Fat Guy Jelly Donut

     Dragged along.  That's how I attended movies in my teens. 

     I had an undeveloped taste for film, having grown up with a snow-filled black and white TV, parents who rarely took us to the movies and, most of all, a constant craving for books that filled my free time and kept me from straying into other media. 

     The books cemented my status as a loner, a status that suited me just fine until sometime early in my high school years when a particularly pernicious confluence of problems caused me to reconsider the whole loner thing.  My raging hormones fueled a white hot fire of lust for the opposite sex, but my high school only admitted boys.  Problem.  Girls congregated at night at distant malls and movie theaters and in Westwood, but without a car or a license I couldn't get there.  Problem.  And even if I could get there, I'd be all alone, just me and my crippling insecurities, incapable of penetrating the perimeters of those tightly-bound packs of wandering girls.  Problem. 

     The solution?  I needed a pack of my own.  A guy pack.  One with access to vehicles to transport me to the hunting grounds where the girl packs roamed.  One with sufficient strength in numbers to breach the defenses erected by the girl packs.  And then, once in close proximity to actual girls, one that would provide me with a strong enough jolt of peer pressure -- that devastatingly effective mixture of mockery, punches to the arm, chicken sounds and allegations of homosexuality that motivate most teen males -- to overwhelm my insecurities and force my sorry ass to actually approach a girl. 

     There was no other way, I concluded, so I resolved to find a pack.  But it wasn't easy for me to just attach myself to a group, what with all those years I'd ignored everyone in my quest to create my peer group of one.  From what I could tell, most group attachments grew organically, natural outgrowths of shared interests and accomplishments.  So, for instance, the football players tended to hang together, and within that large group, there were smaller focus groups consisting of the hulks (linemen) and the pretty boys (backs) and the scrubs (benchwarmers) and so on.  A process of natural selection, the melding of shared individual characteristics, the group process resisted tinkering and tweaking.  You couldn't just insert yourself into those groups.  It had to happen on its own. 

     Thankfully, there was a group for everyone, even me.  The problem was, many of my natural groups would not do much to help me to penetrate the perimeters of these girl packs.  There were other loners, but, as you'd expect, we lacked sufficient cohesion to ever form a pack.  I knew only two other guys who read a lot, and one was a D&D nut who only read sci fi and fantasy and the other looked like a twelve year old.  Not the most promising start to a guy pack.  And another of my potential affinity groups -- the nerds -- was pure death when it came to girls, carrying not an ounce of cred in those dark days before Microsoft went public and girls started looking at us in a whole new light.  And the poor kids, well, that group never gets anywhere with high school girls, in part because without wheels it can never get to the high school girls. 

     (I initially intended this post to be about movies, and I can see that I've strayed very far from my original topic.  Not that there's anything wrong with that; in fact, it may be a strong signal that my original topic is not the right topic.  But I really like the title of this post and that title will make no sense unless I return to the movie angle so I'm going to skip over the rest of my group formation story (save it for a rainy day) and dive right into the movie stuff.)

     So, having demonstrated to our complete dissatisfaction that we were incapable of even approaching the high-class girl packs that wandered Westwood and the malls, and having learned that there were in fact some girls packs that weren't worth penetrating at all, and having grudgingly accepted that we wouldn't be able to mine the most productive vein of girl packs -- the clubs -- for at least another few years or until we ditched Steve 1 and Steve 2, those two baby-faced guys, an action I proposed, but the others opposed, yet another instance of their mutual friendship obstructing my path to the girls, my sorta social pack settled on the movie theater. 

     We never planned it.  Like everything else we did, it just sorta happened.  The first time, it was probably a good movie everyone wanted to see.  The second time, it was probably because we couldn't think of anything else to do.  By the third time, it was becoming a habit and by the fourth time, it was.  Eventually we stopped checking the newspaper listings, just showing up at the theater at 6:30 every Friday night and watching whatever movie (a) started soonest and (b) was new to (most of) us and (c) wasn't rated "G." 

     We never discussed it, but I think many in the group needed a rest from our quest for girl packs, and after the events that night behind the Ralph's market, who could blame them?  The rest probably harbored secret thoughts that one of these nights we'd stumble into a movie-going girl pack at the theater, one that would, say, materialize in front us at the snack counter, its members eagerly discussing the movie we were about to see, giving us a gigantic hole into their conversation, one that even we couldn't miss, each of us then pairing up with a girl, lost in conversation till we reached the counter and decided to split the extra-large tub of popcorn, a much better deal than buying two large tubs of popcorn, which meant that we had to sit together in the dark and there might even be some accidental hand brushing going on in that tub and perhaps even a scary moment that would send her into my arms, the foundation for our relationship now firmly established....

     That never happened.  Instead, that first year, I saw maybe thirty movies with my guy pack, more than I'd seen in my entire life up to that point, and most of them sucked.  The rest were okay.  And when presented with a choice between a possibly interesting movie, and one that clearly sucked, the pack would inevitably vote for the one that sucked.  Every Friday night I'd return home vowing to never do that again, but by the next Friday at 5:00 p.m. I'd be wavering, wondering whether this would be the night we finally met some girls, and, certain that it wasn't, I'd nevertheless edge towards the door and head to the theater.  You do this enough times, you have to admit that maybe you're not as stupid as you think, that maybe you're doing what you're doing for another reason, one you won't admit to yourself but one that, deep down, you know is true.

     In my case, I was growing to like these guys.  Week after week, we'd show up at the theater, none of us capable of doing anything better with our lives, all of us yearning for something we couldn't quite attain, each of us losing ourselves in the darkness of the theater, momentarily forgetting the torment of being on the cusp of something better, yet unable, for the time  being, to make it there.  Sure the movies were usually terrible, a lowest-common denominator form of entertainment for an undemanding audience, but they provided one of the rare targets for mockery available to those of us at the bottom of the social ladder, a convenient vent for our frustrations.  We'd loiter outside after each movie, rehashing the stupidity we'd just seen on the screen, momentarily boosting our anemic self-esteems by trashing the idiots who made these films. 

     So thank god for film.  Twenty-five years later, I still watch crappy movies with those guys.  It's not much of a foundation on which to build a friendship, but apparently it's enough. 

     (Having steered my way back to the movies, I now realize that I've sped by the original point of the post without stopping, completely skipping over the part that explains the title.  So it still makes no sense.  That'll have to be another post for another rainy day, I suppose.)

     Related posts: "More Than a Movie to Me" (Oct. 19, 2004) and "The Meme Game" (April 19, 2005).

Comments

[Misspent]

Ahh, the guy pack. Great post.

[shank]

So by starting this little post, and missing the original point not once but twice; you ended up finding two more possible posts. And would you believe some people think getting lost is a bad thing? Meh, I call it exploring.

[Ned]

Reading this post, I kept approaching what it was all about only to have it not happen.

Yep, reminds me of my high school experiences with girls.