I Think I Finally Like High School

And it only took 37 years since graduation

Last Sunday night, I had arguably one of the great dinners of my life.

I wasn’t in Napa or the Hamptons at some trendy getaway anointed with a Michelin star.

Nor was I dining with my wife, by candlelight, on the banks of the Seine while a fully reunited R.E.M. (even you Bill Baker) serenaded us with an all-mandolin version of “Nightswimming.”

Nope. Last Sunday, I ate salmon off paper plates with a dozen fifty- something men on a rooftop in Downtown L.A. And it was sublime.

Mind you, we weren’t just a hodgepodge of men tossed together by chance like a reality show or a basic training barrack. Though, truth be told, there was a time (high school) when I knew some of these fellas even less than that. But I’m jumping ahead.

What bonded us, and was basically the only requirement to be included, is that we all attended the super-intense, all boys Episcopalian high school. A long, long time ago. Some left before graduating. Others came late and got to miss the horrors of middle school. But we were all once there together. The class of 1984.

I’ll be honest. For decades I had a wildly ambivalent relationship with my high school history. Okay, I used to flip off the school every time I passed it on the canyon to the West Side. So maybe it wasn’t that ambivalent.

Fine. For many, many, many years, I harbored a Sean Hannity-level of grievance and resentment. This was largely directed at boys who I perceived to have bullied me, not accepted me or questioned my manhood.

Remember, this was an all boys school without even a trace of the civilizing and mitigating effects that are inherent in coed education.

As you can imagine, especially if you saw the Kavanaugh hearings, this was the kind of school where the tone was set by football, drinking, drinking after football, or recounting skirt-chasing tales after a night of , you guessed it, football and drinking.

It was the kind of school where I’d repeatedly be called a “faggot” for what socks with black leather shoes like my British Mod style icons. Or I’d be invariably threatened with being thrown in a pool, at a party, for having British Mod style icons.

Mind you, nothing excuses bullying or casual homophobia. But it is important to factor in that it was a different era. Sensitive comedian Gary Gulman summed up that gender zeitgeist when he joked about what it was like being a boy in the 1980s: “The definition of manhood was so narrow, you were either Clint Eastwood or Richard Simmons. There was nothing in between. There were no Paul Rudds. There were no kind-eyed Mark Ruffalos.” He goes on to recount that in his high school, other boys called him “gay” for ordering a Sprite. Gary Gulman didn’t go to my high school, but he could have.

Gulman tells this story as a way of articulating how exponentially more tolerant Millenial and Gen Z boys are today. Not just in terms of fully accepting LGBTQ+ members not as something to be ridiculed or attacked. But also in terms of accepting a far wider swath of heteronormative boy types. That would even include my type: super sensitive Jewish boy who enjoyed encyclopedias, Encyclopedia Brown and making my own wrestling cards. Which, let’s face it, back then qualified me for a savagery hat trick.

And it’s not just individuals that are kinder and more enlightened now. So are institutions. Schools would never tolerate the mean spirited harassment that my school cavalierly and tacitly condoned as “boys will be boys.”

When they showed us the “Lord of the Flies” movie in 7th grade, I now realize it was screened less as a cautionary tale and more as an instructional manual.

So what does all this have to do with my sunday salmon dinner? Only everything.

You see, one of the great gifts of my adult life has been finally making peace with my high school experience and the characters who populated it.

Because of Facebook, reunions, and a prodigious amount of therapy, I’ve invested a lot of time talking to and getting to know guys who I previously had considered scary and forbidding in middle and high school.

I’ve got to share my stories with them, to hear their versions of the same stories. I’ve tried to understand what others were going through themselves contemporaneously. And the whole process has brought to me enormous relief and catharsis.

I’ll give you one relatively benign example that I believe stands in for many conversations over the years, where I discovered I went to school with a lot of really good guys that I was too scared or ill-equipped to know well back in the day.

So, long story short, in 8th grade, I was terminally shy. Jodie Foster as Nell spoke more often than I did. So one kid in my grade decided to spread the rumor that I was so timid and quiet because I was a drug addict. This rumor picked up steam and destroyed my year until I threatened to cut the throat of the rumor starter with my Swiss Army Knife- Presumably not the corkscrew or toothpick. (Ironically, by senior year, the same people made fun of me for NOT being a drug addict. But the irony was too much to explain to high school seniors who were on drugs.)

Why am I telling you this? Because the guy I threatened to stab was sitting next to me at the Sunday dinner. And over the years, I’ve discovered him to be a great, genuine guy. But at this dinner, I recalled the whole bullying story to him. He didn’t get defensive. He seemed to genuinely not remember it. And truth be told, if I had been in a more secure period of my life, I’d likely have been able to laugh off the rumor, rather than letting it fester into an era-defining memory.

But how healthy was this? I was able to sit down with a former “tormentor” and tell him how it had made me feel. No one called a disparaging name or threatened to drop me on to the downtown streets below. We just cleared the air like men.

And the whole dinner was like this. Men telling stories from four decades ago in granular detail. And other men reacting with empathy and compassion. It was a great night.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t absolve people for past bullying. I’m not the Pope or Dr. Phil. But I’ve come to understand people’s past behavior. And I’ve learned not to treat it with the gravity I long carried it with.

The more guys I speak to, the more I recognize that back then, at that school, in that era, nobody knew what anyone else was going through. At home or internally.

Over the years, I’ve subsequently learned that lots of our school’s most violent young men were facing abuse at home. Some boys dealing with teen insecurity had previously lost a parent to suicide. Some of the boys who lashed out the most were simultaneously being used as pawns in acrimonious divorce maneuvers.

As kids, we knew none of this. We understood none of this. Because nobody talked about anything. Especially boys talking to other boys about their inner turmoil.

But now I do and I’m a way better man because of it. I pray that others gain the same cathartic reflection that I have by opening up. The fact is these men and very few others went through the specific experience that we went through together.

I genuinely look at these classmates at the dinner and the many more I’ve reconnected with over the years as a band of brothers. And this would have been an inconceivable notion just a few years back. And entirely impossible in high school when intense social stratification would have made such open mixing of disparate types of boys darn near impossible.

But such are the perks of time passage. Of changing eras and attitudes. Of sharing our stories honestly and transparently. And ultimately, of growing up.