A gaggle of girls was blockading my exit from the row of
tables we sat at in class, so I took the long way around, past Ms. Bitchy’s
desk, making my way toward the communal pile of textbooks to check mine out for
the night’s homework. I didn’t like to pass so close to Ms. Bitchy, as she was
the only teacher I’d ever hated in my life. To be fair, she started it. With
scowl lines permanently etched into her face from a lifetime of disapproval,
she always wore a no nonsense look that ranged from long-suffering patience to
withering antipathy. Hard to fathom what a bunch of eleven-year-olds could have
done to earn that, but that’s why we referred to Ramona Binci as Ms. Bitchy.
I probably shouldn’t bellyache too much about that gaggle of
girls—although they were mysterious and terrifying to me for reasons I couldn’t
explain—because skirting their chattering little group caused me to walk past
the New Guy’s seat. As I did, I happened to look down and see that he was
drawing on a piece of paper when he was supposed to be working on the math
problems up on the board. I saw that he’d completed the assignment already,
just as I had, which meant he was at least as smart as me, which was frankly
unusual.
It also meant he should have been getting up to check out
his own textbook for the evening, just as I was. Instead, he was drawing a
picture of a figure very familiar to me: Firestorm the Nuclear Man, possibly
the best superhero ever. Not as badass as Wolverine or Batman, but powerful and
unique in a way that would make an imaginative person almost omnipotent, which
is a very appealing thought to a ninety-eight-pound comic book nerd whose life
revolved around doing whatever Ms. Bitchy said and trying to avoid bullies. And
terrifying girls.
The New Guy’s name was JB. Actually it was James, but since
we already had two other Jameses in the class, Ms. Bitchy had decided that he
would go by his initials—JB—which she’d decreed to the class by teacherly fiat,
not to be questioned or rescinded. It struck me as odd since she’d previously
decided not to let me keep my name—O’B—on the first day of class because it was
just initials, and not my actual name. Except it was my name, a shortening of
my middle name, O’Brien, which I’d gone by every minute of my life, right up
until I came under the baleful gaze of Ms. Bitchy. When she’d decreed to me
that I would be Larry instead, after my first name Lawrence, I acquiesced—in
spite of my dawning horror at the idea of becoming a Larry—because of her
invincible scowl lines and untamed eyebrows. Thankfully, my mother put that to
right instantly and I went back to being O’B, while JB was left to his own
devices. And so JB he was, and remains to this day, as far as I’m concerned.
Thanks, Ms. Bitchy!
I had thus far not approached the New Guy because the last
Newbie I tried to befriend had rejected me with extreme prejudice. So the New
Guy, with his new and unwanted name, was on his own. See, that’s the thing
about being a military brat and moving every two or three years. You get a new
life every thousand days, and everywhere you go is a waystation on the road to
the next place you’ll be from. You’re always the New Guy, and always on your
own. A new town, a new school, a new group of strangers to fit into. Your
impermanence, the fluid nature of your existence, is the only permanent thing
about you. So you’re always looking for your in, so you don’t have to stand out
as the one who doesn’t belong. Even though you don’t. Unless you were among
your own kind, like I was there. Like we all were, because Pinetamare
Elementary was a Dept. of Defense school, located in Naples, Italy. Everyone in
the room was always the New Guy. It was the most at home I’d ever felt in my
life.
So when I passed JB’s seat and saw that picture of Firestorm
he was drawing, I didn’t see a New Guy or a stranger, but myself. I saw myself
at the desk in my room, diligently outlining the image of Firestorm from the
splash page of issue eight on a sheet of tracing paper from a supply that was
rare as plutonium. It so happens that it was the very same image that JB was
rendering freehand at that moment. I saw a guy who, like me, didn’t get to keep
his name by virtue of a capricious shrew, a guy who fancied the power of
off-beat heroes. Just like me.
When you’re a kid, that’s all it takes. You walk by and see
a comic book nerd just sitting there minding his own business, and out of all
the heroes he could be drawing, he picks that one. Not Superman or Green
Lantern, not Spiderman or Captain America. Firestorm. And that’s it; I looked
down on my return trip with my math textbook, and all I said was, “Firestorm.
