Boisseau Monkey
Boisseau Monkey
There was this guy, Jon Boisseau, who knocked on our door once and asked for my sister. After she’d lost the big glasses and gone to lenses. He didn’t stand a chance, not bad-looking but kind of scrawny and pimple-faced and a generally unappealing and not so smart aura about him, but I was amazed at the confident way he looked at me, only three years younger than he after all, and said, “Is your sister here?” They actually did go on one chaperoned movie date, because my sister couldn’t say no, but that was it.
I came to think of guys like Boisseau, with whom, as it turns out, I watched my first porno in a basement whose wall-to-wall carpeting I couldn’t stop rubbing my bare feet through because it was the first I’d ever touched, as monkeys. They just didn’t think about rejection. It didn’t cross their minds. When a girl said no, it made no difference to him. That’s why he was so fearless coming up to our door. He probably didn’t think twice about it. He probably had his mind half on California or wherever it was he came from before moving to our neighborhood. Maybe he was even just walking home from the deli and thought of it while crossing through the schoolyard. Monkeys. Where is the gut-wrenching, soul-clasping, hair-tearing agony that I always suffered, before that first phone call, my talking points scribbled in front of me: “Hey, Camilla, did you know there are people down in Georgia who eat dirt?”
And, much later, those first kisses. The endless countdowns from ten before I swooped in for the first kiss with a given rejectress. “Okay, now,” I’d say to myself. “Ten, nine, eight...” and the count would reload itself at zero: “Dammit, okay, now.” At Prince’s Purple Rain concert at the Capital Centre in 11th grade I stood there rubbing the shoulders of Virginia Rojo in front of me for a very long time before I summoned the nerve. Reilly had already fooled around with her, and I had to be higher up on the food chain than Reilly, who had failed three grades, right? Prince was singing my favorite song of his, one where he starts slow and goes crazy toward the end, and I vowed to swoop down for the smooch before he hit the crazy part. That way it could be the best kiss ever, even if I didn’t know the first thing about this Virginia Rojo, other than she had big knockers that Reilly touched one night on a hill in the playground near his house. I did about a dozen countdowns from ten, and finally just after the point where Prince goes crazy, singing, “Do you want him, or do you want me, cuz I want you, baby baby baby...” I tried to duck around to her face to kiss her, but it was a tough angle, because she was standing directly in front of me, and so I never even got close. She saw me closing in like a jetliner, and she lurched back and said, “I don’t even know you!” I went back to rubbing her shoulders, as if the last two seconds hadn’t happened, and the rest of the song became a wash of humiliation. At some point I just stopped rubbing her shoulders and stood straight as a board while the rest of the Capital Centre swayed.
There was something about the transformation from friends to lovers, from two-people-talking to two-people-doing-this-weird-thing-with-our-mouths, that, in that moment of truth, seemed utterly insuperable. I was so sure of rejection that in the very act of leaning in I could feel my lower jaw transform into a wrong-way magnet, so that her face would move away at exactly the pace and distance mine approached.
Often I would lose my nerve, but in the cases when I didn’t, girls reacted with shock that I would do such a thing as swoop down. I thought of going to the “can I kiss you?” but once on a school bus I heard a girl mocking that approach. “I’m like, damn, just do it,” she said. “Don’t ask me first.” So that ruled that out.
Oh, there were the charity cases, pimple-backed Catherine George, the racist rich girl from that Catholic school. Somehow I got drunk enough to—yes, that’s it, I could only do this swooping when I was drunk. That numbed me to the bizarreness of the act. Sober, forget it. Physically impossible.
Finally, after years of flagellating myself for my idiocy and wasted opportunities (still, I think of the five or so who got away as among the biggest tragedies of my life—I can name one who will never read this, Heidi Hendrix, and I can’t another on the off chance she and her family do), I learned. I traveled the world, I learned a bit about the absurdity of life and the way other people see these courtship games, and I learned about Asia and Africa and laughter. Like Boisseau who had his head half in California or whatever beach place had him listening to the Cars and dancing in his Jams, I had my head half elsewhere. The world was larger now. Rejection started to lose its impact. I came to embrace it even, to feel better after I had tried and failed than when I hadn’t tried at all. I read about other cultures and human evolution and apes and mating behavior. Rejection was a job well-done. After all this training, I became a kind of higher-tech seducer, or a busier one, but, by all measures, a better one. Instead of 0 out of 10 I was about 2 out of 10, which is pretty good I think.
