The Struggle To Fit In

The summer before my eighth grade (1960), my mother, who still had hopes for me, got the idea that I would do well to attend my last year of grade school in Deer Lodge, where I would be going to high school.

I was all for it. Living with our grandmother and entering into the Deer Lodge elementary school society was exciting - and a year earlier than expected. Maybe I had a future, after all.

The school population was accepting, of course, and I was quickly absorbed into its ranks. A school with 30 students, composing eight grades, as well as often having cousins for teachers, like I experienced in Helmville, was different than the junior high which offered a number of faculty, plus over 100 students in the same grade.

The social life took a turn for the better when they announced that there

was going to be a Halloween party at the Presbyterian church. That would be a chance for me to show my prepubescent awareness of the social scene.

I wanted to be on the cutting edge of "cool," so I dressed like the really cool fellows did at the Helmville dances. I wore my new LEVI 501's with a thin belt, a white dress shirt, with white socks. I didn't have the loafers but knew that no one would notice.

Back then, the sportier, more western men often wore their huge belt buckles on the side, over the front pocket of their jeans. That practice was cutting edge and hinted at the tawdry side of life.

But I dressed like the classy, late teen and early twenty group of bachelors, out for a Saturday night dance. I was too young to dress like that, but I saw myself on the chronological edge of sophistication, and didn't think it mattered. I expected all the male youths of my social caste to be dressed relatively the same, and was surprised to see that I was the only one with good sartorial judgment, but unfortunately almost 10 years into the past.

Later, I learned that the white shirt with Levi's costume was borrowed from James Dean, an early 1950's actor who died in a car wreck when still young. He became an avatar of youthful rebellion before Ginsberg, Kerouac and William Burroughs offered us a different type of societal change.

But I weathered the party unashamed, and no one took notice of my faux pas. None of us knew about Dean, who died in his Porsche Spyder in 1955, six years before my big debut.

The next year came high school, with all its fads and rages. One I remember was the Butch Wax disaster.

Crew cuts came into vogue for a while, and I had to be a part of the movement. Unfortunately my hair was so fine and thin that a crew cut was impossible. I labored for hours, but my hair refused to stand up, even with Butch Wax.

I gave up the struggle, but only after I was grease clear to my ear lobes and my hair was plastered flat to my shining scalp. I was a tonsorial failure as far as flat tops were concerned. It was disheartening not to have a crew cut like the others.

Thankfully, that fad lasted only until Elvis made longer hair stylish, and I could turn my attention to decent hair creams. Those were TOP BRASS and BRYLCREAM.

BRYLCREAM was the California beaches, with surf and bikinis, but TOP BRASS was the the Algonquin, the Met, or Broadway – all the sophistication of New York City right in Deer Lodge, Montana. They were exquisite hair pomades, but they dirtied shirt collars, hat brims, pillows and everything else. At times we could hear the dirt that was collected in the grease scratch on the comb teeth when we coiffed our teenage hair.

Then the colognes made their way into the school. The first was OLD SPICE and the second was the perennial standard, ENGLISH LEATHER. The halls reeked with one scent until another cologne became popular. Most of the boys' cars would make a person's eyes water.

We went through a number of behavioral phenomena during the high school years. There was always something we had to do or buy in order to be accepted (we thought) into the high school throng.

It's sad, in a way, that our energies were aimed at only belonging. That must be related to our herd instinct or need to have a group of our chosen peers surrounding us.

We struggle to stand out in the group, not out from it, and adolescence is the training ground to teach us how much easier it is to belong and not be seen as a pariah. The struggle for acceptance follows us into old age, but we don't admit it readily.

We should all be like the little man who stood alone in front of that column of tanks in China. Our values should be greater than what is offered by our immediate surroundings, and not merely to conform to the ideas of others without questioning them.