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    Forgotten Faces
    Forgotten Faces
    Forgotten Faces
    Ebook336 pages5 hours

    Forgotten Faces

    By William White-acre

    ()

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    About this ebook

    The omnipresent Facebook leads Richard to seek out High School friends from 30 years ago. From Florida to California, by way of Tennessee and New York, he travels the Interstates to see some old friends. Humor ensues, along with some vintage poignancy.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherWilliam White-acre
    Release dateNov 7, 2017
    ISBN9781370743414
    Forgotten Faces
    Author

    William White-acre

    Photographer first, scribbler second. Lived a long time. When your life resembles an epoch, well, it is scary. Just hope I can entertain.

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      Book preview

      Forgotten Faces - William White-acre

      FORGOTTEN FACES

      William White-acre

      copyright 2017 by william white-acre

      Smashwords Edition

      white-acre.wixsite.com/photography

      *other books by the author:

      Surrounded By Mythology

      I, The Hero

      True For X

      TABLE OF CONTENTS

      Chapter 1 JOHNNY

      Chapter 2 BRAD

      Chapter 3 LAURA

      Chapter 4 JOANN

      Introduction:

      My 30th High School reunion was held a couple of months ago; I did not attend, for many reasons I suppose. Nineteen eighty was a very long time ago. Reunions are like anniversaries, just arbitrary nonsense really. How is the 30 year mark any different than 29.6 years? They are noteworthy only because we look back and see what in the hell happened to us.

      In a very short time, I will reach the half century mark: fifty years of living on this planet and I really didn't see the need to look back now at this particular time. That and the fact I didn't want to see how old I've become by staring back at faces that have lived as long as I have. No one needs that kind of reminder. I am not what might be called a nostalgia monger--if I might coin a term. Besides, I still live in the town where I went to High School, which, in its way, is sort of embarrassing, as if to say that I haven't evolved all that much. It's just that, by living in the same city for the last thirty years, I have little time (or inclination) for reaching back and trying to grasp a tiny bit of my past.

      In the interest of total disclosure, I was even born in the town where I still reside, right at Memorial Hospital in Hollywood, Florida. It was always bad enough living in a town that shared the name of a more famous incarnation in California, where the only thing we shared was proximity to an ocean. The founder of my hometown was a transplant from out West, who had a vision for the swampland that reached from the Everglades to the Atlantic Ocean way back when, you know, in the 1920's or so. Most of my classmates, and friends, have relocated somewhere else, and, presumably, moved on. Not that I am the lone holdout. I suppose there are some of us who have lingered, set down roots. Then again, I can't remember any of my graduating class who were actually born here, in Hollywood.

      Florida is, for the most part, the land of transplants, mostly geezers who have elected to escape the cold and die in the subtropics. Oddly, the majority of them stipulate that they would like to be buried back up north, turning their backs on their adopted State, which is, I guess, the ultimate insult to the Sunshine State. For me, I will be buried right here, at the Palms Memorial Cemetery, courtesy of my mother, who had the foresight to buy burial plots way back when. I will be laid to rest next to my mother, father, and sister, which should make for a cozy afterlife since while alive we barely spoke to each other.

      The fact that I was born and will die in the same locale is depressing on many different levels, mostly because it means that I have accomplished very little in my life. While it may be true that many people throughout history have spent their existence within the confines of a specific zone, it never the less is somehow pathetic. In the modern American era, where the average person moves umpteen times during their life times, I have to be the outlier of sorts. Not that it qualifies me for the Guinness Book of Records or anything.

      If the truth be known, I have little to show for the last forty-eight years. What I have is a failed marriage, a house I was upside down in, and unemployment. I had worked at a local business for closing in on twenty years and was unceremoniously let go. The company was downsizing in the current economy. It seems that people weren't too eager any longer to buy organic bakery products. Too expensive. Truthfully, I never ate the products my company baked. They all, to me, tasted like pre-fabricated sawdust.

      I didn't work in the manufacturing end of things, but rather was a bean counter, stuck away in a small office in the back of the warehouse where the actual baking took place. While the bakers brought flour to life as bread, cookies, rolls, etc., I labored away at spread sheets, trying to squeeze out more profit from a business that relied on the purchasing power of natural food snobs. Our business model leaned towards the imaginary most of the time. Still, the company had been around for over twenty years.

