It's kind of reassuring to me that, even across the pond, gravity still pulls us downward, the sky is still above us, and 13 year old boys are still complete perverts. I am greatly comforted by the fact that the 13 year old boy's unique composition has the same kind of obvious international presence as McDonald's. Except instead of ubiquitous Big Macs it's this ubiquitous struggle of feeling extremely frightened and confused (like the male version of "Are you there, God? It's me, Margaret") while also trying to project total confidence (“Although I only figured out what my penis was for just yesterday, I have now decided that I am Casanova/the God of Sex/Gene Simmons.”).
Call me strange, but this is what I find so wonderful about 13 year olds—the girls have sprinted ahead in the puberty race by this point and from an outsider perspective seem to have quite suddenly woken up one morning with a bad case of the boobs, and the guys have to pretend that they’ve caught up. No, the guys have to pretend that they were never behind, and so they resort to wildly inventing stories and experiences that they can boast about to their similarly pre-pubescent guy friends (within earshot of the girls, who by this point are so far advanced in their development that some have actually started menopause), but the wonderful thing about a lot of these boasts is that they don’t ring true to the ears of someone with actual experience or to the ears of anyone in possession of female anatomy. But, most of the time, this doesn’t apply to 13 year old boys—I mean, there can’t possibly be too many of them with female anatomy. ...
Maybe I should be horrified by 13 year old boys and shriek at some news outlet about how we must stop our children from growing up too fast. And yeah, there’s something to be said about that. But…it’s also extremely amusing. It’s sort of the same feeling I get as when I see rich white kids pretending to be poor, black Rastafarians. They think everyone sees them as cool, mellow and interesting, when really we just think they’re tools. Or it’s like watching an ant carry fifty times its body weight, or whatever that staggering number is we’re told that ants can carry. Yeah, the ant is probably chugging along going, “I am such a badass, everyone. Look at me, I can carry fifty times my body weight. I bet that colossal blob that’s standing next to me and blocking out the great fiery orb in the sky thinks I’m a total badass.” But you, the colossal blob, can see that the ant is just carrying a leaf.
I love that the Jewish community has a safety valve to release dangerous amounts of ego that, if unchecked, could result in boys thinking that they are actually an incarnation of Shiva, God of Sex. I am talking, of course, about bar mitzvahs. Because nothing says “The most intimate relationship I’ll have in the next few years will be with my sock” like standing in front of your entire middle school chanting what is arguably the worst melody in the world in a language that has some of what are arguably the worst sounds in the world, objectively speaking. Because even if you manage to hit every note perfectly and follow the trope like a trained cantor (and God knows that’s near impossible at that age, when boys’ voices sound like little kids playing the violin for the first time), it still comes out sounding like shit. Short of committing some kind of dramatic form of ritual suicide involving some kind of crowd-pleasing weapon right up on the bima, there is no way at your bar mitzvah that you will come down from the bima looking like a badass. And I can say that because I’m Jewish.
You might say, “Well surely the party that follows the auditory travesty cancels out the ego-checking effects of a bar mitzvah, right?” But I say that even the dance party that follows is awful for the 13 year old boy. Even if the boy has the dance skills of Michael Jackson, Fred Astaire, Bob Fosse and me combined, dancing will still end up keeping his ego in check. Because anything that has the potential to make preteens and teens sweat is a terrible, terrible mistake that will soon be regretted by all involved.
Trust me, I remember. In my first year of secondary school I had English class right after PE in a room that was normally used by the high school history teacher. PE at my school was particularly awful, as it was run by a psycho Brazilian woman who would chase after us in a golf cart if we didn’t run fast enough, threatening to mow us down, and who would try to inspire us with this peculiar whooping yell of hers, which was about as frightening as a Rebel Yell but, being produced by a Brazilian, was also vaguely sexual. Her sidekick was a sadistic American who would have us shout empty slogans like, “PAIN IS TEMPORARY. PRIDE IS FOREVER” with each individual push up, even though she herself had this sort of happy, glazed expression in her eyes while doing push ups and other strenuous activity that suggested that long ago she had somehow opted out of suffering, like some kind of PE Buddha. My point: We got pretty sweaty.
But as the high school history teacher would have us believe, at some point before 12th grade you stop smelling like an unwiped ass when you sweat. To us 12 and 13 year olds, this was a thrilling prospect, the hope of which encouraged us to keep plodding on when our own BO became almost too much for one kid to handle. The history teacher would frequently stop by the classroom to pick up materials he left behind, and he’d always say something like, “Forgive me for interrupting, Miss___, but I just had to—JESUS! Can you smell that? JESUS!” He was vaguely Christian, so sometimes he’d invoke Mary and Joseph or other saints instead of the big man, and especially during Presidential Fitness Exam week he’d often call Jesus and some kind of A-Team of saints to his aid.
There would then be an embarrassed silence from everyone, at which point the history teacher would sniff loudly and bellow, “Does it not bother you? God, it’s punching me in the face.” He’d usually then let slip a bit of profanity, against which our English teacher would protest. Taking this as some sort of cue, the history teacher would turn on her, like she was in on this olfactory conspiracy, and yell at her that our horrible preteen BO was going to soak into the walls and make the room permanently smell like ass, something no amount of Febreeze or Glade plug-ins could ever forgive. He would pull one of the hanging Tibetan prayer flags to his nose, take a big whiff, and loudly declare, “See, it’s already starting to happen!”
Usually at this point there would be a sort of awkward pause in the yelling, during which you could hear me and my classmates all trying to find a way to sniff ourselves with a certain degree of subtlety. A girl called Rachel once bragged to me about her effective method of raising her hand as if to ask a question, while slightly turning her face so that her nose was positioned more closely to her armpit. I really liked how she thought of it as an art form, but it didn’t seem like a practical solution to the problem since every time one practices this art one must either give a response to the teacher’s question or ask a question. But I suspect this art may have had something to do with Rachel’s outstanding participation grades…
The conflict between the teachers usually resolved itself when our English teacher would promise to buy more Glade plug-ins even though Amber in the front row was allergic and being in the same room as one would give her hives/kill her/whatever it was Amber said it would do, or she would promise to turn on the noisy fan even though it would make it impossible to hear anything. I always found it strange that our teacher seemed to resign herself to the history teacher’s criticism, as if she accepted that she were personally responsible for how bad we all smelled and as though she should feel ashamed for letting us attain such high levels of rankness. No one ever suggested that it was the PE coaches’ fault, probably because they were too afraid that the Brazilian would come mow them down in her golf cart if she got word that her honor had been called into question, while the American (who was still participating, with a serene/glazed look on her face, in triathalons and marathons while nine months pregnant) would argue that the teachers must be imagining things because no one could possibly sweat even a drop from running only three miles.
And at the same time the history teacher wasn’t trying to be mean, nor was he trying to be funny. The smell was honestly just that unbearable to him. But I take special comfort in remembering him. I know that in a couple years time his own son will be entering the age of BO so bad that it makes you want to vomit immediately and desperately. I wonder if his house will have cans of Febreeze on every available surface, ready for deployment. My heartfelt prayer, however, is that God shows a little mercy and relieves Mr. ___ of his ability to smell before his own son becomes a pervy little 13 year old.
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