The Seagull Story

From the archives. Original blog post date: December 9, 2003.

Dramatic 1994 recreation created by Ernie Hsiung using AI.

A couple of weeks ago¹, I was having dinner with some co-workers, and I referred to the place where I grew up: El Cerrito, California.

Co-worker: El Cerrito? As in, El Cerrito High?
Ernie: Yeah. Class of 1994.
Co-worker: Whoa! Class of 1996! I don't think we knew each other back then.
Ernie: Nope. Well, you don't remember "the seagull guy," right? That was me.
Co-worker: The seagull who? No.
Ernie: Cool. So anyway, I...
Co-worker: Wait. I do remember. I've heard stories about you.

1994. It's kinda hard to believe that I graduated from high school ten years ago. Like, remember the episodes of Saved By the Bell where everyone talks about how their ten-year reunions? Then, in a dramatic fantasy sequence, there they are, the same 17-year-olds wearing "old clothes" and fake mustaches, talking about their fantasy jobs and their imaginary children.

And then one of them took all her clothes off to star in the movie Showgirls. But I digress.

So there I am in my salad bowl haircut. It's not enough that I have the salad bowl haircut, of course. I also have a green baseball jacket that my mother brought back from Taiwan. The soft inside liner, which protects me from the wind, is my favorite jacket. Instead of a team logo, it had a giant lettering: "1993."

Do you know how uncool it is to wear a 1993 jacket in 1994?

But there I am anyway, with a green jacket and bad haircut, and I'm sitting on the baseball field at lunch with some classmates. I wouldn’t necessarily call them friends — they would start talking shit the second I walked away and spoke openly about poker nights and weekend hangouts I wasn't invited to — but they tolerated me having lunch around them.

I had a crush on one of the guys in the group, Scott.² He and I were in a bunch of classes together. He wasn't necessarily hot or anything; it was more of the simple fact that he didn't make fun of me as much as the other guys did. That and he lived within a 10-minute drive from me since it took half an hour to get to school each day.³ He was funny, too.

How do you get a closeted high school boy to like you? Be nice to him, that's how.

(passes in the halls)
Ernie: Hey. Happy Birthday.
Scott: Thanks, man. I don't think I ever told you it was my birthday today.
Ernie: Yeah, you did. A couple of months back.
Scott: Cool. You're the only one who remembered.
Ernie: Oh yeah? No problem.

(looks down, walks away)

You're probably wondering why I bring up the story of an awkward crush I had in high school out of nowhere. Why? Because they were there when all of this happened.

"They" being him, sitting across from me, and 10 of his closest friends.

"It" being, of course, a group of 50 to 100 seagulls.

And “happened” is that these seagulls decided to shit on my head.

Like, directly on my head, running down on my forehead, starting to go between my eyebrows before I took the paper bag that my dad used to hold sandwiches from the meat leftover from dinner and wiped it across my salad-bowl-accented forehead. Everyone is laughing. The people eating lunch, the stoners getting high by the bleachers, the cholos hanging by the gym.

And Scott. He was laughing, too. At me, not with me.

Seagulls, I fucking swear to God. Seagulls in the Bay Area are commonplace: rats with wings flying from the marinas to baseball-diamond-sized fields of pizza crusts and candy wrappers, free to take a shit wherever they want. And there they were, probably giving each other seagull high-fives with their goofy ass white wings afterward.

Fuck. It's brown. Isn't seagull shit supposed to be white? Fuck.

It's night now, and I'm supposed to be doing my calculus homework, but I've been in the shower for an hour, washing my hair for the fifth time, convinced that I haven't gotten all the bird shit out of my hair. I'm convinced that my dad thinks I'm masturbating.

I convince myself, for a brief second, that no one will remember this at school the next day.

It became a legend. Of course, it became a legend.

James Lee drew a fairly realistic picture of “the” seagull on my binder. Others wrote catty remarks when we got our yearbooks at the end of the year and made seagull noises as I walked across the stage for graduation practice.

“I'm going to get the fuck away from here,” I thought to myself. “I'm going to move to Boston where there are seasons, and the school buildings are made from brick and not brutalist concrete, and go to college there, and I'll change, and I'll never have to talk to these motherfuckers again in my entire life.”

And what happens? I date someone from my high school.⁴ We celebrated our first anniversary last Thursday, and next year, we’ll all meet at the Berkeley Marina for our ten-year reunion.⁵

The faster you run, the more likely it catches up to you.

1. Oh hey, maybe present-day Ernie can refer to his original post through footnotes! That sounds like a perfectly rational thing to do. Okay, let’s go with that.

This was definitely NOT a couple of weeks ago, everyone; this is 2003, making reference to 1994 Ernie, and oh wow, does this mean Ernie at 65 will be remarking about Ernie at 48?

2. The name "Scott" has been changed, of course, to protect the innocent. And for high school alumni armed with a search engine.

3. Fun fact: During my freshman year in high school, a photograph of me sticking my head out of a yellow school bus appeared in a 1991 episode of Time Magazine. At the time, my school district was the first in the nation to declare bankruptcy. The cover photo was a feature photo about crack babies, so that was a fun way to bookmark the beginning of my high school experience.

4. I didn’t mention in 2004 that I met him on Craigslist. Let’s just say we didn’t meet in the “Missed Connections” section.

Yes, he knew about the incident, too.

5. Takeaways at my first and only high school reunion I attended: “Scott” never showed up at this or any reunion, nor any of the other smart kids who had their poker nights without me. The majority of my classmates just ended up working at the local Costco.