To Be Honest Page 7

  One of the first bands we saw that I’d actually heard of was Nirvana. Dad was a bigger fan than I was; I’d only heard the hits. This was also the first concert we’d attended where Dad was the only adult in sight. As we waited for the bands to start, I looked around in disgust at this stadium of flannelled drones, a grunge-themed ant farm.*

  A comedian, Bobcat Goldthwait, opened the show. Dad and I respected this eccentric decision, Nirvana flouting convention. I loved Bobcat’s unique hoarse screech, a voice purely his own. He began his routine by mockingly asking the audience how many of them shopped at the Gap’s new grunge section. The stadium erupted with laughter. I was surprised; I didn’t expect people to have a sense of humor about their embarrassing trend-chasing.

  A few songs into Nirvana’s set, I could sense that something was bothering Dad. He said, “This band is so incredible, so authentic and personal.” I could feel a “but” coming. “But I hate their stage outfits. I can’t stop imagining them cutting their jeans with scissors and using hairspray to mess up their hair. It’s the least punk thing I can imagine. They put in all this effort to look like they don’t care.” Dad shook his head. “Plenty of great musicians wear costumes, but they admit to wearing a costume. Grace Jones and David Bowie don’t pretend they just rolled out of bed. Nirvana are lying.”

  “Totally,” I said, impressed by Dad’s insight. “It’s so fake.”

  “Well, they’re still young, I guess,” Dad said. “Maybe they’ll get more comfortable with their real selves when they’re older.”

  Eavesdropping on my school bus felt like watching bad movies, sitting through clichéd dialogue and overacting. Kids around me bragged about crimes and sexual exploits that had obviously never happened. In their preposterous stories of dangerous older siblings and sex-crazed romantic interests at other schools, they couldn’t even keep track of the names they’d invented. Yet, I never heard any of them doubted.

  That summer, I attended an educational program on a college campus often referred to as “nerd camp.” The first day, when we’d all just met, the circle of boys I sat with on the grass wanted to take turns saying how far we’d gotten with girls. I’d heard conversations like this on the bus, but always from boys much older and cooler. Most of the kids in this circle were smaller and less physically developed than me. The child nerds defined second base as touching breasts, third base as getting a blow job, and a home run as having sex. At thirteen, I couldn’t imagine how I would’ve ended up friends with a girl, let alone kissing one. The boys went around the circle, each announcing that they’d gotten to second or third base. I knew they had to be lying so I asked follow-up questions, pressing them to tell the full detailed stories of these alleged blow jobs. The little blond boy who had initiated the game quickly blew up at me, told me to shut up and stop interrupting. He took his turn, cocked his head and smirked in an inadequate impression of a man. “I got into a pickle between third and home,” he said. The circle was impressed.

  When my turn came, I said, “I haven’t gotten to any bases.” The blond boy didn’t allow a pause for this to sink in before gesturing to the next kid in the circle, who announced that he’d also gotten to third base. I listened, stewing. When we’d gone all the way around the circle, I said, “I didn’t realize this was supposed to be a game of pretend.”

  The boys’ eyes darted around the circle, each one hoping someone else would know how to respond. The blond boy ended the silence by standing up and suggesting that they go get sodas.

  I didn’t know if these boys really believed one another’s lies or if their bonding didn’t depend on the truth. But I left with a pretty good method for spotting false stories.

  It seemed that many lied for the purpose of giving off a particular social impression. These boys boasted about nonexistent sexual experiences because they wanted to look cool and adult. Because they weren’t particularly creative, quick-minded, or imaginative, they couldn’t invent realistic details or unique scenarios. They’d remain vague and adapt stories they’d heard elsewhere to be about themselves, assuming no one would ask follow-up questions. So, to spot this kind of lie, I only had to ask two questions: first, does this lie help them make some kind of desirable impression? Second, if they wanted this impression, is this the story they’d use? Once I had these two questions at my disposal, almost every story a boy told me read as a lie.

