Bangles were mostly Swiss. Sandra Bernhard was Stilton with Gouda potential. The drama teacher was Gouda for an older woman—aged Gouda.
I began reading Less Than Zero immediately. It is a depressing read, full of drugs and rape and decadence, but it was very Gouda, because of this: there is a part in the book where the protagonist, Clay, wakes up in bed with a male friend and then gets up and casually gathers his clothes from the boy’s living room while the housekeeper tidies up. That’s the whole thing: it is suggested that our main character has had some kind of sexual encounter with another male, but it is only that—a suggestion. I reread that passage roughly four thousand times. It was easily accessible gay porn.
After classes, we’d go to the nearby art-house cinema and watch movies they didn’t play in the suburbs. Something Wild. After Hours. Mondo New York. Laurie Anderson’s Home of the Brave. We’d smoke cigarettes from the tobacconist next door. Dunhills, please; we’d pretended to outgrow Marlboro Lights within the first week.
These were kids with whom I could trade mixtapes. I’d throw on some Replacements (“Left of the Dial” having the perfect mix of joy and pathos), some Marshall Crenshaw (there is a wealth of goodness beyond “Someday, Someway”; besides Tommy Keene, the man is America’s greatest unsung hero), and some vintage Monkees (whose sitcom was being rerun on MTV that summer). At the time, I was well aware of IRS Records and their hip roster of artists: The Go-Go’s, The Police, REM. An IRS logo on an album cover—a black-and-white drawing of a G-man in Wayfarer sunglasses—was a mark of quality. A Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval for kids who based their identities on which bands they listened to. But the Mark Twain kids dug deeper. They were into acts on Enigma Records: Don Dixon, Game Theory, Rain Parade. I had been trumped. Frederick made me and Ned and Tabytha mixes of Cocteau Twins, The Fall, “You’re Never Fully Dressed Without a Smile” from Annie. Oh, shit, Simply Fred, I thought. You are good at this.
I spent the six weeks writing stream-of-consciousness poetry, overwrought one-act plays, short stories about life on the streets of the big city (by a boy from a nice house in the suburbs). My characters swore a lot, because they could, because I could make them. I tried to write strange things, because I was in a place where nobody would make me feel strange about it.
That year, my family had moved into a bigger house with a huge backyard and a tennis court we would never use, and I decided I should throw the Mark Twain goodbye party. My parents chaperoned from inside, over a rented movie, while outside, artsy fifteen-year-olds threw down. Kids furtively smoked weed out of Diet Slice cans. Dancers did some free-form work to Scritti Politti album tracks on the smooth surface of the tennis court. The scent of cloves hung in the air. I was living the less-rapey parts of Less Than Zero.
David came to the party, and he smoked, and he swayed to The Cure. Ned and I kept our eyes on him and talked too excitedly about all the women at the party who were Gouda. We sneaked drags off cigarettes and drank plastic tumblers full of Matilda Bay wine cooler from a box someone brought and hid in the bushes. And then David’s ride showed up, and he had to go, and he hugged us both on the way out. My heart soared and apparently so did Ned’s, because I don’t remember if he said it first or I did, or if we said it together, but somebody said: “David is Gouda.” And we looked at each other and walked over to an area of the tennis court where nobody was, where we talked about where literally every other boy we knew fell on the cheese scale.
Simply Fred was at the party, too, and we could have waved him over into the conversation, but we didn’t. We didn’t say this out loud, but looking back, I think the reasoning went something like: He is gay. We are just boys who have intense sexual attraction to other boys. Whole different thing.
We continued that way for the rest of our high school career. We’d socialize, and then one of us would give the signal, and we’d escape to a corner or one of our cars to talk about which boys we were attracted to.