Vincent Hale: Remembering Bobby

It was early morning in the spring of 1987. Bobby and I were walking down Firestone Road – walking away from Forrest High School and towards my house. When we reached the part where Firestone passes over Interstate 295, Bobby looked down over the railing, glanced at his watch, looked up and said, “We gotta get off this road…NOW!” He later explained that we were passing over the highway his mother took on her commute to work, and we were clearly visible on the overpass at about the time that she would be passing under. We started running towards the end of the overpass trying our best not to look too conspicuous. Two fifteen-year old’s RUNNING away from a school – not conspicuous at all.

Finally, we got to the part where we could safely jump over the rail and run down the steep grass-covered hill. After a few steps we both lost our balance and tumbled all the way to the bottom. When we finally stopped rolling, we were both muddy and bruised, plus bloodied by the stickers and sandspurs we’d picked up on the way down. After a few moments of moaning and complaining, we looked at each other and just started laughing. Bruised and bloodied but laughing in that way that only fifteen-year old’s on a new adventure can laugh. It was the first time we ever skipped school. It would not be the last.

Bobby and I met in Jefferson Davis Jr High in the fall of 1985. Besides homeroom, we had three classes together: English, Science, and Office Skills/Typing. Science class is probably the reason we became friends. The teacher had us sitting in alphabetical order, so Hale and Head shared a table. It was an odd setup – instead of individual desks there were tables with two students at each. Basically, everyone had a pre-assigned lab partner based entirely on their last name. Due to the unique setup of that science classroom, there was a lot of freedom for talking and goofing off, but inevitably the teacher would scold us when things got too rowdy. Correction: the teacher would scold Bobby. For whatever reason when Bobby and I were goofing off in school he was always the one to get in trouble, not me. Bobby always claimed that it was because I was “innocent looking.” I don’t know if that was true, but objectively speaking he was always the one to get in trouble when I was just as guilty. It was a pattern that would follow us all throughout junior and senior high.

If you’ve known me for long you’ve probably heard the story that I’m about to tell about our Office Skills class. It was one of the few occasions that the teacher was focusing on something other than typing. We were learning how to file, so we all had huge stacks of 3x5 index cards. For some reason Bobby and I decided this was the perfect opportunity to pass notes, albeit with 3x5 index cards. Since we didn’t sit near each other, we came up with the bright idea of throwing the cards across the room. Picture the flight of a Frisbee over the heads of multiple rows of students. Inevitably, we started talking about girls, and eventually it devolved into the time-honored schoolboy tradition of rating them. We were oddly specific with our ratings, so cards with things like “Melissa is an 8.53” or “Teresa is a 9.14” were flying over students’ heads every time the teacher turned her back. When Bobby decided to rate Tina (a personal favorite for both of us) he wrote “Tina is a 9.77” and flicked the card my way like he’d done 5 or 6 times already that day. As the card started my way it inexplicably shot straight up in the air towards the ceiling – maybe the air conditioner clicked on, I don’t know. The card then did a huge loop like a Blue Angel FA-18 at an air show and started back towards Bobby. But instead of coming back to its thrower like a dutiful boomerang, the card instead landed face up right in the middle of Tina’s desk. Yeah, that Tina. The 9.77. Thirty-seven years later this remains one of my all-time favorite memories because it was so improbable, so ridiculous, and so absolutely funny. Not that long ago I asked Tina if she remembered the event. She did, but she only remembered that the card had numbers on it. I told her what the numbers were and what they meant.

Eventually Bobby became friends with my old buddy Ted who I’d known since the 6^th grade. For the rest of the 9^th grade and into the 10^th at Forrest the three of us were great friends. We signed up for many classes together in the sophomore year, including an odd new concept called Zero Hour where students could schedule a for-credit class before school actually began. For some reason we all thought that would be a good idea, so we scheduled a Spanish class together. At first, we liked out teacher, but as time went on our opinions changed quite a bit. I don’t think Bobby ever took the class too seriously, but he absolutely enjoyed coming up with vulgar / offensive things in Spanish. We foolishly considered Spanish our own little secret language, not really giving thought to the obvious fact that the teacher and hundreds of other students at the school would be able to read the notes we thought we had so cleverly encoded.

I don’t believe Bobby took any more language classes after our experience in Zero Hour, but we kept our not-so-clever codes for the remainder of our time at Forrest. Over the next few years, we would see that Spanish teacher in the halls, and he was always oddly rude to us - very oddly rude and definitely not appropriate behavior for a teacher. Once he stopped us to talk for a few minutes and it all seemed friendly enough, but then inexplicably he just started telling me how fat I was. It was odd because he just did it with a smile on his face like it was totally normal, acceptable, and appropriate – like telling a student that he’d gotten really tall or that his hair had grown long. Bobby responded to the insult by advising the teacher how greasy his hair was. He obviously could have gotten in huge trouble for saying that, but Bobby was a loyal friend, and he could see that this idiot teacher was being needlessly cruel. Two years later in our senior year that teacher was removed from Forrest for breaking the window in a classroom door. He was nuts. And his hair was graso. We may have told him that a time or two.

