On Getting Suspended from High School
"We had three drinks each, free tapas, and a flirty conversation with the bartender."
July 8, 2012
Gilford, New Hampshire
I was 18 years old
Speaking of foreign travels, Spain was an experience. The homestay was great. Emilio and his family are all amazing and I know for a fact that, if I were to ever return to Granada, I’d be welcomed with open arms (just not by their father…their parents recently separated). Málaga and Toledo were both fun . The country is gorgeous and it was great to experience it with Emily and Stephanie. And the food. Paella, jamón serrano, tortilla española, etc. etc. And, of course—Madrid. I loved that city. The art museums, the architecture, the people, our tour guide (Gaetan…purr). I adored it. We went to great restaurants, saw gorgeous works of art, so, naturally, once we returned to the hotel for the night, I wanted to keep the party going.
So, Emily and I leave our rooms and go out in search of a bar. We find one right around the corner and sit down for an hour. We had three drinks each, free tapas, and a flirtatious conversation with the bartender about our Americanness. Or flirtatious between him and Emily, at least. So, I’m only tipsy but Emily’s drunk and we leave. We take the scenic way around and are walking safely up to our hotel, which is in sight at the top of the street. And it’s as I’m lifting up my shirt and dancing like a fool that I see a blond-haired woman outside our hotel. I turn to Emily, somehow already knowing what’s in store (I think my butthole was cemented shut for the next 12 hours).
As we get closer, we suddenly hear Mrs. Stoll* scream, “I’M SHAKING LIKE A FUCKING LEAF RIGHT NOW!” For the next few minutes, she rips into us on the streets of Madrid on topics ranging from A) Natalee Holloway (Emily’s response: “Who?”) to B) Mrs. Stoll losing her entire career to C) the word “fuck.” All kidding aside, it was pretty idiotic. Had anything happened to us, all of our other classmates on the trip would have had to return to the USA and my teachers would probably have lost their jobs.
Though the (fascistic, asshole, motherfucker) superintendent wanted Emily and I to return to the USA immediately, as soon as he got word of this whole situation. But Sra. Stoll fought for us to stay for the whole trip. However, Emily and I both had one week’s detention, upon getting back home. They also wanted us to go to fricken REHAB but they never went through with it.
That night, after she stopped yelling and me and Emily went back to our hotel rooms, still kind of drunk, I went into Mrs. Stoll’s and Ms. Mitten’s* room and SOBBED in front of them. Not really knowing what the extent of my punishment would be. I honestly thought my admission to Emmanuel could be revoked. They were very understanding and sweet about it. Mrs. Stoll later wrote in my yearbook, “I was so mad at you but I’m totally over it. And back when I was your age, I probably would have done the same thing.”
*Names have been (kind of) changed to protect the innocent.
April 19, 2022
Brooklyn, New York
I am 28 years old
My regression to teenage angst stands constantly upon the edge of a knife. Stray just a little, and to the ruin of all, I’m groaning “Mom!” in the living room of my Aunt Karen’s beautiful New Jersey home as my mother tells a mostly-false version of an otherwise true story. She doesn’t have a good memory, Kristine. Of course, neither do I. A choice deficiency for someone who spends his days—and makes some money—detailing the lived experiences of the Lower East Side’s Rogarshevskys and Clinton Hill’s Brian Burns. But as I tell any museum visitor who’s backed me into a corner I can’t turn-of-phrase out of: “I’m not a historian.” My mother, a pharmacy technician, isn’t either, though that’s hardly stopping her. It was a couple weekends ago, at a family party, a belated opportunity for my Nana to meet her great-grandson for the first time, that the novelty of being around our newest bloodkin waned just long enough for conversation to veer from our future to the past. And to my past, in particular. How it came up, my Spanish transgression, who knows, but as my mom’s recollections started skewing toward some “World Cup soccer game” that Emily and I never watched or attended, a proverbial spotlight began to beam, too hot and too bright, on this squirming someone becoming, all over again, a teenager who just got caught.
Not that I was a teenager who got caught often. Largely because I hardly did anything. Whiling away most of my teenage years alone in my bedroom. My memorization of the “Vogue” music video’s choreography perhaps warranting some concern but not exactly discipline. Though a complete recluse, I was not. And there were even a handful of high school antics that, had my parents paid even slightly more attention to me, probably deserved consequences. I drove drunk once—and by drove, I mean three doors down, crawling my 2001 Honda Accord from a neighbor’s house party, a distance of 500 total feet that took me somewhere around 10 minutes. Late one night, me and some friends trespassed into the long-abandoned and absolutely terrifying Marlboro Psychiatric Hospital just as car headlights started pulling up the drive. I smoked a little weed, snuck into a couple movies, lied that an afternoon spent rolling around a mattress with John was instead a wholesome day hanging out with Brittany and Isa. And whether it was my guile or my parents’ six day work weeks or just the fact that none of these indiscretions are all that bad, all I know for sure is that I got away with it. Until, of course, no lo hice.
It’s not an especially touchy matter, this trouble I got into in Spain. Likely because of how little a price I had to pay for it. I didn’t need to leave the country early, I didn’t cost my teachers their careers, I wasn’t abducted never to be seen again. And even the punishments that did come my way—a removal from the National Honor Society and a week-long suspension from my senior year that coincided beautifully with warm enough weather to suntan on the back deck—it wasn’t exactly Sing Sing. I had no regrets. If anything, I was proud of myself, a little impressed that, consciously or not, I recognized the oh so metropolitan independence I was feeling in Madrid as some precursor to what surely awaited me in Boston. So proud to know I kept seeking, even for just one more hour, something that felt so good. And yet there I was, itching in my skin, desperate to stop my mom in her tracks as she was sharing this very same story. And not because I was embarrassed or annoyed or uncomfortable being the center of attention. Quite obviously to the contrary. It was that I’d become the object in a story that, while it happened, had everything to do with feeling finally like the subject.
Transcribing this old journal entry, an entry I wrote months after my trip to Spain actually happened, I couldn’t help noticing that something had changed in my writing. If not in quality then in nature. It just read so differently to me than the countless other circa-Gilford High School entries I’ve pored over in the last year. It’s hardly brilliant prose, I’m not suggesting that. But unlike so many of my younger journal entries, I swear this account of our night in Madrid—told with a kind of remove that only time can afford—could fit squarely into any diary I’ve started and finished since. Because as unsolicited as this peak behind the curtain might be, my delayed approach to keeping a diary has mostly stayed that way. It’s always chronological, painstakingly so, but I’m always behind, writing about things that happened days, weeks, months before pen is finally put to paper. If that makes me a bad diarist, if it makes me, in fact, not much of a diarist at all—oh well. Because, knowing my memory, I’m certain so much gets lost. The godly details of my day-to-day surely too small, too slight to stand out, however long later, when I might finally get around to them. But I’m too slow a writer, and too afraid of my right hand becoming an arthritic claw by age 40, to change anything about it now. So, instead, I’ll keep my distance, keeping my past at an arm’s length so I can sit down in the present, trying my very hardest to remember what exactly has happened to me.