Finally, for all his versatility, Elvis could be a sad, sad dude. “Indoor Fireworks” made me want to be an adult, get in a serious relationship, and then break up and be devastated, just so I could properly appreciate the depth of that song. “I Want You” was the most intense piece of music I’d ever heard—vitriolic and desperate, there are public executions that are less traumatic and moving than that song.
I couldn’t believe that one person could create such a range of music, each song so different from the next. He was a musical schizophrenic. I hadn’t heard anything resembling this kind of depth and variety since . . . the Beatles.
Music had always made me feel things. When Led Zeppelin blues’d-out to “Since I’ve Been Loving You,” I felt epically sad. When Jimi Hendrix ripped it up on “Voodoo Child (Slight Return),” I felt I needed louder headphones. But the songs of Elvis Costello made me both feel and think in a way that no other music had before. His songs were not something you listened to and left behind. They were works of art that required thoughtful study. Each time I came back to them, I heard or learned something new about them. And in the process of learning more about them, I learned more about myself.
I knew I still had room to grow, but I also knew that Elvis and I would be happy together for a long, long time. The greatest hits CD had twenty-two songs. By the end of the hour, I felt comfortable using the word love to describe eighteen of them.
My favorite song? That would be “Alison.”
Alison was the –est. She was the superlative. Alison was the prettiest, the most athletic, the coolest. Her older sister was an absolute knockout—and her older brother would knock you out if you suggested such a thing. Her family owned the best bar in the neighborhood (Mick-Daniel’s, the one at which I worked) and were active and considered leaders in the community. It was like Alison was genetically engineered to be the archetypical high school “it” girl, built in a laboratory in Europe by top scientists and then unleashed upon our little teenage Second Street social circle to break hearts, kick ass, and take names.
I met Alison in junior high. She had a mess of blond hair—huge curls that I’d spend most of high school thinking about swimming in. Though we became friends immediately, it was in high school that we became the closest of friends.
I was drawn to Alison for the same reasons that everyone else was. She was a force of nature. Teen girls are not typically known to be bedrocks of self-confidence, but if Alison ever felt insecure, she never showed it. This is not to say she was cocky or a bitch or a cocky bitch; in fact, it was her insouciance that made her so appealing. It was impossible for her to be unaware of the effect she had on the guys in the neighborhood, but she never let on. She was calm, cool, and collected—like a goddamned assassin.* She was also funny, a ball-buster, and a good friend. It was for these reasons that she became my best (girl) friend. And I was her best (male) friend.
We were a strange pair. The blond beauty who kept up with all the latest fashions while being captain of the basketball team, and the chubby guy who was now occasionally wearing a fur cape around the halls after school because he thought it was cool.* It didn’t matter. We spent a lot of time together, hanging out, going to the movies or to neighborhood diners, laughing, talking, and having fun.
Me, in my cape, at a mixer, at which girls were present. Spoiler alert: The next chapter is not about me losing my virginity.
It might surprise you to learn this, but I had a huge, massive, overwhelming, unstoppable crush on her.
I know, I know. The overweight guy who is best friends with the hottest girl in the neighborhood develops feelings for her? You don’t say! Is water also wet, the sky also blue, the earth also round? Yes, it’s all true. In my defense, at one point or another I fell for just about every female friend I had. You see, I wore many hats in high school. I was a dutiful, if not very masculine, son. I was a mostly disinterested brother. I was a dedicated-but-only-when-I-really-needed-to-be student, a committed employee, and a loyal friend, assuming it didn’t require too much work. And to many of my female friends, I was their gay best friend.
Of course, I didn’t know I was their gay best friend at the time. The concept of the GBF was something that I did not learn about until my twenties, probably from an episode of Sex and the City. But when I did learn about it, it made perfect sense. It was me, as a teen, to a tee (minus the actual homosexuality).
I spent most of my life girl crazy, in love with love, in love with every girl I met. In kindergarten, I made meticulous Valentine’s Day cards for each girl in the class. In elementary school, the cards were store-bought, but each came with a synthetic rose (girls whom I really liked would get two roses). I always had several crushes going on at once; some big, some medium, some small, and the objects of my crushes could shift among levels on a daily basis depending on my own whims and how each had treated me that day. It sounds like a lot to keep track of, but I enjoyed it.
With the majority of my crushes, I expressed no feelings in anything other than Valentine’s Day–card form. I may have asked a girl out here and there, but my success rate was so low that I figured it was best to not even bother. Instead, my plan was simple. If I liked a girl, I would befriend her and make myself not only available, but ubiquitous.
Need someone to chat with during recess? I’m your man. Looking for someone to carry your books home? Why, I happen to be going that way. Feeling sad because the guy you like likes someone else? Here’s my phone number—call anytime.
It was over the phone that I did my best work and became a much more efficient and effective GBF. Just as gambling or drug addictions start small, my telephone addiction started with one little call from my friend Maria, who phoned me one night after school during freshman year to ask for guy advice. We talked for a half hour. The next night, Maria called again and put me on a three-way call with her friend Dana. The three of us chatted for over an hour. A few short months later, I had my own phone line with a dedicated phone number and spent about three hours a night on the telephone.
