It’s been a year or two since my high school reunion, but recent discussions have put it back in my mind.

I did not particularly enjoy my high school experience and (unlike my junior high school experience) I have no one to blame but myself for it. I was always a poor fit temperamentally for Mayne {pronounced to rhyme with “maybe”} High School. It was filled with people that had money and seemed to care most about those things that people that have money care most about. It was loads better than middle school, but it wasn’t for me. I never dated anyone from my high school and my picture appears in the yearbook only once because I never did any extra-curricular activities.

As such, I probably never would have attended the reunion at all had it not been for the chance to be reunited with my best friends Clint and Dave. Dave and I flew down from Shoshona and Deseret respectively, met with Clint in Ephesus where he was living at the time, and then drove to Mayne. Even if there hadn’t actually been a reunion, it was great to hang out with them even if much of that time was spent driving. Much to my surprise, the reunion itself was a blast.

Oddly enough, or maybe fittingly, I did not spend all that much time talking to people that I knew from high school. I spent it talking to people that I didn’t know at all or that I knew in elementary and/or middle school but not high school.

I went to West Oak Elementary School (WOES), which is about as middle class as you can get. We were looked down upon by the people that lived in Mayne, but were better off than those that lived in working-class Southfield and Larkhill. For middle school, West Oak and Larkhill Elementary School (LHES) fed into Larkhill Intermediate School (LHIS). Larkhill was much more working class, so working class that it’s actually mentioned in a Bruce Springsteen song. Larkhill Elementary was significantly larger than West Oak, so the average economic status at Larkhill Intermediate was not good.

The same sort of thing in reverse happened when Larkhill Intermediate fed into Mayne High School with upper crest Mayne Intermediate School*. As with before, the school we were merging with was considerably larger than the one we were coming from. Not only did they have a lot more students, but their students were wealthier, more achieving, and better behaved. Almost all of the “problem kids” from high school I knew from junior high and they were weeded out, dropped out, or farmed out to a correctional institution. So what I ultimately saw happen a lot was that instead of people hanging out with the people they hung out with in junior high we Larkhillers would gradually ingratiate ourselves into an existing group of friends from MIS (and Airfield, see note below).

So all of this is the long way of saying that the people I talked to were in three distict groups: people I was friends with in elementary school (who I was not friends with in junior high because they started going to advanced/honors classes), people I was friends with in junior high (a fair number of whom were weeded out or reinvented themselves into some other group in high school), and people I knew from high school.

Here are some observations that I recall (after looking over some emails that I wrote at the time) from the reunion:

• There were almost no Asian-Americans there, despite their presence on campus. I can literally remember two that I think are more of Pacific Islander descent and they were twins.
• The people I was most anxious to talk to were the ones from elementary and intermediate school. Particularly elementary.
• Once they started tracking us into regular and honors classes I lost contact with a lot of them. I hung out with the smart kids in elementary school, but didn’t get into the smart classes in high school.
• The Mayne/Airfield contingent was over-represented. The number of people I knew from Larkhill Intermediate but not West Oak Elementary (read: those that went to Larkhill Elementary) was nearly non-existent.
• I spent the first hour or so talking to someone that I didn’t even know in high school. After I got my food I needed a place to sit down but none of the tables had a friendly congregation. I decided that sitting alone while eating was one high school memory that I was not going to relive, sat down at a random table and made some friends. When we finally parted, our last words to one another were, “I wish I’d known you back in the day!” “You, too!” I wish I’d made more of an effort to get to know people back in the day.
• A couple of the guys did not really think that it might be inappropriate to talk about all the girls a guy “banged” when his wife of six months is sitting right next to him at the table.
• There was only one awkward instance of a guy that I knew that didn’t know me. I knew him in junior high and we were actually pretty good friends. It did not occur to me that he would not remember me. I guess it’s understandable, though. He was a nerd when I knew him but he became an ROTC nut in high school. he’s probably blocked out his nerdy years.
• The reward for the coolest guy goes to Jesse Brooks. I remembered him as being a really cool guy for a goth/punk/industrial dude. He ended up going to MIT, flying jets for the Navy, and working for a venture capital firm in Ephesus. Unlike the ROTC guy, Jesse remembered me despite having done a lot more in the meantime and more genuinely reinvented himself.
• While smoking a cigarette I had the obligatory conversation with a girl that I never, ever could have mustered up the courage to talk to back in the day.
• All of the cheerleaders and drill team members I saw there had engagement and/or wedding rings. Every last one. Only one that I saw married her high school sweetheart.
• Two Larkhill classmates had four or more children. I was not surprised by either of them.
• The girl that Clint obsessed over and Dave’s serious high school girlfriend both had kids. I missed out on any of that since I never dated anyone from my school and besides I was rarely interested in people my own grade. I wonder if I can sneak in for the reunion of the Class of 1999, wherein I could see the fate of the girl that I obsessed over.
• I don’t know what the jocks made of their lives since I didn’t really talk to them at the reunion. They didn’t look like they’d completely wasted away like I might have hoped once upon a time.
• High School reunions are great places to meet people romantically if you’re still single. None of the three of us were, though, so that was sort of a waste. On the other hand, the fact that we weren’t single may have made it easier to go. In fact, I considered my wedding ring a giant shield. So long as I wore it, I was impervious from female rejection.

