I Started To Want It
I tapped my foot, squeezed my pant leg, and tried not to look insane. Don’t say it. Don’t say it. Please, don’t say it. This was about all I could think of during the Cropper Writing Series event. I was sitting in one of the back rows of the KIPJ theater between two of my friends, practically holding my breath. Around that time last year during the Q&A portion, I asked an unusual question to the presenting writer:
“What’s the best line you’ve ever written?”
“Oh,” she replies, completely disarmed. “Um, I don’t know, what’s your best line?” Go figure.
“Haven’t written it yet.” I had the response planned twenty minutes ago.
“Well I can’t say, yeah, I’ll have to get back to you on that one.” She never did. Asking the question probably made me seem like a douchebag—or rather “makes”, up to you. I sure felt like one afterwards—well, sort of; I was less embarrassed by my question and more embarrassed that people were judging me.
Anyway, despite squirming in my seat, I ultimately managed to push the question down. That was probably for the best. Laila Lalami was the presenter; she seemed great, but I only caught 50% of it since I’d been frequently spacing out. Fine, 25%. Though I do remember how she juxtaposed her approaches to fiction and nonfiction: for the former, she’d see where her pen took her, and for the latter, she’d always have a concrete story in mind. I have the exact opposite process: In fiction, I turn into a control freak, meticulously scheming plots, characters, themes, sentences, words, sounds, until things inevitably go off the rails. In nonfiction, I just start rambling. There’s never a concrete plan, which is why I’m writing about that one time where I did nothing.
I suppose that’s a running theme in my life. Since high school, I’ve mostly been coasting off talent alone with my writing. I bide my time until short bursts of inspiration hurl me towards the finish line. Teachers talk about first drafts and every time I suppress my chuckle; what I barf out is usually good enough. Sometimes I pay the price for that, sometimes I don’t. The stressometer is low these days, but that red hand occasionally twitches upward. No plan. No direction. Not what you want to hear from a college senior. “So, what do you wanna do in life?” to which I smile and say “I don’t know.” How come I always smile? Is it to hide my anxiety? Or am I complacent? Similar thoughts floated through my head as I stared blankly—not at the presenter, but at the stage.
—
Here’s another thing I thought of: one time I was in the writing center, again doing nothing. I’d recently studied abroad in Madrid, so I spent a lot of my September catching up with friends. I have a friend in the writing center who is like me in that we goof off, but different in that she’s able to make cutting observations about others at the drop of a hat. I say “cutting” because she can narrow a person down to one word. She’s described me as “neutral” a few times—which I found annoyingly perceptive. Anyway, she and I happened to be there in the writing center on the same day.
“Taking any fun English classes?” she asks. (I forget how our conversation went exactly, so pretend this is right.)
“Eh…” I shrug. “There’s some.” I’m nearly slouching beneath the table at this point.
“Oh yeah?” she says. Someone hands her a clipboard.
“Shiiii… I wouldn’t know, haven’t done the reading,” I smirk (I get so much mileage from that joke—it’s practically free laughs every time).
Now, the above is guesswork, but this next bit I remember verbatim. As she stands up to go, she nods, smirks and says: “Ha, I forgot how lazy you are.”
—
My face feels red. Oh boy, I’m feeling colors again. This is beyond a buzz. God, what’s her name again?
“Hey, tell me your name again,” I ask. The clever wording frames it like I haven’t forgotten.
“It’s %&#$,” she smiles. That’s a cool name.
“Gotcha,” I say. “Hey, I like your tattoo.” I say, partially because I do, but mostly to deflect. A couple people pass by and she asks if they could turn on the A/C. I agree loudly, because I’m from Washington state and here I’m always sweating up a small lake.
