It's rare that I have to do this before starting an article, but today we're going to have to go back in time and interview my past self. You'll see why in a moment; trust me. I mean, would I chance disrupting the entire space/time continuum and causing the premature collapse of the universe for the sake of a cheap laugh?

All right, I grant that you know me. Shut up and strap in.

Anyway, we'll set our collective Wayback Machine for 1984. Place? The shower room at Norwalk High School. Time? Right after gym class. Activity?

That bane of any adolescent: The Group Shower.

Yes, not only can you be humiliated simply by being forced to stand naked next to another human being at the time in your life when you are least comfortable with your own body - do they do this to you in second grade when you still thought nothing of whipping your weenie out for casual shock value? - but they put you in with a bunch of other boys that are actively trying to prove how cool they are. Not to indulge in hyperbole or anything, but Nazi Germany was started by guys trying to prove how cool they were. (Although I will admit that given the choice, I think the Jews would have overwhelmingly picked my kind of shower.) So you have uncomfortable naked people who try like hell to prove that they're not uncomfortable.... By humiliating anyone who walks by.

So; let us interview me.

ME NOW: Ferrett, how would you feel if I told you in thirteen years you'd be coming back to see how these people are doing?

ME THEN: AUUUUGH! GET THAT TOWEL OUT OF MY EYES! NO PURPLE NURPLES, PLEASE! JESUS GOD, DON'T MOP THE FLOOR WITH MY FACE, THESE GLASSES AREN'T SCRATCH-PROOF -

Well, I think you get the idea.

So when my good friend Bryan - who is notable, for other things, for having been balding constantly since high school and still having most of his hair - called me up and asked me if I wanted to go to my high school reunion, I checked my nipples (still sore after all these years from being twisted off like rusty bottlecaps in the shower) and, quite reasonably, told him to go shove a used toilet brush up his ass.

But Bryan, being an intelligent and balding man, convinced me to go for the only reason possible:

Babes.

All of those women who we had feverishly sat in our bedrooms late at night, turning entire boxes of Kleenex into wet clumps that looked like beached jellyfish.... they would be there. In the slightly wrinked flesh. The very same women who - if Bryan and I were honest with each other - we still cracked open a yearbook to occasionally whenever our current pool of fantasy women ran dry. They would be there.

And we wanted them to be broken down. Broken down and desperate.

Because if they were doing well, we didn't have a chance. But with bratty children stomping on their toes, a failed marriage behind them, and the endless day-to-day hell of a menial job ahead... well heck, who wouldn't be tempted to recreate a little of that ol' high school magic with a former worshipper?

Okay, it was evil. I admit that every time Bryan and I spoke we heard a small clock in Hell going "Ka-CHING!", racking up future time. But could we help ourselves? Of course not. These were the women we would have sold our souls for - cheerfully - in 1986, so a little damnation now wouldn't hurt.

Technically it doesn't exist anymore, but the concept of Purgatory makes life a little easier now and then.

Look it up.

So the next thing I knew I was standing in an old friend's apartment, trying to compress the past four and a half million minutes of my life into ninety seconds' worth of conversation. There's only one way you can do it - focus in on the only three things that anyone gives a shit about. Your health, your job, your current love life. That's it.

Oh, it doesn't matter whether you've scaled the Matterhorn using only dental floss and toothpicks, had a threesome with Hillary Clinton and Monica in the Lincoln bedroom while you watched Bill give the State Of The Union Address and laughed hysterically, then basejumped off the Washington Monument after wiping yourself off on Britney Spears' face - you don't have time for that now. Three minutes? No time for anecdotes! Nothing but the essentials now! Fuck off, Mister Screwed-The-First-Lady-Doggie-Style, right now you're a single accountant with arthritis.

Hey, maybe if you'd had the good fortune to get herpes on the way you could bring it up, but now? No.