* – It’s actually a tad more complicated than this. In my 8th grade year they built a new middle school, Airfield Intermediate School (AIS) and my 8th grade class was smaller than my 7th grade class with a portion of the wealthier students siphoned off. Most of the students at Airfield had previously gone to Mayne Intermediate, so they essentially had the same experience we did with the integration of the snobs, they just had a year sooner and on a slightly more limited basis. As such, I’m counting both the Airfield and Mayde students in a single group since they were both (at one point or another) dominated socially by the same people.

When I was in the fourth grade, I had a hot teacher, Mrs. Nelson. She was under thirty, attractive, and very nice and warm. So was so nice and pretty that she had relatively few disciplinary problems with the boys because none of us wanted to make her upset with us.

On the first day of class she gave a speech that it was in the fourth grade that she started needing glasses and that she would be on the lookout for kids in her class that might need glasses.

I’m not sure there was any clearer way that she might have said “If you have bad eye sight, or at least behave as though you do, you will get extra attention from a very attractive school teacher.”

Suddenly I couldn’t read the chalkboard so easily. I had to squint. I had to raise my hand and ask about any writing that might have been the slightest bit smaller or less legible than other writing. In no other class would having been moved to the front a reward rather than a punishment. When Mrs. Nelson told my parents that I needed to get my eyes checked, I was in too deep to do anything but intentionally fail my eye exam.

My first pair of eyeglasses had big, giant, purple frames. I was not particularly averse to wearing glasses in the abstract (I knew my genes and knew I’d get them eventually), but the combination of the girliness of the glasses and the fact that it made my perfect vision blurry, I wore them next to never.

A couple years later I was stuck in the back of my Spanish class, where the ability to read a chalkboard was more crucial in others. I could not for the life of me read what was going on. I don’t know if it was the first time I’d been sat in the back of a class in a year or two* or if my eyesight had just suddenly deteriorated between the fifth and sixth grades, but it was harsh. Out of pure desperation I put on the Ole Purples. They actually helped!

Unfortunately, I had enough popularity problems without those things saddling my already unimpressive personal appearance. So once again I was pretending that I couldn’t read what was reasonably clear so that I could get another visit to the eye doctor and another pair of (preferably black or silver or brown or gold or anything but purple) glasses. When it was all said and done my prescription was… almost identical to the bad prescription I had faked two years before. “This is great!” Dad said, “no need for new glasses!”

Ole Purples met with their untimely demise a week later when Dad sat in them in his chair. “So strange,” he said, “you’d think I would have seen them there.” Somehow they’d ended up below the armchair cover, which had itself been placed on the seat of the chair, making it pretty difficult to see. I managed to convince Dad that my glasses must have been on the armrest and that they must have fallen onto the seat of the chair where he sat on them. The elaborateness of my explanation was probably the most suspicious thing about the whole affair.

* – I don’t believe this to be the case. My last name for whatever reason would usually stick me near the back of the classroom in any alphabetically-assigned seating chart and any time we were given a choice I’d sit as far back as I could.

Perhaps by coincidence and perhaps not, my introductions to both comic books and anime involved vacations.

I was about fourteen or fifteen when I first became interested in comic books. I had finally gotten around to seeing the Batman movies of the day and had fallen in love with them. From there I started becoming attracted to superhero mythos on television from Batman to Darkwing Duck. I’ve always been like that: I discover something new and immerse myself into it. To be honest, the idea of actually buying comic books never appealed to me until I stumbled across a rerun of Simon & Simon involving the death of a comic book writer.

