FCHS '83 Plus Thirty (Part II)

You see George, you've really had a wonderful life. ---some angel in an old movie

Be the ball, be the ball. --- Kenny Loggins

After Paul and I are done taking hits, we come back inside to the Clubhouse at Potts, and I walk over to Susie C. to chat again. She makes a sniffing gesture around me and I can tell what she's thinking.

I'm instantly mortified at the reek I must be giving off.

"To the tower that guides our way."

It's not that I care much about people knowing what I've been doing. It's just that I don't like the idea of it distracting them, or having to talk about it in a way that breaks the coolness. I've known a few people who, upon sensing the same thing with their noses, will blurt out, "HAVE YOU BEEN SMOKING!?"

Such a thing is definitely, well, damn uncool, because it takes over the conversation in a shaming way. It's a big buzz kill. I'd rather talk about something else.

But Susie's cool. Turns out she just wishes she had some of her own. She starts waxing about the great merits of that particular substance.

"If I had had access to it in high school, I would have been a much different person," she says, implying that it would have been for the better.

I decide it's best to hang around her for a few minutes to let the smell dissipate. After we talk a while about the strangeness of the recent legalization in Colorado, I ask her to sniff me again.  She says I'm OK now.

After that, not surprisingly, I'm way more relaxed and find myself laughing and joking with one person after another. There's so many people to talk to. I make eye contact briefly with so many folk while talking to other people, and I realize that I'm only going to be able to chat with half the people I want to.

For much of the evening, I wind up talking to Kathy C. and Jo B., both of whom I barely talked to in high school, if at all. Kathy and Jo treat me like their new best friend, like a boy they are fighting over. I'm basking in this long-delayed female attention from my classmates.

They were both on the cross country team, which was pretty much the coolest sport to participate in at FCHS. We were not a jockocracy in the traditional sense. We were supposed to have arete, after all, perfectly fit in body and mind. Our school was Athens. The other schools were barbarians.

Kathy relates something we all know about our school back then---the magnificence of the architecture of the building. She says she was supposed to go to Rocky, our cross town rival built in the Seventies, but she transferred after junior high. "On the form, when they asked me why I wanted to transfer, I put down because Rocky has no windows."

The evening flies by. Towards the end, I'm talking with Trey S., who is coincidentally standing next to Trey T. beside the pizza table. I tell them they need a third Trey, of course.

Trey S. is a towering guy, well over six feet tall. I didn't hang out with him much in high school, but we became good friends when I moved back to Fort Collins a couple years back. During a rough time in my life post-divorce when many of my old friends seemed to turn their back on me, Trey was sometimes the only person in town who actually seemed to give a damn about me, and wanted to do anything with me. As such he's earned a great deal of gratitude and loyalty from me. I still get random texts from him asking if I want to see a movie. Lately I've had to text him back that I'm in Arizona or California or wherever I've been.

He mentions that Steve V., who's been sitting over the corner with his posse of friends, has a photo album from the time that we all secretly (and illegally) climbed the tower of the school at the end of our senior year right before graduation. It was sort of tradition to do that.

There were about a dozen of us. We had to break in the school one night and then shimmy out onto the roof before ascending the tower from the outside. Then we all dropped down through a trap door into the interior of the cupola, where we sat around all through the night in a circle drinking beer and smoking a then-illegal substance (my first time, as it happens). It's one of the best memories I have from my high school experience.

Steve---who lives in New Mexico now---has always been a popular extroverted guy with a big circle of friends who really adore him. I really wasn't part of his circle back in the day, but I knew people who were, like Coop. I'm not sure how I even got invited on that bizarre tower-climbing expedition. Maybe through Molly, who was the only girl along. But in any case I figured they'd all forgotten I was even along that night.

Turns out I was very much wrong. I meander back to where Steve is sitting in a booth against the back wall. He sees me and calls out my name loudly with great enthusiasm, as if he's been waiting all evening for me to cover over to see him. We give each other a big warm hug.

He can't wait to show me the photo album he has from that night back in May 1983. He flips open to the incriminating photos with all of us in it, and goes through them, pointing me out, laughing with glee with each appearance of my face. It's clear from his reaction, and those standing around him, that they can barely believe that I was on that trip. They love it that I was there, that I was one of them.

While I'm still reeling from all this love I feel from everyone around me, midnight rolls around and the Potts Clubhouse begins to shut down. In a chaotic raucous manner of a Gatsby party, we tickle out of the clubhouse, and many of us simply cross the parking lot to the main bar of Potts, which is still open. I walk over there flanked by Kathy and Jo. Inside the main bar, about thirty of us are still hanging around, refusing to call it a night. We are intermixed with a large group of extremely attractive young women dressed in black, who seem to be some kind of angelic cheerleading squad.

I circulate and talk to some of the same people as in the Clubhouse. While I'm standing at the bar ordering a beer, I see jovial Doug S., who was on the basketball team and was also in a Hollywood movie as a kid with Robbie Benson. The movie was shot in Fort Collins. "I still get royalities from that," he says. "Every year except one."

He's a big golf and tennis player. I make him laugh by telling him that I was the only person who signed up and paid for the reunion golf tournament before Dee canceled it. I'd declared myself class golf champion by default, even though I don't even golf (very well).

