The first day of Mr. Hiller’s government class started off like the first day of the five classes that preceded it. He started off taking roll. As anyone that doesn’t go by their formal first name will tell you, you usually spend the first day of the class correcting the teacher. He said “Alejandro” and you say “Alex” or he says Harold and you say “Trey”. So when Hiller said “William Truman” I said “I go by Will.”

He looked at me coldly and said “I don’t care.” It was not the start of a beautiful term in his class. I can’t say that I was his least favorite student because he really didn’t seem to like any of us. The guy who sat next to me, who I came to think of as “Dude”, never knew the answer to any of the questions that he was asked, which of course made Hiller ask him questions more frequently than anybody else in the class. I knew most of the answers and was anxious to answer if only to save my classmates any embarrassment, so he looked at me like a suck-up. Sitting in front of me was my friend Oswald Framingtonand sitting in front of him was a bully who later became my friend named Nick Soele. Nick would spend whatever free time he had trying to humiliate Oswald, which wasn’t hard. Hiller didn’t like Nick because he was a billy. He didn’t like Oswald because he whined that Nick was a bully.

About two-thirds the way through the first semester, some news was echoing through Mayne High School. “Did you hear about Cody Weaver?” I’d be asked.

“Who’s Cody Weaver?” I asked.

“I don’t know, some guy.”

“Oh. What’s the news?”

“He killed himself over the weekend!” someone would say. Everybody wanted to be the guy that told somebody even though as near as I could tell Weaver was no more than some guy to anybody that was so anxious to tell his story.

I happened to see Nick early in the day and he asked me the question that everybody else did except that he left off Cody’s last name. By this point I was tired of saying that I didn’t know who Cody was because as the day progressed everybody seemed to have a closer connection or relationship to the post-humous high school celebrity of the day and the fact that I didn’t know him was suddenly becoming noteworthy to people I was almost certain didn’t know who he was at the beginning of the day. So to get the conversation moving, I pretended that I knew who Cody was. “You should totally go see the school counselor. It’s a total get-out-of-class free card!”

“Why would I do that?”

“Because you probably knew him better half of these jackasses saying that they were tight.”

I stared at him blankly.

He got the message. “Man, you liked loaned him your pencil every other day!”

Then the little light over my head turned on. Not just my pencil, but all of his supplies. And not every other day, but every day that he was there. Cody Weaver was Dude. “Wait,” I asked, “he hung himself?” In my own head I added the word “Successfully?”

I hadn’t made the connection for a couple reasons. First, because I’d given him a nickname I hadn’t bothered to commit his actual name to memory. I vaguely recalled it being something like Cody or Toby or Corey or something like that. He definitely didn’t strike me as a Code Weaver, though. I’d been assuming all day that Cody was some sort of preppy white kid. Dude was darkly Hispanic and rarely wore anything more distinguishable than a conspicious earring and typical thuggy attire.

Dude was one of those people that initially came off as cocky from a pretty far distance if only because he was aesthetically like people that were generally (or maybe near-universally) cocky. He had a pretty hot girlfriend and was a good looking guy in spite of himself. From a distance, he wasn’t the sort of guy that you would think would do such a thing. The more I thought about it, though, the less bizarre it sounded. Dude was three things: dumb, irresponsible, and vaguely aware that he was dumb and irresponsible. Every day he would walk in without his book or any supplies. Then, if anything was required, he would freak out over the fact that he was so unprepared and would curse himself out (with frequent assists from Hiller). One day I made sure to bring an extra pencil and some paper to give him so that it might last him for a while and I wouldn’t hear the stream of self-condemnation that was kind of a drag at the end of the day. He took the stuff home with him and I never saw it again. From that point forward I actually kept a Dude Folder with a minimum of supplies that I would give him at the beginning of the class and take back at the end. I’d also let him use my book and I would read off the book of the cute girl that sat on the other side of me or, if desperately in a pinch, Oswald. During collaborative homework assignments, I’d just give him my answers. Turned out that he and I had three of the same teachers, though Hiller’s was the only class we had together. The guy who couldn’t remember a pencil to save his life could remember to bring his homework from those other classes so that I could take a look.

I don’t know what it says about me that I really didn’t think that much of his death. It didn’t really bother me. As I started thinking about the self-criticism that in hindsight sounded more like self-loathing, it was more analytical than empathetic. Word came out that he left a note saying that he couldn’t live without his girlfriend. The thing is that his girlfriend hadn’t left him. A rival of his just convinced him that she was going to (with no substantiation). The guy, someone I was actually friends with in junior high, actually bragged about pushing his rival over the edge in pursuit of the hand of his girlfriend. It didn’t take two months before he and she actually did start dating. Just as Cody became Dude to me, that guy became Jackal.