I bought my first comic book from the convenience store right down the street from me. They only had Batman, Superman, and a couple others. I bought Batman and the next day my family left for one of those 12 countries in 21 day European tours. The vacation left a lot of time on the bus. While the rest of the family was peering out the window looking at strange (well, Europe, so not that strange) foreign lands, I had my nose in the comic book. I literally read that thing at least 100 times that trip. With that comic book as my only experience, my imagination ran wild with what other comic books might be like. Almost immediately I was creating comic books in my head.

By any measure, the comic that I had ran a mediocre plot with a fourth-rate villain (Maxie Zeus), but I had no way of knowing that. I read the letters to the editor fifty times, too, and my first order of business upon getting back was buying the storylines referred to in the letters. That meant actually going to a comic book store, which blew my mind. It wasn’t all good. Apparently some of the comic books cost a whole $1.75 instead of $1.50. Of course now I doubt you can get one for under $3.

When it comes to anime, I was actually introduced slightly before a vacation. I was introduced by a friend named Zane. I thought Zane was the coolest guy ever and wanted any excuse I could find to spend time with him. So I would hang out at his friend Mick’s house (Mick’s house was cool cause his dad left and his mom was a dispondent drunk) and we watched some anime late into the night as we took turns chatting online. I only got a couple opportunities to do so before the vacation to Shell Beach, but before I left Zane loaned me his collection so that I would have something to watch.

Clint went with me that year and what time we didn’t spend talking about girls and whatnot we spent watching anime. The first one we watched was a show called Ranma, which was about a boy that turned into a girl when doused with cold water (and then back to a boy when doused with warm water). It didn’t seem like something particularly good, but so many of the people we knew online were into it we had to see it for the culture value alone.

In the US, when there is a TV show and a movie with the same characters, it is typical the the movie came first and the TV show followed (think Highlander). So we figured that the movie should be watched first. Generally (though certainly not always), it works the opposite with anime. The movies come after a TV show has ended (which is increasingly the case in the US, too). But we learned this too late and the movie we thought was going to introduce us to Ranma and company literally had 20 or so characters all chasing each other in the first ten minutes as each chasing member would bump into someone else that had reason to chase them until there was a virtual herd. Akane, the female lead, yelled at Ranma, “Ranma, you do this every time!” We had no idea what the heck was going on, but there were enough one-liners to make us start watching the TV show, which slowly started filling in the backstory.

When we got back to Colosse our first order of business was procuring more of this stuff. Clint quickly befriended an anime friend and basically started dating her so that she would make copies of the anime for us (well, that wasn’t the only reason, she was also very unrigid, affection-wise). Piece by piece, though out of order, we started getting the Ranma story filled in. We also soon discovered a video game rental store that also dealt in anime and within a semester we cleaned out their relatively paltry selection.

It wasn’t until the next summer that we finally made our way to a place called Animenian Outpost in downtown Colosse. The video game store had maybe 100 tapes in all. This place had walls and walls of it, including the entire Ranma series and every other series I’d heard people talking about online. Clint was so excited that he was shaking. I looked at the wall, determined that I wanted to rent about 70% of it, and was trying to figure out what bank I was going to need to rob to make that happen.

Whether you are a fan of South Park or not, five of the funniest minutes I have ever seen on television are from an episode a few years back about smoking. South Park elementary invited in this group called Butt Out that put on a presentation so obscenely lame and yet so familiar that I turned red from rambunctious laughter, which doesn’t happen often with me.

Up until my senior year Mayne High School would invite some person to our school to warn us about the dangers of drugs, alcohol, tobacco, and/or depression. One year it was this black guy that flung a basketball around a bit and sang some song about a girl named Emily who was addicted to drugs, alcohol, or tobacco or maybe committed suicide or maybe all of the above. The next year was the announcer for that Chicago-based clown… Bozo, I think. He was actually pretty good. A bit schmaltzy, but entertaining enough that we went back to see him that night. The next year was a stand-up comic that was absolutely hilarious.

The next year they had a power forward for the Colosse Spiders professional basketball team. He gave us his life story, which mostly seemed to consist of screwing up (or, as he put it, “making poor decisions”… he never went into detail). So it was something like: screwed up in high school, got into college anyway. Screwed up in college, got to stick around for four years anyway. Screwed up again, ended up in the NBA. The moral of the story was that having a great jump shot entitles you to all the poor decisions you care to make.

