Making Out Behind Indiana

I’m raising money to fight hunger. You should help. Bring your lunch to work tomorrow and donate the eight bucks instead.

As promised, here’s the story of the last 30-hour famine I did. It was 15 years ago, when I was 15 and in grade 11. I have an astonishingly poor memory, and so I must thank my old friend Lincoln for lending me his. I’d usually assail my friend Rob for this (he was assigned to be my buddy in grade two, and has never been freed of the duty), but he claimed hypoglycaemia and didn’t participate.

Here’s what we collectively remember:

• The idea was that you spent the 30 hours at school, on a Friday through to a Saturday morning. I suppose this was compelling to me because it was always a little cool to be in your school when you weren’t supposed to be. I remember wandering the dark halls throughout the evening and feeling decidedly privileged.
• Obviously, the boys and girls slept separately. The boys slept on the bleachers, wedged in between the seats. The girls slept in the theatre, nearby but out-of-reach.
• My friends Rob Stover and Morad Goharian (best name ever) ran theatre sports in the theatre until late into the evening. Presumably this was intended to spend more time close to girls in their pajamas.
• As growing boys, my friend Lincoln and I were really hungry. I’d planned ahead, and so we snuck out early in the morning to my car, where I had apples and kettle chips stashed in the trunk. Don’t worry, I won’t do that in 2005–I’ve stopped growing.

And then there was the girl. In the evening, they’re showing movies in the gym on an impressively large screen. It’s hung on the mobile wall that divides the gym in half. She was a grade lower than me. We’d been hanging out and talking leading up to the 30-hour famine, but I was a stupid 15-year-old boy.

So we’re wandering around on far side of the gym, while Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade plays. The next thing I know, we’re fully making out, pressed up against the mobile wall (it must have made Indy shake a little). In retrospect, I’m really unsure about how it all happened. She clearly took charge. And this was making out of a complexity and intensity that I was largely unfamiliar with. I’d had a couple of girlfriends before her, but this was professional tonsil hockey.

As you might imagine, that’s how I spent the balance of the evening. The next morning, when she wandered into the boys’ camp, my friends were all scandalized. The girl wasn’t…how to put this? She wasn’t at the centre of the girlfriend bell curve. For one thing, she worked at the local horse race track. I thought that was pretty cool, but it’s not a feature the average 15-year-old boy looks for in a girl.

We only went out for a few weeks. I have very clear memories of going to The Russia House at a now-defunct West Vancouver cinema. She wanted to make out, while I just wanted to watch the movie (where were my priorities? I was a film geek even then). A couple of weeks later I more or less dumped her like a cad.