This is my third entry in the {W}rite Of Passage writing challenge. You can check out other entries at the bottom of the post. This week’s instructions were:

Take fifteen minutes to write about your elementary school lunch. Describe. Remember. Smell. Touch. Who is there? Where are you? What are you eating?

Pasty day meant freedom. Freedom from the confines of the school yard. Freedom to leave the fenced fields, playground, swings, and tetherball courts and venture into the world beyond. The pasty shop was about 150 yards from the back entrance to the school grounds. With a note from our parents and $1.50, we had permission to walk out that gate, down the sidewalk, and into the pasty shop. We were to buy our pasty and return to school. We must have had a chaperone. But in my memory that person is invisible. It was as though the chains of bondage were thrown off, and we were free.

For the uninitiated, pasties are Cornish meat pies. If you’ve seen Sweeney Todd, the pies Mrs. Lovett ends up filling with the remains of Sweeney’s victims are basically pasties. Sorry if that throws off your appetite. [By the way, if you haven't seen Sweeney Todd, go get the Johnny Depp version from Netflix or Blockbuster or however you get your movies these days. I prefer the original Great Performances version with Angela Lansbury, if you can find it, but Tim Burton, Johnny Depp and Co. do a pretty great job bringing the Demon Barber of Fleet Street to the big screen]. Pasties were a fixture of our small Northern California Gold Rush town because the gold miners had been mainly Cornish. They brought their meat pies with them, and a local tradition was born. There were several pasty shops in town, but it was King Richard’s that was close enough for we wee folk to walk to, so it was their pasties that became for me the yardstick by which to measure all others.

Looking back, the pasties weren’t really that good. The crust was more doughy than flakey. The fillings were often chewy (Have A Little Priest?) and generally lacked seasoning. They generally consisted of meat and potatoes, with perhaps an errant hunk of carrot or onion. Copious amounts of ketchup were required. Some went for the more traditional vinegar, but I didn’t swing that way. Still don’t. I’d buy my beef pasty and my milk and head back to the lunchroom to eat it.

There was a clear divide between the pasty kids and the non-pasty kids. My parents didn’t always have money to give me for pasty day, but when they did it was an invitation to an elite group of more worldly, cultured, and cosmopolitan second graders. Not only were we eating world cuisine, we got to leave school grounds to buy it.

King Richard’s isn’t there anymore. There are still pasty shops in my hometown, and those that remain are generally thought to produce a better product than the pasty of my youth. But my nostalgia for that place is strong. You can find pasty recipes online and in various cookbooks. If you ever make a batch, leave at least one a little doughy for me, and pass the ketchup.

This is my second entry in the Write-Of-Passage Writing Well Challenge. Check out the links at the bottom to see some of the other great writing being contributed.

Gotta say, this week’s challenge is hard, yo! It’s FICTION! Ack! Here are the instructions:

Find a person in public today and study their character. Make a story surrounding them. Build them in to your short essay.

Uh … OK. Find a person in public? You mean, like, on the street? I tried this, but the dude I was staring at noticed me and then was like, “Uh, dude, what the fuck are you looking at?” So I decided to go another way. Hopefully I don’t hit too wide of the mark.

Mr. Noodle’s brother, Mr. Noodle walked onto the set for yet another day of shame and humiliation at the hands of that red-furred, googly-eyed little tyrant.

It wasn’t enough he had to be here at the crack of dawn, wearing these ridiculously oversized clothes that made him look like some kind of Muppet himself. No, he would once again be forced to pretend not to know how to do some incredibly rudimentary task, like tie his shoes, hit a ball, eat soup … whatever … on national TV. Of COURSE he knew how to do these things. Was he a moron? No. He was not. Far from it. Thankfully, it was public television, and few of his friends had kids, so thankfully most didn’t know what was put through every day.

After finishing his Ph.D. in applied physics at MIT, he quickly realized just because his degree had the word “applied’ in it, that didn’t mean his skills could actually be “applied” to anything resembling a decent-paying job. After going on interview after demoralizing interview, he’d finally agreed to meet with his brother’s boss. “The job is great,” his brother, Mr. Noodle, would always say. “It’s a piece of cake. And he’d LOVE you! I’ve told him about you and he’s SO ready to bring on a sidekick for me. Just say the word and you’re in. Piece of cake, I’m telling you. Cake.”

