A L E X I S M

 
 I want to tell you my story, but I don’t want you getting all corny and expecting some sort of tender coming-of-age, Catcher-in-the-Rye bullshit, because kids my age don’t do that crap anymore and you won’t get any of it from me.  The fact is, most people who get off on reading about people like me usually forgot how much they hated being like me, if they ever were.  And if they weren't ever like me, they usually forget that they’d’ve run away from me as fast as they possibly could, and scurry right back to their safe, quiet home.  So you’ll pardon me if I’m a little dubious of the whole story idea, but you’ll see by the end why I wanted to tell you about this one.  Okay?

 Right.  So I think the story 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 it’s not like we can sit still and not blow stuff up now, when nature is always telling us to do it do it do it, come on, you know you want to, and you do want to, so you do.  Really, there’s no reason to make kids obey our parents at all once we’re past fifteen -- it’s just not natural.  And you can’t fuck with Mother Nature.  I mean, let’s be honest: you hit puberty, you should be on your own.  Leave your parents on a fucking iceberg, for god’s sake.  Their job’s over.

 So let me be clear that I don’t blame my boring, suburban parents for acting like boring, suburban parents.  I understand it.  It’s just the way nature works.  People like to look for reasons why I “rebel” or “act out,” you know, as if I really resent my parents for the shit they put me through, or the shitty way in which they live their lives.  That’s way too rational.  This has nothing whatsoever to do with rebellion.

 Really, I guess we could start earlier than that, you know, who I am and all that shit.  Where I grew up.  All my happy childhood years, pulling on the girls’ pigtails or smoking cigarettes at age eleven.  Fortunately, I don’t have the attention span for any of that shit.  There’s nothing more annoying than some kid telling you that his old man used to beat him with a garden hose and that’s why he’s being such a prick today.  Life doesn’t work like that, okay?  I started out normal.  My family ate wheat bread, not white.  We’re Jews.  We live in New Jersey.  There is a basketball hoop, and there are action figures on the floor of my closet.  I don’t really know when it was that I became the blue-haired freak that my parents stopped talking to or caring about, really.  I don’t have a good explanation.  I wasn’t molested or abandoned.  I could just as well have turned out one of those future lawyers of America.  I have nothing to complain about.  I became a punk because I was bored and everyone around me seemed conformist and stupid.  

 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 a gangsta thug, or deranged, or some kind of  creature from the black lagoon or whatever.  I’m basically just a kid, you know?  Okay, the hair.  And the wanton destruction of my neighbors’ mailboxes.  But look, you see a mailbox, sometimes you gotta break it!  My parents should be happy that at least I cared about something, you know, even if it was just breaking shit.  People their age, I guess cause of all that c’mon people smile on your brother shit that was drilled into them when their brains were vulnerable and stoned – they think that like, breaking stuff is just wrong. But come on, is everyone supposed to be some phony hippie smiley happy people love love deadhead all the time?  I don’t have the patience.  Sometimes you have to break shit, it’s just how it is.  You see a mailbox with swans on it, you hit it with a baseball bat.

For the record: the Satanism rumors were completely blown out of proportion.  Lies, mostly.  There were no animal sacrifices.  No -- and the best part of it all – what got me sent away – what got this story moving and what’ll get me to meet Mike and almost get arrested and fall off a cliff in the middle of a desert: naked basketball.

 Yes, it was not the pursuit of higher education that caused me to learn at the feet of Quakers in Pennsylvania.  It was not the loud music, hair, or defilement of all values for which my parents dearly cared.  It was that I played basketball with my dick out.  Now, don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t really all broken up about the boarding school idea, you know.  Because there wasn’t really anything left in metropolitan Cedarwood for me anyway.   My friend Avi 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 just getting to that age when the people you’ve happened to fall in with start to look less and less appealing.  The thing is that Avi and I had gone to Jewish school together, and camp together, so it was natural that we’d be friends, because, I mean, he was always there, you know?  We were kind of assholes to everyone else, too, so there’s another reason: there was never anyone else to hang out with.  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.  That’s what living was about.  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.  No comparisons.  We could cut class, we could do anything.

But now Avi had moved away, which probably saved me the trouble of having to get in some fight with him and break it all off.  It was going to be inevitable, you know?  He was getting into things like cars and shit – cars -- and he had this annoying girlfriend, and you know, your classic boys-getting-older frat-house garbage.  I mean, what was next, keg parties?  Dave Matthews concerts?   I think the slow, inevitable degeneration of people, that eventually turns them into bald bankers and lawyers, starts when they first get jerked off to Dave Matthews.

And besides, if I was living away from home, at least then I wouldn’t get yelled at every night for not cleaning my fucking room.  I know it’s kind of obvious to complain about cleaning your room.  So let me explain: for a lot of people, their room is a place where they live and sleep and don’t pick up socks.   I treated my room like a work of art.  The only thing I could control, really, having had everything else co-opted by my teachers or parents or cops.  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 couuuch was like a shrine to slack.  It should’ve had candles and incense and shit, but of course -- I was too lazy to do all that.  You could put an anal retentive Type A for Asshole on my couuuch, and he would instantly start thinking about MTV.  It was a beautiful thing.  I think, really, that’s the only thing I really missed from home.

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

 But naked basketball, for god’s sake.  We’d done so much worse, and yet they catch us for goddamn naked basketball.  This happened at summer camp, you see, a nice little Jewish place in upstate New York where obnoxious kids like me are sent to memorize how to apologize for our sins in a language we don’t understand.  It’s great – no one mentions the sins our families have to commit to even pay the tuition, but we spend a lot of time talking about the “Jewish community” and how we, the obnoxious, can best fit into it.  

Needless to say the whole situation is a recipe for the most unwholesome of human depravity.  Camp’s meant to be this big Jewish thing where all the kids come and sing Zionist songs, and everyone smiles while pledging allegiance to a foreign flag – typical Jewish dual loyalty stuff.  But in actuality camp is this vast hormonal circus tent were all of the vulgarities of human existence are put on display.  All forms of perversity and depravity, sex and violence, like a massive freak show with ladies in moustaches and fat people.  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.  Avi 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.

 So camp was like the state of nature.  We were noble savages, except not noble: people beating each other up, beating themselves off, eating shit off the floor, whatever.  We pissed on my counselor Josh’s bed, that was worse than naked basketball.  One of us had gotten caught getting a blowjob from the music teacher – that was worse.  Oh and we never went to any of the activities we were supposed to, of course, and, that’s right, the throwing hot soup on Josh’s girlfriend.  But all that, whatever, no problem, until we take our dicks out playing basketball.

The core problem was how deeply, how personally and how impotently Josh the counselor hated us.  I think he hated us before he even met us and before we threw hot soup on his girlfriend.  He hated the very idea of us, the idea that some obnoxious punk brat kids could actually disobey his precious rules, have more fun than he is, and, in fact, sorry to break the news to you rules boy, be a fuckload smarter than he could ever dream of becoming.  Our very existence was an abomination to his order of the universe.  And, to make it all worse, Josh had been a counselor for like four- and five- year old kids before he got us, and he had no idea, there was no way he could understand how to handle us.  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.

 It should be pretty obvious that I don’t like rules a whole lot.  You could say that.  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, yeah, it’s partly the sheep’s fault, for taking it, and not doing anything about it.  But even if the sheep is pathetic and stupid, the shepherd guy is definitely more disgusting, getting himself off because he can’t get any in real life, pumping his rod in and out of some helpless, bleating animal.  Bwaaa!  

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.

 I mean, when I was a kid in summer camp, it’s not like I had some kind of higher order or anything, you know, like a higher morality which I alone knew.  That’d be just  building a better sheep, basically.  All I wanted, 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.  At school, which I’ll get to in a minute, 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.

 Thing is, I make fun of camp now, but when I got thrown out, I’m man enough to admit that I cried.  It hurt.  It wasn’t just the ass-reaming I knew I’d get from my parents – I really liked camp.  Maybe it was all the toe-cheese and body odor or something, but it seems to me that 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 work or something like that.  Of course, 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.  We would have fun, you know, like we were supposed to, I thought.  Like when Avi and I started this band at camp called "Sorry About Your Daughter," or the week when I hooked up with three different girls.  It was real, you know?  Maybe not mature or dignified or whatever other bullshit term someone might want to use, but at least we were honest kids having real fun and not pretending to be something we weren’t.  It's hard to find that kind of thing.  I guess, actually, that's what this book is about too, sort of.  I mean, I know it may not sound all that great to urinate on some guy's bed, but actually, the shit that we all went through after that, and even just like working up enough courage to go and do it, and being in it together and stuff -- I mean, those are way more important than learning some half-dead language or how to build a fire in the goddamn wilderness.  Two words, nature boy: lighter fluid.

 But then all of a sudden, before my summer’s supposed to be over, I’m sitting at home by myself, all on account of my playing basketball with my shlong out.  For the record, it was not my idea.   It was actually this kid Jason’s idea.  He was like a goddamn hooligan, 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. 
 
 Jason’s big credential was that he grew up 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.     

 Let me say something, 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 those people are wrong and hateful and evil.  But this, well we know the truth.  In a way, it's just like the nature thing, you know?  People are always saying two different things with their words.  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 supposedly 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.  Now, of course, like any other fifteen year old kid who’s not getting any, I’m as much an addict as anyone.  You know, if God didn’t mean for us to masturbate, the sentence might be worth finishing if there were a God.  But at camp – it was out of hand, because, see, there's nothing really to do.  So you do shit simply to do it, because otherwise you’ll go insane.  So, of course we used to try and see how many times we could jerk off in one day.  Why not?  We had nothing better to do.  My record was six times, 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 of nature.  Boom, boom, boom, every time.  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.  So Josh pulls back the curtain, and there’s Jason sitting on the floor of the shower with his dick in his mouth.  Josh couldn’t even say anything he was so surprised -- I think it was then that he permanently gave up hope on all of us.  It was pretty damn hilarious.

 So anyone who knew us would know that naked basketball had to be all Jason’s idea.  
Why?  Because it involved lots of guys running around with their dongs out.  You can see the pattern already.  I don’t know if it was some gay thing, or if Jason was just 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, or whether he just wanted to remind us all the time that he could shoot nine times a day, or what.  I just know that if it had to do with Jason, it had to do with his dick.  Because his dick was basically the be-all and end-off of his whole, like, persona.  He was taking it out all the time, playing with it all the time, anything; it was all he was good at, I guess.  At one point I rmember 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.”  

 So when we snuck out after curfew, and we go over to the basketball courts to play basketball, of course Jason’s like: Let’s play naked!  So we’re all like, okay, I guess, sure.  Thing is, most of us weren’t even naked that long.  It was mostly Jason just running around being himself, you know?  But Josh decides to bust our asses 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 that if I screw up my life, it’s my problem, you know?  It’s not your fucking home investment club.

