September

Back to School

The palate of my high school years can most likely be reduced down to four flavors: a slice of pizza, a French fry, a beer and a bong. Every other tasting was either secondary or non-existent. My friend once got so high that he forgot that I was riding in the car with him. While stopped at a red light, he looked over at me and screamed. Of course it was the other way around on the day of graduation or thereabouts, when I was the one driving and he was in the passenger seat. He screamed again, only this time not because he was stoned, it was because I was about to run into the back of a schoolbus. Which I did. I had been looking at a dead rabbit on the road and didn’t notice the bus had come to a stop in front of me. After I crashed into it, the kids opened the emergency exit door at the back of the bus and jumped down onto the hood of my car, laughing.

Other memorable and symbolic sensations from that time concern the passion of romance. The taste of a girl’s tongue in your mouth. The shape of a breast beneath a jacket, a couple of shirts and a bra. Walking my girlfriend to her next class and giving a kiss when the bell rang. It was more like a perfunctory motion for me than a case of passionate attraction. It’s just what you were supposed to do. Same as driving over to the golf course and making out on prom night. Somewhere between novelty and a ritual that had to be learned and adapted to. But that’s what love is anyway, isn’t it? My grandmother once overheard me on the phone asking a girl out and she told me it sounded like I was arranging a business meeting.

Of course, back in those days, people weren’t “out” about being gay, and I’m sure I never thought bad about using words like fag or queer or whatever. My sister didn’t even come out until later when she was in college. I wonder how much pain it caused her to go to the prom with that dorky boy. I wonder if they went to the golf course to make out. Transgender? We wouldn’t have known how to even process that concept.

Racially, the school was predominately white, with some African American kids bussed in from the city. Once my parents got divorced, we moved to the city and I got bussed in too. A lot of those kids were my friends since they were in marching band with me. I guess this one African American girl had a crush on me. I found a note that said she wanted to fuck me dry. Too bad I wasn’t more sexually competent. She was gorgeous. Other than that, as far as racial diversity goes, there was one Arab, who we teased mercilessly, but no other ethnic representation as far as I remember.

We had secret rooms and places to congregate, both publicly and privately. The wall in the tech booth we climbed over to eat our lunch. The classroom where they stored the extra desks. The woods. Parking lots. A field. You name it. The spot on top of the walk in cooler at my job where I would climb up and take a nap. Did that really happen?