#33: Yearbook

Hello,

I feel it is my duty to let you know that next Wednesday I’m playing at Cinetol in Amsterdam, opening for the Sonic Choir of Love and saxophone virtuoso Ben van Gelder. I’ll be trying some new songs on a new guitar. If you’d like to attend you can get a ticket here and I’ll see you there.

To the new faces that have recently subscribed through Nico’s recommendation (intentionally or by misclicking), welcome. Nico texted me yesterday saying “I miss your stories.”, so I wrote another one.

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Yearbook

I’ve been thinking about Emiel Claessens lately. The family home is being sold this year so I’ve been helping mom sort everything out, which involves a lot of sifting through old drawings, school assignments and photos with childhood friends that I forgot even existed. Seventh grade essays on the feudal system and abstract paintings of various family members. It’s like filtering through other lifetimes and deciding which parts will be salvaged and which will be thrown out forever. So it goes.

I came across a yearbook from when I was in sixth grade. It was my first year in Ghana and I still had some chub on my cheeks. I scanned all the faces and was hit by a tidal wave of memories. Winston Ofori fighting Wesley G at lunchtime, lifting him up over his head and slamming him down on the football field. The thump and the silence. Asking Alessandra to be my girlfriend behind the bleachers at the Valentines dance on friday night, her saying yes, not replying to Facebook messages all weekend and then breaking up with me on monday morning. So it goes.

I flipped through to the seniors of that year. The tallest people I ever saw and hairy and very loud. We were worms and they were crows towering and stomping over us, too intimidating to even look at. When I see 17 and 18 year olds now, they’re children to me. So much angst and uncertainty still coursing through their veins. Looking at that page of seniors, I expected to be able to see them in that same way now, 15 years later. But I couldn’t. My brain simply couldn’t bend them into the innocent, naïve teenagers they really were. They remained exactly as they were in my memory. Daunting, scary super humans that knew and ruled everything.

I flipped back to my grade and my eyes landed on Emiel Claessens. One of those kids who erodes in your memory over the years. Like me, he was new that year and didn’t speak much English yet. Up until then he’d only lived in a small town in Belgium, where being a scrawny white kid wasn’t much out of the ordinary. I don’t remember why he moved to Accra but like most of us, it was probably for one of his parent’s jobs. His hair always looked like he just rolled out of bed and his ears stuck out a bit. Eyes somewhere between blue and gray and a shy but gentle smile.

A few months into the school year we had a week of the Presidential Fitness Test instead of our regular physical education class. Some initiative that had been instated in the US in the 50s. Probably because they foresaw obesity as an inevitable byproduct of the American dream. Somehow this fitness test had traveled over the ocean and found its way to our international school in West Africa and for a week we were victim to push ups, pull ups, sit ups, shuttle runs and worst of all: the mile run. Running a mile seems like nothing to me now, but back then it was everything. Something we anxiously anticipated for weeks. It always happened during third period, just before lunch, when the sun hung close and merciless over us. Unless you were on the verge of death, there was no getting out of it.

Mr. Agbo blew his whistle and off we went, the distance between the varsity football players and the fat kids growing with every lap around the field. It proved to be more than Emiel could handle. Poor kid was used to ten days of sunshine per year and average temperatures of 10 degrees celsius. Around the halfway mark, I saw him attempt to run off to the locker room. He didn’t make it and ended up puking all over the corner flag. As we kept running, Mr. Agbo jogged over to him and Emiel tried to shrug it off like it was nothing, as he emptied his water bottle over his scorched head. I could tell he was distraught, his cheeks turned a deep red and his eyes darted around as if he was looking desperately to make an escape. After that, he was always sick on days we ran the mile.

We had a school mascot called Monty. Monty was a python and that joke took about nine years to land for me. Monty the python lived in a terrarium on the first floor by Ms. Renkas’ science classroom. I think Monty was an old snake because he didn’t move very much, so most of us walked by without paying him much attention. But a few times per year, Ms. Renkas would lift him out of his cage, bring him to the classroom and let three students hold him for a while. The last time she brought him out, I felt him drag his scaly dry skin across the back of my neck. Five kilos of pure muscle and two piercing black eyes and that tongue slipping in and out and in. I loved it. This time everyone except Emiel had held Monty before. I guess Ms. Renkas kept tabs on us, because she knew this too. Middle school is really not much different from a herd of mountain goats or a troop of gorillas. There’s a pecking order. Inevitable moments where you need to prove your worth to the group and secure your position, or else you’re out. Emiel knew this. So on he went, shuffling to the front of the classroom with his eyes glued to the floor and nervously smiling at Ms. Renkas as she explained the steps to him like a stewardess giving safety instructions before a flight.

She laid Monty over his neck and shoulders and I could see him grimace at what seemed to be his personal idea of hell. As Monty slid over him, he started to wrap once around Tim’s neck. I remember Ms. Renkas telling us that Monty wasn’t a constrictor, so there was no risk of him trying to kill us. I have since found out that many pythons actually do use constriction to finish off their prey, so I can see why this may have scared Emiel at the time. Maybe he’d done his research and found out that Monty was actually very capable of killing, and was just waiting to be held by the feeblest kid to attempt a lethal choke hold. In Emiel’s mind he was far from home, getting strangled to death in front of his classmates while his teacher stood by and smiled. As this seemed to sink in, his face changed from mild discomfort to pure panic. He started whimpering and trying to put his hands between Monty and his neck. He looked helplessly at Ms. Renkas for what seemed like much too long, until she calmly intervened and eased Monty off of him, like a sleepy puppy she didn’t want to disturb. Defeated, with his tail between his legs and beads of sweat dripping down his temples, Emiel walked back to his desk.

He stayed for the rest of the school year and moved back to the gloomy gray comfort of home on the first day of summer break. I never saw him again, and quite honestly forgot about him altogether until I saw his photo again. I tried looking him up to see what he’s doing now but I couldn’t find him.