Ten Years Gone: Pomp And Circumstance — 2. Misery Needs Company

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“Look at Chet,” David said, motioning with his eyes.

“Which one is Chet?”

“You know, the school guard that looks like Chet from Weird Science? That’s Chet.”

“Is his name actually Chet?”

“Oddly enough, it is…” David always deadpanned shit like that.

“Well, what about Chet?”

“Would you two shut up about Chet, I think I’ve got a shot with Amanda Lynn,” Kevin declared.

“You think you have a shot with Amanda Lynn?”

“Yeah, she sits next to me in Bio and I think she likes me. I think I just need to play it right.”

“Dude, you couldn’t play Amanda Lynn right if she was actually a mandolin.” Oh deadpan, David!

“Hurr Hurr. I’m sure that hasn’t been beaten to death her whole life. For your information, she kept looking over at me today during the test…”

“Oh yeah? SHE WAS CHEATING OFF OF YOU, YOU IDIOT!” This was a typical Andy joke. Not so much a joke as a complete misdirection of totally unrelated anger issues.

“Well then the jokes on her ‘cause he’s failing Bio.”

“Will you idiots shut up? You’re just jealous…party poopers.”

Party pooper, you should know, has always been, and always will be, an invitation to reference Kindergarten Cop. In poorly imitated Arnold Schwarzenegger voices, a medley of “I’m a cop you idiot,” “I’ll be back,” and “Everybody get down,” shouts ensued. The courtship of Amanda Lynn would have to wait because just then the bell rang, and the humdrum of misery continued for three more periods. Then I received my reward—the final bell.

Going home wasn’t a treat, it was a miserable charade. I had to walk home to a little apartment half a mile away from the school and wait until I could go to my real home. My mother and grandfather rented an apartment in the good school district so I didn’t have to go to a city public high school. I didn’t want to continue with my religious instruction after graduating from middle school, and my family didn’t want to send me to the city schools.

We lived right on the line between the Borough of Queens and the County of Nassau, so it was an easy enough ten minute commute to school in the morning. However, it wasn’t prudent to tell anyone of this masquerade—I was told I couldn’t trust anyone. I was like a spy, or a participant observer in the schooling of Polo Shirts and Suburban Clowns.

I’d don my headphones and look nobody in the face on my walk “home”, down streets lined with well-appointed houses and Crayola yellow and orange foliage.

Keep it moving, I’d tell myself.

I’d get to the apartment around 2:45 or 2:50pm. It was in a house that was split into three apartments. Before the split, it must have been a great Leave it to Beaver sized home. The door on the left in the foyer was mine. There was a bathroom, a living room, and a bedroom. There was no kitchen—that’s how it was affordable enough for us not to live there. It was by far cheaper than paying for bussing and tuition at the Jewish high school embedded deep in Nassau, where most of my grade school friends were attending.

I’d play Super Nintendo, instead of doing homework, until I got picked up at the apartment around 6:30 or 7:00. In retrospect, if I had been less awkward, I would have been getting laid and doing drugs left and right—I had an apartment all to my own when I was fifteen! What an asshole—I must have preferred getting a high score to getting high and scoring.

I’d get in the car with my mother and she’d ask me about my day and shit. I’d give one-word answers, not because I had a bad relationship with my mom, which I didn’t, but rather because I didn’t want to talk about school at all. I wanted to go to the Jewish school now, but that boat had sailed. I fell behind from them academically in freshman year and was refused enrollment.

I was stuck with the Polo Shirts, but at least I had my hardcore nerdcore who I could never hang out with after school because they couldn’t know I was a super secret agent from the other side of the Iron Curtain between Nassau and Queens.

Once we got home, I’d enter our ground level apartment in my grandfather’s house and go into my bedroom. The apartment was not legal and we didn’t pay rent for it, but it suited well enough to keep our beds and…things.

My room had been two rooms, but we knocked down a dry wall so I could have a window, so my room was pretty spacious. The room was littered with clothes and soda cans, CD cases and audio cables. The wood panel walls were painted white and plastered with street signs and posters of Led Zeppelin, John Belushi, and Superman. My two guitars were leaned up against the wall next to my shitty amplifier.

There were two beds in my room. A twin was hidden in an alcove created by a piece of wall we didn’t take down and by a beam. It wasn’t on a frame. The other was a full size futon set towards the middle of the room. The larger bed was flanked by a dresser and my makeshift computer table. I had two TVs hooked up to face each bed. An extra TV and cable box had been available because the other room we had taken out was a small den. One was for watching TV and one was for playing games. The smaller TV, which had been mine when the room was smaller, sat on a shelf, while the larger one sat on a cart. I didn’t want to miss anything while I spent hours navigating Alucard through Castle Dracula.

