Tell me one about Joel.
An old friend of mine died recently.
I’m at the age where this starts to happen more frequently, but still young enough to be upset at the news. Joel and I went to high school together.
He had that legendary aura about him that a kid who looks bad but makes no real trouble can cultivate. Leather jacket, swaggering walk, and a scar under one eye as if boiling wated had poured down one day from his brow.
I never asked him how he got it.
My favorite story about Joel is one I published elsewhere, about blowing up a pumpkin that offended us small town kids. My second favorite was the one about him speaking at the funeral of a kid we all knew who had committed suicide when he was eighteen. A lot of people remember that day, but I wonder if they remember Joel, trying to redirect a long, embarassing altar call back to stories about the kid we had known. His unlikely figure, cutting up the aisle of the church, arms spread wide. His swagger and strangeness, the breaking of his young voice.
The third Joel story is the one nobody else knows, and I want to tell it to you today.
I felt mostly invisible in high school, and when I became visible it was almost never a good thing. I had no home, I worked nights, and I didn’t know what would become of me in any sense. You might think being attractive to my fellow teens would rank low on my list of priorities, but you’d be wrong about that.
I wanted to be liked — didn’t we all want that? I didn’t think that being kissed would fix me or my life, but I wanted it anyway. I was fat in the low-rise 1990s and curly-haired in the flatiron era and weird in an American high school. Hardly anyone wanted to kiss me, and I thought I might die before I ever had real sex.
Joel’s weirdness attracted me; his deft tool-handling as a set builder in our theater department and his wicked sense of humor. One day, late into rehearsals, we were all exhausted and trying to mark up the work we would return to the next day. He climbed to where I was sitting and asked “can I borrow a pencil?”
I rummaged in my bag to find one, but I looked up again when he said, “Or sex. I would very much accept sex instead of a pencil.”
We were too young to really joke that way. Sex was still too momentous, too important. I wouldn’t learn the ease of it until decades later, when it became just something else that adults do. But I wanted to say yes. And I wanted to joke back. And I had to choose.
“Since you asked,” I said, cocking an eyebrow. “Here’s a pencil.” I pulled it out of my bag and he slipped it behinid his ear with a rueful smile, with an aww-shucks-I-tried kind of shrug.
It was maybe the first time a boy had said anything of that nature to me without pretending it was a joke, and of course I should know it’s a joke because ew gross, who would want me? It was the first banter between equals I had ever had with a member of the opposite sex, and it didn’t feel like a favor. It felt like a small initiation.
Joel and I lost touch. High school is one of the many foreign countries of the past, and I don’t go and visit anymore. I heard he stayed in our hometown, I heard he joined a union. I heard he died of diabetes exacerbated by poverty. I heard his son is 12 years old.
I heard that telling stories of the people who you’ve lost is a way to keep them, a way to remember them. I hope you’ll tell stories of me, when I’m gone.