Halfway through our 10^th grade year Ted moved out-of-state. Bobby and I then had one of the strangest conversations I ever recall having. As we were discussing what to do next now that the threesome had been broken up, Bobby said, “We should become rednecks.” Some who knew us in high school might think that wasn’t much of a stretch from what we already were. But what Bobby meant by that statement was that we should become friends with the redneck crowd at school – mainly out of protection. He already had it planned out and had obviously given the idea some thought. He mentioned two guys – Brooks and Jim – and suggested, “Those two are our keys in.”

He and I decided to literally give it a trial run and decided to dress like rednecks the next day. We both wore flannel shirts and hats – his a Redman tobacco hat and mine a “Southern By the Grace God” hat. I can remember this because we took pictures that day. The trial run was a success and the next thing I knew we were wearing boots, we were friends with Brooks and Jim, and we were dipping Copenhagen at PE as we walked the track. Jim dropped out of school and Brooks moved to South Carolina the next year, so our “ins” were out. But in the 11^th grade we would create our own circle of friends from scratch.

At the start of our junior year, we were both 16 so life was definitely changing. Since only seniors were allowed to park on campus, I paid a church a few bucks a month to park across the street from school. I can’t recall how Bobby got to school at that time, but I don’t think he drove himself yet. Strangely enough we had some of our best times in that parking lot before school. We’d show up early and goof off for a good half hour before classes started. Shortly after the school year started, Bobby introduced me to his friend Chris. I believe they met in Summer School a few months earlier. Chris and I hit it off immediately, and at this point Brooks was still in the picture, so our circle of friends was growing. Chris was from Ohio, so most assuredly not a redneck. Bobby always marveled and laughed at the things Chris would say that were so different than how we said them. Nothing vicious – he would just laugh at the way Chris pronounced “Mazda” or how he called a vacuum cleaner a “sweeper.” Just regional/cultural differences, but definitely differences.

Not long into the 11 grade we were in the church parking lot one morning before school and Bobby walked up with another friend. At this point I wasn’t ready for more. I liked Chris a lot, but there were already four of us and that was really enough for me. But Bobby was the linchpin of this group, and if he said the new guy was in, then the new guy was in. He introduced the newcomer as Chad, someone who lived near him, and I believe they had had the same school bus stop at some point. Anyway, Chad was there the next day and the next and the next. And then Chris and Chad started paying the church for parking and it became our official every day before school hangout. And since we were not on school property, we were free from the reach of nosy teachers. There’s an unconfirmed rumor that we may have smoked cigarettes before class, which obviously was not allowed on campus.

Once the five of us settled into our new group we started skipping school regularly. At the end of 10^th grade Bobby and I tested the waters by skipping once (and rolling down that overpass), but now that we had cars at our disposal there were no real impediments left. And since we met up at an off-campus parking lot before school, it was easy to just jump back in our cars and just leave. For some reason, the term “Let’s go” because our code for skipping school. Sometimes I would forget about the code, decide it was time to walk across the street to school, say, “OK, let’s go.” Hearing the signal Bobby would immediately jump into the passenger seat of my truck leaving the rest of us to just look at each other, shrug, and get in our cars.

One evening in 1987 Bobby, Brooks, Chris and I obtained a bottle of Ron Rico rum. After the bottle was rapidly drained, I ran to the bathroom knowing that rum, along with any other contents of my stomach, were headed back up. As I threw up in the toilet, I glanced over to see Bobby throwing up in the sink next to me. This started a chain reaction where we took turns puking in rhythmic succession. It didn’t help my queasiness that Bobby was identifying and labeling the items he’d eaten earlier. When it was finally over Brooks branded us “Bathroom Buddies.” The nickname stuck and was brought up often over the next few years, especially any time we were drinking.

Brooks moved back to South Carolina right after Thanksgiving of 1987, our 11^th grade year – so really only a few months after school started. After he was gone it was just me, Bobby, Chris and Chad for the rest of our time at Forrest. We all had other friends – mine were from my job at Publix, Bobby’s were his childhood friends he still saw with his family – but as far as how things went at school it was the four of us. Over time there were others who came in and out of our lives, and frankly there may have been a hanger-on or two who just kind of came with us sometimes against our will. Including some nameless character who may have drank the remnants in a beer can we were using as an ashtray. But once Brooks was gone, it was the four of us – anyone else was kind of floating around on the outside.

