In 1998, I was in my parents’ basement playing Final Fantasy VII. I played that game for so long that I broke the timer that keeps track of how long you’ve played it — it only went up to 99 hours and 99 minutes. So, I can’t tell you exactly how long I spent playing it, but it was a long time. There were other landmark video games that came out in 1998, but I’m not writing a story about video games. I’m just saying that before I met H.C. (Harold Charles), I was in the basement playing Final Fantasy and collecting Magic: The Gathering cards. I certainly wasn’t outside kissing girls, drinking beer, and having fun.
H.C. was the closest human approximation to Bart Simpson that I have ever encountered. Everything Bart was, H.C. was — down to the slingshot in the back pocket. I can’t imagine there were too many days when he wasn’t sentenced to detention, just a piss and vinegar behavioral problem for any adult whose job it was to tell him what to do. He didn’t have a stable home life like I did back then, so the whole problem child vibe makes sense. He was the polar opposite of me when we met; he would do backflips off of roofs, jump BMX bikes, and pull off 360 flips on skateboards. He had none of the paralyzing fear of injury that kept me from climbing trees and jungle gyms as a kid.
I’m sorry, although I remember pretty much everything, I can’t pinpoint exactly when I met him, but I’ll tell you this: it was within a few weeks that we became inseparable. Every single day in the summer after 7th grade, he would come to my house, wake me up, and make me come do some Huck Finn-type outdoor small-town shit, like a jump rope swing at a pond way out in the woods or fishing for bass at any of the 300-something ponds in my hometown. I had never done things like that; like I said, I was in the basement playing Final Fantasy 7. I was an inside kid, H.C. was an outside kid, and he made me join him.
He was a very prolific neighborhood bike thief too. He had a whole chop shop of bike parts in his basement/garage. He taught me how to put together a BMX bike so that we could cruise around town. None of the bikes ever had brakes though; maybe that was too complicated or too safe. You had to put your foot on the back tire if you wanted to stop. There were definitely some scraped knees that summer.
He knew these other kids in the neighborhood who smoked cigarettes and listened to Tupac Shakur. I was a little nervous; these were definitely the kind of kids that my parents had told me to stay away from, but they seemed to really like me despite my whole being a nerd thing. Like “you guys really shouldn’t smoke cigarettes, they’re very bad for you”…yeah, okay, Ev, we’ll cut it out right now, thank you so much for telling us.
I remember, in 6th grade, I went to these dances they had at Plymouth’s Memorial Hall for all of the town’s middle school kids. It was always me, awkwardly riding the wall, waiting for the DJ to play something by The Prodigy, and really hating the Puff Daddy songs that everyone else liked. I was at peak Marilyn Manson goth kid phase at that time, so naturally, I didn’t like what everyone else liked. Now I like the Puff Daddy records as much as any of the other music that was on the speakers at those dances, but I didn’t grow into hip-hop for a few years. I remember the first one I went to, being already terrified of everyone (especially girls), but being especially terrified of the kids smoking cigarettes out in the front of the dance. They just seemed dangerous. I remember telling my mother about them as soon as she picked me up after the dance; I was shocked that kids were smoking cigarettes.
So, my new social circle that H.C. had introduced me to in the summer of my 13th year were the bad kids that I thought were scary and dangerous just a year before. They were actually pretty nice and never once tried to beat me up.
This is important: two of the kids he knew were pretty, blonde twin girls, Jen and Sarah. They also smoked cigarettes and listened to Tupac Shakur. I think they had a single mother who was never home, so we spent most summer days at their house while they smoked cigarettes and listened to either the double 2pac album or “No Way Out” by Puff Daddy and the Family. This is also where I was introduced to that big self-titled Sublime album with the tattoo on the cover; we listened to that album on repeat every single day for months. I’ll tell you two things about that album: I could probably sing it from start to finish off the top of my head, and I am 100% fine with never hearing it ever again.
So, one day Sarah and Jen told me, “We both like you, and you have to pick one of us to be your girlfriend.” They were identical twins. I had not even a fraction of a percentage of what to do with any female, let alone identical twin females. I’m not sure I had even gone through puberty yet, but I had to choose one of the twins. I can’t tell you why, but I went with Jen.
So Jen, the blonde twin, was then my girlfriend — whatever that means when you’re 13. The next order of business was (according to the bad Marlboro kids) that I definitely had to kiss Jen; none of them would shut up about it. I was absolutely mortified by this proposition, and I made it through the whole day without working up the courage to do it, despite the high level of peer pressure. I think I had to be home by 10 back then. I did want to kiss Jen, but I just couldn’t get myself to do it, so I was going to sneak out of the house to give it another try.
This is the first time I ever snuck out of my house at night, and I took it very seriously. I was dressed in all black, and I moved like someone who had stolen Nazi intelligence and had to get it back to allied territory undetected. I even had a black beret on, so I was taking the paramilitary spy approach very seriously.
I made it out undetected, thanks to all of the Metal Gear Solid I had played, and met up with my new clique on the porch of a slightly older kid who had those kind of parents who didn’t give a fuck about anything. This is important because they had left what I think was a little bit of a pint of Southern Comfort there on the table next to the multiple full ashtrays.
The peer pressure was back on, and after 20 minutes or so of stalling, I made a dramatic move (for dramatic effect). I picked up the small bottle of Southern Comfort, threw back a swig, and laid a big awkward first kiss on Jen. It’s not like I was drunk, or even had any idea what it was like to be drunk at that point in my life. In fact, I’m just as unable to figure out how I got that sip of Southern Comfort down as I am surprised I got the balls to kiss that girl.
I don’t think I actually started drinking for at least another 2 years. Look where my brain already was, associating it with courage.
Jen broke up with me a few days after we shared our first kiss. I guess she was more interested in this other kid who was a few years older and also enjoyed smoking cigarettes while listening to Tupac Shakur. I was pretty beat up about it and did what anyone would do: really lean into the Smashing Pumpkins double album, appropriately titled “Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness,” you know, for all of my infinite sadness.
To this day, I can’t hear the song “Galapagos” without thinking of my early teenage heartbreak, as it became my post-Jen anthem.
I went on to 7th grade at a whole separate school from all of those kids and got another girlfriend and at least 100 pokemon on my gameboy. I didn’t see H and the rest of the neighborhood kids for at least a year.
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