When I explained this whole thing to Dad, he laughed. The basketball player in question had been caught with pot in his car and had copped a “Community Service” plea. I guess we were the community service.

So many of the morality crusaders that came to our school were entertaining in their own way. We missed those guys that rip the phone book in half and attribute their success to Jesus Christ* moral living. I guess they figured that as a senior we wouldn’t be impressed or that they would be washing their hands of us sooner or later so no need to give us a lecture at that stage in the game.

The other day I was standing outside a pizza place and looked over and saw a DARE table manned by a black guy in a suit (in unbearable heat). My first thought was that maybe he had been caught with some pot in his car like the basketball player**, but he was way too enthusastic for it. He was walking up to all sorts of people. He was more like a LaRouche fanatic at the airport, a religious missionary, or a military recruiter*** than someone filling out a time card to avoid jail. You couldn’t pay me enough to spend time doing that sort of thing, but I guess it’s good that someone is enthusiastic about it.

* – More than one of these speakers danced the church/state line, particularly (interestingly enough) Bozo the Clown’s right hand man. The Emily guy did, too. Bozo’s Buddy managed to get by by touching on the subject very briefly and then saying that he would talk about it that night for anyone that wanted to stop by (as long as it is afterhours, I don’t think that there are any church/state issues). The Emily Dude got by because after a certain point none of us cared what he was saying. I’m told that the phonebook rippers never mentioned God or Jesus per se, but their speech was riddled with religious terminology (shepherds and immoral temptation and whatnot).

** – I’d like to think the fact that he was black did not enter into my thinking that he might be a criminal. I think not, though, because when I think “pot possession” I tend to think bored suburban white guy.

*** – Interestingly enough, the DARE table was set up caticorner to a military recruiting station. If you ever get a chance to stand outside a military recruiting station, I recommend it. Lots of father’s pulling their sons in by the collar threatening what’s going to happen if they don’t get into a good college.

One of the crazier dieting ideas I got was in college when I read (erroneously) about how the body needs something like a gallon of water a day and that if the body got that much it would deal with calories more efficiently. So I started drinking a lot of water. A. Lot. Of. Water.

I learned pretty quickly that there was about a 45-minute turnaround between when I drank 1/2 gallon of water or more and needing to take care of my business and I made plans accordingly. One day I drank my morning gulps at work (I had an overnight job) and immediately got in the car to head to the Southern Tech campus to take my morning classes. There was some multi-car accident that had the entire Interstate closed. Traffic was at a standstill. Fifteen minutes, twenty, thirty, forty-five.

Gulp.

I realized that I had to do something. I couldn’t even pull off the road and use a public restroom. I had only one option: Three empty quart water bottles that I was bringing back with me to the Sotech campus to refill.

By the time I got back to the dorm, I had filled two of them and was over half-way on the third.

When I got back to the dorm I was so proud of myself for getting myself out of quite a jam that I immediately decided to share this story with my best friend Clint. Before he could respond I got the whole story out there. Then I had to relieve myself of the rest of the water I had drank that morning. When I got back I noticed that I had somehow closed thechat window I had open with Clint and opened one with my mom. Then I remembered how similar there names were, how I’d misdirected messages before, and realized what had happened.

“Must be nice being male,” Mom replied.

Greenwood Hall, where Hubert and I and company stayed at Southern Tech, the rooming situation was (for the most part) two roommates per room and two rooms per bathroom (connected both by each having a door into the bathroom and by a door between the two that could be locked from either end). When I first started, Hubert had the idea of getting all four beds into one room and and then the other room could be a commons area for everybody.

The problem was that we needed to find four people. We found them in our sophomore year with a couple guys that lived across the hall: Dennis and Saresh. All we had to do was convince the two people adjoined with Dennis and Saresh to switch with us. One, Marco, was easy. We got along great with him and assured him that he could hang out in our little arrangement as much as he wanted. The problem was Ahmad, Marco’s randomly assigned roommate.

Our dislike for Ahmad was instant. We tried to get to know him and befriend him, but he made it difficult. Hubert gave him a tour of the dorms, including our own. He had a derogatory attitude towards our television, towards our room decoration, and just about everything. We wanted to like him and offer him the same deal as Marco, but he had no use for us and it didn’t take long for us to have no use for him.

Except that we did have a use for him. We needed to get him to change rooms with us.

