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| Rachel, and J.C. (my childhood crush) |
There were fifty students in my sixth grade class, few enough that we all knew each other. By that last year, we had mostly put aside the bullying and divisiveness that were the hallmark of earlier years - there were still cliques, naturally, but little conflict between them. If we adhered strongly to the fiction that we were all friends, in those last emotional days before people who'd spent all their waking years together finally went their (not entirely) separate ways, I think we can be forgiven - and it wasn't that much of a stretch.
By 1997, Ian was the only friend from elementary school left in my life - it stayed that way for years, and though in most cases we parted friends I did not mourn the loss of the other Centipedes (beat that for a crappy mascot).
It was actually a strange connection that brought my friend Rachel (left) back to me: she had gone to high school with a couple of kids who later attended Vassar with me. So it was that I ran into her in Matt's apartment sometime in 2004. Weird! we both thought, since we hadn't entirely parted friends. But we gamely put our behinds in the past (as Pumbaa advised), and just like that were friends once more.
Over the next eighteen months or so we'd meet up randomly - especially during the time she was dating a VC buddy who was doing a sketch comedy show with Matt. One of the things we said, as old schoolmates may, was that it'd be nice to get the 'old gang' back together - at least, as much of the 'old gang' as was in Los Angeles at any given moment.
Imagine my surprise, given the small nature of such talk, when it actually happened. My old friend Rachel - one of the best, back in the day - was and is very much a doer of things. She was the one who in years past convinced me to tell J.C. (my childhood crush) that I had a crush on her; she was the one who in 2005 found just about every Centipede in the greater Los Angeles area and gathered them into a venue with food, alcohol and music.
Early 90's music, of course. Whoomp!
Amazing things ensued. I saw my buddy Amos - our friendship actually precedes our ability to speak or walk in a bipedal manner, thanks to our parents and a play group (rather unimaginatively named Playgroup). I saw four of the other five Black students from my class - the last lives on the East Coast. And for the first time in nearly a decade, I saw J.C., my childhood crush.
She was engaged; that didn't take the luster off of the moment. This is the type of mid-twenties experience that's supposed to be reserved for cinematic explorations of the quarter-life crisis.
I'll be the first to confess I have dramatized much of my elementary-school experience. It's a way of distancing myself from that awkward boy who was so incapable of holding on to positive reinforcement or creating lasting pleasurable memories. So mostly, that night, I remained silent about my own perceptions of elementary school - they wouldn't have been very fun recollections in any case. I listened to the perceptions of others, and forgave them ahead of time for stating those perceptions as fact.
I mean, it's entirely possible that I was the Most Punished kid in class, and occasionally the things for which I was punished were my fault alone - but mostly, I got busted for fighting back. (And, if you ask my parents, fighting back while being Black. I still don't know how often or even if this was the case.)
Still, it was fun - and entirely surreal. So surreal that it rates in my book as a Crazy Night. Fifteen or so 25 year-olds gather in Laurel Canyon, get drunk in a house sprung from a dream Bret Easton Ellis had the night before, and watch their sixth-grade graduation video.
(I still can't believe I didn't get a solo; there was only one kid in the class who could sing as well as I could.)
We've had one big party and several more smaller evenings out since; weird, right?
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| Bonus Picture! The Centipedes of 1992. |
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