High School Memoir

                                         

I’ve never quite gotten over high school.  The rough jostling of hallway life.  The fellowship of your friends; the scorn of your enemies.  The guerilla warfare of friends becoming enemies and enemies friends.  The killing and the resurrecting.  The exhilarating successes and the heart-crushing defeats.  And all that exquisite – often futile – yearning.   Yearning for someone, and the euphoria of believing that someone desirable desires you, and the cold-sweat calamity of finding that she doesn’t – or doesn’t anymore.  All that desperation.  Desperation to be liked by the likable.  Desperation to know the right things to say.  Desperation to know the right things to do.  Desperation not to be mocked or shunned.  And so much pressure.  Pressure from everywhere, from everyone; pressure from within and without, so much pressure you could burst.  All that fighting for your life.  It burns an impression on your soul.

Just before my freshman year, my parents got divorced.  This affected me very little, except that it taught me that all things were permissible.  My mom was Christian and Midwestern in her sensibilities.  My dad was Chinese and authoritarian.  Their combined force on my life had made for a well-behaved, if tense, fourteen years.  Their separation released whatever their combination had been suppressing, which would eventually turn out to be a trembling, surging force which would frequently verge on brilliant catastrophe.  But at the time, their divorce seemed like mundane event with the simple logical corollary that if my parents didn’t have to stay married, I didn’t have to follow any rules.

My best friend Luke’s parents had divorced a little while before mine.  His mom had gotten a new house near Reno High.  It was made of brick and nestled in a cul-de-sac.  Luke’s room was the basement.  This was somehow very cool.  Everything with Luke had always seemed very cool to me since we’d met as children.  This was probably because Luke was a year-and-a-half older than me and started bucking against the rules much earlier.  He’d always had that knowing edge, as if he were in on essential secrets of the universe, which he would reveal to me in increments.  When I was eight and Luke was nine, he taught me to catch a football and hit a baseball.  There was a quality of both abuse and nurture in Luke’s mentoring.  I remember extensive games of whiffle ball, in which Luke would score run after run off my inept and relatively physically immature pitching:  I would pitch; he would hit; I would pitch; and he would hit, ad infinitum.  Sometimes he’d let me start the game batting, just so I’d get a chance at it.  Then he’d quickly strike me out and I’d take the mound, and I’d pitch and he’d hit.  At one point, I argued there should be a ten-run rule (Luke had taught me the concept of the maximum runs per inning rule), but Luke wouldn’t have it, although he finally agreed to a ninety-nine run rule.  This was, in a sense, fair.  And Luke had a strong sense of fairness, which was deeply moral to him, although fairness has an interesting way of turning about.  But then I also remember Luke teaching me to catch a Nerf football, and I was so bad at first that when I caught one out of nine passes, Luke celebrated with me and told me I was getting better.  This was truly the most generous standard of progress.

            Later on Luke showed me my first Playboy and Penthouse magazines.  I still remember viewing of the glossy, lurid images, and saying with bated breath, “that looks gross but I bet it feels good.”

            Luke invented role-playing games, elementary versions of The Sims and Dungeons and Dragons.  He taught me to play black jack.  He taught me to skip Taekwon Do classes so we could play pick-up basketball and talk trash to our opponents until they were in a dither.

And he would tell me about his girlfriends, who seemed to come out of nowhere.  He’d go to a summer camp or another friend’s sleepover and return off-handedly talking about Amy or Jocelyn, whoever happened to be his new girlfriend.  This aspect of Luke’s knowingness was the greatest of mysteries to me.  My experience with girls throughout my entire youth was that the girl I liked was never the one who liked me, and the one who liked me was always one I didn’t really like.  I was often told by adults that I was a good looking child, but I quickly learned that this did not translate into my own milieu, where I was only rarely mentioned as one of the cute boys, and never mentioned in the same breath with the Nick’s and the Andy’s.  And it wasn’t that I’d get rejected by the girls I like.  I couldn’t even get to that point.  I had no idea how to approach a girl or make my affections known to her in a pleasing way.  But for Luke, there would be a girl, he would like her, she would become his girlfriend.  I desperately wanted to know what the secret was to getting from point A to point B because I wasn’t convinced that it wasn’t simply a matter of looks.  My looks weren’t the best, but they weren’t the worst either.  There were worse looking guys who nevertheless did better with girls (I learned to understand nearly everything by comparing myself to other people).  There was a secret to it, and Luke knew it.  I was too shy to ask him directly about it, but I always observed him in hopes of comprehending the je nous se qua.

