Party of One

by Dave Holmes

  We never talked about it again.

  Phong No was the most effeminate kid of the bunch, and he didn’t seem to care about it. He was obsessed with Dynasty. His s’s were so sibilant you could hear them two classrooms over. He wrote a song about fruit salad, to the tune of Bananarama’s “Cruel Summer,” that he would sing at lunchtime:

  It’s a fruit, fruit salad

  Nanners and waa-aa-termelons, a fruit

  Fruit salad

  It makes your mouth drool with saliva, it’s true

  True! Fruit salad [etc.]

  Phong No either couldn’t change his behavior or didn’t feel a need to. Either way, in retrospect, Phong No is kind of my hero.

  At the time, of course, outside of the Candy Store, we mostly pretended we didn’t know him.

  We couldn’t stay inside the Candy Store forever though. In the Catholic school tradition, we were also forced to be on sports teams at all times. When you’re thirteen and the kind of person who’d rather talk about the quick evolution of Sheena Easton from Scottish pixie into some kind of angry sex worker, you kind of just go through the motions. You warm up and do drills with the team, and then when it is time for a scrimmage, you mostly sit on the bench. It’s an unspoken arrangement you have with the coaches, and it’s mutually beneficial; you would be a distraction on the field at best, an actual hazard at worst. So the gang from the Candy Store spent a lot of time on the perimeter of the playing field. We talked about whom we’d seen on the most recent Solid Gold (“I have the Nena album, if anyone wants to tape it,” Derek told us). We discussed which track on Culture Club’s Colour by Numbers was the best one (then as now, I rode hard for “Church of the Poison Mind”). We talked about how Pat Benatar had little individual secret goodbye handshakes for each of her fellow dime-a-dance girls in the “Love Is a Battlefield” video (“Those women have seen things,” Tim said. “Those women have lived.”)

  In September and May, when the weather was warm, scrimmages would be shirts vs. skins, which would add at least two layers of emotional complexity to a situation that was already fraught. The rest of the year we’d wear red and blue fishnet tops over our sports clothes, which in the wake of Madonna’s “Lucky Star” video were right on trend.

  But there were some boys—most boys, really—who when it came time for practices and scrimmages instinctively knew what to do. They’d look down the field and calculate a clear route all the way to the end, like some kind of robot sports people, like the Terminator, and they’d run like hell, and they’d score however many points you get for taking the ball there. And the other kids in jerseys of the same color would give them high-fives or chest-bumps or—I swear this is true—just pat them, without hang-ups or hesitation, right on the butt. And the owner of the butt that had been patted would just accept it. Like: my friend has goosed me; this means I have done well. It was straight-up fascinating to me, and it is a thing that even now I cannot imagine myself doing, not even now that I can drink.

  But here’s the part that I truly couldn’t and still can’t quite believe: sometimes a boy would send the ball to the wrong person, or someone from the other team would knock him down, or he would break one of the five million rules about where your hands or feet are supposed to go, and his plan wouldn’t work out at all. It might even result in the other team scoring. It might result in the other team winning. And if it did, this boy would get upset for a second or two, and then just shake it off. He wouldn’t worry about what everyone else thought about him, or about how many rungs his mistake had knocked him down the social ladder, or about whether he actually did suck. He would just have made a mistake, as people do, and he and his friends would live to touch one another’s butts another day. This was astonishing to me. This was like flight.

  Jim was one of these boys. He came to Priory from a different grade school, so I met him at age twelve, fully formed. But, like, formed out of marble. He was self-assured, he was cool. He had what young and/or terrible people were recently calling swag. He threw a spiral so perfect even I could notice it. In our first few football games against other boys’ schools, he scored about 50 percent of the touchdowns and exactly 100 percent of the ones I noticed. He ascended quickly and decisively into student council. I was fascinated by him. I noticed what he wore and how he walked—and talked and laughed and coughed and yawned and was—and I tried to mimic it. He had jet-black hair and pool-water blue eyes, and dude could wear the hell out of a pair of Toughskins. When we read Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice in the winter trimester of form one, and Aschenbach described Tadzio as a Greek statue, I thought: Oh, I feel you, Aschenbach.

