Party of One Read Online Free PDF Page B

the boys from my class got dropped into a new all-male Thunderdome of testosterone, an all-boys Catholic school called Priory that was run by Benedictine monks from England. Each form—grades seven through twelve were
forms one through six
there, because of the Britishness—contained fifty boys in jackets and ties and khakis, learning Latin by memorization. The “Total Eclipse of the Heart” video, without Bonnie Tyler as headmistress.
    By form one, most of my male friends had magically transformed into young men, seemingly all at once. They filled out, grew taller, gained confidence. In our free periods, about forty-five of the boys in form one would run outside to tackle and throw balls at one another. The rest of us would do things like talk at length about Bonnie Tyler’s “Total Eclipse of the Heart” video.
    The clubhouse for those who preferred Culture Club to contact sports was the Candy Store, the snack window overlooking the Junior House field. We volunteered to work the register because they had a boom box with a cassette player in there, and for us, proximity to a cassette player was crucial. Me, Ned, Derek, Tim, and Tom, and Phong No, the wildly effeminate Korean American kid. We played Duran Duran. We played Wham! We taped the Hot 9 at 9 off KHTR every night, and then played it in the room and debated each song’s merits. (Stevie Wonder’s success with “I Just Called to Say I Love You” felt unearned; he was coasting.)
    The roughhousers and horseplayers would come to our window, hair slicked to foreheads with sweat, Tuffskins grass-stained. They’d order their Andy Capp’s Hot Fries and Vess Whistle Orange Sodas and little tiny powdered doughnuts. (Phong No would insist on proper nomenclature when orders were placed. “Gimme the little tiny powdered doughnuts,” a kid would say. “The Donette Gems…?” Phong corrected, with just a trace of his mother’s accent:
Donette-ah Gems-u?
“Yeah,” the kid would concede. “Gimme the Donette Gems.”)
    It was in this room that we witnessed the Thompson Twins’ commercial breakthrough (“Is he saying ‘Hold my cold Italian heart’ at the end there? Are they
Italian
?” Tim asked, and we all agreed they look more British. Scottish, maybe). It was here that we compared Swatches (while the all-black one was impossible to read, it was preferable to the white one with the polka-dots, which showed dirt almost immediately). It was here on Monday mornings that we would relive
Friday Night Videos,
which we all watched and recorded and studied like our Latin conjugations (what exactly was this underground lair to which Simon Le Bon descended in the “Union of the Snake” video? In “Dance Hall Days,” were Wang Chung saying they were “cool on Christ”? How would one do the Neutron Dance? What did it all mean?).
    Michael Jackson was everything back then, and the strangest thing about him was that his speaking voice seemed sort of high. To have had the pop perfection that was singles four through six of
Thriller
—to review: “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’,” “Human Nature,” and “P.Y.T. (Pretty Young Thing)” (single number seven, “Thriller,” uncoupled from its truly epic and groundbreaking video, is garbage and in your heart you know it)—as the soundtrack of early puberty and entry into junior high is a privilege for which I am grateful every day of my life. I mean, some poor suckers got Alannah Myles.
    We Candy Store Boys threw ourselves and our energy into pop culture, which, as luck would have it, was going through its most stealthily gay phase ever. Boy George performed in dresses and Annie Lennox in suits. George Michael urged us to wake him up before we went-went, and he did so in shorts that were very small, and when he promised us it would be warm in bed, his eyes rolled back in his head in sheer gay ecstasy. Nobody was out of the closet. The gay was all in the subtext, which most kids missed entirely, though in many cases