Advertisement
It's four o'clock on a weekday afternoon, and fourteen-year-old Joe Reilly is hunched over the computer. It's in the living room of his Edison, New Jersey, home, where his mom can keep an eye on him. "She's not always watching me - I can do what I want," says Joe, simultaneously chatting and typing away. "And my dad will look over my shoulder and try and read my conversations. He's making sure I'm not on any dirty sites." Joe is wearing Dada sneakers, a baggy Hawaiian shirt and long shorts, all of which he bought on one of his trips to the Menlo Park Mall, which he tries to visit at least twice a month. "I used to play Little League on Saturday afternoon," he says, eyes fastened to the computer screen. "Now I usually go to the mall." He has glasses, and the tips of his hair are bleached blond, like many of his classmates at Thomas Jefferson Middle School. Joe's three sisters, Kristen, Jen and Courtney, pass in and out of the room, idly watching a home video of a recent prom. The front door is open, to the sound of the nearby highway. "You don't notice it after a while," Joe says. He is in a mellow mood today. This is not always the case. "Right now I'm doing good, but if I have a bad day, I just flip out," he says. He thinks part of the reason is that he was recently diagnosed with the Epstein-Barr virus, which makes him "extra moody." After an outburst at school, he decided to take an anger-management class that his school offers. "I went myself because I was a little off the wall," he recalls. "I put myself there because my temper is out of control. I do it to the extreme, like yelling at teachers."
Joe has found the course helpful. "It's good to talk about stuff," he reasons. "My group has, like, seven people. They tell us to talk about things that are bothering us." The only downside, says Joe, is that "there are so many groups that have so many different problems, that the crisis counselor who does the course is overloaded." He laughs. "He's, like, fried out."
Joe types furiously. His buddy list, 129 strong, is divvied up by gender. Boys 2/49, Girls 7/79, Fags 0/1. Hmm. Who would that be? "A kid I don't like," says Joe darkly. "He's on my shit list." Hours can slip away as he Instant Messages friends on his list. "I'd say I'm online at least two hours a day probably," he says. "I guess that's a lot. But on the phone, you only have three-way. On AOL, you can talk to more people at once." He and his online community talk about the usual stuff: how school "sux" ("Some of my teachers have potential bitchiness"), who likes who, the latest gossip.
"He's on a lot," observes his mother, Donna, a pretty brunette. "At least four hours. He does it after school, then he eats dinner, then he gets back on, then I scream at him to go take a shower."
Now Joe is Instant Messaging his friend Derek Gianakas about a teacher. "I'm going to put a bag of crap on her doorstep," Derek writes.
"And put it under her tires," Joe types.
"It's going to steam," writes Derek. And so forth.
"He's the only one that gets on the computer," says Kristen.
"Shuddup!" Joe yells.
Joe checks out a few Web sites (Diehard Wrestling, Pontiac Firebird, Iguana.com, Fireworks.com), then escapes to his mostly black-and-white bedroom. In there, he has a murky aquarium, an array of wrestling trophies on a shelf, framed baseball photos and a pile of demolition-derby tapes, a particular passion of Joe and his dad. Funny and self-assured, Joe is known for being a bit of a smart aleck at school - the kind who makes teachers laugh against their better judgment. He gets a variety of grades - "everything from a B to an F," he says.
When he gets older, Joe says, he wants to be a pro football player. "That would be awesome as hell," he says. "Just the idea of going out there and hitting everyone." He tells me about a recent game. "I just went out and hit this kid. I just hit him as hard as I could - so hard that I just saw a flash of white. You got to make an example."
Joe doesn't have a girlfriend at the moment. "When do I have time?" he says, flopping on the bed. "Weekends, I'm busy. Saturdays, I got practice, and sometimes I got games. Most of the time I'm dead tired, and I just hang out with friends."
At a time when boy culture has gotten ruder and ruder (Eminem, Jackass, Freddy Got Fingered), it's harder for boys to just be boys. On the one hand, modern boyhood contains more and more elements that were traditionally the province of girls: group shopping, excessive concern with appearance in the form of hair dye, brand names and dieting. Guys are now encouraged to talk about their feelings like never before - one boy from Joe's class, Mike Manfre, says that he freely cries in front of his family. On the other hand, boys are constantly exposed to the trappings of thug culture: violence, pumped physiques and a free-floating, quick-to-ignite anger.