As mentioned before, he and I had two other teachers in common as well as Hiller. One thing that I remember about that day was that of the three, Hiller was the only one that seemed affected. His sharpness and antagonism were completely gone. Maybe it was because I was there when he had the class with the empty chair where the now-dead student was. Maybe he was upset about something else entirely. Really, though, I’m inclined to believe that it was because the student that he’d spent so much time deriding as worthless had come to the same conclusion about himself. Whatever the case, Hiller wasn’t the same after that.

When I was in high school, Mr. Hiller, my government teacher, asked every girl in the class to stand up.

Then he asked every student who was not white and whose parents weren’t white to stand up. After some looking at one another, most did.

He then asked everybody whose last name ends in a vowel other than “e” to stand up. They did so.

Then he said requested that everyone in the class that is not a protestant to stand up. The couple Jewish kids in the class and a Catholic or two stood up. It was when he said that anyone that had just stood up on the basis that they’re Catholic can sit down if their parents are millionaires that I knew what he was getting at.

Then, to the three-quarters of the class standing up, he said, “You will never be president when you grow up.”

It’s funny how so many years later, the anger and the anger over the anger about OJ Simpson’s acquittal in California still lingers. The subject came up on the smoking docks of the company I worked at in Estacado. I can’t remember how Simpson came up, but almost immediately the two white participants in the conversation rolled their eyes at the idiotic California jury while the black guy immediately jumped to Simpson’s defense.

During the waning days of the trial, I was taking a sociology class where the case came up relatively frequently. The class was unusually white (I don’t remember a single minority, actually). After it had been announced that the jury had come to a verdict and before the verdict was announced, they took a hand count of how they thought the jury would rule. All but three said that they would find him guilty. I was one of those three. More-or-less from the moment that the demographic breakdown of the jury was announced, I was sure that we were looking at a hung jury. Once the jury was unhung, though, I knew that it wasn’t in favor of acquittal. Not within the three hours it took for them to come to their conclusion anyway. Shortly after, we heard the football players yelling down the hall “Not guilty!” “The juice is loose!” Having almost no black student population, the football players were the only pro-OJ demographic.

My sociology professor would relate to us the next day that she cried when she heard the verdict.

I am in the school of thought that Simpson was about as guilty as they come and I don’t believe that the defense team sufficiently knocked it down. I was of the school of thought that he got away with it because he was black. The jury was stupid.

The further away from it all I get, the less sure I am of any of that except for Simpson’s actual guilt. I still believe that I would have voted to convict and I don’t think I would have been wrong for doing so. At the same time, some of it comes down to what qualifies as “reasonable doubt”. I am not 100% sure that Simpson did it and to the jury that may have been enough (focusing on the word “doubt” rather than “reasonable” where I would focus). It’s also noteworthy that while I read daily articles on the trial and got commentary from my biased mother, I wasn’t in there for eight hours a day while the all-star defense team pounded, pounded, pounded away at the case to create just enough doubt to get an acquittal. Sheck cross-examined the DNA expert for something like eight days just hammering away at the DNA evidence to the point that it probably became difficult to hear all of the reasons that the evidence might-maybe-possibly not say what it clearly seemed to say without coming to believe that there were some holes.

The other thing I have chilled out on is the racial angle. Simpson did not get away with it solely because he was black and had eight black jurors. That’s not even enough for an acquittal and given that the non-black jurors came up with the same verdict in three hours suggests that it wasn’t purely racial. Beyond that, though, I think more important than Simpson’s race was his wealth and celebrity neither of which are attributable to his race (in any direct way). Set up the same evidence with either a poor black defendant or a rich white one and I would give the latter greater odds of acquittal. Then lastly, to the extent that the black jurors did unilaterally decide to line up in racial solidarity and the other four caved or were similarly biased), it’s worth pointing out that with a jury pool that was 40% white, there was only one white juror. That’s likely another attribution to Simpson’s deep pockets. None of this is to say that race did not inappropriately benefit Simpson, but it’s not clear to me that it was determinative at all.

So after all this time Simpson is going to jail anyway for a somewhat unrelated crime (I say “somewhat” because if it hadn’t been for the first, he wouldn’t have been in the position that invited the second). I’m sure a lot of former football players that I once knew are heartbroken.

