Men With Fast Cars Know
    By Mark R. Brand

    1.
   
    I was asked once, midst the firefight of a conversation with a woman who was clearly my better, if I hadn’t considered writing a story about how difficult it is to be a boy.  As I remember, and this is not saying as much as no doubt the whole affair warranted, my boyhood was concerned chiefly with escaping my boyhood.  Had I truly understood the blissful impunity in which those miserable years were encased, I surely would have enjoyed the “hood” suffix to its charming and boorish boundaries.
    As it were, I was from an early age instilled with a thorough respect for authority.  All right, so the bald truth of it is that I was a coward; an untested, un-blooded sheep with milk in my veins and a whine in my voice.  In my defense, I assert that all boys who are brighter than average lack a certain toughness of spirit gained in the fistfights of the stupid.  But we all claw our way to the top eventually, if given the proper incentives.  The only difference is our teacher.  The slow-witted get brawling lessons from Dad in the abandoned woodlot after a day of fishing.  The bright and bookish get lessons from Uncles Sun-Tzu and Machiavelli, or any other of a lengthy list of helpful author relatives who espouse at length the heavy-handed brutality possible from the mind of the wily, skirt-clutching chicken.
    The unfortunate problem with this divergence of education is that by the time a bright young man is old enough to comprehend The Prince or The Art of War, it is too late.  By the age of twenty-one, the swaggering schoolyard gladiatorial champions receive an inevitable introduction to such concepts as “unskilled labor”, the “Working Class”, and “minimum wage”.  By then, the upwardly mobile bright young men risk committing the social equivalent of a war atrocity on these broken and meaty dullards, by exacting the revenge they so richly deserve.  But, by the age of twenty-one, the bright young men have at least a significant portion of their milk-blood converted by some age-old alchemy into a bitterest gall running in their veins.  They are capable at last of adding insult and injury to the natural ebb of superiority afforded the formerly muscle-bound, random-hearted, teenage sex machines.
    But, I get ahead of myself.  This is not, after all, a story of why it is difficult to be a young man, but rather of the delightful open cesspool that is boyhood.  On second thought, perhaps it’s not fair to call boyhood by such a coarse metaphor.  I’m quite certain that for some of the other young toughs, boyhood was little short of an orgiastic saturnalia of independence, freedom, and excitement.  Those fire alarms must have been pulled by someone.  The half-smoked joint in the restroom certainly didn’t belong to a teacher.  Unless I’ve missed my guess, that is, and all the girls I went to school with who managed to generate illegitimate offspring before graduation were actually begotten by Providence Himself in an attempt to once again put one of His children in a rural locale to grow up and die for our numerous and carefully-catalogued sins.
    Please, gentle reader, do not mistake me for a heartless and jaded scoundrel who is incapable of appreciating the heartache of teenage pregnancy.  Indeed, at the time I was grossly affronted by the hutzpah of my testis-toting classmates.  How tragic it must have been for the poor beautiful wretches to realize their parents’ worst fears.  How tragic and inspiring of an insipid jealousy in your hormonal fifteen-year-old narrator.
    It was from this dark and ill-defined tragedy/jealousy that I began to feel somewhat cheated.  As if the average postmodern Mallrat needs another reason to feel entitled.  I felt cheated and inferior.  I realize now that such a thing, had it fallen into my life, would have precluded college, an admittedly sculpting and debaucherous learning event in its own right.  But even though I hated to see such angelic young girls with jelly-sandals, china doll faces, and jeans worn three shades lighter in the seat be so fiercely and inconsiderately used, I felt cheated.  After all (reasoned the young metaphysical scholar whose oddly-shifting “husky” Bugle boy pants were the same shade throughout): It is God’s world and not mine in which girls become beautiful and fruitful at such a tender and unprepared age, and as long as God permitted such sinful and tempting things as underage sex, I thought I deserved to enjoy its cloying delight as much as any of my peers.
    As I mentioned earlier, though, and I would have the reader carefully keep in mind, I have ever lived my life in pathetic fear of consequence, so my lust for the forbidden became something greater and far more powerful than biological desire for the curly blonde-headed dolls of the tenth grade.  That lust became fantasy, and as cowards are often made by a vivid imagination more so than any genuine fear, I took the first steps toward a place where I had more control over myself.
    Fiction.
