the girlfriend of a nameless, sad-sack dork like me. Society is aghast. Parents and teachers wonder where they went wrong. The president declares martial law. Meanwhile, Kyrsten and I make out in the gym at the homecoming dance while everyone stands around in a shocked, silent circle. Then she gets up on the stage and delivers this great speech to the student body, condemning them for their superficiality, insensitivity, and racism (because maybe in the movie I could be black or Filipino or Native American and handicapped, too). And when she’s finished, after a panoramic shot of the stunned, silent crowd, one person starts to clap slowly. Soon another starts to clap. Before long, they’re all clapping. They raise me 53
up on their shoulders and ride me around the gymnasium shouting, “Chi-Mo! Chi-Mo! Chi-Mo!” just like they used to in junior high, except now they mean it in a positive sense.
And my dad comes back from the dead and smiles at me from the bleachers and kisses my mom on the cheek. And as the throng hands me a check for a hundred thousand dollars and carries me out the door to my brand-new car, you hear the voice of my back-from-the-dead father saying, “I’m proud of you, boy. . . .” Kyrsten and I start driving off to Vegas to get married. She gives me a blow job on the highway under the steering wheel and kisses me on the mouth and says, “Chi-Mo, you better get used to this, because from now on you’re stuck with me. . . .”
Okay, I got a little carried away there. Take it up to right after the speech to the student body, and change me back into a white, suburban, typically abled, clever, if angry, yet somehow almost loveable mixed-up kind of weird guy.
Slightly more believable.
King Dork to wed Homecoming Princess. News at eleven. It’s a nice thought, and it turns up all the time in movies and books. The one minor problem is that in reality, it never happens. I don’t mean rarely or hardly ever. I mean it has never even come within the ball park of being even slightly close to almost happening in the whole history of high school, since the beginning of time.
Not even once.
It turns up in all those books and movies for the same reason that parents and teachers want you to read
the background is secretly the main guy who has his revenge in the end. It’s a nice thought. But it’s bogus, man. Total crap.
TOYS I N TH E ATTIC
That CHS party was just around the corner, and I was starting to dread it a little. I mean, what good could possibly come of such a thing? Still, I didn’t want to let Sam Hellerman down.
And anyway, I had more important things on my mind. Because it was starting to dawn on me: the band wasn’t going anywhere.
We really needed to take it to the next level. Sure, we had great band names and stage names and album titles, and I could play bar chords, though it would sometimes take me a little too long to switch between the E and the A one. Sam Hellerman still didn’t have his bass, but I was getting tired of waiting.
Don’t get me wrong: Liquid Malice was and is a great, great name. But without songs that are as great, it would never amount to much.
So I decided I would write some songs and we would get together to rehearse them, even if we didn’t completely have our shit together.
One thing I learned right away. It’s way easier to think up names and album covers than to write the actual songs to plug into them. I wrote this song called “Kyrsten Blakeney’s a Total Fox” only to realize that what I’d done was basically rewrite “Christine Sixteen” with new, suckier lyrics. There just aren’t any words that rhyme with Blakeney. Kyrsten does rhyme with “thirstin’,” and I was sort of proud of that one, but the fact remains that my first song set the band back several stages all on its own.
I was starting to sketch out the lyrics for a new song with 55
the tentative title “Advanced Placement Is a Scam” when Sam Hellerman finally came over. He had his clarinet and a book of Aerosmith for Reed Instruments.
He had a good point. We could start with Aerosmith and work our way up to our own tunes.
I played the chords on my guitar and Sam Hellerman played the melody line on the clarinet. It didn’t sound too bad.
Little Big Tom poked his head in and said, “Dream on!”
which I thought was a little mean.
It shouldn’t have come as a surprise that I had so much trouble writing songs. They always say, “Write what you know.” And that was the problem: I didn’t know anything.
The following morning, Sam Hellerman dropped something on my desk in homeroom. It was the “Thinking of Suicide?” pamphlet from the Student Resource Area. (They have a whole wall of poorly written, amusingly illustrated pamphlets to help students sort through their problems. The titles are always in the form of a question, like “Pregnant?” or
“Drugs and/or Alcohol Addiction or STD?” “Thinking of Suicide?” is our favorite, though.)
“Oh, Ralphie,” I said, because sometimes we call each other Ralphie. “Is it that obvious?”
This was a running joke between Sam Hellerman and me.
He would pick up one of the suicide pamphlets and bring it over and I’d say, “how did you know?” And he’d say something like “killing yourself is a cry for help, you know.” And I’d say, “but isn’t death just a part of life?” “Yeah,” he’d say,
“it’s usually the last part.” It passes the time.
But this time around, my mind wasn’t on the hilarious banter. Instead, I was looking at the extremely familiar cover of the pamphlet as though seeing it for the first time.