Games could wait though. I’d get to the computer as quickly as I could everyday and begin instant messaging on America Online. At this time it was still an instant message on America Online and not an IM on AOL—people had not yet stopped using full words. Cultural acromania [acronym-mania –ed.] had not set in yet. I had changed the chimes of the instant message to scream, “HEY STUPID,” and every “HEY STUPID” was an exciting social interaction without leaving my room. The Internet balanced out my never seeing my friends from grade school, my not being able to socialize with my friends from high school, and my having absolutely no game with the Prada Bags.

I also had Internet-only friends. The Internet allowed for me to be a completely different person. I could construct myself however I wanted to be—but I didn’t deeply realize that others could be doing the same thing. I could be talking to girls. Girls I didn’t know. Or, unfortunately, girls I didn’t know weren’t girls. The Internet was a very exciting thing in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

I had Internet haunts—specific chat rooms and secret private rooms—where other losers, such as myself, would “meet.”  One such room was “The RPG Bunker” and residents in the bunker were most certainly nerdy video game folk such as me:

 

=====The RPG Bunker=====

 

HOST: You have entered The RPG Bunker

 

KrisD666: Hi Brandon

BRANDONMM: Hi room

Dustballfire: Anybody beat Ruby Weapon?

MiNiOn2234: You haven’t beaten Ruby Weapon yet?

BRANDONMM: You still stuck on FF7 Dustball?

SpriteTryForce: USE THE RED BOOMERANG!

Dustballfire: Not really. Im on my 4 th run through. I just need tips with ruby weapon. I keep giving up and just going on.

CAiThSeth: Did you defeat the underwater weapon at Juno yet?

KrisD666: You need ultima materia and the ultima sword.

Dustballfire: I hate ultima sword I’d rather use masamune

KrisD666: Then you’d rather lose.

SpriteTryForce: USE THE RED BOOMERANG!

 

CAithSeth: What squad are you using?

 

HOST: Dustballfire has left the room

HOST: Dustballfire has entered the room

HOST: Dustballfire has left the room

MiNiOn2234: WHat a tool

 

HOST: Dustballfire has entered the room

HOST: MiNiOn2234 has left the room

Dustballfire: Sorry. Still trying to learn this touchpad mouse.

Dustballfire: Seth I’m using Cloud, Sid, and Tifa

CaiThSeth: You aren’t using Caith Sith?

KrisD666: You know Caith Sith sucks.

CaithSeth: CAITH SITH IS THE MOST AWESOME CHARACTER EVER INCLUDING THE BIBLE!

BRANDONMM: He’s a cat riding a cloud.

CaithSeth: EXACTLY.

Dustballfire: Cloud, Sid, and Tifa. Why?

CAiThSeth: The reason you fail is not using Caith Sith.

SpriteTryForce: USE THE RED BOOMERANG!

KrisD666: Shut up Sprite its not funny!

SpriteTryForce: USE THE RED BOOMERANG!

SpriteTryForce: USE THE RED BOOMERANG!

SpriteTryForce: USE THE RED BOOMERANG!

Dustballfire: Shut up sprite I’m not playing Zelda

SpriteTryForce: USE THE RED BOOMERANG!

SpriteTryForce: USE THE RED BOOMERANG!

SpriteTryForce: USE THE RED BOOMERANG!

SpriteTryForce: USE THE RED BOOMERANG!

SpriteTryForce: USE THE RED BOOMERANG!

BRANDONMM: SPRITE ITS NOT FUNNY!

SpriteTryForce: USE THE RED BOOMERANG!

SpriteTryForce: USE THE RED BOOMERANG!

SpriteTryForce: USE THE RED BOOMERANG!

SpriteTryForce: USE THE RED BOOMERANG!

SpriteTryForce: USE THE RED BOOMERANG!

SpriteTryForce: USE THE RED BOOMERANG!

SpriteTryForce: USE THE RED BOOMERANG!

SpriteTryForce: USE THE RED BOOMERANG!

 

HOST: SpriteTryForce has left the room

KrisD666: IM bomb!

Dustballfire: What a lamer.

 

Just for reference, KrisD666 was supposedly a girl.

