Is this okay? Is it really?
The number of people who say "yes, it's perfectly fine, lighten up" in the comments is truly astonishing. People? I meant men. The number of men who think that walking up to a random woman and kissing her without warning is completely acceptable...I simply can't believe it.
Ask Eva: most of my more, shall we say, "extreme" beliefs and behaviours have some grounding in childhood experience. I've said, for instance, that I never climbed a tree because I knew I would fall out of said tree and break my spine. That's true, as far as it goes. What you don't know is that I watched a kid at Cub camp do just that.
There was a really cool treehouse there. It had three, or maybe four levels, each one a good fifteen feet above the next, connected with makeshift wooden ladders. The view from the top was amazing. I know this because I climbed up there. Very, very carefully I climbed up there, with people laughing me all the way up.
The next day, Nameless went to climb up there himself. It had rained during the night and everything was still slick. He made the first step of the first ladder.
He didn't make the second.
His foot slid off the slippery wood at that exact crucial fraction of an instant when he had let go of the ladder to take his next step. He fell backwards with a grunt--not a yell, he was only a couple of feet off the ground, a grunt--and he landed flat on his back.
Not quite flat, as it turned out. There was this protruding rock, see. Barely enough to notice if you were scuffling along on the ground. If you fell on it just so, it would paralyze you for life.
Most people would view that as a one-in-a-million freak accident. Little Kenny viewed it quite differently. Little Kenny decided then and there that he would never climb anything ever again without a damned good reason.
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You're thinking I've gone way off topic. You're wrong. I just had to get up a head of writing steam, because what I'm about to write is very difficult.
1987
Grade nine. Oakridge Secondary School, London, Ontario
There is a hierarchy in high school. Everybody knows it. The 'minor niners' are at the bottom, almost without exception. When you are a member of a despised class of people, there is a very strong inclination to subdivide yourselves, to find the weakest among your number and prove that at least you're better than him.
I am, of course, him. I've been him since the first day of grade four, so it shouldn't be anything new or unexpected. Except it is. Because Oakridge kids are different.
No longer am I thrown into lockers, garbage cans, or toilets. Nobody has squashed my lunch, broken my glasses, or stolen my notebook...not that by now there's ever much in it. My notebooks were stolen so often the past two years that I've pretty much stopped using them entirely. No bullies here, not in the conventional sense.
What there are instead are snobs. Lots and lots and lots of them. I am judged inferior not because I wear glasses or because I weigh eighty pounds sopping wet but because my parents' occupations aren't up to snuff. I brown-bag my lunch every day...everyone else seems to buy theirs. The labels on my clothing are so, so wrong that I'd probably fare better showing up to school buck naked. By the standards of Oakridge S.S, I am a dalit--untouchable.
The shunning started pretty much the first day and it has continued, without exception. I have no friends. That's not unusual--I've had one over the last six years, three schools ago. He goes to Saunders now, and ironically, his parents decided after three years of close friendship that I wasn't his sort of people.
I'm nobody's sort of people now. This is made clear to me every day at lunchtime: the people at whatever table I choose to sit at get up as one and scatter to the four winds. It's unnerving: like I have some kind of super ultra mega leaf blower, or rather, four of them. This can't be just because I'm not as upper-crust as the rest of these people. I don't know why they treat me this way. I've tried asking. Once.
"If you have to ask, you'll never know."
Well, that's helpful. NOT.
So I sit in class and lose myself in the lessons. I go to band (I'm learning to play baritone, which is a small tuba) and I lose myself in the music. Then I go home and lose myself in my books, like always.
I'm lost.
February. Valentine's Day. Or rather, Friday the 13th. I was hoping to dodge the dreaded VD this year by virtue of it falling on a Saturday...but no such luck.
I hate Valentine's Day. I imagine lepers everywhere do.
You have to understand, I am a fully functional human male teenager. More than that: I never went through a "girls are icky" stage as a kid: from grade four or five on, if you were female and you shared a class with me, you shared a hell of a lot more than that with me in my imagination. I'm fifteen now and I seem to have hit what we may as well call Peak Boner. It's embarrassing as hell, all the more so since it's not like I'll ever get to do anything with it. I haven't so much as kissed a girl--for real--since third grade. And I kissed quite a few girls in third grade. I am, in short, hornier than the proverbial hoot owl.
To raise money for the United Way, the school is holding a kissing booth. [2015 Ken intrudes: you're going to have to believe me on this. I know it's not the sort of thing you can even imagine a school holding today, but I'm telling you: it happened.]
Twenty five cents a kiss...
Oh. this is, like, totally gnarly. I live in an apartment building almost next door to the school. There's a laundry room in our building. With washers and dryers. That take quarters. I happen to know where an entire roll of quarters is hiding.
There are three girls who volunteer to be kissed. Older girls, grades 12 and 13. I don't remember their names, any more than I remember the name of the kid who fell from the first rung of a treehouse ladder and became paralyzed. I do remember one of them was tall and willowy and seriously cute. The other two were lovely as well--even then, I wasn't picky as to physical type--but the tall girl had a smile that could melt steel. Or smelt it.
At first.
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I wasn't even halfway through that roll of quarters when the smiles were gone. I'd like to tell you I stopped then, but that would be a lie. I did stop when the tears showed up, but by that point I was almost out of quarters.
Those tears brought me up short: my elation turned to ashes in an instant. At first, those ashes smouldered...god damnit, can't they at least pretend a little harder? Then it finally dawned on me that all the other customers at the kissing booth had spent somewhere between a quarter and a dollar. I honestly hadn't noticed: I was too deep in a dream.
I withdrew in shame, and that shame intensified over the following days and weeks. Nobody needed to keep up the shunning charade: I started eating lunch in the music room, alone with a piano. Don't pity me: I earned every bit of my treatment that year, retroactive or not. Pity the nameless women, instead. They never asked for what I did.
I never did learn who those women were. I wanted, very badly, to apologize to them, but I also wanted, even more badly, to make sure they never saw my face again.
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And that was when I changed from your typical lusty teenage male to something a little harder to fathom: a guy who kept his every sexual attraction (he still had more than his fair share) firmly in check until he was absolutely, a hundred and fifty percent sure it wouldn't cause tears. After enough years of that I stopped feeling sexually attracted to random people, no matter how pretty they were.
Explains a lot, doesn't it?
I have carried that guilt with me for almost thirty years. If there's ONE day I could obliterate out of my entire life thus far, Friday, February 13, 1987 would be the day I'd pick without hesitation.
Is it any consolation to those women that I learned something from my despicable actions? I doubt it is. I wish I'd had the guts to apologize. I really do.
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