      Rick, can I talk to you for a second? was how the end began.

      I looked at my boss, the aging Hippie with the long hair pulled back into a pony tail, the one that all the employees mocked behind his back. He had hired me even though I had a spotty work record and an Associate degree from the local community college. For the record, I did go on to get my four year degree from FAU. He had told me, back then, that he wanted people to work for him who could see themselves growing with the company. I had told him sure, I could do that. Then he had asked me if I liked bread, quickly followed by some samples of his stock in trade eight grain loaf. I had eaten a slice and smiled, assuring him that it was delicious, while thinking the whole time that Pepperidge Farm did a better job.

      What's up, Chad? I asked, wondering just what my boss and the CEO of the little bread company tucked away in some warehouses off I-95 wanted.

      In a solemn voice, Chad got right to the point: Rick, the books don't look good. Of course I knew this, I was responsible for the books. We are going to have to make some changes around here. The we was a nice touch. Your job is going to have to be eliminated.

      It was like a punch to the solar plexus. Up until this point I truly believed he had called me into his office to ask my advice on which other person to ax, someone that the company could afford to lose and not interrupt the efficiency output. I was having visions of me having to offer up another victim, someone on the baking assembly line. Who was going to do the books? leaped into my mind.

      Chad, how can you...can you fire me? I managed to mutter, trying not to whine.

      I'm not firing you, Rick, he assured me. You will get references--good references. Listen, Rick, this pains me to do this. You have been with us almost from the beginning. You have been a loyal employee.

      Loyal? I said in almost a whisper. The word sounded somehow preposterous at this juncture. Who is going to do the finances...the spread sheets?

      I have made some arrangements, he said, letting his voice trail off as he pretended to be studying some papers on his desk. We have a decent severance package for you already set up. I wish it could have been more generous but, well, you know how the economy's been. Since it tanked we have been struggling to keep our head above water here. I don't need to tell you that, do I? He let a smile creep to his mouth, then thought better of it.

      I got up from my chair, with my legs weak from the shock, and walked out. I didn't even go back to my little closet sized office but went to my car and drove home. The fact is I never spoke to my boss again. He sent me my check in the mail. It's bad enough seeing his smiling mug (with that ridiculous pony tail) on the bakery packaging at the grocery store every time I go. The only measure of payback I ever got was when I told a woman in the check out line that the bread she was buying was baked with uncertified organic wheat imported from the Dominican Republic. She got a horrified look on her face and grabbed the loaf of bread out of her cart and tossed it. That was the extent of my sweet revenge.

      The other recent life altering event was my divorce, which came six months before me being layed off. We had been married almost twenty years, and before that had lived together for another two. I had met her on the beach one day, right after a surfing session. I say surfing but, as any real surfer will tell you, it was actually more like slogging. The surfing scene locally was dependent on two things: large storms in the Atlantic and a vivid imagination.

      At any rate, I had been out in the knee high waves pretending to be riding them and was showering off at the shower adjacent to the beach parking lot. Celeste, my future wife, happen to walk by. We made eye contact. I don' t remember but I am sure I must have said something that I thought was witty or appropriately suave. She responded, and smiled. It all began from there.

      She lived in a neighboring town and was, like me, a community college graduate. Celeste's future, such as it was, had already been mapped out for her. Her mother owned a boutique specializing in clothes for the significant elderly population in the area. The store was located in a section of the town that was laughably called Fashion Row, a strip of stores that catered to women with money and, apparently, no taste. At any rate, Celeste was to have the store bequeathed to her by her mother. If not anything else, it was a profitable business.

      We dated for a while before renting an apartment on the beach, which was overpriced and full of cockroaches and, no matter what counter measures we did, smelled of rotting seaweed. For us, in our twenties, it was paradise, as we spent most of our time on the beach and on the broadwalk that passed right by our front door. There were beautiful sunrises and plenty of time baking in the sun, to which my dermatologist can thank me for so much of my business in counteracting skin cancer; that is until I lost my health insurance when I was downsized.

      Those were idyllic times, as they say. We didn't think about responsibility as a concept. I was, at that time, going in and out of jobs, not giving much thought to something that might enhance my future. Celeste was working at her mother's store, putting in time when she had to. The money we made was perfectly adequate for our current lifestyle.