Potential speeches are pretty simple to understand.  They all boil down to the same thing: One, I know more about you than you do.  Two, you could be something I want you to be.  Three, that would be better than what you're doing, because, well, see part one.  And then of course, Four, I can now tell you exactly what’s wrong with you and making you fail to live up to my higher, more correct standards of behavior. What a fucking condescending little formula.  Only, cause it's in Potential language, you don't pick up on it right away.  It just sneaks into you, little by little.  You have to put on like a bullshit-meter, like a stethoscope or something, and then you can read in between the lines and see the crap they’re selling.

 And then, the kicker: “We think maybe you’d be better off in a more, boo hoo hoo, structured environment.”  The hypocrisy!  Two ex-hippies admitting that what their punk son needs is rules, discipline, the iron fist!  Maybe some corporal punishment too!  Of course, they took care of their liberal guilt by sending me to a Quaker school, with all the right progressive values to decorate the prison.  They had it all planned out – suspicious, isn’t it, since I’d only gotten kicked out of camp a day earlier.  I think they even had the deposit paid.

 “What do you think, Alex?” my father said, breaking the monotony of my mother’s moaning and sobbing.

 “Whatever,” I said.  Which you could have predicted.  Which, I know, is predictable.  I know.  I know.  

 “That’s it?”

 “Whatever, you’ve made up your minds, you may as well be man enough to carry it out.”  

 Boo hoo hoo, said my mother.

 It was then that I knew that, even if I ever 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, and at that moment I was proud that I never did.  Because at the root of all of it was this core ugliness: that if you didn’t buy in, the shit would hit the fan.  And maybe I had known that all along, or maybe I hadn’t, but looking back now, I kind of admire how arrogant and stupid I was at age fifteen.  I’m different now, and I can’t go back.  But something about me smelled out the foul stench at the center of all the manicured lawns and honors classes, and even though I can see what an annoying little prick I must’ve been, I admire that, because I was more right than wrong.

 And so that was the end of my stay in lovely Cedarwood, and the beginning of my story.  Sometimes I wonder whether I’d’ve been better off if I’d’ve told Jason to go fuck himself, which he probably would’ve done, or whether it was some kind of  pre-ordained fate that I’d go to Wheatley and meet Mike and, well, you’ll find out about the rest.  I guess it’s pretty gruesome to think it’s fate, you know – did everyone who died a senseless death deserve that too?

 So maybe it was an accident.  Maybe Jason just wanted to see my cock one more time, or I wanted to show it to him.  Maybe my parents had just given up on me – really decided, once and for all, that they should just forget about the kid thing and go back to whatever they were doing before.  I guess there are lots of different things that make people do what they do, you know?
 
 
 

2. Life among the Lesbians
 
 
 

 
 When I got to Wheatley I was pretty pleased to find out that my roommate hadn’t showered in about three months.  His name was, and this is true: Lester.  What were his parents thinking?  It took roughly .03 seconds for me to call him Lester the Child Molester.  And, Lester?  It’s a name that, like, has a potbelly built into it.   Did his parents want him to grow up to be a human mutant?  And Lester lived up to his name.  He was probably the repulsive person I’d ever slept in the same room with, which actually is saying something.  Lester supposedly had blond hair, but the blond was so far underneath the layers of brown grease and shit that you could never be sure.  He was about 5’9”, I guess, also like me, but his posture was something out of the Hunchback of Notre Dame.  He was always sort of craning his neck around to make up for the fact that his back was parallel to the ground.  I liked Lester.

 We found out pretty quickly that each of us hated people.  We didn’t like each other that much either, really, but a common hatred of the world in general can really bring people together.  Not that I didn’t want to kill Lester from, like, the first day.  He listened to this horrible heavy metal music -- he didn’t even have good taste about it, you know?  I mean, I hate all heavy metal basically, but I can respect people listening to Metallica or Danzig or something.  Anything that makes you want to kill or destroy something can't be all bad.  At least you're feeling something. But he liked all the shitty fake metal, all the Spinal Tap halfwits with bananas in their crotches and bleached hair.  Dokken, crap like that.  I'd throw these card chairs we had in the room at him whenever he put that shit on.  Luckily Lester didn’t mind all that much when I threw furniture at him, because I did that quite a lot. 

 Within the first month, Lester and I had built this wall in the middle of our room made out of bookcases, books, laundry, and whatever else we could find, so that we never had to see each other reading or sleeping or jerking off.  All things considered, we got along really well.  I missed my couch, and my dog was dead, but boarding school wasn’t all bad.

 Of course, at heart, Wheatley, like most boarding schools I imagine, was basically a boot camp for wayward yuppies.  Curfew, mandatory meals, rules, discipline.  I mean, yeah the people in charge were Quakers, supposedly, so there wasn’t like corporal punishment, which is a good thing because I think if anyone ever tried to take a paddle to my ass I probably would destroy a building or something.  But these were the most pissed off Quakers I’d ever heard of.  I’m like, Nonviolence?  Gandhi?  Nothing; you still have to fucking mop the toilets when they say, or else.  I think the Quaker thing was a scam.  It was like a promotional fee has been paid to the Quaker people for the use of their good name and reputation.  

 And I did have to go to classes, which was an insult, but I guess if I weren’t going to class I would be doing absolutely nothing, so it was probably good for me.  My teachers were mostly self-hating gay men who were teaching boarding school because they got to be around boys like me more than would be natural (or legal) in any other place.  My English teacher, for example, was this guy Mr. Banks, who on the one hand was this really cool washed-up poet, but on the other hand was just a little too interested in being the really cool washed-up poet. He was always trying to get us to seize the day like in the movie Dead Poets Society.  He also, on the first day, he's like, "Call me David, none of that formal stuff."  So I always called him Mr. Banks.  I mean, look, if you want to get in my pants, just come out and admit it; don’t decorate it with games about the meaning of life.

What I learned in the first month at Wheatley was that everyone thought that I was gay too.   Which is funny, because I’m so horny all the time and I jerk off so much that naked women are on my mind for at least half of my waking hours.  But I guess since I didn’t make the required misogynist or homophobic remarks that all the jocks did, I was suspect.  You know, if you’re not insecure about how straight you are, you must be a faggot.  I got pegged pretty fast, since like I’ll tell you in a minute I hate sports and jocks and most straight men, actually, who are just so ridiculous and sexist and annoying that I can’t put up with them.  And then I started hanging out with the lesbians, and I guess that kind of got the rumors started.  The thing is, the lesbians and I fell in together really well.  First off, there were a lot of them.  It turned out, and I didn’t read this in the brochures my parents gave me after our little talk, that Wheatley was a school for fuckups.  It was expensive, so all the kids were rich, except for the token black kids they let in on some kind of inner city financial aid thing.  But, I noticed, everyone except the black kids had something wrong with them.  Really, they must have wondered if any white people aren’t totally messed up.  A lot of the kids were dumb as fucking boards; a lot were complete underachievers, like me; and a lot were complete misfits like all my dyke friends whose parents associated nose rings with mental illness.  What we all had in common was that all of us were at Wheatley because, for one reason or another, we disappointed or horrified our parents.  Oh! sorry, you’re dumb.  Oh! sorry, you’re a punk.  Oh! sorry, you’re a queer.  Basically, if you were rich but too stupid or lazy or fucked up in your parents’ eyes to go to a good boarding school, you went to Wheatley.  Wheatley was like the revenge of genetics on people who really had themselves convinced that they somehow deserved all the money they had and, thus, would naturally have children who weren’t as fucked up as we all turned out to be.  Ding!  Thank you for playing!  Ha ha.

 So a disproportionate number of Wheatley kids were lesbians.  And an even larger percentage of Wheatley’s non-meathead, non-psychotic Wheatley kids were lesbians.  So it was natural that I’d hang out with them.  I had no idea it would influence my ‘reputation’ – it was just that the kids who seemed the least likely to turn out to be imperialist yuppie scum happened to be lesbians.  Of course, it was funny when I found out on “Parents Weekend” that all the grrrls who wore torn pantyhose or dyed their hair blue or stuck safety pins through their clits or whatever, all had really rich fathers who were all corporate swine and mothers who dripped with jewelry.  It was like The Breakfast Club.  But at least they weren’t posers.  They were listening to k.d. lang and Melissa Etheridge cause that’s what lesbians like and they were lesbians and they liked it.  It was really unpretentious.  Honest.  And they also made the most hilarious remarks about the girls at Wheatley that I’d ever heard, especially the hot ones that they all wanted.  We would go around that fall and just sit on the lawn, watching the leaves start to fall, and they’d start talking trash about how one girl’s got so much yeast infection she could open up a bakery, or another girl’s got an irregular period, or all sorts of stuff that made the jizz-talk me and my friends did at camp seem like fucking Nick at Nite.  They also didn’t give a rat’s ass that other people were embarrassed by their very existence.  That counted for a lot with me.

 The thing is, being gay turned out to be a great career move.  All the girls I got with – and I got with a lot – had this whole thrill-of-discovery thing, as if they were somehow special for getting the gay kid to touch their breasts.  I quickly learned to (sorry) milk being gay for all it was worth.  It worked through at least the end of the first semester.  I have to admit, actually, that even without being the sensitive gay punk, I’ve noticed that girls seem mysteriously attracted to me.  I don’t mean that in a stud kind of way, you know, some mysterious charm I have.  God knows I have no idea what that’s about.  It’s more, I don’t understand what it is that girls like about me, but they seem to like something.  Thing is, besides sex, I never understood the whole girlfriend thing really.  Like, why would you want the person who sucks your penis to be the same person you go to movies with?   I want to listen to music and go to films with people who have good taste in music and films, not people who give good head.  And vice versa.  
 
 Sex is overrated in any event.   The way I figure is, most people lead sad and pathetic lives.  They don’t get out, they don’t make art, they don’t see what’s incredible about the world, and they work boring jobs and have boring lives.  So sex is like the best thing in the universe for them.  And it’s miles above moving money around or driving kids around or whatever occupies most people’s days.  So it gets a lot of hype.  But if you bother to make something real out of your life, you know, sex, it’s just another thing.  It’s good, and hell, I jerk off enough, I’m not going to say I’m not into orgasms.  But you know, transcendent shit?  I don’t know.  It’s just another high.

 I think the lesbians caught on pretty fast that I wasn’t really gay, but they didn’t seem to mind, because as long as I hated the whole straight-man culture, we had a lot in common.  It turned out that most of them really had stories.  Like, one of them told me how she’d been raped by her stepfather when she was twelve, and another told me about getting nearly raped at some club by a drunk skinhead, and everyone seemed to have one rape story or another until I was pretty much hating men myself.  It made me want to vomit.  I mean, think about it, it really is disgusting.  A couple of thousand years of making women do all the shit work, and you know, men controlling them, and here we are with a whole lot of men still wanting to control them and control what goes on inside them, and one in five teenage girls getting assaulted by their boyfriends, and all the Barbie Doll shit about what bodies are good and bad, and it’s just enough to make you really, really, sorry, is all.  And then I realize that my being sorry is just another copout, just another way to say that I don’t have the blame, when really I do.  I’m as much a part of it as anyone.  I mean, one time I fooled around with a fat girl just to try and get free of this bullshit, since the only reason I didn’t find fat girls attractive was because society told me they were ugly.  And you know fat women used to be seen as beautiful, like in old paintings.  So this fat chick Rebecca was over at my house one time, this is before Wheatley, and I think she was shocked that I started fooling around with her but she was definitely into it.  But in the end, it sucked, because in the end, I thought Rebecca was an ugly cow.  You can only get past yourself so much.

