So this was going to be it. My night. I would play a carnival game and win her a stuffed bear larger than her bedroom. Then we would make out. Simple.
When you’re twelve years old, you don’t understand certain things about the digestive system. For example, you don’t know that you shouldn’t eat popcorn and peanuts and cotton candy and then go on a machine called “the Scrambler.” Cotton candy is of course the most absurd of those items, almost as if the inventors said, “We’re going to take sugar, which everyone knows is bad, but then we’ll dress it up like insulation.”
And the general idea of the Scrambler is that you sit in a two-person pod with the person you are in love with—and that pod goes in a circle—which is part of an even grander circle—which is part of an even grander circle.
As I understand it, it was originally designed as a medical device for constipated patients, and it was called the Shitzyourpantserator. And then the Carnival Workers of America, CWOA, co-opted the Shitzyourpantserator. And they said, “We feel like the name is something of a turnoff.”
And then somebody suggested, “What about the I-think-I’m-gonna-die-erator?” And they responded, “That’s good because it gets at the essence of how you feel when you’re on the machine. Plus it has the added word play with diarrhea, which is a nice homage to the original intention of the machine.”
And then someone said, “What if we call it the Scrambler?”
And the boss jumped up and said, “Nailed it! But who will be in charge of this dangerous piece of equipment?”
And this one guy said, “Well, I have a nephew who’s sixteen years old and smokes pot twenty-four hours a day. I feel like he might be available.”
And the boss said, “He sounds amazing. We don’t even need to interview him. He sounds completely qualified.”
So Lisa and I go on the Scrambler. And from the moment I sit down in the Scrambler and they latch on the bar seat belt, I know I’m going to throw up for sure. The bar seat belt is not a reassuring piece of safety equipment. That is not a Ralph Nader–approved device. I don’t think the bar seat belt has ever saved anyone’s life, though it has probably pinned someone’s esophagus to the pavement in a Scrambler accident, ensuring that the Scrambler victim won’t ever talk about the Scrambler accident.
So they latch the bar seat belt shut and I think, This is bad. And I even say to the sixteen-year-old stoner, “Hey, actually—” And then he is gone. Apparently he doesn’t enjoy the second halves of sentences. So I grab the bar.
And Lisa and I start scrambling. And I know that I’m going to throw up.
And I think, I need to stop this from happening.
So I come up with a strategy: Don’t look at Lisa and don’t look at any other people.
Don’t look at Lisa or any other people . . . Don’t look at Lisa. Don’t look at any other people . . . This plan will not suffice. I need a new plan.
And my new plan is: tell the Scrambler operator that he needs to stop the ride.
But the mechanics of the Scrambler are such that the window of opportunity in which one can communicate with the Scrambler operator is a very short window.
So I think, I gotta tell the guy to stop the ride. I gotta tell the guy to stop the ride. I gotta tell the guy to stop the ride—
“Please stop the ride!”
Scrambling . . . and scrambling—I don’t know if he heard me. Maybe I should say it louder. I’m not sure he’s even paying attention—
“Please stop the ride!”
And I’m back to scrambling . . . and scrambling—He’s definitely not paying attention to the ride. I think he might be smoking pot right now . . .
“Please stop the—”
And then I threw up, not unlike a lawn sprinkler. Just popcorn and peanuts and insulation. Really insulating the pavement with my homemade carnival salsa.
And I didn’t look at Lisa. But I’m pretty sure she was staring at me because I was really a spectacle at that point. And I think I dropped from fourth to fifth place on her potential boyfriend depth chart that day. Needless to say, we didn’t make out.
The next year I was enrolled at the all-boys school and every year they’d have what people called “a cattle call dance.” It basically means the school would invite girls from all over the state. It seems like an offensive way to describe something, to imply that women are cattle. So the cattle’s showing up at eight and then we make out with the cattle and then the cattle leave at ten. Then we’ll go get burgers—but that’s not part of the cattle analogy.
