May
1999 ac/dc by Todd Levin |
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Naughty
Girls Need Love, Too
"I'm young, I know, but even so I learned a thing
or two from you. I really learned a lot, really learned a lot. Love
is like a flame -- it burns you when it's hot." --Nazareth, "Love Hurts"
There were few things I couldn't have while I was in high school.
I had a parking space in the student lot, decent skin, and an ass that
could make the sternest in-school suspension monitor weep like a Theta
Sigma sister at an organized screening of "Howard's End". My name was
at the top of every student poll, easily nosing out victories in the
categories of Most Unthreatening (Male) and Best Excuse for Poor Sexual
Performance at a School-Sponsored Social Function. (That was the Latin
Club Christmas party, I believe, and I still stick to my original argument
-- it is possible to get drunk on rum balls.) I could not hustle from
the Reference Center to my after-school Advanced Placement Calculus
class without being accosted by the yearbook photographer (and my former
Dungeon Master). The truth was practically written on the walls: adolescent
boys wanted to be me and adolescent girls wanted to be Frenched by me.
With all the trappings of cool -- not to mention my three-time post
as Secretary-at-Arms for S.V.S.F.I.S.C. (Student Volunteers Spoon-Feeding
Infirmed Senior Citizens) -- I had the game cornered. But you'd never
know it to look at me. That's because there was one thing I could never
have. I was often seen peering distractedly out the window during Junior
Historical Re-Enactment Society meetings, down three flights and through
a bilious cloud of Marlboro Red smoke. Down, down, down to the head-butting
throngs of disaffected teenagers sparking up between classes, air guitaring
(and air drumming! But, sadly, no air bass.), flipping the bird, and
tearing up the high school courtyard with a mean streak of unrelated
expletives. This is where the teen mechanics, first-time felons, near-dropouts,
and deadbeat dads-to-be ruled. This was their slice of heaven on earth.
And alongside the men and their mustaches were the women who let them
grab their asses in public, lift their shirts up over their heads at
Whitesnake concerts, and impregnate them before they reached voting
age. These were Bad Girls. All I ever wanted was a Bad Girl to kiss.
Gratefully, I shared a couple of classes with Bad Girls. Girls named
Cathy and Christy and Brittany and Kathy. I was in accelerated science
classes and shared lab with a few older Bad Girls. Bad Girls, surprisingly,
don't categorically go for guys in accelerated science classes. In fact,
they are more likely to fall for guys with accelerated body hair growth
or accelerated cocaine habits. But I didn't care. I loved the way they
talked -- mooning over their boys one minute, cursing the whores that
tried to steal their boys away the next. I loved the way they dressed
-- labia-clutching blue jeans, high-top basketball sneakers (interchangeable
with suede elf boots festooned with a bandana), zip-front hoodie sweatshirts,
and "little miss lady" skinny-strap shoulder bags containing reserve
Aqua Net, a vent brush, birth control pills, and a picture of themselves
as young girls on daddy's shoulders.
But most of all, I really appreciated how strongly these girls
felt. Naturally, I also appreciated the fact that these girls
let boys (and full-grown mall security guards and sporting goods
salesmen) explore parts of their bodies most of my girlfriends
were aware of only in the clinical sense. But it was the completely
bare emotion waiting just below the warm leatherette surface that
always struck me. I distinctly remember the day Tammy -- possibly
the baddest girl in her class (she even had a chipped tooth) --
came into Biology lab class barely fighting back tears over something
about which I had no place inquiring. This was the same girl I
saw punch a featherweight Feather Queen (I think every high school
in America had a different name to describe the subculture of
women that parked it in the school courtyard with their flipped
feathered hair, kicking a pocket in the ozone with their hairspray)
so hard she knocked her out of her post-Labor Day white pumps.
Kim Kessler was tough with fashion etiquette but collapsed beneath
the weight of romantic anxiety. I wanted to marry her and I might
have proposed that very day if I didn't think she'd shiv me for
suspected smart-assery.
Bad Girls were the ones having babies, doomed to spend their Junior
years of high school in special physical education classes, bowling
alongside the juvenile arthritics. Bad Girls were the ones throwing
down violently for boyfriend custody, no matter the circumstances. Bad
Girls let their mascara run through teardrops and still showed up for
remedial English. Bad Girls made Extreme's "More Than Words" MTV's most
requested video for 74 weeks in a row. And Bad Girls mostly grew up
to be jaded single-mothers/hairdressers with restraining orders against
their last five boyfriends. But their feelings were so completely pure,
uncompromised; like the Heart sisters, bad girls knew hurt the way I
knew the Kreb's Cycle. The girls I dated wrote really coherent love
notes and smelled like vanilla, but I know they wouldn't get a broken
nose over me.
I used to cruise through my high school's courtyard to steal a peek
at the tough kids. The kids who loved Budweiser before they had their
first swallow, and the kids who would menace my friends with their muscle
cars. But mostly, I wanted to catch the blue-shadowed eye of one of
those Bad Girls and maybe win her favor. These wonderful girls, headphones
pumping them the rough-road romantic gospel of Slaughter and Poison,
pants applied like lip-gloss. And skinny me, headphones touching me
in a safe place with the Caucasian jangle of Men at Work's Cargo, pants
cuffed, tapered and stuffed so far up my ass that my breath tasted stone-washed.
I could never have the Bad Girls. I could have the Glee Club Girls or
the National Honor Society Girls, but I was invisible to the Bad Girls
-- the same way the Internet and Rice Dream products are invisible to
Bad Girls. Ultimately, I stayed where I was supposed to be, in my proper
circles, rallying students for the charity car wash baking Lesbian Tortes
for the F.L.A.G. bake sale. But, smiling through my own sickening decency,
I knew how good I could have been for someone really, really Bad.
back to the junk drawer
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