#71 - Bapst Girls, Figuratively

Bapst Girls, Figuratively

10/6/05 (#71)

As a teenager, I wanted nothing more than to experience and understand (in that order) the concept of intimacy. In preparation for that curriculum, I kept a mental list of the girls in my high school who I saw as as eligible lab partners for this particular experiment, but I was an awkward kid, and I never got to take that particular science class while I was in high school. I was too timid to approach anyone (in my teens, at least half of the calls I made to girls' houses ended with my hanging up before the objet-du-jour could squeeze out the second "L" in "hello?"), and if anyone on that list was interested in me, they were too timid to approach me. The girls at my school knew me---and being somewhat of a stammering geek, that didn't work to my advantage.

Now the girls at John Bapst, they were different. Bapst was the city's catholic high school (really just a private school, as they had a significant Jewish population), and the girls at Bapst were mysterious, elusive. They were cooler than me (just like the Bangor High girls), seemed smarter than me (just like Bangor High girls), and I was a nervous wreck if any of them asked me something personal like "Do you know what time it is?" (Sheesh, I'm sure making them out to be just like Bangor High girls.) The difference was simple: they didn't know me. Sure, they'd learn the awful truth of my self-consciousness soon enough, but there was a flicker of hope at the outset, a chance to be mysterious, a chance to be the man I envisioned myself to be, not the boy who I actually was. Thus, it was the dawn of a new era when I could finally play the arpeggioed introduction to U2's "Sunday Bloody Sunday" and the melodic lead from "New Year's Day": my pal Bernie Johnson and I would attend the John Bapst dances, and if ever happenstance brought me face to face with a young woman, I would labor to push this crucial phrase from my mouth:

"I play guitar."

I sucked at guitar, but I was young, and saw how the ladies flocked around my friend Craig Wood when he plucked out "Stairway to Heaven" on his sunburst acoustic (mistakenly concluding it was the guitar they adored and not Craig himself, who can be so charming as to make Paul McCartney seem graceless), so I made sure that my "I play guitar" trump card was played as early in the hand as possible.

Of course, finding an amateur guitar player in a crowd of high school boys is like finding a fat man at an all-you-can-eat buffet, so the competition was stiff. Wannabe little-league lotharios from towns 10-miles in every direction would converge on Bapst for their dances, and anyone who could stumble through a bad rendition of "Smoke on the Water" (a song which is to playing guitar what wading in water up to your ankles is to swimming) was peddling this "skill" as a selling point. Bernie developed a phrase to describe many of these posers who claimed to be guitar players: "guitar owner." I was barely more than that myself, but it was reassuring to my awkward, apprehensive virginity to be able to relegate large demographics of these chumps to a secondary status----even as I watched them strolling out of the dances with Bapst girls in tow while I went home with my loneliness.

Twenty years later, I find myself focused on a different art form (writing), and I think about those "guitar owners". At least they were required to purchase a guitar. Some days, I feel as though everyone and his sister are writers, and it makes me feel something akin to those teenage longings---I want something very much, something that I can barely postulate let alone describe, and I have an overwhelming sense that I am arriving at a literary Ellis Island with tens of thousands of other people, each as vague in their hopes as I am, but every bit as ambitious, too. (Or worse, more so.)

These days, it's not about Bapst girls. It's about something more personal, more elusive (though frankly, few things in life have proven to be more elusive than Bapst girls.) There is a certain pleasure in a well-turned phrase, a sense of accomplishment that comes from describing one thing with simple, perfect accuracy, capturing the essence of a moment in just a few words---and that effort seems to me to be a worthy pursuit. Perhaps I'm mistaken, but I think I'm a better writer than I am a guitar player. (I certainly hope so---I still can't play "Smoke on the Water".)

It's hard not to be aware of all of the other writers. Wondering if they're better than me, as if "better" could ever be defined; wondering if they're more productive than me, as if quantity is any indication of quality; wondering if any of them have had sex with a Bapst girl.

But then I recall a party a few years back, and asking a former friend how his writing was going. "Fabulous, really producing lately", he exclaimed enthusiastically, and I was very happy for him, if you stretch the definition of happiness to include seething with jealousy. I would never wish writer's block upon anyone, but it's frustrating when someone is churning out words while I had been spending my time at the computer screen trying to guess the beats-per-minute of the cursor blink---and had logged enough guesses that I must have been right at least once. Ever hopeful for inspiration, I asked if he was ready to let folks read his work, and he went into a mumbled explanation that seemed to reference everyone from Chuck Palahniuk to Chuck Barris, though it could have been abbreviated to a simple "no".

Later that night, after the big hand had passed many Blue Ribbons, this same man told me that he had heard that Henry Rollins had moved to Paris and spent every day in the cafes and pubs, proclaiming to anyone who asked that he was "a writer." He wasn't actually writing in Paris, but no one had to know that---he created the persona of the writer, and that was good enough for him. My friend was more impressed with how Henry Rollins didn't write than how he did.

I recounted the highlights of the evening to my wife that night, including the two paragraphs above, and my frustration that this drunkard was producing volumes while I was making paper airplane fodder. She looked at me incredulously, asking me to examine the evidence----"He tells you he's been writing, and later, drunkenly tells you how impressed he is that someone could effectively lie about being a writer. I think he's showing you his Henry Rollins impersonation."

Dammit. The literary equivalent of the guitar owner----the pen owner!

Hopefully the Bapst girls of the world will ask for a writing sample before they head home with chumps like that.

©2005 wpreagan