Postscript: Generally speaking, race is a subject that we don’t cover here at Hit Coffee. I am making an exception here, so we’ll see how that goes. I ask that comments please show respect towards disagreeing parties. Accusations of racism, actual racism, and derogatory nicknames of the participants in the trial or the surrounding controversy are discouraged. Thank you in advance for not making me regret bringing the subject up.

When I was a junior in college, I was riding a pretty high tide. My grades were good; I had a steady girlfriend that I’d been dating for a couple of years; I was thinking that the sky was the limit. Underneath it all, though, all was not quite right. My girlfriend Julie had started making life decisions that were going to require that I make more money than the average computer guy. I was also starting to think that becoming a computer guy was not actually what I wanted. So I started looking at other options. I had a couple friends in law school and they encouraged me to take that route. It sounded good to me.

There was one major roadblock that I could see: The Law School Admissions Test, more commonly known as the LSAT. I was never a good test taker. I had to take remedial reading in junior high because I’d flunked the statewide standardized exam. My teacher was dumbfounded that I was even there because I was ridiculously brighter than all of the other kids in that class, but when I had to take the test again I flunked it again. We were scared to death about the SAT that I needed to take. We were so shocked at how well I did (which wasn’t really all that well, actually) that we assumed that they must have made some sort of mistake. I don’t do well on standardized tests and I am worse with timed tests.

Spungen said that taking a class rose her score five points. If I’d known that, I would have signed up for a course. Instead I simply got some books and studied. Unfortunately, after all the studying I couldn’t get the score that I was aiming for and my score had only gone up two or three points. Still shy of where I wanted to be.

At the time I was working an overnight position that was in a way an ideal college job. I could spend my nights studying, though that was hard because I was so tired. I could also steal naps, but when I fell asleep at the wheel twice over the term of my employment there in retrospect I realize that I was not getting the sleep that I thought I was. The test day was not ideally situation, unfortunately, because it came after a day of hefty coursework wherein any sleep I would get would need to be at work. When I needed sleep, I could arrange it so that I could get some. Usually. But not that night. It was one emergency after another and I got less than an hour’s worth of sleep.

I drove that morning to the University of Colosse Law School in the Capitol District and took the test. Or at least I think I did. I kept falling asleep. My pages were rife with pencil scratches where I’d fallen asleep while trying to illustrate a problem on the scratch paper. The LSAT is difficult enough when all cylinders are firing and my mental car wouldn’t even start. At the end of the test there is a little box you can check if you don’t want to be scored (with the LSAT, unlike the SAT, you couldn’t simply take your best score, so you don’t want a bad score on your record). I checked it and decided to take the test later under circumstances that weren’t quite so unfavorable. In fact, I was actually going to take the night off before so that I could get some legitimate sleep. Fancy that.

A few months later was the next test, which fortunately enough was on the Southern Tech University campus where I lived and was going to school. I took not only the night off before the test, but even the night before that so that I could get on something resembling a schedule that would have me wide awake at 10 in the morning when I was often going to bed. The test was on a Tuesday and I only had one class on Tuesdays, a phys ed course. A week before the LSAT was to occur, the instructor missed a class because of some family emergency. That meant that one of the PE “exams” was now the morning of the law test. Worse, the test in question was running a mile-and-a-half. Worse still, the professor would not let me take the test early or late. So I was going to have to run a mile and a half (in the gawd-awful shape that I was in) and then walk across campus and take the most important test that I’d taken in half a decade. Not ideal.

Running the mile-and-a-half turned out only to be a component of the problem. The problem, it turned out, was the water I had to drink to replenish myself. Or at least the water that I thought that I had to drink. It turned out that I drank way too much because I didn’t sweat it off. Rather, I had to stop twice on the walk over to the annex to take a leak. The LSAT is a pretty heavily timed test, especially for somebody like me where thinking quickly isn’t my strong suit. I’m the sort of guy that always thinks of the perfect comeback to some joke or bum argument some time during the next day. I’m also terrible at saying “I am good enough with that answer to be able to move on.” It was a struggle for me to finish the test to my satisfaction in even ideal circumstances.

There are six or so rounds of testing and there was not a single section of testing that I could get through without at least one required restroom break. In one section I had to go twice. And I don’t mean that I would leave and go just a little. The only thing that surprises me more than how much liquid I expelled was that I’d managed to drink that much in the first place. Of course, I’ve always been a thirsty person and I can rarely make it through a movie without at least one restroom break, but even so it was surprising. Almost as bad as losing 5 minutes (of 35 minutes) on every section to go take care of things was the fact that even when I wasn’t, I was distracted by needing to. I had maybe ten minutes of undistracted test taking in each round of the testing.

