95: timebomb
When I am twelve I am presented with a choice: Side with the nerds, or side with the freaks. Not a choice that has ever been ignored by entertainment or media, but very real and very much essential when I am twelve.
The nerd boys are my brothers: Comic books, role-playing games, science fiction, puzzles, theoretics. They are as blameless and disconnected from their penises as I am, which frees us to fall in love as easily and passionately as Anne of Green Gables, composing her paeans to Diana Barry. It is my version of a heaven: Whirlwinds of implication, territorial and overt, declarations of brotherhood and partnership, the trading of locker keys and combinations, the late-night sleepover discussions of Robotech and Stephen King. The tender correction of my pronunciations of words like "Magneto" and "integral"; my tender explication in turn of matters of hygiene and etiquette and in the theoretical ways of men and women.
But the freaks! Dissecting and repeating, endlessly writing and rewriting the words of songs by Depeche Mode and the Cure and New Order; trading tapes and posters; discussing sex in frank and delighted terms. They are not my people, but I desperately want to be one of them, and determine consciously to change my entire life. It will be years before I understand that, in this group, my aberrant sexuality is my main cachet.
Among the gay kids, there is an unspoken agreement never to discuss or even imagine the possibilities of homosexuality in other than the vaguest terms; there is the unspoken agreement that any assembly among us is not only a declaration of terms but an acceptance of the cliché we've spent our lives attempting to avoid, and thinking that it's working. While I find myself in the company of similar boys and girls -- across drama, nerd, writing and similar categories, including a seriously disabling stint in the Just Say No club for reasons I will never be able to accurately resolve -- I am convinced this is only a coincidence, and not a serious loneliness given social accessibility.
Chief among the freaks, who welcome me into their ranks bemused and fascinated -- one boy agrees to tape his Bryan Adams and Like A Prayer albums onto cassette for me, on the dual conditions that I tell no one he has done so and additionally accept and purposively listen to three Cure albums of his choosing, with the intent to produce opinions about them -- is a vision of a girl, beautiful by any measure, half her head shaved and the other half dyed in a wispy aubergine, who wears ratty black dresses and black-and-white stockings. She explains to me that while Prince covers are nice, she feels encroached upon by this sudden popularity, since she's been in love with her since Lion & The Cobra. I am convinced she will be my savior.
Shawna is the most interesting person I have ever met in my whole life, both by painful determination and by natural enthusiasm and intellect. To be admitted into her careless company is a gift I could never have asked for. I keep the details of my private life -- mother in and out of a constant whirl of hospitals and religions, myself in and out of a constant whirl of foster homes and socioeconomic strata -- private, more to my later amusement, since I suffer simultaneously from an unending desire to retain their interest in me.
Shawna lives in the city -- Albuquerque, New Mexico, in the United States -- while I live an hour outside town; as an urban kid her social life outside of school is in full and riotous bloom while mine, as a resident of the poorest of the suburbs, amounts to weekly pathetic attempts to find a reason to stay in town for the weekend, or the night, or even just the evening. Her social circle includes older kids, but as I am twelve I'll never be able to relate their true ages: They could be teenagers, grown adults, kids from another school. They are older than me in a way I don't understand yet, straddling the three worlds of latent nerd, gay socialite and secret ward of the state.
They visit sometimes, at lunch, or take her away with them in the middle of the day like Sloane and Cameron, and I spend those afternoons privately musing on their adventures. One of them is a boy named Robbie, with long hair and a quiet, delicate way about him. He is gritty though, too; his uniform is torn jeans and t-shirts for bands nobody has heard of. I am fascinated by him, but frightened too, as I am made nervous by anything I consider cool. His softness exists entirely in tandem with his strength, his punk aesthetic, his disinterest in being cowed or spoken down to. He gives us lectures, on the rare occasions that I'm lucky enough to see him at all, on fighting the power and saying fuck no to gym class. It is said that he has smoked weed and possibly fried acid, and I believe it.
I am scared to think of speaking to him personally, because he is real: A real man, not much older than myself, but so secure in every aspect of himself that when a beautiful graffiti covering the entire west wall of the school is discovered one morning, and we're dismissed from school for the afternoon because it includes an eight-ball that looks vaguely like a bomb near a time of day, I am convinced it was him. His revolution is multivalent. He probably dates Shawna's older sister, or an older version of Shawna, or Shawna herself, and has amazing sex at all hours, when not drinking beer or smoking from bongs. He is the man I want to be as soon as I rid myself of the fifteen things holding me back.
A lunchtime conversation -- square pizza that day, and french fries -- with the freaks turns once again to homosexuality, which I have just been learning in my other life is definitely something to avoid. Shawna and one of the gay kids crane their necks to stare at me, urging me to continue. It is political, it is religious, it involves AIDS and bestiality. It goes on for a long while. I am always flattered when something I say causes such a stir, no matter the age I find myself.
When I am done -- nothing rhetorically or logically sound, not even anything I personally believe in, or think applies to any of us -- Shawna shakes her head, unimpressed. "I have friends that would kick your ass for saying that." I know she means Robbie -- beautiful, effortless, proud Robbie -- and the world abruptly turns over. Either Robbie is, like all of us nominally, gay-friendly to his usual militant degree, or else he is... Something strange, and new, that I don't understand yet.
She watches the wonder and desire arise in my eyes, the blush coming up in my cheeks, and grins to herself, nodding: "Yeah."