Cruelty to a Friend

This is a story about one of the cruelest things I ever did.

My twentieth high school reunion is less than a week away. By the time that one becomes a senior in high school, one pretty much knows all the other seniors - even in a school of Albany High's size. It'll be great seeing all those familiar faces again after twenty years. Although I knew nearly everyone in my graduating class, I was only close to a few people, and I still see those people in my everyday life. Except one. The only person I was close to - and haven't seen since graduation - is Wayne Gagnon. He's the person I most want to see on Saturday night. I hope he's there.

I met Wayne Gagnon when we were in seventh grade at Hackett Middle School. Wayne and I were in the same homeroom, and in all the same classes. Wayne and I were both geeks, so both of us got teased a lot by the cooler people at Hackett. One of only two middle schools in Albany, half of the city's budding teenagers went to Hackett. This sudden pooling of kids from a wide variety of elementary schools and ghettos resulted in a kind of dangerous situation - of all my years of schooling, it was the two I spent at Hackett which were the most fearful.

I managed to survive unscathed at Hackett. I avoided the bathrooms as best I could, for fear of being beaten or knifed inside. Tough-looking students threatened to steal my lunch and/or beat me up, but nothing came of it - I could usually talk my way out of these situations. I don't think Wayne Gagnon was as lucky as I.

For starters, the way he spoke back to his potential assailants usually infuriated them, and made them more likely to actually follow-through with their threats. For another thing, Wayne was something of a dandy girlyman, usually labeled "gay" or a "fag" by the other students. Whether they really believed he was gay or whether it was just meaningless name-calling, I don't know - but the epithet stuck. (About four or five years later, Wayne admitted to me that he really was gay... but that's immaterial here.)

I can't say exactly how I became friends with Wayne. I think he just approached me halfway through our first day at Hackett and commented on the fact that he and I seemed to be in all the same classes. Ditto for Wes Evans, a half-geek/half-cool troublemaker with an early taste for marijuana (thanks to his pot-smoking mother) and an interest in Star Wars that matched my own. Our other friend that year was David Tristman, a friend I had held onto from elementary school. I envied Tristman for his cartooning skills and his awesome sense of humour - both of which were superior to my own. (Likewise, Wayne envied my cartooning, and even began to draw comics emulating my style. On one occassion, he stole from me a comic book I was working on, and then denied it.)

Me, Tristman, Wes, and Wayne. I guess the four of us were friends, before things began to change. Wes's troublemaking (and marijuana use) increased, and Tristman followed him - at least in the troublemaking aspect; Tristman and Wes became aligned as closer friends than any other two of us. I continued - like Wayne - to be a follower of moral living and school rules, and thus Wayne and I had a connection we didn't share with our troublemaking friends, who had come to ostracize and tease Wayne nearly as bad as the other toughs at our school.

I was torn. On the one hand, I still respected Wayne as a person and a friend, but I blindly admired the "cool" of Tristman and Wes - and if I had to ostracize Wayne to be part of their clique... well, sorry Wayne, but I'm an immature fourteen year-old.

This all came to a head at Wes's apartment one weekday morning. Wes, Tristman, and I had developed a habit of gathering there before school each day, to watch Warner Brothers cartoons. Wayne showed up one day, and well, one thing led to another. Tristman and Wes's insults about Wayne's sexual preference led to them tying him up with rope and lightly punching him in the back. They were laughing, and I was too. Far from standing up for Wayne, I was a willing participant in his humiliation - it was my idea to position him so that his face was forced into Wes's mother's dirty laundry basket, particularly among her underthings.

We left Wayne tied-up in Wes's apartment and went to school. He didn't show up for homeroom or first period, but we bumped into him on the way to second. Wayne explained that he couldn't escape the ropes; he had to squirm his way across the floor and out the apartment door, and then bang his head against a neighbor's door to get help. The neighbor had untied him.

"My mother called your mother, Wesley, and you're in trouble," Wayne said, in typical tattle-tale fashion.

I had sided with the troublemakers and had gleefully enjoyed the degradation of someone I called a friend. Things got better, though. I can honestly say that in the following years Wayne and I became closer - playing Dungeons & Dragons together at school, over the phone, and at my house once a month. Later still - in our junior and senior years - he and I acted together in a couple of Albany High School plays.

David Tristman kind of disappeared; he got heavily into rap music, failed a couple grades, and spent all his time with other friends. (I spent most of my time with other friends, too - friends I've kept since.) Wes Evans and I continued to see each other off-and-on over the years, usually at his doing and on his terms. Wes moved a lot, dropped out of school, joined the Army, and continued to smoke pot and get into trouble. He's married now and has a son; he's even given up the cigarettes and the pot. But his hygiene - which was never great to begin with - has continued to go downhill; the last I saw him, he had the appearance of a homeless man with bad teeth. (I once visited Wes and his family at their apartment and found no soap in their bathroom!)

Wayne Gagnon and I remained friendly, if not friends, right up until we graduated from Albany High School. I've not seen or spoken to him since. I hope he chooses to attend the reunion on Saturday night.

But it says something about my lack of maturity that I'm still more amused by what we did to Wayne that morning than I am ashamed. Forcing his face into Wes's mother's dirty underwear was a cruelly comedic touch to the episode, and it was all my doing.