This is my second post about friends I had in high school. Today (and tomorrow), it's about Rod. Please do not confuse Rod with Rad, whom I profiled the last three days. Rod was not rad.
I first met Rod when I was in the sixth grade. Rod was a grade ahead of me. He was tall and had very blond hair. In fact, whenever I mention him to someone who may have met him, they always said, "Did he have blond hair? Yeah, I remember him."
We were both in choir in junior high school when I was in the eighth grade and he was in the ninth. He was one of the boys who initially decided not to return to choir the year after Ms. F taught. He was then one of those who returned with the hiring of the new choir teacher. Rod was an excellent singer and actor. However, this was judging by Artesia standards. Keep in mind he also had the same Drama teacher I did.
Rod's father had died when he was younger. I guess his father was rather wealthy. Rod was collecting Social Security and ALWAYS had money. Rod was also set to inherit about $100,000 when he turned 21. Rod had two older brothers. Rand was two years older than him and was someone I was familiar with. Nied was older than that, but I never knew he existed until later in high school. I never met him.
Even though he had money, he had a really cruddy car. It was a red Gremlin and he couldn't close the driver side door. He always had to drive with the window rolled down and his left hand holding the top of the door to keep it closed. Yes, he had to do this even on long road trips.
One of the things Rod did with his money was rent movies. This was in the late 70s and early 80s long before the home video market took off. What Rod would do is order 16mm films and watch them at his house. Sometimes, he would bring the films to Choir class and we would watch them there just to kill time for a couple of days. Renting 16mm movies was not cheap back then. They could cost almost as much as $50 or more.
I rarely hung out with him at his house. One time, when I did go there during high school, he had just gotten a VCR. He and a couple of other guys were watching movies he had recorded off HBO. I was looking at some of his books when they all left the room. I assumed they went to get something to eat and the VCR continued to play the movie they had left on it. After awhile, I heard coming from the TV, "Harder! Harder! HARDER!" Out loud, I said, "What is that?" before looking at the TV. I then saw PORN! Gasp! I was shocked! I had no idea Rod was into this kind of stuff. Rod and the others came back in the living room and were laughing. From their perspective, it looked like I had seen the TV and then asked "What is that?" Fortunately, we didn't watch any more porn.
The really odd thing about Rod watching porn was that I found out later he was gay. Those of us who hung around him had a suspicion about it. The main clue was that he never, ever talked about any of the girls we went to school with. When you're hanging out with your guy friends, the topic will inevitably steer toward the girls that you wouldn't mind if they paid some more attention to you. I never knew who he was attracted to. That trend actually continued into college, when I found out for certain that he was gay. He still would never let on who he liked.
I don't know how I would have reacted in high school if he had told me he was gay. There was an incident in high school (that I will go into detail later) that made me very homophobic for a few years. I think that once I matured into college, I was able to accept his orientation more because we didn't hang out as much.
Rod and I did quite a lot together with our involvement in Choir and the Drama Club. In the summer of 1980, we went on a road trip to Albuquerque, where we were going to meet with other students from the city to go to the International Theatre Arts Conference in Muncie, IN. It was a gathering of high school theatre students who were members of the Internationalal Thespian Society and came from all over the world. (I will go over the full details of that adventure in a future blog post.) Anyway, we didn't really plan it out very well. We took off late in the afternoon and somehow, we decided to spend the night in the car once we got there. I do not remember whose smart idea that was. We had hoped to stay a couple of hours at some 24-hour diner, but we wound up running out of stuff to do. At one point I suggested, "Hey, let's go find a couple of girls and get laid!" He looked at me weird. I don't know if he thought I was serious. We parked outside the home of the person organizing the trip and just simply could not sleep in that Gremlin. The back seat was full of our stuff, so neither one of us could sleep back there.
Rod had acheived a major accomplishment when he graduated from high school. He was the first student in the state of New Mexico to be awarded an International Thespian Society scholarship.
When Rod turned 18, he was given $10,000 out of his inheritance to buy a new car. It was SO much nicer than his Gremlin. However, a year later at college, I noticed that the hood was missing and he never got it replaced. How did that happen? I can understand not being able to close your car door, but how do you lose your hood?
Rod went to college at Eastern New Mexico University. He was cast in the Theatre Department's first production of the season "Lysistrata." Later that year, those of us in the Drama Club went to the Theatre Festival at the university and saw him perform in their production of "Arsenic and Old Lace." (Yes, the same play we had done two years earlier. He had the lead role in our production, but he only had the small part of the pastor in the beginning of the play at Eastern.)
Rod was definitely someone I had a lot in common with (although we didn't share the same taste in music), someone I did a lot with, but somehow, we weren't especially the best of friends. This became very apparent when we were in college together. I will be covering that in tomorrow's post.
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