Learner's Permit: Part 9 - Freshman Year of High School (2004-2005)

Before I dig into the arduous story of my Freshman year of high school, I thought that I’d touch on something that I forgot to mention. Towards the end of middle school, there was one song that captured the playground’s attention. It was the preceding summer of The Killers’ debut album “Hot Fuss,” and their big single “Somebody Told Me” inspired its fair share of conversation. The gender-bending nature of the lyrics confused everybody. Given that we were only a few years from the t.A.T.u. debacle of “All the Things She Said,” the sexuality talk on campus was hushed in taboo. Nobody was really sure what to say. We were Catholic school kids who were using our final days to talk about how high school was gateway to “the real world.” 

The real world, by this logic, was going to have even more frivolous behaviors. The idea of anything beyond drag being accepted, especially as a one-time lark, consumed the mind. If you were lesbian, you were of the performative kind. At some point before we graduated, the talk of bisexuality came up and it felt like our version of the iPhone. It was strange and new. Nobody understood it to the point my response was, “then what would trisexual be?” 

I’m sure that the summer was meaningful. I remember that I spent more than a few afternoons with Alex just talking about life. Since I haven’t brought it up yet, I want to mention that despite being very detached from OLOR, I was somehow doomed to constantly revisit there. At one point, I had to go there to help install a new playground following a girl injuring herself on the merry-go-round. 

In this case, I was doomed because my father was part of a group that sponsored fireworks booths from TNT and Red Devil. If you drive around anytime during June and early July, you’ll see the buildings in some form of habitation. Basically, because my father was outgoing and wanted to be seen as a good leader, he’d volunteer to do the delivery and because I was often stuck at Fun Services, I would be his partner in helping to wheel boxes and boxes of fireworks off the truck. From there, he would have others help to organize and set up for the interim. Not only did he work at the booth, HE LIVED THERE. On the bright side, he had the benefit of a closed gate to protect him at night. However, he still had to live out of a camper. 

Sometimes they were fun, but if you’re not an outdoorsman type, you’re not likely to find it romantic for very long. We’d play cards and sometimes bring a portable TV. At other points we’d bring a CD player where we played stuff like Gwen Stefani’s “Love Angel Music Baby” while having endless conversations about random things. All we had to do was run around the abandoned school (at least when church wasn’t a thing). We were too young to (legally) be in the booth, and yet we were encouraged to be the side hustlers who stuck around the other group members and tried to make nice. Alex was there a few times and one time we discovered the Magic Bullet commercial, which remains a Millennial touchstone.

That is the extent to what I remember about the summers at the time. It was one of the last before my family began entering the next phase of life. Given that this is something more geared towards my Sophomore year, I will only say here that it was a rocky period. There were arguments, but when you didn’t know better, what are you going to complain about? In fact, there’s something coming up shortly that is a grand byproduct of tumultuous relationships. For now, I was with Alex living at the fireworks stand or wandering around the Lakewood Mall, wondering what high school was going to be like.

To finally shift into high school, I want to touch on orientation. I am a very superstitious type. Because I had been bullied at such a young age, I had been scared of having friend groups for lengthy periods of time. More than that, I am fearful of starting over and finding my own path in a strange land. I need to do extensive research about what I’m walking into. I need to know the map. I need to not look “stupid.” I can’t say that it was at its worst feeling during orientation, but I began to cherish the long walk to the front of campus because it meant I got to survey everything and know if I was even doing the right thing.

There’s not a lot that is necessarily meaningful about the orientation story. I can’t recall much about it other than, “Here’s the 300 building” or “Here’s the gymnasium.” Millikan is by no means a big campus so everything was navigable. Still, there was this sense that the group we were in would be “our friends” going in. 

My only story of orientation is that I met this guy. He was jovial and seemed eager to start the next phase of his life. At one point he talked about how J-Kwon (I assume he was referring to the “Tipsy” rapper, who I promise was relevant at the time) was his homie. As we separated for break, he sat with me and looked around at everybody. He turned to me and asked, “You like them girls?” with such enthusiasm that I had no choice but to agree. I didn’t not not like girls, but I guess it was part of the lengthy teenage struggle of attempting to understand that intellectual and emotional curiosity of a person was not the same as sexual attraction. I’ve written way too many regrettable words because I thought things more classifiable as sapiosexual were signs that I liked someone “in that way.” He was a good kid. Even if I never saw him again, I want to believe life treated him okay.

