Pointy Little Whirlpools

A few weeks ago, while roaming Facebook, I looked up my old high-school classmates. Most of the names were just people I sorta remembered; one, though, was someone who was once among my best friends. We stopped talking our sophomore year of college, when she and another friend came down to visit me and a few others from our class. They were staying in my apartment for the weekend, and they wanted me to go with them to a party with one of our other classmates on Saturday night, but I didn't want to go because I was having this enormous self-esteem crisis at the time--it was probably my first obvious major depressive episode, looking back--and so they went off to this party and I stayed home. Well, later that night, a guy I'd befriended in one of my education classes called and wanted me to come out with him and one of his friends. Since I knew both of them (unlike this party where there would be all sorts of strangers) I went out for a while. Apparently, while I was gone, my two friends came back to my apartment and found me gone, and went back to the dorm of the classmate they'd gone to the party with. When I got home, and when it got late and became obvious that we had missed each other, I tried to call the going-to-the-party guy's dorm room, where I figured they'd go. In fact, I tried to call all night, but they'd taken the phone off the hook and all I ever got was a busy signal.

The next morning, they came back to get their bags and stuff, and barely spoke to me. I told them what was the issue, but they didn't want to hear it. I let a week or so pass, and then I called one of them to try to apologize.

Here I suppose I should give a little snapshot.

These two girls--we'll call them Colette and Gert--had been among my best friends through high school. I had several groups of friends, actually, and though they occasionally intersected, they were actually very discrete groups. The group they belonged to had been my friends since freshman year, and they were the group of Normal Girls. Actually, Gert and I were the least normal of the crowd, since we both had weight issues, or at least we thought we did. (Gert did, actually, and she knew it. I thought I did, which was just as bad, but again: in pictures, I don't see a fat girl.) But the rest of the girls in this group--there were about eight or eleven of us--were fashion-conscious, interested in looking "correct" and in acting like "normal" people--in other words, not drawing any kind of "negative" attention to themselves. More than once they had pointed out my faults--holding my purse the wrong way, or my strange shoes, or being too loud, or whatever--but apparently my flaws were forgivable enough that they kept me around. Gert and I, by our status as the unusual ones, were very close--writing notes, planning sleepovers, long phone-calls, etc. We had a lot in common; we were both writers, both into science-fiction and fantasy, both very verbal and with very silly senses of humor. Unlike me, though, Gert seemed to aspire to the kind of normality that the other girls embodied, and as such, she was also extremely devoted to Colette. Colette was the Voice of Propriety, and Gert seemed to see her as a mentor, someone who could teach her how to be socially acceptable. Colette seemed to enjoy having a student following at her heels, and so they were very close as well.

Anyway, after Gert and Colette left my apartment in a huff, I waited a few days to let them cool down. And then, knowing that only Colette would be allowed to decide if I should be forgiven, I called her. But Colette wasn't having any of it. I tried to explain, I tried to apologize, and she just got huffier and huffier, and louder and louder, and finally I said "You know what? I tried," and she hung up on me.

That was the last time I talked to either of them, and that was in 1989.

And it's twenty years later--TWENTY YEARS, my god--and so when I saw Gert's name in Facebook, I figured We're all grownups now, right? and I dropped her a note: "Hey. It's been a long time; want to talk, or no?"

That was a few weeks ago. And today, I figured I'd check to see if there were any of our other friends she was in touch with, and I peeked at her friend list.

Her entire friend list is practically a roll-call of our old high-school classmates. I'm talking about people we never hung around with; guys from entirely different groups, people we wouldn't have spoken to for a million dollars back in high school, just everyone. Every single person listed under our high school and our graduation year is on her list of friends.

Except one.

I went into my Facebook profile after that, and I cleared out all mention of my school history. And then I took out all the information about my interests, and all the little fripperies that you can put on Facebook to tell others about you. And I added a status update: "Gladys is..." ...amazed at how petty people can be.

