Gawky

by Margot Leitman

  Jackie told me she dated older guys who actually remembered the ’70s. These were borderline-men who didn’t have to stand on a few phone books to make out with her. The guys at my school all seemed to be the size of Webster compared to me. Already I had begun to fantasize about going to a battle of the bands at the local VFW where an older, tall, long-haired guitarist would notice me from afar while he strummed along to U2’s “All I Want Is You.” Instead, still the only guy who ever came close to that back home was Jonah Hertzberg, the guitar player with the Jew fro. Seeing another world at camp made me realize that options are truly limited when you’re a gigantic giraffe in a school full of Shetland ponies.

  It was just as well. I was still recovering from the damage that years of elementary and middle school health classes had bestowed on me. What I had taken from these lessons was that if I came into contact with a penis, I’d immediately die of AIDS. I knew I’d have to experience contact with a genital at some point or another, but Jackie Angel’s invite made me fear it would happen sooner than I expected. Out of all my many health classes, the elementary school ones were still by far the worst. Amid all the other assemblies that tried to prevent us all from ever tasting alcohol or puffing a joint, it seemed every month of fifth grade our teachers would bring some guy into the cafetorium who actually had AIDS to scare us straight. Somehow my school never had enough pencils, milk, or substitutes, yet they had the budget for an endless supply of men with AIDS. I remember one particular guy would walk through the crowd of distracted, bad-mannered fifth graders and tap a select few on the head, saying, “You, you, you, you . . . you’ve got AIDS. Statistically, that’s how many of you have AIDS.” I almost had a full-blown asthma attack from the expectation of being tapped on the head and told I had AIDS. Even though I was in only fifth grade, I had to question his wisdom. Really? I’d think to myself. Five out of 75 fifth graders in middle-class New Jersey have AIDS? But nonetheless, as a horny teenager in the making, I was listening. I believed the words of every man with AIDS who came to our school. I believed that my raging hormones would eventually kill me and that it would be best to assume that everyone had AIDS and not act on the sexual desires building up in my pubescent mind. Besides, I didn’t want to have to call that Tampax operator again in a panic; the first time was humiliating enough.

  I knew my weekend at Jackie Angel’s could be a disaster in the making. Chances were high that in due time, rolling with a girl like Jackie Angel, I would come into contact with a genital. Nonetheless, I wanted to extend my camp experience, so with my parents’ permission, I boarded a train to Pennsylvania. “Have fun, Margot, but not too much fun,” my mom instructed. She was too distracted by the recent death of her mother to see the one thousand red flags about this trip. I was fourteen, traveling alone, across state borders, to visit an older girl with bangs she had never met. Instead of a lecture on safety, she gave me a hug, sent me on my way, and went back to knitting her forever-unfinished afghan.

  Jackie Angel’s house was exactly as I had imagined it. It was a home run by an aging hippie—very wooden with glass Mason jars filled with lentils, raisins, and almonds all around. My mother, being a fellow tall girl, kept no glass anywhere in the vicinity of a hardwood floor. She knew better. Did Jackie Angel live in a world where tall girls didn’t shatter every breakable they encountered? That summer alone I had destroyed a glass coffee table, my mother’s antique teacup, and a Precious Moments figurine (okay, that one was on purpose). I had managed to shatter all that even with being gone for three weeks of summer. Jackie Angel lived in a tall girl’s parallel universe, and I wanted in.

  She took me to her attic, which smelled musty and was covered in tapestries. She blasted the Guess Who and offered me a joint. I had been so preoccupied with my fear of genitals that I hadn’t had time to worry about drugs. I said yes, of course, and as “These Eyes” played I put the soggy joint to my lips, the whole time thinking, It figures I would turn to drugs. All the greats have. I knew everyone in my father’s record collection had smoked pot, including his dream girl Joni Mitchell. I wanted to rock too. After a laughing fit in the shower, and the amazing discovery that plums “taste soooo friggin’ good,” I decided that I liked marijuana and remained stoned for the rest of my trip.

