Month: February 2003

After maundering on at length about these various teenaged trials-by-fire, I have purposefully left off what must be the most universal and most horribly traumatic: the category-defying, all-encompassing phenomenon of Getting Caught. It doesn’t matter who actually catches you in whatever act, whether it be school officials, or the cops, or neighbors: what matters is that your parents are going to hear about it, and then you will have to deal with parental wrath and reprisal. Neither of which is quite as horrible as the associated implication: you will have to talk with your parents. As in, “We need to have a talk,” which is then, horrifyingly, followed by actual talk. No teenager wants to talk with his or her parents about anything apart from curfew negotiations and can I have some money? But there is a thing worse than the parents who “need to have a talk”: the parent(s) who, thanks to your awful transgressions, stop talking. Such as, for example, my father, the ex-Marine Viet Nam veteran. But again I get ahead of myself.

After Tracy kindly informed my entire high school that it was I who was responsible for the bomb threat, the rest of the afternoon kind of passed in a haze, and not just because of the beer, although that either helped or hurt, I really don’t know. I mostly just felt kind of wrapped up in damp bedsheets, a sort of premature shroud of dread that hung on me heavily, because even a poltroon like myself could now see that I was clearly dead, much like the luckless William Katt, who was over on the beach chatting up a reticent Carrie White. “You poor bastard,” I thought, “you’re like me, but with even worse hair. You won’t live to see the end of prom night.” Then I thought of my father, and realized that, all things considered, I would rather be doused in pig’s blood and then hideously killed before facing whatever my dad came up with.

I eventually made it home and sleepwalked my way through the evening, with my dad (my mother was visiting relatives out of town) making some curious noises about the hubbub at school. I muttered that it was “pretty weird” before heading off to bed, where I dreamed of terrible things, like the acting of John Travolta. It was a rough night. And then morning hit, and I had to go to school. Where Everybody Knew.

If you’ve ever seen one of the Invasion of the Body Snatchers movies, you’ll get an idea of how it felt to walk around the school. People either gave me wary, “I’m with you” glances or hard-eyed “Soon your brains will be scooped out like nougat” looks. I knew the second I walked into the place that everything had gone drastically wrong, and that justice would soon be meted out in jagged, cruel strokes. But what could I do? Nothing; I shambled like an unstrung marionette to my first class, playing a part in a tragedy whose unheroic end was eminently clear. The teacher greeted me with an iron smile and a terse, pointed “Hello, Skot.” I waved goofily and dropped all my books. Smooth.

This agony went on until my second class, geometry. Then came the call. The speaker crackled: “Skot Kurruk, please report to the principal’s office. Skot Kurruk to the office.” Everyone looked at me silently, except the teacher, who looked at the floor. I stood up and exited, leaving my books on my desk, even then clinging to tiny shreds of nonhope: “If I leave my books here, I’ll have to come back! To pick them up! QED!” A friend told me later that when one of the school staff came by to gather up my stuff, it was like watching me being erased from the face of the earth.

I went to the principal’s office, where I was greeted by the vice-principal, the school counselor, and . . . the chief of police. He was holding my by-now very crumpled note. I’d like to say I gave them a bunch of Brandoesque fuck-you guff, but by now I was a babbling sack of undifferentiated terror. I do remember the cop saying “You know, we’ve got your fingerprints off this note.” This was pretty stupid, since (a) I had never at that point been fingerprinted, and (b) clearly about nine hundred people had touched the thing since I typed it. It didn’t matter; I confessed nearly immediately. (I did make a brief hopeless attempt at caginess: “Supposing I was the person who did this . . . ” Really, really pathetic.) After the obvious had been admitted to, the counselor put his hand on my shoulder and said, haltingly, “Skot . . . do you need . . . help?” I twitched at him balefully and blurted out, “Jesus Christ, no!” It was my only proud moment; everyone else in the room kind of chuckled.

