Five years later. Five years older. Now, high school is forty years behind me, still parked as a four-year stretch during the buoyant 80s, representing what feels like a hole in my identify; a stop-gap in my growth. Who was I then? I’ve no idea, I cheerfully reminisced to a few old classmates, people who seemed to remember me more clearly than I remember myself from that era. What else could I say, having put this time in life to bed some time ago? Was I there to lament, to celebrate, or something quite distant from either polarity, in the vast in between? This was the latest class of 86’ reunion, the second such gathering I’d attended, not counting an intermediate event in 23’ that featured a panel discussion of celebrity or celebrity-adjacent alumni giving testimonies from the Acalanes vault of tall and funny tales. Such impressive people, I thought that night, just as I had thought on the first night in 21’, mingling as an intent listener, explaining to a few that this is what I do for a living.
The looks I received suggested that old peers were unsurprised, if not necessarily impressed. I was a good listener, I suppose—an able proto-psychoanalyst—though not so much as a student, which meant I wouldn’t attend the universities that many of my classmates would later attend: you know, Berkeley, Stanford, UCLA, Brown, Yale, etcetera. In 86’, I wasn’t listening well enough to notice how many were venturing to better schools than the ones I’d attend, though I should have known better. My sister, for one, had also attended Berkeley during the 80’s, having graduated Acalanes in 83’ after four years of being, in her words, quiet and studious. Serendipitously, she was visiting from out of state at the time of this latest reunion, and since neither of us recall spending any time together during the one year we apparently attended high school simultaneously, I extended an invite to her. The email sent by mayor Matt, reunion organizer, unofficial curator of Acalanes recall, suggested that alumni from other classes were welcome, so I asked, “Do you wanna go? You might see people you remember”
“Oh, hell no”, she replied, sourly dismissing her particular class with epithets I won’t repeat here. However, she was not unmoved by my invite, intrigued as she was by the prospect of learning whether there were people who might remember me, as she likewise thinks that I lacked personality during my teen years, unless I was arguing about something, in which case she’d say I was good at what she today calls Adam Driver denial. Adam Driver, as in the actor Adam Driver, who is good at enacting hot denial: fierce, indignant refusal to acknowledge what everyone else thinks he’s guilty of. For my sister, the other compelling attraction of the reunion was the venue: the Round-Up Saloon. That’s right: the Round-Up Saloon, one of the first Lafayette fixtures my family and I noticed when we first emigrated from England in 1979. Back then, the place conjured a tumbleweed village in a dusty western setting, inhabited by crusty folk and a gunfighting underbelly. Now it’s a piece of vintage Lafayette, still standing in the heart of the town, and still thriving as a business despite a woody exterior that looks like it might be pancaked by a 2.5 earthquake. By the way, it still attracts crusty folk, if not quite gunslingers, though I did clock the odd gangster-looking type in loitering proximity. Anyway, the bar is now owned, and has been owned for decades, by another class of 86’ alumnus, so quite naturally it has become a staple of Acalanes’ reunions.
During the first hour of the event, my sister and I sat apart from the gathering, catching up on day-to-day concerns, but not satisfying her curiosity about my erstwhile reputation. “Go on then”, she prompted with a British turn of phrase, like a mother coaxing a child into class on his first day at kindergarten. My shyness notwithstanding, I edged towards a sizable group that was pooled under an outdoor canopy. In the crowd, there were a few people I’d unmistakably recognize, but the rest were an inchoate blend of distantly familiar gazes, names that rang bells; bodies distended from the shapes we all were forty years ago. I was reminded of an exchange I’d had in the same outdoors spot at either the 21′ or 23′ gathering–can’t recall which–wherein the ambient buzz got louder as the evening wore on, so leaning in to hear but not head butt someone became a thing. One tight, as in buzzed in another sense alumnus gestured to the gathering, leaned in to me and asked something like, “who here did you have a crush on?” You can imagine how one or two vowel sounds might have dissolved amid the steadily growing crowd noise, but for me it was a consonant that needed clarifying. “Sorry, did or didn’t?”. He looked back at me a bit stiffly. “Did, not didn’t. Why would I ask who you didn’t have a crush on?” I shrugged affably, and awkwardly. “Not sure,” I first said. “It would be a shorter conversation, at least”.
Cut back to the present day. Luckily, one or two people met me halfway, approaching as I approached, half-guessing about me, otherwise confirming my identity. The feminine style of recognition stirred old memories, those of blank or uncertain looks, unimpressed eye contact, and over the shoulder glances. There were exceptions, of course. Matt’s female counterpart, a former class president with an everysister air, was as kind and gracious as ever, greeting me and my sister and lavishing praise upon me as a lovable former classmate. My sister shook hands, smiled pleasantly, but still wore an expression that seemed to ask, wait, who are you talking about? As she and I met eyes, I speared telepathic rebuttals: oh, like you’re one to talk. How involved were you back in high school? Who would testify as to your bright and sparkling personality? Being involved. As I reflect on this point in middle age, being involved, putting yourself out there, is all that’s really needed to find one’s place in the crowd, assuming that’s desired. Is that what I wanted back in the day, as a fourteen through seventeen-year-old, the brief yet developmentally crucial span in which I’d attended Acalanes and, for the most part, not gotten involved? I mean, I was modestly involved in sports, first soccer, later wrestling, but never went near school government, club memberships and such. Remember those photos we’d take for the yearbooks, the senior pictures that were flanked by all of our school-based activities and achievements? My list was pretty thin, I’m abashed to say.
