Creeper

"Amelie, "Sammie," MCG, and friend Anita
a visit to SF before graduation

         He called himself a skinhead. His head was shaved; he wore jeans, suspenders, and tall doc martin boots. He repulsed me, but I was seventeen and I had only two weeks, just two weeks left in Tuolumne, that tiny, tiny town at the bottom of the valley, that had held me too tight with its big mountain arms.
         It was June and the days were long and hot, longer now that leaving was so near. Mom was out of her head from too much meth and not enough sleep. She was either wiping at her nose and sniffing or screaming, using every version of the F word with a "shit" and a "goddamn it" thrown in for emphasis.

As if in a final act of self-hatred, a final cut from the serrated mountain-shaped knife, I began fucking Creeper, or letting him fuck me. Recovering from a broken neck, he wore a neck brace which gave him a de-helmeted Darth Vadar look, and his head shaved with a razor nearly everyday, still flaked with dandruff that up close made him look like a very old man. Still it happened at night, after the beer and the desperation set in. It happened in the dark.

He said he was a skinhead, and I knew what that meant, but still he hung around people he was supposed to hate, or did hate, or whatever. And that's how I felt, whatever. There was no one else. I could tolerate the revulsion for just two weeks. I had been hated for so long already, none of it felt real anymore, and I was going to leave it all behind. I just had to get through these last fourteen days -- the bitter end of a long sentence, just 336 hours, 20160 minutes, 1209600 seconds of the dusty driveway, the dry star thistles, the go-no-where roads, and the dead feeling inside.

Who Is The Fairest Of Them All?

No good pic for this story, but I do love this one with friends
who always made me feel good about myself.

I didn’t understand what a feat it was that Tom Sear started going together early freshman year until he broke up with me less than a month later. Tom, a JV football player, was considered rather attractive in his olive skin and sandy brown, feathered hair. Many of the freshman girls who hadn’t gone to elementary school with him, and who weren’t immune to his cool look of suede loafers and corduroys, spent a great deal of time talking about his perfect hair, pretty green eyes, and pouty lips. I wasn’t too aware that he was what most would consider “out of my league,” for the most popular and desired girls usually had big blond hair, light-colored eyes, and long white legs that looked good in cheer leading skirts or shorts. I knew not to mention that Tom had given me several sidelong looks around campus. I got the feeling that no one would believe me anyway.

        After hanging around after school during Tom’s football practice with my friend Brandy whose boyfriend was also on the team, and waiting to take the late bus home so we could all sit together, Tom and I began “going together.” We hung around one another shyly between classes, at first, but we’d soon be breaking the school’s PDA rules, kissing feverishly down on the wooded bridge which was surrounded by a grove of young, green trees in the middle of campus. Tom would grip his hands around my waist and hoist me onto the flat concrete railing and push himself between my legs, holding me tight around the back to keep me from falling. Our foreheads, noses, and lips, now almost level, met, and a charge of tongues conducted an electric volt, Tom’s grip tightening and loosing around my back as he leaned in and then pulled me tighter to him. My heart raced and my head felt light like the sound of the rustling leaves in the trees over my head.

         Then a couple of days before my fourteenth birthday, it was over. Tom broke up with me. 

         Just the day before, he had been standing between my legs, his arms around my waist, kissing me in his hot, sweet way, and the next he was telling me it was over, saying nothing about the dark-haired, but much lighter-skinned girl, named Marcie he was going around with just days later.

At first, I couldn’t figure it out. I went over the entire month long relationship in my head: we never had an argument; he never looked at another girl; all we ever did was kiss and say nice things quietly to one another. I spent the two days leading up to my fourteenth birthday crying and wondering what I had done wrong. After school one day as I was waiting again for the early bus, Brandy found me and told me that she had talked to Tom, “He said that he just doesn’t want to be around you anymore.” Whatever that meant.

For months and months, it seemed like it meant that no other boys felt like being around me either. I didn't dare look at the few Mexican boys who went to Summerville High because it was better to go around pretending that we didn't know we were Mexican ourselves let alone hooking up and drawing attention to ourselves. And I didn't dare thinking I had a chance with older boys. And since there wasn't anyone at the school who looked like Paul Simonon of The Clash, there wasn't anyone that I was really even attracted to, but I really wanted to be liked.