I would still get a little nervous before doing it, but there was a little laugh I took with me in my swooping down, and this would take care of me in the event of rejection, and would even manifest itself in a shrug and smile or chuckle if we backed away from each other.
I realize now that the Boisseaus are not monkeys after all but maybe they—we, now--simply take life a little bit more lightly than the young brooder I was. And maybe monkey is a good metaphor for what we are, when you watch how smoothly they glide among branches, how they seem to glide right through life, lightly, laughingly, bright-eyed, optimistically. Was Boisseau laughing with life even then? Where did he come from and where was he off to? I remember the Hawaiian shirts, the laid-backedness, the way we drove to the beach once listening to Let the Good Times Roll, the way he bobbed his head. It seemed as if we were on our way to the endless party that was life. There was something west coast about him, surrounded by the uptight easterners like the rest of us.
Like everyone, I harbored a life-long crush on Cara Deckelmann down the street. In around 5th grade I had a vivid dream about the bare bottom on her sleeping figure. There was no movement or activity in the dream. Just her bare sleeping butt. The three or four smiles she threw my way over the course of 12 years branded themselves into my consciousness. But I would never have contemplated going to her house and knocking on her door. No, wait, I did once, but I was standing next to Reilly, who was delivering his crush note to her.
One afternoon after school, maybe fourth grade, Cara knocked on my door. Amazing that those fleet Diana feet ever crossed my lawn, stepped on my sidewalk. She was the fastest white girl in our school by far. We all tried to throw the ball her way during that game that used to be called “Smear the queer,” so we could tackle her. There she was, right where Boisseau would stand years later, smiling at me with that supercharged smile. “Is Rick here?” she asked. What? What did she want with my friend Rick?
Gitte, my dying Danish aunt, I think all the time about what you told me in the assisted-living facility. You said if you meet God when you die, you’re going to ask him only one question: Why did you teach me everything I needed to know when it was too late? It sounded rich at the time, and I tried to imagine what it meant to you, was it about the way you lost your big love, do you wish you’d forgiven him or done something else to not lose him, but I didn’t really get it. Until now. Now it brings tears to my eyes. Now, I’ve been to my 20th high school reunion, and Cara wasn’t there, but 303 other people were there, and I could see that nothing mattered anymore. Swooping in to kiss someone would not have amounted to much at all, and it didn’t. I swooped in on the cutest woman there, and she kissed me back, and it was utterly empty. Our lives had been too long already. Our minds were on other things. We just looked at each other, devoid of feeling, and went our ways.
Kissing Cara would probably have been no different. But I see, Gitte, what it means, I see it in the blur of Cara’s running fourth-grade stride, in the indescribable light of her girlhood smile, in the young fire of those brown eyes, those dimples that crushed all the junior-high boys, with those of us who’d been to elementary with her somehow feeling betrayed by these new attentions, in what is still almost impossible for me to contemplate: leaning in to kiss her.
Could it be that the only true magic comes before the world expands. Before you have your mind half on someplace else. When the local place is the only place. When a humiliation makes you think of suicide, and a victory makes you king. But that’s just it. With so much at stake I was petrified to take a chance. I never fought. I never made moves. I carried no global laughter with me. If I had known this secret, could I have used it? Or is it a secret that, once you have it, reduces everything? Is there a way to carry a balance inside, just a touch of the global laughter. Boisseau monkey. I could have laughingly reinvented myself as the swashbuckler who whisked her away, I could have made crazy moves, in all kinds of ways, I could have gotten into fights, raised my hand to speak in class, cracked jokes. I could have seen those hazel eyes beaming up at me, the dimples right up close, the knock on the door for me.