    After all, someone had to be giving those fickle and maddeningly unobtainable beauties the Business (hence the occasional condom falling from the purse or even more occasional Cesearian scar peeking above Umbro shorts in gym class), so why wasn’t it me?  While I pondered this question during nearly every waking moment for the next five years, I occupied my racing cerebrum with any number of self-generated epics, serial tales of suspense, and dime novel bodice-ripping trash.  Of course, the term “dime novel” is an outdated one.  There has never been, in my lifetime, any consumer product with the possible exception of one minute of long distance telephone conversation, that one could purchase with a single dime.  The lack of money would plague me in my youth again and again, but when I had money I didn’t spend it intelligently anyway, so I suppose in the great cosmic rotation of the universe, my boyhood finances are not what you might call a priority complaint.
    So fiction it was, and fiction I suppose it will ever be.  If you are reading this as a student in some unknowable classroom of the future (hey, if I can dream up a world where faster than light travel is possible, I can certainly imagine your sullen and bored faces), for Christ’s sweet sake, grab this book by its loathsome spine and toss it to the darkest and dustiest corner you can find.  Go out later than your curfew, go to the cornfield parties that your parents don’t know about, smoke the joint, drink the beer in the red plastic cups, set off the firecrackers in the john at school on finals day, screw the cheerleader in the back of your Dad’s Suburban as often as you can.  These things are dangerous, yes, but no more dangerous than the career choices that you will be forced to make, or more dishonest than the lies and fake faces that you will have to make every day of your adulthood.  I guarantee you, however, that shagging or smoking Mary Jane will be a whole lot more fun.
    Don’t listen to what your parents say about honor and virtue.  These are nice ways for them to say “Don’t make my life any more stressful.”  Except it’s your life, and you don’t need anyone’s permission to live it.  If you’re the timid type like me, and don’t think I’ve forgotten you, here:  You have my permission.  Right here in writing at the outset of this damned fool story of mine.  Go forth, and be boys, or forever wish you had.
    Now that I’ve sent away the young men who have better things to do, I have a pair of warnings for those who would continue reading.  First, this will be a smutty tale.  Why, you ask?  It will be smutty because boyhood is smutty and vulgar.  Anyone who thinks otherwise has obviously never been a fifteen-year-old boy.  Second, I would caution against hoping for some great and indelible punch-line or moral.  The morality of boyhood is often changing, so expect, at the very least, a shifting and poorly planned story.  It is, after all, only the story of one boy’s life and not necessarily every boy’s life.  All right then, if I haven’t scared you off yet, congratulations.  I can reward your courage only with an equal measure of my own.  Sometimes honesty is the most intimidating thing in the world.  Let’s take a deep breath and plunge ahead, shall we?

    2.

    So, about my boyhood.
    There are many parts to a story which encompasses the first eighteen years of my life.  Fortunately, the first dozen or so can be thrown right out.  Truth be told, I now barely remember them in any terms other than the quantification of squirtgun fights, G.I. Joe body counts, and hours logged in the annihilation of digital Nintendo bad guys.  I start things at year twelve because that is the year things began to shake up.  It was almost three months to the day following my twelfth birthday that the United States and coalition forces liberated a small Middle Eastern country called Kuwait.  If memory serves, it was this year that my shelves of action figures and Legos was joined alongside by the tentative newcomers: a Gillette Sensor razor, a bottle of Revlon “Hero” cologne that I had little or no clue how to tastefully apply, and a Kung Fu grip.
    To this point, my boyhood had been so much like everyone else’s that it bears little or no repeating of details.  The only item of exceptional mention during the years before the war in the Gulf, was my experiment in a once-a-week class where, at the age of eleven, I was encouraged to study simplified texts of Aristotle, urban planning, and various select bits of cultural history that were far above the comprehension benchmark for my age group.  It was like Shunned Nerd day camp, in other words.  It was a repository for those adolescent boys and girls who were still grappling furiously with puberty, and yet showed a hint of creativity or intuition that might have been far enough ahead of the norm as to be remarkable and even slightly frightening to the adults.     
    I hesitate to say that this program (which I will refrain from naming to protect the identity of the perpetrators) was a proving ground for child geniuses or prodigies, though I sometimes think that was the secret administrative goal.  This is a mercifully short segue with an ironic punch-line, so humor me.  At about the same time we rolled into Kuwait City, I finally quit this program a year early, deciding it had no further use for me.  This was also the chosen path for another boy who later became a lifetime friend.  Interestingly enough, he and I were the only two of that dozen-or-so demi-genius classroom who had any success whatsoever in the future.  One was jailed that I know of, at least three others never graduated high school at all.  Two had children before they were sixteen, several degenerated into a perpetual marijuana haze.  Evidently, this program was the kiss of death nearly all of its participants. 