Memories are vague and can be replaced, or taped over. If you were young in the 80s then the metaphor of the audiotape (or VHS) will resonate, because whether you remember names, faces, or bodies, or yesteryear hijinks under the bleachers at homecoming, everyone from that time surely recalls owning stacks of tapes, many of which were blank so you could make tapes of recordings and record over them, again and again. Had a patient once from my generation who described his memory this way: he said his neurons felt weary and stretched from overuse, the taping over old memories with new ones that in turn degraded the old. The sound got fuzzy and the images warped, and you recall the times the tapes died and the music with them. Now, we can look back in reverie upon 86’ while still holding a future, because most of us are on the middle-age cusp, looking ahead to home stretch goals: if not having kids, then having grandkids; to the specter of retirement, or possibly a late career surge, like a promotion, a grand payday, or some endeavor that will yield a legacy. Travel opportunities beckon for some, while others will suffer with illness, or the frailty of the very old and even more forgetful: our parents. Whatever will happen should happen now or soon, or never; that is, if you graduated high school in 1986.
You’ll forgive me complaining about memory, about not having a good one, I mean. That’s what happens when you lose one of your parents to Alzheimer’s. You get a little fearful of that aspect of aging; a little premature in the forebodings. Fuzzy or warped memories, weary and stretched neurons are less amusing after you’ve sat with someone who was once enchanted with everything you did and didn’t care that your senior picture wasn’t flanked with many activities and achievements, but then stopped knowing who you are because they sort of died before they died. This is why I’ll hasten a memory that’s come to mind before it leaves me, or before I enter a stage of life wherein looking back, maybe to the distant past, is all I’ve got left.
It would have been perfect if I’d gone by Anthony, my father’s name, my first name. With Kenny—Kenny Baker—we could’ve enacted our namesakes from Star Wars and played C-Threepio and R2D2 at a Halloween dance or party, or something. Everyone would have gotten the joke and loved it. We’d have been teased about it on a daily basis if only I’d been known by my first name. Well, it wasn’t to be, but what was to be was a performance that culled from another, slightly less iconic piece of pop culture that brought to the surface both of our underused acting chops. Would anyone remember? Well, Stacy did, it seemed. Stacy, who recognized me immediately after forty years at the reunion; Stacy, who shared a French class with Kenny and I in senior year, and possibly junior and even sophomore year in high school. Ugh! Details. Anyway, I reminded her of the skit assignment: teacher Stan Oberg’s idea to bring a little fun to the classroom, a little alternative to the rote recitation of conjugations; a little je ne sais quoi or epater le something in a third period everyday of the week. It was Kenny’s idea to enact a parody of drunk driving by playing a police officer while I played a miscreant driver, with a desk (car) and frisbee (steering wheel) as props. Kenny was authoritative in nature and seemed eager to play authority figures, though he had Stacy in mind for the skit’s denouement in which she’d play a scolding member of a local temperance movement. The problem was that Stacy was actually sincere about her then role as a leader of SADD (students against drunk driving), so she declined to participate. Actually, we got her to play a small cameo wherein she steps forward and biffs me with a rubber toy but doesn’t speak any chastising lines. Good for her, I remember thinking when she demurred on Kenny’s first idea, which was in poor taste, after all.
So, the not-distasteful-at-all meat of the skit was about me and my silly miming action of a drunk driver that gets pulled over with Kenny playing a cop wearing sunglasses and sounding more like Arnold Schwarzenegger than a French gendarme. Not that he wasn’t serious about the assignment. See, Kenny was determined that we’d get an A because Kenny had ambition. He was likely heading towards Berkeley after senior year, or Stanford, or UCLA, or Brown, or Yale, unlike me who only wanted to put in a good performance in Stan Oberg’s French class for the sake of posterity. Indeed, Kenny wasn’t prepared for my perfectionism, which called for last moment script changes, including my inspiration to sing lines of song, in French of course, to supplement my role. Whatever, thought Kenny, not really seeing my vision but indulging me nonetheless. His starry idea was for me to simulate giving a urine sample in vivo, and had brought along a quite convincing looking cup from a bio lab for me to use. Well, that idea fell a bit flat, as standing in a corner upon Kenny’s direction and pretending to, ya know, was a bit contrived and even for us, too adolescent. However, what I recall—what I vividly recall—was the success of my idea, singing while driving along and sounding drunk. The song that came to mind was the Willie Nelson standard, “On The Road Again”, then a relatively new song but already cemented in the public consciousness, or at least that of Stan Oberg’s generation. That’s what I gleaned when he was the only one to respond as I starting singing, “Sur the route encore, je veux etre sur le route encore”. It took him a moment to realize what I was singing, after which he burst into the biggest laugh I’d ever heard from a teacher, let alone one elicited by me.
There: a memory, and no argument. Just personality.