Having passed on the test once, I couldn’t really pass on it again without it raising serious eyebrows with admission offices. So I had to take whatever score I got. It was beginning to matter less and less to me psychologically. It was becoming apparent that I was simply destined not to go to law school. Maybe my subconscious had eradicated my bladder to that effect. I was burning out scholastically and my relationship with Julie was falling apart and without that need I was starting to want a break more than I was wanting to be a lawyer. It was possible that I could take the LSAT again to bring up my score or if I’d done too badly if you take it a second time and score more than a certain number of points better than the two law schools I was looking at would discard the first. But by that point God had spoken to me in the john and that was that.

I didn’t do as badly on the test as I had thought I had. I’d scored above average, even, though that’s of small comfort when most law schools (at least in the league that I was looking at) accept only about a third of their applicants. There was one law school I’d looked at that I might have been able to get into even without retaking the test, but I was more than happy to move on. Looking back, I think that it was the right call. So maybe I owe my PE instructor a debt of gratitude.

Several years ago on a Monday in September, things were not going well between Evangeline and I. That Thursday night I was going to take a trip out to Gilead and visit my friend Clint who was attending Southern Cross University out there. Mostly, though, I found that time away from Colosse and Evangeline was less miserable than time with her in the city.

Before that happened, though, I wanted to try to smooth things over at least a little bit so that I wouldn’t spend the whole trip worrying if there was anything to even go back to. So against my better judgment I bought her flowers. I say “against my better judgment” because at that point every time I had gotten her flowers up to that point there had been some sort of disaster in our relationship. Not even because of the flowers, really. Just bad timing. Over and over again.

So at about 2am that night, I decided to go on a secret mission and deliver some flowers and left them on her car. I figured that was Tuesday, maybe we’d have a talk that night. We’d talk again on Wednesday, and then Thursday I would leave before something else could go wrong and ruin my trip. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that I should have waited another day for the flowers. Three days was way too long for something not to erupt at that time.

I stayed up for a few more hours when I got back and it was 6am when I went to sleep. My reasoning was that there was a 30/70 chance that she would dodge getting online so that she didn’t feel obligated to repay my spontaneous (okay, not exactly spontaneous) generosity with having to, you know, talk to me. She’d acknowledge the flowers and thank me in any event, and she’d probably do so in more than just a two-line email or something like that, but I didn’t want to spend the whole day worrying about the alternative and I couldn’t be worrying if I was asleep and if I didn’t wake up until 3 then I could get online and she could thank me without the awkwardness of any further communication unless she felt so inclined.

I hadn’t been asleep for maybe a couple hours when I got a call.

“Are you watching television?!” She said

“bdabdabdabda… wha?”

“Are you watching television?”

“I was asleep, actually. Wait… huh? What’s on television?”

“Turn on your television right now. Some terrorists have flown planes into the World Trade Center,” She explained. “Oh, and thanks for the flowers.”

After we got off the phone, I was in the living room watching television when my roommate Karl got home from work. “Have you seen the news?” I said almost immediately. Sue me, I wanted to be the first one to tell somebody. I was a little bit worried about his reaction, though. Karl was one of those people that was already smart but for some reason felt the need to augment the perception of his smarts by having opinions different from everybody else and so if everyone else was upset about such an attack he was the sort of person that would find humor in it or say that we deserved it or something like that. That was my fear, anyway.

I think that the news stunned him so much that he didn’t even have time to strategize how he could use this to prove that he was smarter than everyone else. As he and I watched along with our friend John (“Fuzzles”) Fustle, he was actually the most pissed off. Fuzzles was angrily talking about how our warmongering president was going to use this to blow up foreigners and I was too stunned to be angry. Stunned may not even be the right word. The tragedy hadn’t set in yet. At that point it was all so… interesting. Just very, very interesting.

I talked to Eva again that afternoon. Her employer was giving everyone the day off. I was excited because it might mean that we got to spend some time together. She dodged and weaved saying that she felt like she needed to be with her family until she was contacted by an ex-boyfriend pulling a Dan Merchand and decided to spend the afternoon consoling with him. Upon finding that out and that classes at Southern Tech were cancelled until further notice, I said “screw it” and left for Gilead a couple days early.

I heard two unbelievable ads on the radio as I drove. The first said something to the effect of “Fly plane into wall! Stoopid! Getting rates from many auto insurance companies! Smart!” Then there was another that said… “In times of war… you need CABLE!” (it was an ad for Band of Brothers, a then-new HBO miniseries). I have to think that both ads were recorded and set to play before the attacks. Notably, I never heard the ads after that day.

