Carol:
A Story in Two Parts
I married someone who sounds like a social misfit when you hear half the story. Marc repeated the 10th grade twice for truancy, usually heading for the library once he had snuck out of class. The second time he had already skipped 45 days before the administrative wheels began turning and he was withdrawn from school. Not that he would have passed his classes anyway. How did he get away with it? Mostly, he forged his mother’s signature on report cards, wrote forged notes to excuse his absences, and had a talent for lying in tough situations. He ran around with a tough crowd, but he admits to having been a bit of a coward when it came to fighting. He just didn’t like the idea of getting beat up. Finally, on the third try at 10th grade, he talked his mother into completing the paperwork and he joined the Navy at the age of 17.
His best friend Larry was also a social misfit, but with a violent streak that set him apart from Marc. Larry was a drinker and a hard-core fighter. You didn’t mess with him, and you didn’t mess with his friends. He was a bona fide juvenile delinquent whose record of trouble-making caught the attention of some documentary film-makers investigating juvenile delinquency in Massachusetts. Marc and his navy buddies were watching TV together the night the documentary was shown on national television, Larry the central focus of the program who announced to the interviewers that nothing was “cooler” than fighting.
That’s the first half of the story. Here’s the second half.
The truant who ditched school to go to the library went to college on the GI bill after his stint in the Navy, ended up graduating with highest honors from a California university and became a lawyer. Among the ex-military in his law school class, there were lots of former officers but he was the only enlisted man, and surely the only one kicked out of high school twice. He is not a famous man like some of his classmates at law school, but he is respected in his community, loved by his family, and known for being fair, ethical and kind. He is a good defense attorney, and I think he has a special compassion for some of his clients who remind him of Larry.
The teen-age misfit who lived to fight became an adult delinquent, an alcoholic who never lost his taste for brawling. He was a teen-ager when his daughter was born, but he missed her birth because he was watching the Superbowl. He worked in a lumberyard for years, drinking his lunch at a local bar and marching with the Vets in the 4th of July Parade even though he had never served in the military. He died in his 40’s, his health likely ruined by the hard life of a social misfit.
The last time the truant saw the fighter was on our motorhome trip around the country in 1985. We went out for hamburgers, and Larry sat in the back of the car with our children while Marc drove. I looked in the rearview mirror from time to time, just to make sure the kids were okay with him. Before we said our final good-byes, Larry took Megan on his knee and began to sing. “Skidda-ma-rinky-dinky-dink, skidda-ma-rinky-do. I love you.” He smiled, she laughed.
You see, there are always two sides to every story.
Megan:
Social Misfits
My first boyfriend was a homeless runaway from Georgia. He came to Prescott because he met a girl (not me) on the Internet. This was in 1997, so that’s pretty impressive. I didn’t even get my own email address until 1998, but he was clearly an early adopter. The girl was not happy see him when he turned up unexpectedly, so their romance was short lived. I was never really sure what his circumstances had been at home. He just said he didn’t get along with his father.
I was introduced to him by my best-friend at the time. My friend had just been expelled from our high school after refusing to attend the in-school suspension he’d been assigned for some trouble that I cannot remember. He then spent most of his time pacing across the street from the high school waiting for his girlfriend and I to have free periods and lunch. He met the homeless guy, who also spent a lot of time across the street, and he introduced us.
The first time I saw the homeless guy he was wearing a bicycle helmet and a skirt – a long hippie type skirt – over his jeans and . He had green hair and was sunburned. In the two weeks we “went out,” I spent most of my time driving him and my expelled friend around town, buying them food. We went to the movies once and he held my hand. When I introduced him to my parents, he spruced up a bit – shoplifting new clothes from the Kmart just for the occasion. After our dates, I drove him back to his tent in the woods behind Thumb Butte.
My parents were concerned about this relationship, but didn’t forbid me from seeing him. There were a lot of reasons to be concerned about me at that point in my life: I stopped going to church. I tried to drop out of school. I wasn’t a very happy person, but hanging out with these guys was sort of exhilarating. We never drank or did drugs, so I’m not sure what excuse we had for jumping my car Dukes of Hazzard style out in the desert. They were both in the car when I had my accident. The boyfriend (although by that point, the ex) in the backseat hit his face on my headrest and there was blood everywhere.
We broke up after I confessed to having feelings for our friend. They had both been hired by my parents to paint the house, and I picked that time to end it. In retrospect was pretty dumb, because then my parents got to witness the aftermath. The homeless boy took off his shoes, and walked barefoot over the hill towards the mountain. He was gone for hours. When he returned, his feet were bleeding and he had a row of safety pins stuck through the skin in his arms. In the prison, I got used to seeing self-mutilators, but this was my first experience and it terrified me.
But we continued to hang out, the three of us, until just after my car accident. I went to France that summer with my parents, and the boys were arrested while I was gone. My best friend moved to Florida to hide from the charges, and the homeless boy was eventually shipped back to Georgia because he was a minor. I found him on Facebook recently. From the pictures, he looks like the Unabomber, but he has a girlfriend and works for a computer company so maybe he’s ok. I’m not going to friend him. No reason to remind him of a sad, difficult time in his life.
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