So we sat there, confirming and denying all the rumors we'd heard about each other - "Hey, I heard you got shot!" "Aren't you trapped in a loveless marriage?" "Didn't Lou Diamond Phillips play you in that TV movie-of-the-week I saw?" - but for all the questions zinging around, we all managed to avoid asking the big question:

"Say, how come we stopped calling each other all of a sudden about eight years ago?"

Because you're fucking embarassing me, man.

You see, high school is a cauldron of experimentation. If you know someone who has not wondered aloud at least once how the hell they survived their high school days, then run. They're not done yet. (Okay, some people wait until college, but the same principle applies. You don't eat a cake when they're still mixing in the eggs, do you?) High school is where you go nuts, where you push every boundary you can so you find out where you stand.

And when the dust settles, you've discovered one of two things.

1. You're totally different, not who you were in high school at all, and it's time to be off to other places to follow your intellectual pursuits.
2. You're pretty much the same person, only you like getting drunk every night.

But whether you chose the peer review of your paper or peering at nudes with some Schaeffer, you were different. And like a snake shedding skin, it was time to find some friends who only knew this newer, cooler you. To find some friends who weren't there that night you spent drunkenly hunched over a vomit-streaked toilet, puke in your hair and tears stinging your eyes, crying hysterically over a relationship that - in retrospect - wasn't even close to worth it.

Your friends were there for you that night. They stroked your hair, murmured reassuring things in your ear, walked you around the yard to try to sober you up. You burned up massive favors to get over this scatterbrained chippie you thought you loved.

And they remember.

That's why you ditched them.

Because they think it's amusing. And you don't. Not really.

Having your high school buddies hanging around is like having an Encyclopedia Of Your Dorkiest Moments chained to your ankle - except that encyclopedias don't yell out stories from time to time. "Hey, Carmine! You remember that time you had to ask Frankie for a condom - and he gave you one of his used ones? God, was that funny or what?!?"

Yeah.

Very funny.

Can we tell a story about you for a change, please?

And so, out of self defense, you stop seeing them. Just to forget what you used to be. You're cooler now, more suave... but your high school buddies are the only ones left who remember you used to pronounce it "swayve".

Good riddance.

But hell, it was ten years later and I was ready... and besides, this wasn't a one-sided fight. And so it came to be that, holding each other at gunpoint with the threat of even more horrific stories, my old gang and I stood in Becki's apartment.... and against our will, we found the layers of our new personalities peeling back.

It was something we discovered came easily; like stepping back into Narnia, we quickly warmed to our old roles. Within seconds, Ryan - who had always had a surgical precision for finding people's weak points - had once again managed to maneuver three of us into an intense insult fight, then stood at the edges giggling madly. Bryan and Matt, the pharmaceutical astronauts of our little gang, were once again tanking up on weed and vodka at Becki's apartment to avoid paying high drink prices. Becki was still dressed in a form-fitting outfit that left an impression on the inside of our zippers - because we knew that she still might be willing to consider one of us if her nightly patrol proved fruitless.

We were all still different. But the core facets of our personality were untouched - until now. Like the center crystal of a snowflake, every part of us radiated from this tiny seed that had been generated right here, among these old friends.... all of our flaws and strengths stemmed from this tiny shred of self-created ego.

We had all spent the past ten years wrestling ourselves into a new shape.

It's not that we didn't like what we were... but you can't remain the same forever. The flaws had to be rectified, the strengths had to be made into pillars. All of us had spent a decade sculpting around what had formed back in high school, but we couldn't change the center that had formed so long ago... so we twisted the rough edges back, artificially extended the good parts. Forced what we were into what we wanted to be.

Like a heartbeat, it was a constant effort that had become unnoticed. And suddenly, we were all in a place where there was no reason to pretend.

Hey. We had all seen each other at our worst... why pretend?

And so we all let go, at least a little bit. Relaxed and shot the shit. Then headed to the club where the reunion was being kept.

So as we walked in, Bryan straightened himself and furrowed his face, looking somber. He straightened his rented suit and tried to look noble - and not for good reason.

You see, the reunion organizers had given Bryan the opportunity to fill out his occupation as "DEA Agent".

