Girlfriend #1: Roz, Part 1

I know. This is what you've been waiting for. It's the good stuff. I hope I don't disappoint, but it ends up being personally disappointing.

Roz was a senior in high school when I was a sophomore. Roz was very thin, had short, black hair and wore glasses. At first, I thought she was Hispanic (because most of the school was Hispanic). It turned out she was an Alaskan native. At the time, she was the closest I was able to get to an Asian chick at the school.

I remember meeting her during the first week of Drama class when she and I were included of a smaller group of other students as we were learning how to improvise. None of us had been in the Drama class before, so we weren't quite aware of what it was we were supposed to accomplish. The teacher gave us a few words that we had to work into a scene. We agonized with how we were supposed to do that. Our group was not the only one having trouble. The teacher really was not very good at explaining many theatrical concepts to us. At the end of the class, we gave up. The teacher said we would try again the next day.

We finally put a scene together, practiced it a couple of times and presented it to the class. I only remember one of the words being "rabbit." Our scene involved a child telling a parent that he had brought home a rabbit as a pet. I was the child and Roz was the parent. Another student was the rabbit. It was really stupid, but not more so than the other groups. Eventually, we would all get better at improvising. (Yes, I do get the irony of practicing an "improvised" scene.)

When I was a sophomore, I always thought that the senior girls were unobtainable. For whatever reason, I got the idea in my head that NONE of the senior girls lived at home with their parents. I don't know why I thought that. It just seemed like they were all mature enough to have their own jobs, their own apartments, that they were grown up and ready to move on with their lives. They weren't going to let some snot-nosed sophomore boy interfere with that. As mentioned earlier, I also thought they all had boyfriends who had left high school a long time ago. However, I never thought the senior boys had obtained these levels of maturity. I knew they all lived with their parents.

As such, I didn't take much notice of Roz during the first few weeks of Drama class. One day, Roz started touching one of the other male students' arms in a rather sensuous way. One of the other girls in the class I was friends with pointed it out and said she was trying to turn him on. I thought to myself that it would be nice if some girl touched me that way.

A few days later, during practice for "Arsenic and Old Lace," Roz and someone she was hanging out with came and sat right next to me in the auditorium. There was no one else around and the auditorium seated 1400 people, so that means she must have really wanted to sit next to me. I pondered the possibility that she might like me that way.

I talked to a "friend" about this. That "friend" then confronted her when she walked by. He asked her if she liked me. She said she didn't know. He then asked he if she was going to homecoming. She didn't know. He then asked her if she wanted to go with me. She said I would have to ask her. So I asked her and she said yes. I never thought I would need a wingman to get dates, but I did then. I should have used a wingman for later on in life, but that opportunity never presented itself.

So, it was official. I had a date to the homecoming dance, and it was with a senior. I was stunned. I didn't know what was going to happen next, but as we find out in tomorrow's article, other people did.

My first car accident

I was entering the big leagues at high school. I had a car and I had just gotten my driver's license. I was hot stuff. Even though my insurance would not go into effect for another week, Dad decided to let me go ahead and drive the car to school.

One week later (the day the insurance went into effect), I was backing out of a parking space after I had gotten out of Choir so I could drive over to the auditorium for my Drama class. This completely beat out having to run over the auditorium as I had done the first two weeks of school. The parking outside the music building was perpendicular. I backed out across the street so I could go in the direction of the auditorium. When I backed up, I heard a loud "CRUNCH." I realized I had hit someone's car. Someone else who was backing out saw me and yelled at me. I knew that I couldn't leave the scene.

I got out of the car and saw this vehicle with a huge gash on the car door. I figured this was the one I hit. I wrote down the license plate number and went to the principal's office.

They called the cops. I had to wait for them to arrive, which they did in five minutes. (It's such a small town.) While we were waiting, the Assistant Principal took me to my Mom's classroom to let her know what happened. Aftet the police showed up, we went out to the accident scene. They looked at the car I thought I had hit and said I hadn't hit that car. The gash was all rusted, like it had happened a long time ago. They looked at the other cars and saw one that had a dented fender above the rear tire. That was the car I hit. I got a ticket for illegal backing. I don't remember how much the fine was.

The principal looked up the license plate number and discovered it belonged to someone in my class. He told me to call her after school. I did call, and she was not aware that her car had been hit.

Because that happened on the very first day of my insurance policy, my premiums skyrocketed. My Dad was mad about the rates going up, but not because I had hit someone else's car. I guess he figured that was going to happen sooner or later. It would happen several more times. I'm not going to go into detail about all of them.

However, a few weeks later, I was driving around after school on Homecoming. I had my movie camera with me and I would take random film here and there. It was a very exciting day (for reasons that will become more more clear later on). At a stop sign, I filmed a car turning right. I had a big smile on my face as I shot the camera point-blank at the car passing me by. It happened to have the girl whose car I had hit. She was driving and her boyfriend was in the passenger seat.

