What Ever Happened to S?

I've known someone I'll call 'S' for about as long as I've lived in this country. Shortly after my family moved to the United States from West Germany in the late-1970s, I began attending American kindergarten. That's where I met him. He promptly mocked me and my broken English with what came, for a while, to be the customary insult: 'Nazi.' As elementary school dragged on, we nonetheless became friends—running around the bases while playing kickball.

We grew up in a conservative working class town in rural Pennsylvania. The Klan held a rally in a neighboring town in 1987, an event appalling enough to elicit a sharp rebuke from the State House and Senate. 'Garden Spot of the World'.

Somehow or other—perhaps because the local capitalists are exactly that—clothing and hat factories have defied globalization and stayed in business. There were and are no unions to speak of. By the mid-1990s, our hometown began mushrooming bedroom communities on its fringes.

If you've got sufficient scratch, it's 'a nice place to raise the kids'—if you can decipher the code. That was also around the time hard drugs started showing up in high school. The English from the cities showed up with their 'modern ways'.

The thing I remember about early on him was that he always had the best stories. One day, his dad was an astronaut. The next, his basement was a dungeon with eighteen alligators in it. From pretty early on we knew Scotty was telling fibs. But he was entertaining and nice and we somehow sort of caught on why before long. Like everyone else, he wanted people to like him.

Later on, during early Middle School, I met Scotty's pop. After a long day of work, he once drove us to a roller skating rink and sat there smoking cigarettes while we had fun. Scotty's Dad was a short fella who worked in a factory — a hard-working, blue collar guy—and like most of his neighbors here, a Republican. In a way, it was understandable. He was determined that his kid would "do better" than he did—he wanted the best for his children, and that probably meant "making it big" someday.

Scotty's Mom worked in a local grocery store and was a Democrat. Together, she and Scotty's Dad went to PTA meetings, Cub Scouts and local booster events—eventually putting all of their kids through college. They both believed in the thing called the "American dream."

Scotty played Little League baseball, but he didn't really shine. (At least he tried, I was too shy then.) He was always just a little awkward, a little out of sorts.

One of our friends, 'G' had one hell of a Dad, one far more authoritarian than Scotty's. The Greek's preferred put-down was 'you woman!' Didn't much think about the content then, even if the frequency and vehemence of the delivery did register.

They were both heartily encouraged to be good at sports. Dads pressured them both into football camp repeatedly. My family encountered his at the Seven Mountains rest stop in the Mid-State on the way to visit college. I was there to visit Daddy's Alma Mater. They were training to be bigger, stronger and faster, so as to assure a glorious senior year. If I recall, they both got injured in the course of running the primitive 'Veer' offense. In any event, they both played somewhat sparingly 'down in the trenches.'

Even if I have no evidence for it, I somehow imagine that the football thing was at least partly at Dad's behest. When S got his shoulder dislocated, I feel pretty certain that he felt bad about it; maybe he felt a little like a failure in his fathers eyes? Or it could be that his complex came from somewhere else? Perhaps--it's just a guess--his insecurity was a function of growing up as a lower middle class white male in a society of images where the only recognizable media representation is spelled 'trash.'

No one had it as bad as 'L' His father reputedly forced him to do wind sprints after at least one shoddy baseball performance—until he puked. He was one of the clumsiest guys in the school. It's unclear which the chicken was and which was the egg.

In spite of this abundant badness, we nonetheless enjoyed some good fortune being sheltered in our little white town. We avoided the worst of what many of my peers, whom I later met in various metropolitan settings, endured in adolescence. Here it was pretty hard to kill yourself with drugs unless you worked at it with real verve.

Anyway, in Middle School we were, together, extraordinarily naive, ridiculous teenagers. We all loved the sci-fi series V, which, for my friends, was followed by 'Hunter' and 'Miami Vice.' Unlike them, I had tight-ass leftist parents who regarded those shows as 'too violent.' They even had the unmitigated gall to suppress the 'Dukes of Hazard,' on the transparently spurious grounds that it was 'too stupid.'

Then came politics. Like most normal American children, S and I were passionately political at age 13. The year of our first clash was 1984. Just to be extra un-American, this came about five years before I kissed a girl. This of course sounds ridiculous to the reader, but for S and me it was real. We were fighting our respective father's ideological battles and we didn't care if our classmates thought us dorks.

Who won the presidential debates that year? I'll tell you whut, history says Mondale did, God damn it! My Social Studies class, however, exclaimed for the Gipper – and that by a likely tampered tally of 24 - 4. The winners write history, the losers remember it.

