Places, part III

...the high school years, section I...


1998: The Affair Between President Bill Clinton And Monica Lewinsky Went Public

1998 was my first real year of high school.

Well, let me rephrase -- 1997-98, technically, was my first full year of high school, but in 1997 I was in 9th grade at South Middle School, which wouldn't move the 9th grade class to Morgantown High until the beginning of the next school year. I was, therefore, part of the last 9th grade class to ever grace the halls of South Middle School.

I had taken 1997 off from football; it had by that time mostly lost my interest (I wasn't even paying attention to college football that closely or the NFL at all yet, really), and the internet had taken over most of my other interests at that age. I was really into three things -- anime, Magic: The Gathering, and Marilyn Manson. Cathy and I were in the midst of our relationship, which had been going well, and (as previously mentioned in my other posts) I was doing well in school again. I had a group of friends, I had a summer job which allowed me to have some spending money, and that July, my mother and I went to Pittsburgh and adopted a shih-tzu puppy, which we named Moot.

Well, originally I named him Telemachus, after Odysseus' son in The Odyssey, but my mother wasn't going for that.

Anyway, it seemed that my life was going really well -- I'd settled into a groove, I was very comfortable, and I wanted for relatively little. I still lived a relatively solitary life, especially in the summers -- with my dad's band playing almost every weekend, I was home alone a lot. This was alleviated a bit by the dog, and by the fact that my mother had gotten me my own 20-inch TV for my bedroom the previous Christmas. It was on that TV that, with Moot on the bed next to me, I watched President Clinton -- probably still the greatest president of my generation -- deliver his address to the nation on August 18, 1998, revealing that he had, in fact, engaged in a relationship with Ms. Lewinsky that was not appropriate. As he was finishing up with his speech, Moot jumped down from the bed and peed on the floor of my bedroom. It was an omen of how the rest of the year would go from that point forward, I think.

Several days later, with the impeachment happening and then being overturned in the background, I began high school proper at Morgantown High School, my 10th grade year. Yes, yet another new school to get used to and to try to fit into, and I originally didn't think it would be that hard. I was wrong.

At the time, Morgantown High was the biggest school in the county. It may still be; I'm not completely sure. They were a contender, if not outright winner, of the state high school football trophy every year. The school was very old, and had a very old history -- Don Knotts (who I'm actually related to, far down the line, but that's a story for another time) and Lawrence Kasdan (if you don't know who he is, look him up) had gone to and graduated from Morgantown High School -- there's a trivia fact for you Hollywood fans. Anyway, in 1998 the school had not been renovated yet, not since the mid-century -- there was no air conditioning, and the only heat was radiator heat from a literal radiator on the walls of each classroom. You could hear the water flowing through them, and they'd pop and sizzle. If you touched one, yes, it would burn the shit out of you. But, on the plus side, if you sat your mug on one, it would keep your coffee warm. I remember that year hitting a cold snap particularly early in the fall, and because of the poor heating, we were allowed to wear our coats in class. I thought at the time that was a revolutionary idea.

My house was within walking distance of the high school -- maybe a mile and a half at most. If I wanted to walk to or from school, I could. I never walked to school that I remember, but I would walk home a lot, especially if I had something to do after school hours ended for the day. Mind you, this was before Columbine, before the years where schools would be on constant lockdown in and out of the building. MHS had open lunches, meaning you could leave campus for lunch if you wanted to. The school was just south of the university's downtown campus, and was on the south end of the downtown area in general -- you could walk to and from any number of restaurants and cafes in the area, or just get off campus for an hour if you wanted to. I didn't have a car, and the 1.5 miles to my house meant that I couldn't go home for lunches even if I'd wanted to, so most of my lunch hours were spent with what group of friends I could gather with on my same lunch period (read: not many) and if they weren't around, staying by myself away from most other people. I was never going to be one of the popular kids, and I was never going to fit in with them. Add to this that lunch was expensive, and it was paid for in cash at a register. Yeah, not happening for me; I waited until I got home every day to eat.

