Mustache Shenanigans

by Jay Chandrasekhar

  Every muscle hurt. We half-jokingly prayed for injury to avoid practice. My kingdom for a broken arm. We wondered how hard it would be to actually do it, so we laid our arms across a desk and karate chopped each other until we were bruised. Nothing cracked, so it was back to practice the next day.

  On the third day, when the temperature was crawling up to one hundred degrees, Coach called for a water break. As we lined up at the garden hose, Coach Delaurentis held his linemen back: “My linemen don’t need water!” Van smiled, though he was feeling anything but happy.

  When our head coach went into his office, I followed.

  As he sat at his desk, I walked in, offering my helmet. “Coach, I’m done.”

  He seemed ready for this. “Sit down, son.” And then he gave “the speech.” It was actually a pretty good speech, designed to stop quitters. It culminated with the words “Football will make you a better friend, a better student, and a better man.”

  I waited a second or two out of respect, and then exhaled. “Yeah, I’m gonna quit anyway.” And I walked out.

  Back at the dorm, I called Mom to come get me.

  As I finished packing, Van walked in. He looked down the hall nervously and then shut the door. “We’ve gotta get out of here.” He had quit too, though no one on the team knew it yet. But they did know about me, and he’d heard talk about guys kicking my ass. They were also talking about putting Bengay in my jockstrap. The last threat felt nonsensical, because why would I be wearing a jockstrap? I had quit! We didn’t wait to clear it up.

  We dragged our suitcases out to the woods and hid. Ninety minutes later, my mom rolled up in her pink Lincoln Continental Mark V. Relieved, we jumped into the air-conditioning and sped away.

  On the ride home, I told my mom that it might be wiser if I just went to public school, but she wasn’t having it. When I told my sister, Sandy, that the football team wanted to beat me up, she smiled. “Don’t worry. I’ll take care of it.” And she did. She called her friend Maurice, who was a captain on the offensive line, and made it clear that I was not to be touched. And I wasn’t.

  A week later, I was back at LFA, ready to restart my freshman year. Van and I were assigned to a small dorm called New Hall, which housed eight guys, seven of whom were members of a minority group. Yep, we were in the minority dorm, a “safe space” for kids who might have trouble adjusting to life among the white majority. Is that how they saw me? Van and I had already assimilated, and putting us in New Hall was a form of “benevolent segregation” that I found humiliating. I wanted a John Hughes experience, but one where I felt like Ferris Bueller, not Long Duk Dong.

  The racial makeup was as follows: a half-Asian, half-white-American kid, a Venezuelan, a Spaniard, two Indian American kids (me and Van), my Japanese roommate, Shinobu Takemura, a Greek American kid named Freddy Christophorus, and our resident adviser, Willie Wong.

  Shinobu was a foreign-language student who spoke less than thirty words of English and couldn’t have been nicer. But the poor kid was having trouble communicating, and I wasn’t being very helpful. I didn’t learn a single word of Japanese, and while I wasn’t an overt dick to him, I didn’t go out of my way to be friendly either. I had a different vision of high school. I wanted to make friends, drink beer, and hook up with girls, not teach English to a Japanese exchange student in the minority dorm. (I want to be clear: I wasn’t anti-Japanese. I had had an eight-year crush on a Japanese American girl in grade school.) I was just homesick, and the girls weren’t paying much attention to me. I’d gone from being a popular eighth grader to being a lost freshman quitter. And poor Shinobu was a stranger in a strange land who, as you’ll see, drew a bad card when he got me as a roommate.

  One day after school, I locked my door to jerk off. I won’t tell you what fantasy I was working back then, but if they made a porno out of it, I’d be the thirteen-year-old Indian kid with the feathered hair, braces, and a hard-on.

  Midjerk, the doorknob jiggled and a voice said, “Hellooooooo!?”

  I stayed quiet. If it was Shinobu, he’d use his key to open the door and I would pretend that I was taking a nap. But no one came in, so after a frozen minute clutching my cock, I started back up again. Then I heard two voices snickering. It was Martin and Freddy, two guys from down the hall, who were also Van’s roommates. “You’re jerking off! We can hear the bedsprings!” I froze. Slam! Slam! Slam! They hit the door hard. I stayed silent, and when they eventually got bored and left, I finished up.

