A Bad Idea I'm About to Do (10 page)

Then the scariest prisoners made their way to the back of the stage and sat down. A shy-looking skinny kid stepped forward. His voice was soft and gentle. “I'm nineteen years old,” he began. “I'm only a few years older than you guys.” After an afternoon of shock-and-awe-style intimidation, this emotional attack was the knockout punch.

“I want you to think about what you're doing,” he said. “I wish I could be where you're at. You guys are gonna go to college next year. I'll never get to. You're gonna go to parties, with girls. I'll never go to a college party.”

A sick, twisting pain burned in my gut as I met eyes with the kid. His baby face was evident despite the prison uniform and heavy boots. He looked like a kid dressed up as one of the other prisoners for Halloween.

“So stop fucking up,” he said. “Because I would take back everything I did to be where you guys are at right now.” And then he cried. We sat for the longest minute of our lives, staring at the ground. Throughout the entire afternoon, we'd been barraged with threats and screaming. It was only during this sickening silence that we had the opportunity to finally start thinking again.

This
, I thought to myself,
is fucking depressing
.

My schoolmates were shell-shocked. Frank was so pale that he looked 100 percent Caucasian. Kenward's lumbering frame was slumped over in defeat. With the tension having hit its peak, we began to shift on our heels. We were ready to leave.

“You motherfuckers stay right the fuck where you are,” one of the prisoners snapped. “Crazy Chris ain't got here yet. He'll be here any second now.”

Once again the room fell silent, and this time the prisoners themselves looked uncomfortable. Whoever Crazy Chris was, he bothered even the other murderers.

The door bounced open with a well-placed kick. In walked Crazy Chris, a white man in his early sixties. A grizzled beard was the only masculine thing about him, as his other accoutrements included lipstick and women's clothes.
That
, I told myself,
is a very bad man
. Once again my classmates and I shared uncertain glances, all of us wondering the same thing:
Who survives in a place like this dressed like that?
Earlier, I felt like I was going to get murdered for having red hair. This dude wore
lipstick
and everyone else was scared of
him
. To even get your hands on women's clothes in a men's prison you had to be a shady motherfucker. To survive in them, you had to be a badass. To not only survive but to incite fear in other inmates, you must be the craziest of the crazy. This guy may very well have been the baddest man in New Jersey.

He took center stage and grinned a toothless grin at us.

“My name is Crazy Chris.” He paused for dramatic effect. “And sometimes, my dick gets hard like Christmas candy.” No one moved, no one swayed, no one even breathed. I shut my eyes and prayed that when I opened them he would be gone. He wasn't. Instead, he kneeled inches away from the face of a classmate.
“What happens to Christmas candy?” he asked the boy. The kid didn't answer. Fire grew in Crazy Chris's eyes. “I SAID, WHAT HAPPENS TO CHRISTMAS CANDY?”

The kid realized he wasn't getting off the hook.

“It . . . ”—he shut his eyes with the realization of what level of shame he was about to reach—“it gets sucked.” His voice broke as he said it.

“That's right,” Crazy Chris said. “Christmas candy gets sucked.” And with that, he walked out the door. No lesson, no moral, nothing like the other guys had given us. Just a threat of mouth rape and he was out. The guards came back and shuffled us away, and soon the gates shut behind us as we trembled in shock.

Thirty seconds after we got back on the bus, the thugs got back to business.

“Knutsen,” someone shouted, “call them bitches back and tell them I said fuck you.” Knutsen smirked. He knew he was days away from his escape. I smiled, knowing that I would never feel the satisfaction he was feeling, because I would never put myself in a position to need it. Knutsen and I were similar people in many ways. We were both nerdy, stiff, socially awkward goofballs. It was easy to imagine his present as my future. Seeing the frustration all over his face, watching him come into class every day resigned and defeated, I knew I had to avoid that future at all costs. Knutsen was a very good man, but there was no way I could allow myself to fall into a similarly dreary routine.

In that sense, Scared Straight worked on me. I've also never been incarcerated, though admittedly I wasn't a high-risk candidate.

It's for the best. I don't even like Christmas candy.

I
spent the first seventeen years of my life firmly believing that my penis would never know the smooth, moist contours of vaginal walls.

This wasn't an outlandish thought. I grew up in North Jersey. The people who became sexually active at a young age were tanned and athletic and chewed their gum loudly. I was pale and shy and never managed to run with the sort of crowd that spent their middle school years fucking in public parks.

My father never gave me “the talk.” To this day, I don't think he's ever acknowledged the existence of sex in my presence. He's more concerned with things like Steven Seagal movies and the pH balance of the water in our backyard pool. One time around 1999, he mumbled something about “hope you're careful.” That's the only indication I've ever received that he recognizes sexual activity is a real thing I might actually partake in.

My mother once tried to broach the subject, but it was a vague, off-putting discussion. I was on the phone in our kitchen,
and when I hung up she was sitting at the table waiting to speak with me.

“You know, your body's going to start changing soon,” she said.

“Yeah, I know,” I replied.

She paused. She looked down, her eyes scanning the table for some hint of what to do or say. She looked back up.

“Sometimes I find stuff in your brother's sheets,” she blurted out.

She grimaced. I grimaced. We looked away from each other.

“What do you do?” I finally asked.

“I throw them in the laundry machine!” she said, before standing and literally running away.

My aforementioned brother, two years my senior, could have served as my guide to matters such as these, but frankly, he wasn't much help. Most brothers probably had heart-to-hearts about sex and girls and whatnot. My brother and I had bigger fish to fry.

After he left for LaSalle University, a typical phone conversation with him would go like this: “Yo,” he'd start out, “can you believe Jerry the King Lawler showed up in ECW? He's a WWF guy!”

“You meet any girls down there?” I would try to slip in.

