Clarksburg, WV is a small town.  Liberty High School was a small school.  We all knew each other, more or less.  In a way, I was lucky.  I was watching a couple fo those cheesy 80s high school movies the other night; Can’t Buy Me Love and Lucas.  They both center around a very basic teen angst:  Cliques, cheerleader and jock hero worship.  In these movies, the popular kids are complete fuckheads and are totally mean to the weirder kids.  At my high school, it wasn’t like that.  We had fuckheads, but they were in every social class..and they were known as fuckheads.  Sure, some of those fuckheads were jocks and a couple might have been cheerleaders, but that certainly wasn’t a trend.  We had nerd fuckheads, rich-useless-kid fuckheads, momma’s-boy fuckheads, and stoner fuckheads.  Overall, though, we tended to stay away from each other and if we had to interact, it was usually pretty civil.  There just wasn’t that sense of bullying at our school.  But one scene from Lucas brought up a memory that still has me really raw to this day.  It’s a scene near the end of the movie where the football coach is trying to brush Lucas off and Lucas tells him he’s a loser because he’s a third rate coach of a second rate high school team and he’s a dumb fucking jock.  My memory doesn’t involve one of my peers…it involves a fuckhead coach.

My best friend and I were hanging out at her house one night and I noticed that they had a duffle bag that had Liberty High School on it.  It had belonged to her older sister and I asked her mom if I could have it and she said yes.  I thought it would be a great thing to take to football games (I was in the marching band) to keep my stuff in and show some school spirit.  Well after one particular game we were marching out of the stadium and the cheerleading coach walks up and grabs me and tries to pull me out of line.  I jerk away and keep marching, thinking she must have thought I was someone else.  We break line and head to our cars and she comes up to me and demands that I give her my bag.  Confused, I tell her no..this is my bag. 

“That bag is for cheerleaders ONLY!”  She tells me.  I tried to explain to her that it was given to me and I was only using it to carry my stuff at games but she wasn’t hearing it.  The next thing I know, another woman came up to me yelling that it was for cheerleaders ONLY and that I had to give it up.  So standing alone in a parking lot being screamed at by two middle aged fat women, I took all of my stuff out of the bag and surrendered it.  I was so confused, but about halfway home I realized why they were doing that.  It was a TERRIBLE thing for them to see a LIBERTY HIGH SCHOOL CHEERLEADING DUFFLE BAG being carried by a *gasp* BAND GEEK.  Jesus fucking Christ.  Like I was a mutant or something.  I cried all night long….both for the fact that I had basically been bullied and that it really hurt my feelings.  When I was retelling this story to Jessie the other night, I cried again.  What the fuck was their problem? 

My friend’s mother made a phone call to the school principal as well as my mother, but he sided with the coach.  My friend’s mother had paid for that bag and said she was within her right to let me use it, but he sided with the coach.  I’m a little disappointed in the adults for not calling the school board and raising hell for letting two teachers (both these women taught at Gore Middle School) bully a student.  And that’s all it was.  I was a geek carrying a duffle bag that only cheerleaders were issued.  Who the hell cares?  It was a duffle bag with MY high school logo and mascot on it.  At those football games, I had just as much school spirit as any cheerleader.  Maybe I didn’t do flips and maybe I wasn’t all pretty with my hair in ribbons, but hell, man.  That’s not fair. 

So the discrimination against the dork came from an adult…two women, who possibly by the standards of their own peers, were losers.  How successful and dignified must you look if you are middle aged, your ass is enormous, and you are a cheerleading coach for a middle school, high school, and an unaccredited university?  I honestly have nothing against cheerleaders…some of those girls (the ones who took it seriously and weren’t on the squad for bragging rights) are really super athletic.  The gymnastics those girls had mastered was impressive.  But thanks to those two horrid women, I DO have something against cheerleading coaches…people who refuse to see that HIGH SCHOOL IS OVER and that after a certain age, nobody cares who the jocks and cheerleaders were.  Shit, the jocks and cheerleaders were more cool about it than they were.  Time to come to grips with the fact that your life is sad and trite. 

The instigator of the bullying also coached the cheerleading squad of a nearby college, which incidentally also employed my mother.  Their basketball games were always fun, so I went to most of their home games my Senior year of high school.  This was probably about a year after the incident.  I knew a couple of the basketball players and always had a great time flirting with them.  They knew me and as soon as I would walk into the gym, I would have at least one talking to me.  She was always there and one particular time, she came in leather pants….and it was the funniest thing I had ever seen.  Like I said before, if she was ever a cheerleader, she lost that physique LONG ago and traded it in for a bottom-heavy shape and those leather pants looked like a big, black, shiny sign that said “PLEASE PAY ATTENTION TO ME,” and one of the basketball players was talking to me and made a comment about how bad that looked and we sat and laughed about it as loud as we could so she could hear.  I have to admit, that wasn’t my best moment, but she heard us and saw that we were pointing at her.  Maybe that gave her a moment of humiliation as payback from me.  I wasn’t the forward person I am now.  If I were to see her now and she remembered me, I’d let her know in a very short rant what a piece of shit I think she is.  She humiliated me to the point that almost ten years later I am still upset over it.  I am SO glad high school is over.

BTW, (SHAMELESS PLUG ALERT!!!) We’ve revamped Datester and really fleshed it out.  We’ve got a nice body if writing going on and I think it is looking great!  Again, if there’s any interest in contributing, you are more than welcome.