It seems to have been the touching that bothered him most. The touching.
"All these girls, these dolled up, hot-looking, married girls, they all just kept, you know, touching me," brave soul Mike NTPB reported. "Putting a hand on my arm while they introduced me to their husbands, holding my hand for minutes at a time while telling me their let's-catch-up stories. I just didn't get it - I mean, who touches people? For the first hour I was there I thought all the women, husbands in tow, were flirting with me."
Many years of living on the hardened East Coast, with its cold-bundled quick-walks and downward-turned lines of sight, have caused Mike to forget the customary pleasantries of the gentile Southern Belle. In as much as people from Texas can be called Southern, and that these particular women could be called belles. Just kidding ladies! The fact that Mike mistook this for flirting is unsurprising: this is, after all, the Casanova who once was suspended from school for "passionately kissing a female student (this was no peck on the cheek)," the man who brought Clark itself to a grinding halt with his rose-giving antics, and the man for whom the normally difficult crossing of social lines, from manly football player to heart-bearing drama kid, was a mere flick of a switch: his romance runneth over. I am quickly realizing the perhaps unfair expectations I may be creating for one let's call her Karen H (no wait, too obvious, etc.) given the impending loom (doom?) of Feb. 14, aka Black Wednesday. So forget all that romance stuff; the closest Mike has come to being a loverboy is humming "Everybody's Working For the Weekend." Expect nothing; be surprised by the something you get. (Did I make the save, Mike?)
So the female touching was just a Southern custom of familiarity and kindness, not the wink-wink nudge-nudge wanka wanka hey-how-you-doin' that Mike initially thought. Not that Mike would have acted anyways, especially given the aforementioned notable Vacekian absence. I kid, Karen, I kid. Mike did manage to snap these shots of some of the party attendees, so red-blooded males let the drooling begin (and womenfolk of the average orientation, you get to check out the married Lunke and the unmarried chunky, David G). Here goes:
That's Kim on the left, the promised "9 Then, 11 Now," meaning that in a strange twist, we wish that we "Knew" then what Is now. Or something. I don't even really know Kim, so I probably shouldn't be making such crass comments, but so it goes. And that's Heather in the red; she was my TopCat wonsuponatime which meant that she made spirit posters for me before games (those raunchy Friday Night Lights-style "spirit favors" were not present in my little corner of the world back then, but given my status of popularity / enlightenment, other football studs may have been receivers; I can't pretend to know such things). Heather was always quiet but very cool and sweet; she's actually someone I remember from back in the day quite fondly. Your awwwws and smirks are simultaneously noted. According to Mike, she owned the room and beamed with confidence, which does give a little glow in my memory banks - I'm honestly glad that Heather seems happy. Next is Rachel, about whom I remember Jack Squat, and next to her is Devin, who was a friend of Mike's whom I didn't know well. She is perhaps most famous for one of the most sequined, body-hugging / revealing prom-dresses I ever had the pleasure of encountering then or since; its color was called, quite presciently, "Viagra Blue."
Well, that's clearly Mike NPTB on the right there, and that's the illustrious Kim Lytle in the middle, a cool gal cheerleader from the day who made pouty lips pretty in the pre-Jolie era. And next to her is... Mike's going to laugh his arse off at me, but I swear her name is Angela or something but then I'm thinking that I cannot remember for the life of me what Stacey Rudd looks like, so it may be she. Sorry, your host has failed you, but I trust Mike to come to the rescue on this one. Another reason I didn't attend: my inability to remember names would have led to a lot of searching-for-nametag bustline staring, and regardless of how the hand-holding cultural practice is accepted, that one, I fear, would not be taken well. What you don't see in these pictures is the menacing cowboy husbands standing guard.
That's Miguel and dance-studio owner Lindsey White; she too was an exceptionally sweet gal and a drama kid taboot. She married the brother of a country star. 'Sall I got.
That's Mike with Amber; she's now shorter haired and more brunette than back in the day. She was over the top cool; we had 10th grade science together and we used to hang out and play with her kitten Ashby. These are the types of details you don't get at CNN. Amber now does something that I don't remember but also has skydived over a hundred times. This is very, very not surprising if you know her.
And finally, the men of note:
That's Mike with husband / caddy of a PGA champion golfer Tyler Lunke. Tyler is a way back childhood friend; we played baseball, basketball and tennis and such together before his life took a turn to Clark's seedy underbelly in 1992 and he joined the golf team. Tyler was a great guy; another miscellaneous fact is that he was the first among us to learn the road geography of San Antonio. He was thinking in terms of loop 410 when I was still on my driveway shooting baskets. He's now working for a golf company in some capacity.
