Lenten Challenges
Goodbye, high school baby girl.
My parents are selling my childhood home and moving from Shepherdstown, WV to Madison, WI. The past week I spent my last days here in the Midatlantic (for likely a long, long time…perhaps forever?!) visiting all the places that mean so much to me. The next few bits from me are about to be almost exclusively highly specific nostalgia, so if that marbled slab of grief and melodrama sounds too rich for your blood, you can bail. Anytime I write one of these, it’s mostly for for me, after all. I fly back to Los Angeles today.
I recently found out that my high school is gone.
The building itself was knocked down a few years ago, from big brick 2-story to flat green field. They moved the operation to some other building for a few years. But the other day, while trying to find proof of existence of an old teacher online (did he really end up opening that bed & breakfast in Vermont?), I found out that St. Maria Goretti High School is gone gone, like ceased to operate, closed, cerrado, OUT OF THE BUSINESS OF SHAPING YOUNG MINDS. If I want my transcript, I’ll have to inquire with the State of Maryland.
It was a Catholic co-ed day school. On the fashionable side of Hagerstown (this is not saying much—once Hagerstown won some sort of horrible little “award” called “Town with the Ugliest People in America” or something equally ignominious). A little ratty tatty shabby meth-y, and yes, totally, spectacularly important to me, anatomically-geographically, because that place is where my whole brain and body and pussy switched the fuck on.
The teacher who always said he would leave teaching to open a bed & breakfast was the freshman year religion teacher, Mr. B. He went by Mr. B, that’s not me trying to anonymize him. I really can’t remember if it stands for Bukowski, which is why I can’t find him online. He had the most beautiful lilting, transatlantic speaking voice. I believe he was either gay as a maypole or one of those elegant bisexual men that don’t really exist anymore like Cary Grant or whatever (the unending gigabyte waves of Gen Z pansexuals or whatever are a different thing entirely, ok?).
I don’t remember what it entailed, but we had some sort of assignment during the Easter season called Lenten Challenges. Lent is over, He has Risen, etc, but I can’t get that phrase out of my head. I think Mr. Cuthbert, the AP English teacher, would have talked about the Ides of March. Mrs. Barton, the Anatomy and AP Bio teacher would have said that God and science can exist in the same world without unraveling each other (yes) and also that the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell (yes) and something about ATP transfer at the molecular level (sure). Mr. Martin (who deserves his own essay, a perfect, exceedingly clever gnome of a man with a voice like a paper shredder, who walked everywhere and never drove, had a second job at a gas station nearby, and jumped on a tiny trampoline while watching regional sports coverage during his free period) wouldn’t have said much but I think he deeply respected my commitment to the bit that is “future English majors who take Calculus I.” I don’t know what Mr. Munday, the chemistry teacher would have said because I literally could not wrap my head around chemistry; it was absolute Greek to me. I played Tetris on my graphing calculator instead. Miss Lilley can eat shit. Pope John Paul II’s Theology of the Body is bullshit, and women weren’t made to serve their husbands. I hope you choke, babe.
Obviously I’ve been spending time in the memory bottle.
My therapist said I have trouble with transitions. And this spring has been no different. I feel all spring like the bulb of my heart has been trying to grow, piercing right out of the frozen soil of my chest. I’ve always done better in summer, sprawling out languidly in the time of leisure and abundance, the time of the un-muddied water of the hyper-present, every still liquid moment drawing more infinite on a rock in the middle of a river in the sun. I’ll be there soon. But right now, I’m still reeling from too much inexorable growth.
So back in the bottle that burns so good, like bad gin and getting fingered in the school parking lot after 7th period and before ballet class.
We all walked as a school over to Mass at the church next door, St. Ann’s, maybe once or twice a month, and on those days we had to wear a slightly more formal uniform, Mass Uniform, button down shirts, dark tights or navy knee socks. I remember tittering and gossiping in the pews, the smell of incense and desire.
The longest Masses were always Stations of the Cross (stand-up-sit-down-kneel ad infinitum) and Ash Wednesday because confessions and ash daubing a whole high school takes what feels like 1000 years. I remember Lila touching up her ash forehead cross with eyeshadow during history class.
I remember in the same history class, feeling unreceptive to the supposed masterpiece that is the 1965 film Dr. Zhivago that we watched in chunks for several weeks in spring semester. Russia in the early 1900s has nothing to give a teenage girl spending most of her waking hours thinking about boys in the Year of Our Lord 2007.
Nothing hits like a teenage crush. Just radiating lust and longing and heartache out to the tips of your fingers. Feelings don’t cut so deep later on. Can only catch that kind of intensity in flashes. God it felt good to feel so much, you know? I know you know.
Last night I made a pilgrimage, greedy for the bottom of the bottle. I dressed up in proper Mass Uniform. I still have the plaid skirt and it still fits, and that’s just a little fuck-you brag to everyone who ever wronged me. I’ve only got hotter every year I’ve been on this earth. I grew into the earthiest, most sensual, most natural beauty you’ve ever seen in your entire life. My tits are godlike. Ok ok ok, my ass was better in high school, I’ll give you that.
So I stole liquor from my parents’ bar and drove my old route to school, 30 minutes no traffic and if you hit all the lights just right, 45 minutes during rush hour. This time in my parent’s 2016 Subaru Forester instead of my dad’s 1999 Honda Accord. I walked out to the middle of the green field where my high school used to be. I smoked a cigarette and poured one out for all the people I used to know, including her, Eliza, ages 14-17. I smelled the grass and thought about those years, so full of hope and almost-fuck and fight. And I felt it inside me still.
Below, a definitive excerpt of iPod selects, in artist alphabetical, for the St. Maria Goretti commute from 2006-2010. I was 16 fucking years old, my taste was still erratic and developing and didn’t know any Pavement deep cuts yet, ok?
Fireworks, Animal Collective
For Emma, Bon Iver
Skinny Love, Bon Iver
Anthems for a Seventeen Year Old Girl, Broken Social Scene
Lover’s Spit, Broken Social Scene
The Skin of My Yellow Country Teeth, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah
At the Hop, Devendra Banhart
Gravity, John Mayer
It Was the Moon that Bored You, Liz Isenberg
Dance, Dance, Dance, Lykke Li
Time to Pretend, MGMT
Gone Sugaring, Mirah
Loveless (full studio album top to toes, for very special days), MBV
Fake Empire, The National
Moth’s Wings, Passion Pit
Gold Soundz, Pavement
That Time, Regina Spektor
Portions for Foxes, Rilo Kiley
Blah Blah Blah, Say Hi to Your Mom
Sleeping Lessons, The Shins
Bitches in Tokyo, Stars
Back in Your Head, Tegan and Sara
Campus, Vampire Weekend
Stephanie Says, The Velvet Underground