He didn’t mind the idea of working with his brother, though “sidekick” wasn’t really what he had in mind. And no matter how much of a shoo-in his brother said he was, of course it wasn’t that simple. Even with his brother’s endorsement, they wanted to meet him before they’d give him the job. Not a problem, although having seen that hairy little red guy on TV a few times when he tuned in to watch his brother, he didn’t trust him. He seemed all happy and innocent and friendly, and sure, kids loved him, but from the stories his brother had told him, it just didn’t add up. His brother called him “brilliant,” “savvy,” and sometimes “ruthless.” He meant it as a compliment, and yet those words just didn’t jive with the bright red, squeaky-voiced dust mop making a fool out of his brother on TV every day. While it looked like fun and games, he knew there had to be more to Elmo than what people saw on that show.

Then there was Mr. Noodle’s brother Mr. Noodle’s inherent … uh … discomfort speaking with others. Social anxiety disorder, they’d called it. Whatever. People get nervous when they meet new people. He wasn’t that different. Sure, he had to wear three undershirts to keep from soaking his clothes with sweat, and he couldn’t exactly speak OUT LOUD for 20 or 30 minutes after first meeting someone, but how unusual is that, really?

The meeting went well enough, all things considered. Luckily he didn’t need to say a word, since that thing across the table never shut up. And even if he hadn’t had a clinically diagnosed condition that made him uncomfortable in social situations, he’d like to see the guy who wouldn’t be taken aback by the deep croaking rasp of the little monster’s speaking voice, and the fact he chain smoked 37 Lucky Strikes during their 15-minute meeting. He couldn’t even be sure it had lips, though that didn’t stop Elmo sucking down cigarettes one after another. But by far the most unnerving thing about meeting him in person was his laugh. His voice sounded nothing like it did on television (kids would run screaming if they heard the cross between George Carlin and Dick Cheney that was Elmo’s actual voice), but his laugh was exactly like on the show. High, fast, and verging on hysterical.

That was years ago. He’d long since gotten used to all of it, though it hadn’t made him like the little creep any more than that first day. These days it was just about getting through the day on the set. Because Mr. Noodle never had any lines in the show, they never sent him an advance copy of the script. They said it was so his reactions would be spontaneous and genuine, but that was bullshit. They knew if he had a heads up about half the shit they made him do he’d have stopped showing up long ago. He could count on ending up soaking wet, covered in pie, or having to land on his ass for about 100 takes until they got just … the … right … one … to please that hirsute Orson Welles. He watched the show enough to know they usually used the first or second take. That little asshat just liked to watch him suffer.

And not just him. He was so jealous of the guy who worked that fucking drawer, getting to push the little megalomaniac on his ass every day. Elmo would have cut that bit long ago if it didn’t get such a huge laugh. His brother was right, the guy was smart. Scary smart. Nobody fucked with him. It was all “yes, Mr. Elmo” and “no, Mr. Elmo” and “right away, Mr. Elmo.” Even the humans who were allegedly in charge knew who was really calling the shots.

More than anything else, it was the goldfish that finally made him realize just how horrible it all was. They went through at least 30 fish a day on the show. It was mind boggling. The kids at home thought there was just one goldfish. Elmo’s beloved pet, Dorothy. He’d always known that couldn’t be true. Goldfish don’t live that long, so naturally there had to be more than one. But that tiny red menace had it written into his contract from the beginning there must be a constant supply of extra goldfish available to be swapped in at any time if something wasn’t quite right. And there was always something not quite right. This one doesn’t move around enough, that one swims too much, this one’s got some white on his fin, that one looked at me funny. It kept Mr. Noodle up some nights, thinking about all those fish. Most people on set still didn’t know what happened to them. They assumed it was Elmo’s one soft spot, the way he personally carried every rejected fish from the set. That little fuzzball wouldn’t so much as lift a finger to move his own water glass, but he’d never let anyone else touch the fish in the bowl when he called for a new one. He’d scoop them out with the little net and carry them through the stage right door to his dressing room. Everyone assumed he flushed them. Then, three weeks ago, Mr. Noodle learned something he really never wanted to know about his boss and those fish.

He’d decided to take advantage of the downtime during one of the many fish swaps to visit the craft services table. They technically hadn’t called a break, but fuck that little hairball, he’d been falling off a pogo stick for six hours, his ass hurt, and he was damn well gonna have a donut. The day was almost over and they had to be getting close to the end the fish supply, Elmo had carted off so many. Noodle was biting into a jelly donut when he noticed the boss man’s dressing room door open behind him. From down the hall he could see straight into where the little thing was taking the latest in the line of rejected Dorothys.

He started to turn away — he didn’t really want that little fuckwit seeing him sneaking a donut between takes — when he saw what looked like a huge glass bowl of mandarin orange slices. Except they were wriggling. The little creep dropped in the latest addition, and Noodle realized it was all that day’s fish, crammed together in a massive brandy snifter, like piano players use for tips, with barely enough water to keep them alive. Jelly dripped onto Noodle’s sleeve as the little fish monger picked up the glass and tilted it to his mouth. He opened his jawless maw almost 180 degrees, like only a Muppet can. Then, just before that shiny, wriggling mass of discarded goldfish slid down his throat, Noodle suddenly understood why the guys who’d been here the longest walked on eggshells around Elmo, jumping out of their skins when he came up behind them.

