Dead Spartans

The class of '73

     Been out there in soaked Orange County, but I finally got home and I took a break (of the laptop variety), looking for something that led me to something else that somehow landed me on a webpage for my goddam high school graduating class.
     Nameless High, 1973. The Spartans.
     Uh-oh.
     Now, I’m not the kind to think about those ridiculous days of half-bakery, when we flailed and lunged about with gestures, not yet comprehending what it means to be a person. Remember high school? It’s like remembering the stages of one’s wretched bout with measles, after recovery. Why?
     After maybe 1975, I had no contact with any of my high school crowd (though I didn’t have a crowd really; just a few friends and acquaintances unified only by my random wanderings).

My BF: from
Avalon to oblivion

     I briefly kept in touch with my best friend—we had taken an ill-fated trip to Catalina Island literally the day after high school graduation, hiking for miles from the south end to the Isthmus. (The adventure was so dismal and ill-conceived that it likely destroyed our friendship.) He lived with his staunchly Republican family on a eucalyptus-lined street in the hills at the edge of the Santa Anas, and his next-door neighbor, a hundred yards up the road, was the pop singer Jose Feliciano. (His biggest hit was a cover of the Doors’ “Light My Fire.”)
     My chum and I used to look over at his house and say, “It doesn’t make any difference where he lives, ‘cause he’s blind.”
     “Yeah, he may as well live here.”
     I’d occasionally drive by Jose’s house, glancing through his locked gate and up to his shuttered windows. But I never did see anything. There was a kind of symmetry in our relationship; he couldn’t see me and I never saw him.

R.I.P.

     Anyway, I found that website for the Nameless High class of ’73, and, against my better judgment (I don’t actually have different grades), I looked at the page of “classmates,” organized by the first letter of our surnames.
     I hit upon the letter “H.” I recognized a friend: Rusty Heaps. (That really was his name. He was a Mormon.) He was a bit of a galoot, but, as youngsters, we were Boy Scouts together, so I knew him whether I liked it or not.
     Some classmates had provided information beyond their name and graduation photo. For instance, Rusty wrote:

“Hi all. I've been living in Arizona since 1987. I've been happily married since 1982, have two kids, one in high school, the other in grade school. I work as a news reporter for radio, for a company called XXXX. My memory of most of my classmates is shot to hell, but contact me if you remember me, maybe it'll bring it back. See Ya.”

The name, if not the
face, triggers something
akin to memories.
R.I.P.

     Ah yes. Rusty fucking Heaps.
     I saw something even more disturbing. One of my former classmates—I vaguely remembered her—had died. Next to her name, it said

“I am sorry to inform you, XX is no longer with us, [sic] she has passed away.”

     I don’t know why, but this startled me. There was her picture: a cute little seventeen-year-old girl (the year of her death was not provided). Dead.
     I looked further. I remembered lots of names, but few faces. When I did remember faces, I didn’t so much remember anything as feel a vague stirring. There is some subterranean patch of Roy Bauer’s mind that flinches (or otherwise emotes) at these images, even after thirty-seven years.

Articulate; dead

     One kid—I recognized him immediately—was briefly a friend. I recall his peculiarly precise enunciation of words and his somewhat advanced vocabulary. (This capacity, in his case, didn’t seem to correspond to academic achievement.) He was a bit of a nerd, but he was also thoughtful and distinctly cheerful. I recall visiting him at his home, not far from my best friend’s house. We stood in his front yard and spoke of literature and philosophy. He made fun of my pronunciation of the word “absurd.” “Ubzzerd,” he said, mockingly. We laughed.
     He died in 1998. Don’t know how or why.
     Another former best friend (circa 7th grade), the temporarily popular Bob, had a girlfriend who was devastatingly beautiful. I was strictly on the periphery of their relationship, a nonentity to her (I was sure). But I never forgot her striking beauty and, as it happens, she lived along my way to school, and so I saw her now and again. The years passed, but I was too shy ever to speak to her. She was beyond reach. My heart breaks to think about it.

Beyond reach

     By the time of high school, her beauty and elegance put her several classes beyond any of the rest of us. (Or so it seemed to me from afar.) I never knew what became of her. I forgot her.
     But, today, there she was, frozen in time, as beautiful as ever. Like Rusty, she provided information about her subsequent adult life. She had become a professional ballerina. She started a dance school. She married some asshole and had two girls. With her girls now pursuing important dance careers, she’s thinking of getting into real estate.
     I was devastated. (Don’t ask me how or why.)
     But she wasn’t dead. I was relieved.
     I came upon many former friends who are now dead. I was beginning to feel like a bad luck charm.
    The website provided a “memorial” page with twenty-eight dead “kids.” (1998 was an especially bad year.)
     Good Lord! I knew half of them!

The Roy of '73

     At the bottom of the “memorial” page, it said

If you know of someone from our Class that you would like to add to this page, email me at….

     That made me laugh.
     A few of my former colleagues described midlife crises. They seemed embarrassed about them. It occurred to me that I have a midlife crisis every goddam morning. It’s been that way for decades, so it would never occur to me to mention the dang things.

* * *

     It’s easy to feel gloomy about one’s life, especially as one reviews one’s dismal distant past, acutely aware of missed opportunities, failures of appreciation, youthful idiocy, and all the rest.
     But, really, that’s foolish, for, if we are lucky, there will be a time, well into the future, when we will look back at this time, right now, with similar longings.
     —But no. We can take the opportunities that we have now!
     Take them. Take them.
     Or die.
     Again.