Here is another example of my life (rather this isn’t an example, it is a story; I want to say a parable, but I know that too is wrong): ninth grade. The first time I got drunk purposefully. (Once, in fifth grade, I had without trying.) I had gone over to a neighbor’s house because his parents were out of town. There was no one watching Bobby. He was a year younger than me. Bobby was nowhere as cool as his name implies. He was pissy, immature and annoying. He was also one of the few people I had to hang out with in my neighborhood. There simply weren’t many kids. And to drink and watch porn — how could I say no, regardless of how much I despised him?
His house had a satellite and we would watch the Playboy channel and drink when his parents were gone. This was over a summer break — after ninth grade. It had to be.
(Although the summer had just started and it is so difficult to remember what happened what summer. Does that happen to you? Did I learn to drive stick this summer or that? Did I meet that girl at camp between these school years or those? And usually you just have to make it up because you have no one to consult with. Although there are those rare times where you can sit down with someone and say, “Do you remember the time we went swimming with the bike in the pool?”
And they will say, “Yes.”
And you say, “When was that — between eighth and ninth or between ninth and tenth?”
“It was between ninth and tenth because I was going out with Anna. I remember because I called her to get her to come over and she couldn’t. So I called you. Once we got the bike in the pool, I called her again to make sure she wasn’t coming because we had driven the bike off the diving board and we were riding it on the bottom of the pool. Do you remember the bucket?”
“The one we would wedge under the ladder in the pool and swim down and breathe the pocket of air? Yeah.”
And it goes on for a while. And then the commercials go off the TV and the two of you are back ignoring each other. That’s what friendships are for.)
I had been going out with Kate for barely 6 months. I was drunk; I needed to call her — as a child that age, dating another child, you cannot go a day without calling each other. Not really any different than now, although then you are in class all day together, making the phone call more redundant and dependent. So I dial. Drunk. At about 1:30 in the morning. While Skin-a-Max porn blares in the background. I don’t know if you ever have gotten the delight of watching the Playboy channel. As a child, Playboy was a synonym for porn. A brand.
Porn implies you get to see nudity. People fucking. See it more than have it implied. In that regard, the Playboy channel was a huge disappointment. It didn’t show anything but tits. Sex might have been on-screen, but genitals weren’t. Sex occurred from the waist up. People screwing at impossible angles, where you just know the actor’s dick is slapping the outside of the woman’s thigh. The fact that the sounds have been overdubbed.
This all was a huge letdown for me.
I called her house, at 1:30, from the kitchen. The kitchen opened directly into the den; the TV was fairly audible from where I was standing. Leaning. Into the den, as far as the cord would let me. I hadn’t even had that much to drink. The two of us hadn’t had more than two or three shots total — Bobby was afraid his parents might notice if we took more.
So, to be fair and honest, I wasn’t drunk. I was buzzing. (What a stupid, stupid word — I am not a bee when inebriated.) Everything was funny to me — I was young and over-reacting on my first drinking experience. People do this all the time. They fake being drunk. Or high. The story where you tell the person you are smoking with (who has never smoked before) it’s some really good pot and they agree and start acting stoned. Then you tell them it is really just tobacco. It really is.
I called. On the third ring, Kate answered. We spoke; she pointed out the time to me; she told me she would speak to me tomorrow. Thinking I had fucked up a good and thoughtful deed, I got upset. She consoled me until she started to fall back asleep and I hung up, depressed. In the morning, she told me that her mother asked if Kate heard the phone ring in the night. Kate said no. Which was assuredly for the best because her mother hated me dating her daughter. She shook her head and grumbled and let it go, knowing I had called Kate.
I loved her. I was only trying to do right. Doing right isn’t always what you need to do. Somehow the innocent part of my mind doesn’t want to accept this, even now. Or maybe it is my problems with artificial-seeming rules, the black and white ones.
Sometimes logic does not work.
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