hetero 2

There seems to be in today’s movies a lack of genuine, real deal bad ass masculine characters. By “genuine” I mean non-douchebag, non-pretty boy hardasses. Characters who get the job done and don’t take shit from anyone. No stupid bullshit one liners to make them seem tough, only take no prisoner tactics that are tough. Today’s cinema is overrun with movies like The Transporter, and XXX, movies that are filled with lots of stylish violence and perfectly couched cool sounding phrases that are devoid of the true grit of past cinema in which men were men, and they did what they had to do in whichever way necessary. There were no bad jokes or flashy cars. They weren’t afraid to lose their temper, and show fear, and get dirty, and start shouting when shit got too hectic, and when they did so, they did it in a manner that didn’t look all that cool, but looked fucking awesome.
This is a review of some of the toughest characters (in my opinion) in cinema history. These are only my opinions, and they are only of characters; oftentimes the real actors portraying the characters were supposedly intolerable shitheels i.e. John Wayne. They span throughout the history of cinema, beginning with post-WWII war movies and ending in early 90s action films. I’m sure you’ll probably disagree with some of them, and that’s fine; this is, after all, my list of characters and mine alone.
Before we any further, I’d like to define my use of the term “masculine” as used in this article. It may differ from the traditional sense of what one considers masculine. I’ve attempted to distill and narrow down the basic qualities one traditional thinks of when they think of a “man’s man”, and, while I’m sure it’s not perfect I believe the qualities I’m about to discuss will help frame the definition of “masculine” in this article.
The following parameters will be laid down in order to better define “masculinity” for this purpose.
A. Virtue-the characters embody a realistic sense of virtuous behavior; namely, courage. They may be afraid to go into any given situation; however, they overcome that fear and in the end are better for it. Usually. I reject the archetype of the Fearless Hero; after, is he really doing anything great if he isn’t afraid of anything to be begin with? Can one control what one’s fears are? No, you cannot. But you can overcome those fears, and in overcoming those fears one becomes a true man’s man in my humble opinion.
B. Respect-Poor sportsmanship is a bad thing. It’s really annoying, and it makes you look like an asshole. That being said, not being full of yourself and overestimating your abilities is a good thing, both for practical reasons and for moral reasons. From a moral standpoint, it allows you to appreciate the good qualities of others. From a practical standpoint, it allows you to achieve your goal, be that goal killing German terrorists or protecting the mother of the future leader of the human resistance from a murderous cyborg.
C. Dedication-Sticking to your guns, as long as your goal is sensible and honorable, is a good thing. I generally can’t stand people who pride themselves on this characteristic using the phrase “sticking to your guns” in real life, because usually those people are total jackasses, but in the cinema world, it’s safe to admire such a quality. A resolve to see the situation through, in other words, makes these characters “masculine.”
D. Being well rounded- a real man isn’t afraid to show vulnerability, or compassion, or even cry. In other words, a real “man” isn’t afraid to show his feelings. Showing fear, as I mentioned before, and overcoming that fear is in the end tougher and harder than pretending to not be afraid. A real “man” can be sensitive, and gentle, and loving, all the while possessing the ability to kick ass.
To be fair, characters such as Arnold Schwarzenegger’s in The Terminator cannot be counted; after all, he was just a machine following out orders and had no choice to do otherwise. There’s nothing truly macho in that. But, on the flipside, characters such as the Predator can and will be counted; he might’ve been an alien, but he embodied all the primitive qualities considered ‘masculine’ in this day and age. Furthermore, women can and will be counted; after all, several female characters in the history of film embody characteristics that one typically considered masculine. I mean, come on, if not for Ellen Ripley, everyone would have died in Aliens. While Bill Paxton was crying and losing his shit and proclaiming doom and gloom for all of them, Ripley was staying frosty and keeping them together. Entries are chronological, and in no particular other order.

1. John Wayne as Wedge Donovan in The Fighting Seabees-I didn’t think I’d really like any of John Wayne’s work. He seemed to star exclusively in movies churned out by Hollywood studios to capitalize on the virulent pro-war attitude that swept the country following the bombing of Pearl Harbor, and I really don’t like many westerns, so I never really saw a point in watching any of his films. But, a few months ago, while hanging out with my grandfather, I caught this movie on TMC and decided ‘What the hell…worst case scenario, I’ll hang out with Pap.’ Turns out, I didn’t think it was half bad. Oh, to be fair, the acting left something to be desired, character development was mostly non-existent, and the portrayal of Japanese soldiers was pushing it even for a time in history when anti-Japanese sentiment was running high…but the story was there. Wayne’s character was a hard as nails construction manager building landing strips in the Pacific during WWII when he realizes his men, as civilians, aren’t technically allowed to fight the Japanese. But, since the Japanese obviously wouldn’t give them the same courtesy, Wayne had to do something. Did he let the laws of war stand in his way? Fuck no. He gave his men weapons and taught them how to fight. And when the Japanese land on the island, he and his men give it just as much as they get it. Long story short, as a result of this, the famed Construction Battalions (CBs) of WWII are formed, and soon John Wayne is kicking enemy ass all over the Pacific. Sure he dies in the end, killed by a sniper after the battle is won, but he got the job done. He manned up, took matters into his own hands and turned his meager construction crew into a gang of hardasses who weren’t going to wait for anyone else to do the job for them. If that’s not manly, then I don’t know what is.

2. Clint Eastwood as Inspector Harry Callahan in Dirty Harry-This movie was probably singularly responsible for every .44 Magnum sold after 1971. It’s also probably responsible for permanently fixing Clint Eastwood as the archetype for a bad ass cop who didn’t take shit from anyone and did whatever it took to nail fuckers who broke the law. And finally, it is, after The Empire Strikes Back, probably the most misquoted movie ever. But enough of the movie, and lets talk about the man. “Dirty” Harry Callahan is a cop who is notorious for his “shoot first and ask questions later” brand of police work that while getting the job done, doesn’t get it done in line with “proper” police work. His superiors are constantly rebuking him, and he is just as frustrated with them and a system that apparently gives more rights to criminals than it does to law-abiding citizens. I’ll spare the “do I feel lucky?” speech and instead go to what I think is the real defining moment for Eastwood in the film. Towards the end of the movie, Scorpio hijacks a bus full of school children intending on taking them hostage, when he sees in the distance Harry Callahan standing ominously on top of a railroad trestle that overhangs the road, waiting. Maybe it’s the long camera angle that makes Eastwood look like some avenging angel out of the Book of Revelations. Or maybe it’s the fact that Callahan was had to be there waiting a while for the bus to drive under him. Either way, that is the true moment in the movie when it’s apparent that Scorpio has badly fucked up and that Callahan is not the man to fuck with. Eastwood’s character was so memorable and on point that he kept it going through four sequels, all of which contain numerous other awesome moments, notably the “me, Smith, and Wesson” speech in Sudden Impact, followed by the second most famous line in the series: “Go ahead. Make my day.” Totally hard. After a suspect he took down gets off on a technicality and taunts him about it, Callahan corners him in an elevator and tells him: “To me, you’re nothing but dogs hit.” It’s more than a job for Callahan; it’s a mission. In a time when lawlessness was running rampant and hippie liberals were looking out more for the criminals than the public, he stood hard, a rock in an otherwise changing and flowing legal landscape.
3. Sylvester Stallone as Rocky Balboa in Rocky-Do I really need to explain this choice? Sure, those movies are almost guilty pleasures, but Rocky really is a man’s man. He doesn’t care about winning. He just wants to prove to himself, and himself alone, that he can go the distance. He’s in it for the journey, not for the destination. At first. Only in the third movie does he really care about winning, and that’s just to shut Mr. T up. His crowning achievement is handing the apparently unstoppable Ivan Drago his ass in the fourth film, fighting a man who literally killed his last opponent. He talks about teamwork, and dedication, and respect, and all the other things that make an athlete great. In Rocky V, an otherwise unremarkable movie, we are shown that it is indeed the journey that makes the champion and not just having a title. Tommy Gunn may have held the title, but he wasn’t a real champion like Rocky, because he lacked everything that made Rocky great. Same with Clubber Lang, and Mason Dixon. They were physically tough, sure, and could probably beat the shit out of me in real life, but in the end they didn’t have the stuff that Rocky had. As he so eloquently puts it in the sixth film: “It ain’t about how hard you can hit, it’s how hard you can get hit and keeping going.” And his humble origins are another thing that makes him great. He came from nothing and trained with what he had. What made him great was the simple drive to keep going and not give up. Ivan Drago may have been bred to be a champion and may have been able to kill a man with only a few punches, but look where he came from. Drago was engineered from the beginning to be a perfect athlete. He was pumped full of steroids and trained using fancy and suspicious equipment. Drago was handed the ability to win on a silver platter, while Rocky actually had to fight for it. It’s why out of all of the tough guys in that franchise, only Rocky actually has what it takes to be make it to my list of guys I’d want on my side in a fight.

4. Charles Bronson as Paul Kersey in Death Wish-What do you do when muggers (including a young Jeff Goldblum) kill your wife and rape your daughter? Go to the inept cops, who treat a lost artistic dog seriously, you say? Wrong. Get yourself a gun and start bringing down old world style justice upon the criminals of the city. This movie is the classic Bronson film, long before Bronson became a doddering and wrinkled parody of himself in the later films of the franchise. In the beginning he’s every inch the classic man, taking saucy pictures of his wife as she saunters out of the Hawaiian surf, politely suggesting they fuck right there on the beach (or maybe she suggests it and he being the gentlemen that he is says they should go to the hotel room; either way, kudos to him.) He believes in the ability of the government to protect it’s citizens and he has faith in the civilized man. After he and his wife return to New York, a gang of thugs attacks his wife and daughter. His wife is killed, his daughter brutally raped and rendered into a state resembling autism. When Kersey goes to the police for help, they tell him there’s little chance of the criminals being caught. Here, we see a man who realizes the system he has put so much faith in his whole life has all but failed him, and everything he has believed in is wrecked and ruined, and his choices are let this injustice lie in the open and flaunt itself, or take matters into his own hands. Kersey decides he’s had enough, gets a handgun and wages a one-man war on the scumbags of New York City. Of course, the police denounce his vigilante ways, but that doesn’t stop him. Even in the end, when he is politely asked to leave the city and moves to Chicago, when some young punk insults him, Kersey coolly smiles and makes a gun gesture at him. He’s the embodiment of a man pushed too far, someone who has just had enough with how the world is and needs to do something about it, and isn’t going to let anyone stand in his way.

