by Paul Feig
“Mom,” I said, approaching her timidly, “I’m . . . uh . . . I’m in love with this girl who’s . . . uh . . . kinda my girlfriend and . . . um . . . I wanted to give her a present, but I don’t know what to get her.”
My mother had a very surprised look on her face. I knew that she was aware of my crush on my next-door neighbor Mary, but beyond that I don’t think she even thought I interacted with girls at school.
“Oh, Paul, that’s so sweet,” she said in a tone that made me feel kind of creepy. “What kind of things does she like?”
That was a stumper. I felt like saying “If I knew what she liked, I wouldn’t be asking you in the first place.” But feeling that this was my only chance at doing things right with Yvonne, I decided to suck it up and navigate my way through this weird moment with my mother.
“Well, she’s really into dressing up. She always wears nice clothes to school.” That was true, even though it was information that could be gleaned by anybody with a pair of eyes and wasn’t necessarily the intimate knowledge of a beau. But my mother didn’t care. I could see that she was already getting an idea.
“I have just the thing,” she said, getting up.
Feeling a bit guilty that I had fooled my mother into thinking I had a girlfriend who actually liked me—or at least knew my name—I followed her into her bedroom to see this perfect gift. She opened up her jewelry box on the dresser and pulled out a dark gold necklace. It was an exotic piece of jewelry that looked like a bunch of miniature boat chains that had been welded together and then driven over with a steam roller. Looking back, I think it was copper or bronze, but at the time I entertained the thought that it was solid gold. It wasn’t a very pretty piece of jewelry by any means, but it was substantial.
“This belonged to my mother. She gave it to me when I was a little girl.”
Geez, this is great, I thought. Yvonne’ll want to marry me if I give her something this good. My mom looked at the necklace a little sadly, because my grandma had just died. But this made me feel happy because I knew the necklace would now stay in the family. Yvonne and my mother could have long talks comparing their childhoods and swapping stories about all the things that happened to them while they were wearing the necklace.
“You sure you don’t mind?” I asked her, reaching out for the necklace. It was even heavier than it looked.
“No. Besides, it’s your first girlfriend,” she said with a smile. “And I don’t have a daughter anyway, so this is the next best thing.”
That made me want to cry. I started thinking that maybe I should just give Yvonne a copy of “I Honestly Love You.” But the song was no longer a hit, and the necklace did seem like the perfect gift. And when Yvonne found out how valuable it was, she’d be putty in my hands. I didn’t know what I’d do with her once she was putty, but that wasn’t a concern yet. First things first.
I didn’t sleep much that night. I tossed and turned, imagining what Yvonne would do when I delivered my mother’s heirloom necklace. I kept drifting into dreams that would alternate between Yvonne’s giving me a soul kiss and Yvonne’s laughing in my face. By the time I got to homeroom that morning, I was a wreck.
Until I looked across the room.
There she was. My love. Sitting the way she always did. Short skirt, legs crossed, out to the side. And today she had a mysterious black beret on, looking quite French. Just when I thought she couldn’t get more beautiful, I said to myself, newly excited about my plan.
My stomach started to hurt. I felt like I had to go to the bathroom. This could only mean that it was time to go into action.
But how? I hadn’t actually thought about how I would deliver the present.
The task seemed easy enough. Get the necklace from point A (me) to point B (Yvonne). Logistically, it made perfect sense. But emotionally, it couldn’t be done. I ran over my options in my head:
Option #1: I could walk the necklace over myself but that would mean I would actually have to talk to her.
Option #2: I could sneak over and put it in her coat pocket, but she’d never know it was from me and think it was from Mr. Parks and then he’d profit off of my mother’s priceless childhood heirloom.
Option #3: I could drop it on her desk wrapped in a note, but my dad had always told me to never write notes to girls. “You should never write down anything that somebody could hold you to legally.” I didn’t know what kind of lawsuit my dad thought I’d get into in eighth grade, but I figured he must know better than I did.
And so, I realized I had only one other option.
