I used to have this crazy multi-colored backpack. It was some sort of plastic vinyl material and different sections of the outside were hued in vibrant Mexican restaurant shades – orange, green, purple, blue. The overall effect was one of discordant rainbow gone awry. I loved this backpack.
I forget whether I had it in seventh grade (Oregon, Catholic school) or got it just thereafter, en route to CTY in Baltimore for the first of what proved to be three summers (the last two in Carlisle, PA). My distinct memories of the backpack are during CTY and shortly thereafter, the early months at the Academy which I recently recounted so fondly. The more I ponder it, the more I think I must have had it in seventh grade, because I later reflected that so many of the sexual-orientation-based slurs I was targeted with that year (and later) could be traced back to my proud carrying of an insanely multi-colored backpack.
Regardless of when I first carried it, I was still carrying it when I became involved with someone who might put some of those slurs (theoretically) to rest, in the fall of my second try at eighth grade (the first in four years) at the aforementioned Academy. I was tall; she was tall. I was awkward; she was awkward. What’s more to like? She seemed extremely into me and I was harassed by most of the popular girls in the school for something like three weeks into “asking her out”. I was in the slow crowd of a slow school (though to be fair, I wasn’t really in a crowd yet), so no one really had any idea what going out really meant. I distinctly remember a note from one of the popular girls who was passing the time trying to set us up for her own amusement using the word “steady”. The year was 1993, but the whole episode was straight outta ’53.
For three years, embarking on this awkward abortive “relationship” would be the biggest regret of my career at the Academy (until said throne of remorse was toppled by an infinitely worse and more serious relationship). There was simply nothing to it. We were virtually afraid to talk to each other, we barely held hands, we never got anywhere close to kissing. I’m not sure we even hugged each other, though we must have at least once. She made me insanely nervous, in no small part because people had spent so much time telling me that she liked me. I didn’t know what to do with that. I won’t say I didn’t have an interest in her, but I think my real interest was in the idea of the whole thing. The idea of being liked. The idea of actually openly expressing feelings for a girl. I had had crushes on girls since kindergarten and it felt like it was finally okay for the first time ever. Which is probably a large part of why the interaction continued long after we had run out of things to say to each other. Which hadn’t been much in the first place.
What I hadn’t been enrolled in the Academy long enough to realize was that while it was “okay” to “be going out”, no one was really doing so in eighth grade. I had picked up some misconception that lots of people were dating and it was sort of the hip thing to do (probably based on more blind assumptions that the next place one goes will always be the one filled with more intelligent, mature, advanced creatures – see also skipping grades, college, work, and every other new experience in my life). As it turned out, our relationship was big news when it started and only became the larger object of ridicule as it progressed (or failed to over time). Every indignity of the two months (or thereabouts) need not be recounted here, but many of my future good friends (lifelong, no less) spent the period after lunch running between she and I as we awkwardly ambled up the path, a well practiced demonstration of how much space was between us as we were walking “together” and how utterly empty of interaction our relationship really was. As I recall, most of our conversations toward the end were about how much we weren’t bothered or intimidated by this blanket rejection of our peers and felt no need to speed things up.
The relationship was abruptly, almost cataclysmically ended by me. Her best friend at the time (and a future girlfriend of mine, as it turned out) had made repeated dire predictions to her of a randomly selected specific date in the future, darkly labeled “Doomsday”. They had private conversations about it and I only periodically heard of it from one or the other of them, with no real details except the girl’s constant denial that any such prediction had any merit. Sick of hearing about it the night before the predicted day, I declared to the best friend and another friend in the locker bay that “Doomsday will never happen!” They giggled uproariously and then asked me if I really knew what Doomsday was about. I (how could I have been so oblivious?) really didn’t. And they looked at me and led me to some conclusions and I blushed, suddenly realizing I had declared that I would never break up with the girl. Blindly crazed by the ridiculousness of my declaration, I went straight home to fulfill the prophecy on the phone that night, simply to make it perfectly clear that I had not intended to declare the relationship eternal.
I never much talked to the girl after that night on the phone… I remember distinctly her responding to a group of people asking about it within earshot of me that “He doesn’t have a reason!” and then she pointedly glared at me. I didn’t treat that girl fairly and I knew it almost immediately, let alone with the passage of time. I held all sorts of things against her that weren’t her fault – the bullying of the popular girls, my naivete and misunderstanding of the school, my not really considering whether I liked her as a factor (just being giddy that someone actually liked me), the incredible social ostracism that resulted from our spectacle of a botched partnership. None of these were her fault. They were the fault of the situation, of circumstance, of (gulp) all the factors that made eighth grade such a living hell the first time around, when I said that “hormones” and “adolescence” were just cover-up words for inappropriate and inhumane treatment of others (I still largely believe that they are). But in my mind at the time, she was conflated utterly with the disastrous situation and I could not have dug myself a larger social hole to start five years at the Academy. There were tons of people who knew almost nothing of me by the time we graduated except “that was the guy who dated ___ in eighth grade, right?”
