angst never goes away

I was talking with a friend of mine. She's 24 years old, and was complaining that she still suffers from teen angst. I said, "I hate to break it to you, but it never goes away." Look at me. I'm 38 years old, and still rocked by mostly the same turbulence that batted me around twenty years ago. Still trying to write. Still looking for someone that mesmerizes me with both her beauty and her wit, and that loves me for who I am. When you break it down, those are really the only two things.

My first love was Nicole Jackson. She was the girl that started growing boobs in first grade. Every school has one. I asked her to be my girlfriend Miss Iantosca's math class. I'm not sure if she said yes or not, but in a swelling male aggressiveness reserved for neanderthals, Kobe Bryant, and my first grade self, I assumed that she said yes. She couldn't have said no; it would have gone against everything I had learned about male/female relationships from Happy Days. You always got rewarded for asking the girl to go steady. There simply wasn't any other possibility in my lexicon at the time.

This sounds frightening, maybe, but I think this type of personal misunderstanding is pretty common in children. Fortunately, most first graders like I had been didn't know what to do next, and lacked the physiological aptitude to act on it if they had. After a couple of misunderstandings that included grabbing her breasts on line for next period, this little memory is mostly buried under layers of spacetime and repression.

The thing that sticks with me is that I was in love with her. The feeling of being in love as a confused first grader is exactly the same way that I feel when I get googly-eyed over someone today. It's the same dopamine.

I want you to know that despite my social awkwardness, I had great taste. She wasn't just endowed early, but she also was pretty, and smart to boot. I had a lot of contact with her because the teachers always sat the smarties at the same table. It was Nicole, Merillee Hestefer, Mike Connolly, and myself. I'm not sure how smart I really was, but I was extremely motivated to succeed if I got to sit next to Nicole.

At Linden Avenue School, the entire fourth grade was housed in one big room that also served as the school auditorium. Cubbies stretched across one entire wall, and in each cubby was a packet of paper that contained math problems. Green was addition, pink was subtraction, yellow was multiplication, and blue was division, hated for it's grotesque necessity for subtraction and multiplication skills, as well as the ability to write in a straight line, not my biggest skill even today.

The cubbies were in four rows. Top row was green, then pink, then yellow, and then blue on the bottom. Each cubbie contained packets of math problems to finish. And as you finished each column, you moved onto the addition packet in the next column. Each column to the left got harder and harder.

My mother said I was clever to figure out that the more work I did, the more work I had to do. I learned to slow down, no doubt setting me up for success in any office in the world. I just stopped working and started doodling in the margins of the packets. As long as I did the work too, the teacher didn't care about too much doodles, until I started to get pornographic, illustrating a popular poem about a gentleman who happened to have a ten foot penis, whose wife mistook for an anaconda of some sort, and reduced it to a length of "five-foot-four" with some sort of garden implement, before realizing that it belonged to her husband. The teacher asked me to do that packet over again, which taught me to only doodle on pages after the teacher had already graded them.

I was happily living in mediocrity, considering class as an opportunity to socialize. You see, if you were one of the few to finish ALL the green, pink, yellow, and blue packets, you got to sit at a table on the stage and do the really hard white packets of math problems. Before the end of the year, Mike Connolly was the only one sitting up there. This was no surprise to anyone because Mike was considered a genius by many, and suspected of being a robot by just a few. I had no interest in sitting up there doing work I didn't have to... until Nicole Jackson finished all the colored packets.

OH MY GOD. Suddenly, I became the best student ever. I shocked my teacher by finishing the entire rest of the wall of cubbies within a week, fueled by jealousy at seeing Mike and Nicole sitting alone together for EVERY SINGLE math class, EVERY DAY! Only Merillee Hesterfer beat me to the stage. I showed up two days later, sweating from my mental exertion over the past week. I sat down next to Nicole, and took every opportunity to get her to smile. Productivity went down quite a bit amongst the smarties after I got there, telling any joke I knew, making any small talk I knew how to do as a 4th grader. I was deliriously happy, comfortable in the knowledge that I could bask in Nicole's glow for the rest of fourth grade, until the following Saturday when an eighth grader, a former pupil at Linden, showed up with a can of kerosene and burned the school down. Absolutely true!