After that came the waiting, because of course they had to call my dad, a small-town courtesy before they hauled me down to the police station to arrest me. Waiting was of course horrible, the worst, the fucking worst, except it wasn’t, because then Dad showed up. He looked like a fucking golem constructed out of wrath and moustache, and the aleph on his forehead glowed with an otherworldly malevolence, and all in all, I knew that doom had finally come. At this point, I just gave over to utter catatonia, and entered into a dream-state where Piper Laurie hectored me about Jee-zus and dirty-pillows. Anything was preferable to reality, where, incidentally, I was indeed arrested, printed, and released, with dark promises that we’d be hearing from juvenile court about a date.

I was given a five-day suspension from school, during which (it was May, remember?) I earned zeroes on no less than three major tests. During that suspension, I spent some real quality time with my crazed, vengeful father, who, depending on mood and timing, (a) threw things at me, (b) howled like a gutshot dog over my idiocy, and (c) devised foul, backbreaking chores to be done around our rural ranch. I shoveled out horse stables. I cleared a 20’x20′ plot of four-foot weeds with a scythe. I waded through a two-foot tall (I’m serious) stack of extra credit problems given to me by my wonderful and sympathetic geometry teacher. I don’t want to exaggerate here, but it was a million times worse than hell.

Things blew over, of course. I lived in terror of ringing phones; I was certain each time that it was Johnny Law calling to give me my judicial ball-kicking. But they never did, figuring that hey, they couldn’t do worse than my dad had. I returned to school, to somewhat embarrassed acclaim; some of my baseball teammates took to calling me “Boom-Boom” or “Psycho,” which made me feel like a particularly lame radio personality. I managed, through a freakish effort and not a little help from teachers who felt I had gone through the wringer, to maintain a better than 3.0 GPA.

And Tracy? I’d love to tell you that she and I got together, that she was dazzled by my half-assed outlaw ways, that she was my first love, all that. But no. Tracy and I remained only friends, but to be honest? I think I could have made a go of it with her, I really think I had a shot, but . . . oh, hell, I don’t have to tell you by now. We ran out of time, she ran out of time. She should have known better than to tease Carrie White.

Fin.

I wrote a bit yesterday about cultural milestones that teenagers pass on their way to adulthood, or really, young-adulthood, or really, “larger, hairier kids still misbehaving.” I also indulged in some baseless blather about the differences between girls and boys in choosing these markers, but also pointed out at least one shared adolescent hurdle to be overcome by both sexes: not being horrifically killed by murderous telekinetic outcasts at the prom, whom you may or may not have drenched in pig’s blood, but she frankly isn’t making any distinctions any more. But there is one more significant activity that crosses gender lines: underage drinking.

Nearly every kid does this at least once, except for perhaps the aforementioned kooky homicidal telekinetic, and look how she turned out: blood-wet, orphaned, and dead, with finally nobody to reach out to except for Amy Irving. If that’s not solid anecdotal evidence supporting the practice of getting boozed up in your teens, I don’t know what is.

So to pick up the narrative thread from yesterday, that’s what pretty much everyone did that day. I allowed myself to be herded whitely into Bill’s car, where we were joined by Kendall–he was the second person I had told of my prank-cum-federal offense–and we immediately found a senior who would buy us beer for ridiculous amounts of money. (Idaho at that point had recently grandfathered the 18-year-olds into the newly raised 21-and-up law, which immediately catapulted those who made the grandfather into a kind of Divine Elect status, which of course they thoroughly and mercilessly abused. In a just world, they would have been the first up against–or lodged in–the wall in Carrie White’s slaughterama, but most likely they were out in the parking lot fumbling with a drunken 16-year-old’s bra.) And off we went, whooping and hollering things like “Afternoon at the beach!” and “Pass me a beer!” and “Oh my god, I’m going to jail!”

I had calmed down a bit by the time we arrived at the river, thanks mostly to our friend Beer. The beach was by this time fully occupied by what appeared to be the Seventh Half-Naked Regiment, who were performing their drinking maneuvers with proper military precision. Wanting, as all teenagers do when no adults are around, to be a good soldier, I joined them. Specifically, I joined a particular person named Tracy. Tracy was a junior, in fact was my partner on the debate team (look, shut up, okay?), and I had a white-hot crush on her, because she was (a) pretty and (b) talked to me. Of course, being my debate partner, she kind of had to talk to me, but one doesn’t make needlessly fine distinctions like that when one is a dorky teenager whose hormones some time ago started Incredible Hulk-ing all over his glandular systems. Tracy, I was wholly delighted to see, was pretty wasted.