The thing is: I would not be surprised if the grapevine has had its way with my reputation. People who know bits and pieces, little details they can stick together with chewed-up bubblegum and spit and rumors, and weave into some amazing tapestry of We Always Suspected Gladys Was A Bitch. It's like at my grade-school reunion, when one of my classmates was finally kind enough to tell me why everyone had been making mysterious comments to me all night: because everyone believed I'd killed JP, who they'd never known or even heard of--but some of my classmates are on the police force, and one of them was stationed in JP's mom's neighborhood right around the time he died. And it all became a story that I'd killed him and been to jail, and I found it funny because I knew for a FACT that had JP been alive to hear that story, he would have absolutely REVELED in the myth that we'd created. But of course, even though it was funny, it wasn't really funny--it was just proof that people will believe anything, especially if it's something sordid, and especially especially if it's about someone they didn't really like in the first place.

Anyway, after cleaning off my Facebook info, I went to my Classmates account. I'd had similar encounters on Classmates: people who had been closer to me than siblings, in at least one case, who never answered my attempts to get back in contact. So I sent a couple of e-mails to those people--a kind of "one last try" thing, with my e-mail address included--and then I sent a message to the Classmates admins, telling them to cancel my membership and delete my profile. Before I left, I looked at my guestbook.

On Classmates, the guestbook tells you who has looked at your profile and checked a box to let you know that they were there. There were a few names there; a couple of my old students, and two girls from grade school...and my ex-husband.

No, not CR; we, at least, have an understanding. No, no; I'm talking about DAVID, the infamous First Husband, the one who destroyed my credit, kept many of my belongings, followed me around the Internet til I told him "don't ever contact me again". I guess he doesn't think this counts as "contact".

Of course, I had to see what he put in his profile. (And no, I did NOT check the box that would let him know I was there. I wouldn't give him the satisfaction.) I can tell you what he did NOT put in his profile: the fact that he's now on his THIRD marriage (at least, his third that I know of); any information regarding those first two marriages (I left him for another man; his second wife wrote a crapload of bad checks on his employers' account, then took off); and in terms of the parts of his life I know about--1990 thru 1995, basically--anything even REMOTELY resembling an accurately-portrayed, truthful FACT. The man is a scumball. He's a self-aggrandizing macho bullshit artist. Reading his biographical story, you would think that once he got out of high school he'd magically transformed into a combination of Steve Jobs, Elvis Presley, and Saint Peter. There are jobs where he claimed to have "managed" or "run" or "been in charge of" something, when in reality he rode his friends' coattails and did so little actual work that his friend finally told him "maybe you'd better go find something that can pay you, because we really can't". I would love, love, love to go over that pack of lies with a red pen and clear up all the inaccuracies; put in the things he left out, and cut down his inflated, egotistical, totally pretentious bullshit.

The funniest thing of all: After this blog post, I probably won't even think about him for months--maybe in April, when our anniversary would have been; or November, around his birthday. About 361 days in any given year, as far as I'm concerned he might as well have never even existed...but right now I would take an unflattering amount of unmitigated pleasure in writing a rebuttal to that puff-piece. Seriously, it's SO MANY FRICKIN' LIES. It's like he did plastic surgery on his life, and only kept the little bumps and smile-lines--the flaws that make him SEEM "real", the things that serve to cover up how much he's actually taken out, that keep him from seeming "fake". Well, he IS fake. And every time I've come across him, from the moment I left him, I've been reminded again and again of exactly HOW fake he really is.

Needless to say, my mood--to say nothing of my opinion of the human race--is fairly low. I just don't know why so many people from my past want nothing to do with me--why people who were once my dearest friends can't even be bothered to answer an e-mail. No one, I'm sure, ever wants to think they might be a bad or unlovable person--and if it was just a couple of people acting as though I was best forgotten, I'd be more able to dismiss their rejections--but really, it's starting to seem more like a consensus, and that worries me. I can think of at least six or seven people, without even trying, who won't acknowledge me, and no matter how many ways I try to frame it, I'm still hurt and stung and worried by their opinions.