The Feel of a Winner.

My previous entry here (about memories of childhood speech therapy) was really just a rewritten Unnamed Social Media Giant post of mine, with pictures of dubious tangential relevance added. So I figured what the hell, while I'm recycling my garbage, I'll also republish this unpleasant school-days reminiscence. I wrote it on the fly as I was posting old ads to the Unnamed Social Media Giant group that goes with this blog. Again, I've now rewritten it to offer more details, because I know the world is eager to speculate further about my fluctuating position on the Awkward Dork Spectrum. Enjoy!


Believe it or not, looking at this back-to-school ad I found in a 1976 TV Guide is just a smidge painful for me. It's for a sneaker called "The Winner" from Sears.

The red-white-and-blue ones seen here were perfect for the Bicentennial, but the ones I had (seven years later, as a freshman in high school) were not multi-colored, just blue stripes on blue. This gloomy color scheme was also appropriate; all my parochial school buddies had moved on to Catholic high schools, while I went into solitary at the nearby public institution, a stranger to virtually everyone. For a quiet, inward kid sometimes verging on neurotic, one not even overly comfortable in what had been my comfort zones, it was not a laugh-riot of a year.

This isolation was driven home one morning in Earth Science class, when classifying and categorizing were being taught. All the students' sneakers were collected for empirical tallying (pee-yu, what lucky kid got that job?). The results were fairly predictable, with something like fifteen or so Reebok, fifteen or so Nike, and... precisely one not-yet-broken-in pair of "The Winner II" by Sears. That's right, not even the original--the sequel! I don't think the shoes had "Converse" written anywhere on them to lend a little cred, but SEARS was of course quite prominent. I seem to recall that the kid who read off these results punctuated them by saying the name of my sneakers with comic timing, pronouncing it crisply, like a Letterman punchline.

I don't recall a roar of laughter, but there was definitely mockery dampening the already-stifling classroom air. Mainly I remember one chubby, way-prematurely balding creep sitting several seats behind me, maliciously chuckling "The Winna!" in his grotesque Long Island accent.

(Okay, we were all afflicted with that accent, but still. It's a brutish dialect steeped in a rich history of sarcasm and humiliation, one that may dull the points of verbal barbs but they don't rip at you any less for it.)

Trying not to come off as confrontational or too defensive, I turned around and said to him, matter-of-factly, "I had Reeboks, they fell apart after six months." (Which was true, but, really, just be quiet now, sad, poor nerd.) The teacher--cute, pudgy, hippie-ish Ms. M.--gave me a pained, apologetic look, like, "Whoops, sorry to inadvertently spotlight you as comparatively impoverished, there."

Over the next few years, after making an actual effort to not be such an introverted turd, I made some friends who helped me become social (meaning "a drinker") and even kindasorta popular (mainly among undiscerning teen drunkards). Much later, like at the very end of senior year, I was out somewhere among a small crowd of students and heard a stage-whispered "The Winna!" I looked and it was that same kid, with whom I had still never exchanged a look much less a pleasantry, talking behind my back--again literally--to seemingly disinterested others a few feet away. It took me a second to even process what it meant, and once I figured it out I laughed and thought, well, I've changed in these last few years but clearly he hasn't.

I should leave it there to make it seem like I'm the bigger person. I am not, however, thus I am regretfully compelled to add that I looked at his social media profile a while back, while lurking in a largely-neglected group for the class. He's saddled with a terribly unattractive family, and is decidedly fatter and inevitably balder, but most important, he's much fatter and balder than I am. The Winna!!!