We talked for a bit, I guess, about nothing, because Tracy like I said was plastered, and what the fuck am I going to talk about? Debate? I don’t think so. I probably unentertained her with some close analysis of the semiotics of socklessness on Miami Vice. Now those guys were cool. True, they may have a looked a lot like why Betsey Johnson sticks to making women’s clothes, but at the time, they were cooler than deep space, and I most certainly was not. And then Tracy said something very important. It was the first of two very important things she would say to me that day. It was: “I wish I knew who was responsible for this, so I could thank him.”

Suddenly . . . I could be cool. Tracy would think I was cool. This was inconceivable. It was also the worst possible thing she could say, because it surgically removed pretty much every shred of self-preservation that I had left remaining, which was nearly nil anyway, because hey, teenaged boy.

I heard myself as if from a great distance, say ten yards or so, because I was half in the bag and I think a volleyball had hit me in the head at some point. But you should have seen me. I was nonchalant. I was low-toned and debonair. I sipped casually at my warm Rainier can and said a bit throatily, “You can thank him right now.”

Tracy’s eyes widened in a way I still remember, and she froze. I smiled winningly and acnedly, and sipped again. Around us, unimportant people did pointless things and yelled uninteresting words. We were figures in a Vermeer painting: perfect, timeless, and pretty much ignored by the world at large. But it was, for me, perfection. I was, very briefly, cool.

“Oh my god,” breathed Tracy. “Really? You did that?” I nodded, still savoring this new sensation, that even then I knew couldn’t possibly last. “OH MY GOD!” she yelled, and hugged me, a sensation I mentally locked into a tight vault with a sign on it reading “PRICELESS OBJECTS.” And then Tracy said the second very important thing of that day.

She stood up on the beach and shouted in her best debater’s voice, “Everybody! Everybody, listen up? You know who did this? You know why we’re here? It’s because of SKOT! SKOT DID IT!”

That’s when I stopped feeling cool. Now three-quarters of my high school non-chums knew Who Did It. And I’ll admit it was nice being the hero for all of about thirty seconds as they cheered me on the beach and ran over to clap me on the back and chummily drip beer on me, sure. But in my mind, I knew: I now had not even the slightest chance of coming out of this one unscathed. High school students keep secrets about as well as radiation victims keep teeth. I figured I had about twenty-four hours.

Not quite.

Conclusion tomorrow.

I was a sophomore in high school when I became a felon.

For many teenaged boys, committing a felony is a cultural milestone, and is a crucial part of the process of becoming a man–which is to say, fundamentally just an old boy who misbehaves in more secretive ways. Some girls go ahead and commit felonies, but for the most part, I’m guessing their adolescent rituals are tamer; plus they’ve got the whole menstruation thing to deal with, which seems to males like a felony perpetrated on one by one’s own fucking body. So while girls are sensibly transgressing the social order by doing things like sneaking a look at Judy Blume’s Wifey or hurling tampons at the local hyper-Christian telekinetic while she showers, boys are out boosting cars and slaughtering pigs for their blood, which of course will be dumped onto the unlucky telekinetic at the prom, causing her to undergo a massive psychotic break during which she systematically murders everyone at the dance before going home to crucify her unhinged Bible-thumping mother against the wall with cooking implements. Christ, high school sucked. Anyway.

The whole debacle got started–where it so often does with your average teenager, provided the teenager in question is kind of a goofy knob–in typing class. The teacher had clearly given up on the whole day, because it was mid-May or so, beautiful outside, very close to the end of the school year, and we were being typically rowdy and uncooperative. I remember, for example, teasing Carrie White about her dress, a slight that would be terribly revenged later at the prom when she battered me to death with a hail of mentally-controlled flying sousaphones. But I get ahead of myself.

