You’re supposed to kiss the buffalo head in The Pub when you turn 21. That buffalo head seems like it’s been in The Pub since the 60s, so God knows how many people have kissed it. At least the large majority of them were, in fact, 21year old college students. So there’s probably a smaller chance that it carries catching, kissing diseases.

I didn’t care.

From a very early age, I’ve hardly ever even shared a drink with my own brother (and in moments of exception, I at least wiped the lip of the cup off between turns).

I have an intense disgust for other people’s saliva.

So, of course, it didn’t help when Jeremy yelled out to the crowded pub, “Look! I’ll do it first!” and then stood up on a stool to reach the buffalo head, mounted high on the wall.

The floor was so crowded; it was impossible to move without elbowing your way through the swallowing crowd. I struggled to see him above the crowd line, but my view was obstructed by so many flailing limbs – it was odd to realize how often people typically do flail their limbs, and I’d venture to say that one would never really notice unless they tried to see just a little above the heads of a crowd. Elbows and hands and arms were everywhere, swaying arrhythmically, without music.

“Jesus, he just frenched it!” Someone yelled out.

“It’s not even his birthday!” Someone else called out from the back.

Jeremy strolled over to me: “I just made out with that buffalo. If I can do it, you can do it.”  I grimaced inadvertently, wondering whether his saliva had dried yet.

“No.” I firmly told my group of 25 who had come out with me to celebrate.

“Why, Tasha? Go do it!” My brother urged me. Easy for him to say – he turned 21 in New York where there were no buffalos around to kiss.

I hadn’t had more than a couple drinks when, in that packed environment, with ten different people talking to me simultaneously, I was becoming increasingly disoriented. I blinked furiously, hoping it would help something make sense.

I tried to squeeze my way to the door, but a wall of friends stood like guards, barring me from the exit. Like a whale, heaved by the ocean waves onto the formidable shore, the crowd heaved me toward the stool.

“Kiss the buffalo! Kiss the buffalo!” they chorused.

“No, that’s okay,” I told them meekly. “I don’t have to kiss the buffalo.”

“Kiss the buffalo!”

“It’s dirty!”

The crowd laughed. Even people at the back of the crowd laughed, though they couldn’t possibly have heard my reply.

“Ummm….”I stared up at the buffalo looming over me with an angry eye. “It’s luminous,” I told my Russian tutor.

“Luminous? How is it luminous?”

“Wrong word.” I thought for a moment: “It looms!”

“Why don’t you want to kiss the buffalo?” Someone else asked.

“I don’t need to. I already know it’s my birthday.”

“Tasha,” my roommate got my attention. She was always protective of me. “Do you really not want to kiss the buffalo?”

I shook my head ‘no’ like a sobbing five year old.

“Then you don’t have to kiss the buffalo.”

I felt like hugging her, but instead, I decided to hide behind her. This proved to be a difficult task, since she’s 5’2” and I’m 5’4”. Russell, who was 6’4” spotted me, and dragged me out from behind my surrogate pillar and left me beside the stool.

Masses of hands reached out to support my trembling legs as they themselves climbed the stool to the waiting buffalo head.

The noise died away and it was just the buffalo and I, having a moment. I looked at it and it looked at me. It wanted me to kiss it. It didn’t care how many people had kissed it before. I was the only one it cared about now, and this was our time together. I closed my eyes and pecked it on the nose.

“Hooray!” The crowd yelled.

“What was that all about?!” Jeremy shouted out. “I hooked up with that buffalo!”

I’ve never climbed off a stool before without sitting down first after a long list of awkward maneuvers. Nevertheless, this is how I attempted to come off the stool. This failed right away, and instead I fell off, backwards, and crowd-surfed to the exit.

Everyone gave me hugs and high fives, as though I had saved the pub from being blown up, instead of kissing an artificial buffalo head that was mounted on a wall. It was silly. But in spite of myself, I was proud.

I had kissed the buffalo. I was 21.

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Here’s how my school gym works: You enter and they scan your Student ID, you walk downstairs to an area where you can check out one of those key-locks and a towel. Then you proceed to the locker room. You stuff your stuff in one of those long lockers, slap the lock on it, take your key, your ipod, and your water upstairs to the cardio room. When you’re done with the elliptical machine, you hop on the treadmill and run for a half hour. Afterwards, you get this little feeling of superiority inspired by the fact that you still feel like you’re walking on a giant conveyor belt. You glide into the weight room, lift ten pound weights and feel like you could be that bandana-woman on the tampax posters until you become intimidated by giant frat guys and football players lifting twice your own weight. You stretch like you only meant to be in there for two minutes and walk quickly back to the locker room, realizing that you just sweat so much in the cardio room that you must look like you just escaped a lochness abduction. You take that very important locker key, open your locker, strip, grab your towel, conditioner, and soap, lock your locker, and hit the showers.

Now if you’re me last Wednesday, you’ve gotten this far but made one fatal mistake: you forgot to remove the key from your lock before you walked to the showers. I hadn’t realized this until I had taken a nice, steamy shower and humiliated myself in front of the other showering gym-goers (I thought no one was around when I attempted to shave my legs, lifting them one-by-one at nearly 90 degrees to my body and bracing them against the shower wall, giving them a graphic anatomy lesson).

These three, perfect-bodied blondies stopped to stare at me for about five seconds with their mouths agape, an eternity when they exchanged looks directly afterwards. I lowered my leg from where it was on the shower-cubicle wall, stopped admiring my flexibility. I snapped my towel off its hook and turned off the shower as they drifted away in a daze.

