Love Is A Palindrome -- Part I: "A Geek Grows In Nyack"

Hello all, aka the four people who actually read this blog with any regularity, three of whom are my other personalities and one of whom I compensate with unsatisfying sexual favors,

I've decided to post this story in two parts, because there's no way I'm going to finish this thing in the next few days, and I don't want to keep my other personalities waiting.

Enjoy (or, at least, don't sue me).

-JKH

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There is a lovely rest stop on the northbound I-95, about an hour outside of New York City, just a few miles after the looming industrial spires of Bridgeport, and a few miles before the five-lane superhighway turns into a two-lane supernightmare. This particular rest stop boasts a Denny's and a McDonalds (complete with a McPlayground, home of the greatest fast-food villain of all time, the iconic and immensely corrupt Hamburgler), several pretzel/donut/ice cream/frogurt/yocream stands, and enough junk food vending machines to clog every artery in Dom Deluise's body. The grounds are kept in immaculate condition, most likely by a group of migrant workers who have a unique appreciation for the aesthetic potential of the American transportation network. And its toilets are cleaner than a nun's cache.

I should know. On the way to college my freshman year, I spent two hours with my head inside one of them. If I knew then what I know now, I would have spent longer.

Refusing to spend another day in Long Island after high school (I'd had my fill of kosher Chinese food and formica), I only applied to out-of-state colleges, thereby making it virtually impossible that my mother would guilt me into staying home for the next four years of my life. When my parents mercifully divorced, I became the man of the house, charged with all of the responsibilities that come with being an adult male -- mowing the lawn, lifting heavy objects, hanging picture frames -- without any of the attendant benefits -- sex, money, alcoholism. But, given my chicken legs, aversion to power tools, and intense pollen allergy, I didn't exactly cotton to my new chores.

"There's a spider on the lawn mower!" I yelled to my mother the first time she asked me to mow the lawn. Mowing the lawn was the worst chore out of all my testosterone-induced responsibilities. I had no patience for anything that required constant upkeep. I still don’t, which makes me question my suitability to be a parent. Kids are fun, but they require a lot of upkeep. Even more than a lawn.

“Why can’t we get astroturf, like the Jensens?” The Jensens were our fabulously forward-looking next-door neighbors. They marched to the beat of their own environmentally-friendly drummer, driving hybrids while the rest of us neanderthals were still cruising around in our gas-guzzling SUVs. Even though astroturf is not actually good for the environment, it does look pretty, and if reality television has taught us anything its that people care more about pretty things than ugly ones.

After successfully ignoring weeks of my complaining -- another quality parents need and I lack -- my mother finally broke down and decided to hire a gardener. I breathed an asthma-induced sigh of relief, until she replaced the lawn with a yard full of large white stones, which required constant washing to keep them at their “whitest,” lest the neighbors judge us by the color of our pebbles. Apparently the racial homogenity of our community extended to lawn decorations. Of course, that chore fell to me as well, but I didn’t mind it as much as mowing the lawn -- at least I could do it sitting down. Plus it gave me the chance to use the rock polishing kit my great aunt Ida had bought me for Hannukah. It would have been a horrible gift, had I not specifically put it on my Hannukah wish list.

When winter came, my mother inevitably turned to me to shovel the driveway -- another job that apparently requires testicles and an Adams apple -- even though I was obviously too small to lift the shovel, which was about two inches taller than me. After I almost lost my pinky to frostbite during a particularly nasty Nor'easter, she never asked me to shovel the driveway again. Good thing, too. I had Child Protection Services on speed dial, and I wasn't afraid to use it. But even though she didn't ask me to shovel, that didn't stop her from pointing out my failure every chance she got.

"See how that Turner boy lifts the snow, Jonah?" she said, enviously eyeing the neighborhood kid she hired to shovel the driveway. She paid him ten bucks to do it, which I considered a rip-off, but I chose not to get involved. He was cute, and I was still trying to figure out how to get him to shovel in his underwear. "Maybe if you pay attention, you can be as strong as him."

"Shhh, mom," I replied, turning on the television. "Bette's on Oprah today!"

Eventually my mother realized that I wasn’t going to be the man, or even the prepubescent boy, of the house, and decided to make the most of it. So she started piling on the “girl” chores, like folding laundry, cooking, and purchasing tampons at the supermarket (though she drew the line at vacuuming, which apparently requires a housedress and a vagina, and I only had the housedress). Putting tampons on the shopping list might have been her way of shaming me into mowing the lawn, but I didn’t mind, mainly because I didn’t know what tampons were. I’m still not so clear on that. All I know is that they have special wastebaskets, and they are usually white, which, as far as I can tell, seems counterintuitive to their purpose.