We skipped a few times with Brooks, but after he left, we started skipping even more. We figured out that there were 9 weeks in a semester and students were allowed to miss 9 days. Even with our Duval County public school education we pretty quickly figured out that this meant we could skip a day every week. And from that point on, we pretty much did. Early on we would go to Chris’s sister Debbie’s house on the days we skipped. Chris would knock on her door and when she’d answer blurry-eyed and half asleep he’d announce, “Time to make the donuts!” She’d call us degenerates and usually mix in a few other choice words, but she would always let us in.

Once at her house Chris tried to make us some macaroni and cheese in the microwave and he cooked it so long that the macaroni lost its form, and just morphed into a big pile of cheesy goo. We were broke teenagers, so we ate it anyway. Bobby called it “Yankee macaroni and cheese” and from that time on that’s just what we referred to it as. We would literally request it. I remember telling Bobby that I was pretty sure Chris didn’t make it that way on purpose, and I was almost certain that wasn’t the standard way of making it in the north. He didn’t care, it was Yankee macaroni and cheese is his eyes.

Debbie gave all of us nicknames almost immediately. Once I was at her house after work, so I was wearing my dress boots with white socks. Debbie said they were milkman socks, and she immediately labelled me the Milkman. Since my grandfather was literally a milkman, I accepted the nickname gladly. She gave Bobby the name “Squirrelly.” Which, on the surface seems like a bit of an insult to a short kid – akin to calling me “Fatty.” But Bobby took it all in stride and embraced the name. He spelled it “Squirley” and used that name as we continued passing notes over the years, and I think he may have even signed his name that way in one of my yearbooks.

By this point we were all hanging out every weekend in addition to hanging out at school. We spent countless hours in the Putt-Putt game room, on the Goony Golf go-kart track, at Burger King, Subway, McDonald’s, and the various movie theaters in Orange Park. Bobby and Chris would sometimes engage in contests with each other at Subway to see who could eat their sub the fastest, and even though he was extremely out of his league in such a competition, Bobby could hold his own.

Most weekends either Chris or I would pick Bobby up after dark, because he had to sneak out of his parents’ house. He lived at the end of a long dirt road that could sometimes be intimidating once the sun went down. We would show up at the pre-arranged time and start driving slowly as we neared his house. We knew to look for his dog Buck, because if Buck was in the road, you knew Bobby was nearby. Bobby would stay in the woods until he was sure it was us, and then step out at the last minute. Bobby would explode into the car full of energy and excitement – throwing elbows and fists and yelling “VINSTER!” – a nickname I picked up somewhere along the line that I never particularly cared for. I think maybe Brooks came up with it, but I’m not 100% sure.

By the time our senior year started we were fully settled into our roles in our group of four, and into our routine, which by the way including a lot of skipping school if I haven’t mentioned that already. I think we literally skipped a day in the first week of our senior year. By this time, we were going to my house when we skipped, not Debbie’s. Debbie may have been married by now, but I’m not sure. Either way, we settled into going to my house once a week. The skip days usually involved beer, cigarettes, and Little Caesar’s pizza. We would sit on the back porch, play in the mud, chicken fight, whatever. We also watched Spaceballs 20 or 30 times over our 11^th and 12^th grade years, cinematic masterpiece that it was.

Midway through our senior year I got busted skipping, and to say the least the gig was up. That was December of 1988 and I never skipped again. Had I known our last time was going to be our last time I probably would have paid more attention. But the memories I have are amazing and the hundreds of photos from those days are priceless to me. In a way it's kind of weird to think that my fondest memories of high school are so tied up in skipping school, but that’s the simple truth. My senior year Bobby and Chad were going to the Skills Center for half the day, so I didn’t get to see nearly as much… unless we skipped.

Bobby was one of the cool kids, plain and simple. Some of those redneck tendencies stuck with him, but he wasn’t one to be pigeonholed into a stereotype. Bobby went to countless hard rock concerts with me in the 1980s – even if he probably left with a headache and didn’t even know the lyrics to any of the songs. Bobby was fearless also. I never saw him back down from anyone. Never. Once a guy at Forrest who literally must have been 6’4” or taller challenged him. Bobby just looked at him and said, “Shut the hell up before I reach up and punch you in the kneecap!” The guy laughed and walked away. Crisis averted. I saw Bobby explode in anger multiple times when someone would insult and/or challenge me. It didn’t matter if it was greasy-haired Spanish teacher, or a fellow student, or some random guy in the mall. If someone insulted me, Bobby would instantly shout “Shut the @#$% up!” before I would even have time to react. Once on Blanding Boulevard the driver of a car at a stoplight next to me shouted, “The speed limit’s 45 fat ass!” Guess I was speeding. Without hesitation Bobby dropped his pants and gave the offender in that car next to us a rear-end salute. The kid took care of business and defended his friends, no doubt about it.

