Primordial scene 1

At sixth grade I switched schools. One kid kept picking fights with me even though I was nice. These kids in general were different than the ones in the other school. They cared what brands you wore and gossiped hard and with malice. One day the boys asked me to the bathrooms where we were to bond by revealing ourselves. 

Another day I had my dad pick up a football and toss it over the painted iron railings of the school fence. The mob was delighted and I felt incorporated. Later on I made up ethnic footballer names for everyone and put them in a custom team in a video game, like we were Real Madrid or something. Some guys would snarl that I had way too much imagination but in general they seemed to like it.

Nevertheless Manolazzi (#10/Forward, since he was the man in the field and I was a klutz who went balls deep into the nerdy stuff way too early) would keep finding reasons to get physical for years. Once in summer camp when I had a girlfriend and he didn’t. That was two years later.

We also had the same best friend but being sensitive I typically got triangulated. When they were bored at my house, they would give each other a look of mischief, and proceed to make me cry.

The scene that has most stuck with me took place early one, at that guy’s birthday party. After most of the guest list had gone off me and the boys were left in a sort of more intimate hang. They started asking what I thought of M. I don’t remember what I said. I honestly didn’t dislike the guy, not yet at least.

M was hiding behind the couches, listening in the whole time. When he came out the whole thing was treated as a joke.

My dad picked me up and I told him what happened in the car. He didn’t understand why it was me who singled out, or why I thought it was funny.

Primordial scene 2

Several spied landline calls later, once adolescence was raging on and we had conceded high school was to be a garbage fire, we discovered being weird. I had a best friend who was always in a house-shaped black anorak concealing his face up to the nose. He enjoyed the Red Hot Chilli Peppers and casual narcissistic abuse — though of course we didn’t have such perfumed words back then.

I had decided I was a ninja. That was a life philosophy that found expression in never giving a straight answer. It pleased me spiritually: I could be funny but also protected. Already I gleaned that you should never let people box you in.

Of course the Anorak would milk this for his own satisfactions and so one day he kept going like, “if you’re a ninja bring me a ninja star.”

I took the road home after school. There lying on the street I found my star. One of these things kids bought for cheap at kiosks and fairs, that would typically hang sealed in plastic along with other accessories of war, having shipped from somewhere in China where they cared nothing for branding.

I tossed it causally on our desk next morning, and he immediately took it in his big hands to examine. “It’s plastic,” he said.

Yet some nights when it was cold and clear, and I was getting home from another boring Saturday night out, I would look up and seek the one I liked. I believe it turned out to be Venus.