Dumb-as-Fuck

My choir career lasted until semester’s end. Despite that beautiful note, the beautiful people on those tiers scared the shit out of me. I wasn’t up to their dedication, their vocal aptitude, or, especially, their breath control. Even worse, I was dumb-as-fucking as if trying to make up for lost time. In less than three months, I managed to piss off most of the school, starting with the choir director.

Dumb-as-fuck scene 1: the connecting hallway between the music department, with its professional-grade auditorium, and the main building, wherein lay the office, the teacher’s lounge, and all non-music classrooms. My BFF was trying to persuade me to play hooky with her, just this once.

She was adept at skipping class, but I didn’t have the nerve. I’d avoided breaking all rules for seventeen years, and the mere thought of getting caught doing something my mother always bragged about doing regularly made my shell shake.

“We’ll get caught!” I hedged.

“No, we won’t!” she insisted. “I do it all the time. We just slip out the stage side door. No one will see us—no one will even know we’re there!”

Giggling my assent, I simultaneously sealed my fate for at that very moment, the choir director came around the corner and heard my guffaw. I non-recall the rest of that day, but the next one he hauled… I mean “invited” … me into his office to express his extreme disappointment about first, my inability to stay on key—despite him moving me around so I could sit next to some of the best voices in choir—second, my earlier flight from the choir room for no good reason, for which I’d never apologized; and third, of course, my giggling “in his face to insult” him as I cut class. What did I have to say for myself?

Nothing. I mean, he was right. I couldn’t stay on key. Maybe I could match tone with a piano, but not, apparently, with a person. Why? No clue. Maybe… Because. Onaccounta. Due to the fact. None of which was utterable.

And even though I’d been having a Reynaud’s attack when I fled the room, I knew better than to think any physical discomfort I had was either significant or material. Who did I think I was, expecting consideration just because I couldn’t figure out how to handle or ignore pain or discomfort? No reasonable explanation there, for sure.

And yeah, I had giggled as he passed. Not intentionally at him, as he insisted, but a snigger is a snicker. No defense whatsoever.

He took my wide-eyed silence as another purposeful insult. For which I had another non-answer.

“You’re out of choir,” he said.

Honestly, I was kinda relieved. Every challenged capillary in my system knew I didn’t belong there. Mind, my classmates didn’t bully, tease, or treat me badly. In fact, some of the same girls who’d been terrors to me in primary school now wanted to be friendly. But I knew better than to trust those overtures. They were being nice to my face, but behind my back, they still thought of me as stupid and worthless.

My mother said.

So I asked my counselor to change my schedule. Could I do all my classes in the morning and get a noon to five pm job?

I wish I remembered her name. She’d been very nice to me ever since our first meeting, when she asked if I had any idea what kind of college track I wanted to be on so she could make sure I took the right courses.

“I don’t want to go to college.”

“Nonsense! A smart, pretty girl like you? You’re in Honors English, Honors Algebra—you just haven’t figured out which way you want to go yet. I’ll keep you on the general-ed track for the time being, okay?”

“Okay. But I don’t want to go to college.”

“You’ll feel differently in a few years. Your algebra teacher already has you down for Honors Geometry.”

“Do I have to? I hate math.”

“Are you sure? You’re good at it…”

No, I wasn’t. I wasn’t good at playing hooky, I wasn’t good at matching tone, and I wasn’t good at knowing what I was doing with numbers or why I was doing it. The only thing I was good at was memorizing whateveritwas I needed to earn good homework grades and pass tests, a hellova two-sided coin: I’d figured out how to fake my way through almost anything without actually learning anything—not because I didn’t want to learn, but because I was too frightened or stupid to retain. The only good thing about school was that it gave me someplace to be away from my house.

Deep in my shell, I knew four years of non-absorption would be my limit. By the time I asked to go on work-study, my counselor agreed.