  My second night there, Jackie Angel took me to a party at one of her cool guy friends’ houses. I don’t know where his parents were; for all I knew he might have lived there alone! “Hey, Margot, this is my friend John. Man, John, I haven’t seen you in like ages!” Jackie Angel and John embraced and then he came over to me. John looked as if he could be one of the guys she knew who remembered the ’70s.

  “What’s up? I’m John,” he said, flicking his cigarette into an open can of Natty Light.

  “What?” I asked, losing focus and staring directly at his tattoo, a skull on his left bicep with the word Dad underneath. The only people I knew with tattoos were my parents’ Vietnam vet friends. I had never met someone close to my age who was already inked up. Didn’t you have to be over eighteen to get a tattoo? And if you were under eighteen, didn’t you need parental permission? John seemed like he was neither over eighteen nor under any sort of parental supervision. He had definitely gotten that tattoo illegally. Wow. I was playing with the big boys.

  “I said, I’m John. You’re a friend of Jackie’s?”

  I nodded, my eyes wide.

  “Cool.” John smiled, just long enough to show the gap between his two front teeth. Hot. He lit up another Marlboro Red, gestured for me to sit down, and then ran his fingers through his long brown hair. He had the same dirty, dangerous, and deviant vibe as Sebastian Bach, and I instantly fell in love with him. And he was taller than me! This was my first opportunity to make out with someone who didn’t need to stand on a bleacher first. Next to John, I actually felt small, the way a girl really wants to feel. I could act tough, tortured, and misunderstood all I wanted, but really I just wanted to feel small and dainty and to be swept up in the arms of some big strong man who could make me forget for just one moment how self-conscious I really was. Staring into John’s eyes, I knew this moment could actually happen with him. Then, in the next instant, I remembered from my school assemblies that he would definitely give me AIDS. But talking had to be okay, right? We chatted for a bit and I found out that John was seventeen years old, a high school dropout who had been kicked out of his parents’ house. Now it was confirmed that the tattoo had been acquired under illicit circumstances. Nothing was sexier to me than a guy who tattooed the very name of the person who threw him out of the house on his bicep. The second his dad saw that skull tattoo, he’d surely offer him his room back. When Jackie Angel and I finally left, we stood in the driveway saying our good-byes, and John grabbed me and kissed me passionately in front of the entire party. I had to stand on my tippytoes to kiss him! Something shifted in my burgundy velvet pants stolen from the camp costume room. This wasn’t love; this was lust. Only this time Bobby Brown was nowhere in sight. John was a real-life person, not a music video, and I lusted for him.

  I proceeded to spend the rest of the weekend smoking weed with John and Jackie Angel. On the second day we helped Mrs. Angel clean out the attic. She asked me to carry down the antique glass Christmas ornaments that had been given to her by her grandmother so she could put them in a safer place. Honored that Mrs. Angel trusted me with her most prized possessions, I carefully stacked the boxes and headed down the stairs, making sure to look back at John sexily on my third step, the way I had seen Greta Garbo do in one of the black-and-white movies my father forced me to watch while my brother took copious notes. I gave John the eye, making sure to blink twice, and then slowly turned my head back so my hair would swing as if it were in slow motion. Unfortunately, my left foot missed the next step, causing me to fly down the stairs on my bony butt. Crashing down a flight of stairs is quite possibly the least sexy move a girl can make, aside from stepping in dog shit during a first kiss.

  I stood up when I reached the bottom,
shouting, “It’s cool, guys, it’s all good. I’m fine. Really. I do stuff like this all the time.”

  No one cared if I was all right. All eyes were on the bloody glass ornament massacre I had created. Not one antique had been spared. This was total annihilation. I had ruined all their Christmases forevermore.

  Right then I knew I was in no position to be running with a crew as hip and coordinated as Jackie Angel’s friends. Everything Jackie touched and everyone she knew was the embodiment of cool. John was no exception. Somehow, though, John and I pretended we made sense for the rest of the trip. My final night there was spent making out with John under a completed afghan while a group of Pennsylvania stoners sat around watching Streets of Fire. I knew they could hear us, but I liked pretending that the colorful yarn was just as good as a wall.

