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?
