2006-08-21 - 4:00 p.m.
There were a lot of wonderful things that went on this past weekend. I've been doing a lot to get out and enjoy San Francisco, and that was a big part of it, as I managed to catch a beautiful experimental piece by Erika Wong Shuch, which made me remember that one of the reasons why I wanted to some to the Bay Area was to experience the art that takes place in the leftiest of lefty cities. Then on the walk back to my car I found a book I'd been looking for all summer being sold by a homeless man on the street for $2. I also went to a free show by Ozomatli in Golden Gate Park with my lesbian wife, Vera Hannush, and my friend Ashley. I had no part, however, in planning the main event of the weekend, my friend Alexis's wedding party, where I got to meet her beautiful family (her mother and sister, both professional chefs at various points in their lives, made all the food, and it was AMAZING) and hang out with my friends. It was at this wedding, however, that my surprise for the weekend happened, the surprise that, in many ways, became my favorite part of the weekend. It was a phone call from Laura, my best friend in junior high and good friend through high school, whom I lost touch with after college and therefore had not talked to in almost four years.
It was not totally unexpected, as I was the one who tracked her down. I've been typing her name into friendster for many years, but it was only last week when I realized that just because I couldn't find her didn't mean I couldn't find someone who knew her. I typed in the name of her younger sister, whom I was also friends with in high school, and sure enough I found her. I sent her a message with my email and phone number, telling her that I was happy to find her but I was also hoping she'd send my info on to her sister. So there I was at the wedding, in the bathroom, no less, when I got a call from a number I didn't recognize. It was Laura. I, of course, couldn't take time from the wedding, but I told her I'd call her the next day. Sunday afternoon we talked for two hours, and it was one of those wonderful situations where there was no awkwardness despite the lapse. It was like it had been four weeks rather than four years. We gave our quick rundowns of the past four years (she'd gone through law school, was now working as an immigrants rights lawyer in Minneapolis, and has been with the same guy all this time and is perfectly content NOT being married yet, despite her parents begging for grandchildren), and then it was just funny stories about cars breaking down and complaining about not being able to function the day after drinking anymore.
And, of course, catching up on gossip.
Laura, you have to understand, was popular. If you've ever seen the movie Jawbreaker, you'll know that there are two kinds of popular kids: those who rule by kindness, and those who rule by cruelty. Laura was decidedly of the former variety. Everyone loved Laura. She was the class president our senior year and was voted most outgoing. Even people who hated our high school and everything about it (and there was a lot to hate) loved Laura. I was no exception, but Laura and I had something special. It all started when we had lockers next to each other in seventh grade, the year I returned to San Antonio after three years in Washington, so that I knew some people in my school but not all, not even the majority. It wasn't just that we had lockers next to each other, either; by some slip up, we had lockers with the eighth graders, who, of course, wanted NOTHING to do with a couple of seventh graders, and chubby seventh graders at that. Of such things are eternal friendships formed. We had a number of classes together, and wound up gravitating to one another more and more. I still remember the day that I told her that, despite the fact that the characters were graduating from high school, 90210 would NOT, in fact, be taken off the air, and the day that our English class decided that Laura was the ideal person to use in a sentence with the word "gregarious." By our freshman year, we reserved entire pages of our yearbook so that we could write notes to each other, and for my fifteenth birthday Laura suprised me with a homemade cake at school. As sophomore year rolled around, though, we started hanging out a lot less. It's hard to remember what it was that kept us from hanging out as much. I think it was that by sophomore year the divisions between cliques were starting to become more pronounced. Our school was small enough that there couldn't be any real hardcore exclusivity between cliques, and as a number of popular kids in our grade were also overachievers (Laura included), the division between nerds and popular kids was very blurred, with only a few of the guys falling hopelessly into the nerd set (I, of course, thought one of the nerdy guys was super cute, although I never got a gay vibe from him so I never quite developed a true crush, thankfully). Nevertheless, Laura became the center of the A Group, and that meant that she was usually surrounded by a lot of people that I didn't want to deal with. I, in the meantime, mostly floated around between groups. If I ever showed up at an A Group party, I was warmly welcomed even if people were mostly surprised to see me, but partying didn't become my thing until my senior year, when I had cobbled together a group of my own made out of various people from various groups, both within my grade and in younger grades, as well as friends from other schools and from the gay coffeeshop where I spent most of my senior year, and I discovered that my mother had no problem with my serving alcohol at my parties. She, in turn, confiscated car keys and cooked a mean Mexican breakfast the next day. High school still sucked, but it sucked a lot less.
