For kids whose most compelling example of urban life came from prime-time cop shows and medical dramas, the idea of our thousand-student high school, a magnet institution for the performing and visual arts nestled cozily between a supermarket and an ice cream parlor, as “inner city” just seemed ludicrous. Sure, our student body offered an economic and racial diversity conspicuously lacking in the white-flight suburbs, but Dangerous Minds we were not.
We were theater geeks and cello players, brooding photographers and mural painters. Hell, we made the sassy choir members in Sister Act 2 look edgy.
Despite all of this, when I entered the front door of Clarkson on that first day of freshman year, it felt like Times Square at rush hour. I had, after all, spent my entire educational career up to now in a twelve-room building only two blocks from my house, passing every weekday with the same fifty-eight kids I'd known my whole life—mostly white, mostly wealthy, all exceedingly familiar. Stepping through the metal detector (one of Clarkson's few districtmandated nods to its inner-city status) into the school's cavernous front hallway where dozens of strange voices rocketed off fluorescent light fixtures and off-white linoleum tiles, I found myself longing for the cozy corridors of my old school, the pre-established cliques, the near-scripted conversations. But, of course, I'd come to Clarkson precisely to escape all that. I wanted diversity. I wanted to stop feeling like a middle-class kid in an upper-class world. I wanted a new start.
And at eight o'clock that morning, I got one. I walked into history class and slid into a desk amidst a cluster of guys in the back. I said nothing, just listened to them joke with a tight-lipped smile—not presumptuous enough to expect inclusion, but hoping at least for silent acceptance, tolerance. I wasn't so lucky. A boy with closely cropped red hair and buggy blue eyes stopped midpunchline to shoot me a glare. “That's Robert's seat,” he spat. I flushed to match his buzz cut, apologized a bit too eagerly, and began to shift my books to the next desk over. He and the rest of the crew behind him kept glaring. “That's Chris's seat.” I blushed still deeper and looked at him, helpless. I didn't get it. I hadn't even spoken. How could I already be unwanted?
Then a girl's voice piped up from the opposite end of the room: “Ignore them.” And another: “Come sit with us.” I turned and spotted a pair of smiling blondes in the corner. Still aware of the red-haired boy's gaze chilly against my spine, I shuffled over. After mumbling a flustered thanks to the girls and at last settling into a truly available desk, my discomfort melted quickly away. Riley and Alice, my rescuers, were warm and talkative and, I soon learned, shared my love of WB teen dramas. I felt instantly at home.
At lunch Riley and Alice introduced me to their friends, all of whom proved equally welcoming. Before long, I found myself almost constantly in the company of a pack of girls—my “harem,” as Mom called it. And so it was that I carved out my unique spot in the social hierarchy of Clarkson High. Not a lowly place, exactly, but not entirely desirable either. In middle school, I'd been a definite nerd, with a regular spot at the nerd table full of similarly nerdy boys. However internally aloof I'd felt from my fellow undesirables, to the outside world I was a firm member of the pack, just another slimy chunk of the socially awkward blob. Here I found myself higher up the ladder, but on a much more precarious rung. I sat at the right table, but on the wrong side. I was invited to the right parties, but by the wrong people. At any social event my conversation was limited entirely to those present who did not possess genitalia similar to my own. In this high school aristocracy I was the genteel poor.
Wolfe and I had a few classes together, and, in most, he treated me just like all the others, which is to say he didn't treat me much at all. Geometry, though, was different. In geometry, we were the only two boys in the entire class, and so, I guess, in this testosterone vacuum I was rendered masculine enough for interaction.
For the first few days he simply sat in the desk next to mine (I say simply, but this move was downright intimate compared to the behavior of other boys). He said nothing directly to me, but occasionally mumbled a complaint about the teacher under his breath. At these I would offer a suitably manly grin or throat-clearing, but otherwise I matched his reticence, spending most of class doodling on the cover of my spiral notebook.
