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.
No comments:
Post a Comment