I graduated in the Class of 1987 from Horace Greeley High School in Chappaqua, New York. Chappaqua is the richest half of the Town of New Castle, containing the train station. The less-rich half of town is known as Millwood, and it was the part that was originally farm country. There are old stone walls dating back to Colonial times in the woods behind the elementary school.
Some kids in my school lived on Whippoorwill Close in big houses with elaborate ornamental gardens, with stockbrokers or executives for parents. Others lived on Sand Street or right on Route 100, had single mothers who drove school buses, and rode motorbikes on the powerline access road. I lived on Glenwood Road, which was sort of halfway between.
Here's a local joke to help you understand what kind of place it was.
A Jewish family moves to New Castle. Before the first day of school, the father takes the son aside and says, "This is a very rich community. I want you to be on the lookout for any anti-Semitism; you may need to be careful about where you go and who you hang around with."
At the end of the day, the son comes home and the father talks to him again. "Did you see any signs, or hear anything, that worried you?"
"Not at all, Dad. In fact I don't even know who the Jews are. But I can sure tell who's from Millwood."
Told to me by my mother, oddly enough, years after I'd graduated
The summer after my first year of college, I was offered a part in the Saw Mill Summer Theatre production of "Fiorello". I was Floyd the cop. I played opposite this girl named Beth Cohen, who had been one of the major stars of the Greeley Theatre Company. She was basically the top diva of our senior year, inheriting the mantle from her friend and mentor, Heather Kent, (now known professionally as Heather Paige Kent). When I first saw Beth, I was kind of icy to her, responding to a polite introduction with a curt "We've met" and being defensive and touchy whenever we were offstage, basically because I still felt jealous that she had been one of the popular crowd and I had not. I later found out they'd cut Floyd's song, but I did have a couple big scenes, including one where I got to slap Beth on the behind. The director actually had to get on my case about how cranky and sullen I was around Beth. He even used the magic word "unprofessional".
But at the end of the summer at a party at Larry O'Keefe's house, after I'd done some thinking, I actually pulled Beth aside and said to her, "This is a koan. There were these two Buddhist monks standing on a bridge watching the fish in the pond. And one of them said, "I'd like to be a fish, because fish are happy and carefree." And the other one said, "Hey, man, that's metaphysically absurd! You're not a fish, so how can you know how fish feel?" "Well", says the first monk. "You're not ME, so how can you know that I don't know how fish feel?"
Beth looked very confused at this point. I continued.
"You see, I didn't like you because you were more popular than I was. And I used to think that wanting to be an actor was a stupid thing to do with your life. But I realized recently that "You're not ME". We don't all have to be the same. I realized that it's important that you should get to do what you want to do with your life, like I'm doing what I want with mine. So I'm sorry I was mean to you. I feel bad that I wasn't nicer to you, and actually I hope you do get to be an actor. And I wish you good luck."
She actually kissed me on the cheek and said, "Weird, sweet boy."
I missed my five-year high school reunion, mostly due to social anxiety. At that time I had only just graduated from college anyway, so there probably wasn't much worth reporting about my or anyone else's lives. By the time of the ten-year reunion, I'd had a few girlfriends, one serious and then a couple not so serious, gone to grad school and dropped out, had a couple of jobs, been fired from one, gotten married, and was living in Bayside, Queens and working in Manhattan as a computer consultant.
And I had learned to snowjob people, to some degree. Once my then-wife and I were at the dealership and had spent half an hour at the mercy of a smooth-talking car salesman, and I was getting annoyed and wanted some control back. He asked me what I did for a living and I rattled off, "Well, we perform a variety of consulting engagements, mostly on the Street; we've got practices in distributed systems management, network management, database administration, and data warehousing."
"Oh." he said, his line of patter momentarily interrupted. I was actually a little surprised that I'd managed to toss out that salad of buzzwords so easily, til I remembered I'd recently spent a week "on the beach", which meant in the company office with the sales staff.
So Janet and I went off to the reunion. One of the first people I talked to was Jeff Kennan, who I believe is a grandson or something of George Kennan the foreign-policy guy. He'd been in my Scout troop, and I think he had even made it to SPL (Senior Patrol Leader); I know he'd made Eagle.
Whenever you talk to someone at your reunion who you haven't seen for years, you do not see them as an adult. You only see the sharp contrast between who they were then, and who they are now. You are measuring them against who they were the last time you saw them, which was at the end of high school, when they were all potential and expectation. You compare them to who they were expected to become.
And you are also measuring them against yourself. You compare lives, you compare jobs, you subtly try to deduce income and compare that as well. The old high school rivalries and competition, so long submerged, rise again.
Jeff had been an honest man when I knew him, but he'd also had a fairly powerful and influential family. As we talked, and he explained that he was working as a carpenter, the implicit contrast between expectation and outcome became so sharp that it surfaced unbidden and we had to either address it, or stop talking.
He said that he had gone to college, majored in Political Science, and had a marketing job for a while. He found himself unable to stomach it. He felt like he was lying for a living, and left to find honest work.
