The last one of these was a while ago. In it, I told a story about a girl I knew back at Westwood Elementary School, a girl I'm calling Pauline Binder. You can read it here if you haven't read it already…but you don't have to. All you need to know is that Pauline was a girl who got picked-upon a lot — we might now call it "bullying" in some ways — and I even joined in on it for a while before I grew up a little, stopped, and got most of the other kids to stop. Pauline was most grateful.
Pauline and I had a certain rapport because we'd both been skipped ahead a couple of grades in school. This meant that we were both pointed at by others and identified as the youngest kids in our classes and probably the smartest. I don't think anyone but the two of us knew this but she was smarter than I was. Waaay smarter. She'd been skipped ahead because she'd demonstrated superiority to her classmates in English, Arithmetic, History and Foreign Languages.
With me, it was just English. I was skipped because I was proficient in that and only that. My skills in the other areas were probably average for my age…and that wasn't good enough when you were expected to be Class Brain and also when you'd missed certain grades.
She moved from Westwood Elementary to Emerson Junior High the same time as I did and then it was on to University High. We stayed friends, though with decreasing proximity. I didn't think much about it then but looking back, I think it had something to do with how the way boys and girls relate to one another changes in early teen years. When you're in single digits, age-wise, girls are just like boys with different interests…and maybe in most instances, they're not as strong or suited for rougher sports and games.
At least, that's what it was like when I was growing up. Maybe it's changed. Before my teen years, I probably had more female playmates than male. Where we lived, most of the kids my age happened to be girls. Since I wasn't that interested in sports, we got along fine. The main difference between the girls I knew at age 10 and the boys is that the girls were mostly curious to explore the differences in our respective anatomies. Sadly, when I hit the age when that would have begun to be real fun, they stopped suggesting it.
That was the age when we began to regard the opposite sex as The Opposite Sex, and we all had to begin dealing with our attraction (or lack of attraction) to its members and with those members' attaction (or lack of attraction) to us. I was still some years from dating but the girls around me at school were becoming potential dating candidates, and of course it mattered to me in a different way if they did or didn't like me.
It was 1967 or 1968 when a bad thing happened to Pauline. We were both 13 and since we'd skipped grades, at least a year younger than our classmates. I was starting to get along in a schoolyard flirtatious way with girls…not all girls, of course, but enough. My mind was crammed with jokes from TV shows, records and comic books and I could often summon one up at a propitious moment. I could also draw cartoons that were kinda impressive for my age.
One reason Pauline and I weren't close friends is that she didn't have any close friends. And one reason she didn't have any close friends is that she could be pretty obnoxious. To talk to her was to hear that you were wrong about this, wrong about that, wrong about everything. In class, she'd interrupt anyone — teachers, included — to point out the teensiest error.
She was also not diplomatic when she did this. In life, you need to learn how to correct someone without implying you think they're a blithering idiot. Pauline knew a lot but she sure didn't know how to do that.
And she was unattractive, which back in the sixties was maybe the worst thing you could be if you were a sixteen-year-old girl. Thinking back, I believe she could have been with a better choice of hairstyle, wardrobe, glasses and (especially) expression on her face. But the hair and wardrobe were drab, the glasses were huge, and she always looked like she was appalled at all the stupidity around her. I have no memories of her ever smiling, not even when I got the bullies to stop bullying her, and she had zero sense of humor.
In gym class back then, there was a lot of what the esteemed Mr. Trump has called "locker room talk." We were in our mid-teens, all or almost all virgins and very, very horny. One day, Neal Fordham was ticking off his list of the ten hottest girls on campus and he said, "I'd do any one of them in a flash." I made some smartass comment about how if he did "do" any of them, it would be over in a flash (ha ha) and added, "There isn't a woman alive under the age of 60 that you wouldn't 'do'" and that got a big laugh also from the guys around us.
Then one of them said, "Yeah, except Pauline Binder!" And he got a much bigger laugh than the two of mine put together.
I doubt Pauline ever heard that remark but I'm sure she was aware that no guy on campus was the least bit interested in her. I had been nicer to her than anyone else but as she got older, she got more strident in correcting others and she trapped in a circle of great viciousness: She was angrier and angrier than no one liked her…and no one liked her because she was always so damned angry.