  At thirteen, masturbating was one of those things. We were all doing it, but we didn’t know that we were all doing it. When the topic came up, everyone just denied it. These guys had crossed a line for me, because the last thing I needed was them walking around school telling people that I was masturbating.

  “Did you enjoy jerking your dick this afternoon?” Those were the words that greeted me when I walked into Van’s room at study hall that night. Martin and Freddy sat at their desks smiling like fucking pricks.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” I shrugged as Van smiled. (News was spreading.)

  “We saw you through the keyhole!” they cackled as they mock jerked off. I denied it, but it was a lost cause. If I had been capable of blushing, I would have. I headed back to my room, embarrassed and fuming.

  The next week, Shinobu developed a nickel-size erupting boil on his cheek. I eyed it with trepidation, worried that it might be contagious. Chicks would really dig me then, right? Of course it wasn’t, but I was thirteen.

  A few days later, after school, I went back to my room, but the door was locked. I slid my key in, but when I tried to push open the door, I could feel a body against it. I heard whispered laughter and then noticed the towel that had been shoved in the crack under the door. I smelled smoke—not cigarette smoke. Could it be pot? I had never smelled it before, so maybe . . . ?

  Not sure what to do, I wandered down the hall to Van’s room. Fifteen minutes later, my door opened and a very stoned Shinobu, Martin, and Freddy tumbled out.

  This is a hard story to tell, because I’m decidedly not the hero of it. And sure, I drank alcohol, but I was very anti-drug at the time. All of us freshmen were. On top of that, LFA had a guilt-by-association policy. Now, I don’t want to make too much of that, since I was smart enough to know that that rule was probably bogus and that I would never be kicked out for my roommate smoking pot. But it was just more ammunition. I was pissed about being in the minority dorm, I was pissed about having a Japanese roommate with a boil, and I was pissed about getting busted jerking off. Now all three of my nemeses had smoked pot together . . . in my room.

  I wanted those guys gone, so I went to my resident adviser Willie Wong’s room to knock over the first domino. Willie was a cool guy from Taiwan, with glasses and a Taiwanese accent. I told him what had happened and that I was there only because I was worried about getting kicked out. I didn’t want to tell on them. I had to because of, you know, guilt by association. I laid it on thick—probably deserved an Oscar. (No, I know they don’t give Oscars to guys who look like me. I know.)

  Willie listened, nodding. He was taking this seriously. Then he said, “Don’t worry. I’ll take care of it.”

  I paused. Something about that answer didn’t sound right. “So they’re really getting kicked out?” I asked, sounding like I didn’t want them to get kicked out.

  Willie shook his head. “Don’t worry. I’ll give them a warning.”

  I left Willie’s room in a panic. If Willie only gave them a warning, not only would I not be rid of Shinobu, but they’d all know that it was me who had ratted them out. That would make me a quitting, masturbating narc. I was in too deep, so I went over Willie’s head.

  —

  In the morning, before school started, I slipped into Vice Principal Andrews’s office, sat down across from him, and told him everything.

  Half an hour later, I left Advi
ser Period and walked down the hall, where a crowd had formed outside Mr. Andrews’s office. Through the glass windows, I could see Shinobu, Martin, and Freddy sitting in chairs and looking worried. Mr. Andrews motioned to his secretary, who closed the drapes on the gathered crowd.

  “What’s going on?” I asked a sophomore I kind of knew.

  “Martin, Freddy, and that Japanese guy are getting kicked out . . . for something,” he said.

  “How do you know?” I asked.

  “Because the secretary closed the drapes. When the drapes close, you’re gone.”

  They were gone. After school, I wandered back to New Hall to witness the carnage. Not a trace of Martin, Freddy, or Shinobu was left. I felt guilty, though by now I had actually convinced myself that I had done the right thing. What choice did I have? How unfair would it have been for me to get kicked out? There were rumors around school that I was the narc, but I denied it. And though a few people pressed the case, most let it drop. And with time, everyone moved on.