If there’s any way to avoid current events, it’s by visiting Clint. The guy is about as apolitical as anyone can be. About the only thing I remember about that visit that pertained to the attacks was a really dirty joke by his then-roommate about the 9/11 victims and necrophilia and I can’t even remember the joke (or if it was at all funny then or now).

A couple months later, Eva was gone for good. A couple days after that, she and the Merchand guy were officially an item. At the end of my trip that week, it all finally hit me on the drive home. Not having known anybody in the attack (once I knew that my brother wasn’t), I had to create fictional people that were in the WTC to be able to relate to it and to understand it. But it eventually happened.

There was a short time in Colosse when the Republicans were on the rise in city government. They couldn’t seem to swipe the mayor’s mansion, but they got quite adept at picking up lower profile races where the Republican voters were well-organized and the Democratic voters complacent and not always knowing that the guy that they see all those signs for is an icky Republican. They managed to win even city-wide elections despite the Democratic tilt of city politics in addition to a handful of Republican-leaning districts. With a couple surprisingly conservative black Democrats and a not-popular mayor, they even had a majority on the council for a couple of years.

The funny thing about the Republican city councilman is that they almost all looked exactly the same. Unusually young-looking handsome white fratboyish men with dark hair and a winning smile for the cameras. I followed politics closely and even I couldn’t always tell them apart. When one was term-limited out, another would step right in and take over the same role as seemlessly as Girard Christopher took over for John Haymes Newton as Superboy. Coincidentally, both actors looked a lot like Colosse Republican city councilmen.

Anyway, this post in particular involved Councilman Trevor Gaines. One night Gaines left a strip club that he’d been cut off for drinking too much. While driving, he swerved off the road, hit the railing, and ended up with a flat tire. He was walking down the road to his mother’s house, which was apparently nearby, when someone pulled over to offer aid.

• If you’re a city councilman, it’s not good to be caught drunk driving, much less doing so in a way that results in your car kissing the rail.
• The people that stopped to help him almost certainly didn’t know who he was, so all he needed to do was refuse the help and keep on walking.
• If he could just sleep it off, he could return and pick the car up the next day. Or perhaps it would have been towed, but that was preferable to a DWI.

Unfortunately, he wasn’t moving very fast physically or mentally. He didn’t really manage to get away completely before onlookers started gathering. He told the Samaritans, “No, thanks! I can’t get caught here because I am drunk and I am a city councilman and I drove my car into a rail!”

Though he’d cleared the first, he was apparently hadn’t made the second stop on the above logic train.

He pleaded it out for a fine and community service announcements. You might think that his political career was over, but shortly before election day he had a stroke of good luck that got him some sympathy votes: The newspapers found out that his wife had been sleeping with another Republican city councilman. Maybe she thought that the Republican City Councilmen were as interchangeable as I did.

As with a lot of adolescents and early post-adolescents, I defined myself in many ways by who I wasn’t. My sister-in-law grew up deciding that she was first and foremost not her father. Most seem to define themselves by not being some authority figure or another. Some, though, define themselves against mainstream society as a whole. They’re not a conformist or a preppie or whatever else.

That’s more the category that I fell into. I had minimal beef with my parents (as far as such things go when you’re that age, of course), but I hated everyone around me. I hated the rich snobs at my high school. More than that, I hated high school culture itself. Though there was always a special emphasis on the connection between money and popularity, though naturally it extended to the conformity required. Deep down, of course, a lot of it had to do with the certainty that I could conform and do everything they asked of me and still be an outcast. Meanwhile, I had a group outside my school that accepted and even celebrated my presence. Who needed those snobs?

Up through my junior year, I never went to a high school dance. That was mostly because I could never ask a girl to one. I declared the grapes on the tree sour and turned my failure to participate in any extracurricular activities into some bizarre badge of honor. The senior prom, though, was different. I was willing to put the badge on the shelf to avoid a certain other mark — the mark of someone that couldn’t get a date.

Back when I was a junior, I had a friend that I didn’t care very much that spent prom night watching movies with his parents. I decided right then and there that one way or another I would go to the prom if only so people wouldn’t think of me the way that we thought of him. That superceded the Badge of Nonparticipation.

I decided, though, that if I was going to do the whole prom thing that I was going to do it on my own terms. I was not going to spend the outrageous amounts of money that the other kids were spending. There would be no limousine. No beach house in Surfenberg. Not even fine dining. I was going to do this thing for under $20 (excluding gas).

