You Boys Were Important
(even if you didn’t know)…..
Douglas
Douglas (he was not a “Doug”) was the first boy I laid eyes on and actually fell in love with from afar. What was remarkable was that it occurred at such a young age for me. Most people I’ve talked to don’t recall being attracted to anyone until far beyond first grade, which is where we met, or rather where I pined in silence for a time. In a sea of pink-marshmallow midwestern faces, Douglas was dark skinned and had huge brown eyes with giraffe eyelashes and a slim frame. I was completely smitten by his mystery: His last name was French, his looks were perhaps from India, his parents were never seen, and as I recall, his intellectual stance in class was pretty high (as much as one could be in a chorus of little brains learning to spell words). And he was Quiet. Sitting there across the room, never near me, dammit, so Quiet. It was a good thing spelling came easily to me. I’m sure I spent most lessons looking off to my right, where he sat.
I had completely forgotten by high school days and a new city away, however, just HOW I had expressed my love to him.
I mentioned him in a letter to a high school-aged pal I hadn’t seen since those days how I had adored him.
To my surprise, both she and he still lived in town.
She spoke to him about my letter and he remembered me, she said.
“He says he remembers you kicked him in the shins on the playground a lot.”
Allan
At 7 years old, Allan was not a crush - but one of my two first actual friends that was a boy. It was second grade and he sat near me and we talked too much constantly. We did everything together for a short time. He was quick-thinking, likeable right-off, and we ran rampant in the neighborhood group of …girls. He was FUNNY. He made me laugh until my sides hurt. He was good looking and spryly thin. It wasn’t until my mother basically told me I shouldn’t be hanging out with a guy who liked hand-sewing so much that I realized there was any difference between him and the other boys. Mom said he definitely had a weird attachment to his mother. I didn’t see why this was important at all.
But then we moved away. I have always missed knowing what became of him since.
It wasn’t until years later that I realized I was quite happy to be a fag-hag at such an early age.
Paul
When you’re in fifth grade there’s always a class clown. This guy will do ANYTHING, even to over-the-top practical jokes, to make fun of a teacher and get a laugh from the group. He’s the kid who just can’t behave for the life of him, because he’s bored out of his mind. He may also just not be all that sharp, missing the interest-level that some of the smarter smart-mouths would have been able to sustain. He above all others in the social spectrum, dares to throw out convention. For sheer bravado, and for some of his better retorts to our boring teacher, I loved Paul. But I also feared for his life. He seemed absolutely unable to tone anything down, could not stop a rebellion when he could add one more punch line, even if it sent him to the principal’s office, even if he were corporeally punished. He was severely yelled at on a regular basis and treated like the class dunce by this teacher. He also had a stroke against him before he’d begun: His brother had been a notorious trouble-maker. And he was IRISH. They said his family had the whole set-up of old Irish entanglement: too many children, a father who drank and hit them, etc. Whenever he was punished, Paul was a pack of matches ready to fume into catastrophic rage. I actually prayed for him to not be punished again in class, hating to see his dignity lowered again and again.
Five years later, as a teen, I met him again. He had dropped out at 16, and his father in punishment had made him join the Army. He had gone through bootcamp and had just returned. And there was no trace of the former Paul at all. His humour, his wit, his antagonism had all been artificially supplanted with the proud rhetoric of a fine military brainwashing. I tried to find even the slightest shred of individual thinking in him, but the floor had been swept clean of anything in his former life. He was part of the group now, he was proud to be integrated with the best fighting machines in Our Great Country.
I never found out if he went to Vietnam, nor whether he got home. But I called it a death all the same somehow.
Sheldon
Sheldon was a Math Genius in my 7th grade math class. He was everything a girl could want: bright, soft-spoken due to embarrassment over his recently-descended baritone voice, good-looking in a blond European way, of statuesque height, and came from a family of 50s-style motor-jacketed Grease-y older brothers. Sheldon was the perfect mix of good student and bad boy: He had learned well their thug-slouch and disinterested coolness, and had been caught smoking once. But he was the bright one in the bunch, always answering correctly in geometry, where I was helplessly lost.
Perfect for me!, I thought. The heart-stopping item, however, was a strange bit of detail: He had the most lovely forearms. He wore white shirts (which no one did in those days) with the cuffs turned back just so, exposing a very large silver ID bracelet on his left wrist with heavy chain link on the back. I coveted that ID bracelet. I coveted his wrists. I wanted to stroke just the four inches of his arms and wrists above his long hands. That would have been enough. But he never noticed me, and I never approached him; we went to different high schools, and I never saw him again. What would he think now knowing a girl fell in love with his wrists?
Ralph
My best friend from 8th grade French class was Leslie. We giggled and aced our way through most classes, and wrote notes in French back and forth about how jolie our professeur was, even if she was old. When I went to her house, ever in our cloud of pre-pubescently annoying constant chatter, I found a piano and began playing, since I played every chance I got. Her older brother played guitar, she said. Really? Eventually I even jammed with him one afternoon, he being a tall Czech type guy with the family’s characteristic cowlick of dark sleek hair hanging in a lock that fell over his eyes like an anime-cartoon. He had a great electric guitar, a Fender Strat, he announced to expect a raised eyebrow. But Leslie and he argued in a constant sibling spat, and once fought over my attention; so I backed away.
“But I like your brother,” I said to Leslie. “He’s neat.”
“Eeeewwwwww.” was all she registered.
