When I think, honestly, about my days as a high schooler, I experience an awful sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach. My God, the embarrassments. Now, I’m proud to say that I’ve made an ass of myself THROUGHOUT my 32 years on this planet. But being a six-foot-plus Bengali bookworm with zero coordination and a puffy Indo-Fro, combined with the heightened insecurities that come part-and-parcel with teenagerdom created a perfect storm of fails. To this day, it’s impossible for me to think about the following 3 moments, all true, without cringing. I share them with you in the hopes of inspiring fellow shares about those crazy, unformed, and unforgettable days between childhood and adulthood:
Note: Some names have been changed.
1) The First (and Nearly Last) Time I Asked a Girl Out
If there’s one idea fueling the thoughts and actions of a high school boy, it’s: get a girl. Somehow maintain a relationship. And then, on a magical night when your parents aren’t home, lose your virginity. Grade 9 was when I decided to stop writing elaborate, unsent love letters to girls who didn’t know I existed and actually ask one out. Only problem: I had no idea what that meant. My friends at the time were good-hearted, passionately into computers and Dungeons & Dragons, and honestly themselves, which of course meant that they were total nobodies in the high school ecosystem and had never had anything more than accidental contact with a girl. Turning to my parents for advice was also out: like most South Asian families, there were little-to-no signs of affection between parents and CERTAINLY no reckoning with the sexual impulses of a teenager (my Dad once found me watching porn in the basement and backed up, step-by-step, in complete silence. He’s never mentioned it since). Despite all this, I was determined to go through with it. The mere possibility of being close to someone was worth the risk of jumping out of a plane without a parachute.
The bell rings, ending the school day. I’m waiting by my locker on one side of a long hall, watching classroom doors swing open and students stream out. By this time I’d memorized Elora’s schedule and knew it would take her about three minutes to finish chatting with her fellow girl friends and reach her locker on the opposite end of the hall. Three minutes, long enough for many of the students/potential witnesses to get their things and head for the stairs. Long enough for my heart to race so loudly and frantically it was all I could hear. Cold sweat on my brow. A flash of blond hair- she’s at her locker. Start walking, someone says Hi, think I nod, heart beating so fast, legs like jelly, getting closer, she’s checking her hair in a vanity mirror taped to the inside of her locker, she sees me through it, I try to smile this was a mistake, a mistake, a total mistake…
“How’s it going?” I ask.
Elora gives me a quizzical smile. Despite our having nearly half the same classes, this was the first time I’d spoken to her. “Good. You?”
“Good.” One of her friends whose name I didn’t know was watching us. I could leave right now, just leave and I’d only embarrassed myself a little. But where would I go after that? I couldn’t go through my days alone anymore…
“Would you like to go out sometime?” I asked, very quietly.
She glanced inside her locker, stalling. “Go…out?”
“Yeah, uh…” mouth dry, I had no idea what going out meant, only that this was what you asked, “sometime?”
She looked back at me, washed-out blue eyes, long neck, shrugged. “Okay.”
“Okay,” I said, nodding as I backed away. I could feel the anxiety draining away. Okay meant she wanted to be my girlfriend. Okay meant she understood what it was to be lonely, to stare out the window trying to imagine a place better than the purgatory you were in. Okay meant I’d been found.
As I learnt the next day, “Okay” meant hanging out sometime as friends. A polite refusal, but one that didn’t fool the gossipmongers.
I ate lunch in the bathroom for the next three weeks.
2) The Accidental Arsonist
By Grade 10, I was busy climbing the popularity ranks, methodically submerging all aspects of my personality that didn’t fit in with the established template: liking hip-hop, experimenting with drugs, and smoking like it was the 50’s. On the heels of a humiliating incident where a horse-faced bruiser of a girl named Candace called me out for not inhaling the smoke, I began sneaking off to the bathroom during classes to practice. I’d check the stalls to make sure they were empty, crack open the window, and light up. So what if it tasted awful and made my eyes water? Since when did being happy in high school ever mean actually doing things you cared about?
Usually I’d toss the butt out the window. But one Thursday, for a reason I still cannot fully understand, I ashed it on the sill and tossed it into a trash bin stuffed with the brown cardboard sheets that passed for toilet paper in my high school. Then I went back to class.
