And So We Carrie On

It was interesting timing to me that the theme of my office’s Halloween party this week was the high school prom. I remembered having read somewhere that this year marks some significant anniversary of the first film version of Stephen King’s horror novel Carrie. That’s the story, you might recall, of a naive teenager with telekinetic powers who’s cruelly humiliated at her prom and reacts by blowing not only her own fuse, but also those at the high school gym, on her way to burning the place down and killing as many of her classmates as possible. 

The timing is noteworthy to me because, as it happens, the film was released 40 years ago, in 1976. Which is the year that I graduated from high school.

I wrote a newspaper column during prom season around a quarter-century ago, when I was a feature writer at a middling rag in Savannah, Georgia. The gist of it was that I was so uncool and socially marginal during my years at Grimsley High School in Greensboro, North Carolina, that, while I had to assume that proms were held at that time, I couldn’t swear to it, because the whole concept was so alien to me that any prom-related announcements or hoopla might just as well have been spoken or written in Arabic, Chinese or some other language that I not only couldn't parse, but that was encased in an impenetrable alphabet.

That pretty much encapsulates my high school experience. It wasn’t entirely sad—I made some very good friends who I still have today—but it was far from the halcyon experience that proms are designed to pump up and celebrate. So, I can’t say exactly why, from the moment I got my postcard invitation in the mail, I was intrigued by the prospect of attending my 40-year reunion.

As I recounted in a previous blog post, it had made a certain amount of self-serving sense for me to attend my 20th reunion, as by that time I had a good job and an attractive wife, I wasn’t fat, and I still had a lot of hair. All of which fueled a turnabout-is-fair play narrative in which I fancied I’d gaze across the room at the schlubby former elite —humbled by mundane employment, mounting bills, ungrateful kids and unforgiving mirrors—and subtlety share knowing smirks with anyone else of my teen social strata who’d attended the event for similar reasons. Never mind that, as it happened, schadenfreude played a very minor role in the good time that I had that night. (Alcohol might have.)

But what point was there, really, in attending my 40th reunion? Wasn’t I still in touch with all of my former classmates with whom I wanted to be? If I wasn’t sufficiently curious about the rest even to establish a Facebook or LinkedIn account for spying purposes, why should I pay almost a hundred dollars for Lynn and me to spend an evening awkwardly standing around in a historic theater’s former props room, scanning name tags, seeing which of them perhaps rang a bell, and waiting for long-dormant memories to emerge from the deeper recesses of my brain?

I tried not to analyze it too much, beyond the fact that it surely was, on some level, a mortality thing. I mean, I’m nearly 60 now, I did share a time and place with these people, and I likely wouldn’t ever see most of them again. Also, the logistics were easy and the circumstances convenient. Greensboro was only a six-hour drive, the recent death of our beloved old cat meant we weren’t tethered to the house by her various medical needs, and we could spend time some with my mom and dad while we in town.

(A quick aside here: I love my folks and I don’t mean this cruelly, but they, too, evoke Stephen King—in that they are The Parents Who Wouldn’t Die. They still live in the house from which I caught the school bus during the Gerald Ford administration. And yes, I do realize that making this joke at their expense means that one or both of them inevitably will expire before Christmas, damning me to everlasting guilt for having written these words.)

So, we drove down to Greensboro a few weekends ago—after I’d done a little web-searching, found some contact information, and determined that two people I wanted to see at the reunion wouldn’t be there, one would, and a fourth either was determined to avoid me or had abandoned that email address.

We arrived in town on Friday afternoon, but I purposely missed the first of the reunion weekend’s planned activities—the homecoming football game, that night, between GHS and its arch rival, Greensboro Page. I’d had no interest in high school football in the mid-1970s, or any detectable school spirit for that matter, so the match-up was no draw for me now. (I was amused the next morning to learn, however, that the Page Pirates had thoroughly annihilated the Grimsley Whirlies—which I have some dim recollection had been the typical result decades ago, too.)

I similarly skipped without regret a Class of '76 meet-up after the football game at what in those days was an Italian restaurant named Anton’s but now is a cigar bar owned by a classmate of mine who I don’t remember from Adam. (You could smoke on high school campuses back then, so he might have been the Guy With The Stogie who I'd nevertheless somehow missed.)

There was one other pre-reunion event in which I was interested, though: a late Saturday-morning tour of the school. Though I’ve been back to Greensboro a zillion times over the years—what with my parents still living there—I hadn't made a dedicated trip to the campus where I’d spent so much time over the course of three years being largely bored and sometimes miserable. (Go figure!) For whatever reason—perhaps that mortality thing again—I decided it was time to walk the halls and grounds for the first time in decades.

Somewhat to my surprise, most things didn’t look that different to me. There’s a new, modern cafeteria and a few other notable improvements, but mostly it’s the same stolid collection of brick buildings with dingy interiors. The institution dates back to the 1920s, when it was generically named Greensboro High School because it was the city’s only public one. (At least for white students, but that's another story.) A multicultural group of delightfully dorky current students—the type of earnest kids who'd gladly volunteer part of their Saturday to field questions from geezer forebears—led us at one point into the school's main auditorium. The stage still looks like it could host a vaudeville show for North Carolinians time-heisted from the Coolidge Era without any of them realizing they’d been zapped into the 21st century.

But also not surprising, sadly, was the fact that the school newspaper—for which I’d written during each of my years at GHS— no longer exists, because the very idea of reading a print compendium of days-old happenings is bizarre to today’s social media-bred youth. A teacher who was on hand for the tour told me that the wheezing publication finally gasped its final breath a few years ago, and that a brief effort to revive it online went nowhere in an age when any school news worth noting has been texted or tweeted within minutes of its occurrence.