  One night that winter, I woke up covered in a thick, pungent-smelling liquid. I came to the quick realization that someone had thrown up on me—all over my hair and face. I leapt out of bed, reeling, as vomit shot out of my mouth. Then I stumbled, through my own puke, into the hallway, where I threw up into a garbage can. Doors opened, and I saw people confused and smiling. When I went to the bathroom to shower, I realized that I hadn’t been thrown up on at all. In fact, the thick liquid was just gel toothpaste. As a prank, someone had squeezed a bottle of toothpaste on me, and my brain had turned it into vomit. I never found out who did it, but I knew in my gut that it was payback for my narc job, and I knew I deserved it. (To this day, gel toothpaste still smells like vomit to me.)

  That spring, in response to my grousing about school, my sister suggested that I audition for the school musical. She had been in the chorus of the fall show and said it was fun. I had never imagined acting, but I showed up to the audition, because, why not? They didn’t cast me—not even in the chorus.

  The next year, Van and I roomed together in Bates dorm, which housed about fifty freshman and sophomore boys. Living in Bates with everyone else made a world of difference. Soon I met a beautiful junior named Leslie and we started dating. Leslie was a boarding student from Grand Rapids, and she spent a lot of weekends signed out to my house. (A boarding student could go to a classmate’s house for the weekend if the host parents gave their permission.)

  Leslie and I were wild about each other, and as teenagers with raging hormones, we were sometimes reckless. In biology class, I would pull up my chair directly behind hers and slide my hand into the pocket of her flowing skirt so I could finger her.

  One Saturday, she came over to my dorm to chat. The campus was empty, so we started making out through my window, which quickly progressed to her giving me head. Recognizing our exposure, Leslie crawled into the window and then into my bed. We were so hopped up, we didn’t care that we were risking expulsion. After about an hour, one of my teachers knocked on my door. Leslie hid in my tiny closet while the teacher and I chatted for thirty minutes. When he finally left, Leslie crawled out of the closet, no longer in the mood.

  Those days were fun. Van started playing electric guitar and became so enamored with Jimi Hendrix that, in addition to buying a brown Fender Stratocaster, he also permed his hair into an Afro and started wearing loose psychedelic shirts and bell-bottoms. He used to sit on his twin bed, plug in, and jam for adoring freshmen.

  He had also started smoking pot. One Saturday, Van told me that he and a guy named Phil were heading out to the woods to get high. Did I want to come?

  I was curious, but how could I reconcile it with what I had done? I went.

  —

  Lake Forest Academy was located on 250 acres of forested land, so if you wanted to do something illicit, you only had to take a short walk before you were in deep woods.

  As the school disappeared from view, Phil packed a bowl, lit it, and took a big hit. Van followed, and then it was my turn.

  “What’s gonna happen?” I asked.

  Van smiled. “It’s like getting drunk, but kinda less. But don’t worry, most people don’t even feel it the first time.”

  I lit the pipe and inhaled smoke for the first of what would be thousands of times—cough-cough-cough-cough!

  “You’ve gotta cough to get off!” Phil laughed.

  Van was right. I kind of acted spaced-out, trying to “make it happen,” but nothing did.

  The next day, after the Bears game, we went back out to try again. This time, it worked.

  Now, I didn’t turn into a pothead. I never got high and went to class. I never even got high on school grounds again. To me, it was too risky. I smoked occasionally, on weekends, and only if someone else had it.

  I knew I was a hypocrite. I had destroyed three guys’ lives over a joint, and now I loved it. Yeah, that weighed on me.

  That fall, auditions for the musical Brigadoon were posted. I didn’t have a burning desire to act, but I was pissed about being rejected the first time, so I went. I’ll show them. This time, I landed a part as a Scottish clansman. I wore a kilt, sang in the chorus, and even had two lines. Holy shit, I fucking loved it. After that, I auditioned for every play that was offered.