Or at least it felt that way.
Shortly after the phone call and the fulfillment of Doomsday, my multi-colored backpack started running out of steam. It was tearing and dirty as all get out… the material was cheap and didn’t hold up well amidst Albuquerque’s volatile climate. I denied needing a new backpack – I loved my color wonderland and never like replacing anything utilitarian (see also and especially shoes). My parents had to get me a backpack to get me to try to replace the technicolor satchel.
Their knowledge of my love of green and my Mom’s avowed love of L.L. Bean combined to prompt them to purchase the green L.L. Bean backpack of that year’s vintage. It arrived a few weeks after “Doomsday” and my parents attempted to confiscate the color wheel in favor of the new bright green book-carrying machine. But – horror of horrors! – it was identical to the backpack the recently dumped girl carried each day and had since I met her.
Explaining to my parents (who had really only tangentially been aware of the “relationship” in the first place, given that [A] it was embarrassing, [B] I saw her outside of school exactly once, and [C] we didn’t talk on the phone all that much) exactly why taking this backpack to school even one time would be the piece de resistance in a carefully crafted social suicide already in progress was, in a word, difficult. Given my new resolution to start salvaging the next 4.5 years, it was unforgivably impossible. Not “try it, you might like it” but “return it, yesterday”. It was one of two gifts I received from my parents in high school that I outright rejected and refused.
We argued about it periodically for something like a week before they finally conceded. That weekend, we trudged to the mall to find suitable non-doppleganger shoulderwear. And we walked into an Eddie Bauer store where I picked out the green backpack that would travel with me through the rest of my educational life.
Four years later, as a freshman in college, I would discover that this backpack, already a veteran of more time with me than any other item in a school setting, was identical in every way to one owned and regularly carried by one of two people on the college debate circuit I would truly wind up detesting. Over four years of bemused acknowledgment of this coincidence over an ebbing and flowing rivalry, we would only accidentally switch packs once; remarkable given that the general practice on APDA is to leave everyone’s stuff strewn all over an auditorium each weekend, often only loosely arranged and hastily grabbed on the way to wherever is next. Thereafter, we learned that he always left his main section zippers at rest at the apex of the backpack, equally meeting in the middle, while I always had mine all the way over to one side or the other, with only one zipper holding the whole operation closed. We never were confused again.
As bitterness grew in our rivalry and some particularly harsh words and accusations were exchanged at different junctures, I began taking extra precautions to ensure that he had no excuse to “accidentally” walk off with all my cases. I’m sure he did the same and both of us were completely overreacting. But as someone said on the forum in a thread recounting some of these events, 2001 was probably about the most bitter time imaginable to be in college debate and no one really wants to go there again.
The girl recently RSVP’ed and then retracted her RSVP to come to the ten-year high school reunion. Unlike the other ex of mine to follow this pattern, I was a little sad to see her follow it. I’m not sure I’d have any more to say to her than I ever did, but she’s married with kids and life seems to have worked out for her. It must be said that some pictures of Emily from eighth grade look not dissimilar from this individual at that time, and it makes me wonder about change and timing and a whole host of things.
The guy who actually shared my backpack hosted many people, including Emily and I, at a Super Bowl party in 2005 when we were back east. He seemed happy, more mature, less eager to lash out and prove himself to a world that wasn’t always kind. He walked us out when we left and sincerely thanked us for coming; it had been a nice surprise for all three of us (Emily liked him even less than I did). He died the next year at the age of 26.
Fish and I had a bizarre series of phrases we used to say early in high school, when our friendship had solidified later that eighth grade year. It was based on L.L. Bean – he had something from there or my mom did or we were just talking about L.L. Bean. It began with “L.L. Bean. What does the L stand for? Love. Love Love Bean.” and ended, after multifarious precarious permutations, with “What does the Love stand for? Bean.” It sounds like a commercial in this retelling, but it was really just about silliness and how Fish and I could make a humorous interaction out of anything. For some reason, walking in the windy October city tonight on the way to a late lunch or an early dinner, this old scheme occurred to me. And I was whisked away to L.L. Bean and the whole history above.
Really, I just wanted to talk about backpacks.