And these are just the highlights of Luke’s magical doings, and my childhood was a continual stream of such things, and so it was natural for Luke to lead the way into high school with one of his greatest revelations yet.

Through my eighth grade and Luke’s sophomore year, we had played basketball and done a little Taekwon Do.  Then in the summer of 1993, Luke announced that he was becoming a skater.  We were in the driveway of my dad’s house; Luke’s dad lived next door, and the two lots were divided by a long evergreen hedge.  I was probably dribbling a basketball, as I had become impressed with my new ability to cross the ball over between my legs.  And then Luke broke the news that he would not be playing basketball anymore.  He was becoming a skater, he said, probably that weekend, and he and I probably wouldn’t be seeing as much of each other as we had, given that I’d be playing basketball and he’d be skateboarding “forty hours a week.”  I’m sure I played it cool, and I’m equally sure that Luke had no thought, nor gave any thought, to the effect this would have on me, but the reality was that it threw me into an profound panic, and I felt the crushing power of gravity hurling me down.  Luke’s becoming a skater changed everything.

I thought this over that night.  First, I had become a pretty good basketball player.  In eighth grade, I’d been a significant role player on the best middle school team in Reno, and I’d gotten even better since then.  I was sure to have made the high school team.  And I liked basketball.  Second, skaters at that time were stigmatized outcasts, and basically I still made my way in the world as a pretty good kid: good grades, clean rap sheet, polite to adults.  In other words, I was the antithesis of a skater.  But Luke was my best and only true friend; I had other friends from school, but I really didn’t like any of them – they were all such unsophisticated children compared to Luke, with whom I’d spent most of my time for as long as I could remember.  I couldn’t fathom my life without Luke.  I know I never would have put it in these terms at the time, and I certainly didn’t act on this feeling, but the possibility that Luke would abandon me made me want to cry.

But then after considering the cataclysmic situation, I saw that the solution was simple:  so I shed my old identity like a used-up cocoon and became a skater.

Hell yeah.  We bought skateboards, baggy clothes, and Thrasher magazine.  My mom reacted with some shock and incredulity, but couldn’t make a prima facie case against skating on moral grounds (not that she was in a great place to be making moral judgments at the time, divorce pending and all), and so she mostly just looked at me with wide eyes and let me go kicking around on my board.  My dad, and this is something great about him, bought a skateboard too.  This created the short-lived, absurd spectacle of a fifty-year old, Chinese lawyer, riding around his driveway on a skateboard.  This phase ended abruptly when he tried to ollie and fell hard on the asphalt and decided that becoming a skater was not a good idea.  Nevertheless, he was supportive.  He gave his board to my brother Jason, who also became a skater.

I don’t remember Luke’s reaction to my becoming a skater, except that he allowed me to seamlessly transition into his new world.  Luke neither objected to me joining him in his new venture nor did he request that I do so or welcome me once I did, all of which proves that it never occurred to him one way or the other how any of this affected it me.  I suppose Luke was thoughtless, but he wasn’t malicious.  In a sense, I suppose he was spontaneous:  it had simply dawned on him one day to become a skater, and that was that.

