Getting Some Stinkfinger

Continuing my story of spending my senior year of high school in Punta Gorda, Florida…

After a few days, I settled into a routine. Board the bus, endure a few crude and idiotic insults thrown at me by the Hank Williams, Jr. crowd, go to my classes with the freshmen. Eat lunch by myself, sitting in the corner of a hallway. Go to abnormal psychology and the rest of my classes. Get back on the bus, endure more insults. Occasionally have someone threaten to fight me. Stop for cigarettes. Go home. Eat dinner. Watch TV. Go to bed. Repeat.

That’s how I spent the next eight months. I had no social life to speak of. The closest thing I had to friends were the cashiers at Publix, where I had gotten a job bagging groceries (building on my established skill set of putting bananas on top). At that time, cashiers were always female and baggers were always male. The cashiers ranged in age from eighteen to sixty. The baggers were an odd mix of students and creepy old men. The two age groups tended to remain segregated (the old men worked during the day, and the students at night), but I do recall that one particular old man used to ask the younger guys if they wanted to “go get some stinkfinger.” I think even the more redneck-y of the younger guys were a little creeped out by this.

At school, I made occasional, abortive attempts to endear myself to my classmates, but my sense of humor, always my passport to begrudging acceptance by my peers at Grand Rapids Christian, found no fans at Charlotte High. My jokes fell flat, as if I were speaking in some barely comprehensible dialect. I remember my English teacher chiding several students – myself included – for waiting until the last minute to start writing a paper. I explained that writing the paper was like pulling off a Band-Aid: it was better to do it suddenly, without warning, so that it hurt less. The other kids stared at me like, well, like they had never heard anyone use a simile before. They simply couldn’t comprehend what Band-Aids had to do with writing an English paper. I was labeled a dork.

Adding to my frustration was another self-styled comedian who had recently moved to Punta Gorda from New York. Mr. New York was a huge hit on the Charlotte High comedy circuit. I tried to figure out what he was doing differently than I, but couldn’t put my finger on it. As far as I could tell, my material was at least as good as his. I just didn’t get it. One day Mr. New York came into English class bearing a Teddy Ruxpin doll. In case you’re too young to remember, Teddy Ruxpin was an animatronic teddy bear that would move his mouth and eyes as he played a story on an audiocassette. Mr. New York had the brilliant and presumably unprecedented idea of recording a barrage of insults on a cassette tape and shoving it into poor Teddy, who had no choice but to recite the contents of the tape while moving his mouth and eyes in a creepy, robotic fashion. Mr. New York had broken the streams of insults into blocks of thirty seconds or so, so that he turn Teddy to face a new victim just as he was saying, “And you, you fat-headed lump of jelly…” or something suitably insulting but not offensive enough for the teacher to pull out the old hooked cane for Teddy. As I’m sure you can guess, Teddy the Insult Bear killed. And on that day, I put my comedy career on hiatus for the duration of my stay at Charlotte High. There was just no competing with something like that.

Another weird complication of my efforts to be accepted at Charlotte High had to do with the Cadillac Motel itself. Oddly, the previous owners of the motel had somehow secured a liquor license, and they had sold beer and assorted spirits from the motel office. I didn’t realize it at the time, but it’s very unusual for a motel to have a liquor license. This is because selling alcohol at a motel is a really bad idea. There are two types of people who frequent motels in southern Florida: travelers who will be shortly getting back on the highway and rednecks with domestic problems. Providing either of these groups with an easily accessible supply of alcohol is ill-advised.

The Cadillac Motel’s prime liquor customers, however, hailed from a different demographic entirely: the Cadillac Motel, it turned out, specialized in selling cheap beer to high school students. Every Friday night, one or more teenagers would stop by the office looking to buy beer, and my parents would politely tell them that we didn’t sell alcohol to minors. One night I happened to be minding the office when a kid stopped by to buy a case of Budweiser, and I told him I couldn’t sell it to him. He put a five dollar bill on the counter, grabbed a case from the cooler, and walked out. After that, we stopped stocking the cooler. The Cadillac Motel was officially no longer selling booze.

I soon discovered that it was well-known at Charlotte High that the Cadillac Motel supplied alcohol to minors. It’s difficult to imagine that the local police weren’t hip to the game, since every sixteen-year-old in town knew, but I suppose it’s possible that they really were that incompetent. It’s also possible that Mr. and Mrs. Peg-Leg bribed them to look the other way. Whatever the case was, the regime change at the Cadillac Motel was not welcome among the substance-abusing losers that predominated at Charlotte High. Rather than being just another anonymous dork, I was now the Dork that Ruined the Party.

