I attended a private boys’ school during my last three years of high school. I suspect this was another idea planted in my parents’ brains by my Cinderella’s sisters-like sisters. One day I came home from the public high school, where I was, if not happily ensconced, at least ensconced, to find my parents had decided going to a private all-boys’ school was the latest thing I needed to tune me up and, I suspect, to raise their status in the neighbourhood.
Private school was special not only because of the abuse and the snobs and the lack of girls. You got to be an ‘army cadet’, which meant dressing up in a supremely itchy wool uniform on unbelievably hot days and marching around like an idiot, doing right and left turns I never could get the hang of, in front of the girls from Miss Egbert’s and Miss Cramp’s School for Young Ladies. Eventually, I found out you could get out of cadets if you took speed-reading courses. I had neglected to notice the marching about in front of the giggling girls was part of the mating ritual for the rich.
I made up the ground I had lost when I went to the debutante coming-out ball. A friend of mine knew a guy who had a date to this ball. He had dumped off his date on my friend, who then asked me if I would take her. I said yes, thereby ending up with this twice-dumped Miss Egbert and Crampite. My parents were thrilled with the whole idea, which should have given me a giant hint that I was making a mistake. Why did I accept? Probably because I hadn’t really had much luck with girls to that point. For example, once I was riding a chairlift. There were two pretty girls waiting at the top, looking at me and giggling. I tried to be extra cool. As the chairlift arrived at the top, I leaned against it, adopting a devil-may-care nonchalance that would leave the girls defenseless against my charm. I wore a long army coat, all the fashion at the time, adding to my overwhelming masculine allure. As the chair pushed, it hooked under my coat. Inexorably, it dragged me up in the air. It left me flapping my arms and legs suspended in the air like a hooked fish. Finally, I was able to reach behind me and tug my coat free. I fell face-first in the snow. The girls were no longer giggling, but laughing so hard tears streamed from their eyes. I slunk off.
The first part of the date was a dinner in Upper Westmount, the ritzy section of Montreal. There were eight of us, three other witless suckers and four girls. My date looked just like the hockey player Claude Provost except she had more teeth. A lot more teeth. In fact, she had more teeth than Mr. Ed but less personality. His legs were better too, if you want to get down to it, and he probably would have looked better in a dress, been a better dancer, and had better breath. Once we all got seated, the kilted patriarch came in followed by a bagpiper and a sombre looking servant with this plate of steaming meat. I thought it was hamburger, being as yet uneducated in the finer points of Scottish culture.
Later on, I studied the culture extensively. One of the games we used to play on our endless road trips was called Scottish Twenty Questions. Other games included “Guess How Far Away the Next Grain Elevator Is, ” “The Crapping Cow Game, ” and “Speak in the Local Accent Game”. Ever since seeing Braveheart ( “Ay’ll crush ya… like a woorim”), we had begun speaking like the Swedish Chef, except in Scottish.
“Wheryubeen?”
“Ah’v been awrronihoose.”
“Huv ye seen ma booties?”
“Aye thir bin the hall.”
Scottish Twenty Questions is different from the normal Twenty Questions in that:
As I ate, that night of The Debutante Ball, I was thinking how desperate the father must be to dump his daughter to have made all the fuss over a plate of hamburger. I figured they’d blown the budget on the bagpiper and the servant and had to scrimp on the meal. After dinner, we loaded into Daddy’s limo to head down to the dance at the D’Youville Stables. I guessed the barn had been converted for the dance to make Claude feel more at home. Once inside and while avoiding having my dancing partner step on my feet, I made eye contact with another girl. It was her, the girl from the bus with her impossibly short dress and her pristine thighs. She looked a million times better than Claude. She recognized me and gave me a wistful look, which I returned with a teenage-boy-lost-in-love look, but then off she drifted, leaving only the memorable miasma.