The Monthly Obit List

One of my favorite stops on the 'net these days is the monthly obit list on my high school alumni website, which is Maine West High School. I don't know why I'm so obsessed with the monthly obit list, but I check it every day to see which faculty members and classmates have recently died.

I guess I just enjoy the shock value. It's hard to believe that these people from my youth are gone. Their faces are forever frozen in my mind as adolescents with their bad '70s hair and clothing. I dread the day when my own senior year picture shows up in the monthly obits, before it is consigned to the lost "Warriors" page for the class of '75, mainly because my picture is so incredibly dorky. It's not quite as dorky as my friend David's senior year picture, who looks like Ernie Douglas from "My Three Sons."

I was incredibly hung over when that picture was taken one bright summer morning in 1974. I had a big gash on the bridge of my nose from passing out the night before caused by resting my head on top of a glass when it broke. My mother was furious with me the next morning, and I told her that I got clipped in the face by someone's fingernail while dancing -- not because I injured myself passing out. The photo studio was able to touch it up. On the large 8X10 portrait, there is a large blob of flesh colored paint over the gash. This was in the days before PhotoShop. My senior year picture is the last professional studio portrait that was ever taken of me. A few years ago, I had an offer for a free studio sitting, but I used it for my dog in instead.

Still, I remember the days as adolescents when we all thought we were immortal.

For example, there is my friend Linda from junior high. I was really sad to see her show up on the list. In seventh grade she often talked about wanting to get a sex change operation.

There is my friend Steve, who I went to see the Rolling Stones' Some Girls Tour at Soldier Field with in 1978. Steve picked me up in his freak van, along with four of his guy friends. I remember my father chasing Steve's van down the street demanding that I get out the van NOW because there were no other girls going. I told Steve to floor it. We slept on the sidewalk all night in front of Soldier Field. Our little group was quite popular with the other freaks because Steve's friend Rudy opened everyone's beer bottles with his teeth. This was in the days before twist tops.

The girl who started the trend of calling me "Baby Huey" is also dead. I have to admit, I was kind of glad to see her name and dorky senior year picture appear on the list. I'm sure she had some 'splainin' to do to God about her cruelty as a teenager. I was a sensitive kid, but I should have kicked her ass in art class. If I had it to do over again, I would retailiate and not be so intimidated by my childhood enemies and their ridicule.

But as a friend of mine recently said, these people will never again enjoy a greasy burger, a power dump, or a beautiful sunset over the Wal-Mart parking lot.

A few weeks ago, I saw another guy of whom I have less than pleasant childhood memories about show up on the list. I'll call him Keith X. The Xs lived down the street from us in our isolated cornfield subdivision during the late '50s and '60s. The Xs had five kids who all went to Catholic school. My parents, lapsed Lutherans, couldn't stand the family and thought they were snotty, stuckup Catholics.

Warren, the father, was nuts. He was full of pompous lies and delusions of his own greatness. My parents used to laugh at Warren when he'd walk down the sidewalk wearing his English derby and twirling his umbrella, with the five X kids trailing behind in order of age, his wife, Pat, bringing up the rear, on their way home from mass.

Pat X, the mother, was a gorgeous woman. She used to take the garbage out to the curb wearing a short teddy and would bend over, exposing her butt crack and boobs to the garbage men. All of the neighborhoo women to whom pregnancy had not been so kind, my mother included, thought she was a slut.

My oldest brother, Marty, was good friends with Bryant, the oldest of the X kids. My mother used to compare Bryant to Eddie Haskell, who was forever complimenting my mother on her attractive house dress and Keds. Bryant was following in the bullshit footsteps of his old man, Warren. Warren was a machinist and blamed Bryant's colic as a baby for his flunking the bar exam. Warren told everyone he was a lawyer, anyway. The meanest thing Bryant ever did to me was push me into the deep end of the YMCA pool when I didn't know how to swim. Thank God, my brother was there to pull me out of the water.

Warren X never wore a shirt on hot days and would strut around his driveway in a Speedo. He was a sex maniac and had the hots for the beautiful 17-year-old redhead who lived across the street from with Xs with her parents, Rusty. Anyway, it's pretty certain that Warren and Rusty had an affair. One evening, my parents were coming home late from a movie and saw Warren and Rusty strolling hand-in-hand through the subdivision. In another scandal, one of our neighbors said she saw the Xs at a Maine West football game. Pat and the kids were sitting in one row bleachers, while Warren and Rusty were cuddled up under a blanket in the row behind them, right in front of Pat and kids.

The X kids were all pretty arrogant. I always imagined that the Kennedys were a lot like the X kids growing up. Keith was a year older than me and used to beat me up all the time. He'd sit on my face and make me smell his balls. By high school, he was a hotshot and in the upper echelons of high school popularity, with his rock star hair. I hated him.

My brother told me that a few years ago, Keith X had a kidney transplant. Like most kids who grew up in the '70s, he was a huge partyer, so I don't know if his kidney problems were caused by substance abuse or natural causes.

But all was not well in the X household. Over the years, my brother has told me some horrifying stories about incest in the X family. Once, when he was about 14, Bryant X called him into the basement and showed my brother his penis, which he had proudly wrapped in black electrical tape. According to my brother, Bryant talked of fooling around with his sister, Debbie, the only girl in the X family. Debbie was precociously beautiful and not much else is known about her. The Xs lived in a three-bedroom house and my brother said that whenever he went over there, Warren was usually walking around in his underwear.

Anyway, I have lot more empathy and understanding of Keith, and why he probably acted the way he did. I'm sure all the Xs, with the exception of Bryant, grew up to be decent human beings. Even that chick who called me Baby Huey.

Eventually, the Xs got divorced and Warren spent some time in a mental hospital. My brother says he runs into Warren occasionally, and he's still as nuts and psychotic as ever.