Shifting gears for a moment, we start a new category today called “Boys’ Tales of Privilege.” Think of them as Horatio Alger stories in reverse. And just remember – it’s all true. Except for the parts I make up.
Some of you may remember this story, as it was thrown up elsewhere on the web. But I've changed some stuff. Enjoy.
There’s just something about a girl who can bend over backwards and lick her own ankles.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
I have a confession to make. I come from money. Money and prestige. My ancestry dates back to the Mayflower. I grew up on the Upper East Side, in a chichi all-boys private school. Birthday parties included orchestra seats to Broadway musicals. My parents would set me up for playdates with the children of the Von Trapps and the deposed Shah of Iran. Incidentally, the Shah's son ran for Student Council President. He was asked what he would do about the chronically malfunctioning soda machines if elected.
"I'll do what I do at home," he said. "Buy new ones."
The audience ate that up at the debates but he still lost.
Before you cast judgment, know this: life was not easy for me either. There was a dark side to it all. There was the elementary school cookbook incident, where we all wondered why Mrs. Onassis felt the need to write into her recipe “make sure to save some rum for the rum-balls.” And life got really rough after Father got caught on tape talking about “the shipments” with John DeLorean. We had to move out of our townhouse on the Upper East Side and make do with a five bedroom duplex on the Upper West Side. Forget about retaining Consuela, our Guatemalan au pair, we were told. Mother would have to make the crepes a l’orange herself. And of course, there were those twice-weekly beatings at the hands of Robert Chambers in front of the Guggenheim…
Even in the upper crust, there was a bottom layer. And that’s where the shame of acne, coke-bottle glasses and a Federal investigation left me.
It was eighth grade. Being from an all-boys school, we didn’t have much opportunity to interact with the opposite sex. But our elders on the Social Register took care of that. Invitations began to arrive in the mail; invitations to dances, debutante balls and even the odd cotillion. Unfortunately for me, these invitations petered out after the first one I attended. That’s really a story for another time, but let’s just say it involved my inhaler, Malcolm Forbes’ now-secret nephew and cherries flambé.
At any rate...
The eighth grade play was coming around. It was The Madwoman Of Chaillot. For our grade-school plays, one didn’t really audition as much as one was conscripted. Most of my fellow classmates would join the Boy Scouts, the Knickerbocker Greys or even the Masons just to get out of walking the boards. There were no girls, so many of the actors would have to perform in drag. Those of us whose voices had not broken awaited three performances in a corset and three months of subsequent mockery.
But eighth grade…. eighth grade was different. In eighth grade, everyone auditioned. Everyone ached for a role. Everyone mobbed around the bulletin board when the cast list went up.
Eighth grade was when we performed with the Spence Girls.
In our little corner of the Upper East Side, there were a number of all-girls schools. All these schools specialized in educating a particular type of girl. Brearley had the bad girls. Chapin had the lesbians. And Spence had the hotties.
My school—Saint David’s—had a reputation of its own. Stupidity. Odds are, if you see a child in formal wear get hit by a taxicab while skateboarding into traffic up Fifth Avenue, you'll find an "StD" emblem on his blazer pocket. If you see a well-heeled child with his head stuck between the iron bars of a fence, laughing and laughing because he just won a dollar, you're probably not far from 89th Street. See a child on Madison Avenue staring into the sun? Block his view and direct him towards the Guggenheim.
Being one of the few eighth graders who could actually read at an eighth grade level, I was given a substantial role in the play.
I remember all of us anticipated that first rehearsal with a mixture of lust and fear. Of course, the fear won out. Our first rehearsal opened with the boys on one side of the ballroom, the girls on the other. (Yes, Spence had a ballroom. Most of these Upper East Side schools were converted townhouses donated by a dying, wealthy industrialist trying to stay out of hell.) We stood, our backs pressed up against the far wall, staring forlornly at slim, blonde girls named Genevieve, Miranda and Pepper.
Then they demanded we waltz.
The Madwoman of Chaillot had no required waltz. But Ms. Warwick, the Spence director, thought it would be a good way for us all to get to know each other.
Foolish, foolish woman. Poor, poor Spence Girls. Their toes were casualties to our penny-loafers. With dimes shoved in them. To make us look rich.
Like I said - reputation for stupidity.
Actually, in this regard I was one of the few exceptions. Well, not with the dime-loafers, but I actually knew how to waltz. Consuela had taught me. Between preparing international cuisine and regaling us with long Mayan-language diatribes against Rios Montt (Thanks to Consuela, I actually learned to speak Mayan. More specifically, I learned to say "Fuck that small-testicled bloodthirsty son of a llama," but still - I lost all grasp of Mayan once Consuela left us), she taught us to dance. And one of her favorite dances was the waltz.
My dancing partner, on the other hand…
She must have been a head taller than me. Her hair was a sandy, tangled mess of frizzy curls. We took our positions on the dance floor, and she smiled at me with a mouthful of braces. I tried my best to lead, but clearly this girl had reached that stage of puberty where there’s a rather sizable delay between the signals from the brain and the reaction of the body.
Not fair, I thought. Not fair at all.