 So I wasn’t any less of a problem than the backwards-hat wearing, beer-funnel slurping morons who think than please, don’t, stop means “please don’t stop.”  I don’t want to pretend any differently.  Like, you shouldn’t think that my passing myself off as gay was any kind of solidarity with my lesbian friends or real progressive openness about my own sexuality.  Sucking dick seems disgusting to me.  I like tits.  I guess it just sort of happened that I became a poster child for non-machoistic masculinity at Wheatley.

 The only problem was teachers like Mr. Banks.  Once they got convinced that I was gay, it was impossible to convince them otherwise, because of course my denial was just like, oh he’s still in the closet, maybe I can help him out.  Honestly, if Mr. Banks and his co-flaming colleagues didn’t stop showing so much interest in me and my writing and my talent and aren’t I like a little Rambo, whoever that is, I was gonna report him. Banks even gave me the Suicide speech, which is almost, though not quite, as popular as the Potential speech.  You know, Alex, if you ever feel like you just need someone to talk to, you know, please call me, anytime, blah blah blah.  Why the hell does everyone I know think I’m about to blow my brains out?  It’s kind of insulting if you think about it.  Here, you look like you should be depressed and suicidal.  I mean, okay, I am, but it’s insulting that people think so.  
 

 And then the jocks.  One time, I was sitting with this girl Melissa, and we watched this meathead football player – the kind of Wheatley kid who was there because he was dumb and not because he was weird – walk past, in full uniform, and Melissa shouts, “Oooh I wish I was the man who puts his hands between those thighs!”

 And the guy stops and turns around, and I get scared, because we’re about to get the shit kicked out of us.  And he says, completely unaware of the, like, subtext, or gay meaning of what he’s about to say, he says, “I’m a receiver.”

 Melissa and I looked at each other, because, you know how this happens when someone says something and there are just too many possible responses?  Because what they said is so – it’s just so over the line in every possible way?  In retrospect, I can think of a lot of responses, none of which he would get; you know, since “receiver” is so obviously, like, the term for the guy who gets it in the ass, and this guy is so out of it that he doesn’t even – I mean – where do you begin?  Later, these people vote for fucking Republicans.  They stick their jock heads in the sand and believe the lies about value this and moral that, and accuse the people who are the most moral, meaning the people who question morals because they’re trying to figure them out, as being the least moral.  So it would be funny, really, just to laugh at this jock if I didn’t know for a fact that ten years down the line he’d be wearing a suit and voting for people who want to put me in jail.

But at the time, Melissa could only manage “Alex here likes to give.”  And so the jock walked away, puzzled and confused.

 There isn’t really a place to begin with these people.  Where does it start?  Is it, like, in the womb?  Is it genetic?  Jocks beget jocks?  I don’t think so, I mean, as far as I can tell, plenty of the freaks I was friends with – Melissa included – had not only square parents but square brothers and sisters too, happy-go-lucky future date rapists who’d be only too happy to pop the new mainstream-conglomerate radio pap on the stereo, kick back with a brewski, and watch the game on TV.  Now, don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing necessarily connected between the beer and the date rape.  It’s just, there’s a culture here, you know, that rubs my fucking nose in its bullshit every day, and then has the gall to go around and complain when I spit in its face for a change.  It’s like, maybe if you weren’t spitting in mine every waking moment of my life, I could take your complaints a little more seriously.

 And then – the best – the best is when I get profiled as like the next psycho who’s going to blow up the high school.  You know, if you reject their society, they don’t even bother to check whether you’re rejecting it cause you’re a pacifist, or rejecting it cause you want to kill them all.  I mean, I know it’s hard for patriotic Americans not to understand the principle of not indiscriminately killing other human beings.  But some of us do believe in it, you know?  And the total bewilderment, the well-primped TV anchorwomen on the screen shaking their heads in total ignorance of “how could this happen” or “this senseless act” or “why would anyone want to do this to us?”  It’s like, hello, you’re fucking torturing and pillaging and raping half the countries on the planet, in your own selfish interests, and then at home you’re forcing a mass-produced culture of waste and consumption on everyone, whether they like it or not – and then you wonder why some people might react in a, I don’t know, pissed off way?  

 All this in like the moment Melissa and I look at each other in the eye as the jock walks away.  You know, it can get kind of tedious to sit around and talk about this shit all day, but you either get it or you don’t.  I’ve given up trying to figure out how it happens.  It just seems to happen, that somewhere along the line people either know the score or are part of the other team.

And really, on the simplest level, I think that sports are the biggest waste of time humanity has yet developed.  I mean, at least in exploitation, prostitution, and other forms of capitalism, you’re making money, or raping the Earth, right?  You know, at least you do something.  But in sports, you’re not making yourself feel better unless you win, and that’s not sports; that’s winning.  “Being a good sport” is sort of beside the point, in that case.  In the meantime, when you’re not winning, you’re running, which I hate, sweating, which I hate, and moving all around for no particular reason.  I mean, it’s bad enough we have to haul our bodies from place to place in order to get anything accomplished.  Why do it for no reason at all?

And it’s funny that you have to be a jock in order to be manly, because most sports are the most heavily homoerotic things in the world.  The football thing is an obvious one.  But the locker rooms – that’s the place.  In junior high school, gym was a big joke, because we were all these pasty frail Jews trying to play basketball like black people and trying not to look to stupid when we ran.  Gym was sort of like organized humiliation: the idea of making all these European peasants do things like the shot put.   (The shot put is the best example of sports being totally useless. One time I asked my gym teacher in junior high what he thought the point of the shot put was.  The guy was like ‘son, you ought to stop complaining and criticizing and start trying to make something of yourself.’  I was like, yeah, thanks that means a lot coming from a guy who pulls socks up over his knees and wears a whistle to work.)  So that energy had to go somewhere, and it went into the locker room.

 I think the idea of putting Nair in someone’s jock strap started out as just an urban legend.  You know, you put Nair in a guy’s jock strap and all his pubes fell out and wasn’t that fuckin’ cool.  But someone got the idea to actually do it.  They actually bring Nair to school, pick out a nerdy Jewish kid (glasses, a name like Morris or Wiener, you know the type), and plot it all out.  And for what – this was back in junior high; the kid hardly had any pubes to lose to begin with.  But of course the kid didn’t have a jockstrap.  It was like eighth grade, you know?  The only people with jock straps are the ones you don’t want to mess with.  So they put the Nair in his tighty whiteys while he was off in the shower.  Now, you’d think the guy would’ve noticed all the cumlike  cream smeared on the inside of his jockeys, but he didn’t, so he puts the thing on, and – this is where the urban legend breaks down, because, duh, wouldn’t you  feel the Nair before it could actually really work?  Well Morris sure did, and he throws off the underwear like it’s cursed or something and starts jumping around the locker room, ball naked, screaming aah aah there’s something in my shorts.  It was great.  Like Stuart Little was lurking around in Morris Wiener’s underpants.

 That’s just the tip of the iceberg.  I could go on and on, because school locker rooms just get worse and worse as best I can tell.  They started out innocent enough in elementary school, but by freshman year of high school it was this rat-infested sweat-smelling sty of athlete's foot and jock itch.  And all the naked guys pushing each other in the shower, you know, shoving and touching each other and shit.  Of course when anyone got a hardon they were pretty much beaten to a pulp.  The best I saw was when these track jocks were beating up some kid who’d got a stiffy in the shower, and then all the track kids got hard while they were doing it.  I was like, you know, isn’t it better to get hard because you want to fuck a guy, than get hard because you want to kick his ass?

 So at Wheatley, when they’re like, choose a sport, I was, “Do I have to?”  And it turned out the answer was no!  What luck!  I got to sit on my ass for two hours each afternoon while most people were out putting shots where they didn’t belong or rowing up and down a river for no reason at all.  Most of the lesbians played sports, you know, field hockey and whathaveyou.  Even Lester did it, which was surprising; he ran track, actually, which was kind of funny because he smoked so much weed that he was always out of breath.  I thought that was only supposed to happen from cigarettes; I had no idea you could smoke enough pot to get lung shit coughed up.  But I guess Lester was pretty much what you'd call a frequent flyer.  

So sports time became my time alone.  That’s important because it’s how I finally got to meet this guy Mike, and shit, you know, finally find someone I could respect and who respected me.  And that’s not very original, I know, and I’m sorry about that, but I’ll tell you this much, it deserves its own chapter.
 

3. I Like Mike
 
 
 

 I met Mike on one of those crappy autumn days when leaves are turning for the worse and the cold weather has long since been more trouble than it’s worth.  Fuck Autumn, you know?  I mean, leaves -- who the hell cares.  Can you imagine anything stupider than two thousand American families piling into minivans to go look at leaves?  This from people who are all too happy to burn down the goddamn rainforest.  Autumn is the season for people who’ll only adopt white babies, or only help stop a war if it’s in Europe.  It’s like, Oh I care about nature and justice and human rights, as long as it looks good.  Autumn: vastly overrated nature racism.

 I think it was sometime after Halloween, if I remember right.  It was my saddest Halloween ever.  I managed to break into the school kitchen, but, as if they knew – which I bet they did, I bet this was actually a conscious decision – there were no eggs to be found.  Like, they had cleaned them out.  I ended up having to throw grapes.
 
 This one day in particular, I remember that it had been three weeks since anyone other than my right hand had given me much pleasure, and I remember Lester’s ambient stench amplified by all the fog of the overcast day.  I had Victoria Williams moaning sweetly on the stereo, but her voice was more annoying than usual, and it was the time when most kids were playing sports, and I was bored.  I looked out the window at some born-too-late hippie trying to play ultimate frisbee on one of the lawns.  Fucking, smoke some pot and go away.

 I went over to the TV lounge, which was a place where the thin blue carpeting over the cement was covered with mildew in order to make it softer, and where some future frat boys had tried to rig the cable to get the Playboy channel so they could think about jerking each other off to Cindi from Sioux City or whatever.  As a result, we had nothing but the networks.

 I was in a foul mood.  Being pissed off is one of those things kids like me like to write poems about, but then throw the poems out the next day.  It’s like, you’d think there’d be something to say about being pissed off for no reason, like there is about being happy and in love for no better reason either, but there isn’t.

