Talking to Girls About Duran Duran: One Young Man's Quest for True Love and a Cooler Haircut by Rob Sheffield Page B

dog on the cover. My temples throbbed when she cleared her throat after a smoking break. I still dream of Ms. Calasta, who taught me so much, like the way modern literature reflected the alienation of a godless universe, and how if you hold your coffee mug at a certain angle, you can reduce a high school boy to Camembert.
    She was a pheromone parfait in a pencil skirt, always rocking a severe bob of red hair and glasses that she could have used as a shiv. Years later, in my college French class, I would see the movie Les Diaboliques and realize that Ms. Calasta had stolen all her facial expressions from Simone Signoret. But it was all new to me. Where did she come from? How had she gotten this cool? Nobody knew, but we all worshipped her. The class was full of stoners, thespians, hockey players and bookworms, but everyone seemed to idolize Ms. Calasta. I was certain I loved her best.
    It’s always dangerous to have a crush on your teacher, because the crush filters into whatever you’re supposed to be studying. Thanks to my Latin teacher, I will always feel a certain nescio quid whenever I will have used the future perfect tense (like just now). Whereas my crabby math teacher means that I will never truly enjoy full erotic release in the presence of a hypotenuse. Ms. Calasta had that effect on my reading and no doubt still does.
    As near as I could guess, she hovered somewhere in her forties, looking back over her shadowy past with the elegant disdain of a 1930s bank robber in the back of the getaway car, glancing over the landscape as it trailed behind her. The clincher was her deep, hearty laugh, which involved downturned lips, a few seconds of sustained eye contact, a coda of hacks. Then she’d say the name of whoever made her laugh, as in, Oh Raaahhhb . Whatever she laughed at, you’d say again. She had a way of making you feel like an adult, as if you might slip up and she’d find out you were really just a sixteen-year-old boy reading The Great Gatsby for the first time. She would ask us questions like, “Have you ever argued about the death of God with someone you were sexually or romantically involved with?”
    Not even Kenny Rogers could advise me how to handle this one. I could neither hold nor fold her.
    Ms. Calasta laughed warmly at my enthusiasm for music and pop trash. She found it fetchingly jejune that I knew all the words to all the songs on the radio and read celebrity magazines. I even knew the oldies from the ’50s and ’60s that she’d grown up on.
    “Oh, Raaahhhb ,” she said. “You have so much passion for the Shirelles. Tell me about that Skeeter Davis song again.”
    I was a dreamy boy, always bumping my head on ceiling fans and tripping over chairs, but she saw something in me that I hadn’t seen in myself, and I became more like whoever she thought I was. She gladly read my stories, poems and plays. She listened to the tapes I made her. After hearing me gush about music, she called me “Dolores Haze,” after the radio-listening, comics-reading nymphet in Lolita , but unfortunately, that was a joke I wouldn’t get for years.
    Like any teenager who reads The Great Gatsby , probably, I was madly in love with the teacher who had opened it up for me. She was teaching us about Gatsby, the way he disappeared into his own Platonic conception of himself, the way he followed the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock, drunk on the impossible past. But what did I know about the past? I didn’t have one yet. I could only covet hers.
    “Daisy and Gatsby had a connection,” she mused. “But not sexually. Gatsby never could have fulfilled her.” I wasn’t sure what she meant, but I wrote it all down.
    When I go up into my parents’ attic and dig out my high school copies of these books, I am dumbstruck by all my feverish scrawls in the margin. I guess I really identified with the narrator of Notes from Underground. Looking at the novel now, the guy just seems every bit as much of a tool as