High Life—a boilerplate name in one sense, but a tokingly appropriate sobriquet in another—was highly significant in my life, in that it set me on my career course, first in print journalism and then in writing and editing for membership organizations. The newspaper also attracted as staffers a compatible group of misfits who loved words, and relished the rare opportunity at that fraught stage of life to have some power over them. Newspaper staff gathered during the last period of the day. I have fond memories of heading home with residual feelings of camaraderie and shared effort.

At least, I noted with slight satisfaction, there’s nothing high-tech now in the large room where the newspaper offices once were. The space is a French classroom. Which seems kind of appropriate, in that the Gallic tongue lost its relevance battle with Spanish a long time ago.

After the school tour I drove back to my parents’ house, where Lynn was waiting, and we all went out to lunch. My 88-year-old dad was driving and nearly got us all killed at one point when he overshot the left turn for the restaurant and lingered seemingly forever on the wrong side of the double-yellow line as a stream of cars loomed toward us in the not-so-far distance as we all screamed, and what remains of our aging lives flashed before our collective eyes. (So, let me revise that earlier description. Let's make it The Parents Who Wouldn’t Die Unless They Could Take Their Son and Daughter-In-Law With Them.) Thankfully, however, there was no collision, and Lynn and I lived to attend the reunion.

We arrived at around 6:30 and wouldn’t end up leaving until about four improbably delightful hours later. That was about two hours after Lynn, ever the trouper and looking fantastic in a new dress—had started sitting down because her knee-high boots were killing her feet. She also reported that the Spanx that enhanced her profile were simultaneously narrowing to a trickle the blood supply to her midsection. Fortunately, however, she didn’t embarrass me by passing out. (Just kidding, sweetie. Thanks for making my classmates scratch their heads at our visual mismatch, just as they had in 1996.)

I’d spent much of my time leading up to the reunion wondering if I’d find enough people to talk to, whether the whole evening would be incredibly awkward, and if I could possibly sneak enough alcohol to maintain my spirits with the lovely but far more adult Lynn watching me like a hawk. As it turned out, however, I had just two glasses of red wine during the course of the evening and felt no need for the mellowing effects of more.

In fact, it was a great evening. Even though I found out for a fact—because the presence of the king and queen was announced—that there had indeed been a prom my senior year, apparently held in some alternate universe far from my solar system. I met up with Anita, who’d been an early fan of my newspaper writing and still was the same smart, funny person I remembered from back then. I spoke at length with Janis, who I’d liked a lot in high school but came to realize through conversation that night and a subsequent email exchange that I’d never really known. Now that I've learned at least the broad outlines of where she came from to get where she is now, I've added great admiration to that affection. I enjoyed getting reacquainted with Mark, who subversive humor came back to me the more we talked. I kidded him about his jailbait wife, who was born during the comparatively recent Nixon administration.

One guy I totally didn’t recognize tapped me on the shoulder and greeted me with great warmth. He told me his name before I even could read his name tag, and my immediate recollection of him was his sequined, bewigged and thrilling star turn as Diana Ross in a lip-synched rendition of “Stop In the Name of Love” in drama class. I mentioned it and he seemed embarrassed. He was giddily effeminate back then, but he looked and acted 100% straight now. I couldn't think of any politic way to ask, “Didn’t you used to be gay?” and it seemed presumptuous of me to exhort, “You can be yourself around me, honey!” So, I told him it was great to see him, and let it go.

At one point prizes were bestowed to alumni who could answer various school-related trivia questions. Since I’d been in most ways peripheral to school life and was involved in no activities other than the newspaper, I figured my chances of knowing any of the answers was slim to none. But one of the questions related to a striking yearbook photo in which a bunch of guys in flasher trenchcoats are standing in front of a marquee, acting as if they're about to expose their junk. I correctly identified the venue as the Star Theatre, an X-rated movie house that had been located, much to my parents’ horror, mere blocks from their Catholic church. The Star fell victim decades ago to neighborhood gentrification, but it lives on in my memory as an icon of an earlier, gentler time, when smut was the province of dank, sticky showplaces, and not something abundantly available on the nearest telephone.

My prize was covered in wrapping paper, but was exactly the size of a boxed set of videocassettes. This had me simultaneously blushing at the thought of the box containing—given the question I’d answered—director’s-cut editions of Behind the Green Door and Deep Throat, and cursing the fact that we have no device in our house on which I might watch such abhorrent cultural artifacts. As it turned out, however, I discovered, when we got back to our hotel, that the door prize actually was a pair of shot glasses bearing the name of that cigar bar. (So, still vice-related, but less interesting.)

The evening’s ambiance was frankly kind of wonderful. While the prom king and queen and I never mixed or even acknowledged each other's presence, there was no sense of social stratification in the room. We all were adults here in manners and congeniality, as well as in age. (Although not necessarily in self-perceived maturity. The gap between our external appearance and evergreen insecurities was one of the evening’s recurrent conversational themes.) Some of us have kids, others of us don’t. Some of us have stayed local, others migrated. Discussion of religion and politics was wisely left at the check-in desk. And, I have to say, most of us still look pretty damn good, considering that we came of age at a time when today’s world, for better and for worse, was essentially unimaginable.

So, yes, I did miss my high school proms. I know that for certain now. But, so what? It’s not like my high school years were a horror movie that ended in death and devastation. At worst that film was a pretty dull documentary. One that nevertheless had its moments and memorable characters, with some of whom I’m happy to now be reacquainted. High school certainly played a role in making me the person I am now, and living the life I now lead.

Attending that reunion probably did start out as a mortality thing, more than anything else. But I now see it as more of a continuum-of-life thing.