Long Past Stopping (34 page)

Dawn and Josh heard that I was back, and they both came to the alumni meeting to say hi, offer their support, and fill me in on their lives. Dawn was working at a café in Sherman Oaks and had just had an abortion.

“Wait a second. Doesn't that imply that you had sex with someone?” I asked, before realizing I should have offered my condolences first and then led into that. I was jealous, but at the same time I was glad she had finally worked through whatever demons she was fighting. I had tried so fucking hard with her, though, and I never tried.

“I'm sorry you had to go through that,” I told her.

“No, it's great news! I didn't think I could ever have kids.”

Josh was wearing an Armani suit and driving a brand-new BMW with tinted windows.

“Looks like you got your old job back,” I said. “What happened with that bag of rocks?”

“Those rocks were hurting my back so bad that my boss eventually came down here and spoke to someone.” I wasn't a big fan of suits, but he looked pretty good in one. “I don't know what he said to them, but afterward they told me to stop wearing the backpack.”

The three of us sat outside smoking cigarettes until they called me in for my meds. It was nice to see that they were doing well, but I had lost faith in myself.

 

F
OLLOWING ANOTHER
excruciatingly long and painful night's sleep, I checked out of the rehab, and Jack gave me a ride from Oxnard back to L.A. to get what few belongings I still had out of the apartment. I also needed to get my van before it got towed. Even though Jack had seen the worst of me only a week and a half earlier, I was still too embarrassed to let him see the shithole I had been living in. I could tell him how bad it was, but I couldn't let him see for himself.

I took the cardboard off the windows, threw my dirty clothes into a bunch of trash bags, and cleaned up as best I could. With Jack waiting in
the parking lot across the street, I didn't have time to patch up the walls I had ripped apart, and there was nothing I could do to hide the countless cigarette burns I had left on Nora's mattress and carpet. The only thing I could hope for was that I never ran into her or any of her friends ever again. It was unlikely, but I could always hope.

Following Jack back to his house, I felt defeated. I had tried everything I could think of in the past two years to get my shit together, and nothing had worked. I hated all that One-Day-at-a-Time and Easy-Does-It shit with a passion. Although it just didn't make sense that a three-word saying could get me clean, there were a few things that were hard to deny. The one that always struck a chord was when someone would say, “When I was I kid I never dreamed of growing up to be an alcoholic or a junkie. I wanted to be a…” Usually a fireman or jet pilot or some shit, which couldn't have been further from the many things I had thought of becoming. But it was true that I had never once entertained the fantasy of growing up to be a crackhead junkie. Having gone through all this shit myself, though, I was way past looking down on drug addicts. Not to say that I thought very highly of myself, but staying high all the time was hard, thankless work, and there were no benefits that I could see. Until I got uncomfortable, of course; then I couldn't see the consequences.

It was all so goddamn tragic and confusing that I decided it was time to go back to square one. Hit the reset button. Go back to where it all started and try to figure out what the hell went wrong. At Jack's house, I did my laundry for the first time in months and got another much-needed night of sleep. The next morning I got in the van and headed back to my first rehab, in Redwood City.

W
ITH THREE HUNDRED
dollars and my first car, I hit the road to San Diego to hang out with a few of my friends from school before they went off to college and I returned to Arizona.

When I returned to school, my beard was about four inches long, and my friends at school thought I looked as if I'd aged at least ten years in only three months. A few of the new teachers, who looked to be about twenty-two themselves, asked me what I taught and why I hadn't been at the faculty orientation.

 

A
S A JOKE, AARON
had submitted my name as a candidate for student body president the previous year. I don't know what the other kids were thinking, but for some reason they went along with it and voted me in. Technically I hadn't even run for the position, which may have had something to do with me winning, because after listening to the other kids give their speeches, I decided to vote for myself too. My first order of business as the new president was an attempt to repeal a new rule that made study hall a requirement for seniors. For as long as I had been there, seniors were always exempt because our grades wouldn't affect our college applications at that point. My grades were so bad that, for three years, I had spent two hours a night sitting silently in the dining
hall pretending to study, and just when I was supposed to get a break from it, they took away the privilege. After a failed attempt at diplomacy, I called for a schoolwide study hall boycott, but I ended up being the only one to participate in it. After only a week, I had racked up almost enough cuts to get suspended. Since my new responsibilities required that I meet with the headmaster once a week anyway, he just waited for me to come to him.

“What's it been? Four days now? I obviously have never had any luck trying to tell you what to do, but in two more days, I'm going to have to suspend you,” he told me.

“That's fine. I don't want to be here anyway if you're going to treat
us
like this,” I told him, trying mostly to convince myself that I was fighting for a noble cause. In truth, I was pissed because
I
had to go to study hall. There were only thirteen seniors anyway, and out of those, only two other kids had such shitty grades that our studying required adult observation.