      Then we got married. It was a mutual decision. I am here to testify that Celeste was not, in any way, the instigator of our change in status from carefree boyfriend and girlfriend living together to husband and wife. That change happened more in an organic way, I guess. After two years of co-habiting it just seemed like the next step to take.

      We took it, honeymooning in Key West. It made our parents happy, if not some of our friends who had made the same step prior to us saying our vows. Along with that I found gainful employment. Next came the purchasing of a house, quickly followed by the arrival of a child. I suppose a psychologist could easily trace the demise of our marriage to the death of our kid, a boy. He died in a car accident when he was just five years old. A neighbor was driving him home from her house when they accidentally drove into a canal in a blinding thunder storm. The woman and her son also perished. It was one of those tragedies that befall the average person, leaving them with an infinite emptiness. I don't think Celeste ever recovered.

      Things were, in many ways, different after the accident. We never attempted to have any other children. I, on several occasions, tried to broach the subject, but Celeste was non-receptive. She would just say that she wasn't ready. After a while I never brought it up again. In time, the remainder of our relationship declined. We began to live in different orbits. I don't know how we lasted as long as we did.

      When the end did arrive I was, somehow, relieved. Rick, I have something to tell you, was how Celeste delivered the news. I know this sounds like I am not being...I...I want a divorce. We were standing in our kitchen, in the house we had bought in one of those newer developments, you know, the ones with the phony sounding names and over abundance of cul-de-sacs; which reminds me of that joke: I live on a one way dead-end street. That concept somehow defines my life.

      You do? was all I managed to say, as I stared at the floor.

      Celeste had met someone else, so it seemed. The store had been turned over to her and she had fallen in love with one of the suppliers, a guy who lived in Fort Lauderdale and, so I thought anyway, seemed a little shady. He drove a Lexus, with the tacky personalized gold trim, and went to tanning salons even though he lived in Florida, two definite signs that he was not to be trusted. I would only meet him once, but first impressions sometimes leave a lasting mark.

      The divorce proceedings were amiable. I was glad to let her go. She deserved to find happiness wherever she thought she could find it. Now that she was in her forties, and the child bearing years were behind her, I figured that she thought she could now pursue love unencumbered. Our mutual history was rife with pitfalls. What we had between us waslong gone, extinguished. Second acts in life can and do occur.

      So I had no job and no wife. I still had the house in the cul-de-sac, the leftover legacy of my failed marriage. The real estate market had tanked, leaving me with a financial albatross. I ran the numbers, taking our equity into account, and promptly placed it on the market with a price to sell. In my mind, I wanted out. Unloading the property was my best bet. Get out from under it. Better yet, just get out.

      For several weeks after losing my job, I rattled around in the empty house feeling sorry for myself. After you are divorced you find that you have suddenly been relegated to second citizen status. Before, when you were a member of the marital club, your membership was never questioned. Your wife's friends were your friends and, truly, friendship usually came in pairs, or couples. Without even knowing, your social circuit had become a set of married couples interlinked by something as simple as a legal document swearing your allegiance to another human being.

      Now that I was, more or less, a free agent, my pool of friends had been drastically reduced. My being ostracized was, admittedly, not exactly a medieval shunning, but never the less it existed. Unless I accelerated the process and landed another mate, I was destined to be the oddball individual forever disrupting the couple's balance. It was a strange realization to find out that I had operated for so long with a partner, one that was included in the definition of my life.

      And so that was when I found Facebook. Trolling the internet had become my refuge after I lost my wife and then my job. Before, well, let's just say that the internet and me weren't sympatico. Sure I would go online, but mostly to buy something. I hardly ever spent time surfing backwater websites or even prominent news sites; and let me say that includes porn websites too. For some reason I was usually too busy with work and other things to be hanging on my computer.

      I made up for all of my internet surfing negligence in a very short time by practically living online. It was like a whole new world opened for me. Although I was never a political junkie before, now, let's just say I was making up for lost time as I visited both the rightwing and leftwing websites, from blogs to established magazines gone cyber. For so long I had been one of the silent majority out there in America, head down, involved in my work and my family. That the questionable machinations going on in Washington could affect me, personally, didn't register. Hell, I hardly ever voted.

