Tony: Part One
The very first boyfriend I had was in 8th grade, my second year of 8th grade to be exact. He was in 7th grade. I was 14 and he was 12.
His name was Tony. Okay, it wasn’t Tony. I’m the only character in these stories going by my actual name. The thing is his name was VERY Italian. I’m talking the combination of first and last name couldn’t get any more Italian if you covered it in pizza and set it to the Super Mario theme song. I can’t even imagine a more Italian name. We’ll just call him Anthony Piccolini. Even that made up silliness doesn’t sound AS Italian as this boy’s actual name. This is the best I could come up with though.
When I told my grandmother I had a boyfriend, she asked, “What’s his name?” I told her and she got this disgusted look on her face.
“He’s Italian?” she demanded.
I was dumbfounded. Of course he was Italian. This was when we still lived in New Jersey. Almost everybody in my high school was Italian.
“Yeah,” I said. “So what?’
She rolled her eyes and said, “I’d almost rather you date a black.”
I know that conversation was icky. Maybe it was hard to read. It felt important to include though. It had an effect on 14-year-old me. I don’t think I knew my grandparents were racist until then.
Do you remember that I called my stepdad Jose? Yes, my younger sisters are biracial. My grandparents love my sisters and are not racist towards them. However, if you were to ask them about Mexican people in general….
I don’t know what to say. Everyone has ugly things inside of them. Racism is an ugly thing inside of both of grandparents.
One thing about this conversation that really fucked me up was like…she was being racist against another type of white person. Italians. I didn’t even know that was a thing back then. I knew that some white people were racist and said awful things about black people and other groups of people that weren’t white. But this left me like…wait…white people have racist problems with other white people sometimes?
I tried asking her what was wrong with Italians, but she never told me. She just clicked her tongue and made vague statements like, “You’ll see what I mean, if you keep messing around with those Italians. They’re full of it. All of them.”
And I don’t know what exactly they were supposed to be full of.
It also confused me the way she said, “I’d almost rather you date a black.” Like there would be something wrong with that. I hadn’t seen my grandmother interact with many black people, but there was my dance teacher, Miss Cheryl. She was my jazz and Irish Step Dancing teacher. She was a major part of my childhood. She was in my life for years. Not only was she my dance teacher, seeing me several nights a week, but her stepdaughter Inez went to elementary school with me. Miss Cheryl and my grandmother would see each other at school functions and they always chatted and sat together. My grandmother was very friendly with her. Yet….the way she had said that, it was like she thought black people were bad. Even though she treated Miss Cheryl like anyone else.
“You’d better get out in that garage and practice, Jennifer. You want to disappoint Miss Cheryl? She works so hard to teach you the steps and you can’t even practice?”
“You give Miss Cheryl a hard time in class again today and we aren’t stopping for TCBY after. You’re gonna turn her hair gray if you don’t start acting like a decent child.”
“Go and give Miss Cheryl a hug. You aren’t going to see her until the end of the summer! Tell her thank you for the year of dance.”
So…yeah, I guess I didn’t understand cognitive dissonance back then, and that first time I heard my grandmother talk badly about black people and Italians, it fucked with my head a little. I didn’t really know what to make of it.
Well, let’s get back to Tony.
Not only was Tony very stereotypically Italian, but he was very stereotypically gay. He was incredibly flamboyant. He had the trademark lisp and everything.
So why was he dating me?
Because this was 2003. Kids still got bullied a fuck ton for being gay. Especially gay boys.
He surrounded himself with mean girls who would tell the boys to fuck off. Although I’m sure it didn’t save him entirely. I can’t imagine what the locker room must have been like for him.
In addition to having only female friends, he told people he was straight (when he was in a mood to gush about how hot a guy was, he’d pivot to calling himself bisexual) and he had girlfriends. He asked girls out and they said yes. I was girlfriend number two.
The first was a girl named Lauren. She got tired of being a beard.
Then he asked me out. He came over to me at lunch. To the first group of girls I’d declared myself in charge of. This was before I’d banished Katie from the group. It was before I turned all her friends against her. But it was after I’d started the campaign against her. So Katie was there, but no longer chatty and the other girls didn’t look to her for direction. They looked to me. Poor Katie. Her 8th grade year was hell and all she really did was try to befriend me. She didn’t deserve that.
Anyway. Tony came over and I was flipping through this astrology book. I was telling Courtney, Megan, and Nicole all about the sun sign and what it meant about their personalities. Katie was writing a Harry Potter fanfiction in her notebook and astutely ignoring all of us.
Tony asked me out in front of all my friends. I was thrilled. My first boyfriend! YES. I gave him a resounding yes.
He went back to the group of girls that he was friends with. It might be important to note that his group semi-overlapped with my group at times. You know in school how there are these core groups, but then sometimes those groups socialize with each other, almost like you put the core groups into these little VennDiagram clusters? It was like that. I think Tony wanted a girlfriend outside of his core group to keep things from getting messy.
Tony started calling me a lot. We talked all the time.
At lunch, we would each go to a different teacher and get a hall pass to go to the bathroom. Then we’d meet in a stairwell and make out.
Before getting to that, I should tell you about my first kiss with him.
A couple of days after he asked me to be his girlfriend, I was getting off the bus in the morning and there he was, standing on the sidewalk waiting for me. This was a HUGE middle school. Almost 2000 kids in 2 grades. There were at least 40 buses. They parked in two u-shaped bus circles in front of the school. How he knew where my bus was going to park, I don’t know. There were two that came from South Toms River.
So there we were, on the sidewalk at 6:45 in the morning, with SWARMS of kids all around us. He gave me a stuffed Betty Boop. It was dressed as a Playboy bunny. Even back then, I found this very weird. I didn’t know why he’d give me such a thing. A small teddy bear or something cute, sure. This was a Betty Boop….with fishnets and little onesie with bunny ears and a little cotton tail. I was immediately embarrassed to be holding it.
After he gave it to me, he moved in to kiss me. He was a good deal shorter than me. I bent down and let him press his lips to mine.
It was like an electric shock of sensation. Although, looking back, I think it’s just because I’d never kissed anybody. It wasn’t anything special to do with him. I liked him well enough, but he didn’t really give me butterflies or anything. Also, looking back, I think he was kissing me on the sidewalk like that to be seen by the other boys. And I’m not mad at him for it. I have no idea what it’s like to be a short chubby flamboyantly gay kid in middle school in 2003. I’m sure it fucking sucked.