We tried to befriend him, but that didn’t work. We even tried to intimidate him (“You need friends here,” or something to that effect), which wasn’t our nature. He wouldn’t budge. It wasn’t a matter of him not wanting to repack and unpack his stuff because he barely had any stuff and we volunteered to move it for him. The only reason he gave for the move was that our room was smaller than his, except that the two were absolutely identical. We would bring him measurements, offer to let him watch us measure, and anything else we could think of to convince him, but he would not be convinced. He didn’t want to be convinced, he was just being obstinate.

We got a lucky break when, after a couple of days, Dennis came over exasperated. “Ahmad was in my room! {breathe, breathe} on my computer. {breathe, breathe} Looking at gay porn!”

We asked him to repeat it a couple times just to make sure that we understood him correctly. We did. “Did he see you see him?” we asked.

“Yeah, but I bolted out of there before I had time to react.” Dennis was apparently visiting Marco in Marco and Ahmad’s room, so Ahmad thought he had the room to himself. Dennis discovered him walking through the adjoining door (which faced directly at Dennis’s computer) before bolting out, across the hall, and straight to us.

About five minutes late, Ahmad dropped by for a visit. He asked if we had any medicine for a sick stomach because he had just seem something that made him feel sick. He specified that he had seen something on Dennis’s computer. He was sent a link in email that he followed. He saw it for an instant and it made him sick. We might have even believed him had he not gone on so long about it. We recommended some Sprite and the next opportunity we had we checked the history on Dennis’s computer. It was more than a single site that he had visited. He had downright surfed.

The ironic thing is that between us, Hugh, Dennis, Saresh, Marco, and myself, none of us were hostile to homosexuality. Though our politics all differed, we did agree on that. We never outright threatened to out Ahmad, though we did not tell him that we wouldn’t. We already were not in the habit of making conversation with him or talking things out. We didn’t have to blackmail him, though. The next day he paid us a visit and volunteered to switch rooms. And that was the end of that.

Were he not such a disagreeable person, I might have felt some sympathy for him. It can’t be easy to be bi-curious (which he was at the very least) coming from such a conservative background. I hated the idea of taking advantage of that insecurity. But at the end of the day I just didn’t like him and my sympathy was outweighed by my dislike for him. Ahmad acclimated himself to college and dorm life well. He loosened up up a bit, started dressing a little pre-metrosexualish. It was eventually established that he was a gay-leaning bisexual and that persona ended up landing him a coterie of girl friends.

After the room-switch we never really spoke to him again.

A couple other interesting tidbits:

The only friend Ahmad had during all of this was Saresh. This was inconvenient to us because it made Ahmad that much less inclined to switch rooms (because he would be switching away from Saresh) and it meant that Ahmad could be hanging around after all. Ahmad was of Pakistani descent and judging by his accent was not far removed from his ancestral homeland (though his parents were in the US, so he wasn’t an exchange student). Saresh, the fourth person in our arrangement, was of Indian heritage. Dennis pointed out that Indians and Pakistanis hate each other the world over and yet those two had to get along. Their friendship didn’t persevere, however, as Saresh converted to Catholicism and last I knew was on his way to becoming a Catholic priest.

The two guys who were our suitemates before the move were both gay or bisexual. One was an effeminate guy named Gary and the other big guy named Ellis. After the switch, that meant that of the four people in that suite arrangement, three were bisexual or gay. But they all hated one another’s guts. We’d hear them all arguing across the hall.

Throughout high school I kept hearing of this rumor of a short blond-headed girl that had a crush on me. At first I dismissed it, but enough unconnected people mentioned that this girl mentioned me that I figured there had to be some truth to it. The problem was that I didn’t know who it was.

My primary fear was that it was a girl named Andrea Carmine. She was a friend of mine that was short, blond, and strikingly unattractive. I met her while pursuing her friend, but when things didn’t work out with her friend I became friends with Andrew instead. It was a good experience as she was the first female friend I’d ever really had. I wanted to want more, but there was just something spectacularly unattractive about her face that made the thought of kissing her entirely unappealing even though I liked her a great deal otherwise (a lot more than I liked the friend I initially befriended her in pursuit of, actually).

Andrea may or may not have felt that way about me, but I discovered somewhere along the way that even if that was the case she was not the only short blond-headed girl whose attention I captured because Mystery Girl was still riding the bus. Andrea rarely rode the bus at that point and there was no way she rode the bus in particular that my informant rode. I went through the yearbook looking for someone fitting Mystery Girl’s description that I might know and had no luck.