Cool.” And for no other reason than that, we were best friends for years
following. It’s almost though friendship was the default setting, and all we’d
needed was even the slightest reason to not be strangers anymore.
Over the next three years we spent countless nights at each
other’s houses, comparing notes on Star Wars, comic books, GI Joe, and girls.
We grew out of things together and into the next phase, sometimes with fits and
starts and uneven pacing. He gave up the action figures before me, which
created friction. He danced with a girl before me, beating me by an hour or so.
It just so happened that she was the girl I had a huge secret crush on, so he
unknowingly took his life in his hands by asking her to dance. But I cut him
some slack because he was the first person to call me Brien when I changed from
O’B to escape the incessant mockery. Plus, I was only fifty-fifty on whether or
not I could take him, as I’ve been with every best friend since.
But inevitably, our thousand days expired and it was on to
the next life, where I was the New Guy at school number six, in Long Beach,
California. In that iteration, I was a scared little pencil-necked honky at a
rough inner-city school. Fresh from the civilized, orderly world created by the
DOD, I was dropped into the Darwinian Thunderdome of Washington Jr. High, where
they were teaching 9th graders what Ms. Bitchy had taught me in 6th. If only
she’d been there to cold stare that pack of wild animals into submission. Hard
to believe I could find myself wishing for her imperious presence as a bulwark
against all the poverty and chaos of this brave new world.
For some reason, everyone kept asking me, “‘Sup, cuz?” At
Washington Junior High and Gladiator Academy, nerdy rejoinders like “the sky”
were not acceptable answers. And since I didn’t have the nerve to ask what a
“cuz” was, every one of my answers was a hopeless non-sequitur anyway. After a
thousand days in a foreign land, it was like I’d come “home” to 1985 America,
only to find everyone had lost their minds. They had a gross new kind of Coke,
I didn’t know what a CD was, I couldn’t figure out how to roll my pant legs
correctly, everybody wanted some dude named Amadeus to rock them, and my old
elementary school friends were now inquiring as to who my favorite wrestler
was. With a blank look I said, “What, like…Greco-Roman?” It was then that I
discovered that grown-ass men in spandex pretending to hit each other was one
of a million little touchstones that I had no connection to. I might as well
have been dropped off by aliens and told to blend into human society. It was a world gone mad, and I really had no idea ‘sup.
Compared to the rigorous academic environment of all the DOD
schools I’d attended, classes at the embattled and crumbling Washington Jr.
High were ridiculously easy. So it wasn’t long before the outgunned teachers
had me grading papers, and even administering vocabulary tests for them,
instead of doing my classwork. I didn’t have the sense to hide that light under
a bushel, and instead got noticed by some pretty scary people as the teacher’s
pet—or even contemporary—and I instantly became a target for hazing and abuse.
So school went from being a sanctuary where I thrived to a foxhole on the
Seine, where I stumble shell-shocked from one glancing blow or narrow escape to
the next. It was as I wandered aimlessly from one bolt-hole to another that I
passed a group of three dorks out by the athletic field who were talking about
what turned out to be a mutual friend of ours, Matt Murdock.
All I had to do was hear that name come out of their mouths
on my way by and I was arrested dead in my tracks. If these guys knew that guy,
then they were all right with me. Out of simple relief and a sense of
recognition at an island of my own kind amidst this new sea of chaos, I butted
right in on their conversation, without preamble. Anyone who considered Matt
Murdock a friend was bound to be good people. My people. Because Matt Murdock
is also known as Daredevil, the blind superhero and patron saint of lonely
nerds everywhere. I jumped in with them and was welcomed with open arms,
because all we needed was the slightest reason to not be strangers anymore.
