Summer of Drought

The other day, this nice old gardener named Charlie commented that he hadn’t seen a drought like this (in Iowa) since 1988. “But you probably wouldn’t remember that,” he added.

Truth is; I remember the summer of ’88 like it was yesterday. That’s when we moved from a farmhouse in the middle of nowhere to the small town of Polk City. I found it pretty easy to meet kids simply by riding my yellow Huffy bicycle around town, and quickly discovered that I lived not far from three classmates- Jason England, Bob Newton and Matt Bird. Jason liked to bike ride and skateboard, but I don’t remember him participating in the frequent front yard touch football games, which was my favorite thing to do. I also don’t remember him joining us in playing Nintendo, which is what we usually did. I wish I had learned to skateboard- I probably would have gotten to know Jason better. In fact, I do remember my sole childhood skateboarding experience, which consisted of getting on Jason’s sister’s board and immediately wiping out.

Bob Newton played touch football with us sometimes, and his front yard was a preferred field, but in general he was not one for shenanigans. Whereas I have always been a bit hyper and like to stay active, Bob was kind of lazy. I remember mostly hanging out with him alone. I never knocked on Jason’s door, even though he lived across the street, but I’d frequently knock on Bob’s, which was about a block away. This might have been due to my knowledge that his parents were never home. He’d show me where they stashed their weapons and booze… in a non-threatening, matter-of-fact way. It seems crazy in retrospect, but these things were innocently revealed as a way of bragging about what were obviously his family’s most valued possessions. Bob was forthright and unashamed.

The majority of my time that summer was spent with a group revolving around Matt Bird, his brother Lee and this kid Sean who was a year younger than me and lived across the street from them. They listened to a lot of Poison. I used to try to decipher their lyrics, which I had been told were Satanic, but had no luck. They also played a lot of Nintendo, which I was embarrassingly bad at. Our favorite game was Mike Tyson’s Punchout. The best Nintendo player was a girl; I think she must have been older than the rest of us, but now have no idea who she was. Girls would remain mostly mysterious to me for several more years.

My first day at the new school was overwhelming. A classmate I hadn’t met before also named Andrew (with the last name Mercer) began picking on me when I was still at the bus stop. The seventh graders’ lockers were in a basement, and when we got to the school I was relieved to discover my locker was next to Matt’s. I happily shared my excitement about this with him, and immediately this short kid I’d later learn went by Curious George jeered from behind us, “Hey Matt- you know that nerd?” Then he turned to me, “Hey kid, you’re going to have to move your locker down the hall. Only the cool kids have their lockers in front.”

I glanced down the hall and saw that I could move to be nearer to Bob, but to this day, the best way to get me to not do something is to tell me I have to do it. I turned my back to the heckler and twirled the combination of the lock on my locker. At my old school, the lock was built into the lockers, so once you entered the combination you simply lifted the door handle to open them. These lockers instead had a lock that passed through a hole that you had to remove before lifting the handle. Not understanding how it worked, I attempted to open this new locker like the ones I was used to while Curious George became annoyed that I was pretending to ignore him. “Are you going to move your locker or what?” he continued, as he pushed my fumbling hand aside and twirled the combination lock so I’d have to start over. “You’d better not be here when I get back,” he finally threatened and left.

Matt had been there right next to me the whole time, nervously ignoring the proceedings. I re-entered the combination and tried lifting the handle again to know avail. Having no alternative, I sheepishly turned to Matt and asked, “How do you open theses lockers?” He angrily removed the lock from the locker and gave me a look that I knew meant, Never talk to me again, you idiot.

To this day, whenever I get flustered I suddenly become unreasonably disoriented. I spent the rest of that day wandering around the school utterly lost, wondering how the hallways kept moving locations. Eventually a teacher would look at my schedule and guide me to my next class, but, even as the book count piled up after every new class period, I never found that basement locker room again for the remainder of the day.

I wasn’t flustered for being picked on. I have this inexplicable fearless stubbornness that I guess must be in my genes that at this point had accumulated 12 years of experience at ignoring being yelled at. (I never did move the location of my locker.) I was, however, mad at myself for stupidly not knowing how to open my locker. I don’t like not being able to figure out how to do things that should be obvious. More importantly, I was confused by having experienced something that was new to me- betrayal. Matt would never again behave as my friend. Matt was the good-looking, relatively athletic kid that we were all supposed to be aspiring to be like. I recognized, though, that his disloyalty represented the worst in humanity. I resolved to never be like him, even as I understood I hadn’t been given the choice.

In contrast, neither Jason the skateboarder nor Bob the delinquent ever did me any wrong. Years later I would have a highly enjoyable time reconnecting with Bob as we were thrown into the same Driver’s Ed car. Bob was also the first person I knew who got a tattoo- a tribute to another kid in our school who died. I thought it was awesome, and he proudly displayed it on his arm even as our classmates expressed their disgust. You see, I went to a school where ridicule and bullying was the norm. With the remarkable exception of Charlie Husak, without whose protection I probably would have been seriously injured, the most popular kids were the ones who picked on me the most. The nicest kids at that school were the ones who rebelled against it.

I was surprised when I received an invitation from Robert Newton to be his friend on Facebook awhile ago, but gladly accepted his invitation. I was saddened to learn from it when he suddenly and unexpectedly died earlier this year.