The Somewhat Less Than Friendship Seven
Jun. 23rd, 2020 12:07 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
captainsblogHats in the air! Boring speeches! The last time together with kids you grew up with over three, six, maybe even 13 years! For me, the annual remembrance of that occasion will come Friday, 43 years after 600-odd fellow classmates and I walked the stage in blazing heat and claimed our high school diplomas.
This year's seniors all over the state have had their celebrations muted, if not called off altogether; many graduation ceremonies got canceled, or per the Guv's May guidelines have been allowed to proceed only in groups of 150 at a time, everyone properly masked and distanced. There have been parades of cars to the graduates' homes, lawn signs to identify the grads, and in some places, banners on Main Street and photos on electric school lawn displays and handwritten neighborhood signs recognizing the graduates by name.
(Some has even rolled downhill to the youngeruns. I've seen minivans rolling round congratulating elementary school kids on their MOVIN' ON UP, and even the preschoolers can't be left out:
My thought when I saw THAT was, do they even wake the kids up from their naps when they come around?)
Back in 1977, our 600-strong crop of seniors had that final summer to see each other before many of us went our separate ways. There were seven of us who chose (and more importantly were chosen by) Cornell, and I spent the next four years with them above Cayuga's waters. Although I went all the way back to Prospect Elementary with at least one or two of them, Cornell was a much bigger place, and most of the others were in different majors, even different undergraduate colleges there. I couldn't remember the name of one of the three girls who made the journey until I looked it up last night- she, along with the other two women out of the seven, I'd been friendly enough with in East Meadow, but our paths rarely crossed on campus and I haven't heard a peep out of any of them since. One of the other three guys, I saw little of back then and have heard just as little from after 1981. (He is a Mets fan, according to his Facebook, so he's got that going for him, which is nice.) That leaves the two I did know well in high school, kept in touch with in Ithaca at least in early years, but had utterly lost touch with since. One remains more or less at large; the other, I just heard from for the first time in almost 40 years.
As you'll see, I was on a mission from God.
----
One guy I saw at least some of in early Cornell years was a rather odd bird who was in most of my high school honors and AP classes, behind me in band on the trombone riser, and in a few assorted nerd-friendly activities. I will not name him for the sake of privacy, but his rather ironic nickname among us was "Crusher." (Among other ironies: he took home a sack full of departmental awards at graduation, most of which were based purely on test grades; included was the coveted "Driver's Ed Award," which did not take into account the fact that he never had a driver's license in high school and I never saw behind the wheel of a car in Ithaca, either.) I saw relatively little of him on campus; he was in a high-intensity STEM related program and scored one of the coveted work-study jobs in a library while I loaded the dreaded dish machine.
Crusher was never one to socialize beyond what was mandatory anyway, so things faded between us. Last I heard when I was in school, he'd suffered some sort of injury and had to take a leave of absence. Uncle Ezra Online confirms that he did indeed graduate, although a year later than I did; it lists him as living in Brooklyn (news of which caused 40 hipster free-range chickens to hurl themselves goatee-first into the Gowanus Canal), and they have his alumni contact under a Compuserve email address, which is fucking perfect. I've seen references to him elsewhere online being a long-time and decorated NYPD investigator of some sort, likely involving a computer rather than a gun.
But that's not who I came here to tell you about. That would be the seventh member of the contingent, who I did remain close to for more than half my Cornell years.
----
I didn't meet David until high school, but he became involved with the literary mafia I was a part of, including the school paper and literary/science magazines. He's in the fairly famous photo of the only high school paper staff to ever win a Newsday journalism award and include a serial killer:
I did NOT draw the arrow through Joel's head; don't blame me for the rampage. I'm two heads above the arrow, to my left in glasses was our esteemed editor Ted who I still keep in touch with, and the one with the glasses to his left is David, who joined me in Ithaca for the next four years.
