parasitegirl | I was promised Hungry Hippos

I’m at the end of a nasty tussle with a cold/allergies. My voice is slowly coming back. I feel some disbelief, because I can’t remember the last cold that ended without my bronchial tubes getting involved and more serious complications emerging. This is how normal people have colds. I am not used to it.

I did get to see long-time Japan-friend, Kazu, this weekend…but other than that my weekend was quiet. Still, I find myself wanting to write. Twice I’ve found myself remembering Aaron M. this weekend and that seems as good a prompt as any.

I’ve known Aaron since the day before we both entered Madison West High School as freshmen. We were 14. I’d been shopping for back-to-school clothing on the east side of town with a friend from summer theater, Stacy. My friend lived on the east side. I rode the bus back to the west side by myself, sitting towards the back of the vehicle. At some point downtown (Madison is on an isthmus, all busses then passed through downtown) a noisy group of 13 or so kids around my own age boarded the bus and sat down all around me. They were mostly boys, there couldn’t have been more than three girls among them (Merritt, Christina… perhaps Naomi was there but it feels like she came a little later). Happy and loud, they laughed and told stories and quoted the shared knowledge of skits and movies I did not yet know. I had never watched any Monty Python or read the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. They pulled out new student ID’s, for the upcoming year, and compared/mocked pictures.

This is when I spoke up. I had a new ID for West High too! I spoke. I produced the ID. I joined in.

They told me I should come with them to Kidwell’s and they pointed to the boy named Ben Kidwell, who would be instrumental in introducing me to surrealist artists and Dadaists in the following month….who would once sit in the backseat of my father’s car with me, our pinkies touching. They said they were all hanging out and it would be fun and games. They promised me Hungry Hungry Hippo (a board game with metal balls and snapping hippo mouths…for they had some sense of ironic-retro mocking humor before such things were cool).

I got off the bus with them near our shared school. Many of them ran into Joe’s on Regent to stock up on soda. Joe’s, a fixture of lunchtime snacks at West, had hand-painted price signs all over the front windows, so you couldn’t see in. I stayed outside and bought a Dr. Pepper at the vending machine while a thin boy with dark hair that spiked, un-styled, above his head, Aaron, continued to try to talk me into coming with them. I may have been telling him then that he needed not convince me further. This was four bus stops before my own, I may have said, I’d gotten off to join them. I don’t remember what I said, but I do remember that Jeremy B stuck his head out of Joe’s and shouted at Aaron that they were buying Hubba-Bubba Bubblegum soda! Aaron, his limbs all awkward, ran from me and into the store to stop the insanity.

It was yesterday, while looking over the found VHS gems of everythingisterrible.com that I saw an advertisement for Hubba Bubba Bubblegum soda and thought back to that day. They didn’t buy the bubblegum soda. At Kidwell’s they didn’t play Hungry Hungry Hippos . We did listen to the Violent Femmes, joke, and laugh. I think it was then that they called John Walsh’s answering machine every few minutes to play a talking clock to him…all followed by Jeremy calling to ask if he knew the time… They had no idea my Christmas would be spent, in part, with John Walsh and I would be unable to get that memory scrubbed as I talked with him.

I was four hours late in getting home. Dean Mommy was concerned and less than amused. The next day I awoke knowing that new friends would be at school, happy to see me.

It hasn’t been the first time I’ve remembered that day. I’ve though of it often, because those people I met that day became one of the core group of friends I had in high school. I’ve written about them often, the good and the bad. They were the first friends I had that introduced me to new writers, artists, music, and movies. They were smart and complex. They were, I used to think, much smarter than me. It wasn’t that my small group of friends before that weren’t smart, but it was a quiet liberal-arts smart we shared, not math, science, computers, music and things I thought beyond me.

They’d found each other deliberately at first and then it became more organic. The first gathering, I was told, had stemmed from the idea that each of them had one or two friends, and if at each gathering each new person brought a new-to-the-group friend…it would grow. It was growing when it met me. I, as I have written, had been on my own path of being less shy, talking more, reaching out more, leaving the hellish shell of middle school. I was growing as I met them. Eventually, they were the friends first experimenting with drugs and discussing it in detail and the friends first horrified by other friends experimenting with drugs. They were the first people I knew to experiment with open relationships and sexuality and they were the last virgins I knew. We/they contained multitudes.

