Being a mid-realm teenager (14, 15, 16 and sometimes 17) can feel like a cross between a Eugene O’Neil or Edward Albee stage play and a kind of low-simmering horror film.
It felt that way to me, at least, during my Agony Years.
Most of the time I was dead bored or lost in television shows or a movie I’d recently seen, or I was seething about some suffocating parental restriction or discipline, but during those periods when I actually faced my situation I was engulfed in something that felt like a form of suffocation. As in barely able to breathe.
I can’t speak about the horrors that teenage girls have endured over the last half-century, God help them, but almost all male teenagers go through unpleasant trials and gauntlets and humiliations, sometimes involving sex (or the desperate longing for same or at least a brief taste) and more often involving battling-buck behavior…parking-lot taunting, braggadocio, forced machismo, “I won’t back down but on the other hand it might make sense if I do, even if the other guy gets to preen and strut around,” etc.
Who contributed more significantly to making my teenaged life feel more tortured, more conflicted, more arduous, more upsetting in this or that way? Me, first and foremost. Bob Seger‘s “Against The Wind.” I called the shots and the world pushed back.
But it was also my alleged junior high and high-school chums (i.e., confrontational peers) who gave me shit for being different and odd-angled in my thinking (which I definitely was in a Matt Groening secret-genius sort of way), or my well-meaning but nonetheless bruising parents, which is to say my mostly indifferent, occasionally seething alcoholic dad, who was augmented for the most part by my mom, who was just trying to hold things together.
The answer, of course, is that my parents and high-school frenemies behaved like a kind of team — they worked hand in hand to make my teenaged life feel like a dungeon. It’s commonly understood that teenaged life is always difficult. I don’t want to say “it’s intended to be” — that would be too horrific a diagnosis — but the experience has never been a walk in the park for anyone except for high achievers, brown-nosers, goodie-goodie and Student Council types, and in some instances even these people, these apparent lightweights, are dealing with all kinds of buried convulsions.
True story: There was a straight-arrow guy in my New Jersey junior high school, a bespectacled, conservative-mannered guy who had either run for or been elected Student Council president, and one night he tried to commit suicide. No, not by hanging himself in the bathroom — that would have been too decisive — but by drinking some kind of poison. And he was the kind of guy who sprinkled talcum power in his shiny shoes when he was getting dressed for a prom. (I was there — I saw him sprinkle the stuff.)
I never even fantasized about doing myself in — the thought has never been in me until recently — but I did undergo a kind of long-accumulated rage explosion in my high-school cafeteria once, and it was a doozy.
A “friend” had gotten hold of something I valued — I can’t remember if it was a drawing or a letter to some girl or a movie program from Times Square or a cherished record album — all I remember is that it was something that mattered a lot to me, and this guy (a casual hang buddy whom I regarded from time to time as a half-assed friend of sorts) had thrown it into a garbage receptacle of some kind, and I distinctly recall pulling the article out of the bin, walking over to a cafeteria table where the “friend” and some others were sitting, picking up a wooden chair and throwing it at him and shouting what an asshole he was.
I threw the chair so hard that it bounced off my “friend’s” head or shoulder and grazed a young girl who happened to be walking just behind him. I was disciplined for this, of course. People who can’t hold their tempers will always be called on this by social forces, especially if physical harm (however slight) is part of the lashing-out process, as well they should. The girl who was hit by the chair (most likely a glancing blow) didn’t make anything out of it, thank God.
My “friend” was scowling in the aftermath and telling me what an unhinged jerk I was, etc. My comeback line was something along the lines of “yeah? well, there’s more where that came from, fucker…a lot more.”