  Here’s the thing. The best actors in Hollywood spent some years acting onstage, in plays and musicals. Period. End of story. No debate. I know that a lot of young people think that musicals are nerdy, or they feel that they’re too cool for plays, but if you want to be a great actor, go audition. Not only will you learn how to really act, but you’ll have a phenomenal time too. To give credit where it’s due, if my sister hadn’t pushed me to audition, there never would have been a Broken Lizard.

  —

  In my junior year, I auditioned for more plays, and my roles got steadily bigger. I played Gangster 2 in Kiss Me Kate, and then Biff in Death of a Salesman.

  Leslie and I broke up, and I was now dating a thrill-seeking actress named Courtney, who I was in a couple of plays with.

  Courtney lived on the sexual edge. With ten minutes to curtain, she would pull me into a private dressing room and insist on having sex. You could hear the crowd chattering away just on the other side of the wall. We used the withdrawal method, so when I pulled out, her dress bore the brunt of it. We tried to wash it, but there was no time, so she went onstage that way.

  Courtney was turned on by the prospect of getting caught. I used to sleep over at her house, and she would sneak into my room and crawl into bed to have sex, with her parents sleeping just twenty feet away. One night, after sex, I turned on the light, and it looked like someone had slaughtered a deer on the bed. She had had her period, and there was a three-foot circle of red on the sheet. Panicked, I started stripping the sheets, while Courtney just laughed.

  Ten minutes later I was standing in the laundry room downstairs, watching the evidence melt away in the suds, when Court walked in buck naked. I whispered for her to get her clothes on, but she said (at full volume) that the only way she would be quiet was if we had sex on the washing machine. High school.

  Lake Forest Academy assigned a lot of homework, so we stayed up late. The next day, we’d be tired, so we’d take NoDoz to get through our nightly study hall. When someone said that snorting it would make your brain process it faster, we tried it. I don’t know if it worked, but it was fun, and we were idiots, so we started snorting everything—aspirin, Pixy Stix; some fool even snorted foot powder. From there, we progressed to Kensington snuff (snortable tobacco), which burned the inside of our noses and caused tears to run down our faces. We loved it.

  We didn’t hide it. Our doors were open and we’d cut lines of NoDoz right on the desk. When our befuddled study hall monitor walked into our room and eyed three fat white lines sitting there, he looked startled. “Oh gosh.”

  “It’s NoDoz,” I said. “It works faste
r this way.” But he just covered his eyes and moved on.

  How did all of this lead to cocaine? Cocaine was a big part of the culture back then, with Scarface, Miami Vice, the New York Mets players Keith Hernandez and Darryl Strawberry, Studio 54, and so on. Here’s the thing. Doing coke wasn’t something we aspired to. Cokeheads were portrayed by Hollywood as losers. They wore flashy clothes, they talked on huge cell phones, they were insincere, and they were all addicts. Sure, we were snorting everything in sight, but no one had talked about doing cocaine.

  Then, one night, our friend Jimmy walked into my room. We were cutting lines of NoDoz and offered Jimmy a bump. He just laughed. “What’re you messin’ around with that kids’ shit for? I can get you the real stuff.” I remember feeling the same way I did about marijuana: curious. We asked questions: What was it like? Won’t we get addicted? Won’t we have heart attacks? Jimmy assured us that all of that was bullshit. He had done it a couple of times and it was fun. The thing is, we liked Jimmy. He was a smart, small, Irish American kid, with a big fucking brain and a great sense of humor. If Jimmy said it was fun, it was fun.

  A few weeks later, Jimmy and I and three other pals crowded into the bathroom at a motel party and had a mind-bending ball.

  Before I go on, let me say that I’m not an advocate of teens doing drugs. I’m just talking about what it was like when I was a teen. The adult exaggerations about the dangers of drugs had the opposite of the intended effect on us. Most of us tried them anyway and realized that the claims were bogus, which made us disregard any future claims made by adults. If the goal is to prevent teens from trying drugs, scaring them with false info is not working. Maybe being honest about drugs could work. The real dangers are from heroin and legal painkillers. I’ve known a number of comics, including Mitch Hedberg and Harris Wittels, who died young from heroin. That shit’s real, and that’s where the focus should be. Okay, I’m stepping off of my soapbox.