My mother was horrified. She told me that Julie was going to dump me if I did this to her. I pointed out that it wasn’t her prom and besides she was on board with the whole idea. She went to a working class high school where things like limousines and the like weren’t done anyway. Besides, just because I was going to be cheap doesn’t mean that I was going to be lazy. Mom told me that she would take care of the corsage because a friend that made them owed her a favor anyway. She begged and pleaded me to allow her to buy our dinner at a nice restaurant, but I refused.

Instead I drove all the way down the interstate looking for some sort of park that had some covering. Then I found the nearest Wendy’s, which was the establishment that she and I had eaten at on our first official date.

I picked up Julie at her house on prom night. That meant going in the wrong direction, but it still seemed like the thing to do on prom night. We stopped by the Wendy’s nearby and ordered two salads, two burgers, shared fries, a shared drink, and a shared desert. A three course picnic in a little canopy in the wind and rain. That she had a good time was one of the things that I really loved about her.

The prom was the prom. Neither Julie and I are dancers, so we only danced on a couple of songs. There had been an election for what the official prom song would have been. Ironically, the song in question was never played until the very end, where it had to be cut short because our time was up. We had our picture taken (those cost money, of course, but I didn’t count that because that wasn’t on prom night), I had my pictures taken with my best friends Clint and Dave. On the whole it was… kinda boring, actually.

Things picked up afterwards when Julie and I somehow hooked up with my classmate (and reluctant friend) Scott Sanders and Marianne Silbet. The four of us went to the beach together and considering that Scott was by far one of the least fun people to be around, we enjoyed ourselves walking on the pier in our bare feet. Talking about the prom, high school, and all that. That replaced the picnic as the high point of the evening.

Unlike a lot of people, there wasn’t any sex on prom night. By the time we drove home I was beyond sleepy. I told Julie that we’d need to pull over so that she could drive. She asked why and I told her that all of the lane changing I’d been doing (and I’d been doing a lot) had not been intentional. She quickly pointed out the first exit afterwards. She took the wheel, we drove to her house, and I slept on the couch in my tux.

That I was able to go to the prom spending so little money was a source of pride for me for a long time afterwards, though in the last couple years my perspective on it has changed. The biggest factor in that, I think, is the realization that my decision to be different on such inconsequential things as that was a bigger barrier to my social life than anything else. And with the exception of the popular people and the select few people that didn’t like me for one reason or another, it wasn’t because they were snotty and hated my individuality or anything like that, but rather it was because it cost me opportunities to get to know people.

Looking back, I wish that I had gone to the prom with Clint and Dave in their limo or whatever it was that they had. Or if their limo was full, I’m sure I could have found someone to go with. I didn’t even like being around Scott Sanders and yet sharing the experience with him was one of my favorite parts of the evening. Even going with him would have been more fun. Though, come to think of it, he may have been hip to the whole $20 prom thing because he was tightwad.

Instead, I let my conception of the way that things should be get in the way of having as good a time as I might have otherwise had.

Unfortunately, I did that sort of thing a lot.

I don’t know what possessed me to, but when I was in the eighth grade I took a shop class. Maybe I thought it was an easy grade or maybe I just had some space to fill. I don’t know what I expected, but I didn’t expect what we got. Neither, did it turn out, did Mr Meeker, fresh out of college and ready to educate young minds.

Meeker had his lesson plan ready. We’d learn all about slide rules and then lessons and tutorials on the equipment. If all went well, somewhere around the halfway point we’d actually be working on said equipment. I don’t know what exactly my classmates were expecting, but it wasn’t Mr Meeker’s lesson plan.

If you’d had a sign up on the room asking for the most unruly, disrespectful, and disruptive students, it surely would have said “Shop Class”. I remember the first day looking all around me and being quite shocked at the high concentration of lowlifes, bullies, and ne’er-do-wells. If a single person from that class actually graduated with me five years later, I couldn’t tell you who they were. Sure, sometimes people move away or whatever, but I would be surprised in half the people in that class graduated at all and I suspect of those that did graduate far more than not did so from the alternative high school.

I heard that as far as the shop classes went, we were not even the worst.

Adding flame to the fire was Meeker’s lesson plan, which gave these unruly kids no outlet for all of their energy. One would expect that they were there to use saws and flames and all manner of exciting tools. They were not there to take pop quizzes on measurement conversions.

Most of the first six weeks of that class was a blur. I went to middle school in a lower-middle class school who’d had most of the wealthier kids plucked out and taken to the new school and by that point most of the smart (and thus well-behaved) kids were in honors classes. On top of that, we were all aged 12-14 or so. So I was used to crazy. I was used to the Lord of the Flies and all that.

