Belonging

Last night, part two of the high school reunion, was an amazing experience for me.

We all met up for dinner at 7:00 at Osso Buco, an Italian restaurant. They had set up a long table for us in the back. It wasn’t a separate room, but it was up half a flight of stairs, and as we ate, some of us could look down on the rest of the restaurant. There must have been fifty of us there, including alumni and a few spouses. It felt like the royal family eating dinner — one enormously long table. Wine and beer were included, and the meal was served family style — waiters would come and put down plates of food, and we’d help ourselves. All of the people from the previous night showed up, as well as a few others. We were going to have a slide show, but there was nowhere to project slides, so people just passed around photos and old yearbooks.

Two and a half hours later, the dinner was over. From there, most of us went to this dance club in Tribeca called Culture Club. What a place! The club was a paean to the 1980’s. The DJ spun nothing but 80’s tunes, one great song after another. The decor… well, let’s see. On part of one wall there was a painted mural of the cast of The Breakfast Club. Above one of the bars was a neon sign that said “Cocktail,” just like the sign in the Tom Cruise movie of the same name. Hanging from the ceiling were a full-size Delorean, with one of its gull-wing doors open, and a giant Rubik’s Cube. Another wall had a reproduction of the famous shot of Eliot riding his bicycle with E.T. in the basket, silhouetted against a giant moon.

We graduated in 1991, which wasn’t exactly the 80’s but wasn’t exactly the 90’s either. Post-Reagan, pre-Clinton, my high school years were defined by international events — the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of the Soviet satellite states, the Persian Gulf War. (Living overseas, international events loomed larger, and we were spared the gloomy American economic recession at home.) Pop music during my high school years was in a pretty sorry state: it was after the 80’s kitsch, yet before the arrival of Nirvana and the grungy “alternative music” that would come to define a decade, and we were stuck with the likes of Milli Vanilli, C & C Music Factory, and Vanilla Ice.

Life as an American teenager in Tokyo was pretty charmed; on the weekends, many of us would go out and party in Tokyo’s nightlife district, Roppongi. It didn’t matter that we were only 14, 15, 16, 17 years old. Either the Japanese bouncers couldn’t tell how old we foreigners were, or they just didn’t care, because they always let us in. While high schoolers back in the States were sneaking kegs into their parents’ basements, we were buying cans of beer from vending machines on the street and ordering our Moscow Mules and Amaretto Cokes at the bars, then getting onto the dance floor and dancing like crazy.

But I was pretty inhibited back then, and when I’d go out, I wasn’t really with the “cool people,” as I said the other day. I’d go out with some of my other friends, and I’d see the cool crowd and sort of aspire to be part of them, but I never really felt good enough to mix with them. And I wasn’t a very good dancer.

Last night was different. I was out there on the dance floor with everyone else, dancing my feet off. I’ve neglected to mention this, but none of the people whom I hung out with in high school showed up for the reunion. For the entire weekend this was great for me, because without them around — with me unburdened of them, if you will — I could finally be the guy I’d always wanted to be.

We were out there, dancing in a big crowd, sweating like crazy. (In the first two or three years after graduation, my dancing improved.) I was totally relaxed and pumped and enjoying myself. One great song after another came on, and I mouthed the words along with everyone else. It felt so great finally to be part of the cool crowd, to show people that I could dance, to show them that I knew all the words, to show them that I wasn’t just a nerdy smart guy after all.

We traveled back in time. It was 1990 and I was back in Tokyo, at Buzz, one of the hot Roppongi nightspots of the era. Hearing a song like “Funky Cold Medina” really enhanced the experience. I was completely immersed in high school memories. The past ten years since graduation had all been just a dream.

But then something strange happened. They started playing “Rock the Casbah,” a song that for me evokes late 1992 and early 1993, when I was in my second year of college. That year, one of the UVA a cappella groups performed that song and put in on their CD. I would listen to that CD over and over, desperately wanting to audition and get chosen for that group or one of the others. For about a year and half in college, I was obsessed with this goal.

So here I was on the dance floor, steeped in all this Japan-era high school nostalgia for 1990 and 1991, and suddenly I was wrenched a couple of years into the future to 1993. It was temporal whiplash! Paradoxically, 1991 felt so immediate in time but 1993 felt like years and years in the past. Here I was, at my high school reunion, suddenly being overwhelmed not by this collective nostalgia for high school but by an individual nostalgia for my first couple of years of college, for experiences and memories that none of these high school people dancing around me knew anything about, and all at once I felt an incredible pride in those private memories and incredibly protective of them. I suddenly realized how much had truly happened to me since high school graduation — and not in ten years, but just in the first two years after high school alone. I was overwhelmed with emotion, and I wanted to cry and laugh and dance even harder.

I realized how much I had changed and how much I had learned. The DJ played REM’s “It’s the End of the World as We Know It,” and when they got to the appropriate part I shouted the words “No Beer, Cavalier!”, just like everyone used to do back at UVA to make fun of former president O’Neill’s crackdown on drinking. (UVA students are known both as Wahoos and as Cavaliers.) And none of my fellow high school alumni even knew.

The night went on and on, and before I knew it it was past three in the morning and there were only seven of us left: me, four former football players, and two women. One of the football players was Mr. Attractive Jockboy, whom I mentioned the other day, and another of them used to hang out with the intelligent and preppy and popular crowd. And there we were, all dancing together in a circle. I couldn’t believe I was out there with them, one of the last seven holdouts — it was so surreal and cool. At this point, some great things happened.

Great moment #1: I knew the words to every song, and every so often, Mr. Attractive Jockboy — whom I never, ever talked to in high school but whom I had a big crush on — would give me a big smile and stare at me with a wild crazy expression on his face and mouth the words along with me. At one point he even put his hands on my sides and mock-danced with me. (I don’t think he has homosexual tendencies, because he was majorly going after one of the two remaining women in our group, and had been doing so the night before as well.)

Great moment #2: One of the guys obviously knew that I was gay, because at one point when we were all on the dance floor he asked me, “So are you on the prowl? Any gay guys around here?” It was so great — not only was this former high school jock actually talking to me, but he was totally comfortable with my being gay as well. I was so happy, I felt like I was soaring.

Great moment #3: I left the dance floor for a while, and when I came back again, one of the guys gave me a big high-five.

Finally we were all worn out and it was time to leave. At 4:00 in the morning we stood on Varick Street outside the club. Some of them were going back to the hotel and others were going in other directions. Before I left to catch my train, we all said goodbye and they gave me big chummy handshakes and masculine hugs and pats on the back.

And so my ten-year reunion ended.

I forgot to mention that on the wall of the club — along with all the other 80’s paraphernalia — was a picture of the logo from the movie Ghostbusters, the ghost inside a red circle with a slash through it. And this weekend I accomplished exactly the goal I’d hoped to accomplish. I killed all the ghosts. Back in high school I’d often thought that the problem was not that these “cool people” didn’t want to hang out with me, but rather that I was too scared to hang out with them, to let them get to know me. If only I hadn’t been so shy and nervous and in awe of them — if only I’d got up the courage to hang out with them — they would have liked me. It had been all my fault.

Have you ever seen the movie Can’t Buy Me Love, in which — for a short time — the perenially geeky guy manages to transcend the social barriers and become one of the cool people? That’s how I felt last night. But it was even better than that, because I hadn’t had to sell my soul in order to do it. I had truly changed in the past ten years. I had changed myself for the better. We all had. That was the greatest thing about last night, and indeed the greatest thing about the entire weekend.

I was just being myself. And finally — yes, yes, finally — being myself was good enough.