The time between there and the first day of school is hard to really place into context. At some point I met my guidance counselor Sandro. Given that I wanted to be a journalist at the time, he helped me start working towards that goal. It wouldn’t come in Freshman year, but at some point he had me go to the teacher’s classroom to sign an acceptance letter. He also mentioned that because I was into music and read Spin and Rolling Stone frequently, he suggested that I watch Almost Famous (2000) because of how it depicted the profession I was romanticizing. In the grand scheme of things, I don’t know that I really ever visited Sandro outside of planning classes and the rare occasion where my student I.D., which would hang from a lanyard, had the free period stickers fall off. It was disparaging because the stickiness wasn’t all that sticky and every now and then a clever rapscallion would flat out steal them when you weren’t looking.It made things annoying because I rarely skipped classes so any time I lost the sticker and didn’t have the money to buy replacements, I had to wander around for an hour with fear of being caught.

The downtime was spent largely on Myspace or any other family event. On the day before classes started, I remember fixing my backpack. We were going over it several times to make sure that I was prepared. I didn’t want to be seen as “behind” before my future really started. The random detail that I remember is that it was the night that Father of the Pride with John Goodman premiered. It’s not important to anything, but I remember that CGI lion being somewhere in the background. It was around the start of when we got cable, so the world was about to open up. Again, I’ll leave that for another time.

The first day of school was in some sense horrifying. Nothing bad actually happened, but being surrounded by hundreds of strangers was too much. In one form of irony, I was part of the second year of students who were assigned to the dress code rules. That meant that juniors and seniors got to wear casual every day. It’s a weird sight, but also a great way to determine what everyone’s interests were. Once they disappeared, there was something robbing of personality that made it difficult to latch onto anything. My only real connectivity to strangers was that I had a backpack covered in patches for music artists. Somebody would notice and I’d occasionally strike up conversations while waiting outside the Rite Aid for my father to pick me up. 

But on this day, we had the now familiar routine. You found your name on a sheet of paper and proceeded to a classroom that featured said number. The teacher I ended up going to was an English teacher that I was always curious about but never got to know. I never had him as a teacher. However, he seemed to be trending towards the cool youth vote. He had a poster of The Surf Punks in one corner. Somewhere along the upper wall was a quote of Coldplay being like, “Am I part of the cure or am I part of a disease?” For four years, he gave me those papers and then I would be on my way.

Because of my own superstitious self, I did my best to get to class 10 minutes before things started. I wanted to have all of my books out and ready to go. I can’t recall what my first semester roster ultimately was, but there are a few moments that stood out.

There was my Math teacher. He was part of a couple who taught next door to each other known as The Mickelsons. They were nice people who did their job well, but I liked to imagine that they used a conjoined room to make out and do other adult things. 

It was also where I met one of my shorter lived friendships. There was this kid that I’ll call Eugene. He had a soft voice and a glare in his eye. While I knew some kids from middle school who would go on to become stoners, this was the cliché version of it. He was overtly friendly and only seemed to want to give off good vibes. As I sat there trying to impress the surrounding students with a writing style that was intentionally goofy, he made fun of me for being a Freshman. Next to him was a relationship that lasted a little longer. The kid’s name was Hezekiah who was also a nice person. He even showed up to poetry readings a few times. My only criticism is that he once convinced me to let him “borrow” the chain from my wallet chain which he never returned despite seeing him several times since.

I didn’t hang out with Eugene, but he always seemed to be coming out of somewhere around campus. One time I caught him coming out of gym and he gave me a friendly wave. He said that his favorite movie was Dazed and Confused (1993), which totally lined up once I saw it. He was the first, but not last, druggie I’d know at the school. Something convinces me that he was eventually caught smoking and that’s why I stopped seeing him around.

