wasn’t an asshole, I was just a coward.

     Funny thing about that.   Karma’s a bitch.   I stuck with the new girl for a year and she didn’t put out either.   Lots of fooling around, but she’d always say, “Manyana…”, in this coyly lilti
ng way.   It got so I hated the fucking word.   She wouldn’t put out, but she loved it when I went down on her, but she wouldn’t reciprocate.   Something about a pushy ex-boyfriend and maybe some rape, maybe something weird with her dad who was a preacher, but she never told me anything straight about it.   Just lots of listening to Tori Amos and Ani Difranco and the Indigo Girls.   But fuck that noise.   Recipricocity is key.   On our year anniversary I gave her the ultimatum.   Either she put out or I was done.   She went all frantic and sobbed like I’d never heard before.   She cried all the fucking time, but never like that.   I had to lay in bed with a throbbing hard on, my underwear all sticky with pre-cum, with her cooze juice drying on my face and listen to her wail in the bathroom.   What a bummer.

    
I heard about her every now and then from our mutual friends.   Turns out she went round the bend and started having multiple personalities and married a guy that had multiple personalities too.   That must have been fucking interesting.   I wonder if it was like being polyamorous?   I thought I recognized her in the passenger seat of a car when I was working as a security officer at a parking garage.   I was in the booth and her husband pulled up and she was sitting there looking like a ghost.   Like a doughy phosphorescently pale mannequin.   They drove off and I never saw her again.   That’s life.

     High school was crazy.   There was a lot of underage drinking whenever we could get near enough to booze.   There was a lot of pot smoked, but I didn’t get stoned until I went to college.   Hometown pot was just flake.   Dust.   I didn’t see a bud until I went to college.

     I spent a lot of time in detention because I was always late to school.

     I never was a morning person.

     Eventually if I was going to be late I didn’t bother going in at all and I almost didn’t graduate I missed so many days senior year but they relented and granted me the diploma I earned.

     What were they gonna do?   Try to make me repeat twelfth grade?   Yeah right!

     The summer between high school and college I learned a lot.

     I ran with a fast crowd and you had to be quick or you’d be left behind.

     I worked at a Taco Bell, because, like all of my friends, I didn’t have any job experience to speak of.

     I worked a lot of hours because I was willing to stay late and close.

     The base pay was shit minimum wage, but I had this great trick.

     I would tell people the total for their order when they came up to the window and they’d hand me some money.    Then when their food was ready I’d lean out the window and give them their food and shoot them a big smile and say, “Have a nice night!”.    They were so hungry or stoned that they’d drive off.

     Without their change.

     Hot food is a great distraction for a hungry or stoned person.

     It worked like a charm.

     No one ever rolls up to the drive thru with exact change.   And if anyone was smart enough to say something about their change, I’d put on a real tired expression, take off my purple hat and rub my hand over my scalp and say something about it being a busy night or about being tired.   They’d shoot me a suspicious look, but no one ever asked to talk to the manager and I’d remember to not try the same trick on that person the next time they came through.