"So I use my right arm to pick up the left arm that I cut off, and I use it to bat the vulture away."
"But. . ."
Joni trailed off. At first, I figured I had her stumped. Then she leaned over, her eyelids closing. She smelled like bubblegum and bicycle grease. Before I knew it, her lips were coming near mine. I was so freaked out, I stood up. Since we were still under my bed, I crashed into the bottom of my mattress.
Her eyes opened quickly after that.
"What'd you do that for?" we both yelled at the same time.
"Don't you like me?" Joni asked, clearly hurt.
"Yeah," I said. "But, you know, I'm gay."
"Oh. Cool. Sorry."
"No problem."
There was a pause, and then Joni continued.
"But the vulture pulls your left arm out of your hand and begins to hit you with it. . . ."
At that moment I knew Joni and I were going to be friends for a good long time.
It was with Joni's help that I became the first openly gay class president in the history of Ms.
Farquar's third-grade class.
Joni was my campaign manager. She was the person who came up with my campaign slogan: VOTE FOR ME . .. I'M GAY.
I thought it rather oversimplified my stance on the issues (pro-recess, anti-gym), but Joni said it was sure to generate media attention. At first, she wanted the slogan to be VOTE FOR
ME . . . I'M A GAY, but I pointed out that this could easily be misread as VOTE FOR ME . . .
I'M A GUY, which would certainly lose me votes. So the A was struck, and the race began in earnest.
My biggest opponent was (I'm sorry to say) Ted Halpern. His first slogan was VOTE FOR
ME . . . I'M NOT GAY, which only made him seem dull. Then he tried YOU CANT VOTE
FOR HIM . . . HE'S GAY, which was pretty stupid, because nobody likes to be told who they can (or can't) vote for. Finally, in the days leading up to the election, he resorted to DONT
VOTE FOR THE FAG. Hello? Joni threatened to beat him up, but I knew he'd played right into our hands. When the election was held, he was left with the rather tiny lint-head vote, while I carried the girl vote, the open-minded guy vote, the third-grade closet-case vote, and the Ted-hater vote. It was a total blowout, and when it was all over, Joni beat Ted up anyway.
The next day at lunch, Cody O'Brien traded me two Twinkies for a box of raisins--clearly an unequal trade. The next day, I gave him three Yodels for a Fig Newton.
This was my first flirtation.
Cody was my date for my fifth-grade semi-formal. Or at least he was supposed to be my date.
Two days before the big shindig, we had a fight over a Nintendo cartridge he'd borrowed from me and lost. I know it's a small thing to break up over, but really, the way he handled it (lying! deceit!) was symptomatic of bigger problems. Luckily, we parted on friendly terms.
Joni was supposed to be my back-up date, but she surprised me by saying she was going with Ted. She swore to me he'd changed.
This was also symptomatic of bigger problems. But there was no way of knowing it then.
In sixth grade, Cody, Joni, a lesbian fourth grader named Laura, and I formed our elementary school's first gay-straight alliance. Quite honestly, we took one look around and figured the straight kids needed our help. For one thing, they were all wearing the same clothes. Also (and this was critical), they couldn't dance to save their lives. Our semi-formal dance floor could have easily been mistaken for a coop of pre-Thanksgiving turkeys. This was not acceptable.
Luckily, our principal was cooperative, and allowed us to play a minute or two of "I Will Survive" and "Bizarre Love Triangle" after the Pledge of Allegiance was read each morning.
Membership in the gay-straight alliance soon surpassed that of the football team (which isn't to say there wasn't overlap). Ted refused to join, but he couldn't stop Joni from signing them up for swing dance classes twice a week at recess.
Since I was unattached at the time, and since I was starting to feel that I had met everyone there was to meet at our elementary school, I would often sneak out with Laura to the AV
room, where we'd watch Audrey Hepburn movies until the recess bell would ring, and reality would beckon once more.
In eighth grade, I was tackled by two high school wrestlers after a late-night showing of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert at our local theater. At first, I thought it was a strange kind of foreplay, but then I realized that their grunts were actually insults--queer, faggot, the usual. I wasn't about to take such verbal abuse from strangers--only Joni was allowed to speak to me that way. Luckily, I had gone to the movies with a bunch of my friends from the fencing team, so they just pulled out their foils and disarmed the lugheads. (One of them, I've since heard, is now a drag queen in Columbus, Ohio. I like to think I had something to do with that.) I was learning that notoriety came with a certain backlash. I had to be careful. I had a gay food column in the local paper--"Dining OUT"--which was a modest success. I'd declined numerous pleas to run for student council president, because I knew it would interfere with my direction of the school musical (I won't bore you with the details, but let me, just say that Cody O'Brien was an Auntie Mame for the ages).
All in all, life through junior high was pretty fun. I didn't really have a life that was so much out of the ordinary. The usual series of crushes, confusions, and intensities.
Then I meet Noah and things become complicated. I sense it immediately, driving home from Zeke's gig. I suddenly feel more complicated.