I didn't really think anything about it at the time until about 20 minutes later, when the boyfriend called me and asked me if I was trying to catch her doing something wrong. I then remembered the accident. I said I wasn't trying to do anything like that. The incident was never brought up again.

The next week, I had developed the film. The part where I thought I had filmed the two of them together turned out to be a shot of the trees. I had aimed the camera lens too high. If I was trying to catch her doing something wrong, I would have failed. This means I failed without really trying. It seems like I do a lot of that.

Music to wreck a wedding by

There are times when my brother Loyd can mess up a situation without even trying. This was one of those occasions, but as you will see, he could have fixed the problem by doing nothing at all and he couldn't even do that.

I mentioned earlier that I almost always had an issue with my birthday because it almost always fell on Labor Day weekend. My sophomore year of school, I was rather happy because we didn't going to go to the woods. Instead, it was the day my Aunt Cind had decided to have her wedding with Jid.

Cind asked me and Loyd to help provide the music for the wedding. She had selected Frank Mills' "The Poet & I" to march down the aisle, John Denver's "Annie's Song," and Chicago's "Colour My World" during the ceremony and Frank Mills' "Music Box Dancer" to return down the aisle with Jid. She did not choose any traditional songs. I played piano and Loyd played guitar. We rehearsed and got very good at performing the songs.

The rehearsal dinner was held the night before the wedding. A huge cake was purchased. It seemed like it was all the family there, all the same people who would be at the wedding the next day. My Mom purchased yet another cake for the rehearsal. It was a birthday cake for me. However, there was too much cake, and no one ate the one with my name on it. Maybe they should have cut back on the cake. Neither one was chocolate.

Mom had bought us shirts to wear for the wedding. They were white with thin black stripes. I got mad because she was making us wear identical shirts. At this point, I was fed up with Mom buying us stuff that would identify us as brothers. I wanted to scream, "WE ARE BROTHERS, NOT TWINS! QUIT BUYING US THE SAME OUTFITS!" The bad thing was that the wedding would not be the only day we would be wearing those shirts.

The wedding was held outdoors. There is a church by my Grandma Bend's house in Fort Sumner that has an outdoor garden. That was where the ceremony was held. The only problem was that it was next to the main highway. I was not looking forward to having to deal with the traffic.

Shortly before the wedding started, we rehearsed one final time. Everything went well, except that the person doing the singing got a little shock from the microphone and shouted "Holy F***!" which came out the PA system. Fortunately, no one else was around to hear it.

The wedding started. It was a very beautiful, sunny and warm day. The first thing I noticed was that there was no traffic. I found out later that Grandma Bend had the Sheriff's Department stop traffic on the highway during the ceremony. I couldn't believe it. My grandmother was a probate judge at the time, so she was able to pull some strings.

On the first song, I started playing the piano. Loyd would join in on the guitar after the first few measures. When he started, I immediately noticed that his guitar was OUT OF TUNE! I guess he had left it out in the sun and the strings expanded. He noticed the problem, but he continued playing. It sounded TERRIBLE! I wanted to shout at him to stop playing, but I hoped he would pick up the hint and stop on his own. He didn't. He didn't even bother to get up after the first song to try to re-tune the guitar. He just kept playing that out of tune instrument.

After the wedding, I asked Loyd why he didn't stop playing. "I didn't rehearse all that time to just not play my guitar."

Loyd ran off after the ceremony and did his own thing. I don't know where he went. However, when it was time for the family photo, he was nowhere to be found. He was not in that picture or very many of the other wedding photos, for that matter. History records that I was at that wedding, but not him. I felt vindicated. I just hope everyone else at that wedding forgot about the music being out of tune.

Cind and Jid remained married for 35 years before they divorced. They actually lasted longer than my parents.

High School Enemies: Pid

I don't know why it was, but I seemed to attract the morons who wanted to cause me mental anguish by acting like they were my friend, but treated me in a condescending and patronizing manner. Pid was the worst of them.

I don't know when I was first aware of Pid. I know we were in the ninth grade together, and I guess he had been in Artesia since the beginning of the 7th grade. However, I don't have a solid memory of his existence until the first day of high school, when he was in my home room. Somehow, we managed to stay off each other's radars until then.

We sat next to each other. During lulls in the first day, he tried starting conversations with me. Our student council representative made a presentation about the things that had been planned for the school and that they had a Citizen of the Month award. There would be one homeroom meeting every month, and each homeroom would take nominees for the award. Pid told me, "I'm going to nominate you for that!" I thought this was odd because I really didn't know him, but okay. It was nice to be well-thought of, and I wasn't about to pull that jerk move that Johd did the year before. Pid nominated me, but I didn't get selected.

