The Inner Ring Royalty

Who Makes Up the Inner Circle?

By Robert Ringer

The Inner Ring at Brigadoon High was an interesting mix of characters, but the one who stood head and shoulders above everyone else was "Pudge" Johnson — 6'2" ... handsome ... captain and starting point guard on the basketball team as a sophomore ... tough as nails ... and rich ... make that very rich. So rich that his family donated a mansion, sitting on hundreds of acres of prime land, to Brigadoon Village. Brigadoon High used the Johnson Mansion for proms and other special events.

Pudge was bigger than life. As a 4'11" freshman, I remember thinking to myself that he was a man. And, in fairness to him, he wasn't a bully. In fact, Pudge was a pretty decent guy. Why shouldn't he be? His parents owned Brigadoon! Nobody gave Pudge any grief — not the teachers ... not the administrators ... not the coaches ... not his peers. At Brigadoon High, he was The Man — the guy at the very center of the inner circle.

Like many of the other jocks, Pudge was a chain smoker outside of school and, looking back on it, probably an alcoholic as well. Of course, smoking and drinking were officially off limits for athletes, but that didn't seem to bother the elite jocks.

At first, I was awed by how brazen they were about violating the athletic department's rules. But it soon became obvious that the reason for their lack of concern was that the Brigadoon coaches clearly understood how The Game is played — one of the rules being that they were required to look the other way. After all, jocks will be jocks.

Determined to move up in rank, it was only a matter of time until I got into the swing of things. I took up smoking (though, like Hillary's husband, I didn't inhale), even learned how to dangle a cigarette out of the side of my mouth at a James Dean angle. I was a classic wannabe rebel without a cause. Drinking was even easier, because in those days "three-two" beer was mandated for hotshots like me who were under twenty-one years of age.

But I digress ... back to the Inner Circle crowd. Paul Hathaway was a skinny kid, but hard as a rock — and, like Pudge, tough. Paul was captain of the football team during our senior year, and placed third in the state in the 100-yard dash. He loved to taunt, albeit cheerfully, and he had a nickname for everyone — sort of a friendly way of letting you know that your real name wasn't worth much. He boisterously referred to me as "Rings."

(Interestingly, decades later, some of the kids in my son's Brigadoon high school tagged him with the same moniker. Not that there's anything inherently wrong with "Rings" ... in fact, it has a nice ring to it. But it's an example of how even the most subtle elements of The Game transcend time at Brigadoon schools.)

My worst memory of Paul is that he had a nasty habit of balling up his fist as he walked toward you in the hallway, middle knuckle protruding outward, and, at the precise moment he passed by, slugging you on your upper arm. After enduring a couple of month-long bruises, I finally got smart enough to move as far away from him as possible whenever I saw him coming.

Unlike Pudge and Paul, Inner Ring fixture Jonathan Bettman was not pleasant — at least not to wannabes like me. Jonathan was a straight-A student, a member of all the important after-school clubs, and a mediocre athlete who ran track and played football. Above all, he was a verbal bully, a true master of the putdown.

Jonathan also had a very loud, very foul mouth — which he had an uncanny knack of exhibiting only when teachers and administrators were out of earshot. I could never figure out how he had all of them fooled, but now that I'm a bit wiser, I suspect that on the rare occasions when they might have heard his wise-guy bellowing, they just smiled and brushed it aside. After all, he was the smartest kid in the school and an Inner Ring member since first grade. The phenomenon of favoritism, alive and well in all schools today, did not go unnoticed by me.

Mel Stillman was one of those mystery members of the Inner Ring at Brigadoon High. Though he was an honor student, he had no athletic prowess, wasn't physically attractive, and, quite frankly, was a bit effeminate. But for reasons that still mystify me, he was solidly entrenched in the Inner Ring.

Like Jonathan, Mel was a Brigadoon blueblood going back to the first grade — for all practical purposes, born into the inner circle. Being an intellectual by nature, he had the remarkable ability to calmly and quietly slice your ego in half. If Jonathan's putdowns were like being struck by an axe, Mel's were administered with a scalpel. From his cashmere sweaters to his Buckley-esque vocabulary, Mel, the ultimate Inner Ring mystery kid, was the archetypal Brigadoon High snob. (I sense that, as you're reading this, you may be recalling an image of a "Mel" in your own high school.)

There's just one more Inner Ring fixture I want to mention here, Bones Bremer. Bones was the Inner Ring's assassin. He did a lot of dirty work for the benefit of Inner Ring members who didn't care to exert themselves. Bones made Jonathan Bettman seem soft-spoken and mild-mannered by comparison. He would say anything, anytime, anywhere, to anybody — and say it loudly. He was beyond foul, and his specialty was aiming remarks at your mother's lack of virtue.

But Bones had an even greater talent that secured his position in the Inner Ring: He was an accomplished hocker. If you're too civilized to know what a hocker is, reader discretion is advised. A hocker is a glob of mucus-strengthened saliva that is artfully directed at an unsuspecting humanoid.

If I hadn't viewed Bones as the scum of the earth, I would have been in awe of his ability to hit his target's ear at a distance of twenty-five feet or more. The Inner Ring heartily approved of Bones' unusual skill, though I now realize that the only reason he made it through high school alive was that we didn't have a Seung-Hui Cho lurking somewhere in the Outcast Ring. If we did, trust me, he would have been mentioned prominently in the videotape left behind.

In the next installment, I'll tell you how life turned out for some of the Inner Ring members — as well as for some in the rings below.

Previous - Part XXIV, The Brigadoon High Experience

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