Taking Part
Rejection as a Means of Individuation
On stage, a different sort of performance had begun.
Adam and Scott, mumbling with funny voices in the argot they had created, The Holy Language of Kazoobalib, walked up on either side of MacGill, scrutinized him wide-eyed, and swiped him with the backs of their hands several times.
"Gizba!" wheezed Adam.
"Zabbaba," Scott croaked.
MacGill and Cecilia, Ellen and Nicole, Nick and even Rudy then took park in the bizarre and primal rite. For the next several minutes all of them jumped and danced around the stage squealing strange, nonsensical utterances, jostling one another and leaping with loud, wild animal howls, bursting their bonds—the restrictions and regulations of the Skinner box called public school—as easily as sloughing off a dead skin.
For a moment, Daniel was not at all in the mood to play along. Instead, he took up the role of Romeo, isolating himself between the curtains and continuing his moody mulling. For a moment, the others all seemed false to him, attention-seeking improvisers playing the silly role of spontaneous free spirits. Then, as though finding himself unexpectedly in costume, he looked down his arms and body and saw the selfsame costume slip away. And he felt suddenly absurd and pathetic hiding in the wings, enacting the role of Romeo regretful of his love's labours lost on Rosaline, as though shuttering the windows was just a way to broadcast that he was waiting for someone to notice his absence. His fawning pose struck him as more ridiculous than even prancing lunacy. So when Cecilia, her twisted tendrils flying and her long hippy skirts held up by one hand, leapt toward him to grab his arm and pull him into their whirling, shrieking circle, Daniel let himself dissolve into the self-obliterating ring. He removed the lovelorn-poet's tragic mask and replaced it with that of the comic and lighthearted carnival reveler. The torrents of perpetual worry within him were swept away almost at once, the end-of-the-day onstage masquerade carrying him off, away from himself. Like a blissful drunkenness, the antic rite dispersed him amongst the others and reminded him that as much as he was condemned to a certain type of solitude, he was not alone.
"Droon dadoob blurv!" Adam yelled.
Scott pretended to be a dog, barking and jumping up to hump Ellen's leg. MacGill clung onto Cecilia's arm, pretending to be a two-toed sloth.
"Bahoora!" bellowed Nick, turning Nicole upside down.
"Schmingee!" Rudy tamely exclaimed.
"Droon dadoob arrg!" howled Daniel in response to them all.
If adolescence is about rejection rather than adherence, then "taking part" in adolescence comes not as joining in but almost exclusively in the form of "playing a part." Nick Early's reductio ad absurdum of a late-night comedy sketch, "I'm not myself, but I play me on TV," is as succinct an observation as one can make on the subject. And if being yourself sometimes feels like the dream in which you perform a role without knowing the lines, a young person has both the added disadvantage of working without a script and the rare opportunity to improvise the role. The best that most of us can do is crib our blocking notes on the back of our hand and practice our shticks as much as we can in the mirror and in front of our friends, who themselves serve as mirrors of a sort.
Adolescent friendship is a corollary to the habit of rejecting. It is based as much on finding one another enjoyable as it is on escaping or rebelling against common foes, be they family, teachers, or simply the condition of being old enough to hate not being old enough to do what you want. Yet to the young person, friendships seem to have a positive charge, an attraction—friends are the whole world. But the intensity of young relationships is the result of the virulence of the denial—one is part of a band of brothers only until another shift comes along and he realizes it was mostly circumstance that bound them. But for the time being, Daniel and his friends shared a common battlefield and this stage was, literally, its theater.
The communal sense of humor shared by Daniel and his friends, indeed their whole way of communicating with one another, was itself an elaborate theatrical production. Though in different ways, they desired in equal measure to be something other than what they were. And the stage proved the perfect environment for them because it saved them from the vacuum of improvisation. Theater gave them a solid script, allowed them to be well-defined persons and in places far from home, to speak in voices new and different. It helped to slake their thirst for things beyond their ken. On stage they could insist with greater credibility before peers and parents that they were not just gawky kids in ill-fitted, musty costumes, but the genuine article. Not only that, but everything framed by the proscenium arch was bigger, better, infused with meaning and importance, and within that arch each act was worthy of recognition and applause. Beneath that arch, performance and rejection came hand-in-hand: Denying whatever little thing it might be that they were, rejecting whatever sense of identity had been thrust upon them by circumstance, local identity, nationality, religion, language made them feel more real, alive.
In short, it made them special—and being special was, above all, what they longed for. If not to be special, why would MacGill, on the very day of his Confirmation, have ditched the trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit for that of Fantasy Novels, Girls, and Half-Baked Communism? If not to be special, why would Rudy put on adult airs, wearing those wrinkly pinstriped dress shirts and those clashing ties, letting his glasses slide to the end of his nose just so? Why would Adam and Scott compete with such ferocity to be acknowledged as the young Brando of the class? Why would Daniel have written sonnets to his Laura? In their strivings for significance, the sheer violence with which they rejected their condition distinguished them from other young persons their age—"mall-trawling Neanderthals" as Nick had dubbed them, a coinage he used often—and perhaps even let them see farther than their peers through the mist of otherness and difference, far enough to want to be something more than what they were and by the burning light of that desire eventually (but only eventually) to become their true selves. After all, who answers the casting call that decides our lot in life, we ourselves or Fate's exigencies? Who decides whether our character shall be the bit part or the lead? Should each not strive to write his own unique role and play it with his own measure of virtuosity? Although Adam, Scott, and MacGill were recognizably the best actors in the class, in one essential way Daniel was more theatrical than them all. While they all spent their weekdays performing on stage and their weekends playing Advanced Dungeons & Dragons and Warhammer, Ars Magica and other roleplaying games in secret (in Rudy's basement or at MacGill's once everyone had cleared out after a party—for surely they did not want anyone to know that they were such geeks after they'd strived so hard to be cool), Daniel's everyday life was a role-play. So when he read Mr. Marlborough's footnotes to his sonnets, it was not a teacher's hastily jotted notes to a fifteen-year-old that Daniel saw but Coleridgean marginalia on a manuscript of Wordsworth's. And the letter beneath Sonnet X was not merely girlish swirls of purple ink scribbled by the hand of his mentor's moon-faced fiancée, no!, but a missive from Louise Colet to Flaubert or from Lady Gregory to an exiled Joyce. Again, why did Daniel want to be a French-speaker, a Balbach, a Romantic poet if sameness were what he was after? He wanted to speak French because it was not his mother tongue—to be a Balbach because it meant not being the son and brother that he was—to be a poet because the majority of his classmates were more interested in baseball and the Beastie Boys—and to be a Romantic, to shower a girl in poetic praise, because therein he had touched upon something that seemed a path to becoming different, purer, better, transformed.
Any act is an imitation as well as a deception. And to protect himself during this dangerous period a young man of great sensitivity has little choice but to be pretentious. He wants to write the script himself, but in the meantime he must be content to plagiarize... From the first the entire act will ultimately still be less about expressing something than it is about denying everything—or at least denying just enough to allow the desert rose of the self bloom atop the dune of individuation. And bravo to the young actor who steals his lines but plays his well-borrowed self with faith and conviction—however doomed he may be one day to see through his own act. While Daniel occasionally glimpsed the artifice of his roles and poses, and remarked his personality-kleptomania, he did not yet feel the full impact of the strife that attends the search for significance. His dim insight was not nearly deep enough to bring the curtain down. But such a moment of realization would come soon enough, as it must for anyone who wishes to escape the play and embrace real life.