Another class was gym. There aren’t any great stories from there. I remember getting my locker code and being the absolute worst about it. I had no way to keep it locked. Sometimes I’d get it locked and it would refuse to open. It came to the point where I eventually kept it “locked” as in I kept the lock over it, pretending so that I would have an easy time getting in and out. I hated gym for many reasons, but it included the fact that I once got my money stolen out of my wallet. 

I also hung out with this mentally disabled kid that I’ll call Richard. I’m not entirely sure how we came to be paired up, but there was a point early into gym where it was clear we’d be doing assignments together. I had no problem with him. Even with the familiar vocal tics and personality traits that made him seem laughable to more “socially conscious” types, I enjoyed spending time with him. He was easy to get along with. Even if he occasionally had that extroverted lack of self-consciousness – he once went around with a sporting tool yelling “Bonsai!” because he claimed it meant “Attack!” – there was something forgiving about Richard. While we wouldn’t hang out much after that first year of gym, I would see him again while waiting outside Spanish class because he was in the special education classroom next door. Because of my availability, I was called upon a few times to help with wheelchairs and other duties to make the staff members’ job easier.

An issue with talking about this section is that it’s not in any sense of chronology but I want to build a sense of importance. While Spanish was at the end of the day, it’s one of the first times of Freshman year where I felt “connected” to a teacher. I won’t suggest that I was a great Spanish-speaking student. If anything, other languages continue to intimidate me because I struggle to recollect them for more than a few months. I felt similar in college with French classes. Still, if anyone was going to ease me into the Spanish-speaking world, I’m glad that it was Strader. 

Even if I found other places to hang out as the years went on, I spent a lot of months before class started in Strader’s classroom. I’d sit doing homework while he listened to Adam Carolla. He was the “cool” teacher who had a bit of a surfer vibe with neck-long hair and colorful shirts. Another claim to fame was that he really liked Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1984), which was appealing to teenage me. He was candid and knew how to make class fun by splicing in comical stories, whether about the videos we were forced to watch or his own life. At some point he talked about how he had a kid and was wondering what people did with the placenta. He then suggested making a restaurant that served it. I promise it was funnier than that sounded.

Of the two Spanish teachers I had, Strader was very much the favorite. Not only was he capable of making language accessible, but he’d humor students. At some point he even challenged a student to read a whole Spanish passage with a southern accent. Even if this was directly after gym and I’d be sometimes exhausted, there was something relaxing about it. On another note, we had days where we watched stuff like El Norte (1983) and a King of the Hill episode where Peggy goes to Mexico and speaks with very bad Spanish. It was his way of congratulating his students on being fluent enough to notice her mistakes.

To show how chaotic the timeline is, I am going from the last period that I had of the day to the first. It was Sexual Education. If you had to ask me, I don’t remember a whole lot about it. The most that I can recall is that at some point we also discussed drug addiction. There was some video where a guy admitted to having to close the door while snorting cocaine because his child was in the other room. I swear there’s another one where a woman has sex with someone that causes her health to deteriorate. I may just be revealing my lack of ability to listen properly, but I swear it begins with her young and promiscuous and ends with her using a walker. Another video showed the stereotypical teens talking about how they smoked excessively because they believed they wouldn’t get old, or deal with the consequences later. It’s by no means a memorable or unique take, but we watched sensationalist stuff like that.

Because I wasn’t a great public speaker, the one thing that I feared more than anything was the final. We had to give a lecture on some topic. I got assigned “safe sex.” All I had to do was run down the facts and get that quick grade. As things rambled on, my nervous tics kicked into gear and I eventually found myself improvising. Without any great closer, I came up with a line that is in theory dumb, but felt clever at the time. “Safe sex is phone sex.” I said as I walked away to pity claps. If nothing else, I was hoping that somebody would get a laugh out of that. I forgot what grade I got, but I graduated didn’t I?