Not bad complicated.
Just complicated.
The Homecoming Queen's Dilemma
I look for him in the hallways on Monday. I hope that he's looking for me, too.
Joni promises me she'll be my search party spy. I'm afraid she'll get too carried away with the job, dragging Noah over to me by the ear if she finds him.
But the connection isn't made. No matter how far I drift from the hallway conversations I'm having, I never drift into him. The halls are awash in Homecoming Pride posters and post-weekend gossip. Everybody is jingling and jangling; I look for Noah like I'd look for a pocket of calm.
Instead I run into Infinite Darlene. Or, more accurately, she runs on over to me. There are few sights grander at eight in the morning than a six-foot-four football player scuttling through the. halls in high heels, a red shock wig, and more-than-passable make-up. If I wasn't so used to it, I might be taken aback.
"Ah'm so glad I caught you," Infinite Darlene exclaims, sounding like Scarlett O'Hara as played by Clark Gable. "Things are such a mess!"
I don't know when Infinite Darlene and I first became friends. Perhaps it was back when she was still Daryl Heisenberg, but that's not very likely; few of us can remember what Daryl Heisenberg was like, since Infinite Darlene consumed him so completely. He was a decent football player, but nowhere near as good as when he started wearing false eyelashes.
Infinite Darlene doesn't have it easy. Being both star quarterback and homecoming queen has its conflicts. And sometimes it's hard for her to fit in. The other drag queens in our school rarely sit with her at lunch; they say she doesn't take good enough care of her nails, and that she looks a little too buff in a tank top. The football players are a little more accepting, although there was a spot of trouble a year ago when Chuck, the second-string quarterback, fell in love with her and got depressed when she said he wasn't her type.
I am not alarmed when Infinite Darlene tells me things are such a mess. For Infinite Darlene, things are always such a mess; if they weren't, she wouldn't have nearly enough to talk about.
This time, though, it's a real dilemma.
"Coach Ginsburg is going to have my hat," she declares. "It's the frickin' Homecoming Pride rally this afternoon. He wants me to march with the rest of the team. But as homecoming queen, I'm also supposed to be introducing the team. If I don't do the proper introductions, my tiara might be in doubt. Trilby Pope would take my place, which would be ghastly, ghastl
y, ghastly. Her boobs are faker than mine."
"You think Trilby Pope would stoop that low?" I ask.
"Is the Pope shrewish? Of course she would stoop that low. And she'd have gravity problems getting back up."
Usually Infinite Darlene acts like she's in a perpetual congeniality contest. But Trilby Pope is her weak spot. They used to be good friends, able to recount an hour's worth of activity with three hours' worth of conversation. Then Trilby fell into the field hockey crowd. She tried to convince Infinite Darlene to join her, but football was the same season. They drifted into different practices and different groups of friends. Trilby started to wear a lot of plaid, which Infinite Darlene despised. She started to hang with rugby boys. It all became very fraught.
Finally, they had a friendship break-up -- an exchange of heated classroom notes, folded in the shape of artillery. They averted their glances dramatically when they passed in the halls.
Trilby still has some of Infinite Darlene's accessories, from when they used to swap. Infinite Darlene tells everybody (except Trilby) that she wants them back.
My attention is beginning to wander from the conversation. I am still scanning the hallways for Noah, knowing full well that if I see him, I will most probably duck into the nearest doorway, blushing furiously.
"I do declare," Infinite Darlene does declare, "what has gotten you so distracted?"
It is here that I feel the limit of our friendship. Because while Infinite Darlene feels comfortable telling me everything, I am afraid that if I tell her something, it will no longer be mine. It will belong to the whole school.
"I'm just looking for someone," I hedge.
"Aren't we all?" Infinite Darlene vamps ruefully. I think I'm off the hook, but then she adds,
"Is it someone special?"
"It's nothing," I say, crossing my fingers. I pray that it's not nothing. Yes, I pray to my Big Lesbian God Who Doesn't Really Exist. I say to her: I don't ask for much. I swear. But I would really love Noah to be everything I hope he'll be. Please let him be someone I can groove with, and who wants to groove with me.
My denial has sent Infinite Darlene back to her own dilemma. I tell her she should march with the football team while wearing her homecoming queen regalia. It seems like a good compromise to me.
Infinite Darlene starts to nod. Then her eyes see something over my shoulder and flash anger.
"Don't look now," she whispers.
Of course, I turn and look. And there's Kyle Kimball walking by.
Turning away from me like he might catch plague from a single bubonic glance.
Kyle is the only straight boy I've ever kissed. (He didn't realize he was straight at the time.) We went out for a few weeks last year, in ninth grade. He is the only ex I'm not on speaking terms with. Sometimes I even feel like he hates me. It's a very strange feeling. I'm not used to being hated.
"He'll learn," Infinite Darlene says as Kyle recedes into a classroom. She's been saying that for a year now, without ever telling me who Kyle's going to learn from. I still wonder if it's supposed to be me.
