Alexism

John Ono Lennon

The story probably starts when my parents sent me away to boarding school because they couldn't handle me around the house anymore. Not that I blame them. I mean, people my age used to be out hunting elephants and shit like only a few thousand years ago, so there's no reason to make us kids obey our parents anymore once we're past fifteen. It's not natural. I mean, you hit puberty, you should be on your own. Leave your parents on a fucking iceberg, for god's sake. Their job's over.

But you'll have to bear with me, cause I should give some background, you know, who I am and all that shit. I mean, it won't take long, cause I don't have much of an attention span, but it's not like the first thing that ever happened to me was getting kicked out of the house. I guess I started out normal, you know, suburban Jew with the parents and house and basketball hoop. It's not like that matters. To be honest, my way of telling a story is like that Lennon quote, you know, take it to pieces and mend it with glue. Well the glue's up to you, you know? You get the pieces.

John Lennon was pretty much ahead of his time. I know people say that about Yoko now that she's the coolest person on the planet or whatever. But Plastic Ono Band? Two takes, three instruments, greatest album of all time. Maybe. Anyway, that's what Mike said about it -- I'll get to Mike in a little bit. Too bad Lennon managed to get blown away by some loser ex-hippie who couldn't get himself a job on Wall Street and became his own Holden Caulfield instead. Fucking Holden Caulfield. It's like, nothing more phony than trying to be someone else cause you think they're not phony, you know? I guess it just goes to show that too much peace, love and fucking catchers in the rye don't get you very far.

Actually, the fact that my parents couldn't handle me around the house should tell you something about my parents, because it's not like I'm the lizard from planet Mars or something. I'm just a kid, you know? Okay, the purple hair. And the like wanton destruction of my neighbors' mailboxes. But the Satanism rumors were completely blown out of proportion. To be honest, my parents were full of shit, because if it was all just like a phase like my parents were saying, then they should be able to goddamn grin and bear it instead of shipping me off to a horrible Quaker boarding school in Pennsylvania. Really, one rampage beating things with a baseball bat, you know, healthy teenage Freudian cock-wielding, nothing really out of the ordinary, and bam! send him to the boondocks. You know, working class parents, they throw their kids out on the street. My kind of parents throw their kids into boarding school.

All for a few damn mailboxes. They should be happy that at least I cared about something, you know, even if it was just breaking shit. People my parents' age, I guess cause of all that c'mon people smile on your brother shit, they think that like, breaking stuff is just wrong. But what, are you supposed to be some phony hippie smiley happy people assholes all the time? Sometimes breaking stuff, shit like that, it's just what you gotta do. You see a mailbox with swans on it, you hit it with a baseball bat.

Anyway, the whole thing was kind of gradual, really. It just got to the point at the end of freshman year, a few months after the mailbox thing, that I was like, "I think I should go to boarding school," and they're like, "yes, you're right." It was their idea originally, of course. They just mindfucked it into me, mentioning it over breakfast and dinner all the time, you know, just sort of a threat or a promise or whatever. That's how my parents work, you know -- it's not like they're gonna actually come out and say something, because that would be repeating what their parents did to them one hundred and forty three years ago. But obviously they've long since turned into their parents anyway, so they still want the same shit to happen. Only this way, they just kind of pretend to hang back and let nature take its course. Whatever the hell that means.

I have to say, I like when people use nature in their arguments. Cause it just makes them look stupid. You know, it's not natural to have like blue hair, or fuck goats, or shoot up and stuff, so that's bad. Of course, it's also not natural to wear clothes, use computers, and shower every day, but -- oh, right, those are the signs of fucking advanced civilization. So if something is unnatural and you like it, it's good and advanced and a sign of progress. If something is unnatural and you don't like it, well that's unnatural. That's another thing Mike used to like to do -- twist people's shit so far around they're eating it. That's his phrase, man, I didn't make it up.

It's not that I minded the whole boarding school idea, you know. My friend Ari had just moved to the next town over in New Jersey, which put him just far enough away to make seeing him a pain in the ass, and actually, we were like fourteen or fifteen then, just the age when the people you've happened to fall in with start to look less and less appealing. Ari and I had gone to Jewish school together, and camp together, so it was natural that we'd be friends. We were kind of assholes to everyone else, too, so there's another reason. I remember one time when we were around eleven or twelve, we cut class for the first time -- I know that may be a little late, but remember, we were New Jersey Jews -- just looked at each other as we were going between classes, and we knew that there you go. We just left school and went to his house and read comics. Looking back on it, I remember that I had thought maybe we should just go back to school because this was boring, but looking back on it without thinking about it, it was one of the best times in my life. Really, I mean you get older and you have better times and all, but you're always comparing them to other times and thinking about it, and it's never as good. That first time when we were eleven or twelve, it was pure. We could cut class, we could do anything.