I didn't realize until later what a big twerp Pid was the whole time. I was a little blind to it when it was going on (probably because of my likely Asperger's). Pid was not one of the Alpha males and he was not one of the best students. In that respect, he was just a little lower than me in the pecking order at high school. Maybe he just thought if he pecked hard enough, he would somehow rank higher than me on the social level. That's pretty bad when someone thinks they have to compete with me for status.

I guess the thing that really ticks me off when I look back and think of Pid is that he had a sister named Elz who was a year younger than us. Elz was cute and smart. I remembered thinking very well of her when I was in the ninth grade. I didn't realize until junior year that she was of any relation to Pid. I probably would have done more to pursue Elz if it hadn't been for Pid. He was already giving me a hard time about stuff in school. Imagine what he would have been like if I started kissing his sister.

I had Pid in Chemistry my junior year and in Physics my senior year. He didn't do so much to me in Chemistry, but it was in Physics (which also included Johd and Jend in the class) where he discovered he had a better platform for humiliation. There were other students who joined the war against me in that class.

I never saw Pid or Elz again after I graduated. From what I gleam off the Internet, they both wound up in Texas. He went to Lake Jackson and she went to Pflugerville. It appears that neither one of them married nor had children. That's starting to become a theme among certain people in my past.

High School Enemies: Johd and Jend

Johd and Jend were cousins in my class. Separately, they were pretty decent people, but when they were together, they had a tendency to inflict cruel mental torture on me, and sometimes, it turned physical.

I had known Johd since the fifth grade when I had transferred over to Central. Over the years, he slowly became more of a bully. I don't know how this happened, but he lived with his grandparents. His grandfather was a police officer and his grandmother worked for the DMV.

I know that Johd was very poor. After junior year, he was among those of us who went to Boys State. This took place at the New Mexico Military Institute in Roswell. They had an amazing athletic facility. However, they told us we couldn't go inside if the bottoms of our tennis shoes were black because of the risk of permanently marking the floor. Johd was the only person there with black bottom tennis shoes that were made from recycled tires. He was not happy.

You may recall that I had a crush on a girl named Tez when I was in the sixth grade. You may also recall that in a retaliation, I referred to her and her best friend as "Queers." Jend happened to be that best friend. I had known her since the sixth grade.

They were both in band and the Drama club. Johd had taken part in the production of "Arsenic and Old Lace," in which he played "Teddy." Jend got involved in the Drama club later in the year, when we did the children's theatre production of "The House at Pooh Corner." Jend played Tigger and Johd played Eeyore. I was not cast in that show, but Rod (from the posts last week) wasn't cast, either.

Once in ninth grade, Johd tackled me and yelled at me because I nominated him for treasurer of our homeroom. I didn't realize that was an insult. However, looking back, I think he thought I had nominated him because I was gay for him. That doesn't justify it because I wasn't gay at all. I just thought I was doing something nice by showing him that I trusted him with money.

Once, Jend had these little pins with feathers that functioned as darts. She just started throwing them at me one by one, just for the heck of it. I got really frustrated and bent them all out of shape. I really wanted to throw them back at her, but I knew that would just get me beaten up by Johd.

During our senior year, she got a brand new pick up. I was carrying around my portable stereo and placed it on the hood of her car. She SCREAMED at me and accused me of messing up the paint job. Yes, there was a black mark on the hood where I had placed the stereo, but I was able to get it off with my finger and saliva. I wondered what the big deal was. I've gotten a new car, and while I wouldn't have liked it if someone scuffed it up a little bit, I certainly wouldn't have reacted that way. If I had been someone else, she probably wouldn't have done that.

I only ever saw Johd once after high school. In 1984, I was working on replacing the shingles of a roof with my father. I guess he lived next door. He saw me and kind of shyly waved. I waved back. I never saw Jend, but I know that at one point, she had gotten married to her high school sweetheart a few years after graduating, and it ended pretty badly. (Strangely enough, Johd had dated that guy's sister during high school.) From what I can tell on-line, she married someone else and became an emergency preparedness manager in Texas.

I guess the main problem with Johd and Jend is that, under normal circumstances, they would have been my real friends as we had Music and Drama in common. I guess my possible Asperger's probably caused me to rub some people the wrong way, to the point that they just could not tolerate me being in their lives, even just to be in the same room.

But I guess it doesn't matter who I was friends with as I have almost no desire to be in connection with anyone was in high school with me, with just a few exceptions.

High School Enemies: Byd

I've spent the last week and a half telling about friends from my sophomore year. Now, let's go to the other side and discuss some people that I was at odds with.

Byd was a senior and was in my Physical Education class. I considered him one of the worst kinds of bullies. He was one of these guys who would start off acting like he was your friend and later make snide remarks about you in front of every one else. I would rather get beaten up than be treated like that.

