Episode 3:  ”Oh the Guilt”—Nirvana

Escaping from the escape plan.

I knew that there was a world outside of Central PA.  I’d seen it in magazines, in the fuckingWeekly Reader newsletter in elementary school (remember those?), in theWorld Book Encyclopedia that resided in our living room (I’m pretty sure this was a gift from one of my mom’s particularly smitten boyfriends).

I didn’t have an escape plan, but I knew a better world, filled with attractive, articulate individuals awaited.   If I was ever going to be plucked from Mt. Wolf, Pennsylvania by the benevolent (but mostly cruel) hand of fate, there would be hard work on my part:

1.  Get into a good college.  Not state school.  This would require good grades (easy easy easy) and a well-rounded assortment of extracurricular activities.  I signed up for a little bit of everything.  Literary magazine (eventually I was the editor), yearbook (photographer), every school play and musical (I’m secretly a ham), orchestra (cello), concert choir (soprano), peer tutoring (math), and of course, cheerleading…

Which leads to number… 2.  Be attractive.  Rule number one of cheerleading and life success.  I wasn’t allowed to wear makeup until I was 16, but my mom did bend this archaic rule for games and other “important” school events.

3.  Be charming and popular!  Okay, let’s be honest, I was/am shy and nervous and I tend to randomly fall over.  I’ve always had a lot of nerdy interests and my vocabulary is just a little too wacky.  But if reading every single Sweet Valley High book had taught me anything, it was that cheerleading was the easy ticket to popularity, and theoretically, social grace.  I had blonde hair and green eyes.  I was halfway there.

But cheerleading sucked and all of the girls were bitches.  I was never going to want to date athletic boys with lesser reading skills.  And I couldn’t “pretend” that I wasn’t smart.  I stuck it out because I knew the team needed me…at 14, I was less than five feet tall and I weighed 80 pounds…perfect for pyramid building and being tossed in the air.

I was waiting for a reason to quit.

And it came at the St. Jude’s All-Night Dance Marathon.  A weird theatre boy requested that the “DJ” (and yeah, I use that term loosely) play one of his own CDs. (Side note about this boy:  I had a vague crush on him, mostly because I had read the poetry he had submitted to the literary magazine.  It seemed really sexy in a very Scott-and-Zelda-Fitzgerald sort of way.  But then again, I had never even been kissed at this point, so my concept of “sexy” may have been misguided.  Eventually I heard he married some girl on Halloween in the late 90s).

I had never heard anything like this song.  Maybe I was delirious from lack of sleep, but it sounded like everything I had ever heard in my head when I was pretending to participate in idle conversations about the mall and boys.  It was alienation and anger and confusion and power, all at once.  It was “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and the band was Nirvana.

The next few weeks are a blur, but the following events occurred:

1.  I dyed my hair “True Black” with a bottle of Loving Care hair dye purchased with hard-earned babysitting money at the drug store in Manchester.

2.  I became vegetarian.

3.  I listened to Nevermind and Bleach no less than 200 times.

4.  I tossed my Keds into the trash, swapping them for a pair of black Converse high tops.

5. I was “persuaded” to drop out of cheerleading by a decidedly weirded out team.

Transformation is surprisingly easy for teenagers.

Popularity rapidly morphed into notoriety.  ”That’s fine,” I told myself.  ”I’m going to be a famous writer instead.  I’m going to date boys in bands and smoke french cigarettes and wear only the most amazing clothes.  I’ll travel around the world and do things that all these cheerleaders only dream about.”

P.S.  I chose “Oh the Guilt,” only because it’s one of my favorite Nirvana songs ever, released on a split single with the Jesus Lizard.  The day I bought that record, I believed for the first time ever that maybe I really was cool!

Alternatively, “Swap Meet” (obviously, a favorite solely for the lines “She loves him more than he would ever know/He loves her more than he would ever show”) and “Been a Son” ( A favorite of every feminist).

P.P.S.  Sorry for the tense changes…it’s definitely one of my pet peeves.  The previous posts seemed better in the faux present tense, but this one, a story for the ages (or at least my ages), seemed better in the oh-so-absolute past tense.