That's David Gutzman, filling out the old reunion adage of "everyone either looks more or less the same or looks like they consumed a small village." Dave played basketball with us way back when, but after freshman year, I think, also went to the dark world of golf, but now enjoys his favorite sport, beer. David in my brain, however, is mainly notable because one of my best friends in high school, Marisa, had a crush on him the size of a, well, a small village, and David did not pick up on this until way too late. She moved during our sophomore year and maybe spent the last couple weeks of that cavorting with Mr. Gut. The Zman has no clue what he missed; she was a fantastic gal.
(Oddly enough, despite the fact that I know that she works as a TV producer out in CA, I cannot find a picture to share. But she produces a show that features Jerry Rice as a co-host and she was recently nominated for an emmy. Sweet! Double oddly enough is that if you google "marisa silvas," one of the few hits you get is my own blog on the old site. Wack).
So those are the visual elements of Mike's dig. What else did we learn? The average rich white male suburbanite from Clark continues to be rich white and male, meaning that the Wheel in the Sky rule is still in effect, and all the womenfolk were married with children. That's probably another Southern / East Coast difference. Old bandmate (band as in HS band, not as in my famous Rice band CSDH) Alice Kelly was in attendance and specifically asked Mike about me and to say hi; Mike thinks he smelled a smoldering HS crush which as I told him "makes me like Elvis on a much, much smaller scale." What can I say, ladies love cool jones. Jim Gray remains a gregarious nice guy, though he apparently answered Mike's question of "are you happy?" with a sarcastic, "oh yeah, living the dream." Cliff Kuang wrote for the Economist for a while and still acts weirdly - he apparently dodged having his picture taken all evening for some reason. I'm thinking something in the vampire-mirror continuum. Cam Banks confirmed a rumor; Brandon Goertz denied one; both of the rumors are PG-13 so i won't ruin their respective political careers here, but Cam's answer was an emphatic "Hell yes" and Brandon's was a "No, but that does sound like something I would have done." Please note that the literary technique I am practicing here is called "alienating the reader."
Zane Hamilton is married and doing well in some computing job. Okay, now I'm boring even myself! And I knew these people!
So I have a theory on these types of reunion things, and it's largely that had I wanted to stay in touch with these people or had they wanted to stay in touch with me, one of us would have made a bigger effort. There's too much to think about without worrying about whether the "Beautiful People" of Clark's Yesteryear remain "Beautiful People." I know that Mike NTPB doesn't share this opinion - of course not, he went to the reunion. And though his efforts at touring Ex-girlfriend lane were at least partially thwarted, I'm sure he had a good time. But if we are going to be this dynamic duo, I am leaving all shmoozing duties to Mike, because I frankly don't have the stomach for it. So we applaud you, NTPB: you represented the football team, the drama department, and the general Clark intellectual elite brilliantly. So here's a toast to you, and a hearty potential terrorist bomb that turns out to be a light brite (emphasis on the extended pixelated middle finger) to anyone who dared utter the phrase last weekend, "You're a teacher? But you were so smart in high school..."
Mike and Nyet: souls still intact.
Addendum: So here's some news I in my pop culture ignorance recently became aware of:
Whose gorgeous headshot is that, you ask? That's Jessica Holcomb, small scene (and utterly pointless bimbo-role filler) star of Miss Congeniality and starred-as-herself cast member of The Bachelor (2002). And, to round out the resume, she also played an uncredited role as a cheerleader in Varsity Blues and has a law degree from UT.
WHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA???
Before we even get to that, Miss Holcomb's importance to the story of Nyet cannot be underestimated. She transferred from a small town called Pearsal to our middle school in 8th grade; I, with newfound confidence gained in the school of hard knocks aka the Duke Talent Identification Problem, was under the mistaken but esteem-boosting impression that smart guys could be sexy. Plus I had this weird notion in my head that starting for all the sports teams, playing in the band and jazz band, acing my honors courses, etc., would somehow label me as a catch. So when the breathtaking skinny blond from small town Texas showed up in the band hall that August morning, I pounced (read: I actually talked to her, which if you know anything about my current talking-to-stranger habits and my then Cool-Hand-Luke steadiness around pretty girls, was a feat of no-small order). I should have known better; I had after all had the initial lesson of fickle woman drummed into my thick skull at Duke that summer (thanks a lot, Angela Carpenter, and yes I do remember your name though you don't mine). But I was smitten, over the top, bad. But the unusual thing about this, by middle school standards, was that I was not smitten from afar; Jess and I became great friends and confidants and all that stuff, and there was over the top kinds of chemistry there. I may have been a middle school boy caught in a hurricane of hormones, but even I didn't need a weatherman: we dug each other, big time spark-wise. So after a couple of months of brushing hands and long afterschool talks, I finally gathered the courage to ask her to "go with me."
She said she would get back to me.