Dumb-as-fuck scene 2: journalism room, where I learned basic reporting and feature-article protocol alongside two different Mikes. One would die shortly after high school from a health problem nobody took seriously at the time. Our instructor kept yelling at the other to stop his perpetual coughing, which was likely from some condition no one took seriously at the time.

Side note: those were the “great” times to which so many folk want to return. I’ll pass. Just sayin’.

 After practicing on numerous faux articles, we all became reporters for the school rag, as Mrs. J called it. I was assigned to write feature stories since I was the best writer.

Yes. I could always bounce nouns against verbs, as my late brother-by-love used to say. But let’s don’t forget: I didn’t think right, and I didn’t think about the right things. So when my very first feature story—which I only semi-remember but will nevertheless non-cop to—created an uproar, I was both pleased and amazed.

In my defense, I never expected anyone would actually read the piece. I was so used to being ignored and dismissed, I dumb-as-fuck figured I could write anything I wanted, and it would just pass into the flotsam and jetsam with little notice and less impact.

I figured wrong.

People started avoiding me in the hallways. I got called into the principal’s office to explain what in the world I’d been thinking. And the very next issue included a front-page retaliation to my page-three little story.

And wouldn’t you know it, my spot on the school paper was suddenly unnecessary.

Which was just as well, I consoled myself, because when I dropped by the journalism room to pick up my stuff, I found the entire writing staff smoking weed in the back office. They held no grudge about my piece—I shouldn’t, either—and to prove it, they invited me to join them.

I declined—not because of anything as prosaic as the law or even school rules, but because I couldn’t take the chance of losing even a teensy bit of the miniscule control I had over my life. A powder keg waiting to blow, I didn’t want to lose it all to being high. Fear steered every aspect of my non-life, if for no other reason that, despite (or due to) all my dumb-as-fuckedinity, I was still non-girl, the only non-boy in school who didn’t date, never got asked to dances or parties (I hated parties, anyway), and who didn’t know how to hang out with my own kind—mostly because I didn’t know what kind I was. And one of my brother’s college friends, visiting for some holiday or another, really drove that home to me.

Pre-dumb-as-fuck scene 3: my living room, late evening, me somehow alone with said friend, let’s call him NW, lying on my parents’ couch. My first necking. It felt like… nothing at all. But I chameleoned enjoyment because otherwise I’d be a prick teaser, that worst of all girl offenses.

I don’t know how he came to be there—if conversations had come down or if was just serendipity—but NW and I liked each other right off the bat. I liked that he was a tall, good looking, strong, virile guy to whom I hoped to lose my virginity.

“I don’t believe in having sex until I get married,” he said, sucking on my unresponsive tit.

Wait—wasn’t that supposed to be my line? But he was a good… whatever religion he was… and as one of seven sons, he’d promised… somebody… to remain celibate. So while he frustrated himself with his own restraint, I pretended the same.

Honestly, I wanted to do it so I could have done it—the logic of teenage hormones. I take no credit or blame. Puberty just is.

Interlude: I was at a party where a guy I’d dated a few years earlier was playing trumpet in front of drums and guitar. My mother had dropped me off despite my protests, expecting me to be out for the evening. “You’ll have fun when you get there,” she said, as usual.

But after maybe five or ten minutes, I got tired, as I typically did/do in loud, crowded places, so I went upstairs to call my mother..

“You’re ready to go already, aren’t you?” Tom said.

I hadn’t even realized he was at the party. I shrugged. “Yeah.”

“I’ll drive you home.”

“Wait—what?” his girlfriend cut in. “We just got here!. You can’t just leave me! Let her call her parents. Or let her walk home. How far could it be, anyway?”

He turned at her. “Look, I’ll be back, but I’m taking her home. I don’t need your permission. I’m taking her home.”

I don’t know what her problem was. It wasn’t as if we were dating. We were just… attached.

Sheesh.

Dumb-as-fuck scene 3: I took the train from Chicago Central Station down to the University of Illinois Champaign/Urbana campus to visit NW for the weekend, sharing the ride with his roommate’s girlfriend, who adroitly did her nails on the way. Fascinating—not just seeing someone do their own nails but watching her sway in rhythm with the train, never spilling a drop. I couldn’t do that sitting perfectly still.