    I’ve thought about this chapter of my young life more than any other event previous to the year 1991, and at the time of this writing, I can only report a tentative theory as to why it failed miserably.  In its quest to recruit the best and brightest, the directors of this program mistakenly enrolled a disproportionate number of tortured idiot-savants, who might be able to learn to speak French fluently in a month, but who could not fill out, say, a job application, without listing faithfully all of their mental breakdowns.
    I came through this fine sieve of genius relatively unscathed (the real scathing was yet to come) and strode confidently into the sweaty, gyrating, throb of Junior High School.
    There is, mercifully, not much to tell even about this little developmental speed bump.  There were a few homely girls that deigned to give me their attention, and whose wallet sized school pictures from the year before adorned the inside of my locker.  I remember distinctly a small neon-orange picture frame with a snap-on magnetic back that housed the adolescent portraiture.  This little frame went virtually everywhere with me for some two or three years, regardless of which face peered out at me from it.
    Yes, there were tentative hand-holdings, note exchangings, and even a few furtive and thrilling ass-grabbings, but beyond this there is not much to tell of these years.  The next truly significant event came about shortly before my entrance to high school. 
On a summer day most like any other, riding my large bicycle (did I mention I stood nearly five foot ten inches at the age of 13?) home from a day at the beach, at the foot of the driveway, my size twelve sneaker toe managed to contact the pavement while the heel was still firmly on the pedal.  Down came a painless and silent thunder that blotted out the world.  As I look back now, I must say that it was somewhat comforting that bolt of oblivion.  If death itself is that sudden and irrevocable, then I can offer hope that those who have gone before me did so in a resigned peace, even if the methodology was violent.  As I tumbled off of the bike, in the instant that I was suspended airborne before I bounced headfirst onto the pavement and skidded a few merciless feet, I had no time to be frightened.  There was the strange sensation of my toe scraping the ground, and before the thought; oh, that was odd, was able to fully complete its circuit of my distracted adolescent brain, the silent thunder bashed me into a warm and fuzzy blackness.
What followed for the next three hours is mere conjecture.  I remember only images of it, like photographic slides taken of a vacation that I did not attend. 
Slide change: Eyes opening to see wrist bent in odd position, in the shape of a “z”.  Grabbed arm instinctively, felt the first pain, and a snap.  Black. 
    Slide change: Eyes open again, arms now both normal.  Laying in the street.  Standing.  Grabbing bike.  Something warm and wet like water from a hose that had been in the sun all day.  Red Kool Aid, too thin to be blood, running off of my head as if someone dumped a bucket of it on me. Black.
    Slide change:  Neighbor, neighbor’s son, father, sister, holding a washcloth to my forehead.  Two washcloths.  A large bath-towel.  Telling them that I lost my glasses, and saying thank you. Black.
    Slide change:  Nurse leading me by the hand to a little room where she asked a slew of questions which I cheerfully answered.  No real pain since the arm grabbing thing, blood still sporadically oozing from various locations.  Hard to see with no glasses.  Middle name is Robert.  Black.
    Slide change:  Triage room with a bed that had no pillow.  Very cold.  Sitting up if I can.  Shot in the arm.  Nurse asking more questions to my parents.  That’s his skull.  Black
    Slide change:  Tell them I had to go to the bathroom before they sew me up.  Pull up the bandage and see the forehead injury in the mirror.  Even in the gloom my skull bone peers back at me from between a set of peeled back red lips.  Red and white, and Black.
    Slide change:  Lying face-up on a table under penetrating lights.  Close my eyes and lay there as they sew me.  Doctor has a reassuring voice.  Stitches don’t hurt a bit.  Cut on forehead just feels like a sticker they’re trying to gently peel off.  Casting of my arm doesn’t hurt either.  Not displaced.  I displaced it.  Not displaced.  I fixed it.  Not displaced.  Ok.  Time to clean up. 
FUCK.
