“Pay no attention to your unconscious classmates”

Continuing my account of my senior year in high school, in Punta Gorda, Florida…

My job at the Punta Gorda Publix was – at first – no worse than my job at Shop-Rite in Grand Rapids. I glumly bagged groceries, occasionally chatting with the cashiers. The cashiers, as I mentioned, were all female, and they tended to be young and pretty – probably because the managers who did the hiring were all creepy old men. At Publix, I didn’t have as many crippling social disadvantages as at school: the cliques weren’t as well defined and the employees all interacted regardless of age. There wasn’t as much pressure to be cool; we were just trying to get through our shift and go home.

My first real date – excepting Kimberly – was with a cashier and fellow Charlotte High senior named Kristy. We went to her house and watched Blind Date, an excruciatingly unfunny Blake Edwards comedy. We had a good time despite this, but at some point during the second date negotiations she recalled that she had a boyfriend away at college. This put a bit of a damper on our relationship, and as she was my only real friend in Florida, I was suitably crushed. I remember venting my adolescent angst by driving around in my parents’ 1981 Oldsmobile Delta 88, blasting Def Leppard’s Love Bites at full volume.

Around this time my job also got significantly worse. It was decided that I had worked as a bagger for long enough and that it was time for me to move up to higher-level tasks. I was supposed to re-stock items that would run low during the day, like milk and soda (what we called “pop” in Michigan). This should have been a simple job, but I was terrible at it. A normal person would scan the soda aisle, making a mental note of the items that were running low, then go to the back and fill up a cart. But I was too absent-minded to remember which items I needed to get (and I learned many years later that I have a condition called aphantasia, which means I’m unable to picture things in my mind), so I would end up getting Diet Coke instead of Caffeine Free Diet Coke, or Faygo Orange instead of Orange Crush, or two liter bottles instead of six-packs, or six-packs instead of twelve-packs, or… you get the idea. Sure, I could have gotten a scrap of paper and written down what I needed, but one thing you learn working at a place like Publix is that everybody is supposed to do every job in the same way. If the inbred redneck that stocked the soda yesterday could do it without writing anything down, there was no reason I needed to. In retrospect, I should have just said, “Look, I need to write it down. Deal with it.” But I didn’t understand at this point that my brain just didn’t work like most people’s. I was still convinced that I was smarter than everyone around me and that I was Destined for Great Things. But here I was, stymied by the soda aisle at Publix. If life were a game of Donkey Kong, I’d have been stuck on the first level. So I spent a lot of time running back and forth between the stock room and the soda aisle, muttering streams of syllables like cherrycokemountaindewtwolitersdietpepsifaygograpesixpack while my supervisor looked on and shook his head.

Meanwhile, life at the Cadillac Motel was about as glamorous as you would expect at a run-down $40-per-night motel in southern Florida. There was no door between the motel office and our living room, so you could be sitting at home enjoying an episode of Golden Girls only to be interrupted by some drunken wife-beater or sun-weathered whore looking for a place to spend the night. My parents, being good Christians, made the mistake early on of getting involved in the personal problems of these transients. It may sound callous, but in some businesses you really have to stop thinking about your clientele as human beings. If you’re going try to solve all the problems of the dregs of humanity filtering through the motels of southern Florida, you might as well close up shop and become a social worker. You’d have a lighter case load, the work pays better, and the clients aren’t allowed to barge into your living run unannounced while you’re trying to watch Golden Girls.

I remember in particular my parents counseling a young couple who were having marital problems. I’m not sure what my parents’ end game was here, given that the husband was an unskilled, heavy-drinking jerk who was prone to fits of rage, and the wife was a dim-witted 17-year-old who used to glue fake fingernails to the ends of her real nails so that it looked like she had a second set of nails that took over where the first set left off. She wasn’t obviously pregnant, so I don’t know what possessed them to get married and run off together to the Cadillac Motel; I can only guess that she was fleeing domestic abuse at home in order to be abused on the road. Years later, while watching Natural Born Killers, I wondered whether Quentin Tarantino had run into this pair somewhere along the way. Suffice it to say that their problems ran deep enough that it was going to take more than a couple of motel managers with graduate degrees in English to solve them.

Then there was the diminutive, hard-drinking Indian who went by the name Billy Two Rivers. Billy was a drifter who showed up just as my parents were feeling overwhelmed by the mess that had been left for them to clean up by Mr. and Mrs. Peg-Leg. Billy didn’t have much money, but he was willing to work, so my parents gave him room and board in exchange for doing some painting and other menial tasks. “Board” meant that Billy ate dinner with us most nights. Billy told a lot of stories of dubious factual content; one of these was that he had seen his wife and children die in front of him in a car crash. It eventually became clear that Billy was an alcoholic who was sticking around mostly because he was infatuated with my mother. My parents set up a meeting for him with someone from Alcoholics Anonymous, and Billy showed up to the meeting with a cup of spiked coffee. He left not long after that, presumably with a bit of encouragement from my parents; some weeks later my dad answered the phone to be greeted by a drunk and barely coherent Billy Two Rivers, demanding that he be allowed to come back and work at the motel. When my dad said no, Billy threatened to kill him with a knife. My dad hung up. That was the last we ever heard of Billy Two Rivers.

