(Part of this story was published in NYLON for Guys)
I lost the spirit of Christmas at an early age, when I realized that Mom was in cahoots with Santa Claus. Every Christmas morning as I tore open box after box of khakis, turtlenecks, sweaters and Argyle socks, all in hopes of finding a toy or two, Mom reassured me, “Even Santa knows that clothes make the man.”
Whenever I complained about the “gifts,” she’d mention the kid she was considering adopting: “I bet the little green boy with blue hair would wear this, no problem. He’d love to make me happy.” For several years, this threat was enough to coerce me into line. So it was no surprise that the happiest day of Mom’s life came on my last day of seventh grade when she read the superlative above my yearbook photo. “Most Preppy!” she marveled, scanning me from head to penny loafer. “That’s my boy. Now let’s make some photocopies of this for my friends.”
Mom had carefully patterned my image after Michael J. Fox’s character on Family Ties, Alex P. Keaton. We rarely missed an episode, and nary a one passed without her commenting, “Will you just look how sharp he looks. You could cut straight through a coconut with looks like that.” That was Ivy League material if she ever saw it.
Naturally, I wanted to outshine Alex Keaton, so at the age of thirteen I slapped a briefcase on my Christmas wish list. Sometimes I gussied up in a blazer and tie and visited my Uncle Pete’s office in the World Trade Center, riding the train with a copy of the Wall Street Journal in one hand and my attaché in another, hoping all eyes were on me, of course. Having mastered my Ivy look, I anticipated a celebrated life that would validate all the toyless Christmas mornings.
Unfortunately, when it came time to apply for college, the Ivy admissions offices needed a little more to go on than my overall aesthetic. Things like GPAs and SATs were weighted heavily and while I was a very good student and in the top 10% of my high school class, I didn’t cut it. After being rejected from Harvard and Yale and Dartmouth, and a handful of other top schools, like Georgetown, Notre Dame, Stanford and Vanderbilt, I went with the only school that actually accepted me, Boston College.
Not that I was too disappointed. BC had a great reputation and was like an animated Abercrombie & Fitch catalog into which I blended like a chameleon. I was surrounded by thousands of kids who all looked “Most Preppy” and Mom couldn’t have been more pleased, although on our tour of the campus she did finger a small group of dreadlocked misfits: “You’ve got to wonder who those kids knew to get in here.”
During my first semester an old friend from New Jersey visited. For a good three-year run in elementary school, Greg and I were joined at the hip like Batman and Robin. Ultimately, it was skateboarding that drove a wedge between us. We had both learned how to gel our hair straight back and say “Skate or Die” together, but he actually learned how to skate. I never could manage much more than forward movement on flat streets while Greg swiftly took to hopping curbs and dropping into half-pipes. It didn’t much matter that we were at drastically different skill levels, until we moved onto middle school and he started hanging with the older skate rats. I clearly didn’t fit in with that pack and our friendship quietly faded. Within a couple of years, he started the unofficial Sk8orDie club and became Mom’s public enemy number one. “You see them,” she’d say scooping me up after school, “the whole lot of ‘em are heading nowhere fast, except maybe jail.”
Sure enough, when I was in high school Mom tossed me the local paper my way and said, “Looks like your old buddy had a little run-in with the police.” She liked scanning the police blotter and obituaries for anything that would help keep me straight and narrow. Apparently Greg was skating on school property and when a cop asked to see some ID a joint fell out of his wallet. “It’s a good thing you are done with that loser,” Mom said. “You know what they say about guilt by association.”
Greg straightened himself out enough to get into a culinary school in Providence and on a whim I invited him up to Boston for a weekend. I had tried pot a few times and thought it would be fun to smoke with the expert and catch up on all those years we veered in different directions. In my door room he unfolded tin foil, pointed to a tiny wedge of red paper and said that I should try acid, that it was fun, just like the pushers in the after-school specials and “Just Say No” commercials that Mom had taped for me. I had never heard of acid but it looked harmless enough so dropped it under my tongue. By the time we rose from the subway into the Boston Public Gardens, the skyscrapers were swaying like reeds and the crescent moon’s lips curled into a jittery smile. Something, some hidden or secret dimension had suddenly unfurled and everything, and I mean everything seemed to vibrate to the hum the city. I felt transparent, invisible, outrageous.
