Manic Panic Blue

  
A party was thrown in our honor for actually making it through high school at the Hyatt or Marriot or some other mid-priced hotel in Minneapolis. It included music, giant Subway subs, and a numerologist. It also included a number of us who didn't really care about/for graduating or our high school or too many of our classmates. Graduation made us feel rebellious. Luckily, we planned ours ahead of time.

Two of my girlfriends and I were determined to change on this night of celebration and transition. We went through a large list of possibilities ruling out most. Piercings were painful and potentially unsanitary. Tattoos were a little too permanent let alone needing to find an artist available for graduation parties. Mutilation was untidy and included blood -- yuck. Goth make up would've resulted in a beating. So all three of us decided semi-permanent hair color was the easiest and least potentially lethal thing to try. It required only dye, a sink, and a little time.

We snuck into the ladies' room with a jar of Manic Panic blue. There was nothing unusual about me being in the bathroom. I was already considered a fag without coming out, so none of the other girls said a thing. We opened the jar and began painting our hair. After the allotted twenty minutes of setting in, we rinsed in the hand sink splashing royal bluish water everywhere. Blue ended up on the mirror, faucet, hands, counter tops, stalls, floor, scalps, faces, and toilet seats. Little color actually took to our hair. Seeing our mess and reflections that looked no different than before we entered minus the new blue sheen to our hair, we quickly exited excited by the change that no one else would ever really notice. It was lucky no one noticed because the bathroom was a gigantic disaster and there was no way we were going to clean it up. (Oh high school rebellion and egocentrism.)

The rest of the night ended pretty uneventfully. I was told by the numerologist that I would leave Minnesota to travel starting in my early twenties. (Check.) I watched a hypnotist make the jocks and cheerleaders do really embarrassing things -- things that surely would have resulted in  a black eye or broken nose had I done them. I did my best karaoke to "Love Shack".

My mother picked me up and actually noticed the bluish tint to my almost black hair. She was mortified. You would have thought I actually did hire that tattoo artist to carve permanent goth make-up to my face. She couldn't wait to scrub it out of my hair.

The next week I found hair bleach and Claire's and fell in  love with the color "auburn" and stainless steel studs.

Lost and Found in Limbo

We built forts out of worn-out couch cushions, synthetic pillows, thin cotton bed sheets, metallic folding chairs, the wooden bunk bed, whatever we could get our hands on. They were the places of imagination where war's only casualty was the fake death of a brother or friend and mansions were an eight feet by eight feet square that you couldn't even stand in. Anything could happen as long as you forgot who and where you were and had a sliver of creativity. Even the creativity could be forgiven, you could always play out classic stories or Saturday morning cartoons, if you knew how not to be you. There were dragons to slay, Princess Leia's to save, robbers to catch, COBRA to destroy, murders to solve, Carmen Sandiego to fin. The scared, manic boy was a fearless, reserved villain. The shy, quietly seething kid was a brave, calculating warrior. The high energy, laughing youngest was a secret weapon set to explode on either side. Worlds constantly transformed before your eyes making the infinite seem possible.

But we all knew that while the infinite might seem possible, it was in fact as imaginary as Transformers, and He-Man, and Scooby-Doo, and The Jetsons. There was no Krypton or Gotham or castle. It was just two chairs with a blanket hung between them and me dancing in my Batman underoos. And while our imaginations soared, it was bound by the limits of heterosexual masculinity. It was always a princess that needed saving, a war that needed waging, a clear division between right and wrong.

In the land of fancy, I couldn't be a fruit.

The dissonance between fancy and reality, villain and fruit grew until it became harder to distinguish one from the other. Forts transformed into hand-written plays casting me in the role of Jacob Wetterling and Jeffrey Dahmer. Batman underoos became invisible masks worn just as frequently but with much less zeal. High school was as foreign and faraway as Krypton. Manically happy and depressively sad looked exactly the same.

One wintry night, a few years later, when the snow fell in slow lulling rhythms, I could no longer tell whether they were snowflakes or ashes. I looked at myself in the mirror and saw a familiarly unrecognizable face. I listened to the clatter in the hallways outside my dorm room, and I heard the whispers of sexuality telling secrets about someone that was supposedly me. I was lost in limbo.

Shortly thereafter, I came out and in doing so learned that reality and imagination are boundless and  blurry. The underoos, the masks, the forts, the plays are all reflections of self, real and perceived. Neither one more or less significant. They tell a story of truth. That was the gift of coming out: I no longer needed to leave limbo; rather, I needed to share its story.

High School Halloween

 
I went to high school as Marilyn. It was Spirit Week. I didn't care what would happen, but I feared the worst.

I forgot that I had a site visit scheduled. She came from Washington, D.C., to ask questions about our federally-funded program. She couldn't get past the red vinyl pants, army jacket and cap, the three ratty wigs piled on top of each other, or the gothed-out make-up. She laughed the entire time. It ended with a great report.

Later, a student visited me in my office. He was Dracula -- face painted white, blood red lips, plastic fangs, polyester cape, and black pants and t-shirt. "Thanks," he said. "You make it okay for me to be in this."

I smiled and skipped as I walked home that evening. Everyone loved the costume, even the principal. As I was crossing the pedestrian bridge over the 101, my pants split wide open. I laughed hysterically. It felt fabulous being my self and not giving a fuck.

Introducing Chicken Boy

 
I worked the Renaissance Faire in bright, bright red tights, royal blue puffy shorts, a peasant shirt, and a purple velour cape all mad by my granny. Chicken Boy they called me because the tights accentuated my bowed legs, my voice cracked and garbled, and I was full of nervous energy. Buses pulled in filled with tourists, and we'd hop on telling them what to expect in our best, which were really horrible, British accents. At some point, one of my fellow actors would scream "Chicken Boy", and I'd cluck and flap my arms up and down the aisle in an old school Chicken Dance sort of way.

Chicken Boy was my role for two falls. I made it, and it made me. He's still somewhere inside me, and he comes out when I'm smashed. It's how I ended up in the middle of the street at 1am drunk off 12 glasses of red wine refusing to listen to anyone.

My Brother Finds Out

  
The news hit my old high school before I could tell my brother, and he found out from friends. That wasn't how I wanted it to happen. I wanted to protect him and shelter him from the new as I was sure it would shock him. I didn't have enough faith in him. He handled it beautifully.