Boyhood is a constantly swinging pendulum between two opposites. Call it the Limp Bizkit-'N Sync principle. "Sometimes, like, some of them will act weirdly, overly sweet," says a pretty cheerleader at Joe's school. "I don't know, it gets annoying when guys act like girls should." This strange dichotomy is personified by Eminem, whom the boys from Thomas Jefferson worship. He's not only provocative and dirty, but also pumped and blond and cute - and, most significantly, a peer talking very openly about his emotions. Strip away all the violence and ugliness, and what you have is a vulnerable kid without a lot of choices in life, talking about how he feels.
Lord knows, adolescence is tough in any era. Most of the Edison boys, God bless them, were in the throes of it: operatic voice changes, braces, epic zits, sometimes all three at once. I asked one of the triply blessed if he had a girlfriend. "I'm keeping my options open," he said, his options conjuring up the image of a vast, open field with the occasional tumbleweed scuttling by. I spent a lot of time in the boys' rooms. I went bowling and headed to the mall. I even went to the eighth-grade dance. The guys were, on the whole, sweet, shy, awkward and, often, very sophisticated and self-aware. With some of them, it was disturbingly easy to forget that they were thirteen.
"I don't think it's that we're more angry," Michael Constanza says. "I just think we show it more. We let you know that we're angry. And the way we rebel now is a lot bigger than it was back then." He uses music as an example. "The stuff we have is a lot edgier than the stuff my dad rebelled with," he says. "My dad called the Beatles rebelling." He shrugs. "Right now, you'd just call them a pop band."
It was true that some of the boys did indeed feel isolated. "People know me, but they don't know me," says Raysel Martinez one sunny afternoon as we sit on the steps of his apartment building. "When I look into myself, I don't like what I see at all. I hate it. I analyze things too much. I don't know how to explain it." He pauses. "Can I think about it for, like, a minute or something?" Sure. We sit quietly. "I know why," he says suddenly. "It's because I can't talk to people. I can have, like, normal, shallow conversations, but after that it's hard to keep it going." He sighs. "So many of my friendships have stopped because I couldn't talk to them anymore. Something is barring me from expressing myself more than I would like to. I'm scared of rejection." Jeez. This is what passes for emotionally inarticulate these days? Paging Oprah!
"A lot of people don't know who I really am," says Tim Langan, talking about his lack of feelings with such...feeling. "They just judge me by how I look. I wish people would see who I am instead of what I appear to be."
There were a few consistencies among all of the guys. They all loved rap music, going online, sports and Sony PlayStation. Only a couple of people in the eighth grade, they say, have Done It. Of much more importance to them were their relationships with their friends. Each of them, at one point or another, also stressed his individuality, carefully clinging to a subphylum of whatever he perceived as the norm and maintaining that he was immune to the opinions of others. I heard more than a few Eminem-like "Fuck all y'all" speeches. "I really don't care what other people think of me," says Derek Gianakas. "Other people's opinions are irrelevant. I'm self-dependent, because I know where I want to go in life, so I listen to myself only."
"Everyone in school has their little Caesar haircut," says Peter Lipson. "I had the cut, and I was like, 'I'm gonna grow my hair out.' " He waves his hand dismissively. "Even when everyone had it combed down, I had it all messed up and everything."
Edison, New Jersey, is named after its most famous resident, Thomas Alva Edison, whose profile is only slightly higher than that of the town's other well-known alum, Susan Sarandon. Edison had a research laboratory in town from 1876 to 1886. Christie Street in Edison was the first electrified street in the nation. Back in the day, says town historian and self-described "cesspool of trivia" Dave Sheehan, "there was not too much industry in Edison until the 1950s. Then along comes some Army installations, and Revlon moved here, and Westinghouse and S&H Green Stamps." With industry came an influx of new citizens lured by jobs, low taxes and a speedy half-hour train commute from Manhattan.
Up until that time, says Sheehan, the town's ethnic makeup was "primarily like the rest of New Jersey: Dutch and English." Then in 1956, a wave of Hungarians fleeing communist rule came to Edison and took over a small Army post called Camp Kilmer. In 1982, the town was host to another wave of immigrants, this time Gujarati Indians who had been living in Uganda. "These were well-to-do people, many of whom had medical and educational backgrounds," says Sheehan.
Indeed, the town is now truly multicultural, and despite its proximity to New York City, it has an appealingly small-town feel to it: well-tended lawns, kids' baseball games that are swarming with parents. "I love living here," says Mike Manfre. "I don't know why. I just love Edison."
