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As Much As I Hate to Admit it...
I was born on a warm Spring day in 1987. To my neverending dismay, my exit from the womb took place in Kingston, Mi. For as long as I could remember I was trapped in that culturally desolate slab of pine forest; banished to a realm of closed minded biggots, nights of unbrideled boredome, and a severe lack of any form of culture. The best one could hope for in this winter wonderhell was the Independent Film Channel and MTV.
Overtime, However, I grew more adept to this lifestyle. In my early teen years I went throught a stage of total, and complete malevolence with my surroundings, but it was about the time of my senior year that came to be at ease with my roots. Brace yourself for a flashback.
August, 2004
It was my final year of high school. I couldn’t tell you in any accuracy how many stories have begun with that very line, but I’m sure it’s a lot. What I can tell you is that, in all honesty, I had zero expectations. My goal for those dreary, boredom ridden nine months was merely to survive it without taking my own life in some terribly tragic way.
And so I began the first day in a depressed stupor. Wait, lets rewind to the night before the first day. The night before my first day of the last year of my high school career, my friend Helen called me up at somewhere around 5:30 and asked if I wanted to go get baked with her at Quentin park. Of course I felt obligated to say yes, I’m never one to pass up good bud.
She picked me up soon after in her 1988 Chrysler Dynasty, which we lovingly referred to as Dyna. I’m fairly sure we wrote a song about Dyna once, but that, my friend, is a different story for a different time. She whipped out her utensil and asked me politely to pack it, and so I did and, as you can guess, we proceeded to smoke the bajesus out of it. We parked in the dirt lot of Quentin park and sat on the big dome jungle gym... thing. We stared to the east, watching as summer passed with the setting of the sun before our very eyes.
“Allen?” Helen inquired timidly.
There was a long pause, “you gonna follow that up hun?” I cooly retorted, not realizing she was waiting for me to respond.
“Do you realize, this is it. We just spent the majority of our lives in one place and now we’re suddenly going to just leave.” Another pause, “that’s fucked up.”
“I don’t know,” I started, not entirely sure what I was actually going to say, “I think ‘suddenly’ is a bad word for it. If you think about it, we’ve been leaving this place for a while now.”
“I suppose we have.”
On that note we got back in her car and proceeded to drop me off at my house. I walked in the door reluctantly, hoping my mother had already gone to bed. I walked in, building myself up to make excuses like, “I tripped and the pipe just landed in my mouth!”. Thankfully she wasn’t around, so I went up stairs and got ready for bed. I had just moved from my old bedroom into the smaller one. I like cozy spaces. I had finally lain down to sleep when I heard crying. My heart sank in my chest. Had she caught me? Did she know? Jesus Christ I’m fucking dead! Oh she’s crying oh no oh no oh no! Kaaaaahn! I contemplated opening the window and throwing myself out it, but I decided to face the music.
I opened the door of my bedroom reluctantly, and stepped into the hallway. Creeping like the goddamn hamburglar, I pressed my ear against my old rooms door, listening to see what was going on. Finally, after about twenty minutes of getting myself ready I opened the door to find her sitting on my old bed, face in hands weeping like little girl. I love my mom, more than I can ever bear to mention, but I hate it when she cries. Because first she cries and then I cry, and then we cry together, and then its just a big crying mess. It’s anything but pretty.
She looked up from her hands and saw me and just began to wail. I walked over to her and sat beside her on the bed looking into my empty closet. It was the first time I had seen my room since I moved out of it and I guess I didn’t realize how affecting that would be to me. “What’s wrong”, I asked as innocently as possible, “did I do something wrong?”
She stopped crying instantaneously and looked at me, “oh my god, no hunny, you didn’t do anything wrong, I just... It’s just that you’ve lived in this room since you were a baby, and...” she paused to wipe the flooding of tears, “it’s the first time my baby has been right next door.”
It was true, too. I had lived in that room since I came home from the hospital. I had gone through everything that I had ever known in that room. Sharing it with my brother, the first time someone I knew died, my first kiss, everything. That room held more memories that I can even really recall, and now I wouldn’t sleep there anymore. I wouldn’t know the comfort of its memories.
For at least another hour we sat on my bed, staring at my closet, crying, reminiscing. It was strange, I never even thought of how big of a move that was. I just thought of it as a change. I didn’t realize just how much a change it was, and just how much it foreshadowed the other changes that would quickly be sweeping through my life.
I went to bed that night, and I dreamed about dogs chasing me. You tell me what that means.
September 2004: The 411 on Kingston High School.
September brought actual school. My class schedule went as follows:
Advanced Placement Government and Politics
Journalism
Independent study at the animal shelter
Advanced Placement Literature
French 3
Digital Video Editing
Concert Chorale
My first class of the day often became the source of my great annoyance with the world. My teacher, Mrs. Ciel, was the wife of a judge. A fact that she felt made her eligible to teach government and politics. Fact was, she usually had no idea what she was talking about. Well that’s not totally true, but for the sake of my own amusement we’ll say that it is. Throughout the year my classmates and I would find ourselves catching worried glances as Mrs. Ciel scrambled to think of the answer to a question. If she couldn’t even think of something totally untrue to say, she’d answer our inquiries with a “I’m not sure, I’ll have to look that up” or a “let me ask my husband and I’ll get back to you.” Needless to say, she never got back to us.
She had the pretentious air of a wannabe socialite. Constantly noting the fact that her daughter was on the speech writing staff for the governor of Wisconsin. Often she would get this airy look in her eye and begin to tell some disgustingly superficial story about her husbands’ election, or how they once saw a senator in a restaurant with some “sleazy bimbo that most certainly was not his wife”. The part that made everything come together just perfectly was the fact that she had one of the largest overbites known to man. But to put aside all physical and personal flaws, she really was an excellent teacher. In years to come I would I often find myself remembering discussions we had in her class.