I was first reminded of him a week or so ago, during my attempt to answer something called the DWDQ, for Dreamwidth Daily Quiz. This, despite its name, is a weekly quiz, and dates back to Live Journal days. (Behold the mysteries.) It is also not to be confused with the Learned League quiz, which I've mentioned and is more-or-less daily, and which I've sucked at ever since bragging about my briefly being in first place a week or so ago. To paraphrase Tom Lehrer, the object of the DWDQ intellectual exercise is to understand what's funny rather than to get the right answer. The final weekly question is usually free-form, tied to the theme of the previous five of the quiz, and in the case of last week's was:
What's the wildest thing you did in your adolescence?
I count freshman year as part of that- it may be the peak of adolescence, in fact- and replied thusly:
Scoring a 30-day suspension from entering the Pyramid Mall outside Ithaca for dumping a box of laundry detergent into the fountain outside the Hills Department Store mall entrance. I thought my partner in crime got a worse deal for his lifetime ban (for borrowing the phone in the mall cinema box office to call Hong Kong to order moo goo gai pan to go), but since David and I have now both outlived the mall, who's laughing now?
In retrospect, I may be conflating the Chinese food part, and maybe even the lifetime ban part, with others' indiscretions, but David definitely did misuse the mall back then. We remained friends into at least junior year, when through circumstances I totally do not remember, we decided to spend a week of our winter break, in January of 1980, visiting Los Angeles. It was my first-ever time on an airplane, and remains to this day my only trip into that time zone. He was already there when I flew in on a redeye, took a hotel bus to a downtown hotel, went out exploring the next morning and promptly got a ticket for jaywalking before meeting up at the famed glass-elevatored Hotel Bonaventure.
We were 20, which meant neither of us could rent a car at the time. So we found a cheap joint on the Boulevard (quite possibly the Hollywood Hawaiian Hotel made famous in Zevon lore), walked a ton, took buses in the absence of an existent subway system at the time, and went on a bunch of package tours. We did NBC Burbank (touring Carson's studio but not seeing the show or His Royal Carnacity), checked out the library at the Huntington Museum to satisfy my Shakespeare fix, wandered around the UCLA campus in Westwood, stuck feet in the ocean off the Santa Monica Pier, and, of course, did as we were told at the end of Animal House:
Babs did us no good whatsoever, but we did get to see a bunch of back lots, tacky attractions like the Jaws scare site and the Bates Motel, but there was one weird thing we did not recognize:
The lit-up sign and the Bluesmobile weren't there, but the rest of the set was. They told us it would figure prominently in the upcoming major motion picture adaptation of Saturday Night's Blues Brothers. We took note, and not quite six months later, forty years ago this past weekend, Jake and Elwood premiered to packed cinemas and to rave reviews for its story, its genuine tributes to the music and musicians of soul and the blues, and the then Universal-ly shared hatred of Nazis everywhere, particularly Illinois ones:
I didn't hear a single person in the cinema calling them "many fine people."
----
That was now two reminders of David in a matter of days. I had to follow this up.
A few times over the years, I'd tried Googling this old connection, without success. He shares a first and last name with a fairly famous personage who regularly appeared in the news over the ensuing 40 years, most recently on the occasion of Famous Dave's death a few months ago. Somehow, though, this time I got luckier, and Linkedin filled in some missing details. David did indeed graduate with us in 1981, and while I went off to the western edge of the state, his career took him even westier- back to Californ-i-yay, where he got his MBA from the same UCLA we walked around. He's back in New York now, working in Manhattan blocks from our old friend Ted, in the employment field. He got back to me quickly, and once I get back to being able to travel, I suspect we'll be picking up more or less where we left off.
Maybe we'll even track down Crusher in Brooklyn. Hey, there's a Wegmans there now so it's all good:)
----
ETA. My brain hurts.
I sent a copy of that school paper picture to a dear friend, mainly to check if it included her brother in it. (It does.) But I also rattled off the names of the other six Cornellians from our class- and one of them, whose name I couldn't remember at first, I'd totally whiffed on, after all. It was distracting enough that I actually went home to check source materials: yearbooks, old newspapers (yes, I'm a pack rat), even a 2000-era all EMHS alumni directory my sister ordered for me which had a list of our entire class in microscopic print. Nothing jumped out. I resolved to Let It Go and grabbed my keys to come back to the office, when the correct name just popped into my head out of noplace.