It was the doodles that really caught his attention. Or, rather, the doodle, singular, since I really only drew one thing over and over—an image that had been indelibly pressed into my brain ever since my first harrowing exposure the previous summer.
“So, you a total nutjob, or do you just really like Scream?” he asked one morning, pointing to the dizzying array of blooddripping ghost masks with which I had spiced up my notes on the proper uses of sine, cosine, and tangent.
Horror movies were an unlikely obsession for me, considering I was a paranoid wimp of a fifteen-year-old who had yet to outgrow an unreasonable fear of the dark. And yet, ever since completely losing it after being dragged to a midnight screening of Scream by my eighth-grade girlfriend, I'd been totally, utterly, wholeheartedly infatuated, trekking to the video store every Saturday without fail to pick up a new stack of trashy eighties slashers—Prom Night, Pet Semetary, Hellraiser I, II, and III. Even the bad ones never failed to scare the hell out of me—my pulse pounded at the slightest of shocks, my palms spewed sweat at the first hint of blood—but I loved them nonetheless. Or, rather, all the more. My intent wasn't masochism but liberation, a chance for much-needed release. Because when watching horror movies, fear was totally normal; it was, for once, the appropriate reaction and socially acceptable behavior. Needing a night-light in high school, on the other hand …
Of course, I wasn't going to explain all this to Wolfe—not if I wanted him to ever sit by me again. Instead, I simply replied: “Both, I guess.”
He laughed. Well, he smiled and gave a slight grunt; I took it as a good sign.
“What about you?”
“Scream didn't scare me at all; I'm a bigger fan of Krueger.”
Now this was getting exciting. “I own all seven!”
“No shit?”
And so it was that Wolfe Reed came to my house at ten in the morning that Saturday for a Nightmare on Elm Street marathon. Not just came, but came bearing a gift: a limited edition, pristinely preserved Freddy Kreuger board game (his mom had picked it up at a flea market a year or so earlier). I was beyond touched, even though we quickly discovered that the game managed to be at once ludicrously complicated and profoundly boring. Fourteen nonstop hours of increasingly spectacular (if decreasingly frightening) maiming, murder, and mayhem later, we emerged from my living room bleary-eyed, vaguely nauseated, and utterly brain-dead. Traumatic experiences, though, have a way of bringing people together, and the marathon was no exception. It may have taken a thoroughly desensitizing round of gratuitous violence to forge, but Wolfe and I shared a connection now, a bond every bit as thick as the fluorescent goo that pins Hapless Teen #47 to the floor of a life-sized roach motel in A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master.
From then on, Wolfe and I hung out pretty often, though we rarely made firm plans. Planning, after all, typically involves questions. For example, I might have to ask something along the lines of, “What are you doing this Saturday?” to which Wolfe would have no choice but to reply, “Are you shutting your bitch-ass mouth this Saturday?” No, Wolfe preferred to simply show up at my house on random afternoons, expecting me to be free. Sadly, the fact that I usually was free made it difficult to effectively discourage this presumptuousness. And anyway, I found it nearly impossible to be annoyed with Wolfe; I was always so thrilled to see him. I'd have chosen an afternoon with him over a hundred mall trips with the girls, over a thousand awkward keg parties. We'd walk down to the park so he could show me his latest skateboard stunt, or to the video store to root through their pile of used display posters, or take my camcorder around the neighborhood to stage horror flicks of our own (all agreed that The Merry-Go-Round of Death was an instant classic).
