Rambling Rhodes

Next up. . .

Not to worry. I'll have my senior pictures posted eventually; I just have to find the damned things first. I only had two outfits for senior pictures: a sportcoat and football jersey. And then I didn't even end up playing football my senior year because I went to Tokyo.

Which reminds me, I should totally dig up my old Tokyo yearbook and scan my class picture from that year. You want to see stress acne? Good God, man, my face looked like early volcanic earth.

Let the eagle soar. . .

Good God, where to begin? I suppose we can start with the necklace. I really can't make any excuses for the thing. I honestly thought it was cool, which proves that, even though I was an A Honor Roll student, I was actually very stupid.

Now. . . the teeth. I'm sure you noticed it looks like there's only one big front tooth instead of two defined teeth. Okay, remember the denture thing from the previous year? Well, basically, the thing fell out of my mouth while I was swimming in a river during the summer. Considering how freakin' expensive the damned thing was, the local dentist decided to try and glue a temporary tooth into place. I'd had surgery to drill a titanium post into my upper mandible that would one day support a permanent tooth, but since my mouth was still growing, we had to make do with temporary measures.

The glue treatment worked for about two weeks, before a slight bump to my mouth knocked it out again. Rather than go back to the dentist to glue it back in, I came up with the grand idea of using. . . Super Glue. And it worked! For about two weeks, at which point the tooth broke free again and I had to glue it back into place. This was an ongoing process, so by the time this picture was taken, the place holder tooth had enough Super Glue build-up on it to make it look like I was growing plaque as some sort of experiment.

The hair is it's own thing entirely. I have no explanation for that.

It's a dental miracle!

Okay, this wasn't really a dental miracle. What actually happened was, a few months after my ninth grade picture was snapped, I was doing pull-ups right before wrestling practice started. The pull-up bars were mounted to the wall, which meant I had to face the wall to do pull-ups. Lining the walls of the wrestling room were these big green military-type bags, which were ironically in place to protect us from running into the walls during practice.

Well, one of my fellow wrestlers thought it would be funny to throw one of those large heavy pillows at my back, thereby making me smack my groin against the wall. Unfortunately, I dropped down from the pull-up bar just as the pillow was released, so the pillow hit the back of my head, and the transfer of momentum meant my face smashed into the wall.

So, all those years of waiting for my teeth to grow together were basically for nothing, as in that single moment, my right tooth was ejected from mouth just as I nearly went unconscious. The sight of my tooth bouncing off my arm woke me right up though. Well, that and the pain of having my tooth snapped off at the root.

What's in place in my mouth in this picture is basically a temporary denture. It was a most irritating device that took up the entire roof of my mouth, and attached to the plate was this single tooth. I had to pop the denture out every night and drop it in a cup with Polident. Yeah, I was real special.

Also, you probably noticed that my eyesight also went south in the previous year, necessitating glasses. As class pictures go, this one is actually pretty decent for me, particularly when you consider the following year. . .

I can has puberty?

True, it would have been nice if I had actually been looking at the camera, rather than some odd distraction over to my left, but as I said in my last post, you only really got one shot at class pictures back in the day. I suppose kids today get to see their digital images before they go out for processing. Little brats don't know how good they have it

I don't recall this particular shirt, although I imagine it was another hand-me-down. Thankfully, I didn't pop the collar. By this point in my developmental growth here in 9th grade, I was capable of growing just a wisp of a mustache, as evidenced here by the noticeable razor lip nick. My teeth are actually starting to squeeze together. Perhaps the dentists were right, after all. Maybe next year. . .

Tell Me About the Rabbits, George.

Well, I eventually ditched the jean jacket in favor of my hometown football jersey (Harmony Cardinals). I wore #80 from eighth grade to my junior year.

The larger issues here are the proto-mullet snaking its way down my neck, and the "don't-take-the-picture-yet-I'm-chewing-my-tongue" smile. That's the thing with class pictures back in the day: you only got one shot at it. You sat down, struck your best pose, the white umbrellas illuminated, and you just had to pray things looked okay. As we've seen, my batting average for class pictures was pretty damned low.

And. . . it's only going to get worse.

Fonzie Says: "Ayyyyyyy!"