  I felt certain girls weren’t like this. I’d listened in on their conversations and watched them from afar. Girls talked about their experiences and feelings. They wrote in locked diaries; I’d daydreamed about what thoughts or stories could merit such secrecy. Girls wanted to express themselves. I set myself to the task of figuring out how to be friends with them as soon as possible.

  High Self-Esteem

  At fourteen, I went back to summer nerd camp and met a girl named Maya who liked personal questions. In our first conversation, Maya told me the story of her birth: her mother wanted a child but not a husband so convinced an ex-boyfriend to father a child he wouldn’t raise. Maya also told me about her eighteen-year-old boyfriend back home in Washington and shared with me her observations about sex. She theorized that there was no way to be universally good at it, that sexual chemistry was about the lucky coincidence of two people having compatible interests. She wore a tie-dye shirt and shorts, so I told her she dressed like my dad. She said her mom dressed the same way. It was the first interesting conversation I’d ever had with someone outside my family.

  The next day, Maya said I’d made her realize she should break up with her boyfriend. She’d written a break-up letter and mailed it that morning. She told me now she wanted to kiss me. She spread a picnic blanket under a tree in an isolated area and we stretched out, facing up. She leaned over and kissed me from above. When I kissed back, she pulled away. “Let me show you how to do it,” she said. “Stay still.” I’d seen people press closed lips together or stick tongues in each other’s mouths, but she did neither; she sucked on each lip, one at a time. I tried the same thing on her and it felt like how I’d hoped kissing would feel. This was a big relief; I’d feared that kissing was something else everyone pretended to like just to fit in.

  I said, “Wow, I guess some stuff is popular because it’s genuinely beautiful.”

  Maya laughed and said, “Kissing can be real or fake like talking can be real or fake.” She smiled dreamily from above me. I thanked her for teaching me how to kiss, and she said she was touched to be the one to teach me.

  I told Maya that she was the only person who’d ever really liked me and she didn’t believe it. After talking about me with other camp nerds, she reported back and said, “It’s true! Most people really don’t like you! They explained why, but the stories they told made you sound really funny and interesting.”

  “We both like honesty, so it’s hard for us to imagine why other people wouldn’t,” I told her. “But trust me, they hate it. Or at least they hate it when I’m honest.”

  She nodded. “People mostly like me, but now that I think about it, it does feel like the ones who don’t probably turned against me because I said something honest.”

  Maya was my “girlfriend” for the rest of nerd camp. After that, we wrote letters and talked on the phone long-distance as often as our parents were willing to pay for, once every few months.

  Having met one girl who liked me, I felt even more justified in my plan to hold out for the few who were capable of honesty and forget about everybody else.

  A year or so later, I started regularly passing notes with a girl in my sophomore Spanish class. Tamar wasn’t like Maya; when it came to my personal questions, she was evasive. Though she never answered, she appeared to enjoy my asking. She’d write me just as personal questions back, provoking me to say more and more. It wasn’t long before I was raving in these notes about my fetishistic fantasies, getting a thrill out of watching her big eyes widen as she read them during class. She’d finish a note and give me a sly look with a closed-lipped grin. I
started to write about how I felt about her, telling her the sexiest and most romantic things I could come up with. I asked her directly how she felt about me and she told me she thought I was cute and emotional, that I was a sexual person like her. She told me about seeing the British band Pulp play, how she couldn’t stop imagining Jarvis Cocker’s long hands moving over her. We never had these dirty conversations face-to-face—we never even spent time alone—it was all in notes in Spanish class, as if real things had to be kept secret. I’d seen in teen movies how notes could be intercepted and read by the teacher in front of the class, humiliating everyone involved. I wrote Tamar that I would love it if that happened, that I was proud of our notes. I told her I thought we wrote stuff so dirty that this teacher would be too embarrassed to read it aloud. I asked Tamar if she’d be upset about one of our notes being read to the class and she avoided the question.

  I passed her a note asking if she’d like to hang out sometime outside of school. She wrote back “yes” with an exclamation point. I took the exclamation point seriously. That night, I dreamt of exclamation points.