As the wriggling mass of former Dorothys slipped into his mouth, six or seven rows of jagged, triangular, razor-sharp teeth emerged from the soft black felt inside his mouth. He chomped and slurped till the fish were churned into a kind of soup of scales and blood and tiny bones. When he’d swallowed them all, the teeth slid back into their sockets and he wiped his face with the back of his fur-covered hand. Then, Noodle realized Elmo was staring at him. The crimson creature grinned and winked a little, as much as a monster with no eyelids can wink. And it was then Noodle knew why no one ever quit, and why he could never leave the show. No one would ever believe him if he told them the truth. He dropped the donut in the trash and wiped the jelly off his sleeve before heading back under the lights in a horror-filled haze. From behind him he heard that screeching, hysterical laughter. This was Elmo’s World, all right. And he suspected he would never escape.

This post is dedicated to Michael Jeter, the actor who played Mr. Noodle’s Brother, Mr. Noodle, in addition to many wonderful roles in film, theater, and television. He died in 2003 after voicing Smokey and Steamer in The Polar Express.

I also just realized that this post might make this one make a bit more sense.

This is my first entry in the Write-Of-Passage Writing Well Challenge. Like Mrs. Flinger, whose brainchild this challenge is, I like good writing. I read blogs to get a sense of the personalities behind them, but mostly I read them for stories. Well told stories. Yes, this includes using reasonably good English and not murdering spelling and grammar. But (and don’t believe anyone who says you aren’t allowed to start a sentence with a conjunction) it’s more about using language to engage readers and evoke an emotional response.

Anyway, I’m all about good writing and shit. So, I thought, sure, I’ll take the challenge. The first challenge was to describe your most embarrassing moment.

Some of the stories other writers in the challenge have shared are really brilliant. There are links to them at the end of this post so you can see what I mean. Reading them and wracking my brain, I honestly couldn’t come up with a single good story about an embarrassing moment. The few I did come up with paled in comparison to the gems shared by others. Try as I might to exhume a hilarious anecdote about public nudity, flatulence, or general buffoonery, I either had a very high tolerance for embarrassment or I’ve successfully blocked out those parts of my life. There’s no way I was cool enough to avoid them, but I just can’t come up with any.

So, I’m skipping right over run-of-the-mill embarrassment to abject humiliation. Why not go all the way, right? This is a post I’ve been trying to figure out how to write for a long time, and maybe this was the trigger I needed. Here goes.

Junior high sucks. This is a fact like gravity is a fact. You can fight it, but sooner or later it’ll drag you down. Some have it better than others, but for most people there are few times in life more full of awkwardness, confusion and despair than adolescence. Plenty had it worse than I did. I wasn’t one of the popular kids, but I wasn’t an outcast. I was smart, I did well in my classes, and I had friends. Good friends, I thought.

When I was nine, my parents got divorced. Their divorce was not the horror show some could describe. I never heard them fight. I never saw my mother cry or my father storm out. No doors were slammed, nobody got hit, and when it was over we could all still be in the same room together and be basically decent to each other.

My parents were fairly evolved about how they handled their split. Both veterans of the EST training, precursor of today’s Landmark Forum, they were steeped in self awareness and understanding your true motivations and being honest with yourself and all that self-actualized crap. Taken to extremes this can be crazy making, but in moderation there are plenty of worse ways to approach life.

Having done all that self exploration, when the paths of their lives diverged, my parents were pretty grown up about it, as much as my nine-year old self could tell. By the time we kids found out they were splitting up, they’d been discussing it for at least a year and had made the decision to go their separate ways. For many kids my age, this might have prompted a tortured exploration of why this happened. Did my parents not love each other anymore? Did I do something to break the family apart? Why, why, why?

But I knew why. My father told me why. My parents were getting divorced because my father was gay.

“Do you know what it means to be gay?” he asked as we stood alone in his bathroom. He’d just explained to me and my two younger brothers, six and three, that he and my mother were going to be splitting up, then asked me to stay while they went off to play.

“Yes,” I said. And I did, basically. I’m not sure exactly what I knew, or how I knew it, but I had the basic idea. It was the 80s. Reagan was president, AIDS was in the news and gay people were on TV. My parents were both singers and theater people, and had plenty of gay friends. So I knew what it meant to be gay as much as I knew what it meant to be straight in my prepubescent nine-year old way.

