FCHS '83 Plus Thirty (Part III)

When I woke up the next morning at the Hilton, surprisingly not hungover in the least, I cleaned up and rode the glass elevator down from my floor through the giant indoor atrium to have breakfast at the hotel buffet. I heaped the plate full of plenty of eggs and bacon.

My very first byline

The first night of the reunion had been such a blast that I almost wished it was over. It seemed as if nothing could top the evening at Potts, and I wanted to just let it sit in my mind as is---perfect, as I said.

The only thing I had scheduled until evening was a get-together that Trey T. had invited me to as he left Potts. Actually he had simply told me an address on Whedbee Street just south of Old Town, and a time in the early afternoon. I assumed it was some kind of get-together. But maybe he was setting me up for a mob hit as a revenge for some past injury. In any case, having no other plans, I figured I'd take the random cue and drop by there.

After breakfast I decided to kill some time by meandering around town a bit until evening. I went outside through the revolving doors, thinking I'd walk all the way into Old Town, but I immediately saw a yellow cab sitting out front of the hotel. I walked over to the open window and asked the driver if he was free. Turns out he was, so I got in the back seat and told him to take me downtown to the corner of Mountain and College.

As it happens he was from New York---from Flushing, Queens, to be precise. "Oh, yeah, like the Nanny," I said. That made him laugh.

I told him I'd lived for a while in Staten Island, and that it was a pleasure to get a ride from a real New York cabbie. Once you meet any ex-New Yorker and you tell them you lived there too, it opens up a whole layer of conversation, because you know you have a common vocabulary of places and experiences.

"How long did you live in New York?" he asked me.

"Long enough to realize that everyone there is trying to escape to here," I replied, without missing a beat.

He said he lived in Loveland. "It's fantastic," he said. "I love driving into work into the morning---the mountains, the open sky."

After he dropped me off, I walked up and down Old Town Square (built in 1985), which was swarming with a lively Saturday summer crowd. The new Fort Collins is, conservatively, fifty times more lively and interesting than it was back in high school. Say what you will about population growth, but there's no way I'd go back to the way things used to be. There was almost literally nothing to do in town back then. 

Mr. Fawcett, you've changed a bit!

In the early afternoon, weary of the heat, I walked over to the address Trey had given me. It was an old house amid a well-kept pre-War neighborhood. I thought no one was home, so I sat the front porch for a while relaxing in a wicker chair until Trey saw me through the window and let me in. I turns out I was one of the first to arrive. We hung around in the kitchen drinking beers with his wife as other guests arrived, including some folks I'd seen the night before---Anita F., Marcy N., Sherri S. (the only female member of our poker group), and Susie C., among them.

But there were other people from our class, including folks whom I didn't see or get to talk to at Potts the night before, notably Amy J., who used to date my friend James, and whom I technically "won" from James in a bet over Super Bowl XVII.  I didn't bring that up to Amy, but if I had, she surely would have laughed about it. She was always a good sport about those things.

At Trey's urging we went out onto the back screen porch. Most of the womenfolk peeled off to their own table to "gossip." I spent a good deal of time talking to Jephta B., who was not in our class, but a few years younger than us. She was part of Trey's larger circle of friends, which was quite expansive.  I always thought of them as the unpretencious artistic folks, the introverts, the punks, and the ones involved in such things as the Society for Creative Anachronism.

Jephta is actually a close friend of my sister Kate, who was in the class two years behind me, and was part of that circle much more than I was. Last year my sister helped Jephta organize a chamber music festival in Fort Collins. Jeptha herself is a violinist an has the graceful mannerisms of a woman who plays that instrument. She decided to sit next to me instead of at the gossip table.

I reminded Jephta that I knew who she was, and that I had actually been in her house with my sister the year before to videotape some musicians for a promo. It took a few minutes for her to recognize me. She got out her smartphone and commented on one of my sister's Facebook posts, saying "Guess who's sitting right next to me?"

More people arrived until the screen porch was almost full. I didn't know most of them, or had barely known them. They were more in my sister's circle of friends than my own. Then Bill Tremblay Sr. and his wife Cynthia arrived in mid afternoon. My parents are friends with both of them and see them from time to time.

Bill's son was in my class, and was part of Trey's circle, but there was no way he was going to be there for the reunion. His lives in Boston, where he actually shacked up with my sister for a time back in the 1980's after they moved there together, and is not the type to be found at such small-talk-oriented social events. In high school I remembered that one of his ambitions was to build his own set of chain mail. He used to talk about such things in our French class, en français, when prompted about what he was going to do during the weekend.

I was eager to tell Bill Sr. that I had just been talking about him at the Fishtrap writer's conference in Oregon a couple weeks ago. We talked about our mutual friend Kim Stafford. Bill said that KBOO radio in Portland (which has offices right next to the Hotel Jupiter where I'd recently stayed) was going to air some readings of his own poetry in October.

After a couple hours the screen room was packed with people. It was about that time that dark clouds started to roll in off the mountains. I told Jephta that they looked like funnel clouds. About twenty minutes later a huge wind burst came through the screen porch, followed by a heavy downpour and then a torrent of marble-size hail that filled the backyard. It was tremendous fun. I love those kinds of storms.

Eventually we were driven inside, but by then the party was winding down. I was eager to get back to the hotel to rest for the evening coming up. Anita F. graciously offered to give me a ride back to the Hilton.

Anita used to be in drama with me back in the old days. She mostly worked crew while I was mostly on stage.

She wanted to avoid College Avenue on the way to my hotel, so we wound up going down Remington Street, which took us right straight past the old high school. It's still so bizarre to see it now, even though I've lived in Fort Collins recently.

It's now the arts facility of Colorado State, completely remodeled inside and out, with a huge new additional auditorium on the north end, built in the style of the old building. "Our high school graduated and went to college," as I like to say.

I got to go to a dance concert last year in what used to be the "small gym." There's also a museum of fashion and design inside, located where the principal's office used to be. The auditorium where Anita and I once toiled in drama productions is now a fancy organ recital hall.

In the lawn out front of the building is installed a giant can of Campbell's Soup built in the style of Andy Warhol, and signed by Warhol himself during a visit to CSU in 1981. It used to be on the main campus but they moved it to the new "University Arts Center" a couple years ago.

I know all this because that visit by Warhol to CSU was the very first story I covered for the high school newspaper, during the fall of my junior year. The old newspaper office was on the second floor right above where the soup can is now installed.

Moreover the CSU art professor who brought Warhol to campus for that visit was the father of a good friend of mine, one who chose not to attend the reunion.

"This play is called Our Town" (RIP Ken S.)
But what would Simon Stimson think?

Seeing the soup can there, and all the grandiose new performing arts stuff in and around the building is a downright surreal experience, not just for me but for all of us.

I told Anita something I've told other folks, about seeing how the building turned out.

"Imagine, having a dream about all this..." I said as we passed the old structure,

"Something like this," I said. "I dreamed that I was inside our old high school, but now it was part of CSU. And our old auditorium had become an organ recital hall. And they had built a huge brand new auditorium on the north side, where the gym was. The new one was beautiful and large."

"You wouldn't believe any of that was true," I said.

She knew exactly what I was talking about.

[continued Part IV]