    This is the point where the slide show ended and the lights came back up into your narrator’s befuddled mind.  Up until this point there had been remarkably little pain.  Whether it was from the adrenaline in my bloodstream or if they had mixed some nice little pharmacological martini for me, I suppose I’ll never know, but that word, fuck, in front of my own mother for the very first time, was the end of our polite and interesting vacation slide show. 
    An emergency room nurse (or nurse’s assistant, or medical aide, or Chief Torturer) began scrubbing several patches of sizeable road-rash abrasions on my shoulder, chest and torso, with a series of yellow-then-pink sponges which felt like steel wool.  This woman proceeded to weave an entirely new, and as of this writing unparalleled, definition of pain.  A world of pain.  A universe.  I had crossed over into a land where the grass was a billion tiny razor blades and the sky was the heart of an oily firestorm.  I had broken the radius and ulna of my left arm, cut the flesh of my forehead all the way to the bone, and lost a significant amount of blood, so by then the tension was off and the most serious wounds were under control. 
I had experienced only mild pain until she began scrubbing the abrasions.  After thirty seconds of this, I realized for the first time how someone might be actually driven over the precipitous brink of insanity.  The scrubbing probably lasted only ten or twelve minutes, but in my mind I lived a whole chapter of my youth on that table, first trying to be strong, then slowly breaking, breaking, broken, crying, whimpering, whispering, pleading.  A puddle of ruined pride and electric agony.  Some part of me is still on that table, waiting for that precise and unknowably immense pain to finally be over.
    My dear readers, no doubt especially the ones who have, or will someday experience childbirth, are thinking at this point that I must surely be exaggerating the pain of this ordeal.  Having three or four patches of road-rash the size of saucers on your chest or belly cleaned is no doubt unpleasant but could not be that bad.  To these doubting Thomasinae I offer a comparison.  Several years later, shortly before my twenty-first birthday, I was involved in a work accident involving an industrial kiln in which I sustained second and third degree adhesive polypropelyne burns covering both of my hands.  These burns took two months to heal and I could not use my hands for most of that time.  I would rather relive those burns ten times over than once more go through that slow and horrific scrubbing at the talons of that nameless nurse.
    But there is a point to this story, and not simply to prove how loquacious I can be about pain.  The cut on my forehead had been caused by my head striking the pavement and driving the outside rim of my coke-bottle glasses through the flesh.  In the process, I had lost one lens of my glasses.  Little did I know that this proved to be a pivotal event in more ways than one.  Shortly after the accident, still doped up on Vicodin or Hydrocodone or Darvocet or whatever they had given me, I sat for an eye examination to obtain my first set of contact lenses. 
    Now this might be coincidence, but as any fourteen year old boy who has been chained to glass and metal for all of his young life will tell you, girls in fact do not make passes at guys who wear glasses.  Less than two months after the first day of ninth grade with the patches of road-rash still angry red marks on my chest and belly, I landed my first real girlfriend.

3.

    It’s hard to be a writer.  No, it’s not overly difficult to learn how to type on the one hundred-and- twelve-key standard Microsoft keyboard, or to scratch the 26 character Arabic alphabet onto a piece of yellowed 75% recycled paper.  Those things are just a failsafe, a protective barrier, a great big metaphorical condom to prevent any undesired contact between the vulnerable and impressionable world, and whatever insidious and malignantly influential thoughts happen to spew from my mind.
    Unfortunately (if you like smutty metaphors), or fortunately (if not), this is where writing leaves off any resemblance to sex.  It is likewise not difficult to be imaginative.  Depending, of course, on your willingness to allow yourself the guilty sin of doing so.  Nor is it even difficult to learn and regurgitate, within the average human lifetime, a number of phrases, themes, characterizations, stylistic twists, plot devices, shams, scams, and outright lies.  All of this, of course, with the eventual purpose of convincing the world that you are, in fact, a writer and not just an unusually apt pupil of memorization.
    Within the context of imagination, there are an even more primitive and distinct set of limitations.  I take a precipitous liberty with my own logic here, but I would go so far as to say that writers are some of the most amoral, self-destructive, and potentially evil people alive.  All right, all right, at this point some copies of this story are no doubt lying face down as the reader has abandoned them to go do something productive like eat a ham sandwich.  In which cases, I’m talking to the bed stand or to the floor, which is not much different than my everyday life to begin with, so I will continue regardless. 
