I’ve always had a problem with cliques; the little exclusionary groupings that insulate people from one another for, usually, superficial reasons. Cliques are most common in school settings, even through college (although they’re usually on the wane there) and, hopefully, by the time a person enters the real world, these things are gone for good…but don’t bet on it.
My basic distaste for cliques started in grade school where the seeds are sown, junior high school where these divisions normally germinate, before coming to full bloom in high school. Everyone receives a random category and is expected to act accordingly, except that didn’t feel right to me and I crossed boundaries whenever and wherever, which likely caused some confusion among the various cliques as what to do with me.
The fact that I was as easily a friend to one of the nerdy kids as to one of the jocks or one of the popular kids, left my standing with all the groups a little murky, which is just the way I wanted it.
If I liked somebody, I never stopped to consider their status, only whether or not I liked them. Pretty simple, eh? Well, not so much when you’re a kid facing the judgment of a pecking order in school. But the kids who were comfortable with my approach were the kids that I ended up befriending.
I just didn’t give a shit about these various factions and so, ignored all of it. If it couldn’t be ignored and I was being required to be exclusionary by one group, I resisted.
In grade school I took the unpopular step of playing marbles with Cathy out on the playground. This was 2nd grade and Cathy was taller and probably stronger than all the boys, had a mouth like a longshoreman and was coming from the poorest of circumstances. Nobody much liked her but I wanted to play marbles with her because she was uncharacteristically bawdy for a 2nd grader and I got a charge out of her shtick. I even took it one step further and, God forbid, deliberately sat next to her in class! By doing this, of course, I got myself inadvertently pigeon holed by some of the popular kids but, at the time, I didn’t consider the social consequences.
I was like fucking Switzerland, lodged between partisans, having no compelling attachment to any of them.
In junior high I was an athlete but even though I had friends in that group, I avoided the social pack as a whole. I’m convinced that some kids got into athletics because it put them in a more elite class among their peers, especially if they were good at their sport, but I ran track and played football because I had lots of energy to burn off and was somewhat of a masochist.
At the same time I ran with the athletes, I was pals with the guys in the audio-visual room and AV guys were some of the most renown nerds in the entire school but I thought all that tech stuff was fun so I hung around those who knew it best. Ah, the sweet smell of mimeograph paper!
My random allegiances continued on into high school and eventually college, where I again played utility fielder with my relationships. By then, I was playing music professionally and when my music partner and I got together with friends for partytime and the inevitable ‘joint passing circle’, I always passed the joint to the next person, declining to partake.
What? You were a musician, in college, hair down to your shoulders, idle time galore, no reason to go to geology class, taking a 1 credit course in golf and you refused to get high with your buddies?
Yes, because they made it a ritualistic clique and if I passed on the joint I was no longer part of that inner circle and not properly partying and, I always felt, not trusted to even be in the circle. That pissed me off because these were my ‘friends’, so then I went from disinterested to radically committed to never smoking that joint with them.
You see the mental quandary here? Well, maybe you don’t and you just think I was a big weirdo and maybe you’re right but that’s how it played out in my personal code so I had to see it through.
About the same time, one of the sorority girls asked me to be her date at a formal dinner with another fraternity. I was a scruffy hippie/musician with a mustache in training, so it was not immediately apparent why she asked me, except that I knew her through other friends and she thought I was funny. Uncharacteristically, I accepted an invitation to the ‘clique of all cliques’ because, I’m afraid to say, she was kind of quirky cute, and I was terribly curious as to what this was all about, even though I was going to be pathetically under-dressed for the occasion.
When I went to pick her up, one of the first things she asked was if I had brought my guitar and then it dawned on me that this was the catch and it was hoped that I might literally be singing for my supper at the post-dinner party. Unfortunately for her, there was no guitar in her future as I was there for the food (musicians are like that) and to be her date and nothing else. Even though I was seriously out of my element with the frat scene, we still had a relatively good time, drank a lot, ‘made out’ in front of her apartment after the ride home and, as a night capper, she puked just outside my car door. Priceless.
I always understood, to some degree, why cliques naturally occurred in school settings. Young people are a little unsteady on their feet at that point and there’s comfort in something that walks and talks more like you, but it also denies you the chance to learn things outside your sphere of knowledge and, at its extreme, takes on that exclusionary role that can be a harbinger of social misunderstandings to come.
I don’t think I rebelled against cliques for any reasons that were particularly noble. I just didn’t like them and refused to, as Groucho Marx once said, join any club that would have me as a member.
If I had a child, I’d tell them the same thing: don’t get hemmed in by your own insecurities…it’s a big world.
