Memory Mania #11

i was a drama dork, but i was a really cool drama dork and hung out mostly with the older kids. at the beginning of Junior Year, all of my friends were gone, graduated, moved on into the world, to community college and a whole 'nother life. they were Trace and Merrell and Michael S. and Amy, and at lunch the year before we used to pile into the back of Colin's van and snort No-Doz and smoke pot from a purple bong on our way to the Pizza Hut, and then again on our way back to school. (gym class was directly after lunch, counterintuitively, so I was stoned and numb, and today i'm very grateful to have so little memory of what went down there.)

one day at lunch, i skipped the Pizza Hut and smoked pot and cigarettes in the laundry room of the condo complex across the street from school with a new kid, Matt S. he was smart and sexy and cool, like Christian Slater or somebody, and he used a briefcase instead of a backpack and, at some point between gushing over Franny and Zooey and gushing even harder over Breakfast of Champions, I fell completely in love with him. he introduced me to Bourbon and Shaving and Talcum Powder and Rolling Your Own Cigarettes and I spent most of the second half of Sophomore Year trying to keep myself from jumping out of my skin and kissing his neck. but it wasn't okay to be queer, not even as a drama dork, not even as a really cool drama dork, so i turned up the volume on the Violent Femmes and the Pixies, and Morrissey and i smoked more pot and lived with the yearning.

but that was Sophmore Year. now it was Junior Year and Matt S.'s parents had moved him away, i think to philadelphia, and Colin and Amy and Michael S. and Trace were a thousand miles away up the street at Community College, and i was alone. at lunchtime one day about two weeks into the new school year, i walked to the nature reserve with a joint and a thermos of vodka i had stolen from mom and dad, and I got about as high and drunk as i've ever been. i remember a middle-aged officey-looking guy wandering down the path and offering me his sandwich because he thought i was homeless because i was sitting under a bush and i sneered or something and could not have felt cooler. when i heard the bell, i stumbled my way back to campus, feeling really awesome and cosmically lonely, and in the middle of fifth period i was called into the principal's office. i thought i'd gotten busted, but as it turns out he just wanted to censor my student drama-club production of the play "Nuts." i remember staring at him sort of vacantly and agreeing to cancel the production and, a few days later, not really caring anymore. and then, about a month later, i was in boarding school.