More importantly, this was the point where I met one of the few long-term friends who theoretically exists to this day. Ethan is a kid who existed somewhere on my periphery the entire time. I don’t think we ever had classes together after that first year, but we would run into each other constantly. When I was walking around campus before class, he’d wave me over and I’d just listen to him talk about nerdy things. He was the first person I knew besides myself who saw Hot Fuzz (2007) and together we geeked out over how great it was. I will openly admit that I maybe misread his cues every now and then and got mad at him over nothing. 

Then again, I think that it was easy to feel judged. For starters, I was obese and became a target for some students to grope at random. While I don’t think that anything of note happened in Freshman year, I know this kid named Dontay who is easily a troublemaker and loudmouth if I ever saw one. Very notorious and noticeable. He was in my gym class during the semester we had swimming and it was terrible to see him look at my body, itself suffering side effects of obesity. There was also the fact that some people thought I talked slow and, because I didn’t know I needed glasses, would be in perpetual squint. I also often had my mouth slightly ajar until enough people complained about it. Given my broken tooth situation from earlier in life, I was always self-conscious about smiling. Put that all together and you have a reason why I still struggle to like how I look.

But Ethan, as antagonistic or sarcastic as he was, always liked having me around. I think it took a while in general to read social cues that were positive but also teasing. With that said, he mocked me for that final report. With that said, I can’t recall what he actually said. 

Before I dig into the final class, I want to shift towards how the in-between hours went. When I wasn’t spending mornings in Strader’s classroom or talking with Ethan, I was walking aimlessly around the buildings. At some point, I met this kid named Jose who hung out with a big Mexican population. One day he stopped me and just began asking questions. It wasn’t necessarily a bad interrogation, but it was more an attempt to understand who this kid was. 

I was dumb and naïve. Without any context I created a fake gang sign for Long Beach (or so I believe) where I flashed an upper case L with one hand and a lower case B with the other. They called me pimp and thought that I was cool. Whenever I passed them by, they would give that friendly wave. For reasons of self-consciousness, especially coming from a family that frowned on gangster culture, I did try to separate myself from Jose’s group just to avoid potentially being seen as a troublemaker. However, I can honestly say they never prodded me to do anything “destructive.” Their motives were curious and innocent. At one point I showed off my dance moves and won them over because they thought I was doing a “crip walk.” It was mostly a mix of lifting my feet and wiggling my ankles and knees like an inflatable man. Still, it was enough to persuade a dance-off with this random kid one day that caused a big group to gather around. Staff was called because everyone was convinced we were fighting. Among the circle was a girl named Graciella who was very nice. Of everyone’s story, the oddest one is that even as she remained a peripheral friend, the last time I saw her was in Senior year. She was pregnant and sitting on a bench just waving at me.

When I wasn’t walking around, I had discovered a bench which I marked as my official place to pass the time during lunch. For 30 minutes, I would sit there and watch the world pass by. I’d see the students buying lunch on the other side of the bench, eavesdropping on conversations about things more interesting than my thoughts. While I had packed lunches early in the run, I eventually stopped eating altogether. This means that in my four years of having lunch there, I maybe had less than 20 actual meals considerable of lunch there. Given that in later years we moved to homes closer to campus, I would walk home on that empty stomach and devour stuff like Ramen noodles. Somehow I was impenetrable and never complained. It was the start of a bad habit that would continue well into adulthood. It never seemed like a problem because I wasn’t “anorexic,” and I don’t think many actually noticed. Even the random guys who loitered around the bench and began talking to me out of curiosity didn’t seem to care.

The one last friend that I want to touch on here is Jonathan. I forgot how I met him. I want to say that he was in one of my classes and we liked to do projects together. Among our early talking points was just randomly quoting Kung Pow! (2002) and finding these odd things that both interested us. We eventually begun hanging out before school. It was always a blast to see him from afar because he always gave a smile and a head nod that suggested he was excited to see me. He was really into Elvis Presley and wanted to be a police officer. I once sold him my Game Boy because I thought that I’d never want to play with it again. Idiot. 

One of my bigger regrets in high school was ghosting him. Because I didn’t know how to manage time, I accidentally ended up spending time with other groups as the years carried on. After sophomore year, I never saw him again. Still, I remember one of the last times I did watching him walk by the same place we used to hang out looking disappointed at my absence. I can only hope he found a great new group. I want to believe that I did, even if the people I ultimately hung out with were questionable at best in terms of how they felt about my well being.

