don
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The Story of my Life: A humorous memoir of the ninth grade
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Jul 28 23:48 UTC 1999 |
Hello, everyone. I've been really bored for a while (summer in a rural
area is not fun) so I started to write about my life this past year. This
is pretty long (around 6 pages), and I'm nowhere near done (The finished
product will include much, much more and will have four or five times the
length; I've only gotten to November here.) Hopefully PicoSpan has no
problem with this long of an item. Let me know how you like it. Enjoy!
P.S. -- I had this posted in the writing conference, but it seems to be
dead, so I'm putting it here. I hope that's not too huge of a faux pas.
The (Unabridged) Story of my Life
Part II
By Don Joffe
Chapter 1: 9th Grade
INTRODUCTION
This is the story of a guy fresh out of ninth grade at Durham
Academy, a private high school in Durham, North Carolina. I came to this
school and spent much of my time adjusting to new stuff -- high school,
the preppie culture, and the crazy people in my grade who seemed to know
each pressure point with which they could completely screw me over. Life
just couldn't get any more interesting (to someone else; to me it was a
living hell, twiced baked and then frozen over.) This story is mainly
about getting kicked in the ass, and more importantly, about kicking
yourself in the ass. Sometimes you feel it; other times you don't notice
it until you sit down for a crap and the seat applies pressure right on
the bruise.
THE BEGINNING
Sure, I've been to a lot of new schools in my life, seven to be
exact, and Durham Academy has made for the wierdest transition of any of
them. I started out the first day of school with a senior, Catharine Ward,
who spontaniously hugged me after she learned I was joining the debate
team. Stuff like that is pretty rare, and I was really surprised that
someone whom I had just met would just come up to me and... hug me, and on
the first day of school at that.
That same day, I got into an argument/screaming match with Mr.
Jordan Adair, my English teacher and the boys' varsity basketball team,
and I could tell he was enjoying it as much as I was. I could also tell
that nobody ever got into spirited arguments with him. Suddenly, everyone
knew me. Within a week or so I couldn't walk through a single breezeway
without hearing someone yell my name out in the distance. The
upperclassmen started to call me "Joffenator," (Elliot Sutherland came up
with that) and a few people, after I met them, told me that they had
thought I was some sort of myth. At that point I just lost it. These
people must be crazy. Are they just screwing around with the new kid? Was
it just about the match with Adair? Or are they just being nice to the new
kid?
DEATH TO TELEMARKETERS
A few weeks had gone by. I was really bored. The phone rang, and
an MCI telemarketer, a black woman by the sound of it, was on the other
end. I wasn't in the mood for listening to that kind of crap, but I let
her finish her shpeil for lack of anything better to do. Listening to her,
I decided I was really sick of these people. Politely asking them to take
me off their calling lists would never work. Bitching at them to take me
off their calling lists would never work. Maybe scaring the shit out of
them would.
So she got to the point where she wanted to know if I wanted to
sign up, so I said, "Can I ask you a question?"
"Okay," she said.
"Tell me, what are you wearing?"
Her voice lost all of her professionalism. "A blue dress."
Now to drive it home. "What else?"
I think she realized by then that MCI wasn't going to be getting a
new customer. "A blue dress."
"Thank you." Click.
Now before you run away into the night, screaming incomprehensibly
that I'm some sort of pervert, hear me out. I didn't care for a second
what that woman was wearing; I only did it for laughs, and to get MCI off
of my back. I often look back at that day and laugh my ass off; so do many
of my friends, and probably the telemarketer too.
LINDSAY SPEIR -- DARE I ASK TO HIT ME ONE MORE TIME?
Durham Academy likes to instill into its students a sense of
community; at the beginning of the year everyone does some community
service with their homerooms for a few days. My homeroom went to do some
work at Duke Forest, basically manual labor like spreading mulch, driving
planks of wood into the ground (for rainwater redirection), and hacking
through the brush to clear trails. When we all finished the work one day,
we all got some water to drink. Then a few people started screwing around
with the water cooler; Lindsay ended up with a wet shirt. A _white_ wet
shirt. It took her a few seconds, but she noticed this, and made a futile
attempt to... make herself decent, by folding part of the shirt under
itself so that there would be an extra layer covering her chest. Enter
Don, the bigmouthed idiot. Without even thinking, I blurted out, "Lindsay,
that makes you look deflated!" A few seconds for it to sink in. She was
pretty surprised. So was everyone else.
