“Exactly what in the nine hells ever made you think you were
worthy to stand close enough to me to breathe the same air? Go back to your sweat smelling ass cave and
rot so I can go back to pretending you don’t exist.”
Or, at least, that’s what it sounded like she said. The reality was far more innocuous but had
the same impact.
It was high school, and it was the middle of the 1990’s, and
I had a dozen acquaintances but no friends.
I existed in a no-man’s-land of being both a jock and a nerd and doing
neither very well. It’s not that I was
trying hard but incapable, it was that I didn’t care enough to try hard enough
to be good at . . . well, anything. I was
on the varsity football team . . . third string. I was taking the Advanced Placement Chemistry
class . . . I got a 1.
And I don’t remember which class it was, but there I sat
when someone from across the room called me over. Her name was Bekkah (B-e-k-k-a-h), and she
had very curly red hair, and it was a simple, “Hey, Mark, come over here,” that
beckoned me. So I did. Bekkah, whom I knew, introduced me to Bonnie
(B-o-n-n-i-e), who had straight dark hair and bore the mystery of someone I
didn’t know, but I knew the company she kept.
Probably she lived in one of the wealthier neighborhoods than mine. If I had known what a trust fund was, I would
have suspected her of having one. Not
disparagingly.
I sat. We
chatted. Later I would learn that Bonnie
had confided in Bekkah that she, Bonnie, thought I, Mark, was SO hot, and
wanted to talk to me but didn’t know how to approach me or what to talk
about. This is what prompted Bekkah to
call me over. But by the time I learned
that little bit of information I was no longer capable of being flattered by
it. I’d been instead flattened by such a
powerful rebuke that was totally unfair yet completely true but made me
question my whole worth as a human being.
I no longer remember exactly how I phrased it, but it came
out that I watched Star Trek. And 47
seconds into an otherwise pleasant conversation, her smile dropped, and she
said to me simply, “Oh, you watch Star Trek?
Go away.”
As I walk-of-shamed myself across the classroom back to my
own desk, I remember thinking That’s it?
That’s all it takes? I was
stunned that the whole quality of my character was weighed, measured, and completely dismissed as unworthy because of
something so trivial as a single TV show I liked to watch.
It wouldn’t be the last time. When I was 12 I got a Next Gen communicator
pin that I still had when I was 19 and happened to be wearing when I was
rear-ended (gently) by another driver on a short stretch of road right by the
local mall. We pulled over, inspected
the damage. There was none that I could
see, so I declined to take her information because I didn’t see the point.
Then suddenly she asks me, “What is that?” and pointed to my chest.
“That” clearly had nothing to do with the cars, so clearly she was
starting a new topic. Slowly it dawned
on me that she was continuing the
conversation. It’s weird to me when
women do that. I’m like, Oh, is – is
this flirting? Am I being flirted . . .
on? I don’t . . . I’m not sure . . . what . . . I’d
better say something back . . .
Well by now I’d grown accustomed to people dismissing me because
of the things I enjoyed, so I was in the habit of hiding that bit of
information before people got to know me better. But it was too late. There it was, out in the open, pinned to my
shirt. I had been about to say, “It’s a
Starfleet comm badge,” but if she didn’t already know that, that wasn’t going
to explain anything, so I said instead, “It’s a Star Trek pin.”
But I may as well have told her, “It’s the remnants of an
uncooked egg, which spent three days decomposing in the sun before being farted
on by a cadre of fat Lithuanians before finally being cracked open and spread
across my sweatshirt,” because that, at least, would have justified to me the
scorn in her eyes when she said to me, clearly giving me another chance, “Why
are you wearing it?”
If you’d been a casual observer of this exchange, standing
just beyond earshot, you might have believed my answer – being composed of four
words – to be one of the following.
a)
I like the smell.
b)
I like Star Trek.
Because without another word, she simply got into her car
and drove away.
These exchanges and so many like them are what make me feel,
today, like I’ve stepped into a Rod Serling anti-nightmare where the nerds have
taken over the popular cultural landscape.
It’s like we were wizards (from 3rd edition before the
balance issues got sorted out in 3.5) who lost our hit points real easy at
lower levels while the fighters and barbarians dominated the board, but now
that we’re all epic level we found out that the cultural power balance has
shifted in our favor, so we’re safe and secure in our towers lobbing
intellectual H-bombs into every major movie theatre near you that you couldn’t
possibly understand because we know you never even HEARD of Joseph Campbell and
your degree requirements only included, like, one physics class and while you’re crumbling like the ignorant, low
charisma score havin’ meat shields we knew you to be, meantime the children of
the people you used to scorn and/or beat up for fun are “bronies,” who not only
have a safe community in which to share their love of a particular piece of pop
culture, but they also have parents who have a first-hand understanding of what
it’s like to be mistreated for life choices that don’t harm anybody.
So thank you, Bonnie, and all the all the he-Bonnies and
she-Bonnies that came after you, for you taught me to treat people better than
you treated me, and elevated the quality of art that I am capable of producing and
perpetuating.
