Dan

Other than Steve Dan was probably my closest friend in our section. I palled around with some guys in M section, girls too, but Dan was more of an outsider than Steve, not as much as me. I'm pretty sure he was smarter than me IQ-wise. I never knew my IQ until years later and didn't know his. Dan told me Andy said his was 130 and he was depressed because he fancied himself a genius. I didn't put much stock in tests of any kind and don't now. I made straight As without studying, having something close to a photographic memory and one girl in our class, determined to equal me and Dan and one or two others, studied furiously and never had time for any extracurricular stuff, and she and I had the same GPA. Didn't make me any more popular. Dan was like me, absorbed everything easily but either sandbagged on tests or just didn't care that much about grades.

His dad was a retired Air Force NCO, no-nonsense but didn't let his son's oddities bother him. He got a little upset about one little affair but otherwise accepted him as he was and made sure he had the money to go to the college he wanted to. Dan had an older sister, six or seven years, seriously good-looking. Wild too, but that's not the subject at hand. Dan and I were into SF big-time, books weren't that easy to come by just yet. In a few years I could get anything I wanted by mail from the purveyors of paperbacks, buck a copy was the highest, a lot were seventy-five cents or less. There was one store in town, a drugstore, had a couple of those rotating racks for magazines. These had comic books and paperbacks. I wasn't that much into comics, never was seriously into them, just a regular reader of Superman and Batman, twelve-cent days. Wish I had some of those now.

Still do have the paperbacks. They had the usual mix, westerns and detective stories, and some SF. We'd go down about once a week and see what they had, got my first Burroughs Martian novels there. Anyway Dan and I talked about science and science fiction a lot, and he told me about living in various places with his Dad being in the Air Force. He lived in town, just a couple of blocks from the high school, and so was more integrated into the social life of the regular kids. A little more. I don't believe he was autistic as I am, just pretty introverted. He drank and smoked pot with them and was cool and didn't give them any reason to dislike him. Like being a country bumpkin in their territory.

He was a smoker too, so we hung out at the smoking area on breaks and lunch. I believe he may have sampled some drugs besides pot, mostly just whatever someone happened to offer him. Not a good idea these days but then it was reasonbly safe, usually the worst thing that would happen was nothing. As in the acid wasn't really acid. The incident that got his dad upset was because he was hanging out with the wrong ones at the wrong place and time.

TSU was popular with the regular kids that weren't going to try to get into one of the fancy east coast schools or some other prestigious school. Every year a new crop of Twin Falls graduates started to school there. It was only an hour or so away, and on weekends there were a lot of younger kids going there to party with them. One night a bunch of kids were in a house occupied by a couple of students from Twin Falls, and Dan was among them. The local police raided the place and arrested everyone in the place, about a dozen. Marijuana of course, in sufficient quantity for 'intent to deliver' - several years in prison for that alone - and some pills and other stuff.

They were targeted of course. The cops would bust a guy if they caught him toting in a pound from Memphis, send him up for a while. But this house was a big one. One of the kids was just a couple of years older than Dan and me - I believe were seniors that year - and his dad was a big farmer, bigger than mine had ever been. Two or three others were pretty lucrative, rich kids. Dan and one or two others were smaller fish but they milked them good.

I don't remember the exact amount Dan's dad had to come up with but it seems it was five figures. Lower fives maybe, he wasn't happy about it. The farmer got in a financial crunch from the amount he had to pay and he was pretty well off. The money went to the judge. It was a small enough place there was only one judge, not a big city where they'd have multiple judges at the same level and there was no way to be sure which one would get the case. That one made out pretty good on that one bust and there's no telling how many deals like that he pulled.

Anyhow Dan's dad wasn't too happy but Dan was a smart kid and wasn't going to make that mistake again. He wasn't addicted to any drug or to that social environment. Didn't need to be accepted, one of any group. He was fine with being in and just as good not being in. After graduation he went off go get a physics degree and some place I forget now, not one of the big ones but pretty pricey. I used to talk to his dad now and then and he said he was paying something like seven thousand a year, which would be fifty or so these days.

After he graduated he moved to New York City and went to work for a game developer. Board games, video was just being invented. Military simulations. He was always interested in military stuff, especially military history. While in college he came back to town in the summer and we hung out some, Andy had his meltdown in one of those summers. I left to enlist in the Air Force in his third year and we corresponded by mail for a while but at some point we stopped.

Haven't heard from or about him since, used to see his sister occasionally but haven't in years. Somehow I doubt he'll be at the reunion. I won't. A while back I was talking to a former classmate and the subject of the reunion came up and he asked me if I ever went to one. No, I say, as I recollect most of them sonsabitches didn't like me fifty years ago and I doubt many of them have changed. For the better anyway. Some clearly got worse, and quite a few got dead.

People do change, rarely. I'm talking about change as going from the privileged kids that treated the regular ones like dirt. Sometimes one of them is humbled by being thrown off their high horse and actually becomes a better person, but I haven't known many. I believe they send out letters while they're getting the thing together, telling about ones they can't find, the ones that are dead. There's more every time.