It should be pointed out that not everyone has welcomed their new Indian neighbors, who are the source of occasional tension as the citizens of Edison adjust to the new town order. "They, like, stay with their own," says one local boy. "Like, at the lunch table they sit with five other Indians. They're, like, very quiet and really shy and everything." Indeed, it was impossible to interview any of these kids - either they said no or their parents did. Ankur Patel has achieved crossover status, but he is one of the few. "I hang out with everyone," he says. He theorizes that Indian kids are timid "probably because they don't want to share their differences with other people. They might be embarrassed."
Or maybe they don't feel especially welcome. "Oh, my God, I have no clue why they keep to themselves," says Derek Gianakas, reached by phone after school. As he speaks, there is a pronounced delay, as if he is calling from Australia, because he is simultaneously chatting online. "You'll be like, 'Hi' to them and they'll, like, cry or something. Their parents must be like, 'You cannot talk to white people' or something. They, like, have a leash on them. They just sit there and do nothing."
"They smell too much," says another boy. "I live near an Indian neighborhood. Some of them I talk to, but most I don't."
Michael Constanza shuts his bedroom door against intruders. "I don't come out of my room a lot," he says. A thoughtful, intelligent boy who writes song lyrics and poetry, Michael is the sort of guy who is somewhat out of step in middle school but will be the king of his small liberal-arts college. He has braces and expressive eyes and wears tan cargo pants and a blue sweater. His room is papered with James Bond posters, and Bond figurines line his dresser. Leisure-time pursuits include a thirty-two-inch TV, a Nintendo, a VCR, a phone with his own line and a stereo. All the kids have TVs in their rooms. ("Of course," snorts Joe Reilly. "We even have a TV in the kitchen.")
Michael moved to Edison about a year and a half ago and still feels a little lost. "If you asked the kids about me, either they wouldn't know who I was, or they'd say, 'Oh, yeah, him,'" he says.
("He's quiet," says Peter Lipson.)
"If you asked the teachers," says Michael, "they'd say, 'He's a good kid, but he doesn't try hard enough.'"
("Michael? He's really smart, but he doesn't try hard enough," says teacher Julia Delahunty.)
Michael continues to find his way with a group of good friends. "It was easier being a little kid," he says. "You don't think about anything, it doesn't matter." When you are thirteen, Michael has discovered, everything matters. "It's a pain, because you start to see how bad people are in general. You just start hating people a lot more." It is hard to weather his ever-changing moods. "One day you're ecstatic, the next day you're depressed," he says, slapping a Robbie Williams disc on the CD player. "I think I'm really sensitive to stuff, so if I see something that upsets me - the things people say, the things people do - I can get extremely angry about it real fast." For instance, the other day a friend blew him off to hang out with someone else, and he was hurt. Michael is convinced that he feels this sort of thing more deeply than others do. "Other people think about it, then they just toss it out of their minds like it's nothing the next day," he says. Constantly he broods over his social situation at school. Girls, in particular, can be "heartless." Why do they always go for the assholes? Why must he, Michael, be penalized for being sensitive and empathetic?
He finds solace in his poetry and song lyrics, which he has posted online.
A selection, from "Not Here":
But the words on my face say "Do not dare"
I'm not much to look at, why should you care?
Is it that I'm needy or try so hard?
Or are the feathers ready and I've just been tarred?
Could it be that I'm just not here?
Am I just not here?
There is a soft knock at the door. Mike Constanza Sr., a mortgage realtor, pops his head in the bedroom. "Do you need anything?" he asks. "A drink or something? Want to go in the living room?"
"We're fine," says Mike Jr., tersely.
His father shuts the door. "I don't care how nice he seems," says Michael. "My dad's a psycho. He's not violent, but he is messed up in the head. Not like Static-X messed up. More like Johnny Rzeznik messed up." He gives an example. "Like, the other day, we both, like, dyed our hair?" (Permit an interjection here: This is not an uncommon father-son activity. Mike Manfre and his father both recently shaved their heads.)
Michael Constanza and his father are both film buffs. "We have a huge collection of movies downstairs," he says. They share CDs, too. "Me and my dad were watching a Goo Goo Dolls video," he says. "We were talking about how the bass player had a normal life and Johnny Rzeznik's was totally messed up. We were like, that's why all his songs were good, and the bass player's were mostly bad."