This was something different. This was kids bringing bug spray to school and then creating a virtual flamethrower with the flametorch. This was kids brazenly hitting other kids with plywood. Kids karate-chopping wood. Slapping the desk with a ruler just to see how loud they could make it. Kids’ lighting other kids’ schoolbags on fire.

At first Meeker tried to control the madness. He would tell the class to quiet down and sit down. He said “Don’t make me say it again” fifteen times one class period (plus two or three times before I actually started my count). After a couple weeks he ditched the lesson plan and decided to show people how exactly to use the grinder that Marc Eldridge was using on Kerry Fenwick’s math book… but when he’d take over the grinder for a demonstration, people just walked away moved on to the flametorch.

After a couple of weeks, Meeker just locked himself in his office and let the madness reign. Somewhere around the fifth week he was absent. Rumor was that he checked himself into a mental health clinic. The sixth week (or so) he came back. Three days later he quit.

After that we were stuck in an unused classroom with a different substitute teacher each day. At first the subs went off a lesson plan, but it was really kind of pointless because most of the textbooks had been burned to char or grounded up to bits. The only reason I still had mine was that I refused to actually bring books to that class anymore after I had to spend a whole period simply trying to protect my bag from the nuclear incinerator or whatever else they wanted to do with it.

The rumors about the shop class spread and the new subs started coming in wearing their full protective gear. Okay, that’s an exaggeration, but they stopped trying to teach. Then they stopped actually showing up. After only a few weeks, Vice Principal Davis himself was having to teach the class. After a couple days, he stopped trying to teach it, too. He made a deal with us that we could do whatever we wanted as long as we stayed in our seats. Kids made a point of bringing large objects with which to swat and poke one another. Davis just sad there and worked on his paperwork.

Finally at about the twelve-week point, he’d managed to find us a new teacher, Mr Kohl. The first day of class he said that he was going to appoint a Class Leader from our ranks and that whoever the best and best behaved student was would get the honor. From the second he mentioned, I knew that giant target was going to end up painted on my back.

Once again, though, things didn’t turn out quite as expected. Kohl was a former military man and he had apparently been fully briefed on the class. In just a couple of days he did what Meeker, Davis, and countless substitutes could never do. He got everyone in line. The first person that cracked a joke got shut in one of the walk-in-closet-sized rooms on the side of the lab. One kid made a physically threatening gesture and was literally pushed onto his ass. The kid complained, but Kohl simply said that the students had thrown out all the rules out so they couldn’t hide behind them now.

I don’t know how Kohl got away with it. Maybe most of the trouble-makers came from families that were too broken to care. Maybe the VP Davis and the Principal simply ignored parental complaints since they knew the score. Whatever the case, in the last six weeks or so of that class, we actually had class.

When I was in high school, my brother Mitch invited me to a fraternity party at the University of Delosa. The gist of the party was that the entire frat house was flooded by a couple of inches and everyone dressed like a swamp soldier in camo and whatnot. It was a pretty big deal. Being 16 and invited to one of these things was a pretty big deal, too.

My brother was dating a girl named Suzie at the time and Suzie was a member of the fraternity’s sister sorority. One of Suzie’s sorority sisters was a girl named Maggie. Maggie wasn’t gorgeous, but she was curvacious (sp?) in a really good way and she had a spunky personality that I liked. The coolest, thing, though, was that she talked to me. Not as Mitch’s kid brother, but as a guy.

The water came down and the place was flooded and the party began. Having access to unlimited free booze, I did the expected thing and started drinking a lot right away. Wherever I turned, for a while, there was Maggie. She kept… touching me. Not in a sexual way, but in the offhand way that made me feel warm (so maybe the alcohol was helping in that regard).

I kept trying to work up the guts to kiss her. The idea that a college girl could be interested in a dopey high school kid like me was on its face ludicrous, but there really weren’t many alternative explanations for the way that she was acting. I wasn’t sure of anything, but I was sure that to not even try was even more ludicrous than the idea that she might be receptive.

Then, after about my eighth beer or so, she disappeared. Then I was stuck with this other girl who was very, very interested in me. This one didn’t know that I was in high school. Can’t remember a whole lot about her but her name and that despite the fact I was drunk, she was still extremely ugly.

