Live Right and Find Happiness (Although Beer is Much Faster) (2 page)

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I hate David Beckham. To understand why, take a moment to examine the picture below. It's my yearbook photo from my senior year at Pleasantville (N.Y.) High School, where I was a member of the class of 1965:

This photo has not been retouched. This is what I actually looked like when I was a senior in high school and desperate to be accepted by my peers, or at least not get beaten up by them.

Perhaps you are thinking: “Hey, don't be so hard on yourself! Back then
everybody
looked like a dweeb!”

I appreciate your thoughtful effort to console me, but no, not everybody did. Many people back then looked normal; some were actually quite attractive. I was not one of them, as you can clearly see. Remember: This was my
high school yearbook photo
, which means I was actively trying to look good when it was taken. This was
the best I could do
.

Part of the problem was simple genetics. I was not a naturally good-looking male. Also I was a late developer puberty-wise. In the photo, I'm looking thoughtfully into the distance, as if I'm thinking: “I wonder what the future holds in store as I prepare to depart from high school and enter the next phase of my life.” In fact I am thinking: “I wonder if I will ever develop body hair.”

Speaking of which: Note my haircut. I appear to be wearing a malnourished weasel on my head. How did I achieve that look? I'll tell you how:
My dad cut my hair.
He was a Presbyterian minister. He had received extensive training in theology, but, incredibly, this training did not include a single course in hair design. Also he was bald.

Nevertheless, for years my dad cut my hair, and my brothers' hair, using electric clippers that he bought at a drugstore. In my opinion it is tragic that our elected officials, who are always making such a fuss about assault rifles, make no effort whatsoever to regulate the sale of electric hair clippers to civilians. In a sane world, my dad would never have been allowed to possess those things. He was a thoughtful, wise and kind man, but he had the hairstyling talents of an enraged barn owl. Consider, for example, this sector of my haircut:

What are we to make of these two strange, vaguely clawlike hair formations on my forehead? It's not at all clear what their role in the hairstyle is. Are they supposed to belong to the majority of my hair, drifting off to the side? Or are they supposed to be pointing down and forming bangs? Apparently they cannot decide! So they're just going to loiter there in the middle of my forehead, looking weird.
In my high school yearbook photo.
Which is the PERMANENT RECORD OF WHAT I LOOKED LIKE IN HIGH SCHOOL.

Not that I am bitter.

Now consider my eyeglasses:

I started wearing glasses in third grade. I was the first kid in my class to need them. I was also one of the smaller kids, which made me the Puny Kid With Glasses, often sensitively referred to by the other kids
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as “Four-Eyes.” My mom took me to get my glasses at the optical department of Macy's in White Plains, N.Y., which offered basically one style of eyeglasses for boys, which should have been called “You Will Die a Virgin.”

Today, 1960s-style eyeglass frames are considered “retro” and are worn ironically by members of the hipster community. Ha-ha! How clever of you, hipsters! Maybe, to complete the “look,” you can also develop a case of retro 1960s-style acne, causing zits the size of hockey pucks to erupt randomly on your face, especially on those rare occasions when you had the opportunity to talk to an actual girl. Wouldn't that be
ironic
?!

Not that I am bitter about that, either.

Anyway, my point is that in high school I was not physically attractive to the opposite sex, namely girls.

“But Dave,” I hear you remarking, “looks aren't everything! There are plenty of other qualities besides cuteness that girls look for in boys.”

Good point! And when I say “Good point!” I mean you are a stupid idiot. The girls of Pleasantville High School were not interested in “plenty of other qualities besides cuteness.” I know this because I HAD plenty of other qualities besides cuteness. Sarcasm, for example. I had a black belt in sarcasm. I went entire
years
without ever saying anything that was not basically the opposite of what I actually thought. Also I could make realistic farting sounds with my hands. These are just two of the many qualities other than cuteness I had in high school. None of them impressed girls. You will never hear a high school girl say about a boy, in a dreamy voice, “He's
so
sarcastic!”