The teacher had basically just given us some ridiculous wankery to do involving simple transcription, and being a pretty good typist already (boy, and that phrase still makes the ladies breathe a little heavier), I got done way early. And then I got what sounded like a pretty funny idea: Wouldn’t it be cute as the dickens to type up a bomb threat? Wouldn’t that just make the administration chuckle their fucking nuts off? Sure it would. So I did, making sure I moved to someone else’s typewriter first, because I was sneaky. No way I get fingered for this! I saw Jagged Edge. I’m sixteen, I’m beautiful, I’m dumber than a dead ape.

So I typed the thing up, and I made it look pleasingly insane in a crappy Hollywood-esque way: all caps and with plenty of stupid misspellings. I wish I had a copy today, but I can reconstruct the gist of it, including a couple of salient features that I most certainly recall:

THERE IS A BOMB IN THE BILDING IF YOU DO NOT EVACATUE THE HIGH SKOOL BY NOON THERE WILL BE NOTHING LEFT BUT SCROCHED CORPSES. THIS IS NOT A JOKE AND I WILL NOT DEIGN TO TELL YOU WHERE I PUT IT YOU WILL JUST HAVE TO FIND OUT YURSELF IM SERIOUS GET THE FUCK OUT

Uh huh. It’s just pitifully stupid. “Scroched”? “Yurself”? Okay, even morons don’t do shit like this, but did you notice the kicker? Plunked right down in the middle of all that blaring idiocy? “Deign.” As was related to me later, after I was caught (you knew that, right?), the faculty, upon receiving the threat at the office, passed it around amongst themselves to see if they could, I don’t know, find any clues? My English teacher did. “Well, whoever wrote this not only knows the word ‘deign,’ but also uses it more or less correctly. There’s only about three kids in the school who probably know that word.” (This is not to trump me up as a super-genius, I was just a book nerd. Also, I went to school with fucking hillbillies.)

So I was already fucked even while the ink was drying on the page, but did I give a second thought? Of course not. The whole thing by now seemed deeply funny to me, a kind of Up Yours to the school that was so irritatingly trying to educate me. So I reread my little opus, and surreptitiously left it at the office. I cackled inwardly as I imagined the office staff passing it around: “Oh ho ho. One of the students has made a droll joke in which he promises a fiery death for all! What a scamp this anonymous student is and how he has brightened our afternoon with this federal offense! Ah, well, best chuck it away and get on with our slightly less oppressive lives!” Seriously, I to this day have no idea what I could have been thinking, but I suspect it had something to do with Toto lyrics.

I promptly forgot about the whole thing as the day progressed, until my class right before lunchtime. There was only about ten minutes left before the bell, and all of a sudden–what the fuck? Was that the fire bell? It sure was, and I distinctly remember thinking about how goddamn stupid it was to have a fire drill when there was only ten fucking minutes left in class. Honestly, I was that clueless, a trait I continue to cope with. When we had all assembled in the parking lot, the vice principal started speaking. “Some joker thinks he’s pretty funny, and has left a threatening note at our office. By law, we have to evacuate the school and blah blah blah . . . “

Right about then, had any school official happened to look at my face, they would have been able to save themselves the trouble of the search, because I had the whole thing written right on my face. (And let me tell you how happy a lot of students were to have their lockers searched. Bye bye tobacco, booze and porn!) I felt a terrible sensation in my gut not unlike the feeling one gets when viewing a Steven Seagal movie; I wanted, on a cellular level, to die. I knew I was fucked; it was only a matter of time. And this was brought savagely home to me one moment later, when my friend Bill leaned in and whispered to me, “You’re my hero.” Because . . . oh yeah. Oh fuck. I had told people. Only two people at that point. But that was enough, and I knew it.

There was really only one thing to do, I realized. I could still make things better. So I immediately drove down to the river and drank beer with the rest of the student body. Things, I knew, were just getting started, and there was still ample time for me to make everything massively worse. So I did.

Continued tomorrow.