Despite Michael's claims that his dad is a psycho, he says, "I love my dad. He's who I look up to. We really only spend time playing guitar, when he teaches me songs." He thinks for a minute. "He tries a little too hard sometimes, but I appreciate it." In the meantime, Michael will try as best he can to navigate his way through school. He is neither optimistic nor pessimistic about his future. "It's weird," he says. "I don't see a glass half empty or half full." He shrugs. "I just see a glass."
Derek Gianakas and his sidekick Ryan Belford are slouched on a couch in front of the TV, deep in a game of Tekken on the PlayStation. Their eyes are blankly fastened to the screen; the only sound is the ticka ticka ticka of the controllers. Derek, a baseball star who is a source of fear among the younger kids, and of jealousy and irritation among his friends because of his impressive pecs, is wearing jeans, a dark-blue shirt and a crucifix necklace. His brown eyes are simultaneously hooded and watchful. Ryan, smaller and bespectacled, has the bleached-blond hair that is common among the male population of Thomas Jefferson Middle School.
"Hey," says Derek, eyes on the screen. He likes any and all video games. "Pretty much any game I try," he says. "Except gay games like Barney."
"Gay" is a generic insult, rampant among the eighth-grade population. "It doesn't mean guy on guy," says classmate Bobby Jordan. "It's just means that something's, you know, uncool." If Derek doesn't have sports practice after school, he will listen to music ("Eminem's the man") or play one of his ten video games. Derek's mom, Arlene, an attractive blonde who keeps a close eye on her son, walks by with some laundry. She works at home, selling candles. "The child sits on the computer, he listens to the radio through the computer, he has the phone on his ear, he's typing, talking to somebody, he'll have the TV on." She shakes her head. "He has it all going at once."
Derek, like most kids his age, is a savvy consumer. "They are extremely aware of how valuable they are," says Jeff Kaufman, vice president of research and planning at MTV. "You can't pull the wool over their eyes," he says, laughing. "In fact, sometimes, when we're testing a show, we'll say, 'What do you think?' And they'll say, 'Well, I can see what MTV is trying to do here. If they air it in the right time slot, after the right lead-in, they'll probably get the target demographic they're going after.'"
Derek's dad, who manages a bookstore in Newark, New Jersey, will sometimes join Derek at the PlayStation. "There's a few things I won't do with my dad, like go to the mall," Derek says.
"Tell her why you won't bring your father," Arlene yells from the kitchen.
Derek grins, eyes still fixed on the TV. "He doesn't know how to dress. Like, I'll match my boxers with my shirt, but my dad will throw everything on." Ticka ticka ticka.
Raysel Martinez lives with his mom, his two aunts, his grandparents and his sister, Saira. "I love having so many people around," he says happily. Raysel's folks are divorced, so he visits his dad on weekends. "It's boring," he says. "My dad doesn't have cable." Raysel is tall and handsome, with a frequent smile, shy brown eyes and a slightly worried expression. We are sitting on the stoop of his apartment building. An extremely bright student, Raysel wants to be an ambassador to the United Nations. "I love diplomatic affairs," he says, hustling off the stoop to help his grandma bring in some groceries. "I don't know, maybe that sounds weird for a kid." Raysel excels in math and science but thinks that history is "the most pointless subject," he scoffs. "It's in the past. Like the Holocaust, that stuff is recent, that's important. But stuff like Egyptian civilization? Who cares how they built those pyramids?" Back to the stoop. Raysel waves to a group of girls across the apartment courtyard. "I love female friends," he says. "They're the easiest to talk to. You can tell them anything, they won't tell anybody. Guys, they'll blurt it out the first chance they get." He is friends with a slew of girls and has a girlfriend as well, but he doesn't consider himself attractive, despite being boy-band cute.
"All the cute boys get the girls, and I can't stand it," he says quietly.
"Because I don't find myself cute." He stares off into the distance. "I think I'm ugly," he blurts out. "I guess it's my face. It's ugly. I want to be, like, a heartthrob. That would be the best. The girls love Derek, because he's cute and because of his body."
Raysel is not alone in fretting about his appearance, which is the premise of The Adonis Complex, a recent book which argues that in the past couple of decades, males have been under increasing pressure to achieve physical perfection, resulting in a new, and often harmful, obsession with their looks. Cry me a freakin' river, right, ladies? Consider, however, that forty percent of Americans who suffer from compulsive-eating binges are men, and that a 1997 study found that a full forty-five percent of men were unhappy with their muscle tone - nearly double the percentage discovered in the same survey in 1972.