5. Michael Biehn as Kyle Reese in The Terminator- my personal favorite, and in my opinion, the hardest dude in any movie ever. If there were one man I would want to come back through time to protect me, it’d be Kyle Reese. I don’t think I need to give any sort of plot summary for the movie; that would just waste valuable space that could be used praising Reese. When we first see him, he’s shaken from coming back in time, but in moments, he’s pulled it together enough to ambush a cop and take his weapon from him with the quickness. After evading police and obtaining clothes and a shotgun (and a fresh pair of Nikes, might I add) he begins a race against his opponent, the titular cyborg, to get to Sarah Connor, a young college student who’s unborn son will be the future savior of the human race against Skynet, a murderous supercomputer. His moments of hardness are almost too numerous too count. From the moment we first see him jacking a cop up against a wall and disarming him like it’s nothing, to him strolling down the street moments later after stealing a shotgun from that same cop’s car, Reese is hard as shit. There’s the moment in the bar, when he finds Sarah and blows the Terminator out of a window with a shotgun before uttering the best line in the movie: “Come with me if you want to live.” There are the flashbacks of his past where he is shown as a hardened soldier strategically blowing up giant robots and then fighting Terminators in bunkers underground. Seriously, watch this movie, and when the scene where’s looking at the picture of Sarah comes up in the tunnels underground, check out the look on his face when he realizes the cyborgs are attacking. It is the face of a man who is ready for action. Then there’s the scene in the police station when he fucks a cop up (while handcuffed!) punches a window out of a door, and rescues Sarah just before the Terminator, who is methodically killing everyone in the station, can get to her. When she remarks about him being shot, he replies, “It’s just a flesh wound.” Totally hard. Even in the end, when he’s so hurt he can barely walk, he picks up a steel bar and challenges the Terminator to a fight. And after getting the shit slapped out of him, his last living act is blowing the Terminator in half with a homemade pipe bomb. But he is not without a soft side. There’s the classic scene between him and Sarah when’s she talking about how much pain he’s been through, and he tells her he has dealt with pain by shutting off all feeling. He hasn’t shut off all feeling because soon after he makes passionate yet gentle love to her. He has it all. The dedication and the commitment to see it through. The sensitivity and the compassion. The man is a fucking rock. He remarks early on that the Terminator can’t be reasoned with, and that it doesn’t feel pity, or remorse, and that it won’t stop until Sarah is dead. But the unspoken sentiment is that he himself won’t ever give up on Sarah, and that we won’t stop until the Terminator is gone. Maybe what he meant was “Come with me if you want to survive.” But to go with him, truly, is to live.
6. Sigourney Weaver as Lt. Ellen Ripley in Aliens- A women? Masculine?! Reign in your fury and restrain yourself from ripping this publication in half and at least hear what I have to say. Earlier, we had outlined the parameters for “masculinity” as what one traditionally considers being masculine, and at no point did I propose that being male was a necessary precursor to be masculine. That being said, I argue that Weaver’s role in Aliens, without a doubt, qualifies as something masculine. Now, note that I am excluding her role from the first movie, as I don’t believe her character in Alien would fulfill the requirements for what one considers masculine. Her gender is not at all in contrast with her portrayal of the character. However, in the second movie, there is a definite change in her character, one that will carry over in the third film of the franchise. The change takes here from a non-descript flight officer aboard a mining vessel just struggling to survive the onslaught of a single alien in the first film, to a hardened leader in the second film who is actively fightint to survive, a character arguably keeping herself together better than a squad of Marines sent with her to dispatch the alien threat. Out of the survivors of the initial attack early in the second film, only two of the Marines seem to have their act together. The rest of them, namely Bill Paxton’s character, are falling apart at the seams and are borderline hysterical. Not Ripley. Through the whole movie, she keeps her cool, doing what it takes to keep the rest of the group together. When the aliens attack their stronghold and kill all but her, Newt, and Hicks, she leads Hicks and Newt out of there to safety. When Newt is snatched away by an Alien, she takes Hicks to the drop ship, gathers a small arsenal of weapons, and goes back into the hell of the alien nest, fighting her way through alien drones, facing down the alien queen, and saving Newt from a most horrible fate of becoming an alien incubator. They get back to the drop ship, back up to the Suloco, only the find the alien queen had tagged along. How does she solve that dilemma? By doing what needed to be done, of course! After bravely distracting the alien queen and allowing Newt to escape to safety, Ripley engages the alien queen in a clash of the titans style battle using the super rad and unfortunately totally fictionally power loader, smacking the shit out of the queen and jettisoning her out into space.
There is another character in the Alien franchise that I believe deserves at least a nod of acknowledgement in this article. Charles S. Dutton plays the spiritual leader of the convicts in Alien 3, a man of God who makes no secret of why he is in prison; that being that he is a “rapist and murderer of women.” His two key moments in the film are his rallying speech to the rest of the inmates (“You’re all gonna die someday, but how you check out is up to you. Do you wanna die on your feet? Or do you wanna die on your knees, beggin?”) His second shining moment is his last stand against the alien. Trapped in a lead mold with no way out, he simply faces the alien, takes his glasses off, calls it out, and goes out fighting. Amazing.
7. Bruce Willis as John McClain in Die Hard-The sole exception to the “no catchphrases” rule, because this guy’s is awesome. Throughout four films, he never, ever stops kicking the collective ass of those doing wrong. Franchises rarely make it past one or two films before becoming redundant and stale, but he keeps it fresh and rad the whole time. He is shit on, time and time again, by his superiors and his family, and yet he never gives up. Whether it’s running across broken glass as German terrorists are shooting at him, blowing a plane up with a road flare, walking through downtown Harlem with a placard that says “I Hate Niggers” strapped to him because if he doesn’t a terrorist will bomb another building, or killing a sexy femme fatale by dropping a SUV down an elevator shaft onto her, McClain is one man who should not be taken lightly. He has a simple and fundamental dedication to justice: doing whatever it takes to bring about that justice, and that makes him unstoppable. By the fourth and most recent film in the series, this drive for justice has cost him almost everything. He talks of how everyone, including his own daughter, has left him. He has nothing. And yet even though the world has turned it’s back on him, McClain still does the right thing, no matter how hard it is. He’s usually filthy within twenty minutes of the beginning of the movie, covered in blood and dirt and God knows what. And why? Because he’s doing what no one else wants to do. And that’s just what has to be done. If I was a fictional bad guy trying to rob the Federal Reserve or shut down the nation’s power supply through a computer virus and I heard McClain was coming after me, chances are I’d simply give up and walk away while I still could, or at least not shoot my mouth off like an asshole and threaten one of his family members when he finally did track me down.
8. Kevin Michael Hall as The Predator in The Predator-Now, why is The Predator on this list, but the Terminator isn’t? For the same reason R2D2 isn’t the real hero of Star Wars, as some argue: robots, as non-sentient beings, cannot perform acts of courage because they cannot choose to do otherwise. The Predator, as a sentient being, can be counted according to the parameters set forth early in this article. We see the Predator in the first movie hunting a group of generic military guys doing something in some jungle (well…we don’t actually see him at first, just the aftermath of his exploits; namely, a one armed Carl Weathers and a dead Jesse Ventura). He fights Schwarzeneggar’s character in unarmed combat at the climax of the movie, displaying a sort of weird chivalry in the process. And while appearing to be a merciless killer, Predator pursues only worthy prey that are armed and capable of fighting back. He spares the life a captive Spanish woman, and in the second film spares a pregnant woman. Furthermore, in a weird way he honors those adversaries he considers worthy prey by keeping their skulls as trophies, as opposed to skinning them and hanging them upside down as he does to the prey he considers unworthy. In the second film, after Danny Glover kills on of their kind, the kin of that dead Predator acknowledge Glover’s skill by gifting him with a Civil War era pistol, which shows a respect for an adversary. And what happens if a Predator is defeated before being killed? A brand of alien seppuku involving a small nuclear explosion. If they’re going to die, they’re going to go out on their own terms and not at the hands of their enemies. I won’t say the Predator has a sensitive side, as the near unwatchable Alien Vs. Predator suggests, but I will say that it apparently has ability to show at least compassion for weaker beings, and that quality coupled with his ability to kick ass earns him a spot on this list.
9. Linda Hamilton as Sarah Connor in Terminator 2-Why only Sarah Connor in T2? Because in the first movie she’s too busy running and hiding and being terrified to count in this list. Just look at how she compares from the first movie to the second. Her first appearance in the first film is like a breath of fresh air. Her introduction is the first daylight scene. It is the first scene without some kind of violence. In other words, she is the first character who just exists in that movie. She is relaxed and carefree…for the moment. By the end of the movie, she shows some of her future resolve; her last words to the T-800 as she crushes it in a hydraulic press are, while not as iconic as “I’ll be back”, still just as memorable: “You’re terminated, fucker.” Now, take that change into the second movie. Her introduction, instead of showing us a carefree and happy character, shows us a woman preparing for the worst. She has been committed to an insane asylum for blowing up a computer factory, and when we first see her has turned her bed frame into a makeshift pull up bar. Her first words are asking her doctor how knee is, a few weeks prior she stabbed him with a pen. She breaks out of prison by knocking several guards unconscious and taking that same doctor hostage by threatening to inject him with antifreeze. When her, her son John, and the T-800 are attacked by the T-1000 in an elevator, instead of hiding and ducking and cowering like the old Sarah, she takes a pistol from the T-800 and begins shooting at the attacking Terminator. When she is stabbed through the shoulder by the T-1000 and threatened with death if she doesn’t “call to John”, she defiantly tells the Terminator “fuck you”. And, in one of the most memorable scenes of the movie, after the T-1000 nearly kills her son by mimicking her, she nearly shoots it off the ledge and into the boiling metal with a shotgun, dramatically chambering a new shell after each shot one handed. And yet, she is not without her soft side. After the escape from the asylum, she shows her maternal instinct by fawning over John. When she attempts to avert Judgment Day by assassinating the man who would invent Skynet, she realizes she cannot pull the trigger at the last second, and collapses on the floor in front of his family, crying until John and the T-800 show up. And in the end, after the T-1000 is destroyed and all is apparently right, she offers her hand in friendship to the T-800, an acknowledgment of the abilities of one warrior by another. While appearing to be a total nutcase through most of the movie, she is actually just a woman transformed by the knowledge of what is to come and what must be done, and yet she still holds tight onto the values outlined earlier.
10. Tony Todd as Ben in Night of the Living Dead-George Romero may have thrown racial archetypes out the window by casting Duane Johnson as Ben in the original film, but Tony Todd brought some of those racial archetypes right back in by re-defining that character in the remake. In the first movie, we see the character Ben as a frightened but tough businessman who arrives at the farmhouse just in time to save Barbara from a couple of zombies. Throughout the film, he is the glue that holds the group together, the rock for them to stand on. And, even though in the end everyone dies and he is mistaken for a zombie and shot by redneck zombie hunters, he is still the good guy, a semi-tragic hero. He just happens to be black. In the remake, Todd turns the character into a sort of blaxploitation throwback. He is apparently constantly on the verge of losing his grip on his temper and seems to be in a state of semi-rage throughout the whole movie. His fury is a palpable thing, and he routinely threatens to somehow hurt the character Cooper for getting in his way. When he falls from a truck on his way to a gas pump, he fights his way back to the farmhouse against a horde of zombies and somehow makes it. But like several of the other characters on this list, it isn’t just his tough moments that put him on this list. He comforts Barbara when he first finds her, and unlike in the original doesn’t slap her when she begins spewing nonsense. Upon seeing Cooper’s daughter lying upon the sawhorses after a zombie bites her, he offers to get her a blanket to keep her warm. And in the end, when he is shot by Cooper, he urges Barbara to flee and save herself, as he is beyond saving. He is tough, but he is thoughtful, a rational man paired with a rage that in the end while not saving himself at least saves someone else.
11. Samuel L. Jackson as Jules in Pulp Fiction-more on here for the shit he says than what he actually does, Jackson’s character in Pulp Fiction is hands down the best in the movie. He’s so tough he’s almost unbelievably so. But look in his eyes during his “Ezekiel 25:17” speech, and you can see he doesn’t need to do anything more than shoot another unarmed man to prove how tough he is. I feel bad not really listing any of his accomplishments, because in all reality he doesn’t really do anything all that hard in the movie. But the shit he says so mind-blowing badass I couldn’t not put him on this list. I suppose I can acknowledge his ability to admit he’s wrong and change for the better by his speech at the end of the film. He realizes he’s going down the wrong path, a path of ill virtue, and decides to make a change. And apparently it’s just in time, because while he is off seeking wisdom, John Travolta’s character, the skeptic to Jackson’s believer, is getting shot to death by Bruce Willis after taking a shit.
12. Mickey Rourke as Marv in Sin City-I was a Johnny come lately to this movie, and I never read the comic, but I was definitely impressed with Rourke’s character in it. He plays Marv, a lovable psychopath hell bent on avenging the death of one of the few people who was ever kind to him, and all he has to get that revenge are his “mitts”; in other words, his bare hands….and razor wire, rubber tubing, and a hatchet. He manhandles cops, jumps out of windows several stories up with no ill effect, and gets the shit beaten out of him by the cannibalistic serial killer Kevin, and yet still comes throw to do what he set out to do. After subduing Kevin, who was indeed the killer of his beloved Goldie, he saws off the killer’s limbs and makes his dogs eat him alive. He then proceeds to kill a fucking cardinal of the Catholic Church after taunting him with Kevin’s severed head, and then eggs the cops on at his execution by telling them to “hurry up, cause I ain’t got all night.” His fellow Basin City outcast Dwight says that Marv was just born in the wrong era, that he should’ve been a gladiator. And who knows…maybe in his last days, Marv did make things rights, because as he says, “These are the old days, the bad days, the all or nothing days. They're back. There's no choice left. And I'm ready for war.” He’s a man who will do anything to right what has been wrong. To avenge the death of the women he loved. To return the kindness showed to him by exacting justice upon a corrupt religious leader.
13. Jackie Earle Haley as Rorschach in Watchmen-okay, I was a little hesitant to put him on here, namely because I don’t think he’s actually a tough character, just sort of crazy. And upon further examination, he’s just a jumble of contradictions. But anyone who stands by their word as much as Rorschach deserves a place on this list, even if they are out of their mind. And, crazy or not, he’s undeniably a hardass. After being set up for a murder, he fights his way out of an apartment building by beating shit out of several cops and setting one of them fire, and is only subdued by even more cops outside. His golden moment is in prison when an inmate attempts to shank him, and instead of just merely defending himself, he throws a pot of boiling fat on his opponent and tells those watching that “I’m not locked up here with you, you’re all locked up in here with me.” Given the fact that he’s one man facing literally hundreds of pissed off inmates that he was responsible for putting in jail, saying anything like that is pretty ballsy. He faces down Dr. Manhattan in the end; preferring death to compromising his belief that evil must be punished, even if it is done for the greater good. Now I openly admit that such a choice appeals to the Kantian in me, but further examination of Rorschach nearly disqualifies him. First, as I mentioned before, I don’t really think Rorschach was being courageous and defiant during most of his exploits, merely crazy. Being crazy isn’t the same as being courageous because you don’t really know what you’re doing. Secondly, if we examine his character further, we notice several contradictions. Rorschach thinks the others are weak for staying silent about Ozymandias crime at the end, stating that it is never okay to kill someone and that doing so is always wrong. He believes Ozymandias must be punished for what he did, even if in the end it would cause the ill-gotten peace to unravel and possibly even more deaths. In other words, Rorschach believes that the ends don’t always justify the means, and that using people as mere means is wrong. But if we look at some of his actions we see that he has no problem early on in the movie and comic using brute violence against possibly innocent people to get what he wants. Think of the way he treats Moloch, a former supervillian who is now for all intents and purposes a straight laced and harmless old man. Rorschach tosses him around a room brutally, and for what? All he gets out of him is the fact that Comedian lost it and came crying to Moloch one night. Rorschach was treating Moloch as a means to an end, something that at the end of the film he felt was so wrong he was willing to die for it. In the comic, we are treated to an essay written by Rorschach as a child, in which he commends President Truman for dropping the bombs on Japan, because even though it killed thousands of Japanese it saves tens of thousands of American lives. This mindset was the same that he condemns Ozymandias for having in the end. So, in other words, I don’t think Rorschach was so much tough as he was insane. But since we’re talking fictional characters, we’ll let him stay.
So there you have it. My list of the toughest movie characters of all time. Some will argue I’m missing a few characters. I’m sure some think that Jean-Claude Van Damme’s character Frank Dux from Kickboxer belongs on here. Or maybe Travis Bickle from Taxi Driver. But I’m pretty satisfied with my list. If you disagree, oh well. So next time some bullshit run of the mill action movie is playing on AMC, and there’s some slick overproduced asshole looking cool, just remember: there was a time when tough movie cinema characters weren’t annoying assholes, and as the last two entries show there are still are a few characters in recent cinema history that make you say “I definitely wouldn’t fuck with that guy” as opposed to “ugh, fuck that guy.”