Now, anyone who knew Bryan knew that not only was he the sort who saved newspaper clippings of his own arrests, but he used them in his band flyers. Not that he was arrested often, since Bryan had a low cleverness that allowed him to know when to leave the party - but Bryan the perennial wastrel, semiprofessional blues musician, and barfly would have been ejected from a police academy quicker than a bullet fired from a gun. Toilets, abandoned parks, and apartments that had long given up their security deposit were Bryan's milieu, and he prowled them with unabashed glee. Anywhere there was beer and naked bodies... there was Bryan.

In short, Bryan was the sort who would gleefully wake you at three in the morning to tell you how he had fooled a cop with his fake license and registration. "I stuck it to The Man!" he'd cry triumphantly.

And now he was The Man.

"Having spent four years on the fine force of the LAPD," Bryan wrote, "I transferred to the FBI and have served my duty at locations like Waco and New York. I am not currently at liberty to say what my current assignment is."

This information was dutifully transcribed and printed in the "Who's Who" book handed out at the door. And people had been impressed. Strangers who Bryan barely remembered lined up outside the coat room to meet him, shaking his hand proudly.

"Man," they said with unrepressed happiness for him, "I thought for sure that you were gonna turn out to be some kind of dumb potsmoking musician, or maybe an alcoholic. Your life was going nowhere. Everyone we knew felt sorry for you... but man, is it great to see that you got your act together!"

Bryan remained stonefaced. I don't think he had quite expected this.

The rest of us just snickered.

And so it was with considerable regret that we extricated ourselves from Bryan's retinue of fans... and walked into the ballroom, humming "Hands Across America" under our breath. This was the tough part.

We had all agreed that this room would be a gigantic, steaming bouillabaise of all the people who we fucking hated in high school - and if we admitted masturbating to ex-prom queens, we also had to admit that once in a while we each popped a woody at the thought of giving our old enemies a hot bazooka enema. We were nervous and springy.

But Bryan and I, at least, weren't seeking revenge. Understanding was what we sought. Why had these guys hated us so much? That was why we had hated them; their blind, inexplicable loathing of us.

That was the thing that we had never understood - and in some small way we both hoped that the tenth anniversary reunion was the opportunity to cross boundaries. Burnouts could never talk to jocks in high school. But over drinks, now we could satisfy our curiosity. Maybe, maybe, we could figure out where the pain had stemmed from... and in some small way, change a part of that core personality.

Of course, we both also agreed that at the first sign of any insult from these degenerate motherfuckers, they'd find ten years worth of coiled-up anger exploding in their faces. But we had brought bail money. We were okay.

Until we noticed the breasts.

They were impossible to miss, being set on the body of someone who was short enough that you had to look down to watch her. As if a lead weight was attached to our foreheads, Bryan and I simultaneously dropped our heads down to get a better view.

They were glorious, creamy globes, bulging out from a skintight black dress that covered a taut stomach. No blemish was on these breasts, leading one to imagine the rest of them as perfect as the available evidence. A touch of dark skin lay at the bottom of the fleshy ravine, suggesting a hint of lickable nipples.

After a breathless moment, it occurred to us that it would perhaps be a good idea to look at the face that the breasts belonged to, if only as a courtesy to the owner.

It was Leanne Shenken.

This was a surprise.

I had once nursed a silent crush for Leanne in high school - and I had to keep it silent, but because all of my friends would have mocked me relentlessly for liking her. She was short, dumpy, and squawky.... but she had the kind of unflagging perkiness that I later came to associate with Human Resources departments. There wasn't a school activity she didn't participate in, no play that didn't feature her in some horribly-miscast role. But at that point in my life, any girl who was not physically repulsed by me was a legitimate target for attraction.

One of my fondest memories was driving her to school early one morning. That was it - she had airily chatted about various subjects, flitting from one to another like a hummingbird without so much as a single synapse firing. She was a big fan of one-sentence topics. At the end of the ride she leapt out of the car without a word of thanks and went to join her friends, babbling indiscriminately to whoever came close to her.

