Category: Friends

Breaker 1-9 for a radio check. My dad still has a CB radio. And an 8-track player. He’s this interesting combination of intellectual and redneck. He drinks Paisano, and is currently reading A History of the English-Speaking Peoples. He threw out my Highway 69 sign. I hate him for that. The term “69” took on great significance to my little high school buddies, after Carla, a senior, expressed her ignorance as to its sexual connotation. We would go on outings to Eckerd Drugs and buy suggestive items that cost 69¢, comparing our finds at the end of the spree. When Jason told us that there was a Highway 69 in Alabama, we had to go. He, Ginny, Susan, Jaydie, and I drove there one night, and stole 5 signs from the highway. We’d park the car by a sign, pop the hood, like we were having engine trouble, sexy Ginny played the lady in distress, so that people would look at her instead of me, and I climbed the sign and unscrewed it from its pole. By the 5th sign, I needed only 45 seconds. When I asked Dad where the sign was, he said “I threw it out.” My parents live in this huge house, with tons of space, and they toss out a sign that was leaning against the wall of my closet, sorry, my former closet, occupying no space. James promised that the next time I visit we’d take a trip to Highway 69 and reclaim a sign.

My brother Mark brought his wife and little 8-month old daughter, Cassady, to our high school reunion. Because the baby was in town, my sisters in Florida flew up. Cassady is so beautiful and happy, she squeals and squeaks and laughs and dances because that’s all she knows is how to be beautiful and happy.

Susan and I and her son, Jimmy, 16, drove around Pinson one night, the little suburb of Birmingham that I grew up in. It recently incorporated, and there’s a hot runoff election going on now, with the candidates going door-to-door and hurling all sorts of small town accusations at each other. The Pinson that I knew, of little houses with field-stone foundations and small businesses, has been covered over by strips malls and 4-lane roads. Downtown and Triangle Park don’t exist anymore. When Food World (or -Giant, or -Land) opened, it effectively closed downtown, even luring several of the businesses, like the flower shop where I got all of my high school dance boutonnières, into their ugly building. Convenience and progress at the expense of identity and charm.

So Jimmy called me “sir,” and I almost had a heart attack. “Jimm-meh, don’t call me sir, please.” “Yes, Sir, I mean, Mr. Komater, I mean, Chris…” His mother, Susan, was one of my best friends, from a family with deep southern roots. They lived in a cool log cabin in the woods. Susan and her husband now occupy a double-wide that they parked on Susan’s parents’ property. In high school, Susan wanted to marry an effete poet and live in a trailer park and have a million kids. She loves Jesus and is open about being bi-sexual, although she’s married with 2 kids and doesn’t have a practical outlet for her homosexuality. She’s one of the great wits of the south, spinning long and fabulous yarns out of her wild experiences. She’s had a book in her for about 30 years, and is just in the process of writing it. I guarantee another Confederacy of Dunces. So anyway, after chicken pot pie and Ambrosia at the Dawg House (“What can I getcha, babe?”), we made our way to one of the massive warehouse-type churches on Pinson Parkway to watch her church’s softball team, the Agape Underdogs. We made it just as the game ended and the team was giving post-game thanks to the Lord, only an hour into play. In lieu of 9 innings, when one team gets 11 points ahead, they call it quits. The Agape (pronounced “ah-GAH-pay”) Underdogs have never made it past a few innings, although they sure try. We piled into the car and drove to Trussville, where Lisa, whom I haven’t seen in about 23 years, and who had the biggest hairdo in the south (“closer to the Lord!”) now runs a massive hair salon, called Kuttin’ Up. She has 60 employees working in what’s more like a theme park than a salon, offering everything from hair cuts and body waxes to massages and spray-on tans. We watched Lisa effortlessly give a woman who rode in on a motorcycle a fabulous wind-blown mullet, all the while entertaining us with stories of her 3 kids and cheatin’ husbands and boyfriends.

I had dinner with Pete and his lover, Jim, and James, the fugitive, one night on Birmingham’s Southside. It was pasta night at Silvertron, all pastas $7.95. I had spent the whole day trying to find the perfect southern place to eat at, but they were all closed on Monday night, or just open for lunch. Anyway, Pete is just adorable, and with hardly any detectable accent–strange for an Anniston boy, and Jim’s really easy-going and sweet. They compliment each other nicely—and don’tcha wanna just lick them forearms?

Much to my delight, the Vulcan, a colossal iron sculpture of the god of the forge, towering over Birmingham’s Red Mountain and commemorating the prosperity that the iron industry brought to the region, had been restored. His naked ass hovers directly over my high school, and during my school years, I’d frequently look to that big iron butt for inspiration and solace.

When I go home, I become the southerner that I never was when I lived there. I drink cheap beer, listen to country music, eat hickory-pit barbeque, and love humidity. I say “Aw-haw” a lot, and use the verb “tump.” I notice things that I didn’t pay much attention to while growing up, like kudzu, which is everywhere I look, and so beautiful and horrific. The humidity is almost unbearable, yet guys look so hot and smell so sweet. I’ve fallen in love with the south by getting out of it.

