Popular

I'm head of the class
I'm popular
I'm a quarterback
I'm popular
My mom says I'm a catch
I'm popular
I'm never last picked
Got a cheerleader chick
- Nada Surf, 1996

The first time I ever went to a high school social without a supposed Significant Other turned out to be a metric arseload more productive - or at least eventful - than any time before it. At the time, as per the Practice Relationships I usually found myself in, I’d been loosely linked to a girl named Karen. I don’t know why. I’ve never been big on Karens. I shared a house with a girl called Karen in St Lucia for six months (along with uberlegendary flatmate Dr Cletus) and she was crazy. Not Crazy John’s crazy, not “I’m crazy and therefore I’ll give you large discounts on Telstra-branded mobile communications products” crazy; Karen was more along the lines of 'not paying her share of any bills and never going to lectures and never going to work and dressing up like a Goth and changing her name to Desparia and hanging by her ankles from the ceiling of her room on some sort of goddamn trapeze thing' crazy. In fact, on more than one occasion, our communal Telstra-branded communication product was cut off because she was too skint, disorganised and/or off-planet to pay her share of the fucking phone bill on time.

(Random aside: You'd struggle to find a more pointless endeavour than being a Goth in Brisbane. Six to eight months a year it’s so stinking hot and debilitatingly humid your deathlike makeup runs and you look most distressed. Anyone who was at the Livid festival in 2000 when the Cure dragged their fat, elderly and sagging arses onto stage will know what I’m talking about. Forty-two degrees in the shade, forty-four thousand punters crammed into the RNA showgrounds in Brisvegas, and more runny mascara than taking the Kiss Army through a car wash on a flatbed truck. Funny as fuck. End of random aside.)

Anyway, Karen - not the crazy goth one, the other one - and I were supposedly Going Together. I’m not sure if we’d even so much as shaken hands at this point, let alone gone the time-honoured Snog Option, but we were An Item, or so I was told. It was in New Idea or something. However, a couple of days out from the school social she apparently got a better offer because she stopped hanging around me and instead turned up on the arm of one of the big footy players. My more observant colleague-in-league Sam McCarthy was kind enough to point this out to me, pointing to the vacant space next to me and politely inquiring, “What the fuck

“Fuck me,” I remarked, “I’m single.”

For the record, he declined.

Then the big footy player in question was polite enough to drop by that lunchtime and inform me of his catch and that she didn’t want me hanging round her no more, ay, and that he’d go the thump if I did, or or I thought about it, or even if the urge just happened to pass him. My reply must have confused him - I wished him them both the best of luck for a happy future together and then offered to pass on a few tips as to the best way to get her off, given my deep and searching in-depth sexual familiarity with his new girlfriend. I know my reply must have confused him, because he went the thump.

Luckily, my mates were right behind me. A good fifty feet behind me, granted, but at least they were able to alert the authorities, a.k.a. the metalwork teacher, Mr Jeffes, who was trying to dodge playground duty. Of course, Mr Jeffes turned up just in time to witness my first and only fistfight since the early years of primary school end in an unprecedented win for the tenacious, broad-shouldered cane farmer’s son from Broadwater, Andy Young. My glory was fairly shortlived - Jeffes was also the school rugby league coach and I’d somehow managed to give his burly, ball-playing back-rower blurred vision and a busted nose the very afternoon of the seniors' big interschool game against Marist Brothers of Lismore

At this point I’d like to say that I put my hand up to fill the breach created by my handiwork, pulled on the school jersey and led the boys to a glorious win over the vicious Catholic bastards of Marist. I'd like to say that, but it’d be a complete load of bollocks. Old mate didn’t play because he couldn't figure out which of the three sets of goalposts he was meant to run between in the prematch warmup, collecting all three and compounding his concussion; neither did I because I wasn’t completely fucking stupid; and Marist flogged us by fifty. Then again, they always did - everyone did, our league team was so very, very shit - so noone really seemed to mind.

Except, however, that though a simple act of caveman-level thuggery, somehow I’d appeared on the radar of a lot of People Who Mattered. By this I mean primarily really hot surfie chicks who were impressed by brute force and ignorance, by a guy who was tanned from the surf, chiselled from farm work, rakishly handsome, with a devil-may-care attitude and a willingness to use fists rather than words to settle an argument. Since no-one like that was around, they started to notice me instead. You might call them superficial idiot bimbos, but I would have said that was unfair, harsh, cruel and completely out of line, largely because I wanted to sleep with them.