Then one day my senior year my best friend Clint pulled me aside. “I found out who your admirer is. Get this, it’s Jessical Lambrey.”

I’d never had a class with Jessica Lambrey in high school and I hadn’t spoken to her in years. When I looked through the yearbook I must have just glided over her name because of what she said to me the last time we spoke. “I’m sorry, Will, I can’t go with you. My parents won’t let me see boys.”

Jessica Lambrey was the third girl I ever asked out. She said no, giving the exact same excuse that Number Two gave. Number Two, it turned out, was a liar (she was “going with” another boy less than a couple weeks later). I don’t remember what I said when Jessica gave me her excuse. I was probably polite enough to her (I was too scared of girls to be mean to them), though I had some choice words about that liar afterwards.

Though she dropped from my consciousness almost immediately after I asked her out, I didn’t drop from hers. As I would find out years later, I would be the only boy to ever ask her out (at least up till her run-in with Clint). Her father really did forbid her from becoming too close to boys and she hated having to say no. And being sheltered and dateless, she harbored feelings for me for years afterwards. Never enough to approach me or say a single word to me, however. Of course, by the time I found out about it I was spoken for.

There’s a conversation over at Bobvis that’s detoured briefly onto the subject of what exactly happened to some guys to make them feel unworthy of approaching a young woman and asking them out. I commented that the fact that the first seven (or nine, if I could just remember the other two names) rejected me. It reminded me of this little story.

The Nine Strikes when I asked out the first nine girls had a profoundly negative effect on my self-esteem, as one might imagine. Looking back I can see all sorts of things that I missed at the time. I was asking out the wrong girls in the wrong manner. I didn’t realize what exactly was required to get from Point A to Point B. Number One was out of my league by any measure. Number Five was too popular, even if she was fat. Numbers Four and Six were just weird. Number Seven thought I was playing a cruel prank on her by asking her out. And, of course, I was even more clueless than most kids are at that age.

If I had only believed Jessica when she told me why she couldn’t be my girlfriend, I would have been mad about it (“Stupid parents!”) but that alone would have put a serious dent in the hopelessness I felt for the longest time was me. And if nothing else I could have made my first female friend years before I did, learned about girls, and maybe have actually gone out with her whenever the time might have been better.

If only I’d believed what she told me and understood what she never found the guts to later tell me.

Web’s post on his experiences with athletes and housing reminds me of my freshman year, which Hugh and I spent in Lecter Hall, the “Athletics Dorm” before moving to Greenwood Hall, the “Honors Dorm”.

For the most part it actually wasn’t that bad. Fortunately for Hugh and I we had one another to room with so we only had to deal with suitemates, who weren’t all that bad all things considered. But even so it was always very… loud. Music was always blaring at volumes that we never experienced in Greenwood. And athletes in general are more loud and rambunctious in their behavior than are honors students or even regular college students.

The worst we ever had was actually with a couple of female athletes across the hall. One of the two was a somewhat quiet, studious sort that defied stereotypes and her roommate was a very loud one that conformed to some rather unfortunate stereotypes about African-American women. I don’t know if the two got along generally or not, but I do know that exams were more than they could bear.

Well, more than the quiet one could. Frustrated with the loudmouth’s lack of an “off switch” the quiet one locked her out of her own dorm. At two in the morning this did not go over well either with the loudmouth or with anyone else on the floor. Studious said that she needed to study and Loudmouth said that she needed to sleep. Studious pointed out that Loudmouth never actually seemed to sleep and therefore was suspicious of that rationale for her to be allowed back into the dorm. Loudmouth disagreed with that assessment and simultaneously compared her to a female dog and a vagina, among other things.

This eventually culminated in the UPD* campus police being called. When they arrived the officer and the loudmouth played a game of “Opposite!”

For instance, the loudmouth would say “Oh my god, you did *not* just tell me to be quiet!” by which we ascertained that the police officer had in fact told her the be quiet. The loudmouth said “You did *not* just force me back on the bed” by which she meant that he had, in fact, physically prevented her from standing up. The climax of the game came when she said “Oh, my god, you did *not* just put handcuffs on me!” and “I am *not* going to put up with this” which meant “You just put handcuffs on me” and “Okay, fine, I’ll calm down” respectively.

