Teenage Girls in the Living Room and other War Stories
By Greg Evans
I was sitting in the living room in a recliner watching the Yankee game. My daughter and her friend were in the living room, also on a “group call”, which meant, in reality, there were 18 teenage girls in my living room all talking in tandem.
Picture going to the zoo, and then running through it, banging on all the cages so that every animal is screeching, screaming, zipping, yipping, cawing, wailing, cavitation bubble canon blasting, hollering, bugling, tearing your achilles tendon, blood curdling shrieking, all at the same time at the top of their lungs. Now put several microphones in front of them. Now turn up the dial to full volume. Now start banging on some tin cans. Set off a few fireworks. Screamers and bobbers and flippers. That is at least in the ballpark of what it was like.
Remarkably, I was able to pick up some of the conversation from the girl beside me during a brief lull while the majority of them reapplied their makeup, like the reloading of machine guns during a lapse in battle.
“Dating is so complicated. Jake is my boyfriend, and I keep Gary as my replacement boyfriend. Though I might replace Gary with Stan,” the girl said.
“Yeah,” the girl on the phone responded, “Joey is my backup.”
“You have backup boyfriends?” I said.
“Uh, yeah,” the girl beside me said, brushing away the purple hair from her eyes.
“Does he know that?” I asked. I knew it was a stupid question.
“Does it matter?” She said.
As a young guy growing up, the movies and television, and some mothers teach you how fragile and delicate a teenage girl is. They survive on flowers and pastries, pink and purple and glitter. You give her balloons and she squeaky stuffed animals. Sugar and spice and everything nice.
But then you become the dad of a teenage girl, and you learn about how it really is. Teenage girls are dangerous animals that stalk the night. Teenage girls are what men eventually become: predatory, pseudo-sociopathic, aggressive, domineering cannibals with a penchant for psychological bloodlettings, merciless self-confidence decimation on an atomic level, skewering ESP brain lasers shooting from their eyes, melting the reptile brains of desperate teenage boys who can’t understand why they are so ignored, and why they can’t seem to score.
Why do you think men act like they do? Because that is what they were subjected to their entire lives until they can think reasonably for themselves, which is at about 40.
That was the moment I realized, looking back to when I was a teenager, that I never stood a chance. I was, repulsively, the quintessential “nice guy”. A little skinny deer prancing into the den of blood-thirsty wolves wearing Lee Press-on claws, mascara made from the ground-up eyeballs of teenage boys, and copper-stained fangs.
Back then, they could smell my soft nervousness, my confused desperation, and my willingness to carry their books and buy them 15-cent chocolate milks in the cafeteria. By sophomore year at Croton-Harmon High School, my reputation was sealed. It was leave town or die alone.
Back in 1994-95, if you didn’t have a full beard and ripe BO, you became really good at Super Mario Brothers and the Legend of Zelda. I nearly beat both games.
I see these guys, trying so hard to be “cool,” to be “noticed,” to be “desirable” to these unaffected battle-hardened teenage girls. They have seen it a thousand times. Sometimes I want to say something to these guys, but you can’t do it. That is like going on a safari and saving the antelope from getting eaten by the lion. You can’t interfere. Nature takes its course.
Teenage boys are cannon fodder, and 96% of them leave adolescence scarred and the wounds carried on into adulthood, fester, and thank God for beer and sports on ad-riddled television screens to help distract from the lifelong PTSD.
I am by no means blaming all the wrongs - the swirling chaos, endless wars, economic crashes, blistering crime epidemics, plagues, alcoholism, overpayment of athletes, and the unadulterated greed of scoundrel executives in surreptitious MLB boardrooms, and the howling madness throughout the world - on teenage girls, I’m just saying.