Can you guess what happened next? The fire alarm went off and ominously went silent a few moments later. Then a knock at the door. I turned to see the vice-principal and the janitor, walkie-talkies in hand, staring back at me.
“Can I help you?” our Social Studies teacher asked.
They pointed me out. Brought me down to the office. And only then, with a tape recorder running to get my confession, did they mention the bathroom that had begun billowing smoke a few minutes after a hallway camera had caught me leaving it.
I was suspended for two weeks. And despite my Mom’s handwringing and the disappointment writ plain on my father’s face, the truly tragic after-effect was not being able to perform in a production of King Lear I’d spent months rehearsing. The guilt I felt, not just for screwing it up for myself but for my amazing Drama teacher Mr. Floen, who had to scramble to replace me at the last minute, was all-consuming. From then on, no matter how much phoniness I engaged in (which was considerable) I never did anything that might possibly jeopardize future plays. Acting became one of the great passions of my life; it’s a shame getting suspended was what it took for me to openly care about it.
3) Turn On, Tune In, Disaster
LSD and high school dances do not mix. This seems obvious, but you’d me amazed by how many things a teenager is unwilling to believe without personally testing it out. It was my Senior Year, and the end was in sight. A whole new group of younger students, blessedly unaware of my past embarrassments, actually looked up to us as (gasp) role models. A super-cute Italian girl named Diana, two years my junior, was among them. Long black hair, oval face like Michael Corleone’s doomed first wife in The Godfather, and best of all: she liked me! Without a doubt, confirmed by multiple sources. What better (or more dramatic) venue than a crowded school gym, air heavy with hormones, floor shaking with bass, to make her mine?
I’m sitting at the base of a large stage set-up for the DJ, tripping on a tab of acid Jeff, one of my neer-do-well “cool friends” had given me earlier. We’d been drinking and making ridiculous claims about sexual prowess (FYI: I was still a virgin), he’d pulled them out, and without even hesitating, I placed the tiny square of paper on my tongue and let it dissolve. Now the faces of schoolmates were taking on bestial qualities and I was having amazing insights like, “We’re all just shapes, jigsaw pieces for a puzzle God’s putting together”.
November Rain by Guns and Roses starts playing. I spot Diana off by herself. I get up, go over and ask if she’d like to dance. “Sure,” she says and we move towards the center of the crowded dance floor, guys and girls shuffling about locked in rigid embraces. We start dancing- for how long exactly, I don’t know. Then I make the fatal mistake of glancing around and see:
An empty dance floor but for us. Everyone else is pressed up against the far walls, whispering things about us and pointing. We are completely alone.
Diana keeps dancing like nothing’s the matter. I follow suit, pressing my eyes closed tight, trying to tell my drug-addled brain that this is just the drugs, it’ll wear off, don’t lose it. DO. NOT. LOSE. IT.
“Are you okay?” she asks.
“Yup,” I say. “Great.”
I can’t make out the song but it’s still playing so we keep dancing, left foot, right foot, left foot, right foot. I have to open my eyes. I have to see what’s going on. I force them open and see:
My arms, which are supposed to be around Diana, held out into thin air. She is gone, joined the ranks of whispering watchers on the walls. I am dancing by myself, alone, during November Rain.
I walk away towards the exit, keeping my head down so as not to make eye contact. I go straight into the bathroom, crouch down in a stall, and try to get my breathing regular. Some time later, as the bathroom tiles are slowly collapsing in on themselves and I’m gnawing on my lower lip to make sure it’s still there, I hear my friend Cory enter.
“Anish?”
“What’s up, man?” I ask, not daring to open the stall and step outside.
“Nothing, except…you left Diana in the middle of the song, in the middle of the dance floor.”
Kids, I cannot stress this enough: STAY AWAY FROM PSYCHEDELICS.
This post was written by
Anish Majumdar – who has written 15 posts on DashAmerican.com.
Anish Majumdar is the creator of DashAmerican.com, a site devoted to the cross-cultural experience. He is of Bengali descent, raised in Canada, and currently living with his Irish-German-Lithuanian wife in upstate NY. His work has received Independent Press Association Awards and a Pushcart Prize nomination. Contact him directly with any questions, career opportunities or just to say "howdy" using the "Send an Email" button below!