Here is an actual thing that happened to me in eleventh grade:

There was this girl I liked a lot, so I finally worked up the courage to ask her to go with me to the Halloween dance. Incredibly, she agreed, which meant I had an
actual date
. And it was a magical date indeed, right up until the moment when, as my date and I stood side by side watching people dance in the Pleasantville High gym, I happened to glance over to the
other
side of my date and saw that
she was holding hands with another boy
. Yes. Talk about an awkward moment! Talk about a long, horrendously uncomfortable ride home! Fortunately, I have totally gotten over this incident, and the hideous humiliating memory of it has not festered in my brain ever since, popping up unexpectedly at random moments to torment me like that alien creature that chased Sigourney Weaver around the spaceship. I'm over it! I'M TOTALLY OVER IT, YOU UNDERSTAND??

SO TO SUMMARIZE:

1. In my crucial formative adolescent years, girls liked boys who were cute.
   
2. I was not cute.
   
3. I am not at all bitter.
   

As far as I could tell, the only other quality, aside from cuteness, that girls found attractive in boys was athleticism. Guys who were good at sports, even if they were not cute, were a very big deal at Pleasantville High. In football season we had these Friday pep rallies where the entire student body would gather in front of the school at lunchtime and show their school spirit by sneaking off and smoking cigarettes.

No, that was only a small group of juvenile delinquents.
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The rest of the student body participated in cheers led by the PHS cheerleading squad, made up of peppy, attractive, popular girls who would have gone to the prom with a bag full of live tapeworms before they would have gone to the prom with me. This is another thing that I am not at all bitter about.

At the pep rallies, the football players stood on the front steps of the school wearing their varsity letter jackets and looking manly, while we civilian students urged them to fight, fight, fight for the Green and White. I would have
killed
to be standing on the steps wearing a varsity jacket and basking in the adoration of the student body, but I was not football player material. I was more the puny-kid-in-ugly-glasses-who-the-football-players-stuffed-into-the-trash-can-for-amusement material.

I was never good at sports. For a while I played Little League baseball, but I had very little interaction with the actual ball. I heard a lot of
yelling
about the ball, and I occasionally sensed that something—which I assumed was the ball—had just whizzed past me. But I almost never had any direct personal
contact
with the ball, which turns out to be crucial to succeeding in many athletic endeavors.

I was like that in every sport. I was not good at catching things or throwing things or even necessarily seeing things. I was not strong, and I could not run particularly fast. My main physical skill was wincing.

Nevertheless, at Pleasantville High I was so desperate to get a varsity letter and be adored by the student body, especially the girl members, that I went out for the track team. My thinking was that since there were many different events in track, I might find one that I was good enough at to get a letter. The event I finally settled on was the long jump, which seemed like a good candidate for me because it involved relatively little actual physical activity. You ran down a short runway, and when you reached this board, you launched yourself into the air, then you landed in a sawdust-filled pit. I figured, how hard could that be?

What I did not anticipate was gravity. Apparently some people contain more gravity than others, and it turned out that for a high school student, I had an extremely high level of gravitational attraction. I was probably affecting the tides. During track team practice I would run down the runway and launch myself from the board, then I would soar through the air for approximately the length of a standard matchbook cover before thudding back to Earth.
Sometimes
I couldn't even jump far enough to land in the sawdust pit.
I possessed essentially the same natural leaping ability as the Lincoln Memorial. As a result I took a lot of good-natured ribbing from my fellow track team members. (“You suck.” “Why are you even on the track team?” “Who cuts your hair, an enraged barn owl?”)

So that was a discouraging time for me. But there's an old saying among jockstraps: “When the going gets tough, the tough get going.” These words are very true. Sometimes, when we face adversity, instead of becoming discouraged, we decide to work harder, to show the doubters that they were wrong. This was not one of those times. The doubters were 100 percent correct: I sucked. So I quit the track team. The only way I will ever own a varsity letter is if I buy one on eBay.

(On a more positive note: I
was
elected Class Clown by the Pleasantville High Class of 1965. But that was not much consolation. Another thing you will never hear a high school girl say is, “When I lose my virginity, I want it to be with the Class Clown!”)

At this point I hear you saying, “But Dave, so
what
if you were an unattractive, non-athletic, four-eyed, hand-farting loser with zits and a bad haircut in high school? That was many decades ago! Since then you have gone on to enjoy unparalleled success as a minor humor celebrity. You have also made many friends, and apparently even had sexual relations with the opposite sex at least twice. Get over the past!”

Ha-ha! That's easy for you to say, because, as we have already established, you are a stupid idiot. The truth is, I will
never
get over high school. My self-image was permanently etched into my brain back then, and nothing that happened since has changed it. No matter how old I get, when I look in the mirror, this is what I see: