When I was 14, I spent a summer learning French in Morzine, a small Alpine Franco-Swiss border village. There were ten American kids and seventy French kids... needless to say, for a few weeks the overwhelmed American minority stuck with their own (except for Will, who refused to speak to any of us—refused to speak in English at all, mostly. He was pasty and bovine with feminine hips. He buttoned his polo shirts up all the way and knew all the names and numbers of the planes that flew overhead. As you can guess, most of us were happy not to talk to Will). Nancy and Susan were from the rich St. Louis suburbs, sweet and sheltered. Kathryn and I were both from U. City, which walked a fine line between ghetto-style hood and culturally-rich progressive liberal enclave (thus messing with our identities in ways that still impact, even now). Alex and Lucy were from a school in Arkansas—Alex was handsome, silent, wore a Black Flagg t-shirt the entire time, while Lucy was a pseudo-homely blonde who managed to use that to her popular advantage in a way that only southerners seem to be able to pull off. Jesse was a weaselly little skate-rat... not sure where he came from.
Finally, Tim and Olly were pals from a wealthy prep school in Tennessee. They were privileged, smart and funny as hell... but kinda nasty. Tim was the nicer of the two—mild-mannered but naughty, soft-spoken and gigantically tall with dark dark skin (the French crassly called him simply "Le Grand Noir" in a way that horrified Kathryn and I, who would have gotten our asses kicked at school had we ever referred to anyone as "The Big Black"). Olly was the shit-stirrer. Raunchy, devilish, bordering on cruel, he was an owlishly piggy boy with sharp beady blue eyes and a wicked sense of humor. He and I hit it off right away. Kathryn and I ran with Tim and Olly for the entire session, and even did a bit of writing back and forth after we all went back to our separate corners of the US. We forgave them for trying to convince us that they'd touched us in adolescently-unexplored places while we were asleep on bivouac (in the hayloft, of course). We aided and abetted them as they tried to steal wine from Madame Bouet—running gleefully into the corn, we crowded around Tim as he took a giant sip... then spat in revulsion (it was vinegar) at the very same moment one of the wild mountain horses appeared and nipped him from behind as Olly's choking laughter rang down the mountainside. We helped them terrorize Jesse, we conspired with them over which of the twentysomething counselors were having sex, we tried to help them bust Philippe et Martin getting it on under their covers at night in the boy's upstairs, we taught them all the curse words our French girlgang roommates taught us, etc. I have fond, slightly unsettling memories of those guys. But, despite our occasional correspondence (which, looking back on, I'm impressed we even made that effort), we fell out of touch.
So today, full-grown Olly pops up on
CoolHunting, a site I follow with some regularity. I'd heard something about him developing technology, but now I have a full update—complete with video. Kinda creepy, really. The piggy boy initially grew up into a
piggy adult but has since morphed into a Danny Houston-ish bear of an art collector, visible on
this video (takes a while to load) and in
this bio page. I kinda want to contact him and rip on him a little bit for the cheesy ass adult he has become, but 1) that would just be bad form and 2) he is clearly way too LA-cool for peasants like me these days anyway. The whole thing has kind of shaken me up, to be honest, and I'm starting to realize that Danny Houston-esque boys have been coming in and out of my life since I was a young teen—what is
that about??
The only other person from that French adventure that I've ever encountered again is Susan—she and I ended up across from each other at a bar, doing the how-do-I-know-you squint at each other across a table full of mutual friends (perhaps inevitable—there are less than six degrees of separation between any social group in St. Louis). After I finally figured out that it was Susan from Morzine and we had our gush session, she confessed that she'd had some sort of sexual misadventure on that trip involving the slightly predatory French boys, which shocked me. Yet another reason I kinda want to contact Olly—what was his impression of that trip and had he had any shocking misadventures (outside the hayloft, of course)?? So I've become a professional creative (what a bullshit term), Olly has become a Hollywood networking tech developer/art collector/schmooze and Susan has become a Protestant Minister. Wonder where everybody else is (well, except for Will—he's either an airplane pilot or a serial killer, I'd bet money on it).
And this would be the
rambling part of rants & ramblings... ;)