“It's just not worth it, Oran. It's like biting off your nose to spite your face.”

“I don't get it. What does that mean?”

“You know, you don't like your face, so you bite off your nose,” he said, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. “All I'm saying is, think it through before you do something stupid.”

“Okay, but seriously, what does that have to do with my nose?”

“Is there any other business to discuss?” he asked, changing the subject.

“Yeah.” I looked at my notes from the senate meeting. As I read off the list of how many liters of soda and bags of chips we needed for the Halloween dance, I realized that a big part of me really didn't give a shit whether they kicked me out. Aside from Aaron and Matt, most of my friends had already graduated, and I felt as though I was just biding my time until I could join them out in the real world.

The boycott was ultimately successful, but I had accumulated so many cuts in the process that I was on very thin ice. If I was late to one class or got caught smoking one cigarette, that would be the end, or so I thought. I did try as hard as I could to start following the rules, but getting through a whole semester without missing a class or being caught smoking one of my twenty cigarettes a day turned out to be impossible. To my surprise, however, my teachers would somehow forget to turn in my cut slips or, when they popped out of the bushes to catch me smoking, would quickly make up some other excuse for why they were sneak
ing around off campus late at night, once they realized it was me.

“Oh. Hey there. I didn't recognize you. What are you doing out here?” my teacher Gary asked one night.

“Just taking a walk,” I answered nervously, hiding my cigarette behind my back.

“Me, too. It's such a beautiful night. Well, I guess I'll be on my way then,” he said, heading off to give a group of four other kids smoking violations. Gary was a chronic pot smoker, and it was rumored that he got high with a few of the students. Every once in a while, he had to pretend to be an authoritarian and catch someone. It seemed as though that was the case for all of the teachers, who were mostly fresh out of college and stuck in the middle of the desert watching sixty teenagers run wild.

Once I realized I couldn't really get into trouble, I wasn't nearly so interested in causing it. Aaron and I were taking acid every weekend to use up the sixteen hits I still had left from when I was a freshman, but the headmaster was far less interested in what I did secretly than in my more public troublemaking efforts, such as walking around with a Hitler mustache and calling for strikes. As a result, I found myself on much friendlier terms with the faculty, often spending my evenings at the houses of various teachers who were so lonely they had taken to inviting Aaron, Matt, and me over for dinner.

Holly, one of the administrators, even started including a couple of six-packs of beer every Wednesday night when we went to her house for dinner. We would get buzzed while she would fill us in on all the week's faculty drama. Two teachers were sleeping together, and two others had broken up on bad terms. Curiously there hadn't been any student-teacher relationships so far, at least that we knew about. The year before, I caught one of my teachers, Phillip, red-handed when I went over to his house for a tutoring session. Looking in his desk for a pen, I was shocked to see my pot pipe in the drawer.

“Hey, this is mine,” I told him, holding it up so he could see.

“No, it's not,” he said, looking as if he had just been electrocuted. I had lent it to a girl a few hours earlier, who, it immediately dawned on me, must have been the robed figure I saw dashing into his bedroom when I had knocked on the door. Phillip rescheduled my lesson, and ten minutes later the girl returned the pipe.

It was virtually impossible to keep anything secret on campus, which was why we were all so surprised when Gary told us, “There's been at least one student-teacher relationship this year.” We were hanging out at his house, and he was stoned out of his mind.

“Really?”

“Who is it?” we asked.

“I can't tell you till the end of the year,” he said.

I was never very judgmental of these relationships. If anything, I was jealous, because it seemed that everyone was getting laid but me. It wasn't that girls weren't interested in me; it was that I didn't know what the hell I was supposed to do about it when they were. I wouldn't understand why a girl was always trying to wrestle with me until a week later when she'd start wrestling with some other guy and all of a sudden they would be an item.

When I was aware that someone was into me, I would get scared and run away. The closest I had come was when a girl asked me if I wanted a massage and I talked shit about her friends the whole time she rubbed my back. Another time I walked into my room early in the morning after sneaking off campus to hang out with Eli, who was back in Arizona visiting his mom, and I found two freshmen girls asleep on my bed. In a panic I closed the door as quietly as I could and ran away, fully aware that I would never be able to forgive myself for that one.

 

B
ACK IN BERKELEY
for Christmas, Mom and Kyle staged an intervention. I hated the way Mom always brought this kind of thing up when we were in the car, usually driving fifty miles an hour down the freeway. Even then it was tempting to open the door and get out.

“All we're trying to tell you is it's fine if you're gay. We just want to know,” Kyle said.

“Jesus Christ. I swear I'm not gay. Not that it's any of your fucking business!”

“Hey, Ory. You don't need to get so defensive. We're not accusing you of anything. We're just trying to let you know we would still love you.”

“For God's sake. Don't you think I know that? But if telling you I'm gay will end this fucking conversation, then fine, I'm gay,” I said.

