High School Hierarchy

This may seem a bit of a rant. It’s definitely angry. I hope that it burns of defiance.

Was I popular in high school? I’d have to say, no. If anything, I was quiet and shy, especially around the girls, especially around the girls I had a crush on. I asked Penny Deluce what the girls thought of me, back then, and that's what she told me; she said she and her friends liked me, too, maybe not in the way I wanted, but it’s nice to be remembered kindly. Was I aware of my lack of popularity? I’d have to say, yes, that I was. Did that lack of popularity hurt? Yes, sometimes. But not always. I wasn’t exactly a pariah, either. I was invited to parties when I was finally old enough to attend them, more as the years passed. I even threw a few.

My first party I attended was my sister’s. I had to be invited. It would have been quite a feat to have kept it secret from me. I did live in the same house. And I was actually invited, and not just because I lived in the same house. My sister was not at all concerned with my social status. In fact, she was my coach when it came to helping me figure out how to navigate all the obstacles thrust in my way. She taught me how to dance, and we practiced how to jive together. I guess she didn’t want her brother to be a geek. And I wasn’t, not really. At her party, I was the disk jockey. It was fun. And her friends treated me well, for a kid. I think they were especially impressed with my LP collection, since I had just about everything they wanted to listen to.

But in school, I can’t say that the “cool” kids or the jocks had much to do with me. Nor I with them. As I’ve said before, I was fairly heavily involved at the pool, first as a helper, then as a guard and instructor. I had my crowd, our weekend outings at the mall and arcades, kickin’ back time at the beach, at the pool, and in basements, routing through others’ collections to rout out my next purchase, my next favourite LP, my next favourite song, my next obsession. There was homework, there was TV, there was the cinema on Friday nights (Mark Charette worked there and snuck us in every now and again). And there were books.

But the evidence was there. Leafing through the old yearbooks, I’m astonished how little the yearbook crowd actually knew about us, if they even gave us a second thought. The pages are thick with the popular crowd, with the basketball teams, the volleyball teams, and hardly ten pages passed without the popular girls crowded together in the fame, mugging for the camera. Even the supposedly candid shots were always of them. There were a few pictures of us, one of John Lavric here, his hair quite a bit longer than in his class photo, another of Garry Martin there, a couple group shots, no more. I’m sure I saw my back in one of the photos once. To be truthful, we weren’t really a school spirit, rah, rah, rah bunch. John worked for his dad and was one of the first of our number with a car, Garry and I spent most of our time at the pool, without much spare time for school sports. There were few extracurricular activities that interested me, us. Gerry Gerrard was in hockey, not an O’Gorman staple. Mark Charette and Roger Rheault were in basketball, but few others. John and Dan Loreto began working out at a gym. Chris Cooper was in Cross-country running, but somehow didn’t grace those pages. Gerry, Mark and I were in Track and Field (Roger, too, I think), but it was held too late to make the print deadline (although it always did in the RMSS yearbooks, I’ve since learned, leafing through my wife’s).

So, were we pariahs to those “cooler” kids? Maybe.

Did we care? Yes. And no. We were the geeks and freaks of our school, in our day. And we liked that just fine. We were into our own things, sometimes that meant sports, but for whatever reason they weren’t the “right” sports. Whatever.

And as it turns out, it took years for the rest of the world to catch up to us. We were gamers. Pre-home-computer. The arcade era. And the arcades were teeming with us, not a jock or a popular girl to be seen. It seems like everyone plays them now, not that I have for more than a decade. We played Dungeons and Dragons. We read horror, science fiction, and sword and sorcery novels, watched every genera of escapist movie ever made, modern, classic, silent, red menace, anything we could see at the theatre or the video store. In the aftermath of Lord of the Rings, whole hosts of superhero movies (to be clear, I never cared for superhero flics), and decades of fantasy gaming, 100,000s of thousands of people now play roleplaying games and attend every type of escapist convention imaginable. FYI: I was never part of the costume crowd. To each his own. If you love it, go with it.

That said, I never liked being invisible to others, either. Reading what was written about my friends and I in the O’Gorman Yearbooks, what was inferred, what was obviously bullshit made up by strangers, it’s no wonder that I did not purchase my final yearbooks.

I remember that the burbs to be published about each of us being distributed throughout, beforehand. I was shocked when I read mine. It was vicious, backhanded. I went to the writer and told her in no uncertain terms what I thought of her description. I even went to the principal and complained, told her what I knew it meant. And demanded that it not be published in the yearbook. Was it? No, it wasn’t. Some shallow, banal piece replaced it. What was it? I don’t remember either, now. Thankfully, I suppose. Not having that book allows me distance to the insult, and its flaccid replacement. Am I imagining that long ago slight? Not a chance. We remember the hurt inflicted upon us far more than any other memory. Why? In hopes of never having those hurts repeated.

What did that long-ago editor think of me when she wrote that blurb? Was it indeed spiteful? And if it was, what did she think of reputedly meek little David Leonard venting his red anger in her face? His not being so expectedly compliant. Not being such a victim.

Compliant? Meek? Victims? If they only knew. I remember us well. Geeks? Sure, why not; but we were also fearless, adventuresome. We were daredevils, speed demons; bright, tech savvy and replete with curiosity, loyalty, and love.

What do those people think of us now, I wonder? Do they, at all?

Do we care?