But to my mother’s dismay, I actually enjoyed my new chores, mostly because they provided me with some freedom in my otherwise stifled adolescence. In the beginning she micromanaged my daily routine, telling me how much detergent to put in the washing machine, what kind of frozen lemon juice to buy, how to spot a ripe cucumber (a skill which came in handy in later years). She'd inspect the bags every time I'd come home from the supermarket. Sometimes I'd try to sneak something by her, but she was too sharp for that.

"Was Count Chocula on the list, Jonah?" she asked, tapping the Count's cardboard face with her fingers.

"No," I replied, gazing longingly at the Count's chocolate-y goodness. Junk food was on the list of forbidden items in our house, along with cable television, rap music, and optimism. "It's the Count. He hypnotized me. Take him away, he'll get you too!"

After a while, though, she loosened her apron strings, and I tightened mine. I started stepping out of the narrow domestic box that she had created for me, trying out new recipes, new oven mitts, new dryer settings. Eventually I became so bold as to try my hand at interior design, rearranging the living room furniture in the morning when she’d leave for work. It was my own form of personal rebellion -- every time I rolled the socks into a ball instead of folding them in half, or moved the living room ottoman three inches to the right, I struck a small but palpable blow for trod-upon Jewish sons everywhere.

“Maybe you should get me a maid’s uniform,” I joked to her once as I was rebelliously rolling my dress socks. The jokes were for my benefit, not for hers, as she didn't find humor in the subtle jabs at my sexuality. While she eventually came to accept my sexual orientation as yet another cross to bear in her Sophie's Choice-inspired life (somehow she managed to turn my cross into hers), to this day she blames my genital preference on my father's failure to play sports with me as a kid. She underestimates the lasting impact of forcing a twelve-year-old boy to fold his mother's underwear.

As the years passed, though, the thrill of sock-rolling began to wear off, and by the time it came to apply for college, I was looking for new challenges. New experiences. New opportunities. New fabric softeners. Somehow, it escaped my attention that college wasn't all about clipping your own coupons, ironing your own jeans, and befriending professors who could fill those parental roles that your own parents had blithely abandoned when you were an infant. It was also about drinking and smoking, dating and sex, being completely responsible for yourself and simultaneously completely irresponsible. It was about all those things that most red-blooded American children look forward to for the first eighteen years of their lives, the very same things that I had dreaded for the first eighteen years of my life. Although I pretended to be independent, in reality, I only enjoyed the semblance of autonomy. The umbilical cord was cleverly hidden behind a stack of rolled up socks.

As the time for cutting the cord grew closer, I began dreaming up various ways to get out of this whole going away to college debacle. I investigated various short-term but potentially serious illnesses that I could develop without actually dying, but to no avail. It seems most deadly diseases entail some physical indicia of, well, death. Leprosy was a possibility, since it didn't kill most people, and I doubted any reputable private university would admit a leper, even if leprosy had a new fancy name. It doesn't really matter what you call a disease that causes you to ooze pus from every inch of your body. You could call it Spectacular Orgasm Disease, and people still wouldn't want it.

I also considered developing a mental disorder, but I couldn't think of one that I didn't already have.

Then again, maybe I didn't have to come up with an excuse. Maybe I'd be kicked out of college, without even developing one pus-filled nodule. Sure, I did relatively well in high school, but maybe I had fooled all of my high school teachers into thinking I was smart. It couldn't be that hard; they weren't that smart themselves. Or what if I wasn't cool in college? I wasn't cool in high school either, but I found a few people in high school who were less cool than me, so at least I was cool to them. Uncool kids don't graduate from college. Radio Shack needs to recruit from somewhere.

I was sure to fall far below the college standard for cool, though. I wasn't even comfortable ordering any drink that could possibly be mixed with alcohol. What if some alcohol accidentally made it into my glass? Or what if the bartender didn't hear the "virgin" part, and made a real margarita instead? Was the tasty lime treat worth a possible criminal indictment? I was only 18, after all. Laws are laws for a reason, and ignorance of a margarita's contents is no excuse.

A few weeks before my imminent departure, my friends and I -- a mix of nerds, drama freaks, and wanna-be nerds/aspiring drama freaks -- gathered at T.G.I. Fridays, the most sophisticated of our regular haunts (some dinner entrees actually exceeded twenty dollars!), to bid farewell to my friend Laura, who was going off to some prim southern college the next day, where Jews are a endangered species and people talk about coming out parties without a sense of irony. Laura was the first of us to leave, and while everyone else treated her exit as a ticket to freedom, to me, it was a death march.