Moving onto the final class is someone that will come into play a lot later in this series. Still, it feels important to highlight the Freshman year because it had such a profound impact. It was English class and Vann was the teacher. After dealing with teachers of various degrees of conventionality, I was surprised by the bungalow he taught in. The walls were covered in black wallpaper. There was a Saturday Night Fever (1977) poster up in one corner. However, the one thing that made me think, “Oh yeah, I’m safe here” is that his podium was covered in band stickers from musicians that I not only knew about, but thought were cool. They were a lot of punk bands and edgier acts that didn’t seem “cool for school.” Among them was Devo and The Adolescents. I can’t claim to know them all, but they provided a glimpse into someone who at least enjoyed thinking outside the box.

He spoke with an accent that I assumed a jazz poet had. While I can’t recall anything about that first day, I did discover that his lesson plans were the most fun. Even if I was initially intimidated by the people who hung out in his classroom, he provided a glimpse into English as something greater than stuffy classics. We had lesson plans that discussed the difference between fact and opinion by using lines like, “Tupac Shakur died much too young.” He wasn’t specifically about media, but he would use songs by artists like Subhumans to discuss use of language in ways that were jarring and exciting. He once made the comical note that, “Before you asked, I went through and edited the song so the bad words were not in it.” It was such an amazing way to enter high school.

I think Vann was the first teacher who made me feel like high school was going to go okay. In order to not waste too much time talking about him, I will save a lot for later down the line. I promise that he’s one that has never gone away. I have seen him as recently as a year ago working with the literary arts department. With that said, I do find it funny that when I was a Freshman, the literary arts magazine cover had a four-armed human on it that could be seen as an accidental swastika that everyone in later sessions made fun of.

To be honest, there’s a lot of small details that I get mixed up between Freshman and Sophomore years. That is why I’m saving some for the next entry. Given that this is running long, I am going to forgo the mundane day to day and begin focusing on the larger scope of things.

While this is all going on, my family life was beginning to shift. At the time I was too naïve to fully notice what was going on, but in hindsight reflects the turning point of how I saw relationships in general. I’m not saying that I had the healthy mentality of seeing marriage as the end all be all, but as my parents went through separation, I became more fixated on the idea of divorce. Somehow, I was the type who felt that if people who were not happy together they should simply not be near each other. 

Let me briefly touch on Gina…

I still remember the first day that I met her. My dad had signed off on the idea that she could pick me up and drive me to Ralphs. At the time, I was still attending St. Cornelius Fiestas, so I would be dropped off afterward and mingle with my own crowd. After visiting the grocery store, we were in the parking lot, and she proceeded to try and exit while hitting several shopping carts. She seemed aloof, but I was still processing what I’d think about her.

To put it directly, I still like her. I think she’s a great person even if we don’t talk as much as we used to. As she’s found her own life away from hanging out with my father, she’s continued to be upbeat and fun whenever I do see her.

In high school, she was someone who was marketed to me as “the stepmom.” Because I was taking Spanish at the time, we got the great idea to call her Madrasta. We’d hang out at her home on the weekends where some of us would watch NASCAR while others took to a different room to play video games. At another point, we also had a game night where she invited two friends over. With all due respect to them as people, the easiest way to describe them is that it was a guy and a girlfriend in a wheelchair. He wore movie t-shirts, such as Average Joe’s from Dodgeball (2004). Again, I think they were cool and enjoyed cracking jokes whenever we got a good card game going. To the man’s credit, he knew when he was being too off-putting and made a point to apologize to me, even if I hadn’t realized that his behavior was technically creepy. I don’t know why they disappeared, but they were nice people and I talked to his girlfriend a lot on Myspace.

Not only was I welcomed to the adult’s table, but they were allowing risqué humor. We’d play card games with a traditional deck and there would be a common joke about taking the “jack off.” It was a release from whatever the outside world was putting upon us. 

