Today’s another day when way too many people are saying this stuff happens in high school because that’s just how men are like, and if you add alcohol to the equation, whatever, what else can you expect?, and I’m suddenly thinking about Hockey Boy (my next door neighbour growing up), and a party we found ourselves at when we were seventeen and summer was almost there, enticing and sweet like ripening strawberries. I considered it a wild thing at the time, but I now understand we were innocent nobodies in the middle of an isolated nowhere. Still, there was music and spin the bottle and some very hard liquor and I think two people disappeared in a room together and everyone laughed and cheered. And anyway, Hockey Boy drank too much of whatever that thing was (‘Oven cleaner’, the host described it) and finally passed out on the couch, his freckles standing out like scars in the fading candlelight.
On the whole, a most interesting & satisfying night.
Only the next day I was made aware of a prank they were playing on him, and here it’s where it gets complicated for half a second: Hockey Boy and I were very good friends, but I was best friends with his best friend, Silver Earring, another boy who lived in the neighbourhood, and we’d all grown up together and spent time together and were in a band and did all those things teenagers did before the internet. What I never realized at the time is that Silver Earring had a tentative crush on me and what I did realize of is that I had a tentative crush on Hockey Boy because he’d basically put on thirty pounds of muscle over the previous summer and there’s a moment you get around friends of the opposite sex, right (or friends of the same sex for whomever’s so inclined) – that Shit, okay tHEN flash of realization that your childhood playmates have actual physical bodies attached to them, that they’re not only jokes and weird habits and shared memories but real people with bits and bobs and lips you could potentially kiss and wouldn’t that be a good story for your future children? And anyway, Silver Earring was trying to find out how I felt about him, also he needed to get back at Hockey Boy for some situation involving a guitar I never knew the full truth of, so what he did is that he told Hockey Boy that he’d been Very Inappropriate with me the night before, Very Inappropriate Indeed, and when asked for details he smiled a wild fox smile and dropped concepts like ‘nudity’ and ‘didn’t know you had it in you’ and also ‘not sure she’s happy btw’ and we were seventeen and idiotic, and this was all a big joke to him, time of his life, really, and when he came to me and asked me to lie and help him out so he could turn this prank into something Epic, I honestly didn’t see anything wrong with it?
(I now understand he was hoping I’d cry out, ‘Oh no, I couldn’t possibly pretend to have feelings for him’ and ‘I don’t want you, specifically, to think I’m interested in someone else’, but, well – miscommunication and missed chances and life taking us both in better and more suitable directions.)
No: we all knew one another really well and school was boring boring boring and people were always lying and going on adventures in my books, so this was exciting and new and something to write in my diary about. Yay. We both assumed Hockey Boy would be embarrassed, that he would blush that rare blush of his, and it was fun to have this stupid secret between us.
(As I said: yay.)
But when I got back from school that very same day, Hockey Boy was waiting for me in my driveway, all miserable and washed-out in the hot afternoon sun, and suddenly the thing didn’t seem so fun anymore. As soon as he saw me, as soon as I got off my bike, he stood up – he tried to look at me, couldn’t – and staring at his feet, he delivered a stumbling, heartfelt, soul-shattering apology for something I knew perfectly well he hadn’t even done. He told me he didn’t remember anything about that night, that he regretted drinking because he never wanted to embarrass or hurt me in any way, that Silver Earring hadn’t told him the details of what had happened but it didn’t matter – it was bad, and it was his fault, and he hoped we could still be friends but he understood if I –
“You fell asleep,” I blurted out, and I don’t think I’d ever been more ashamed of myself in my entire life. He was pale and red-eyed and freaking undone. “You fell asleep and nothing happened.”
“But he said – wait – that bastard -”
It ended, luckily, in nothing at all. Silver Earring paid us both drinks the next Saturday night, apologized profusely for being an idiot, and there was some blushing and a couple of uncomfortable smiles, but that was it. And if I think of my (boy) friends, of the people (men) I grew up with, stuff like this is mostly what I remember. Boys being careful, boys being kind, boys asking if you’re sure, boys backing off, boys saying sorry and looking at their feet and knowing exactly where the line is.
(Boys being normal, that is.
Boys being human beings and not freaks and not monsters.)
So, I don’t know – it physically hurts, it
physically
makes me sick to sit here and listen to grown-ass adults pretending boys and men are inherently violent, inherently brutal, inherently selfish and criminal and mean-spirited – and that we, as a society (as women) should simply let them be as violent and brutal and selfish and criminal and mean-spirited as they were born to be.
Seriously, enough with this bullshit.
Just – enough.
(And also: if men and boys are so utterly incapable of self-control, why do those same people insist of they should be in charge of virtually everything? You can’t both argue men are way more rational than hormone-driven, blood-dripping, borderline hysterical women and then explain away shitty and illegal behaviour as ‘just male nature’, surely? How does that work?)