She asked if I wanted her to do mine, too. I couldn’t imagine why I would—I’d already bitten them down to the quick. But she just smiled, genuinely friendly, and oblivious to how much younger I was—not so much in years, but in mindset. I was still child to myself, after all, having never been treated as anything but. Her attention felt unreasonably kind.

I perceived age differences at my core, in light of being too young for my thirty-five month-older brother to play with. My seatmate was maybe two years older than me. I thought of her as adult.

My seatmate’s graciousness was just the first of that weekend’s amazing revelations. It turned out NW’s roommate had a percolator and just took it for granted I drank coffee in the morning like everyone else. That blew me away—how old did he think I was? I wouldn’t be allowed to drink coffee until I was at least eighteen, if not twenty-one. “But don’t wash it,” he went on. “Don’t ever wash my coffee pot!”

I almost fell over. Kitchens and everything in them have to be spotless. Always. Wasn’t anything the way it was supposed to be?

At least I was. NW went out to play basketball, so I changed into shorts and a midriff top—standard teenage-girl stuff—and settled down on his bed to read. All of a sudden, my father was there.

“What the hell are you doing?” he roared.

Me?! What the hell was he doing here?! Had he followed me all the way down to U of I? Why? He hadn’t said a word when I told my mother about the weekend. Hell, he barely ever talked to me at all. Now, out of the blue, he was concerned about, what? Me “wearing almost nothing,” the same outfit he’d seen dozens of times, while I read in the only spot that had decent light?

Call me dumb-as-fuck or supremely naïve, but I didn’t get it. How could someone essentially ignore his daughter for seventeen years, then suddenly throw a fit because she did exactly what she said she was going to do—spend the weekend looking around campus and going to a Stones concert with her I-finally-have-a-boyfriend.

Which is exactly what we did. Our seats were so far back from the stage we could have been at a Beethoven festival for all I could see or hear. But that was okay. It was better than the only other concert I’d gone to, at which Jeremy, of Chad and Jeremy, was replaced by a cardboard cutout because he had royal duties to attend to. I’d gone to the show to see Jeremy.

But back to my father, and what the hell? I mean, Tom spent hours at our house playing cards and annoying my mother to no end. He’d pick me up for breakfast almost every Sunday and keep me out until mid-afternoon. My father had never said a word about any of that, never cared what I wore with him. We could have been doing anything in that spacious backseat! Okay, no, we weren’t doing a thing, but still… what the hell?

As per our family creed, neither my father nor I ever spoke of the U of I incident again. Life folded in on it after that weekend, engulfing it in nothingness and making it inadmissible as evidence in perpetuity. NW became persona non grata at our place, and my mother stopped pushing me to date. She tolerated Tom’s he’s-here-again presence, even as she “made it known” that she considered him lower-class. Menial. After all, his father sold used cars for a living. Didn’t that just say it all?

My future father-in-law graduated Summa cum laude from Northwestern and held a Phi Beta Kappa key. Just sayin’.

I had a job, I had some money in my pocket, I had a newly no-boyfriend again, I had a gin/Sunday breakfast partner. I looked forward to failing tennis one more time and finishing my last year of school forever. But Mother, non-able to tolerate one more Chicago winter, and Father, non-able to bid her nay, flew out to Southern California that junior-year second-semester Spring and came back with a new home. The house got packed more quickly than I’d ever seen my parents accomplish anything, and we arrived—mother, father, son, daughter—in the Land of the Mouse Place on July 3^rd, 1970, if I remember my personal history correctly. I immediately dumb-as-fuck fell into the pool, and a cousin we’d never met before took us to The Happiest Place on Earth the next day.

Legend has it Tom stood outside our empty former house later that week, staring and shaking his head.

“How can I marry her if she’s halfway across the country?” he asked himself.

Spoiler alert: we found a way. Only took us another eight years, that’s all.