Cat Sigh

It was another dreamy spring morning when I stepped out of my reverie and onto the no. 3 bus out of Ypsilanti. I had come to count on the 3 being the least sketchy ride to Ann Arbor, but I had a weird feeling when I greeted the driver. As I turned the corner and headed toward an empty rows of seats, I noticed a couple of teenage girls sprawled out on one of the sideways benches at the front. They pointed at me and laughed as I passed them and I immediately became flustered and self-conscious. Was there something on my face? Was my belly sticking out from my sweater? When I sat down, I quickly buried my face in a novel and pretended to not notice them noticing me. Of course, I was hyper-aware of their ridicule, which they heaped on every new passenger who boarded after me. When another woman walked by, they snorted and chortled and one of them muttered, "We should have tripped her!" For a moment, I was calmer. There wasn't anything wrong with me. These were just a couple of catty bitches... on a mission.

I knew the situation would escalate and since I was the nearest passenger, I would inevitably become a target. The bigger of the two girls - clearly the alpha bitch - turned to me and said, "Excuse me, don't you ever get out in the sun?"

"Well, that's a very rude question." I squinted my eyes as I peered into her smooth, womanly face. "How old are you?"

"Sixteen".

I gave her a dubious look and returned to my book. She tried to talk to me again, but I ignored her. I hoped that I wouldn't have to ignore them for long. Fortunately, their next victim arrived a minute later. A young man stepped on the bus and as he passed the jailbait duo, one of the girls tripped him and laughed. He told them they had no respect and headed to the back of the bus. They were on him in two seconds. Alpha bitch screamed, "You can't talk that way to us, faggot! Faggot!" She had really perfected the rage behind that slur, really enunciated the hell out of it. What a gutteral term- so fittingly mouthed by such a trashy young woman.

I won't lie. I took part in similar dumb pranks when I was a teenage girl. I remember when Megan Rossi and I were thirteen, we went to Fairlane mall and spent a whole afternoon riding the elevator at Hudson's, getting into fake fights in front of complete strangers. We thought it was really hilarious to make other people feel uncomfortable. It's the one power we ladies have had in all these centuries of male supremacy. We may not get paid what we deserve and we may be considered nothing more than baby-birthing chattle, but all of us are well versed in methods of emotional torture. All of us, at one time or another, flex that muscle, so I understand the thrill that comes with these sort of adolescent capers.

I'd like to think I outgrew that impulse. I don't think Megan ever did, but by age sixteen she was far more adept at her craft than the girls on the no. 3 bus. I mean, at sixteen, shouldn't they be sleeping with each other's boyfriends or something? Shit, Megan was slashing guys' tires by then. These pointing, laughing and tripping antics are diaper tactics compared to what most girls their age would do for some mean-spirited fun.

But the bus bitches were at least as persistent as they were immature. They ragged on that guy for a good five minutes. I don't know where the driver's mind was during all this activity. Eventually, a couple moved from the back of the bus to the front and apha bitch squealed, "Ooh, they're gonna' tell the driver!" but they didn't. She and her pal must have been disappointed, because they got off at the next stop.

And then, at that very stop, two incredibly aggressive, loud, mentally retarded men boarded. They sat exactly where those girls had been sitting and just like their predecessors, they said rude things to people who walked past them. And just like everyone (except "faggot" man) who had to deal with those mean girls, we ignored them, because that's what you do with retarded people who say mean things. Conventional knowledge tells us that it isn't their fault that they're assholes. They can't help it.

I remember in eighth grade catechism, Mr. St. John told our class that "retards are the only people who are guaranteed to get into heaven, because they don't know the difference between right and wrong." This was the definitive moment when I realized that Catholicism (religion in general, really) is a crock of shit. But, let's say we follow that logic for a moment. Are ghetto teenage girls any more accountable for their sins? Can these girls help being as awful as they are? Who could love them? Probably no one does. And I even considered mentioning that to them, along with some unsolicited advice about going to school, as that would probably be their one and only shot at a future.

It seems that I haven't completely outgrown the impulse, after all.

A Late Blooming Notion

Ever since I turned thirty, I keep experiencing these striking moments of self-awareness. A random example: the whole time I was growing up in Dearborn, there was this kid who lived around the corner, who I’ll call Chris Murphy. We were the same age and went to the same schools from Kindergarten through Fordson high. Other than in the third grade, when we were apt to pal around in class because we sat in the same block of desks, we were never really friends. He was just a guy who hung in the periphery of my girlhood from way before I had any interest in being around boys. I was also very shy, and tried my best to be invisible.

