Talking to Girls About Duran Duran: One Young Man's Quest for True Love and a Cooler Haircut (11 page)

No woman made me break as many of these rules as Ms. Calasta.

Ms. Calasta always showed up late for class with a mug of coffee the size of a cinder block. She kept her hard pack of unfiltered cigarettes propped up on her desk, with a disturbing illustration of a salty old sea dog on the cover. My temples throbbed when she cleared her throat after a smoking break. I still dream of Ms. Calasta, who taught me so much, like the way modern literature reflected the alienation of a godless universe, and how if you hold your coffee mug at a certain angle, you can reduce a high school boy to Camembert.

She was a pheromone parfait in a pencil skirt, always rocking a severe bob of red hair and glasses that she could have used as a shiv. Years later, in my college French class, I would see the movie
Les Diaboliques
and realize that Ms. Calasta had stolen all her facial expressions from Simone Signoret. But it was all new to me. Where did she come from? How had she gotten this cool? Nobody knew, but we all worshipped her. The class was full of stoners, thespians, hockey players and bookworms, but everyone seemed to idolize Ms. Calasta. I was certain I loved her best.

It’s always dangerous to have a crush on your teacher, because the crush filters into whatever you’re supposed to be studying. Thanks to my Latin teacher, I will always feel a certain
nescio quid
whenever I will have used the future perfect tense (like just now). Whereas my crabby math teacher means that I will never truly enjoy full erotic release in the presence of a hypotenuse. Ms. Calasta had that effect on my reading and no doubt still does.

As near as I could guess, she hovered somewhere in her forties, looking back over her shadowy past with the elegant disdain of a 1930s bank robber in the back of the getaway car, glancing over the landscape as it trailed behind her. The clincher was her deep, hearty laugh, which involved downturned lips, a few seconds of sustained eye contact, a coda of hacks. Then she’d say the name of whoever made her laugh, as in,
Oh Raaahhhb
. Whatever she laughed at, you’d say again. She had a way of making you feel like an adult, as if you might slip up and she’d find out you were really just a sixteen-year-old boy reading
The Great Gatsby
for the first time. She would ask us questions like, “Have you ever argued about the death of God with someone you were sexually or romantically involved with?”

Not even Kenny Rogers could advise me how to handle this one. I could neither hold nor fold her.

Ms. Calasta laughed warmly at my enthusiasm for music and pop trash. She found it fetchingly jejune that I knew all the words to all the songs on the radio and read celebrity magazines. I even knew the oldies from the ’50s and ’60s that she’d grown up on.

“Oh,
Raaahhhb
,” she said. “You have so much passion for the Shirelles. Tell me about that Skeeter Davis song again.”

I was a dreamy boy, always bumping my head on ceiling fans and tripping over chairs, but she saw something in me that I hadn’t seen in myself, and I became more like whoever she thought I was. She gladly read my stories, poems and plays. She listened to the tapes I made her. After hearing me gush about music, she called me “Dolores Haze,” after the radio-listening, comics-reading nymphet in
Lolita
, but unfortunately, that was a joke I wouldn’t get for years.

Like any teenager who reads
The Great Gatsby
, probably, I was madly in love with the teacher who had opened it up for me. She was teaching us about Gatsby, the way he disappeared into his own Platonic conception of himself, the way he followed the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock, drunk on the impossible past. But what did I know about the past? I didn’t have one yet. I could only covet hers.

“Daisy and Gatsby had a connection,” she mused. “But not sexually. Gatsby never could have fulfilled her.” I wasn’t sure what she meant, but I wrote it all down.

When I go up into my parents’ attic and dig out my high school copies of these books, I am dumbstruck by all my feverish scrawls in the margin. I guess I really identified with the narrator of
Notes from Underground.
Looking at the novel now, the guy just seems every bit as much of a tool as I was, so either I was easier to impress then or I was just mesmerized by my frantic love for Ms. Calasta. I fished for details of her past, but instead I got more book recommendations, and devoured every one—John Milton’s
Samson Agonistes
, Aldous Huxley’s
After Many a Summer Dies the Swan
, Hemingway’s
A Moveable Feast.