 This kid who turned out to be Mike was sitting sideways on the uncomfortable sofa in the lounge looking at Home Improvement reruns while reading a book.  I was surprised to see anyone there; I had become convinced that I was the only unathletic loser who didn’t even go out for bowling.  The soundtrack on the tv was laughing away at some practical joke.  I remembered reading that Tim Allen was actually an ex-con, convicted of robbery or something.  On the screen, the three blond sons of the two black-haired parents came running out.  You know, except for a pretty good slash fiction story about Jonathan Taylor Thomas being anally fisted by his babysitter, there really is nothing redeeming about these sitcom kids.  There's nothing worse than tv precocious teenagers who have their zits removed with lasers and alternately make self-deprecating jokes about being teenagers and act like perfect little thirty-five-year-old yuppie machine gun fodder.  A lot of people I meet expect me to act this way, like some sort of fifteen year old cabbage patch kid, as if, well I couldn’t possibly have a thought or care, because JTT doesn’t.  Home Improvement, that's just part of the fucking conspiracy if you ask me.

 “Do you mind if I change this,” I asked Mike, who I didn’t know was Mike, after about ten seconds of Tool Time.

 “The show or the day,” he asked in the same tone of not quite asking but mostly saying.  What a fucking retard, I thought.  If I’d wanted any conversation, I’d have worn a ‘Make small talk with me’ sign or something.

 “Uh, the show,” I said.

 “It’s not going to do any good.  There’s different swill on the other channels, but nothing good’s on.  Go ahead, do what you want.”

 “Thanks,” I said, switching to the MTV that hadn’t come in since those losers broke the cable in their Playboy game.  Fuck, I said, switching back to the 4:00 news, where you Hear Nothing First, and around to Oprah and her transvestite hunchbacks, and back around to Home Improvement, which was the only tolerable shit on the television.  So I turned it off in protest.

 “Hey,” Mike said.  

 I asked, “What, it didn’t seem like you were watching.”

 “I wasn’t watching, but I can’t read when it’s quiet,” Mike said.

 “Well then I’ll talk,” I said.  What an uncharacteristic thing to say, Alex, you might tell me.  Why would you say anything like that?  And truthfully, I don’t know.  I’d seen Mike, who I didn’t know was Mike, around campus, but never thought much of him.  I think it was some combination of the weather and Lester’s smell.  That and the fact that there was something appealingly hostile about Mike’s tone.  Maybe he was one of us, I thought.  Or maybe I didn’t’ think that, maybe I’m just thinking I thought that because I want to tell you I thought something, or that there was a reason, or that it isn’t all completely random and senseless what happens later.  Really, it was probably just my mood.  I didn’t want to go outside with the damn leaves or to the library with the books or anyplace like that; I wanted to be here, now.  And if there was nothing on the TV to entertain me, I thought I’d bother this kid, who looked like a senior and thus could probably score me some weed.  On the other hand, he might kick my ass, since I was the gay kid hitting on him.

 “Okay,” Mike said, putting down the book, “say something worthwhile.” Ha!  The fucker.  He sort of stared at me, without staring, just sort of looking over as if I might actually have something interesting to say.  I noticed his eyebrows were thinking of growing together, and that his brown hair clashed with his black shirt.
 
 “What are you reading,” I asked.  Mike said it was the Tao of Physics.  I said something like what was that about and Mike did this big sigh and said it was about how the unity of all matter and energy which is a scientific, uh, uh, observation, is, uh, similar to some currents in, uh, Eastern Religion.  Mike seemed to sound like he was thinking each word out carefully, like some lawyer afraid to be misquoted.

 “I ... see,” I said.  That was… less than true.  Basically what I knew about physics was that I was having to take it now but it wasn’t as interesting as Chemistry, because it was harder to blow things up.  Not that I blew anything up in Chemistry either.  You know, everyone says things like ‘I blew up the science lab’ but I doubt that ever happens.  What are you going to do, send strontium 90 flying everywhere?  Well I guess you could.  My only positive science memories involve wrapping the fetal pig's intestines around this one girl's neck so she screamed.  But I'm in the middle of a story.

 As far as “uh, Eastern religion,” I knew a little about that, and not much of it was good.  My mother had once been a hippie, basically, so that’s what I knew about Eastern religions; they seemed to involve doing lots of acid and then saying holy shit, I understand the entire universe.  I didn’t get the drugs and religion thing, you know.  If it’s all so true, why do you have to fuck your mind up to see it?  So that was what I knew about Eastern religions.

 “What Eastern religions,” I said, as if I could tell my Eastern ass from my armpit.  And then he’s like talking like I know what he’s talking about, which is my own fault, and he’s saying shit about zen buddhism and the tao te ching and tae kwon do and fifty other words I know now but had no fucking idea about when he was saying them in the late autumn tv lounge at Wheatley. 

 “I think most of religion is bullshit and the rest is authority,” I said.  It sounds like a pronouncement, on the page here, but it was just letting him know, actually.

“Well,” Mike said in that already annoying slow way, “that’s probably true, but you could say that about anything, you know.  I mean, you can take anything apart and reduce it to something else, which is fine, but if it’s something before you do that, then, I guess that’s what the thing is.  Not what you take it apart into.”

 “I guess,” I said.  Then I said, “I don’t really know that much about Eastern religions.”

 “Have you read the Tao of Pooh,” he asked.  No, I hadn’t.  So the surprising thing was that he says to hang on a minute, and he goes down the hall two rooms and comes back with the book in his hand and says here.  

Now, the thing to understand here is, I don’t read books.  You know, if it can’t be said on TV, then, why say it?  I have to read for school, you know, the Cliff Notes to Huck Finn, the Cliff Notes to Catcher in the Rye.  These are the great books, I guess.  But as far as reading otherwise, I guess I’d felt like it’s all very important and good for you just like flossing and eating lots of bran so your shit doesn’t stick, and all the other crap that I don’t do.  So for him to be like, here, is like calling the poker hand of someone who didn’t know when to fold ‘em, when to walk away, or when to run.

“Is there a movie?” I asked.  

“No,” he said, “but the book’s really short and has lots of pictures.”  Condescending asshole.  Of course he was right, but don’t change the subject.

 At some point I said who I was, my name and all, and he said something like, “Well, what’s it going to be then, eh?”  And I said something like, Well, what the fuck are you talking about, eh?  And Mike’s like, “You haven’t read A Clockwork Orange,” and I’m like, you haven’t heard a word I’m saying, have you.  Mike didn’t get the laziness thing at first.  So, no, I hadn’t read this book I’d never heard of either.

 So Mike gets up for a minute and I’m sitting there like, what, and he goes and gets this book called A Clockwork Orange and says I should read it.  Now I was like the little kid at the damn county library who's handed fourteen picture books by the old lady who smells like Pepto Bismol.  

 “Where do you get all these books?”

 “I’ve only given you two.  Anyway they’re just books.  The important thing is if someone wants to read them, then maybe they’re, uh, you know, a fellow traveler.”

 “How do you mean.”

 “Well, you’ve got the I-hate-authority thing down pretty well.  Have you ever thought about what you’re going to love?”

 “What?”

 “I mean, you’re not the first person to realize that all of this shit – ” Mike waved his hand around the TV lounge – “is bullshit.  So, okay, you’re in.  So what’s it going to be then, eh?  What’s instead?”

 I said I had no idea.  And I didn’t.  I said I hadn’t really given it that much thought.

Now, I think your first inclination might be to reduce this little conversation, this little beginning of a conversation, to some quaint ritual that you probably went through when you were “my age” and to think of it as some kind of phase or bridge to something normal or ordinary.  But that’s what Mike was talking about – taking something apart and thinking the pieces are less than what they were together.  Try to remember what it was actually like, if it actually happened for you.  You know, when you first met someone who later turned out to be your best friend, and whether you actually realized it right away, or whether there were just these little signals that you probably didn’t notice, but that if you put it down in words maybe you would see pretty clearly in retrospect.  Of course, you can’t trust retrospect. 
 
 So Mike kind of looked at me, and said, “Well, you should.”  Give the meaning of your pointless existence some thought, that is.  He seemed to want to go back to his reading.  
 

 Mike said, “I think I know who you are.”

And I said “You do?”  

And he said, “Yeah well you kind of stand out.”  And since standing out was definitely not what I kind of did, I said what do you mean standing out, and he said something like, “Well, considering the fact that the school is 90% yuppies and 30% hippies and 50% completely stupid, your not fitting into any of those categories makes you stand out.”  He said it just like that, again like some lawyer justifying his argument.  I said, thanks, figuring that now he was the one hitting on me.  I’m telling you, it’s complicated being the gay kid, especially when you don’t actually know whether anyone’s into you or not, cause you’re not like turned on by them ever.  Mike said, “Plus you seem pretty smart, so go ahead and read the books, you can give em back when you’re done.”

 “Do you want me to put Home Improvement back on?” 

 “If we’re done.”

 “I guess we’re done.”

 “Then I’ll go back to reading.”

 In the end, I read A Clockwork Orange cause Mike recommended it, and after this first bizarre conversation I ended up taking a good bit of his advice, for a while.  Actually when I did read the damn book it pissed me off that I was like named after this kid who goes around being real and then gets turned into something fake.  Not because it was like a sad sad story or anything, o my brothers and all that, but just that it was like, well, of course it told me something about my future, which Mike denied, but also because it seemed to say that we’re all “real” at some point and then later we’re not.  Like, weren’t you a different kind of Clockwork Orange beforehand anyway?  I mean, there’s no way to know what’s in our heads at any given time.  I don’t pretend that I’m ‘real’ now in any way that I wouldn’t be if later I sold out and became some sort of yuppie scum.  There is no such thing as ‘real.’  You just move from one set of clockwork to another.  

 I mean, I know full well that I’m a product of my spoiled suburban upbringing as much as the kids who don’t even know they’ve had one.  I don’t pretend to have like, so completely passed it over that I’m immune to it.  We’re all wired by our genes anyway, you know, we’re just machines to make more human beings to overpopulate the Earth with.  But Mike said that that was part of the point of the book after all: what makes us choose, what makes us alive.  Of course most people only notice the sex and violence.  But what most people only notice is usually the least important thing.
 

 Anyway there was no big moment when an angel came out of the sky and united Mike and me in some kind of bond of brotherhood.  I’ve always wondered about that forced bonding thing.  Fraternities, the order of the Elks and Moose and Antelope or whatever, all of that shit, you know if you need this kind of thing to force you to be friends with someone else, shouldn’t you consider someone else?  Honestly, it was kind of improbable, Mike and I being friends.  His being a senior was more than just being two years up, it was like, he was basically a child molester for being friends with a sophomore.  Me, no one cared about.  It hardly mattered.  Although I think this confirmed everyone’s suspicions about my being gay, but that was okay because Mike was the gross one and I was just being taken for a ride.  You know, innocent little sophomore fag being used by some old and skeezy senior.  Anyway the improbability of it made it better, actually, because we knew the other guy wasn’t in it for some reason.  You know, it's like, we're obviously not here to be popular or have some random person to watch movies with.  .  People filling each other’s needs, it is basically just prostitution, but hell, it’s our prostitution, so it’s okay, right?  But there wasn’t any here.

