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4.2.12
WC: 191694

which I laugh and cry while they observe me in puzzlement. I crave reruns of television sit-
coms and revivals of shows I hated in their original incarnations.

Those must have been wonderful times to evoke such strong - and expensive - reactions.

I then described a nostalgia weekend that I and six guys I grew up spent at the Concord Hotel in
the Catskill Mountains, where we once had gone to summer camp or worked as waiters. The guys
played one-on-one basketball and horse (even those who hated hoop as kids). We told jokes so
old you could give them numbers (itself one of the oldest jokes). And we wondered about why
our lost adolescence exerted such magnetic attraction.

"Those were the worst days of my life," one of the guys - who used to talk with a high
voice - confided. Suddenly, we were all contemplative. Our adolescence was miserable,
we acknowledged. As the Musak played "Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing," another
related how he dreaded the slow dances because he would always become palpably
tumescent (certainly not a phrase from our youth) while doing the fox trot. Another
shocked us all by soberly confessing that he had become tumescent only once during his
adolescence, but then he reassured us by bragging that "it started when I was 12 and it
didn't stop until I was 21."

I then recalled one of the most humiliating moments from my adolescence:

It was prom time, and the girls had established a committee of three to which the boys had
to apply for dates. I had my eye on a pretty blonde from an adjoining neighborhood (her
distance, I hoped, might have kept her from learning of my questionable reputation among
the local parents). As I approached the committee and shyly uttered "Karen," all three
arbiters laughed. "Don't you know," the cruelest admonished me, "that Karen is on the A
list and you're on the C list? You can only pick from the C or D lists." It was a relief to
learn there was a list lower than mine, but a shock to be confronted with my official
ranking. I went to the prom alone and danced with my cousin, who was also on the C list.

...

Those were miserable years, all right. They were years of self-doubt, sexual guilt without sexual
pleasure, fears and transitions. Before you were comfortably into one stage you were already
entering another, more precarious, one. They popped up as if on schedule, like the beginning of
the yo-yo, marbles or mumble typeg seasons. So I asked myself why I insisted on recapturing the
most miserable period of my life. This was my answer:

[W]hen a man reaches the age of counting backward, maudlin nostalgia sets in and he
begins to run, not walk, to every restored toy emporium he hears about from other
retrievers of lost youth. 14

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