We go outside for a second to get some air. Ah. San Diego at night is perfect weather to me. She’s more used to the cold since she transferred from the east coast and then I say I’m from Tacoma, Washington—although usually I say Seattle because people here know that name and back home I say Ruston because people there occasionally know that name. Not to mention Tacoma is known for its Dome stadium and serial killers. We’re number one in something, I guess. Jesus. Did I really tell her that? Or was this a different conversation? When you’re drunk it’s hard to tell who’s talking, you or the alcohol. Despite that, I was enjoying a friendly conversation I wasn’t expecting to have during an otherwise loud party. Suddenly I started to wonder how I felt about this person. She’s cute, funny, no red flags—how come I don’t ask her out? Ha! Now that’s my mom talking. But seriously, why don’t I feel anything? Her face starts to blur. Voided faces of the night walk past us. Then my long-time friend Patrick shows up; I smile all big, I put my arm around him, and I tell %&#$ that me and him are “endgame”. I blink and an hour passes. Patrick says he’ll drive me back, but my uber is already here. He appears slightly crestfallen. There’s nothing here for me—I’ll see him again when we’re both sober. On the further dizzying thirty-minute ride back home I’m practically a corpse in the back seat. Oh. You know what? Frank Herbert, the author of the Dune series is also from Tacoma. He has his own statue in Ruston; of the gigantic, coiling sandworm.
—
I hear the door open downstairs. So can the whole neighborhood, that thing squeaks like a mouse with a megaphone.
“Hey, grandma!” I shout from the living room down to the top of the stairs. I’m sitting at the top of the stairs, writing this piece.
“Anthony?” she replies. She’s 77 years old (she’s older than that, but we agreed to stop counting because the number sounds nice).
“Yeah, it’s me,” I respond. “How was it?” She just got back from some social event. She’s got on some fancy clothes; an oversized, cream-colored blazer and a gray dress. Grandma lies down across from me on the other couch, letting out a large sigh. I look up from my laptop. She’s got the back of her hand pressed against her forehead, like she’s going to say “alas”. Behind her is a collection of photos from when her daughter was a ballerina, and behind me is an even larger collection of when her youngest son was an actor. My dad jokes that it’s the “Mariah-wall” and the “Johnny-wall.” He and his older brother didn’t get a wall.
“This’ll only take a minute,” grandma says, and she wholeheartedly means that. But I know better. She laments about a hamburger; she felt obligated to eat her son-in-law’s cooking but now it’s making her tired. Then she talks about the drama at their place and how each person’s appearance, followed by how they were doing. After taking five minutes, she finally stops.
“Tell me about Patrick,” she says. “Oh, and then one more thing.” She continues. Now, I like listening to my grandma, I do… What? Were you expecting a “but”? It’s true! I mean it. Yet I know this “one more thing” is about to spiral into ten more minutes and now my writing momentum is lost. But woe is me, right? Listening to her vent is the least I can do—especially since I’m freeloading at her place.
Somehow this one-sided conversation finds its way to the place where it often ends up: Trump. She, however, refers to him as “Donald.” She says someone apparently brought a shotgun to his rally. I watch her try and wrap her head around why another human would want to kill another human.
“Ugh! Bring me the 40s and 50s back. No drugs, no stealing, no cliques, everyone was nice,” she says. I don’t reply to that. I could. I really could. Don’t get the wrong idea, though; my grandma glamorizes, but she never lies. She tells it exactly how she sees it, it’s just she was born with rose-colored lenses.
“My mother, she once told me to hang out with the least popular person in high school…” She proceeds to tell me about how, after she befriended two other students “who hadn’t touched a pen of lipstick before”, became popular by the next year. I ask her if she’s the reason they became popular—she promptly reminds me that she was homecoming queen in high school and in college. If my grandma knew how to use the word “slay”, it would be wraps for all of us.
She continues onward and, as you could have guessed, I stealthily typed down her words. While still on the subject of high school stardom, she tells me about how my dad was part of the homecoming court. She says that at first my dad thought it was stupid, which checks out. And then—apparently—he said, “I started to want it.”