Being introverted, bespectacled and an aggressively good student, I was naturally considered a giant nerd. Junior high was, of course, a social nightmare, but I was also dealing with an explosive and depressing home life as well as the realization that Megan Rossi, my best (and only) friend from age five onward had fully blossomed into a catty and manipulative bitch. I was pretty hardened by the end of eighth grade, as the burn of being called a “dork” by my classmates was pretty mild in comparison to the rest of my life. I consciously decided to embrace my awkwardness and just be myself, because it seemed like that was the only way I was ever going to have fun. I began wearing strange and brightly colored clothes and started responding sarcastically to the more popular kids who picked on me. I was transforming from a nerd to a “weird” kid.

Meanwhile, Chris Murphy was blazing a different path of rebellion. He was becoming a “bad” kid, the kind who sometimes smoked cigarettes and probably shoplifted at Kmart. He and some of the other neighborhood hoodlums created a “gang” called the PFC, which was CFP (Cash Flow Posse) backwards and stood for Pimp-Fucking Crew. Well, I guess it was supposed to be Pimp, Fucking, Crew, but it isn’t quite as funny that way. Anyway, the PFC started tagging the new plastic slides and swing sets down at Geer Park, and when they got bored with that, they would beat up on little kids, or at least one little kid - my eight-year-old brother.

On two or three occasions, my little brother came home from the playground in tears because a bunch of scary teenage boys had shoved him around. This ended as soon as my 6’5” older brother paid a visit to the PFC. Incensed by the injustice of it all, I remained furious about those incidents. My fury erupted one day when Chris cornered me at my locker. I think he called me an ugly loser, or something like that. I said, “At least I don’t pick on little kids who are half my size,” or something to that effect, but what I remember most is what happened next; he shoved me, which I found very startling, especially when the palm of his left hand, en route to my right shoulder, landed exactly on my boob. My face turned red and he scurried past me. I ran to my Life Science class and felt distracted and weird for the rest of the hour. It was a classic uncomfortable moment in the age of puberty.

Starting high school that fall was like starting a new life. Life at home was less rocky and I’d figured out that if I didn’t make any noise, I could do whatever I wanted without my parents noticing. Mrs. Rossi sent her daughter to the whiter school across town and Megan, perhaps fearing her “new kid” status, took notice that I was her only remaining friend and stopped being such a bitch to me . I quickly found a new crew of friends at Fordson and toward the end of my freshman year, I started dating Sam, my first boyfriend. Sam was really good at being the weird kid. He wore combat boots and sometimes smoked joints while skipping class. I knew him from his scathing, anti-establishment column in the school paper, but we met in the drama club. Our first date was a They Might Be Giants concert. We were that couple. Other than my being a good four inches taller than him, we were a pretty well-matched pair of outcasts.

About two months into our relationship, Chris Murphy randomly decided to get the old gang together and beat up my new boyfriend. I was so hurt and confused by that sudden reverse in my suddenly happy life as a teenage girl. I was already reeling from the fact that I had a boyfriend, because I honestly didn’t think that would ever happen. I wondered, quite earnestly, why Chris had to come along and fuck it all up. It’s taken another 15 years of dating and relationships for me to figure out that Chris Murphy probably had a crush on me. I don’t know if it began with the Freudian slip of a boob-pushing experience or at Jamie Brown’s seventh birthday party, when one of the other parent drivers bailed and Jamie’s nutty white trash mother shoved me and Chris and Jamie and a bunch of other little kids in the back of her clankety-ass Ford on the way home from Showbiz Pizza and made all the girls sit on the boys’ laps, shrieking, “It’s so romantic!” That ride from Telegraph Road on Chris’s lap was a classic uncomfortable moment in the age of “girls rule, boys drool”.

But who knows, right? I mean, are these memories any realer than dreams, and what does it matter, anyway? After Chris and his buddies stopped threatening my boyfriend, he faded into the periphery. The public school system had tracked us into different spheres and I don’t even remember seeing him around the neighborhood. Yet, if I were to see Chris Murphy today, I could honestly say that he’s known me longer than any of my friends. Beside my mom, who was pretty distracted with other drama at the time, I don’t talk to anyone who knew me before my adolescence. That’s why I get so excited about understanding these rudimentary pieces of my life, because, at least in this situation, I really like this new idea that I wasn’t actually invisible.