Option #4: Have the necklace delivered.
The problem now became which one of my friends would even consider going up to a girl. None that I could think of offhand. We were all about even when it came to the amount of female-phobia surging through our veins. No, it would have to be somebody outside my circle of underdeveloped peers.
I looked around and immediately saw the answer.
Chris Nubellski.
Chris was the most polite kid I knew, which is unusual for an eighth grader. At that age, everyone is pretty much socially retarded. But Chris was just this friendly thirteen-year-old father figure who seemed out of sync with his age. He was the only kid I didn’t worry about introducing to my mother. With other kids, you always had to worry about whether they were going to be rude or clam up or make fun of your mom’s hair or burp or fart in front of her. But the one time I brought Chris over to my house, before we went to see Young Frankenstein, he was the most sincerely polite kid my mom had ever met. And so, he was the perfect candidate to act as my delivery service.
I went over to Chris and told him my predicament. Once before I had mentioned to him that I had a crush on Yvonne, so my request for his help came as no surprise to him.
“I’d be happy to, Paul,” he said in his usual brotherly tone. And before I had time to think, he grabbed the necklace out of my hand, immediately leaped up, and headed over to Yvonne’s side of the room. I wasn’t expecting him to deliver it that very second and so was completely unprepared emotionally. I wanted to stop him but he was already halfway to her. In a panic, I hurried back to my desk so that I could hide behind my math book. As soon as I hit the chair, Chris bent over to Yvonne, handed her the necklace, said something to her, and pointed right at me. My heart stopped. My stomach imploded. Everything around Yvonne went black, as if I were looking at her through a long tunnel. All I could see was Yvonne, in slow motion, turning her head to look at me. I started to feel dizzy. All I could think of was that I wished I hadn’t done this. I wished I could have somehow magically transported Chris back and erased the last few seconds of my life. In my suspended perception of time, Yvonne’s head was still swiveling to look at me. What would I do when our eyes met? Should I wave? Smile? Act cool? Pucker up? Throw up? My brain was spinning. Maybe I’ll just run out of the room. No time. Her eyes were almost at mine. And what if she’s so happy about the necklace that she runs across the room and kisses me right here? That would be great. Everyone would see it and it would secure my place in the Junior High Hall of Fame. But I’ve never kissed a girl before. And now maybe I’d have to do it right in front of Mr. Parks and everybody. It was all happening too fast. I should have thought this through more. Oh, God. She’s gonna know I exist now. Somebody help me.
The moment of truth was here.
Her eyes hit mine. My body went numb. She gave me a puzzled look that said “Who the hell are you?” I think my legs fell off. My face immobile, I quickly looked into my math book and stayed there. The whole hour I could feel her gaze burning through the top of my head. I wanted to look up at her, but my neck wouldn’t bend. All the sounds in the room became loud and fragmented, like they do right before you doze off in study hall. I felt like there was an enormous spotlight on me. Everyone in the room had to know exactly what was going on in my head at that moment, I thought. I’ve gotta look up at her, I’ve gotta look up at her.
But I never did.
The hour
somehow passed. I didn’t hear a word Mr. Parks said the entire time. Everything in the room sounded like a foreign language to me. And all I kept thinking was how I wished I hadn’t done this.
The thing is, if you’re a kid and you have a crush on a girl and you never do anything about it, I think you ultimately enjoy it more. You can enjoy the thoughts of what might have happened with her and what you would have done with her and how cool you would have been with her, when in reality, you know you never would have done any of the things you thought about. You would have ended up talking to her and not having much in common and finding out that she had friends that you couldn’t stand and a big brother who didn’t like you and that you could never muster up the nerve to even hold her hand, let alone kiss her. She’d think you were a goofball and that you were boring and that your friends were immature and she’d start looking around at other guys and then you’d start to feel all jealous, even though you really didn’t want her to be your girlfriend anymore. And you’d end up not talking to her after a few days and then you’d have to spend the rest of your junior-high and high-school career avoiding her in the hallway and answering the question “Hey, weren’t you and Yvonne going together for a while?”