There was this guy, Jon Boisseau, who knocked on our door once and asked for my sister. After she’d lost the big glasses and gone to lenses. He didn’t stand a chance, not bad-looking but kind of scrawny and pimple-faced and a generally unappealing and not so smart aura about him, but I was amazed at the confident way he looked at me, only three years younger than he after all, and said, “Is your sister here?” They actually did go on one chaperoned movie date, because my sister couldn’t say no, but that was it.
I came to think of guys like Boisseau, with whom, as it turns out, I watched my first porno in a basement whose wall-to-wall carpeting I couldn’t stop rubbing my bare feet through because it was the first I’d ever touched, as monkeys. They just didn’t think about rejection. It didn’t cross their minds. When a girl said no, it made no difference to him. That’s why he was so fearless coming up to our door. He probably didn’t think twice about it. He probably had his mind half on California or wherever it was he came from before moving to our neighborhood. Maybe he was even just walking home from the deli and thought of it while crossing through the schoolyard. Monkeys. Where is the gut-wrenching, soul-clasping, hair-tearing agony that I always suffered, before that first phone call, my talking points scribbled in front of me: “Hey, Camilla, did you know there are people down in Georgia who eat dirt?”
And, much later, those first kisses. The endless countdowns from ten before I swooped in for the first kiss with a given rejectress. “Okay, now,” I’d say to myself. “Ten, nine, eight...” and the count would reload itself at zero: “Dammit, okay, now.” At Prince’s Purple Rain concert at the Capital Centre in 11th grade I stood there rubbing the shoulders of Virginia Rojo in front of me for a very long time before I summoned the nerve. Reilly had already fooled around with her, and I had to be higher up on the food chain than Reilly, who had failed three grades, right? Prince was singing my favorite song of his, one where he starts slow and goes crazy toward the end, and I vowed to swoop down for the smooch before he hit the crazy part. That way it could be the best kiss ever, even if I didn’t know the first thing about this Virginia Rojo, other than she had big knockers that Reilly touched one night on a hill in the playground near his house. I did about a dozen countdowns from ten, and finally just after the point where Prince goes crazy, singing, “Do you want him, or do you want me, cuz I want you, baby baby baby...” I tried to duck around to her face to kiss her, but it was a tough angle, because she was standing directly in front of me, and so I never even got close. She saw me closing in like a jetliner, and she lurched back and said, “I don’t even know you!” I went back to rubbing her shoulders, as if the last two seconds hadn’t happened, and the rest of the song became a wash of humiliation. At some point I just stopped rubbing her shoulders and stood straight as a board while the rest of the Capital Centre swayed.
There was something about the transformation from friends to lovers, from two-people-talking to two-people-doing-this-weird-thing-with-our-mouths, that, in that moment of truth, seemed utterly insuperable. I was so sure of rejection that in the very act of leaning in I could feel my lower jaw transform into a wrong-way magnet, so that her face would move away at exactly the pace and distance mine approached.
Often I would lose my nerve, but in the cases when I didn’t, girls reacted with shock that I would do such a thing as swoop down. I thought of going to the “can I kiss you?” but once on a school bus I heard a girl mocking that approach. “I’m like, damn, just do it,” she said. “Don’t ask me first.” So that ruled that out.
Oh, there were the charity cases, pimple-backed Catherine George, the racist rich girl from that Catholic school. Somehow I got drunk enough to—yes, that’s it, I could only do this swooping when I was drunk. That numbed me to the bizarreness of the act. Sober, forget it. Physically impossible.
Finally, after years of flagellating myself for my idiocy and wasted opportunities (still, I think of the five or so who got away as among the biggest tragedies of my life—I can name one who will never read this, Heidi Hendrix, and I can’t another on the off chance she and her family do), I learned. I traveled the world, I learned a bit about the absurdity of life and the way other people see these courtship games, and I learned about Asia and Africa and laughter. Like Boisseau who had his head half in California or whatever beach place had him listening to the Cars and dancing in his Jams, I had my head half elsewhere. The world was larger now. Rejection started to lose its impact. I came to embrace it even, to feel better after I had tried and failed than when I hadn’t tried at all. I read about other cultures and human evolution and apes and mating behavior. Rejection was a job well-done. After all this training, I became a kind of higher-tech seducer, or a busier one, but, by all measures, a better one. Instead of 0 out of 10 I was about 2 out of 10, which is pretty good I think.
