It was no surprise to us that Rich was chosen to be the featured kisser at the five-bucks-a-pop Kissing Booth at our fund raiser for Senior Grad Night. Girls eagerly lined up for hours and paid Rich cash, plus exorbitant tips, for the pleasure of smacking him on the lips. I cringed with envy as I watched girls coming back from the courtyard, having received their kiss from him. One girl’s knees buckled. Another fainted. Another had an accident. It was all standard procedure, another typical day for the glorious life of the school’s most handsome boy. As a testament to his super human powers, Rich had made close to a thousand dollars at the Kissing Booth and would have made double that amount, but growing chap-lipped and fatigued, he quit in the middle of the day, resulting in a near riot and hysterical sobs from those grieving girls who had been turned away before they got their chance to experience an encounter with Ecstasy.
Now it was late in the afternoon, a couple of hours after Rich had made so much money at the Kissing Booth, that I witnessed my first piece of evidence that for all his good looks and popularity something wasn’t quite right with him. I was on my way to use the gym locker bathroom, for after school it tended to be relatively abandoned and afforded me more privacy than the bathroom by the classroom corridors, when I saw Rich and another girl outside the gym’s back door. They were unaware of me as I passed them by, which was a good thing, since they were absorbed in a marathon session of French-kissing. Seeing Rich smooch with another girl wasn’t my first clue that something was wrong with him. Rather, it was his choice of girl.
It’s hard to describe her without sounding insensitive, if not a bit cruel. First let me say I don’t remember her real name. I only remember what the boys, myself included, called her—Tasmanian Devil. It was a very cruel name indeed. It captured the horror she instilled in us. She was a hulk of a girl, no smaller than our football team’s offensive linemen, with an oversized head, long, black stringy hair, a snout for a nose, and those unfortunate fleshy cheeks that seem to push against the eyes so that they are barely visible.
Now what made Tasmanian Devil particularly frightening was that she was not, like the other homely girls, particularly apologetic about her unsightly appearance. Nor was she particularly smart, a claim reinforced by rumors that she took special classes for slow learners. On football Fridays when we had a home game, she was especially scary because she would show up to school wearing a pink mini skirt, white stockings, and a thick application of bright makeup. These measures did not diminish her dreadfulness. To the contrary, her “dressing up” only exacerbated her ugliness the way one might, by picking and popping a pimple, cause it to inflame.
Now for the record I need to make it clear that my sense of decency had stopped me from calling her Tasmanian Devil after seeing her sitting alone in the bleachers during a football game a few weeks before. It was raining that night and my friends and I were snugly close to each other protecting ourselves with our many umbrellas. We were full of adolescent exuberance, joking, laughing, slapping each other on the back. Twenty yards away Tasmanian Devil sat all alone, no one closer than thirty feet from her. She had no umbrella. Rain poured on her sodden hair, which clung to her wet forehead. Mascara ran down her face and reminded me of blood. But she appeared to be completely indifferent to the fact that she was getting more and more soaked. She was withdrawn into herself and there was a despondence in her expression as if she knew, in that moment, that she would be fated to a life-sentence of loneliness and ridicule.
And so you can imagine how disconcerted I was, two weeks later, to see Rich French-kissing her behind the gym. He couldn’t have been attracted to her. He had to be playing a sadistic game: First, giving her a taste of something forbidden, then denying it from her, and then watching the powerful, devastating effects of that denial. Tasmanian Devil was submitted into a mental institution a month later during Christmas vacation. I never knew her exact diagnosis but it was rumored that she would without warning erupt into violent fits in which she would babble Rich’s name over and over while being forced into a straitjacket and being injected with a variety of anti-psychotic drugs. Her insane reaction to Rich’s narcotic sex appeal was not uncommon. During our first year of college, for example, he played on the soccer team and paraded around campus on roller skates while wearing translucent onion skin red gym shorts and no shirt, revealing his lean, muscular torso. In the cafeteria, I’d see him roll up to some unsuspecting girl sitting at a table. Standing behind her, he’d cover her eyes with his hands and say, “Guess who?” When she turned to see who had been flirting with her, she’d be mortified that he had caught her with too much egg salad in her mouth and she’d dash to the bathroom to expel her mouth’s contents and freshen up so as not to be seen in an unfavorable light. Of course, by the time she returned to her place at the table, Rich had forgotten all about her and was now making his rounds with the other girls, laughing at their disarray, intoxicated by his own ruthless powers.
This is no lie: My freshman year in college Rich and I were on an elevator in the Humanities Building. The elevator stopped at the second floor. Two young women, one of them whom I recognized from my speech class, entered it and stared at him. My classmate’s friend was clearly beside herself. Her chin quivered and her eyes welled with tears. It was as if she had, against everyone’s advice, sacrificed her whole life searching for uranium and had, near the end of her life with nothing to show for her efforts, had finally come across a rich vein of the precious element, a bonanza so great that she was overcome with the assurance that she would finally be able to move her impoverished family from Hicksville to a plush seaside residence in California and buy them all mansions and a fleet of luxury cars. While she tried in vain to suppress her breathless rapture, Rich looked positively bored, a bit supercilious, and maybe, just maybe, slightly amused. Shortly after, the girl from my speech class started calling me. Mind you, she had ignored me before; she had even scoffed at my attempts to talk to her, but now she was calling me and saying hello with a cloying enthusiasm whenever we passed each other on campus. Who was she kidding anyway? Just because I was now vaguely associated in her mind with Rich Drakos, she had decided that I was worth a second look. Rich’s incredible sexual charisma merely highlighted my own conspicuous absence of it and at night I contemplated my lowly position in the Human Reproduction Scale, tossing and turning for hours until eventually I fell into a vexed, restless sleep.
To tell you the truth, my depression wasn’t so much the envy I suffered as I watched Rich Drakos enjoy his glory; it was more the shame I suffered for being so shallow, for allowing myself to get caught up in the trap of measuring my wellbeing by comparing my appearance to others and, falling short, succumbing to self-pity. I felt I needed to reach deep inside myself and find something deeper than the pathetic young man I had become—a scared little boy who, like that day in my tree house, was so quick to curl up and give up on life. I wanted to find a better, braver, more noble self that didn’t get caught up in the world’s obsession with good looks. I wanted to shun the world’s superficial preoccupation with appearances and go on a quest for Higher Meaning, Truth, and Light.
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