After he leaves, I turn around and see Elaine M. and Penny M., whom I didn't know well at all, but whom I recognize from Facebook (half of my almost 200+ FB friends are people I went to high school with---the Lambkins of our day are a scarily tight group after all these years).

I call out both their names. They look at me as if I've just delivered some kind of stunning news to them. Elaine's mouth is hanging open.

"You remember who I am?" she says, almost staggering.

"Um, yeah, of course," I tell her. "Why wouldn't I?"

"Because you were way up here," she says, putting her hand above her head, "and I was way down here." She puts her hand down by her waist as she says that last part.

"What the heck are you talking about?" I tell her.

I tell her that I always thought of FCHS as some beautiful utopian community where everyone was perfectly equal and everything was in harmony.

"That's because you were up there," she tells me. The evening is turning into one of the most eye-opening experiences of my entire life. I'm beginning to see my entire life in a new light.

As we stand there other folk walk up and join our conversation. Elaine tells them that she can't believe Matt Trump remembers who she is. I decide to make it into a big joke.

I put my arm around her like an old pal.

"She's always joking around like that," I say, giving her a squeeze with my arm. "We were best friends back in the day."

"I'll never forget that you were the only girl to ask me to Sadie Hawkins our junior year," I tell her, in front of the others around us.

Elaine has to struggle to remember who her actual date was that year. "You had girls queuing up to go out with you," she tells me.

"Maybe like the letter Q, as in qrazy," I say.

Later, standing with Charles, Randy, Karin, and her husband John at the bar, I tell them that I feel like the luckiest S.O.B. ever to walk the planet.

"To have been born when we did---in all this prosperity, and to get to live in this perfect little town at the time we did. I feel like I got surf the apogee of civilization."

As I say this, I make a big sweeping gesture with my hand above my head, like a roller coaster coming to the crest of a hill, except at the top I just keep my hand going without letting it go down at all. Maybe that last part is just wishful thinking, but I just can't bare to think otherwise that night.

As people trickle out of the bar, leaving only a handful of us, I see Randy sitting at a table on the other side of the room with Penny and Diane M., who was easily among the two or three prettiest girls in our entire class. We were in A Capella choir together. We never spoke a single word to each other. My teenage shy self was terrified of her.

"Eager, they look with longing eyes" (photo credit John Rice '83)

I walk up behind Randy in the booth and pull the opposite stunt that I did with Elaine.

"Randy S-----!" I say loudly, pretending as if I haven't seen him since high school. "What have you been up to all these years!? You lived in Los Angeles?" He gets a big kick out of that. He knows I have an odd-ball sense of humor.

I plop myself down in the booth next to Diane, who has kept herself up very well over the years and still looks very good. We strike up a long nice conversation. She remarks how the two of us never spoke in high school, but it's awesome to finally get to know each other. She seems glowing from the attention I am giving her, as I am from hers, although I am playing it cool and relaxed of course, as if it's perfectly natural that the two of us would be hanging out.

At the table we discuss how the new FCHS, which opened in the Nineties on the edge of town in the midst of new subdivisions, flat out sucks. Everyone knows that. It looks like any other modern brick suburban school. We all detest it as some kind of abomination.

Diane says there is a rumor that the budget for the music department is being cut drastically. They might eliminate some of the music programs. I look at her with an open gape of astonishment. She looks back at me with the same expression.

"They can't get rid of A Cap," I tell her. "They just can't."

Randy, who lives in town again, and who has kids in the local school district, says that with the new school of choice set-up, Rocky, which we always thought of as the "jock" school, is now ironically the best performing arts school in town. The new FCHS has barely enough enrollment to support many of the old programs.

"But we're the Home of the Champions," I exclaim, with theatrical pride. "We're supposed to be excellent at everything!"

The old FCHS is dead, it is clear. It was like Camelot. It could only exist for one brief and shining moment.

The evening ends with me sitting next to Diane, discussing what we both have been up to over the eyars. As the bar shuts down, I wind up getting a ride back to the Hilton with Kathy and Jo, along with Randy and Charles, who is staying at Randy's place, and who is more than three sheets to the wind. I haven't seen him like that in a long time. He's in rare form, just like the old days, making jokes about how he wants to see Kathy naked (a theme he keeps coming back to). She knows him well enough from the cross country team and shrugs off his drunken jokes with casual ease. Jo is well entertained and keeps making comments asking if there are any late-night liquor stores open.

I get out of Kathy's car under the portico of the hotel, thanking them for the ride and telling them I'll see them tomorrow night. Back up in my room, with my nice view of campus and my king size bed, I think how the only word to describe the entire evening was perfection---not a single negative note the entire evening. I think how I'm being idealistic, that there are certainly people there who didn't have as good a time as I did---painful memories and all----but it's almost scary how awesome it all was.

As I lie in bed, still a bit stoned from earlier in the evening, Elaine's words echo in my head: You were way up there.

So you were right all along, C. You knew me better than I knew myself back then. But I'm so glad you didn't make it here for this. I would have been disappointed to see you there. It wouldn't have been your style at all to come back. You were meant to flee this place long ago and never look back, just as you did. 

[continued Part III]