“Nah,” he would quickly say. “But can you believe that Cactus Jack took that bump from Sabu? Man, ECW is the best.”

Even if Gregg was more concerned with filling me in on the events of the third most popular professional wrestling league in America than with talking about girls, he still could have given me slivers of advice along the way. Where was I supposed to take girls on dates, for example? Where should I go to meet them in the first place? (I still have no idea.) And what about what to wear? Not that his suggestions would necessarily have helped.
The most fashion conscious my brother ever got was when our neighbor gave him a huge bag of clothes from the early '70s that had been stored away in his garage.

“Holy shit,” Gregg said as he rifled through it and took out one particularly hideous item. “This orange jumpsuit is made of corduroy. Perfect!”

He wore that orange corduroy jumpsuit all through his senior year of high school, which was the same year I was a freshman. While dressing like a member of Devo might have spoken to Gregg's free spirit, the female reactions to it that I saw firsthand made it absolutely clear he would not and should not be my mentor in the ways of love.

By the time my own senior year of high school rolled around, when my brother's performance-art style of dress had mercifully faded to just a distant memory, I had established a pattern of how I dealt with women. It was a simple three-step process.

1. Fall in love with a girl and absolutely never ever tell her.

2. Slowly become her “best friend” over the course of a few months.

3. Wait until she told me a guy had asked her out and she said yes. (At which point I would break down and tell her I loved her. To which she would reply she thought we were just good friends. To which I would explain that I'd always felt this way, and here she would accurately point out that I had been deceptive and manipulative by not revealing my true intentions. Afterward, we wouldn't talk much anymore. Then back to step 1 and repeat.)

It fit me like a glove. I was good at that routine. From Kristy Enginger to Melissa Goldfarb and back again, I was an old pro.

Then I met Veronica and she fucked it all up by actually liking me back.

Veronica was a redheaded, freckle-faced Irish Catholic girl. She was amazingly kind and cute. She'd also spent her whole childhood doing Irish step dancing, so her body was tighter than any seventeen-year-old's has a right to be.

The first actual conversation I'd had with Veronica was the one that occurred as I sadly left her best friend Samantha's house after Samantha dumped me for delivering one of the most awkward first kisses in human history.

During our junior year of high school, Veronica and I hit it off. She found me funny. I found her leggy and redheaded. I put my usual plan into action. It didn't take too many months before we were talking on the phone every night. I liked her so much that when I heard things like the following—

“I don't care if I play cymbals and Kevin Connolly plays quads. I work harder than him and I should be the sole drum captain. It's bullshit. We're the only section in the whole marching band with two captains.”

—I was able to pretend I actually gave a fuck.
That's
love.

Toward the end of the year I found myself on the phone with a guy named Will. He was an all right guy, but he was a little stiff and didn't have much of a sense of humor. He also played the trumpet and was Unitarian. To this day I literally know nothing about the Unitarian religion, but I can safely say that the phrase “Unitarian trumpeter” doesn't sound like the sort of label you'd attach to someone who's fun to date.

“Hey, you're friends with Veronica,” he said.

“Yeah, good friends. Best friends,” I answered.

“I asked her out the other day and she said yes. Any tips on what she likes?”

Up until then, I had kept my crush on Veronica secret from everyone. But Will must have instantly realized it existed. It wasn't hard to deduce, being that my response was a long pause followed by muffled sobs.

“Are you crying?” he asked, clearly annoyed.

“Yes,” I replied, figuring there was no reason to lie about it at this point.

“You like her, don't you?” He sighed, heavily. “Let's solve this right now.”

Then, before I knew exactly what was happening, Will dialed Veronica up on three-way. She picked up to hear her boyfriend of nine hours and her weepy best friend on the line together. With him listening, I poured my heart out to her.

“It's just,” I sobbed, “I think you're so nice, and you're beautiful, and we have so much fun together, and I've wanted to ask you out for so long, but I never was brave enough, and I wish I was, because now I maybe lost my chance and I just can't handle—”

Wisely, she cut me off.

“Chris,” she said. “I don't think it would work anyway. You're my best friend, and I need you for that. But we wouldn't work together.”

“So we cool?” Will said. I wanted to reach through the phone and strangle him.

Somehow, though, life went on.

Veronica and Will dated for nine brutally long months. As summer moved forward and we entered our senior year, I couldn't shake my crush on Veronica.

Strangely, and independently of all of this, I somehow became just a tiny bit popular during my final year of high school.

The head of the cheerleading team, Debbie, was my lab partner in physics class, based purely on the fact that the only other
available option left was a Greek guy known as “Shit Lip Larry.” Debbie and I sat together, and at first she cold-shouldered me. But the teacher of the class was a club-foot-stricken creep named David Harding whom everyone called Mr. Hard-on. He had a habit of bothering female students. Debbie was at the top of his list.

“If you apply that formula, you'll see how fast the plane rises despite gravity,” he'd say, grinning at Debbie as he leaned over our table and pointed toward a physics worksheet. “Sometimes things rise real fast.... Real fast. . . . ”

“Mr. Hard-on, I got a question,” I jumped in and said.

“Fine,” he grumbled, turning his attention to me.

“How much force does it take for a roller coaster to go in a loop, and also do you think the way you're behaving is appropriate?”

I was trying to be a wiseass mostly to break the tension, but as a side effect Debbie came to find me both funny and a pretty good guy.

When people noticed that she and I were palling around, it gave me credibility among a whole new social class. For the first time, those tanned, athletic gum chewers had decided I was okay enough to hang around their periphery. It gave me a bit more confidence.

At year's end, Veronica and Will were still dating. But she somehow broke rule 3 of my well-trod cycle. Instead of feeling betrayed or duped by my feelings toward her, Veronica actually made an effort to remain friends.