Girls loved Bobby. He was popular with all types – from the avowed redneck girls at school, to the random cashiers we encountered at fast food restaurants. I can’t count how many times I stood there staring blankly into space as some girl we just met got all giggly and started flirting with him. But Bobby never once abandoned any of his friends for a girl that he had just met. Never. Not once. He’d talk to them, get their number, give them his, arrange to come back another time, but he never once turned around and said, “you guys go on ahead” to his friends.

When we graduated, I didn’t think much would change – a naïve assumption that I suspect many graduates have made over the years. For a while, it didn’t. Bobby went to work immediately, and I enrolled at FCCJ – the local community college. By this point Bobby had brought another friend into the mix – Mike. We all liked Mike and he fit right in with all of us immediately. But, for whatever reason, we all started drifting apart as the 1990s crept in. Bobby and Mike started hanging out more together, while Chris and I got jobs at a baseball card shop. In January of 1993 I left for college in South Florida, and at that point I didn’t even see Bobby anymore and frankly didn’t know how to contact him or Mike. Chad came to South Florida a few months after me. I have no memory of the last time I saw Bobby in the 90s, nor why specifically it was the last time. Again, had I known it would be the last I would have paid more attention.

I saw Bobby twice in 2000s. Both times were mini-reunions at restaurants with a few high school buddies – I believe Chris was at both. We talked about old times of course, and shared pictures of our kids. I remember thinking how sad it was how we’d never met each other’s kids, and didn’t even know their names. I enjoyed both meetings and both times we vowed to “do this again sometime,” but of course that never really happened. Through Facebook we were able to reconnect, and we chatted a few times. He started each message with “VINSTER!!!” Some things never change.

It’s not a stretch for me to say that Bobby literally changed my life. Not just because he was kind of the ringleader of our little group of friends, but because he was responsible for bringing those other people into my life. I never would have met Chris and Chad had Bobby not forcibly inserted them into our group (against my stubborn anti-social wishes). Chris was the best man at my wedding and the godfather to my first child. To this day Chris’s younger sister is a dear friend who may or may not have named her child after me. There’s a human on this earth who would have a different name had Bobby and I not sat together at that lab table in 9^th grade science.

I still see Chad often and we talk most days. He and I were drinking beer a few weeks back and we talked about Bobby a bit. I couldn’t help but think how nice it would have been had Bobby been there with us. That squirrelly (sorry, I mean Squirley) yet fearless little 15-year-old who tumbled down that overpass with me 35 years ago. How interesting would it have been for the 51-year old to be there with us talking about old times.

On May 12^th at 8:13 PM I received the following text: “Don’t even know how to ask, but have you heard about Bobby?” Needless to say, I knew this was not going to be good news. No one starts a conversation that way and ends it with “He won the lottery,” or “He got remarried.”

It was indeed bad. Worse than I imagined, to be honest. I immediately called Chad to let him know. Chris already knew, because he was actually the conduit through which the news flowed, and it was his sister Mary who told me.

My last words in the text to Mary were: “All this growing up business kind of sucks.” And it most assuredly does. When I told someone (who didn’t know him) that my best friend from high school had died, he said, “That’s sad, but high school friends are there for a reason. They serve their purpose and then you move on as you grow up.” There’s some truth to that, but that doesn’t mean that it wasn’t devastating news. I spent the next few days seeing things everywhere that reminded me of him. When I drove past Kingsley Lake, I thought back to the great time we all had one sunny Saturday on the slides and platforms at Stickland’s. Later, I saw a hat in a gas station and thought, “That’s something I could see Bobby wearing.”

I don’t wish to be melodramatic – I saw him twice in the last 20 years. There are literally hundreds of people whose day to day lives have been impacted by Bobby’s passing, so I do not wish in any way to try to jump undeservedly into that sympathy pool. But Bobby was my best friend in high school. I can say that without fear of offending Chris or Chad because they were the class of 1990 - one year behind us. So that caveat gives me the wiggle room to claim Bobby was my best friend. There may be others who will tell you that he was their best friend in the 1980s, and I would not dispute that. As I mentioned earlier, he had another set of friends that he grew up with. But I know that it was me driving down that dark dirt road nearly every Friday and Saturday night from 1987-1989. I know that it was my car that he rode in to our high school graduation. And it was me who tumbled down that hill with him in the Spring of 1987.

Before I met Bobby, I used to slide down that overpass on big splayed-open cardboard boxes – kind of the Deep South version of snow sledding. For years I would think about that if I ever found myself in the old neighborhood. I suspect that from now until the day I die I’ll only think of Bobby and me rolling down that thorn-covered hill whenever I happen to see it.

When I look back on my high school days, I consider them some of the very best of my life. My memories are plentiful and full of so many good times. And I can say with 100% certainty they would not have been so special had I never met Bobby Joe Head.