What did my female friends and I talk about? I don’t really know. There were main themes; me providing advice on relationships or giving thoughts from a guy’s perspective was a big one. But that would imply that I was useful exclusively because of my genitals*—that I was only good as a male sounding board. This was not the case. Many hours were filled with conversation about the vagaries of teen life: friends, family, school—as well as love.
Spending time on the phone with these girls made me feel fucking terrific. I was the goddamn social director, the king of the phone lines. Any way you cut it, I had the phone numbers of dozens of girls. Girls would call my home asking to talk to me. Maybe none of them was my girlfriend. Whatever. That was semantics. I liked girls. I liked getting attention from girls. The details would get filled in later.
And to be clear, I still had lots of buddies and an active, dude-centric social life. I was not getting manicures or going on shopping trips with my girl friends. Nor did I attend girls’ nights out or slumber parties—regrettably. (If there were a record for ejaculating without any direct contact with one’s genitals, I might have made a run at that record during an all-girls-plus-me slumber party.) I could hang out around the Park or under the bridge and talk about sports and music and wanting to touch titties like the rest of my guy friends. But I then went home and spent a few hours on the phone with girls, recapping the night’s events.
It wasn’t entirely clear to me what my endgame was. Perhaps I thought that by being consistently available as a shoulder to cry on, a giver of advice, and as a great friend in general, one day one of these girls would suddenly realize that she should start dating me immediately. Then we’d have sex and it would be amazing. What I didn’t realize was that by insinuating myself with my girl friends, I was stripping myself of my maleness—and, more or less, becoming one of the girls. It was a cruel irony. I thought that the closer I became to my girl friends, the closer I became to a real, live hand job from
one of them. In reality, from my girl friends’ perspectives, that I had a working penis and testicles was becoming less and less of an issue.
Hence, the gay best friend. I was such an afterthought from a sexual perspective that for all intents and purposes I was no longer heterosexual in the eyes of my female friends. They’d tell me everything from secret gossip to shopping-trip recaps, who they liked and who they hated, problems and positives. And half the time, I’d be on the other end of the line with a boner. I’m not saying that I would touch it or anything. But it was definitely there.
The feelings I had for Alison, though, were above that. That is not to say that those feelings were boner-proof—far from it. But we had a deeper connection.
The phone calls with Alison were the longest, lasting well into the morning hours, held in secret, after we were told more than once by our parents to hang up and go to bed already. The nights out with Alison were the most frequent—even if she happened to be dating someone, which was often the case, there were still the movies and the diners and the hanging out after school. The spending time with Alison was the most fun. The comfort and ease we had with each other was remarkable, even more so considering the depth of my feelings for her.
She held an enormous amount of sway over me. In one conversation, she mentioned the name of her favorite men’s cologne. I purchased that cologne the next day and wore it every day thereafter. In another conversation, she told me that she thought boxer briefs were “so much more sexy” than boxers. Though I was a committed boxer-wearer at the time, I then wore boxer briefs every time we hung out—though I looked less “sexy” and more “pudding in a Ziploc bag.”
Over time, my crush on her became unbearable. High school was dragging on, and before I knew it, I’d graduate. I hoped to go away to college, and she’d stay in Philly to finish her senior year. It felt like we were approaching the end. Something had to be done. But what? The indecision was killing me.
After my relationship with Amber, I knew that a friend-to-girlfriend transition was, in theory, possible. With Amber, it was quite easy, actually. But of all the girl friends I’d had, Amber was the only one who bridged the two words and became my girlfriend. Was such a thing possible with Alison?
I thought about it for weeks. Should I tell her how I felt? Or should I just keep quiet about it? I weighed the risks against the rewards. Either way, the stakes were high. If I confessed my feelings and she felt the same, BLAMMO. I’m not saying we would get married right away, but I’d start calling around to check the availability of certain wedding reception venues, just to be safe. On the other hand, if I told her how I felt and she didn’t feel the same, it would be catastrophic. At a minimum, it would compromise our friendship. Realistically, we probably wouldn’t be friends any longer. Worst-case scenario: the whole neighborhood would learn what a fool I was and I’d have to start a new life somewhere west of the Mississippi. Maybe in Montana. I’d finally be able to put my knowledge of that state to practical use.
With the benefits (eternal wedded bliss) and the dangers (expulsion from the city) of a confession being just about equal, I had to make a decision based on another factor. Which outcome did I think would be more likely?
Alison could have her pick of any guy she wanted. That she was the prettiest girl in the neighborhood was up for debate as much as whether Christmas was a better holiday than Arbor Day. Her boyfriends were usually the best athletes and the best-looking. In my corner, I’d had one post-puberty girlfriend—for about two months. I was on year four of my clear braces. And again, the cape.
Again, the cape.
It didn’t look good.