I hadn't realized at first, but I had heard of Byd when I was in the ninth grade. There was this girl in my class named Diad. She was one of the cheerleaders. She talked about how she was dating this boy in high school named Byd. She had written his name over and over in her notebook, like "Diad loves Byd" and so on, sometimes framed by hearts.

The way she talked about him, I thought he was a pretty cool guy. I was shocked beyond belief when I found that this jerk in my PE class was the same guy. I overheard him telling some of the other guys that he started dating Diad because he had heard that she was the hottest girl in my class. Then, he saw this other girl named Gwed from my class and found out he was wrong. He didn't know what to do.

He continued seeing Diad, but when I saw them together, I felt bad for her knowing that he would rather be with someone else on the basis of hotness. Diad and I were not good enough friends for me to tell her what I heard.

Fortunately, as I mentioned before, I only had to deal with him for one semester because I took Tennis after the winter break. I don't know what other classes he was taking during the day.

Byd had a sister named Miz who was a year older than me. She was very attractive and I always wondered why she never seemed to have any boyfriends. After I met Byd, I figured out that no one considered her worth dating because they would have to deal with him on a regular basis.

Byd also had another sister two years younger than me. A friend in my class got her pregnant and had to marry her. (This was the same friend from Hermosa who had moved to the Central district without changing schools.) When I saw the wedding announcement in the paper, I felt very bad for him. He was going to have to deal with two completely forms of trouble in his marriage. The first was Byd and the second was knowing that he could never be with Miz. I guess it was too much because it looks like she got married to someone else and had kids with him.

It also looks like Byd himself never got to reproduce. Judging by the obituary for his mother, none of her grandchildren had the same last name. I don't know if he got married, but if he did, there weren't any children, or at the very least, none who lived long enough.

I think we can all be thankful for that.

High School Friends: Orld, Part 2

This is the follow up to yesterday's post about a friend I had as a teenager named Orld. My post-high school encounters with Orld were rather infrequent.

I know I ran into him in Artesia from time to time while I was in college. He got married to some woman from Carlsbad. She worked at the Tastee Freez. (An interesting side note: Dend, who my mother married after divorcing my father, was related to the people who owned the Tastee Freez.) He worked at one of the grocery stores in town. He eventually worked up to department manager. He and his wife had a couple of children.

I remember he came to a concert at Eastern New Mexico University on 10/31/86. This was after I had graduated from college. I was surprised to see him there. We caught up for a little bit and then I wouldn't really see him again for almost six years.

In 1992, I had come to Artesia for my first visit since I moved to San Diego. I came a few days before my class' 10-year high school reunion. I went over to the grocery store where Orld worked and found him. At first, he thought I was there for the reunion. We met up at his house later that evening. He said his father had given him his house. I was glad to see that he was doing pretty well, especially considering that my mother thought he was worthless. (By the way, I blew off the reunion. I had no intention of going.)

I continued to see Orld every time I came to Artesia, which was about once a year. At the time, he was the only person from high school I still had contact with. Then, in 1998, I had shaved my head. For the previous seven years, I had this incredibly long and bushy hairstyle that I was rather noted for. I had to shave it because it was damaged and I needed to get a fresh start on it. I went to see Orld. (At this point, his father had taken the house back and he was living in a mobile home on the outskirts of town.) Orld was watching a football game with some friends and was drunk. I had been around him before when he was drinking, but I had never seen him drunk like this. He kept commenting on how surprised he was that I had cut my hair. He made no attempt to act even a little bit sober and I got kind of irritated that he wasn't making an effort to be the friend that I came to see.

I don't drink and I've never been drunk, so I don't know how easy or hard it is for someone to just sit up and act normal for a few minutes after having a few drinks. I have seen people on LSD trips keep their composure when the time calls for it. However, I was there to visit Orld and it just wasn't happening the way I wanted it to. I decided to leave and figured that I could live the rest of my life without ever having anything to do with anyone I went to high school with. I guess I was just looking for an excuse to do just that.

I don't even know if Orld realizes what happened that day or that was the reason why I never came to see him again. I do know that in 2012, a couple of weeks after Wild had called me and Rad had e-mailed me, Orld tried contacting me at the station. When I asked my father to tell anyone inquiring of me to just Google me, I meant for them to send me an e-mail. He actually called. I was on the air at the time and the woman who was working in the newsroom at the time answered the phone. She IM'd me with his phone number. Thinking that she had written the number down on a piece of paper, I deleted the IM. I then found out she didn't write down the number. She put it directly in the IM. I don't know if I would have called. I probably would have felt obligated to explain what happened 14 years earlier. However, Orld never tried to call the station again.

I do feel bad that I broke off a friendship that had lasted about 23 years that point. I may have to look him up the next time I go to Artesia. That will be a story for a later time.