Oh, I knew she was a brainless socialite. But I thought that one day she might realize what that ride had meant.

I also knew that chances were about equal that she might have solved the mystery of Stonehenge at the same time... but hope springs eternal for a sophomore loser. I treasured the ride and waited for the next time she might need transportation... which, of course, she never did.

But my peer group still referred to her as "the squashed potato". They made fun of her pinched looks, her shrill voice, her slumpy body.

Well.

That wasn't a problem anymore.

She had lost about thirty pounds, revealing a short but stunning figure. Her face had transformed, probably due to a better grasp of makeup and a bit of a growth spurt during college. Her dress was spectacular. In every way, she was a babe.

"Um," I said.

"Yes," said Bryan.

She didn't seem to notice. Like a Barbie doll with fantastic hooters, she just waited smiling for us to speak further.

"Hey, Leanne," I said. "It's me. Ferrett."

"And I'm Bryan," said Bryan, pushing forward and nudging me into the background.

"Well!" she said happily, without the slightest hint of recognition in her eyes at all. "What are you doing with yourselves nowadays?"

Her voice was pitched down a bit, not nearly as shrill - she'd evidently had lessons to smooth it.

"I work for Waldenbooks as a buyer," I said... then decided to play the Bryan card to see what her reaction would be. "And Bryan here works for the FBI."

"Oh," she said, her face scrunching up with unaccustomed thought. "Weren't they in the news a while back or something? 'Cause I'm an actress," she added without segue, flipping her hair.

There was a brief pause while we digested this information.

"Yup," said Bryan. "They were in the news."

"I thought so," she said cheerfully.

And once again, there was a break in the conversation that might have been awkward... except that this was fine by Leanne. Apparently she dealt with a lot of these moments. She just sat there with bright, perky eyes, waiting for what we'd say next.

The both of us had the exact same thought in that moment: Boy, I'd like to fuck her... but I'd have to talk to her.

We made our excuses and walked away. Okay, we'd had our shot at cheap sex and decided that it wasn't worth it.

Now it was time to heal old wounds.

We looked around the room and searched for people to talk to. Now was the opportunity to bridge the gaps that had haunted us for years now. We could find old enemies and have the tete-a-tetes that we had so desperately sought. We could even find new people, the missed treasures we'd never gotten to know in the helter-skelter of school.

Within half an hour, we all sat back at the table.

I looked around. Everyone was seated next to the exact same people they'd ate with during every lunch period. Furthermore, we had all taken the same kinds of tables - we were scrunched up in back where nobody in authority could see us, the jocks were at the table closest to the entrance, the minorities at the table nearest the wet bar and having a far better time than the rest of us, as usual. Nothing had changed.

It wasn't that we didn't try. But it turns out that we didn't have anything in common with the old enemies we had hated so much. I tried talking to some of the old prep girls, and the conversations were like two strangers on a bus stop. Bryan chatted it up with the jocks, who were by and large still in pretty good shape and friendly to him at last... but even disguised as a respectable, upright pillar of society he still couldn't find the words to talk to them. They talked about family, about sports, about salaries... the kind of dull stuff we took for granted. Except they were genuinely interested. Bryan griped about substandard government wages and took delight in his versimilitude, but realized he was never going to reach these people.

The only bright spot came from listening to Leanne babbling at people, and watching the looks of dismay as everyone came to the same fuckless conclusion that we did. The conversations went like this:

LEANNE: So where do you work?

HAPLESS VICTIM: I'm an engineer for McDonnell-Douglass, a major aerospace corporation.

LEANNE: Oh. Do they make commercials? 'Cuz I'm an actress.

And Leanne was pretty much Column "A" on the sex menu. The pretty ones were still by and large pretty, but I also still had nothing in common with them - especially our names. As in, I remembered their name... but they had no idea who I was.

Vague thoughts of grabbing their ass and shouting, "I worshipped you in high school, bitch! You should know me!" flashed through my mind, but a quick count of my bail money showed I couldn't afford it.

