248: Like It or Not
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From WBZChicago, it's This American Life, distributed by Public Radio International. I'm David Rakoff, sitting in for Ira Glass. There was an old cartoon. It was either in the New Yorker or a national ampoune, I can't remember, where a man is sitting on the bus. It's pretty empty. An odd stranger boards, and the man in the seat thinks to himself, "Oh God, please don't let him sit beside me. Oh God, please don't let him sit beside me." The guy approaches and says, "God told me to sit beside you." In the spring of 1978, I was 13 years old. The local public high school that I would be attending in a year's time was having an evening screening of Casablanca. So I took my friend, Jeff, and we went off to the high school. In addition to my love of old movies and my general cluelessness about popular music and youth culture, I was also a really tiny child. Maybe five feet at the time, probably closer to four foot eight. So I looked markedly different from other kids my age. I was also a little neurotic. I was riddled with phobias. It all served to make me seem a little odd, I'm sure. I didn't lack friends, but I was a strange, round-limbed feminine little kid. A strange, round-limbed feminine little kid, for whom a screening of Casablanca at the high school, no less, was a fairly important event. If I think about it, I guess the fantasy going through my head was that I would meet other old movie buffs, who would see past my juvenile exterior and into my very poet's soul. And then I would have, you know, a community of people who didn't care that I was dwarfish or 13. Maybe we would smoke and talk about film. Jeff and I were the only ones who showed up, the only two people in the auditorium, aside from two older boys at the back on the ladder who were taping up some banner of some sort or another. So the lights are still on and we're waiting for the movie to start. But I hear one of the boys on the ladder call my name, David, David. If you're a gay kid or even just a gay-ish kid, you basically spend your life anticipating having the crap beaten out of you, or at the very least, being even what used to be known on Leave it to Beaver as the business. I didn't know this guy calling my name, I knew that much. He wasn't a friend of my brothers or my sisters. I knew actually two things with complete certainty. One, that I wasn't the David that he was calling for. And two, that if I did turn around, he would give me the business. So I didn't turn around. But it just went on and on, him calling my name and nobody else being in the auditorium. After about a quarter of an hour against my better judgment, thinking perhaps that there had been some wrinkle in the space time continuum and maybe this older guy did somehow know me after all and there was no one else in the auditorium and he kept on calling David. So eventually I turned around and I said, yes, it was as if I could see the words coming out of his mouth printed like a speech bubble in a comic, moving through the air towards me as if the entire atmosphere was viscous, moving as slowly towards me as a bubble traveling
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