    Fortunately, writers have a medium to express themselves which acts as an efficient safety valve.  However, in order to describe and characterize evil, writers must acknowledge their desire, capability, and even occasional willingness to, in fact, do evil.  In some sense, being a writer may be something like standing up in front of the group at Maniacs Anonymous and saying “Hi, I’m Gomer, and I can imagine a scenario in which I might be forced to beat someone to death with a can of beans.”
    For those of you who noticed that I used the masculine pronoun to describe the hypothetical writer, good job, here’s a cookie, but I don’t care if you protest; this is a story about boyhood and manhood and man-writing, and I’ll not have you muddying it with points of semantics.  I am not, nor hopefully will I ever be, a girl, and I do not presume to explain why they are the way they are.  But I get away from my point that was already away from the point.  A writer must conceive of the depth of horror to which he writes before he can write it.  And, as good old Coach Bobby Knight will tell you: If you can dream it, you can do it. 
    For the sake of brevity (I fear this story is already eating up more valuable page space than it deserves), I will limit my explanation of this concept to a single example.  One of my favorite authors, Mario Puzo, managed to appall the Western world with his story, The Godfather.  As criticized as it is popular, it contains several memorable moments of cold-blooded violence and callus, unapologetic, animosity.  I personally think Mr. Puzo was judged unfairly in this case.  If my theory holds, Mr. Puzo might have had enough understanding and capability of imagination to write about the deaths of Moe Green, Sonny Corleone, and Sollozo in a hard-edged, believable fashion.
    But so what?  So a man is capable of writing, if not actually committing, acts of homicide by firearm.  This is no precedent.  In terms of the literary and real world, these deaths, these crimes of the imagination mean less than nothing in a bigger picture.  Men have killed each other with firearms for nearly three hundred years, where would a reader get the idea that cold-blooded murder is so taboo that reading about it, experiencing it vicariously, is a shock that defies description? 
    If I may be so petulant, I’ll tell you where the desensitization comes from:  The Classics.
    The same books taught in schools all across the United States paint visions a thousand times more heinous than a drive-by shooting or mob rubout.  The late 1990’s saw a surge of mass-killings by school children, many of whom were driven by unknown motives and unknown ideas.  The media immediately hounded popular rock musicians and video games as the influence.  But why would these misguided boys need violent video games or Marilyn Manson lyrics to tell them to commit atrocities?  They had plenty of violence of an even more sinister caliber, right in their own syllabus.
    As Dylan Kliebold mowed down his classmates, what images do you think put him over the edge?  Do you think it was the virtual monster being “zapped” onscreen, or the riotously ridiculous Goth waif in women’s underwear?  Personally, I think it might have been the image of Gaspard’s corpse hanging over the town water supply in Dickens’ A Tale Of Two Cities.  How about George shooting his friend Lenny in the back in Steinbeck’s Of Mice And Men?  My point, circuitously, is: So what?  So what if a man or writer or lunatic is capable of shooting another man?  Better that, and usually for good reason, than Elie Weasel’s corpse-shoveling crematory S.S. in Night, or good ol’ Bill Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus grinding up Tamara’s jackal sons and feeding them to her.
    There comes an uncertain time when writers must ask themselves how far they are willing or imaginative enough to go.  How cold-blooded and merciless can they imagine a person to be?  An author friend of mine once wrote a short piece on the artificial morality of murder.  He said something to the effect that there was metaphysically no difference between swatting a fly with a flyswatter and clubbing a puppy to death with a shovel.  It is only our perceptions which attach any morality to shoveling the puppy, as opposed to just swatting the fly. 
    There is a reason for the nonsense above concerning writers.  There comes a point when boys must ask themselves which boundaries they are willing or imaginative enough to break.  Adolescence forces boys to confront situations where they do not know how they will react.  But you must understand that it is not truly important how they react specifically, simply that the situation is ultimately without a satisfying resolution.  If the boy doesn’t throw the punch, or light the firecracker, or grab the breast, or take his arthritic dog out to be shot, he is a coward forever in his own mind.  If he does throw the punch, break the window, shoot the dog, gut the fish, he is forced to acknowledge that somewhere in him there is the capability, if not willingness, to perform acts of cruelty, selfishness, callousness, and destruction.
I had always hated the phrase “the end of innocence” when used to relate the passage from childhood to adulthood, but in retrospect, I cannot improve upon it.  Adolescence and puberty and the unclear teenage years are, for boys, a constant struggle against the polarization of cowardice and callousness.  Since girls and young women, while plagued with problems of their own, are not expected to shoot dogs or throw punches or perform any number of unpleasant but inevitable tasks, it is left up to the boys to make their individual decisions about what they will and will not be talked or shamed into doing.
