warning Hi, we've moved to USCANNENBERGMEDIA.COM. Visit us there!

Neon Tommy - Annenberg digital news

From Young Rooms: The King Of The Just Theres

Michael Juliani |
June 13, 2011 | 12:12 p.m. PDT

Staff Columnist

I read On The Road a number of times, the Penguin Classics version with the black and blue cover, and once when I stood to pull up my pants I dropped it into the toilet water. (Creative Commons, Susy Morris)
I read On The Road a number of times, the Penguin Classics version with the black and blue cover, and once when I stood to pull up my pants I dropped it into the toilet water. (Creative Commons, Susy Morris)
At the end of senior year I published a story in the literary magazine that was essentially a love letter to one of my best friend’s girlfriends.  I told it from the perspective of an old man looking back on the demure fervor of his youth.  It wasn’t something I did on purpose.

Molly was blonde, she acted (well) in plays, had this effect like she didn’t care but couldn’t help it.  Like she knew about and couldn’t explain the things that upset her.  Shrugging, the neck cut out of her t-shirts.  Up till it was time to know she said she had no idea where she wanted to go next for school.   

She was one of those girls who would end up drinking too much in college, coming home from the east coast pale because of the snow, skyscrapers, and vodka.  She turns eighteen in New York City.  The one at the party who’d stand alone, looking down at her feet in the kitchen, immediately applying a warm face if approached, the same face for everyone, good or bad.  In person it was always surprising to see it was her.  “Hi you,” she’d breathe, not like an adult.  She couldn’t keep a coffee date, something always came up.     

Scratching the self-applied paint off her nails, she wore black tights under her school uniform skirt.  I was one of those kids whose fingernails were always a little dirty and too long, hair a bit left in yesterday, myself the one most aware of these things.  I thought we were perfect for each other.  She was someone I wanted to write about, I’d found it.

It was the last day of classes and I hadn’t realized what I’d done.  I was excited, I had two pieces in the mag, a story and a poem, and my little bio in the back was pretty snarky: “Mike Juliani has been young a long time and has more or less enjoyed himself.”  I ran up to him and grabbed his shoulders sort of from the side and said, “We’re done!  We’re done!” because I had this little booklet in my hand and I’d be going somewhere new next year: college, the greatest place to approach for someone in love with myth.  I remember wishing that graduation felt like a bigger deal to me, smoking a cigar in front of my family.  “Did you finish that whole thing on your own young man?”

He turned and realized who I was and gave an “oh yeah” like he was upset but not at ease enough to really show it.  We were some of the only guys left on campus, school had been out for about an hour.  I don’t know what he was doing there, there weren’t any reasons left.  His reaction didn’t hit me till later, when at grad parties I seemed to have one less friend.       

At all-male Catholic school downtown it was easy to feel like you weren’t appreciated.  The security guards treated all of us like we were guilty and some of us were.  They’d make you walk around all the cones in the parking lot, even if you were eighteen.  They told parents waiting around that the administration frowned upon coddling.  If I want to be dramatic I could say it was sort of like white collar jail.   

I would’ve been fine having to shower in front of other men in P.E.  That kind of stuff doesn’t bother me, or not that much.  The first week of school an upperclassmen was standing naked under a weak faucet, and that was nothing more than surprising.  I barely felt like staring.

Sexuality was only confusing when it took me over like a cloud, a jungle sweat, a consuming orb containing no words.  Beyond the influence of young society’s images, it’s the physical peer pressure you put on yourself.  

Yeah, all the billboards have women with arched backs and incidental clothes.  Music videos are like pornographic Halloween parties.  My generation was the first to have this blown at us from technological fans.  We could go from waking up, to school, and home having distorted sex physically crayoned onto everything.  And also have to do the traditional shower in front of classmates thing.    

But we never had to do that kind of shit, the humiliating high school moments of old.  Private schools with huge endowments have by now weeded out all the shaming problems they’ve seen portrayed in 80s movies.  No matter how much they love tradition, high school isn’t painful like that anymore or it wasn’t for me.  I never got thrown in a locker because I liked books.  

It just kind of makes you quietly wish you were something that you’re not.  The painful moments are the ones when you’re taking the garbage out at home, wishing someone you know would drive by in that window of two minutes.  Because your imagination is on fire.       

And I was in my literary thing with Molly, starting my life of little notebooks and typed pages.  

I called her “my muse.”

I read On The Road a number of times, the Penguin Classics version with the black and blue cover, and once when I stood to pull up my pants I dropped it into the toilet water. The back half of my favorite novel darkened and turned even softer, but I let it dry, and now it’s on top of a tall stack on my desk.  I’ve never told that to anybody."  

Molly had the same copy.  One night I was at her house with friends and she left me alone with the book for a moment.  I read all the notes she’d made, and made one of my own that I thought was profound: “You can always tell if a book is good by the first and last pages.”  Her senior quote came from that book, I read it Indian-style on the floor of her bedroom with a cocoon of people standing around me.  I felt disappointed she hadn’t quoted me.  

