Chapter 37: Reports

Sunday, September 11, 1983

It felt slightly surreal to be flying on September 11th. Unless I’d forgotten something, this was the first time I’d ever done that since it became a meaningful date. Of course, in this universe, I was only aware of two people for whom it was meaningful.

Everything felt a little more ‘off’ than it usually did. The sloppy (by 2000s standards) screenings, non-ticketed passengers at the gates, no endless warnings about the dangers of unattended baggage, and so forth.

Rationally, we were likely extremely safe, but it still felt wrong.

Our trip home was pretty uneventful. Dad wanted to talk more about Reagan, of course, and Mom wanted to listen in and sometimes comment. Angie added a few of her own.

We’d lucked into a flight that was two by two, so it was easy to talk. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been on a plane that had two by two seating, but it was a long time — and I think that had been a prop plane on a short hop, too.

We made it home by five. Too late for Study Group, as expected, but we called Gene’s house and made our excuses to Gene’s mom, who promised to pass it along.

Exam week or not, I had homework to do that hadn’t gotten done, and so did Angie. Mine was a bit worse, since Tom Myerson wanted a report about the trip. That wasn’t hard to do, just tedious.

Writing the report was tricky, though. Too much, and it came off as bragging. Tom would probably know that I wasn’t bragging, but even he might expect that I’d gotten more of an ego boost from it than I had.

If anything, this was a place where I was so far outside of even ‘bright seventeen-year-old’ behavior that it’d be a red flag. What seventeen-year-old wouldn’t get a bit of an ego after being given a private meeting with the President of the United States? Maybe not the ones whose parents were friends or colleagues of that President, and maybe not Eileen, who seemed a bit like the shy, quiet type, but I really wasn’t the shy, quiet type at Memorial. Maybe humble — hopefully humble! — but not shy or quiet.

I could certainly credit Tom’s questionnaire, and I did. That had made a big difference, and one that set the tone for other things (or, at least, might have). It gave me another chance to stand out (there’s that ego thing again!) and make a difference. I was pretty sure it was exactly the sort of thing Tom wanted to see.

Some of the other kids, and particularly the group that met Reagan, were interesting, and Tom would likely want to know about them. He quite possibly knew more about their parents than I did, since I knew almost nothing, and a lot of that was from forty-year-old memories. I didn’t drop them, but I downplayed them a bit. Well, except for Eileen. I’m pretty sure she was the type of student that Tom would’ve loved to have had.

As for the actual conversation with President Reagan, that took the most editing. I really wasn’t prepared to discuss giving Reagan advice about AIDS or the Fairness Doctrine with anyone outside of my innermost circle. Not even Mom and Dad knew, and I wasn’t sure if Paige would, at least before (or if) she joined that innermost circle.

I certainly had to own up to discussing my original quote with him, though. If we hadn’t discussed that, what had we been doing? Fortunately, there was plenty there. I could say that my feeling was that Reagan should continue to embrace a ‘Big Tent’ vision of the Republican Party, one where everyone was welcome. To the inherent contradiction of (for instance) both gay people and anti-gay people being welcome, my comment was that both could be welcome, but they needed to refrain from attacking each other as much as possible. Gay and anti-gay supporters of Reagan likely agreed on the vast majority of issues (the military, foreign policy, taxes, the role of government, and so forth).

One thing that has always plagued politics is ‘litmus tests,’ where someone’s view on a single issue is so dominant that anyone with the ‘wrong’ view on that issue is out of consideration, even if they agree on everything else, and even if the other candidate (with the ‘right’ view) is otherwise completely misaligned. Trying to take things like race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, and so forth out of the category of ‘litmus tests’ can easily be argued to be a positive. Doing it is tricky, and perhaps impossible, but it was an obvious thing for me to write about.

I wrote and rewrote sections of it several times, trying to make sure the whole thing fit together and that it wasn’t obvious that there were omissions. Tom Myerson was nobody’s fool. He would detect anything I wasn’t careful about. On the other hand, the idea of the most powerful man in the world giving a high school student (even a particularly smart and talented one) the time to rattle on about not one, not two, but three issues, two of which were somewhat off-the-wall from a 1983 perspective, was unlikely enough that Tom might well not see it as a possibility unless I left some inkling of it being possible.

I was pretty happy with how it turned out in the end, but the proof would be in the pudding. In this case, not the grade pudding — Tom would give me an ‘A’ on it as a matter of course, since it wasn’t even a class assignment but just ‘extra credit’. The pudding would be how Tom reacted to it and whether it raised questions that I couldn’t easily answer or created expectations that I couldn’t meet.

Monday, September 12, 1983

The big news around school was the football team’s surprisingly narrow loss to Brazoswood. Even with a number of key starters suspended, we’d only lost fourteen to seven. Andy had the lone touchdown. Graham had been pretty good, apparently, but the backup running back had fumbled twice, and the offensive line had let Graham get sacked one too many times. The last sack had included a forced turnover, and that turnover led to Brazoswood’s second touchdown.

For a loss, the mood was much closer to that of a win. If we could play them tough under those circumstances, we’d be clear favorites if we had the whole team.