  I’d failed my driver’s test (not because of truth-telling, just because I was a bad driver), so Tamar picked me up at my house far out in the San Fernando Valley, and drove me around Los Angeles, blasting Billie Holiday’s Music for Torching. I’d never heard a voice so honest.

  At the end of the night, Tamar parked the car outside my house and I asked if I could kiss her. Her shoulders hunched to her ears. “Why did you ask?” she said, squirming. “Why didn’t you just do it?” She looked back up at me. “Asking ruins it. I would have kissed you but you asked.”

  Maybe I was supposed to understand this as a polite excuse. Maybe I was supposed to kiss her now without asking. But instead I held her to this philosophical position. “You only want to kiss someone who doesn’t ask? Is everyone supposed to read your mind? I don’t want to try to kiss someone who doesn’t want to kiss me back.”

  “Don’t ask permission,” she said. “Do what you want.”

  I thought back to Maya telling me in advance that she wanted to kiss me. “Isn’t this just your personal preference?”

  “No one likes being asked,” she insisted. I mentally noted that I should pose this question to Maya in my next letter. “Asking isn’t sexy. You should be more confident. If you’re confident, you don’t have to ask. Because you know everyone wants to kiss you,” she said. “Confidence is hot.”

  “Let me get this straight,” I said. “You’re saying that if I somehow convince myself that everyone wants to kiss me, that unsubstantiated delusion will be perceived as hot?” Tamar backed against her door, likely considering what to say to politely get me out of her car. I still hoped to turn her around by arguing. “Barely anyone wants to kiss me. That’s just factual information. How am I supposed to believe something that’s provably false?”

  “You have low self-esteem,” Tamar said.

  I laughed. “No, low self-esteem is when you hold yourself in low esteem. I love the way I am. I have a low opinion of other people. I have low other-people-esteem.”

  Though Tamar didn’t kiss me and we didn’t go out again, we still kept up our note-passing. Maya and I also kept up our letters and phone calls.

  Six months later, Josh was having his Bar Mitzvah, and my parents told me I could invite friends. It turned out that we’d be borrowing an RV for the weekend (so Dad, who didn’t drive on the Sabbath, could stay next to the synagogue Friday night and avoid walking back and forth). On Saturday night, while it was parked in our driveway waiting to be returned, one of my friends could stay there too.

  I invited Maya and two other friends we both knew from nerd camp who lived near me. When Maya arrived, she told me she now had a boyfriend back home and that it would be wrong to kiss me, even though she still loved me. I appreciated her clarity and straightforwardness and respected this boundary. I focused on another fantasy: to introduce her to Tamar and have a conversation with both of them at the same time.

  After the Bar Mitzvah that Saturday, we all met up: me, Maya, Tamar, and the two others from camp. Everyone but me wanted to somehow get ahold of alcohol. I’d never gotten drunk before, so I had no thoughts about whether this would be fun. I ran with it because it was what Maya and Tamar wanted. The nerd boys and I sat in the car in a supermarket parking lot watching from afar as Tamar and Maya asked an older guy to buy them vodka.

  We drank the vodka with orange juice in the RV in my parents’ driveway. My memory gets hazy here because I was so drunk, but I woke the next morning remembering enough isolated moments to put together what likely happened. I remember suggesting that we all take off our clothes.* I don’t remember any discussion that might have followed, but they must have liked the idea, because the five of us ended up naked in the RV bed together, two boys lying with one girl and me alone with the other. The two other guys were older and more experienced.† I’d done nothing but kiss Maya and reach up her shirt. Naked in bed with Tamar, I didn’t know what I was supposed to be doing. I might have been the least experienced person to ever start an orgy.

  As thrilled as I was to make out with Tamar, it wasn’t long before I wanted to stop and talk. “Hey, Tamar,” I said. “Is this the only time we’re gonna do this? Or is this gonna happen again with just us, alone?”

