I once was the pineapple

Last night at the Ruck, before the Monday night “Catch the Mania” trivia game began, I chatted with one of the members of another trivia team, the Troyale Family.  We were mostly talking about trivia and whether the “Catch the Mania” game was as good as the “Trivia Nights Live” competitions.

And somehow, the conversation meandered to people we both knew.  And that included a “Trivia Nights Live” trivia player who, shall we say, had less-than-accepted social graces.

“I knew him when we were in college together,” said the trivia player from the Troyale Family.  “He used to be a big pain in the neck.  And if we knew he was in our dorm that evening, we had a code word to make sure our dorm room doors were closed, so he wouldn’t just wander in our dorm rooms and bother us.”

“Wow,” I replied.  “There was a code word?”

“Yep,” he said.  “Once we shouted that code word,  it was a warning that the guy was in the building.”

“What was the code word?”

“Pineapple.”

Wow.

Now truth be told, I’ve dealt with the Pineapple before.  At one point in time, when his trivia team and mine played at Brown’s Brewing, he had a propensity to walk over to my table and ask me the most obtuse trivia questions.  As if he was the host.  Okay, I’m sitting there trying to impress someone into joining my trivia team, and the Pineapple is walking over to do his best Bill Cullen impersonation.  No, I didn’t care about where the hottest temperature ever recorded in the United States was.  Go away.

The worst instance with the Pineapple occurred maybe about three years ago.  Again, another game at Brown’s.  It was two days after my Street Academy trivia team lost Trivia Bowl 7, and I was in a very, very bad emotional place about it.  Well, that night, the Pineapple’s team won trivia at Brown’s, and they were excited.  Very excited.  They were Richard Sherman-swatting-the-ball-away-from-Michael-Crabtree excited.

So much so, in fact, that the Pineapple ran from his table to mine, and decided to do that little “L” thing with his hand on my forehead.  You know… the universal hand gesture for loser.

That action infuriated another trivia team, A Few Cards Short of a Deck.  Next thing you know, both the Cards and the Pineapple’s team were screaming and shouting at each other, and it almost erupted into an Animal House / West Side Story rumble.

I saw the Pineapple a few more times in trivia contests – mostly at big-money tournaments like the Summer Bowl.  Then I lost track of him.  He became less of an adversary and more of an anecdote.

But when I heard about how he was an infamous legend – not just in trivia, but as an underclassman – it reminded me of moments in my past.  And they weren’t good moments, either.

Flash back to my years as an undergraduate.  I was probably the most socially awkward person to ever attend Hamilton College.  I belonged there like a LEGO piece belongs in a game of backgammon.  And having grown up in a broken, dysfunctional homelife, there were moments at Hamilton where I wasn’t as socially graceful as I could have been.

In other words… there were times when I was the pineapple.

I thought about that last night, as I drove home from the Ruck to my apartment in the Town and Village.  I thought about the moments where I was about as welcome at college frat parties as a bill from the gas company.  Heck, the only frat that would take me as a member – the Emerson Literary Society – only did so because they had several years of disastrous pledge drives and they needed warm bodies in the house or they would lose it.

And even in summers, when I stayed on campus to earn a few extra dollars by working with the college physical plant, I still felt like what I learned in life – or didn’t learn – left me unprepared.  And in some cases, I tried to compensate for it – with disastrous results.

One summer at college, I spent the mornings and afternoons mowing the lawns on the college’s nine-hole golf course.  In the evenings, the other summer college students would watch television and play games of Trivial Pursuit to pass the time.

One day, I came back to the dormitory, looking to play another game of Trivial Pursuit.  But no one was around.  No big deal, I thought, I’ll just watch some television.

A few days later, I found out what had happened.  Apparently my classmates were not enamored with me winning at Trivial Pursuit every time.  So in order to play a game without me, they held their matches in another location.  They didn’t want me there.  I wasn’t welcome any more.  They were sick of me.

In other words… I was the pineapple.

And it was something I thought about this morning.  For every achievement I’ve done, for every time I found a way to turn my crazy upbringing into something positive, there’s still moments – still bright, glowing, burning moments – that scream at me, chiding me, reminding me I have a long way to go.  That I haven’t reached the finish line of success.  More likely, I’ve taken a nap around the clubhouse turn.

These are the things that I still battle every day.  The moments of worthlessness.  The moments of inadequacy.  The moments where my mistakes and failings come back to me with the force of a hundred thousand locomotives.

Nobody’s perfect.  Me least of all.  I mean, I could blame what happened in my life on a hundred different people and a hundred different situations.  I could use that as an excuse, a crutch, a failing.

I’m not perfect.  I never will be.  But I understand that there are pineapples in this world today.  It’s easy to ridicule them for their lack of social graces.  We don’t know the whole story.  We don’t know about their upbringing or their life or if there’s a disability or an inability.

And we have to get past that point.

That’s the most important part.

That’s what we need.

More understanding.

More undertaking.

Less undermining.

And less pineapples.