My first girlfriend’s father just died this year.  I asked her to be my girlfriend in Spain.  We were on a class trip (I know) and a bold friend passed a note for me up to the front of the bus: “Will you go out with me?” and she had to check a box: Yes, No, or Maybe.  It was a big deal because my parents didn’t want me to have a girlfriend, but my life with her was lying in wait like a night of drinking.  She checked off all the squares, passed it back, and then met me on the edge of the plaza where our next stop was, in (I think) Granada.  She said yes, we hugged, and then dated for almost two years.  

I’d text her from my bedroom when I was obsessed with Green Day and the American Idiot album.  “Shit, really, they’re tearing it up on VH1 right now, you’d love it.”  It was the first rock band I imagined myself singing for.  I thought Billie Joe Armstrong and I had similar hair and noses (a note of insecurity for me), and I liked that the liner notes of the albums looked like torn notebook pages.  He sang about Ritalin, shopping malls, divorce, greasiness, and Edgar Allen Poe.  I wanted to be heard singing about the same things.    

In each of my fantasies I’m doing something heroic in front of a girl I want to impress, and her family.  The family is important.  I don’t know why I need her mother to see me win at basketball on my home court, but I do.  I need someone confident to whisper to the girl how good I am.  Her ex-boyfriend plays pretty good defense for the second best team but tonight he can’t keep up.  The mythical me has always had a difficult childhood.  He plays well because he has to.  What does that mean about what I want.   

Kerouac taught me to have dreams that weren’t dreams, more the result of deep exploration in thought.  A book of his is called Book Of Dreams.  Some of his girlfriends said he wrote in it every morning.  I imagine that half those things were ideas he wished had come to him in sleep.  For some reason I’ve never been very interested in reading it.  A lot of times these things aren’t exciting.    

Molly became my landing zone with this spotty, calculated free verse.  I have a lot of these online conversations saved.  Full of exclamation points and indulgences.  In the ether: brown-haired young man, whiskey breath, damaged blonde housed by his arm, warm California and time.  I thought I’d discovered the universal language, the groundwater finally coming up through bone.  We’d talk about “just theres,” things that happen and sit in our view like emotional stones.  “For this there is no adequate reason,” says The Iliad.  There’s a manuscript of some of my most first-draft material somewhere in her bedroom right now, The King Of The Just Theres.  I guess that was supposed to be me.     

She would sign off without saying anything, and I couldn’t tell how many people she did that to.  Talking to her was like grabbing someone’s collar as he’s walking through one door to the next.  I imagined that she always had someone important in the room with her, she’d allow me only a few moments away from whoever that was.

Around that time she started dating this friend of mine.  For awhile I tried to wedge myself in, but then eventually it was time to just deal with the page.  Between Molly and Kerouac I had to choose Kerouac I couldn’t have both.         

I wonder how many people at school have the crutch that I do.  It’s the embarrassing addiction I want to but can’t give up.  There have been plenty of others I’ve willed into submission.  Loud music, in headphones, makes me get lost.  Music until my ears have webs.  And I put myself in extreme situations, and I waste time.  People are going to work, getting paid, raising families.  I’m twenty years old crossing the street with buzzing white tails coming from my ears.   

I’ll admit a lot of it has helped me.  It’s been said that all the immortal songwriters used heroin.  I carry the hangover of fantasy with me into the car.  Their voices enliven a well.  I’m understanding that everyone wants to be a pop star, or at least the favorite child.  Crutches are sort of inevitable with this, they’re just there.  Even if you’re happy.       

Molly and her guy infested each other for a long time.  They may still be together in some form.  She went to London and got even paler.  Each time I see pictures of him I hope he’s put on more weight.  “Tell your fat fuck boyfriend to leave me the fuck alone,” I told her last year in fall when he visited other friends at school and wanted to see me.  She said it made her laugh.  The literary magazines rest in a pile on my couch, little squares that fan out like playing cards.  It’s the only poetry I’ve published so far even though I’ve done much better since.    

When I go to class I always listen to music on the way there.  If I don’t make big changes in my life I’m going to go deaf.  In sixth grade I went to my first “teenage” birthday party.  The girl with the biggest breasts in our grade, with the most out-to-lunch, vain parents, was having a dance in her backyard.  My mother waited in the car for me at 10:30 or so.  

I felt like I was a grade behind.  Where did they get all these songs?  The rap.  The stuff that made four guys end up in the pool by the end of the night, juiced out of their minds.  The “Move bitch get out the way…”  I went home and walked around my dining room table wanting to start a new life, listening to the most controversial CD I had.  My family was not ready for this.  The next few years were spent entirely in my head.

 

Reach Michael Juliani here.   

              



 

Buzz

Craig Gillespie directed this true story about "the most daring rescue mission in the history of the U.S. Coast Guard.”

Watch USC Annenberg Media's live State of the Union recap and analysis here.

 
ntrandomness