This wasn’t the only experience I would have with the Internet and girls, however. I spoke to people who I actually knew as well. One such day in that fall when I was 15, my friend Adam tried to pawn off an annoying conversation he was having online to me:

 

BSElect3: Hey fag

BRANDONMM: Fuck off. Whats up.

BSElec3: Talk to this girl that goes to my school

BRANDONMM: Whats wrong with her?

BSElec3: Nothing I just have to do homework

BRANDONMM: Theres gotta be something wrong with her

BSElec3: No nothing I just need to do homework

BRANDONMM: Sure…

BSElec3: Whatevs be a fag

BRANDONMM: Whats her screen name?

 

JunyMints10: Hi!

BRANDONMM: Hi, um, Adam’s friend?

JunyMints: Hi Adam’s friend!

BRANDONMM: I’m Brandon

JunyMints: I guessed that…I’m Rachel.

 

This is how I met Rachel. My relationship with Rachel, and the way I dealt with the issues that came up during the time I knew her, would come to help define the kind of man I would grow up to be, or not to be. It became a big part of the way I identified myself in high school. My instant message conversation with her stretched long into that night. Sifl and Olly came on MTV and left. Eventually that awful station was actually showing music videos, it was so late. Then around 2:30 in the morning…

 

JunyMints: ack, gtg I hear my parents they’ll kill me if they know I’m still online. Ttyl.

 

That Friday when I went to Adam’s house for band practice—I was in a rock band, sort of—he and Mayer had very little to offer me in the area of information about Rachel. They both went to that Jewish high school entrenched in the ‘burbs with her. I spent the whole weekend at Adam’s house fishing, but I couldn’t get any information. Mayer didn’t know her so well, and Adam was annoyed by her questions about Bio—apparently they were lab partners. Adam was never a team player, he’d either do all the work by himself or coast and do nothing. Collaboration was not, and is not, his strong suit.

The band played in Adam’s basement. The red, black, and white-checkered floor of Adam’s parents’ finished basement was our free studio space. His parents must have been saints to deal with the cacophony that emanated from their basement every week. With my tinny electric guitar, their son’s swinging-out-of-tempo drums, and Mayer’s completely elsewhere bass-lines, we were hardly The Who. Hell, we were hardly the what. We could never get a good name and we could never get a singer. So, realistically, we were not so much a band as we were most of a band.

On Saturday, we went to the bowling alley with a few of the other Jewish high school kids. We all met at Adam’s house but I was at the comic book store when the others arrived. When I walked in, one of the boys asked if I was Adam’s brother. I said yes.

“Hi, guys I’m Freddy…Adam’s older brother.”

“Oh…Adam never mentioned his brother.”

I went into the kitchen.

“Oh yeah? I don’t go to your school…”

“I guess not, or we’d have seen you right?”

Adam’s family wasn’t home and Adam was dropping a deuce.

“Yeah, I don’t get out there much.”

“Well, who would want to right?”

“Yeah, I mean usually they keep me in the basement.”

At this point, I was really glad Mayer was playing along.

“Yeah…wait, what?”

I came out of the kitchen with a big butcher knife.

“They usually feed me fish heads!”

They started laughing. Apparently, they caught the light inspiration of a Simpson’s reference.

The three guys were Dan, Alon, and Hank. Dan had an angular face with an untended Jew-fro, Alon was a heavy-set fellow with glasses and an odd and endearing wit, Hank was Hank. I would come to be very good friends with them in high school.

We headed over to the bowling alley like a group of jerk teenagers: walking in the middle of the street, smacking street signs, and posturing like we owned the world. At the bowling alley we all had pseudonyms like Big Dick and Ben Dover, thinking ourselves to be at once hilarious and rebellious.

Over nachos and far too expensive sodas, we bonded. Dan and Alon enjoyed RPGs, while Hank was pretty knowledgeable about classic rock. Dan was a bit of a Trekkie, which I wasn’t, but I was also not anti-Trek so it worked out. Alon, it turned out, happened to be great friends with Rachel. I spoke to him at length about her. He didn’t have any information that I didn’t already have though. I still hadn’t met her; I had only spoken to her a bunch on the phone and online.

I felt like he was doing recon for her though. What he got from me was a very important fact to bring back to Rachel. I was interested in her. The next week I got an invite to her birthday party and I knew why. It was all very high school of us.

I looked down at my copy of Hitchhiker’s Guide to Girls and on the cover it read in oddly comforting letters: “Panic. She’ll never get this reference.”

Fuck.