Okay, I'm going to let ya'll have a few minutes to finish laughing.

*waiting*

You finished? You get it all out of your system? No?

*waiting*

Well, you're either finished laughing, or you're unconscious from lack of oxygen. Either way, here we go:

Honestly, at the time, this was my most favoritest class picture EVAR. I LOVED this picture. Granted, like Seinfeld episodes, it hasn't aged well. The spiked hair was a summer project; it took weeks of training with hair mousse to get that shit to stand upright on demand.

You may remember the jean jacket craze that rocked the fashion world during the late 80s. Well, I was not about to let that craze go without taking part. The only problem was, my mother was not about to spring for a jean jacket. Solution? This was my mother's jean jacket from when SHE was in high school! I didn't tell anybody that, of course; I had some concept of shame. I think the jean jacket aged well, don't you? You gotta love the popped collar. I was poppin' collars before it was cool, maannn. Unintentionally, of course. That jean jacket was so old, I think the collar was permanently popped by age.

Can We Talk?!

I've always wondered what the hell I was thinking, during this picture, putting my arm out like a chicken wing. It's kind of an aggressive posture, like I'm about to give Matt Lauer the 411 about Scientology. The photographer probably was afraid I was going to bite him with my Chiclet teeth. It had been about two full years since the toboggan to the face incident, and the teeth had moved at a glacial pace somewhat closer together. Dentists continued to insist braces weren't necessary. To their credit, in about three more years, they would be proven right. Just not quite in the way they imagined. Oh, and say good-bye to the bowl cut, people, because. . .

Oh, Hai Guys!

My bowl cut and gap teeth. Let me show you them. You really have to marvel at the level of self-esteem I must have had back then, to be able to confidently and proudly display my chompers without even a hint of embarrassment. Then again, maybe I was just so happy to be wearing horizontal stripes, once more! An alternative theory is that I was happy because I was drunk with the power of being a student patrol guard. They're all good theories.

What's Up, Doc?

In retrospect, maybe I should have adopted more of a "Plain Layne" approach to pictures after my teeth became bifurcated. Oh well, live and learn. I think that was the only Vikings jersey I ever wore, and I think it was a hand-me-down from my brother. Oh well, at least it was a final farewell to the world of horizontal stripes.

All I Wanted For Christmas Was . . .

As stated in my previous post, a couple things happened not long after my second grade photo was taken. Thing one was, I lost a tooth. Thing two was, I lost another tooth. Now, the right tooth came out the nice, natural way, by which I mean I wiggled and wiggled it until it broke free from its gummy nest. The left tooth, on the other hand, came out a tad different, and well before it was supposed to.

How it went down was, a bunch of my classmates and I were sledding during noon recess, when one of my classmates thought it would be funny to hold out his red, plastic toboggan like a matador's cape as my sled raced down the hill towards him. A little known fact that's little known about red plastic toboggans is this: they are nowhere near as soft as a matador's cape, especially when they smack you in the mouth at 15 mph.

It didn't knock the tooth completely out, but there was a lot of blood and a lot of screaming. I eventually found myself in the principal's office and, I shit you not, the principal actually tied a string around my wrecked tooth and, with a flick of the wrist, my tooth went flying across the room. If that kind of shit were to go down like that today, I'd no doubt be living off a grand financial settlement.

At any rate, the premature departure of my left tooth gave my right tooth all sorts of room to grow however it damned well pleased, which led to the next six years of dental wait-and-see, where dentists all agreed the teeth would eventually gravitate together without the need for braces. Believe me when I tell you, hilarity ensued.

Calm Before The Storm

Nothing too remarkable about this year, which is a good thing, because the next year will make up for all the previous years of cuteness taken for granted. A couple months after this picture was taken, things started to happen in my life. Big, important, dramatic things that so warp a developing child's mind. Technically, I don't suppose you can say this shirt has horizontal stripes. It's just the one stripe.

Childhood Resumed

We continue now with the photo journey that is my childhood. As you can see, the hiatus from striped shirts was short-lived. And, I just want to say, for the record, a collared shirt on a six year old is just wrong. My hair apparently didn't know quite what it was supposed to do that day. Oh, what I'd give for that particular problem nowadays.