Five minutes later, I remembered something very, very important.
Lindsay is Jim Speir's daughter. Mr. Speir is the interim headmaster!
Whoops, I guess I'm completely screwed.
Somehow, Mr. Speir never heard about it. Either that, or it didn't
matter to him. I got no dismissal letter in the mail, and the next time I
saw him, he still said hello to me.
Life manages to kick me in the ass every once in a while. But I
somehow manage to survive.
VIR PRUDENS NON CONTRA VENTUM MINGIT
(Latin for "The wise man does not piss against the wind")
Edith Keene is my Latin teacher. While she teaches decently, any
one of my chickens could beat her in a personality contest. One day in our
class of five, both of the juniors were gone, leaving us three freshmen.
Britney Hayes started out the period by asking why we always had to sign a
pledge of honor at the bottom of our quizzes and tests (For all of you who
don't go to DA, many of the teachers utilize pledges of honor for stuff
like that... basically it gives them an excuse to go have a cup of coffee
in the lounge while we're _supposedly_ not giving each other the answers.)
Ms. Keene answered with this long shpeil about honor. A really long
shpeil, and she started repeating herself. With fifteen minutes left in
the class, when she was about to repeat for the third time how the honor
princible can be applied to how if you hit someone's car in a parking lot,
you're supposed to leave your name and number on a paper on the
windshield, I raised my hand and said, "I don't mean to be offensive by
this, but, I think you answered her question."
More than a few seconds were used to sink that in, while she
stared at me in pure shock. Then she got _really_ pissed off, and said
that it had offended her. When I said that I was sorry, she said, "You
should be!" Then she let us go early, probably so she could cool off.
Like I said, I survive my kicks in the ass.
LIZZIE: THE PROLOGUE
I still don't know if I survived this big, long-term kick. I paid
almost no retrospective attention to this after it happened, but months
later I remembered it as the beginning of all of my problems with Lizzie
Stevens.
I was in the computer center during study hall, last computer on
the right in what used to be Ms. Craft's room, working on something or
other. Maybe a bio lab writeup, just as likely I was just surfing the net.
Lizzie, a decently good-looking blonde with shallow, tell-nothing blue
eyes and shoulder-length hair, sat down next to me and said, "Hi, Don." to
me. Though this was the first time she had said hi to me (and I think the
last), and though there were lots of other free computers around for her
to have gone to, not a single lightbulb went off in my head. Nothing
looked different about her that day. I nonchalantly said hello back, and
she started into a small shpeil about how she had gotten three inches cut
off of her hair, and did I like it. My taste at the time had been in
longer hair on women (now my taste is in available girls whom I have a
chance with, but that's still a bit too restrictive), and that overrided
whatever I had really thought. So I said halfheartedly, "I guess," and
turned back to whatever I was doing. No doubt she took that as a "No, I
hate it." Oops.
THE LUAU
The first dance of the year at DA wasn't too odd... There was the
normal fretting about not having a date, and the normal sitting on the
side during most of the dance. But Anne wasn't there, and neither was
Rebecca. That was just slightly unsettling.
Around halfway into the dance, the speakers blew. No music for
around 10 minutes. Then someone drove their car into the quad (just like
they do in the Best Buy commercial), and started playing music out of it.
The music was pretty bad, some sort of R&B/rap combo. Go to a cheapo party
in the part of a city where Ebonics is the official language, and you'll
hear the same stuff. A bunch of people left, and the night simply went on.
I talked with a few people, and the night eventually ended. Not a
particularly memerable night; so it goes.
MODEL UN AT APPALACHIAN STATE UNIVERSITY: PELVIS-THRUSTING AND A MIDNIGHT
RENDEZVOUS
Model UN is basically a simulation of the United Nations; people
go to a college (they usually host the conferences) and act like delegates
from United Nations countries. Durham Academy has an MUN team, but to put
it lightly, it really sucks. Most of the people are on the team just so
they can get away from everyone and drink vodka-and-orange-juice at night.