A pleasant surprise was running into my friend Charlie Banks. Charlie was another guy from Theatre Company; our class clown in middle school Latin; he and I used to draw cartoons featuring the scrubbing bubbles from the old Lysol commercials. His art was more curvy, fluid, and expressive, like Garfield or Calvin & Hobbes; mine was more sharp and dry, like Doonesbury.
Charlie had gone to some college with a really good theatre program, I think; and I know he'd done some kind of prestigious theatre work in Moscow or something. Now he was an aspiring actor in New York City. He joked, "I tell people I'm an actor, and they say, Which restaurant?"
Then there was Darren Sloan. I didn't like Darren in elementary school. He had beat me up a little, but I didn't consider him so much a bully, as a mere oaf. It was years later, so we forgot our former enmity, and talked jobs. He said he was living in New Jersey, married, with kids. I thought he said he was working for Cisco (manufacturer of routers, hubs, and switches), but he corrected me and said it was Sysco (distributer of paper cups, plates, and napkins). I had one brief, guilty moment of Reunion Glory, where you find someone to whom you can unreservedly count yourself superior and bask shamefacedly in your tiny petty triumph.
Later in the evening I spoke to a girl named Jodi Forrest, who remembered me well (I had been semi-famous) and who I didn't remember at first. We talked and she said that she was a little nervous about seeing Darren too. She said they had had a relationship, on and off for years; she had been with Darren when he found out he had cancer and when he fought against it. But he had married someone else.
And I got a big sense that my moment of Reunion Glory was false and hollow, as all Glory is. Your time in high school is a tiny blot in the corner of the canvas that is an entire life. Darren Sloan wasn't who I thought of of him as. He never had been. He had been far larger, far more significant in his own right. Not only was what I thought of him out of date, it had never mattered. I wasn't even a footnote in his story.
The big bully of elementary school had been a different guy, Robbie Ovca, who almost ruined my fifth grade year. Whatever was left of it that my bowl haircuts hadn't destroyed, that is. I never found out what happened to him, but I hope he's ok. When I knew him he was a kid with a lot of problems, and I was just a convenient target. Part of what happened because I learned about Darren, was that I forgave Robbie, fully and truly.
Next, I saw this tall, beautiful dark-haired woman, very well-dressed. I don't know much about fashion, but you could tell this lady did, and was dressed in the subtly understated, elegant way that is even more stylish because it's got no frills. I said to someone, "Who is that?" It was Beth Cohen. I didn't even recognize her at first.
We talked a bit. She was working as a bit player on soap operas in L.A. "Last of the blue-collar acting jobs", she said. She said the soaps people run such a quick-and-dirty operation that they'll use her as a nurse one day and as a policewoman the next; the audience isn't expected to notice or care that it's the same person.
[ My then-wife was a General Hospital fan, so I knew what she meant -- soaps will change even top-billed actors midstream. This completely unfamiliar person will show up on screen and the characters will treat him as though they've known him for years, as though he'd secretly been replaced with an android (or Folgers Crystals) and all the audience gets to explain it is a quiet voiceover announcement, "The part of A.J. Quartermaine is played by Billy Warlock". ]
And another strange thing is that I didn't even remember the "Weird, sweet boy" incident until later, going home in the car. Though if I'd remembered it I still would have meant it. But apparently Beth did remember, and that's more important anyway.
It's a happier version of the bit in the Street Fighter movie where General Bison (Raoul Julia) says to the heroine, "The day I destroyed your village was the most important day in your life. But to me, it was Wednesday."
After talking to a bunch of other people, I came up with the following general rules about how potential and reality match up.
The people you go to high school with are forever a part of you. The values they had are always going to be part of your moral compass. The mean things they did to you, you will always want some little bit of revenge for. And I will always regret the mean things I did to them, from the time I bashed poor Andrew in the head with the toy truck in the sandbox in nursery school, to the time I teased Miriam Kornhaber about not having a prom date in the final months of senior year. That guilt is something you can't fix; even an apology on your part can't retroactively salve their wounds no matter how well healed. You can't change the past and you can't make it go away. But thank goodness you also don't have to live there any more.
When people ask what you got out of high school, the best answer to be able to give them is, "Me".
If a new housing subdivision unwittingly supplied some badly-needed connectivity it would find itself spammed by traffic.
[ This actually happened to a development called Random Farms, which lets you skip around Seven Bridges Road. We also used to love to steal their signs, because to a high school kid the name "Random Farms" is sublime, witty satire. Last time I went past there, the frequently-abducted wooden post sign at the entrance had been replaced by a humongous GRANITE BOULDER with RANDOM FARMS carved into it in foot-high letters. ]
Whipporwill Close ran from the middle of Route 133 to the downhill end of Old Roaring Brook Road. In New Castle traffic terms, this is like running a Cat-5 cable directly from a horny teenager's bedroom to www.hot-chicks-with-jello.com. The residents of Whippoorwill Close had so much money and influence that they were able to stall the paving of their road, indefinitely. They could filibuster the Town Club; they could eject the Town Supervisor; they could sue to force an environmental impact statement to be prepared and then sue to disqualify the firm preparing it. This was where Justin Stangel had lived.