The Deciders

// posted December 27, 2006 by Lou Schuler

Back in high school, there was this girl named … well, I can’t remember her name, so I’ll call her Stephanie, since I’m pretty sure that wasn’t it. But more than 30 years after graduation, I can still picture the girl’s face: oval, with full lips and enormous brown eyes, framed by long, straight, blonde hair.

Since I went to a small high school in rural Missouri, there weren’t really deep social divisions in the student body. Everybody hung out with everybody else. But when it came to dating, there was one unwritten, unspoken rule: The cutest girls in our school, such as Stephanie, were out of our league.

We were in the shadows of two bigger public schools, and the prettiest girls in our little Catholic school accepted the social hierarchies of those schools, rather than the level playing field of our own. To us, it didn’t really matter who someone’s parents were, or what kind of car they drove; our classmates were judged on the things that mattered most to teenagers in the 1970s — good looks, success in sports, and access to drugs and alcohol.

But outside our walls, there was an entirely different game being played. The scions of the biggest local businesses were at the top of the social pyramid (they had the nicest cars, if nothing else), and the top athletes at those schools were close behind. You could be the best-looking guy at our school and the most popular and the best athlete and the guy with the brightest future, and you’d still be in a lower social stratum than the guys with the shiniest pickup trucks or who scored the most touchdowns for one of the public-school teams.

Stephanie dated one of the touchdown-scorers at the bigger of the two public schools. I can’t remember his name, either, but I remember he looked kind of like a Viking. Let’s call him Brad, since that’s as good a name as any for a handsome, broad-shouldered jock dating someone like Stephanie.

After high school, I lucked out and landed probably the best summer job you could possibly have. I was a lifeguard at a local recreation camp owned by the Teamsters Union. The main attraction was the swimming pool, which employed a couple dozen lifeguards. It also had a nine-hole golf course, tennis and basketball courts, a summer camp for children, a restaurant and snack bars, campgrounds, picnic areas, and a few other amenities I can’t recall and that wouldn’t add much to the story if I could.

It was a very labor-intensive place, and most of the employees were college kids on summer break. For us, it was a three-month-long party, and as a lifeguard, I found myself nearer the center of the action than I’d ever been before. The pool where I worked was the most trafficked area of the camp, and that made the lifeguards the most visible employees. For the first time in my life, being visible worked in my favor. I was still pretty skinny back then, but I was the right kind of skinny for a guy who worked in a Speedo. My romantic possibilities increased accordingly.

What little social hierarchy there was at the camp was imposed by outsiders, guys from suburban St. Louis who’d been on swim teams at their high schools and who belonged to college fraternities.

I’d grown up in the St. Louis suburbs — very close to where these guys lived, in fact — but my family had moved to the sticks when I was 14. Thus, I’d missed the transformation of my friends and neighbors into social climbers, and was startled to hear the suburban guys using designations like “loser” and “low-life” to describe people they didn’t like.

I had my prejudices, of course, but I don’t think it had ever occurred to me to classify people in those ways. The part I found most fascinating is that the suburban guys had somehow appointed themselves as judges of all they surveyed.

Stephanie, the pretty girl from my high school, worked at the Teamsters camp, but Brad didn’t. They were still a couple, though, and she brought him to the one of the parties. That inspired the suburban guys to pronounce Brad not just a loser, but a “total loser.”

Imagine the cognitive dissonance: Throughout high school, I’d slowly internalized the idea that guys like Brad — good-looking, popular athletes at the local public high schools — are near the top of a social hierarchy in which guys like me didn’t even have a caste. We were non-entities outside our own small high school. And here were guys who, by virtue of the fact they grew up 20 miles to the north and belonged to college fraternities, decided that Brad was nothing, a “total loser” in a competition in which none of us knew the rules.

I guess I could’ve bought into their world view, but to tell you the truth, I thought the suburban guys were ridiculous. They weren’t smarter or better-looking than anyone else there, and while they could swim better than any of the other lifeguards, they weren’t particularly athletic. Only one of the three had a good physique. (He was also the only one who wasn’t a total dick.) I dated better-looking girls than they did, and I suspect I had a lot more fun as well. If you don’t consider yourself too good to socialize with anybody, you’re free to hang with everybody. I had a small group I mixed with to play sports, another group for dating, another group for going to see movies like Star Wars, and everyone else for drinking and having a few laughs.

I’m thinking about all this today because of a movie my wife and I watched last night. If you haven’t seen Little Miss Sunshine yet, I highly recommend it.