So Ari had moved away, which probably saved me the trouble of having to get in some fight with him and break it all off. He was getting into things like cars and shit, and he had this annoying girlfriend, and you know, your classic boys-getting-older shit. The point is that Ari had moved away, and there was no one I was hanging around with, and I figured I may as well watch tv at boarding school and not have my parents to deal with than get yelled at every night for not cleaning my fucking room.

My parents never really understood my room, actually. They thought it was a place where I lived and didn't pick up socks. In fact, it was a work of art. What I did was, I kept on painting and repainting it, and putting up postcards and posters and shit, and just writing whatever I felt like writing, the only rule being that I would never erase. If something I had written or posted later seemed so completely ridiculous that I couldn't bear to look on it, I'd cover it over.

On the ceiling I had a shower curtain that I got from a garage sale, with those two angels, you know the ones who are like staring up at you looking vaguely annoyed. Mike said it was by Raphael or Leonardo or one of those damn people they named the ninja turtles after, but I don't think he even knew which. Most importantly in my room, I had a couch. Not just a sofa, you know, with cushions and stuff, but a couuuch, with deep cushions, and lime green upholstery, and cigarette burns. The couch was like a shrine to slack. My bed was pretty comfortable too, and some of the best times I've had with friends have been sitting on the bed talking about shit, but the couch was like a sacrificial altar to laziness. You could put an anal retentive Type A for Asshole on it, and he would instantly start thinking about MTV. It was a beautiful thing. So it wasn't like leaving home had no strings attached. But I was ready to go, you know?

Oh, my dog had just died too. I don't know why I mention it, it just seems like it might be relevant somehow.

I was kind of set with the idea of becoming a boarding school orphan, but what I didn't count on was getting thrown out of my summer camp three weeks before school started for playing naked basketball. Let me explain. The plan was, I'd get back from camp, have a week to fuck around with my friends, and then go off to Wheatley, which was the name of the school I was going to. But the reality was, I got thrown out of camp two weeks early, and had three weeks to have my parents give me shit about it.

It wasn't even like I should have been thrown out of camp. Naked basketball, for fuck's sake. We'd done worse. We pissed on my counselor Josh's bed, one of us had gotten caught getting a blowjob from a babysitter (camper-staff relations, against the rules), we never went to any of the activities we were supposed to, and I think the throwing hot soup on Josh's girlfriend was probably a mistake. Not that she didn't deserve it. But the thing to remember about my summer camp is it's like meant to be this big Jewish thing where all the kids come and sing Zionist fucking worksongs in Hebrew, and everyone smiles while pledging allegiance to a foreign flag -- but in actuality camp is this vast circus tent were all of the vulgarities of human existence are put on show. It's like, they just need a two-headed baby.

You know I saw a two-headed baby once, in Coney Island, of all godforsaken places. Ari and I were actually debating whether it was worth the 50 cents to see it, but now it's like one of my clearest memories. I think you should always go out of your way to see something grotesque or horrifying, even if it costs 50 cents or something to do it.

My point about camp, though, is that the place was a complete freak show. It was the goddam state of nature, only we weren't noble savages, we were just fucking savages. People beating each other up, beating themselves off, whatever. Naked basketball in this den of bodily fluids, physical abuse, and grungy towels was like jaywalking in Times Square. The old Times Square, I mean, not the Disney one. Fuck it, what business did they have throwing us out of camp to begin with? It wasn't their camp. Our damn parents paid for it. But Josh the counselor hated us. I think he hated us before he even met us. He had been a counselor for like four- and five- year old kids before he got us -- that's me, my friend Ari, and a couple of other fuckups -- and he had no idea. He was totally unqualified. I mean, you don't get a bunk full of wanna-be juvenile delinquents and read them the damn riot act on the first day of the summer. But that was all Josh knew, you know, here are the rules, do this or else.