We formed a nerdly cadre that somehow navigated all the
treacherous waters before us, as they saved me from the slow death of a
thousand cuts at Washington Junior High. They showed me the ropes, the nooks
and crannies where dorks like us could not only survive in that kind of post-apocalyptic
landscape, but actually thrive. We eked out a life and culture of our own, out
on the edge where we were always only hanging on by our fingernails. We fought
and backstabbed, we saw each other through California earthquakes, school
violence, first loves, and the end of our collective innocence. At the end of
our thousand days, we four had become two, and by the next thousand I was the
New Guy again, but in yet another state when I’d run out of schools to attend.
Without that pool of ready-made, like-minded souls, held
captive by common circumstance, I had to find a new way, and it wasn’t as easy
as it used to be. I still found friends along the way to all the places I
hadn’t intended to go—some of the sweetest and most enduring of my life actually—but
it was harder. It was as though, at some point, all the rules had changed. More
was required, and hearts were no longer open and given with abandon to the
first person to share even a common thread. People weren’t looking for a simple
reason not to remain strangers, but an abundance of reasons to reject one
another. And they found reasons aplenty.
That thousand-day cycle has continued all of my days.
Careers began and ended, relationships came and went, every major change set
according to the turnings of a great celestial clock, like some tidal biorhythm.
Ended my last major relationship, then met my wife after one thousand lonely
days. Married her one thousand days later, bought our first house two thousand
days after that. Started my business in another thousand days, made it a
thousand more before closing the doors. And the last new friend I made was a
thousand days ago, at age forty-three, already fifteen thousand four hundred
and seventeen days into my finite supply of thousand-day cycles.
His name is Jesse. He swears in Klingon, loves TED Talks,
and is the only person on Earth who does better Dana Carvey impressions than
me. Not to mention he is literally the world’s best whistler. That might be a
little Holden Caulfield of me, but I appreciate a good whistler. I met him at
the start of another thousand days, the New Guy again, this time at a
construction company. Jesse is my alternate self, almost like a mirror image.
If I’d been raised without religion, or was of a different political
philosophy, I would be this guy instead. Which means he didn’t fit in the
construction world any more than I did, but the difference between me and Jesse
is that he made no effort to be anyone other than who he is. So he didn’t fit
in, everyone knew it, and he didn’t even try. Of course he didn’t reinvent
himself every thousand days. Who does that?
Sometimes I think it must be a relief to be able to not
choose which version of yourself to present to the world. Thomas Wolfe once
wrote that “seeing yourself in another person is like coming home.” I couldn’t
agree more, but it’s harder than it used to be. Harder than it needs to be if
you ask me. It takes painstaking time, because there are all these rules now.
You can’t be too into it, or try too hard, or move too fast. Nonchalance is the
name of the game. There’s ten thousand ways to get it wrong, and about two
point five ways to get it right. But it can still be done. After all, next week
Jesse and I are having lunch together for the second time this year.
I’ve since left that job, and the construction industry
entirely, but haven’t even tried to make friends at my new job. Sure, our
department has a yearly barbecue one weekend in the summer, but that’s called
team-building. And, yes, have a great time and a lot of laughs working
together, but no one even pretends that we’re going out for beers together. It hasn’t come up once in the year and half
that I’ve been here. We’re just work friends. Or as Ron Swanson would say,
“work-place proximity associates.” I guess that’s how it goes these days.
I don’t know when we all became such a bunch of specialists.
Like each person is a boutique, refined to a series of inflexible likes and
dislikes, and you either fit in with their brand or you don’t. Every path we
take in life dictates to us all the people we will not accept as friends. Gives
us another reason to reject them. If you have the right education, the right
musical tastes, the right political views, have the right hobbies, like the
right TV shows, and don’t do anything on the long, secret list of my pet peeves
and dislikes, I can schedule you in for forty minutes, six weeks from now. The
siren-song of a busy life drowning everything else out.
One of the top five regrets that people consistently share on
their deathbeds is losing touch with their friends, and winding up alone at the
end. Google recently released these statistics: Every week in America over six
thousand people ask how to make friends, and ten thousand ask how to mend a
broken heart. The sum total of human knowledge at our fingertips, and these are
our questions of the Oracle?
If only there were some reason to not be strangers.
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