One had to give her credit. The aformentioned government class could not have been composed of a more socially diverse group. We had Nick Bradivich, my best friend in the world who, coincidentally, happened to be gayer than Liberacci’s toy poodle. Not in the feminine, I’m-not-really-sure-if-I’m-a-boy-or-a-girl kind of way, but in the I’m-obsessed-with-boys kind of way. To counter that, we had two people. Make that three. The first of the three is Alex Bevnie, a right wing religious fanatic with a teletubby tummy. Secondly theres Brant Blomquist, once again a right wing religious fanatic. The only difference to between him and Alex, was that there’s a good chance Brant was gay. Thirdly, we have Stephen Wainer. Stephen may have just been extremely old fashioned, but there is a line to be drawn. The worst part of his story, is that there was good reason to believe he once killed a litter of kittens. Yes, Kittens. I mean seriously, unless you have some extreme form of anti-social, borderline personality disorder exaserbated by by intense homo-erotic insecurities, you should not be killing litters of kittens.
On the opposite side of that spectrum we had yours truly (moi), Amelia Grinn (my long term best friend and co-conspirator), along with her insanely long term boyfriend Mick Allende. Together we gaily roamed the middle of the road, leaning, of course, toward the liberal lane. Often we were the voices of reason, calling order to chaos and all that jazz.
Sticking soley to the left was Vicky Collinsback. Vicky was so liberal that theres a good chance she gave large monitarial donations to the socialist party. She was the vapid animal rights activist type who enjoyed stopping in the middle of the street to give road kill proper burials. One time she stopped the car, told me to get in the drivers seat, and made me drive 20 minutes with a dying cat in her arms to an animal hospital. Peeing, vomiting, bleeding all over, the cat was dying an agonizing death. Vicky, however, stood strong until she could get it to the vet. It died, needless to say, but at least she eased its suffering.
Pardon my digression, I’ll get back on topic.
Another teacher worth noting is Mrs. Sullen. Despite her name, she was a constant confidante and friend throughout high school. I found her to be one of the easiest teachers to talk to. She had the perfect balance of teenage comfort and grown up respect, and at the same time, she was able to take everything we said with a grain of salt.
To follow Mrs. Sullen, we have the infamous Mrs. Jane A. W. Steel. Yes, her initials spell out JAWS. She is the teacher that everyone will remember for years to come. Her crazy antics, and intense mood swings took us on a roller coaster ride between absolute love and adoration, to entire loathing and intense fear. You hear about teachers like this from every school that exists. There are different forms, shapes and sizes, but, for the most part, they do the same job. I think there might be a union.
Madame Monroe, my french teacher, was a bubbly loving woman, who, along with JAWS headed the drama department. The drama department was a massive part of my life in highschool. I tell everyone that I loved the people in drama, but in all honesty, I coulnd’t stand half of them. The real reason I loved drama so much was soley because I loved being on stage. There was just such a rush about standing in front of a hundred people and becoming an entirley different person. I never really got over my life for the dramatic arts.
Some less important characters in the high school were Mrs. Holland, an overdramatic, intensley sensative woman who taught concert chorale, the highest chorus in the high school of which I belonged (music was another large part of my life, but that comes at a different part my tale). Mr. Castinello was the large, portley principle who made an art of instilling fear in the hearts of all children. Often he would been seen wandering the halls with Mr. Smits, the vice principle. He was a short, slender man in his early to mid fourties. You could pick him out of any crowd his skin was so dark, but this wasn’t because he was any type of exotic race. No, it was because he liked to go tanning. Probably a little too much.
Mr. Shurn was the was the ‘wacky’ band teacher with thin, balding red hair that went down to the nape of his back and was most often seen in pony-tail format. He was often involved in the chorus concerts, usually dancing around the stage in a tu-tu or some other ‘wacky’ get up. I stess the term ‘wacky’ cause he insisted on using that term at a constant rate. Never ‘crazy’ or ‘wild’. No, no, always ‘wacky’.
Which brings me into the next events to take place. Homecoming Week. This is probably one of my most dreaded times of the year. I’m not one for school spirit. Don’t get me wrong, I’ll go to games, and I’ll dress up for the fun days like, “favorite cartoon character day”, but when it comes to painting my body blue and yellow and screaming, “LETS GO KINGSTON” at the top of my lungs, I usually tend to shy away. Its not because I didn’t feel pride for my school, or that I felt it embarassing, I just, in truth, didn’t feel that motivated by it, and I would have felt false trying to get into something I just didn’t get.
The theme for my senior year homecoming was “disco”. That put a damper on my homecoming week considering it was the single least creative theme possible. I can’t even imagine how many schools had a “disco” theme for their homecoming in that year alone. The only reason I even went to the dance was because my friend Helen (mentioned at the beginning of my story) insisted I go with her, and I felt obligated to do so.
So we went, danced, got our “groove-thang” on. I’m really quite embarrassed I ever used the term “groove-thang”, but I felt it appropriate. Afterwards we went to some random party where I sat by a fire dismally and tried ignore all the superficial girls hugging each other and trying to work up some fake tears to look like they really cared about each other. Christ, I’m a cynic. You must admit, though, they were pretty fake.
And so Homecoming came and went and, as usual, I didn’t even really notice. The important thing about homecoming, was that the next day, My older brother Khoury moved out of my house. My older brother khoury, god bless him, was a big of a loafer. He liked to have fun and do what he wanted to do as opposed to doing what he had to do. It was strange to watch him pack up and go to school considering he was twenty-one years old and had graduated four years beforehand.