My high school reunion began with a get together at Whiskey Tango, a bar near our old school. My brother and I drove by the school first, which is now a Muslim Community Center. The school moved and is now called the Jefferson County International Baccalaureate Program, which sounds considerably less special ed than “Resource Learning Center.” We preferred to call in just “RLC” and make it seem more mysterious.

All of the guys, except for Donny, Peter, and Ben, have cultivated cute beer bellies. Rita looks exactly the same, gorgeous and thin, and with the trophy husband. She told me that David, my big high school crush, was gay, but that they couldn’t reach him to invite him to the reunion. “Wait, Rita, like I was totally in love with him, don’t tell me that he’s gay. How do you know this?” She told me that they spent a summer together during which time he made no pass at her at all. “He must be gay.” I told her that she just wasn’t his type, and that her bruised ego did not a homosexual make, although I made her promise me that she’d make it her mission to find out whether or not he is gay. In high school I wrote him a letter telling him I was in love with him. He actually wrote back and told me that although he was flattered, his god didn’t allow such activity and that if I had professed my love to him a few years ago, before he was Christian, that he would have flattened my face. I had already photographed him without a shirt, telling him that my photography teacher recommended that I needed some photographs of the male form for my portfolio. (I pushed that a bit later when I told Potsie, my next crush, that my photography teacher recommended that I take some nudes for my portfolio.)

Here’s David’s picture in the yearbook. I was the layout editor and the photographer, so in my first stab at visual narration, I tried to indicate that the only way to his heart was through me. I was the detective, trying to find the way in, while he stood there guarding his pearl beyond all price. That’s Wendy, below me, in the looking glass, my girlfriend and best buddy (although she didn’t make it to the reunion), representing the illusion of love.

Rita told me that she had always had a crush on Sam, my first boyfriend, who looked like Mick Jagger’s cute little brother. Evidently she didn’t know about me and Sam, so I broke it to her that he and I used to have sex in the Ya-Ya room at school. Sam ended up with his picture on the cover of the Birmingham News after setting up a date with an FBI agent posing as a 14-year old boy. He later made a fortune with Amazon and retired, and is now drying out somewhere on the east coast after a crystal meth addiction. Should have stuck with me!

Liz is still kind of horsey, but beautiful, too, and no longer the awkward kid. She married Sam, not my boyfriend Sam, who is about 20 years older and looks like Santa, and completely adores her. Rodney also married someone older, and surprisingly a woman, and was the only one who said “Nothing, absolutely nothing” when asked what he was up to these days.

Amy.

Amy was a successful criminal defense lawyer for about 10 years, but recently decided to handle a few bankruptcy clients a month instead. She looks like she stepped out of a Hammer film–huge eyes set widely apart on a face with a ruby red mouth and white skin and long fingernails. She married the guy that I would have married–the food broker with the beard and the belly and the heart of gold. (He seemed unusually taken by my art, btw.) On the first night of the reunion, Amy got really drunk and made a prolonged, but ultimately unsuccessfull pass at my brother, whom she dated in high school, but never put out because she was only dating him to make Brad jealous, yet determined to say “yes” 20 years-, a husband-, and a 9-year old child later.

I really connected with Karl, whom I remember as being sweet, but not particularly strange or creative enough to run with my pack. He’s now working in theater and has a gorgeous wife and that cute belly that I mentioned earlier that all of my old mates have grown.

I dragged James out of seclusion to join us. He is a fugitive from justice, having jumped parole in California after spending 2 months in the LA County jail for dealing crystal meth. Too strung out to serve his sentence, he split for Alabama and the comfort of his mom and dad, where he is currently recuperating. Like all of my classmates, he’s incredibly smart, as well as being very articulate and funny about what was a truly terrifying experience, which included getting his glasses smashed and face bashed in before his dealer/partner pulled a gun on him and ran off with the money they had stashed for the next investment. So James and I sat at the table with the former Brad, now Braden, and his wife—–devoted Christians who recently adopted a Chinese baby girl because God so willed it. Braden is now an OB-GYN, and his wife a former nurse. They have 4 kids in addition to the adopted girl. I spoke with Mrs. Braden for most of the dinner, and we shared stories about our kids. She was very charming, and sincere, but I couldn’t help but wonder if she went to the “thou shalt not lie with a man as thou lieth with a woman” church, or the “love thy neighbor” church. I fear Christians as much as they fear God. I sensed that they were the good kind, though.

More Bama adventures later…

Tomorrow I’m off to Alabama with my banjo on my knee and my ipod at my hip, Birmingham Tuxedo Junction bound for my 20th high school reunion. I looked at my high school yearbook today, at the photos that I took of my buddies, and realized that I’ve carried around images of these people for 20 years that haven’t changed. They’re frozen in 1984. Friday night my sweet innocent young friends, untouched by time or pain or careers or loss will suddenly be replaced forever with fat, successful, balding, graying, complacent, bitter, middle-aged people with kids and families and lives and pasts that happened long after my history with them. They’ll instantly become richer, complete characters, but total strangers whom I once loved and dreamed with. The pictures that I take of them now will perhaps add dimension and complexity, but I’m feeling a tremendous sadness at having to amend what was such a perfect moment in time–like watching a sequel to Casablanca.