Interlude, or: Justin And Mcardle Visit Circuit City, Hilarity Does Not Ensue.

a brief and refreshing break from girls who drove me off the deep end, this is a short tale of intrigue and how i ended up owning the guyver, one of the worst movies ever made.


Friday was pay day for both Mcardle and myself, and while the two of us weren’t exactly the thriftiest of consumers, nor were we throwing money away. We did, however, enjoy a good shopping spree every now and again, and at some point that spring, we ended up at Circuit City with the intent of spending every available cent that we had on shitty movies. So we took our time browsing through the multitude of titles available, occasionally making wise ass comments about particularly shitty movies that were what we referred to as “real bad”. Example: Killer Klowns From Outer Space is a “bad” movie in the sense that the plot is stupid, the acting not particularly great, the set ridiculously awful, and the special effects laughable, but it was made that way on purpose as an homage to 50’s sci fi movie. Gighli, however, was “real bad”, as it was intended to be a serious movie and fell woefully short of the mark and instead resided into a territory that was offensive to good taste. We probably resembled to some degree John Cusack and Jack Black in their roles in High Fidelity: two snobbish and aloof movie nerds snarkily making comments apparently loud enough so everyone else would know what impeccable taste in movies we had. At some point, an extremely cute associate of Circuit City came over to ask us if we needed help finding anything. We told her we were just looking, and she smartly replied that if we needed anything to let her know. She had said all of this with an almost coy manner about her, a half a smile on her face the whole time, and as soon as she was out of earshot, Mcardle claimed she wanted it from me and that’s why she came over.
“No, she came over cause that’s her job. She probably thought we were shoplifting or something.”
Disbelief spiced with frustration was written on Mcardle’s face. “Dude, seriously, she didn’t come over here because she thought we were going to shoplift. And she certainly didn’t come over because she thought we needed assistance. Did you hear the way she was talking to us? Or see the way she was smiling? At you? I’m telling you…she came over here to talk to you because she thought you sounded interesting, or smart, or funny, or something at least a little attractive, and you fucked it up.” He said all of this in patient and patronizing tones, the tones reserved for use by a teacher trying to drive an idea home to an imcomprehensive student.
I threw my hands in the air, but not so much as to draw attention to us again. “How-“ I realized how loud I was and took it down a notch, “how was I supposed to keep talking to her? She asked if we needed any help, we said no, she walked away. Where was my in?”
“Okay, here’s how it should have happened. Her: do you need any help? You: yeah, actually, um, do you guys happen to have the ultimate edition of Dawn of the Dead? Her: Gasp! I love that movie!!! You: Oh man really? It’s my favorite! Her: here’s my number! Let’s watch it sometime! But no. You had to be a bitch about the whole thing, and fucking ruin it for yourself, and now you’re gonna be a mopey bastard for the rest of the night.”
Things aren’t that easy, and I wish more people would understand that. Mcardle may have been able to woo women with his weird masculine magic, but I was a lesser being when it came to the fairer sex and lacked the mystical ability to charm girls with clever words and all of that jazz. “Mcardle…she didn’t want it from me. She just came over to see if we needed help with anything.”
“And are you not in need of help? Maybe not with movies, but possibly with some other things, if you know what I mean. Eh? Eh?!” He burlesqued the old nudging me in the ribs gesture, one eyebrow up at a perfect 45 degree angle.
“Well…I can’t talk to her now. The moment has passed.”
“Fucking-“ He sighed, at a loss of words. “Dammit, Lore. No. No, it hasn’t.” His voice dropped to a conspiritial whisper. “Look.” He nodded towards the far end of the aisle, where our mystery lady was now apparently taking inventory of the DVDs there. I dared not let my gaze linger for any longer than a second or so, for fear that she would look up, see me apparently staring at her, send back a look of disgust and scorn, and then wouldn’t my day just be complete. However, a second or so was too long apparently, as she looked up almost as soon as I looked over at her. Maybe she heard Mcardle talking about her. Probably. Either way, instead of throwing up, and spitting at me, or giving me the finger, she smiled at me. Not the plastic reassuring smile a sale associate will give a customer to maintain good PR, but real deal genuine smile, the smile of someone who notices they are being noticed. I quickly looked away, not wanting to try and smile back and look like an idiot.
“See?” Mcardle said. “I told you she came over to talk to you. Now walk over and say something.”
“Eh I dunno. I don’t want to go over there and look like an asshole if I fuck it up.”
“Lore, you already look like an asshole because she came over to talk to you and you didn’t fucking run with it.”
I risked a glance over at her again. She was still taking notes on a clipboard, neatly and methodically cataloging the DVDs. She was slowly but surely working her way down towards us, and if I waited long enough could probably talk to her by virtue of her ending up down by us through whatever task it was that she was doing. “She’s coming this way anyway. If she ends up down here, I’ll say something.”
Exasperated, Mcardle rolled his eyes. “No. Because she might only have to take inventory in that section and might not end up down here. Plus, you’ll probably bitch out anyway.”
I didn’t really know what to say. I was too afraid to talk to her, but Mcardle was making a good case. She did smile at me, and when she first came over it had none of the formal and helpful air of an employee offering assistance to a bewildered customer. I was in sort of a jam. “I dunno. What would I say?”
“Ugh. Who fucking cares. She obviously thinks you’re somewhat attractive and if she was listening to us talk probably thinks you’re pretty funny too. Who gives a shit what you say. As long as you don’t walk up and grab her ass or take your dick out I’m sure she won’t reject you. Just go up and say you need help finding something, and then, I dunno, ask for a movie that’s right in front of you. I don’t know. Just fucking say something instead of standing around like an asshole.”
I looked down at her again, she of the clipboard and methodic work ethic and possible intrigue. She was adorable, I remember that. I don’t really remember her exact features, but I remember she was had shoulder length brown hair pulled back in a pony tail. She looked at me again, smiled again, and when she looked back down, the smile remained, and her eyes would occasionally flicker in my direction. Fuck. I couldn’t go over there. I wasn’t cut out for this shit. Mcardle was. He had impeccable style, a magnetic personality, he knew how to talk about really cool stuff, and he just radiated mystery and intrigue. He liked ‘adult’ movies, and could at least bullshit his way through a conversation about them. He liked weird obscure literature. He was (and continues to be) the definition of a ‘Renaissance Man’. He knew what girls wanted to hear and he had the confidence to say it. I didn’t. I had to muster up the courage to talk to them and pray I didn’t make too much of an idiot out of myself. I was just about to possibly go over and talk to her when she was called over to the register to help a customer. I relaxed. I was off the hook for now. Maybe.
She was working a register and ringing customers up when we were getting ready to leave. I forget exactly all of the movies I had selected, but I do remember one of them was The Guyver, a barely watchable sci fi movie that I suspect only ever got any attention because Mark Hamill had a minor role in the movie, despite the cover which advertised him as the main character. It was, in other words, the last movie you’d want a girl to see you being associated with, especially a girl who was still probably in the process of getting a first impression of you. The movie all but screamed ‘don’t talk to me. I’m a complete fucking loser. I enjoy shitty movies that don’t really make much sense and represent the end of Mark Hamill’s career.’I tried to weasel my way towards another one of the checkout lanes, but Mcardle stopped me before I could get too far.
“Uh uh. Over there. Let her ring you up.”
“Are you kidding? Do you see what I’m buying?” I held up the copy of The Guyver to make my point. Even the cover of it was hopeless nerdy, and not in the charming way that some people (including myself) can pull off; this cover pretty much said you had more interest in stuff like being alone for the rest of your life and not being involved with women than you did in, say, not being alone and being involved with women.
Mcardle would not be swayed. “Who cares. She’ll probably fucking think it’s cute or something. Just go and get rung up.” He pushed me towards her in a an ungentle way. Reluctantly, I went. She smiled at me and mercifully didn’t comment on my choice of movies, nor did she show any sign of being disgusted with me for what I had purchased. She was just nice to me, she didn’t write her number down on my receipt or wink at me or touch my hand or anything. Maybe she was waiting for me to make the move. Or maybe it was all in Mcardle’s head and I was dumb for going along with it. Either way, nothing ever became of that girl at Circuit City. It was nothing more than a humorous anecdote occasionally brought up by me and Mcardle when making fun of my lack of tact with women.

