When I was an 8th-grader at co-ed St. Clare de Maltese
Falcon*, I was deathly afraid of girls – even though I had a mother and four
sisters. All my friends were guys, and a couple of them had girlfriends, but
I’d been so painfully shy with girls my whole life that I never did. To fill
the large blocks of time I spent not dating, I played lots of sports, read lots
of books, and watched lots of TV.
While it never occurred to me to use my splendid imagination
to figure out what to say to a girl,
I did use it to invent a succession
of imaginary relationships – from courtship to marriage to children. But my
imagination lacked even the most rudimentary knowledge about how those children
could ever come about.
Whenever a girl spoke to me I’d become hopelessly tongue-tied.
Since girls made me so nervous, I came to the conclusion at a very young age that
maybe I should just avoid them altogether. But then one day, a miracle! I got
invited up to St. Clare’s to hang out with the cool kids after dark. I was nervous
and excited because I knew there would be girls there. I was particularly nervous
and excited because I knew The Girl would be there.
Me and The Girl were a match made in heaven. She was Irish. I
was Italian. She was freckled. I had a dark tan. She was skinny. I was pudgy. She
was beautiful. I had a dark tan.
I really liked her and she seemed to like me. But I guess we
were doomed from the start because my only prior date had been with her best
friend, and it had ended disastrously thanks to my total ignorance regarding the
topic of French kissing. You see, our Catholic-school “Becoming A Person” class
had provided as much practical information about sex and sexuality as it did
about the inner workings of the internal combustion engine – which is to say, none
whatsoever.
And Dad had never had the talk with me. He was busy working
two jobs, volunteering at church and going to V.F.W. meetings. Mom never had
the talk with me, either. She was busy shopping, cooking, cleaning and doing laundry
for a family of nine. Plus, she had a part-time job. Maybe they figured my
older siblings would fill me in on the facts of life. Or maybe even my little
brother. But none of them ever did. And it never occurred to me to ask any of the
siblings who threatened my well-being on a regular basis for advice on how to
make out, let alone about how to make a baby.
On my first night up at St. Clare’s, we were just standing around
talking until somebody asked if anyone wanted a cigarette. So even though I had
never smoked before, I grabbed one as if I’d been smoking my whole life. And after
I’d struck a few ridiculous poses puffing on an unlit cigarette, a Bic®
lighter appeared before me and was flicked. As I leaned in to light up, from
the deep recesses of my cavernously empty head, a simple, yet idiotic plan emerged:
The first prodigious inhalation I would take – and the only one that would
be required – would mimic the humongous breath Hanna-Barbera’s Peter Potamus always
took just before he unleashed his monumental Hippo Hurricane Holler. Crossing
my eyes would enable me to watch the cigarette burn all the way down, in the
blink of an eye, leaving an impossibly long, intact ash dangling from the end
of the filter. Then I’d spend the rest of the evening basking in the admiration
of those fortunate enough to have witnessed it.
But that’s not exactly how it went down.
Two seconds into my herculean inhalation, the ember on the end
of the cigarette glowed brightly, but made no discernible progress in my
direction. I began to cough uncontrollably, as if I had emphysema and had just
speed-smoked a carton of Camels®-without-filters. My eyes flooded
with tears, turning everyone into giant, soft-focus amoebas, swaying to the
sound of 8th-graders laughing.
And when that coughing jag finally ended and the laughter
subsided, something quite unexpected happened. I relaxed. For the first time
since I’d arrived. And I finally knew how different it feels when you know the cool
kids are laughing with you instead of
at you.
And when somebody reached for my cigarette, I pulled it away
indignantly and said, “Hey! I ain’t finished
with that yet!” and pretended to take another drag before handing it over. So you
can probably understand why the first cigarette I ever smoked also happened to be
my last.
Once the smoke had literally cleared, I was able to turn my
attention to the main reason for my pilgrimage to St. Clare’s that night – The
Girl. However, before long I realized my parents’ unusually early curfew was
quickly approaching. And when I told The Girl it was time for me to head home, she
took my hand and walked me to the corner of 55th and Talman, out of sight from
the others.
In an ancient Greek tale, after Orpheus’s true love Eurydice died, he traveled
to the underworld to rescue her. Hades, ruler of the underworld, was so moved
by Orpheus’s love that he agreed to permit Eurydice to return to the upper
world with Orpheus. But there was a catch. Eurydice would have to follow
Orpheus at a distance, and if Orpheus looked at her before she had reached the
upper world, Eurydice would be returned to the underworld for all eternity. Upon
reaching the upper world, Orpheus panicked and turned around to check on
Eurydice without realizing she was still in the lower world. And in an instant,
she was gone to him forever.
Standing beneath that street lamp with The Girl, I found
myself in no-boy’s land. Since I still didn’t know how to kiss, there was as
much to fear from acceptance as there was from rejection. I could have asked
her if I could walk her home. Or if I could call her sometime. Or if she would
teach me how to kiss. But I had no words. Like Michelangelo’s “Schiavo Giovane”
(Young Slave), I was imprisoned in a block of stone, unable to move. And in the
end, fear trumped love and I mumbled good night and raced across the street.
We were only 30 feet apart, but it felt like a million
miles. As I watched The Girl turn and walk away, I knew the heartbreak Orpheus
must have felt when he realized his terrible mistake – and she was gone to me forever.
At some point you come to realize that when people say
things like “Everything happens for a reason,” and “It’s all for the best,” they’re
just trying to console you. And if you look back on your life, you just might
see that if a litany of events – some quite painful – had not happened
precisely as they had, you might have missed out on all kinds of wonderful,
life-altering experiences. But when you’re an adolescent boy who’s as unaware
of his ignorance as he is of his innocence, those kinds of aphorisms are
meaningless.
That youngster I was thought he was in love. In fact, he knew he was in love. But it wasn’t really love. He hardly knew The Girl. It
was simply a combination of physical attraction and an overactive imagination. And
even if it didn’t feel like it at the time, maybe everything did happen for a reason. So he could be
where he is today. But that being said, perhaps somewhere out there in the
multi-verse things had played out differently and he and The Girl are currently
enjoying their respective retirements from playing for the Chicago White Sox®
and modeling swimsuits, spending lots of time with their pudgy, gorgeous grandchildren,
to whom they explained French kissing and where babies come from in great
detail long before any of them entered the eighth grade.
The day after my debut at St. Clare’s after dark I ran into
Cathy Damico who shared her simple, frank reassessment of me: “We all thought
you were just some kind of brainiac who stayed home and read the dictionary all
the time. But you seem pretty okay.” Perhaps not much of a compliment in some
circles, but to people from the South Side of Chicago and the island of Scotland
– that is high praise indeed.
And from the recesses of that still cavernously empty
cranium of mine came my indignant, unspoken reply: “Yagottabekiddinme! Me, Jimmy
Klenn, staying home every night to read the dictionary? How ludicrous! How preposterous!
How patently implausible!” And without the slightest hint of irony or
understanding, I thought: “I mean, sure I read the World Book® Encyclopedia all the time, but never the
darned dictionary!”
“At least almost never.”
* My dear friend J.C. Packard’s oft-repeated misnomer of
my beloved alma mater, St. Clare de Montefalco.
Grazie to Joanne and Marietta for their sweet
encouragement and gentle kick in my culo.
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