Speaking of my gay senior year: I came out to myself at the beginning of my junior year, and came out slowly to various friends. I kept it mostly a secret, though. Then, in the August before Senior year, I went over to Laura's house. We were hanging out in her room and she said, "Rudy, there's this rumor going around that you're gay." After a while I said, "Well, those rumors are true." She was totally okay with it. A week after school started, a note I wrote was fished out of the girl's bathroom and passed around the school, outing me at a Christian private school in Texas. A few people couldn't talk to me, but no one started shit. I think Laura put the word out that day that anyone who messed with me would answer to her. I was relieved that I had come out to her not only because of the protection she provided, but because she got to hear it from my own lips rather than secondhand.
If anyone is curious, by the way, as to whether Laura had the power to make that many people do what she said: our sophomore year, a girl named Christina Selk started spreading rumors about Laura's younger sister, who was a grade below us and as much of a punked out rebel as her sister was a superstar. Christina also claimed that Laura's ex-boyfriend--who at the time was dating Jessica, another friend of mine--had been secretly dating her the entire time. Now, this Christina chick was nowhere near as pretty as Laura or Jessica, and she was DESPERATE to be popular, so odds were that every word out of her mouth was a lie. Laura might have forgiven the remarks about her ex--I think her words to Jessica when she heard they were dating were "Good luck--you'll need it!"--but there was no way in HELL that ANYONE could talk shit about her sister. Laura LAUNCHED into Christina in the cafeteria with a few "Who the FUCK do you think you are talking about my sister?!?!?!"s and no one would talk to the girl for a year. Myself included. I gave Christina a glance of pity at her stupidity, but no way would I ever talk to someone who messed with my girl!
As these tangents might indicate, Laura and I got into a lot of nostalgic conversations, and Laura had a lot of information about what had happened to who in the eight years since we all walked down a stage in tuxes and white dresses.
Some of it was serious. There had been a death in our class, and I got details from her that are not about to be published here. There were people who we thought would be world-changers who got stuck in bad relationships or bad jobs. Then there was this guy, David, who had been my friend in junior high. He was crazy smart, almost literally, getting a 1600 on his SAT but never being able to sit still in class, talking right back at the teachers at every opportunity. In high school, he became a member of the A Group, and although we still talked occassionally (particularly when he wanted to talk about how stupid people he hung out with were) I stopped dealing with him when he started being cruel to some of my friends (particularly a girl that he had a crush on but couldn't do anything about because she was unpopular). He went into the military, and I found out last night that he had been injured in Iraq. He'd always been a ladies man in school, and now his face had been lacerated by an explosion. That sobered us up from our smack talking for a while. He had a good heart underneath it all, I think, and even if he didn't no one deserves that.
There was much that made us laugh, though, including Laura's own sister, whose escape from New Orleans during Katrina was more comedy of errors than tragedy, thank God. There was the girl from our class who won the Lame-Ass Award for cheating on her husband with a guy from our class. There was an encounter with the one of the glacial cunts who ruled the school through cruelty, who is just as haughty and bitchy as ever (her family, BTW, was hunting with Dick Cheney when he shot the guy--THAT'S the kind of school I went to). There was the girl who spent a few years in China who now spouts Mandarin every time she gets drunk (this girl being about as Nordic looking as they come). And there was something that I knew about already, that our student council president (different from class president in that the SC prez pretended to have power and the class prez knew her job was useless) was running for Congress. As in House of Representatives. This was funny because, although we always knew that he'd run for office (his dream was to be the first black president of the United States, and when I saw Barack Obama I wondered if this friend of ours had put a hit on him), we also remembered the time he made up a song called "Lesbian Love in Prison" to the tune of "Tears in Heaven." This is who runs our country, folks. There were also plenty of success stories, friends completing law school and med school or getting jobs in Hollywood. There's even another kid from my class here in the Bay Area that I have no intention of trying to contact.
Laura, at one point, said that we had to make sure our class made a good showing at the ten year reunion in two years. I told her that between friendster and myspace and such sites I was in contact with everyone I wanted to be in contact with, and that for the past four years there had been only one person whom I knew would go to the reunion that I wanted to see, and that was her. There may be a couple more people I wouldn't mind talking to, but for the most part they can have their lives and I can have mine. However, I have to admit that I like the thought of being in town that weekend, on the periphery of things, like I always am, and telling Laura to give my number out to a select group of people, or having her bring them to a bar for a drink.
She said, "I have two years to convince you to come," and let me tell you, it's been eight years, but I still feel a little trepidation at saying no. When Laura talks, we listen.