 So there was no grand moment; we just sort of started hanging around.  I read the Orange book because I was bored, and then I liked it, and so we talked about it.  Then Mike would make some remark about how the Velvet Underground were better than the Beatles, so I’d have to punch him.  Or, you know, when you eat in a cafeteria, and you’re looking for someone who isn’t a lesbian, just for a change of pace, it’s kind of a natural thing.

 The timing was good because Mike was probably the only thing that saved me from slitting my wrists at that hellhole, which is what Wheatley became once it got too cold to sit around and do nothing.  It was like the worst of all worlds.  Outside you couldn’t go because you’d freeze your ass off.  Inside you couldn’t sit around because everyone else was inside too, and they always wanted to talk to you.  And you could only break so much stuff before, well, it was all broken.  Actually, Mike used to get really pissed off whenever I would go and destroy shit, but basically it was the only thing that reminded me that I wasn’t completely anesthetized by the Quakerism and math and the Ritalin I’m convinced they put in the food. 

 I found out why Mike wasn’t at sports that day.  It turned out Mike had done, of all homoerotic sports fantasies, wrestling when he was a junior.  He had given it up senior year because the other wrestlers were too annoying to be with, but I still couldn’t forgive him.  I mean, first of all, wrestling?  The wrestling should’ve clued me in to the fact that Mike liked to do things a little too much; you know, he just was a little too enthusiastic.  It’s not that I’m against doing anything, okay, it’s just that I’m against doing anything very much.  And really, the only difference between doing something and just thinking about it is moving stuff around.  And what kind of good can come from moving stuff around?  It’s in one place, it’s in another, who the hell cares about that.  The difference should be in your mind, right, and in my opinion, you can get a lot done without doing very much at all.  So, therefore, there is no reason to do much of anything.

 I told that to Mike, so naturally he brings out a book that says the exact same thing.  I wondered about Mike as we talked about this shit over the winter at Wheatley if he had any ideas of his own.  I mean, everything seemed to come from one book or another.  That thing just now about not doing anything and doing everything, I came up with it on my own, but Mike comes and points it out in the Tao of Pooh book and gives it a Chinese name that he didn’t think up but that’s supposed to be some sort of great idea, and I was saying, well if it’s all about living naturally like the book says, shouldn’t it be my own idea?  Mike seemed pretty impressed by that one.  Why thank you, I said.

 That was basically what we did, me and Mike.  It kind of odd: him sitting somewhere, maybe pretending to be doing something else or maybe not, and us just talking.  In some ways it was a beautiful validation of my not doing anything idea, because, well, we never did anything but talk about how things should be done and thought about, and that was pretty much good enough for me.  Remarkably, Mike managed not to piss me off.  Now, when I look back on it, I see him as really something pretty important: someone who actually listened, and actually spoke to me, you know, as someone who was really there.  I liked my lesbian friends, really – I liked them a lot.  But I always felt like they were more into the idea of me, the concept of me, than really – me.  With Mike, I didn’t know why he was into me (though I suspected; I always suspected) but he seemed to actually pay attention to what I said and then respond in a way that made me think he hadn’t already decided what to say ahead of time.  

 The difference is pretty slight.  Like, I would say to Melissa one time, “I really don’t think my mother loves me.  She says she does, and she cries when she’s sad about me, but I think she really loves an idea of what a son is supposed to be.”

 Melissa would say back, “I know exactly how you feel.”  And then she’d talk about something related about her life.

 Mike, on the other hand, said back, “Well what is it that you give her that isn’t an idea?”

 “Um, me,” I said.

 “What is that?”

 “I don’t know.  What I stand for, what I feel.”

 “Is that ‘really you’?  Or is it what you stand for or feel?”

 And, you know, sometimes it would go okay and sometimes I’d really want to kick Mike’s arrogant ass, but do you see the difference?  I mean, he seemed to actually do more than just sympathize.  Sympathy is easy to fake.  Mike’s stuff, I mean, sometimes it could get ridiculous, but sometimes I actually was able to learn something.

Eventually the point where we were just spending all our time together when we didn’t want to be alone, talking in various places around school.  That was one good thing about Wheatley.  The place had like a hundred little spots where you wouldn’t be noticed by the jocks and the rowers and shit.  It was a coed school, Wheatley, so there were usually people fucking and sucking in most of these places, which is probably what everyone thought Mike and I were doing, but there were more places than there were people, and once you got to know the standard make out spots you could avoid them if you tried a little.  So Mike and I found our way around the hell of not being able to sit around and do nothing.  See, laziness takes creativity.  If people realized this, they wouldn’t be on my ass all the time.

 The best place for just not doing anything or seeing anyone was this little spot on the top of the school’s auditorium.  Wheatley was only built in like the 1930s or something, but they decided it ought to look like a medieval church, you know one of those millions of medieval churches built in America, so there were all these arched ceilings and carvings and stuff flying every which way.  You could pretty easily get up to the crow’s nest in the auditorium, which is where some of the lights and shit were kept for assemblies and plays, and it was this odd kind of cavelike space under an arch, with a small gothic window facing out on one of the lawns, which by this time in the year it was more often than not covered with snow or frost.  I guess because the place was kind of musty the make-out croud usually steered clear of it, and so Mike and I started setting up our own kind of place.  

 Mike, I guess cause he was a wrestler to begin with and had like little or no success with girls, seemed a lot more bothered about everyone assuming we were screwing each other than I was.  I mean, I was totally used to it, but Mike, I guess it was new to him.  He said people might look at him funny in the shower.  Which was actually a good point, since we had these horrible communal showers at Wheatley.  It had to be deliberate - it couldn’t cost so much money to put up shower curtains.  How much does a fucking shower curtain cost?  My theory is that it was like forced male bonding, the idea was that if you look at everyone’s pubes enough you get to be friends with them.  Great!  Or maybe it wasn’t male bonding, maybe it was like a purity regime – you know, to get us to stop jerking off.  Lester and I kind of had an arrangement that as long as the other guy stayed in his bed, under the covers, it was his business, but I had a sneaking suspicion that not everyone was as, um, not-disgusted by it as we were.  But doing it in the shower had always been my favorite.  The water’s rushing down, you’ve got plenty of conditioner handy, and it’s just so peaceful, you know.  At home my family had those showers that are also bathtubs, you know, so I could lie back and have the shower water raining down on me and masturbate in peace.  It was a real debate between Avi and me; he would always point out that everything sticks in your pubes and it’s all impossible to get out, but I would point out that there is nothing better in a young American Jewboy’s life than being wet, prone, and post-orgasmic.   It won every time.

 And now – gone!  Just proving that life can always get a little worse, I guess.  Ultimately, I think the showers were a kind of cultish mind-control thing.  I mean, here we are, wayyy earlier in the morning than any human should have to be awake, all crammed into this big space where everyone has to be embarrassed about having morning wood, and it’s like, every single day the same horrible routine.  Take a way all a person’s privacy and they’ll submit to your will.  Submit!  Conform!  So much for the damn dissident Quakers.  Bunch of mind-control freaks.

 In the end, I basically gave up taking showers at Wheatley.  I mean, what was the point.  I looked dirty anyway, and if you itched it usually went away, and if you smelled that was usually someone else’s problem.  The best was when Lester complained about my smell.  I thought that was some kind of personal victory, to make the most rank and feral animal I’d ever had the pleasure of living us complain to the RA guy that I smelled to me much.  I was like, yeaahhhhh, the big leagues.  Mike asked me one time, when I guess the smell had become kind of overpowering, why I was so shy that I wouldn’t shower.  I was like, what the hell are you thinking?  Shyness, honestly, it never crossed my mind.  I can’t even conceive of being shy about my body.  It’s like the moving stuff around thing.  I mean, it’s stuff, who the hell cares about it?  Like, wow, there’s some great secret that my dick looks like this and yours looks like that.  Come on.  Okay, I’m too skinny, and I guess at some point some chest hair would be nice so I don’t look like Snow White when I have no shirt on, but that’s not been a problem with girls so it shouldn’t be a problem with me, and my dick is fine, and besides, I mean, if you’re ashamed of your body, how the hell can you not feel like shit all the time?  At least when you’re naked, you have nothing to hide about it anymore.

 Mike disagreed, he said shame was sort of a natural thing, that it was just kind of part of the human condition, and that my denying it was the only unnatural part, but that was Mike playing Dr. Freud again.  Sometimes a lamppost is just a lamppost, you know?

 Mike couldn’t believe that my kind of lack of any semblance of cleanliness didn’t get in the way of “meeting women.” Mike always called girls women.  I was thinking that was a little pretentious for a high school senior but he said that you might as well get in the habit since some friend of his at college said that it was rude to call girls girls.  Whatever.  Mike was a little too set on college, if you ask me.  He was sending out all these applications to half a dozen ivy league places, and he was pissed because Wheatley was such a crap school that he probably wouldn’t get into them, even though his father went to Princeton.  And what then, you know, as if life might then be regarded as totally without purpose.  I was like, hey take a year off and go on safari or something.  Then you can get into anywhere, cause you’ll be cool.  Being on safari is almost as cool as lesbianism.

 But I told Mike that my fragrant aroma made me all the more attractive to girls.  They all wanted to clean me up.  I must have hooked up like five or six times in the fall semester, with girls who wanted to cuddle me and take me in and protect me from the big bad world.  Maybe I’m being sexist myself here, you know, using these girls and all, but frankly I don’t see anything wrong with treating a girl like a tool if she’s treating me like a teddy bear.  So Mike – at least in this one area, Mike had no idea.

 The obvious question, it seemed to me, was the one I never asked and never really found out: whether Mike was batting on my team or the queers’.  I really didn’t care much myself, but it seemed like something relevant, you know?  Mike and I didn’t talk about girls that much.  He made the comments about my smell, and he told me some time about some girlfriend he’d had – I was like, “yeah, in Canada?” and he sort of smirked.  Mike much more than I was worried about the fact that everyone assumed we were hooking up.  I couldn’t care less, as I said, and if anything it gave the girls yet another reason to feel thrilled with their conquest of gay, taken, vulnerable punky Alex.  I told Mike if he was worried that people were thinking he was a fag, then maybe he should try and get some play instead.  Mike was one of those guys who, it was sort of hard to imagine him actually getting off, because he was so busy thinking.  I mean, I guess at some point he wasn’t pondering the Oneness of the Universe and was just thinking about tits, or dick.  But I never saw it.  The girlfriend (not from Canada) was really into the whole wrestler thing, which was apparently something she was into, like the athletic thing and all.  Which I found extremely scary.  Mike said that for guys like him, times are tough, you make do.  That gives me the shivers.