However, I did have a football history, and as most of my friends were separated from me by different class schedules in that massive school, as well as lunch schedules, I figured I'd try my hand at football again. At MHS, football was almost a religion. The school's reputation dictated that. It also dictated that those who had played 9th grade football (at South or otherwise) would basically get an automatic spot on the team as long as they could prove their worth. Everyone else had to try out and go to regular practices, get into shape, all that. So, shortly after the school year started, I made the decision to go back into football and try out for it, see if I could get on the team, see if I could make my high school years a little better.

The first few days of after school training was fine; it was very clear, however, that priority was going to be given to the more experienced, tenured players with games under their belt already. It was they who dominated the weight machines, and they looked at me like an interloper, sneered down at me like I didn't belong there -- and really, I didn't. These were the musclebound jocks, the guys who were born for football, who were there to stay in the habit and because the team demanded it. I was the short, fat kid who played defensive line in jr. high for the practice squad, not even the real squad (which was also looked down upon by the "star" players of the school), looking to join the elite squadron of MHS football players.

Despite this, I trained. I trained hard. My friend Chris was on the team and he helped me out, he stood up for me, he made sure my name was on the right lists and made sure I got equal training time.  Chris would go on to play football for the team for his entire high school career, and played for WVU as well. He was and is a good dude, and wanted to see his friends succeed. The Friday of the first week I was training, we were throwing medicine balls back and forth across the football field like basketballs, chest passes -- strength training. This was already after the requisite sprints and weight training, mind you.

I caught a particularly hard-thrown medicine ball, and heard/felt something pop.

I don't remember much of the next few minutes after that, except that I was in immense pain in my lower back and that I was on the ground. I didn't know what it was, but something did not feel right. The pain was blinding. I was on my hands and knees on the turf of the field, trying to catch my breath (even though it hadn't knocked the wind out of me). I was seeing spots. Chris didn't understand the extent of the injury, and told me to walk it off. He asked if I wanted a medic, and I can't remember what I said because I really can't remember much of anything during the incident. I remember getting up a few minutes later, stretching my back (still in immense pain) and telling him I was done.

I then changed back into my street clothes (slowly), picked up my very heavy backpack, and began the 1.5 mile walk home. About halfway there, as I was moving really slowly, it began to rain.

And just like that, my football career was over. I never went to another practice or tryouts. It was simply over.

It was the first time I'd thrown out my back. I was fifteen years old. A few days later, while I was lying in bed, I felt that pop again, and immediately I felt normal again. Over twenty years later, I now believe I probably had a partially slipped disk. At the time, that pain, that fear that I could do something that seriously damaging to my body without even getting hit or hitting someone else, meant that I would never play football again. I made that vow that day.

The next week, on another walk home from school, I stopped in at the local vintage gaming store and picked up a used NES and a handful of games for about $50 total. The only games I would be playing from that point forward would be of the video variety. This marked a huge turning point in my life. To this day, I still have some nagging back problems and knee problems from my time tangentially associated with jr. high and high school football.

Throughout all this time, in the background, my parents were, apparently, house-shopping. I didn't really know about it -- or if I did, it didn't really register, and I didn't really pay attention to it that closely, but I knew they wanted to get a house together, one big enough to where my brother and sister (dad's kids) could come stay in when necessary for visitation weekends and summers and the like. The house my mother and I had in Morgantown simply wouldn't do for that as it wasn't large enough, so they branched out and were exploring many different options and locations.

I was fifteen, so I was along for the ride; I didn't get much say in it, and at the time it was also so ancillary to my actual life that I truly didn't care that much. At the same time I remember being very resistant to change -- I didn't want to leave Morgantown. I was born there, I spent most of the vastly formative years of my life there, and I really liked the house we had. I remember suggesting that my parents look on the western side of the county, where my mother had grown up and where I had lived the first six or so years of my life, but that was rather quickly dismissed.

