In the Year of Our Lord, Nineteen-Hundred and Eighty-Six, a grave wrong was visited upon a young man, fifteen years of age. Tall, slender, and pale, the young man had a hawkish nose and bright eyes. He didn’t smile easily or often, but it was worth the wait when he did, because each one was earned. The world was not always a kind place to the young man, since he was above average in intelligence and preferred comic books to sports. Though he was a talented baseball player, his crippling shyness made team tryouts a nonstarter, and most would still have called him nerd—otherwise known by its scientific nomenclature Dorkimus Maximus. And the world is no friend to nerds, as you shall see.
As a result, Dorkimus Maximi (plural) typically travel in packs known as Nerd Herds, which can often be found in long
lines ahead of certain movie premiers, at conventions of similar variety, and
of course comic book stores. Owing to their rejection by and persecution from
the general populace, especially the athletically inclined or otherwise
genetically favored of either gender, Nerd Herds are often skittish, insular,
and rigidly territorial. They will usually situate themselves on the periphery
of gatherings, with clear sightlines both to exits and clusters of pretty
girls. The former for obvious reasons, and the latter in the hopes that a
female that would otherwise be uninterested might be charmed by some overheard bit
of clever repartee or hypnotized by the intensity of the Nerds’ desire.
These tactics
virtually never work, of course, and on the rare occasion that they do, the
presence of the female will often be a disruption to the cohesiveness of the
Herd. The males tend to compete over her attention, which is ultimately the
demise of the Herd, even if neither of them wins. And it’s worse if one of them
does win. Nonetheless, the prolonged absence of the female can be just as
harmful to the health of the Herd—testosterone and involuntary celibacy being
what they are—if the group decides that one of its members is responsible for
repelling females or otherwise damaging the group’s standing among existing
social hierarchies, low as it may be.
At these times,
the Herd behaves much like other groups in higher social strata, turning on
their own and designating a scapegoat upon which to heap the blame, a lightning
rod to absorb all of the self-loathing that society has taught Dorkimus Maximus to feel for himself and
his kind. Within the Nerd Herd, this designee is usually the nerd’s nerd, and
much like the ‘winner’ in Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery,” they find themselves
the victim of the group’s efforts at expiation in order to please some social
deity who might look kindly on the propitiation of their sacrifice. Such was
the cruel and unjust fate of the young man.
For although he
was a bit awkward and ungainly, he was also without artifice or guile. He liked
Star Wars, comic books, and Steven Spielberg movies. If he liked or disliked
something or someone, he said so, and that was it. He took things and people at
face value and would be friendly to anyone that was friendly to him. He was
completely himself and was unburdened by ambitions to fit in anywhere other
than where he naturally fit. Though there were many that seemed to be above his
station in life, there were none that he deemed below him, and though his
circle was small, he was a stalwart and true friend. His name was Tim Smith,
and for no reason at all, I betrayed him.
I’ve been hearing
a lot lately what a great memory I have. I never thought it was especially good
myself until I started writing these ad hoc memoirs, spelunking deep in the
recesses of dusty archives and discovering some true delights, and not just a
few moments that made me cringe with regret. On average, a person remembers a
total of about nine days per year. That’s 2.4% of your life, in case you’re
wondering. I’m guessing that means I remember maybe thirteen days a year, or
3.6%, which is why people say I have a ‘good’ memory. I wish I could pick and choose
what went into that measly 3.6%, because there’s a lot that I’d prefer to put in
the trash bin for collection. Things I’ve done that are inexcusably,
unequivocally wrong. Not talking about boosting GI Joe figures from Target
here, or pilfering quarters from Mom’s purse to buy Slurpees and play Mario
Bros. and Yie Ar Kung Fu down at the 7-11. No, I mean the truly dishonorable
things that I’ll take to the grave with me.
I’ve discovered
that memories are most easily retrieved from the foggy ruins of time when
they’re attached to some sort of association, like a song or even a smell.