  Tamar kept her eyes closed. “Shut up and kiss me,” she said, which I loved; it was like something from a movie. We kissed awhile more, and then I paused again to ask her, “Are you gonna be my girlfriend now?”†

  “Shut up and kiss me,” Tamar said again. And again that line served its purpose.

  A while later, we’d switched. I was with Maya while the other guys were with Tamar. This time I commented to Maya, “You said before that we couldn’t kiss because you have a boyfriend.”

  Maya took Tamar’s line. “Michael, shut up and kiss me.”

  “Are you gonna tell him about this?” I asked.

  “Shut up and kiss me,” she said again.

  Then we were interrupted by Tamar making ecstatic noises. One guy was kissing her while the other was doing something between her legs. I didn’t know what exactly he was doing, and I thought to look. But then, when I turned, I realized I didn’t want to see it. It was the first time I’d not been able to bear to look at something. I wondered if this was how others felt when they couldn’t face the truth. My shame at my cowardice was quickly eclipsed by frustration that I didn’t know how to get Tamar to make these noises.

  The next morning I woke up in bed with Maya and the two guys. Tamar sat on the opposite side of the RV, fully dressed in the previous night’s clothes. She shot me a blushy smile that I adored. I walked over to her, naked, and found my clothes. When I bent over to pick them up from the floor, she ran her hand through my hair. “I should go home,” she said.

  Once everyone was up and Maya was taking a shower in the house, the other guys deconstructed with me the previous night’s events. The taller one said, “Tamar was a screamer! She was sucking my face off!” Though he was technically telling the truth, hearing this disgusted me. I instantly decided I’d never speak to him again. The nerds left and I dropped Maya off at the airport to fly home.

  At school the next day, I told the wild story of the orgy, by far the best story I’d ever lived, over and over to my friends. I included all the miserable parts and my continuing uncertainty about whether I’d ever kiss these girls again. In Spanish class, Tamar smiled at me in that same blushy way, so I asked her if she’d like to hang out that night. She said yes.

  Once at Tamar’s house, I told her how much I wanted to do that again with her alone and asked if she’d teach me what to do. She recoiled, told me she’d thought of it as a one-time drunken thing, and asked me not to tell anybody about it. “Oh,” I said. “I didn’t realize it was a secret. I’ve been telling the story all day.” She got quiet and didn’t want to look at me. I should have just left, but instead I told her what was upsetting me, about the other nerd calli
ng her a screamer and saying she’d sucked his face off. She then told me she felt sick and needed to go to bed.

  “You don’t have to lie,” I told her. “You can tell me you’re upset.” I naively expected a breath of release. But the more I assured her she could be honest, the more stressed she acted, and the more desperately she repeated that she was fine except for this sudden mysterious illness.

  The next day at school, she wouldn’t respond to my notes. Maya wasn’t returning my calls either.

  After dinner that night, my parents and I were in the kitchen talking about various things that had happened at the Bar Mitzvah. “How was it seeing your friends?” Mom asked.

  “It was good at first and then really bad,” I said. “Everybody hates me now because on Saturday night we got drunk in the RV and I convinced them to get naked and make out and no one liked how I dealt with it.”

  Mom and Dad sat down at the kitchen table and I told them the entire story (it didn’t feel remotely unusual to tell my parents about my teenage orgy). When I described Tamar getting upset the next day, Dad mirrored my indignation. “What were you supposed to do?” he asked. “Keep it secret? Hide what had been said about her?”* Dad gave me an approving nod. “I think you handled it well.”

  * My style was unique because Mom still bought my clothes and she had no idea how thirteen-year-olds in 1993 dressed. My baggy pants and button-up shirts still bore flamboyant colorful 1980s patterns. My pattern-mixing must have looked pretty unhinged.

  * This was particularly odd to suggest because I didn’t like my body. Still, I saw it as cowardly and self-destructive to hide my flaws. Seeing others naked required being naked myself. My body was just another unpleasant truth worth exposing.

  † Some teen nerds managed to have girlfriends, apparently.