      Now, after several months on line, I was like a poli-sci drone, steeped in the Byzantine ways of inside the Beltway. Unfortunately, I had no one to share my newfound awareness with. My friends, such as they were, consisted of two long time buddies I played golf with at a local nine hole golf course, the one that catered to miserly retirees and penny pinching French Canadians. All we talked about was our wives--and not favorably. A close second in line was the fortunes of the Dolphins or the Heat, both of which (lately) tested your sense of loyalty.

      We were, for the most part, apolitical. Somehow we believed legislation was enacted in a vacuum. Making law was something that materialized and made our lives worse. This disconnect was probably the one thing me and my wife had in common. She was blissfully uninvolved as well. We passed through years of matrimony heartily maintaining our disassociation with the rest of the nation, only coming into contact with the civic structure when it came time to decide on where we were going to go on vacation; which was, most times, out of the country, to the islands.

      So this is where Facebook came to my rescue. One day, as I was stumbling around the Publix supermarket, trying to gather up the items on my shopping list I had hastily scribbled on the back of a flyer from a local pizza place that had just opened, featuring ultra thin pizza crust and toppings you normally wouldn't associate with Italian fare, e.g. sushi. Not to be outdone, my local bagel place was now selling pizza bagels, complete with four kinds of cheese injected right into it. It was certainly true as a culture we Americans had taken our short attention spans and desire for something new to extremes. Right on TV you could see the advertisements for the latest concoction in fast food culinary abominations every night, from multi-layered pizzas to burgers constructed from several different barnyard animals to ice cream creations only a thirteen year old sugar junkie could devise. I wouldn't at all be surprised to see barbecued pizza on the menu or, better yet, barbecued sushi tacos.

      As I was perusing the natural section of the supermarket, deceiving myself into thinking by buying maybe five percent of my weekly caloric intake from the health food aisle I might avoid the heart attack that was imminent, I ran into a classmate from High School. This in itself wasn't unusual. I wasn't the only one of my graduating class who had decided to stay put after leaving school. What was unusual was I recognized him immediately. He didn't look a whole lot different. Good genes, I guess.

      The flip side of that wasn't so immediate. He stood and stared at me for a full (uncomfortable) minute before realizing who I was. I was just about ready to offer him a hint as to my identity when he put my, undoubtedly, bloated face to memory. Rick, how ya doin! he finally called out a little too loudly, trying to mask his embarrassment, or mine. We talked for a few minutes, with me leaving out the recent downturns in my personal bio. In the course of our small talk he said, You should check out Facebook, there are a million people from our class on it--really.

      My first reaction was to think: Why in the hell would I do that? Why would I want to contact people from my past? I hadn't, if memory served me correctly, liked many of them; and I am sure the feeling was probably mutual. In High School I had been a proud member of the stoner clique. The membership fluctuated of course, but generally hovered around maybe a half dozen. We had our awful New Wave rock, poseur surfing, and dope--now illustratively called weed. No one was going to mistake us for the next generation of leaders.

      Still, I was curious. Everyone has that hidden desire to see how everybody else turned out. I practically rushed back to my empty house and aging lap top so I could log on and take a look around, excited about possibly seeing how I might stack up against my past friends.

      Not well, as I would discover rather quickly, while several pages (walls) popped up on my screen showing some well preserved specimens from the class of 1980. My voyeuristic impulses were stunned, leaving me wondering why I even took a peek to begin with. Who were these people from my past, the ones with the seemingly perfect lives and well restored physical attributes? Me, with my ingrained facial skin cancer and well fed mid-section, didn't seem in any way their contemporary, someone who had shared a history together.

      I found, without much effort, four of my friends from the past, two men and two women. They were a representative sampling of my group, four people who had accompanied me through my High School career. The two men had been my buddies, spending many hours with me at the beach as we made it through our teenage years. Thinking back, I couldn't remember when they had drifted away. We had established a bond back then, us against the world. The proverbial teenage angst had been fought as a trio, a united front. After High School, as I recall, life's necessities divided us. They had both gone off to college, leaving me behind, in more ways than I imagined at the time.

