I had no close friends my age when I was in high school, but I hung around with some of my brother’s friends, two years younger than me, who lived in the area. By association, we became friends. We didn’t have a great deal in common intellectually, but we played basketball, ping pong and football together. For years there was the proverbial vacant lot in back of my house, and we could play touch football there, although it was not a large area. This was in the pre-video game era, of course, so we spent a lot of time outdoors. No computers to distract us.
I didn’t really mind the age difference that much because they were a lot of fun to be around. One them, Kevin, had a very special sense of humor. He was genuinely funny. He went to our high school. Jeff and Bill attended Catholic high schools.
We’d go bowling together, play poker, go to the mall — all kinds of things. But after I graduated from high school, the bond was gone completely — except for Bill. He suffered a stroke or brain aneurysm when he was in his early 20s, and I remembered seeing him in years after and admiring his grit and determination, though deeply saddened by what had happened to him.
Prior to knowing them, when I was 15 and 16, I did have a friend, of sorts, my age. In fact, he and I were in the same high school graduating class. In 1965, he and his family moved into a rather large and garish, white brick, split-level house almost directly in back of us. It had a V-roof, skylight, and red room on the second level with a pool table in the middle. It was kind of ostentatious, but not too much so. However, it really didn’t fit in too well with all the other tasteful, more traditional brick, two-story houses in the neighborhood. . It definitely had a kind of nouveau-riche look about it.
The boy who moved in was named Scott. Now, he was not in any way pretentious himself. I had known him only superficially in the sixth grade when we both went to the same elementary school just a few blocks down the street. He stood out even then as kind of popular. He was good-looking. He had this rough, good-natured quality that everyone was drawn to. And he knew it.
In high school, he was in student government. He played quarterback on the junior and varsity football teams. By the time we were juniors and seniors, he had reached the social pinnacle — popular jock, student body president, voted Best All Around, but smart and modest enough to transcend many of the stereotypes. This only made him more popular.
He obviously needed to be liked by others. Most people who achieve this status in high school have this need, perhaps even a craving. So there was this quality, something else that made him so popular, and I saw him as someone you would want for a friend even though you knew you really had nothing in common with him. He was just that — the loyal friend, the good guy. He was known by the nickname “Boushka,” a takeoff on his last name.
Now ordinarily, I wouldn’t be the type of person to be in his circle of friends, but like I said, he moved in right in back of me. When he found out I was his neighbor, he’d often call me up and we’d talk, or I’d go to his house and play pool or visit for awhile.
He had an infectious, beaming personality, quite different from me with my quiet and reserved demeanor. Occasionally, I’d be looking out the sliding glass door in the rear of our house, and he’d be out in his backyard, leaping over the azalea bushes, headed for my house. I have to say I was a little flattered that he would choose me as someone to befriend socially, even if only because of neighborhood proximity. I was not at all a popular kid — not really into social groups or cliques. I mostly kept to myself, and had only the science and computer geeks to hang out with at lunch in the cafeteria, which was a different social plane altogether. And I didn’t have anything in common with them either. Scott and I didn’t mingle in school — obviously. As I said earlier, the only reason I knew him at all was because he was my neighbor.
Later, when he was running for and won election as Student Body President our senior year, he had all kinds of attention showered on him. In high school social circles, he had reached the apex, the highest point of popularity. I could only look back wistfully to our times spent together, for we had by that point long gone our separate ways and didn’t even see each other after school in the neighborhood. Maybe on occasion, by coincidence.
It’s curious to me, now, all these years later, how I skirted the edge of that more popular group in high school even though I never needed, or wanted, to be part of it. Yes, they were primarily jocks and Key Clubbers, but I sensed a certain bond with them, I guess mainly because we came from the same social strata and lived in the same area of the suburbs. There was a whole other group, just about as large, who lived in the older and poorer neighborhoods, some of whom did well and were in the advanced academic tracks, but many more who populated the business and industrial arts tracks. I was in the college prep track, so I never saw them, just heard about them when they got in trouble.
Scott’s friends would, however, have always been essentially alien to me, if I had not known Scott and shared some time with him and his family. He definitely had charisma. I fell for his charming way of making me feel special in his company. He wasn’t a friend I could have known on a deeper level, I don’t believe, but he represented something I wish I possessed.
Shortly after we had completed high school I heard the bad news. He was working a sales route in some distant state that summer after graduation, walking along a road, when he was hit and seriously injured by a hit-and-run driver. He almost died from loss of blood, but he was young and strong, and survived after having to have his leg amputated below the knee.
I think I only saw him once after that accident. He learned to use a prosthetic device and carry on a near-normal life. He married, and basically that was the last I heard about what had become of him. In recent years I learned he had become a very successful financial planner. He died a few years ago at age 68.
I’m not giving a complete picture of this friendship here. I write this account mainly to offer a glimpse into my life in high school, and to hint at other mysteries about adolescence and identity. It’s a strange fact that in high school, so much about us is already formed: personality, temperament, intellect, fears and inhibitions, and the seeds of what we later discover to be “mental illness” or depression, in one form or another. I can see my future unfolding and who I would become when I recall those days so long ago.
Kevin (left) and Jeff playing chess at my house in New Orleans, December 1968
https://imgur.com/a/BhlnYpE
Scott, 1967 yearbook photo
https://imgur.com/a/2WwyAjE
Me, 1967 yearbook photo
https://imgur.com/a/MGD65LX
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