A Common Pornography: A Memoir

My Friend Pat

In tenth grade, I started to embrace my weirdness a little more, thanks to one of my new friends, Pat Kennelly. He was this short kid with curly white hair and glasses. He sort of looked like an albino. He lived with his family in a pretty big house a couple of blocks from the high school. We had a couple of classes together and even though I really wanted to be popular (and Pat was like a poster boy for Not Popular), Pat cracked me up and I realized we had the same kind of weird humor. We both liked Monty Python’s Flying Circus, the movie Airplane!, and Devo.

I started to hang out less with Darren and Maurice. I hung out at Pat’s house a lot and spent the night there on most weekends. We stayed up late and watched Night Flight, an assortment of music and comedy that took over the USA Network on the weekends.

At school, we would do weird things for the sake of being weird. We’d go sit in a class that wasn’t ours until the teacher would look at us, puzzled, and then ask us to leave. While walking down the hallways, we’d sometimes fall to our hands and knees and spastically crawl several feet before getting back up on our feet, our facial expressions flat and muted, as if nothing goofy was happening at all. We would get in fake fights and then run away from each other, pretending to cry. If someone from Yearbook was taking photos, we’d try to get in the picture and point at something outside of the frame, sometimes with a look of glee, sometimes with an expression of horror.

We were friends for a couple of years, but something odd started to pull us apart. I really wanted to have a girlfriend and I wanted to be cool. I wasn’t sure if I could hang out with Pat Kennelly and be cool. Plus Maurice would make snide remarks about Pat and how much we were hanging out. Not that Maurice was any cooler, but sometimes it’s easy to be swayed by fear, and I was afraid I would lose Maurice as a friend. We’d been friends for a long time and we sometimes talked about living with each other when we got older. I think when you’re a teenager and you start making plans with your friends in regards to living together or going to a college together or hunting for Bigfoot or whatever, you really get excited. Because it’s the future! And it’s without your parents!

I’m sad I wasn’t Pat’s friend for longer. I’ve looked through all my high school yearbooks and I don’t think he even signed any. There is one funny scrawl that takes up a half page in back of my sophomore yearbook. It doesn’t have a name signed to it, but it says in part:

Kevin,

Guilty! Where is the fish? Dance with the flame! The yellow man inside that egg is in love with Big Leggy! Vegetables!

I’m pretty sure that’s from Pat.