This was also the period when I was cultivating arcane devotions to obscure saints. In a way, Catholic devotion was preparing me for my adulthood in the record collector/taper/critic world—collecting relics, obsessing over hagiography, looking for physical traces of the divine in the most ordinary things. It’s no coincidence that so many record geeks grow up Catholic—it really prepares you for that path. Praying the rosary was twenty minutes, just like an album side. And it had five mysteries, just like (most often) the five songs on an album side.

When I discovered Roxy Music, it was like I’d been waiting to hear them all my life. Bryan Ferry took romantic obsession even beyond Kenny Rogers. Where Kenny had merely urged me to “Love the World Away,” Bryan Ferry insisted that for the new-wave love-boy, the whole world would be obliterated by the sheer intensity of your devotion. Bryan Ferry wore a tuxedo and oozed ironic romantic despair. He had barely any voice at all, but his vocals were full of ornately stylized emotion; you could hear how many times he’d rehearsed every quiver, but somehow, that just made him more believable. “More than this,” he whispered. “There’s nothing.”

This song was more than a hymn—it was a religion in itself. No wonder he did the video in a church, standing under a cross that only existed to shine light on him. And just like Gatsby, he took romantic obsession to the point where he disappeared into the Platonic conception of himself. He spends the video watching himself up there on a movie screen—an awkward, ungainly man dancing like a foxy disco lady. He clearly knew how funny he was, but all his emotional playacting didn’t detract from his sincerity—it
was
his sincerity. He was a self-parodic Casanova in the privacy of his own mind, and every song was an invitation to the swinging party going on in his mirror—the more, the Bryan Ferrier.

I’ve loved this song since the first moment I heard it, yet I really have no idea who the girl is he’s singing to or what she’s like. I guess this is a song about desire so complete, it doesn’t even need an actual girl in it. He is beyond such details. If she won’t accept his love, he’ll have to adore it himself. The end of the song is just Bryan Ferry murmuring the words “more than this” and “nothing,” so that every time, they describe a new shade of blue. Gatsby would have understood.

Thrillingly, Ms. Calasta answered the letters I wrote her from college, always beginning with “Dear, dear Rob.” She got a little exasperated I was still calling her M s. Calasta. Every time I was back home from college, I went over for coffee. One sunny afternoon, she taught me to smoke, on the barstools in her kitchen. She had the same hard pack with the same disturbing sea dog cartoon. I tried to seem nonchalant as my virgin lungs filled with smoke.

“This is pretty strong, Ms. Calasta.”

“Yes, Rob.”

“Where is your bathroom?”

“Upstairs. You could call me Catherine.”

One day when I was in town, I called to invite myself over for coffee and cigarettes. But she was gone—she’d left abruptly, in a cloud of mystery. When asked about her whereabouts, other faculty members cleared their throats uncomfortably and changed the subject. Had she killed a man? Robbed a bank? Corrupted a student? (A student who wasn’t me? Unthinkable!) Whoever knew wasn’t talking, at least not to me. I would never find out. She left no trace, like the green light going dark at the end of Gatsby’s dock, or like the siren on a Roxy Music record cover.

The Gatsby blues made so much sense to me in Ms. Calasta’s class. When I read the book as an adult, I was startled to see that Gatsby and Daisy have only known each other for five years. When I was sixteen, this seemed like a lifetime’s worth of tragic romance. I’d always cherished Gatsby and Daisy as the emblem of a doomed, fatal, endless romantic obsession. They’d met, they’d fallen in love, they’d endured a tragic separation, but he had carried the torch for her all this time. But it was just five freaking years? I’m an adult now—I can do five years standing on my head.

But as Gatsby knew, five years
is
a long time. That’s the time the boy and girl have spent together in the Human League’s “Don’t You Want Me,” easily the most famous breakup song in history. They’ve had five years together, and now she’s got the world at her feet and she’s leaving him behind. That’s how long we’ve got until the planet burns out in Bowie’s “Five Years.” It’s how long John Wayne wanders the wilderness looking for Natalie Wood in
The Searchers
. It’s how long Ione Skye and her dad have lived together in
Say Anything
.