The whole thing took a couple of hours. I suppose if this is the worst story I have in Lecter Hall it wasn’t too bad. The worst part about it was the social isolation, really, and constant stream of bass coming from one dorm or another at any given time. On the upshot my suitemate left a primo shirt. I tracked one of the suitemates down the following year. He said that the shirt wasn’t his and the guy he roomed with was in jail. So finders, keepers, I still have that shirt today.

* – Presumably they would shorten the name of the police department and drop the “Southern Tech” from it lest Southern Tech University Police Department be shortened to STUPD.

I was at a neighbors house when I read about it in the local paper, “Local High School Coach Accused of Sexual Assault.”

I didn’t even need to read the article to know who or what it was about. I immediately ran home and called by best friend Clint. “They got him!”

We were mostly indifferent to Coach Montgomery except insofar as we feared him. He had this cold and mean way of looking at us. We were in regular Phys Ed, meaning that we weren’t athletes. We were also boys, making us even more useless to him. More on that in a moment. We’d had coaches yell at us before, but he wasn’t one of them. Coach Montgomery had a quiet scorn for us girly boys that were just as happy sitting around talking as we were lifting weights.

But while he didn’t like girly boys, he sure loved girly girls. We noticed it almost instantly. When he wasn’t scaring the living hell out of us with a glare, he was smiling and flirting with the girl students. He was initiating borderline human contact, meaning that he wasn’t touching them in inappropriate places, but he seemed eager to make physical contact with him. Many of the girls really appreciated the attention. Though not a remarkably handsome man, he had an incredibly impressive physique. While we were dodging basketballs thrown at our heads, he was otherwise occupied.

His inappropriate interests caught up with him and a girl’s parents found out about it. Once it’s out there, girls start stepping forward out of the woodwork. The secret that nobody cared about was suddenly out in the open. Coach Montgomery was having sex with students. A lot of them. When it all came out parents and administrators was wondering why no one had said anything. Our answer was that nobody asked. In all honestly we knew it was goofy and morally suspect, but it didn’t seem as monstrous to us as it did to parents. There was never any indication that the sex wasn’t consensual, even though some of the girls later apparently regretted it. The concept of authoritative manipulation hadn’t really been introduced to us at that point.

In between the initial questioning and his eventual arrest, Montgomery attempted suicide using pills of some sort. I don’t know what happened to him, but his career was over and his life wasn’t doing much better. Clint and I actually got a little bit of delight in it all. We didn’t like Montgomery and we couldn’t appreciate what was so wrong about it because sexual harassment was something that happened to adults and authoritative manipulation was a concept we hadn’t really been introduced to.

“It’s kind of funny that his life is practically over but Horton got away almost without a scratch,” Clint mentioned. Not well-versed in the ways of romance and certainly not that between an adult and a peer, the reason that we were so quick to pick up on what Montgomery was doing was because he looked at the girl students the same way that Coach Horton did.

Coach Horton was our coach throughout elementary school. Like Montgomery, he had little use for male students that weren’t athletic and he had too many uses for girls of all sorts. Except unlike with Montgomery, these girls were in elementary school. Rumors swirled for quite a while about the favoritism that he showed girls and the inappropriate ways that he would touch them. Nothing nearly as straightforward as Montgomery (as far as anyone knew), but the kind of creepy thing that lingers with girls years later.

Despite all the rumors and some awareness by the school’s administrators, Horton was there throughout my brothers’ tenure at West Oak Elementary up until we were in the fourth grade. At some point he slipped up and touched the wrong girl in the wrong place. A girl whose parents had enough pull in the community that they didn’t have to worry about the social repercussions of making an accusation. The problem for West Oak administrators was that if they were to fire him for molestation they would be be admitting that it took place and opening themselves up for a world of lawsuits from hundreds of parents. So they ultimately fired him for showing favoritism towards girls.

Last I heard, he was an elementary school coach in Colorado.

Still mostly maxin’ and relaxin’, but stopping in for a not-so-quick post while I’m thinking about it.

A couple thoughts, observations, or revelations gleamed from driving across Delosa:

1. You can still rent cars that have a tape player in leiu of a CD player.
2. You can tell a lot about a person by what kind of music is on his mix tape. Or was when he was fifteen.
3. Letting a girlfriend, boyfriend, husband, or wife listen to a mix tape you made when you were fifteen may be a better sign of emotional trust than anything else in existence.
4. An advantage of blogging anonymously is that you can admit that once upon a time, you liked some of Michael Bolton’s music. To quote our esteemed President, when I was young and irresponsible…

Though I didn’t know they made them anymore, the rental car only had a tape player available. Since we visited my folks’ place first, though, the drive across Delosa to Clancy’s was accompanied by a bunch of radio-swiped mixed tapes.

