Wading in the Velvet Sea

The scene: my 6th grade classroom. Me: wearing those abominable Chuckie Taylors, the ones that ran all the way up to your knee and could also fold down. These suckers, and I’m not making this up, were turquoise on the outside, and bright frickin’ canary yellow on the inside. Either I looked like Grover’s boot-wearing dorky cousin or’well, Big Bird’s dorky cousin, I guess. These shoes summed up 6th through 8th grade---I never knew which way to wear them, which really means I didn’t know which way the cool kids would accept, and really, draw your own conclusions from this. Simply stating it seems a bit unnecessary and for me personally, far too depressing to say aloud.

So, 6th grade, appalling footwear, and 24 other kids, forming altogether a 5x5 grid of desks. We had lunch at our desks every day, 11:55 am on the dot. One particular day, a kid whispers, ‘Psst, Ryan.’ So I turn around. ‘Do you like Karen?’

(‘Karen’, like, every name here, ain’t real. Don’t go and Google this, peeps.)

6th grade marked that first awkward year when girls became these things boys didn’t necessarily want to push into a puddle, at least for my social circle (or more accurately, the circle I wanted to be a part of). ‘Going out’ became the cool thing to do that year, as boys and girls paired off to…well, no one seemed to know. Especially the kids going out with each other. So near as we uninitiated could parse together, going out meant a few things:

• You said good-bye on the bus on the way home after school.


• An occasional phone call was rumored to be made.


• You danced with them to ‘When the Children Cry’ whenever the song played at a party.

Other than that, nothing seemed terribly different. Kids ‘going out’ really didn’t seem to have any more interaction with their partner than before the proclamation from on high was bestowed; in fact, they seemed to ignore each other all the more, to the casual observer. Nevertheless, we all wanted in, because if Jesse and Susie were doing it, it was obviously the cool thing to do. Thus, people partnered off, and by December, no one could make eye contact with each other and silence tended to reign supreme betwixt the sexes except for an enthusiastic chorus of goodbyes on the bus from 2:04 pm and 2:21 pm.

So, when someone asked if I liked Karen, I thought: OK, wait a sec, I have absolutely no interest in Karen. Mandy, Tammy, Gwen, maybe. (Jesus, I need to work on my imaginary names. Sounds like I’m in a porno here.) But not Karen. No way in hell. I mean, great that she liked me, and no one else was beating down my door, but c’mon, Karen? No way. So after contemplating all this for half a second, I answered, ‘Yea, totally!’

Never underestimate the power of fitting in, is the lesson.

The flashback went from this formative lunch to roughly one month later, in the basement of someone’s home. ‘When the Children Cry’ starts to play, and I’m partnerless, along with about half the party, creating an instant ‘has’ and ‘has not’ culture. Well, Karen likes me, right? I mean, people told me she did. Or rather, I inferred it. And so I ask her to dance, and she accepts, but accepts in a way that indicated to me, even then, that she clearly did not want to do this and would rather have walked to Tokyo than done this. So, now we’ve got two people dancing, both of them studiously avoiding eye contact, leaving enough room for the Holy Ghost and a few linebackers.

Turns out, someone heard from someone who heard from someone through a gossip telephone that I liked her. Karen had no interest in me and was summarily appalled to learn that I pined for her with every beat of my skinny, Caucasian heart. I can’t imagine how someone came up with the idea that I liked her. One minute I imagine, people were talking about last night’s episode of ‘My Two Dads’ and out of nowhere, someone mentioned that I wanna do a Tune In Tokyo on Karen. I didn’t know what Tune In Tokyo was, and I suspect no one else did, but someone’s older brother must have mentioned it along the way, and before long, and entire 6th grade class was playing chicken, no one wanting to blink and admit they didn’t know what one was. But I digress’

Found out after the party, maybe the next week, that she never liked me in the first place, which I had basically gleaned from the frostbite I got from touching her hand in the basement. Absolutely embarrassed to have been seen dancing with me, she’d been. And I realized, in the gym tonight, mulling it over on the stationary bike, that every fear of rejection I have ever had/have is based on that one dance, that one encounter, that one girl.

Hell, I hadn’t even thought about her for a good 5-6 years, and very little before that. But she did enough of a number on me that the fear of that night’s replication haunts me to this day. Every girl I ever tried to ask out, every time I convince myself that someone can’t possibly like me, every time I have backed out of something prematurely to avoid the active rejection I know beyond a doubt will come…all goes back to a dark basement, White Lion, and Karen.

---Inspired, per usual, by ‘High Fidelity’