bookbookbookbook

so a number of people apparently read this and look forward to updates. this is reassuring. i feel sort of bad because i've kind of been neglecting this blog and not posting as much on it as i had initially intended to. but that's what happens i guess.

several times, people have asked how this is "working out". i'm not quite sure how to answer that question. is it a question about the creative process? is it a question about how the book is affecting me as a person? or is it a question about how the book is being perceived by those closest to me. as i said i'm not positive about which question is being asked. so i'll just answer all of them.

the 'creative process', if any really, is going okay. i use the term 'creative process' lightly because i'm not really creating anything; this is a story that has already happened and simply needs to be told. or unearthed from the past like a great rough diamond, to be shined and cut and faceted so it is pleasant to perceive and easy to understand. there is no creating, only revealing. obviously, i cannot recall word for word conversations i had years and years ago, so liberties have been taken to establish and re-create not the letter of these conversations but more the spirit of those conversations. it is not a matter of letting the truth ruin a good story; more so it is using the perfect form of the conversation to tell the story, taking the ideal of what was discussed and presenting that as truth so as to perfectly get across what was going on. and obviously, memories, over time, become something more than reality, so while i will admit that some of the accounts have a semi-fantastic feel to them, they are still true accounts of events that happened in my life. it is not a case of some tucker max-esque phenomenon where i'm simply making wild stories up so fratboys can make lame jokes about it with their friends; instead, it is me writing down and telling you how i remember these events. case in point; i'm sure my first kiss was much less romantic than i portray it, but since we tend to romanticize our first kiss, then too will mine be romanticized. so, when asked what this book is about, i've occasionally used the phrase 'lightly fictionalized' to describe it, because it is just that. it is the highest ideal of my love life so far. plus i use pseudonyms, and because i never really made out with a girl who was really named 'kate romero', it is technically fiction, but a piece of fiction heavily rooted in reality.

how has this book affected me? badly. while i don't really desire to end my life because of it, there have been some very bad moments i've had upon realizing some things because of this book. i won't get into detail, but you can imagine what would happen if you yourself went over your past with the opposite sex with a fine tooth comb and then put down an honest account onto paper. you'd come face to face with some shit you probably wanted to forget. i've been doing a lot of that confrontation over the past few months and it sort of sucks.

my family thinks i've gone completely nuts. i'm sure most of my friends think the same thing as well. oh well.

Why Do I Do What I Do.

I finally finished the section of the book that this excerpt is from. Close friends and family will understand why it was difficult for me.



