For the life of me, I don't know how I ended up on the
debate team in my freshman year of High School.
Actually, that's a lie: my parents really wanted me to have some sort of
extra-curricular activity, and I picked something that had sleep-away trips (which
sounded like a cool idea) but didn't require me to be even remotely athletic
(which has never been a good idea).
However it happened, this is how I came to find myself once again in the
Greater Boston Area - Cambridge, this time -
for some hotel fun on a Valentine's Day.
The debate team was a co-ed proposition. I mention this
because you just can't put a bunch of teenaged piles of hormones in a hotel,
away from home and parents, without the idea of sex hanging in the air. By "idea", I mean exactly that: in
our heart of pubescent hearts, we knew
nothing was really going to happen.
Still, you could practically smell the hormones in the air in that hotel
- from us, from the other teams booked in there, just in general.
Big talk and dumb shit was the order of the day. Lots of knocking on doors and running, lots
of knocking on doors and barging in, lots of knocking on doors and saying
stupid things like LADIES, YOUR ESCORTS HAVE ARRIVED. Believe me when I tell you this: I have not a
whit of nostalgia for that age when your
body is telling you that you want it,
the big IT, but you really haven't got a clue what to do about it. In some ways, the scariest prospect of all
was that you might actually, you know, get
somewhere...and immediately be revealed as the inexperienced phony you
were. Fortunately - or unfortunately,
depending on perspective - I was about a year off from that uncomfortable
moment.
At some point, I think it was probably around eleven o'clock
or so, my friend Chris and I decided to take a minute or two off from being teen-dork
goofus jerks and go walk around the hotel for a while. We did this for about an hour or so, taking
in as much as of the range of human emotion on display as our fertile little
minds could handle. Particularly
image-making was a woman running down the hall in a bridal dress, screaming
obscenities at the (her words) stupid
faggot she'd assumedly just married.
We took this as a sign to head back towards our own little corner of the
chateau. On our way there, we ended up
walking past another team's boys' room, door open, teen-dork stationed
outside. He speaks up: "Hey guys -
do you have any girls on your
team?" I don't miss a beat:
"We do. In fact, they're waiting in
our room for us as we speak. Sorry,
gentlemen." I believe I was then
called an asshole. Both halves of that
exchange are proof positive that some things never change.
Actually, there were indeed girls from our team waiting for
us in our room when we got back upstairs.
Not for anything more illicit than further teen-dork goofus jerkery,
mind you, but while I may have been an asshole to the guy on the lower floor, I
was not a liar. From there, things
proceeded into the wee hours as you might expect them to: silliness, loudness,
empty threats to order porn on the hotel TV system and/or open up the
minibar. At some point, one of the girls
threw a wrapped tampon at my buddy Chris; he and I then did what any
red-blooded male teenagers would do and proceeded to play soccer with it out in
the hall. We'd made our way down to the
bank of elevators when one of them
opened, revealing a well-dressed woman.
She made a face I can't quite describe but will never forget and yelled,
with the full weight of sheer indigence fully behind her, "THAT'S
DISGUSTING!" I grinned at her and
waited a moment; as the doors started to close, I executed a perfect kick that
I couldn't possibly replicate if I tried and landed the, er, "soccer
ball" squarely inside the elevator car just before the doors closed. Triumphant, we scrambled furiously back to
our room, to slam the door, hide, and charm the ladies with our tale.
I was originally going to say something along the lines of
"I was proud in that way only a teenage boy can be", but truth be
told I'd probably still be proud if
this happened again tomorrow. For that
revelation, I sense I'm about to once again be called an asshole. Like I said, some things never change.
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