  Everybody liked Jim. But I really liked Jim. And it thrilled and frightened and confused me at the same time. I felt constant, sexy panic.

  When I started to have erections, and I started to, you know, do something about them, I would force myself to think about Teri Copley, the maid from NBC’s Saturday night sitcom We Got It Made. She seemed correct to me: blond, busty, the mutually agreed-upon heterosexual male fantasy. And at the beginning, my desire to be normal would provide enough fuel. Really, pretty much anything will do for a boy in junior high. But then, oh, no, oh, God help me, one of those sophomore JV football players’ calves would pop into my head, or the beefy forearm of a senior. No, Dave, no. This is about Teri. Focus on Teri. That’s right. And then without my even hearing him come in, Corey Hart would show up out of nowhere and I’d realize I was in the jail cell from the “Sunglasses At Night” video. He would just rip off that white shirt and let me see the whole chest-hair situation the cover of First Offense hinted at. And then I’d come, and the joy would rush out of my body, and guilt and shame and nausea would rush in to fill the space, and I’d pray to God to just let me hold on to the Teri Copley fantasy through the whole process, just once.

  (Teri’s a born-again Christian preacher these days, incidentally. I take credit for making the introduction between her and God.)

  If the boys of the Candy Store were going through the same struggle at the same time, which time has revealed that about half of us were—Ned spent a lot of time checking on the whereabouts of Brian, a form-two boy with a cool haircut; Derek always laughed a little too loudly at the young English teacher’s jokes; Phong No was Phong No—we kept it to ourselves. We threw our energy into Tears for Fears. We had no choice.

  My parents eventually relented and got us cable, and the importance of MTV in all this simply cannot be overstated. If you were a kid on the margins, you could turn on your television and get a window into a world you could see yourself in someday. It was reassuring, an “It Gets Better” video with a beat. I wanted to be like these strange people in Day-Glo clothing on my MTV. I longed to be free and sexual and unrepressed; you know, British. I requested a Frankie Say Relax Don’t Do It T-shirt for Christmas, two sizes too large, as style dictated. I got it, and I wore it often, and I had no idea I was telling the world to hold off on ejaculating.

  I also watched USA’s “Night Flight” late on Fridays and Saturdays, when they were most likely to play the weird stuff. And I rode my bike into town each week to buy Smash Hits and No.1, the two glossy UK pop magazines the local newsstand imported. Smash Hits and No.1 gave you bite-sized interviews with the likes of A-ha and Go West. They provided the lyrics for songs like King’s “Love and Pride” and Paul Hardcastle’s “19.” They devoted their back pages to the charts, which were full of familiar hits by Madonna and Billy Ocean, but also mysterious UK up-and-comers like Steve Arrington and Hazell Dean. Every song and artist featured in these magazines instantly and automatically became one of my favorites, whether I was actually familiar with them or not.*2

  I remember where I was the first time I heard Simple Minds’ “Don’t You Forget About Me.” This is easy because I was where I always was from ages twelve to sixteen, which was in our family room, two inches in front of the television. But it quite simply knocked me dead. It had everything I wanted from a song and a video: a sweeping chorus. A Scot in
a tweed suit. Scenes from The Breakfast Club. It was fresh, urgent, vital. I heard it the way I imagine the people of 1971 heard “What’s Going On” for the first time, except the cause of our generation was getting teenagers to see the new Molly Ringwald movie. (We did see it opening weekend, by the way, us Candy Store Boys, despite it having been rated R. It was playing at the Crestwood Plaza two-screener, whose other theater was playing Places in the Heart. We convinced our parents and the box office of this cinema that we were spending a Saturday afternoon watching a Sally Field/Danny Glover 1920s farm drama, the way groups of adolescent boys are known to do.)

  I had to have “Don’t You Forget About Me.” I had to get this song inside of me. I hopped on my bike and went to the Record Bar with my allowance in my pocket. It had just arrived, as had a brand-new single from a band so fresh they hadn’t even been featured in Smash Hits or No.1 yet: The Smiths’ “How Soon Is Now?” I pulled it out and stared deeply into it. The guy at the counter saw a kindred soul, despite a grand whoosh of hair that blocked one eye. “Wanna hear it?”