 I told Mike he should just deal with the weird looks in the shower like I did, and just enjoy it, and as long as he kept his eyes to himself I didn’t think anyone would really mind.  Obviously I should have asked him “Well, are you?”  Obviously.  Okay, I know.  But it’s not like I really wanted to know, I guess.  I guess it’s not that I didn’t care.  I did care, but I didn’t know how I cared.  On the one hand, of course I didn’t care.  On the other hand, I mean, we’re spending all this time together, like, I’d like to know if he was thinking of me naked.  You know, cause I wasn’t.  Thinking of him, I mean.  I’d hate to think that all the time I’m really thinking about the Velvet Underground, he’s thinking about a blowjob.  You know, that it’s all a pretext.  But then, back on the other hand, if he wanted to make a move, he’d make a move and I’d reject him.  Or maybe I wouldn’t, I don’t know.  Mike wasn’t bad looking, I mean, I’d seen him in the shower too along with everyone else, I just, I don’t know, it just seems mostly ridiculous, a little confusing, and probably kind of disgusting, although I know it shouldn’t really feel like that.  So I didn’t ask him, okay?  I didn’t ask him.  I assume the girlfriend was real, not that that meant anything, and I just didn’t want to know.

 When I could put that stuff out of my mind, things got good fast. The crow’s nest, for example, was getting really nice.  We had brought in a few good books and magazines that Mike was sort of lending me but that he didn’t want Lester or one of his friends to steal from our room, and I’d started writing stuff on the walls like I did in my room at home.  Best of all, Mike had this old stereo, which was sort of a piece of shit but which he’d used before he got his new one, and we bought some cheap speakers for it and set it up up there.  Mike sort of knew the maintenance guy who was responsible for the place, and checked it out with him, and the guy said it was fine as long as I cut out writing on the walls, so we got some curtains and I wrote on them instead.  And we were set.  It was like an enclave of civilization in a sea of puberty.

 Finally, and this was the like last touch, we got this old couch from the basement that had been thrown out of a student lounge because one of the cushions was busted, and after more work than I care to remember, got it up to the crows nest, lugging it up the narrow staircase for like hours on end.  It wasn’t as good as my couuuch at home, but it was pretty close and pretty lucky for us.  Mike and I were just wandering around down there exploring like we sometimes did when we saw it, and it was just obvious.  He looked at me, and I was already looking at him, because we both knew that it had to be done.  I just want to say, by the way, that isn’t that fucking amazing, too, when two people who don’t like anyone else in the world just sort of find each other.  I mean, whatever, we’d both be fine without the other, but it’s pretty rare.  You should look for someone like that if you can.
 

 Of course, little did I know that my friendship with Mike would quickly turn into like the Journey to the East.  I was right that first time about Mike; he was heavy into this whole Eastern Religion Buddhist Meditation Sitting Thinking Watching thing.  I was into the sitting.  So basically, while I sat on my ass and listened to whatever Lou Reed soundalike was on the stereo, Mike gave me fascinating lectures on zen, taoism, buddhism, hinduism, jainism, shintoism, confucianism, basically everything except Judaism, which is of course the one religion Mike and I both actually belonged to.  Against my better judgment, I also read books - the Tao of Pooh and the Tao of Physics and the Tao of Horseback Riding or whatever.  I told him I was thinking about writing a Zen of Masturbation book, you know, what’s the sound of one hand jerking, or something, but he was like, if you can do it, go for it, which of course was a little more sincere a response than I was looking for.

 The main question, of course, was like, how seriously to take all this stuff.  On the one hand, it made a lot of sense, I mean, a lot more sense than the horseshit I was fed in sunday school before I got kicked out.  On the other hand, I mean, Mike was a seventeen year old kid from nowhere.  A Jewish kid, no less, like me.  Where’d he get all this stuff?

 Actually that was kind of an interesting story, how Mike ended up at Wheatley.  His parents were in the foreign service, which meant that he’d already lived in like forty three countries and wasn’t really from anywhere.  Diplo-brat.  Which was funny because in some ways he was definitely a New York Jew.  I guess he got that from his parents.  But his family sort of decided that he should go to high school in America, and in one place, and so for some unknown reason he ended up at Wheatley, he said because he had an aunt who lived an hour or so away, I think because he must’ve been too much of a fuckup at all these schools in Arabia or India and couldn’t get in anywhere better.  You don’t get deposited at Wheatley unless someone along the line gave up on you.

 Being from twenty different countries gave Mike a certain amount of credibility, but still, you have to wonder about talking about like mystical experiences on a worn out couch in a crow’s nest at prep school.  Shouldn’t that shit be kept for college?  I guess that’s why Mike was so obsessed about going away to school, and he was a senior and all.  I was still so far away from that crap, I couldn’t give a damn.  I mean, if I cared, I probably could’ve done a little better in school, but did I care?  It seemed to me like college was just going to be all the pretentious people from high school, mixed in with the overachievers, sitting around having coffee.  Mike was treating it like it was god’s gift.  I guess if you’ve never lived anywhere except Wheatley, and never had any friends for more than like a year, it’s a pretty attractive place to end up.  And then you could take zen more seriously.  You know, if you’ve just dropped a lot of acid or something.

Right before Thanksgiving, I finally found out why Mike was really at Wheatley.  Turns out, he was nineteen, not seventeen as I’d assumed.  I found out when Mike just sort of mentioned something about when he was in the hospital and I was like, what do you mean when you were in the hospital, and he’s like, oh didn’t I tell you, I spent a year in the hospital after I was almost killed in a car accident; that’s where I started getting into all this religion stuff.  All casual, like, oh didn’t I mention that I had this radically different thing for an entire year which has probably fucked me up?  Oh yeah and by the way, Mike, I’m actually a woman.  From Africa.  Who’s a space alien.  Huh?

 After the accident, I found out, his parents decided to put him in boarding school, because it wasn’t such a good idea to go trekking all over the world, because apparently he still had some injuries and every so often had to go in for “tests.”  Tests?  And it turned out like the main hospital was in Philadelphia, and his aunt was nearby, and so, hooray, here he is in Wheatley among the freaks.  I could just see the attendance people going over the applications from our school: Okayyy, we’ve got fourteen lesbians, three punk juvenile delinquents, oh look! a cripple horribly maimed in a car accident.  Excellent!  He had it made.

 I asked Mike what all that did for him, what it was like being in the hospital for so long.

“It kind of knocked the youth out of me, if you know what I mean.”

“I guess.”

“I mean, I was fourteen when the accident happened, and fifteen when I finally got out of the hospital for good.  So when most kids were, I don’t know, playing baseball or learning about girls, I was in the hospital.  It was pretty abrupt.  I had a lot of time to read, and think, and almost dying, it changes you.”

“Yeah, I’d assume.”  I wondered if that’s one reason Mike was into hanging out with me, you know, lost youth and all that.  I didn’t ask Mike about that.

 “I mean, when I was with Courtney,” – that was the non-Canadian, wrestler-lover girl – “I thought everything was going to be great, you know, I would finally have a normal life.  You know, I missed out for a while, but now I’m back.  But actually the sex was the most lonely and depressing thing I’ve ever done.  Neither of us cared about each other, really, I don’t think.  I didn’t tell my parents, because she wasn’t Jewish, and we didn’t have much in common.  So, I mean, that’s why I’m not really so into getting as much play as possible.”

 Because I was nervous, because I didn’t ask what I should’ve asked, I said, “Oh, I thought that was because you’re an ugly loser.” 

Mike thought that was not very funny.  “Every time I try and tell you something about myself, you turn it around into a game of trading insults,” he said.

“Sorry.”

“It’s just, you know, you don’t have to take things seriously, but you shouldn’t assume that no one else does.”

 “I’m sorry.”

 “Well I get the sense that you think I only do what I do because I’m not hooking up as much as you do.  Which maybe is partly right.   It’s true that not having a sex life in the hospital and after freed up a lot of time to think about things, and it’s true that you have to quiet down your bullshit in order to hear the outside in you.  But if you really think that meditation and solitude are all just repressed hormones, or what you do when you’re not getting any, I don’t know if we can have anything in common.”

 It annoyed me how Mike used not being friends as some kind of threat or something.  But he was right.  I did take his shit seriously, though.  The reading, the meditation, the subculture stuff.  It wasn’t that I disagreed with any of it so much as I felt like I would have time to think about it later.  Of course, my own feelings on religion were pretty clear, like I think I said before.  I mean, how degrading can people be, forcing their kids to say words they don’t understand and their parents don’t even believe, just out of some fucked up sense of guilt or responsibility.  How about responsibility not to make your kids into mindless zombies?  The worst was that I never met a single person outside of my rabbi who believed any of this shit about God and the torah and commandments and kosher and all that.  They were all full of shit.  I don’t know if I would’ve felt better about anyone who did actually believe all the stories, and obeyed God because otherwise they thought they’d get punished, but at least that fool would have some integrity.  Not like my parents rattling their jewelry three times a year while trying not to fall asleep.  Actually my mother was pretty religious, Orthodox basically, but my dad didn’t give it too much credit, so things just sort of settled into apathy for both of them.  I couldn’t see why their apathy made me have to waste my time, or pay respect to things I didn’t believe or understand and which no one bothered to explain.

 Mike was different.  He agreed that most of Judaism was bullshit, but kept saying he was taking another look at some books on mysticism and hasidism and he was reading this thing called “Zen and Hasidism,” which fit in with his Zen and Archery and Zen of Motorcycle Maintenance and Zen and Laundry Machines, just like the Tao of Your Name Here stuff.  So Mike was saying that maybe the Jews had something to say after all, but he hadn’t found out about it yet.  I was like, I found out about it plenty when I was being yelled at for being a “nonconformist” before I even had my bar mitzvah.  

 Besides, I had made up my own religion before I even met Mike.  It was called Lexism.  I was gonna call my religion “Alexism,” which I picked for this book’s title, and which I’ll explain later, but at the time I thought I was gonna change my name to Lex.  It sounds a lot better, don’t you think?  I mean, it’s got that sort of Lex Luther evil genius kind of thing, which I definitely admire, because when I saw Superman when I was like six the only thing I wanted was to be Lex Luther.  I couldn’t believe my friends were into like killing Lex, and go Superman and everything.  What?  Didn’t they see his apartment?  I mean, the guy had this great mansion under New York, with like a beautiful woman and a dumb fat guy, which is always nice to have around, and like, he was so chill!  The whole thing about Lexism was that it had one commandment: Do What You Want.  That was it.  Not surprisingly, I got a lot of followers.  All you had to do to be a Lexist was just do what you want.  If you wanted to make up rules and follow them, fine.  If you didn’t, that’s fine too.  Thing is, I figured everyone is basically a Lexist waiting to be converted.  Spread the gospel!

 Of course, later on I’ll tell you all about that coming apart at the seams.  For crying out loud, my name was Alex, there wasn’t much I could really do about it.  Chopping off an A wasn’t gonna make me into the punk I always dreamed about.  But it was nice having my own religion.  I even had little business cards made up saying “I am a Lexist” and I gave them to people to put in their wallet.  So really there was no reason to get into Zen while I still had Lex.  

 But I told Mike, “I do take it seriously.”

 Mike said, “Sometimes you don’t really seem to.”

 And there was no way to win the argument, lose the argument, or do anything but regret the argument, so I just stopped.  Mike went to his aunt’s for Thanksgiving.