Robert Olivardia, one of the book's three authors, says that younger teens are especially vulnerable to unhappiness about their looks, because they are essentially surrounded by a sea of pecs. A flotilla of beefcake in teen movies every time they turn on the TV or go to the movies. Even the music world, traditionally a haven for less-than-attractive men, has put a premium on appearance. Say Dire Straits came into popularity this year. Could they get their video on MTV? How about Genesis? Styx? Journey? The Ramones? "Male artists in music videos are showing a lot more skin," says Olivardia. "If you look at D'Angelo's 'Untitled' - where his basically naked body is showing through most of the video - Lenny Kravitz, Mark McGrath of Sugar Ray, Red Hot Chili Peppers - Anthony Kiedis in particular - there is more pressure on men to look a certain way."
"Everywhere you turn," says Peter Lipson, another eighth-grader from Thomas Jefferson Middle School, "people on TV, billboards, ads - you see all these guys who are in great shape, and you think, 'I want to be like that.' People equate success with a good body."
Perhaps unsurprisingly, steroid use has exploded among younger teens. A recent Monitoring the Future study showed that about one in forty boys in the eighth grade has tried steroids, which are easy to get online ("Welcome to Affordable Anabolic Steroids!" trumpets one Web site). The less bold, says Olivardia, go for weight-gaining powders. "The products often sport names like anabolic something or other, which give the illusion that they are like steroids, and they cost an incredible amount of money for what you get, and, for the most part, those products aren't regulated by the FDA, so these boys are taking products that could mess up their systems."
Boys are bulking up, says Olivardia, because "they equate muscularity with masculinity. When you hit puberty, it's very important to establish yourself as masculine."
Among the Edison guys, Derek is an object of envy because he is built. He plays baseball, basketball and soccer, and lifts three days a week. "I, like, never have a day off," he says. "It helps me with sports. And girls. But that's not the reason I do it. The girls mostly say stuff to me, like, 'You're hot.' Whatever. 'You have big muscles.' "
This burgeoning obsession with being ripped is a tad paradoxical, considering that for every kid who looks like Justin Timberlake, there are twenty who look like Fred Durst. These are kids growing up in an era when the average household has four remote controls, and eighty percent of boys watch television every day.
"The percentage of overweight children has doubled since the late Sixties," says Gregg Hartley, a vice president at the Sporting Goods Manufacturing Association. "After smoking, physical inactivity is the single largest health-risk factor in the country - only one in three kids have physical activity every day." In fact, the American Association for a Child's Right to Play estimates that forty percent of the nation's 160,000 public schools have eliminated recess or are considering doing so.
Doctors say that overweight kids are at least partly the result of the Internet and the mushrooming of cable-TV channels, as well as a mind-boggling array of processed foods now available to these kids. A recent development in the food industry is IncrEdibles' microwaveable mac 'n' cheese, on a stick. You eat it push-pop-style.
"People are getting lazier," says Mike Manfre. "Like, my friend has a paper shredder. I'm like, 'Why don't you just cut the paper up yourself?' Most people don't even work out, they just take Metabolite pills and expect it to slim them off or something. And they have that Priceline.com where people can just order their groceries from home." The refreshingly old-school Manfre shakes his head. "Too much free time," he says.
What scares you?
Ankur Patel: When I have to make individual presentations and stuff.
Joe Molinaro: Getting kidnapped. There's this guy who lives near us in these apartments who would follow my brother in his car. My brother told a DARE officer, but I'm afraid it's going to start again.
Michael Constanza: Being alone. I have a really big fear lately of being alone, and needing to be needed. It's probably just the puberty thing.
Peter Lipson IS having a little trouble bowling today. He has been playing a ton of baseball lately. "Ten games straight, in ten days," he says, aiming a ball toward a few errant pins. He has been a Little League all-star every summer since he was eight. "I don't go on vacation or anything," he says.
