- I didn’t go to the 10-year. I must have been in California, a year into a new job, and a flight back to Michigan would have been a month’s worth of pay-after-rent, and all my accumulated PTO. I don’t recall having any feelings either way–no anxiety, no regret.
- There was that informal, impromptu 5-year gathering; and I recall it was mostly band and newspaper and model UN nerds like me. I remember telling jokes, laughing. I remember very nearly continuing the party with a girl–one of those nights that could have unfolded if I let it–but I reasonably, and (classically, thematically) avoidantly went back with other friends to sleep in their parents’ basement, and I left before breakfast to get back to work the next morning.
But a couple weeks later, a high school buddy came up for an interview in the next town over, and we got beers and he asked if I’d be a reference for a job application, and months after that I was driving over the Golden Gate and got a call from the hiring detective who asked about him and I said he was a nice guy, and she said, no I know he’s a nice guy but does he have the gonads to handle being on the force, those weren’t her words, her words were, “were you on the football team with him? do you know if he has any military service?” and I thought of Robert Bly’s “Two Ways to Write a Poem”: “I write poetry…but my back hurts.” Because he was really a sweet guy, just a big softy with this goofy laugh, and I knew he wasn’t going to get the job, though it was his lifelong dream to be a cop, and this was the time (is the time, is always the time) when cops shoot people for no reason, and I wanted to say, he is exactly the kind of person you need. But I was holding the phone while driving across the Golden Gate Bridge, and I wanted to get off the phone as soon as possible lest she realize it and send the cops after me.
- Did he get the job?
- There are a few people I’m not interested in seeing–and those are likely people who aren’t coming. In a different school, definitely in a movie, they might have been called popular, but, to be popular, by definition, a lot of people have to like you, and I don’t believe that was true for most of the people I don’t care to ever see again. Somehow it seems they put up with each other.
- The people I’m most curious about are not likely to be there, too: I’m interested to know what happened to the street urchins. For lack of a better word. My family moved in middle school, but prior, we lived on the main road just off downtown, tucked between the “no-tell motel” and the cheap apartments. The kids we played with, the kids who knocked down our snowforts, the kids who invited themselves over to bask in my mom’s Christ’s-love-on-earth, were the poorest kids in school. Truth be told, I don’t know their stories, but I trust they were rough. These are the people, exes notwithstanding, whom I google late at night. I want them to have gotten out.
- The first day of freshman year I got an open burrito anonymously thrown at my pants. I started the year sitting with the boys I had sat with in middle school–but our friendship had already faded. So most days I’d eat fast, then wait in front of my 5th period class, staring at an empty bulletin board on which someone had graffitied the words “Evidence Against Me.”
One day the hall monitor Francis came up to me in a huff, and said, “there you are!” I think I just looked at him with enough of a question on my face that he stood up and asked, “aren’t you the guy I was just chasing?” I shook my head, he smirked as if to say “the game is up,” I said I don’t know what he’s talking about, then his face was a question mark, he said “oh, okay” and he walked away.
Some days I found myself in Mr. K’s classroom, where the nerds played card games and talked about video games–and even they knew I was out of my element. I don’t know if they never asked me to play or if I never asked to play; I don’t remember playing.
- As I told Paula, my sophomore-year-crush-turned-reunion-committee-chair, the person I most don’t want to run into at the reunion is the myself from high school. I don’t particularly like that kid. He was timid and shy, unsure of himself, his value in a room. To blend in, I wore a gray sweat-jacket every day–of course this then became a trademark, what I was known for. I yearned, but never quite invited myself–to be in a cooler group.
I often compensated for my insecurity in a way that came off as holier-than-thou. In some cases I was the worst kind of teacher’s pet. For instance, in band, somehow the teacher passed the task of taking attendance to me, and so the tubist I marked tardy every day, who was tardy everyday, who parked his Oldsmobile? Cadillac? next to my Ford Aerostar in the parking lot every day, keyed it one day.
- My social life rooted in my sophomore year–I joined clubs and found a place to eat lunch. It blossomed in junior, and I see now how in my senior year, the fruits set on the friendships that would last the lifetime. Finally in the spring before graduation I stopped wearing the gray hoodie and khaki pants every day. For a time I wore jeans and a thrifted polo. So I had some friends, all held at arms’ length.
- I was also Prom King? It was a pirate themed prom and maybe I was a boot-in (get it?), because somehow I became “the pirate guy”. I have wondered if there was some back-room dealings with the election committee, who also responsible for tallying votes for class president–I have wondered, with no hard evidence, if the vote for president was too close to call, and so the Class of ’04 Literati traded my presidency for my reign over pirate prom. Thank God.
- I was also voted Most Eligible Bachelor? A title that haunted my 30-year-old virgin ass.
- I think a lot about this dream Becky told me about, 20 years ago: she dreamed all her friends were on different levels. Except me. I had no level, I floated between. I have held that dream as a badge of my identity–or lack thereof. But now I see the double-edge to be so avoidant.
- When I write, and more so edit, poetry, I think of the vestigial staircase that a poet uses to get into the room of the poem, which mostly can and should be excised from the poem before its published. As I write now I think of my high school self as this. Ultimately those awkward years are the ramp that got me to here. But I so wish to cut them away. And that’s the anxiety of the thought of standing in that room, of 37- to 39-year-olds: most only know of that awkward, shy, gray, kid.
- So I wasn’t going to go. But then more-or-less my friends talked me into it. But they’re the friends I talk to all the time. They’re the friends who come out of their way to visit me. And they’re the friends who I most want to see, because they fill my bucket. If I get bored I’m going to steal away their husbands to go drink whiskey in a different bar.
- So I RedSVP. And then Paula sent me the list of people who had already RedSVP and I immediately was overcome by the thought of all that small talk. “So what do you do?” “How many kids do you have?” One thing I’ve come to know about myself is I want the the Big Talk.
- I wasn’t going go, because, my thought was, there’s no one else I want to cultivate a relationship with at this point. The friends that have stood the test of time are here beside me already. And: I have nothing to prove to these people. I told Becky that it’s like being a ghost–but I have no unfinished business. Miraculously, the one who got away, I have since married. Eventually, I have come to know myself, trust myself, love myself. And ultimately I don’t need to supplant anyone’s idea of who I am with a more correct idea of who I am, or a more curated idea of who I am. Know what I mean?
- And but really I’ve done some cool fucking shit in the last 20 years. I hiked the coast of California, became a farmer at a Napa Valley winery, was twice-appointed Napa County Poet Laureate, I married the woman of my dreams and fathered a gorgeous kid and step-fathered another. There’s things I have yet to do, but damn I’ve done a lot.
- Is all that vestigial staircase, too? How long is this staircase? When have I arrived? Am I here? Are we there yet? Is this a poem? Please tell me this is not a motherfucking poem.
- So now I’m kind of curious to meet myself there again. When the room is full of people who remember, who know or knew, only the one version of me, who will I then be? Will I shrink and revert (should I pack a gray sweatjacket)? Or will I laugh and turn the conversation toward them, ask a deep question that brings us all closer?
- Andbut let’s be honest:
that kid is still here.
- He always will be.