Toward the end of the school year, I had a surreal experience that surpassed even my first day at Charlotte High. A few days before school let out, the students were instructed to head to the athletic field for an assembly. I had no idea what was going on, but I was glad to be outside. Buildings in Florida tend to be excessively air conditioned, and despite the fact that I grew up in Michigan, I had always had a low tolerance for cold. I used to wear a jacket indoors and take it off when I got outside.

It was a sunny day in the mid-80s, with the typically oppressive Florida humidity. I took a seat in the bleachers and read Isaac Asimov’s Foundation while I waited for whatever it was to start.

Eventually, the principal came out and made some introductory remarks, which consisted mostly of informing us that we were likely to see some people faint and that we shouldn’t make a big deal out of it. He advised us that paramedics were on hand to deal with this eventuality.

Wait, what?

People are going to be fainting? I thought. What people? How do you know this? And why aren’t you stopping it? Where I came from, multiple people fainting at a school assembly was a sign that the assembly had gone horribly wrong.

It turns out that it was some kind of ROTC commencement ceremony. The dorks who had been wearing military uniforms to class all year were lining up on the field with their toy wooden rifles. They were wearing full dress uniforms, made of thick navy blue polyester. Not what you want to be wearing out in the sun in southern Florida in May. The air was muggy and still.

Various speakers came to the podium, one after another, delivering dull speeches that I have long since forgotten. Even I, sitting in the bleachers in shorts and a t-shirt, started to feel uncomfortably warm. The officers-to-be standing at attention on the field had to be dripping in sweat.

Then, maybe forty-five minutes in, the first one dropped: a diminutive brunette slumped to the ground, unconscious. Paramedics moved in from the sidelines with a stretcher and removed her from the field. The audience, having been instructed that this was no big deal, did not react. Then another fell. And another. And another.

I scanned the crowd, searching for some expression of worry or concern, but there was nothing. This was just another day at Charlotte High. My mind went back to my first day at the school, walking in on my abnormal psychology class. And just like that, I was one of the unconcerned spectators. Surely the people in charge knew what they were doing. Perhaps we would be chasing the ROTC dorks through the town with pitchforks next.

I didn’t keep an exact tally, but I think we lost about eight prospective officers that day. They didn’t die, of course. They had just passed out from the heat. I’m sure they were fine.

On the other hand, maybe they died of heat stroke, and nobody thought to complain because someone in charge had told them it was “no big deal.” People are funny that way.

Finally the school year ended, and I couldn’t recall ever being so happy. I remember walking the halls that final day at Charlotte High, trying to convince myself that my ordeal was really over. I was so traumatized by my year in Florida that I was still having nightmares about it two decades later. The details vary, but the general theme was always the same: an error was discovered with my high school transcript; it seems that I failed to take some class or other that was required for graduation. As a result, I had to return to Charlotte High to make up the missing class. Depending on how lucid I was in the dream, I’m sometimes able to rationalize that I don’t really need a high school diploma. Sometimes I remember that I have a college degree, and it occurs to me that they can’t retroactively cancel my degree just because I hadn’t actually graduated from high school. But most of the time I’m forced to surrender to the inexorable dream logic and accept that I will be spending another year in hell.

The worst of the nightmare was over that day I walked the halls of Charlotte High for the last time, but I still had three more months left at the Cadillac Motel, and I was nearing the breaking point at my job at Publix. Despite my obvious intelligence, I simply couldn’t do what was expected of me. I asked to be relieved of my shelf-stocking duties so that I could go back to bagging groceries (carting groceries across an asphalt parking lot in the Florida summer heat isn’t exactly fun either, but at least I knew I could do that), but my request was denied. I was either going to do what I was told to do or be fired. I ended up quitting a few weeks later.

My parents were, again, puzzled and disappointed – I had nothing to do for the next month but sit around the Cadillac Motel. My parents had agreed to pay my college tuition, but obviously I would need some money to live on. Why would I quit a perfectly good job?

I tried to explain the reason to my parents, but they couldn’t accept that I simply was unable to do what I was expected to do. They assumed that I was being disingenuous when I said that was lousy at putting containers of soda on a shelf. I can understand their incredulity, but if you think about, it’s an odd thing to lie about. Why would I claim to be too stupid to stock shelves? “I have a perfectly good explanation, Mom and Dad. You see, I’m borderline retarded.”