He neve
r brought me home with him, though, and it went without saying that I was never to show up on his doorstep unannounced. Nor did anything change at school. At lunch, he still sat with boys, and I still sat with the girls, never mentioning our exploits of the previous weekend, barely even speaking on most days. Except for geometry class. There we'd speculate about the gore-factor of the upcoming Chucky movie, crack jokes (more specifically, he would crack jokes, for which I would serve as the butt), blatantly ignore the teacher, and, on particularly special occasions, rap. Yes, in addition to being a film buff, Wolfe was also an aspiring rap star and a devout fan of Cypress Hill. This was one interest we didn't share, my music tastes running more along the Joni Mitchell/Stephen Sondheim spectrum. For the sake of our friendship, though, I tried to develop, if not a passion, at least an appreciation of the stuff—approaching it with the same grim determination I employed when gulping down beer at parties. I never really grew to like rap (or beer, for that matter), but even if I didn't love the words themselves, I was unquestionably amazed at the way they flew so effortlessly from Wolfe's lips—no stumbling, no hesitation, no self-consciousness—just long, lacquered streams. Sometimes he'd even enlist me for call-and-response lines, and what I lacked in skill I made up for with blind enthusiasm.
Him: And when we rock the mike we rock the mike….
Me: Riiiight!
Or, his all-time favorite:
Him: I want to get high.
Me: Sooooo high!
By sophomore year, though, Wolfe didn't just like the song, he lived the song. This turned out to be another interest we couldn't share (though, again, it wasn't for lack of trying). I didn't particularly like pot. I didn't have anything against it, exactly; I just didn't have a very pleasant reaction to it. Pot brought out my brooding side. I became the guy who sulks in the corner, doing his best to ruin everyone else's good time. I'd sit in forlorn silence for hours, breaking occasionally to toss out a fatalistic comment or two:
Me: Go ahead, dance, laugh, sing, but it's all a pathetic, meaningless, futile game.
Bystander: Who invited this kid?
That kind of thing.
People didn't like me high. I didn't like me high. But Wolfe liked to get high. More and more, Wolfe liked to get high all the time and, determined as I was to keep common ground firmly beneath our feet, I thought I needed to get high, too. Problem was, Wolfe didn't like stoned Jack any more than anyone else did. We'd smoke and I'd try to just relax and laugh at his even-more-nonsensical-than-usual rants, but all the while I'd feel the involuntary lecture building in my throat and, try as I might to suppress it, the whole thing would eventually come barreling out of my mouth. I'd go on and on about how useless it was to do this, how pathetic we were, how he was throwing his money and life away, all the potential he was wasting. There were other things I wanted to say but didn't, like how crushed his mother would be, how she didn't go to jail just so he could repeat her mistakes. But, even high, I knew better than to open that door. I'd never even met the woman, after all. And what I did know had come from Riley, not Wolfe.
Wolfe let the condescending rants slide for a while, hoping I'd get used to the stuff and stop being such a drag. Then one night he brought me along to see his dealer.
“We're going to have to stay and smoke with the guy, okay? He gets pissed if you just buy and run.” Wolfe's instructions for me were simple: “Just keep your mouth shut. He can be mean. Real mean.”
And I did keep my mouth shut, retreating to the noncommittal language of smirks and throat noises I had used on Wolfe in those early days of geometry class. But sitting there shivering on the filthy carpet of this house with no furniture and no heat, passing a joint to some strange girl in a sweat-stained tank top and Day-Glo Windbreaker, terrified that if I so much as yawned I was going to incite the famed rage of this greasy-haired, acnespotted kid in a leather American flag jacket, I realized that, however bizarre the situation, the way it made me feel was all too familiar. I was back in eighth grade, pretending to like rollerblading all over again. I thought about how long it had been since Wolfe and I had just gone to the park to walk around, how long it had been since we'd camped in my living room with a stack of videos. I watched him take a hit across the room, his whole body curling in as he inhaled, and I felt my own limbs collapse, melt. I was so tired.
In the car after we left there was the usual swirling in my chest, that familiar pressure at the base of my throat. I opened my mouth to release a sermon, but instead of words, I found sobs. I just sat there and cried. Wolfe didn't make fun of me, didn't get mad. In fact, he didn't say anything at all. We drove home in silence.