Peter wears blue shorts, Adidas shell toes and an American Eagle shirt. Short, dark and handsome, he is smart, intuitive and remarkably perceptive for his age. He and his brother and sister live with his mom, who works at a dispatching company, and his dad, a sales rep for R.J. Reynolds. Even though they have been divorced for a few years, Peter's parents now live together. His mom, Mel, is saving up to buy a new house. "It feels weird," says Peter. "It feels like, 'Wow, my parents are in the same house,' but I know they're not together. I'd rather have it just the way it used to be." He looks wistful. "Like when we visited him every weekend." He thinks that most kids do not want to follow in their folks' career paths. "Some kids want to if their dads have a really cool job," he says. "Like, one of my friend's dads is a police captain." He takes a pull of Snapple. "But I want to be, like, real famous. I know every kid does." He wants to be a chef. "They get paid good money, and it's a really respectable job for a guy. Wolfgang Puck, Bobby Flay, Emeril - you get your own cooking show."
Peter's main passion, aside from baseball, is the WWF. He and his buddies convene at each other's houses to watch all of the pay-per-view events. "I just watch it all the time," he says. "I see my mom's soap operas, and I don't understand it, but when I watch wrestling I see that it's the same thing. They have scenarios - it's just funny. You try to predict what they're going to do next."
Melissa Fernandez, whom we find at the Menlo Park Mall with Mike Manfre and Bobby Jordan, has another typically nontraditional family setup. She and her brother live with her mom and her stepdad, but her father frequently comes over. "But my dad and my stepdad are, like, best friends," she says. "They go everywhere together. They share their cars. It's the weirdest thing." Melissa, who has long, curly hair, sparkly nails and an appealingly blunt way of speaking, takes a tray at the food court to get some dubious Chinese food. "My friend lives with her mom, dad, brother and little sister, her mom's boyfriend, her dad's girlfriend and some other dude that I don't even know who it is, and they all live in the same house."
We amble around the mall. "I hate this town," Melissa announces. "There is nothing to do here at all." Aimlessly, we head for Foot Locker. I pick up some Adidas shoes, and they surround me. "That's played," says Melissa. Moving on to Bobby's favorite store, Lids, an emporium of baseball caps. A gaggle of goth kids wafts by. "Issues," Melissa snorts. Bobby buys a cap with a wad of cash. A recent study of almost 9,000 kids ages twelve to sixteen revealed that their average weekly allowance was a startling fifty bucks. No joke. They don't get it working at Burger King, either. In these status-conscious times, suburban middle-class teenagers who are willing to work in fast-food restaurants are becoming a rarity.
"I wouldn't work in, like, McDonald's," says Bobby. "I mean, no offense, but I wouldn't do it." His career path is already established anyway. When Bobby gets older, he wants to be a singer. "I like 'N Sync," he says. "Because they have the best life. They're all young, they all have mad money, and all the girls sweat them, and they do something that's fun and that they enjoy doing."
"All I know is, I don't want to live in New Jersey," declares Melissa.
The eighth-grade dance starts promptly at seven, but at 7:20, not a single student has arrived. Held in the cafeteria of Thomas Jefferson Middle School, it would seem that everything is good to go: There are two DJs, sparkly decorations ("Forever starts tonight" is the theme) and PTO moms dispensing doughnuts and soda. Where the hell is everybody?
"They're all milling around out there," says PTO mom Arlene Gianakas, stationed at a folding table near the door. "No one wants to be the first one in."
Outside the school, there are at least a hundred kids, standing in knots, furtively glancing at each other. The guys are self-consciously dressed down - baggy chinos, baggy plaid short-sleeved shirts. They shove each other, they whisper. The girls, meanwhile, could have stepped from the court of Versailles: towering hairdos, glittery makeup (professionally done, in some cases), and more sequins, beads and sparkles than a Divas Live special. "Heels suck!" screeches one, stumbling in hers. "I want to be a guy!" No one is still. The whole lawn in front of the school is boiling with movement. Ross Capaccio, the school principal for eight and a half years, watches the proceedings with a benign eye, as a group of girls greet each other, shrieking and falling into each other's arms. "This is traditional," he says dryly. "They like to talk like they never saw each other before." Capaccio, a veteran of many dances, can see that it is up to him to get this party started. He begins to shoo the students into the building like errant chickens. "They won't come in otherwise," he says bemusedly. Capaccio generally refrains from dancing, although he will occasionally bust a move around the girls to embarrass them. "Mostly I try to stay out of the way," he says.
