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December 14, 2004
My Photo Collection
My high school was pretty small. I think there were about 40 people in my class/year. There were only about 40 people in each class giving us a total of well less than 200 students (I was pretty easily in the top 100 coolest kids in my school). It was a boarding school situated on the top of a hill. A hill that overlooked mostly farms. Farms and a village.
At the bottom of the hill was a village of about 300 people. The number of people in the village is really just a guess. I can say with certainty, however, that there was one tractor dealership, one bowling alley, three bars and one meat store. They had all sorts of meat in the store. Raw, smoked, stuffed in tubes, whatever type of meat you had a hankering for could surely be found there.
I only went to the store once. We had to get special permission to leave the campus, even to go down just as far as the tractor dealership.
Being unable to leave except with special permission made contact with the outside world, and more specifically contact, of any sort, with females at the all boys' school more desirable than heroin is on my street corner. (While that wouldn't mean much in many neighborhoods you'll have to take my word for it when I say that there are a lot of people standing on the street corner at all hours of the day, in all weather conditions, waiting, just waiting for someone to come by and sell them some heroin. Just one hit. Come one. Just one hit.)
Physical contact was extremely limited, on account of the closed campus, so we settled for other means, namely mail. Mail delivery was an event not to be missed. Guys crowded around the mail boxes every day unwilling to let their mail get comfortable in their mailboxes.
All mail was good, even catalogs and junk mail of all stripes - they carried messages from the outside world after all. Personalized letters, however, were, of course, favored. They were a sort of measure of cool, even letters from Mothers and Grandmas. The guy with the most letters in his box got to strut around the rest of the day knowing he was better than everyone else and he had the stack of letters to prove it. Sometimes the recipient of multiple letters even left them in his box to show anyone and everyone just what was up.
Letters from girls, especially girls that sent letters making obvious their girlness were by far the most desired, covetted, envied letters there were. They trumped all other letters. One girl letter was worth 2 or 3 grandma/mother letters depending on the amount of stickers, the cuteness of the handwriting, the cutesy sayings on the outside of the envelope. (Envelopes sealed with lip sticky kiss marks were worth double.)
So my friends and I found it disconcerting when some of the dorky kids suddenly started getting mail from girls. They started getting letters almost every day. They were really cutting into our cool. We were, of course, still getting more girl letters, so our fear was irrational, but we did fear. "What if this is just the start? What next? We can't let them be more cool than us. They must have cheated. They're up to something. They have to be."
How could the guy with one breast that masturbates through his pants during class when he's not picking his nose and eating it be getting this many letters? Who would write the the guy with bigger breasts than all the students' mothers be getting 4 letters a week? He smells like Cheetos. They must have done something.
We confronted them. "Where'd you meet her?"
"Ahhh."
"Did she come up here for a basketball game?"
"Ummmm."
"Come on, it's cool. I'm just wondering if I know her."
"No. I found her address in a magazine."
"Oh. Cool."
We searched the magazines in the common room in the dorm. Sure enough. The addresses matched up to the girls listed in the pen pal section of one of the magazines.
"Ingenius! We've got to hand it to them for their resourcefulness. Now copy down those addresses."
But there was a problem. How could we write to the same girls that the dorky kids wrote to? What would there be to write if we couldn't write about how her other pen pal started sticking pen caps up his nose until he sneezed and then licked the projectiles off his hand? It would probably be bad form to tell the girls that an auditorium chair just gave under the weight of her other pen pal. We figured it was probably a bad idea.
Then. Then came the answer. Get our names in the magazine. Why not? We could sort out the guys and write to the girls. We'd constantly be getting mail from girls.
Holy crap! We didn't know what we were getting into. We started getting 3-4-5 letters a day within two weeks of the arrival of the magazine containing our profiles. Then for months we got 5-7 letters a day. (It kept up for about a year. Then there was a lull of a month or two before the letters started coming in from kids in Africa looking to practice their English. They had gotten the magazines through missionaries.)
Every day after school I set aside a block of time to sort through my letters. I tossed the occassional male originating letters and ripped open the letters from females. I poured over them. Deliberated. Does she warrant a return letter?
The letters were sorted into piles (in ascending order): Boring. Interesting. Boring with hot picture attached. Interesting with hot picture attached.
The hot girls always got a letter back. Some of the interesting girls got letters back, usually asking for a picture.
One day I came across a certain letter with exceptionally bubbley handwriting. She wrote a lot, but didn't seem terribly interesting. I was about to toss the letter into the boring without hot picture pile when my friend stopped me. "Dude," because everyone said "dude" all the time back then, "I'd write back. She's hot."
"Dude. How do you know?" I looked around to see if maybe a hot picture had eluded me, maybe it fell out when I was opening the letter. "Did she send a picture?"
"Dude. Look at that handwriting."
"Dude. You can't tell what a girl looks like just by looking at her handwriting."
"Dude. I can."
"No way, dude." Sometimes we stuck "dude" at the end of a sentence. "You can not."
"Yes I can, dude."
"Well then tell me what she looks like, dude."
"Dude.She's got long blonde hair, she's real tall and thin, with green eyes."
"Dude. You can tell all that from the handwriting."
"Yeah, dude. She's smoking hot. Either that or she's super fat and disgusting."
"Dude, that's like every one of the girls. She might be hot, she might be ugly."
"No, dude, this girl is at one of the extremes."
"Well, then, dude. I'm going to write to her to prove you that you can't tell what a girl looks like from her handwriting."
"Dude. I'm telling you..."
I wrote to the girl and naturally asked for a picture. I got about 10. Pictures from her childhood on to her senior year of high school. Plus a picture of her dog.
She was in band. I could tell because she sent me a picture of herself holding an alto sax, or a bass clarinet or an oboe or something. She was also fat and ugly, to one of those extremes, the pictures made that abundantly clear. He was right.
I kept the pictures but never wrote her back (and yes, I know that makes me a horrible, evil person, but she was also extremely boring and I had a lot of letters to write). I actually kept all the pictures at my parents house. I dug up a box of them years later when gather up my stuff before moving to Mississippi for a while. I giggled when sorting through them. I guffawed when I got to her pictures.
Then I got an idea. I don't have a girlfriend now but people I meet are sure to ask me if I do. I'll pretend she's my girlfriend.
"Hey, Brian do you have a girlfriend?"
"Yeah, dude." I was probably the last guy to quit using "dude." "I've got a picture of her right here."
"Wow." Was about the most positive remark I got out of people.
"What do you think? She was in marching band in college." Something about the weight made her age hard to pinpoint.
"Oh. She's -- ah -- she's nice. Here you go." Was along the order of the usual response.
I gave up my gag after one guy looked at the picture and yelled, "Oooh, she's disgusting. You are one fucked up dude."
"No. No. It's a joke. She's not my girlfriend."
"I'd deny it too if I were you. Man, you're disgusting."
Posted by calculatoronfire at December 14, 2004 02:36 PM