We were very badly prepared, and I went into the thing without knowing
anything about what was going on. C'est la vie.
On the first day at night there was an MUN-sponsored party at the
local bar (somehow all of the beer was out of sight. Damn). It was either
that or going back to the hotel, so I went.
For anyone who hasn't heard Part I of The (Unabridged) Story of my
Life, a long series of events has made it so that whenever I go to any
sort of dance or party, I usually sit on the side, out of the way. For
some reason no less than a hell of a lot of people would usually try to
drag me out to mingle with people or dance, even though I would always
return to my seat after a few minutes. After the dances, lying in bed, I
would always visualize someone lecturing me about how next time nobody
would go to the trouble of dragging me from my seat, and then what
position would I be in? And every dance or party, I've waited for that day
to come...
This party was more of the same, with lots of weirdness. I started
out with a cup full of heavily-watered Coke in my hand, looking around for
a few people in my committee to discuss sponsoring one of my resolutions
-- I think it was the one to freeze the currency exchange rates all over
the world. I couldn't find most of the people I needed to talk to, and
ended up discussing the resolution with the "delegate" representing
Germany, a blonde, not-bad-looking, tall, largely-built (but by no means
fat) girl, nice to talk to yet at times distant. I soon found myself
loosening my tie and following her into the dance floor, where she
swing-danced with around 5 guys (including me) in a round-robin fashion.
After the second guy I realized what she was doing, and remembered that I
couldn't dance worth half a crap, and couldn't swing worth a quarter of a
crap. So when she came around to me, I told her I coudln't do it. So she
basically made me dance, and somehow I managed to stay where I was until
she came around again. And again. I think the song ended then, but I
somehow stayed around until I noticed I was dancing in a circle with only
one person in it -- yours truly. This gradually hit me, so then I went
back to a table and sat down.
Remember what I said about nobody dragging me to dance? That was
going through my head then, and I realized that I didn't know that many
people there (maybe 10), and I didn't know anyone well. Great conditions
for it all to come true. So I was nursing another watered-down Coke when a
girl from Orange High (DA had shared a charter with Orange), whom you
could easily recognize as a "popular" type, came over and tried to get me
to dance. I objected, made some excuses, but she dragged me up anyway. She
asked me why I was sitting by myself, and I gave a short shpeil about how
I couldn't dance. So she tried to show me, trying to get me to copy her
bending her legs and thrusting her pelvis. No, I didn't thrust _her_
pelvis. Stop laughing! So I tried to do it, but I felt really stupid.
Eventually she left, and once again I was alone on the dance floor.
A guy from DA then called me over, and we started dancing
side-by-side, like an open invitation for two girls to join in. I was
doing that bending and thrusting thing, completely self-conscious. Around
five seconds pass and these two girls come and start dancing with us.
First I thought, wow, this is pretty neat, but then I just got more
self-conscious. Around fifteen seconds passed, then the girl in front of
me turned her attention to the guy on the side. I quietly faded from the
floor.
Let that serve as a lesson to anybody who's said I lie when I say
I can't dance: It only took _fifteen_ goddamn seconds for a girl to lose
interest in dancing with me! I came back to the table, where my neglected
drink lay. All that was left was some molten ice and barely a wisp of Coke
taste which eluded me as soon as I tried to isolate it. I had been kicked
in the ass once more, and this time I felt it immediately.
A couple tables over was a young girl, something like sixth or
seventh grade, shy, and sitting with her father. I lamented about them for
a while -- she was stuck in the same boat I was, or at least one with the
same model year. I looked back at my cup of water for a while. Suddenly
the girl's dad came over to me and asked me if I could dance with her
daughter. I guess I subconsciously interpreted it like someone trying to
drag me out onto the dance floor, so I said, "I'm sorry, I can't dance."
So he said thanks and went back to the girl... she seemed a bit down about
it, but he did a good job of consoling her. Now I had guilt to top
everything off.
Basically the party was over around 12:30, and so I walked back to
the hotel. I went into the lobby and got some coffee. The faculty advisor,
Ms. Anne McNamara, saw me there and asked me if I had seen Amy Simms (A
brunette junior, petite and with light-blue eyes that make Lizzie's look
like the deep end; she occasionally puts her hair into a bun and holds it
in place with a pair of really nice chopsticks) anywhere. Turned out that
she was missing and people were supposed to be either at the bar or in the
hotel, and that Amy was in a hell of a lot of trouble. I said I'd keep an
eye out for her.