So that summer was a jumble of paradoxes and contradiction. On one hand, I was miserable that Sue was growing more remote by the day, but on the other, I was having the time of my life. I usually didn’t work until noon or so, so my nights lasted until around three in the morning every night, and it was so much fun I didn’t want it to end. On my days off, I’d usually walk over to Erik’s around noon or so, and we’d then walk down to either Quality Pizza or Joe’s and get a pizza or two each, and then sit around all day eating and waiting for Chuck, at which point we would then stay out til the ungodly hours of the evening. Sometimes, Erik and I would sit out on his roof and heckle the girl who lived across the street. It was my last summer as a kid, because every summer after this would be just another period of time for me, without the thrill of “summertime”. Or so I thought at the time. As summer wound down, the weight of my position in life settled into me. I was going to be a senior in high school in a few weeks. My last year of high school was close at hand. My childhood was drawing to a close. I’m a nostalgic person to a fault on any given day as it is, so at this point I was virtually an emotional wreck as August drew to a close. As a side note, I remember I got into AFI right towards the end of August, when I bought Black Sails In The Sunset. Here was an album that spoke of autumn, and fall, and heartache all in one. The two stand out tracks on that album that remind me so much of that period of time in my life are “The Last Kiss” and “Malleus Malefecirum”, the first because it was about being sad about a girl, and the second lyrically it reminded me of autumn and new beginnings, like graduating high school. So yeah. I was a wreck. And to make things worse there was the bullshit with Sue. I felt like a Ming vase that had been thrown on the ground and then put back together in a piss poor manner with substandard glue: always on the verge of falling apart at the slightest push. I’d invested so much in this relationship, and it felt like everything was simply sliding away out from under me, and nothing I was doing was making it any better. I made a half-hearted attempt at suicide by swallowing a bottle of Tylenol Simply Sleep, but lost my nerve and forced myself to throw it back up moments after swallowing it. I think that was my intent the whole time, because looking back I don’t think I was that far gone that I really wanted to kill myself. After collecting myself, I went and hung out with Erik Gaughran, who, in an uncharacteristic display of compassion, spent the rest of the day and night with me trying to cheer me up, mostly by ordering several pizzas for the two of us to eat while we watched anime and blocks of porno. Weird as that was, it cheered me up in a simple way. But only periodically. Because I was still depressed about everything.
For the most part, (and for the time being) my friends remained mum on the fact that Susan never called me and she never came around anymore. Once, her and I made plans to hang out, and me, Mcardle, Chris, and Chuck drove up to Catty. When we got there, however, Susan was nowhere to be found. Her mom simply said she had gone out and not said where she was going. The four of us stood there in the street outside her house, the awkwardness settled upon us in an almost palpable weight, none of us saying anything. Finally, Mcardle broke the silence with a phrase that has since entered our lexicon:
“Dump the bitch.”
I turned on him, furious for saying something like that, but he stood his ground. I didn’t make any overt threatening movements towards him, like raising a fist, but I’m sure my body language broadcasted imminent violence. But when I looked at him, I saw he was completely serious. This wasn’t his attempt at riling me up. He really meant it. And what’s worse is that Chris and Chuck seemed to be wearing similar expressions that he was; they agreed with him a hundred percent. I told Mcardle that that wasn’t cool, he shouldn’t say something like that, and that she didn’t really mean to ditch me, and he told me it was bullshit. She knew I was coming up there, and she bailed on me. Deliberately. I knew he was right. I knew it was unacceptable. And deep down, I knew I should heed his advice. Every time I walked away from the payphone after not talking to her, some small part of me swore that next time I called there and she wasn’t there, I would tell her mom to tell her that it was over, that I didn’t want to deal with it anymore. A cowardly thing to do, but nonetheless I felt that it would be the right thing to do. Alas, I never did that. Time and time again, I just called there and dealt with the increasingly sinking feeling that not talking to her awoke inside me. If I may paraphrase Office Space: Every day was worse than the last, so every day was the worst day yet. Every morning when I woke up, my first thoughts were of how miserable I was because of her. Every night, I would lie in bed silently praying for something to happen. If things weren’t going to mend between her and I, then I wanted out quickly and as painlessly as possible.
Throughout the summer, there had been threats by the phone company to shut off my parents phone service because my mom was continuously late with paying the phone bill. I helped out as much as I could, giving her as much of my paycheck that I could, but sometime in mid-August, our phone got shut off. My insubstantial daily attempt at contact with Sue was now severed, and all I could do was walk down the block to the pay phone at the corner store and hope she was there when I called. Which, of course, she usually wasn’t. I would call her when I got home from school, and if anybody picked up at all, it was her mom saying that Sue wasn’t there. The depression I experienced during the summer rapidly progressed into something so black and despondent that I don’t think I can do it justice by writing about it. It wasn’t merely rejection or heartache; it was the underscoring of everything I believed in about myself, a questioning of my ability to function as a human being in a world of other human beings. How could I have let this happen to myself? How did I let myself become involved in this? And, furthermore, why was I so depressed over someone like her? My journal entries from the time are difficult to read now, pathetic and sad things that are so transparently hopeless that I wish I could somehow comfort the seventeen-year-old version of myself. I stopped masturbating, believing that God was punishing me for doing so. The mild form of OCD I’d lived with my entire life rapidly swelled into a time consuming monster involving strange and pointless rituals that kept me busy for minutes at a time in various parts of the house. I became something like the emotional equivalent of a vial of C-4, flying off of the handle for apparently no reason at all. And it was just getting worse and worse every day, because every day, when I would walk down to Pal’s Mini-Mart to use the payphone outside of the store, I invested so much hope that today would be the day that Susan would be home, and I would talk to her, and she would realize that not talking to me was stupid and that she should be my girlfriend for real again, and every time I heard that hated answering machine pick up, or her mom picked up, or her sister picked up, or anything that resulted in me not talking to Susan, my hopes, which had for whatever reason been high as heaven, would come crashing down once again and I would be wallowing in a misery that was frightening. I can honestly say that those daily walks down to the phone and back were some of the worst times in my entire life. Few times before or since have I felt so completely hopeless when it comes to the realm of women. Once, as I was walking back, I watched a cat get hit by a car. It was thrown into the gutter, where it lay screaming and yowling until I ran home and got a towel to wrap it’s miserably wrecked body in, and held it until it died a few minutes later. I remember thinking that this was the icing on the cake, that my life couldn’t possibly get any worse than holding a dying cat after yet again being denied a chance to talk to my girlfriend. As I sat there weeping, I felt a hand on my shoulder, and I turned to see a large black man, dressed in stereotypically urban clothing, looking down at me with a mix of pity and fatherly concern. He asked me if I was alright, and all I could do was shake my head. He gave my shoulder a squeeze and told me he was going back inside to call the SPCA to come and get the cat’s body, and then he came outside and sat with me until they arrived. It was horrible.
I felt like someone swimming in a pool and suddenly realizing they’re exhausted, and they can’t make it to the side of the pool to safety, but their feet can’t find the bottom, and it’s becoming increasingly difficult to keep their head above water as horrid panic fills them. Drowning. That’s how I felt. Like I was being pulled under, and the breath was being forced out my lungs. It was awful. Absolutely awful. Another metaphor involving water: as a child, my family would often go to the Jersey shore. Being somewhat afraid of the ocean due to a fear of sharks (and the countless other ways the ocean can kill you) I usually stayed in the tidal shallows, letting waves wash over me and then struggling to pull myself up against the outgoing tide. Once, when I was maybe nine or ten, I was blindsided by a wave that was, in all reality, probably taller than I was at the time. I was knocked off my feet and slammed into the sand, the air rushing out of my lungs. For several horrid seconds, I was pinned against the bottom of the beach under water, unable to surface. I really thought I was going to die. It was absolutely terrifying. When I finally got to the surface and drew a breath, my eyes and throat and nose were on fire from the salt water forced upon me. But the inability to surface and take a breath, that’s what this time in my life with Sue reminded me of. It was a time of panic and depression, of suffocation. And through it all, the self-doubt and the fear continued to build and swell and become unbearable. As the fall progressed and things got worse and worse and worse, I began to wonder if there would ever be an end to it all. I knew, of course, that the end would come when she out and out broke up with me, but I dreaded the how and the why of us breaking up. As bad as it was, I was pretty sure I could deal with just being broken up with at this point. I could not, however, deal with being left for someone else. To think of myself as something that could just be replaced was unbearable. Also, the thought of her physically being with someone else was awful. At night, I pictured her doing things to other guys, going down on them, getting fucked, etc. Essentially, I pictured her doing to other guys (sometimes more than one guy at once; let us not underestimate the power of the human mind and it’s ability to conjure up the worst possible scenario when it comes to an possibly unfaithful boyfriend or girlfriend) what she couldn’t (or wouldn’t) do to me, and that, I’m ashamed to admit, was what I dreaded most of all. Sure, I was afraid of everything I’d mentioned already; the idea that something I’d invested so much in and trusted in would just turn away and shit on everything I cared about, but what really, really dug it’s nails into my gut and twisted was the sick and awful jealousy that ran through me. Part of me assured myself that I was simply seeing the worst possible scenario, and that pessimism was one of my less lovable habits. But another part of me insisted that no, I wasn’t being pessimistic, I was being realistic, and that given time she would prove my worst fears right. I want to tell you that I was just being negative to a fault, and that all this worrying was for nothing, and that in the end Sue proved herself to be worthy of my trust.
But if I did that, it’d make me a liar.
It was simple, really. As the fall progressed, I began to approach a dangerous obsession with the past year. My journal that I kept shows a depressing catalogue of how I felt; every day, it was one year since this or one year since that, and how much I loved her, or how I hoped everything would be okay, or a written prayer to God, along with some offering to appease him. I didn’t realize it at the time, but looking back I was probably suffering from a mild nervous breakdown. I ignored my friends and family, I stopped sleeping through the night, I experienced almost menopausal mood swings (usually from feeling awful to feeling downright abysmal) and my schoolwork began to suffer. What made it worse was the tendency of my friends (mostly Chris and Erik) to begin to think it was okay to make fun of the situation. I don’t think I’ll ever forgive either of them for knowing how badly this was affecting me, and knowing how much pain it was causing me, and yet day in and day out making fun of me for it and seeing how upset they could get me. Of course, when I would flip out on them (and that happened a few times), they would claim that they were just busting my chops and I needed to relax and get a sense of humor. But they were going beyond just busting my chops. This was downright mean, some shit that they would undeniably cry foul against if done to them.
It came to a peak one day in October. I did my daily ritual of walking down to the corner store to use the payphone, except this time, I was thrilled when someone picked up. It was her mom, and I wished it would have been Sue herself, but it was an actual human being as opposed to the answering machine. Alas, she told me that Sue wasn’t there. Just as I started to tell her to tell Sue that I called, I heard a female voice in the background yell “Hey Josh! Stop touching Susan!” Numbly, I hung up the phone, maybe saying goodbye but probably not. Those five words were on a loop in my head, over and over again. I felt my stomach try to kick its contents back up to my throat, and suddenly, I felt lightheaded, as if I were on the verge of fainting. I don’t remember much of the walk home, except I spent it on the brink of tears. It felt like someone had punched me as hard as they could in the stomach, straight back to my spine. I felt swelling in my chest that could’ve been that weird inexplicable feeling one gets right before crying, or, if you have a taste for the melodramatic, it could have also been the heartache trying to escape. Either way, it was difficult to breathe. Sure it’s clichéd, but you know the feeling. There’s no other way to describe it with any justice without straying into cliché territory. I went home, went straight upstairs to my room, and lay in bed for the rest of the day, sobbing my eyes out and asking aloud why this injustice had been allowed to happen. Because that’s what it was: an injustice. A wrongdoing. I feel just as strongly about it now as I did then. It was fucked up an inexcusable for her to not get up and take the phone and explain that, to alleviate my fears. And that made it worse. It was bad enough if she was fooling around with some guy; but it was worse if she wasn’t even going to try and defend herself. Even if she wasn’t actually doing anything, it stands to reason that she would want to try and…clear the air of such unbelief’s. But no. There was no attempt (none I heard anyway) to try and do so. She let me believe what I truly didn’t want to believe. Cold. Without heart. Mean. And the salt in the wound, the real shit in my cut, the cherry on top of it all was that embryonic idea that would plague me throughout my romantic history and still continues to plague me, was that sense that I had somehow let myself down. I had let someone who would do this to me fly under my radar and get past my defenses and get close, get so close, get inside, and nothing raised any flags and now they were too insensitive and cruel to not alleviate me of the fear that they were cheating on me. Of course, the possibility that the reason she hadn’t spoken up was because she actually was cheating on me had occurred, but that provided no relief. Being broken up with for a douche bag was bad enough, but being fucking lied to about it was so much worse. I thought, and I still think, that I was at least owed an honest and straightforward explanation, an apology in the classical sense of the word. I understand that the heart wants what the heart wants, but I also think that there is a simple obligation to own up to what you have done and be fucking honest about things. But like always, I was let down.
So the year went on, autumn into winter. Thanksgiving was approaching, and that Easton High tradition of the senior sleepout soon came up. Every year, before Easton’s traditional Thanksgiving Day football game against Phillipsburg across the river, there is a huge bonfire outside of Easton High School. And the night before the bonfire, the seniors sleep out to guard it. Apparently, back in the day, like, years and years ago, some mischievous students from P-burg snuck across the river and set fire to the woodpile early, and to safeguard the sacred pile Easton seniors began sleeping out to protect it, and it soon became something of a right of passage. Of course, in order to participate in the sleep out, one had to keep up the grades necessary to earn SENIOR PRIVILEGES (yes, when those words were spoken together in this context, they were in all caps. And probably in neon as well.) Senior Privileges was basically a fancy way of saying that you could go off campus for two periods a day for lunch, and was used much in the same way a carrot was dangled in front of a donkey; get good grades, and you get privileges. I could honestly care less about going out for lunch, so that wasn’t much of an incentive for me, but the sleep out was definitely something to be stoked about. So I got my privileges. Me and Erik bought a second hand recliner for the event, which we would end up burning the next night at the bonfire, and Chuck dropped us off at the high school. I remember Chuck was listening to Linkin Park, and the one song whose name escapes me at the moment still reminds me of that night.
The sleep out was a cold and boring affair towards the end. Mostly, I remember just being sad because this was the end of an era. As I mingled with friends in the frigid November air, clustered around makeshift campfires, I could almost hear some ethereal book slowly closing as this chapter of my life was rapidly being written to end. Stef was there of course, but we didn’t say a word to each other. I mostly just hung out with Erik and sometimes Jay, and at one point taught an attractive and popular girl named Cody Buscher how to skank. But mostly, it was just a struggle to stay awake. The cold air seemed to work on me, trying pull my eyelids shut. The temptation to crawl into my tent and wrap myself up for a few hours of sweet oblivious sleep was great, but I overcame it and went through the next day like an extra from Dawn of the Dead; going through the motions of life only through force of habit and with no enthusiasm whatsoever. All I really remember of the day after the sleepout is a constant struggle to stay awake. But enough of the bonfire. Back on track to what you came here to read.