—
In seventh grade, my mom ordered me to run for student body president. “But mommm…” I probably said. I didn’t want to be president. I have an August birthday, so I was always the youngest in my classes, not to mention one of the smallest. I didn’t really see myself as the leader of that circle. but sometimes my mom digs her heels in. It often pays off. After a little groaning, I put my name on the list, taped a shark-themed campaign poster above the school drinking fountain, but the main thing I left until the last minute: the speech. The way I’d been approaching it, and what I’d been telling my friends, is that I didn’t care about winning. “My mom made me,” I would tell them. That way, nothing bad could happen: if I win, whatever, cool. If I lose, I don’t have to be president. Nowhere in my contract did mom say that I had to win. And then I started writing.
Fast forward to the day of the presentation. The entire middle school sat on the gym bleachers awaiting the main event. All their chatter sounded like a bee swarm hovering above crashing ocean waves. My thoughts were in a frenzy. Only now did it dawn on me that running away wasn’t an option. I’d done something horrible: I had started to care. The students running for office were seated in navy blue chairs across from the audience and adjacent to the microphone, powerfully perched on a stand that I would have to lower. They had me seated at the very end; I would be the last person to speak. The other students had stapled, MLA formatted speeches in front of them. In my hands was a sweat-stained piece of paper with no full sentences, just notes. Despite my anxiety, I knew that—if things went well—I had a winning strategy. The previous year, a student ran for student body president and, despite his relative unpopularity, he won in a landslide. Why? He was funny. Two jokes in his introduction and it was already over. For crying out loud, it’s a private, Catholic school; the students either talk about their stance on free-dress days or their economic policies regarding the student store—they’re humor-starved! Telling jokes during a speech was taboo and I was up there holding a joke book. Somewhere in that moment, though, as I watched the other students look down and recite their speeches, my nervousness turned into thrill. The students running all talked about what they’d implement and what their approaches were… blah blah blah blah BLAH! Can’t remember it! All I remember was giggling to myself, realizing that I was about to kill.
I tapped my foot, squeezed my pant leg, and tried not to look insane. They call my name. The first thing I did was stand up, turn to the left, and walk directly 45 degrees away from the microphone, and then sprinted right up to it. I decelerated like a cartoon character turning the corner and stared into the audience like I’d seen a ghost. They were completely disarmed. Ironically, simulating the nervousness lessened my own. And, though yet unearned, I knew I’d sealed the deal right then and there. I blacked out through most of it. Only the microphone breaking halfway through snapped me out of my trance, but once a teacher fixed it I went right back in. At the end, any remnants of a speech went completely out the window and were replaced with physical gags. The first was a dance. During the 2015 Super Bowl halftime show, one of Katy Perry’s backup dancers in a shark costume—the one to her left—forgot the choreography and started waving his fins like an idiot. So I did a totally inaccurate rendition of that. Best I can describe it was a horrible version of the “Bernie Dance”—feel free to google that. What I did instead was plant my feet, and without any rhythm, flailed around my noodle arms like the inflatable outside a car dealership. And it killed. Then I kept going. I told the audience the story of how, when I was an altar server, I almost lit my finger on fire. I’d forgotten to snuff out a candle and I’d already put away the snuffer tool, so I decided to try something I’d seen on TV. I licked my index finger and went to pinch it out and, yeah, burnt my thumb a little. In this speech, I re-enacted what happened, gesturing towards an invisible candle. And right when I pinched my fingers, I immediately recoiled from imaginary burning. Like something out of Tom and Jerry, I hammed up the pain. Again, I killed. I don’t know if the uproarious laughter was from genuine appreciation of comedy or how amusing it was to watch a maybe four-foot, seventy-pound, bug-eyed boy do some wack shit (in hindsight, I think I know which one it was). I didn’t care then and I don’t care now—I conquered my fear that day.
I remember everyone congratulating me; friends, teachers, the current student president, even the students I was running against. Yet there was one person who didn’t congratulate me—and I happened to have a fat crush on her. Never asked her out, either. Not even five minutes after the speech, even before they announced that I’d won, and she walked up to me. My eyes found her fast and although I couldn’t wipe the grin off my face, in her face I saw a multitude of expressions. A smile of dazzlement, a slight head tilt of confusion, a scrunched nose of endearment, and eyes that, ever so slightly, felt betrayed.
“I thought you said you didn’t want it.”
“Well…” I shrugged.