The next few days, I will be focusing on the friends I had during my sophomore year in high school. Don't worry, I didn't have a lot of them.
Today's (and tomorrow's) post is about Rad. As I mentioned earlier in my post on the first day of high school, I met Rad during Drama class. I wound up sitting next to him in the classroom. He was not someone I had seen before. At first, I thought he was a junior or senior, but it turned out he was a sophomore like me.
He had moved to Artesia from Louisiana. He lived in a mobile home on property owned by the refinery. In order to get to his house, I had to drive through the refinery. He claimed that he had gotten his Louisiana driver's license when he was 14. However, he never showed it to me, so I don't know that it was true. I do know that even with the license, he was not permitted to drive in New Mexico.
About a week into school, I started hanging out with him during lunch. We were both very excited about the Drama class, acting and getting to perform at the auditorium. Rad and I started hanging out after school as Drama was the last class of the day. He came to my house one time. My Mom came home and was surprised to see I had a friend there. That didn't happen very often.
We did a lot of running around the town, doing goofy things. Once he came home and met my brother Loyd for the first time. For whatever reason, he thought Loyd (who was 12 years old at the time) was a junior in high school. I've mentioned before how Loyd would attempt to steal my friends from me. This was one of the times he succeeded. Rad started coming over and spending more time with Loyd than with me. Once, he spent the night and stayed in Loyd's room.
However, Loyd stopped the friendship after Rad ran him over with his car. Actually, what happened is Loyd was laying on the ground and Rad drove the vehicle over him, probably believing there was enough clearance for him to just drive right over him without hurting him. He wound up dragging Loyd a few yards before he realized that Loyd didn't come out the other end. Loyd was not hurt, but he probably got a lot of gravel in his pants.
Another thing worth mentioning is that Rad proved to be rather popular with girls and had no problems getting dates. However, they were not girls I would have wanted to have anything to do with. The two of us appeared to have completely different sets of standards when it came to choosing potential mates. I will say that, even though Rad had no issues with public displays of affection, he was rather discreet about his sexual encounters. He never once said anything to me about having sex with any of his girlfriends. I had, however, heard that one of his girlfriends told one of her friends that she and Rad did it six times in one night.
When the next school year started, Rad was the unfortunate victim of one of the biggest mistakes in the school yearbook. His photo was placed among the juniors. His name was also misspelled. AND that misspelled name was under someone else's picture, so he had a different name under his. The next year, he was in the correct class with the correct name.
During junior year, we didn't hang out as much, even though he had joined choir. Rad found another friend to hang out with. However, there was one Saturday night in which the three of us ran around together. This happened because Rad's car didn't work. We wound up at Rad's house. It was snowing and I didn't want to drive home, so I called Dad and asked permission to stay the night. He said I couldn't.
The next year, Rad moved to Roswell. He graduated the year after I did. I would stop by and see him during my freshman year in college. It was strange because I was in college and he was still trying to finish high school.
As with many of the friends I will go into detail about in this blog, I encountered him several other times following high school. I will go into what happened with Rad in tomorrow's post.
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