The main character, played by Greg Kinnear, is a motivational speaker held back by the fact he’s unable to motivate anybody. His schtick is a nine-step program to transform people into “winners,” and in the movie’s opening scenes he’s obsessed with classifying people as winners or losers.

The other characters, correctly, see Kinnear’s character as a tool, and his nine-step program as a complete crock of shit. The screenplay telegraphs early on that the motivational speaker, who considers himself a winner despite his failure to even make a living at his chosen profession, will get his comeuppance. When he does, it isn’t remotely surprising. (He’s convinced he’s going to get a lucrative book deal, but if you’ve spent five minutes in the publishing industry, you know there’s no reason anyone would hire an unemployed speaker to write a book about winners and losers.)

I don’t want to say it’s a great movie, or even one of the best of the year. (I haven’t seen enough movies this year to know. Most of the memorable ones I’ve seen were documentaries, but none of the critics are putting them on their end-of-year best-movie lists.) But it is a damned good look at the limitations of a world view that allows only two classifications of people.

The point of the movie — and I’m not really giving anything away by saying this — is that you can’t will yourself to be a winner if you aren’t suited for the competition you’ve chosen. We all learn that lesson, in various ways and at various points in our lives. The best illustration is this bit I heard many years ago, and have used a few times since: A boy’s first dose of reality is when he realizes he’s not going to be the star quarterback. A girl’s is when she realizes she’ll never be a princess. Girls figure this out around the time they hit puberty. Guys figure it out in their mid-30s.

If a guy’s competitive, he finds games in which he has a better chance. Or he takes satisfaction in staying in the game, even if he knows his potential is limited.

But, at the end of the day, winning and losing aren’t black and white designations. Most of the good things in life happen in between the extremes.

I have no idea what happened to Stephanie, Brad, or the suburban guys. I probably go months at a time without ever thinking back on high school or lifeguarding or the social strata of rural Missouri. I hope Stephanie and Brad are happy with each other, if that worked out, or with other people, if it didn’t. And I kind of hope the suburban guys got some kind of comeuppance. I don’t mean I wish bad things on anybody, but I do think those guys were in desperate need of karmic intervention — It’s a Wonderful Life in reverse, with Clarence the angel showing them what nimrods they’ve been. If nothing else, I hope their poor judgment came back to bite them on the ass once or twice.

Here’s what I mean about their judgment:

The pool was managed by a guy who was a teacher and coach at one of the smallest local high schools. He was a real prick, one of the foulest people I’ve ever had to work with or for. What I remember most about him was his deep voice, like that of Ted Cassidy, the actor who played Lurch on The Addams Family and was the guy who got kicked in the nuts by Paul Newman in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

I don’t know if he was a good teacher or not, but I’m pretty sure the teams he coached never won anything. Even if they had, he’d still have been an unpleasant, abusive, alcoholic bully, the kind of guy who had to find a new wife every few years and got into fistfights with their ex-husbands.

The assistant manager was a neighbor of ours, a big, good-natured guy who was a teacher and football coach at one of the bigger local high schools. His teams would go on to win state championships, and his one and only marriage worked out for him.

If you could magically travel back in time to that pool in the summer of, say, 1978, and you were forced to classify the people working there as “winners” or “losers” in the game of life, you’d never in a million years pick the assistant manager as a loser. He was a nice guy, a talented coach, and a decent human being. Conversely, you’d never pick the pool manager as someone to admire. You had to fear him, given his position and disposition, but you’d find him contemptible in most other ways.

And yet, the suburban guys spoke of the assistant manager with utter derision. They even added an extra syllable to his last name, turning a garden-variety German name into two words that you wouldn’t use to describe someone worthy of respect. (Sorry to be so vague, but I’m deliberately avoiding the possibility that any of these characters would Google their own names and come across this post. I don’t need the aggravation.)

They didn’t stop with his name; they made fun of the way he walked, the cadence of his voice, his intelligence (which was probably above average for a high school football coach), and anything else they could think of.

At the same time, they treated the pool manager as an admirable character, and used him as the paragon against which the assistant manager should be unfavorably measured.

By any objective standards, they should’ve admired the man who was not just a better coach, but also a better human being. And yet, the guys who’d introduced “total loser” and “lower form of life” to my vocabulary chose one of the least admirable people I’ve ever known as the guy they looked up to.

Today, more than a quarter-century later, I can’t think of a stronger indictment of the type of people who feel empowered to pass judgment on others. If the guy you admire is a drunk and a bully, and the ones who hold in contempt are decent and successful, what does that say about you?

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