One of our old flames was in a wheelchair, which creeped us out more than you can imagine. And the women I could talk to showed a distressing amount of self-esteem. It looked like the only option was Leanne, and none of us had the strength to wake up next to that.

So we did what we had always done; we sat at the table and sniped at everyone else. What they were wearing. Who they were talking to. How they still were stuck-up losers.

Basically, we bitched. And found that we really liked bitching. We had been outsiders for so long that actually being accepted would have ruined it for us. It was far more fun to sit on the sidelines and cast vitriolic judgements at everyone we could reach.

We spent the rest of the night merrily trading memories, pouring scorn on the crowd, and occasionally making brief forays into the non-burnout sections of the room, only to return moments later.

Only two more things of note happened:

The first came when I was getting another round of drinks. I was standing at the bar, ordering when I heard a low, rough voice from behind me. "Hey! It's Steinmetz!"

I turned around and cringed instinctively. It was Marvin, a large puggish black kid who had made my life miserable. He had never beaten me outright, which might have been tolerable... but he had spent my middle-school years randomly abusing me. Every once in awhile, he'd push me down in the lunch line and then smiled angelically when the teachers came over. He'd stomp on the back of my feet when I was running for a class. Every once in a while, I'd receive a smack to the back of my head that was so painful I'd see nothing but white for a second until the blood flowed back into my eyes, only to find him looking the other way.

I was meek back then. I couldn't chance more violence.

This went on for three years.

But in high school, the flow had trickled and stopped. I always viewed him with distrust, though - I never knew when it would start again, and even when I was ready to defend myself with violence if I had too... well, I still was scared of him. And him only. The sheer randomness of his attacks suggested someone who might well lie in wait for four years, then kill me in my bed.

But this Marvin was grinning magnanimously and weaving just a touch. "Hey, it's you!" he beamed. "Come over and drink with me, man. Sit down."

"Sure," I said... and did. He had that same face that filled me with a dropkick feeling to the stomach, but there was something about his expression that put me at ease. I settled into a chair opposite him and took a sip of my drink, comrades at last.

"So tell me, man," he said, leaning back and puffing on a cigar. He was still in very good shape, even after all this time. "What are you doing with yourself these days?"

"Oh, I'm doing some buying work for Walden... good solid corporate job, you know, that sort of thing."

"You're kidding," he said, leaning over his drink. "You're not a professor or something? Smart guy like you?"

"Oh no," I replied honestly. "Actually, I never graduated college."

"No way," he said, his eyes narrowing slightly, as if I were lying.
"You never graduated college?"

"No," I said honestly. "Worked retail for a lot of years, but eventually I moved up to the corporate office and I'm making good money." This was true. At the time I was making about $40,000 a year plus stock options.

"Wow," he said.

"So how about you?" I riposted. "What are you doing now?"

"Well," he said, pleased that I had asked, "I'm in real estate now. Graduated college and figured out the real money was in property. I make about ten thousand a week, usually - depends on my sales. Sometimes twenty." He puffed up with justifiable pride.

"That's great."

"Yeah, I make a lot of money - but you make more, don't you?"

"No," I said again. He stared in suspicious disbelief, and I hastened to reassure him. "About forty k. I could do better, but I like my job."

"Only that much?" he said in disbelief.

"Yeah," I said. Truth be told, I was starting to get a bit defensive.

"Wow," he said, settling back into his chair. "You know something, Steinmetz?"

"What?"

"I used to be so fuckin' jealous of you."

This floored me.

"Really."

"No, it's the truth," he said, and leaned in as if to deliver a secret. "I know I was bad to you in school, man. But you know what it was like? I saw you there, and you read more than any guy I ever knew. You were so smart.... and you didn't even know it. You had a vocabulary that was three times mine. You knew things. You were going places, and I wasn't. I hated you for that."

I just stayed quiet. This was somewhat of a revelation.