So the dances were held in this gymnasium charged up with hormones and Binaca and Drakkar Noir. All crammed into a room with strobe lights and Bel Biv DeVoe and sweat. The strobe light is helpful because people can only see you every five frames or so. Strobe lights are really good for hiding acne, braces, leg braces, sweater vests, sweaty armpits, over-the-pants handjobs.
There was no alcohol, so there wasn’t any kind of social lubricant. Just warm Sprite and Dixie cups of pretzels.
I went with my friend Sam Ricciardi. He was a makeout ninja. Every week he’d tell me about all the girls he had made out with over the weekend. Usually those makeouts took place at the mall—which seemed perfect to me. I imagined this strange food court orgy. And I’d be like, “Sam, how did that even happen?” and he never really told me. He’d be like, “It’s the mall, dude. It’s crazy.” I was like, I gotta go to the mall. The mall sounded like a perfect place because I hadn’t had my first kiss, but at an all-boys school you could never admit that you hadn’t had your first kiss. So when people asked if I had had my first kiss, I’d be like, “Me? Yeah! Totally.” So I was living this lie, terrified that one of these days someone was going to call me out. They’d be like, “Well, what’s it like?” And I’d be like, “It’s like eating an ice cream cone?” and they’d be like, “No it’s not. It’s like licking a rocket pop.” Oh man. Wrong frozen dessert analogy.
So I’m at the dance with Sam and there were two girls our friend Tom had introduced us to. They were the last two cows at the dance. We were like, Moooooo! They were like, Moooooo! It was love at first moo. And it was one of those situations where guys (and girls) say uncomfortable phrases like, “You get that one.” That follows us all the way from childhood into adulthood. “That one’s yours and that one’s mine.” Like we’re cars. And I don’t feel like I’ve ever been one of the good cars. No one’s ever seen me and said, “I get that one!” They’re more like, “I get that one? Um, okay.” Or even, “I get that one? You owe me.” It’s so sad to think that people are incurring debt based on my appearance. I’d hate to hurt someone’s credit score.
So I’m dancing with this girl Sondra and we haven’t really spoken but I think we both have a sense that making out is about to take place. Maybe it was that magical moment she noticed me staring at her mouth, trying to figure out how I could land my mouth on hers in a smooth, non-teeth-bumping way. And we’re fast-dancing, which is really hurting my case. I can tell that she’s thinking, If he’s this bad at dancing . . . So her interest is waning but I’m saved by a slow song. “Stairway to Heaven.” I knew I had approximately eight minutes to climb those stairs.
And slow dancing isn’t all that challenging. It’s just like hugging someone in slow motion. And all I’m trying to do is just not fidget, because then it might seem like I’m trying to start the making out before the making out starts. Because all it takes is the slightest tilt of the head. Just the subtlest tweak of the neck and it is on. I think that’s one of the things that scared me so much about the making-out concept. I had kissed relatives on the mouth but never with tongue or the tilt.
And the combination of the tilt and the space in between the two mouths is what scared me. No one has video footage of what happens in the middle of those two mouths. It is uncharted territory. It’s the giant squid of making out. There’s no way to learn how to kiss. There’s no kissing camp. There’s just camp.
It was that unknown that terrified me. Litera
lly terrified me. What if there was some secret move that no one was telling me about that happens in there, like you swap tongues for like one second or your tongue presses a secret button on the other person’s tongue? And then afterward someone is like, “Did you press the button?” And I’m like, “No! There’s a button? I really botched this one. I didn’t press the button.”
So I think, I have to do this, so I initiate the tilt and then she comes in strong. It was really like an all-out mouth war. And Sondra had artillery. She had braces. It was like a dog eating spaghetti and the fork, because of the braces.
And as this oral atrocity is taking place, all I could think was, I’m not alone! I’m not one of those freaks who hasn’t had his first kiss. When I finish up here I can make fun of those losers!
