Photo by Alberto Bigoni on Unsplash
I’ve been told I have a firm understanding of what I need and that I’m not afraid to ask for it or demand it if the situation requires. My wants on the other hand? My wants are like a tune I used to sing by heart but now can barely hum the chorus. And that song, the song of my wanting is “Wild, Wild West.”
Stop! You don’t have the right one, even now my wants don’t make sense outside my own head. They are no more relatable at forty than they were at thirteen when I first requested the song. My friends and I listened to Kool Moe Dee everywhere that spring. MTV played it often, if we thought hard enough in the direction of the television, we could make it come up in the rotation. We were adolescent girls and no one had yet told us the world didn’t work that way. No one will read your mind, you are not telepathic, nor are you telekinetic. Your desires alone will make nothing happen.
At the eighth-grade dance, I requested the song from the DJ. This dance was difficult and trying all around. My date, Bryan (who I feel safe in naming because it was the name of 75% of the boys in my class), had said, in advance, that he would dance one fast and one slow dance with me. No more. I could pick the fast dance (“Wild, Wild West,” of course) and the slow one would be the last one of the night. He’d already promised Julie and Holly, Stephanie and Carrie (girls who already had boyfriends) that he’d dance with them. He’d accept my invitation to the dance so long as I didn’t get in his way. He had a very full evening planned for himself.
It was 1989 and I was the kind of girl who asked boys out.
Boys get an ego boost from your awkwardness. It makes them feel more in control, more manly.
My Aunt Sharon gave me a whole shelf-worth of conduct guides when I turned ten. She didn’t call them that, of course. And unlike Victorian conduct guides, none of them said my ovaries would shrivel if I read too much (although, my ovaries did eventually shrivel, or more accurately, they exploded, but that was years down the road yet. At 13 my ovaries were still intact, as far as I knew).
My favorite of the books (which I quote to you throughout this story, you’re welcome) was Stacy Rubis’s How to Be Popular with Boys, which encapsulated my life goal right there in the title, though, to be honest, it wasn’t just with boys. At that age, I wanted to be popular with everyone. Boys, girls, mothers, fathers, rabbits in the yard. When I was coming home from my best friend Sarah’s house, I’d pass a yard with two big pine trees. There were always rabbits in that yard. I’d say to myself, “If I can bike past without them hiding in the trees, I’ll know they like me.” Sometimes they stayed and sometimes they went, whatever they did set the tone for the rest of my night. My happiness depended on the moods of skittish creatures.
When you’re shy and natural, boys instinctively feel “Here’s a girl I can believe...She doesn’t have anything up her sleeve.”
But shy wasn’t natural, not for me. If I had known the phrase “hegemonic bullshit” then, I would have used it. But I didn’t know it for at least another twenty years, so instead I tried to be as shy and awkward as possible. Which would typically last all of about five minutes until I was pushing someone or slapping someone on the back. Seinfeld premiered a few months into that summer, and had I watched it then, Elaine could have been my goddess.
But again, it was at least another good twenty years before I started catching it in reruns. I had only the book cover’s pretty blond, pink-sweater-wearing bad seed, chatting on the phone to guide me. I was blond, I had a phone (though it was way cooler than hers — see-through-blue plastic, not boring white), so I figured she was pretty much me or I was pretty much her. And I was probably on the other end of that phone, practically begging to be interpolated.
By letting a guy make the big moves you’ll be doing wonders for his ego, when his ego’s feeling fine, your life will be brighter, too.
But Bryan was off dancing with Julie or Crystal or Carrie or whatever, when I decided it was time for the song, time for some “Wild, Wild West,” so I went up and asked the DJ myself.
“Sure thing, princess.”
I rejoined Sarah in the middle of the dance floor and we twictched and fidgeted, calling it dancing. Paula Abdul, Debbie Gibson, Guns N’ Roses. Jesus, was he ever going to play our song? Patience is a virtue; seersucker is a fabric. That was in one of those books too, or maybe it was a Bazooka Joe comic. Def Leppard, Winger, that stupid “Iko Iko” song. The evening was winding down. Bryan was with Sherrie or Carrie or whatever the fuck. It wasn’t like I’d even wanted to dance with his funky, smelly self anyway. Now I know that smell is depression. The body trying to get as much of the overload out as it can. You can’t smell that? Have you ever tried? There’s a lot we can smell and see if we only let ourselves. And a lot we can block out.
Eventually the DJ had played “Wild, Wild West” for us, after I asked twice more. It was the wrong one. The Escape-fucking-Club. Really?
“You’re white, which one did you think he was going to play?” Sarah said, “Should have let me ask.”
I hated it when she was right. No, I hated it when I was wrong.
Bryan and I danced anyway. Then it was on to the last slow dance of the night, the one he’d said would be mine. “Patience” by Guns N’ Roses. Screw you DJ gods, screw you. The room was dark and everyone pressed up close to their someones. Once he’d finished whistling along with Axl, he pulled back a little and looked into my eyes.
“How long have you been waiting for this?”
“What?”
“How long? How long have you been wanting to dance with me? At least since last year, right?”
Sarah was swaying with Bobby Sheridan not far from us. I caught her eye, she waited expectantly for the inevitable.
Even if your stomach is doing flip-flops, even if your hands are shaking, go out anyway. Simply by doing the thing you’re most afraid of, you’ll get over your fear.
What I did probably wasn’t what good old Stacy Rubis had in mind. I know that now, and truth be told, probably knew that then as well. That didn’t stop me from pulling back my arm as best I could and punching him full in the gut before heading out the open doors of the gym into the bright lights of the cafeteria where Sarah’s older sister was waiting to drive us home.
Jennifer Schomburg Kanke’s work has recently appeared in New Ohio Review, Massachusetts Review, Shenandoah and Salamander. She is the winner of a Sheila-Na-Gig Editions Editor’s Choice Award for Fiction. Her zine about her experiences undergoing chemotherapy for ovarian cancer, Fine, Considering, is available from Rinky Dink Press (2019). Her full-length poetry collection, The Swellest Wife Anyone Ever Had, about Appalachian Ohio, will be available from White Violet Press in Fall 2024. She can be found on YouTube as Meter&Mayhem.