It’s now early December, and I’d venture to say by now my senior year of high school was around a third of the way over. I was now fully and deeply in the grips of what can safely be called a mild prolonged nervous breakdown. My OCD worsened considerably. Simply leaving the house was a half hour long ritual that involved me touching various points of the wall, certain points of the coat rack at the bottom of the stairs of my parents house, and tapping wall frames a set amount of times. Going to bed was a horrid affair, with me praying a set amount of times for things, and starting all over again if I fucked up. I would kiss Sue’s picture goodnight, and if I didn’t would experience a panicked “what if” moment. Til this day, when going up or down stairs, I still skip the second stair. This can be traced back to this time in my life. I would disappear for days at a time, ignoring calls from friends and barely speaking to my family. In an anecdote often recalled by my friends, I once walked home from the 25th Street Burger King, a full three miles, for no good reason. I simply got up and walked out. There had been no tension between my friends and me; I simply decided to walk home. It was on a lunch hour with McArdle that I was introduced to a band that would come to represent everything negative that I felt about humanity and the world as a whole, a band whose music perfectly embodied how I felt almost all the time but especially that time. That band was Shai Hulud. I remember Andrew putting on “Set Your Body Ablaze” for the first time and feeling my knees go weak and my arms break out into goosebumps. This. Was. Perfect. Reading the lyrics along with the song almost felt like I was reading something that I myself had written. It was that dead on to how I felt. It was eerie. It was magnificent. It went deeper than that, though. I don’t think that my liking of this band sprung from the fertile soil of the shittiness of my life at the time; I think that no matter how good or bad things were for me at the time I would have fallen in love with them. It was just a connection with their music on a level that was a lot deeper than just girls and heartache; it was more profound than that. It reached my deepest feelings on humanity, the frustration and disappointment with how people treat each other. Shai Hulud remain probably in my top three favorite bands even today; I have a line from that first song tattooed across my chest and still feel a thrill whenever I see them live. That’s actually putting it lightly; usually after seeing them I can’t speak from screaming the whole time and feel like I’d been jumped the next morning from going absolutely apeshit the whole time. I suppose I owe them a great deal. Since that first listening, they’ve gotten me through many, many hard times in life. If not for them, I don’t believe I would be nearly the same person as I am today, the fine young misanthrope whose words you are reading. So yeah. Thank them for that if you get the chance.
I would drift through school speaking only when necessary, avoiding contact with my friends, probably causing my teacher s a great amount of concern. I know for a fact my drama teacher, the lovely Miss Trimble, was worried about me, as she had noticed my behavior towards other students in Drama Club was becoming strained and at times openly hostile. I ran Drama Club less like a drama club and more like forced labor camp. Instead of lead director and writer, I was something like a Nazi commander barking orders and having zero patience with any dissent or mistake whatsoever. In November, Miss Trimble took me aside and asked me if everything was okay. Somehow, I managed the lie. But she knew, I think. She had picked up on my tension with Sarah, which wasn’t entirely that dissimilar from my problem with Susan. You’d have to be an idiot to interact with me for more than an hour and not know that there was something dreadfully wrong and ill within me. I practically radiated melancholy and sadness. The low point came one day before Drama Club when I called Sue from the pay phone in the school lobby, and her mom picked up. She apologized for how her daughter was acting and said she had spoken to her about it, and she said that maybe I should just give it a rest, because she didn’t want to see me get hurt. Me? Get hurt? I wanted to somehow climb through the phone and smash her in the face with the receiver on her end. I’ve already been hurt, you fucking idiot. You’re asshole of a daughter has practically driven me off the fucking deep end, my friends don’t enjoy my company anymore, I’ve stopped sleeping more than two or three hours a night, and you think it can get worse? Fuck you. But all I did was mumble some weird form of gratitude and hang up. The fact that her mom had said something to me about it had cemented this unpleasant situation in reality. If her parents saw what was going on, it must be bad. Real bad. The rest of that day was a typical me being an asshole at Drama Club, and I’m sure lots of people wondered what was wrong. Things went on that way for a while. But there’s a saying, which also happens to be a line from one of the greatest songs ever: it’s always darkest before the dawn. Of course, this dawn wasn’t so much as bright as something pretending to be bright, like the sick and rotted light of a mushroom as compared to the clean light of a spring day. Either way, I would soon be sprung from the prison I’d been in for almost four months. Or, in a much more accurate image and metaphor, be thrown out of the frying pan and into the fire.
I first heard of the Winter Dance from Jay one day in early December in English class. He was talking about it to our friend Mark, and he himself was debating on whether or not to go. He asked me what I thought, and I told him it didn’t really matter to me what he did, and that he should just see what his girlfriend wanted to do. He thought this was probably a fine idea. Then:
“Lore, why don’t you go to the dance with us?”
I sort of laughed in his face then. Did he really think I was that pathetic I would go to the dance with him and Erin as some sort of sad third wheel? Maybe this was Jay’s attempt at being nice, or maybe it was he just being a classic asshole.
“I dunno dude. I-(have a girlfriend)-don’t have a date. It would just be weird if it were you, Erin, and me.”
Jay made a face that informed me that he thought finding a date for me would ridiculously easy and was a chump for thinking otherwise. “Well then get a fucking date.”
He also apparently didn’t know that not all of us are blessed with the Jay Frankett Knockout Combination: stunning good looks and a charm that all but sprayed out of him in every direction.
“I dunno. I’m not good at talking to girls, and even if I was, I don’t know who I would take. “
Jay gestured to the girl sitting a few seats ahead of us, whose back was mercifully turned and hopefully wasn’t listening to any of this.
“Take Melissa. I’m sure she would go with you.”
With this, Melissa turned around in her seat. Although she plays only a minor role in this story, I’ll try and give her a fair representation. Melissa Chaughran was new to Easton that year, although she had dated Klint the previous year so we all kind of knew her. She was a really cool girl and super cute. She had deep, glossy black hair that seemed to shimmer whenever she turned her head and spilled over her shoulders like rich oil, large dark eyes that always held a hint of good humor, and a mouth that seemed perfectly wide for a stunning smile, a smile that seemed to be a laugh frozen in time. She was, in short, a classically pretty girl and not at all the type of girl that I thought would go for me. I felt a film of sweat break out on my forehead. Jay had thrown me under the bus. She would demand to know why we were talking about her, and when one of us explained, she would either A) laugh in my face about it and continue laughing until she passed out, or B) vomit. I braced myself for the seemingly inevitable.
“Where would I go with you?” she asked, her curiosity sheathed with a façade of bitter annoyance.
I glanced at Jay, who gave me a brief “fuck it and go for it” look, so I went for it.
“I was wondering if you wanted to go to the dance with me. The Winter dance.” Then, added on at the end in a weird attempt to reassure her: “It would be a double date with Jay and his girlfriend.”
I could almost hear the gears of her mind mulling it over. Not in the “do I reeeeally want to do this?” way, but almost in a “do I have the guts to say yes?” way. Maybe I’m looking to deep into things and she did just feel bad for me and only agreed to go with me because of that pity. Or maybe she felt she was doing me a huge favor. Either way, she agreed to go. I was stoked. Beyond stoked. I was so happy that she had said yes that, for a mercilessly brief moment, all my troubles with Sue were forgotten. This dance was going to be awesome.
That night, I lay in bed and considered breaking up with Sue so I wouldn’t go to this dance with an irrational guilt draped over my shoulders like a heavy rancid shawl. I even went as far as to write out a rambling and indirect letter about how I felt she didn’t care about me as much as I cared about her, and that I didn’t think it was fair to her for me to continue in this relationship when I felt she would be happier not being in it. Somehow, the letter carried an apologetic tone, as if I were the one who had been the shitheel for the past few months and not the other way around. The discovery of that letter a few months back at my parent’s house was one of the things that spurned on the writing of this book. It provided one of several kernels that the idea for this book is built on. But as you can tell, I never sent the letter. I think part of me was hoping for the better, that eventually Sue and I would get back together, but I can honestly say that there was another part of me, a more honest, more selfish, and more rational part that simply didn’t care if she read that letter and carried within itself and thus me as a whole a complete and total disregard for her feelings. Fuck her if she got upset over me going to the dance. Who gave a shit. She didn’t feel feelings. She didn’t have a heart. She’d proved it over the last few months by completely ignoring me and probably hooking up with some dipshit she worked with. So fuck her. Let her be in Catty on some shitty ivory tower, thinking she was better than me. While she was hanging out with lame fat girls and stupid assholes from Weis, I would be dancing with a cute girl and hanging out with my friends.
Unfortunately, my night of logical bravado was just that: a single night. I soon felt horribly guilty about asking Melissa to the dance, and the idea of calling it off soon entered into my mind. I kept thinking about Susan finding out and crying, and, gloriously stupid asshole that I was, I felt bad for this possible future version of her. However, I stayed on course with Melissa and kept my plans for the time being. Plans were made for before the dance (the four of us would get together for dinner) and after the dance (hotel at the beach, I think. Or something.) Melissa was getting really excited about it. More and more it was all she would talk about. I bought our tickets, and maybe, I’m not quite sure, we began coordinating our suit and dress colors for the evening. A dim spark of hope flickered on in my mind: maybe we might make out afterwards. Looking back, making out with a girl really isn’t much, but at the time the thought of making out with a new girl was something akin to how Chase Utley felt this past year when the Phillies won the Series: a gigantic triumph. No longer would I bear the shame of having under my belt only one girl that I’d really truly made out with. Finally, I could kiss a girl who knew how to kiss (and didn’t have an embarrassing pseudo-mustache). My excitement was a dull hot stone in the pit of my stomach. Things were getting better and better. I began to mull over once again the idea of just calling Sue and leaving her a message on her answering machine telling her to fuck off. This idea became deadly attractive and gained, in my mind, a seductive logic. Or not so seductive, because that would imply that it wasn’t a good idea but seemed like one. Hell, breaking up with her was a great idea, probably the best idea I’d had the whole time we were together. So, a week before the dance, I worked up the stuff to call her and break it off. I guess I should be commended for doing the honest thing and having the good intent of breaking up with her, but nonetheless, I really, really wish I hadn’t called her that day.
She picked up after the second or third ring, her voice nasally and thick with illness. I was so surprised at hearing her voice that I didn’t know what to do at first.
“Susan?” I said, shocked into stupidity and only able to really say her name.
“Yeah?” she replied. It sounded as if she were well into having a really bad cold.
“Hey. It’s…it’s Justin.”
“Yeah I saw on the caller ID it was a payphone.”
That threw me for a curve. Up until now I had assumed she’d picked up as a mistake, or for some other reason other than knowing it was me. But now, knowing that she had known it was me calling and picked up nonetheless had me wondering. The immediate future suddenly branched out into two possibilities. First: she had seen it was a pay phone from Easton calling, knew it was me, and picked up with the intent of finally ending things and thus putting this relationship out to pasture before it deteriated into something even worse before just dissolving completely into an unacknowledged nothingness. Essentially, she was doing this to end the relationship with dignity. Which I had prepared myself for, I think. Or, she had picked up with the intention of mending things with and putting this relationship back on track, which I had also mentally readied myself for, but was also, I think, deep down not really excited for at all. I had called to try and at least initiate the chain of events that would result in this sad thing with her no longer existing. But now I didn’t really know what to do. So I just talked.
“How’ve you been?” I asked, hating how lame and meek my voice sounded, both from my own mouth and through the dim electronic echo of the cheap phone earpiece. It was a stupid and pathetic voice, almost mewling.
“Eh. Good I guess. I’ve been really sick lately, and I stayed home from school today, but other than that, I guess I can’t really complain.”
Some irrational and blind urge grabbed the wheel of my mouth just then, some idiot thing inside of me that dropped out of nowhere like lightning on a clear day to take the reins and drive me into ruin: “Want me to bring you up some soup or something?” I heard myself say. Inwardly, I smacked myself in the face for saying such a stupid thing. I braced myself for the anticipated flood of laughter from the other end of the line, at which point I would drop the phone and walk away. But that didn’t happen. Instead:
“Um…yeah sure. That would be really nice.”
Disbelief. “Really? You-you really would like me to come up and bring you soup?”
She laughed a little bit, the laugh made ragged and rattly by the cold. “Yeah I would. We haven’t seen each other in a while, and soup would probably hit the spot right now.”
“Um, when…when would be good for you to…to get together?” I felt now the way I felt (and still feel) when playing videogames and I get to a particularly hard part: even though you know it’s just a game, suddenly, you actually feel as if you are really in a life or death situation, and every action must be chosen with the utmost amount of care. Likewise, now I felt that, with success in sight, every word must be carefully selected in order to not ruin this fragile reconciliation that her and I were starting to work on.
“I’m not doing anything tonight, if you want to come up.”
Hope and other good things thrilled through me. “That sounds like it would be great. That would be really great.” Silence hung between us for a second. “Oh…yeah. Um…what kind of soup do you like?”
She laughed again. “Chicken noodle would be fine.”
“Chicken noodle it is!” We said our goodbyes, and hung up, and I walked home, “happy” for the first time in months, not knowing that freedom and a path that would have bypassed months more of bullshit had just been closed down to me, and that I was yet again walking down a road that I didn’t really want to talk down.
I felt like a convict who, a minute before midnight, receives a pardoning call from the governor. My mom agreed to give me a ride up to Catty for a few hours (I didn’t get my driver’s license until after college. Truly, I am a sad person.) and everything was looking good. We stopped at a Giant on the way up so I could grab a can of chicken noodle soup. I don’t remember the drive up, except that I was so excited I could barely sit still. It had been a few months since I’d traveled this way, the last time of course being when she invited me up there, and when McArdle, Chuck, Chris, and myself made the journey, she had gone out with her friends instead. The possibility that this would be the same had occurred to me, but I was stupidly hopeful, wanting this to be a new beginning for the two of us, wanting to not even address why she had ignored me and done all of those shitty things, just wanting to forge ahead and put it behind us. Of course, there still was the chance that she would break up with me when I got there and only wanted me to come up so she could do it in person. Looking back I realize that was completely out of character for her, because she was too gutless and nonconfrontational to do something like that and had demonstrated she preferred letting a relationship die a slow death rather than honorably and honestly ending it. But I still went up there.
I’ll spare you the nitty gritty of it all. I won’t get into the details of how we ‘re-connected’. Suffice to say, as the two of us sat in her basement, watching some stupid movie, she started crying and apologizing for what she did to me. She said she had no right to act like that and that she felt horrible for treating me the way she did. I bore all of this stoically, wondering if I should tell her about the hell she had put me through. I decided not to, and instead took a trite and mean pleasure at watching her sob in remorse over her own actions. I feel no regret of savoring this show of remorse; I won’t apologize for it, and I won’t lie. Listening to her admit that she was wrong and that she felt awful for what she had done gave me a great deal of pleasure. It felt wonderful to see the person responsible for my pain feeling a small piece of that pain themselves. I told myself at the time that I was only basking momentarily in such gloating behavior, and that once she got it out of her system, her and I could move on with our relationship. But the truth is I liked the fact that she was torn up about what she had done. If I could go back in time, I wouldn’t comfort her. I would do the exact same thing that I had done: nothing.