I really, really wanted to get dressed. I rushed to my locker without the aforementioned key, ran back to my shower, thinking I’d left it behind, and then began to panic. I pulled on the lock, hoping I’d get lucky and it would pop open.

My first class was in half an hour.

God forbid I should ever be stranded on a desert island – I consider the contents of my gym bag as necessary to my survival as food. In ten minutes, my curly hair, without maintenance, would look like a byproduct of electric shock therapy.

In a panicked frenzy, I paced back and forth for about 20 seconds, breathing heavily. I pathetically tugged on the lock as my bottom lip began to protrude, preparing to quiver. I sat down on the concrete bench and held my face in my hands until I heard a trio of voices advancing. The same three girls were heading toward me, talking about their opposition to tights, as they really all focused on me, avoiding even looking at me. They were still about 20 feet away when I abandoned my conditioner and soap, fled the bench and ran into the sauna to hide.

I sat down on one of the wooden shelves – the heat felt good, but I once again thought of my hair and the tragedy it would become when it dried without anti-frizz serum. I wondered how long it would be until I could come out and they would be gone. Some other girl came in, spread out her towel and lay naked on top of it on the wooden shelf across from me. To avoid seeming like I was watching her, I mirrored her and lay naked on top my own towel.

I didn’t realize I was falling asleep until I woke up drenched in sweat, feeling as though my head were too big for my body. I stumbled out of the sauna and nearly passed out.

What time was it? I ran out into the locker area and found a mounted clock– somehow 45 minutes had passed. No key. My second class started in twenty minutes. I don’t know if it was an effect of the sauna, my panic, or both, but I became conscious of my racing heartbeat.

I sat down in front of my locker and began to cry. A Mexican woman had begun to mop the floor at the end of the row of lockers, but stopped when she saw me walking toward her, dabbing tears from my eyes with the corner of my towel.

“I lost the key to my locker. I’m going to be naked forever,” I told her.

“¿Che?”

Why the hell was I taking Russian?

I grabbed her hand to lead her to my locker and show her the situation – thinking maybe she had a skull key or something.

We made it halfway to my locker before my towel fell off. She stared at me. I stared down at myself and nodded slowly. Why wasn’t I better endowed? Where did I get my breasts from? My father?

Unexpectedly, Maria (so said her nametag) began to laugh her head off as I recovered slightly and suppressed the urge to squeeze her gratefully.

When we reached my locker and I turned the invisible key in the lock and then shrugged my shoulders and lifted my hands palms up in an “I don’t know” gesture, she nodded and held up her pointer finger to mean “one minute”.

Maria disappeared for half-an-hour during which I studied myself in the hall mirror and tried to wipe off the excess make up beneath my eyes with my towel, making the skin red and swollen. My hair had begun to sprout little baby hairs.

Maria returned with a key and I jumped up and down in excitement. She joined me and we jumped together. Then she opened the lock and opened the locker triumphantly.

My first thought: These aren’t my clothes.

Fuck.

All these lockers look alike. Next one over. It was the next one over. It had to be. I tap it hurriedly. Maria put her head in her hands before she left to get the next lock.

When she returned, an authoritative-looking woman accompanied her. Her bright, red lipstick scared me. She was probably there to make sure I wasn’t stealing anything.

I explained the situation to her and promised her I had my Student ID in the locker so that I could prove I wasn’t stealing anything. She opened up the locker and to my relief, my gym bag was hanging peacefully on the hook within it.

Maria clasped her hands together happily and I gave her a giant hug. She returned to her mop bucket and I scrambled to make my 1 o’clock class, arriving just in time to catch the beginning of the Parliament of Foules discussion.

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Every Wednesday morning, there’s a kid on the bus (he looks to be about twelve and I don’t know what he’s doing riding the bus alone). He asks me the most ridiculous questions. For some reason, he’s always there, always sitting beside me. I don’t know how it happens. I sit down and he’s there – I don’t look for him, he doesn’t know where there’s going to be a free seat when he climbs aboard.

About a week ago, I was standing in the aisle, as there were no seats available. As students boarded the bus, I found myself being gradually pushed to the back of the bus. I looked to my right, and there the kid was, sitting there, his short legs dangling six inches from the rubber ridged floor, smiling up at me.

“Hi.” He usually instigated our exchanges.

“Hello.”

“Do you think there was ever a time when um…” he paused, perhaps for effect, but probably not. “…Peru only had 25 people living in it?”

“Maybe.” I was impressed he was aware there was a country called Peru. He probably just saw it on a map somewhere.

“Because I think it did.”

“Then you’re probably right. It probably did have 25 people at one point.”

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It was impossible to hate Lauren – she was bubbly, generous, fair, and had always been nice to me. But it was difficult to reconcile how she came to be manager of our little coffee shop when I was the one who trained her two years ago. I wanted to hate her.“Lauren’s the manager now,” my boss told me matter-of-factly. “If you have any questions, problems, or need any help with anything, Lauren’s your girl.”
1) Lauren was no one’s girl; you couldn’t even call Lauren your woman. She wasn’t even her boyfriend’s woman – the last time he held open the door for her at the Sistine (a posh restaurant downtown), she glared at him with her hands on her hips and did a fairly accurate imitation of Jessie from “Saved by the Bell.” She was like a feminist on speed, “What are you? Some chauvinistic pig who thinks women can’t open their own freaking doors?” There was more, but at that point, I excused myself to go get a table.
2) I know I already stated it, but I was the one who trained Lauren. I was the oldest employee and I had always kept up to speed with smoothies and syrup protocols – I didn’t need any help and the boss’s inference that I needed any was enough to make me cross my arms over my chest and make faces at him every time he turned around. Read the rest of this entry »

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