 When I go back and remember that fall and winter at Wheatley, what mattered most, really, was the time Mike and I spent just sitting around.  For me, the laziness thing made it really the best, the fact that we could just sit there, talk, listen to music, whatever, and then at the end of the day I’d have felt like, yeah, I guess it’s worth not killing yourself.  For Mike it was mainly a quality thing -- he said during the first snow of the winter, as the flakes kind of hesitated their way down out of the sky, that he couldn't imagine time having any more quality to it than this, whether you were out doing stuff or what.  Basically, just spending random time is just kind of natural when you find someone who like understands things to talk about it.  It doesn’t matter what you talk about.  One conversation Mike and I had was about fucking Gilligan’s Island, of all things, like why did the Howells bring all this shit with them on a three hour tour, were Gilligan and the Skipper butt-buddies, Ginger vs. Maryanne, all the possible orgy combinations (my favorite was definitely Lovey taking it up the ass from the Professor; just picture it), you know, nothing special.  But it was just like, there are so many objects and shit in the world.  Most of our time is spent with them.  And then, like, there in the middle of all of these things is some person who’s not a thing, who’s like actually You or Me instead of He or She or It, and it’s like, any exchange of trivial information is suddenly like, I don’t know, living.  

 The old stereo actually was key too, because Mike had almost every cd that I’d heard was good but never heard for myself.  You know, like you read some old Lester Bangs essay and he's like "O, this is just like 96 Tears by ? and the Mysterians," and you're like O,O,O, I don't know what the hell you're talking about.  I am not as cool as you.  Mike actually had these things.  That fall was the first time I’d heard the Velvet Underground, for example, which I now can't even imagine like never having heard of, and Mike had every album.  And it was where I first heard Rust Never Sleeps, and Highway 61, and Plastic Ono Band, which I mentioned before, plus things like Big Star, and The Clash, and a lot of obscure Dylan albums, and basically whoever else suited the mood at the moment.

 You know, hearing a new album like that is probably one of the best experiences you can have.  I mean, especially when you know it’s going to be good, like with the Clash or the VU stuff.  There’s like 3 songs you know and they’re all fantastic, and then there’s one you’d heard of but never heard, and a couple you’ve never heard of, and you know even if they’re not going to be as good as the others they’re still going to be really good.  And then there’s the possibility that the others will end up being beautiful, and it’s so much better than the best orgasm you can have, that I feel sorry for anyone who doesn’t get that way on something.  Whether it’s music or movies or goddamn ballet, I don’t care, even if it’s sports, I guess, you’ve just got to give a shit, you know?  Otherwise why not jump off the George Washington Bridge and save us the food and resources.

 I think the music thing is one reason Mike and I became such good friends.  I was into some stuff he didn’t like, like cheese music like Primus and Ween, all the stuff Mike said was too ironic for him, i.e., not Serious Enough.  Also he never understood Nirvana the way I did, which is fair, because most people don’t.  Mike and I would get in fights about music, that was like the one area where I guess we both respected each other enough to just whale on the other guy’s bullshit.  Like, I would say something about Offspring, and he used to be like, Wire did it first.  And I'd be like, well I don't care.  And then he'd be like, you're an idiot.  Or, like, I thought his Beatles obsession was ridiculous, to be honest.  The guy was fixated.  He even had the anthologies, you know?  Talk about twisted Catchers in the Rye, this guy was like the Number One Fan.  “Oh, Alex, did you ever hear this bootleg I have of outtakes from the Let it Be sessions, it features a thirty-second take of Buddy Holly’s That’ll be the Day.”  Oh, for joy, for joy, for happy happy joy.  Jesus Fucking Christ.

 Obviously, even then we respected each other’s decisions because we knew that they were made for good reasons.  That’s why we could bust on them so much.  It’s the opposite of the Phish effect.  You know, you go to a Phish show and there’s like some people who like them for the right reasons and some who like them for the wrong reasons.  Sometimes it’s hard to tell who’s who.  Usually the wrongies have brand-new tie-dies and pre-ripped jeans on, and they’re really clean and probably live in Great Neck or someplace.  They’re waiting for “Truckin’” to come on, although only the complete fuckups admit it, and so they kind of sway back in forth and maybe smoke a little and think, wow, how cool that even though I was born too late I can pretend that I am a hippie for a night before going back to my large beautiful house and studying to be an investment banker.  Then there are a bunch of people there who are really into the music, and get stoned or something and really follow it through, and those people I can respect.  But sometimes they look the same on the outside and so you’re suspicious of everyone.  Phish shows are even worse than Dead shows used to be, cause at some point it seems like Phish just gave up trying to weed out the posers and so now if you want to be hypocrite-free you have to go down to the village and see some far crappier band play far crappier purpose, just because of all the suspicious fake hippies that lurk in better places.
 
 With Mike it was like the opposite.  On the surface he’d like something stupid like the Rolling Stones, but I got to know him inside and so I know that he had his reasons, which I could respect even though I disagreed with him.  This may seem like a lot to say about music, you know, respecting opinions and shit, but it’s not if you’re like Mike and me and music is so important.  It’s not like, well I’m a fan, or I’m into underground music.  If you’re really into it, it’s what you go to when your life sucks, and when it’s beautiful, and when you’re with someone you like, or when you want to get away from someone else, or any time that you want anything to either matter or go away.  There’s not a word for people like me and Mike, kind of people who really feel strongly about liking something, whether it’s music or whatever, but people who also hate other people and think about just getting out of this world but then finally meet other people who hate people, and realize that we were not so wrong all along, and what a relief!  Get it?  Thing is, I’ve met a lot of us over the last few years and we should sort of band together.  Solidarity, or at least like some way of letting the new kids know that we’re out here.  You know?

 I guess a lot of people feel that way about different things.  Some people fly across the country to see a painting by someone or other, some people spend all their money in fancy restaurants, and I can respect that, as long as they’re really connecting with what they’re doing and not going through the motions for bullshit reasons like everyone else is doing it or it’s a decent hobby or you can impress people by your knowledge of it.  The people who don’t feel that way about anything, I think they’re not even alive.

 And yet people call me lazy.  I don’t get it, you know?  Lazy times are sometimes the best times that there are.  Once, Mike and I were just sitting on the couch, and we were talking for a while, talking without really thinking-about-talking, just talking as honestly as you would if you were talking to yourself.  It was only after like two hours that we even realized it, that we had been sitting there I mean, and we look at each other like we had when we got the couch to begin with, and I realized, hey he's right, I mean, what more can you want out of this godforsaken planet than this.
 
 
 

4. Thank you, sir, may I have another
 
 

 Drugs are good revenge against suburban parents.  Think about it.  These people leave wherever they went to school and wherever it was they wanted to live when they were young, they ditch the whole life they had, you know, in a place where there was actually something to do, and they move out to godforsaken suburbs which, while there isn’t anything at all worth living for out there, hey, at least it’s safe and clean and you can have enough room to set up a grill in your backyard.  And of course, it’s all done “for the children.”  As if that's the best idea for raising a kid, you know, surround them with nothing but BMWs and strip malls, as if it’s not entirely selfish to live a life of convenience instead of – I don’t know – things actually happening.  I mean, okay, maybe I might decide one day that I’ve had enough of putting up with black people or walking, and maybe I’ll do it too  But let’s not pretend that it’s the kids.  Okay, no dangerous muggers and better schools, sure -- but also no clubs to go to, no bands to see, no people who are different in any way other than the superficial ones, or movie theaters that show art films, or decent cafes, or bookstores with zines, none of that dirty shit that gets under your fingernails, you know?  Which is what life is.  If it doesn’t get you dirty, it’s dead.  And the suburbs are about nothing if not godlike cleanliness.

 So luckily capitalism, the miracle of supply and demand, came up with a solution: portable fun.  Just smoke this or drop that and even Cedarwood looks like an interesting place to be.  What a country!

 It’s perfectly natural, you know – take away every source of anything interesting, and kids will inevitably go to something else.  I love how all the anti-drug ads try to say that it’s only kids who want to “escape” life who do drugs, as if the life their presented worth isn’t an escape itself – an escape from everything that makes life worth living.  Or, they’ll tell you how drugs cause violence, because, you know, your dealer might be a terrorist.  Whereas, if drugs were legal, my dealer would be Philip Morris.  So who’s causing the violence? 

And basically, the message we’re getting is all lies.  Have these people even smoked up, ever?  If the commercials were honest, they’d have to say “Well, I've never done this, but DONT YOU DO IT EITHER, because it's BAD, even though I have no fucking idea what I'm talking about because I never did it.  But hey, some people did it and DIED.  We heard.”  But instead it’s like, some glaze-eyed morons acting like Reefer Madness.  Now, don’t get me wrong – drugs are just like everything else: you can be smart or not.  I mean, drugs are great to liven up the music. or the class, or the masturbation session, or, well, almost anything else, because it can just like accentuate the sensuality of it, or the absurdity of it, or whatever.  But if you’re a jock fratboy idiot, who doesn’t know what sensuality or absurdity is, and only says “dude!” like the fucking kids in the movies, they’ll be just as stupid on drugs as off.  Or if you’re a pathetic waster, then you’ll become a pathetic stoner  who has to take a toke before they can get to sleep, and pathetic old people with like no brain cells left at all.  

The thing is: most people are stupid, that’s why they get addicted.  All you need is like half a clue and you’ll realize when’s a bad time to smoke up, or whether you’ve done it too much in the last few weeks or whatever, and then you just stop for a week or so before it gets too difficult.  At one point I’d been stoned like every night for a month, and it was pretty tough getting back to normal, but I knew I could handle it, because there was no way I was going to end up like one of those burnouts or old ex-hippies.  So all this Don’t Do Drugs shit is fine for the masses, but the way I figure it if I’m stupid enough to get my ass in too deep to get out, I deserve whatever shit I’m stuck in.

 In Cedarwood, as best as I can tell, the drug infrastructure functions like a well-oiled machine.  Secret connections, phone numbers, all probably traceable back to the same three or four regional sources, only of course no one knows that, it’s always from a friend who happens to have incrementally more shit than you have.  Like, I might want a dime bag, so I’ll get it from a kid who got an ounce, and he got it from a kid who has four ounces, and that guy got it from someone’s brother’s contact in the city, et cetera.  I heard there’s a law that if you get caught dealing drugs you can’t get a scholarship to college.  That’s about the dumbest idea I’ve ever heard.  They should send those guys to business school.

I always tried to have the most clueless drug dealers possible.  The kinds of kids who wouldn’t do anything to screw you, or put rat poison in your weed.  My most recent guy, this dumb kid named Adam, was perfect, because he was stupid and tried to act cool but wasn’t.  God knows how he got this connection, but since he had it, he started using the dealing as just a way to be cool.  That meant he didn’t charge too much and his stuff was always pretty pure – you never got that Chemical Shit Feeling you get sometimes.  Yeah, I had to put up with Adam’s incessant babble about nothing, but I got good drugs.  It's useful to do business with people who have like their whole emotional lives invested in you being happy.