“You're gay? Really?” Mom asked.

“Man! I was being sarcastic, but if I change my mind, I swear to God I'll let you know!”

“Okay. Because Kyle and I will still love you. Right, Kyle?”

I couldn't blame them for asking, but I was annoyed that they thought I would have been ashamed of it. Most of my role models growing up had been gay. The real reason I hated talking about it was because I didn't know why I was so scared of girls. I also had a very real fear that I would
never experience sex in my life. I mean, how much easier could it get than finding two girls in your bed?

 

W
HEN I GOT BACK
to school, a few new students had enrolled for the second semester. One of them was a junior named Dana. She had long dark hair and wore mostly black clothes with striped red-and-white socks. She even parted her hair down the middle, giving her a distinct Wednesday Addams look. I couldn't help stealing glances at her, and even when I noticed her doing the same, I couldn't bring myself to approach her.

Someone must have told her that if she hoped to have any luck with me, she would have to do all the work and do it quickly, because almost immediately she was sitting next to me during lunch, joining me for cigarettes, and tracking me down after study hall to hang out. The whole situation scared the hell out of me, but I felt like I was running out of time and that it would only get harder once I was out in the real world.

Even so, no matter how much I wanted to, I couldn't bring myself to make the first move. Luckily she didn't have a problem taking charge, and one night, while espousing my views on how utterly fucked up the universe was, she shut me up midsentence with a kiss. My anxiety disappeared instantly, and we made out under the stars for a few minutes until some other kids interrupted us by coming out to get a last cigarette before our in-dorms curfew.

“Let's go to your room,” she said.

“Shit, it's already nine thirty,” I said, looking at my watch. “We only have half an hour.”

“Then we'd better make it quick,” she responded, already walking down the path back to campus. I wasn't sure whether she meant what I was hoping she meant, and I was too freaked out to ask her.

She made it very clear when we got to my room, though.

“So, do you have any condoms?”

“Wow…Uh…No. I mean…I've never even done this before,” I answered, figuring it was best that she knew in case I screwed the whole thing up.

“Well, you better find one. I'll be right here,” she said, sitting down on my bed.

Nervous as hell, I went down the hall and knocked on a few doors to see what I could turn up, but no one was ever around right before curfew. Even if I did find someone, it wasn't certain that they had any more use
for condoms than I did. I thought about making a mad dash for the infirmary, where they always left a salad bowl full of condoms on the counter, but there was no way I could make it back in time.

Just when I was about to give up, I heard voices coming from my friend Kazuhiro's room. Kazu was the only Japanese student who made any effort to interact with the American kids. I felt a glimmer of hope because I knew he had a girlfriend. Too impatient to knock, I opened the door to his bedroom, which also served as a clubhouse for all the Japanese exchange students, who would hang out and play video games the rest of America wouldn't see for another year.

“Hey, Kazu. Come here a second,” I said, peering in. There were four other Japanese kids, all of them yelling at the TV screen while one of them played
Super Mario Brothers 3.

“What's up?” he asked, looking up from the game.

“Come here, I need to ask you something.” I was freaking out, and it must have shown by the sound of my voice. I only had a twenty-minute window left to lose my virginity.

“Do you have a condom?” I whispered, after getting him to follow me out into the hall.

“Ah,” he said, smiling. “I have, but it no work for you.”

“What? What are you talking about, it no work? Just give it to me,” I pleaded.

“Seriousry. No work. Very embarrassing, but Japanese condom too smar for you.”

“Too what? Small? You got to be kidding me,” I said. “Just give it to me. It'll be fine. It's not like I have anything to brag about.”

“Okay, but I'm terring you. Too smar.”

He reappeared a few seconds later with a condom, and I ran upstairs as fast as I could.

“Find one?” Dana asked when I got back to my room. She was already under the covers, and her clothes were on the floor.

“Yeah,” I said, locking the door and turning out the light. I didn't remember what was in my tape deck, but I pressed play to cover up any noise that might occur. It was Captain Beefheart's
Trout Mask Replica
—not the most conducive music to lose one's virginity to, but I was running out of time. I took off my clothes, got under the covers, and handed her the condom. Presumably she had more experience with them than I did.

“There's something wrong with it. I can't get it on,” she said.

I hadn't even been paying attention to what she was doing for fear of
finishing before she even got the damn thing on. Instead I was focusing on the lyrics to the song that was playing.

 

meaty dream wet meat,

 

It turned out to be the perfect music.

“Really? He was right then?” I asked, taking the condom from her. Sure enough, the thing was the size of my thumb. I wasn't sure who I felt worse for, myself or Kazu.

“Fuck!” I said. “God fucking damn it!” I had been waiting my whole life for this, and finally, after years of fantasizing, there was a real, live, naked girl in my bed.