And then afterward, Sam asks me, “How’d it go?” and I say, “It went pretty well, actually.” And then as days went on I started thinking it went much better than it had. Like, That was great! I’m great at this! This could work! So I called Sondra.
But we had nothing to talk about because we didn’t know each other, like “Remember when we made out? That was cool, right? Hey—is there a button? Nevermind. I love the show Full House. You like that show? Yeah. I hate it too.” And a few days later she stopped calling me back. And I was like, What is up? First I rock her world and now this? I took her for a ride on the Mike Birbiglia mouth machine and now she’s not calling me?
So I say to Tom, the guy at school who set us up, I’m like, “What’s up with Sondra?” And he has this shit-eating grin.
And I’m like, “What?” And he’s like, “Sondra said you’re the worst kisser she’s ever kissed.”
And I was crushed. The worst part was that I couldn’t explain that it was my first kiss because I already lied about it not being my first kiss.
So I had to play it off like it was my style. I said, “Yeah, that sounds about right. I’m a terrible kisser.”
Fortunately Sam was right there with me. He smiled and nodded, saying, “Me too, dude. Me too.”
Growing up, I was a big fan of the Indiana Jones movies. I watched them again recently and found them to be misleading. Aspiring archeologists across the world probably show up to their first day of work with their weather-worn fedoras and their whips and they’re like, “Where’s the cavern of jewels?” And their boss is like, “Actually, today we’re gonna start off by dusting thousands of miles of nothing.” The thing I admire most about these movies is the conviction and sense of self that Indy has. He’s an archeologist and an overly trusting action hero and he’s okay with that. Indy’s always like, “My long-lost friend with a glass eye and a black suit needs a hand locating a crystal scepter that turns people into sand? Sure, I’ll help. That sounds totally on the level.” The other notable thing about Indy was that he always got the girl. I’m not sure this is true for real archaeologists. And it definitely wasn’t true for me.
When I was in high school, my parents moved from Shrewsbury, Massachusetts, to Cape Cod, so I was separated from my childhood friends. There was a geographical midpoint between my friends and me at Great Woods, an outdoor concert venue. Basically these outdoor venues are a great opportunity for musicians to play for huge crowds and for teenagers to convert Porta-Potties into meth labs. I attended these types of festivals with much enthusiasm, in an earnest search for who I was.
One summer, when I was seventeen, I decided to wear a cowboy hat, not unlike that of Indiana Jones, to many of these summer concerts, not to seek out treasure nor to put to rest ancient curses, but to prop up a hibachi in a tailgate parking lot and eat salmonella-laced chicken kabobs while getting drunk enough to befriend strangers. What I discovered by wearing this cowboy hat was that people would remember who I was. I was “the cowboy hat guy.” And I was proud of that. I was like, That’s who I am! I’m the cowboy hat guy! And no one can take that away from me, unless of course they take the cowboy hat, in which case, they’d be the cowboy hat guy.
Well, at the time I didn’t think it through, so I was the cowboy hat guy.
And one summer while wearing the silly hat at a Steve Miller Band concert, I met this girl and fell in love. Well, I thought I fell in love. I actually just found her physically attractive and so attributed to her every positive quality I’d ever hope for in a woman. We ended up making out on the lawn of the Great Woods Center for the Performing Arts. For me, it was great. For the people watching, it was awkward, pathetic, or totally totally hot. But I went home with her phone number and address and I proceeded to write love letters to her. Or, I should say, elaborate fictional narratives that ended with the two of us reuniting in some strange way that included one of my heroes like Jimmy Connors or Bill Cosby and somehow we’d get to the next Steve Miller Band concert just in time for the encore of “Fly Like an Eagle.”
Well, after a summer of letters, I built up the courage to call her.
She was having a slumber party with all of her friends and so I spoke to the whole group. And it didn’t go as well as I had hoped. There’s something about women in groups. And beyond that, there’s something about women in groups on the phone that generally leaves the male on the other end of the phone at a severe disadvantage.
