I was developmental.
That’s what they all said about me, all the time, and about all my peers. So I believed them.
So life was a drifting past the next person, hoping to avoid the next cumbersome set of eyes, full of vitriol and wishing only for my demise.
In third grade I’d started this club. Only to people in the club would I give these blue clips that said “Digibind.” I got in trouble for it.
There was no more starting a club.
I was pretty active though. I worked a job, played sports year round, had a slight weakness for Metal Gear Solid on Play Station One but played in “band” freshman and sophomore year and in “a band,” junior and senior year.
But life was a matter of seeing what I, we, could get away with. And so there was stealing an orange recycling bin and throwing it onto the school track on a Saturday night, there was lifting the Beastie Boys Anthology from Virgin Megastore in downtown Chicago, endless teepeeings of houses and stealing other schools’ t-shirts at the cross-country meets.
And at the parties it was getting wasted and pressing my face to the popular girls’ breasts, which at that age is considered a mighty achievement, and rightly so. I didn’t know how to take off bras so this one girl’s unit I just straight up tore, then starting to fondle her breasts and continue to kiss. I saw her in high school a little bit later and apologized profusely and she was totally cool — she wasn’t mad at all, smiling, and glad just to talk to me. She had a “crush” on me, as they might say, when they what they say. We’re friends, today. With the other girl I’m not.
But I was developmental.
That’s what I said. I’d not yet developed my skills. Well, with unhooking a bra I was still pretty intermediate, clearly.
Prom rolled around and I couldn’t get a date and I decided not to go. This one chick flipped out, though, so I decided I’d go. For some reason it was a big deal to this random girl whether I went to prom or not. One time I’d been trying to take a piss at a party and she’d barged into the bathroom and started feeling on me whilst my unit woth spraying yellow liquid, and then I got accused of fucking her, despite the fact that none of her disgusting clothes were off. This is something I’d eventually get used to, as a white man — everything being my fault. See, I guess I actually was developmental, after all.
So I asked this girl from this other school and she said yes.
That day, I lay around listening to Soul Coughing. I’ll admit, I was trying to get tan. And I’ll admit also that it didn’t work. I was still corny white. I always hated how my prom pictures looked.
So I showed up at the big shot photo shoot and you could have heard a pin drop. I felt like a complete alien.
And I shouldn’t have been there at all. I felt bad because I wasn’t really making conversation with my date on the way back — I barely knew her. I had this mix tape in with Blink-182, Oasis and The Ziggens on it, and a bunch of other bands I can’t remember right now… probably Soul Coughing.
She’d given me more than I gave her. And we were still cool. But one time I went back over to her place to give her her share of the pictures and she was dating somebody, this dude named Greg who went to my school and whom I knew a little bit.
She described him as a “typical, controlling, overly involved boyfriend,” or something like that. That always tickled me, that she’d said that, and I’d always remembered it. She’d liked Eminem. Actually, I’d liked Eminem too. It was just a coincidence that I hadn’t put any Eminem on that tape I’d made. The Eminem Show came out about three weeks after our prom.
At the end of high school, I was partying with people from this other high school, a Catholic one, despite me not being Catholic, and finally “Without Me” was on.
Spiritual sidenote: junior year I’d decided to start going back to church again. Three days after I went back for the first time, my cousin Courtney got killed in a car crash in New Jersey. She was about 21 or so. I never went back to church after that.
But I remember this foreign exchange student from Latvia, saying things like “I wanna rape some bitches, in the ass.” Developmental stuff, all the way, I’ll tell ya.