Greg took me to an underground after hours club that pumped beats on all three floors. As we approached a chain of smokers outside the unmarked entrance, my loose nerves were pulled taut as I spotted an alien culture that I never even knew existed. In the cherry glow of their cigarettes, I spotted dark, smoky eyeliner or glitter on guys. Neon green light poured out of a girl’s mouth from a small glow stick tucked under her tongue. One kid’s piercing had hollowed out his earlobes so much that I could have served a tennis ball straight through them. These were the kinds of kids voted “Most Unique” in high school, if they even went to high school. And with his septum pierced and spiky black hair, Greg was a card-carrying member of this scene. I wasn’t so much the chameleon in this galaxy. Dressed in my white button-down tucked into my khakis, I stuck out like a human ear on the back of a lab rat.
Once inside the club I waded through a sea of sweaty, dancing, half-naked bodies with all the ease and flexibility of a cadaver. While I had always assumed I danced as well as the next guy, I had only ever swayed my shoulders at proms and bar mitzvahs and weddings. Everyone around me was riding atop a current of drum & bass while I looked as if I were bobbing for apples. And just in case anyone didn’t notice, my shirt and socks were blinding in the black light. I had lost my transparency.
After that night I started dressing down, way down, in my rebel quest to become a misfit. No more turtle necks or ties or tucked in button-downs and exposed belts. And God-willing Mom, please, no more penny loafers for Christmas.
Of the ten thousand kids enrolled at BC there were only a handful with a unique sense of style: the eight with dreadlocks and their small cluster of amigos. They all wore patchwork corduroys, Birkenstocks and hemp necklaces, and every sunny afternoon they congregated on campus with hackeysacks and journals, guitars and Gameboys. Their effusive laughter sliced through the haze of pot smoke like a lighthouse guiding me ashore.
I went searching for a new image at a head shop near Fenway Park. With each new purchase I inched towards becoming a new, terrifyingly awesome beast. By day’s end, I had ditched Clark Kent in the dressing rooms and was outfitted in Birkenstocks, the thickest hemp-and-quartz necklace I could find, a floppy Rasta hat meant for dreadlocks, and what I thought was a genius “Just Do Be” t-shirt that featured a cartoon joint with smoke curling to form the Nike logo. The one thing I couldn’t find, however, were the patchwork pants that everyone else was wearing.
Fortunately, my roommate Daniel started dating the school’s subculture seamstress. Meri was like a hippie Betsy Ross and I parlayed my friendship with Daniel into a crash course in sewing. I told her about all the edgy designs I had in my mind, and she pretended she cared. One afternoon, the three of us went hunting for new styles at Fabric Land. I felt like a mad scientist in this virtual laboratory of possibilities: from Sesame Street to safari scenes on silk. Screw patchwork, I decided. I wanted to make loud, funky bellbottoms with furry inserts that roared “Hippie!” with animal-print fury. I bought yards upon yards of different tiger and leopard and zebra faux-fur and we went back to Meri’s place.
The black walls of her studio apartment were nearly swallowed by big plants and small trees and driftwood. And with the alternating color accent lights, the treasure chest shimmering with fabric, and the sips of mushroom tea, I felt like the Little Mermaid. The three sewing machines finally snapped me back into reality and her place began to feel more like a sweatshop. It was time to get to work.
Meri held my hand while I Africanized my J-Crewduroys. The first step in the process was splitting the seams from ankles to waist. As the seam ripper sickled my pants, snapping each stitch one by one, I imagined Mom gasping, But those were from Santa! We then measured and marked and cut out long acute triangles from the furry fabric. Within an hour I had learned my way around her Singer. The rapid-fire needle filled me with a strange Voodoo-like pleasure. Somewhere in New Jersey, Mom was convulsing.
