The Great Cooties Scare

I was reminded recently that I was once in fifth grade. I was reminded that I once had a hearty belief in the power of Michael Jordan, and that I had once heretically questioned my classmates belief in cooties. I was reminded of this when I found myself talking to a girl last week, in a bagel shop.

She stood in line behind me and I noticed her right away because she had covered her face with make-up, but you could still tell that underneath, she was pretty. Not model pretty. She was plain pretty. But she was plain pretty enough to look out of place, especially since she was standing next to me. I'm more accustomed to pretty people being on the other side of the street, walking in the opposite direction from me, stylish and put together, ear to a cell phone, talking about things pretty people talk about, like their wonderful lives. So you can imagine my surprise when she tapped me on the shoulder and asked if I could grab her a bottle of water from the display refrigerator that was closer to me.

The fact that she asked for water specifically should have meant nothing. But it meant something to me. You see, I drink water too. The only other thing I knew about her is that she was good looking. Water was the one thing we had in common. So I commented on it, before she could walk away. I offered her what I claimed was useful advice as a fellow water drinker, that bottled water should be shaken well before being consumed since I found that the oxygen generally settles to the bottom during shipping making the first sip very hydrogen-y. She actually laughed.

I must have followed that odd joke with some charm because pretty soon after, I found myself sitting with a very buttered wheat bagel, across from from a very pretty girl, at a very wobbly table, and that table is a good metaphor for how I felt at the time, a feeling I had not felt in a few years.

***

The first time I ever felt wobbly over a girl was in fifth grade and I enlisted my grandfather as my life coach. "When trying to attract a girl, the best approach is to be yourself", I remember him saying, "and if that doesn't work, then become someone else entirely." I was straining for the attention of a one Kathy Cleary. My grandfather, I reckoned, was a true ladies man (he was not), so I took him quite seriously.

At the time my whole sense of self and identity was tied up in the brand and cost of the sneakers I was wearing. Sneakers meant everything to me. Every time I would pass a shoe store, my heart would skip a beat. I'd rush in to see the latest in the placement of air vents, unique color coordinations and if they had found new locations in the sole to inject what I thought was that most critical of ingredients for an effective athletic shoe, Nike branded air.

Change the shoe, change the person. That was what I believed. So I concluded that the only thing separating me from Kathy Cleary's heart, was an expensive trip to The Foot Locker. Which is why I began a weeks long campaign to win the approval of my parents. They, of course, were the ones who would have to invest the money for the shoes I was going to become. So I delivered a set of speeches at the dinner table. I made a series of promises to my parents. I essentially promised that I'd start acting like a good boy, if they would buy me those shoes. This last point is quite important.

Change the shoe, change the person. That was what I believed, but what ended up happening was quite the opposite. For example, before Kathy Cleary, my bed sheets were left as a pile on the floor and my leaving a trail of clean dishes in my wake was unheard of. What was heard was my parents regularly talking to me about making my bed and cleaning my dishes, but that all changed after Kathy Cleary. I became something of a different person after Kathy Cleary, a more responsible person. By the time I did get the shoes that were going to change me, the real transformation had already happened.

***

On a weekend in the middle of November during my fifth grade, I came back from the Yorktown Mall carrying a shiny box, imprinted with a swoosh and the picture of a silhouetted basketball player. The box, when opened, released that new shoe smell. And the moment I tied them securely to my feet, I was sure I had become someone Kathy Cleary would like. And I had. Kathy Cleary did end up liking me. But not long afterwards I stopped liking Kathy Cleary.

My and Kathy Cleary's doomed, in-school three week courtship during the fifth grade was something of a memorable era. She demanded that I do things like think about her all the time, which proved too much for me. She also had me write her notes attesting to our everlasting love, and endure her crying when I didn't do it well. I on the other hand, demanded that she do things like think about me not so much, which proved too little for her. I also had her engage in discussions about basketball and endure my crying when she didn't do it well.

***

The outcome of our relationship notwithstanding, Kathy and I were something of pioneers and our short-lived pairing was a long time in the making. The year before was when I first noticed Kathy. I noticed that I liked her. I noticed that she was nice to me, as long as I kept my distance. Keeping a foot or two of distance was key to her niceness, because Kathy Cleary, intelligent as she was, had been swept up along with most of the fourth grade class in a growing hysteria about cooties. Cooties being a disease all children in America believe infects anyone of the opposite sex.

Cooties is a fake disease, it doesn't actually exist. The fake story about it's fake origins has some thing to do with fake monkeys transmitting it somehow to fake people in a fake country within Africa. But all this fakery has the real implication of causing children, in schools across the country, to actively avoid contact with the opposite gender.

I was an early skeptic of cooties, which is how near the end of the school year in fourth grade I gathered the courage to tell Kathy Cleary I liked her. She said something along the lines of, "Ewwww. You have cooties." She went to the nurse. She told all her friends and soon the whole of my world knew. She thought I had infected her with a deeply virulent strain of cooties just by what I said, and so did everyone else. No one knew what the actual consequences of having cooties were, but everyone seemed sure that they were dire. There was a vague feeling in the air that it led to a quick death.

Kathy walked into class the next morning, perfectly alive. Her survival was a small surprise that had the big effect of inoculating my whole class against their most feared disease. By the beginning of fifth grade the following fall people had stopped talking about cooties and not long afterwards, the more progressive members of my then fifth grade class stopped being scared of touching each other.

Kathy Cleary avoided me for months after The Great Cooties Scare had subsided. I thought she would never talk to me again. That summer I played a lot of basketball. I also thought about her a lot, unaware that I had laid important groundwork for winning her attention the following school year. I had planted a seed that flowered with the help of a pair of expensive shoes.