    But even the cowards realize, after a while, that even if they have no stomach for it, the punches will still be thrown, the bra straps still snapped, the dogs still shot behind the barn.  These things will happen even if they refuse to do them, and by standing their moral ground, all boys accomplish is earning themselves a generous dose of frustration and the notorious title of coward.  So after a while, as I’m sure Mr. Puzo and all authors (including myself) simply decided that if we had Weasel on the one hand telling us about the crematories and Dickens on the other telling us about Gaspard’s bloated rotting corpse, that perhaps shooting crooked old Moe Green wasn’t such a bad thing after all.
    But even as I write these words I know there are flaws in this metaphor.  I myself wasn’t able to kill or watch the destruction of my own aging and fatally-ill dog.  This is something I am ashamed of.  I should never have let another person kill my dog.  I should have done it myself.  If I had it to do over again now, knowing the sense of loss and cowardice that would follow when I failed, I like to think I would do it.  But I did dig the hole, I did carry him down to it, and I did cover him up when it was over.  To this day, I wish it had been me.  I wish I had killed the old golden retriever myself.  But, see, that’s the thing about being a boy.  When you’re a boy, you never know what you are and aren’t capable of, and it seems that every corner you come around, you either need to do something you can’t, or you are capable of doing something that you wish you weren’t.
    But I was talking about girlfriends in ninth grade, wasn’t I?  Let’s get back to something brighter and more light-hearted.  I wouldn’t want you to think I didn’t have any fun as a boy. 

4.

    It was roughly three months after I managed to poke my first set of contact lenses into my eyes, grew a foot over the summer, and somehow obtained what nearly every woman to look into them since has referred to as “those eyes”, that I managed to land my first real girlfriend.  It would be more accurate to say that she “landed” me.  This, I’m afraid, is where the story must get really smutty.  I got on a bus one morning, unsuspecting, and by third period I had received my very first and very memorable kiss.  Do I still remember it?  My friends, I remember everything about that moment as if it were a great big 3D, Scratch-n-Sniff, Ansel Adams photograph hanging on my wall. 
    Her name was Kathy.  Ok, so her name wasn’t Kathy, but that’s close enough.  If I had any doubts about the differences in male and female adolescence, I laid them to rest with Kathy.  This first girlfriend, in those long ago days of gravel summers and harmless Hallmark sunsets, was an adventure of sights and scents and textures.  An explosion of newness so vast that I could never experience it all even with both hands and all the time in the world to try.  The excitement was silk and rosewater.  A JC Penney and Revlon experiment in heretofore unfathomable palpability.
    How many lilting novelettes and steamy, passionate, flesh-treatises have been written about young love?  Old Shaky liked it, hell, Harold Robbins practically made a career out of it.  But there’s one thing that the stories don’t tell about one boy, one girl, and the end of the world.  Young love is supremely tacky.  Young love isn’t Dawson’s Creek or sports cars or tuxedos.  Young love isn’t jewelry or supreme gratification.
    Young love is tank tops and Daisy Dukes.  Young love is McDonalds and cotton bodysuits and cars with no heaters.  Young love is nipples and Nintendo.  It’s an X-rated European director’s cut of a PG-13 U.S. release.  Young love is gas stations and Deb and sneaking into the Tobacco Barn.  It’s bikini pool parties with water balloons, and bad 3-chord guitar ballads and long auburn hairs stuck in your teeth.  Young love is borrowed leather jackets and class rings and hiding out after dark.  It’s poorly-fitting carpenter jeans and Hanes Her Way 34B tucked into a book bag between facing copies of Stephen King’s Firestarter and The History of Modern Sudanese Algebraic Sociology.  Young love is notes on loose-leaf Mead spiral notebook paper and tampons in the glove compartment.  It’s “I miss you.” and “Call me when you get home.” and “Did your aunt come to visit?” and “My friend was totally pissed.” and “What would you name a baby girl?” and “You’re such an asshole.” and “I know a place we can go.” and “Buy me one of those.” and “What time do you finish work?” and “Wow, you used to figure skate?”