      The women, girls as I can only think of them still, left as well, traveling out of state to attend college. One of them, Laura, had been what might best be described as a girl friend. We had a brief romance, maybe a semester or so, before it tapered off and we became friends. Our carnal pursuits consisted of me proving that premature ejaculation is messy, as we lay under the stars on the beach, trying to ignore the planes flying over and landing at the Fort Lauderdale airport. The other woman was JoAnn, who never fit in with my small cliche of friends. She was a neighbor, literally the girl next door.

      This quartet of facebook devotees constituted my discoveries, if you want to exclude the one other friend I found, who happened to be in prison for bank fraud. He, too, had been a member of my circle of friends but had moved away for a totally different reason. As luck, ironic as ever, would have it he had been the one voted to most likely succeed from our graduating class. It wasn't because he was financially astute or had a well honed business mind but rather due to his father being filthy rich. He had been mostly devoid of ambition, choosing to accept his dad's bank account as a guiding light for his future.

      It was about then I had my eureka moment, while sitting munching on some jalapeno Pringle chips as I surfed the internet, with the orange stained keyboard to prove it. I would go visit my High School friends. It was to be a journey, of sorts, something constructive that would get me back on track in my life. Of course, I would have to fund this adventure; not to mention my friends would have to agree to such an undertaking. It was not an insurmountable problem.

      I called the real estate agent who had sold me and my wife the house and immediately put it on the market. Next, I signed on to Facebook and posted myself on the site, complete with a photo taken by my wife at the beach some five years before, showing me, you know, in the best light. The photograph was taken before my stomach expansion and expanding forehead. It was also taken at such a distance that made for some flattering exposure to my face, which, translated, means you couldn't see all the wrinkles. It wasn't like I was posting an ad on some singles website, something my neighbor encouraged me to do by the way. He was trying to be sympathetic, I guess, but it came off as creepy because it just seemed as if he was trying to get some vicarious thrills out of me dating while he sat at home with his wife who had ballooned up to a running back's weight and liked to, apparently, throw it around a little bit.

      The house was priced to move, as they say. I wanted out. The funds in my bank account had dwindled but with the sale of the homestead I would have adequate funds to stake me for enough time to decide what I wanted to do. Fortunately my car was, miracle of miracles, paid off, leaving my transportation needs taken care of. I was more than willing to jettison my household belongings, furniture and all, then I stumbled on a local company that organized garage sales/yard sales for a split on the take. They arranged everything, from ads to actually selling the junk. End result, almost two thousand dollars in my pocket and I didn't have to do anything but open the garage.

      Chapter 1 JOHNNY

      The last memory I have of Johnny was back in 1981, at a bar on the Fort Lauderdale strip, Springbreak, and we are watching a banana eating contest. It is March 3rd and the MC on stage holds up his hand and motions for the DJ to stop the music. A hush settles over the crowd, except for some guy standing behind us who yells out: Mine's bigger than that! The MC, a guy wearing one of those cheesy hats woven out of palm fronds, tells us that President Reagan has just been shot. Everyone looks around, like just maybe this guy might have a warped sense of humor. Then the MC waves to the DJ and he cranks up the music again, while the girls on stage return to fellating their bananas or, for the more prudish contestants, simulating a hand job. The 40th President of the United States might be dead but life goes on.

      Johnny had come back home for, of all things, SpringBreak, something we had been going to since we were freshman in High School. In fact, being locals, Springbreak was something you usually tried to avoid. This, you must remember, was back then, before the Chamber of Commerce and the Mayor, not to mention every other civic minded personage, voiced their disapproval of the annual pilgrimage to Fort Lauderdale for some R and R away from the academic toiling at colleges all around the country. Springbreak was something that had been going on for so long the local merchants planned their business models around it.

      It may have been a bacchanalian pukefest but it was lucrative for the businesses along the beach. That the annual event had been immortalized on film and become an institution in and of itself didn't matter to the politicians and do-gooders who wanted to rid the city of the stink that came with being associated with rampant immorality; it didn't help the cause when each year there was usually a tragic and totally avoidable death associated with the spring time event. Most times some drunken college student would fall off a balcony and splatter on the pool deck below or be run over by a car on the strip, leaving a grieving family back home wondering how junior had died such a senseless death. Recriminations would follow, of course, as usual shown on the local news. In the end, the moralists got their way and shut down the drunken four mile orgy, replacing it with a corporate sponsored beach front

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