Jayne Margetts
Post Columbine, High School is a weird kinda place; it’s not so much trapped in the aftermath of a shooting-range emporium frenzy as it is floating in the jetsam of Leftist magazines, strange poetry & Birkenstocks. Today “Lipstick lesbians, cracked-coffee-cream-lips & obnoxious blonde-cheerleadertrash” pimp the corridors of learning. And guns are so lame. So passé. So yesterday. Apparently, it’s much more thrilling to tote the drive-by language of ‘Generation Glib’ from the mouths of cynical teens and heirs- apparent to the beatnik Bukowskis of old.
Where the hell is Joni Mitchell when you need her? Where are those cold and flinty Portland sidewalks that glint in the shadows of strangers’ houses? Where does teen angst really hang out these days?
Rites of passage is such an anti-climax, just another batch of sycophantic tantrums thrown by Hormone Nazis sliding dangerously off the emotional Richter Scale. But some things never change; they’re as predictable as High School still being as shoe-gazey as any ethereal Radiohead album ever was. But it’s even more of a revelation to realize that pubescent angsty evolution hasn’t hemorrhaged into the glare of metal detectors, bullet shrapnel or the occasional shriek of a Tori Amos ballad.
It’s still all about hormones; siphoned from the cistern of gothic poetry, melancholy lust and fixations with dudes, chicks and anything balancing anatomically in between. Point in case: our voyeuristic cannibalism of CNN – and traumatized testimony from sepia-tinted sophomore ghosts recalling the horrors of their I-Don’t-Like-Mondays classroom hell. High School had become – post millennially – a target practice for homicidal bullies. So excuse me while I don’t rush over to the latest copy of any hype-whore culture bible to see who it’s currently sinking its thighs into while celebrating its school-combat-culottes-day-wear doublespread.
Now this was before Litterati Little Miss Trope. Because there’s definitely a ‘before’ and ‘after’ in her case. She’s an impossible princess with the maturity and range of a futuristic Sylvia Plath. She was previously just a bleep on the Underground US publishing scene. Seventeen years old, stained with the tag of “staggering genius” and who could strut ferally like P.J. Harvey all over the goddamn page.
Her debut memoir, Please Don’t Kill The Freshman, is more Kurt than Courtney, more Teen Spirit off the riff of a Bukowski ballad. It’s got her publisher, Harper Tempest, hopping to the beat of their very own cult-style Chick Lit queen & potential sister laureate to Portland’s-native son, Chuck Palahniuk.
“I am a whore for attention and I spread my legs as wide as my mouth…”
Poetry such as this allegedly scored Trope a $100,000 advance to publish her memoirs, not that it’s any consolation for the fact that she’s had her heart broken, like, a trillion times. And sure, her debut novel may hint at a soft Birkenstock underbelly but she can roar like the furnace of a freshly-lit crack pipe on cue.
The narrator is every typical teenager; she pouts, falls in-and-out-of-love with girls, wrestles with our societal humanity, believes “birthday parties are the result of broken condoms”, and wrings enough pathos from her soul to drench a nation. She’d rather “stay at home with my perfectly messy curls and lesbian Lolita fiction and too loud music.” And life is a wickedly profound bitch: “I walk in the rain and not under the awning. I walk in the rain. I walk in the rain, tilt my head up to the sky, and taste someone’s tears.”
That’s Zoë for you. She drowns in lust, has just about a perfect argument for just about everything, because being a teenager sucks, it’s a karmic holocaust with apathy stirring its soul. “No one cares,” she bleeds. “Apathy is a disease and some days I long for it. I kiss people who have it with the hope of infection. But I still care. And I care too much. And I don’t want to care.”
On War she rants:
“What is your definition of war for kids? Dot-to-Dot his missing limbs, match the food with the starving refugee, put together the puzzle pieces of a mother’s broken heart? What’s your definition of war for kids? Want me to climb the plastic tank-shaped structure in my backyard and play ‘war’? Want me to make a gun with my hand and kill my little brother?”
And patriotic indifference:
“They wonder why I don’t watch the news, read the paper anymore. Sometimes it’s not just the news, but also the way you want to give it to me. You want it with the American flag waving proudly behind the translucent head of an eagle so I can feel good about killing for peace.”
Trope is so far removed from the legallyblonde glamourpuSS school of pamper-sparkle-and-make-me-vomit-an-overdose-of-Barbie-dom that it’s left her peers in a spin, and rapidly navigating her skatergirl trajectory into full scale bloom.
It didn’t take much though – a chance meeting with underground US Future Tense publishing guru, Kevin Sampsell, who was teaching in Trope’s after- school writing class. He was blown away in probably that very Steve Cooganesque-24-Hour-Party-People kinda way, they started conversing via email, he suggested they publish her memoir entries as a chapbook (small, cheap books of poetry and prose), 10th Grade author Joseph Weisberg landed a copy, was equally bewitched and he forwarded a copy to his agent… The rest as they say…
Please Don’t Kill The Freshman is as harrowing a depiction of blood & guts in High School as Larry Clarke’s Kids was for apathy and barbiturates. And there’s one more factor that has to be taken into account: Miss Trope hails from Portland, Oregon. Remember the seaboard town that fathered Chuck Palahniuk and spat out his evil child Fight Club? Well, it’s just spat out another dark ingénue and the irony is, she speaks in a similar vernacular as her obnoxiously gifted counterpart.
Sometimes irony slaps society around the jowls with a poem, a song or just one unique and disquieting voice. Example? God bless that loveable rogue Vernon God Little. How rude to slip in the back door, defile the Booker Prize moniker, steel the booty and worm his way into into glitterati.cam land before they even noticed.
In Zoë’s world, squirrels could smoke crack and teens are free to roam through buzz-wordy pastures with nicknames like linux shoe, cherry bitch, vegan grrl, techno boy and greasy buddy holly. But in reality, she’s doing just fine because she knows how to survive and how to spin gold from her words.
“Is it funny that my passion isn’t dead but my peers are? Is it funny that my best friend was raped and the boy who did it still walks through the halls of my school? Is it funny to you that my high school has the highest pregnancy rate and is it funny to you that on the first day of school my teacher told me that one in four of my friends wouldn’t graduate?
“I’m glad we’re so entertaining and so funny to you. I’m glad you can laugh because I think you’re too scared to cry…”
Touché!
