I got a text yesterday from a friend asking me if I’d heard about a reunion for my high-school class that is apparently in the works, which, no, I hadn’t.
You know, because I’m hard to track down, just being the editor of a local-news website that gets a million page views a month, and all.
I’m an anonymous hermit living under a rock off the grid, to these reunion-organizing folks.
“It’s because you’re not on Facebook,” the friend noted in a followup text, which, no, not true.
AFP has 92,000 followers on Facebook, and I have a personal page.
Granted, I don’t post to the personal page except by accident, and I don’t use it to communicate with people, though I did check it last night, for the first time in months, to see if I’d gotten an invite to this supposed reunion thing.
Turns out, no, there was no invite, but I did come across a long series of messages from a guy who wants to meet me in a public place so he can kick my elitist liberal ass.
If you want to know why I don’t do Facebook to keep up with the world, there you go.
Anyway.
I’m going to have to be a hard no on going to this reunion that I’ve not been invited to, the reason being, it’s been 35 years, and, no, don’t miss those people, not a single one of them, not at all.
High school sucks for just about everybody, from what we all have come to understand, but here’s how it specifically sucked for me:
I was the only kid from my trailer park in the academic-track classes, and the suburban kids in those classes seemed to delight in looking down their noses at me, one; and then, two, the kids from the trailer park decided that I was uppity because I liked to do things like, for example, read books on the school bus.
That was how every day started and ended for four years, between eighth grade and 11th grade, on an hour-long bus ride to and from school, where I was, to the kids in the Future MAGAs of America, “faggot,” “homo,” the like, because I was taking trig, creative writing, Latin and French.
Being able to do quadratic equations in your head and spending hours translating the Aeneid makes a person gay.
Who knew?
And then when I got to school, the “rich” kids, who, honestly, this is Augusta County we’re talking about here, so it’s not a matter of, people born on third base, thinking they hit a triple – more like, born on first base, thinking they hit a triple – let’s just say, they made it tough on me because I was the token poor.
Back-to-school shopping for me was one pair of jeans and a couple of shirts.
On top of that, my mom smoked four packs of cigarettes a day, and if you know what I’m getting at here, my clothes smelled like four packs of cigarettes a day.
And then on top of that, I was a living, walking pizza face.
I’d share a photo here if I could, but I can’t – I didn’t save any photos of me from my teen years, none.
So, I get it – bad acne, smelling like high-tar cigarettes, the same jeans every day.
Oh, and then, the jean jacket from 10th grade.
That year was a particularly tough year for mom, with my dad fighting having to pay the court-ordered $40-a-week child support, because he was (past tense signifying, the jerk is dead) a major-league asshole, so my option for winter coat that year was a hand-me-down jean jacket that had been the unfortunate victim of a bad bleach job.
This one kid, in particular, gave me crap over that jacket every day, like it was my choice to have to wear that jacket.
My option was, wear that awful jacket or freeze, and I’ll be square here – it got to the point where I stopped wearing the jacket and froze, to avoid the ridicule.
I missed 15-20 days of school each year because I’d get to a stage every couple of weeks where, I mean, I just couldn’t deal with it – the relentless picking from the trailer-park kids on the school bus, the picking from the rich kids in class and at lunch.
A guy from my high school that I didn’t know back then and is a friend now, a year older than me, another academic-track guy, said something interesting to me recently about those days that got my attention.
He said the other academic-track kids that he knew from his class, a year ahead of mine, always wondered why I was so quiet, so reserved.
It was because, I was just overwhelmed.
Things got a little better in 12th grade because I was able to work the summer before to be able to put together $400 to buy a cheap used car, which meant I could drive to school, taking the bus trip out of the equation, and get an after-school job, so I could diversify the wardrobe beyond the one pair of pants and two shirts.
The car also allowed me to do after-school things like get a role in the school play, and join the pop-quiz team, which I helped lead to a state championship and appearance in the national tournament.
Senior year was also, though, marred by a torn ACL suffered in a pickup football game, to a point where all of the photos of me in the yearbook from 1990 have me either on crutches or with crutches in close proximity.
Somehow, through dealing with the stress of being picked on by the trailer-park kids on the bus and the rich kids in class, missing 15-20 days a year for what we’d call today “mental health days,” the rest, I was able to keep my grades up to the point that I was named my class salutatorian, which meant that I had the chance to deliver a speech at graduation.
I so desperately wanted to use that speech to exact revenge on, you know, pretty much everybody and everything, and I wrote a doozy of a graduation speech that raised issue with, in one instance, a lazy English teacher, and was critical of the county board of supervisors and the General Assembly for not equalizing funding so that kids in Augusta County could have the same level of education as kids in Northern Virginia.
That ditty came from my years on the debate team, and debate tournaments held in opulent high schools in NoVA; my high school still at the time didn’t have air conditioning, but those kids had everything working for them.
I had to submit my speech to the principal for review, and naturally, he didn’t give his approval to a speech that strayed big time from the rubric of, today is the first day of the rest of our lives.
Me being me, I rebelled, didn’t rewrite the speech, went to the podium, announced that the speech I’d written didn’t meet with the administration’s approval, then proceeded to read the speech that I’d written, prefacing each remark with, I’m also not supposed to say …
I wish a recording of that night existed, though, maybe it’s good that it just lives in my head.
I’ve never felt more alive than I did in those five minutes.
It was the beginning of the zero fucks given era of my life.
Looking back on high school, I figure I got out of it what I needed to.
In a weird way, I’m glad it went the way it did.
Being picked on every day toughened me up.
I don’t know that I’m an LGBTQ+ advocate without having to endure the epithets on the school bus.
I still struggle with how I feel about myself now that I live in a $500,000 house, because I hated the kids from nice neighborhoods because of the way they looked down their noses at me.
I assume that my neighbors think I’m an imposter, trailer trash invading their rightful territory.
I know how the trailer-park kids feel about me.
Thirty-five years ago, they called me “faggot” and “homo”; now they send me messages on Facebook telling me they’re going to kick my elitist liberal ass.
I’m glad I didn’t get an invite to this reunion thing.
I don’t need to catch up with people who, every single day for five years, made me wish that I would die, so that the relentless picking would just stop.
I’m busy that weekend, whenever it is.
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Chris Graham