Sometime in the mid-fall months, my parents found a house that they wanted. It was 20 miles to the east on top of a mountain, at the foothills of a few larger, taller mountains. It was an old plantation farmhouse, the first built in the entire development (in the early 1900s; the housing development around it came later) and it had last been renovated in the mid-70s. It sat half a mile back from the main road and had a few huge oak trees in the front yard, with tall pines on the side and back of the house. Behind the house was a very old wooden shed (my guess from the 40s or 50s, and a hickory nut tree, in which cicadas apparently loved. They put in offer in on it and it was quickly accepted, but the owners (a very elderly couple, retired and looking to get rid of a lot of their property and holdings) said they needed a month or two to get their affairs in order and move out. My parents agreed to this (I remember apprehensively at best), and suddenly we were on a timeframe to moving out of Morgantown.

I don't know exactly how I felt. I can't really put it into words. My entire world was changing. My mother put our house up for sale. Suddenly I was not only dealing with moving to a completely different county and starting at a completely different school again, but now I had to deal with random strangers coming to our home and looking it over, barging in to examine and criticize the place -- sometimes with me there. I would be losing all my friends. I would go through the very tiresome process of packing up all of my belongings, deciding what stayed and what went, trying to figure myself out again along the way.

The move date was set for Thanksgiving week. I knew it was coming. I did not want it to. It had been a wet, cold fall, and the leaves fell early, covering everything in damp brown. It was all so surreal, like it wasn't even happening. My last day at Morgantown High was the Thursday before Thanksgiving week, and I turned in my books, cleared out my locker, and went through the day in a haze. I said goodbye to everyone one last time, to some people I would never see again (alive or dead), and left the MHS campus for the last time. I have never returned since.

The following weekend afterwards was spent moving, with the help of some family and family friends/dad's band/etc. I'd been to the house but one time before, the night before we really started moving everything in, and looking back on that now as an adult I find that really odd. Here I was, about to move into a house I'd never really seen, never really knew, and it was, well, just happening. I took the spare bedroom downstairs, in the new part of the house built during the renovations in the 70s. The house had no air conditioning and hardwood floors (when I was used to carpet everywhere), but my room had a ceiling fan, two windows, and a dedicated phone line for my dial-up internet -- which at that time had very recently updated our plan to unlimited access for $4 more per month.

Moot, my dog, was not happy. In addition to being moved to a new home, he also had to now share this home with my dad's dog, a large shepherd mix named Betty. I had to keep him shut in my room while the furniture was moved into the house, and he showed his displeasure by taking a giant shit on my bed.

These omens keep getting better and better, don't they?

By the end of that weekend we were exhausted, but moved in. Most stuff was still packed up in boxes, but we were in our new home. My mother had taken the week of Thanksgiving off work, so that following Monday, she and I drove up to my new high school -- Preston High School -- to enroll me for classes. School was not, surprisingly, in session. When I asked why, it's because the week of Thanksgiving is deer hunting season in West Virginia, and nobody went to school that week, so the county cancelled all classes every year for the entire Thanksgiving week. If that doesn't give some indication of exactly how backwoods redneck the county I moved to was, here's another example -- there were probably, give or take, ten or so high schools in the county Morgantown was in. There may be more or less now due to redistricting or consolidation; I don't know for sure. Preston High was the only high school in the county, period, and had about 1100 students total. Morgantown High had pretty close to double that, alone.

I met with one of the school guidance counselors, who didn't end up being my "assigned" guidance counselor but remained a close contact throughout my high school career, and he registered me for my classes for the remainder of the year. I would start the following Monday after Thanksgiving, I received a copy of the approximate time for the bus schedule and how it worked, and I was sent on my way for the rest of the holiday week, being told to report to the office as soon as I got in on Monday morning so I could be told where to go. The entire school excursion took maybe an hour.

