When I was sixteen years old, one my dad's old drinking buddies said to me, one day, "Son, you probably don't realise it now, but these are the best years of your life. Once you finish school, it's all downhill from there. Mark my words on that." My heart kind of sank when he told me that, and I thought,
You mean, this is as good as it gets?
To put it, mildly, my school years weren't the happiest years of my life. I was skinny, kind of shy, and I didn't have a lot of self-confidence. As for girls, well, just forget all about that, too. They weren't interested in me at all, and I used to get all kinds of crap about being so skinny. My friends were mostly from the non-athletic group, although, being built like a greyhound, I was always good at running, both on the track and cross-country, so at least I got on okay with the school sports master, Mr Shersingh, and he didn't give me a hard time like he did with the others. Unlike all my friends, I would turn up for the school athletics carnivals, and I'd usually do okay in the running events, but that didn't make me any more popular with my peers.
I remember one guy in my year at school, Eddie Clayton, who hung out with all the "tough guys." He was a big guy, who played representative football for the school team, and for some reason, he took a dislike towards me right from the start of high school, even though I hardly ever had anything to do with him. One day, in English class, while we waited for the teacher to arrive, he took exception to something I said, even though I wasn't even talking to him, and he said, "You're a pissweak little poofter, Roberts!" I tried to ignore him, but he went on with. "I see you hanging out with your faggot mates all the time. You're queer, you little
cunt
, aren't you?" After that, he would often call me a "poofter" or a "queer" in front of his tough-guy friends, and although I hated it, he was twice my size, so there wasn't a lot I could do about it.
Another person in my year at school was Linda Moffatt. She was good looking, in fact, she was a knockout, with long, wavy hair that was a kind of light strawberry blonde colour, and she had fair skin, blue-grey eyes, and a pretty face, with cover-girl features. She had a slim but curvy figure that filled out her school uniform remarkably well, and don't even get me started on her legs, or her butt in a pair of jeans. She hung out with a bunch of girls who all seemed to love themselves almost as much as they loved giving me a hard time for being so skinny. At the school athletics carnivals, they'd sing out "Muscle Man," and "The Incredible Hulk" when they saw me, and I tried to laugh at the stupidity of it, but I used to wish I wasn't so thin, and of course it didn't do much for my self esteem, either.
One day, in my second last year of high school, we were in biology class, in the science lab, and we had our textbook open at a chapter on the human musculoskeletal system. The page was illustrated with a black and white photograph of a big, muscular body-builder type, in the classical pose, showing off his rippling physique. Linda came over and slid onto the stool next to me, and she pointed at the picture in my textbook, and said, "Is that a picture of you?" Back then, I was kind of lost for words, so I didn't even answer, and she just slid off the stool, and went back to her own desk, to giggle with her friends at her witty escapade.
A couple of times during the following year, she would speak to me at school, as though she was trying to start a conversation, but I was a little awkward in responding, because of the crap I'd taken from her in the past, so we never really got to know each other in those days. Even so, if I wasn't friends with her, I have to admit I fantasised over her from time to time, but, hey, I was only human, and I was a teenage boy, wasn't I?
When I finished school at eighteen, there was a recession on, and jobs were a little hard to get. Not only that, but I had no real idea what I wanted to do with my life, but I felt like I had to do something constructive, so after a lot of soul-searching, I surprised everyone, including myself, by joining the army. People say the army makes a man of you, but I like to think I at least gave them some worthwhile raw material to work with. My recruit training in the army made me fitter and stronger than I had ever been, and when I got fitter, I felt better, and began to like myself more. I put on a little weight, but not all that much, so I was now lean-built instead of just skinny, but at least I was well-toned.
After my recruit training at Kapooka, I was assigned to the Royal Australian Corps of Transport, where I learned to drive trucks, heavy equipment, cranes, and small watercraft. I only did six years in the army, but in that time I went places, and did things I would never have expected to have done otherwise, and I regularly faced both physical and mental challenges that made me a stronger, more confident person, who was closer to my own potential. I feel like I owed a lot to the army, and I loved my time as a soldier, but after six years, I was ready for a change.
At twenty-four, and straight out of the army, I joined a logistics company that actively recruited ex-army personnel, and I spent the first year in Sydney, before they offered me a transfer to a city halfway across the state, and I accepted. I made a good life for myself out there, and a few years later I married a local girl named Wendy, and a new chapter of my life began. At thirty-four, I was an assistant manager, and a year later, I was made area manager for the region. I was earning very good money by that time, and I thought I had a great life. I was married to a beautiful woman, I had two great kids, a nice home in a good part of town, and everything seemed to be going well. Maybe life was just too good, or at least, fate seemed to think so, because it seems like fate must have decided I needed to be taken down a peg or two, and just after I turned thirty-seven, Wendy left me for another woman.
That's right, you did read that correctly. Wendy, the love of my life, left me for the nursing unit manager in the orthopaedics department at the local hospital, and I never even saw it coming. Right up until our last week together, our sex life was great, or at least I thought it was, and everything seemed to be going well, and then I was dumped for a
woman
. I felt gutted, I felt lost, I felt like I was destroyed.
I tried to minimise the disruption to my kids' lives by moving into a small two-bedroom apartment in the middle of town, so they could stay in our house with their mother. I got a place with an extra bedroom, so they could sleep over, and we arranged for access visits, and everything else that goes on after a marriage breaks up, and I got on with life the best way I could.
Somehow, losing Wendy to another woman seemed to be worse than if it was another man. I don't know why, because the result is the same, but it just felt worse. I kept wondering if it was me, if I had turned her the other way somehow, if I was lacking in something, that made her turn lesbian. It shook me to the core, I can assure you, and I know a lot of guys would be out looking for a new woman straight away, but I didn't feel ready to go back into the arena. Not yet, anyway.
About a year before Wendy left me, I went to a manager's conference in Melbourne, where I ran into a guy called Warren Baxter, who was an old friend from my school days. We had been pretty good friends in high school, and I found out we'd been working for the same company for years, but neither us knew about the other one. After that, we used to keep in contact by email and the occasional phone call, but seeing I had left my home town almost as soon as I left school, Warren was the only person I still knew from those far-off days, although he would occasionally give me some news on people we had known as teenagers.
Now that I was suddenly and unexpectedly single, I had a lot more time on my hands, and about eight months after my marriage broke up, I got an email from Warren, telling me there was a twenty-year school reunion coming up, and asking me if I was interested in going.
Twenty years!
I thought
, Has it really been that long?
Then, I thought about it and wondered if it was really worth going in the first place. My parents had long since retired and moved to Queensland, so I hadn't even visited the city where I grew up for years, and I wasn't even sure I wanted to revisit that forgotten, and forgettable, part of my life again. First off, I told Warren I'd be giving it a miss, but then I reconsidered. My social life was almost zero, but that was mostly because I hadn't felt like going out much after Wendy left me, so I gave it some thought, and decided a few days away might do me some good.
