I'm in a very strange mood lately. I have this sudden swirling in my brain that causes me to tell people things that I didn't necessarily want to advertise about myself, and certainly things that they never asked about. You know what I mean. Like when you said "good morning" and I said "I forgot to wear deodorant." Just blurted it out as if you gave a damn. Or maybe like I didn't give a damn.
One of my recent fits of verbal diarrhea led me to telling the following story. Which I supposed served its purpose to entertain, as I have been requested to re-tell it a few different times since then. It wasn't until the second or maybe even the third time through that I thought to tack on the ending -- go out on a high note! Or at least what seems to be a higher note. So, with my dignity already in shreds, I present to you...
That Time That A Boy Tried To Ditch Me In The Disneyland Bathroom
In ninth grade, I spent a day at Disneyland with my friend Dena (which sounds like some alliterative jump rope song), Depeche Mode freshly snuggled into our heads with only one goal in mind: Boy Scouting. Which is exactly as it sounds, you look for boys that are cute, then you pounce. The idea is to find a local boy -- one who maybe doesn't go to your school, but doesn't live too far away and maybe even has a car -- but not someone too close to home. You probably don't want to see him every day, don't want to have to tell people how you Met At Disneyland and hear all the chortles and chatter.
Anyway, the day started out as it invariably does: looking high and low, gauging who is cute, who is potentially the right age/height/hipster crowd. Staring at every face that passes and disregarding those who are holding hands with girls or in the tight bundle of a family vacation. Any guy with a t-shirt just like his sister's is out, regardless of his great hair. By mid-day, we'd spotted a couple of potential victims candidates and by late afternoon, we had our sights set on two that we'd narrowed in on.
Dena's guy had kelly green hair. I knew just from a quick glance that he wasn't Green out of some love for punk rock or secret meth addiction. It was clearly green hairspray that had been allowed because his family was on vacation and, by golly, they were going to have fun. We'd seen him alone twice already and when we finally spotted him once more, he was with a younger sister (maybe 10 years old) with flamingo pink hair. My family-fun-vacation theory was now a proven fact. Despite this, Dena was determined.
I spotted "my guy" walking alone on several occassions, and standing alone in line more often than that. Which meant that either he'd ditched his obnoxious family or was a German tourist, visiting the House of Mouse all alone. Either way, he was an easier catch because he was flying solo. As dusk settled in, Dena and I (at the height of desperation) spotted My Guy entering the queue for the Matterhorn and we ran to get behind him in line. We were cut off by another group of 4 adults who seemed oblivious to the way that they were blatantly cramping our style. We continued to peer around them, hoping for eye contact. When it finally happened - he accidentally looked - I smiled like a goon at him. He turned back around pretty quickly, when Dena started yelling "Hey! Come wait by us!" He looked pretty sheepish at all the adults around us now staring. What did they think of these 14 year old girls, hollering at boys in line like that? Instead of ignoring us, he cut through the group of 4 ahead of us and joined us in line. A quick round of introductions found that his name was Mark. It was then that Dena spotted Green Hair Guy and she jumped out of line to chase him down. She returned breathless and said that Green Hair Guy (Joe) was going to tell his parents that he'd meet up with them later and that he'd meet us after the ride.
Mark was pretty quiet at first, but fortunately Dena wasn't, so pretty soon we had a decent conversation going. It turned out that he was visiting the park with his dad and new stepmother (who couldn't have been more than 20 herself) and that's who he was standing with in line when Dena started yelling at him. His father was the one who encouraged him to hang out with us, and he suspected it had more to do with Private Time with the new wife than it did with his son's happiness. C'est la vie. I had my man.
After the ride, Joe met up with us, as promised, and we set out across the park as a foursome. Joe, it turned out was from Ohio (or maybe Utah? Or Colorado?) and was visiting with his whole family. He'd barely escaped the torture of wearing the "Family Shirt" (where everyone in the group wears the same color shirt, with the reasoning that it would be easier to find one another if they were separated), instead opting for the bright green hair -- an easy way to find him AND avoid the t-shirt debaucle. Unfortunately, his kid sister was able to use the same argument to color her own hair hot pink, so instead of him looking like an uber-cool hipster, he ended up looking like a vacationing farm kid, whose parents dyed their children's hair to make them easier to find.
After a couple of hours, Mark had to go meet up with his parents again [pre-cell phone days] for dinner, so we all walked him to the restaurant, trying to make a plan to meet him again later. His dad and stepmom were waiting when we got there, and instead of forcing him to come to dinner, they insisted that he stay with his "friends" and they'd find him later on. He was clearly disappointed. This was his exit strategy, a way to ditch the loony girls and their ensnared beaus, and his father had sold him out.