loooong overdue for an update.

so i apologize to the two people who read this blog. i'm still writing the book, and i will put something up in the next few days. stay tuned!

wrong from the beginning.

it's been awhile since there was an update, but here it is. those of you who know me can probably pick up on who this is within a few lines from the beginning. enjoy.

There’s a saying of sorts: A butterfly flaps its wings in Tokyo, and there’s a storm in California. In other words, causality has a nasty way of creating something big and dramatic out of the entirely forgettable. Bad things may usually happen in threes, but, more often that not, bad things have the frustrating habit of seemingly reproducing geometrically. But it’s not often that you can go through something bad, and in the aftermath be able to trace back through the line of causes that led you to where you are presently. In the case of the tale I’m about to tell you, I can. Like Louis Creed, the ill-fated protagonist of Pet Semetary looking back over the series of events that led to his son getting run down by a Mack truck, I look back over the course of my sophomore year of high school at the seemingly innocent events that took place, falling into place like malevolent dominos, each one in itself insignificant but together forming an insidious whole that would emerge early on in my junior year, and I wonder if at any point I realized what was going on. I mean, I don’t think that there was any sort of pre-arranged fatalistic bullshit going on, but looking back now, there were definitely some signs that something was going to happen. It was like a storm gathering unseen and unfelt in the distance, and you have no idea it’s there until the rain is pouring down around you. That’s how it felt with Susan Roth, like I was caught in some infernal variation of a Rube Goldberg machine that ended with me, years later, asking myself how the fuck I got myself into something so transparently…wrong for me.
I confess to some difficulty when it comes to introducing this next chapter, because I find it vastly uncomfortable writing about. Doing so has brought to the surface emotions that, while I hadn’t fooled myself into believing I’d done away with entirely, I hoped that they’d been put away for a while to mellow, to cool, to soften the edges. Alas, time has done nothing to soften anything; on the subject of this next girl, my heart is as hard as ever. I am truly and honestly not looking forward to writing about this, out of something equal parts embarrassment, fear, and disgust with myself. She represents the worst of me, the desperate for anything, needed to be loved by anyone cowardice that occasionally guides me down the worst possible path in a situation with a woman. Because of her, I look back on my first semi-sexual encounter with nothing of the fondness that most people tend to do; instead, I look back on it as I would if I’d suddenly shit my pants in the middle of class in high school; there is a tremendous sense of shame and disgust there. It is her fault that, according to some people, I experienced a not so mild nervous breakdown my senior year of high school. This relationship, and it’s ensuing collapse provided me with nothing of value. There was no Pyrric victory, no hero’s trial of sorts. I cannot tell you that “oh, sure, things went to hell and I got royally fucked but at least…” No. There is no “at least”. This wasn’t a learning experience where some valuable bit of knowledge was gained at the cost of having my heart broken. There was nothing. This relationship and break-up made no sense whatsoever and thus I got nothing out of it at all. All the suffering and bullshit I went through was without value and for nothing. Even now, almost eight years after it is all over, still, when I think of her, I become angry, with both her and myself. At myself for allowing myself to become involved with such a lunatic, and her for myriad tiny and not so tiny offenses. If Sarah hadn’t already inadvertently planted the seed of my present discontent with women, Susan would have. However, since that seed was already there when her and I started dating, she more than made up for it by watering that seed liberally until it was a thriving parasitic shit of a thing. What I had endured through my crush on Sarah was the most I’d felt when it came to heartache and worrying and all of that mess, but Susan showed me that I knew as much about real heartache and strife as my thirteen year cousin knows about Rousseau’s theory of the noble savage: next to nothing. I thought that I’d found something to call my own after months of being denied a chance with Sarah. I thought that I could “finally” be happy. But, to paraphrase the great New Jersey hardcore band Turning Point: what she offered wasn’t love, just misery.
But it didn’t start out bad. It never does. It actually started out quite innocently and totally free of any indication of the hell that it would soon lead me to. It started out, as these things sometimes do, as a coincidental meeting in a mundane setting; in this case, in my sophomore year of high school in biology class.
The teacher for that class was Mr. Evans, a youngish teacher who made class a pleasure to go to. I’d first had him in seventh grade, when, halfway through the year, our teacher Mr. Dunbar suffered a heart attack and had to be replaced. We had a series of substitutes, and then one day, our principal brought a fresh out of college greenhorn looking guy, not much more than a kid himself, to watch our class. He wasn’t dressed like most teachers; instead of being smartly dressed in a button down shirt and dress pants, he wore Chuck Taylors, jeans, and a Misfits t-shirt with the huge Crimson Ghost face on the front. Now that I look back on it, that may have been my first exposure to the Misfits. He sat there, watching us, occasionally taking notes, and a week later he was teaching. I liked him right off the bat. Mr. Evans was the type of teacher who understood that kids weren’t going to learn if you talked down to them, because he was still young enough to remember what it was like to have pompous and aloof teachers who spoke to you as if they were teaching semi-intelligent monkeys. There was none of that in Mr. Evans’ manner. I’m sure if it were allowed, he would have had us call him Brian. He was that cool. He didn’t make class boring, but nor did he pander to those awful stereotypes that a lot of liberal teachers fall prey to. He didn’t talk “street” to us, he was by the book, and he was forceful when it came to disciplinarian action. But the good part was that that was almost never necessary. Kids listened to him. He had nicknames for all of us; mine, which he remembered years after giving it to me when I had him once again in high school, was “Juice”. It felt wonderful being called that. It was like a secret name, something a Gypsy would call me. He made learning about the regenerative qualities of planarian fun. Somehow, he made me interested in hemoglobin and it’s role in the transport of oxygen. When it came to learning about the relationship of predator and prey, he actually borrowed a huge reticulated python from a local game preserve and then, as we watched, fed it a rat. I couldn’t watch, of course, as I was incredibly squeamish about such things, but I remember hearing the smack! As the huge snake struck out in that freakish explosion of energy and wound itself around the hapless rat, squeezing the life out of it. It was from Mr. Evans that I learned constrictors a) didn’t crush the bones of their prey, but instead squeezed so hard that they prey couldn’t breathe and essentially strangled to death, b) only squeezed when the prey exhaled, c) could unhinge their jaws and open their mouths several times wider than their bodies to take in prey if need be, and finally, d) had rudimentary legs, tiny spur-like things on the sides of their bodies. See? I told you he was a great teacher. I couldn’t get enough. He had passion for what he was teaching, even if it was something as mundane as biology. And he had a sense of humor about himself. Once, he said “orgasms” instead of “organisms”, and, even though most of us had no idea what an orgasm was, there were small titters of laughter from the class. Now, most teachers might shush the class harshly, letting their embarrassment get the best of them. Mr. Evans blushed furiously, smiled an aw gee type smile, and quietly asked us to not tell our parents that he’d slipped up like that. He was like Winston Wolf from Pulp Fiction: totally fucking cool. So I was hugely excited when I saw my schedule in the mail for my sophomore year. I had no idea he’d moved up to the high school, and was thrilled to see I’d have a class with him. I was also excited to yet again have a class with Mr. Goldstein, a history teacher who I’d had in one form or another since eighth grade. I won’t write much about Mr. Goldstein, but I will say that, in my entire primary education, he was probably my favorite teacher out of all of them. But I’ve gone off topic, sort of. Back to writing about something I don’t want to talk about, but for the sake of honesty and a good story, I’m going to. As I said, it was in Mr. Evans’ class that I first met a girl who would affectively change me in huge and terrible ways.
One day in the fall, not long after classes started, I came to class a little early, and the only people in the room were Mr. Evans and some girl. He gave me a casual ‘Hey Juice what’s up.’ and then went back to talking to this new girl. I hardly paid her any attention, as at that point, I had no idea who she was. She could’ve been a student from one of his previous classes for all I knew. It was a non-issue at the moment. Class starts, and Mr. Evans announces we have a new student in the class. He gestures towards the new girl, who at this point was now sitting behind me. Her name was Susan Roth, a name that I would literally come to hate in the years to come. She would be the first girl I’d ever really kiss, the first girl I’d be involved with sexually, and the first girl to really, really fuck me over. But at that moment in the beginning, I knew none of that. To me, she was just a plain looking, on the pleasant side of average girl who was new to our school. She smiled shyly at the rest of us and gave a little wave to the class. I looked at my friend Jeff, who sat a few seats down from her, and we exchanged a brief look-she’s okay-and then I turned back around to face the front of the room. And if it weren’t for Sarah later that day, Susan would have probably remained as just a new girl in one of my classes, someone I would have forgotten about eventually. But no. Nothing is that easy, and anything that can potentially fuck us does so if it can. This could, and it did. Badly.
Later that day, Sarah told me how she had made a new friend at lunch. There was a new girl in the cafeteria, sitting by herself, and Sarah in some flash of compassion, decided that she was going to reach out towards that new girl and take her under wing, and hopefully by doing so would bring her into our little crew. I don’t know why she did this. Maybe she felt some sort of obligation to do the right thing and not let this pitiful looking girl sit by herself. Maybe she felt bad for her. Or maybe she’d just seen Clueless one too many times and was just acting out a part from that movie. Who knows what mechanics are behind such awful destinies? For whatever reason, Sarah began talking to this new girl (who, if you couldn’t figure it out, was Susan) and suggested she come sit at their table. I believe that their lunchtime gang consisted of Matt, Chuck, Casey, and this kid Bryan Linton who Matt and I would later be in a band with. Sarah was glowing while telling me about her act of kindness. Hearing her talk about it, you would’ve thought she’d done something as meaningful and life changing as donating a kidney or sold all of her belongings and given the money to charity, instead of just inviting a new student into her little clique. But that’s just how Sarah was. Sincere or not, she often did things such as this, apparently entirely out of kindness, so I wasn’t all that surprised when she told me what she had done. Nor was I entirely surprised that the girl she had talked to was Susan.
The next day, in those few minutes before class started, I decided to talk to this new girl Susan, just to get to know her, since she would probably be around from now on. I turned around to face her.
“Hey.” I said, figuring that the simplest way to say hi was the best.
She smiled shyly, almost nervously, and looked around briefly, as if not sure that I was talking to her. “Um…hey.” she replied quietly.
“How’s going to Easton working out for you?”
She was almost blushing now, and kind of sliding down into her seat, as if her desire to avoid contact with other people was physically manifesting itself in her demeanor. “Um…it’s good, I guess.”
“Where’d you to school before this?”
“Whitehall.”
Jesus, this was like pulling teeth. The hell with taking my time to get to know her. “Did you talk to a girl named Sarah yesterday?”
She smiled, relieved that I wasn’t just some random weirdo trying to sketch her out. “Yeah. She came up to me at lunch yesterday and said I should sit with her and her friends. She’s nice.”
“Yeah. You’re telling me. I’m Justin, by the way.”
“Hi, Justin. I’m Susan. My friends call me Sue though.”