I remember feeling numb, nervous, and just a little bit excited, I guess. I was that weird nerd kid, with the long afro-like hair (my hair reached serious levels of out of control in those days) who listened to some pretty dark music, wore a lot of black, and desperately wanted to be viewed as a badass but could never quite pull it off properly because he played Magic: The Gathering and loved Star Wars.

The following Monday I put on my fingerless leather gloves, black trench coat, Iron Maiden t-shirt (which I still own and wore last week, in fact), black jeans, and black combat boots, and went to school. I was immediately ostracized. I was introduced to each of my classes awkwardly, and was looked at like I was an alien who had just landed -- the classes were full of redneck guys in shitkicker boots and plaid flannel shirts, offset by the skater kids, jocks, hippie girls and high-achievers, and the cheerleaders and farmers. It was immediately very clear that I was not going to fit in with any of these people. Frequently I was asked where I was from, and when I replied with "Morgantown," people answered with "...then why did you come here?" I always had to answer with some sort of variation of "I didn't choose to; my parents wanted to buy a house in the country, so here I am."

There was one girl, however, who stayed behind in one of my classes that day to introduce herself to me and get to know me better. Her name was Becca, and over the course of the next year or so, I would fall madly in love with her -- the first time I'd ever truly felt that way about another person. It scared me. It scared me very badly.

That is, quietly enough, how 1998 would end. In a new house, attending the third school I'd been to that year, feeling alone and more isolated than ever before. I got a Sony PlayStation for Christmas that year, and my dad got a five-disc DVD player -- our household was rocketing toward the 21st century. And yet, to me, it felt like a time of great upheaval, and I had no idea what would come next. That also greatly scared me.



1999: The World Feared A Y2K Bug Would Destroy All Computer Systems

On December 31, 1999, at 11:55 PM, I put Led Zeppelin IV into my brand-new, just-received-for-Christmas 3-disc changer, scrolled through the tracks to "Stairway to Heaven," and cranked up the volume loudly, singing along with Robert Plant as he belted out the lyrics, which reached the best part of the song just as the clock struck midnight:

And as we wander down the road
Our shadows taller than our souls
There walks a lady we all know
Who shines white light and wants to show
How everything still turns to gold
And if you listen very hard
The tune will come to you at last
Where all are one and one is all
To be a rock, and not to roll....

I was prepared for anything. I didn't know if the world would end. I didn't know if every electronic device on the planet was going to stop working. I didn't know if the world was going to be the same the next morning, if we were going to be thrown back into the stone age, if water would keep flowing out of the tap and the lights would still be on. So, I decided to, having just turned seventeen, celebrate the possible end of civilization in true teenager fashion -- blasting what at the time was my favorite song (and the one that spoke to me the most) and giving the rest of the world the finger.

This was, in a nutshell, how most of 1999 was for me as a whole.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

1999 was (and I'll say this again for the probably fifth or sixth time in this series of posts) a strange year. The Y2K thing was very real, and as the year went on, nobody really knew what would happen to the world's computer systems, nor did the news media ever shut up about it. When your dad worked in IT, it took on even more of a focus. Most people believed that nothing would really happen, but it's not like anyone would ever know for sure until January 1, 2000. Doomsday preppers and end-of-the-world cults made the news frequently, religions talked about how the coming millennium was a big milestone event that would see the dawn of a new era, and (personally) for me, it marked a time when things slowly began getting worse in my life -- the beginning of a very long downward spiral.

Because I'd been made fun of for my appearance as well as my crazy-wild shock of afro-hair, early in the year I shaved my head down to the skin, military style, with a pair of clippers the parents had purchased to groom the dog. I also loosened up my wardrobe a bit -- I began purchasing somewhat normal shirts and jeans, and (when I didn't need them, anyway) traded in my combat boots for Chuck Taylors. However, as winters were cold and snowy on top of the mountain, the black trench coat remained -- it was the warmest garment I owned.

