I’ve been writing quite a bit for this blog. I’ve just not posted any of it yet. It’s stream of consciousness, as it stands, and I’m wanting to publish something more cohesive. There are many overlapping themes, repetitive segments needing to be combined and edited down. But I do have quite a bit of raw material to sort through.
This blog is inspired by the 1990 film, Pump Up The Volume, written and directed by Allan Moyle and starring Christian Slater and Samantha Mathis. If you’ve seen it, please bear with me a moment while I set the scene for those who haven’t.
In the film, Slater plays high school student Mark Hunter, a painfully shy, awkward, highly-intelligent kid who’s just moved to town. By day, he can barely squeak out a word to his classmates. By night, he’s a pirate-radio shock jock named Happy Harry Hard-On. In the privacy of his room, with a radio setup originally intended to communicate with his old friends back home, using a voice disguiser and assured of his relative anonymity, he felt free to say what he so desperately needed to get off his chest.
When I first saw this movie in the theater back in 1990, it became an instant favorite. I identified so completely with Mark, and with Harry, two very different people, as I am two very different people. Speaking was physically impossible at times. I would have to duck out with a nod and a scurry. Yet, at the same time, I had so very much to say.
I felt the ending of that movie. Spoiler alert, as the credits roll we’re treated to many different voices, speaking out, being heard, many for the first time. It produced in me that swell of emotion we humans experience when we know we’re in the presence of something great, something whole, something so much more powerful than ourselves alone.
And now, I think that movie was prophetic. I feel like the Internet is that swell of voices at the end of Pump Up The Volume, and this is my little station. This is the band I’m broadcasting on. And I’m just going to talk. I’m just going to be me. I’m rude, I’m crass, and I have a lot of issues. I hope to talk some of those issues out. There are things rattling around in here that I thought I buried a long time ago, but I haven’t, because, sometimes they come back (apologies to Stephen King).
It wasn’t that hard, comparatively. I had it pretty good for a while. It was the late 70’s into the early 80’s. Dad worked at Chrysler making plenty to keep a family of five comfortable. They were different times.
There were kids at school on the free lunch program. They were looked down on. Not by me, but by the school culture, the social hierarchy. We never had to count ourselves among them. Even when Dad got laid off and had to take a job paying less than half what he was making before, Mom started an in-home babysitting business to keep us afloat. She didn’t want her kids to know we were struggling financially. She’d grown up being told the family couldn’t afford anything, and she never wanted to say that to her children.
But I’ll get the that later. Right now I want to talk about what was hard for me as a child, what is still hard for me now: Social interaction, or simply existing in a public place. I went through a period of my life starting in my late teens where I was capable of social interaction, it didn’t make me uncomfortable, I was confident and charming. That all gradually left me, and now, about to turn 42, I find myself right back where I started.
I feel the judgement of others.
I don’t know that in most cases the judgement I feel radiating off of others is even present in reality. In fact, I’m fairly certain it’s all in my head. When I break it down logically, in all likeliness, most other people barely notice I’m even there, they’re so wrapped up in themselves and what’s going on in their own heads. And knowing that just feeds my overwhelming feeling that I’m completely alone and nobody truly gives a fuck about me. But that’s a whole different issue I’ll explore later.
So, in an attempt to avoid any judgement, I attempt to blend in, to just act normal, mimicking what I think normal looks like. But it feels awkward. I know everyone can tell I’m an imposter. And if someone speaks to me, the jig might be up. Depending on how well I’m doing on any given day. On a good day I may be able to hold a conversation for a few minutes without seeming too strange. But on a bad day I may nod, smile, mumble something incoherent, or just walk away muttering to myself.
I was shy, awkward, overweight, a late bloomer, and had a pornographic last name. My school life was not pleasant. I didn’t get beat up, but I was mocked mercilessly. For some reason I flush red really easily. I’m not easily embarrassed, I mean, I don’t feel embarrassed, but I sure as hell look embarrassed. Some group of assholes would decide to start asking me stupid questions, and I’d do my best to ignore them, but I’d turn bright red. And then they’d make fun of that. They would begin insisting I was about to cry. I was so far from wanting to cry at those moments. What I wanted to do was stand up and plant my knee in their face.
Sometimes, by myself, I’d wonder why people couldn’t just leave me alone. I just wanted to be alone. What, exactly, was me not wanting to participate hurting? At those times, sometimes I’d cry.
I wonder how I got back here. I wonder why I often feel like I did in school, because I thought I had overcome that unpleasantness. These are things I must explore.
I wish people wouldn’t ask me if I’m going to my mom’s house for Mother’s Day. That leaves me in an awkward spot. I can either lie and say, “Yep.” But I don’t care for lying. I can tell the truth, “Nope,” and leave it hanging unexplained, making me look like an asshole. Or I can tell the whole truth, “She’s dead.” People usually flinch at that. “She passed on.” “She’s no longer with us.” They take that better, but no matter how I say it, they always apologize. “Oh, I’m so sorry.” What am I supposed to say then? “Don’t worry about it, it was a long time ago?” Well, it was, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t still hurt. Especially this weekend. I guess, “Thanks,” is the right response, but what I’d really mean by that is, “Thanks for bringing it up, I wasn’t thinking about it at all before you asked. So, thanks. Thanks for that. I appreciate it.”