  I was really into the heat of the moment. This was the furthest I had ever gone with a guy, and John seemed to have all the right moves. His Dad tattoo was uncovered, our pants were half off, and underneath the multicolored afghan, I felt a genital move toward me. It didn’t come too close, but it definitely brushed my thigh, and I just knew I was milliseconds away from contracting the AIDS virus. What if it came closer? Being a high school dropout, John probably had a lot of time on his hands to gain some heavy-duty sexual experience. I had basically none, so I thought back to my school assemblies for guidance. I could hear that scary man with AIDS threaten me, “You, you, you . . . you’ve got AIDS.” I took both hands and pushed it away. No! No AIDS! No penis! I would not be a statistic!

  Then the fear set in. Oh my God! Pre-cum! Pre-cum! Overheard conversations from the descendants of the White Lipstick Posse as well as my horse camp counselors had taught me all about pre-cum. In a large coat closet during a Bat Mitzvah at Temple Beth Ahm, Jessica Rosenstein had lectured several of us girls on the dangers of hand jobs. “I’m just saying, the second you touch it, even though you can’t see it, pre-cum just leaps onta you. It’s, like, microscopic. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.” I was positive that AIDS had come out in John’s pre-cum, and in that moment of pushing his penis away, it soaked into my bloodstream through my hands and destroyed my life.

  Seconds after this thought, I heard, “Margot, time to go, girl!” Jackie Angel’s hippie mom was coming to drive me to the train station to go home. There was no time to wash the AIDS off my hands; we were running late. THERE WAS NO TIME! I unfolded myself from the afghan, quickly said good-bye, and then raced upstairs—weaving among Mason jars, a disgraced, terminally ill whore on her way back to meet her parents in Jersey.

  I ducked into the back of Mrs. Angel’s station wagon as we headed off to the train depot, both terrified and secretly pleased with myself for having such a wild weekend. I stared at the slender hands that had just touched their first genital and feared for my life. I didn’t want to say my thoughts out loud for fear of losing both Jackie Angel and her mom’s respect. Theirs was the only place I could go to escape my mundane existence. If they knew I was freaking out, I could lose essential cool points with the coolest girl ever and the tallest and baddest boy I had ever met. John was the only guy who ever liked me besides Jonah Hertzberg and the weird guy who gave me T-shirts.

  Just before my heart leapt out of my chest, Jackie’s mom made a brief pit stop at 7-Eleven. She returned to the car with a box of Entenmann’s soft-batch chocolate-chip cookies. I loved soft-batch cookies, but we never had them at home. My mom had moved on from Pecan Sandies and now stocked the house only with Lorna Doones, a cookie reserved exclusively for British hags over seventy. The Entenmann’s looked and smelled especially good to me, considering I had been stoned for three days straight and just finished a hearty dry-humping session. At the same time, I was positive I would accidentally ingest AIDS via the cookies. I didn’t care anymore. I wanted to taste them so badly I was willing to become a statistic. When Mrs. Angel tossed the open box into the backseat asking in what seemed to be slow motion, “You want some?” I knew I was screwed.

  I looked down at the box, tempted by chocolate and sweet satisfaction. What was she doing? She was offering me a box of the most delicious cookies in the whole entire world. The temptation was killing me; I was staring death in the face and it smelled magnificent.

  Like a savage beast, I tore into the box, holding nothing back. Well, Margot, are you happy now? If there was a shot in hell that you didn’t get AIDS before, you have blown your chances now. Enjoy your cookies, slutsky.

  I savored every bite of the twelve soft-batch cookies I consumed in that backseat, licking the crumbs off my fingertips. I knew when I got home I would only have stale Pecan Sandies to gorge myself on. Plus, after being stoned for the past three days, they tasted extra, extra delicious. I wasn’t sure if AIDS could be transmitted via pre-cum from a penis brush-off onto an unwashed hand into a soft-batch chocolate-chip cookie into the bloodstream. My teachers never mentioned it.