With some break-ups, all you can think about afterwards is how badly it ended and how much the other person hurt you. With others, you become sentimental for the good times and lose track of what went wrong. When I think of Kyle, the beginnings and the endings are all mixed up. I see his enraptured face reflected in the light of a flickering movie screen; passing him a note and having him rip it into confetti-sized pieces without reading it; his hand taking mine for the first time, on the way to math class; him calling me a liar and a loser; the first time I knew he liked me, when I caught him hovering around my locker before I actually got there; the first time I knew he didn't like me anymore, when I went to give him back a book I'd borrowed and he pulled away instinctively.
He said I'd tricked him. He said it to everyone.
Only a few people believed him. But it wasn't what they thought that mattered to me. It was what he thought. And if he really believed it.
"He's the worst," Infinite Darlene says. But even she knows this isn't true. He is far from the worst.
Seeing Kyle always takes some of the volume out of my soundtrack. Now I'm no longer floating on a Noah high.
Infinite Darlene tries to cheer me up.
"I have chocolate," she says, reaching a big hand into her purse for a Milky Way mini.
I am sucking at the caramel and nougat when Joni comes up to us with her latest Noah Report.
Sadly, it's the same as the last five.
"I haven't been able to find him," she says. "I've found people who know who he is, but nobody seems to know where he is. Chuck was helping me before, and Chuck said that he's one of those arty types. Now, from Chuck that wasn't an ultimate compliment, but at least it pointed me in the right direction. I looked at the wall outside the art room and found a photo he did. Chuck helped me get it."
I am not really alarmed by Joni's thievery--we take things off walls and put them back all the time. But my inner security device does take notice of the number of times that Joni's name-checked Chuck. In the past, I've been able to tell that things with Ted were getting better when Joni began to name-check him again. The fact that it's now Chuck has looped me for a throw.
Joni takes a small, framed photograph out of her bag. The frame is the color of Buddy Holly's glasses, and has largely the same effect.
"You have to look at it closely," Joni tells me.
I hold the photo up to my face, ignoring my own reflection to see what lies beneath. At first I see the man in the chair, toward the back of the photo. He's the age of my grandfather and is sitting in an old wooden rocker, laughing his head off. Then I realize he's sitting in a room covered by snow globes. There must be hundreds -- maybe thousands--of the small plastic shakers, each with its own blurry locale. Snow globes cover the floor, the counters, the shelves, the table at the man's arm.
It's a very cool photograph.
"You can't keep it," Joni says.
"I know, I know." I look at it for a minute more, then hand it back.
Infinite Darlene has kept quiet through this whole exchange. But she's about to burst with curiosity.
"He's just some guy," I say.
"Do tell," she insists.
So I do. Tell.
And I know as I do that he isn't "just some guy." There was something in our two minutes together that felt like it could last for years. Telling Infinite Darlene this doesn't just feel like I'm setting myself up for gossip.
No, it feels like I'm putting my whole heart on the line.
Pride and Joy
Joni, Ted, and I sit together for the Homecoming Pride Rally that afternoon. It's the first rally that I've ever been in the stands for. This is due to a fluke of scheduling. Our school has too many activities and teams to be represented in each and every cheering session, so whenever we have a rally, only a dozen groups are spotlighted. They'd asked me to bring my acting troupe this time around, but I felt such recognition might damage our art--putting the personality before the performance, as it were. So as a result I am sitting in the bleachers of our gymnasium, trying to gauge the Joni-and-Ted barometer. Right now, it looks like the pressure is high. Ted keeps looking over at Joni, but Joni isn't looking as much at Ted.
He turns to me instead.
"You find your boyfriend yet?" he asks.
Panicked, I look around to see if Noah is in the immediate vicinity. Luckily, he is not.
I am starting to wonder if he actually exists.
The principal's secretary gets up to the microphone to start the rally. Everybody knows that she wields the real power in the school, so it makes sense to have her leading things here.
The gymnasium doors open and the cheerleaders come riding in on their Harleys. The crowd goes wild.
We are, I believe, the .only high school in America with a biker cheerleading team. But I could be wrong. A few years ago, it was decided that having a posse of motorcycles gun around the fields and courts was a mu
ch bigger cheer-inducer than any pom-pom routine could ever hope to be. Now, in an intricately choreographed display, the Harleys swerve around the gym, starting off in a pyramid the shape of a bird migration, then splitting up into spins and corners. For a finale, the cheerleaders rev all at once and shoot themselves off a ramp emblazoned with our high school's name. They are rewarded with massive applause.
Already the rally is doing its job. I am proud to be a student at my high school.
The tennis team is the next up. My brother and his friend Mara are the doubles champions, so they get a pretty good reception. I try to cheer loudly so Jay can hear my voice above the crowd. He's a senior now, and I know he's started to feel sad about everything coming to an end. Next year, he'll be on a college tennis team. It won't be the same.