But I think the reason that Gina was seen as cool was because she was welcoming me into opportunities that interested me. She was into “cool” music, mostly 80s stuff. We’d go down to Second Spin and shop for records. At another point, she took me to see the Green Day concert on their American Idiot Tour. This was around the same time as Holiday Havoc. Somehow, they were cool going to the punk concerts and it made me feel like I could be more casual around them.

I should say that as a teenager, I didn’t fully process the larger picture. Even as I was taken to some event where I met Gina’s significant other, there wasn’t some connection that spoke to me. I thought she was cool. She allowed us to listen to and watch stuff that felt off limits in the years before. She exposed me to the media that I might’ve taken longer to discover. While I can’t say we agreed on everything – I didn’t care for What Not to Wear – there was enough there that she became one of my favorite people to see almost every weekend.

As you may notice, one figure is missing from this equation. On one particular day, Gina had come to our house for the afternoon. As she left, she joked about how my mother was still sitting in the car. I didn’t think much of it and thought it was odd. She didn’t come in until she was gone. I suppose that I should’ve taken that as a sign, but being young and not all that experienced in emotional complexities allowed it to simply be a binary detail in a swath of greyness.

For the sake of consistency, I will briefly mention that this was a period where I also had a lot of Myspace friends. While I am planning to dedicate an entire entry to my days on the social media website, I will mention that during this time I had a “girlfriend” named Kristine who I struggled to talk to on the phone. While we had a great time talking on AIM, there wasn’t a longevity to things that could make it seem feasible. 

Still, if I was to relate to one particular Taylor Swift line, it was “When you’re 15, when somebody tells you they love you, you got to believe it.” Call it naivety, but I was a bit too into the belief that we were “dating.” I printed out her picture and put it in my folder. I am sure that she came across as “My girlfriend from Canada” material. At the end of the day, it was difficult to feel encouraged by this phase of my life when my father and Gina actively made fun of me for having an “online girlfriend” because they believed she could be a fat plumber just taking advantage of me. Given how innocent and inconsequential it ultimately became, I am still bothered by how unwilling they were to let me just buy into the fantasy.

Another significant day of that school year was when Green Day’s “American Idiot” was released. Because of my British friend Alex, I had gotten into the band over the previous three years and was at least a fan of “International Superhits” at the time. They were on the radio all the time. I remember that I missed the radio premiere of “Jesus of Suburbia” because I was sitting in the car trying to push as long as I could before class started. I’m sure it would’ve been an immersive, life-changing moment, but because of how a clock works, I was forced to wait.

And wait, I did. The song “American Idiot” was inescapable. While this was also the era of My Chemical Romance and Fall Out Boy also coming to prominence, Green Day was about to enter their own period of success. I’m not going to get into it, but the day was special because I knew that I got out of classes early on Tuesday. I chose to walk over and pick up a copy. In one of the more indicative examples of where my life took me at the time, I had enough time to walk to the nearby K-Mart (itself a mile or two from campus) look around before realizing it wasn’t there and then another few miles to the Target, buy it, and return to the Carl’s Jr. by said K-Mart and listen to it before I was picked up. That day was significant because I also bought The Killers’ “Hot Fuss” along with it for under $20. Nowadays, that feels ambitious for two relatively new releases. 

Still, I remember sitting in the Carl’s Jr. for that hour and having that self-actualization that they were about to be big. I hadn’t heard anything that ambitious before. I could go on, but I think the 20 years since its release have shown how significantly the record exists in our public consciousness.

But, more importantly, this was also the day when I attended a preview night for St. Cornelius’ Confirmation class. Even with all of my friends sitting in the church, I had this feeling of disconnect from them. Everything I heard wasn’t enough to make me want to join in. Even if my parents wanted to believe that sacraments were crucial to my well-being, they agreed that I was becoming an adult and could make my own decisions. I chose to walk away in that moment. 