  I never uttered a word to anyone about my inner fears—I hoped I was just being neurotic. Eventually the terror wore off and I fantasized about turning the whole experience into a possible cash cow. I contemplated writing a letter to Entenmann’s telling them my story as a testimonial to how much I loved their cookies. I fantasized about getting my big break when they made a commercial of my risqué tale starring me. But alas, I never wrote that letter to Entenmann’s, but instead wrote letters to John.

  CHAPTER 12:

  Lesbian Shoes and Baby Teeth

  High school began the day after my trip to Jackie Angel’s house, and from the start it was nothing but stress. Right away there was a blood drive, which I opted out of on the off-chance I had contracted AIDS from the penis brush-off/cookie ingestion. I looked like a real jerk for refusing to give blood for sick people, but I blamed it on my vegetarian diet, claiming I had no blood to spare. Medically it made no sense but I couldn’t handle the pressure of possibly infecting innocent people after eating all those possibly pre-cum–infected cookies.

  Also, I was getting weird bruises all over my body. There were purple and blue marks on my upper arms and thighs, giving me a Courtney Love/punk rock look that I loved to admire in the full-length mirror in my parents’ room. Bruises gave me a damaged look that really aided me when pouring my soul out into my journal alone in my upstairs bedroom. However, the bruises were for my eyes only. Considering I was into a rock ’n’ roll man’s look, I didn’t often show any skin. My long-sleeved butterfly-collared shirts were usually worn with a tank top underneath, paired with jeans, and usually with a scarf to accent. I had learned a little about fashion while watching Roger Daltrey in Tommy one afternoon on HBO and knew that less is more. So there were no rumors going around regarding my bruises about me being beaten at home and/or having an abusive boyfriend. Of course, in order to have an abusive boyfriend, one must have a boyfriend in the first place, which I did not.

  But the bruises persisted, and after rocking a black tank top à la Joan Jett one afternoon at home, my parents got worried. One day I left school early so my mom could take me to the doctor. It turned out I was severely anemic. This meant that I had very low iron count in my blood, probably due to my sudden and strict vegetarianism brought on by trying to emulate Jackie Angel at camp.

  When the doctor offered his diagnosis, my mom had trouble controlling her glee. For her, this was a tiny victory, as she believed I had quit eating meat just to make her life more difficult. It must have been a hassle for my mother to have to make a separate meal for me each night, but I felt like meat was something I just had to take a stand against. I wasn’t sure exactly why, but it felt good to be actively protesting against something.

  “So, Doctor, this means that Margot will have to reintroduce meat back into her diet, then?”

  “Not necessarily,” he said, and I watched my mother’s face fall. “She just needs to eat foods high in iron, like spinach and beans. Here’s a list of some good vegetarian options.”

  My mom scanned it, looking disappointed.

  The doctor continued:
“And she needs to take iron pills. But with the pills and an altered diet, the bruises should clear up quite quickly.”

  We left the office mostly feeling relieved that nothing serious was wrong. Although she was uninterested in making burgers out of lentils, she was especially happy nothing major was ailing me. I sulked a little on the car ride back knowing that without my punk rock bruises I would no longer resemble a more articulate Nancy Spungen. At home, the phone was ringing, and it was my friend Derek calling to see if I was okay. Derek was a fun guy whom I’d known for years and often paired up with on class assignments because he, too, valued the social rather than the academic aspects of working as a team. He was in the class that I was taken out of to go to the doctor’s and had seemed concerned when I’d left early. Usually anytime Derek or I left a class it was to fake sick to get out of an exam. We even had prewritten cues to back each other up. For example, if I faked a headache to go to the nurse’s, as I walked out the door Derek was always supposed to ask, “Wow, Margot, what’s with all these headaches?” This was to reinforce that my headaches were a recurring problem, not an isolated incident, to add to their believability. So when I left early for a real doctor’s appointment, Derek was taken a little aback.

  “Are you okay?” he asked, prepared for the worst. “What did the doctor say?”

  “It’s nothing. I was diagnosed with anemia, and I’m being treated for it.”

  “Oh,” he said, sounding serious. “Will you be in school tomorrow?”