What ever happened to Howie

I was reading rserven's diary Teachers Lounge this morning and in it she mentioned a "special friend" she had in school. I was instantly transported back to high school and memories of a little guy I kind of adopted. His name was Howie and he was one of the special ed. kids. I don't know what exactly his problems were that required him to be in that classification but I do remember him vividly. Howie had this crazy hair that shot up out of his head at various skewed angles of differing lenths, it almost looked like somebody tried to cut it with a dull scythe, but that's just how it grew. I often wonder  what happened to him. Below are a few memories of my experiences with high school, and Howie.

He had a mouthful of extra teeth that didn't fit and were stacked up like a sharks from his incisers on back. He was fairly short, weighed probably about 85 pounds and had these big goofy ears that some people just loved to pull on. In a highschool full of mean unconscious adolescents, he was a huge target. Perhaps nobody else noticed but he also had these incredibly bright, crystal clear blue eyes that flashed and darted about, taking in everything around him.

The first time I met Howie was in freshman gym class. Other than his bizarre appearance he seemed in good physical health so he was in a normal gym class with us. One thing about Howie, he really, really tried his best to fit in. I liked the little guy right away just because he was so determined not to let the teasing and other abuse he recieved deter him from being a part of.

One of the gym class standards of that era was dodgeball. It could be brutal sometimes. The bullies loved to smash that ball into the faces of those smaller and weaker then themselves. Myself and a few of my friends always made sure Howie was on our team and was one of the last people standing. He was soooo proud when we won, he would grin this big huge toothy grin the rest of the day and chatter at an even more frenetic pace. He talked all the time, but I rarely understood anything he said. He had this high pitched rapid fire speech that was garbled, not in a way that made him sound stupid, but almost like his brain was working faster than his mouth could keep up with. It was really, really annoying to some kids, but I always thought his long drawn out unintelligible ramblings made a perfect soundtrack to the weirdness and pointlessness of high school.

After a few weeks in gym class together and him having a few bad experiences, I moved his locker next to mine so nobody fucked with him in the locker room, after that Howie started following me around other places, including the parking lot at lunch break.
This was the mid 70's, before the war on drugs, before the arcane drug laws. Dope was cheap and plentiful and I proudly belonged to that segment of the population that was intent on consuming as much and as many kinds as humanly possible. We were called freaks, or stoners, and didn't give a rat's ass what anyone thought of us, we were free from the outdated indoctrination into the american mainstream thought process and my response to any and all types of authority was a resounding Fuck You.
I don't know how much Howie understood about the things my buds and I talked about, but he sure loved to hang out. I never let anyone get Howie high, even though almost everyone else thought it would be cool. I figured he was already wacked enough. It was a daily happening, "Hey let's get Howie stoned" and me telling them to knock it the fuck off.
Then one day it happened. By now it was junior year and we had gym class right after lunch. I spent that lunch break sniffing around some new girlfriend and my buds decided in my absence it was time for Howie to smoke a little weed. Bad idea.

The day they hung Howie.
We were inside that day as it was raining. Free Day they called it. It was basically an hour and a half of a hundred kids running wild in two gymnasiums, doing whatever they felt like doing. Howie was beaucoup fucked up. He was running around like a rabbit on crack and annoying the piss out of almost everyone including me, throwing shit at people, screaming and yelling, trying to pull kids gym shorts off, he was totally wacked.
There was a climbing rope in the gym, part of the old presidential physical fitness directive was how far and how fast you could climb the thing. Somebody decided it would be funny to hang Howie from the rope. At first they were trying to hang him by his feet.
It was all fun and games. I didn't see it all until it was too late, all of a sudden I see Howie perched on the shoulders of a friend of mine with a half-hitch sorta knot in the rope which was around his neck. Those around them were laughing and joking about hanging Howie, it was all a big joke. Out of nowhere this redneck jock dude came running up and did this flying kick to the back of my buddy knocking him on his ass and leaving Howie dangling by his neck. It went from funny funny ha ha to holy fucking shit in a heartbeat.
I don't remember the next exact details but we somehow got him down, half conscious wearing a nasty red welt necklace, and then got into a huge fight. Stoners versus jocks, right there in the gym. The cops came and of course they and the school admins sided with the football/basketball fuckers, several of us got suspended and nobody seemed to give a shit that they almost killed Howie.

After that event I got kicked out for a week and when I returned to school Howie was kind of quiet for awhile. The rest of the year passed without much to talk about. It wasn't until next year that another notable incident occured.

Gimme your fucking money
I was at a football game with some buds, we were stoned as usual, hanging out, probably trying to figure out how we could get laid, more stoned, or both. I went down under the bleachers with one friend Mike, to get some munchies and take a whiz. When we got down there, behind the consessions in an unlit corner I spotted Howie. He was surrounded by four of the most rotten pricks in the whole school. Everyone was afraid of these dudes because they were big, crazy and just plain fucking mean. Like sucker punch a girl in the face for fun mean. Two of them were brothers and one of the brothers had Howie by the throat, up off his feet, pressed up against the fence there, choking the shit out of him, with another one slapping him around. Howies parents had dropped him off alone at the game with money for snacks, and they wanted it it.

I had an instant reaction that didn't even require a decision even though I knew getting involved was a bad idea for Mike and I on a personal physical level.
I knew talking to them was pointless, I knew Mike had my back no matter what, and i knew that the G-ds were watching. That thought process took about 1/100th of a second and my next reaction was to run up before they had a chance to react and smash brother number one in the face with the hardest punch I've ever thrown in my life. It was enough to put him on his back, dropping his grip on Howie, who ran for his life, and Mike following up taking down one of the other guys. What followed was one of the worst ass whippings I ever took, not only by the dudes we just punched, but by the cops who arrived shorty afterwords. We ended up fighting and wrestling out from under the bleachers into the main walkway in front of the consessions and then got surrounded by a crowd. i'm more of a lover than a fighter and other than almost biting the ear off one of the bastards, that first punch I got in was about all the damage I was able to do.
Even though when the cops got there a few minutes later and proceeded to beat all six of us senseless with their billy clubs, I was still glad they got there. At least the cops weren't trying to kill me. I got my. ass. beat.
And again, nobody cared what happened to Howie. He was invisible it seemed.

A couple weeks after that got kicked out of that school district for good and went to alternative school to finish my diploma requirements. That ended my high school experience and cemented in me a knowing that the education system in america was seriously fucked up. I never saw Howie again. I think about him several times a year.
In many ways his path through that school was similiar to my own kid brother four years behind me,  who had suffered brain cancer at age nine and by high school age was healthy enough to go to school. He was a special ed kid too due to the tramatic brain injury he recieved from the surgeries and massive full head radiation treatments that followed. My brother Tim was also a target and thankfully like Howie, he found a few special friends that looked out for him with several incidents that closely paralleled mine and Howies.

It's funny how just a random click of the mouse can bring up such a flood of feelings and memories, perhaps it is also because my brother died a little over a year ago at age forty after a thirty one year battle to survive in a body that never quite worked for him. I was his legal guardian for the last ten years and miss him terribly. Maybe it's because of the extreme rift in this country where my views and ideals are so far apart from what is portrayed as mainstream america. Maybe it's he behaviors I see from people in power who are so much like the bullies from high school. Whatever the cause I was inspired to write this morning and if you've read this far, bless you for indulging me and my ramblings.

The next time you meet someone like Howie, or Tim, give them a smile and if you are so inclined, say a quick prayer that they may too have special friends that are willing to step into a place of guardianship for them. I hope Howie is still out there somewhere, doing whatever it is he does, bright eyed, taking it all in. I hope.