    Young love is all of these things and a hundred thousand more that it only takes one look at the old photos to evoke.  A small cardboard box:  A white lace garter that doesn’t smell like her anymore but did for a long time.  A few old crinkled pieces of notebook paper and an invitation to the 1994 Prom.  Memories of phone calls for hours with a cordless G.E. telephone, sitting on a beanbag chair and playing Tetris and another game I don’t remember the name of.  You know, the one with the ninja.  Kisses behind the furnace, serenaded by the first three bars of the Super Mario Brothers soundtrack.  Memories of all sorts of benign tackiness and poor taste.  Yelling matches in the hall, smugly groping on the bus, brazen kisses stolen at carefully calculated intervals in front of the parents. 
The things we remember about those days speak toward what was, and for some reason will always be, truly unforgettable.  I don’t remember Kathy’s parents’ names or the color of her house’s interior or even her birthday or telephone number, though I must have dialed it 500 times that year.  But there are things I remember, memories that never fade but seem only to become even more vivid with time.  I remember the carpeting of her bedroom and the way her hands were sort of short-fingered and rough and had a scar on her right index where it had nearly been cut off by a kitchen knife a long time ago.  I remember a green floral print summer dress unlike ant I have ever seen since.  Long sleeves and long hem and a long green string lacing up the back.  I remember how her ears always smelled like a mixture of cheap Revlon “Unforgettable” perfume, and the cigarettes her mother smoked.  I remember some parts of this big, bright, tragic, tacky nonsense as though it happened only five minutes ago, half a minute ago, as if it were going on at the moment I write this and I had better pay attention lest I miss it.
    These, my dear readers, were very memorable times.  Thankfully I was able to enjoy and appreciate them to best of my teenage ability.  What was to come would leave your oversexed narrator in the maelstrom of cold winters and lonely summers for some twenty-four months to come.

5.

    If unhappiness had a name it would be Todd Murphy.  Well, not quite, but it would be something like that.  There are a hundred other names for him, most of which would earn the movie of my life an R rating.  For the duration of this piece, we'll refer to him as either “that Rat Bastard” or “Coach.”
    I may never understand Middle Eastern politics or post-modern French philosophy, but I do understand hatred, thanks to the aforementioned sterling individual.  The details of this bitter and grueling rivalry I will spare you.  Frankly, they're probably exactly the same trials by fire that every young man goes through.  Coach didn't want me on the team and it suffices to say that he did probably every thing in his meager power to give me the boot.  In the end, I won of course.  I had the decided advantage of a father on the school board (a terrific man, I must say, who is afraid of literally nothing, much less a petulant PE teacher).  Even my mom went to bat for me at the meetings when the athletic director took the coach's side.  THANKS MOM. 
    It bears mention, perhaps, that our school district has a policy of no cuts from their athletic teams.  Hence, while fifty or so young hopefuls arrived for practice on the first cold November afternoon, there were a mere seventeen by the end of the second week of practice.  Not because they were cut, mind you, but because the spine bending hell practices that good old TM foisted upon us were enough to make guys who were better players than me slink painfully away into the shadows.
    I know that in most cases revenge is a petty emotion, but in this particular case it would have been sweeter than cane sugar.  Though the opportunity did arise later for retribution, I decided smugly against it.  Or maybe I chickened out, who can say?  Many years later when I saw Coach buying pizza and thought briefly of doing him ill, I hesitated.  Some ponderous abacus in my head weighed a month in jail against putting this monster of my youth into the intensive care unit.  This was during my fourth and final year of college, and I happened to have with me at the time a friend so trusted that he would have helped me do it without hesitation.  I was no longer the nervy authority-appeasing high school kid that I was when this horrible basketball season took place.  I was five years older, fifty pounds heavier, and by then a good five inches taller than my former coach.
    It would have been light work only.
    The look of fear in his eyes when he saw me, and his wince when I applied the vice-like handshake of a Division I rower...  Those things were enough.  The boogeyman of my youth was no more.  All that was left was a pathetic dullard, buying pizza for his family in the poorest town in New York State, and driving away in a fifteen-year-old Japanese subcompact car.  Still, it's not often that one gets to stare such a demon down.
