got an endless stream of bitchy females. And zero sexual activity until I was fifteen.
Grade nine. It seemed as if almost every girl in school was getting some form of action. The beauties, of course, had as much or as little as they chose. Ditto the cute chicks and the sort-of-cute chicks. Even the orthodontisized, dog-faced girls with half-decent bodies were attracting their share of hormone-fueled attention when the nights had worn on and the lads had smoked enough pot, or dropped enough E, or consumed enough booze. It took all of these elements workingin concert to convince Servan Carp that I was a temporarily acceptable canoodling partner. It occurred after a Friday-night Youth Center dance—a kind of sanitized faux-rave that was held weekly in the school cafeteria. Kids from grades seven, eight, and nine danced the night away—not to techno, mind you; it was mostly mainstream rap and disco remixes, but they waved their stupid glo-sticks around and sucked on their ridiculous pacifiers anyway. I didn’t dance, wave, or suck. I gravitated toward the marginally cooler stoner kids who spent the greater part of those Friday nights in the ravine behind the school, getting drunk and high. At that point I was still managing to fit in with my class-clown shtick, and was allowed to orbit the group because I provided fat-girl comic relief, and almost always provided a reasonably full, forty-ouncer of booze, pinched from my mother’s endless and carelessly monitored stash.
Servan Carp was new to the clique. A recent immigrant from Romania, Servan had been doing everything possible to instantly assimilate himself. Within days of arriving at Tom Thomson Junior High, he had shed his Soviet-looking sweaters and Zellers grandpa jeans and adopted the standard hip-hop costume—the bloated Nikes, the fat and fake gold necklaces, the Starter football jersey, the oversized, falling-down pants that made him look like a rodeo clown. Even in his hip-hop uniform, there was something inherently geeky and Romanian-villagey about Servan (he wouldn’t have looked out of place with a few goats trailing behind him), and he was doing his best to overcome this by being a boisterous “party animal,” consuming awe-inspiring quantities of alcohol and drugs in daring and dangerous combinations. Everyone called Servan by his last name, Carp, and he thrived on the endless jokes about him being “pissed to the gills” or “drinking like a fish.”
There were initially six of us together in the woods that night. I remember that Servan had been demonstrating his hopelessly uncool, therefore amusing, therefore redeemablycool break-dancing moves precariously close to the edge of the steep and muddy embankment where we regularly assembled. There was much laughter and shouting, especially from Servan, who had taken E, smoked several joints, and swallowed most of the contents of a plastic soda bottle full of home-brewed Romanian hooch-palinka, I think he called it. The plan was to get sufficiently buzzed and then go inside for a while to check out the dance (i.e., stand on the sidelines and mock the dancers—my specialty), but when it became apparent that a couple swigs of the Carp family’s combustible cocktail had rendered Rachel slack drunk and perhaps fully seducible, Leon dragged her off into the bushes. Thirty seconds later, Bonnie (Leon’s ex) led Steve away to their own little woodland revenge session. That left Carp and me alone, awkward without an audience, uncomfortable in sudden silence. He tried to lighten the moment by signaling to the departed lovers, making loud jungle-animal noises: ooh-ooh-ah-ah monkey screech, lion roar, elephant blast.
“Shut the fuck up,” came Leon’s stern reply from deep in the woods.
Servan obeyed Leon. He laughed weakly. He made a barely audible monkey sound and took a long pull of palinka.
“Well, I guess we should go in,” I said, noticing that Carp was looking pale and sweating heavy in the cool
Grade nine. It seemed as if almost every girl in school was getting some form of action. The beauties, of course, had as much or as little as they chose. Ditto the cute chicks and the sort-of-cute chicks. Even the orthodontisized, dog-faced girls with half-decent bodies were attracting their share of hormone-fueled attention when the nights had worn on and the lads had smoked enough pot, or dropped enough E, or consumed enough booze. It took all of these elements workingin concert to convince Servan Carp that I was a temporarily acceptable canoodling partner. It occurred after a Friday-night Youth Center dance—a kind of sanitized faux-rave that was held weekly in the school cafeteria. Kids from grades seven, eight, and nine danced the night away—not to techno, mind you; it was mostly mainstream rap and disco remixes, but they waved their stupid glo-sticks around and sucked on their ridiculous pacifiers anyway. I didn’t dance, wave, or suck. I gravitated toward the marginally cooler stoner kids who spent the greater part of those Friday nights in the ravine behind the school, getting drunk and high. At that point I was still managing to fit in with my class-clown shtick, and was allowed to orbit the group because I provided fat-girl comic relief, and almost always provided a reasonably full, forty-ouncer of booze, pinched from my mother’s endless and carelessly monitored stash.
Servan Carp was new to the clique. A recent immigrant from Romania, Servan had been doing everything possible to instantly assimilate himself. Within days of arriving at Tom Thomson Junior High, he had shed his Soviet-looking sweaters and Zellers grandpa jeans and adopted the standard hip-hop costume—the bloated Nikes, the fat and fake gold necklaces, the Starter football jersey, the oversized, falling-down pants that made him look like a rodeo clown. Even in his hip-hop uniform, there was something inherently geeky and Romanian-villagey about Servan (he wouldn’t have looked out of place with a few goats trailing behind him), and he was doing his best to overcome this by being a boisterous “party animal,” consuming awe-inspiring quantities of alcohol and drugs in daring and dangerous combinations. Everyone called Servan by his last name, Carp, and he thrived on the endless jokes about him being “pissed to the gills” or “drinking like a fish.”
There were initially six of us together in the woods that night. I remember that Servan had been demonstrating his hopelessly uncool, therefore amusing, therefore redeemablycool break-dancing moves precariously close to the edge of the steep and muddy embankment where we regularly assembled. There was much laughter and shouting, especially from Servan, who had taken E, smoked several joints, and swallowed most of the contents of a plastic soda bottle full of home-brewed Romanian hooch-palinka, I think he called it. The plan was to get sufficiently buzzed and then go inside for a while to check out the dance (i.e., stand on the sidelines and mock the dancers—my specialty), but when it became apparent that a couple swigs of the Carp family’s combustible cocktail had rendered Rachel slack drunk and perhaps fully seducible, Leon dragged her off into the bushes. Thirty seconds later, Bonnie (Leon’s ex) led Steve away to their own little woodland revenge session. That left Carp and me alone, awkward without an audience, uncomfortable in sudden silence. He tried to lighten the moment by signaling to the departed lovers, making loud jungle-animal noises: ooh-ooh-ah-ah monkey screech, lion roar, elephant blast.
“Shut the fuck up,” came Leon’s stern reply from deep in the woods.
Servan obeyed Leon. He laughed weakly. He made a barely audible monkey sound and took a long pull of palinka.
“Well, I guess we should go in,” I said, noticing that Carp was looking pale and sweating heavy in the cool
Similar Books