It took getting my hopes up about Matthew Johnson, who I didn’t find remotely attractive, to get a sense of what had happened with Tom and why I wasn't one of those girls who boys spent time thinking about. Matthew had stared at me in history class since nearly the beginning of the year. Our classroom, a portable, had the desks arranged in an L shape, the teacher’s desk and chalkboard were at the front of the class; rows of desks descended down the left and the back wall, making it possible to sneak looks, or in Matthew’s case, stare. When Matthew wasn’t staring at me, I snuck looks at him, his pink skin, nose that hooked unattractively upward, and awkward haircut that insisted on parting down the middle, in spite of being too short to do so. Even though he had blond hair and blue eyes, Matthew was not particularly attractive; he was popular and well liked by for being smart and nice to everyone. He also played on the football team, which didn’t really impress me all that much, but he didn’t strut around like some kind of Adonis. He got straight A’s and impressed people in class by his thoughtful insights. By many important standards, he was a dreamboat, and if he had asked me to a dance, I would have said, “yes,” even though I wasn't physically attracted to him at all. In fact, in some ways, I found him quite revolting.

         Thinking about Matthew one morning, while getting ready for school and taking special care to look my best, I saw my naked face, no mascara,  no  eye-shadow, or bright pink blush, when I realized something that had worried me about dating Tom from the beginning. I had black hair, dark skin and dark eyes, and no amount of blue eye shadow, mascara, or even perfectly feathered hair was going to help me blend in better or keep everyone from seeing who I really was – a shabby Mexican girl, trying to pass herself off as an all American girl worthy of a boyfriend.

       Then I had the urge to spit, to spit in my own face, to yank the mirror from the wall and smash it to bits and pieces. I saw the glass shattered at my feet. It was me. I was the problem. Matthew stared at me because he was intrigued and curious. He wasn’t going to redeem or validate or save me. He went out of his way to stare at me long enough to catch my eye before looking away, but he wasn't going to ask me out. I finally knew that.

Saving Face

MG with "Amelie" and friend Lara Sprinkles
Summerville High circa 1986

In any other school at any other time Rick Oliveros and I might have been a couple. He was a short, compact, dark-skinned, muscular Mexican-American (the kind who wouldn’t have wanted to be described as dark-skinned at all) who almost always wore the classic grey pullover hooded sweatshirt, the look of his sport. Rick was a wrestler, known for lean, bulging muscles and quick moves. His athleticism gave him access to popularity that my being a band geek did not.

         Rick Oliveros, who was a year older, hated my guts. He hated Amelie too, called us freaks and spit in our direction whenever weren’t able to avoid crossing his path. It was because of Rick Oliveros that Amelie and I developed a sort of defense system. I was the mouthpiece.

         “Fuck you, Rick. What’s the matter, you upset you don’t have any sweaty guys to roll around with today?”

         We had to respond, to be nasty back, to save face.

         If Rick made any aggressive gestures in my direction, Amelie would get between us and stare him down, for she was several inches taller.

“Little man complex, eh?”  I’d add before he’d turned to walk away.

Fucking freaky bitches,” he’d say loud enough for others to hear that he had gotten in the last word.

We both knew he wasn’t likely to take his threats too far and jeopardize his place on the wrestling team, though we went to the kind of school that might let such a slip-up slide the first time. And he never said anything to Amelie when she and I weren’t together, but we both sensed that I had to take special care not to run into him on my own between classes or coming out of the bathroom alone.

         At my locker one day, on my way to a class that Amelie and I did not take together, Rick crossed the breezeway, crashed into me, slamming my body hard into the metal lockers. Shocked and in pain, I did nothing but grab my bruised hip with one hand and shut my locker with the other. Some watched on amused and at least one or two looked concerned, but no one intervened.

         “That’s what you get,” he said, nostrils flaring.

         I watched and waited until he turned and lumbered away.

         Though, I guess we both knew that he was, Amelie and I never talked about the fact that Rick Oliveras was Mexican-American just like we were. In fact, his English was lightly accented, that of a Spanish speaker, and his older brother Omar spoke with an even heavier accent. Only Omar was skinny and nerdy and nice, nice to everyone. Maybe it was because we were tired of hearing about it from the adults who pointed it out for us, like our Spanish teacher who liked to remind everyone that we were best friends and we both had Spanish last names and French first names, but Amelie and I never spoke much about being Mexican at all.

         Maybe Rick was secretly angry that I had sullied my chance of dating him, sullied our hyphenated identity by dressing weird and purposefully chopping my hair short in response to the ascribed standard of beauty. Or was he simply a short, dark-skinned Mexican kid in a small town that didn’t want him either –Amelie and I threatening to expose what he was trying to mask with his singlet and that hard look on his face.