I would still get a little nervous before doing it, but there was a little laugh I took with me in my swooping down, and this would take care of me in the event of rejection, and would even manifest itself in a shrug and smile or chuckle if we backed away from each other.
I realize now that the Boisseaus are not monkeys after all but maybe they—we, now--simply take life a little bit more lightly than the young brooder I was. And maybe monkey is a good metaphor for what we are, when you watch how smoothly they glide among branches, how they seem to glide right through life, lightly, laughingly, bright-eyed, optimistically. Was Boisseau laughing with life even then? Where did he come from and where was he off to? I remember the Hawaiian shirts, the laid-backedness, the way we drove to the beach once listening to Let the Good Times Roll, the way he bobbed his head. It seemed as if we were on our way to the endless party that was life. There was something west coast about him, surrounded by the uptight easterners like the rest of us.
Like everyone, I harbored a life-long crush on Cara Deckelmann down the street. In around 5th grade I had a vivid dream about the bare bottom on her sleeping figure. There was no movement or activity in the dream. Just her bare sleeping butt. The three or four smiles she threw my way over the course of 12 years branded themselves into my consciousness. But I would never have contemplated going to her house and knocking on her door. No, wait, I did once, but I was standing next to Reilly, who was delivering his crush note to her.
One afternoon after school, maybe fourth grade, Cara knocked on my door. Amazing that those fleet Diana feet ever crossed my lawn, stepped on my sidewalk. She was the fastest white girl in our school by far. We all tried to throw the ball her way during that game that used to be called “Smear the queer,” so we could tackle her. There she was, right where Boisseau would stand years later, smiling at me with that supercharged smile. “Is Rick here?” she asked. What? What did she want with my friend Rick?
Gitte, my dying Danish aunt, I think all the time about what you told me in the assisted-living facility. You said if you meet God when you die, you’re going to ask him only one question: Why did you teach me everything I needed to know when it was too late? It sounded rich at the time, and I tried to imagine what it meant to you, was it about the way you lost your big love, do you wish you’d forgiven him or done something else to not lose him, but I didn’t really get it. Until now. Now it brings tears to my eyes. Now, I’ve been to my 20th high school reunion, and Cara wasn’t there, but 303 other people were there, and I could see that nothing mattered anymore. Swooping in to kiss someone would not have amounted to much at all, and it didn’t. I swooped in on the cutest woman there, and she kissed me back, and it was utterly empty. Our lives had been too long already. Our minds were on other things. We just looked at each other, devoid of feeling, and went our ways.
Kissing Cara would probably have been no different. But I see, Gitte, what it means, I see it in the blur of Cara’s running fourth-grade stride, in the indescribable light of her girlhood smile, in the young fire of those brown eyes, those dimples that crushed all the junior-high boys, with those of us who’d been to elementary with her somehow feeling betrayed by these new attentions, in what is still almost impossible for me to contemplate: leaning in to kiss her.
Could it be that the only true magic comes before the world expands. Before you have your mind half on someplace else. When the local place is the only place. When a humiliation makes you think of suicide, and a victory makes you king. But that’s just it. With so much at stake I was petrified to take a chance. I never fought. I never made moves. I carried no global laughter with me. If I had known this secret, could I have used it? Or is it a secret that, once you have it, reduces everything? Is there a way to carry a balance inside, just a touch of the global laughter. Boisseau monkey. I could have laughingly reinvented myself as the swashbuckler who whisked her away, I could have made crazy moves, in all kinds of ways, I could have gotten into fights, raised my hand to speak in class, cracked jokes. I could have seen those hazel eyes beaming up at me, the dimples right up close, the knock on the door for me.
posted by Thon at 10:55 AM
1 Comments:
hummmmm...Atlanta is a cold place for some.
talent
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