by Tom Pantera
Columnist

If I ever need a public relations person to tell the world how great I am, I’m not going to go with a professional firm. I’m going to hire one of my high school classmates.

Karon and I went back to Minneapolis last weekend for my 35th high school class reunion. I gave her big props for going with me; there aren’t many things duller than hearing a bunch of people you’ve never met rehash a past you never experienced. But she is nothing if not a good sport and she’s very good at meeting people.

It turned out that she spent a lot of the evening hearing about how intelligent and popular I was in high school. Fortunately, I didn’t hear a lot of those conversations.

The funny thing is, that’s now how I remember it. My high school, like most, was rigidly and viciously stratified. It had a caste system that would make the most retrograde Indian blush; the only thing we were missing were dots on our foreheads to identify just where in the social pecking order we were. But then, that really wasn’t necessary.

It was a very jock high school, so the best jocks were the kings and (this being the days before girl’s sports were very important) their girlfriends were the queens. I was a jock, but a pretty bad one; I warmed the football bench. I was, at best, second- or third-tier in the social hierarchy. Yeah, I was relatively smart, but in that kind of social setting smart doesn’t count for much, or so I thought.

I was popular enough to get elected “class clown” my senior year (go figure, anyone who knows me is saying), but I never felt like a success. In the two things that really mattered to me, football and the affections of a certain girl, I was a failure. And I felt like it. I pretty much hated high school, although not as much as those benighted souls who were considered losers by nearly everybody and for whom just walking into the building was torture.

So it was rather heartwarming to hear that people’s memories of me, if not my own memories of the experience, were positive.

Over the years, I’ve reconnected with various high school friends a few times and it’s always fascinating to compare notes about our memories. What you find out, of course, is that everybody either felt like a loser in high school or was haunted by the deep fear that they would be found out to be one. That latter is a fear many carry into adulthood; who hasn’t occasionally felt like he was a fraud about to be exposed? Most of us get over that, or at least learn to live with it, but in high school the feeling can be particularly acute. And the stakes seem so very, very high.

So it’s always a surprise to find out that everybody felt the same way at that age, and that everybody basically misread everything and everybody else.

I once read an article the high school years of celebrities and what their experiences say about the high school experience of nearly everybody. The author’s conclusion was that you’re basically stuck with the same personality you had in high school. The good news is that the things that make you a success in high school aren’t the same things that make you a success in the real world. That’s pretty much proven by the fact that many a current multimillionaire went through high school as an extreme nerd. Bill Gates is a shining beacon of hope to millions of socially inept, or socially ostracized, teen-agers.

But it doesn’t help when you’re actually there going through it. It’s a painful time for virtually everybody. The scars linger. To this day, being obviously excluded from any group I want to be part of sets me off. It’s like a bad flashback to when I was 17 and had little hope of cracking the ceiling under which many kids feel they’re living.

I was lucky, because I could at least make people laugh – which was itself a defense mechanism formed in my very early school years – and wasn’t the kind of person who sent the popular kids running away from me, lest they be caught “talking to him.” And I had some really good friends who at least helped me laugh about my situation. A friend of mine once attended one of my football games and led about 40 people in the stands in a chant of “UNLEASH PANTERA,” which is really pretty funny when you consider that by that point, virtually everyone else on the team would have had to suffer a paralyzing injury for the coaches to even consider sending me in.

But many was the night, as I drifted off to sleep, that I would brood on my social failures and wonder what I could possibly do to change them. It’s easy to see in retrospect that I overestimated my failures, and they weren’t all that important in the greater scheme of things. That’s the kind of perspective that comes with middle age, though; at the time, it was everything. It took a lot of years, and a lot of life’s buffeting, for me to understand just how I fit into the world. I’m still finding that out; if you’re aware, you realize that process really never ends.

So it was, in many ways, a lovely evening. It’s always nice when you find out that people remember you fondly, especially if you never really knew how they would remember you at the time. I just wish there were some way to go back through those years and tell my 17-year-old self that life would change, that the little slights that seemed so big at the time wouldn’t even be remembered, much less have any importance.

But then, when you’re 17, that kind of good news would seem like nothing more than a distant hope. And when you’re 17, sometimes hope can seem like only the coldest of comforts.