Shortly after, we all made a stop at the restroom. We girls fixed our make-up and fluffed our boobs in our bras. The boys, well, did whatever boys do in the bathroom. Outside, we found Joe, who was excited about the prospect of a slow dark ride, like the Haunted Mansion. Even though it was his first time at the Magic Kingdom, he had a keen eye for scouting places to sit in the dark with a girl who had chased him around the park all day. We talked a while about the order of the rides we would go on next, the Haunted Mansion, then Pirates of the Caribbean (another 8-10 minutes in a slow-moving dark ride), then maybe Haunted Mansion again. We'd been waiting for a while, just outside the restrooms in New Orleans Square. Just a stone's throw from the Mansion, and the tension was building (certainly in Joe's pants) for the moment we could leave this dingy corner and head for the dark seclusion of the manse. Joe was all smiles and kind words and he must have eaten a whole box of Tic Tacs (very subtle) while we stood there.
Now, I am not the brightest bulb on the tree. I readily admit it. And maybe it was my hormones or this cute boy or the overwhelming fun of the day, but my mind was all flowers and sunshine and freckles and cute boy kisses. It took me a terribly long time to figure out just exactly what was happening. In a rush of sensibility my brain woke up, chastised the rest of my brainular area and put my feet in motion. I walked directly up to the doorway of the men's restroom and shouted (like a moron. A defeated moron, but a moron all the same), "Mark! You can come out now. There's only one exit to this bathroom. You're not going to ditch me by going out a back door."
Dena and Joe looked genuinely sad. They hadn't put 2 and 2 together yet, and the prospect of the group dissolving was a serious blight on their possible make-out scenario. Mark came walking out of the bathroom, slow but not embarrassed. He said, "Well, I guess if you're that hard to shake, I might as well give up." Which my feeble brain accepted as some sort of compliment, and away we went.
While standing in line for the Haunted Mansion (while Dena and Joe subtly flirted by hugging each other close and squeezing the other's butt cheeks), Mark apologized. He said he just felt kind of overwhelmed and weird and the whole thing with his dad and his new stepmom (who was indeed young and whom he had gone to school with) just threw him off. He really wasn't prepared for fun and then these crazy ladies chased him into a line, and well... here we were. I didn't know what to say. I was that crazy girl. So I said the only thing that my idiot brain could think of: "It's kind of like Bill from Bill & Ted."
Somehow, that made him laugh and he relaxed a bit and enjoyed the rest of the night.
Yes, of course we made out. In fact, I was grounded the following week for being over an hour late meeting my mom to be picked up because I was "saying goodbye" to "this really nice guy I met". Some sort of magnetic thing happened (maybe from our fillings or something?) and we couldn't stop kissing each other. When my mom found out that THAT was the reason that she'd been sitting alone in the parking lot until after 1am, she gave me the same lecture that her mother used to give her about how you'd get Trench Mouth from kissing strange boys and didn't I know better? But the good bye was... well, good. I tried to downplay my tardiness with a gift that I had bought for my sister, a Little Mermaid note pad. Shaina was crazy for Little Mermaid at the time, and I knew that my mom would at least appreciate the fact that I was thinking of my family and especially sweet little mermaid obssessed Shaina.
In actuality, the paper was an afterthought. We had all wanted to exchange telephone numbers and addresses [pre-email days] and didn't have anything to write on. I bought a Little Mermaid notepad, which we used to exchange our info. The bonus was that I could give the rest of the paper to Shaina and thus my total practical purchase would become a gift as well. [side note: I still have that paper with his name and address on it somewhere]
~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ *
The last part of this embarrassing story always feels like some kind of redemption to me, although you can be the judge.
The next day, Mark called me from his hotel room to say goodbye (while it was still a local call). He lived in the Bay Area and they were flying back home that afternoon. We talked for about an hour before he had to go, and by then he'd already mailed me his first letter. We kept in touch pretty regularly after that. We'd exchange phone calls every-other week (always alternating who was calling who so nobody's parents would freak out about the phone bill) and sent letters every week. For months we kept up like close friends. Mark was the first person that I ever knew who pierced his tongue. He swore that it hurt like a sonofabitch but it was totally worth it. We even made plans to meet up a few months later, when he'd be traveling in a VW caravan to Orange County for some sort of Volkswagen rally (he restored old fastbacks and Bugs). I couldn't wait for him to see the car that I was going to get (as soon as I'd passed my permit test): a 1971 Karmann Ghia. He even sent me a VW emblem on a string, as a necklace. Enclosed with it was a picture of him wearing the same necklace. [I think I still have this picture someplace, too.] Plus, I also wanted to see what kissing him with that thing in his mouth would be like.
He never made it to the rally (engine trouble in Bakersfield) and I never saw him again. Our correspondence slowed, then stopped once we'd both started dating people in our own area code. But every now and then, I'd get a phone call from him, just to say 'hello'. The last time that he called was after I had moved out of the house (for the second time, and 8 years after our Day at Disneyland) and my mom had accidentally ended the conversation without giving him my new contact information. I lost track of him after that, and still don't know where he is.
Dena and Joe never made it past that one day. He never returned any of her phone calls or the three letters that she sent. She shook it off and started chasing a guy with blue hair instead.