I guess we had been a little depressed at the time.  I sometimes fantasized about killing myself, and I’d get out my dad’s Glock and set it in front of me, often crying as I did.  I didn’t have any real intention of pulling the trigger; I never even put the gun to my head.  But obviously this wasn’t the behavior of a happy tween.  Luke would also go into these deep funks and just lie on his bed and not move for hours.  At night, Luke and I would stay up late trying to catch a few specific videos on MTV.  One was Radiohead’s ‘I’m a Freak,’ with its uplifting chorus, “I’m a freak, I’m a weirdo, what the hell am I doing here? I don’t belong here.”  Another was 4 Non Blondes ‘What’s Up’: “Twenty five years and my life is still trying to get up that great big hill of hope…I scream at the top of my lungs ‘What’s going on?’ ” And finally, kind of ironically, because we didn’t like their music in general, we liked R.E.M.’s ‘Everybody Hurts,’:  “Everybody hurts, Everybody cries, Sommmmmetimes…”  One night, when we were really depressed, Luke just started wailing, mock-soulfully, “Everybody hurts, Everybody cries…” and I joined him, again, both of us purposefully overdoing it and sort of making fun of the song, but by the end we both felt better and were laughing.  Becoming skaters gave us a jump start out of our depressions.

We learned from Thrasher that there was a quite a lot to being skaters.  Thrasher confirmed my notion that skaters were outcasts, as it was full of stories of skaters being harassed by cops, misjudged by authorities, and beaten up by jocks.  The latter characteristic, of course, grabbed our attention for obvious reasons.  But along with the unpleasant prospect of taking physical beatings, there was a romance to it.  As it happened we’d been doing Taekwon Do and gotten the vague notion of ourselves as handy with our fists, and we sort of liked the idea of putting ourselves to the test.  As with a lot of our ideas, we liked them best in the abstract.

And, somehow, happily, we also developed the idea that our appearance as skaters on the Reno High scene would involve substantial and unprecedented numbers of girls becoming available to us.

 Luke and I had these long discussions at night about what the coming year would hold.

“We’ll probably have to fight everyday,” Luke said.

“We should try to stick together so the dumb jocks don’t catch us by ourselves and jump us,” I said.

“Last year this guy, Shawn, showed up in baggy pants and a Mohawk, and all the jocks jumped him at lunch and kicked his ass.  He came into school spitting blood and puking.”

The conversation always moved onto all the girls we planned to get with.  I certainly had no concrete idea of what to do with them once we did get with them, but it seemed like sex was the ultimate goal, despite, or perhaps because of, the fact that neither of us had ever had sex.  We placed girls on a scale from one to ten, with the cutoff line for sex being a six, which was an idea we got from this low-grade men’s magazine, Stuff.

“Heidi from Taekwon Do is about a six,” Luke said.

“Yeah,” I said.  “I want Melissa West; she wanted to go out with me in seventh grade.  I think she’s about an eight.”

“I’d say she’s a seven,” Luke said.

“Yeah, a seven.”

“Oh, man, what about the Six and the Eight from the mall?”  I said wistfully.

“Don’t even bring them up.”

At some point just after our becoming skaters, we’d be milling around Meadowood Mall when these two girls had started checking us out and following us around.  One was blond and pretty good looking, and the other had wavy, light-brown hair, and was really gorgeous.  But the real thrill was not just that they were attractive, and not that there were two of them (one for each of us), and not that they were clearly trying to get our attention.  What mattered was that they were like us.  Their baggy pants with the shredded cuffs and their oversized shirts of unorthodox color and pattern made their social identities unmistakable:  they were skaters.  They were perfect for us.

At one point as we munched on pizza from Sbarros we labeled the blonde ‘the Six’ and the wavy-haired girl ‘the Eight.’

Unfortunately, despite their tailing us for hours and our intense desire for them, we didn’t have the nerve to introduce ourselves.  I was really undone by the whole the circumstance, just too afraid to approach these overwhelmingly appealing girls, and Luke didn’t do anything either.  At one point, just before my mom was scheduled to pick up us, the blonde jeered at us, saying “I guess they don’t want to talk to us.”  And then she turned her back and along with the Eight walked away.