So don't worry, Sue. You have returned to my active memory. Now let's see if I can get all three items on the grocery list tonight without forgetting anything.
This year's seniors all over the state have had their celebrations muted, if not called off altogether; many graduation ceremonies got canceled, or per the Guv's May guidelines have been allowed to proceed only in groups of 150 at a time, everyone properly masked and distanced. There have been parades of cars to the graduates' homes, lawn signs to identify the grads, and in some places, banners on Main Street and photos on electric school lawn displays and handwritten neighborhood signs recognizing the graduates by name.
(Some has even rolled downhill to the youngeruns. I've seen minivans rolling round congratulating elementary school kids on their MOVIN' ON UP, and even the preschoolers can't be left out:
My thought when I saw THAT was, do they even wake the kids up from their naps when they come around?)
Back in 1977, our 600-strong crop of seniors had that final summer to see each other before many of us went our separate ways. There were seven of us who chose (and more importantly were chosen by) Cornell, and I spent the next four years with them above Cayuga's waters. Although I went all the way back to Prospect Elementary with at least one or two of them, Cornell was a much bigger place, and most of the others were in different majors, even different undergraduate colleges there. I couldn't remember the name of one of the three girls who made the journey until I looked it up last night- she, along with the other two women out of the seven, I'd been friendly enough with in East Meadow, but our paths rarely crossed on campus and I haven't heard a peep out of any of them since. One of the other three guys, I saw little of back then and have heard just as little from after 1981. (He is a Mets fan, according to his Facebook, so he's got that going for him, which is nice.) That leaves the two I did know well in high school, kept in touch with in Ithaca at least in early years, but had utterly lost touch with since. One remains more or less at large; the other, I just heard from for the first time in almost 40 years.
As you'll see, I was on a mission from God.
----
One guy I saw at least some of in early Cornell years was a rather odd bird who was in most of my high school honors and AP classes, behind me in band on the trombone riser, and in a few assorted nerd-friendly activities. I will not name him for the sake of privacy, but his rather ironic nickname among us was "Crusher." (Among other ironies: he took home a sack full of departmental awards at graduation, most of which were based purely on test grades; included was the coveted "Driver's Ed Award," which did not take into account the fact that he never had a driver's license in high school and I never saw behind the wheel of a car in Ithaca, either.) I saw relatively little of him on campus; he was in a high-intensity STEM related program and scored one of the coveted work-study jobs in a library while I loaded the dreaded dish machine.
Crusher was never one to socialize beyond what was mandatory anyway, so things faded between us. Last I heard when I was in school, he'd suffered some sort of injury and had to take a leave of absence. Uncle Ezra Online confirms that he did indeed graduate, although a year later than I did; it lists him as living in Brooklyn (news of which caused 40 hipster free-range chickens to hurl themselves goatee-first into the Gowanus Canal), and they have his alumni contact under a Compuserve email address, which is fucking perfect. I've seen references to him elsewhere online being a long-time and decorated NYPD investigator of some sort, likely involving a computer rather than a gun.
But that's not who I came here to tell you about. That would be the seventh member of the contingent, who I did remain close to for more than half my Cornell years.
----
I didn't meet David until high school, but he became involved with the literary mafia I was a part of, including the school paper and literary/science magazines. He's in the fairly famous photo of the only high school paper staff to ever win a Newsday journalism award and include a serial killer:
I did NOT draw the arrow through Joel's head; don't blame me for the rampage. I'm two heads above the arrow, to my left in glasses was our esteemed editor Ted who I still keep in touch with, and the one with the glasses to his left is David, who joined me in Ithaca for the next four years.
I was first reminded of him a week or so ago, during my attempt to answer something called the DWDQ, for Dreamwidth Daily Quiz. This, despite its name, is a weekly quiz, and dates back to Live Journal days. (Behold the mysteries.) It is also not to be confused with the Learned League quiz, which I've mentioned and is more-or-less daily, and which I've sucked at ever since bragging about my briefly being in first place a week or so ago. To paraphrase Tom Lehrer, the object of the DWDQ intellectual exercise is to understand what's funny rather than to get the right answer. The final weekly question is usually free-form, tied to the theme of the previous five of the quiz, and in the case of last week's was:
What's the wildest thing you did in your adolescence?
