Was a lesbian. I guess. Maybe she wasn’t. Maybe Bi, or Pan.
I don’t really know. Maybe neither.
This is rather long. I’ve been nursing this one as well as a cold for throughout the week. Which hasn’t been sooo bad except for not sleeping last night. At all.
Anyways…
6th Grade.
Weirder things have happened, but I guess a lot happened in my brain or to me… during this time. Maybe I woke up and started seeing things for what they were. Probably not though. I don’t think that happened until I was about 16.
I had just moved across the country again. CA to NC. Harrisburg, NC. I always have to emphasize that, because people jump to Harrisburg PA in excitement, but are always disappointed when I correct them to NC. In which case is generally followed by a conversation about NASCAR and the proximity to Concord NC. People still usually don’t know where it is.
NC was harsh to come back to. Kids were close minded and judgey, caught up on doing drugs or the idea of doing drugs, and fixated on bad rap tunes (that east coast bullshit) or grunge music martyrs (Kurt knew what he was up to). I was way too busy with Lego’s and Nintendo to pay any of that shit any attention.
I made friends with some flannel covered kids that sat in back who were just as bored as I was in class. I guess somewhere between passing notes and talking in the hallway I managed to get this one flannel covered girls phone number.
We talked all the time.
We eventually decided to go to a school dance. Together?
The dance was boring. We sat in the bleachers talking with a few friends. Then at some point they played something other than fucking boyz II men or the electric fucking slide…I guess they had to validate forcing us to learn those stupid dance routines in P.E. …
They played some Offspring. Maybe it was come out and play. Could’ve been Green Day.
Whatever it was, I jumped down off the bleachers. Something pulled me to the floor, something told me, commence head banging.
For some folks, head banging is or was a casual thing. In 6th grade, to me, it was a furious flail of attempts to dislocate something.
After almost blacking out and seeing white spots for awhile, I notice that quite a few people joined in and that I was now in trouble for something. Apparently inspiring a cult like head banging consortium is disallowed behavior. I was led away. Scorned. And brought back just in time for some shitty slow dance song.
The last song of the dance. My last chance to dance with her. We danced. Then it just so happens, we kissed.
It was a weird mixture of bad breath, Marlboro Reds (her), and pickles. I have no idea whose fault the pickles were.
I guess that was my first real kiss.
Anyways…
After that we started using the word love in some of the notes we passed around. That was a first too.
She’d come over to my house sometimes, we’d ride bikes, sneak in to the race track across the street from my house. I’d awkwardly try to figure how to makeout. I didn’t know what the fuck I was doing.
We fooled around a bunch, which consisted of her telling me what to do.
Nintendo, nor Lego’s teach you anything about those sorts of things. And it wasn’t like my brother ever told me anything about anything like that… I had no reference, or how-to’s. Maybe that’s natural.
We never did anything much more than makeout until much later in our lives.
When we couldn’t do that stuff, when we couldn’t hang out, we’d talk on the phone. As soon as I got home from school and I’d grab the phone…704-455…
3 way calling was some sort of future technology to us as kids. It was like AOL instant messenger but better. When we figured out how to use it, we’d always have someone else on the phone with us.
Mainly our friend Crystal.
Who I think was the center of, or at least the main cause of the first of my mother’s hilarious attempts at a parental proverbial birds and the bee’s conversation.
Let’s talk about that. Because it’s a fucking gem of my existential naive-ety.
We’re on the phone, on one of these 3 ways. And to me, we’re talking about going out to dinner. The girls, Crystal and my girlfriend…. They ask me how many times I’ve “eaten out”.
I promise I didn’t know what the fuck that meant. To me they just asked me if I’d gone out to dinner or eaten outside of my home. I didn’t understand anything other than that.
I start explaining how my brother and I go out to Arby’s sometimes, how that 5 for 5 was a damn deal and those jamocha shakes hit the spot. How we’d “tornado” all the sodas they had and see how many we could drink. Then burp as loud as we could because we weren’t with our parents. How my brother would drive his first beater car as fast as he could without killing us, and we’d listen to Tupac and Biggie rival each other with his hand wired actual home speakers in the back of his car…
They giggle, and correct me repeatedly or try to, by asking the same question again…
“Have you ever eaten out?”
I say, yeah, I eat out a few times a week I guess.
:: loud click noise ::
My bedroom door flies open like it was possessed. My mother appears. Maybe it was possessed then…I guess she was listening in to the entire conversation, or a portion of it at least…
And this was one of the loudest times I’ve ever heard her use my full name.
“Hang up the phone!” She screams.
I comply.
This is followed by a grounding. A conversation about being disgusting and vulgar. Then a long talking to about having a parent-parent-child-child meeting.