We were devastated.  Destiny had extended its blessing and we had lost it.  It was an unthinkable and incalculable loss, all the more for all the private boasting we’d done about the conquests we would make.  But we did use the failure as a goad to motivate our approach to girls the coming year.  We vowed to practice unrestrained aggression in our pursuit of high school girls.  I had absolutely no idea how this transformation, from wall flowers to lotharios, would occur, but I hoped that all the pep rallies we held on the subject would somehow push us over the hump.  I did secretly fear that when the moment of decision came, I would remain unable to act, while Luke would blossom into a ladies’ man, leaving me behind forlorn, humiliated, and alone.

In addition to all the social aspects of skating, there was the activity itself, which was harder than it looked.  At first it was a challenge to simply ride down the street on the board as it wobbled wildly, simultaneously gaining speed down the incline of Canyon Drive.  I tried to stick to a less graded portion of the street, just trying to get my balance, but Luke took off down hill, and I remember being amazed at the grace of a gentle u-turn he made after coasting for several hundred feet.

The first big milestone was learning the ollie, which is essentially jumping and getting the board to jump with you.  There are many subtle challenges to learning this, all of which are dangerously complicated by the fact that your wheeled vehicle can at any moment shoot out from under you, leaving your body parallel to and due for an unpleasant meeting with the cement.  It took months just to learn the most basic ollie, and we spent many afternoons at a nearby Safeway riding up to the curb and trying to ollie onto it and failing any number of ways, many of which ended with a body sprawled painfully on the cement.  It would have been a pitiful drill to behold, but eventually we did learn the trick, and so then there we were, ollying up and down the curb, or sometimes ollying in place, yelling excitedly to one another, “how high was that one?”

“About three inches!”

But we slowly got better.  Soon we were ollying down two stairs at a time, which was a terrifying thrill; and we began to learn how to turn the board onto a surface, the edge of a planter or a painted street curb, so that we’d go sliding along, always, at first, with us eventually losing our balance and falling, often hurting ourselves, but feeling distinctly bad ass about the whole series of events.  Skating exacted a steep physical price from you, unlike, we noted, the sports the dumb jocks played where protective gear and grass was the norm.

One hot day at Safeway, our expectations of persecution were confirmed by the arrival of the police.  The cops approached me, calling Luke over and making him sit on the ground next to me.  They officers were both fairly stocky and had thick brown mustaches.  One seemed to have it in for Luke.

“I told you last night not to skate here,” he said.

But Luke hadn’t been there last night, which he told the officer.

“Don’t lie to me,” the cop said, and Luke and I were incredulous at the incorrigibility and audacity of the accusation, given its patent falsity.  “You were over there at the McDonald’s.”

“No, I wasn’t,” Luke said.  “I was at my mom’s house.  You can call her.”

The cop then turned on me.

“But I don’t remember your little Nazi friend here.”

By Nazi he could only have been referring to my shaved head, which I had done on a bet with my dad, whom I’ve mentioned was Chinese, and my biological father.

Again, I was stunned by the cop’s brazen inaccuracy and hostility.  Luke and I had never been harassed by an adult before, let alone one toting a gun and a nightstick, the latter of which we’d seen used to great effect the previous year on Rodney King.  The injustice of the situation nurtured a nascent, Thrasher world view.  The cop kept it short after he’d maligned us, he wrote Luke a ticket (but not me, which again did little give us faith in the equal protection of the law) and departed.

When he was gone, and we were walking away from the scene of the crime,   Luke offered an interpretation of what had just happened: “Pig.”

My parents were concerned about the incident, but after I carefully explained the cop’s corruption, stupidity, and racism, they quickly rallied to my side.  They’d never known me to make trouble, and couldn’t yet even conceive of me as a wrongdoer, a bias it would take me about a year to eradicate.  Dad told me “next time to get the cop’s badge number and report him.”

So it was a summer of upheaval and new experiences, which were but a shadow of things to come.