"You're gonna get so wasted when you get there, Laura!" my friend Becky shouted, while downing her virgin Pina Colada like an unrecovered recovering alcoholic. Becky disappeared from our radars the day she got to college, and only reappeared seven years later on Facebook, with two kids and a Wall Street husband in tow.

"Yeah! Totally! Hey, dude, are you going to rush?" my friend Jake asked, while drinking his virgin Rum and Coke (which, as the waiter explained to him, is just a Coke with a mixing straw). Rush? Wasted? Dude? Who were these people? Just a few weeks earlier we had all attended a Star Trek convention together. Jake had gone as Geordi. You don't get any more nerdy than an engineer with a visor who has sex with holograms. I went as Data. At least he was fully functional in every sense, as he proved to one particularly enterprising crewmember in season four.

And where had they learned this new vocabulary? They sounded like they were straight out of The OC. I was still stuck in Saved By The Bell, with its sanitized adolescents who never seemed to get past first base (except Slater and Jesse, but she was a Showgirl, and he was just plain sexy). I was a freak without a posse, a geek without a home. Sure, they were still only poseurs, but at least they knew how to pose. They were on their way to actual post-adolescence. Condoms, mosh pits, and all.

While the rest of my friends went outside to pretend to smoke cigarettes, I curled up in a corner booth, praying for Doc to show up with a time machine and take me back to 1985, a simpler time, when my biggest worry was whether the evil-looking Garbage Pail Kid was hiding under my bed. I took a letter out of my coat pocket that I had received from the university earlier that day, listing my new roommate's name and address, reminding me that in just a few weeks I would be sharing my living space with another teenage boy. There was no way I was going to survive that rite of passage. I barely survived the other rites of passage I had endured so far, like puberty, my parents' divorce, and gym class. But living in the same room with another person -- another boy, and most likely a heterosexual one -- was just too much for my already over-stressed brain circuits to handle. Just thinking about sleeping within spitting distance of another human being sent me into a sort of catatonic state, sort of like the mental hibernation that Kathy Lee Gifford's husband must have entered when he put a ring on her finger. I wasn't sure if I was more afraid of my roommate spitting on me or vice versa, but both possibilities frightened me. I couldn't even keep a goldfish in my room at home. I always felt like it was watching me masturbate.

I hadn't opened the letter yet, in the hopes that it would be a belated rejection from the school.

Dear Mr. Haslap,

Our sincerest apologies, but we do not admit weird homosexual Jews to our school. We confused your application with someone who knows the proper use of the term "dude." We regret any inconvenience our error may have caused, and wish you the best of luck in your future career at Radio Shack.

Sincerely,

A Large Group Of Old White Men

But no such luck. There it was, plain as the pre-angioplasty nose on Baby's face. Mark Kramm, from Nyack, New York. Mark Kramm. Mark Kramm. The name screamed violent felon -- there were just too many consonants. He was probably a budding serial killer. Maybe he hadn't actually killed anyone yet, but everyone's got to start somewhere, even serial killers. There was probably a string of missing kittens in his hometown. Yet here I was, completely unprepared to defend myself. For a moment, I wished I hadn't quit Karate with just a yellow belt. I didn't even actually earn the yellow belt. The Karate instructor gave it to my parents in exchange for their promise never to return to the school again.

Laura came back for her fake matches, and noticed me sipping on my Sprite, fingering the offending letter, and searching the night sky for a flying Delorean.

"Hey dude, what's wrong?" Dear Mr. Haslap...

I handed her the letter from the university. I was afraid to say anything. She looked so cool, with an invisible cigarette in one hand and virgin Pina Colada in the other. She didn't resemble Beverly Krusher at all anymore. She was a full-fledged Deanna Troi.

"Mark Kramm, eh?" she said, adjusting the stuffing in her oversized bra. You can't be a real poseur without poseur breasts. "You know, that's a palindrome."

I grabbed the letter from her, and examined the name again. Indeed, it was a palindrome. I was too preoccupied with Mr. Kramm's hypothetical plans to knock over the campus convenience store to notice it before.

"Oh my god, you're right! It is! It's a palindrome!"

It was the first good news I'd had in months, ever since Buffy was renewed for a second season. No one with a palindrome for a name could be all bad. Even if he wasn't a complete nerd, he had to be at least somewhat intelligent. Stupid people don't have names that are spelled the same backwards and forwards. Mark Kramm and I just might be friends after all. It was a slight hope, but a hope nonetheless.

College was going to eat me alive.

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Stay tuned for Love Is A Palindrome -- Part II: "A New Hopelessness"