My high school friend group was a mix of chorus, band, and theater people, which occasionally absorbed misfits from other groups because - and this is crucial - we tended to be the misfits when we were in other groups.
It was high school, of course, so anything I say about people I knew then has to be taken with a huge grain of salt. We were all trying on faces to see which one looked the most like who we wanted to be. It’s like Kurt Vonnegut said in his book Mother Night, “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”
The complex orbital mechanics of social life in my school frequently put me on the band bus or at cafeteria tables near Fred, whose persona was built around being the strangest person in the room. There is a whole corner of my mind built around the punk rock/avantgarde milieu of the late 1980s that I associate with Fred and his younger brother, Scott: Mojo Nixon, Jello Biafra, the Dead Kennedys, and the Dead Milkmen; the back-page comics that ran in the New Times; John Waters movies. High school Fred pushed the boundaries of what I had experienced in my suburban white-bread childhood out to encompass gonzo writers and beat poets - a heady and terrifying world that I could never quite bring myself to embrace completely.
But then we grew up.
Most of the people from high school I re-encountered when social media took off were less interesting - kids, jobs, and the occasional belated cultural awakening that led to joining cults or multi-level marketing companies (but I repeat myself). But as Fred matured and mellowed, his passion for oddness gave way to an enthusiastic and unironic love of funk music.
When Fred shared his Pandora funk station, Radio Free Yo Mama, that turned out to be one of the greatest gifts the internet has ever given me.
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