Better still is when they are tagged with a particular emotion. It’s easy to
remember when someone embarrassed me or made me angry. Exhilaration and fear are
big ones, too. I have vivid snapshots of sitting at the top of a steep hill on
my bike at six, mere moments before being hit by a car; of making serious
attempts to gain superpowers by way of high voltage. Sharp memories of the
first girl that I liked who liked me back, and the fluttering jolt of
electrochemical love. A note taped to a cold door that didn’t open when I
knocked, explaining why a different girl would not be spending Christmas with
me. Of realizing that I wasn’t going to be able to stop in time and feeling the
world slide into dreamy slow-motion, as I shouted an expletive before slamming
the family Datsun 710 into the rear bumper of a Chrysler New Yorker at sixteen.
Moments of absolute panic, when guns came out in anger, or when a ladder gave
way and I went two stories down with it. And thousands more, all tagged with
some emotion and filed away as important for some reason.
The memory of how
we treated Tim is especially vivid because of the emotion it’s tagged with:
shame. More than regret, shame attends the things that I’ve done wrong in life
when I knew better ahead of time, and couldn’t blame it on being young or
foolish. When there wasn’t a lesson to be learned or good that arose from the
wrong that was done. That’s when having a good memory can be a double-edged
sword. Because I perfectly remember standing up on the bridge between the Admin
and History buildings at Long Beach Poly, looking down on the quad and seeing
Tim standing at the flagpole, waiting for us at our usual meeting place. He was
checking his watch, looking around in confusion because he didn’t know that we
wouldn’t be coming that day, or ever again.
I first met Tim when
I was a scared little pencil-necked honky at a rough inner-city school in Long
Beach, CA. I was fresh from Naples, Italy and a very civilized DOD school run by the military, only to be dropped into the Darwinian Thunderdome of Washington Jr. High. By the time our
paths crossed, my status as star-student and teacher’s pet had gotten me
noticed by some pretty scary people, and I’d become a regular target for hazing
and abuse. It was as I was taking the long way around campus, through service
breezeways and behind buildings—instead of across the quad where I might run
into Mike Connelly—that I walked past a group of four Dorkimus Maximi out by the athletic
field who were talking about what turned out to be a mutual friend of ours,
Matt Murdoch. All I had to do was hear that name come out of their mouths 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 of an
island of my own kind amidst this sea of chaos, I butted right in on their
conversation. Anyone who considered Matt Murdoch a friend was bound to be good
people. My kind of people. Because Matt Murdoch is also known as Daredevil, the
blind superhero and Patron Saint of lonely nerds everywhere. As
Patron Saints go, you could do worse, believe me.
So I jumped right
in with those four, and was welcomed with open arms. Tim Smith, Phillip
Holliday, Mike Price, Stephen Abatay, and I formed a nerdly cadre that somehow
navigated all the treacherous waters around us. Staying the night at each
other’s houses for Star Wars trilogy marathons, trips to Richard Kyle books on
Friday for new comics and Wester Bacon Cheese Burgers at Carl’s Jr, and using
washers to trick dilapidated old pinball games into letting us play for free.
We fought and backstabbed, we saw each other through California earthquakes,
school violence, first forays into the world of girls, and the beginning of the
end of our collective innocence. But eventually, the day came when none of that mattered. Because in the Year of Our Lord, Nineteen-Hundred and Eighty-Six,
‘ghosting’ may not yet have been a term, but it was absolutely a thing.
If you said it to
a kid today, they’d know right away that you meant disappearing out of
someone’s life without explanation by pressing the right series of buttons on a
screen to delete, block, ban, or otherwise unfriend a person. The result being
that the victim can’t see you on social media, their emails get delivered
straight to the trash, their text messages dissolve into the ether, phone calls
go straight to voicemail, and any message they leave is heard only by machines
who instantly forget what was said. All without notice or fanfare, all
unbeknownst to them. At the touch of a button, they simply fade away like a
ghost. Kids these days and their rock n roll music. In my day, we didn’t have
machines to do our dirty work. You had to be a coward the old-fashioned way. Right
to someone’s face…except, you know, behind their back.