It's a detail that I didn’t fully realize until skimming my notebooks of history. Somehow the dates lined up and there it was. Green Day’s “American Idiot” correlated to the day where I chose to begin my slow disconnection from the church. While I was still encouraged to go to Sunday mass for several more years, there was a sense that I was doing it more out of obligation than any personal passion. Soon it would dwindle to big holidays before the family finally admitted that they weren’t interested and we stopped going altogether. Part of it is my theory that we went less out of interest and more to please my grandparents. If you check the tape, our drop-off parallels their own declining health and lack of need to see us.

With that said, we also had a weird back-to-back visit to Death Valley Junction. My great uncle Tommy worked out there and performed a “world famous” revue with dancer Marta Beckett. We didn’t go out much to see him, but for some reason we went in December with my grandpa. We brought a TV so that we could watch DVD’s in the hotel room. Other days we would drive out a ways and pull out guns to shoot at different props that we’d set up. For as much as I detest guns now, I will admit there’s something cathartic bout long distance aiming. Watching cans fall off in the distance and the echo of the gunshot was thrilling. 

Over the mountain was Pahrump, Nevada where we’d occasionally go for a great buffet. When driving back, my dad liked to go a few seconds with the lights off just to mess with us. Given that he enjoyed stealing my music and playing it in the car, he had a knack at the time for playing The Offspring’s “Americana.” Following our second return out for his funeral, he would get into Jimmy Rodgers (a so-called distant relative according to him) and Johnny Cash. I would personally get Uncle Tommy's box of old DVD’s, which included The Exorcist (1973) as well as a Jenna Jameson disc that I was always too self-conscious to look at around my grandparents’ house where it was initially stored.

Because he was a performer, he had one of those comical personalities. He was always cheerful and his large size made him self-deprecating. He claimed that he didn’t wear a tutu but a “four-four.” During the one time that I saw him put on a live performance, I remember he came out to talk to us beforehand. When he turned around to get ready for the show, I started a slow clap that spread throughout the room. To Death Valley Junction’s credit, there were a handful of people in attendance, suggesting that there was some allure to what he was doing.

I should say that Death Valley Junction was an area different from Death Valley, CA. While they were connected, I think of it more as its own village. It’s out in the middle of nowhere. If you go a ways in, you’ll find the camp where The Manson Family stayed. It’s rundown now, but there’s definitely something ominous about it. The sign outside of Death Valley Junction (itself a fork in the road with the fork leading to Pahrump) had a  low number to the point you think it’s not worth considering. During my last time seeing him alive, he gave us a tour of the hotel, including several hallways that had been closed off from the public because they were either rundown or lacked function. Given how rarely he opened himself up to us, it was a worthwhile experience that in hindsight felt predictive. When we returned to Long Beach, I remember my grandfather having a lengthy conversation on the phone with him that may as well have been the symbolic goodbye.

My grandfather became the last of his generation alive and I’m sure it bothered him a lot. Given that he would live into his 90s and another 18 years, it must’ve been a lonely experience. We attended his funeral and had a very lovely ceremony. 

However, I think the one thing that matters most to me is seeing the room that best described him. He was an eccentric after all, and he had a room with player pianos and various contraptions that seemed to be kooky and out of place without knowing who he was. While I can’t recall what all there was, I can recall a player piano that specifically played Scott Joplin tunes such as “Maple Leaf Rag.” Because of that moment, I formed a lifelong fondness for Joplin’s ragtime style and think of him whenever I put it on. While I also got into Rodgers and Cash as a result, they feel more like my father’s way of coping with that generation’s passing. Given my admiration for piano players, I think it said something to me to listen to Joplin and realize that I’d never be able to play those riffs no matter how hard I tried.

Returning to Millikan and Freshman year of high school, I think we need to conclude the class talk with something that I took in 2005. Because Sexual Education was only one semester, we were thrust into History class taught by Massich.

In an interesting pairing, Massich and Vann were neighboring classes. They also seemed to be partners in crime despite having different modes of expression. Compared to Vann’s aggro style, Massich seemed nice and classical. She was sweet and supportive along with being the leader of the cheerleading squad. She claimed that she once taught a man who only joined because he wanted to learn how to do backflips. 