I guess now's as good a time as any to tell you a little about what I think about rules. Or at least, what I thought about them that summer. I don't like rules a whole lot, you could say. Or you could say that I think authority is just the fascists taking advantage of the sheep. Basically the way I see all forms of authority -- government, school, whatever -- is as a fat ugly Scottish guy fucking the shit out of a helpless little sheep. I mean, it is the sheep's fault, for taking it, and not doing anything about it. But the shepherd guy is disgusting, getting himself off because he can't do so in real life, pumping his rod in and out of some helpless, bleating animal. So when people like my parents or Josh say, "when you're older, and in charge, you'll understand," it just makes me want to punch them more. Who the hell do they think I want to be? If I ever "get older" and find myself understanding these dildos, I hope someone has enough common sense to shoot me dead.

So Josh giving us rules was just as stupid as my parents giving me rules. It's not like I had some kind of higher order or anything, you know? Like a higher morality. That'd be just a better screw, as far as I'm concerned. It was just, let me the fuck alone, if I'm not hurting you, just let me do what I want.

I know that doesn't sound like much of a philosophy. But you'd be surprised how many people still don't get it. Mike used to argue with me all the time about rules for accomplishing things, for noble purposes, whatever. He never convinced me that we couldn't do better by just being decent people and not fucking each other over too much. What more rules do you need? Mike told me I was an 'Aristotelian,' but that was mainly Mike being a pretentious fuck.

The only real downside about getting kicked out of camp, besides having two more weeks of my parents glaring down at me, was that I really kind of liked camp. Maybe it was all the toe-cheese and body odor or something, but people tend to act a lot more real at camp than they do when they're all trying to impress each other at school or fucking work or something like that. I mean, I'd known for a couple of years that I was too old to be a goddamn summer camper and stuff, but it was cool. Ari and I started this band at camp called "Sorry About Your Daughter," until we got banned by Josh when he was in one of his fascist moods, and I hooked up with like three different girls, I mean, it was real, you know? It's hard to find that kind of thing. I guess, actually, that's what this book is about too, sort of. We'll see.

So things had started to go downhill a while before I actually left home, on account of my playing basketball with my shlong out. The second I got home, my mother gave me a Potential speech, which was no big deal, only she did it for two hours. It was like, Alex why aren't you, and then like, insert something that I didn't want to do or be here. Potential speeches all boil down to the same thing, you know: I know more about you than you do. I can tell you (a) that you could be something I want you to be (b) that that would be better than what you're doing and (c) exactly why you're failing to live up to my higher, more correct standards of behavior. What a fucking condescending thing to say. Only again, cause it's in like Potential language, you don't pick up on it right away. You have to put on like a bullshit-meter, like a stethoscope or something, and then you can read in between the lines.

Still, the worst was that in all the hurry getting kicked out of camp, I didn't really get to say goodbye to anyone from the summer, which was also no big deal, except that, like I said, I'd been fooling around with like two or three girls at once and I had planned on sealing it up carefully so they'd never find out, and I'm sure they did find out. It was like, all my careful plans gone to hell. And I didn't even get to see all the girls cry and scream and curse me from inside their tear-stained bunkbeds. The worst of both worlds!

But I'd had some good times at camp, you know, growing up times. Like it may not sound like growing up to urinate on some guy's bed, but actually the shit that we all went through after that, and like even working up enough courage to go and do it, and being in it together and stuff, I mean, those are way more important things than like learning some half-dead language that no one really knows anyway.

And then to get chucked out for naked basketball. Of all the trivial shit. You know, Mike told me one time that someone said 'what matters most should never be at the mercy of what matters least.' I agree. And really what could matter less than naked goddam basketball? It wasn't even my idea, although everyone sort of assumed it was. Which was fine with me. Most of the shit I get blamed for I have nothing to do with, which is fine because the stuff I actually do is usually worse. It was actually this kid Jason's idea. He was like a goddamn hooligan, that kid. He'd stolen cars and shit. Or at least, he said he had. I guess he probably saw someone steal a car once, and like wrote down all the details so he could answer questions about it if we called him on it. That was Jason's style. Complete bullshit, but carefully crafted bullshit like the fake wood bookcases my dad has in our den. So close to the real thing, you wouldn't know that they're complete garbage.

I wonder what I'd be like, if I'd grown up in Brooklyn like Jason had. He wasn't even in a good part of Brooklyn. He was in one of those neighborhoods that old people say "Oh, that used to be such a good neighborhood." Meaning, there used to be Jews and Irish people, and now there are black people there.