On the night of the social McCarthy and I showed up late and lively, a couple of illicit beers to the wind, proudly brought to us in association with brother Matt (big ups for the big fella). We did come with misgivings however - the last school social had Sucked The Fuckin' Big One. Last time out, end of last year (call it '92 for arguments sake), one of the Maths staff in charge of chaperoning the show had taken offence to the DJ's cranking of Rage Against The Machine’s seminal chart-topper Killing In The Name, mainly on the strength of its bellow-along coda - not sure how could anyone be offended by a hundred pubescent boys screaming FUCK YOU, I WON’T DO WHAT YOU TELL ME at the top of their pathetically breaking voices, but he clearly was. As such the DJ had been given his marching orders by dint of a size 12 shoeprint on his backside and proceedings had degenerated into what could politely be called a farce, and less politely a total fucking shitfight. From memory one of the year 12 music students ended up running the DJ desk - one with an obvious penchant for the slit-yer-wrist stylings of Morrissey, the Cure and Joy Division, which was all he played for the rest of the evening. A fucking appalling turn of events. As such we bailed forthwith, went back to the farm and 'borrowed' further from Matt's neurotoxic stash of Tooheys Red (itself 'borrowed' from the old man). Teenage self-harm is such a bloody unfortunate thing to be part of.

Tonight was the first social of the new year, which meant a new Year 12 (us), and predictably a new DJ, but yet the same Top 40 chart shite - though I seem to remember it as being better than today’s Top 40 chart shite, somehow. Maybe it’s just the rose-coloured glasses, or the ones with beer in them. For every fully tops track like the Gurus’ The Right Time or Animal by Pearl Jam, there was abject slop and detritus like Gabrielle, or Cut ‘N’ Move, or even Ace of Base. Jesus fucking Christ, Ace of Fucking Base. The bane of my existence for most of 1993 - thanks very much Lismore’s own Triple Z FM, you pack of arseclowns. (Our liberation at the hands of Triple J was still two years away.) Clearly tonight’s DJ was getting paid on quantity not quality, judging by the absolute crap he was cranking out. As regards Fashions in the Field, McCarthy was resplendent in his favourite Holden Racing Team shirt and stonewash Lee jeans; my own designer ensemble was supplied by Messrs Quiksilver and Co, the quintessence of cool circa the early 1990s. I may have even been wearing a Hypercolor T-shirt. There. Right there. That was why we couldn’t get laid

Battle was joined. I availed myself of a belt of the strongest hallucinogen in the house (Coca-Cola - don't laugh, they didn't allow us to have it in the school Coke machine, so this was Pretty Big Stuff) and took up a strategic raised position overlooking the dancefloor of the school hall. Settling in to survey the form, I noted McCarthy and some of our other mates in traditional Single Bloke Formation - pressed against the wall, drinks in hand, trying desperately to avoid being sucked into the vortex of the dancefloor, where only self-humiliation could result - as well as my theoretical ex-girlfriend and her new boy, steering each other awkwardly around the dancefloor to the strains of big hair ensemble Extreme’s cheese-laden ballad More Than Words, like a Dalek trying to reverse-park a skid-steer forklift. I’d clearly dodged a bullet there, if not a Wolfenstein-style Gatling spray. Silently thanking the bloodied-but-unbowed Macca for taking one for the team (for the second time in three days), I beat a strategic retreat to recce out the back of the main hall where Too Cool Division, the alpha males and alpha bitches of our year, were likely to be amassed in numbers, surrepticiously getting off-chops on swigs from adulterated soft drink bottles, while slagging off the DJ and the poor fashion nous of every attendee other than themselves. As you do when you're King Of All Shit.

Surprisingly the alpha males and/or bitches weren’t much in evidence in the cool of outside. Maybe big-hair acoustic ballads were their thing. In the darkest part of the shadows I came across one solitary blonde girl, her back against the outside wall of the school hall, sobbing demurely. You may think that it’s not possible to sob demurely, but I knew otherwise. The gorgeous Nerissa Sutton had been in my Year 9 and 10 elective drama classes (I only did it for the chicks, honest) and I knew full well she could sob demurely on cue. This though, as near as I could tell, appeared the real thing. Also worthy of note were the absence of her surfie chick alpha-bitch coterie of friends; my limited intel on the subject had suggested girls usually gather around and commisserate over boys dumping them or being cocks to them or whatever.

Nerissa looked up. Catching her eye from distance, I gave a reassuring smile and wave, then turned to retreat and allow her some space.