    But this is, of course, all after the fact.  At the time of our story I wasn’t a tall and brutal looking man but a lanky and rather uncoordinated boy of sixteen, who was good at damn near everything except basketball.  I survived by thriving on misery for those four months.  Like a flower that grows best in a cellar, I drank in the physical pain of those grueling afternoons and blossomed steel petals of pure anguish.      What emerged on the other side of those two weeks was a scarred and fundamentally-changed person. Like a veteran of some horrific and unknowable battle, I wandered the halls of my high school, a Reebok wraith in a twenty four hour Nike nightmare.  Pre-Calculus was just a series of numbers which made sense for the instant I saw them and then faded again almost immediately back into the arcane hieroglyphs of an insane physicist.  Chemistry, being the final class of the day, became a forty-minute power nap, every minute of which I savored before the pain began again for the day.  The moments before the bell rang were filled with so much anxiety that I often began to sweat and feel sick to my stomach before I had even left school.  Looking back, the fact that I passed my classes at all, much less got high marks, is something I owe to the power of my unconscious mind and the mercy of Providence rather than any real effort on my part.
    I was old enough to drive by then, but an automobile was still out of my price range.  I was forced, along with the other unfortunates of my age group, to ride the great lumbering Laidlaw school busses.  I waited at the bus stop in the cold, with a hood pulled tightly over a woolen cap, which was pulled tightly over the hi-fi earmuff headphones of my ever-present walkman.  Yes, boys and girls, that was back in the days when music was recorded on tapes instead of CDs.  I sat on the bus, second seat from the last (the one with the wheel-well, and therefore, the most legroom) and listened to songs over and over that spoke to me.  It seemed, in fact, to be the only thing at all which was speaking to me.  The rest of the world was either yelling orders or trying to tape crude drawings of male anatomy to my coat while my back was turned.  I can remember a specific song by Meat Loaf with the line that would define that year. 

    There were endless winters when my dreams would freeze, 
    Nowhere to hide and no leaves on the trees.
   
    And I listened, and my soul nodded over and over that I understood, Mr. Loaf, I understood.
    In this state of mind, compacted of course by the fact that hardly any girls had even looked in my direction for months, I fell into the first period of true despair that I can remember.  The more I ponder it, the more I suspect:  This nearly-inevitable plot twist in stories about young American men, is when I began to first seriously think about ending my own life.  I'm afraid that's about as dramatic as the concept was at the time.  Flat and emotionless.  Not a psychological call for help, but a pending act a self-loathing based on the impeccable logic of a seventeen-year-old boy. 
        Having no car, no money, no skill on the basketball court and only passable good looks, I had no prospects of satisfying my biological impulses with members of the opposite sex.  Furthermore, since I was convinced somehow that college only brought women smart mouths and cottage cheese thighs, I saw my widow of opportunity to bed down one of my skirted classmates get smaller by the hour.  Naturally, since the best sex and the prettiest and purest women were slipping inexorably and forever through my grasp (God, what a hopeless virgin I was), the only dignified thing to do was to blow my own brains out.
        You'll read this and laugh, I know.  Like Daffy Duck taking the big cartoon revolver and holding himself hostage with it.  The sheer ridiculousness.  Hell, I'm cracking a pretty good grin myself at the idea.  But, understand that this is only partially sarcastic.  There was, at the time, a part of me that was loading the gun, a part of me that was quickly and unceremoniously pulling the trigger, and another slightly daft part that was trying to work out exactly what sort of statement I was making by doing it.
        Stupidly, or perhaps a better adverbial phrase would be; with a turn of events which was both ironic and anticlimactic, it was eleventh grade literature that saved my life.  It was Of Mice and Men and The Crucible and Macbeth.  I was ready to end the living nightmare that was my life whenever I got around to it, except, I really sort of wanted to see what happened to Chillingworth and Hester Prynne.  I could wait at least until I finished that book.  Dot.  Dot.  Dot.
        Thankfully, old Nathaniel Hawthorne was so delightfully verbose that by the end of the book, I was nearing the end of basketball season.  For a wonder, I had a girl that had taken an unexpected interest in me.  Somehow, topping myself no longer sounded so appealing.  Thanks again, Mr. Hawthorne.  If a fellow from the days before pens with self-contained ink could draft such splendid story, then why couldn't I?  So I set about it. 
    With no muse, I could write only about my emptiness and pain.  But this was enough.  A journal of a few hundred pages evolved, then a few stories.  A few tentative songs for the guitar that I had just begun to play.  And, as I'm sure you can imagine, it was at the end of this that I began to find peace, and to find my true friends.  And, that, my dear readers, is exactly how it happened.