When I was in school, I would do a lot of spacing off, tuning out and daydreaming. Sometimes when I was in the middle of a particularly strange and unusual daydream, or an embarrassing one, I would become convinced that someone near me could read my mind, hear my thoughts; I would become absolutely convinced that someone knew what I was thinking. I was sure of it. I would then become obsessed with this idea, and, depending on my mood, I’d either try my hardest to think normal thoughts, or, I’d think of the most fucked up shit I could imagine and casually look around to see if anyone reacted.
I never did see any evidence that anyone knew what I was thinking. But that didn’t stop the paranoid idea from creeping into my head time and time again. It didn’t make me feel any more alone with my thoughts. I didn’t feel alone in my head. I mean, I knew my personalities were driving, but I always felt like there was an observer. Someone, something watching, listening, to everything.
I’m sure I’m far from alone in feeling that way. Perhaps that’s one thing that helps nurture a belief in deities. The absolute certainty that someone is listening, even when you’re scared and alone. Someone is there, and they can hear you.
I have known from a very young age, since long before puberty, that I had a very strong interest in naked men. The first time I noticed it was while watching the 1981 comedy-horror classic, An American Werewolf in London. The movie rips your heart out at the end and then throws a cheery song in your face, like, get over it, pal, we’re having fun here. But during that first transformation, wherein David Naughton is completely nude, I first noticed the naked male body.
I didn’t like it. I didn’t like the way it made me feel. I didn’t like that I wanted to keep looking. I told myself that I wanted to keep staring at him because he was weird looking, not because of the low down tickle that it gave me. I didn’t like how I kept thinking about it long after the image was no longer visible.
“Naked men look weird,” I remember proclaiming, probably to my brother, but I’m not certain. I was really talking to myself. It was important that I believed that. It was weird. That’s why I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Cause of how damned weird it was.
Then, I remember, not too many years later, my brother had obtained some Hustler magazines. He showed them to me. The naked women were very exciting to me. Very pretty girls with everything showing. Then, in one of them, the multi-page center spread was of a four-way. Two women, two men. And there they were: Penises. Two of them, as different as night and day. One was thick and stout, nestled in curly blond hair, a beautiful cream colored tube capped with soft pink. The other was long, also thick, but less so, dark hair, olive skin. I liked them both, very much. I forgot there were women in the picture. Oh, but they were there. Those lucky bitches.
I also really did enjoy the female form. And I had crushes on girls, lots of them. I will spare you all those details. I had a bad habit of falling head over heels in love with girls who either literally did not know I existed, or who did like me, but didn’t like like me. I had plenty of posters on my walls of scantily clad women. Images of Madonna, Samantha Fox, scream queen Linnea Quigley, Paula Abdul, a North American Guide to Boobs, displaying varieties ranging from “mosquito bites” to “watermelons,” even the classic redneck favorite, Hot Soapy Girl On A Red Corvette, adorned my bedroom walls and ceiling, finding a home among the myriad movie posters, mostly horror, and helped fill in every square inch of boring painted drywall with exciting, stimulating imagery. Because that was acceptable. That was normal, encouraged even, for boys to have such interests. I didn’t get made fun of for having hot chicks and violence on my wall.
I did not plaster my wall with men I was attracted to. That would not have been a normal or acceptable thing to do. Most people have a certain concept of what a gay man is. Growing up, I learned that a gay man was some kind of fruit. A gay man was light in the loafers. A gay man was a sissy. That’s how they were portrayed in the media and talked about in society. Gay jokes weren’t crafted to incite people to laugh with homosexuals, but to laugh at them. Look how funny! A man who likes things women like! A man who talks like women talk! Well, I wasn’t that. Sure, I wasn’t athletic, didn’t care to be, and some of my favorite movies were musicals. But I didn’t prance around and flap my hands about and lisp like some goddamned fairy, so, I wasn’t gay, obviously.
Society encourages straight behavior, even more so when I was young and impressionable than today. I was lucky that I had an attraction to women, because it was much easier to focus on that and write off my other desires as mere fantasy. Sure, I liked looking at pictures of naked men. Yeah, I liked sneaking peeks at other guys in the locker room. But everyone had sexual fantasies, mere curiosities that they would never actually try or experience in real life. I researched it at the library. There’s a whole section there on abnormal sexual behavior that children can just walk into and study, if they’re so inclined. But I learned that it was perfectly normal to have sexual fantasies about things that one would never actually try.
So, I wasn’t gay after all. Man that was a relief! Because I heard the way guys talked about gay men, when they were sure there were none around. I heard the jokes that were nothing but a very thin veil for the contempt fueling them. Assurances to each other that if a gay man ever hit on them they’d get punched right out. Constant reinforcements that being gay wasn’t okay. That it was sick, disgusting, immoral, against nature, against God. That the fruits who pranced around acting like women chose to behave that way, and they had no valid contribution to society and were going straight to hell.
I didn’t share these opinions. I didn’t know if there was a God, but if so, I couldn’t imagine he’d care one way or the other. But I was sure glad I wasn’t one of them, regardless. I mean, I did like girls, after all, and there was nothing at all wrong with a little private fantasy, no matter how hard I prayed for it to go away. But living in a society that villainized your very existence couldn’t be easy.