“Well, it’s nice to officially meet you, Sue.”
“And it’s nice to meet you, Justin.”
And there it was. For want of a nail, a rider was lost, and so on and so forth, world without end, amen.
Susan and I soon became friends. She was easy to talk to and fun to be around. She was quiet, sure, but this wasn’t a bad thing because she was a great listener. She was, however, a tad bit immature in what would become an infuriating way. I remember one time in a study hall; she was showing me a notebook she kept full of pictures of her friends back in Whitehall. It looked like something someone out of the Babysitters Club would keep. The notebook was crammed with of photos of her and her friends posing in their stupid teenage ways: quotes about living, laughing, and loving; pictures of various teen idols cut out from teeny bop magazines; pictures of cartoon characters, particularly Elmo from Sesame Street; and assorted symbols of the New York Yankees, who were her favorite baseball team. Even then, I was a little put off by this. Nothing bothered me more than typical teenage girl activities. Braces, kissy faces, being friends forever, slumber parties, gabbing about boys, chocolate, Elmo, and singing and dancing to scenes from movies like Empire Records. I wanted none of it and hated all of it. But Susan was too nice to point this out to, and besides, it didn’t matter to me. I wasn’t really affected by her weird obsession with little kid bullshit. Although, as I said, it kind of bothered me, because it wasn’t your average high school girl trying to be a cute little girl thing; that was bad enough, but Susan’s sort of genuine obsession was somewhat more unsettling. She wasn’t acting like a high school age girl being trendy and claiming to like things like this. She seemed to actually be all about this stuff. Her favorite musical group was the fucking Backstreet Boys, for chrissake. But Sarah acted the same way, albeit not in the creepy genuine sort of way, so I guess that’s probably why they got along so good in the beginning.
Susan was sort of like Sarah’s protégé, the Darth Vader to her Emperor. I remember Sarah talking to me about how we should make Susan ‘more punk’ by getting her into ‘our’ music and style of dress. So overnight, she started wearing Converse All Stars and baggy jeans. She went with Sarah everywhere. Literally. She even started dating the best friend of Sarah’s boyfriend, a skinny kid from Jersey named Travis Tirlindon who would later DJ under the name DJ Tindy. Her and Sarah soon had dozens of stupid little inside jokes, and apparently they had one for every situation. It was somewhat annoying, in that I hated when people did stuff like that just to make themselves feel important and better than everyone else.
Susan was a good listener, as I said. As the year wore on, we developed a weird sort of friendship that almost movie like in quality. She was the best friend of the girl I was hopelessly in love with, and once said it was a shame that Sarah didn’t date me, cause I was a really nice guy. Or something like that. I suspect she may have had a crush on me for a while before we actually started dating, but I simply didn’t want to see it. As I mentioned, her and I were supposed to go to some dance, but that fell through and I suppose only really delayed the inevitable. But anyway, she listened. She listened to me complain, and whine and bitch about the unfairness of Sarah not dating me, and everything. She listened to me about everything. She was always there for me. The summer after our sophomore year, a few months before we started dating, she made it a point to hang out with me as often as possible, just to take my mind off of Sarah. It felt nice to know that there was someone there that would listen to me gripe about completely pointless shit. She never took sides. And, most importantly, she kept her mouth shut about what I’d told her, or so I thought at the time. I would later find out she ran her mouth like nobody’s business about everything, but for some reason, what I told her about Sarah remained, for the most part, a secret. Maybe she was already starting to have feelings for me, although I doubt it, but maybe, just maybe, some idiot sense of self-preservation was making her her bypass her normal chatty tendencies to keep from Sarah what I had said to her. But again, I doubt it. It was probably just a weird quirk that made her remain silent on it all.
The rest of the school was largely unremarkable. Like I said in the earlier chapter, Sarah and Josh broke up, and got back together, and broke up again and again. When she cheated on her boyfriend, Susan was one of the few people who stuck by her, and this sort of cemented the bond between the two of them, and further between her and I, because we both felt that although Sara had made a mistake, she wasn’t a bad person and shouldn’t be treated as such. Granted, my dedication to Sarah was more so out of self-interest in which I quietly smoothed over any rough feelings I had for her just to make myself look like the caring and sympathetic male friend who is potentially something more, while Susan actually did care about her and her desire to stand by her no matter was actually rooted in a real loyalty, not vicious selfishness dressed up as a genuine sense of caring.
So the summer came around, and school let out, and I saw Susan a handful of times over vacation. One time, her and Sarah came to visit me at Bushkill Park, and I got in trouble for not only letting them on a ride for free, but for letting them on a ride designed for children for free. I’d let them ride the piece of shit, ought to be condemned ride called “The Kiddie Coaster”. Both of them were barely able to squeeze into the ride cars, and the safety bars (which didn’t do jack shit anyway) wouldn’t even fit over their knees. I let the ride go around once before I saw my manager scowling at me from across the park. I quickly turned the ride off, hurriedly rushed them off, told them I’d see them later, and then tried to avoid looking at my manager until she came over and told me, in a tone that sounded as if she were embarrassed for me, that I wasn’t to let my friends on kiddie rides. That was that. I went to South Carolina later on, and, as I said, while I was there, Sarah and Matt ended up making out a few times, and that they were probably going to end up dating. Susan told me this in the way you tell someone something that you don’t want to tell them, but you think them knowing from one of their friends I preferable to them finding out on their own. She genuinely felt bad, it seemed. She’d found out not because Sarah had told her, but because her and Casey had been hanging out and decided to spy on the two of them one night when night when Matt was leaving her house. I’d later find out that Sarah was really pissed off that Susan had spied on her, and even more pissed off that she was telling people about her and Matt. She’d deliberately avoided telling Susan what was going on, because she felt Susan would tell everyone. Which to me was strange, because I’d always felt that she, Susan, could be trusted with keeping secrets and wasn’t the type to run her mouth. But apparently, she was that type. It was just another facet of her underlying lack of maturity. While most people our age had the common sense and tact to keep our mouths shut about certain things, Susan didn’t really have that. She was, in truth, the type of girl who, if a secret were told to her, would wait until they got home, and then once they were safely behind doors would call or simply tell everyone they knew, because they just couldn’t keep secrets. Her lack of an ability to keep secrets was just many parts of her that were woefully underdeveloped. I would come to know, later, many aspects of her that were like that.
I came back from South Carolina, and it was then that Susan and I began hanging out in earnest. There were only a few more weeks before school was in session again, and it really feels like her and I hung out every day. I remember the first…pang of affection, I guess you could say, that I had for her came when one day, I was simply thinking about how different some people look with different hairstyles. With Susan, I wondered how she would look with her hair straightened, and I realized she would probably be pretty cute. A few days later, her and I were, for some reason, down by Riverside Park, and we were laughing about something when, out of the blue, I just thought What would it be like if Susan and I ended up dating? The idea had a weird movie-like quality to it, and admittedly, it did feel like something out of a movie. It felt right in an uncontrollable way, almost as if I was being guided towards the inevitable conclusion of dating her. I thought about it often in the next few days, and just how perfect it seemed to be. Keep in mind, at this point, it was just some kind of weird thought experiment for me. I didn’t really think that anything would ever come of it. It was just something…nice to think about. I won’t quite say ‘fantasize’ because of the obvious overtones that such a word has, but truth be told, it really wasn’t far off. I just kept it to myself and never really discussed it with anyone, because I didn’t think it was really that big of deal, and because I knew what the ramifications with Chuck would be like. Not that I thought Chuck had any sort of claim to Susan just because he had a crush on her, or anything as stupidly sexist as that. It was just a simple adverse reaction to doing something that I thought would hurt my friend’s feelings. Soon, however, I realized that it wasn’t just an idle fantasy. Each day, thoughts of Susan crept into my way of thinking with increasing ease and frequency. It would happen in the most freakish and damnably convenient ways. I could be thinking of something as mundane as, I don’t know, the ingredients to pancakes, and somehow, my thoughts would follow a path that would lead to Susan in some way or another. I wasn’t an idiot, and I began to suspect that I might have something of a crush on her. Which, even in my early, purely analytical stage of this crush, I supposed was entirely natural. She was, after all, someone who knew a lot about me, someone I obviously trusted enough to open up to, someone who cared about me enough to stand by me whenever I was feeling low and terrible. She was somewhat attractive, in a criminally average way. Later, one of my friends would describe her as ‘homely’, something that offended me, partly because of his intent to get under my skin, and partly because it was true. Not in the sense that she was ugly, but more so that she was…simple, I guess. Just pleasant enough to be somewhat attractive, but nothing too grandiose. And this isn’t just the bitter and biased hindsight speaking. Even throughout our relationship, I never really let myself believe she was anything more than ‘ok’ when it came to looks. Somehow, I kidded myself that she made up for it in her personality, which is the true testament to how fucking gone I must’ve been. Because I really do believe that, had I not been so hopelessly and stupidly in love with Sarah, I never would’ve been in the state of mind to allow myself to develop any sort of feelings for Susan, be they genuine or just redirected from Sarah. I was like a patient suffering from AIDS dying of something simple like the common cold; I was so distraught over Sarah, so miserable and desperate for anything even remotely resembling love, that I saw some tiny theoretical spark in Susan and nourished that spark in myself, justified it, encouraged it, and fanned it until it was no longer just a theoretical idea but a real thing. I don’t think I made myself fall in love with her, because there was something tiny there, but no more than the base attraction that all men have for all of their female friends who aren’t criminally unattractive. In this case, I just decided to take that tiny and default sense of attraction and inflate it into something monstrous. That’s all it was, and that’s why it lasted so long, really. But I digress.
I realized by the beginning of September that I did indeed have a crush on her. On September 12th, 1999, I got fed up of all the stupid shit at Bushkill Park, and Chuck and I simply walked off the job. It was in the morning, and we were both assigned to rides we didn’t want to work (me to the Tilt-A-Whirl, he to the Bumper Cars) and we both just had enough. It was similar to Michael Douglas losing it in Falling Down, only instead of going on a rampage of righteous vengeance that culminated in Robert Duvall shooting us, we bid the crazy old racist guy who ran the Haunted Pretzel farewell and walked out of the back entrance. Our walk home was one of both celebration and fear, as we were happy to finally be free of the bullshit baggage of Bushkill Park, but at the same time fearful that, at any second, our boss, Balloons the Clown, would drive by us, see us walking when we were supposed to be at work, and get out of his car, in full clown makeup, and begin screaming at us. We made it home though, and while Chuck’s mom flipped out on him and made him go back and ask for his job back, my parents merely told me that I didn’t have to go back unless they called me and offered me my job back. So instead of having to work a shitty job that day, I called Susan to see what she was doing.