1995 -- ELEVEN
Eve,
Whats up, OK I’m sorry It wasn’t my fault,
he got me drunk, + one thing led to another, Oh
God, it was horrible. Just kidding.
Anyway, I wouldn’t mind bein’ wrapped
in plastic with you babe, wanna come back to my
pad and get down!!!
Just kidding, anyway, nothings wrong with
your shirt opening, just kidding, I don’t like freak.
Anyway, even if we did go out, I wouldn’t
want you to pay, I wouldn’t let you pay for like a
movie or somethins.
Anyway, when you get home, call me. If its
past 11:30 ring once + I’ll call back. It would be
mad butter g-funk home skillet g-money q-ball
bad homefry. Type person. Anyway.
I’ll miss ya.
Gabe.
I met Gabe when all the skater/metalhead/goth/juvenile delinquents from both junior high schools in the district found each other after we converged under the big ninth grade umbrella that September. We were easily identifiable to each other by our wallet chains, skate sneakers and wide-leg Jnco jeans. Vic had gone to the ‘other’ junior high, and when my friends saw the percentage of gangster verses dirtbag from the other school, we realized that we had clearly come from the more rock and roll side of the school district. Our dirtbags outnumbered their dirtbags, I guess one could say. With regards to the whole class, it was as if some whole mods vs. rockers turf war had been started, unofficially, with the merging of the two JHS, except it was gangsters verses alt-rockers. Ninth grade started for me two years after Kurt Cobain shot himself, two years before Tupac was shot and three years before Biggie. It was around that time in the middle that I realized that according to the crowd I chose, we were more likely to kill ourselves rather than each other. Which over the next couple of years, I saw firsthand in my own town - the rock kids overdosing, or shooting themselves, the rap kids stabbing mad, and in one god awful case, stomping someone to death.
Gabriel was sweet on me, as if that wasn’t clear enough from this note. The shirt-opening reference was to this polyester thrift-store shirt I had, which the buttons of would pop open on their own, and I wouldn’t know unless I looked down ever so often. There was no reason for this other than it having a too-loose button hole - I totally stuffed my bra throughout high school. I am going to claim the fifth on the plastic wrap reference, though it could probably be chalked up to my being a fourteen year old tease on the cusp of being a complete whore, and that’s all I can say about that.
Gabe was adorable and hysterical and amazing and we clicked so well, but I just didn’t like-like him. What a gentleman he was to offer to pay for our date, if we’d ever had one. I should note right now, hi if you are reading this. He and I still know each other, and he went from being the sweetly nervous boy in this note to being this total player who lays girls out now. I have no idea how it happened but I couldn’t be happier for him. He’s still a big teddy bear no matter what anyone says. He could probably kill someone with his bare hands if he were mad enough though.
I knew I didn’t want to “go out” with him, but I knew I did want to have him as a friend. I didn’t know back then how to tell boys I didn’t like them without just cutting the communication lines completely and never talking to them again. I didn’t want to do that with Gabe. I wanted to have friends who were boys, but in most cases, what I didn’t know then, was that all the boys who wanted to be friends with me actually would have dropped the friendship to go out with me in a second if I’d consented. And then I would have never talked to them again after we’d inevitably break-up. It wasn’t until I was about 16 or 17 that I sort of got a clue about the hidden agendas of an occasional friend who was male. If I really valued someone as a friend, I had to control myself and never, ever hook up with them even if I felt the slightest urge, because I knew once we crossed that line we would never have the same friendship as before. In retrospect, I can’t believe I actually made a smart decision, and am so grateful I did, because we are still friends to this day.
How could anyone forget the “ring once and I’ll call you back” technique for talking on the phone at all hours of the night in a one-telephone-line house after parents fell asleep? You could have this work with two people in an evening as well - one rings once, the other rings twice. I have absolutely no clue what life would have been like for us if we’d had cell phones then. Wow. I can’t even imagine what high school would have been like if computer technology and the world wide web were at the level they are now. To us at that time, computers were mainly for doing essays, term papers and book reports, or playing some low quality game on - forget about instant messaging or even email. That didn’t come until about a year or two later, and three years before it really gained even half as much mass popularity as it has now. I had it in my house at the end of my sophmore year in high school, but it was on a free Web TV that my mother had been given from work, so it was a rather weird introduction to the internet - seeing it on my TV from the couch in the living room with a wireless keyboard. It made it into more of an entertainment experience then for getting information or using it to communicate with people in real time, but I still did. A year after that was when we got the internet on our computer, with dial-up, so I could clog up the phone line of the whole house for hours at once. And you’ll notice later that the notes will decline around that time. That’s probably a good reason for why there is no section for senior year notes - I don’t have any. Not only was I making as few appearances at school as possible that year, but most all of my written corespondance had turned into email by then (1999).