“Well, yeah, but we broke up.”
“What the hell’s wrong with you? She’s a fox.”
You know what’s wrong with me. I’m a loser, that’s what.
Well, Yvonne never did talk to me or thank me for the necklace or give me the time of day after that, and I avoided her more diligently than I avoided the bullies who wanted to beat me up. My romance had ended before it even started. Which was fine with me, because I started listening in class again and actually ended up learning stuff.
Once, however, a couple of months later, some friends and I put together a band for a class project and played an extremely terrible rendition of “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” during homeroom. During it, I looked out at the class and saw that Yvonne was staring at me. Trying to be cool, I made an “oh, brother, these guys are bad and if I had some better musicians up here with me I’d really wail on this guitar” face at her. She gave me a smile and an expectant look that made my heart skip a beat and realize why guys are in bands. But then Mr. Parks asked me if I wanted to cut loose and jam on my guitar and I realized that I couldn’t and Rick McBane jumped up on stage and took my guitar and played an incredible version of the guitar solo from Chicago’s “25 Or 6 To 4.” The class rocked out and I saw that Yvonne’s eyes were filled with passion for Rick. Of course. And that was the last time she ever looked at me.
The next year, when I got to high school, I heard that Yvonne and her family had moved away and no one knew where they went.
And my mother never asked me what happened to her necklace.
I guess when you give an eighth grader an heirloom for his girlfriend, you’ve just got to figure that you’re not going to get it back.
RESUSCI-ANNIE
I heard a story once, when I was around eight years old, about how Frank Zappa was so outrageous that at one of his concerts he passed an empty cup around the audience and told each of the crowd members to spit into it. They did, and when the cup was full, it was brought back up onto the stage and Frank Zappa drank the whole thing.
I don’t know if that story was true and I tend to doubt that it was, especially since Frank Zappa was famous for not taking drugs and, let’s face it, only a person on drugs could even conceive of doing something like that, let alone seeing it through to completion.
But the story affected me profoundly. I had nightmares for years after that, fever dreams in which I was onstage with Frank, and when the spit cup would come back up to him after making its rounds through the audience, full and warm and sloshing over the sides, Frank would hand it to me and say, “Here, you drink it tonight. I’m not feeling so hot.” And then the band would force me to guzzle it down in one long gulp.
A nightmare for anyone, to be sure. But for me, the thought was immobilizing.
When I was a kid, I was germ conscious. Really germ conscious. But I’m not sure if it was actual germs I was conscious of or if it was really just the thought of other people’s spit that made me feel like passing out.
You see, much of childhood is set up as one big germ- and spitspreading activity. And it seemed as if all of my grade-school peers were more than willing to put their mouths on whatever it was that I or anyone else happened to be consuming at any given moment during the day. Other kids just didn’t seem to care about germs or spit—or dirt or bugs or worms or anything else that made my skin crawl, for that matter. Which always left me feeling more like a miniature version of the prissy Dr. Smith from Lost in Space, shrieking in horror at the sight of an attacking Cyclops or space biker, than someone who had anything in common with the kids in my neighborhood. The problem was, no matter how hard I tried, I just couldn’t force myself not to obsess about my revulsion toward anything that came out of, or resided inside of, anyone else’s mouth. And this made it quite difficult to be a kid, because it seemed like whenever I had a bottle of pop (or “soda,” as you non-Midwesterners call it) at any point from age four to fourteen, it was guaranteed that within seconds of opening it, some kid I knew would appear behind me and utter these dreaded words:
“Hey, can I have a drink?”
Every time. And then I was stuck. Because if I dared to say no, it was sure to provoke a thoughtful and understanding response of “C’mon, ya baby. I’m not gonna drink it all.”
“Yeah, but you’re gonna get your mouth all over it.” Or at least, that’s what I wanted to say. But instead, in my true nonconfrontational fashion, I’d always relent.
“Uh . . . okay. Here.”