Ethan was in the class and we often got paired together. I think there was a point where we were learning about some Africa genocide. We were assigned to do a creative lesson plan and we just copied a song from System of a Down’s “Hypnotize” by changing Tiananmen Square to Africa. Yes, even as teenagers we were finding ways around putting in effort.

There were a handful of interesting people in that class. I remember that I was friends with a handful of cheerleaders who thought that I was funny. While I can’t say we ever hung out, there was something about them sitting near me that allowed us to like each other. Even if I never went to a football game nor did I really connect with cheerleader life, I really respected what they were doing. 

Finally, I know somebody who comes to symbolize something that was maybe a bit immature about me. Given that the early 2000s were a time where it felt like every music genre was territorial, I think there was a divide between punks and emos. Even if I listened to The Used and My Chemical Romance with regularity, I didn’t care for stuff that would fall closer to screamo. There was something comical about making fun of the mentally unstable people. Maybe it was because I saw a lot of life as performative at the time, but I struggled to see emotional conflict as something different. Given that I wasn’t the only one to comically talk about slitting wrists, I didn’t see the problem. I perceived the death infatuation as being fictional and not some reflection of some inner demons.

Without any greater reasoning for it, there was this emo-looking kid who sat next to me. I joked once or twice about slitting wrists and I remember them laughing. There wasn’t much to our connection, but I was struggling to see the greater meaning in it. When looking at old notebooks, I realized that a lot of what I joked about were struggles I’d eventually come across, making me realize that it might’ve all been a coping mechanism. There was that and maybe being a bit too confrontational about queerness just to annoy people because it seemed like a punk thing to do.

I should say that for all of the music that I listened to, NOFX’s “White Trash Two Heebs and a Bean” was a high point. It taught me how diverse the punk genre could be and how you could use it to entertain and confuse people. That and “So Long and Thanks For All the Shoes” were my favorites by NOFX and they each depicted something unique without being personal. Still, hearing songs about suicide and alcoholism alongside being commercial felt revolutionary to a young mind.

I’m tempted to write a whole post on how “Liza & Louise” maybe unlocked something in me. While I don’t think it qualifies as traditional queer art, there was something to hearing Fat Mike sing about lesbian sex that was startling. I don’t know if it’s considered leering and negative, but it still worked as an entry point into something more complex. As someone who also wrote a lot of poetry from the perspective of women dealing with complicated men, I like to think this was an entry point during an era when queer art wasn’t that accessible. That, and I think there was a lot of disrespect towards women that kept me from being able to appreciate their contributions as more than “cute woman also talented.” It’s tough to say that queerness became appealing because of a song about lesbian sex without seeming weird, but I have to say… that song was among the most jarring things on my playlist.

To be honest, I both don’t remember my Freshman year that well as much as I seem to remember these small tangents. If anything, it was the start of a new era of life and will only become more complex from here. 

The final day of Freshman year was also memorable. Given that nobody showed up, it was a free for all among the students who did. While we were appointed to show up to class, we could leave whenever we wanted. I remember going to Vann’s class and he was so impressed with my writing over that year that he invited me personally to join the literary arts magazine next year. After that, we sat around listening to Rudimentary Peni and acting like bored teenagers until it was time to move onto the next thing.

I forget where I met up with them, but there were kids in one class who invited me along for the weirdest going away ritual I had seen. This white boy would have me follow him into the bathroom and just look around. When the coast was clear, he’d pull out a market and do some gang tag. He didn’t seem like the gangster type, but he did it in at least five locations over that time frame. I never saw him again, but there was some strange thrill in being caught. Me and this other kid just stood there watching him erratically looking around before leaving his mark whether in the bathroom or on the stairwell or wherever.

I’m sure that I’ve forgotten something along the way. However, this is quite a hefty way to remember Freshman year. For all the people I have missed, I want to apologize. I hope to be talking about you in the near future. For now, just know that this moment in time is quickly approaching 20 years and it’s a miracle that I am able to recall as much as I can. As it stands, the first two years of high school are indistinguishable for me in some respects. It wasn’t until the back half that things became more interesting and the lasting impact truly settled in. For now, I started things off on a good note. The trick was now making it through the remaining three years alive.