Chapter Forty

High school.  The Tail hated it, but he never missed a day.  Up out of bed at 6:30 every morning.  5 minutes to take a shower.  5 more minutes to eat an English muffin, or a piece of toast.  5 minutes to say goodbye and good morning to his father.  15 minutes in which to be cheerful, young, and alert.  15 minutes to be a young man on the way to somewhere, completing a task, or taking one step closer to the freedom and adulthood he desired above all other things.  15 minutes in which to defy the perpetual gloom that hung over his father’s person.

He was always happy to leave the house in the morning.  It gave him a sense of purpose.  It was only as he approached his high school that he began to feel that familiar sense of dread.  Somewhere between the gloom of his father’s person and the institutionalized aggression of his school something happened, something changed.  The sun came out, briefly, while he was walking.  But no sooner had he left his home than this sun passed behind a cloud, not to be seen or felt again until it was time to walk home.  And once home, night fell.

For him it was an everyday affair, walking back and forth through the treed confines of suburbia.  It was a continuation of what he had experienced in elementary school, only magnified by his years and the more threatening form that schooling had assumed.  He was looking forward to a time when this ritual of going to and coming from school would cease to be, though he often found that future time difficult to picture.

It seemed that he was always walking to school, and as he walked to school he thought about the shape his life had taken.  He thought about what he was, then, as a young man.  Cars passed him by on the roads, some driven by older, cooler classmates with licenses.  He bore his backpack with his head down, studying the lines in the pavement.  There were crows in the trees, calling him.

        He wasn’t a handsome young man, the Tail.  His acne was receding, but he was still fat and clumsy.  He never bothered with his appearance, and his hair hung down from his temples in oily clusters.  His clothes had all been purchased in thrift stores, and half of his T-shirts bore the names of places he had never been to.  His fondness for torn sweatclothes was definitely unfashionable, and bordered on the embarrassing.  Classmates and teachers often joked about how he smelled.

You might have seen a native intelligence glinting from his eyes, but you would have had to look closely.  For the most part he kept his eyes downward.  This was how he avoided the bullying of classmates.  This was how he avoided their jeers and laughter.  He cultivated an attitude of silence, and only spoke when spoken to.

        And girls.  What to do about girls?  Lately he thought of them more and more, their long legs glimpsed behind dresses and skirts, their laughing mocking smiles.  He wanted to know what girls were like.  He had that urge.  In the later hours he would masturbate to an adult magazine his classmate had given him, part of a vast pornographic horde that this classmate kept inside a suitcase.  He had pretended to take the magazine out of courtesy, but this was not the real reason.  Girls, and that alluring orifice.  Girls, and the promise of their love.

        Two such girls passed in front of him, also on their way to school.  A blonde girl in a denim miniskirt, and her Asian friend in a tight pair of hot pants.  The two girls had looked right at him, but they had not seen the person standing in his place.  They had seen, rather, the space where he was supposed to be.  They had seen, he hoped, only the space a more mature version of himself would occupy.

        He was as attentive in class as he’d always been.  He took notes.  He listened to what the teacher said.  One of his teachers swooned over a story he’d written for Creative Writing, but instead of filling him with pride the entire episode had filled him with embarrassment.  He hadn’t realized it when he was in the midst of writing the story, but it had been about one of his female classmates, a girl on the cheerleading squad.  He had even given the character in his story a similar name, and parts of his story had been quite graphic, quite “adult.”

        All the other boys in his class had laughed at him because of the story.  It became a school joke.  After the teacher returned his paper, after she had read it aloud to the class, he had quietly ripped the paper into bits beneath his desk, trying not to meet the cheerleader’s curious eyes as he did so.  There were so many feelings inside of him.  It was such a mess.

        He followed the two girls at a reasonable distance, passing by the chain link fence that enclosed the school’s athletic field.  Beyond the athletic field he could see the brick eminence of his school, a larger version of his elementary school, and built around the same time.  Past the athletic field and the school’s main building the suburbs swept down towards Lake Union, and at the bottom of the hill he could see the residences of Queen Anne far distant, and beneath them the neighborhood of Shilshole behind the Ballard Locks.  It was a clear day, and he could see very far down the hill.

        Whatever his dilemmas concerning the fairer sex, he got good grades regardless.  He did well in school, because that was all he really knew how to do.  He did not do it for the praise.  He did it for an unspoken aesthetic.  The idea was that it could be done.  Perfection was unattractive to some people, but their mockery just pushed him closer to this lonely ideal.  He knew that his grades were going to earn him a scholarship, but this was not his driving motivation.