I mean, what other option did I have? What else could I do without sounding like an oversensitive only child in serious need of an ass-kicking? Unless I was prepared to dig into the old coffee can I kept my extra allowance in and buy every kid who came up to me their own bottle, I had to give in or suffer the consequences.
But it really made me mad. And it made me want to cry. Because I was always so happy and the world was always a much nicer place when I would buy myself a bottle of pop. My mother had her rum balls, which she would eat whenever she felt as if the day had dealt her too much hardship. And me? Well, there was nothing I liked more than a good soul-soothing bottle of liquid candy.
The circumstances were always the same. It would be a warm afternoon. I’d be walking home from grade school, tired and worn out from a full day of crushes and failures and overreactions. I’d approach the old drugstore, where I usually bought a 3 Musketeers bar or some oversize Sweet Tarts or a few long strands of Bubs Daddy Grape Bubble Gum, the flavor that tasted so good when I chewed it and yet had the power to turn my stomach when smelled on the breath of others. Feeling like a snack, I’d check my pockets and discover a dollar bill that my mom would occasionally give me on the days when she was overcome with love for her only son, money she had specially earmarked as “buy yourself a little treat if those boys are mean to you again” cash. I’d smile warmly as I pulled out the dollar, thinking about my mom. What a nice thing to do, I’d muse. At least she likes me. I mean, she never calls me Fig Newton or Pig Newton or Paul Fag. At least not to my face. And so, dollar in hand, I’d head into the store. Since it was usually warm and humid outside, I’d make up my mind to get a bottle of 7-UP. Or maybe a Dr Pepper. But not a Coke. Because Coke would stunt my growth and rot my teeth and make me question authority in a caffeine- and cocaine-induced stupor. Or so my mom always said. And so, I’d settle on a Squirt. I’d grab an ice-cold bottle out of the refrigerator and go up to the counter. There would be nice old Mr. Ken. I never knew his full name, but I always liked him, even though many weeks later he’d falsely accuse me of shoplifting. What a jerk he turned out to be. But on this day, he was still good ol’ Mr. Ken. I’d pay for the bottle, say “thank you,” and head outside. As I walked, I’d twist off the top. The bottle would give me a friendly hiss th
at seemed to say, “Oh, friend, are you going to enjoy me.” I’d take a deep breath, releasing all the tensions of the day, raise the bottle to my lips, tilt my head back and take a drink, enjoying life to its fullest. The world seemed to melt away. I’d forgotten that Karl Scott tried to beat me up in math class and that I’d gotten yelled at by one of the playground ladies for jumping off the swing. What did they care if I broke my leg? They never came to my rescue when someone was trying to push me off the top of the monkey bars or strangling me with the tetherball cord. No, no, let it go, Paul, I’d think to myself. You’ve got your Squirt. Enjoy it, drink it slow, and maybe you can make it last all day. And life for that one moment was good.
That is, until the dream would be shattered when Norman would suddenly walk out of the bushes and want to backwash into my bottle.
So, I’d reluctantly give him my Squirt and he’d put his mouth on it and take a sloppy swig and I’d feel defiled as I’d watch him gulp down my once pleasure-producing soft drink. My thoughts would be torn between hoping he choked on the pop and figuring out how I could possibly salvage what was left in the bottle. Maybe I could pour out the top inch of spit-contaminated liquid, then thoroughly wipe down the mouth of the bottle with my shirttail to remove the memory of his mouth. I would actually start to feel there might be a possible second life for my pop when suddenly the nightmare would worsen.
Another kid would invariably walk up.
“Hey, Norman, can I have a drink?”
“It’s okay with me, but it’s Paul’s pop. Ask him.”
What was I gonna say? “No, I don’t mind Norman’s saliva but yours is a no-go.” Why did all these kids have to drink out of the same bottle anyway? Couldn’t they go and buy their own? Didn’t it bother them that they were drinking out of something that two people had already contaminated? There’s no way I’d do it, so why would they? Was I that much weirder than everyone else? Was I that much smarter? Or was I just an expert at making big deals out of nothing?