First Person
State of the Reunion
In 1976 my classmates and I left Houston’s Westchester High School in a hurry. But the memories lingered, and when we met up again, so did we.
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The following afternoon, our class gathered at the old campus for a picnic—an event staged both to bask unashamedly in nostalgia and to trot out the toddlers. Lacking in both categories, I killed part of the afternoon driving through the neighborhood of my youth, where my parents still reside. It’s actually a fine, well-groomed, pine-redolent enclave, and I found myself smiling as I eased by the pool where four of us used to skinny-dip on summer nights. The other three—my older brother, Eli; my best friend, Martin Gschwind; and cheerleader Kendall Williams—were all dead now, and sometimes I wondered if I was so damned restless because I was living for four, or maybe just taunting the reaper. In any case, the neighborhood wasn’t mine anymore, though it surprised me to learn that so many of my classmates had in fact moved back and today practiced the ancient rites of 1976: the men in oil and gas, the women at home, cigars and golf club memberships. Everything was as it was before, except that there was no Westchester.
At the end of the afternoon, I checked into the Marriott on the western edge of the neighborhood, where the evening’s gala would take place. I had charged a hospitality suite to Texas Monthly (sorry, Greg) and spent a few minutes pacing its perimeters. Then I phoned up our senior class president, Bob Ashfield, and invited him up for a drink. We had run into each other at a bar in Houston a year before and argued about Phil Gramm (him for, me against). Today neither of us felt like debating. We sipped tequila and talked about what it was like to be practically the only unmarried, childless members of our graduating class. Bob said that one of the ex-jocks had pulled him aside and said, “Don’t worry, Ashfield. We all envy your situation.” There was, we agreed, always something to envy.
Shortly before eight in the evening, Murphy Graham and his wife, Ann, visited. Though Murphy had been a football stud, we’d always gotten along, and the previous night I had laughed at the gentle admonishment he had written in my yearbook twenty years ago: “Don’t judge people too hard—they’re only human and unlike you and I they are fallible.” Today he was one of the few ex-jocks who still had hair and a waist size that did not exceed his age. Murphy, now in engineering, had tried his hand at teaching for a few years but quit after being told by school administrators that his “failure rate” was too high. Ann knocked back her tequila shot and added, “Nowadays, teachers in the district are told not to count off for ‘creative’ spelling.”
“Okay, okay,” I conceded. “So Westchester wasn’t so intellectually pathetic after all.” I muttered a few objections about our alma mater’s lily-white demographics, and then we headed for the hotel ballroom.
Orange and white balloons (signifying the school colors) adorned the ballroom portals. Behind the registration desk, I could see a few articles from our school paper blown up and displayed on an easel. One of them was headlined In Defense of Football; it was an interview I had done with Murphy. The reunion registrar thrust something into my hand. It was a badge featuring my name and my oily-haired, deer-in-the-headlights class picture. Reading my mind, my high school crush, Kim Rambeau Ellis, came over to me and said, “You have to wear it,” and smacked me hard on the chest for emphasis.
I stepped inside the ballroom and, to paraphrase Faulkner, whirled swirling into the swirling whirl. “Hi! What are you doing these days? Where do you live? Good, good! Hi! . . .” People squinted at the picture on my badge, squinted at me, and shook their heads as if to say, “Well, I guess anything would’ve been an improvement.” A few yards away, I noticed that Pamela Lacy West was fighting off the advances of Greg Smith, who had written in our reunion pamphlet, “If I could go back to high school for one day, I would find the best-looking girl in school and ask her out on a date!” The deejay was playing “seventies music”—meaning, it seemed, nothing but Aerosmith. (Where, I demanded, was “Baby, I Love Your Way,” by Peter Frampton?) Making maximum use of the dance floor was Steve Smelley, once a tormented adolescent, now almost toxic with self-confidence. With the greatest of ease he sashayed with his former flame, Lynne Dillard Montgomery, who had dumped him on the eve of the senior prom. Tonight, Steve would at last get his apology.
Outside in the lobby, I located Scott Frederick and John Green. We’d been running buddies all through Westchester, but then Scott moved off to Colorado for college, John had become deeply religious, and like that we lost each other. But not forever, miraculously: For here we were again, bonded by eternal wiseassedness and an affection so easy and sure that it unnerved me. Then Scott said, “I bought these at a tobacco store on my way into town,” and from his jacket withdrew a pack of Sher Bidis, the rancid Indian eucalyptus-and-betel-nut cigarettes we used to smoke in the schoolyards, for which offense my main man Mr. West awarded me a one-day suspension. As Scott lit one up, I could’ve sworn I heard the old vice principal gag. We passed the foul-smelling cigarette among us, pretending to enjoy it while other classmates eyed us with revulsion, just like old times.
The lights went up at one, and thereafter several dozen Westchesterites crammed into my suite. I sat on the edge of the bed and watched them file in, people I had remembered fondly and people I might as well have never seen before, the forgotten many now determined to wedge themselves into the ephemera of a long-vanished era. And me absolutely among them. For the past twenty years I’d denied their relevance to my life. They don’t know me, I’d say. They’re not part of my world. They just came and went and did nothing to earn their place as my peers. I didn’t select them. Kind of like my family, I thought, and then the epiphany took hold: Good God, we’re family, we’re stuck with each other.
Two days later, while I was staring blearily at my office computer, the phone rang. It was Steve Smelley. “Tell me,” he said. “Are you depressed?”
“Yeah,” I admitted. “Twenty years of gritting our teeth and then an effortless weekend and then it’s over before we can savor it.”
Steve murmured thoughtfully. Then we wasted the rest of the afternoon engaging in easily the longest conversation we’d ever had. I don’t remember much of what we talked about, except that it felt nice and that he said something about how he threw a hell of a New Year’s Eve party and that my name would be on the invitation list.
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