Finding My Euphoria – In The Beginning . . .

Ah, youth. Or should I say rebellious youth?
Or maybe I should call this my crazy youth or the wild times, or wild as ever, at least they were to me, or so they seemed.
I was young once. This might have been a long time ago or another lifetime. Or maybe this was another person or, to me, I sometimes view my youth as if it were a movie that played in a strange movie house. I was like a patron to the theater and living in a neighborhood that seemed as if it were in a storybook somewhere.

I know that I wanted to be cool. I know that I wanted to stand out somehow or, if possible, I know that I wanted to be desired or wanted.
I wanted to be “that guy” and walk with a special dignity, like some bad ass with a great mystique about him. At the same time, I wanted to be cool about this, as if I didn’t notice or didn’t care.
I wished that I was like a cougar, strolling through his territory and totally unaffected over who comes or who goes, who stays, or who thinks, feels, or has an opinion.
I wanted to be able to stalk and hunt and find my prey. I wanted to be impenetrable, and no matter what was said or what was done, nobody could hurt me.
Not even me.
There was this thing which I had noticed about life in the hallways at school. There were different divisions of people, cliques, and different derivatives of popularity.
There were different looks and different fashions and different versions of beauty.

There were girls . . .
I liked girls. I did.
But none of the ones I liked seemed to like me, at least not enough to walk with me, hand-in-hand, to which I have to explain, this is a high all to itself. But that is a high that will be discussed in the later chapters.
Either way, I wanted to be noticed. I wanted to be wanted and to be beautiful.
I wanted to be enough and to be loved and even then, or should I say that even at a young age or during the times when I was youngest and most afraid, I can say that I have always dreamed about you. I have always dreamed about the acknowledgement that comes with sitting at a place to eat and reaching across the table to hold hands.
Even then, or even at my youngest version of awareness, I knew that there was something about you. But again, this is a topic that will come later on in this journal.

In fairness to this approach, I should explain that I was small. I was young looking and, at best, I could be seen as cute, but cute only gets a guy so far.
Maybe I was more like a cub than a cougar, which might have warranted some attention. But this was not the kind of attention that was enough to say that hey, yeah. Those were the best days of my youth.

I can say that no one picked on the crazy ones. No one picked on the kids with status or, if for some reason, like say a blood relation to someone of note, or if you were somehow connected to one of the more socially desired people in the crowd, the general hazing and bullying was kept to a dull minimum.
Otherwise, or at least as I saw it, the social part of school was a case of every kid for themselves.

No one wanted to be “the fat kid” or “the smelly kid.” No one wanted to be the kid who wasn’t invited or included. Above all, nobody wanted to be crushed in the cogs or thrown beneath the wheels of the gossip mills or the rumor factories. And these things were crucial.
Life can be pretty hard when you’re a kid. Everything is new. Everything is bigger than it is but when you’re in the world for a short time and life can be intimidating when you’re looking at your little world through the looking glass of your own perception.
But let’s get back to the cliques and the different divisions of popularity.

Yes. You had to have a style.
You had to have something that made you stand out. You had to have something cool about you. If not, then you had to figure out a way to use whatever God given talent you had—otherwise, you found yourself in the middle of the cafeteria, sitting with the unknown, faceless kids or with the unmentioned, as if they never existed. This is worst than being an outcast because outcasts at least had some kind of recognition. But being faceless though?
This is one of my biggest fears.
To be faceless, to be unnoticed, to be unwanted or unloved, or to never have the feel that I was desired enough to be touched in public, or that you would never dare to walk down the hall with me was a fear worse than I can describe.
By the way, I would have carried your books for you.
If you’d have let me. . .

I have been asked about my youth and my experience with drug use. I was asked the most frequently and shortest question of all.
Why?
Why would you do something like that?
Was it boredom?
Was it curiosity?

I think in fairness to the question, it would be inaccurate for me to say yes to anything specifically. However, and more to the point, I think my attraction to the ideas of mind expansion, or when it comes to the temptation to feel something out of this world; the real answer is yes to everything and all of the above.

