The Weekly Screed (#828)

Useless stuff I’m glad
I learned (mostly in high school)
by David Benjamin

“… And we, so sadly past the bonfire and celebration of our birth,
Shall burn quietly,
Passing, on a zephyr, into a new realm
And blaze anew.”
             — David Benjamin
             Robert M. LaFollette High school yearbook, 1967

MADISON, Wis. — Looking forward to seeing my best friend from high school at our 50th reunion, I realized that he and I are probably the only surviving members of the Class of ’67 who can click our heels in sequence. We did not seek this knowledge. It was thrust upon us by a blonde named Jillsey (Class of ’68), who had snagged the female lead (Marian the Librarian) in the school production of The Music Man. Jill was recruiting male dancers for the musical’s underpopulated corps de ballet. Dick, her erstwhile boyfriend, and I, her stalker, were eminently available — and pliable.

So, Dick and I ended up cavorting on stage in front of people. Jill also trapped Larry Stamm, whose premature demise — along with those of Fred Astaire, Eleanor Powell and Gene Kelly — exacerbated the national shortage of heel-clickers.

If you’ve ever tried this trick, even once, you realize that it’s way harder than Gregory Hines (Oh my God! He’s gone, too!) ever made it look. Clicking away ten times in a row — which Dick, Larry and me had to do — is pure rocket science.

Since my Music Man moment, I’ve gone older and fatter, but I can still knock off a few heel-clicks. This useless relict of my high-school days lets me apart from most of mankind. I cherish it — rather perversely — more than much of the book-learning I’ve since forgotten.

Thoughts of heel-clicking reminded me of other superfluous lessons that were not on the LaFollette High School curriculum, among which, for example, was the hard-learned conviction that Girls Are People.

High school, unfortunately, coincides with puberty. For boys, this clash of hormones with co-education triggers a case of either reckless lust or paralyzing terror — directed at the girls who were previously our occasional playmates or, in most cases, furniture. Suddenly, they had all our attention but were not really human. Without warning, they became objects of an unspeakable (or overspoken) desire. This objectification, in those days, was encouraged by every boy’s guide to manly suavity in 1967 — Playboy magazine. We prowled our adolescence seeking the Playmate of the Month, but were willing to settle for the girl in the desk in front of us in Mr. Swanson’s English class.

(No, the other Mr. Swanson.).

Of course, most boys, including me, could not find first base with the aid of Sacajawea and a Rand McNally road atlas. We envied those James Bondian paragons in our midst, a certain Dave and a particular Mark, who exercised a wondrous, inexplicable power over girls. They were too aloof and cool to intimate their secret. So the rest of us muddled about and scored the occasional date, before which we drenched ourselves in English Leather. We didn’t progress ’til much later, when we either joined the Sexual Revolution, or married a girl who knew what goes where, and when.

Although I failed chronically to win the heart (or any other organ) of some girl, any girl, I started befriending babes like Jill, for whom I was every bit as sexy as, say, a day-old oleo sandwich on the cafeteria floor, but who found me vaguely amusing. I served her by making jokes, sharing girlish secrets, listening to her troubles, mocking her vanities and casting wry aspersions on her cavalcade of airhead boyfriends.

This strategy actually got me closer to a number of beautiful and vivacious girls than many of their nominal boyfriends ever got. But those guys got kissed.

Me? Eh.

This knack — for communicating with women without turning them on— became the story of my life. Platonic bonding wasn’t in any of my high school courses, but if not for high school, I might have wasted years wallowing in meaningless sex.

While I was I learning, more or less, how to talk to girls, I also learned that love is comedy, that romance is an accidental mismatch that leads more often to heartbreak than joy. But I also figured out, by and by, that few heartbreaks are permanent. Many end with outright relief and most romances, especially those that fail, come back to mind not painfully, but nostalgically.

There are, I know, several almost-girlfriends from high school whom I’d love to find, to reminisce, to apologize, and laugh.

I learned as we all do that high-school, finally, is irrelevant. Among my classmates, I know for sure only two of us — me and Vogt — who are doing the same thing we did in high school. Vogt studied venomous reptiles, and still does. I write the same sort of drivel I wrote when I was 15. Neither of us learned our vocation from our high school teachers, especially Vogt. (I had English teachers but I fought them more than I heeded them).

Everyone else either found something to do that they didn’t even think about in school, or they adjusted their dreams when reality (or Vietnam) popped up and whacked them across the chops. But all of us pressed on, did jobs, made careers of one sort or another, got married, got divorced (or didn’t), found someone else (if necessary), got older, got fatter (or shrank) and by now we’re all signed up for Medicare and Social Security.

Best of all, we mellowed out. Few today cling to the petty triumphs, heartbreaks, loves, hates and grudges that haunted us 50 years ago. Almost all of the guys who wanted to take me out behind the gym and beat me up can’t remember who I was.

Finally, despite its sheer pointlessness, high school’s one of the most relevant experiences we’ve ever lived. Having holed up elsewhere in the world, I’ve come to understand that high school is a rare passage, uniquely American. On the brink of adulthood, we are plunged — without our consent — into a random society of old friends and new strangers, forced to communicate, study, experiment, fight, play, and explore our own insides more intensely than we’ll have time to do again in our lives, until it’s too late.

High school is where most of us learned how to relate to others, how not to relate, how goddamn hard it is to relate, how remarkable it is to find a friend, to encounter a person — or persons — whom you will trust completely as long as you live.

When I see Dick, after five or ten years, there’s no time or space between us. We start up as though we’d been apart only as long it took for Dick to go to Mr. Meissen’s chemistry class and for me to muddle through Latin III with Mrs. Atkins.

As the writer in the film Stand By Me said at the end, we’ll never have friends like that again. Maybe that’s what the grownups sent us to high school, against our will, to figure out.