One of the Boys I Used To Be
My Fellow Shennyer:
The other week I met a neighbor from our condo development, a white 50-something on a walk. ‘Oh you’re renting,’ she said after I told her. Then she warned us about keeping our car parked in the driveway. ‘They’ll take your catalytic convertor,’ she said. I’d known her for not yet 3 minutes.
Across the street from us is an open hill of weeds the ravens like to circle over, and below that are townhomes maybe half the size of ours. My neighbor waved over toward them. ‘You know that’s all subsidized housing,’ she said, ‘so they don’t share our values.’
‘Well,’ I said, ‘maybe not our means.’
‘Exactly,’ she said. ‘They don’t share our means or our values.’
How worried am I about next week’s midterm elections? I’m losing faith that people are able to even see their neighbors, much less think clearly about their lives. I don’t trust the means by which our electorate is informing itself. I’m worried less about partisan divides than I think I’m supposed to be; I’d bet my life savings this neighbor votes blue no matter who.
My remedy for these worries is to work the polls on Election Day, which I’ll be doing again on Tuesday, at the fire station just down from my house. I hope I meet more of my neighbors, and help them do their bit to bring us closer to whatever futures they’ve decided on.
Yours:
Dave
Endorsements
1. ‘The Sex Lives of Women Composers, Ranked’, by Julia Conrad (Van Magazine)
I love this piece a great deal. The title is self-explanatory: Conrad looked at 30 women throughout history and ranked them in terms of ‘quality of composer sex life.’ I know of maybe 3 women composers, and none of them were making music before 1950, so this piece is a handy resource. But what I love more is the argument it makes. I can imagine a lazy counterargument: Writing about their sex lives belittles these women’s contributions to music. This argument takes as a given that the genitals are a lesser organ than the brain, and it’ll surprise zero Shenny readers that I want no truck with such arguments. Plus the piece is funny. Kudos to Julia Conrad for this groundbreaking work of musicology.
2. Flannel Shirts with Pockets
Not the kinds over your boobs, but the kind for when your hands are cold, which is often in San Francisco, certainly now that Hot Hot October is over. My daily routine for much of 2022, on coming home from the office, has been to put one of these babies on, with usually a hankie tucked in one of the pockets:
Each of these was under $20 at Costco. I don’t feel great endorsing what, given that pricepoint, is very likely sweatshop labor. But I do feel great wearing the middle one, which is a soft fleece I picked up just last week. I feel like my Grandma Myers wore shirts like this around the house, big roomy plaid numbers with pockets on the sides. If the Coastal Grandma look is dead, maybe it’s time for Appalachian Grandma.
One of the Boys I Used to Be
In our little split-level, each of us kids had our own bedrooms to decorate as we wished. Shani put up a doorsized poster of Jon Bon Jovi shirtless with just a vest. Jenny had posters of Joey McIntyre in unthreatening pastels. On the door of my bedroom closet, I taped a foldout poster from an issue of Boys Life that warned me of the dangers of drug use.
It showed a cartoon outline of a body, with its head turned to the side, as if some doc holding its nonexistent scrotum had asked it to cough. Around the body floated windows of info on marijuana, or alcohol, or amphetamines, or heroin. What was PCP, how did it get in the body, and what did it do once it got there? I read the poster whenever I wanted to scare myself about being at a party where needles were passed around, peer-pressured to try what the poster informed me was sometimes called ‘horse’.
I imagined a life of living on the streets, jonesing for my next hit of acid. Drugged out of my mind, that was the fear. Any drug out there had to be researched then avoided, because it would derange me.
Years later, in high school, I was at an elementary school playing The Boyfriend. Kara, a senior, played The Girlfriend. In her woolen turtleneck and faded jeans she looked like a girlfriend. In my cutoff jeanshorts over longjohns, my hair flopping over a teal bandana, I looked like an extra in a Discman commercial. Which is to say I looked like myself, but I felt like not myself. We sat, Kara and I, on the hard carpet of Floris Elementary’s cafetorium stage before the slacked jaws of 100 fifth-graders, and I felt all the sickening punch of nerves but none of the thrill. In our hands we held red plastic cups. A blanket from Kara’s bed underneath us. We were a boyfriend and a girlfriend at the end of the date, up on the kind of overlook where the boy tries to get the girl to put out.
We had an empty bottle, no label, and I took it up and mimed some pouring.
‘I had such a great time tonight, babe,’ I said. ‘Let’s have a drink.’
‘A drink?!’ Kara hammed it up, throwing her lines out to the audience. ‘That doesn’t look like soda! What is it?’
‘It’s Riuniti,’ I said. ‘On ice.’
‘So it’s called Riuniti,’ Kara had told me in her car on the drive over. In the back sat Mark and Mike, two knucklehead Mormons. They were all Mormons, these three. My new Mormon friends. ‘Ree-yu-nee-tee. It’s a kind of alcohol.’ I didn’t know what she was talking about. ‘In the commercial they always say “Riuniti on ice, that’s so nice!” but in the skit we do a different spin on it.’ She meant our skit in Youth to Youth, the student club I was suddenly a part of that warned kids about the dangers of drugs and alcohol. We’d been let out of school early to drive ourselves, unchaperoned, to Floris, and the rest of the drive I made her run through our lines twice more. I wasn’t going to be the dumbest one on stage.
‘Just try some, babe,’ I said now, taking a pretend sip. Across the stage, Mark stood behind the curtain, already laughing about what was going to happen.
‘If you say so,’ said Kara, and took her own sip. ‘MMMM!’ she growled at the room. In seconds she was drunk, wobbling on the floor and smiling like an imbecile. ‘Riuniti on ice,’ she slurred. ‘That’s so ... nice!’
Then she let her head fall in my lap and made big loud barfing sounds. All the fifth-grade girls cried Ew! and all the fifth-grade boys cracked up, and I tried to make a face that showed I, The Boyfriend, was disgusted, but I was having too good of a time. In one beat I’d help light up the faces of a hundred little kids. Their attention felt like laurels tossed toward me.
Kara and I stood and took our bow and then it was time to set up for the puppet show, where I was to play the dog. The dog who didn’t have any lines.
Not long after, our dad for some reason bought a CB radio my friends and I were playing with one afternoon, standing in the garage and listening to truckers jaw their ‘Hammer down!’ jibberjabber in staticky snarls that sounded like alleycats looking to rumble. I couldn’t make out half of it. Then I watched my friends’ eyes get wide, and they laughed that unsteady laugh you made when someone cussed in front of an adult.
‘What’d he say?’ I asked, but they wouldn’t tell me. They said just forget it, it wasn’t that funny, and we shut the CB off. It took a few more days of bringing it up again and again, until Clay finally told me the guy said he was ‘looking to buy some reefer’.
‘We didn’t want to tell you because we figured you’d get mad,’ he said.
Of all the boys I used to be, this one confounds me the most. Why didn’t he want more from life? I didn’t pray to any god in those years, but if I had any faith it seemed to be this: if I did the best job following the rules other people made, only then would I be happy. I never cut class. I joined all the honor societies. I kept what I was horny for secret.
Coming out in my 20s, I broke what seemed like the ultimate rule. It took a long time for that to feel like I’d finally tossed myself a laurel. Today, I have more weed in my house than I know what to do with. And I’m not even ending this Shenny properly.
This week’s natatorium is the Aquatic Center at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, where I taught myself how to swim laps, but never got to toss myself from that high dive.
Greg and I were just talking about this kind of rule following, and somehow I want to connect it to my expectation of flannel shirts only have boob pockets. But clearly this is only a place for learning.