For all my
vaunted memory, I wish I could recall the specific event that lead to our
decision to “ghost” Tim. I’m certain that it centered around a girl, as every
teenaged boy’s problems do. I can see a parade of faces from the myriad girls
that I wished would have liked me the way that I liked them: Ylani, Julie,
Norma, Juvy, Luz, Gloria, Anna, Rosie. The list is endless, because it’s made
up of pretty much any girl that I’d ever exchanged more than ten words with
outside of class. At some point, one of them approached me out on the quad for
some reason—maybe socially, or more likely some help with school work—and got a
gander of me in my native habitat, amongst my Nerd Herd. I could practically
see the gears turning in her head as she reassessed her impression of me and
beat feet for the hills. Unlike Tim, I wasn’t content to just be myself, to
accept my station in life. So instead of disregarding someone like that for their
shallow judgment of us (or me, specifically), I took it as a perilous loss of
status that I couldn’t afford if I was ever going to escape exile in Dorkdom. That
had to be somebody’s fault…
There is no
measure for how absolutely desperate I was not to be labelled a nerd, dork, geek,
spaz, egghead, poindexter, neo-maxie-zoom-dweebie loser. Not again. Not after
the nightmare of Washington Jr. High and Gladiator Academy. No matter what, I
couldn’t let that cling to me at another school. So over the next couple of
weeks, as the dust began to settle on the initial chaos and uncertainty of our
Sophomore year, and our reputation as the Dorks Who Met At The Flagpole was
firming up into a fact, the wheels were turning as to who was to blame for that
assignation and how we might shed the taint of their presence. Looking around,
the group began to triangulate on Tim as the nerd’s nerd, a lightning rod to
absorb all of the self-loathing that we’d been taught to feel for ourselves.
Our scapegoat.
Of the four remaining members of our original Herd, only
Mike Price had the humility and character to see that what we were doing was pointless
and cruel. After a few days, he went and mended fences with Tim and made things
right between them. That should have been enough to break the spell of
self-delusion we were under, but rather than admit what shitty assholes we
were, we doubled down on our assholery, finding ways to taunt Tim and flaunt
our shunning of him. It was as if, by piling up enmity and derision on him, we
could cover over our bizarre and inexcusable behavior. Looking back, I’m glad
Tim had Mike to stand with him, because Mike was a big guy, strong as an ox,
and he had a punch like a pile-driver. Not only did he teach our little pack of
hyena-like cowards to keep a respectable distance, but he went on the offensive
to get back at us in a variety cunning ways. Until that moment, Mike had kind
of been the troublemaker of our group, the ruffian shoplifter and foul-mouthed
oaf. But when the chips were down, and I was the villain instead, he was a
loyal guy who stood up and did the right thing.
That year passed into the next as they are wont to do, and
by then we were moving in different circles and mysteriously never had one class with Tim, or saw him in the halls, at the mall, or the movie theater. It was as if we were living in
parallel dimensions, existing at the same time and place, but somehow removed
and unaware of the other’s existence. We didn’t necessarily escape the dreaded
label of nerd, or dork—or whatever it was we were so terrified of—but we did
learn to live with it and accept ourselves and who were with a little bit of
grace, as everyone eventually must. Over the course of our High School career, we began to look back on what
we’d done like it was from a fever dream, or something done by other people. Disassociated,
as though it were too shameful to have been done by what were otherwise
terrific guys like us.
Even after I’d graduated, I kept the story in my back pocket,
carrying it with me everywhere I went. Every now and then, when I’d get into a deep
conversation or truth-or-dare type of game—like you do when you’re of a certain
age or have been drinking—and people would ask what the worst, most embarrassing
thing I’d ever done was, the Ballad of Tim Smith always came to mind and then inevitably came
tumbling haplessly out of my mouth. No matter what anyone else had to say, my story
always topped theirs. I’d get these looks of shock or mild horror, as though they were
reassessing me as someone capable of things that even an animal wouldn’t do. Well…not
the cute ones anyway, like weasels and rats. To this day, my wife and
closest friend all know the name Tim Smith. Such is level of remorse that I’ve
felt ever since, that it’s become a permanent part of my biography.
