DICAPRIOLOGY

by Kate Durbin

Plague of Frogs (1995)

We are always at the mall, where we start to see frogs everywhere: at 5-7-9, Wet Seal, Afterthoughts, The Magic Company, Natural Wonders. Another trend is holographic everything dresses, stickers, and necklaces that shimmer and quiver like oil on asphalt. Micro notebooks, so small you can only write a single letter on a thumb of page. Giant pencils from Claire’s Accessories. For her birthday, I buy her a frog pencil, a foot long and an inch in diameter, and a tiny hologram notebook that is also a keychain and fits in her palm.

When you wiggle the notebook, a frog hops across the cover, leaping off the edge, then resurrecting back to where it began. The dare is she will use them in biology class the day we dissect frogs as I slit their bellies and stab their formaldehyde hearts, she will take notes.

Dicapriology (1994)

My bedroom walls are plastered in teen heartthrobs, from magazines like Teen, YM, Big Bopper, Bop, Teen Beat. Gazing each night at my wall shrine, I notice Leonardo DiCaprio poses weirder than the other heartthrobs, whose posturing could be categorized as “innocent but sexy.” For example, one heartthrob, JTT, stands on overgrown railroad tracks, swallowed up in an oversized blazer for a much larger adult man, head cocked, lips pouty. But in Leo’s posters, he seems to be trolling this teen hunk cookie cutter pattern. In one, he’s in a kitchen drinking milk out of a measuring cup, spilling it everywhere, arms and legs flailing. In another, he leans his hip on a pool table, but also, he’s putting the pool cue down his pants. Leo holding up a big pair of inflatable lips that say KISS ME, covering his own lips with the inflatable lips. Leo reading a Tiger Beat where he is on the magazine’s cover, a look of fake surprise on his face. But the strangest posters are the ones of Leo holding framed photographs of his younger self. In one of these Leo inception photos, Leo looks about 12, and he is holding a framed photo of himself at about age five. Both Leos, the Leo pinned to my wall and the Leo in that Leo’s hands, smile out from the image, conspiratorially.

Spencer’s Gifts (1998)

I collect candles from Spencer’s Gifts. An alien head that glows neon under black light. A purple mushroom, little white daisies scattered across its cap. A drip candle that melts rainbow. My favorite is an orange VW bus, decorated with yellow smiley faces. Meant to resemble 1970s smiley faces, they look somehow 1990s, which is when they were made. I rode in one, my mother says, back when we hitchhiked and wore our hair long and didn’t use hairspray and sewed our own clothes. The trippy 1970s, a full-blown mall trend, my youth a cannibalization of her youth. It wasn’t that good of a time, she says, all I did was smoke, mostly just to piss off my mom, and run away from rapists and serial killers. They were everywhere back then. A girl from my homeroom was killed by Ted Bundy and then he killed another girl who lived two houses down from my best friend. We came up with safety plans: always travel in pairs, stick to lighted roads, known faces … but still, we went to parties. Wasn’t that dangerous? I ask. To still go to parties? It’s not like I was safe at work. Every day, I handed files to the Green River Killer. What was he like? Not like anything. Just a man. There must have been something odd about him, I press. She thinks awhile he never smiled. One time she was at the park, sitting on a bench, and a man jogging by grabbed her face, shoved his tongue down her throat, and then just kept jogging. In Hawaii on a trip with her friends, her date raped her in a hotel room. I knew he was going to do it by the way he looked at me when he closed the door. And because he locked it, she says. If you scream, I’ll kill you, she says, he said. I don’t think it’s affected me, though. I mean, it’s been decades, I think I’m over it. When she tells me this, I feel something so terrible and far in the distance, I cannot go and get it for you. I want more Spencer’s candles than I can afford, I only have four, always thinking I’ll buy more eventually, which I never do. I am always starting collections I never finish. I also never burn any of the candles, thinking they could last forever that way. I guess I am still too young to really understand materials, the substance a thing is made up of what can, under careful conditions, endure, and what, by its very nature, is doomed. My Spencer’s candles sit on a shelf in my window, next to my blue lava lamp, also from Spencer’s, collecting dust and cat hair, fading and softening in the sun. Over time their shapes warp. The van wheels flatten to the shelf. The mushroom cap distends weirdly. The smileys start to look nervous. When I go off to college, my mother throws them all out without asking me, and turns my room into her sewing room. She lines the window with Yankee Candles, their cozy Americana fantasy scents like MidSummer’s Night and Home Sweet Home. The reason Yankee Candles are so expensive, the company claims, is because they have slow burning wicks, wicks that, unlike other candles, you need never trim. And because the wax burns evenly, all the way down to the bottom of the jar. She goes into that room, where she sews slim, ugly dolls in pioneer dresses, dolls whose patterns she cuts out from the Better Homes and Gardens Pattern Book, while she watches Gilmore Girls. Agoraphobic, she never goes outside. When I come for Christmas, flames in the window, that room now smells like fake sugar cookies, and I was never born.