  I nodded yes. He grabbed it out of my hands, stuck a 45 adapter in its hole, popped it on the turntable, and introduced me to Morrissey. “I am the son and the heir of a shyness that is criminally vulgar.”

  I was hearing my story without even realizing it.

  I bought it immediately, and a tiny Smiths button besides.

  Biking home, I ran into Andy, a big, sporty kid from my class. “You went to Record Bar? Lemme see.” I handed him my bag. “What are The Smiths?”

  “They’re a band. They’re British.”

  “Ah.” He nodded his approval.

  “They’re awesome.”

  He looked harder into the austere yellow cover and the blocky, utilitarian lettering. And then he looked at me. “This stuff looks weird.” But it didn’t sound like an insult. He said it with something like fear. Respect.

  “Yeah. They are. They’re weird.”

  I smiled, because I finally had a thing. I was weird. We were weird: me and the Candy Store Boys and Morrissey and Go West and Su Pollard. We were the future. We were not to be fucked with.

  I also smiled because a bigger kid was going through my Record Bar shopping bag and I didn’t want anyone driving past to think that I was being robbed or bullied.

  * * *

  *1 What’s especially odd is that in 1984 you could get called a faggot, and then the guy who said it to you would put his headphones back on and resume listening to Twisted Sister or Mötley Crüe or whatever other group of men in bustiers, fishnet stockings, and full faces of L’Oréal products he had been enjoying before he accused you of being gay for holding your books the wrong way.

  *2 No, but really: Smash Hits hipped me to the existence of a UK Top 10 hit called “Starting Together” by a young Brit named Su Pollard, who got a two-page spread and a pull-quote: “I used to do tap dance shows for me mum, right there on the lino!” I never did hear her song, but her sassy specs, creative name spelling, and devil-may-care hair spikes convinced me she was the real deal. I wrote her name across the spine of my binder in bold letters: SU POLLARD. In the years since, I have done my research, and it turns out Su Pollard was the star of a family-hour sitcom called Hi-de-Hi! and a regular on the morning chat shows. What I did at age thirteen is the equivalent of a British kid today trying to earn credibility by scrawling KELLY RIPA across the cover of a notebook.

  When you’re in the middle of your teenage years, all you want to do is be an adult. And in the middle of the 1980s, pop culture seemed to want that for you. Teenagers voluntarily listened to albums by middle-aged and/or bald guys like Phil Collins, Peter Gabriel, and Steve Winwood. The big show on ABC was Moonlighting, where Bruce Willis and Cybill Shepherd—both openly in their thirties—solved crimes and threatened to have sex with each other. In the monologue of the first episode of the 1986–1987 season of Saturday Night Live, host Sigourney Weaver brought out playwright Christopher Durang to give a quick, tongue-in-cheek dissertation on the work of German playwright Bertolt Brecht. I will repeat: there was a playwright on Saturday Night Live once. These were heady times. It felt like American culture wanted me to be thirty-two with a loft in TriBeCa, to read all the books, to be glib.

  I was fifteen in 1986—too young for a proper job, too old to spend all day at the neighborhood pool, just the right age to start plotting an escape. Having left the Candy Store behind for the summer, Ned and I hatched a plan: there was a summer school for artsy kids in St. Louis called the Mark Twain Summer Institute, Mr. Twain being one of Missouri’s prized offspring. You would select a course of study—creative writing, dance, drama, painting, or, for some reason, economics—and spend six weeks of your summer working at it. It was all we wanted to do. (It was almost all we wanted to do; I had seen an ad for the Bennington July Program in the back of my parents’ New York Times Magazine. A summer doing white drugs in Vermont with young Bret Easton Ellises would have been a nonstarter.) I begged my parents to enroll me in the creative writing program for the summer. They did. So did Ned’s. We couldn’t wait.

  We arrived dressed exactly as we would have been on a casual spring Friday at Priory—madras shorts, a sensible Polo—and immediately felt out of place. On the first day of Mark Twain, it was clear: the weird kids were in charge here. These were kids who took dance seriously, kids who had thought their haircuts all the way through. These were boys who could rock a Guess jean with confidence. These were wearers of black trench coats, even in the punishing Missouri humidity. There would be a new social order here.