Over the years, I added a couple of other whoppers to the
resume of regret that I left in my wake. Things that, in spite of the years of
drug addiction, small-time dealing, and money laundering etc., still stand out as
the worst things I’ve ever done, and which make up a special trifecta of regret that
I’ll take to my grave. Since I turned 40 (cliché as that is), I’ve been on a
low-key mission to rebuild friendships and make amends—or at least
apologies—for long-term sins, wrongs, and general douchebaggery that I engaged
in over the course of my life. It’s taken a lot longer than I thought it would,
because people are busy and our lives are complicated, and you can’t just show
up on somebody’s doorstep out of nowhere and, apropos of nothing, blurt out how
sorry you are for being a jerk.
What I couldn’t have guessed at the outset of my “mission,”
was how pivotal these stories would turn out to be in helping me to connect
with people. Not only resurrecting old
friendships I thought were lost to the sands of time, but for creating
opportunities to have conversations I would never have been able to even begin
otherwise. Phillip and I got back in touch in 2012 and have dinner a couple of
times a year these days. At some point during those long and boozy
conversations, we inevitably return to Tim and the indelible sense of remorse
that we’ve carried with us, always. I guess there are just some things in life
you never get over. Still, the outcomes have otherwise been so gratifying that
I started telling all the stories that I had in me. By way of all this
bloviating, I’ve managed, incredibly, over the course of the last six years, to
find redemption and even restoration with virtually all of my beloved old
friends that I’d so grievously wronged. Everyone except Tim Smith.
That is until the morning of June 6th, 2018.
On that fine morning, an otherwise nondescript Wednesday, I checked
the blog and noticed a spike of unusual activity in the analytics. I poked
around and found that someone had left a new comment on a three year old story,
“Whitey Sings the Blues.” The comment began this way: “Jerk, asshole,
tormentor? Yes to all three.” I recognized my own words from that selfsame
story being spit back at me in pain and discovered that they had been written
by none other than Tim Smith himself. Through a series of unknown connections
and coincidences, he’d somehow found the story—in which he is briefly mentioned
by name—and left a lengthy reply.
In it, he confirmed all of the things I’d felt about myself for the past three decades and described in some detail the injury he’d suffered more than half our lifetime ago. It was exactly as painful an experience for him as I'd feared, and more besides. I read it over and over again, until it was like a silent bomb had gone off inside. When I finished picking my jaw up off the floor, I immediately reached out to Phillip, and so began many hours-worth of soul searching. Long discussions about what we should say and how to say it. Reminding each other of details we’d forgotten, debating the timeline and our motivations. More than a few tears were shed in fresh anguish, and yet somehow there was still this air of…possibility.
So I sat down and began writing the single-biggest apology
I’ve ever owed in my life. Inflation adjusted for 1986.
“Whitey Sings the Blues” is a story about bullying, and
about how even a Dorkimus Maximus like me had found people lower in the social hierarchy,
and saw fit to keep the same shit I received rolling downhill to them. That
being a victim of bullying doesn’t indemnify you from being a bully yourself.
About how we find ways to pass on our pain, and that my regret for that is why
I tell all these tales in the first place. The closing words of the story are
these: “I write these rambling, oblique apologies for the way that I was; these
huge love letters to friendship and days gone by; thank you notes to the Grace
that has planted itself at the corners of my life as a bulwark against my own
stupidity… Try not be too big of a dick, Whitey. It’s a helluva vig when it
comes due.”
Well, after thirty-two years, the vig has indeed finally
come due. But rather than an unpayable debt, it somehow feels like a gift. It’s
hard to say where this will lead, because thirty-two years is a long time. A lot of years, a lot of miles, a lot of hard feelings. Still, difficult and candid conversations have begun
between Tim, Phillip, and me at long last. Reflections on betrayal, rejection, and pain; meditations on
the vulnerable, confusing years of high school, and how life has turned out for
us in the wake of it all. Looking back on the best of times and the worst of times. And maybe a bit forward as well...so who knows?
Of this I’m certain, even an inch down Redemption Road is worth a million miles anywhere else.
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