All The Beautiful Girls

Mel met him and as soon as he saw her, felt her impact. She was enshrouded in a gothic attire, dark makeup, dark clothing, radiant white skin, hips, long strong straight hair falling down her milky face. She’d drive a car back when I used a bus-pass to get home. She looked too sexually appealing and Damian experienced shame and disapproved of her looks. But I couldn’t look away.
Next time I saw her was at the high school’s library. She approached me with the greatest of ease and casually asked if I wasn’t in one of her classes. Nonchalantly, Damian replied as if trying to recall the possibility in his mind: “Yeah. I think we have AP Spanish Literature.” Damian was known in the underground by those who needed a paper done, he’d sell essays, compositions, turning paper into paper. He had been a controversial writer in all his English classes; went from not speaking a word as far as regular English classes in less than two years. Had two Advanced Placements’ classes. A five over five result in both State tests, a couple of grand worth of college tuition. He had been thrown out of three consecutive classrooms for misconduct, and since Damian was too smart for the detention’s office, he’d walk right down the hall to the teacher’s break room. There, teachers who had the period off, sat and drank coffee and graded exams. Damian didn’t volunteer for this; he was asked, and couldn’t refuse. It was, to his mind, a discreet kind of child labor. He’d grade their exams, sweeten and spit in their cups of teas and coffee, listen to how those who taught us really lived and heard more than one unpleasant thing. Except, they were able to sort out their differences most of the time, didn’t hold grudges if the issue wasn’t resolved, and always use plenty of humor -even if it was the sarcastic or sardonic kinds, to ease tensions.
You have nothing to lose so long as you keep your composure.
One day, as I found a moment leisure, I was idly looking away, bored out of my mind, when one minute teacher stood in front of me and said that was no way of spending time. “What you do with your time off says a lot about who you are” and handed him a book. “Here, read this.” It was a copy of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. Nothing would be the same anymore. Literature saved me from destructive self. It gave me structure. It gave me a world all of my own. Many of the writers from the Boom generation migrated and lived in foreign lands; I could relate to the experiences described. Literature made me far more sophisticated than the average high school chump. Suddenly, I was part of something, even if it was as little as a cool nerd. Yeah, there was and still is such a thing. With the money I was soon to make selling paper assignments, I invested in a couple of simple t-shirts and a pair of jeans in Gap (back then, it was the shit).

Damian’s Oral Sex Diaries entry# 39
Literature happened in high school. I owe a lot of my literary prowess to many great minds, mentors, teachers that throughout the years have shaped the course of my mental journey. Perhaps too focused in the storyline, I forgot really how the experience, the emotions involved in all the process that turned him from a young, insecure boy to being the man he was today. The storyline tells the anecdote but lacks the drama and all the little flaws that make an ordinary life so interesting. I forgot to mention laughter. It happened when I was in the middle of the worst financial crisis of my life: with just ten dollars for the rest of the week under my name. I bought a gallon of milk and a huge box of cheerios, and I remember there was this old lady making the line next to me who said: “Oh, you must like cheerios!” I couldn’t help but laugh. “Yeah, but after this is done” I said, pointing at the box: “I’m not going to no more.”
In high school, I was sent to the teachers lounge, a medium size room packed with shelves of books and in no time I was grading their students’ exams for them and charging something on the side to those interested in improving their academic chances, discreetly, and I’d pour a new cup of coffee recently brewed and pit on, and I’d see that teachers were a lot like big children. Adults, in general, are like big children.