Junior High School in the 1970s in the Minnetonka school district was 7th through 9th grade. The school district had two junior high schools in those days, West Junior High and East Junior High. Everyone merged in 10th grade as a sophomore at the high school. Naturally, kids at West Junior High School had a stereotyped view of East Junior High and vice-versa. “West is best, East is least” echoed throughout the hallways at West. The kids at West were smarter, better looking, better off economically, better balanced, and pretty much all around superior to the kids at East. Kids at West did not want to associate with kids at East because everyone at East was a junkie on the verge of spending significant time in reform school. And with 5 weeks to go in 9th grade, we moved to a different house near the other end of Lake Minnetonka and I spent those last 5 weeks at East Junior High. School number 12. I learned something about stereotypes during those 5 weeks. From what I could tell, kids from East weren’t much different than kids from West. But I was an outcast from day one because I was from West and the kids from East had their own stereotypes about kids from West. According to kids from East, kids from West were prima-donna jocks and general snobs. Kids from East were just regular kids from regular families, in contrast to the Hollywood-like prettyboys at West. A cute girl named Kelly sat next to me in one class. Sometime around my first week at East, she gave me the name, Bumpkin. She never called me Greg, just Bumpkin. I didn’t know what a bumpkin was but I didn’t think it was anything good. I carried a notebook with me and on the way to Science class one day, one kid grabbed my notebook and threw it outside and shut and locked the door as I stepped out onto the grass to retrieve it. 30+ kids had a great time lining up at the windows laughing at me as I retrieved my notebook and tried to get back in that locked door. I eventually made my way around to a hallway door and got to class on time, much to everyone’s amazement. I may have been a social outcast, but I wasn’t stupid. The East building was laid out as a mirror image of the West building, and finding a working door turned out to be just a few steps up and around the corner. I hung on a little tighter to my notebook after that. On the way to another class, a kid named Roger told me I was not passing him in the hall. If I wanted to go to class, I was going through him. “Here we go again”, I thought. I told him I was not turning around and he roughly shoved me back. Every time I tried to walk around him, Roger got in my face and shoved me back down the hallway. So I set my notebook down and got ready to fight my way past Roger. I remember thinking, I needed to make sure he couldn’t get up because I needed to retrieve my notebook after it was all over to get to class. But before fists started flying, another kid came by and settled things down. Roger told me I was lucky – he said I had no idea what I was up against. After my experience in 8th grade, I had the same thoughts about Roger. Roger had no idea who he was up against. But I kept those thoughts to myself. No sense giving the enemy any information. I figured that sooner or later, Roger and I would meet again and when that happened, only one of us would be left standing. Giving him any information or provoking him further only gave him an advantage. So I quietly made my way to class. That was how my world unfolded. The world was pretty simple. There was me. And there was everyone else. It wasn’t like everyone was openly hostile, but from what I could see, nobody was particularly friendly either. So I mostly kept to myself, bottled up my anger, and finished out the school year. There’s an old saying, you find what you’re looking for. I think the psychologists call it cognitive dissonance. In my case, I was looking for hostility because that’s what I expected to find, because that’s what my role models demonstrated and reinforced when they were drunk. So even when people at school or elsewhere were genuinely kind and nice, I found a way to mess it up, because in my view of the world, nobody was nice to me unless they wanted something. I never learned how to deal with genuine kindness and I’m not sure I would have recognized it if I had seen it. I really was awkward around people, and gullible while also suspicious at the same time. This set up a negative feedback loop that never really stopped as my awkwardness triggered more ridicule, which triggered more awkwardness and withdrawal, which triggered more ridicule. I am still awkward to this day in unfamiliar social situations. Some people are born with an instinctive awareness of interpersonal relationships. I wasn’t. Interpersonal skills are still work for me. But it went much farther in those days. In those days, I saw myself as special, singled out for some cosmic reason I would never understand to live with endless ridicule and humiliation. People who were genuinely nice to me did not fit my model of the world, so I generally figured out a way to push them away and align the situation more closely to what I saw as the correct view of the world. Hindsight is 20-20. It’s not so easy living through it. There were a few boys around my age in our new neighborhood and I spent most of the summer between 9th and 10th grade caddying and swimming in Lake Minnetonka. We generally played tennis ball tag in the water and waved at the boats as they drove by. I called the lake lot where we swam our private, exclusive lake lot. I never completely understood how this all worked, but the homes in the neighborhood shared ownership in that lot, so people who lived in those homes could use the lot to dock boats or swim or just have a picnic. The lot had only one entrance from the land, at the end of a dead-end road. Coming in from the road entrance, to the left was a Minnesota jungle of trees and weeds and vines and mosquitoes at the back of the lot. The grass leading to the shore was always nicely mowed, with a couple of picnic tables. Looking out towards the lake, at the edge of the grass was a small sand beach between two fixed boat docks and a floating dock a few feet beyond the edge of the left boat dock. The entire lot was maybe 50 feet wide at the shore, the sand beach in the middle maybe 15 feet wide, and the floating dock was anchored about 30 feet out from the shore. Matt and his brothers who lived across the street told me a wild story about an underground cave one day. They told me the cave had air and they liked to swim down to it and explore. Being both gullible and suspicious one day, I asked them to show me this cave, so they looked at each other and said, “sure.” They had done this before. We waded into the water and they took off like a speedboat. But Matt and his brothers didn’t realize I was probably the first person they had ever met who could keep up with them in the water. I followed them through several underwater twists and turns until I watched them surface, hidden from above under that floating dock. I waited a few seconds and then surfaced right next to them and asked, “so where is that cave anyway and why are you guys up here?” They were shocked, but quickly realized I still believed their story about that cave. After several failed attempts at eluding me, they were finally forced to admit, there was no cave. Their “cave” was really that cavity under the floating dock. I was a little disappointed, but kept this story in the back of my mind in case I might want it later. It would turn out to be valuable. Dave lived down the street with his sister, Lorie. Dave didn’t like his sister, but my 14 year old hormones raged from the first time I saw her. Lorie was blond and great looking, and Lorie and I spent one glorious afternoon that summer kissing. I had trouble sleeping that night as my gut ached for her and I made plans to spend the rest of my life with her. Except that she was so good looking and I was, well, just me, and I figured she would sooner or later, somehow, some way, humiliate me. It’s a shame I knew nothing about cognitive dissonance in those days. Dave criticized and yelled at her mercilessly. I was shocked and amazed at how cruel Dave could be to his sister, and I amazed myself one day when I joined in. I can still see the hurt in Lorie’s eyes as I cut her down verbally and she never spoke another word to me after that. Ever. I don’t blame her. To this very day, I feel badly about how I treated her that summer and I hope one day before I die I have an opportunity to apologize to her.
Posted on: Tue, 15 Oct 2013 07:40:40 +0000