Scotty and I would argue while the rest of the class snored. He mocked Tip O'Neil, the rotund, rosy-nosed chowderhead Speaker of the House. And I, in a tradition which persists to this very day, made fun of Reagan's inability to remember anything important.

Once we got to high school, Scotty and I weren't always in close proximity. We were on the Track & Field team for the first two years of the Big Time. The seniors, who were on the football team in the fall, would listen to the Beastie Boys in the back of the bus while dipping Copenhagen.

One of that gang, upon learning that the Beastie Boys were Jewish, concluded 'I knew there was something I didn't like about them.' 'That's Jewish' was an 'insult' heard every now and again, although not nearly so frequently as 'that's gay' or 'faggot.' That the blossoming dullard had never met a Jewish person, much less a homosexual, reflected really well on the parents. Thanks again for breeding.

S also went out for band; I suspect he was more comfortable here somehow; he met his first girlfriend through it. People made novel fun of her because she was overweight. Or, they derisively called her 'the Russian' due to her surname. Her Dad taught handicapped kids at school.

As for my sports-bro exploits, I dare say, not only in the interest of historical accuracy, but also in wearing the hat of dispassionate chronicler of social phenomena: I was a kingpin. I played tennis and was invited by more connected enthusiasts to play at a country club every now and again.

I ended up 'lettering'. Scotty probably didn't set foot in a country club and may not have lettered. My family took (it should be said, low-budget) trips to exotic foreign countries like Haiti, Morocco, Portugal and Indonesia pretty much every summer. Scotty probably went to 'the mountains,' the local pool and the sea shore.

Scotty wanted to be accepted by the cool kids, as I did—until punk rock gave some voice to a certain discontent during my junior year. Then I realized something that Scotty never did—at that time, or perhaps since. The lesson was: people who set themselves up as better than you, more often than not, have little or no justification for doing that.

So, while I gravitated towards those interested in 'alternative' music, Scotty orbited off towards the football coach. This self-described 'southern Democrat' dressed up like a cop on Halloween (complete with mirrored shades.) Behind his desk, 'coach' displayed a poster of Oliver North dressed up as Rambo firing a machine gun that gushed out shredded government documents. (How I wish that I had that ultra-camp / Zeitgeisterific bad boy now.)

Scotty and coach never much concerned themselves with the tens of thousands of Nicaraguan peasant corpses that were piling up thanks to the Gipper. So what if 100,000 dead human beings resulted? There would always be an eminent statesman around like George H. W. Bush to tell the football coaches who would tell the Scotties: 'I will never apologize for the United States of America. I don't care what the facts are.'

Back then, America was still 'standing tall', and these two litte men loved it. Taking some: the shattered shell of the early-70s anti-war movement, not to mention the Red wetbacks. Coach would later show me and my Social Studies group 'Top Gun' – as a 'reward' for finishing some insipid project early.

One of my family's 'favorite schadenfreude' (in the Bender household, these two words are inextricably linked) moments concerned a Christmas service we attended at my father's United Church of Christ. Scotty's family happened to sit behind us. This was before I refused to attend 'Chi-ster' church services. I thought I was 'making a stand', which perhaps I was; in the end, I probably just ended up hurting my elderly great aunt's feelings.

After having actual human beings perform a Glockenspiel in a pleasant and theoretically spiritual way, the canned music took over for the duration. Happily, the musak hit a snag and the choir got thrown completely off stride by that screeching fast-forward noise. Murmurs in the crowd, scarcely suppressed laughs from the Bender family contingent ensued. Scotty then leaned over to opine that 'I guess Jello's about', in a reference to the iconoclastic punk rocker of Dead Kennedys fame. So, as with others henceforth, he was cognizant of alternatives. But they never take is the thing.

It's an interesting phenomenon, which I've witnessed on multiple occasions: seemingly 'straight' people flirting with the counter-culture for a little while. Soon enough they're snapped back under the weight of every day life, socialization or God probably knows what. Had a college roommate like that. He too went the way of Scotty after college.

Graduation came and went and Scotty was finally off to live the wild life a little. He got into more than a little 'horsing around' in college, I gathered. He re-injured his shoulder, by dislocating it while jumping on a bed at some party, if I recall correctly via gossip.

College came and went; five years had passed. One holiday evening, Scotty and I met up at a local watering hole to 'catch up'. I was genuinely looking forward to it, although I was admittedly curious to see if Scotty was still telling his tales. He was, and with such a breakneck intensity that I was taken aback.