They, we, found a path out of feeling alienated and from being alone in our own skulls…and yet could be horrible snobs at times and unintentionally intimidated people. There was something that bound us together, yet we were, at times, a collection of people better explained by a Dadaist experiment. The orderly disorder of an exquisite corpse, my friends.

I have written about how I felt part of, yet intellectually inferior to, this odd group. That sense of inferiority was not all my own invention and insecurity, some of it was implied by others in the group. In retrospect, it probably helped me seek out other groups of friends who did appreciate the odd skills I have and the ways in which my brain does make itself known.

Aaron, however, never made me feel like my mind lacked. I think it is because we both understood that stories and sharing experiences are important. This was the other thing that made think of him. This morning on the train I was listening to a Radio Lab pod cast entitled Tell Me a Story (I highly recommend it and all of Radio Lab) It was one of the between-season pod casts they make, shorter bits of this and that. This one was of Robert Krulwich giving a commencement speech at the California Institute of Technology. His speech was about why people involved with science should take the time to find ways of sharing the stories about what they do, and what science is, with laypeople…no matter how exhausting the prospect might be…because stories matter and because the stories of science must compete with all the other beautiful stories that refute science.

I thought of Aaron because he was skilled in, and loved, math in ways I could barely understand (and wasn’t interested in pursuing) but that never stopped him from trying to describe that world to me. He never seemed to halt his description of an idea out of concern that I wouldn’t understand or appreciate it. I listened, knowing that there was much I wouldn’t grasp but also knowing that he had enough of a gift of image and word that I would bring something away from it…and that if he was excited about it there might be something I’d find exciting.

There’s a re-occurring shape I think of, thanks to Aaron, of a set of horns that arc together but moments before the horns of the shape touch, two more horns spring from each point and flee at a 90 degree angle (I may be off) creating two more arcs circling toward each other almost to meet…but the same fate awaits them. It’s one of those things I sometime think about as I try to sleep, like imagining myself to be on the back of a giant catfish (a relatively newer image that comes from Japan).

I don’t mean to imply that I sat at Aaron’s feet, waiting to learn. Our friendship, though perhaps odd from the outside, was quite even. We both assumed that, despite how different we may seem, things one of us were interested were worth sharing with the other. He’d come up to me in study hall and snap a pair of headphone on me so I could listen to Wire and, in a worthless history class, I would pass him a graphic novel of Sandman. Most of what we shared was books, music, films.

I don’t know how best to describe how different we may have seemed to other people, not without doing us both a disservice, but I suspect we appeared an odd friendship…if we even registered to outsiders as friends. In many ways we weren’t close but were the sort of friends who, when together, are endlessly talking and interested in what the other is saying.

I suspect the reason I didn’t think of him as a close friend is because there were, no doubt, things he didn’t talk to me about, those parts of his world that I wouldn’t have grasped, just as there were parts of my complex relationships with people that sometimes I didn’t share with him for the same reason…but there was so much that we did and could share that there was some sort of friendship.

When, my second year in college, I visited Dean Mommy in Boston, she was in a trade-union-program thing at Harvard for a half a year, I saw Aaron and drew this:

http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=4446646&l=ffd44ff7ee&id=644629953

I remembered that we talked about his first dating experiences when I was there.

Later I ended up in Boston for the first semester of my third year in college. We spent that Thanksgiving together. We walked through a silent neighborhood and felt a part of the world. We ate Mac and Cheese, drank Cherry Coke, and watched Swimming to Cambodia.

In my time in Boston I saw him cry and he saw me cry. I think we cried due to relationships, but relationships were still one of the things that marked how different our worlds were. I remember that I held him and talked while he cried. I remember that he offered me candy and a sofa when I cried, not really knowing what else to do.

Since then we’ve found each other again, although I won’t out him here. He is as much a story teller as I am. I met him for dinner when we were both back for our first Wisconsin winter in ages, last December. It was a little over 20 years since we’d first met.

We sat down and talk and talk and talked. I didn’t perceive the experience gaps I used to when with him. His life is as varied and odd as my life is…as anyone’s is if you care to look closely…although I’d say some of our lives are generally agreed upon as strange by the general public. Much has happened over the years, things our younger selves wouldn’t have predicted but that neither of us seemed particularly surprised at when face to face and sharing our stories. We ate, we walked, we drank (but barely) and then we walked around the snowy and silent capitol, feeling part of the world.