Party of One by Dave Holmes Read Free Book Online Page A

blond ringlets over his right eye, wearing a black turtleneck sweater. A leather satchel—a purse?—hung off his shoulder. “Ugh,” he said, sweeping his swoosh of hair off his forehead, “forgive me, I’m Frederick and I’m always late, I’m the
worst.
” He threw himself into an empty chair. “What have I missed?”
    Coming from an all-male high school where we expressed our masculinity by being terrified to stand out in any way, I had simply never seen a person like Frederick. He gesticulated wildly, turtleneck sleeves pulled far past his hands, like a hyperactive Muppet. He was proudly effeminate. He might as well have been from another planet. I was fascinated.
    We spent the first class getting to know one another, talking about what we liked to read and what we hoped to write and who we were. Conversations like children imagine grown-ups having. Frederick liked
Less Than Zero
—“Well, who
doesn’t
?” I said. I hadn’t read it yet—and wanted to write something real, raw, poetic. I was into John Cheever and wanted to write short stories. “I like your hair, Frederick,” said one of the North County girls. “You look like that guy from Simply Red.” And he did. “We’ll call you Simply Fred,” said another. He hid his face behind his turtleneck sleeves and laughed. “Oh, I hate it!” He loved it.
    Our first assignment was to walk to the nearby St. Louis Art Museum and look around. Get inspired. Find something we like and stare at it until it begins to look unfamiliar. Just go interact with art and meet back by the front door in an hour. When we got back, we got a project: write a story about what we’d just seen. If it was a portrait, tell that person’s life story. If it was a statue, make that person a character. If it was abstract, tell a story with the emotion that it made you feel. There were no wrong answers. I had literally never been told to do anything like this. I nearly cried, I was so happy.
    Ned and I were in heaven at Mark Twain. We consoled the drama kids through their weekly breakdowns. We read someone’s older sister’s issues of
Tatler.
We watched the dance class rehearse the piece they had choreographed about the Museum of Westward Expansion; these motherfuckers were
actually dancing about architecture
!
    We watched one boy from the dance class in particular, every day. Thick like a football player, but graceful. Masculine, yet, you know, in a dance class rehearsing a piece about a Mondrian painting. An ass and a pair of shoulders that were as exquisite as anything I’d seen at the museum. David. (No, I mean his
actual name
was David. But his resemblance to the statue was also not a thing you would miss.)
    Ned said: “Everyone here is beautiful.”
    I said: “I know.”
    “I mean, like, the women are amazing here. We should, like, let’s rate the women here.”
    “They’re all
so amazing.
”
    “But, like, on a secret scale. Like, just our thing. So nobody knows what we’re talking about.”
    “Totally.”
    “Should it be, like, numbers? No, numbers are banal. How about, like, breads?”
    “So…like, a scale of Wonder White to…rye? Something like that?”
    “Right. Except Wonder’s the bottom.”
    “I
love
Wonder Bread.” Ned gave me a look. I made a mental note: expand bread horizons.
    Ned made up his mind: “Let’s go cheese. Let’s do it on a cheese scale. Like, at the top is Gouda.”
    “Gouda.”
    “Yeah. Like, Ornella Muti from
Flash Gordon
is so
Gouda.
”
    “You think so?”
    “Oh, absolutely. I find Italian women far more attractive than American women.”
    So we settled on cheese as the scale we would use to talk about women, and we did it on a scale of Gouda to Velveeta, which was a betrayal of my own personal taste, because I loved Velveeta, and also because we were using this scale to rate women, which neither of us actually liked. But we did it a lot: Susanna Hoffs was Gouda; the other Bangles were mostly Swiss. Sandra Bernhard was