Scotty was really cool now. He was totes hip to ecstasy, for instance. Why, it made you want to 'fuck anything that moves'. The line 'nice shoes, wanna fuck?' yielded pleasures all too speakable. This wasn't silent desperation, it was blaring desperation.

He was also taking care of some pretty heavy academic biznez. He was studying, as it happened, 'artificial intelligence'. Consequently, the FBI and the CIA were both recruiting him. It was a done deal; he had an 'in' with a shadowy operator whom he called his 'uncle'. I let it wash over me, betraying nothing but myself. It became a habit to give a shoulder to lie on. It's how you begin the see to the bottom of it.

The beers, as always, helped. As time passed we just reminisced and shot the shit; I had just gotten word that I'd be headed to Germany again the following fall for a privileged scholarship and Scotty was about to put the finishing touches on what I imagined to be a business degree.

The following spring I saw Scotty again under completely random circumstances. I was out looking for collectible and obscure books at an antiques mall, and whom do I encounter but Scotty. The freshly-minted mother of his child was in tow.

Scotty seemed in some ways more at peace, although he did have misgivings about his fiancée's 'rich Dad'. The guy evidently made it known that his special little girl was marrying beneath her station; or, then again, maybe it was just more Scotty-style gloss. Dood did make an obligatory 'married life sux' remark. However, for Scotty, and for most of the rest of his hitched gender, in my experience, this was obligatory fluff. Get married – it makes fewer than 50% of Americans happy.

Scotty and his personable wife had settled in the South. They were back home to visit and comfort Mom in the not-too-distant wake of Dad's unexpected death. I don't believe Scotty's pop reached the age of 60. I know he never got to retire. My Dad is retired and has spent the last few years learning how to boat on the Chesapeake with Mom. Privilege rules!

So it was that Scotty was managing a Waffle House down Pensacola way. His employees weren't reliable, and it was something of a headache. But things were looking up, man. Upper level management was gonna have killer blowouts in Naw'lins for up and at 'em local managers. I guess the wife and kids stay home for that one.

Before long, we met up with Scotty's affable, salt-of-the-earth Mom at the neighborhood Applebee's.

In a way, it was kinda like being back in 7th Grade again—only weirder somehow. This time, Scotty wasn't implicitly borrowing his father's rhetoric, he was now explicitly parroting Rush. Scotty was pretty damn confident that Rush was whupping some serious anti-American ass.

By that time I had read a fair bit from the New Left, some philosophy here and there and kept up on current events reasonably well. I was trying to read widely and figure things out. I imagine that's part of the reason I could make absolutely no headway with Scotty.

Keep in mind, it's not that Scotty was 'dumb'. Not at all. However, his assumptions were already so deeply engrained—and yet, so deeply at variance with his experiences—that he'd always wriggle away to square the circle between the Waffle House manager he was and the high roller he wanted to be.

Scotty was long-gone with illusory aspirations. Mom would gently interject and contradict her son by reminding him of the rigged game he was ignoring. The term 'feminazi' was bandied about to scant acclaim, given that the rest of the crew consisted of two women and a subversive.

Scotty went on to gloss me a naïve 'bleeding heart liberal'. He had his cliches lined up like ducks in a row, but he didn't know the half of it. All the same, somehow, it ended up being an enjoyable, if curious, 'old times sake' afternoon. Scotty wasn't slinging the embarrassing bull of his childhood anymore. He was now pretty certain about the 'big things', as all too many family men are wont to advertise.

A few years later I heard that Scotty had gotten divorced and subsequently enlisted in the Navy. My Mom says he was sent over to Bahrain and was honored in the late-90s. I don't know what he's doing now.

I really hadn't thought of Scotty too much in recent years. Then something occurred to me while reading the paper the other day. Somehow or other I got a feeling, after I'd read the latest obituary out of Iraq, that there are a lot of Scotties killing and getting killed over there. And then I wondered why it was that what some people cherish, what they think is most honorable and sacred, is really hurting—or killing—them.

I'm guess Scotty turned out a Trumper, as was 70% of my hometown 3 times over – the highest percentage a Republican ever won. I believe Obama in 2008 held the Republican share of the 2 party vote to 63%. Funny thing is, anecdotally local sentiment is souring on Trump here as elsewhere.

I mean how a corrupt New Yorker celebrity adulterer with a golden toilet penthouse and a foul mouth who couldn't decide which testament in the Bible he adhered to, ever convinced honest God fearing ethical people in small towns across this country he was on there side will never cease to amaze. He's such a subhuman piece of shit long-time party pal of Jeffery. But they loved him dearly, and I'd bet dollars to donuts Scotty still does.