11/23/08

What's New?

When I was in the sixth grade I was best friends with this girl and we both had crushes on the metal dudes at our school. This was in my California suburb in the mid-1990s. These guys were in a band, I don't remember what they were called but it was like Anthrax-- the name of a chemical. One of the guys in the band, Tim, had a huge crush on my best friend and everyone knew it including her, but she just wasn't into it. I, however, was totally into the guy but I didn't know it at the time. Actually now that I'm thinking about it he wasn't actually in the band but he hung out with them. Tim and I would walk home from school together and he would tell me how much he loved my best friend all the time. I just wanted to go over to his house so we could watch music videos. He and his friends had hours of MTV2 on VHS (the bitch is real). These are the kids that would discover pot first. Once, even though I had been sworn to secrecy, I told Tim a salacious story about my best friend.

At my best friend's house recently, she had another girlfriend over for a slumber party. For some reason, maybe her parents knew about it, Tim and his best friend Mark, who played bass in the band came over late at night to hang out. There was some pretext of a sober virginal double date or something. But we weren't even kissing yet, really. Really young. At some point my best friend and Mark were the only ones up, the other two kids having fallen asleep and been rejected by the respective objects of their desires. My best friend was watching a movie sitting next to Mark and slyly, without making eye contact, sort of masturbated him, over his underpants and (obviously cargo) shorts with her foot, while she was wearing a sock. He didn't cum. Or, she couldn't tell and she didn't ask told me "Cum isn't the point Max, the point is you that can never tell anyone about this, especially not Tim. You're the only one who knows."

I think I made it something like 20 hours from the time she told me until I told Tim while we were walking home from school together. He started crying and told me that it broke his heart. I didn't tell him because I wanted him to be sad or not like my best friend, I told him because I thought that if he saw that I was on his side and told him things even things I wasn't supposed to, that he would like me. My best friend found out in something like 15 minutes and called me to curtly say "You can't keep your mouth shut, so I'm never speaking to you again." And I was totally devastated. The next morning she came up to me in drama class, in full damage control mode, and said "Ok. Here's what we're going to do. We're going to act like you didn't tell anyone and we're just going to act like this whole thing never happened, okay?"

Everything as fine after that. She bought a copy of Switchblade Symphony's cd-single for "Drool" and I was so jealous cause I couldn't find it anywhere and she got it at fucking Hot Topic and I was livid that she had it and I couldn't have it. And somehow she knew that i wanted it and gave to me. And I still have it and I still listen to it all the time.

1 comment:

Daniel Portland said...

me too! sisterhood! it gives me goosebumps like this, the last paragraph from bodies that matter:

"it is one of the ambivalent implications of the decentering of the subject to have one's writing be the site of a necessary and inevitable expropriation. but this yielding of ownership over what one writes has an important set of political corollaries, for the taking up, reforming, deforming of one's words does open up a difficult future terrain of community, one in which the hope of ever fully recognizing oneself in the terms by which one signifies is sure to be disappointed. this not knowing of one's words is there from the start, however, since speaking is always in some ways the speaking of a stranger through and as oneself, the melancholic reiteration of a language that one never chose, that one does not find as an instrument to be used, but that one is, as it were, used by, expropriated in, as the unstable and continuing condition of the 'one' and the 'we,' the ambivalent condition of the power that binds."