My yearbook from my senior year of high school is filled with the hastily-scribbled comments of classmates and teachers praising me for "being an individual," as in, "I love the way you are your own person! You're an individual! Don't change! Keep in touch," ad nauseam. At the time, I considered that a compliment and was rather proud of it, buying into the myth that I had a certain special "something" which my peers had not been able to attain. Now, however, I'm not so sure it's something I can in good conscience take credit for. An "individual," by my definition, is a person who exists outside of mainstream society and lives by their own set of rules, and, contrary to appearances, I was not like that.
Granted, at first glance, I probably appeared to be. My hair was longer than that of any guy (and almost any girl) in my class, in which I was ranked 13th out of 230. My interests included J. O'Barr's The Crow and heavy metal, but, unlike many fans of both, I avoided mind-altering substances almost completely. Once during the school year, I wore a Star Trek: The Next Generation uniform to school, just for kicks. Even on the last day of school, when the principal called my name during the graduation ceremony, I walked up to him with a 3.98 GPA, a silver hoop through my left ear, and a Superman t-shirt underneath my robe.
In short, I was "the weird guy."
But did I actually make the choice to be weird?
To call my hometown of Barre, Vermont "conservative" might be too weak an appellation. To call it the largest white trash heap in Central Vermont would be going just a teensy bit too far. Perhaps using the facts themselves would be the best way to find that elusive middle ground.
With its population of under 10,000, Barre is one of Vermont's ten largest cities. The local high school, Spaulding High (conveniently located between the city's three Cumberland Farms convenience stores), has a fairly good Division I basketball team which enjoys a tremendous amount of support from the blue-collar natives. The bars in the city outnumber the churches and have become a bigger draw than ever since the city council passed an ordinance allowing topless dancing.
Barre's tiny populace somehow supports five take-out pizza places (Domino's, Little Caesar's, Pizza Hut, Del's, and Jockey Hollow), but only two bookstores. Besides the local granite quarry, Rock of Ages (which is actually located in nearby Graniteville), Barre's largest tourist attraction is Hope Cemetery, which functions not only as a final resting place for many native Vermonters, but also as a macabre outdoor art gallery. The cemetery's tombstones are themselves the work of stonecarvers who have long since succumbed to silicosis caused by the dust from the stone which they made their living sculpting.
Until I entered high school, I rarely left Barre, except to go on family vacations or to the orthodontist in distant Burlington. My first fourteen years of life found me stuck in a town with people who seemed to find writing a largely useless skill, except when it came to airbrushed detail work on "DON'S 4x4." The scrawny, bookish kid that I was could not thrive in that kind of society. I never got beaten up, because a few of those future quarry workers had hearts of something considerably softer than granite. But, until I reached high school, I was never able to explain to any of my peers why school was so important to me or what appeal reading Huck Finn had over looking at the pictures in The Auto Hunter's Guide. I never consciously placed education and imagination on such high pedestals, and whatever direct influence my parents had in the decision was limited at best. I simply did not want to end up like the kids I laid awake at night dreading.
However, despite how uncomfortable and out-of-place I felt, I remember a time in my junior high school life when I desperately struggled to fit in as much as possible with my peers. It wasn't a time of my life of which I hold particularly fond memories, but it did exist. And during that time, everyone I knew was very conscious of what clothes they should be wearing, how long their hair should be, and what movies they should like.
If you didn't have the obligatory jean jacket and pair of Nikes (preferably Nike Airs, of course), you were just begging to be ridiculed. Jeans were never out of style, but make sure that they were Lees, Levis, or Bugle Boys. Gap jeans were for girls, and rich girls at that (well, as rich as Barre City allowed its girls to be). If you were going to wear a button-down shirt, make sure to remove the useless little loop of fabric on the back, or bigger kids would torment you relentlessly for having a "fag tag," and someone would inevitably rip it off in the lunch line, almost always ruining a shirt that your parents would not hesitate to tell you they "paid good money for."
Long hair was for redneck kids who couldn't afford real haircuts; Mom would trim enough to keep it out of their eyes, and that was it until summer, when it was cropped shorter than even the Marines would have thought necessary. If you weren't a redneck (and no one ever admitted to being one), you could either comb your hair to one side, using plenty of hair gel, or spike it up like Chris Mullen; I had a vague idea that Chris Mullen was some basketball player, and I knew I had never seen his hair, but the way to get Moe to cut my hair cool was to use those three magic words: "Like Chris Mullen's."
And cool movies were always easy to figure. If you expressed a great liking for anything with lots of violence in it (especially RoboCop), and a violent distaste for anything "queer" (expressing the beauty of human interpersonal relationships) or "boring" (having to do with anything you'd learn in school), you were set. Being able to boast about having seen all the Friday the 13th or Nightmare on Elm Street movies was a definite plus, and if you could explain the continuity between all the Jasons, man, you were something to behold.
The only problem was, there were some who, try as they might, just couldn't follow those simple, stupid rules. Me, for instance.