Until April 20, 1999, that is. The day of the Columbine shooting.

Suddenly, I had a very large target on my literal back -- I was the weird guy who wore the black trench coat and listened to Marilyn Manson, I must be a member of the Trench Coat Mafia, how could I be trusted? Who could say when I would snap and shoot up the school? Was I one of them? Did I believe the same things they did? I began getting threats, I got bullied -- I was once more finally beginning to fit into the background and just go about my life when the shooting happened, and all of a sudden I went from being the guy who could pass as at least somewhat normal or otherwise faceless to the masses to being the one who was shunned and ostracized again, and feared. Being one of the Freaks when I was in Morgantown, one would think that I'd be used to being an outcast, or be used to people actively avoiding me, and for a time I reveled in that -- instead, now it had the opposite effect. It just made me immensely sad, and it put me into a depression that it took me months to really pull out of. The coat went into the closet, where it remained for at least a year, unworn.

I ended my 10th grade year at Preston High in the beginning of June 1999, to little fanfare. At the very least, I had some things to be a little happy about. I mean, a new Star Wars movie had been released for the first time in sixteen years, and I'd made a few friends -- very few, but a few -- who lived close enough to me where we could hang out a bit, and the beginning of the year was vastly improved by me enrolling in the high school's guitar classes. My music tastes began to branch out a little bit, skewing more towards classic rock than anything else. I discovered The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, and AC/DC all independently of one another, but also garnered an appreciation for The Ramones, Rancid, and The Offspring as well as some ska and swing bands. If I could learn how to play it on the classical guitar my dad had let me borrow for my guitar class, it was worth me learning about.

Still, the summer was mostly lonely. I slowly descended into some neuroses, such as becoming obsessed with videotapes and completing my episode collections of several television series, looking to see when they'd air whatever episodes I was looking for and then recording them onto VHS tapes in the proper sequence, cataloging each episode on each tape. I alphabetized my t-shirt collection based on band, slogan, character, or what-have-you. My parents got me a bicycle (an updated, modern one, purchased from Kmart) and I occasionally rode the bike trails to and from my friend's houses in the next town, which was a fifteen-mile round trip. I began obsessively keeping daily journals, filling notebooks with whatever was on my mind -- mostly about how much I wanted my friend Becca to be my girlfriend. By this time, Cathy and I had ended our online-only relationship and were mostly out of contact with one another, though we would talk occasionally via email here and there. I was slowly getting more and more out of shape, primarily because (aside from those occasional bike rides, which were few and far between) I never left the house except to mow the grass or to occasionally go grocery shopping with my mother.

In July 1999, for a change of pace, my parents booked our summer vacation in Dewey Beach, Delaware. I'd been there before, a year or two earlier -- it's where I got my Iron Maiden shirt mentioned above, and where I'd found my first of several KMFDM t-shirts (also as mentioned previously, I still own and wear both of these shirts). Dewey was a very small beach town not far from the larger beach communities of Ocean City, Maryland and Rehoboth Beach -- the latter being apparently the #1 gay beach destination in the world (at the time; that has probably changed in the twenty years since). In 1999 I had no true concept of what a gay person was, as I'd never knowingly met one.

So we packed our things, boarded the dogs at the vet, and drove the ten hours or so to the beach...just in time for John F. Kennedy, Jr. to crash his plane into the ocean 100 miles or so away.

It was a big news story at the time, of course, but it was an everything else stops, turn on the TV and stay transfixed event along the coastline, especially north of us in New England. Pill bottles and luggage and clothing and shit was washing up onshore in places, people talked about it incessantly, and as he was a Kennedy -- the Kennedy that people assumed would be eventually getting into politics and living up to his father's name as well as his own, even if he didn't really want to -- there was a lot of mourning.