The students cautiously make their way in. The girls tower over the guys. 'N Sync's "Bye Bye Bye" blares from the cafeteria. As the room fills up, I recognize some of the boys, who mass together against the wall. They do not come near me. Groups of girls start to dance together to Blink-182. The temperature of the room rises, as does a queasy cocktail of gum, perfume, nervous BO, hair products and hormones. After an hour, one boy finally approaches me: Joe Reilly. "Hey," he says. He is having a pretty good time. "All the other dances are gay, because the sixth-graders are there, and the DJs suck," he says. Derek Gianakas slips by. "I asked the DJ to play Slipknot, and he said no," he shouts to Joe. "He'll still play 'Slim Shady,' though," Joe shouts back. Joe gestures over to the guys, most of whom are still not dancing. "You stick with your friends, so you don't look like a retard," he explains.
A gentlemanly Joe suggests refreshments, so we make our way to the miniature food court, set up by PTO moms. There are brownies on little paper plates, and bags of chips.
"Want a soda?" says Joe, proffering a Dixie cup. No, thanks. "It's free," he points out. OK then. It is hot in here. In fact, the room is spinning a little, for the eighth-grade dance has not changed one iota in decades, except for the music. The festival of awkwardness. The PTO moms. There's even a girl crying in the bathroom over a guy, right on schedule. Most of all, there's the disproportionate number of girls dancing together.
Suddenly, Capaccio makes his way through the crowd to a couple who are dirty dancing to a song by Usher. "Whoa!" he barks. "Whoa!" They disentangle themselves, giggling.
At this stage in the game, there isn't much actual sex, but there is a lot of fooling around.
"Most people in our grade are virgins," says a girl we will call X. "They just kind of fool around at parties and the movies. The guys say they have sex, but I highly doubt that any of them really know. I'm like, 'You guys don't do anything.' "
"Guys my age, I hate them all," says a girl for our purposes named Y. "They're just . . . gay. So immature. They ask, 'Can I grab your boobs?' Stuff like that." She mentions one of the guys. "He looks innocent, but he's not. He's a virgin, but this past summer he probably fingered three girls in two weeks. He fingered two girls in one day! One girl didn't even like him, it was just spur of the moment."
"I don't like girls my own age," says a guy we will call Z, who is popular with the ladies. "They're scared. They're just prudes. They'll kiss you, but they won't do anything else. 'I'm not ready,' they say." The precocious Z hooks up with girls on a regular basis, usually at their houses. "Parents? I don't care," he says. He sneaks into their rooms at night, or goes downstairs to the den, where parents fear to tread. "Usually you just, like, do whatever, and then you get the hell out."
"I think girls are the same as guys, but the girls don't show it," says Y. "They say, 'You're so nasty,' but they're thinking about the same thing."
"Guys are mad hornier, though," says Z. His formula is fairly simple. Compliments work well, he says, particularly the surefire "You're hot." He has no fear about approaching girls at the mall and asking them to go to the movies. He doesn't pay, however, because they are not "going out," they are "hanging out." Big difference. They make out at the movies, then he will go to the girl's house to continue doing Everything But, or he will take his quarry to his friend's house. "His parents are never home, ever, so I bring girls there," he says. "He could commit murder and hide someone in his basement, and no one would find out for years."
Z attributes his sexual confidence to his parents. "They say, 'If you want to do something, just go out and do it.'" He laughs. "Although they were definitely thinking about sports and stuff."
This is the first generation of kids for which the influence of their folks is just as powerful and unconscious as that of pop culture - a complex, endless and purely sensational bombardment: Video games! Hip-hop! MTV! Big-budget movies! The Internet! It's amazing to find that despite all the competition, parents are closer than ever with their kids - they understand them better and share more common ground. For the first time in American history, teenagers can't reasonably say, "My parents don't understand me." Yet they still find a way to do so. Such is the genius of adolescence.
Just ask Joe Reilly Sr., a forty-two-year-old mechanic. Here's what he says about his son's 129-person buddy list: "He probably doesn't even know two of them. Every one of these kids has, like, three or four, I don't know what you call 'em, but different alibis, you know? One minute Joey's a nineteen-year-old, six-foot-four, 210-pound bodybuilder. His one friend Jake, on his profile, one of his things is, 'If you have a problem with me, you have a serious problem.' He's a sixty-pound worm, you know what I mean?"
On the generation gap: "I don't know. It's a different world. I grew up in the Sixties and Seventies. Now, everybody wants to talk in Ebonics. You know what I mean? And that's cool. They want to get into the rap and the ghetto stuff. I tell Joey he's a wanna-be. All the kids are like that when you talk to them, but half of them don't know what they're talking about. Just like we didn't."
[From Issue 872 — July 5, 2001]