Happy Birfday illWill!

originally printed February 23, 2007

Staying with my buddy Ryan for the last week has got me reminiscing. Back in high school, Ryan was the coolest cat there was. Had the uber-80's cool Morrisey haircut, looked otherworldy. And had an older brother in a band in DC who would send tapes with amazing bands to Ryan, which he would pass to the rest of us who were stick suckling at the teet of Duran Duran and Lisa Lisa and the Cult Jam. Replacements, Dream Syndicate, the Dogmatics etc, Ryan gave us access to a world we didn't know existed. Stranger than the rest of us who could only dream of playing football and being rednecks, he was THE coolest.

The first time he came to my house he had...a ponytail. Ugh. Not even a long hippy one, but like a 4-inch one which somehow seemed gayer. Whatever, he was still cooler than us. Anyways my father was of course horrified with a boy having such a thing on his head, and throughout the weeks Ryan was referred to him as "that boy with a ponytail...christ."

All this changed though when my dad realized that Ryan was, like him, a history buff. Next thing you know he's sitting in a chair regaling my pop with the history of Essex County, on which he was an expert. He in turn would be enthralled with tales of history my father would tell; stories he had tried to share with my brother and I. But you know how it is with fathers and sons; he could've been reading off winning lottery numbers and it's nothing but eye-rolling and "please get us out of here. " So it went from "What's wrong with that boy with the pony tail?" to "when's your friend Ryan coming over?"

The ponytail, however, was short-lived thanks to my little brother. About 4 years old at the time, he walked up to Ryan, young face contorted with confusion. After staring at Ryan for a few minutes, he finally works up a question.

"What's that in your hair?"
"It's a ponytail."
Long pause, still staring...."are you a girl?"
"haha! No, I'm a guy."

To which my brother slowly turns to me and says "then...am I a girl?"

At that moment my mother happened to be walking by, scoooped him up and said "no!", saving the boy from his first bout of sexual identity crisis.

Ryan laughed, but I did notice the thing was gone next time he came around. Ah, such coolness crippled by a four year old. Life.