Just You and Me, Punk Rock Girl
If you don't got Mojo Nixon then your store could use some fixin'
Updated 12/3—Some stories need to be spoiled, and this is one. Chris contacted his family on Sunday. That’s all I know, and it’s all that really matters.
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I graduated from Smith-Cotton High School in May 1991, and not a moment too soon.
I couldn’t wait to start my adult life and no, I don’t have any regrets about wishing my childhood away. My childhood wasn’t horrible by any stretch but it wasn’t great. An only child, labeled gifted when I was in first grade, fat and tomboyish, my teen years were spent focused on everything that was wrong with me. Much of which, I now know, was due to undiagnosed depression and a whopping huge anxiety disorder. The rest of it is pretty much the textbook shit for most people in the U.S. born in 1972 or 3.
I spend very little time in my hometown (Sedalia, Missouri, pop. 22,086—up from 19,839 in 1990). The biggest town between Kansas City and Columbia, Missouri, it remains an agricultural and manufacturing town. The best-known native son? Scott Joplin, the Black musician who created ragtime, wrote his most famous pieces during the few years he was a Sedalia resident. “Maple Leaf Rag” was written about a nightclub that once stood in the neighborhood where I grew up on the street that marked the town’s redline real estate districting.
I didn’t have a musical family, but music spoke to me as far back as I can remember. I think it’s because of where I was born.
Part of my haste to leave was because I always felt like an outcast. Bullying? There was some. Despite being 5’3” tall now, until sixth grade, I was the tallest kid in my class and I had few qualms about taking down anyone mean to me. But I also didn’t make friends easily, or keep them for long.
I’ve never attended a high school reunion. This year I was invited—for the class of 1989. And I almost went because I thought it would be funny. With social media, I’ve reconnected with the friends I had, reconciled with some I lost, and become friends with people I knew in passing throughout my childhood.
This has always been fine with me and it’s never bothered me as an adult, until this week when I learned that Christopher Robinson has been missing for six weeks.
Chris and I went through school together from pre-school until we graduated from Smith-Cotton. We were in gifted class together. In a “large” class of 220-ish kids, we were always in the same classes and same activities. We were also similar brands of weird, by which I mean, we were creative, arty kids.
In sixth grade when one of Chris’ stories beat mine in the school’s literary festival, I assumed I’d never make it as a professional writer because our school was too small to have two famous authors, and clearly ours was going to be Chris.
In the past year or two, I’ve had a recurring dream about going to Chris’ childhood home as an adult. Instead of the perfectly maintained canary yellow Italianate house on South Grand, in my dream it’s on Broadway—Highway 50—narrowed to a treehouse but still filled with period-specific paisley and cabbage rose walls, rich jewel tones like peacocks in full display. Once, his mother—still as put-together as she always was, in a tea-length skirt and white blouse, blonde bob held back with a headband—and I were making a large dinner.
Chris and I talked a bit when we first got on Facebook years ago, but he’s not a social media guy. I knew he lived in Columbia and had become a hell of a blues harmonica player.
Our freshman year in high school, Chris’ brother was away at college and he’d send Chris mix tapes, which Chris would copy for me. They were full of songs and bands I’d never hear otherwise as a 15-year-old in Sedalia, despite the hours I spent at the record store. The artists I most clearly remember getting from Chris: the Dead Milkmen, Mojo Nixon, and the Violent Femmes beyond “Blister in the Sun”.
The songs cracked me up. “Elvis is Everywhere” and “ Burn Down the Malls” made me laugh and also gave me a reason to start considering why some of the stuff I dug might not be the best stuff. While I was listening to The Clash on MTV, this was a different introduction to punk because it made me laugh, and it made me think. Why is it so funny that Joan Rivers is in Elvis but trying to get out? These songs left my tender little brain wide open for what was about to hit in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s.
We hardly ever talked about the mix tapes or what the songs meant beyond, “Bitchin’ Camaro’s fucking awesome, man! Thanks!” We were the kind of friends who hung out away from school events. On the occasions when I had a social circle, it often overlapped with his, but that was inconsistent. I was prone to getting into friend groups and then doing or saying something that would get me ditched for all the reasons 13-year-olds ditch friends.
Chris never ditched me. He was always there. Aside from him being a better writer, I liked him because as teen boys go, he was a good one.
My class was no stranger to tragedy. We lost our first member, Kristy, a few days after seventh grade ended when she was thrown from the back of a pickup truck. Know when I think of her? When I see Gen X nostalgia about how we all rode in the back of trucks and survived. No, we didn’t.
John, who informed me of the truth about Santa in pre-school, shot himself in the head on the first day of 1990. A teacher told me while I was working the dinner shift at my first restaurant job and she came in for dinner. Later that week, Chad was diagnosed with lung cancer. He made it to the last week of our last summer break.
There are so many more. So many. I haven’t looked at a yearbook in decades but I know it would be a staggering list of losses.
Maybe it’s best that I was a loner and didn’t get too close.
My friend Tessa, who graduated a couple of years before me, broke the news of Chris’ disappearance to me. They’re both Columbia residents and frequent the same places. This week has been a flurry of old schoolmates posting information about the last time Chris was seen (October 15th) and the number to call if anyone knows where he is (660-620-2700—not the cops).
I have hope that Chris is okay. I just do. Someone saw him leaving his house with suitcases, I’ve heard. I hope that means that he just got fed the fuck up and is hanging out somewhere and will walk through the right door when he’s ready.
Maybe he’s in the Bermuda Triangle…
You know what's going on in that Bermuda Triangle? Elvis needs boats! Elvis needs boats! Elvis Elvis Elvis Elvis Elvis Elvis Elvis needs boats! Ahhh! The sailing Elvis! Captain Elvis! Commodore Elvis it is. —Mojo Nixon
Chris’ disappearance has hit me so hard. Harder than all the deaths in our class. Not because I was closer to him necessarily, but because there is that glimmer of hope. It’s so small. Terrifying in its smallness.
One of my initial thoughts: I hope he turns up soon because I want to have a coffee with him and catch up. Talk about what we’re listening to these days, and all the days over the last 33 years.
Yeah, I had a crush on him back then. Sort of. I don’t think I could tell the difference between having a crush and just wanting to be a closer friend. I didn’t know how to initiate that any better than I knew how to initiate a romantic relationship. I never really learned how to do either of those things.
But maybe if I had, I might not have been so anxious to leave as soon as I could move into my dorm freshman year of college. In someplace other than Sedalia, Missouri in 1987 we could have jumped up on the table and shouted, “Anarchy!”
and someone played a Beach Boys song on the jukebox. It was “California Dreamin'“ and so we started screamin’ on such a winter’s day. —The Dead Milkmen
I don’t play “what if.” What happened, happened because of who we were, our circumstances, and because that’s just the way it happened. And what happened was we came from a cluster of children who, together, experienced too much loss too young. Loss that I don’t grapple with for fear of ripping off the scab.
But Chris’ disappearance has ripped open that scab. The one for Kristy, for John, for Chad, for every kid born in 1972 or 3 who went to school in Sedalia and isn’t here anymore. Most of us will rub some dirt on it and keep going until the wound sags open, spilling out the hurt and grief and hopelessness of 14-year-olds.
Some of us will listen to “The Badger Song” to stop the tears with laughter.
If you have any information about Christopher Robinson, please contact [redacted]. He's 6'1" tall, 145 pounds long blond hair and blue eyes. Last seen on October 15, 2024.