I went up to my room and put the key card into the lock. No click,
and I got a yellow light. I tried it again. And again. And again. A couple
more times, and I gave up. I was coming up to the elevators when I saw Amy
come out of the stairwell. So I ran over to her and said that Ms. Mac was
looking for her and was really pissed off. So Amy got really frantic and
started about how she had just been talking in the stairwell, and how she
thought that that would have been OK.
According to some of the older guys on the team, Amy frequently
enjoys having midnight rendezvouses on MUN trips. Come to think of it,
those same older guys thought that I was Charles Dominguez's rival for
Amy. Whatever.
So I went down the elevator with her (she looked like she
desparately needed some support) to the first floor. The door opened, and
we walked out to find Ms. Mac coming down the hall. So I told her, "I
found something you were looking for" and walked back into the elevator,
pressing the close-door button, just as I heard an angry "Where have you
been?"
I waited in the elevator for a minute or two, still on the ground
floor, hoping that Amy didn't go into the other elevator. But the door
opened, and Amy, hands visibly shaking and her voice a notch higher,
walked in. We went up, and I took her to her room. She knocked, and the
door opened to reveal a really drunk blonde. I was thinking of taking
advantage of that when the door slammed in front of me.
My room was literally on the other side of the hallway. I tried my
key card again and got a yellow light. So I tried a few times, cursing
louder each time. By some stroke of luck the other "chaperone," Mr.
Cunningham, came out of his room, which was right next to Amy's. So I
explained the problem to him, and hey tried the key card. Then, in a flash
of genius -- I would never have thought of this -- he knocked. Charles (I
was sharing a room with him) opened the door, and I got in. I worked on
some resolutions, watched some TV, and went to sleep. The next day I won
an honerable mention, and we went back home. Amy, Charles and I ate dinner
at a Subway. The rest of the way back I sat with Amy and talked to her,
always trying subtlely to get her away from her walkman so I could get in
just one more word.
We got to school, and my parents weren't there. I waited, and
waited, then Ms. Mac let me in the office, so I called them... they didn't
answer. So I waited and waited some more, and they finally came. I went
home and fell asleep as soon as my head had hit the pillow.
It turned out the bastard had put the deadbolt on the door. That's
why I kept getting a yellow light. I have no idea why he wanted to keep me
out. Kicked in the ass once more.
LINDSAY SPEIR: SHE HIT ME ANYWAY
Black isn't the preppiest color to wear these days, exept for the
tight dresses that many of the DA girls wore to the formal -- the kind of
dresses that could easily make Hillary Clinton, Madeline Albright, and
Oprah Winfrey look like experienced sluts.
But few wore black in their everyday wear. I started to wear black
in the seventh grade, after some chilling experiences with two girls, Anne
and Rebecca. One broken heart followed another, and being happy wasn't
ever high on my to-do list for the day. So I began to wear black very
often, and it gradually became a subject of inquiry at school.
One day in November during homeroom, one of the more talkative
girls, Lauren Moore, jokingly(?) asked me if I wore black for seduction or
for witchcraft.
"Ohh, I wear it for seduction. It makes me look sooooo sexy!"
"Hey, Don!" Lindsay called from the other side of the room. She
was wearing a grey sweatshirt with some sports team's logo on it. "Do you
think this looks sexy?"
She took her sweatshirt off to reveal the black, extremely
low-cut, spaghetti-strap piece of cloth which she was wearing underneath.
In any porno video (not that I watch them, mind you!), that
intensity of a thing usually leads to _some_ sort of sex. But only if you
play your cards right.
Mr. Joffe the porn star did not play his cards right. Mr. Joffe
the porn star said, enthousiatically, "Hell, yeah!"
Ms. Speir the porn co-star (or is it co-porn star?) gave Mr. Joffe
the porn star the same surprised look which she had given at their last
meeting.
So the next day I started getting a lot of people telling me that
I had "scared the shit out of Lindsay."
Did I mention that she's the headmaster's daughter?
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