Of course, it was entirely fair. I was a geek. She was a geek. I’m sure Ms. Warwick was just thinking we’d get along famously, being in the same social caste. What Ms. Warwick failed to understand is that no geek actually wants to be a geek. No one wants to be nicknamed “Poindexter.” Or wose, have their last name become the nickname for NERDS. No one wants to be pantsed outside the Metropolitan Museum of Art. No one wants to be shoved into the Shah’s security detail because Jimmy Osborn thinks it’d be funny to get you detained… no, we all wanted to move upwards. So the last thing I wanted was to be paired with a gawky, white-girl afroed spaz…
“Your danthing ith exthellent,” she said.
With a lisp!
(to be continued)
It’s one thing to be a nerd in junior high. It’s junior high, after all. Everyone’s awkward. Everyone’s mean. As for myself, I imagined that things would improve once I left Saint David’s and went on to high school. Everyone at Saint David’s had known me since first grade. First through third grade, I’d been in the gifted program. (Keeping in mind the rest of the student body, this was not a great achievement). Fourth grade, I got into chess. Fifth grade, computers. By sixth grade, I was dabbling in D&D. My peer group at Saint David’s had been witness to my steady decline into dorkery. I felt I only needed a change of setting, somewhere where my past was unknown. I could reinvent myself…
…then Ms. Warwick takes one look at me and pairs me with the biggest dork in Spence.
D’oh, as they say.
I’ve always been short. In eighth grade, I was 5’2”. My dance partner was 5’9”. She smiled down at me with her metal-encrusted teeth as I struggled to keep up with her large steps and out from under her size 10 feet.
“I’m Gwynnie,” she said.
“Uh-huh.”
I looked around the room at the rest of the dancers. As it turned out, we weren’t doing too badly. We had the rhythm down. At least Ms. Warwick wasn’t looming around me, saying, “1-2-3! 1-2-3! Porter, you move like a brain-damaged mule. Look at Miranda! Look at her! SMILE, damn you!”
Still, I would rather have had a different dance partner. Like Pepper, for example…
“Your handth are tho warm,” Gwynnie said, clearly trying to get my attention off of Pepper’s legs.
“Thanks,” I said distractedly.
“Mine are clammy, I know. I’m thorry. I’ve been thneezing.”
…and just then, Ms. Warwick approached.
I gripped Gwynnie’s hand, trying to forget her revelation. And I smiled.
Ms. Warwick paused a moment, then turned to the rest of the group. “LOOK AT THEM!” she commanded. “LOOK AT THESE TWO!”
Everyone stopped and stared.
“THIS IS A COUPLE! THIS IS HOW A COUPLE DANCES A WALTZ!”
And from that moment forward, Gwynnie and I were an item.
Later, the girls rubbed their bruised, swollen feet. The boys hung their heads in shame, occasionally punching me in the gut for busting the curve.
I looked over at the girls. Lo and behold, they were talking to Gwynnie. Talking to her as if she was their friend. I watched Gwynnie giggle and chatter with these perfectly proportioned, clearly more popular blondes, dreading the inevitable moment when they would turn on her with a wedgie… oh wait, these were girls. They’d probably turn on her by making her bulimic.
Yet that moment never came. Instead, a moment came when Gwynnie pointed to me, whispered something and giggled. The rest of the girls looked at me and also giggled.
I realized at that moment that I knew nothing about girls. Still don’t.
So that was it for me. I’d been chosen for Gwynnie. Or maybe Gwynnie had chosen me. I wasn’t so sure. Actually, I didn’t really care. Two weeks into rehearsal and I’d fallen head-over heels for Pepper Hunter – she had big blue eyes, curly red hair, and was about three inches taller than me. Pepper, had fallen head-over-heels for Eddie Gambino, a boy whose parents worked in some capacity for a construction firm. He may have had a pre-pubuescent moustache, he may have had difficulty remembering his two lines, but he could buy her anything she wanted. In cash.
Anyway.
Most of my downtime was spent with Gwynnie, despite any attempt I’d make to avoid her. It seemed that the other girls were almost conspiring to get us together. So I spent many an evening after school hearing all about Gwynnie’s allergies, her Honors Math class and her love of Star Trek.
“Oh, The Gamethterth of Trithkelion ith my favorite!” Gwynnie would say, wiping her nose on the arm of her sweater. “It’th the one where Kirk endth up fighting all thethe alienth for thport, and it tunrth out that the alienth running the gameth are dithembodied brainth!”
Then she’d laugh, wheeze, cough, (often directly in my face) and go for her inhaler.
“I’m thorry, the pollen count’th really high today,” she’d say. “Tho what’th your favorite epithode?”
Okay, I knew my Star Trek. And I had an abiding fantasy about meeting a girl who could talk about Star Trek. Of course, in my fantasy, that girl had more of a resemblance to Miss October 1985 than Big Bird on diet pills. Still, since I knew my Trek, I knew the one episode I could name that might turn her off.
“I really liked Spock’s Brain,” I said.
Gwynnie hit me on the arm, apparently attempting to be playful. “Thpock’th Brain? Thpock’th Brain? How can you like that epithode? It’th tho thtupid!”
“Yeah, but they steal Spock’s brain.”
“Oh, you’re jutht thilly! Thilly, thilly, thilly!”
With each “thilly” she hit me on the arm again. Then she kissed me.
The resulting bruise on my arm went down after a few days. The resulting confusion I felt upon being kissed – for the first time – by a woman who I had, up until that moment, been completely repulsed by… that didn’t subside anytime soon.
She knew how to French kiss. God only knew where she picked that up.