It’s sort of a long story, but I only really got in to music in my junior high years. I made the transition from “adult contemporary” to “Top 40” to “Alternative Rock.” By the time I got to the second and particularly the third phase I was already purchasing CDs. Prior to that, I obsessively recorded stuff off the radio. I may write more on this whole process later, but what’s important is that I started migrating away from tapes in my high school years and so most of the stuff I had was from junior high when I listened to Sunshine 98.7 FM, the easiest easy listening in Colosse.

So the antiquated radio system on my car gave me a little time capsul as I listened to my few remaining tapes from the early 90’s that provided what was actually an almost scary glimpse into who I was at the time.

I’ve never been one for happy music. I don’t know that I’m a hugely pessimistic person, but it’s always seemed to me that story thrives on conflict and a song about loving someone so goshdarn much almost inherently lacks that conflict. The happier songs (or at least not-unhappy ones) are ones where there is a conflict, but it is somehow resolved or that provide a sort of sensation and you don’t know how exactly it’s going to turn out, but it’s exhilarating at the time the song is sung.

But what I found interesting about the music, and the subject-matter therein, is how it was wave-on-wave depressing. As she listened, Clancy said she didn’t know what was more disturbing: that I would have a Michael Bolton on a mix tape or that I managed to even find a depressing Bolton song to complete my depressing setlist. The pattern was unmistakeably clear.

What’s telling, though, is not just that the music was depressing, but that (a) I did not seek out depressing music, (b) it was depressing with subject matter that I had not experienced, (c) at the time I did not even consider it depressing.

The most common theme was a love-had-but-lost. That’s the source of most sad love songs, so it’s hardly surprising that my tapes would be populated with that theme. Even considering that, though, I found my ability, as someone that had never had love much less lost it, to relate to it interesting. Well it’s not that I could relate to it exactly.

I could relate to it the same way that I could relate to comic books. It was a sort of imagination twitch. A tilt on reality where everything was different, except that life somehow went on the same. All of these amazing things happened, and yet life went on so much more normally than seemed possible. Just as I could sort of imagine some comic books as the way things might be if some of us had extraordinary gifts, I saw some of the songs as what might happen if I someday actually got into a relationship.

Even allowing for eventually getting into some relationship somewhere along the line, I saw the result being heartbreak. In the same way that some heroes ultimately give up their mantle to resume a life of normalcy, I saw a relationship being terminated so that I could return to my normal state of being — abject loneliness. But I had a sense of appreciation, born more out of naivete than wisdom, of the ride. The old maxim that having loved and lost was better than never having loved at all rang true — as someone that had never really had love I could in a way attest to just about anything being better than that.

When I did “have” and did “lose” of course, my perspective would change greatly. But at the time I actually understood bittersweet before I had ever fully experienced the bitter or the sweet.

While most of the tapes and CDs I actually bought hold up to some degree or another even in my earliest purchases, most of the radio swipes do not. They were good for a nostalgic kick, an introspective look at who I was and a blog post, but not a whole lot more than that. I find it a bit ironic that easy listening music is often called adult contemporary because I outgrew it as I became an adult and once I started experiencing what they were singing about, it all became less magnificent and the blandness of the lyrics exposed as the mystery was peeled off.

The songs were depressing, but listening to them actually make me happy and it was in a way perfectly appropriate for the holiday season. When I was half as old as I was now, I had no idea that I would ever experience what I have experienced. I had resigned myself to a life of loneliness that I moved beyond rather quickly. My life has been so much more wonderful, colorful, and love-infested than I could ever have dreamed it being. Clancy is twice as good as I ever thought I might do. Same for Holly before her. Even Julie, who I left heartbroken because she wasn’t enough, was more than I could have dreamed of.

And so I am flushed with a thanksgiving for the things I have taken for granted. Not only now, but a perspective on what I didn’t realize I had then that made me ready for the wonders that awaited me: a loving family, an adequate education, a complicated and creative mind, and a good upbringing.

If there is a better place to realize this than with Clancy in Delosa with all of my families, I’m not sure what it is.