Mash wrote to ask if I remember a dinner party we threw, which involved blindfolding the boys and driving aimlessly around the southern end of the county to make sure they did not guess the destination. Which, if either of us could remember, was probably an elementary school playground.
That would have been a typical weekend excursion, when we had grown bored of standing around in supermarket parking lots. Other amusements the crew indulged in were a bit more esoteric.
We forked lawns. We had an effigy that we would string up in each others forested yards. We threw dog weddings.
As David recently commented, we were extremely innocent and good. If we skipped school (and we were only caught once, when eight of us went missing on the same day) it was to go to the city to see a play.
There were no drugs, no drinking, no smoking. Sex, if it happened (and for most it did not) was a secret.
We were honors students, and we took over the International Society in order to have an officially recognized clubhouse.
Yet, at the same time, we were the social pariahs of the school – the kids who couldn’t ride the bus for fear of what might happen. The ones always suspected of wrongdoing, because we had strange haircuts.
One evening in Seattle Jeffrey asked if, when I achieve something, I think of someone or something in my past. I replied The high school vice principal who told me I would not be allowed to graduate…. and then had to retract his statement when I won more merit scholarships than anyone else.
I’m not motivated by the memory. I have no need to settle scores, and nothing left to prove. It is just that the look on the face of that small gray man with the twitchy moustache was a pure distillation of every other fight with someone attempting to exercise false authority over my life.