Faking It: Chapter Two, Part Two - Grunge

February 13th 2012

Grunge

In the summer before my sophomore year, my best friend Jamie and I discovered grunge, god help us.

I have to take some time here to write about Jamie because she was basically the most important person in my life from the ages of thirteen through sixteen. In adolescent years, this is an eternity. We often spent the night at one of our houses every Saturday, since Jamie’s parents went to the same not-quite-a-cult church as my mother did.¹ She is my only witness to the time my mom hauled me out of bed at three a.m. to clean up the yarn that my kitten had strewn around the living room during the night.²

We both had black hair, and Jamie had an insanely pretty heart-shaped face with apple cheeks and eyes that became crescent-shaped when she smiled.³ Jamie and I were the kind of best friends who could laugh at ourselves in the middle of an argument for being bickering little bitches, freak each other out with ghost and demon stores, and share a crush on an Unattainable Idol.

In the summer of 1992, that idol was Eddie Vedder. I’m not sure how we even became aware of Pearl Jam’s existence, since neither of us was technically allowed to watch MTV. But you can’t keep teenagers away from angst; they’re wired to pick it up, and it’s in the air, like the wifi in a Starbucks.

Pretty soon, we were local experts in the grunge scene. We watched Singles and decided that Cameron Crowe had pretty much captured exactly what we wanted our grown-up lives to be like. We acquired flannel shirts from the thrift store. There is nothing quite so ludicrous as wearing flannel in the middle of summer, but we were committed to this lifestyle. We roamed the streets of Fremont, California in flannel, cut-off jeans, and Chuck Taylors, sharing the earphones of Jamie’s Walkman as we listened to a mix tape of songs recorded off the radio. We prided ourselves on having “discovered” Stone Temple Pilots before anyone we knew had.

As our delve⁴ into all things grunge deepened, we were psyched⁵ to discover that there were girls involved in this movement. There was Hole and L7 and Babes in Toyland; there was D’Arcy in The Smashing Pumpkins⁶; and in the broader “alternative” genre there was Kim Gordon in Sonic Youth and former Pixie Kim Deal’s band The Breeders and Bjork.

When Kurt Cobain married Courtney Love it was a kind of affirmation.⁷ In our angsty and yet still hopeful eyes, this meant that you didn’t have to be the one boys wrote songs about. You could write your own songs, play your own guitar, scream your own lyrics — and the right kind of boys would think you’re really cool for doing it. Yeah, it’s bad to yearn after male approval, but let’s face it: we were thirteen and fourteen; we cared about boys an awful lot.

All of this was brought into my carefully crafted image, of course. This particular mode of being seemed to fit me better than the Scarlett O’Hara one. It was creative rather than coquettish. I stopped worrying so much about what other girls thought of my hair and make-up and clothes, and — thanks to this being the era of the Grunge Waif — stopped agonizing about my skinny, flat-chested figure.

What this also meant is that I pretty much abandoned my friends. (We were only a little more than a year apart in age, but thanks to my November birthday and her February one, Jamie was two grades behind me, and so not in high school yet.) At the time, this struck me as something I had to do to be true to myself or some bullshit, but in retrospect, I see it as calculated and unkind.

Still, I suppose it’s part of the Teenager’s Progress to leave behind friends when your interests and tastes diverge.⁸ I was feeling the outsider as much as ever. I had to find my people.

In sophomore year, my people were a group of boys who liked the same kind of music as I did and also had a penchant for flannel. They accepted my presence like it wasn’t even weird that some girl had just started hanging around them. Rob, Adam, Paul, and Dan were good guys, with only the occasional bit of unavoidable adolescent boy ickiness.⁹

In a lot of ways, though, I was biding my time until Jamie started high school. Together, I thought, we would be an unstoppable force of pure girl awesomeness. I was right, but — and isn’t there always a “but” when it comes to having your anticipations fulfilled, like when a severed monkey paw grants your wishes? — it came with unexpected results.

I am proud to say that every hole I have ever had in my stockings got there without artificial contrivance. This is because I am clumsy.

– –

Jamie was there when I made the smart aleck retort to the pastor’s wife that I wrote about in chapter one.
My mother doesn’t disbelieve that this happened, but she has no memory of it.
That sentence should be written in the present tense, since Jamie still looks like this, but it reads strangely like that.
In case I don’t get to it later, I am taking this opportunity to tell you about the time during my sophomore year that I tripped over Jeremy Lieb, a senior who was, like really cool, at the local library branch, talked to him for a little bit, and then slunk away horrified when my brain smooshed the words “divulge” and “delve” into an entirely new creation, “velge.”
I originally used “delighted” here, but I’m pretty sure my not-quite-fifteen-year-old self would give me a dirty look for it.
I was confused for a period of months when people kept telling me I looked like “the girl from Smashing Pumpkins”; it was only after I saw this MTV commercial that I realized they were talking about James Iha.
The way everything went wrong makes this feeling hard to remember; the drug use, the suicide, the madness that followed overshadows it.
Toward the end of Freshman year I had put together an outfit I was particularly pleased with (red plaid shorts with a white sweater, white tights, and black Sam and Libby Mary Janes), one of my friends took me aside and said, “Don’t take this the wrong way, but you look like one of those seniors who wears really light make up and dark lipstick.” She was talking about the Mods, and the effect I had achieved was, of course, exactly what I had been going for.
Paul now lives in the same condo complex as I do. We both have two-year-olds. Rob is an allergist who once in a while dispenses free medical advice to me on Twitter.