Maggie reappeared and I ditched the other girl with all the tact of a drunk 16 year old kid on the cusp of getting his first kiss or more by an older, hot woman. Before I could spring into action, I was suddenly being talked to by all sorts of girls. One after another. They were introducing themselves to me and lightly flirting and eventually all getting around to telling me the exact same thing: Whatever you do, stay the hell away from Maggie.

Girls of the sort that would never even give me the time of day were suddenly taking an interest in my welfare. Maggie must be a psycho or something, I thought. I was too drunk and too dumbstruck to turn down their advice. Maggie seemed to change a little bit, too, making me wonder if someone had said something to her.

The next day it became apparent to me that Suzie had sent her sorority sisters to be my protector. I asked in as offhanded a manner I could muster why she had done so. She said “I don’t know, I just don’t think that she’s good for you?”

“Really. Why not?”

“I don’t know, she’s just… weird.”

I didn’t say so, but the thought that went through my mind was “Weird? Weird?! You got in between me and a hot chick because you thought she was weird?! Who the hell do you think I am? I know every baseball statistic from the 1986 baseball season. I plot gritty noir movies starring Darkwing Duck. I write comic books during English class and set up paper football leagues. I talk to myself, I talk in my sleep. Weird? Not so much a problem!

But alas, it was not to be. The upshot was that it provided me with a much-needed self-esteem boost (sure she was probably crazy, but a college chick dug me!!) and the whole thing made me feel closer to Suzie who really was looking out for me (why couldn’t Mitch have married her?). Greater opportunities were lost, of course. Then again, considering how much I had to drink, it’s quite possible that they wouldn’t have been remembered, anyway.

One of the long list of things that made me unpopular in junior high school was that I refused to wear jeans and would instead wear slacks (among other things, see below). It wasn’t a fashion decision or a desire to go formal and look sleek. Had it been that, I would have showered and groomed, two more reasons for my unpopularity. No, the main reason was that I thought jeans were the most uncomfortable thing ever. So from about the fifth grade to about the eighth, I wore no jeans.

It’s funny how little things can have a disproportionate effect on things. The things that you didn’t know that if you had… Looking back, I think that the reason that jeans were so uncomfortable was that they were tight. They were tight because I have large legs in comparison to my waist size. Slacks generally allow for more leg-room, so they were more comfortable to me. They may have made Relaxed Fit jeans back then, I really don’t know because I didn’t shop. Or they may not have because baggy pants weren’t all the rage back then.

Whatever the case, I didn’t have access to them. I want to say “Gosh, if they’d only existed” or “If I’d only known about them” as if it would make all the difference in the world. Looking back, by itself it likely would have made very little difference. I was unpopular for a lot of reasons, my jeans only being a part of it.

The local fashion scene broke a little luck in my favor when I was in the seventh grade with these pants called (I think?) Skidz. Skidz were these thin, baggyish, colorful, stylized non-jean pants that from my recollection were more similar to pajama pants than actual pants. For hot southern summers, they were great. Increasingly, I also pestered my mother for at least a couple shirts that were “in”.

So at least a couple days a week, I was dressing not too far off from some of the most popular kids at school. Yet… somehow… it didn’t help… at all. My tormentor at the time (who later became a friend when I figured out how really to win those people over) accused them of being fakes and so I was one big, fat fake. Also, and this certainly came as a shock to me, Skidz were unbelievably easy to pull down. So even when I was doing things the way I was supposed to, it was still somehow turned around to my disadvantage.

That’s not to say that my aversion to jeans made no difference. The most popular kid could have gotten away with wearing slacks, but not someone like me. It was merely another thing that cemented my level of popularity with other people that couldn’t wear jeans because their mommas wouldn’t let them (like Orson Millard).

Several years later, I was in an English class where we had to write a paper about ourselves. My teacher didn’t like any of my papers and that one was no exception, so I was called in to class early to discuss it. One thing he didn’t understand was my usage of the fact that I wore slacks instead of jeans as indicative of my unconventionality. Out of nowhere, this girl who was serving morning detention interjected and explained exactly what I was trying to say.

When the teacher moved on to someone else, she moved to the desk in front of me and struck up a conversation. She was asking me all sorts of questions about myself in small talk that I would later figure out was the sort of chit-chat you involve yourself in before asking someone out. I think the kids call this “flirting”. I was of course utterly oblivious at the time. She mentioned in the course of the conversation that I reminded her a little bit of this guy that she knew. I jumped onto the familiar name and expressed how completely and awesomely cool the guy was. Turned out that they’d dated and it didn’t end well. Oops. That remains one of the missed opportunities that I’m sorry that I missed. She was a lot more interesting than the girls I actually wanted to date.