I love Jewish racists. They're so clueless, it's like, well it isn't racism because everyone knows it's true. Oh, I see. So the stuff about us that everyone knows is true, well that's one thing. But this. I mean, it's just like the nature thing, you know? People are always saying different things with their words. Like on one level, whatever they're saying, and then, on another, like a whole other thing, about what they're trying to make you think, or what's making them act like such ignorant fucks, or whatever.

I remember one time this black kid Anthony, who I met at Wheatley, asked me if it was true if all Jews were racists, or if it was just him and every other black guy imagining it. I told him it was more or less true. There were some who tried to hide it, so you have to give them credit for that. But basically it was true.

Anyway Jason was from this shitty neighborhood in Brooklyn where according to him he was dealing and stealing cars and fucking black girls all the time. And he was completely crazy. He jerked off nine times in one day. Wow, that's another thing I may as well get on the table early: me and jerking off. I don't want to freak anyone out this early in the book or anything, you know, but I'm pretty much an addict. The way I see it, it's better than drugs, you know? Hey, it's natural, remember? Actually, I guess it wasn't natural how we did it at camp: i.e., in every spare moment. But you know, if God didn't mean for us to masturbate, the sentence might be worth finishing if there were a God.

The other thing about camp is, there's nothing really to do. So you always do the shit that you do cause you have nothing better to do. So basically we used to try and see how many times we could jerk off in one day. I did six times once, which I was pretty proud of. It's not like the last two or three were any good, you know, it was more like a scientific experiment than anything else. But then Jason managed to do it nine times, and like, within two hours or something. It was like a freak show. Boom, boom, boom, every time. And there was still jizz coming out on the last few times, I was like, is he made of the shit? You get pretty impressed by this kind of stuff when you're fifteen. Jason could also suck his own dick, which was pretty cool. The best was when Josh caught him doing it. Jason was in the shower for around half an hour, and Josh was getting pissed because he was using up all the hot water, so Josh goes in there, and we're following him because we knew it was going to be good. He pulls back the curtain, and there's Jason sitting on the floor of the shower with his dick in his mouth. I think it was then that Josh permanently gave up hope on all of us. It was pretty damn hilarious.

Anyway, this naked basketball shit was Jason's idea. If you knew us well, which no one at that camp seemed to, you'd know it was all him. Why? Because it involved lots of guys running around with their dongs out. Jason was real proud of the fact that his cock was like seven inches long, which for a Jew boy is pretty big, and that he could suck it himself, which was good because he sure never got head from anyone else, and that he could shoot nine times a day, and all that. It was basically the be-all and end-off of his personal, like, life and shit. He was taking it out all the time. At one point he flashed this arts and crafts teacher, some eighty year old Jewish lady named Zelda. Funny thing is she didn't seem to mind that much. She said something like, "That's very nice, young man, why don't you save it for someone your own age."

I guess if you're doing a service for someone, they're bound to be polite.

So this was pure Jason. Naked basketball. We weren't even naked that long. It was mostly Jason just running around being himself, you know? But Josh decides to bust us, because we were out after curfew, and the camp director calls us the stupidest campers he's ever known in his entire career, which made me feel really proud, and before I knew it I was back in Cedarwood, New Jersey, getting the potential speech from my Mom. She seemed on the verge of tears. I was like, Mom, it's camp, you know? And she's all, You're always disappointing us, you don't care about us at all, and we had such hopes for you, boo hoo hoo. I was saying, hello, I thought that camp was supposed to be something for me? And like, I thought it was supposed to be my life? It was then that I knew that, even if I came back from boarding school, there was no way I could really stay in Cedarwood. It wasn't about being in a physical place exactly, it was about being in that state of mind, where jangling jewels and shit are worn to synagogue, and where you expect ten years after a bar mitzvah to have your kid in law or medical school, and if not, well, life has its disappointments. I never bought into that shit, I'm proud of that. I knew pretty early on that it was a load of crap, just people puffing themselves up to make up for whatever it was they were missing inside. I was pretty arrogant back then, when I was fourteen or fifteen. I felt sorry for almost everyone I knew.

Anyway, that was the end of my stay in lovely Cedarwood. Those weeks were an interesting kind of hell. I had nothing to do, Ari was at camp, and even the rejects from my school who I'd go see a movie with were out of town. Which basically left me, the television, and the vaseline. My parents, true to my mother's word, seemed to have given up. It was like they were writing me off by sending me to boarding school to begin with, but now they were really giving up. Like playing basketball without any clothes on, that had convinced them that there was no point in going on with any of it. There are lots of different things that make people realize that life is hopeless, you know?

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