I was somehow constantly oblivious to the finer details of 7th-grade fashion; I had the Levi's jean jacket and the white Nikes, but then I'd go and blow it by wearing a Batman t-shirt, before such things were "retro" and, therefore, cool. Plus, having plastic-rimmed glasses approximately the thickness of a bank vault door didn't help.
Furthermore, despite my express orders to Moe to make my hair look like Chris Mullen's, it always wound up sticking up where I wanted it flat and vice versa, no matter how much hair gel I used, as well as showing off what I was sure were desperately huge ears (in fact, they weren't; they were just big enough to not be inconspicuous).
And I couldn't stand horror movies, or any movie with any kind of shock suspense whatsoever; I nearly panicked when a friend brought me along to see Little Shop of Horrors, not realizing at first that it was a comedy.
Plus I had bad skin.
Plus I would have rather read a book than played basketball.
Plus I couldn't play basketball even if I had wanted to, despite the attempt at a Chris Mullen haircut.
I was a nerd. A geek. A dweeb, a loser, a dork. I wanted so badly to be "like them," not realizing that it just wasn't going to happen, and throwing myself up against that wall of rejection time after time after time.
I was not making decisions to be different. I was not "doing my own thing." I was trying to fit in with groups of people that I just did not belong in, and I kept trying, time after time, even after it had become obvious to me that it was not working.
I was the furthest thing from an "individual" that I can imagine.
Then the world of Montpelier opened itself to me quite accidentally through a handful of Capital City misfits who occasionally hung out in Barre at the same comic store that I frequented. Vermont's capitol lies smack dab next to Barre on a map, though, for some reason, any Central Vermonter will tell you that it's seven miles to Montpelier from Barre, and vice-versa. Montpelier's population is slightly larger than Barre's, but, for all intents and purposes, they are considered the same size. The city is home to the Governor's mansion, two movie theaters, and three natural food stores. During the winter holidays, a huge, artsy net of lights, resembling a giant squid from a 50's B-movie, hangs over the intersection of State and Main.
While Barre welcomes the new McDonald's which will be built past Howard's Market in South Barre, most of Montpelier's store owners are currently fighting to prevent that same corporation from invading Montpelier's downtown, which supports the distinctly "Vermonty" Bear Pond Books, Crump's Coffee House, and Ben & Jerry's scoop shop. Montpelier's largest tourist attraction is, unsurprisingly, the Capitol Building, with its huge gold-leafed dome and carefully-sculpted lawn. During the summer, all manner of Montpelier residents can be found on the Capitol Lawn, from barefoot high school kids high on grass to little children playing ball with Mom and Dad to older couples sitting on benches and enjoying the sunshine.
Where Barre enforced a rigidity of thought and a shame of intellect, Montpelier seemed to encourage expression and imagination. I was one of the very few members of my high school class who spent his weekends there playing Dungeons & Dragons, instead of line dancing at Blueberry Hill or bowling at Twin City Lanes. I realized later that the city had its faults, even if they were different than Barre's; the average annoying Barre native had never been anywhere and had never done anything, whereas the average annoying Montpelier native had been everywhere (or so he said), had done everything (or so she said), but was never in the process of doing anything at the present, except acting as if they were still in Greenwich Village.
Still, even Montpelier's worst was better for me than Barre's best, and I enjoyed hanging out with my new group of friends. It was through them that I acquired my fondness for long hair, earrings, and a taste for film goth. I found a society I could fit into, and I fit into it, even though I was more scholastic than Jami and didn't smoke pot like Josh. My differences went largely ignored by the group, a welcome relief for me, who had grown up learning to fear them. Viewed in terms of that little enclave, I was just "one of the guys." Dave never turned to me during one of our D&D games and said, "Y'know what you are Stratt? You're an individual, that's what you are." They accepted me as a member of their party and certainly not much of a deviation from their version of "normal."
This is what I brought back to Barre, a life which, on the weekends, was perfectly normal to me. Others had never been exposed to it, and they resisted it at first. At first, I hated high school, because my Montpelier friends were not there; weekends were the times when I saved up enough strength to get through another five days of hell. But as my confidence grew, their opinion of me mattered less and less, and, eventually, they accepted me as someone who was not like them but someone they were not going to get rid of or change. Some of them even grew to respect what they saw as integrity, and those people, the ones who had excluded me for not being like them, were the ones who praised me for my "individuality" in my yearbook.
Even now, returning to that yearbook makes me feel a little twinge of pride, despite my token attempts to retain humility. But now, instead of being proud that I am "my own person" or an "individual," I take credit for finding a place in society where I feel comfortable and fighting to be accepted as a person who was like the people I truly respected. No one wants to exist outside of society; I sure didn't, even with my dyed-black hair and my Crow fixation. On the fringe, maybe. In a different part of it, sure. But who could really just decide that no one was worth their time and turn their backs on the rest of the world? Even the most anarchistic of the anarcho-romantics needs to buy their clove cigarettes and Cure CDs from someone.
As hackneyed as the old politically-incorrect saw about "no man being an island" is, it's true. Identifying with a social group is a basic human need, and even the weirdest among us are, believe it or not, only human.