“I’m gay,” he went on. He said that was why they were getting divorced. They still loved each other very much, and loved us boys very much, but he was attracted to men, not women, and said he needed to be honest about that and live his life accordingly. I’m paraphrasing now. He said something like that, but after your dad says “I’m gay,” things go a little staticky for a while. He asked if I had any questions and I said I didn’t, and I asked if I could go play, and he said yes.

My memory of that conversation is clear, but the days, weeks, and months after are a blur. My life changed significantly. We moved to a new house. My mom started dating someone almost right away. And I had this new weight on me I hadn’t carried before. My parents were divorced, and my dad was gay. These things were now with me constantly like an invisible, non-fatal illness. I couldn’t change them. I couldn’t make them go away. I just had to carry them around and try to understand them.

My best friends in school at the time were Dale and Mark (not their real names). I didn’t tell them right away about my dad. They knew my parents were splitting up, but that wasn’t so unusual. Lots of kids had divorced parents. It took a while before I was ready to share more details. I don’t know how long it took, where we were, or how I brought it up, but in my very evolved and mature way I told them what, for me, made my whole family situation make sense. My parents were splitting up not because of anything mysterious or sinister, but because my father was gay. No big deal. He’d only just realized it, or come to terms with it, or whatever, and had decided he couldn’t be honest with himself and stay married to my mother.

In hindsight, I can’t say I’m surprised they didn’t take this well. Neither of them came from families that were very socially progressive. Mark lived with his mom. I never met his dad, but I know he at least had some perspective on divorce. Dale, on the other hand, lived with his still-married parents, who could fairly be described as … backward. I don’t know exactly where they were from. Maybe West Virginia. Somewhere south and east of our small Northern California town. Where ever it was, they’d brought their values and attitudes with them and imparted them to their son. Dale would not have sworn allegiance to his parents, but when faced with something as fundamental as homosexuality, he reverted to his roots.

It didn’t happen right away. It started gradually. Dale would make jokes about my dad. About him being gay. Being a fag. He’d draw semi-pornographic sketches of my father with a man. To be funny. I didn’t object at first, tried to be cool about it. It was just Dale. He’d always had a biting and sarcastic sense of humor. But it didn’t stop there. The drawings got worse, the comments more hurtful, and then things took a nasty turn. I’d confided in my two friends. I wasn’t ready to tell just anyone about my personal situation, but them, I trusted. They didn’t take that confidence as seriously as I did.

I emerged from class one day to find Dale and Mark standing with a group of guys who weren’t exactly regulars in our social circle. These were the guys who liked to push the smaller kids around. Guys who took pleasure from intimidating those smaller or less confident. I wasn’t friendly with them, but neither had I spent much time as the object of their abuse. I wasn’t a small kid. There were easier targets. But now they had ammunition. My secret wasn’t a secret anymore. Dale had told the school bullies my dad was gay, and in doing so had allied himself with them as the ringleader of his own humiliation squad. Target: me. Mark stood with them, not quite among them, but not on my side, either. He might have offered a half-hearted “Hey, knock it off, dude,” but no more. They taunted me. They said things about me, about my father, my mother, my step-father, and my brothers. Nasty things about anal sex and incest and things I still don’t like to think about in relation to my family.

I couldn’t breathe. I didn’t know what to do. I might have been able to beat the shit out of Dale on his own, but he, knowing that, had surrounded himself with guys I had no hope against physically. I’d like to say I brilliantly tore him down with my superior intellect like a character in a John Hughes movie. But I didn’t. I screamed “Fuck You!” I cried. I shoved him and was swiftly advanced on by his newly formed gang of thugs. I backed off. I walked away. And I cried some more. Like a fag, as far as they were concerned.

What I felt can’t adequately be described as embarrassment, though that was certainly an aspect of it. I was humiliated. I was hurt. I was devastated. I’d chosen to share a deep personal truth with people I considered my friends, and they had betrayed me fully and with gusto. Our friendship ended there. We still had some friends in common, but the closeness I thought we had was gone.

There’s still a part of me that has trouble trusting people with important but potentially damaging pieces of myself. I have thoughts I don’t share. Or if I do, I share them in a joking tone from which I can easily retreat if pressed. How much of that is because of what happened in seventh grade? I don’t know. But if the essence of humiliation and embarrassment is exposure of something dear and personal, I certainly felt exposed that day. I still cross paths with Dale and Mark now and then. We have friends in common on Facebook. I’ve had beers with them at parties and stood around fire pits talking about mutual friends and our lives now. But we’ve never spoken of what happened then. Part of me wants to forgive them, openly and fully. But another part of me still feels the shame I felt that day, and if it’s possible to grow up enough to move past that, I’m not there yet.