Today, I had grand endeavors to work on blog posts, brainstorm on ideas, and read (just started Dave Eggers' A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius--so far so good), but really, I just sat there, ate my cereal, and scrolled through Facebook. I have determined that Facebook is the ultimate time passer, an endless font of knowledge on childhood friends and people you otherwise would never remember, much less think about. Recently, I found someone on Facebook I had met over a summer in 1999. A few weeks ago, a girl I went to college with randomly found me. Because of Facebook, I have been able to keep in touch with people I would never have the discipline to do so otherwise (admittedly).
But what do you do when someone you want to find isn't on Facebook? If you were me, you wake up at four in the morning and e-stalk them.
And of all the people I would love to find out more about, it would be Marshall. Anyone who has known me for some amount of time will inevitably hear my stories about Marshall. And now you will too.
When I was 16, I met Marshall outside of the principal's office on my first day at a new high school in order to get my student ID card. Marshall came up next to me and asked if he was at the right place for schedule changes. I had no clue, could barely find any of the classrooms I needed to be in that day, but even if I did know, I probably couldn't have formed coherent words at the sight of him: threadbare T-shirt, equally tattered jeans with a wall of muscles underneath both, and a baseball cap with the words "WHITE BOY" scrawled in sloppy chalk across the front. White boy indeed. When he reached up to wipe his sweaty brow, his bicep flickered.
And so it began, the two-year long, obsessive, unhealthy "relationship" I held with Marshall in my head. Nights were spent thinking about him. Love letters and horrifically embarrassing poems were written, ones that included words like 'beloved' (with an accent on the second 'e' for dramatic effect) and 'forbade.'
To complicate things, we eventually, actually became friends, and I learned how to turn my (perceived) love for him into friendship, sublimate my lust into, well, I don't know what, but it wasn't lust. OK, it wasn't just lust.
Alright, fine, it was totally lust, the all-consuming, crazy kind where I dreamt about him regularly and would have given my left leg just to see him shirtless. And I did eventually see him shirtless, and I'm still bipedal, so I'll let you fill in the blanks on that one. (I promise it will be more exciting than what actually happened.)
So anyway, I became that gay kid in high school with the great (mis?)fortune of actually being friends with my impossible straight crush. Not to say that we were close or anything, but he did write more than "Keep in touch. Have a nice summer!" in my yearbook. That says something, right?
Truth is, Marshall and I kind of became this odd couple. He was a stoner who hung out with other slacker-types kicking a hacky-sack around during lunch while I was in as many AP classes as I could find and had two girls and a foreign exchange student from New Zealand as lunch companions to gab about magazine articles and boys with. Marshall and I rarely saw each other during the day, but met every afternoon in the library to walk home together.
People picked up on it, of course, and a few even approached me about it. One girl wanted me to pass a note to him, no doubt some love letter or horrifically embarrassing poem. I told her that he already had a
By the time we graduated, he and I had gone on numerous "man dates," from playing miniature golf together to dinners at the restaurant I worked at. He really did become a friend, but as things often go, we lost touch after a few years and I have not thought of him much since (honest!).
But of course, every now and again, I would see him in something Sam does (who, really, is like an older, gay version of Marshall), or something would happen and I would feel compelled to tell a story about him. I'm convinced that when I'm in my 60s, I'll be just like Rose from The Golden Girls.
Anyway, when I first joined Facebook, he was one of the first people I looked up. "No results found." And I let it go at that. But in the quiet of this morning, while Sam was at the gym and Grr napped on the couch, with nothing else to do (at least nothing that I could concentrate on as I mentally debated whether or not I should just go back to bed), I underwent a much more comprehensive search.
Turns out that Marshall is a teacher now with an advanced degree in pure mathematics, whatever that is. I even managed to find one picture of him (in all of the internet, I only managed to find one), and he is as I remember him.
So I'd say those were 45 minutes well-spent.
(The more I read this post, the more it seems like it was nothing but an excuse to talk about Marshall. Probably true.)
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