Once I sewed the leopard wedges in place, I darted into the bathroom and emerged a new, wizardly creation. There was no sign of my size-thirteen feet as I glided across the floor as if on a cushion of air. I was slapped with the sewing bug, but I didn’t want to push it with Meri. So I returned to Fabric Land all by myself. Combing through the aisles, I filled my cart with my very own Singer and more yards of wild fabrics. There was a certain pride stitched into the idea of handcrafting my image, even if I was the only male shopper in a store thronged with older women. The cashier looked askew at me, and peering through her bifocals she asked, “Girlfriend’s birthday?”
My dorm room was converted into a hippie textile mill and I began reconstructing my closetful of Christmas gifts. My black corduroys moo’d with cow-prints. My jeans were flared with Big Bird and Elmo. My pleated khakis were stitched with wedges of Kokopelli. After a twenty-hour Ritalin-fueled sewing spree I had created a flashy new wardrobe. Of course, since I knew I wouldn’t be able to wear any of this around my parents, I spared a couple of pairs of pants.
Shortly after returning home for Christmas break, I heard a guttural shrill in the laundry room that sounded like a squirrel being skinned. It was Mom. Her face was pinched and her eyes watered as she held my Elmo’s in her hand.
“What happened to my little boy with the briefcase? Is every day Halloween for you?” she said, tugging at my hemp necklaces.
“It’s not like I wear Elmo pants all the time.”
Mom plucked my velveteen giraffe-print corduroys from my dirty laundry bag and looked at me as if she wasn’t born yesterday.
“Hogwash,” she fumed. “You only get one chance to make a first impression. What the hell are people going to think about you dressed like this?”
As she rifled through my dirty clothes I skipped to my argument about how my image was a true reflection of the uniqueness I felt inside.
“I don’t care what people think,” I said.
“Well that’s apparent.”
Mom found the desert-scene fleece poncho that I had made from a sewing pattern, “What are you, some kind of fake Indian now?”
The back and forth waged on for the entire break, with her $150 bribe ensuring that I wouldn’t wear any of those clothes while in the state of New Jersey. “Not even to the mall,” she decreed. “God forbid, my friends mistake you for some kind of druggie.”
* * *
I’m now twenty-nine and Mom still hasn’t found peace with my style. Although I no longer wear my handmade clothes, there are plenty of ingredients of my current look that just rub her wrong, from my faux-hawk to my boots. “I don’t understand why you have to go around wearing eyeliner or black nail polish like that Marilyn Manson weirdo,” she said. She cringes at the sight of the thick leather bands with silver rings that I wear on my wrists: “I don’t even want to know what those are for.”
She still flashes me old photos from high school to remind me of the good old days. Although, she’s changed her tune quite a bit from when I was twenty, though.
She now says, “You know what they say, if you haven’t rebelled by twenty, you have no balls. If you haven’t conformed by thirty, you have no brains.”
She had better keep her fingers and toes crossed for the next year.
posted by Scott Keneally @ 3:02 PM
1 Comments:
-- I enjoyed this story man. Parts of my own past mirror yours ... Lack of coordination on a skateboard is inversely correlated with the elevation of one's center of gravity, I believe. I had a Powell and Peralta sword-and-skull deck; man I loved it. I was surprised that my parents didn't object to that image there between the screwed-on plastic rail guards. I was never good enough to need rails, but the nose protector thingy came in very handy. Anyway, I eventually found an object with wheels that I could cut loose on, and build skills with: the bike. I found Ray Rodriguez' deck design sticker at a skate shop some time in 1996. Slapped the f*cker on my mountain bike. It fits.
Devin -- 31 -- still oscillating between conformity and self expression. I hope that brains thing ain't a hard rule. ;)
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