They decided to read excerpts of my letters aloud and after each excerpt there would be an eruption of laughter like a Johnny Carson highlight reel. None of my letters included jokes, but they seemed to bring these girls great joy. At first I was happy to be the hit of their party. After just a few of them I said, “Okay, well, I’m going to go now, that’s funny . . . I guess if you read it like that it does sound a little silly . . . I think I have to go to the store now with my brother . . . okay, good-bye!” A few weeks later, I started my senior year and I hung up my cowboy hat. I didn’t know who I was. But I knew who I wasn’t.
I had my first girlfriend, Amanda, during my senior year of high school. And she was great. She was beautiful and she played tennis. And she wrote for the newspaper. She was a bad girl, and I was kind of a dorky nerd, but not even a mainstream nerd, because this was at a boarding school that I didn’t board at. I was only there because my family lived nearby.
This was a big deal for me because it was the first time I fell in love and thought, Oh, there is someone for me. This is it. I found her.
Amanda had major street cred.
She had been expelled from her previous school for dealing acid. At one point she told me, “It was totally messed up because it was actually this other girl who was dealing acid and I was framed.” And I was like, Awesome.
I thought it was one of those things where we were opposites and we knew it. And that made it more exciting. Like she wanted to be a writer and in student government and I wanted to know what it was like to be cool.
I find that when you fall in love, you overlook certain red flags.
One of them was that she was a liar.
I don’t mean that in a pejorative way. At boarding school lying can be a way of life. There was one legendary liar in my class named Keith Robbins. He used to lick his finger like a bookie and say, “Yeah, yeah, nice. Nice. Nice.” He would lie about things that weren’t important. One day he said, “Yeah, yeah, nice, nice. My uncle is Tony Robbins, the motivational speaker. Yeah.” And I found out later that it wasn’t true. But even if it were, it wasn’t that impressive so you didn’t bother protesting it. You’d just go, “Oh, okay, Keith.”
Another red flag was that Amanda would say really mean stuff to me, and then try to pull it back. She’d say, “You’re not good at anything—only kiddin’!” “Nobody likes you at all. Just jokin’!”
The final red flag was that she told me not to tell anyone she was my girlfriend.
She explained to me that she had another boyfriend at home that she was in the process of breaking up with. She assured me it was over, but if it got back to him, “You know, it’d be bad.” I totally got that.
So she would go home every weekend and visit him, and at one point she said she had to go
home more frequently because his parents were sick, so she had to console him. And I thought, Well, you know, the guy’s parents are dying. So I ought to be understanding.
I also put up with it because I couldn’t believe how lucky I was just to be with her. When you’re in a relationship with someone who’s selfish, what keeps you in it is the fact that when they shine on you, it’s this souped-up shine. And you feel like you’re in the club. And you don’t even know what club it is. You just know you want to stay in it.
We’d been going out two months and we went on Christmas break and she invited me to meet her parents in New Hampshire.
This was very exciting. This was going to be my big moment. It would legitimize me as the main boyfriend.
So I drive my mom’s Volvo station wagon from Massachusetts to New Hampshire. And Amanda introduces me to her parents as her “friend Mike,” and I can see how she’s playing it. She doesn’t need to put a label on me. I totally get it.
And then this guy shows up.
And his name is Scott.
And the three of us are hanging out. It slowly dawns on me that I’m hanging out with my girlfriend’s boyfriend.
And it’s going okay. He seems like a good guy. He’s an allstate wrestler and remarkably nice. I could totally see what she saw in him.
It hurts but there’s some consolation because every time he steps out of the room, she’s very affectionate toward me. She kisses my neck or says something in her sweet voice.
But then there’s a moment when I was in the bathroom, and I think, What’s happening in the other room?
The day takes an even stranger turn when Scott suggests that we go hang out at his house.
And so we go and I meet his parents. And it’s a very strange thing meeting your girlfriend’s boyfriend’s parents for the first time. Part of you is angry for obvious reasons and part of you still wants to make a good impression. On a side note, they seemed in perfect health.
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