Very Far Away from Anywhere Else Read Free

didn't know well—which was the entire human species except for my parents and Mike Reinhard and Jason Thoer—I was either completely speechless, or said extremely serious things that instantly prevented any further conversation. But still, I am male, and it seems to me that at our age acting funny is almost an instinctive form of behavior in men. The girls laugh
at
things, but they seem basically serious. Whereas the fellows horse around and clown and make everything into a joke. My only real relationship with Mike and Jason, who were the nearest thing I had to friends, was a joking relationship. The point was never to be serious about anything. Except maybe sports scores. One of the main subjects to talk about was sex, but we kept unserious about sex, either by telling dirty jokes, or by being gross—using the special technical vocabulary of the sexual engineer, as if women were machines with interchangeable parts. I was pretty good at the dirty jokes, but my engineering vocabulary was unconvincing.

    I might as well say here that at fifteen I still didn't know what "scoring with a girl" meant. I thought it meant you'd gone out and had a good time at a movie or a party or something. I knew the facts of life, all right, but I didn't connect that phrase with them. So that when Mike, who was way ahead of me physically, started telling us that he had finally scored with this girl, I said, "Yeah, what did you do?" And he gave me this look and said, "What do you think we did?" and I have never felt so stupid in my life. I am getting red talking about it into this tape recorder. Mike had to go tell a lot of other fellows about me asking, "What did you do?" It was good for lots of humor. However, they forgot about it eventually, and I kept a good string of dirty jokes worked up, so that I could talk with Mike and Jason. It beat eating lunch alone, I guess.

    But one more thing about humor and seriousness: it doesn't necessarily go on like that. Older women sometimes say the funniest things, and older men often get deadly serious. My father has no sense of humor left at all. He is a kind man, but nothing ever strikes him as funny. And I've heard my mother and her friend Beverley laughing in the kitchen till they were bumping around like drunks and gasping. They were laughing about something dumb Beverley herself had done. Just listening to them whooping in there made me laugh, for nothing, for pleasure.

    Well, anyhow, it was really neat to have this girl laugh like that at my feeble jokes, so I went on. "Sounds to me as if what you need is two aspirin tablets and a tourniquet. Bring the leg in to me tomorrow. We have a three-legged centaur that needs a transplant." And so on. I mean feeble. But she laughed at me till I ran out; and then I said, "But how come no time? You got a job?"
    "I give some lessons."
    I couldn't remember what instrument she played. It would be uncool to ask. "You like it?"
    She shrugged and made a face. "Oh, well, it's music," she said. Like people say, "Oh, well, it's a living." But the implication is different.
    "That's what you want to be, a music teacher?"

    "No," she said, the way she'd said "Bah."
    "No teacher. Just music."
    She was so fierce she sounded like Tarzan, but it wasn't directed at me, exactly. She had a nice voice, clear and soft, with that fierceness in it. I went into an ape act. "No teacher. Urgh, urgh, kill teacher. Good teacher, yum yum. No teacher. Good tummy, fat, full of teacher." Natalie said, "Teacher lousy, all bones!" The man across the aisle was giving us Send to Siberian Prison Camp Look No. 12. That kind of look can create a bond between you. "What are you going in for?" Natalie asked.
    "Urgh, urgh, professional gorilla. Taking Advanced Grooming now, in Home Ec," and I showed her how to groom my knapsack and eat the fleas neatly. Then I said, "I'm going to be a teacher." That seemed funnier for some reason than the ape act, and we both laughed.

    "Honest?"
    "No, I