For me, I knew who he was, of course, but it didn't factor largely into my life. My focus of the beach trip was to do three things -- one, get out of West Virginia; two, to have some good sandwiches from the Italian sub shop next to our hotel (Nick's, who made the best pizza cheesesteak I've ever had to this day); and three, to find the head shop I'd purchased my Iron Maiden and KMFDM shirts from on my previous beach visit, so that I could go get more.

The head shop was gone, and I lamented its absence -- down the boardwalk further, though, was a video rental place that was selling tapes of Bucky O'Hare and Robotech for $5 each, and I picked up several. I probably still have most of those tapes someplace, or I did until I moved out of our apartment and into this house.

I swam in the ocean, I sat on the beach, I listened to static and talk radio in the overnights on my by now, nearly-busted walkman while I watched my mother sleep, unable to really sleep myself. When we returned home, we got the dogs back from the boarding house and life returned to the normal routine of me feeling mostly isolated and alone.

In August, I entered my 11th grade year with a game plan: survive, and make Becca my girlfriend.

Let me tell you a bit about myself at this age (some of you may be asking, isn't that what you've been doing all along? and you'd be right, but)...I was painfully shy and awkward, and any outward confidence I exuded was simply a mask for incredibly low self esteem and being so sheltered that functioning amongst other, relatively normal people left me drained and exhausted. I hated putting on that mask all the time just to appear like I wasn't as mentally disturbed as I was. I was extremely self-conscious of my looks and mannerisms, of the way I dressed, of everything about myself. On top of that, I was burdened with great intelligence and was very aware of that. Everything was an act, everything was a mask or a cover-up for the real me that, trying as I did, I couldn't escape. I wanted to "fake it until I make it" but I couldn't do that. Every day the mask felt like it was going to crumble and expose me. Nobody knew the real me. I was terrified that the real me would drive people away.

There was only one person who I wanted to let in and see the real me, and that was Becca. I'd put all my hopes and dreams into procuring a relationship with her, into preparing myself to let her in, to the point where I became obsessive and began believing my own bullshit, as they say. We were friends; I, at the time, called her my best friend. Why wouldn't she want to be more? I was a great guy, I could've been great with her and for her. She was my one, I believed at the time.

I asked her out and was summarily rejected. I don't remember the circumstances, I don't remember the conversation, I don't remember her reasoning. I remember that it was October, and I remember that I wanted to die because she wanted to be "just friends." Words cannot express my level of devastation or how it shattered my entire world. It helped cement my belief that I was completely worthless and unworthy of being loved. It shaped my world view that nobody could ever truly be known or fully trusted. And, in a twisted sense, it confirmed my belief at the time that I was destined to be, and to remain, unhappy.

Look, man, I was a teenager. What do you want from me?

Let me tell you a little about Becca. Becca was blonde, pale, mostly plain and nondescript, but absolutely beautiful to me. She was (and is, to this day) a very kind soul. She was also a nerd, and was into a lot of the things I was into, and is probably the biggest Sailor Moon fan I knew then, and probably now. She wore glasses. She was involved in theater. She was prim and proper and almost the exact opposite of myself at that age. She was also (and probably still is) very religious, way into Jesus -- Baptist, I believe. I, meanwhile, had lost any sense of faith I once had several years prior. Again, I was cursed with intelligence and a sense of reason. Aside from a few common interests we would never have meshed well anyway.

Becca was really hard to get over. Four years after this, ironically enough, she and I did eventually go on a dinner and movie date. We went to see Big Fish. It was fine, but the spark just really wasn't there (or if it was, I missed it due to being bad at social cues and the like), and we sort of went our separate ways in life after slowly growing apart during our college years. She got married last year to a guy who, strangely enough, looks a lot like me -- or at least I think so. Maybe that's just me. I assume she is happy and content in her life, but we haven't actually spoken in many years.

Circling back around to the beginning of the 1999 story, however, that's how I found myself giving the middle finger to the world and hoping it all burned to the ground on December 31. I was ready to end the 90s with a bang. If I'd had a gun, it probably would've been a bang to the face.