I’m giving you a heads up before you read any further. I’m somewhat impaired physically this time, rather than my standard mental impairment. While doing some yard work the other day, I ran over my glasses with the lawnmower, which made them unsuitable for seeing through, mainly because they are now in about two dozen oddly-shaped pieces. Fortunately, they’d fallen off and weren’t on my face when I ran over them. Because of this cruel, but nevertheless completely preventable accident affecting my eyesight, you may see some randomly misspelled words, sx ddom’t bd alwrmed.
Before the aforementioned grass-cutting and specs-shredding catastrophe, I’d been emptying boxes of my heirlooms, hauled down from the attic; boxes of valuable stuff I ever so carefully hauled up there when we’d moved in 22 years ago and where they’d remained unopened until now. Although I knew everything I’d saved in those boxes was priceless and should be preserved for the enrichment of future generations of family, my wife had a different opinion and told me for the 637th time if I didn’t get rid of that junk, she’d hang me by the neck until dead, thereby severely limiting my ability to enrich the current generation, not to mention any future generations.
As I dug through the boxed artifacts, I ran across snapshots of high school friends. Back then, there were, basically, two identifiable groups of guys at my all-boys school: The greasers, who wore mainly tight, dark colored banlon shirts, iridescent sharkskin pants of any color, black socks and pointy-toed black shoes. Their hair was longish and slicked back. The second group was the dupers, don’t ask me where that name came from. Duper guys had their hair cut short, neatly combed and parted. They dressed mainly in madras plaid ivy-league shirts, off-white jeans, white socks, and penny-loafers. They were the college-bound representatives of a bright future for America, while the greasers were the gutter-bound representatives of a future America hoped to avoid.
But there was a largely-discounted nebulous third group hovering around the teenage male perimeter, a group of individuals neither greaser nor duper. Members sported undistinguished haircuts, wore unremarkable clothes that mother bought at Sears or Zayre or Shopper’s World, sported colored socks and clunky, what greasers called “Frankenstein” shoes to propel them down the school hallways, clutching their nerdy book bags. It was the colorless, nameless, middle-of-the-road group, the one that was made up of dorks or dweebs or nerds, but probably best represented the average kid, that my friends and I were in.
Because I wrote funny stuff that I was requested to read it aloud whenever the class had an essay assignment, I got along with all the kid-types. But I began attracting more greaser friends. They seemed to like my anti-establishment humorous writing more than the dupers, who, although they laughed, felt I should take education more seriously. I thought I would give greaser life a try.
To be assimilated into the greaser culture, I bought a fancy Italian knit shirt, skinny iridescent sharkskin flat front slacks, black socks, and pointy-toed shoes. The shoes were so pointy, they could easily slash the tires of duper cars, something the greasers liked to do for fun. Although my pants were skinny and the right size, they just weren’t anorexic enough to suit me. A greaser friend told me to soak them in geyser-temperature water, then dunk them into frigid H2O. It worked and made the legs so tight I could barely pull on the pants over my socks. How cool was that? An instant greaser fashion icon.
Another of my greaser friends spent a few days going through classes without any books. He sat in the back of the room, so none of the teachers noticed. One teacher finally did notice and asked him where his books were. He said they’d been in the trunk of his old car when he took it to the junkyard and now his books were in the middle of a three-foot-square metal cube. How cool was that? An instant greaser hero.
Being cool for a few months was okay, but I discovered that the greasers didn’t do much other than avoid school work, hang out on street corners, or in local greasy spoons, smoking, talking about girls, and all the uncool people in the world, people who were so uncool that they knew they were uncool, but didn’t even care. So I gravitated back to my dorky lifestyle and my dorky friends.
Even though the dupers and greasers still laughed at my writing, I sensed the dupers felt I’d go nowhere in life because I still didn’t take it seriously enough, while the greasers felt I’d go nowhere in life because I was no longer cool. My dorky friends, though, felt I’d go somewhere in life because I was like them and didn’t give a rat’s patoot what the greasers and the dupers thought…or anyone else thought, for that matter.
Some things never change, because that’s where I remain to this day. Dorks forever!