        PE class was the worst.  He was a freshman, and so much smaller than the older, athletic boys straight from a Greek urn.  They had muscles and hair in odd places.  They talked of fingering girls in the backs of cars.  They talked of conquests as if the world was comprised of a single, resounding Today.

        One of the boys in his PE class, a football player by the name of Mark, had backed him against a locker in the rear of the changing room while everyone else was outside in the gym.  Mark had called him filthy names and grabbed him by the crotch.  Mark had told him what they did to little nerds like him.  Mark wanted to take him further back, into the darkest part of the changing room, but he had struggled too loudly.

        At the end of the chain link fence he entered the staff parking lot, and also arrived at a footpath that sloped toward both the gym and a nearby outbuilding.  The outbuilding had an aluminum roof that extended over the footpath, and as they passed beneath this roof his heart began to beat faster, his mind suddenly full of apprehensions and worries.

        After the episode with Mark he went home and cried in his room.  He cried for all the shame he felt about his urges.  He wanted to be with those pretty, smiling girls, but it was always such a long time until growing up finally happened.  They never noticed him, and when he tried to speak in their presence, the words putrefied on his tongue.  Some of the girls were horrid, teasing creatures.  Others were kind.  The kind ones were worse, because they were only more devious in revealing his inferiority.

        And when he thought about it, he wondered what might have happened if Mark had taken him back into that shadowed place.  Would he have liked it?  Did that make him gay?  Oh, to be a nerd and a fag at once.  They would laugh at him even harder then.  They would stop being merciful.  And there would be no escape – no escape – until graduation.  

The girls’ route diverged from his as they took a left onto another footpath. The girls walked into the building where the band classes were held.  He walked straight on, and on the other side of a small, ornamental yard he saw another footpath leading to the main building, where his locker awaited.  Behind the main building there were trees screening off the lawns around the swimming pool.  Many of his classmates chose to loiter on these lawns in the morning.  That was where they smoked weed in their cars, or else groped one another, or else talked of matters that continually eluded him.  That was where their days flashed by, while his days ground on, chained to the slowest of timepieces, measured out by worry and fear and doubt.

Forever watching the clock now.  How many minutes until break time when he had to avoid the beatings.  How many hours until lunch when he had to avoid the football players.  How many days until vacation, when he could pretend that the bitterness of high school was only a passing nightmare, to be woken up from in four, three, two, one more year.  He always knew how many minutes were left in each class.  He always knew what dangers lurked in the next hallway.  But as careful as he was, he could never be careful enough.  There were days when he went home with hidden bruises, and with memories that he wanted to forget.

        If you had seen him from beyond the classroom window, you would have thought that he enjoyed the lectures and the bookwork of school.  But he was not one of those movie nerds, devoted to Science or bug collecting or something like that.  He was instead a scared little boy locked into a certain trajectory, and he did not want to face anything beyond his chosen path.  To choose or not to choose, that was the question.  But he also wondered if he had chosen at all.  Sometimes he could see a crazy woman and a dottering man behind everything he did.  A virago that spit blood and cursed him, and a gentle, ineffectual fool who loved stories like he loved the world that began anew within these stories – each day.

        A set of double doors led him to his locker at the end of a long hall.  He started to enter his combination, and then another student pushed him into the long metal door.  “Whoops,” said this other student, smirking as he disappeared down a set of stairs, “Guess you better be more careful!  Fag!”

        He wanted only a girl to help him out of the labyrinth.  Some kind creature with golden hair, to help him escape himself.  There were times when he searched the halls for this girl, but he knew that he would not find her among the countless wallflowers and sluts that inhabited his high school.  Everyone was fucking or being punished for not doing so.  He was one of those.  And even if that girl had been present in those halls, he knew that it would await later years, when they had all emerged – somehow – from their adolescence to win her.

        The first bell rang.  He had his locker open, and he was pulling out his textbook.  Ten minutes until Spanish.  Four hours until lunch.  Six hours until it was time to walk home, and to greet his father, and to pretend that it was just another day at school, where no harm was ever done.

        When I am a Great Historian, he thought, I may write down a record of this time.  That record is all that afterward people will care to know of what passed here, in this hateful place.  In writing that record I will then be the master of this situation, and I will pass judgment on everything that has come before me.

        They will remember me, and not my shame.  My urges will be erased.  And if that story does not suit I will write another, and another, and another after that.