  The creative writing teacher was a professor at nearby Washington University with a pushbroom of a mustache, and the class was a cross section of a city I’d only seen a sliver of. Black kids from up North. Old-money kids from the Central West End. A girl in a black silk cape and matching lipstick—Tabitha, with a long i and the accent on the second syllable. Surely she had been regular-style Tabitha when school had let out in May, but here she would be Tabytha.

  And then a boy flounced in, a few minutes late for the first session. A boy with blond ringlets over his right eye, wearing a black turtleneck sweater. A leather satchel—a purse?—hung off his shoulder. “Ugh,” he said, sweeping his swoosh of hair off his forehead, “forgive me, I’m Frederick and I’m always late, I’m the worst.” He threw himself into an empty chair. “What have I missed?”

  Coming from an all-male high school where we expressed our masculinity by being terrified to stand out in any way, I had simply never seen a person like Frederick. He gesticulated wildly, turtleneck sleeves pulled far past his hands, like a hyperactive Muppet. He was proudly effeminate. He might as well have been from another planet. I was fascinated.

  We spent the first class getting to know one another, talking about what we liked to read and what we hoped to write and who we were. Conversations like children imagine grown-ups having. Frederick liked Less Than Zero—“Well, who doesn’t?” I said. I hadn’t read it yet—and wanted to write something real, raw, poetic. I was into John Cheever and wanted to write short stories. “I like your hair, Frederick,” said one of the North County girls. “You look like that guy from Simply Red.” And he did. “We’ll call you Simply Fred,” said another. He hid his face behind his turtleneck sleeves and laughed. “Oh, I hate it!” He loved it.

  Our first assignment was to walk to the nearby St. Louis Art Museum and look around. Get inspired. Find something we like and stare at it until it begins to look unfamiliar. Just go interact with art and meet back by the front door in an hour. When we got back, we got a project: write a story about what we’d just seen. If it was a portrait, tell that person’s life story. If it was a statue, make that person a character. If it was abstract, tell a story with the emotion that it made you feel. There were no wrong answers. I had literally never been told to do anything like this. I nearly cried, I was so happy.

  Ned and I were in heaven at Mark Twain. We consoled the drama kids through their weekly breakdowns. We read someone’s
older sister’s issues of Tatler. We watched the dance class rehearse the piece they had choreographed about the Museum of Westward Expansion; these motherfuckers were actually dancing about architecture!

  We watched one boy from the dance class in particular, every day. Thick like a football player, but graceful. Masculine, yet, you know, in a dance class rehearsing a piece about a Mondrian painting. An ass and a pair of shoulders that were as exquisite as anything I’d seen at the museum. David. (No, I mean his actual name was David. But his resemblance to the statue was also not a thing you would miss.)

  Ned said: “Everyone here is beautiful.”

  I said: “I know.”

  “I mean, like, the women are amazing here. We should, like, let’s rate the women here.”

  “They’re all so amazing.”

  “But, like, on a secret scale. Like, just our thing. So nobody knows what we’re talking about.”

  “Totally.”

  “Should it be, like, numbers? No, numbers are banal. How about, like, breads?”

  “So…like, a scale of Wonder White to…rye? Something like that?”

  “Right. Except Wonder’s the bottom.”

  “I love Wonder Bread.” Ned gave me a look. I made a mental note: expand bread horizons.

  Ned made up his mind: “Let’s go cheese. Let’s do it on a cheese scale. Like, at the top is Gouda.”

  “Gouda.”

  “Yeah. Like, Ornella Muti from Flash Gordon is so Gouda.”

  “You think so?”

  “Oh, absolutely. I find Italian women far more attractive than American women.”

  So we settled on cheese as the scale we would use to talk about women, and we did it on a scale of Gouda to Velveeta, which was a betrayal of my own personal taste, because I loved Velveeta, and also because we were using this scale to rate women, which neither of us actually liked. But we did it a lot: Susanna Hoffs was Gouda; the other Bangles were mostly Swiss. Sandra Bernhard was Stilton with Gouda potential. The drama teacher was Gouda for an older woman—aged Gouda.