 I started smoking when I was thirteen, at some kid’s bar mitzvah.  I still think that was really appropriate.  They were doing one of those candlelight ceremonies, where the kid invites his aunt up to light a candle and she kisses him and almost burns him to death, when Avi comes over and tells me that the kid’s cousin has a joint.  It was like he had a million bucks.  We were lined up out the door to get a puff.  Of course, I can’t say I actually started getting stoned then, because at the time I was too busy coughing up my thirteen year old guts to actually get high.  I also had no idea what it would be like.  So, you know, it was more like "Am I stoned?  Really?  Cool!  Am I stoned?" than anything actually resembling being wasted.  I will say, though, that "Sunrise, Sunset" was a really fucking hilarious song that night.

 The first time I actually smoked enough to notice it, I couldn’t stop talking about how fucked up it was.  Wow, man, I’m like here, but then at the same time I’m somewhere else, and shit, what was I talking about, I lost my train of thought, shit now I don’t even remember what I was losing my train of thought about, uhh, uhh.  It was pretty funny.  Now, of course, whenever I'm around people who do that, I just want to punch them.  

So smoking up is something that I’ll do at the drop of a hat. But not many hats drop at Wheatley.  Maybe all the bullshit Say No to Drugs crap that these preppy kids heard when they were like five years old got too far ingrained in their brainwashed little minds.   Or maybe it's because Wheatley's too far from civilization to make it work efficiently.  I don't know.  I especially don’t know why the Lesbian Harem couldn’t score.  Mike had done his share of drugs also, mainly pot, but also some acid, and ecstasy, and smart drugs, and shrooms, none of which I’d done.  He’d never done heroin or coke because he was afraid of getting addicted, which I thought was a bad choice because if it’s really so good that you get addicted after one try, well I’d like to experience it.  I mean, I’ll accept the consequences, you know?  If it’s that good, there must be something to it.

 Mike had a couple of sources in town who were expensive but pretty reliable, so fortunately we generally had weed when we needed it.  We had to be pretty careful; like I said, we were pretty much unique in that for some reason hardly anyone was smoking in the whole school, and drugs were like the one thing that they’d just immediately kick you out for.   Neither of us wanted to deal with our parents when that happened.  But that little gothic window and some incense usually made the pot in the crows nest pretty undetectable.  I was worried that it was going to like sink into the couch, but Mike bought some carpet cleaner or something and we cleaned up the couch, and that was that.

 Smoking with Mike was pretty nice, partly because, as generations of hippies have noticed, pot makes religion sound a lot more cool than it probably is.  So Mike could actually go off on a riff about the world being just the skin of Being, and those words would actually sound like something other than a bumper sticker.  Or we’d take our time, plan it out, block off a couple of hours and pick out good music, and it was just beautiful.  One time when we were high I actually brought up the fact that everybody thought Mike and I were fucking each other.  I put it in philosophical terms.  I said, “Mike, you know, like, how people think we’re queer, you know?”

 And he said, “Uh… ok.”

 And I just continued, as if he had said yes when of course he sort of said no but I got a little waylaid thinking about that because I was stoned but then I remembered what I wanted to say, which wasn’t what I really wanted to say but was, actually, what I wanted to say to deflect the conversation away from what I wanted to say – conversations taking place on many levels, I realized through the pot, and my true intention probably something closer to asking Mike ‘you don’t think they do?’ but my superficial intention – and that was the one you started with, stay with that one, stay with the plan, was to say what I did say, which was:  “I mean, people are like, oh he must be a fag cause he’s seen another guy naked or something.  But, you know, like, how about seeing past another guy’s skin and into his soul?  Isn’t that, like, more real than, like, a cock?”  

 Then Mike said, “Well I’m glad we can be friends like this, Alex.  You know, everywhere, the world is so beautiful, but there's so much pain in it.”

 I thought, it would be too bad if, underneath it all, the sentimental Mike was the real Mike after all, and that he was just some hippie wannabe, what with the dope and the Zen and all the rest.  There’s nothing more ridiculous than a hippie born in like the 1980s or something, who puts a Peace & Love bumpersticker on her dad’s Audi and smokes and likes Phish but wears lots of nailpolish.  Or maybe it wouldn’t be too bad – maybe if this was really Mike, then this wasn’t really so bad, that the godawful old hippie burnouts were just a caricature, but there were other ones out there who really were, I don’t know, turned on or something, who really did see that there were layers to everything and not just the obvious shit, which really was something that was trapping me as much as the fucking yuppies, because they were just living it and I was just rebelling against it.  

 It came sort of as a flash, that last bit: I saw myself as as much a victim as the corporate suit.  You know, he’s just going through life obeying the shit, and I’m going through life reacting against it.  But what is the it?  Why is it trapping us both?

 I said, “Well, what is it, what’s causing that?”  Meaning, the pain.

 And Mike said fear, and that seemed to make sense.  And so I wondered what I was afraid of, if I was caught up in the same web as the other shit.  But I thought, no, wait a minute, this is the world I live in, that I’ve been given, it’s not like I opted into this system of money-grubbing and lying and despoiling nature and forcing mediocrity on everything – I mean, I can see staying in the vat of shit because you’re afraid of leaving it, but I was born into it!  So what was I supposed to do other than rebel?

 I didn’t have an answer to that.  But I didn’t like the question.
 

 In early December, Mike and I decided to hike up a little godforsaken mountain, a hill really, that overlooked Wheatley and its surrounding rural boredom.  Well, actually Mike decided.  Obviously it wouldn't be my idea, hiking up a goddamn mountain -- you know, if it takes this much work, wouldn’t it be better to just stay indoors and jerk off?  But no, Mike has me hiking up this damn mountain with a thing of Snapple in my backpack and this late autumn cold thing going on, I don’t know.

 It was the week after Thanksgiving – a holiday in which the only thanks I had to give was that my parents decided to go to Paradise Island, Bahamas, without me.  Thanks a heap, assholes!  It was a mixed blessing.  On the one hand, no Paradise Island.  On the other hand, none of Alex’s parents.  Little did I know that an even worse fate was in store – my cousins in Philadelphia, where basically the entire four-day weekend with my cousins can be reduced to listening to my six-year-old cousin cry her eyes off, and watching her parents disapprove of me and my haircut and my “slovenly behavior.”  I liked that word: ‘slovenly.’  It seemed really  comfortable.  In fact, I remember that I had been thinking about changing my name away from Alex and towards something that actually means something to me -- you know, something like Wind or Spirit or Dream or whathaveyou – and I thought ‘Slovenly’ might be pretty nice.  This is before I got finished with my sarcastic thing.  You’ll have to wait a couple of chapters for that.

 Anyway, so we’re hiking up this mountain the week after Thanksgiving.  I don’t remember what the mountain was called -- Deer mountain or Fish mountain or some kind of animal mountain, I think.  Which was pretty funny because despite being in such a country kind of place, I’d never seen an animal of any kind around Wheatley.  Presumably the animals just knew better.  You know, steer clear of kids with rocks.  This was one of those years that happen periodically where the news media discover that little kids like to mutilate animals – you know, in Satanic rituals or whatever.  You know, I have to say, at least that shit horrifies old people into realizing how little us young people give a shit about life or the world that they’ve given us on a silver platter.  I think it goes on all the time.  One time when I was back in Cedarwood some kids got hold of a stray cat and tied it up to a tree and lit it on fire with hairspray -- you know, the torch, like we used to do at camp.  Only the cat didn’t die right away, for whatever reason, so they ended up cutting off its arms and legs and leaving what was left of it tied up to the tree.   It was horrible.  At first everyone thought it was like a religious thing, some fucked up Satanists on crack or something, but I knew better; it was Cedarwood, you know?  They ended up finding the kids that did it, or some of them anyway -- personally I think there were more than the two or three they picked up -- and pretty soon all the newspapers were going on and on about how valueless our youth was and how terrible, that these kids all came from good homes and shit.  As if it wasn’t the “good homes” themselves that were really valueless.   I mean, it’s sort of like what I was saying before: you move away from everything that can matter to a kid, and you don’t replace it with anything else, what the hell do you think is going to happen?  I mean, it’s not like they were interested in the cat anyway; it was just what this Says about our Children.  Here’s what it Says: Parents of Cedarwood, Your Children Don’t Give a Fuck.

 Let me also just say that I had nothing to do with the cat thing.  Personally, I gave up mutilating animals when I was around ten.  You grow out of it.

Actually, I was even a vegetarian for a while.  You know, when the cat thing happened in Cedarwood, I was pretty pissed off myself, but for totally different reasons: I was pissed off that kids would hurt a cat, just like I was pissed off that people would eat veal.  But then I got so much more pissed off at all these self-righteous hypocrites, claiming to care about animals while supporting factory farms, claiming to care about ‘values’ while feeding at the trough of greed while other people starved, that I forgot about being pissed off about the cat.  I just came to the realization that people are assholes, and we’re at the top of the food chain, and so to try not to be an asshole by not eating meat is just hypocritical.  Still, I kept my own set of Unterberger Eyes on my wall: I had a Meat is Murder poster from PETA, with some calf looking all sad in its pen.   People at Wheatley thought that I was being hypocritical by having it up and eating meat.  They were like, you’re such a hypocrite, and I was like, you don’t get it; it’s not that I disagree with the poster, I just have it up to remind me every day that I’m a murderer.

 Jesus, I got off track.  Fucking, Sheep Mountain, that’s what got me started.  Anyway, so we were hiking up the mountain, and it was getting kind of late, Mike like five steps ahead of me showing how manly and natural he was, me wondering when we were going to smoke.  We were going to watch the sun set on top of the mountain, that was the idea.   Finally we got up there, and I was a little pissed off at Mike for dragging me up here just for some kind of nature hippie shit.  I was also pissed off that it was four o’clock and yet the sun was already about to set, leaving us only like an hour before it got so cold that we’d have to go down the mountain and fall and trip and die in the dark.  Mike could tell I wasn’t exactly that happy.  Mike was clueless a lot of times about how I felt, or what I wanted -- mostly he kept telling me that I wanted to say things that he wanted to say, or wanted to do things I’d never thought of -- but even a stranger could see that I was pissed.  Obviously the solution was to smoke as much weed as quickly as possible.

 Which was sort of too bad, because that wasn’t the point.  The point of coming up here was to relax and smoke the dope and make the most of it, and enjoy the sunset, not to like hurry-up-and-smoke because I feel like shit.  That's basically the whole difference between smart drugs and bullshit stupid drugs right there, actually, in a nutshell.  Oh well.  We sat down on a pretty nice spot, and there was no one around, and so we lit up Mike’s glass bowl and all that shit during the walk up just faded away.  

People who’ve never smoked seem to think that smoking up is like drinking, you know, drowning your sorrows.  That’s not true at all; actually, it’s the opposite. When you get drunk you sort of forget what your problems are, but you still feel sort