Great. Another situation in the 6th grade where I literally had no idea what was being discussed or why I was in trouble.
What the actual fuck…
I went to my favorite place to think. The closet. I had Xmas lights in there and blankets and pillows. And a CD boom box.
I didn’t figure anything out.
The next day ish, I was taken to meet with the girl I was dating and also to meet with her mother.
In her mother’s flower shop of all places. Hilarious symbolism.
I guess my mother thought her mother cared. Or that she wasn’t so high that she wouldn’t laugh at all of this.
Surprisingly her mother maintained composure.
I was enlightened to what it was that I was actually “in tribulatione” for. Something that was so wrong to speak of, even though such acts took place in the Vatican to vet the cadre of the church…
Eating out, apparently, meant eating pussy, oral sex for or on females. Something.
I didn’t know this. How the fuck would I have known this. At this point I’d never even seen a pussy. I may have touched exactly one of them or not really. But no way had I seen one, or thought it was even a thing to put my mouth to one.
What?
So I was told all of this was wrong and I needed to be guided back on to a path of moral subjugation-a-tude. Whatever.
We all talk. I was red faced and unaware the entire time. While the girl and her mother smirked, and fleeted glances at me during my mother’s berating of my moral turpitude, and sexuality, or lack thereof ..lack of knowledge of even, ensued.
That was all a bunch of bullshit, and a play put on by her and her mother to appease my mother. We never did anything even bordering on sexual before or after for years to come. I don’t even remember grinding. Or dry humping or whatever the fuck it’s called.
Anyway…
After a long break in 3 way calls, out of fear for another one of those handy you’re doing it wrong motherly conversations.
Myself, Crystal and the girl I was dating, have a call. This time about, I can’t remember. Probably something about how crazy the new Smashing Pumpkins album was that I hadn’t heard, because I had no damn MTV.
I remember having to go or something, so I let them know I was on my way, and switch off the phone. I didn’t actually switch it off though. I accidently hit call waiting and hear a dial tone. So I hit the button again, and over hear them talking about what they wanted to do to each other later.
That was interesting. So, feeling entitled I listen a little longer. And discover something else I had no actual idea that existed.
I seriously didn’t even know a word for it back then.
Girls that liked girls, moreover girls that did the same things to each other that boys did to girls?
No one now would ever even entertain the idea that I’m naive. But I was. I still am. Sometimes.
I don’t mind it. And it wasn’t a choice back then.
Living in CA, I was exposed to a great deal of things on a first hand in person type of way.
Gay men, I didn’t know what that was called, but I asked about it. Why were they holding hands. I was told they just liked each other, a lot. That was my mom’s explanation.
Drugs, I was told they were bad. Stay away from them. Someone tried to sell me some once and I said no. I was beat up for saying no. When I got home I was given 5 dollars for saying no and standing up to them.
These and many more…
But I was never exposed to nor had thought there to be a situation in which girls liked girls the way boys liked girls.
Then, at that point in time, in 6th grade, it confused me.
Anyways…
I hung up the phone. Didn’t say a word. I thought a lot about it. I asked another girl, a friend of mine at the time. She confirmed it like it was common knowledge. I asked the girls about it, Crystal denied it. The girl I dated denied it as well.
I heard what they said.
Years later the girl I dated corrected what she said. Said I was right. But never apologized.
I guess I was angry in the 6th grade. About it all. I didn’t understand it.
I didn’t know what it was. Or a word for it.
I was totally and utterly stuck on defining it.
Well…Anyways…
I wasn’t smart enough to ask enough questions of her or of that. Thinking back though, I’m not sure I was owed any type of explanation or entitled to believe that any of that was wrong. There were never any explicit terms of datery-ship that I can remember.
Then, some years after her explanation, we found ourselves back to fooling. Around.
That was quelled with another relationship for both of us.
Hers with a woman, mine with a woman.
Both of those relationships had their time.
I was involved with a high school sweetheart or whatevershit. Then married to her. Then sometime later, not married to her.
Her girlfriend eventually left her for a man she fell madly in love with. Almost immediately…One of my best friends. One which I had introduced to them both. I felt guilty for a period of time. Mostly because of the introduction, somewhat because of the misuse in my judgment for their relationshit. The girls. I miss those friendships.
I made some assisted mistakes. Some selfish, some induced by other means. I regret that…
The girl I had dated in 6th grade, now in a relationship with a man that she seems to be crazy about.
So now…maybe it’s Lesbian or Pan or Bi or a variety of other words to describe what it was or what it is. Terms. None of which matter, it’s just people loving each other or on each other in many different ways, however they want to, which is really fantastic and how I see it altogether fluid.
There’s still really no defining it or need to. It changes I suppose.
Whatever. Narnia.
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Well...Anyways 