Retrospect: R

Self-tutoring about people and events from the past: the tutor mentions someone who still puzzles him, decades later.

I moved into very cliquey place when I arrived on the west coast at age 16. One problem: I didn’t realize the extent to which it was cliquey. Perhaps, on the other hand, I did realize it, but didn’t realize how powerful cliques could be.

One person who did seem to understand and respect cliques was R, whom I met through mutual friends. He went to my same high school.

R didn’t worry about school. He was already living on his own. His parents were somewhere in the interior, at least a day’s travel away.

While I focused on truth in my relationships with people, R had a different system: he just told everyone what they wanted to hear. (In that way, he was decades ahead of me.) It actually could get a little embarrassing hearing some of the things he’d agree with or let people believe. It worked for him, though: everyone loved R.

Somewhat ironically, R was also my friend. Possibly because I valued honesty, he told me the truth about things. This was safe for him because I was far out of the orbit of the cliques.

When it was just R and me, he was actually quite philosophical. He was much smarter than he pretended to be when he was among the cliques. He would talk about anything.

R’s girlfriend (when I first met him) was definitively a clique member. She didn’t approve of his being friends with me. However, R didn’t care about her approval.

What R understood (but I didn’t) was that, so long as he said he cared about people’s approval, he would be accepted and forgiven by them regardless of what he actually did. This wisdom led to a problem for R, because he was able to charm himself into the company of some very desirable, but dangerous, people. It started with a woman quite a lot older than he was, and very attractive, who did more than cry when R let her down.

The last time I saw R he was looking wearing a suit, looking for work. He didn’t say so, but I think he was heading toward a job interview. Apparently he wasn’t in a hurry, though; he drove me across town to save me taking the bus. It didn’t take long; Victoria was smaller back then.

As he drove, R talked about his life: he was getting married soon, and wasn’t sure how to please his soon-to-be inlaws, who didn’t like him. They didn’t think he was serious enough about life; moreover, they thought he was too young for their daughter. They saw him as a boy-toy whom she was marrying possibly to spite them. R must have loved that woman (I never met her), or else been too afraid not to follow though with his promises to her.

We said our goodbyes. I was sure I’d run into him again in a few months, some way or other. That was decades ago. I wonder – is R alive and well? With the social mobility he had, almost anything is possible.

R was, in my opinion, an example of someone too smart for their own good. He learned the social ropes very early, without perhaps the foresight of where certain relationships would lead.