I liked the feeling of daring the line. I liked this because although there was trouble in the midst, there was something wild and empowering about being rebellious and crazy. I was free.
I was free to be crazy.
I was free to go as fast as I could and trace the razors edge between life and death.
I was free to endure and survive the rush of adrenaline.
I could be better than my normal, human self. I could be anyone better than a little kid with no muscles, or I could be better than a kid who couldn’t fight his way out of a wet paper bag, or better than a kid who would otherwise be picked on or bullied.
So, as a means to respond to both my assumptions of rejection and in retaliation against the ideas that somehow bullied me further with the beliefs that I was too small, or too weird, or too awkward, too ugly or unwanted, too weak, or too plain to be anything outstanding, I chose to find things that could alleviate the symptoms of my thinking.

I chose to find an image, which was fake. I’ll grant you.
But this was better than being afraid all the time.

There were different crowds. And me, I was not an athlete. I had challenges and learning disabilities that made school impossible for me to stomach or bare. I never fit in with the smart kids.
I had emotional challenges that I was unable to explain or understand. I never thought that I could be good enough or lovable enough or wanted or included enough to look back at my youth and say, ah, those were the days.
I had trouble finding out where I fit and, above all, I could never seem to find my place in the circle.
I was always curious and skeptical, or perhaps I was cynical or jaded, even back in my youngest memories.

I remember living with an intense fear that I was always going to be a victim, or that I was always going to be too stupid or too gullible.
I remember the fear of being a victim or being victimized and the worry that I would always be too weak to ever defend myself.
I remember being afraid that I would not only the last one to get the joke, but worse, I was petrified to find out that I was the punchline, and that everyone that laughed was laughing at me.

I was rebelling against the narrative in my head. I was far from brave; but more, I was acting in ways that would put me in a different light.
I would do things, like crazy things, which allowed me a place at the bad kid’s table—or so I thought.

We dared the line, at least I did.
I was wild. I was crazy.
I was petrified all the time that I would be seen as a mark or as the gullible one, or that in all fairness to my true inventory, I would be a victim, like I was to the hand of someone who unfairly placed their hands on me.
I was petrified that I would be the one to pick on. You knew kids like this too, didn’t you?
Kids like this are the ones who everyone makes fun of. Or worse, I was even more afraid to be the kid who no one cared to talk to or that I would walk around and never be noticed.
I was afraid to be the one who no one cared if I was around. I was more afraid of being faceless than anything else. Not good looking or bad. Just simply unnoticed, as if I could vanish away or disappear and this would be nothing short of unobjectionable.

I remember the first time I was out on a Friday night.
Or, so it seemed.
This is a very young memory. This is before I earned my place in the crowd and before the boundaries between jocks or the athletes appeared between them and the longhaired burnouts or the bad kids.
I remember this night.
I wanted to try something different.

I had some liquor. I managed to scrape up a few dollars to buy a bag of weed. I decided to take a walk around the town and be by myself.
I decided not to hook up with the usual hooligans or my otherwise, so-called friends, who were never really my friends. No, I suppose proximity and geography forced us together.

I think this was all where it began for me. Maybe . . .
I think this was one of the moments when I started to prove my station in the crowd.
I ended up in the playground at an elementary school in my neighborhood. I decided that I was going to try this drinking and smoking thing out on my own. I wanted to see if I was doing this right. Plus, I wanted to let myself go, just to see what the buzz was about.
And I was all alone, until another group of kids came along.
They were not the typical crowd for me. I knew them the same as they knew me.
We were the same age and we went to the same school but we sat on different sides of the cafeteria, if you know what I mean.

One kid who we will name Kevin walked up to me and laughed, “Look at Kimmel. He’s stoned already,” which I wasn’t. But I played the role.
And why not?
Right?

I drank some and I smoked some and I offered a Marlboro red to see if anyone else wanted a cigarette. I looked like I was in grade school, like I was six or maybe seven, at best.
And there I was, trying to pull off a look, as if I was cool, or as if I was a character like James Dean, or like I was Dallas Winston from the novel, “The Outsiders.”
But I was none of them.
I remember leaving and going home that night. I managed to dodge the bullets of speaking to my parents or having the smell of smoke on me, or the weed, or the liquor which I stole from them.

The funny thing is I wasn’t so high that night or drunk. Well, maybe a little.
But not much.
The real high came on Monday morning when I ran into some of the kids at school and they remarked about how crazy or how fucked up I was—like I was some kind of hero or something.
I think I was higher about being regarded than I was from drinking on the Friday night before.

It’s a funny thing, the draw of the crowd, or the need to be noticed or included or invited. It would appear to me that validation is a drug that no one ever talks about—as in, ah, to be noticed or to be cool, so-to-speak.

This is a euphoria all on its own.