It wasn’t until my 8th grade graduation, at the graduation dance, while dressed in my best party dress and fake-dancing with some guy who agreed to go with me because neither of us wanted to be left unpaired, that I saw Ralph as Rockstar, on stage. There he was with his fledgling band, playing a tune he’d written, a slow-dance number with two haunting minor chords, as I swayed slightly back and forth, and I kept peeking over the unfamilliar shoulder to my friend’s brother, now turned idol. CLUNK. My stomach sank. I suddenly realized the only way to his heart. I had to become a rockstar myself.
Gary
My friend Mary’s family took me on the two best vacations of my teens, out camping in the lakes and forests of Wisconsin. Bill the Marine Dad would gather up his wife Georgette, elder brother, Mary and I, and youngest brother into a van pulling a pop-out campershell trailer and away we’d go to someplace So idyllic, and So full of mosquitoes and deer flies, as not to be believed. We camped on a ridge to avoid the pests. I went off for what I’d said would be a short walk to the lake’s edge before dinner, and in those days, they figured I’d be fine. Serial killers didn’t figure in the psyche much in America then.
So I manouvered down the cliff to a rock ledge just above a fantastic wide green lake with trees of every kind framing both my vision and the opposite shore, and where the late summer sun baked its orange dusty warmth into my soul for a few minutes… when I was suddenly aware of the sound of crumbling rocks and approaching tennis shoes. And down plopped a boy my own age, with longish brown hair and and the greenest eyes and a slightly crooked smile. He must have seen me first and come down, I realized in later years. But I was too naiive to think of that just then. Then he began to talk about things. He talked about things that he’d done on this lake. I told him my childhood and he told me his. We talked about the importance of beauty and nature and good smells and life. We talked like poetry back and forth together. Then he took my hand and we sat there together, electric with each other in the midst of a non-electric experience at last, and when we looked in each others’ eyes we felt like we had made love already. And finally we had to part hands.
It was sundown when I returned and dinner long over and Bill had been looking for me for a half hour. They were PISSED.
The next morning there was a large rock with some chalked words on it left for me.
Gary had gone back home. If the rock had been smaller, I’d have kept it.
Freeman
At seventeen, pushing hard to become the folk-rock star I thought I was destined to become, I discovered one could not make a living by music alone. I had to get some kind of job, and I was untrained at anything business related. I had tried to wait tables and failed miserably, not being able to remember who-ordered-what whenever, let alone do math to figure out how many ingredients on a pizza or a half a pizza added up to on any given day (and it was different on different days due to sales and promotions)…
So I found a job in a hotel. Will Train, it said. It turned out to be janitorial. Not a MAID, a JANITOR. I was the only white and the only woman. There were three black guys, and a couple old white guys, and me. We cleaned the main areas. Appalled at the orange maid’s uniform they gave me, I braided my long hair and tied feathers in the tips. Freeman asked if I was Indian or something. He was only the second black guy I had ever really talked to. He was brown-skinned, pleasant faced, afro-d, and would have been stylish if money had permitted. We talked several times. I liked him. I was just getting interested in him because he seemed so …. gentle. Those were days when Black Power had hit the streets, and I thought I’d be in for a fight, but he was nothing like that. He was just Freeman. We talked about guitar and parents and things. Nothing much.
I invited him to see me sing.
He didn’t come.
I asked if I could come visit him once. He said it wasn’t a good time that weekend.
I asked again later to visit him, but he declined.
I suddenly realized that, at least to his family, it would never be a good time.
The Romany Gypsy
I can’t recall his name now, for the life of me. But when my sister was living in a house with her new husband and I was perhaps 15 they invited a guy-friend over to dinner, and he’d brought with him a nephew, the boy I now call Romany Gypsy, because that was his background. We all had dinner and sat around on the floor in the living room playing scrabble and other stupid things, laughing and talking, the elders having a drink or two. Those days were very loose days — society being questioned in all kinds of ways, and when the adults noticed the boy and I eyeing each other, they went off to bed (probably half high) and left us to chat over a bottle of some kind of wine. Who would do that now in this Republican era? (beside crack heads perhaps….)
He was just my type. His hair has well beyond his shoulders, long and dark; with enormous brown eyes and a sad, shadowed, iconic look to his long face. I couldn’t stand it!! I was hopping up and down inside!! He was GORGEOUS!! He apparently thought the same of me, because we immediately began a game of taking sips of wine and kissing each other until we were both spinney headed and extremely dangerous.
Oddly enough, that was also a more innocent time, and all we could bring ourselves to do was kiss passionately, over and over and with TONGUES which was a new thing to us then. We kissed for what seemed like hours and then kissed more until our mouths were actually sore and DELIGHT became snuggling and suddenly the wine took us in like a viper poison and we passed out on the couch, clothed arms and legs entwined.
I had no idea what vile thing had transpired in sleep. When we awoke, we kissed again.
OH GAWD, he tasted awful! 0-0 so bad I nearly winced.
I must have tasted horrible as well….
But it was impossible to stop! and so we kept assaulting each other, practically wretching inside with the smell of drunken food-alcohol breath. Ohhhhhh. We stank! We REEKED!
ACK!!! But I want….
Mmmmmmmm
ICK!!!! OH GOD!! YUCK!!
oh kiss me again…
EWWwww ok okok stop. I think I’m going to puke.
And that was the last of it…. and we didn’t see each other again…. but I still laugh hysterically every time I think of the dreadful, inexplicable pull to something both delightful and unbearably foul at the same time. Whenever I have such a dichotomous schism in my experience, I think of the Romany Gypsy and think, how like life.