There was a guy at my high school, Abbott Ricard who was academically brilliant — the legend had it that he’d never received anything other than an A in anything, be it French or physics — and the most notable athlete Santa Monica High School had produced in a decade. The Los Angeles Times ranked him as the metropolitan area’s premier quarterback in both his junior and senior years, and he anchored “our” 440 and 880 relay teams in track. He was the sort of classmate shy, miserable, not athletically gifted boys such as I ordinarily detest and mock, except that there was no detesting him, because he was even kinder and more generous than brilliant and athletic.
We hadn’t been at Samohi for two weeks before he rescued Billy Wills, Growing up in my family, I’d thought I’d witnessed some world-class cruelty (my mother’s, to my dad), but it turned out I hadn’t seen nothin’ yet. At lunchtime, Roger Bowman and other Auto Shop badasses would converge on Billy like the plague descending on medieval Europe. One guy, to Billy’s right, would distract Billy, while Roger, on Billy’s left, would spit into his milk, or onto his food. The Auto Shop boys’ girlfriends were thought to conceal razorblades in their enormous Ronettes-ish hair, so not even the football or wrestling teams intervened.
Abbott did. He walked right into the eye of the storm one lunchtime our second week on campus, pleasantly asked Roger if he could “borrow” Bllly for a few minutes, and walked Billy away from his tormentors while everyone gaped in amazement and almost passed out from the shame of not having done as Abbot was doing. Very quickly, the most popular kids embraced poor Billy as a sort of de facto mascot. Among the nice kids from north of Wilshire Blvd., being nice to Billy became the done thing.
Satisfied that Billy Wills was now in good hands, Abbott took to having his lunch in the school cafeteria, on the periphery of which he would ask isolated misfits of all shapes and sizes if the seat opposite them was free, as it of course invariably was. Kids who’d never been seen to smile — kids at whom one hesitated to look because they smelled, say, or ate that which they extracted from their own nostrils — were seen laughing for the first time in anyone’s memory. Ab was said to have received full athletic scholarship offers from 16 universities, including both USC and UCLA.
In the summer between our junior and senior years, he got a job washing cars at a used car lot on a grotty stretch of Lincoln Blvd. near where he lived. When a couple of punks hopped up on marihuana tried to rob the lot’s owner, Abbott scared them away, and at summer’s end, his grateful employer gave him a bonus — a ’56 Pontiac Chieftain that needed a lot of work. It turned out to be that auto mechanics was another of those things at which Ab was naturally sensational, and his uncle, who owned an Earl Scheib franchise, painted the car for him.
Except for the Ronettes-haired ones, probably every girl at Santa Monica High School longed to ride beside him in it to the big winter dance, but Ab was already spoken for — by Diane Geller, one of the misfits into whose lives he’d let a little sunshine in the school cafeteria. Diane was fat, monobrowed, and a booger-eater, with greasy hair and bad breath, but Ab reportedly treated her as though she were Shelley Fabares. (The chances of my going to a school dance in those days — or even talking to a girl — were approximately those of the Auto Shop alpha becoming a nun.)
I never actually spoke to Ab either, though we had English together our first semester of 12th grade, and he always smiled at me when we passed each other in the hall. One of our first projects for that English class was to write an essay about a new friend we’d made over the summer. I, as was my natural inclination, had spent it lying alone on the beach down the hill from my parents’ house, and wrote about a friend I made up. Ab, on the other hand, wrote about how he had come to regard as a dear friend one of the elderly shut-ins he kept company every week.
We had to read our essays aloud. Mine, naturally, didn’t exactly hold my classmates spellbound. There was a lot of whispering as I read, but I didn’t flatter myself by imagining that it was to do with my writing. Ab couldn’t get through his own essay. He got choked up at the end and had to stop, just short of bursting into tears, because he’d found out the day before that his elderly friend had passed away. A couple of the girls burst into the tears Ab had denied himself, and even Bruce Schechter, the class clown, could think of nothing hilarious to say. Indeed, it looked as though the colour had been drained from him.
At lunchtime, I keyed the passenger door of Ab’s Pontiac Chieftain.
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