“Hey, Andy, how’s it going.” Nerissa had a slightly husky voice which would have been an excellent pointer for a career in telemarketing - particularly for services costing around $4.99 plus GST per minute, higher from payphones and mobiles. Tonight, her voice was a little huskier, maybe from emotion, maybe from pulling cones in the back of Dave Murchison’s Valiant wagon. Whatever, I listened.

“Not too bad,” I conceded evenly, turning back to meet her eyes. “Better than you, apparently… Everything okay?”

She sniffed. “I’m fine,” she gestured, embarrassed. “No biggie. It’s just that… Brendan dumped me.”

And the very Earth beneath me begain to crumble and split. Year 12’s own A-list glamour couple were breaking up??? This was big news, surely enough to punt Tom and Nicole off the cover of Womans Day or No Idea. Brendan Tunks was the school’s glamour-boy football prodigy, halfback and captain of both the senior league and union sides, meaning he was as close to God as anyone aged seventeen and a half years could rightfully be. Despite this he was reasonably easily to get along with, so long as you agreed with him that the sun wasn’t actually hundreds of millions of miles off in space but securely lodged up his arse, from whence all its radiance emerged. Tunks actually went on to leave school midway through our final year, in a flurry of controversy and small-town gossip, to sign for one of the Brisbane league clubs - might have been Wynnum-Manly, though someone told me Redcliffe - and subsequently blew out both his knees in his first and only season in reserve grade. Brendan Tunks now sells used Fords at a dealership on Ipswich Road, on the famed Magic Mile of Moorooka in Brisbane’s boganlicious south-west. Go talk to him if you’re in the market for a low kays ex-fleet Falcon - just tell him Angus sent you. He’ll no doubt look at you blankly and tell you to bugger off, but at least it’ll be amusing for you and me.

Back in the day, though, old mate Tunksy was undoubtedly king of the kids and could call the tune with The Ladies, even unspeakably hot ones like Nerissa who should have known better (and, to my way of thinking, should have had better, i.e. Me.) So if he’d decided to shop elsewhere, even Nerissa wasn’t in a position to do much more than sulk. Largely because as with most girls in her social circle, despite her good looks and social station, Nerissa had amazingly poor self-esteem, and footy thugs like Tunksy might have been thicker than two short planks but they sure as hell had figured out how to manipulate situations such as these to their advantage.

I could and maybe should have felt some sympathy for her plight, but given that Tunks et al. were winning on with babes like her and I wasn’t, my heart didn’t exactly bleed for her. And let's be honest, aside from the obvious physical stuff - I was a teenage male for fuck's sake, and she was thermonuclear) - I did like her, more than most girls of her type, because I reckoned she might have been a bit more than just the one-dimensional footy-player-accessory Barbie doll most of her friends seemed to aspire to. Mostly, though, what I did feel for her was strong, primal, physical, sexual attraction. For which I absolve myself for anything that was to follow, of course.

Outside in the cool seabreeze, Nerissa and I got to talking. I’d admit to laying on the charm, beguiling her with my debonair wit. Okay, so I had to dumb down my lines a bit, but they worked. Nerissa went from tears to giggles in remarkably little time. Tutor-next-door Sophie would have been so proud. Actually she probably would have been repulsed and horrified, but at least her advice was being adopted and adapted.

Rule one: don’t talk about yourself. Unless you’re charming and self-deprecating like Hugh Grant... but not too down on yourself, of course, because you have to exude heaps of confidence... but not so much that you come across as arrogant, of course…

Just as well I’d written all this down.

Anyway, we decided to do for a little walk and talk about things, which primarily included Nerissa, why Brendan was a bastard, Nerissa, Brendan, and Nerissa again. I did earn the occasional mention in dispatches.

“You laid out Macca the other day, didn’t you,” she said.

I humbly admitted to taking the bastard apart, downplaying the wild swing and lucky connection which had felled the big unit.

“That was fuckin’ great, he is such a dickhead,” she laughed. “And that mole Karen he’s with, I mean, Oh my Gawwd, what a slag...”

Hmmm, glad my brief tenure with her passed unnoticed then...

So Nerissa and I bailed unobtrusively from the school grounds - an achievement in itself given the Gestapo-like surveillance around the gates - and stole away to her house, nearby. Her mother and stepdad were away in Ballina for the night. Don’t know why; didn’t think to take notes. We liberated her stepdad’s Bundy Rum and adulterated Coke with it. Nerissa was the first to show me a neat trick by which you can top up the bottle with cold tea (no milk, obviously) with presumably noone the wiser. Not until they pour themselves a stiff drink, of course, but by then hopefully you will have left home for university.

