My Pain Is So Significant

There is an internet lady that I like very much, name’a Almie Rose aka Apocalypstick. She wrote recently in the electronic pages of a website that I do not like very much, an article that I do like very much, about the most influential television show of my sweet young life, “Beverly Hills 90210.”

Like Almie, I was not allowed to watch 90210 because my mother deemed it too adult, having experienced firsthand the hot guitar licks and soulful inter-gender glances featured in each and every weekly teaser. Undertones of explosive teenage sensuality were detectable in every sentence. My mom was somehow convinced that watching  30 year-olds pretending to be rich, sexually active teenagers gaze sexily at one another would somehow flip the “PUBERTY! GO!” switch. If only!  I despaired; she was ruining my whole life.  Literally everyone else at school watched 90210, and missing it meant being unable to participate in Thursday lunch time conversations, a consequence that would not be borne.

In retaliation my younger sister and I would silently retreat to the basement on Wednesdays at 8 PM like Yazidis in Iraq, forced to practice our religion in secret. Our furnished basement housed an old-fashioned big screen tv with no remote. We’d put on the show, volume barely audible, and take turns standing by the set and changing the channel whenever we heard the approach of adult feet. It was in this fashion that I was finally, finally exposed to the beautiful, somewhat discordant tableau of adolescence. 

Beverly Hills was a place where a teenage alcoholic had his own bungalow decorated ostensibly by himself, in a rugged masculine style. It was a place where a public school newspaper had offices that rival The L.A. Times’, it’s own design department and a dedicated, passionate staff. It was a place where the coolest kids in town wanted nothing more than to spend their Saturday night eating french fries and listening to oldies at a faux-50s diner, which, actually sounds kind of perfect.

Watching 90210 was like reading the diary of the most awesome, slutty older sibling ever.  Under it’s tutelage I learned that my teen years were to hold sexy Halloween costumes, pregnancy tests, luxury hotel-sex and coping with that universal rite of passage when a young girl on the verge of womanhood plans to do a mother-daughter charity fashion show only to have her ex-model mother get coked up and ruin everything. It was the kind of shit I knew I’d soon be able to relate to. 

Boy-wise, the show was off the charts. The notable exception to this is Steve, which is fine, because Steve is the best straight-guy friend you’ll ever have. He’s fun to get drunk with, will help you move apartments,  fend off gross guys hitting on you and knows how to make you feel attractive without getting creepy. He’s the guy who was a perv-douche in middle school and then grew out of it. It’s not a great pedigree but it’s better than the alternative. A lot of guys never grow out of it. The fact that you don’t want to sleep with Steve doesn’t even matter, though because you’ve got Dylan, Brandon (and to a lesser extent, David) hanging around for all of that stuff.  

I was aware, intellectually, that Dylan and Brenda were prime time’s hottest sexually active teenage pairing. I knew also that for girls between the ages of 11 and 14 including most of my peers, Dylan’s brooding looks, romantic alcohol problem and husky voice induced a veritable avalanche of nascent sexual awakenings.

While I understood all of this to be true, I was not a Dylan girl myself. Dylan girls were a particular type: sexually healthy, moving through puberty at a normal rate, socially popular at school, prone to getting crushes on boys older than them and have likely moved on to enjoy career success. I was not in their number.  

I was a late bloomer, shy and reserved, who found Dylan’s volatile outbursts frightening, his forehead grooves perplexing, and the paper lunch-bag shape of his head most unsatisfactory; I was a Brandon girl. Like all Brandon girls I was moved by the Walsh twin’s traditionally handsome (read: nonthreatening and effeminate) good looks and the fact that he was a teetotaling, stand-up guy with a good work ethic and a flair for punctuality.

In other words, he was lame.

At the time, Brandon seemed a safe entre into the world of adult sexuality and I needed a safe entre.  In retrospect, part of my distaste for Dylan must have been insecurity; a pre-emptive strike against what was certain to be rejection. Having the body of an 8 year-old until sophomore year of high school made fantasizing about the Dylan McKays of the world patently absurd. Far from feeling intrigued or tingly at Dylan’s worldly experience and sexual prowess, I was made anxious. While Dylan would surely have expected hair-whipping shower-sex (the existence of which I was only dimly aware, having seen a Cinemax After Dark movie at my best friends house) Brandon wouldn’t have dreamed of suggesting anything beyond gentle, cautious couch-kissing until I was ready, and then even then clothes would stay on. 

It wasn’t until several months ago at the tender age of 30—the age when many women are tucking the diapered results of their healthy sex drive into race-car shaped beds—that I finally came to understand Dylan’s appeal. It was the episode where Emily Valentine first comes to town. She rides up to West Beverly on that motorcycle of hers, like most high-school kids do, and despite  looking like nothing so much as a particularly attractive butch lesbian, all the boys in Beverly Hills are utterly smitten-including Dylan! He and Brenda are on a break, and he kisses Emily in his car, overlooking the Los Angeles skyline.

Brenda plays it cool but seeing Emily with Dylan drives her fucking crazy and she throws her weekly outburst, and then reunites with Dylan in his car, overlooking the Los Angeles skyline.*

Watching Dylan’s eyes slide all over Brenda from the front seat of his Porsche, all hair gel and raised be-scarred eyebrows, something finally clicked. Right here at the 1:40 mark, was when I realized, “Oh…he’s a man.”

Later, alone in my own bed I allowed myself a throwback Porsche-based fantasy, just for catch up purposes. 

*I could have SWORN that the song playing during this scene was “Wicked Game” by Chris Isaak.  Did they put generic smooth jazz in to avoid copyright infringement?