I was recently talking to a British friend, a married woman who now lives in America, and she complained that when acquaintances saw her in a bar they feared her marriage was on the rocks. She was appalled by their assumption. In fact, she said, she had gone to the bar simply to talk among her friends, a pastime that is quite common in England. In America, however, we don’t really have friends. The bar is a place to sell ourselves while using every trick up our sleeve. Married life, then, is a place to convalesce from all those exhausting single years of self-promotion.
The self-promotion starts early, long before adolescence. I learned this the hard way many years ago when at five years of age I had a tree house that was in competition with another nearby tree house, one that was lorded over by Rich Drakos. Our tree houses were about twenty yards apart from one another in separate walnut trees. We lured girls into our tree houses with dolls, stuffed animals, sweets, anything that would get their attention. One afternoon, I tried to persuade Patty Wilson to climb up my tree by dangling a box of raisins, tied to a long string, in front of her face. I assured her the wood slats nailed to the tree trunk were secure enough for her to climb. She made her way up the trunk, tentatively grabbing each plank, her determined face grimacing, as I eagerly awaited her. Always wanting to outdo me, Rich popped his head out of a leafy cluster and, holding a box of Captain Kangaroo Cookies, he told Patty to forget about my “sad little raisins” and to come join him for a real treat. His tree house was vastly superior to mine. Bigger, lusher, sturdier, it was more elaborately decorated with stuffed animals and lollipops, which hung from nearby limbs. It was quite obvious to me that Patty would not settle for my wrinkled little raisins when what she could be enjoying were delicious cookies, the very same sweets the ruddy-jowled Captain Kangaroo and his side-kick Mr. Green Jeans gorged on. It was my first opportunity to see the power of TV-generated hype. Captain Kangaroo Cookies were promoted to the child demographic in a way raisins were not. So naturally Patty, upon hearing Rich’s scintillating offer, stopped half-way up my tree and greedily eyed Rich’s cookies as if they were gold bullion. She then gave a little snarl of contempt at my raisins before descending my tree, skipping to Rich’s tree house and climbing its little wood slats like a pro. Shortly after, she and Rich got cozy and feasted on their double-fudge, cream-centered cookie sandwiches. When they were done eating, they licked their lips and gloated at me, a lone loser, stuck with my pathetic little box of raisins.
As I watched them nestle together, I realized that Rich’s tree house was perched higher than mine and cast a dark shadow over me so that I felt chilled in the shade of my relatively small hovel. Inconsolable, I curled up in the fetal position and cried myself to sleep, only to be awakened hours later when my body was covered by red fire ants that, presumably attracted to the raisins, had swarmed my perch. My entire body felt like it had been lashed by stinging nettles and I ran to my apartment where my mother drowned the red ants, dozens still crawling over my body, by giving me a scalding bath. As I nursed my welts, I looked at my pain as indicative of the anguish that comes from losing a girl to another male whose powers are vastly superior to mine.
I was reminded of that horrible stinging sensation twelve years later when I saw Rich enjoy a type of power over the high school girls that I had never seen before. His fine features, long lashes and full red lips bordering on the feminine, rendered the other boys at Castro Valley High downright plain or ugly. But what was most striking about him was his resemblance to Paul McCartney. He had the haughty-faced crooner’s slightly upturned nose, puckered mouth, ruddy cheeks, arched eyebrows, and sad-shaped puppy-dog eyes. He had the same hair, which for many years he kept groomed the way McCartney did in the 1970s and 1980s, long in the back and feathered in the front. But to be honest, he was actually a more handsome version of Paul McCartney. He had fuller lips, higher cheekbones, and a liquid iridescence to his dark eyes. All these qualities made him very proud of himself, perhaps even a little smug. He always had a blissful smile on his face, which, owing to his extreme good looks, was born from the assurance that the whole world not only loved him but needed him, needed to be in his presence in order to be reminded of what beauty truly is and needed to be close to him because of the hope that his excess good looks might spill over and give heightened appeal to those who were lucky enough to be in his proximity. The boys wanted to be close to him just as much as the girls because we understood the power of association. If the girls, thinking we were part of Rich’s inner circle, believed they could get to him through us, they would pursue us with mind-boggling intensity. Or if some girls believed we were Rich’s close friends, we were then worthy consolation prizes to those girls who, giving up on the unattainable Rich Drakos, would settle for dating one of his chosen sycophants. We knew how needy we were to grovel and audition to be Rich’s toady, but we did not care because we knew the glories to be enjoyed from being his lackey were far greater than any pleasures we could muster by ourselves.
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