"Eventually one day I realized I had to work," he continued, his eyes a bit dreamy. "So I went to school and studied my ass off to get through it. It was hard work. But today," he said, "Today! I've got money comin' in. I make ten thousand a week. I have a wife and kids. I'm doing all right. And you're just a book buyer?"

"Yeah," I said, still stunned.

"Really," he said. "I thought you'd be in, you know, the White House by now."

"No," I assured him. "But I'm happy where I am."

He thought about this for a moment.

"That's good," he finally said.

"It's good that you're doing well, too," I said. I meant it.

"Yeah," he said. We both looked at each other for a moment, and he raised a glass.

"Here's to you, man," he toasted. "For everything."

I drank up and went back to my table. I felt good.

I might not have been able to lay any of my own ghosts to rest here - but I knew that I had helped someone else bury theirs tonight. That, at least, was worth the trip.

That, and the satisfaction of knowing that I figured as large in some people's minds as they loomed in mine.

The second thing was slightly more frivolous, but also worth the trip. Near the end of the evening, Bryan and I had moved out to sit in the lounge, dissecting the night so far. Neither of us were getting any nookie that night, and we were now laying bets for the twentieth reunion. Meanwhile, people were trickling out of the ballroom, saying their final goodbyes and going home to slip into oblivion for another decade.

Leanne came out of the ballroom, looking perplexed. This was actually unusual for her, since the state of being perplexed indicates that you're somehow aware that you're missing something... and as far as we could tell, most things simply swept right over Leanne's head in a veritable torrent of dizziness. She simply wasn't smart enough to be continually baffled.

"Yes?" we said.

"Have you seen Chris?" she said, not bothering to provide a last name. But we knew who she meant; Chris was one of the other people we despised in high school, another wide-eyed, rah-rah happyboy who participated in all the mindless after-school activities that Leanne had. We had seen him leave about a half an hour ago.

"Chris?" said Bryan. "Oh yeah, he had to go."

"But I was supposed to talk to him!" she squealed prettily.

"Well, you have to understand," said Bryan reassuringly. "It's not that he wanted to leave. He had to. You see, he's a professional rodeo clown and he got called in."

I spurted straight Scotch into my nostrils in an attempt not to laugh. Around me, passerby doubled over and abruptly left for the bathroom.

Leanne looked on anxiously.

"Rodeo clown?"

"Yes," said Bryan, keeping a face so straight I thought it might crack. "You know, one of those guys who dresses up like a clown and jumps into barrels when the bulls get all fired up?"

"Really," she said, intrigued.

"Oh yeah," he continued. "Saves a lot of lives, a profession like that. Draws the bulls' attention away from the riders, you see. Anyway, there was an emergency rodeo act he had to go to, so he went."

"At this time of night?"

"The show must go on," he said gravely.

She thought about this.

"Well," she said thoughtfully, "Chris always did like animals...."

And so the evening drew to a close. And the opportunity to answer my questions faded away.

Did I find my peace of mind? Sort of. I finally realized why all the jocks and popular crowd and actors had shunned us:

They had hated us because we were different.

I thought that it must somehow have been more complex - but we were a threat to their way of life at a time when they were most desperately trying to fit in. And so they despised us, because in that fragile zone any departure from the norm was an attack on their personality.

That was it. It was that simple. It was so simple, in fact, that it's still sort of unbelievable to me. It was as if someone told you that the Holocaust had happened because the Germans just fucking hated Jews. Something that easy and that painful wants something more enigmatic to drive it.

Did I find any nookie? No. Although I still have fantasies about Leanne and a ball gag - and I won't need that yearbook for awhile. I've seen the real thing.

And the most important question: Did I find anything new?

No.

But I found everything old, just the way I'd left it.

So to finish up, let's go back in time again for the final word from my younger self:

ME NOW: Ferrett, what would you say if I told you that ten years from now you'd come back here to try to make sense of it all - only to discover that you still couldn't stand most of the people you met in high school?

ME THEN <with glasses skewed, a towel shoved up my ass, and puffy purple bruises blossoming all over my nips>: What are you, some kind of fucking moron?

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