After that, his skateboard appeared in my driveway less and less often. But I didn't give up. I was determined to hold on (whether for my own sake or his, I wasn't quite sure). I'd invite him over to help him with his homework, but he'd always show up high, get the answers out of me, and leave. I'd bring him film-school brochures, tell him it wasn't too late to get out of this state. We could go together.
Me: Look, NCArts doesn't care about your grades or SAT scores. You just have to make an audition film. You're a great cameraman.
Him: Look, NCArts doesn't care about you sucking it.
Riley didn't get it. She told me he was a lost cause, that he was taking advantage of me. “He's not even nice to you, for God's sake.” But I insisted that she just didn't understand, that friendship with Wolfe was different, that friendship between boys was different. As the weeks went on, what had once been mere eagerness to spend time with Wolfe quickly turned to desperation. I left too many messages at his house, talked too loudly when I ran into him in the hallway. I just couldn't bear to write him off, to write us off. And so, eventually, Wolfe did it for me. The summer after junior year, he stopped returning my phone calls.
We'd still talk occasionally at school after that—he didn't completely shun me—but his eyes were always somewhere else, his voice dull and distant. He was coming to classes high by this point, smoking in the senior parking lot before first period each day. He never rapped for me anymore. By graduation we were pretty much strangers. I was headed for college in New York, and he'd landed a job waiting tables at our neighborhood pizza place. That summer before I left, I dragged Riley in a couple times, sat in his section. He was nice, gave us free soda, entertained us with nasty jokes about the other customers. But he never mentioned getting together, never told me to give him a call.
When I first came out to Riley that August, she wasn't surprised. No one was, really, I soon learned. She did have one immediate question, though: “Were you in love with him? With Wolfe? Was that what it was?”
I was about to unleash a flip negative, but then paused. I realized I had to think about it.
Certainly, I knew I'd never really wanted Wolfe, not in that way. I didn't entertain frequent or intricate sexual fantasies about him. I won't lie and claim I didn't entertain any such fantasies, but that's really not saying very much. After all, I was a teenager and sexually inactive in the extreme. If a guy was close to my age and anything shy of revolting, I'd probably tossed the idea around at least twice.
My point, though, is that my attraction to Wolfe wasn't based on a physical urge. It wasn't lust. Yet it was a romance. Not in the wine-me-dine-me-by-the-light-of-the-shooting-stars-in-your-eyes-like-the-sea-on-a-summer's-day sense, or even in the sweaty-handhold-in-a-darkened-movie-theater mode so common to ninth graders, but on a much more abstract level. I romanticized Wolfe in the way that I romanticized the moors of Yorkshire after reading The Secret Garden, in the way that I romanticized life at Louisa May Alcott's Plumfield School for Boys. I loved the idea of him. I loved the idea of a male best friend. I'd never had that sort of powerful bond with another boy, never felt that kind of asexual affection. I was a stranger to true male comradery, to uncomplicated loyalty. And I wanted it. Desperately.
Ironically enough, the drugs and the delinquency only served to make that idealization even easier. Because I started to think I co
uld save Wolfe. I thought I was the only one who saw him for the creative, intelligent boy he really was. I thought I could be the one to encourage him, the one responsible for getting him into college. I was convinced that I was the only one who really understood him. I would be the Tom Sawyer to his Huck Finn, the Ponyboy to his Dallas, the Dr. Loomis to his Michael Myers.
So no, I didn't want to date Wolfe; I wasn't really in love with him. But I did want a relationship with him—something that mattered. I had so many wonderful girls in my life, so many female ties. But I wanted a boy to be close to. Not naked with, just close to. And so I invented one. I'd spent years trying to convince myself and everyone else of a connection that didn't exist, of a Wolfe that wasn't there.
And that's—more or less—what I told Riley: I'd loved Wolfe conceptually, nothing more. And having explained it to her, I felt I finally understood it myself. Safely analyzed and dissected, Wolfe could at last be filed away with all the other now impotent denizens of my high school experience, no longer able to cause me pain or pleasure, simply available for viewing at a comfortably nostalgic distance.