I made my determination based on the idea that Alison must have known how I felt about her. We were great friends, yes. But cute girls didn’t have non-cute guy friends in that way. Maybe she didn’t want to acknowledge it, but her friends and family must have pointed it out to her. “This guy likes you—how do you not see it?” I could see her older sister telling her. So she had to know about my crush on her. And that she knew I was crazy about her but did not so much as even hint about it—and believe me, I analyzed every conversation for any shred of evidence of such a thing—was all the answer that I needed.
I decided to say nothing, to keep my feelings to myself. It was better to be her ever-loyal, functionally gay best friend than to lose it all. I knew that keeping my feelings to myself would be difficult, but the possible negative outcome of the alternative would be worse. And I’d leave for college pretty soon, so I only had to hold on for a little while longer.
A few years ago, I went on a blind date with a woman who said the strongest, purest feelings she’d ever felt were for someone in junior high. As I had already had a few beers, I understood this to mean that she was in love with a seventh-grader, and I told her that though I was open-minded about a lot of things, this was not one of them—unless he had some sort of developmental disability and was actually nineteen or twenty years old but had the cognitive abilities of a twelve-year-old. If that were the case, I’d be cool with it.
No, she said. The strongest and purest feelings she’d ever had for someone was when both of them had been in junior high.
“Oh,” I said. “Oh. Right.”
Alas, we did not see each other again. But what she said stuck with me. At first, I thought it was sad. How could an attractive woman in her mid-twenties not develop any greater feelings in her life than the ones she’d felt for someone in junior high? What an incredible head case she must be. And since she didn’t call me back, what an incredibly good judge of character she must be.
But after spending some time thinking about it, I found myself understanding her sentiment. When we are young and have feelings for someone, we have those feelings without condition or consequence. There are no ulterior motives. It’s not a case of “I like you because I find you really sexy and I’m going to a destination wedding in the Bahamas in six weeks and I’d love to bring you so we can fuck in the hot tub.” Nor is it, “I like you because I’m getting pressure from my family and friends to settle down and start a family and you seem like you have few catastrophic defects in your family history and you have a good job, so you’ll do.”
And because we have no concept of what a real adult relationship involves, our imaginations are free to run wild. We don’t realize that sometimes the people we date will lock us out of the apartment because we’re on our way home drunk (again), or flush our cell phone down the toilet because they suspect us of cheating. In our minds, everything involved in dating is rainbows and roses and slow dances. When we’re young and have feelings for someone, we have them because we just want to be around that person. That’s it and that’s all.
And when I thought about what my blind date said to me that night, I thought about Alison. And I thought about “Alison.” And I thought about Elvis Costello singing the line “My aim is true” over and over again at the end of the song. For all my Elvis Costello scholarship, it only took me a dozen years to figure out what he meant.
236 pounds of class vice president
As my junior year wound down, it was time to take stock of my high school career and tackle something I had been forcing myself not to think about until I absolutely had to: the eight murders I committed in 1989.
I’m just kidding, of course.* I’m talking about the college application process. After all, the point of going to the Prep was to get into a good college. It was the next logical step in my pursuit of world domination and my mom being able to tell everyone she knew, “My son Jason is going to [name of prestigious university]. Don’t know if I told you that already, but he is. Yeah, so . . . what are you up to again?”
I didn’t really have a preference as to which college to attend. I was getting advice from all quarters: Go to the best school you get into. It’s not the school, but the education. Go south or west to get out of your comfort zone. Stay in the Northeast because long-distance travel is such a hassle, especially over the holidays. Small school
s are better. Big schools are better. Stick with the Jesuits. Get away from the Jesuits. The better the school is, the worse the girls look.
But my list of colleges didn’t matter at that moment. I would worry about which school to attend when it came time to apply and again when the acceptance and rejection letters started coming in. Right now, I could only control my viability as a college applicant.
My grades were pretty good, but not great. Over the course of my three years at the Prep, I discovered that I loved and excelled in Classics, so I took a number of Latin and Greek classes. I don’t want to say it was love at first sight—those first weeks of mastering villa est villa Romana were slow going—but there was something about the order and the structure of Latin and Greek that appealed to me. It was like cracking a code, and when you figured it out, everything was neat and orderly. I also liked that we Classics nerds were a small group. Out of two hundred kids in my class, there were only a dozen of us in Greek II. It wasn’t snobbery. That we took these classes didn’t mean we were smarter than other students: my knowledge of math never advanced beyond that last 144 square on the multiplication table. But in keeping with my code-cracking metaphor, we were the select few chosen to undertake this important task, like a group of specially trained soldiers (specially trained soldiers who had 1.5 sexual partners between them).
In most of my other classes, my grades were fine. Science was another matter. I had always been interested in big-picture science, stuff like explosions or transplants or experiments that turn a man into a hawk. But I was bored to shit by the micro-level stuff and showed little aptitude for it. Whatever hope I had for becoming a mad scientist was crushed during junior year, in chemistry.
236 Pounds of Class Vice President Page 14