I had no friends to speak of, which wasn’t so bad except during times of forced social interaction. I remember dreading lunch period because there weren’t enough seats in the cafeteria for me to sit by myself. At first I would try to find a group of kids that I knew from my classes, but these ended up being mostly freshmen. It was embarrassing to be seen sitting with them and even more embarrassing to be seen getting snubbed by them. Eventually, I started just eating my lunch in a corner outside.

As for my attempts to engage members of the opposite sex, they were no more successful than those of Mr. Stinkfinger. This isn’t to say that no girls were interested in me. One case in particular comes to mind.

A few weeks after I arrived, a girl I didn’t know approached me while I waited in the lunch line. She handed me a folded piece of paper and said, “My friend wanted me to give this to you.” She smiled and walked away.

Puzzled, I unfolded the paper. It read, in a girl’s handwriting, “I think you’re cute.” At the bottom it was signed “Marcy.” I had met a lot of students, at least superficially, over the previous few weeks, but I remembered the names of only a few. I couldn’t for the life of me remember who “Marcy” was. The errand girl was obviously a friend of hers, but I didn’t recognize her either. What was I supposed to do? What if I were to run into Marcy and didn’t even know it? Would she be hurt? Angry? Obviously she was shy; my insensitivity might crush her. I wracked my brain for the rest of the day, trying to remember who Marcy was. I watched the girls in my classes, trying to catch one of them looking my way. Was this one Marcy? That one? I didn’t have a clue. Finally, my last class ended, and I made my way to the bus. Along the way I ran into the girl who had given me the note. She stopped in front of me, grinning.

“So,” she said, “Do you know who Marcy is?”

Oh crap, I thought. She knows. She knows I have no clue who Marcy is.

“No,” I said sheepishly. “I don’t.”

She grinned again, as if everything was going according to plan. “It’s ME!” she exclaimed.

I felt a little sick. Of course it was. This girl didn’t even have a friend to deliver a note to the boy she thought was cute. She had to be her own delivery girl. She had cooked up this little drama so that I would obsess about her all day. And it had worked.

We had a brief, stilted conversation, and I excused myself to get to the bus. What was I supposed to do now? Somehow I had managed to find the one person at Charlotte High who was more of a misfit than I. As bad off as I was, at least I wasn’t delegating social introductions to fictional personae. I was already barely coping with my circumstances; the last thing I needed was a crazy girl stalking me. And even if she weren’t crazy, it was pretty clear to me that encouraging her advances was not going to help either my social standing or my own mental health.

I ran into Marcy a few times over the next few days, and we engaged in a series of conversations that consistently escalated in their painful awkwardness. It became clear to me that she was not entirely sane. She asked me if I wanted to go out with her sometime. I stammered and stalled. Something had to be done.

That night I wrote a painstakingly worded letter, explaining as tactfully as I could that while I was extremely flattered by her interest in me, the feeling was not mutual. When I ran into her the next day, I smiled weakly, handed her the letter, and told her that I needed to get to class.

I didn’t see Marcy for several days after that. This was, no doubt, due in part to the fact that I was deliberately avoiding all the spots where I had run into her previously. I dawdled after class, took circuitous routes around the school, and kept my head down. My hope was that time would dull her psychotic rage, so that by the time we met again she would be content with calling me an insensitive jerk or ignoring me completely.

A week passed. Then another. I began to wonder if something had happened to Marcy. The thought occurred to me that she had killed herself. It was an appalling notion that, I’m a little ashamed to admit, did give me some degree of comfort. At least the problem – as far as I was concerned – would be solved. And hey, a girl killing herself over you, that was kind of cool, right?

And then, there she was, standing on the landing in the stairwell, right in front of me. The stairs were packed with students going to their next classes. There was no room to maneuver, no chance to escape. This was it. The confrontation. Here it comes, I thought. “You!” she said, jabbing a finger at me accusingly.

I tried to think of something to say, some kind of excuse, something, anything, to get me out of this. I opened my mouth, but nothing came out.

“You!” she said again. Then she smiled, and her tone changed to one of motherly reprimand. She chided, “You never write me letters anymore!”