There were only two other grammar schools in town, and Linden's kids were divided between the two. Although Nicole and I both ended up going to Central School, we got shoved into different classes, and I had to finish fourth grade watching her with her friends on the other side of the school yard at recess.

Nicole and I knew each other until we were 18, when she went off to college and I went nowhere for four years. I saw her once at a formal party when I was 20, and she was wearing a slinky satin dress, looking more beautiful than I had ever seen her. Unfortunately, she was more beautiful than anyone I had ever seen since. She was the perfect balance of smart, artsy, musical, and pretty. If I had my head on straight back then, I'd probably have married her, like a bunch of my friends who fell in love in their early 20's and married their true loves. If I ran into her today, I'd probably ask her to marry me, and I probably wouldn't take no for an answer now either. I'd make myself as annoying as possible until she finally gave in and spent the rest of her life with me.

There were many times that I secretly sympathized with that poor confused kid that burned the school down. I've fantasized about destruction as an answer to all sorts of things. I fantasized about murdering the jocks who raped the retarded school in my senior year of high school. I've fantasized about leading a massive riot of unarmed people across the white house lawn to pull Bush and Cheney from the oval office and deliver them bodily to our enemies. And I've fantasized about being 18 again and not being all screwed up so that I could ask Nicole out on a real date and find out if we'd have really worked out as a couple. I still imagine myself as that awkward teenager, wearing stupid clothes and not knowing how to shave without cutting the shit out of myself. The dopamine surge when you fall in love today is the same feeling as the dopamine surge when you fell in love in grade school. Same with the angst of childhood. The only difference is that Angst is labeled as a teen, ignored in your twenties, and called mid-life crisis as you approach forty. It's the same series of brain chemicals. I don't know what they're called, but it's whatever makes you reach out in private to strangle the empty air.

I don't know when it started.

I could say it started when my girlfriend stayed out all night and came home the next morning to retch in the toilet and to lie to me for the next three days. I could stay it started in a hospital ward in a small rural suburb in NJ when my mother gave birth to nine pounds of pure American baby boy in the hopes that I would keep my parents from splitting up.

I could say it started when I rode my bicycle from New Jersey to Denver. Or when I was kissed by Nicole Mozalak in third grade around the corner from the 1st grade entrance. Or when I punched a stop sign when I walked out of my dad and stepmother's town house in Florida and didn't go back until she stopped drinking, or did my first bong hit in Bryan Dorfman's basement, caught the acting bug in college, hung up on my dad when he didn't tell me that my friend in Florida was killed in a car accident, kicked the wood paneling out of one of the kitchen cabinets because my mom was yelling at me, ate a cannoli for the first time, completed my first triathlon, or lost my virginity having really unremarkable sex.

Staying home from school to find out how many times I could masturbate in one day when I was 15 years old, deciding that smoking cigarettes was a good way to mask that I was smoking pot, waiting until 1998 before liking 80's music, strangling Damon Goley in the photography dark room until Mr. Pern broke us up, wanting to strangle George W. Bush, touching Nicole Jackson's breasts in 1st grade, or Erica Banferth's butt in the same grade, or trying to figure out why Parliament recessed their filters.

When I started loving the Police, or when I couldn't stand them anymore. When I moved in with Kim, or when I moved out. When I got my first dog, or when I found him dead in the basement with his jaw locked open after he died of uncontrollable seizures. When I started to ride my bike from Denver to Seattle, or when I quit and hopped on a bus. When I started working for a famous global coffee company or when they laid me off eight years later.

When I learned to cook. When I discovered that teen angst never goes away. When I was in love with Beth, Nicole, Alyson, Erica, Molly, Cheryl, Mara, Maude, Michelle, Barbi, Beth, Meghan, Melissa, Sarah, Jane, Ginger, Kim, Sarah, Kelly, Megan, and anyone else I can't remember right this sec. When I started writing, and then quit, started again, quit, started again, quit again, etc. etc. until today. When I decided I should act like an adult. And then quit.