Odysseus and Circe got five years in
The Odyssey
, so do Humbert and Dolores in
Lolita
, so do Axl Rose and his Sunset Strip groupie in “You Could Be Mine.” There’s something primal about that time span. Five years doesn’t seem quite as epic as it did back then, when it was a third of my life. But I still get it. LCD Soundsystem sang about it in “All My Friends”: “You spent five long years trying to get with the plan, and the next five years trying to be with your friends again.” By the time you’re an adult, you’re used to seeing friends disappear into their five-year plans. They drop out to get married, have babies, go to grad school, get divorced. They start a band or enter the penal system. They vanish for years at a time—some come back, some don’t. Some of them you wait for and some you let go.

Sometimes the only way they come back is in a song. Sometimes the song is the green light at the end of the dock, a sign that the dream we’ve been chasing is already behind us, in the past. Sometimes when a girl goes away, the conversation doesn’t end. You keep talking to her, just in case she can hear.

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne ceaselessly back into Bryan Ferry.

1983

 

 

 

 

People rarely threaten to kill me these days. That’s one of the weird things about being an adult. It’s illegal, so it just doesn’t happen very often. In the past few years, only two other guys have threatened me with murder, and neither time was all that alarming. One guy got mad at me in the accountant’s office when I was getting my taxes done. I was on crutches at the time, because of the tragic roller-disco crash of ’05 (don’t aaaask), and he tripped over my legs on his way to use the waiting-room coffee machine, which hasn’t worked since the Clinton administration. Enraged by the denial of coffee, he threw the Styrofoam cup at me and said, “I’m gonna fucking kill you.” It was a weird threat to make, depending on how you rate Styrofoam murder weapons. It could be done, killing a man with Styrofoam, but it would require some degree of premeditation—carving a styro-scimitar, or maybe a blowgun to shoot those little peanuts. But for your garden-variety impulse killing, Styrofoam gets you nowhere, especially in Brooklyn. His wife made him come back over and apologize, which was embarrassing for both of us.

The other guy was on an Amtrak train, using his cell phone in the quiet car. I usually avoid the quiet car because I loathe hearing myself chew, but this time I was in it, and although I didn’t mind this clod’s moronic conversation (reading the
Star
out loud), I couldn’t stand the slow exhales and exasperated sighs of my spineless fellow passengers. I always regard a succinct and informative shoosh as morally superior to an hour of feeble throat-clearing, and as a longtime librarian, I pride myself on my nonconfrontational shooshing skills. But my professional expertise must have failed me, because this guy took it hard, particularly after other passengers joined in. He waited till we were on the escalator at Penn Station to utter those same five magic words, “I’m gonna fucking kill you.” It was hard to take him seriously, since it would have been
much
easier to kill me on the train. I mean, getting thrown from a moving train would be kind of hot. A very Robert Mitchum way to go. But escalator killings? No class.

Strange as it may sound, though, whenever I hear those words, it always makes me feel all warm and gushy inside. It whisks me back in time to the golden summer of 1983, when I worked on a garbage truck with a bunch of other guys. We threatened to kill one another all the time. In fact, we considered the day a waste if nobody did any heavy bleeding.

There was me, Soup, Okie, Psycho and Psycho’s brother, Chicken. They called me “Bones.” Our truck driver, a crusty old Irish guy named Harry, called us all the same name, which was “You faggots.” We were picking up garbage on the Southeast Expressway, working for the Massachusetts Highway Department, out of the Granite Avenue barracks. We had our orange vests, our plastic bags and our idiot sticks—you know, the stick with the little pointy spike at the tip for spearing trash. Every morning, we’d pile in the back of the truck and Harry would drive us to some point in the road, drop us off, then go get a beer.

We cleaned the sides of the expressway between Exit 11 and Exit 20, the southern stretch, all the way to the Central Artery in downtown Boston, down to the Furnace Brook Parkway in Quincy. We covered I-93, the six-lane highway connecting Boston to the suburbs, down the Neponset River, through Savin Hall, beneath the Boston Gas tanks with the rainbow paintings. We cleaned the living fuck out of that place. We speared all the garbage that piles up along the side of any roadside: porno mags, paper bags, Burger King wrappers, crushed drink cups, beer cans, the occasional pair of pants.