Starship Enterprise (1994)

Since the days of abandonment at the forest’s edge, social death has existed and will surely continue to exist in some form into the future. In ancient Greece, anyone who threatened the stability of the state could be banished without a specific charge being brought against them, or, in other words, without saying it to their face. In the assembly, citizens would write another citizen’s name down, like high schoolers passing mean notes in homeroom, and when a sufficiently large number wrote the same name, the ostracized person had to leave Greece and stay away for ten years. Of course, what charges might lead to social death, a birthmark transmogrifying into a witch’s mark, has always depended on complex variables of a given moment in time. The dangers of the physical environment, the pathogens in the air, the invisible structures that form what we call culture: politics, religion, the internet, late night TV talk shows, Justin Bieber for Crocs. Though now, in 2022, we live in a time of cons, as in conventions, and fandoms and subreddits, when I was in high school in the mid1990s, liking Star Trek was something that could lead to social death, at least at my small religious high school, an ugly concrete block in the Phoenix desert. Before Steve Jobs gave us iPhones and made turtlenecks edgy, I watch my first episode of The Next Generation, in 1994, an episode about The Borg, an alien collective in a goth black metal cube hurtling through space. The Borg have no names, they are only numbers, and they all think and speak as one. When they come for you, it’s no cougar hunting you in the dark, it’s a storm on the horizon-elemental. They even walk without agency, half-flesh, half-machines jolting forward as if by remote control. When they take you over, it feels inevitable, like nothing else could have happened to you. But the worst part is they don’t kill you. They body-snatch you. Injecting nanobots that form neural networks inside your brain, your blood, turning you into a drone. Anyone can be assimilated, your individual identity uploaded into the hive mind, which has one goal: to absorb every being into a state of sameness and horrifying perfection, where not even your thoughts are your own. The Borg drone in unison: we will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Freedom is irrelevant. Self-determination is irrelevant. You must comply. I don’t tell any of my friends I actually watched TNG, except my best friend, who I tell everything. She doesn’t tease me about liking the show, but she does tease me about my embarrassment about liking it. She doesn’t get why I care so much what other people think, she finds our school cliques funny, the Abercrombie cheerleaders who go into Nordstrom together and come out all smelling like Tommy Girl. When the Star Trek: Generations movie comes out, my father, who grew up watching the original series starring William Shatner, takes me to the theater. Nervous my classmates might be there seeing another, cooler, movie like Pulp Fiction or Clerks, I make sure we go on a Tuesday night so the AMC 24 will be mostly empty. Hold my pee the whole movie so as not to duck out to the restroom and be spotted. Besides my father and me, there are only two other people in the auditorium, two men my father’s age. I’m relieved, though this adds to my Trekkie shame, to be seeing a movie only old guys like, and not even that many old guys. Afterwards, my father buys me the Generations Special Edition model spaceship of the Starship Enterprise. When you push plastic buttons on the side of the ship, lights flash, and it makes a crashing sound like it’s being hit. Fake burns singe the hull, a visual reminder of the Federation’s commitment to freedom and self-determination, their willingness to pursue it, at any cost. I hide my Starship Enterprise under a pile of clothes in the bottom of my closet, so my friends won’t see it when they’re in my room. The comm badge is another of the movie’s special edition products that I want, and it’s pinned to the Korn shirt of a boy with unwashed hair in math class. The comm badge toy is cheap plastic, just for display, which means he must have altered it himself to be able to pin it to his shirt like that, or maybe a parent did it for him. The crew members of the Starship Enterprise use their comm badges to communicate. No matter where you are, your crew is always standing by, ready to transport you back to the ship at any sign of trouble. This boy who lunches alone by the far wall of the courtyard, drinking Capri Suns like a child, waiting to be beamed up. His isolation, the cost of being himself. While I am not a nerd, I am also not popular, that’s the football team, the rich girls in brown Doc Marten sandals, who have attended school together since preschool, girls who will go on to marry the footballers, all of whom will not talk or even look directly at me, not once over the course of four years. The Borg communicate via neural networks; they need not speak aloud to each other to know who is one of them and who is not, and they also do not acknowledge lone individuals from other species, especially those they do not consider a worthy enough target. If you are unlucky enough to be on an away mission on a planet by yourself, for example, and Borg show up, you shouldn’t worry too much, despite their superior strength and ability; they likely will not hurt or even see you. It’s groups they’re after, entire crews of starships, populations of planets, whose distinctiveness they might assimilate en masse. What is there to fear from a whisper, the turning of a back each time you pass by in the hall, a glimpse of notebook paper exchanging hands, paper with your name on it, crossed out. One night, in 1994, not long after my father took me to see Generations, the Star Trek movie, my second-best friend comes over to watch My So-Called Life. I have, at this time, five best friends, and except for my best-best friend, their designations are always shifting, who is in third or fifth place on a given day. She goes into my closet, in that way high school girls rifle through their friends’ things and just take them without asking. What’s that? Muffled sounds of intergalactic war arise from the closet’s depths. Yeah, I don’t hear anything. Sounds of battle drop away. In the mirror, she strips off her clothes, puts on my shirt and pants, and neither of us show any surprise when she’s me.