Sam and Me

So my therapist asked, "Why now? Why do YOU think you're suddenly so preoccupied with never having had a relationship?"

"Other than being retarded and a wannabe prick, alcoholic, or sex addict?" I thought to myself. If anything will keep you from thinking aloud, it's therapy. So I said that being three years removed from my career probably gave me a lot more time to think about such things. He asked some other questions:

"Are you judgemental?"
"Hell yes. And about 90% of the time, I'd say my judgement proves true."

I talked about how, despite the grimmer aspects of my early years, there came a point where the pendulum of self-confidence took a decided swing to the opposite end of its trajectory and ultimately gave me some platform from which to fling judgements. Since the day it happened, I have continued to tell that story. It's the one that changed my life as much as Coming Out, a successful career, or even AIDS. It happened in 1981. His name was Sam Johnson.

I was a Junior in High School. I was in the gymnasium being humored by the gymnastics coach who let me flail around as part of the J.V. team because my cousin, who was REALLY good, was on varsity. And I didn't take up much space. My best friend, Trudy, showed up at the gym door one day and insisted that I come down the hall to read a part in a skit she was to perform for the school's Forensics Coach. Her partner had high-tailed it for some reason and she was due to prove herself capable for an upcoming tournament. (Forensics, for you novices, is the competitive form of speaking, acting, etc. - not high school-level autopsies.) Dedicated as I was to my flailing, I was excused to bail out my friend in need.

Now, I did not speak in public. I didn't speak a lot in private. Speaking was something that had not come easily to me and so I minimized its use fearing that I might exhaust the mileage on whatever I'd developed. I hadn't exactly understood that I was supposed to read - out loud - in front of a teacher - and whoever else passed by - the part of Adam in a cute little revision of he and Eve having a spat in the Garden of Eden. It didn't hit me until Trudy and I stood shoulder to shoulder and that man, Sam Johnson, stared me down and said, "Go." I have zero recollection of what took place in the ensuing moments.

My memory picks up with Sam Johnson leading me by the elbow to the school office where he commandeered a secretary and forcibly changed my next semester's schedule from Botany to Forensics. I wasn't quite sure what the future had in store, but it gave me a stomach ache for the next two months.

Taking my place in Forensics class, I was paired with a boy named Jamie (bless his heart) to perform a duet acting piece cut from the Monty Python skit "The Argument Clinic". I couldn't recite more than 5 words of that cutting to you today. But the five I remember would change me in a way that still boggles the mind. Now, in our school, Forensics was IT. Football was big, Basketball was cool, but the Arts had this weird prominence you don't see anymore outside of the few schools that specialize in them. Our Forensics class had approximately 60 people. And it was the novice class. Jamie and I memorized our bit and the day came where we were to perform it for the class. Two hard plastic chairs took their place of prominence at the front of this increasingly cavernous room and we took our places near them to begin...

Again, I cannot recite to you much of this piece, but it clipped right along until I said the line,

"Look! You just contradicted me!"
"Say that again?" came the polite request from Mr. Johnson at the back of the room.
"Look! You just contradicted me," I complied.
"One more time?" he repeated
"LOOK! You just contradicted me," and my mind began to melt into a primordial mush. The number of people in the room seemed to multiply exponentially by the second. And they all seemed really big and really close. Even the walls seemed to be tilting inward.

"AGAIN!", he boomed "And this time ENUNCIATE!" This was so far from a polite request that Mother Theresa would have caned him.

"LOOK! (huff, huff) You just con-tra-dic-ted me!" I exaggerated.
"AGAIN!"

If grown up words had been a ready part of my vocabulary at 16, he would have heard them all. Instead, I felt my face flush and that horrifying catch in my throat that signaled bad things were about to happen - at least from the neck up and quite possibly from the waist down.

"LOO..." and it happened. My voice broke and the dam behind my eyes gave way. My humiliation had reached its apex. I turned around, found the doorknob and gracelessly let myself out of the room. I sat along the wall in the hallway pondering how I would live the next year and a half having openly cried in high school. Sam let me stew for about 15 minutes. While I had my eyes closed wishing, the way you do, that time would turn back, that I would be magically transported to another country, to the perfect family, where I could do more than flail in gymnastics and had never cried in high school, Mr. Johnson sat down next to me on the wall. He didn't even have to speak. I hated him beyond all the evil I had ever wished upon my parents, the boys who had mocked my lack of manly interests and skills, the 3rd grade teacher who told me I would never be able to write cursive....all of them.

"You know..." he began. "You can hate me for a little while. But I want you to know something else, too. What happened in there...just now....changed you. You want to know why?"

"No," said a 16 year-old boy who'd already had enough humiliation to last a lifetime.

"I'll tell you why. Because that was the worst thing you could ever imagine happening in that situation. You finally got the nerve to do that in front of people and the only thing in your head was 'Please, God, don't let me humiliate myself.' Now that it's happened, maybe you can focus on what you're doing and not on what you're afraid might happen. Look....you're still here. And those people in there...those kids....they will only think more of you if you walk back in there and finish what you started."

So I did. I don't know why. And I don't know how. I went on to a long involvement in the theatre - amateur theatre. I became a student body leader with a flair for oratory in college. I became a teacher with a gift for communicating foreign languages. I traveled the world and sang as part of a small ensemble. I finished my career giving executive training sessions for one of the largest privately-held companies in the country. And Sam was right. It changed my life. My self-confidence soared and never faltered. The pendulum had swung to its polar opposite and stuck there...until just recently when it started inching its way back to stasis.

Sam? Sam Johnson? I don't know where you are right now. You told us when you retired that you had never owned a lawn mower, a subcription to Better Homes and Gardens and a bunch of other things that didn't make sense to 100 teenagers who couldn't imagine life without you. But I thought I owed you some tribute in this process as a man who made it possible for me to see through sadness and humiliation to a possibility that exists only by faith. If you did for anyone else what you did for me, may it come back to you 100-fold. And may some of your old magic help me through this time. Bad Boys have been the theme of late. But you.... You were the original Good Guy.

Thanks for that.