One day, she decided to do something about it and, of course, this lady who was so very, very smart about so many things was absolutely wrong in what she did.
There was girl in our class named Cady who was a person of stunning beauty. She was cute. She was popular. She was at the very top of Neal Fordham's Top Ten List and everyone else's. In other words, she was the direct opposite of Pauline.
Cady had a very distinctive way of dressing which emphasized the key points of what sexist guys would call a "dynamite bod." That's them saying that, not me. One day, Pauline came to school dressed like Cady.
I guess she finally got fed up with everyone treating her as they did and she looked at Cady, who was everything she was not, and thought, "That's how to do it." I'm engaged in a lot of assuming here but I also assume I'm right. Cady was actually doing some modeling work at that age, including a bikinied layout in a surfing magazine that many a student raced to buy when we heard about it. Somewhere in storage, I may still have mine.
There was a clothed layout of her in some other magazine that had her dressed pretty much as she dressed for school. I assume — again with the assumptions! — that Pauline got a copy of it, then went to her mother or someone and said, "That's how I want to dress from now on." The first day back from Christmas vacation, that's how Pauline showed up for class: Dressed like Cady.
I'm not sure I can express to you how utterly, chillingly wrong this looked. First of all, it practically screamed, "I am desperate for someone to find me attractive!" Secondly, it looked like she was entering a Cady look-alike contest…but she didn't have the face or figure to go with the outfit. Imagine a grossly obese person becoming an Elvis impersonator. The outfit might be perfect but the person doesn't match the outfit.
Thirdly — and this was the worst of it — she still had that scowl on her face. She hadn't grasped that Cady's smile was a big part of her appeal. Pauline still looked like he was hating us for hating her.
Between second and third periods at Uni Hi, there was a little fifteen minute interval called Nutrition during which many students would grab a snack to tide them over until lunch. This day, no snacks were grabbed. This day, it spread all over campus: Come see Pauline Binder! You won't believe how ridiculous she looks!
She was in my second period class and we both stayed a bit after to talk to the teacher about something. As we went out into the corridor, there was a mob of students out there waiting for her, some shoving others aside to get a good look…and to laugh. They all howled with laughter and they were not laughing with Pauline. They were laughing at Pauline and telling her how stupid she was to dress like that. Some of them, having been the victims of her condescending corrections, were probably just giving back what she'd given them for years.
I cannot recall ever seeing another human being in so much non-physical pain. Pauline began crying and yelling and trembling and began screaming over and over, at no one in particular, "WHY DO YOU ALL HATE ME? WHY DO YOU ALL HATE ME?" One student, who couldn't have made things worse if he'd lobbed a brick at her face, yelled back, "Because you're an ugly, mean cunt!"
Around then, a teacher waded into the fray, waved for the taunting to cease, and put an arm around Pauline, who was sobbing uncontrollably and saying over and over, now in bewilderment instead of agony, "Why do they all hate me? Why do they all hate me?" It suddenly stopped being funny, not that it ever was to some of us.
The teacher led Pauline away. There was a moment of shocked silence in the corridor and someone — I wish it had been me — said to guy who'd yelled the "cunt" insult, "You've got to be real proud of yourself, asshole." And then the mob dissipated and we all headed for wherever we were supposed to be for third period.
I never saw Pauline again. I assume she transferred to another school, though now that I think of it, maybe they gave her some form of early graduation. She was certainly smart enough to not need another moment on that campus.
She was instantly forgotten. I'm still in touch with a number of my classmates from the sixties and some of them read this blog. When I wrote the earlier piece of Pauline, a few wrote to say they didn't remember her at all. But one lady who'd witnessed the scene that day in the hall recalled it vividly and wrote, "You have to write about that," which I'd already intended to do. I have just written about that.
I'm quite sure I learned as much from Pauline's bit of self-destruction as I did from all the attending of classes at that school. The lesson is not something as simple and banal as "Be Yourself" but I'll be darned if I can figure out what it is.