I pick champagne

When I was in high school, I was for one brief shining moment a New England Debate Champion.

I am not generally competitive. There’s nothing wrong with competition: I just don’t like the stress. I suck at sports, and even in the most casual situations I’ve never been a fan of any dynamic that was all about winning.

The thing is, I like to win — I am just not always willing to pay the price, which is for me a weird combination of trying to exercise power over others (I’m going to win win win!) and feeling powerless myself (oh no they’re winning I feel bad bad bad!). I am willing to make myself vulnerable to the world in lots of different ways, but competing is not such an easy one for me. Maybe it comes down to the difference between being good/not good at something myself (does someone buy my novel/short story/screenplay, or not?) and being better/worse at something than someone else. Maybe I just don’t like being shown my place in line. I dunno.

At any rate, signing up for the debate team in high school still remains one of the great mysterious choices of that part of my life. And I only lasted one term (semester, quarter… we called them terms). But in that term, my debate partner Jon Sweet and I kicked some serious smart-kid ass up and down New England.

We found a good division of labor: Jon did as much of the extemporaneous talking as possible, and I wrote as many of the prepared words as possible. I was great at putting the arguments into coherent and occasionally passionate terms: and Jon was great at doing the thing that scared the bejeezus-most out of me, which was fielding oral debate on the fly — answering the challenges calmly, with the facts and figures, and a particular easy-going charm that just made him seem so much more convincing than everyone else.

And so one Sunday we went off to one of the other schools (Exeter, maybe? Not too far away…) and represented St. Paul’s as a Novice Team. Our topic was, I believe: “Resolved: the United States should unilaterally cease production of nuclear weapons.” (Or something like that — Jon, if you ever come visiting here, do you remember if this is right?) I remember nothing of the experience except the statistic that (at the time) the US had the existing nuclear capacity to destroy the entire world dozens of times over (I can no longer remember the exact number, but it was impressive). So when it was my turn to stand up and field the challenges, I just kept finding creative ways to make the response be about We can kill everyone a lot with the stuff we have now, why do we need more?

And at the end of the day, after doing this three or four times, we got named the winning novice team and they gave us little silver bowls, and then we all climbed in the van and went back to school.

I must say that winning was one of the biggest surprises I’d had in a long time. It felt… really weird to win at something that I was pretty sure I actually wasn’t that intrinsically good at. Hey, you know, maybe that experience is part of where my attraction to team-building (and ultimately Humans At Work) came from — I’m certain that neither Jon or I would have won on our own, but we made a great team. Huh. I’ve never thought about it in those terms before, but that’s really what the dynamic was. And it was one of my first direct experiences of the power of teamwork when people are playing to their strengths.

Anyway, Jon and I were friendly but we weren’t active friends outside of debating. I was always a little bowled over by his confidence and charm (waves to Jon through the internet), and I was shy, and…. And so you may imagine my surprise to wake up in the middle of the night sometime the next week to find Jon shaking my shoulder. It was the first time a boy ever snuck into my room.

Hey, Kel, this is for you, he said, and put something in my hand, and phtt, he was gone into the magic invisible wormhole that boys go when they sneak out of your room…

And there I was, holding my first bottle of champagne.

It was just great. Really an amazing moment.

So I did what any kid with no real experience of fizzy alcohol or radiator heating would have done: I hid the bottle behind the radiator.

For several days.

In winter.

The following Saturday night, my friend Margo and I settled down after dinner to savor the experience. I had craftily set up the furniture in my room so that I could block the door from being opened (we didn’t have locks, those were simpler times…). We opened the window and lit cigarettes. I put on music (probably Traffic). I produced the bottle. I peeled the foil. I took off the little wire hat.

I didn’t even have to touch the cork. It exploded out of the bottle all by itself and champagne went everywhere. All over us. All over the bedspread. All over the india-print wall hanging. All over the ceiling (drip drip drip).

And at the door: knock knock.

It was the faculty member on our hallway, Miss Moroney. She opened the door and it banged against the drawer. I beetled over and peered out. My heart was pounding a zillion beats a minute. Behind me, Margo was desperately fanning fumes out the window. I was sure we were going to be in Big Trouble — alcohol was the kind of thing that could get you suspended or expelled.

“Kelley,” Miss Moroney said, “I have to know… are you smoking in there?”

I have never been so happy to be caught doing something wrong in my whole life.

“Yes, I am,” I said, in my best George-Washington-cherry-tree voice. “I’m sorry, it’s just that it’s so cold outside and I just, well, I’m really sorry, I won’t ever do it again, I’m really sorry, I really am.” And I’m sure I looked terrified. At any rate, she took total pity on me and told me that if it ever happened again, she’d have to report it. I groveled earnestly. I thanked her. Then I closed the door, and Margo and I damn near laughed ourselves sick (very quietly!) as we drank the remaining bit of the champagne.

I didn’t sign up for debating again in the spring. I think I hurt the teacher’s feelings who ran the group, but I knew it wasn’t for me. I’d been lucky to be with the right person, but I didn’t really have the fire for winning that one needs to be a top-notch debater. Because debating isn’t about persuading, or having an actual conversation. It’s about positions, points, arguments, and sometimes it’s just about volume and who bangs hardest on the table.

I’m just not very good at it. I would much rather have champagne.