I count freshman year as part of that- it may be the peak of adolescence, in fact- and replied thusly:
Scoring a 30-day suspension from entering the Pyramid Mall outside Ithaca for dumping a box of laundry detergent into the fountain outside the Hills Department Store mall entrance. I thought my partner in crime got a worse deal for his lifetime ban (for borrowing the phone in the mall cinema box office to call Hong Kong to order moo goo gai pan to go), but since David and I have now both outlived the mall, who's laughing now?
In retrospect, I may be conflating the Chinese food part, and maybe even the lifetime ban part, with others' indiscretions, but David definitely did misuse the mall back then. We remained friends into at least junior year, when through circumstances I totally do not remember, we decided to spend a week of our winter break, in January of 1980, visiting Los Angeles. It was my first-ever time on an airplane, and remains to this day my only trip into that time zone. He was already there when I flew in on a redeye, took a hotel bus to a downtown hotel, went out exploring the next morning and promptly got a ticket for jaywalking before meeting up at the famed glass-elevatored Hotel Bonaventure.
We were 20, which meant neither of us could rent a car at the time. So we found a cheap joint on the Boulevard (quite possibly the Hollywood Hawaiian Hotel made famous in Zevon lore), walked a ton, took buses in the absence of an existent subway system at the time, and went on a bunch of package tours. We did NBC Burbank (touring Carson's studio but not seeing the show or His Royal Carnacity), checked out the library at the Huntington Museum to satisfy my Shakespeare fix, wandered around the UCLA campus in Westwood, stuck feet in the ocean off the Santa Monica Pier, and, of course, did as we were told at the end of Animal House:
Babs did us no good whatsoever, but we did get to see a bunch of back lots, tacky attractions like the Jaws scare site and the Bates Motel, but there was one weird thing we did not recognize:
The lit-up sign and the Bluesmobile weren't there, but the rest of the set was. They told us it would figure prominently in the upcoming major motion picture adaptation of Saturday Night's Blues Brothers. We took note, and not quite six months later, forty years ago this past weekend, Jake and Elwood premiered to packed cinemas and to rave reviews for its story, its genuine tributes to the music and musicians of soul and the blues, and the then Universal-ly shared hatred of Nazis everywhere, particularly Illinois ones:I didn't hear a single person in the cinema calling them "many fine people."
----
That was now two reminders of David in a matter of days. I had to follow this up.
A few times over the years, I'd tried Googling this old connection, without success. He shares a first and last name with a fairly famous personage who regularly appeared in the news over the ensuing 40 years, most recently on the occasion of Famous Dave's death a few months ago. Somehow, though, this time I got luckier, and Linkedin filled in some missing details. David did indeed graduate with us in 1981, and while I went off to the western edge of the state, his career took him even westier- back to Californ-i-yay, where he got his MBA from the same UCLA we walked around. He's back in New York now, working in Manhattan blocks from our old friend Ted, in the employment field. He got back to me quickly, and once I get back to being able to travel, I suspect we'll be picking up more or less where we left off.
Maybe we'll even track down Crusher in Brooklyn. Hey, there's a Wegmans there now so it's all good:)
----
ETA. My brain hurts.
I sent a copy of that school paper picture to a dear friend, mainly to check if it included her brother in it. (It does.) But I also rattled off the names of the other six Cornellians from our class- and one of them, whose name I couldn't remember at first, I'd totally whiffed on, after all. It was distracting enough that I actually went home to check source materials: yearbooks, old newspapers (yes, I'm a pack rat), even a 2000-era all EMHS alumni directory my sister ordered for me which had a list of our entire class in microscopic print. Nothing jumped out. I resolved to Let It Go and grabbed my keys to come back to the office, when the correct name just popped into my head out of noplace.
So don't worry, Sue. You have returned to my active memory. Now let's see if I can get all three items on the grocery list tonight without forgetting anything.