And, suffice to say, that wasn’t the only neat little trick Nerissa taught me that night…

Um, yeah.

Okay so that last bit’s pretty much back in the realms of the sort of bullshit I would have spun for the benefit of my brothers-in-arms at the time, if anyone would have actually believed my tale after relentlessly crying wolf for so long. The actual order of service - we get a little drunkie, she gets a little emotional, says she needed to be held. I obliged. A gentleman would. Holding becomes touching. Touching becomes feeling, and stroking, and kissing. Kissing - proper kissing, with searching tongue and roaming hands and stuff - hmmm, mental note, strike one off the list of Things To Do For The First Time Ever. And Then Tell Everyone About, And Then Change Your Story ‘Cause You Already Said You Snogged A Whole Bunch Of Chicks Before. (Which wasn't entirely true, nor was it entirely false. Nerissa wasn't my first kiss... maybe call it my first kiss that meant something. Technically Sophie had been my first kiss - if being taken advantage of by a fellow six-year-old during a furtive game of catch-'n'-kiss at a get-together at her family's place counts as such. Judging by the pitying looks on your faces I'm guessing that's a NO then.)

This... this was nice. Nerissa liked me, liked my hands, liked my lips, liked me, dammit. Her golden ringlets intertwined in my fingers as we kissed on, and on, and owwwwnnn, me hoping to the Jesus Fuggin Christ that my technique was up to scratch, that I hadn’t been suddenly stricken with chronic halitosis, that…

Fuck it. It’s working. Don’t worry. Don’t even think. Just DO.

Nerissa let me slide my hand under her blouse, let me unfasten each button and let it slip off. Black bra, lacy edges. She smoothed her hands along her sides and unbuttoned her fly, then peeled off her jeans. Matching panties, black, silken, lacy. Had she been expecting company tonight? Goddamn.

Don't think, came the reminder. Just DO.

She was kind enough to assist with my shirt, and my jeans, eyebrows raised demurely at the effect she’d had. I’d picked a good night to wear my least scungy boxers, even though I hadn’t been optimistic enough to expect company myself. And then Nerissa, sweet misguided Nerissa, stretched out langruously, reached behind herself and unclipped her bra. The honour of sliding off her panties, however, was generously bestowed upon yours truly

Nerissa didn't want to think. She just wanted to do.

Yes, Nerissa was very accommodating. Up until the point when it looked like we’d actually have sex. Naughty boy-and-girl-bits-interacting sex, involving concepts like ‘penetration’, and its much less pleasant corollary, ‘contraception’. Long story short, Nerissa said she wasn’t yet ready to go that far, since we didn’t know each other that well, and was so early in our relationship, and stuff… Bless her, though, because she was more than prepared to do just about anything and everything short of the above. It’s amazing what desperation, a crisis of self-confidence and half a bottle of Bundaberg Rum (someone else’s, in each case) can do for one’s evening. Specifics? A lot of other things were ticked off that Things To Do list, let’s just leave it at that.

I certainly left it at that, somehow getting my arse back to the school grounds in time to be collected by the folks (I hadn’t yet inherited Matt’s Torana for myself, so I wasn’t driving) at the agreed time, and returned to my own bed at the farm, buzzing like I’d been transfused with BZP and very much the wiser for my experience.

Oh, and as you’d expect, Nerissa and I lasted just about as long as it took you to read this sentence. She and Tunksy had reunited within 48 hours, if that - the very public alpha couple in love once more, our very own gossip-mag-cover twosome.

As such, I figured what was gonna come next, with the sort of grim inevitability that followed this sort of love (hah!) triangle. I expected Tunksy and several of his biggest mates to drop by anytime soon and discuss my previous involvement in the situation, using similar tactics as Karen’s new partner earlier in the week. Surprisingly, nothing eventuated and my head remained steadfastly un-kicked-in. Tunks and I continued to have the same non-relationship as before, based in contented mutual disinterest in each other’s affairs. Nerissa merely ignored me completely, avoiding communication and eye contact for the remainder of our time together in high school. Which left an equally dismal conclusion - that I had been fuck-all more than a brief distraction who was in the right place at the right time, no more and no less, and that whatever the humiliation and self-torture of Nerissa's tawdry relationship with Tunks, it was far preferable to the shame and social pariahdom of not being on the arm of the school footy hero. And, of course, the fact I still had a full set of teeth was a clear sign she hadn’t told him, or anyone else, about our little ‘relationship’.

Welcome, Angus Young, to being someone else’s dirty, embarrassing little secret. For the first, and sure as hell, last time.