While this is a moderately better response than "go where?," it's not by much, and indeed, I should have known better (with a girl like you). Something bad was about to happen; in the rewound movie version where I don't have to cringe through the scene in exacto repeat, I pull some kind of evil, revenge, teenage girl crushing act like saying "just kidding; you thought I was serious? Damn." So something bad does happen; despite our obvious personal connection, Jessica consorts with her circle of female friends, who by this point in the year are not the band peeps she initially hung out with but *those girls.* The same ones who later became cheerleaders in HS; the same ones, you might guess, who tend to do things like show up to high school reunions.
(It should be noted that there is a Freaks and Geeks episode that mirrors this eerily - new, pretty and awesome girl comes to school, falls in with the geek crowd, and they get about a week to hang out with her before she is subsumed into her proper place among the Beautiful People. It's the apex of endearingly awkward television; check it out).
So the popular club holds some tribal council and by their evil druid ways decides that I am not cool enough to be gone with. But this decision is not passed to the masses quickly; Jessica instead avoids me entirely for the next two days, making the decision seem up in the air (when we all knew better). Meanwhile the whole school knows, thanks to the poppers that be, that my heart is sitting out on a plate just waiting to be eaten; even Mr. Montogmery, my history teacher who looked like Randy Johnson, found it necessary to ridicule my foreboding plight in front of the class. Damn, teach, that's cold!
The next day i find this note in my locker, written in red and delivering the inevitable no. It doesn't mention the supreme court decision that caused Jess to arrive at this answer, it just includes this weird story about how at her last school she dated the quarterback and she was the head cheerleader and it was just so perfect and we would just never have that. Yes, the (melo)drama career really took everyone by surprise. Thankfully, though I don't know if he even remembers this, Mike edits the note in black, correcting not only the grammar and punctuation, but emphatically pointing out which parts are the most dumbassed. My friend Chris even wrote a revenge style punk-blues song called "Honeycomb" that we played together; I still know it on my guitar today. So the pickmeup from the dudes (trustable) saved me from the womanly evil wiles (genetic), and despite the devastating levels of heartbreak that one endures when someone who you feel honestly close to sends you to a subcommittee , I managed to survive to other days to develop other, less tragic Pollockian crushes. And if I remember correctly, Jessica and i eventually got to the previous pattern of friendship later that year - never the same, of course - but I remember helping her deal with a Brad Sekula crush and I may have even gotten a "just friends" slow dance out of the whole shebang (though that dance was not to Stairway to Heaven). But the seed was sown; I guess this part of the story illustrates a little bit of the source of my distrust of the in-crowd.
Flash forward three years to junior English, when Jess and I get assigned to the same Moby Dick project group. We hadn't talked much through high school, but I think I can safely sum up her angle as "playing up the ditz factor" (Mike, please verify). And she continued to be a big moron during our whole group's work together; her contribution to the project involved reading off some quotes on MD she had dug up as fast as possible without putting any thought into them whatsoever. So I'm not exactly crying over our lost time together, but then there are moments in the group time where she drops the act and just is, and she's a really beautiful person, aside from the physical, and it's really amazing to see someone for real like that, especially again, and especially after our non-contact over several years. There was nothing romantic about it - I had well learned the lesson by that point, plus I was chasing a senior girl at the time and, you know, eyes on the prize. But there were the moments, and despite all the typical BS of high school, even the unattainable show their soft bellies (note - this was 1995, and not the navel-laden fashion mire of these times; the belly was metaphorical).
So after all of that background, now the punch - she graduated from UT Law? And she's acting, and pulling in some otherworldly salary I'm sure. And all in all pretty set. So on the one hand, I'm jealous plus, I'm driven dagger-wielding insane just upset that someone can behave like that for so much of their existence and the universe does nothing in terms of lightning bolt retribution. And it's a wish-pain-on-your-enemies anger, and it's embarrassing but horribly real. But then I know she obviously worked hard, at least at the law, and deserves it. And then there are the calming moments of just how great she could be, and maybe she snapped to at some point in college and this is all just. So on some level it's all okay, and plus, it's not like I have to see her on a daily basis. On top of all of this, though, is the weirdness of googling your middle school crush and reading blogs of how hot that Jessica Holcomb girl is on the Bachelor. Woah - celebrities aren't supposed to be real.
And neither are high school people. At least the ones I've left behind, or at least especially the ones who weren't all that real to me when we actually were in high school. Maybe that makes me a jerk; could be, I hear ya. But I wasn't one of the beautiful people so I can't really answer the question how it felt, and the answer to what they're up to now is boring anecdotal gossipy crap. I'll always be genuinely happy that people I've known are doing well, and I wouldn't really actively root for their pain - even the heart-crushing Jessicas seem to win me over in the end. SO yeah, I'll never lose affection for the people and things that went before, but I'm not about to travel back to see the ones I haven't even bothered keeping up with over the years to hear their where they're now stories, stories, just stories.
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