“The day the child realizes that all adults are imperfect, he becomes an adolescent; the day he forgives them, he becomes an adult; the day he forgives himself, he becomes wise." -Alden Nowlan 

(Creative Commons)

Once in high school, I stood on the fringes of a tennis court while twenty or more guys swarmed and pounded each other at a girl’s eighteenth birthday party.  It was private schools versus public schools.  Those of us just watching started singing a slow, sarcastic “Happy Birthday,” red cups raised, nobody else but us in any state of being a witness.

As one guy slipped out of the mayhem, it was clear he hadn’t wanted to be there.  With blood in his long blonde hair he looked like he’d tried to dye it the color of strawberries.  He wasn’t very big and someone had taken his shoes.  “Boy is he leaking,” someone said.

The police made everyone file out one by one, and they picked people out of the line who were bleeding or too obviously intoxicated.  Still it felt so random, like anyone with brown hair was going to get the treatment, whatever that turned out to be.  I remember hoping it would be the female cops who would decide what I looked like, because I don’t trust men.

I’ve never been arrested but sometimes it feels like I should’ve been.  I’m one of the soldiers who made it through the war.  The detectives came into the front office that Monday looking for a guy who’d smashed a bottle over someone’s head.  I was working as an office assistant and heard the name before they called it over the speaker.    

It seems so serious when you’re seventeen and eighteen, to have the cops show up in someone’s backyard with their lights flashing, so kind of cool, jumping over wooden fences and getting splinters in your thumbs.  You always hear adults (parents) talk about those nights like they were some kind of rite of passage, a fact of young life like any other.  My parents never talk like that.  I was sent off to college with a roadmap headed for clean success. 

When you show up to a dorm room for the first time, you list off a few things about yourself and let the people infer the rest as they like.  It’s automatic.  Most people don’t like being thought of as judgmental, but it’s as ingrained in us as bad history.  I step off onto the carpet floor and notice: girl with nose ring, international students huddled together, big guy, athlete, black guy, another kid who looks like me. 

By second semester a lot of the guys living in the hotel took habit soaking in the hot tub until 11 p.m., closing time.  It was so totally male, we looked like a bunch of fathers, like we’d just come from golf and the bar. 

On my floor there was a really loud, drunk, blunt Hispanic gay guy who became something of a heart and soul.  Kind of like the holy fool but more obvious and endearing than that, and more incorrect and conflicted and confused.  One night he joined us in the ritual, started giving each hetero male his queer personality if he were to go “gay by May.”  He said that I’d be “so 70s,” and I took that to mean artsy in the Warhol sense, everything an experience, all a means of exploration or curiosity or weirdness.  I’d be the type of gay to sit in the back in dark clothes and let the world organize itself around me so I could watch.   

Hearing that made me feel like I’d done my job.  My barricades were successfully changing colors.  I sat in the water thinking private thoughts to myself, pretending to be as uncomfortable and amused with the thought of being gay as the rest of my new friends who treat college like one big trip toward vaginas.  

Men reveal intimacy in strange ways.  Young men feel like it’s something they’ll save for marriage.  We want to be known, but only by women, and the fewer the better.  But maybe that’s only for us who had really good mothers, and absent and self-destructive fathers.  I wouldn’t know what it’s like any other way.  

This year I had this weird thing.  A result of reading and watching, and amplifying the way I interpreted people, most of all myself.  I tried to cut the romance out of it but, as usual, that always wants to stay.  I gathered what I knew about people’s families and backgrounds and projected that in terms of current behavior.  Everything must be the result of what we experience, because it’s comforting to know that our lives as young people aren’t really our faults. 

I’d gone from striving for disorder in my life, waking up each day to a quivering bell of mistakes, to placing myself in the context of what my psychology needed from me.  And I’d calmed down.  I’d found someone who comforted the parts of me I’d liked about childhood, the best parts.  The happy family drives and baseball games.  It was like I was meeting that again but on an adult level, and in a girl whose story was still very interesting to me.    

It’s like that famous Philip Larkin poem, “This Be The Verse.”  The “They fuck you up, your mum and dad. / They may not mean to, but they do.”  We can all resonate with that, because we all have problems.  Anyone who denies that is in denial.  My girlfriend sent it to me in an email a month or two ago because she’d just discovered it, and she doesn’t read much poetry, that’s more my thing.  I think I’m in love.  

I liked walking across the campus with my hands in my coat pockets and a clear conscience, one my mother would consider healthy.  It felt like going to work and getting promoted, that inner stillness.  It’s white space that doesn’t need color.  My whole life people have said that I’m quiet and calm.  My mom said this meant I should be a surgeon, able to process emergencies.  But no one’s ever actually heard me think during an emergency. 

This whole year made me question everything.  I used to be one of those people who thought a physical relationship between an old person and someone in their twenties was purely harmless and not worthy of shame.  It was easy, accepting that.  It felt so noble, so post-bullshit, and clear and youthful.  Being bothered with complications of emotion seemed so predictable.  Like Shakespeare said: “there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so…” 

But do you really have to look at your modern life like the result of levels of buried neuroses, the human plague of subconscious scar tissue?  This has been the question for me.  I believe in layers, for just about everything.  Practice coats your instincts for whatever goal you’re striving towards.  Experiences make you worry about things that are tucked into your body like dollar bills.  

A lot of people my age will have reverb in their late twenties.  If it’s the anger, the frustration, the insecurities that are now driving them towards the self-medication, then the shame will come when it’s time to change, and that’ll be something else to conquer.  Those parents talking about the cops they ran from are either beyond that now, and a little surprised at themselves in the inside, or they’re still there, wishing they could do it again with an excuse.  

You strive towards things your whole life, looking up to people, pretending to be them, and then one day you taste the soup and it’s just you there, everyone else has their own lives to lead.  We compare our successes and skills to others’ in an attempt to relieve ourselves.  Our opinions of our lives are completely relative, as hard as we try. 

Everyone at my school was accepted and I still have a constant need to relieve myself. I’m part of this group of swimming people, legs kicking for air, the people who pushed us in standing on the edge of the pool with different but similar minds.  

I look at parents who are still making mistakes.  The drunks, the ones who hit pregnant women with cars, the ones who just aren’t there and don’t know how.  It doesn’t take much other than intense fear and laziness to make a failure.  

As it happens, I’m not gay, but if I were, I’d probably want to know the reason why (which is absurd).  And I don’t know if I’d be the type to share myself right away, to be like my friend from the hot tub with all his obvious problems.  

I’d probably keep myself in a little ball for awhile, until something really strong happened to make me realize that this is all just my life that every minute is asking for a new kind of mature progression, another step forward.

And the whole time I’d just be me with my mind anyway.  Nothing would be much different at all from what I have now.    

Reach Michael Juliani here.