My Nemesis in Polyester: A High School Memory

I guess I should say one of my high school nemeses. This guy was easier to draw than the others.

My high school in South Jersey was a nightmare—it included junior high, cramming grades 7 through 12 into one building. Wide-eyed kids fresh from grade school shared hallways with guys banging their girlfriends in customized vans. It was a disastrous mix.

In that era and eras since, STUPID equaled COOL. Everybody wanted to be Fonzie and nobody wanted to be Potsie. Picking on weaker kids wasn’t just bad behavior—it was a pastime, something to kill the stultifying boredom of hours at school.

When I hit 7th grade, I felt like a tiny mammal in the age of dinosaurs. I darted through corridors, praying the bigger predators wouldn’t notice or tread on me.

I did a six-year stretch there and hated every minute of it.

Somewhere along the way, the fellow I illustrated above moved from South Philly to South Jersey—a typical migration at the time. My own family made the same move in the mid-1960s, chasing green lawns, safe streets, and decent public schools.

But this guy? He was still South Philly through and through. I thought he was aping John Travolta’s character from Welcome Back, Kotter and found his swagger tediously pretentious.

He was everything I wasn’t: swarthy, athletic, extroverted. He probably started shaving at 11. Sports came easy to him, and the girls laughed at his lamest jokes.

I hated him. He didn’t care for me either—and he made sure I knew it.

It also didn’t help that I resembled Jodie Foster until I hit puberty.

My South Philly nemesis fit right in with a clique of jocks, all with Italian surnames. These guys were different—they loved disco and weren’t shy about it. They sported loud polyester shirts and slacks, ignoring the “disco sucks” mobs who worshipped ROCK like it was scripture.

The disco boys might’ve been onto something. While rock stars were either choking to death on vomit or aging into irrelevance, teenage angst felt silly coming from rich old musicians. Disco, though? It was a mating ritual—girls loved to dance. It wasn’t my thing, but I get it now.

Looking back, I’ll be honest: this guy didn’t do much to me. Some ribbing, trash talk, and clumsy jabs at my utter lack of coordination and athletic prowess — that was it. I made more out of typical ball-breaking than what it was.

In my head, I was a comic book hero, ready to make him eat his words. But that fantasy needed superpowers from a distant planet or a radioactive bug bite. Real life? It required putting actual work in at a gym and a love for sports I never had.

My disdain for athletics didn’t help me one bit.

Once I left high school, I entered what I thought would be utopia for the sensitive set — art school. I thought I would be among creative and supportive peers. Nothing could be farther from the truth.

As far as the cartoon is concerned, the idea and the drawing just flowed out of me after I was working on a variation of my vector cartoon The Swinging Algebra Teacher. I was careening down memory lane. I drew the nemesis cartoon in my Pen+Gear Sketch Diary which is a terrible name for a sketchbook, but it’s working out great so far. I inked in my penciled drawing with my Sailor fountain pens which I can’t live without.

I drew him from the distorted memories I have of him rather than referring to my yearbook.