This past week, I ate dinner with a large group of my friends from here and another friend that has known me since elementary school. Always on the lookout for new ammunition, my college friends quickly quizzed my other friend on what I was like when I was younger. It was then that I realized how hard I had worked to conceal as much of my past as possible, and anyone wanting to know why would have only needed to sit at that table for a few minutes to understand.
It’s not like I have any earth-shattering skeletons in my closet, like felonies or undercover work for shady government organizations. It’s just little things, like nicknames. I had told them that I had been both “Shrimp” and “Fetus” in the past, but they hadn’t known that my band teacher called me “The Tap Dancing Machine.” If you asked me why he referred to me as a tap dancing machine, I couldn’t tell you. I’m certainly not a tap dancing machine. No matter how adamantly I insisted I was not a tap dancer or a dancer of any kind, my band teacher would not be discouraged. In his eyes, I would always be a tap dancer.
Of course the kids caught on, and that was annoying. Being asked to tap dance and then being kicked hard in the shins when I refused got on my nerves. But the worst people were the ones who truly believed that I was a tap dancer (and there were a lot of them). They vigorously defended my tap dancing, telling my band teacher not to make fun of me just because I like tap dancing. Though I should have appreciated their passionate and sincere defenses, they only led more people to believe that I was really a tap dancing machine, which led to more embarrassment.
But that was only high school. I only put up with four years of that taunt. It’s your earliest mistakes and embarrassments that you have to put up with for the rest of your life. Like when I was in fourth grade and I suddenly started having dizzy spells. Whenever I participated in even the least strenuous of physical activities, I would feel lightheaded until I sat down and composed myself. One afternoon at recess, I was running around the playground when I suddenly had one of my attacks. Unable to sit down in time, I passed out and smacked my head on the slide, slowly inching down head first. After the vice principal reprimanded me briefly, she realized I was really hurt and I was rushed to the hospital.
My pediatrician recommended a prescription, but the side effects were devastating. My head swelled to an enormous size and my neck shrunk at the same time. Just standing upright was like trying to balance a watermelon on a golf tee. My head would wobble about wildly and I would bump into things constantly. I had to focus and exert great mental energy to keep my head from rolling around. This was hilarious, of course, and it didn’t take long for my classmates to realize it. Two of them would get on either side of me and pass my head back and forth, gradually increasing speed. People would keep score to see how many times they could pass me back and forth without knocking me over completely (the record was 97). I didn’t like this game, but since my upper body had roughly the same proportions as a balloon on a string, I didn’t have much say in the matter.
We found out later that the side effects were the result of a bad prescription. It turned out my pediatrician was addicted to cocaine. Now you probably think I made that up for the sake of this wild and wacky story. But that’s true. My pediatrician, as my family found out years after we had changed doctors, was a cokehead. He appeared on television to explain himself and try to dispel some of the bad rumors that were flying around about his drug of choice.
There were other stories traded that night with my friends, like the time I fell asleep at shortstop in little league and no one noticed that I was lying face down in the dirt until a ground ball slowly rolled up next to me, or the day I accidentally wore a dress to school. I probably would be hearing about these old stories at college as much as I do at home, if not for the wealth of material I provide everyone with here anyway. Like how, that very night at dinner, I draped my coat over the heater and started a small fire. I am now “Firestarter.”
Wait until my friends back home get a hold of that one.
Chris Sartinsky, a junior in the College of Arts and Sciences, is a weekly columnist for The Daily Free Press. He can be reached at chs@bu.edu.
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