Mel had talked to Sarah, and she was on the fence. She loved the idea of studying with us, but had made some new friends, and was afraid it might hurt too much to be around us given how much Mike had screwed everything up. Even if we never mentioned him, the circumstances would provide a constant reminder.

I had to repeat at least parts of the Washington story about five times. By the end of the day, I had no idea who knew what, but nearly everyone in my orbit knew enough.

It took until Drama, but I finally got as much of the Brazoswood story as I was going to. Cal and Andy wouldn’t say much, just that some kids had gotten ‘carried away.’ Reading between the lines, of course they wanted to stick up for their teammates.

Jess knew a bit more. Apparently, about a dozen starters had been to a ‘kegger’ and gotten plastered. Not just blasted, but truly, falling-down, throwing up blasted. There were rumors of Jell-O shots made with Everclear and the like.

I’m certain this wasn’t the first time. For all that our little cohort had (so far) been at peace with Demon Alcohol, it’s not like Memorial was a puritanical school. Alcohol was common enough (and legal for many seniors), and drugs were around, too. Long ago (and yet to come) I’d read that Memorial and a wealthy suburban Dallas high school tended to trade off for having reportedly the highest consumption of illegal drugs. In both cases, money bred both access and legal defenses for those who were caught.

Hopefully coming down on them like a ton of bricks would fix it for the future. It’d suck if we blew the season because a bunch of people liked to get hammered.

Jess also told me that Trish and Mike had been at the party, which surprised me not at all. Neither had gotten particularly inebriated. She couldn’t place any of the blame on Trish, nor could she absolve Trish. She just didn’t have a lot of sources in the socialite community, and the players who would get invites to that sort of party weren’t about to talk about it.

Tom Myerson grabbed my report first thing and promised he’d read it as soon as possible. I hoped that he liked my creative reuse of his questionnaire in redirecting things. It’d have gone even better if I’d actually had the questionnaire with me, but the principle of the thing remained the same: diversity of opinions makes for better brainstorming. Tom and I talked about the trip briefly, as well, but we didn’t have a lot of time and most of what I’d have said was in the report anyway.

Both Meg and Cammie wanted to make sure that I was completely focused for Cy Fair, which was coming up in a week and a half. I felt like I was.

Of course, Steffie wanted to make sure that I was completely focused for ‘Pride and Prejudice’, and ... I was doing my best. My best should be good enough. Hopefully, anyway.

The biggest worry wasn’t letting Steffie down, it was letting Jess down. This mattered a lot to her and that made it matter a lot to me, too.

I called both Jane and Laura and told them how the trip went. Jane wasn’t all that surprised, and both hoped and guessed that I’d done the right thing. Laura was a bit surprised but agreed that I probably had.

There was no way to know other than by waiting and seeing. Perhaps (hopefully!) I’d made things better, but I might not have changed anything, or I might have made things worse. Perhaps I’d done a bit of both. I could make things better in a way that would cause trouble down the road.

If nothing else, there was always the big ‘playing God’ question: what if? What if someone who died from AIDS in my first life lived this time because of my intervention, and what if he (or she) was a bad person? What if I’d inadvertently saved a monster?

One could invent scenario after scenario where good deeds wouldn’t go unpunished. In many of those cases I might never know what I’d done.

That’s always the case, though. Sometimes people do things with the best of intentions, for all the right reasons, and disaster results.

I’d done my best, and the people in my life with the greatest ability to guess whether it was the right thing all felt like it was. That’s all you can do. That, or don’t play at all, but that also would result in misery and suffering. If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice, after all.

Tuesday, September 13, 1983

Study Group had become about half SAT prep. We bounced vocabulary words, analogies, and SAT math off each other for an hour or so. Very few questions were difficult, but we expected that. Perhaps none of us would get a perfect 1600 (Connie might, and Sue was a contender), but we’d all do well.

Even though she was doing much better, I was pretty sure that a high score would do Jasmine some additional good. She’d gone from ‘I’m going to bomb this!’ to ‘I’m going to do well!’ but that had to be backed up by results.

My suspicion (and Angie’s, as well) was that Paige was in the same boat. Paige didn’t really have the issues that Jas had, but she’d struggled off and on simply because she hadn’t applied herself. Now she was doing so, and the results should hopefully reflect that.

Gene let it slip that I’d met President Reagan. Curtis had himself only met Reagan twice, both times at political events, and Marsha only once. Of course, their conversations had perhaps been slightly more detailed. After all, Curtis would be presumed to know a lot more than some high school student, however smart. Usually he would, too.

The exception, of course, was that Curtis couldn’t make suggestions based on what would happen in several years, whereas I (and Angie, and Laura, of course) could.

Wednesday, September 14, 1983

When I checked the PO Box, the paperwork for the LLCs had come back, duly approved, with appropriate numbers, addresses, and all of the other necessary information. I now had a couple of New Mexico companies ready to go.

Next stop, Texas!

Thursday, September 15, 1983

We got up a bit early to catch Dad before he left, and Angie lit a candle for Frank which she set on the dining room table. It would burn throughout the day and night.