Reejus Fillbun

My family moved from North Carolina to Virginia when I was half-way through 5^th grade.  On paper, it was a good decision because the secondary school system in Virginia was vastly superior and had activities to keep a curious adolescent amused other than petty-theft and teenage pregnancy.  The day-to-day reality of the situation was, however, that I was thrust in a school where social niches had been festering for six years.  This made it very difficult to fit in.  Well that and the fact that God had gifted me with an industrial-strength dose of social awkwardness.

I was even less popular than the girl who was born without sweat glands.  She couldn’t go outside because she would overheat if she was out in the elements for too long.  This gained her an understandable amount of sympathy, but her skin was weirdly shiny and inflexible like an exoskeleton.  It looked like someone had dressed a giant ant in Aeropostale.  I never really got to meet her, but I’m sure she had a terrific personality.  She must have, because she had about infinity times more friends than I did.  Infinity, of course, being the number you reach when you divide by zero.

I tried my hardest to act like everybody else in the hopes that one day people would forget how weird I was, but it seemed like at least once a week I would accidentally find a new and exciting way to not fit in.

One fateful day, when our class was lined up to go into the Cafegymatorium for lunch, I was listening to a group of guys talking- they didn’t mind if I stood nearby and listened as long as I didn’t say anything.  They were having a conversation about television which I was struggling to follow when one of the guys said some nonsense sound that made the rest of the guys laugh.  He had said something like “Regis Philbin,” which did not register as anything to me, but for some reason had been hilarious to the rest of the guys.  Was it a place?  Did Angelina Jolie go to Regis Philbin and eat some bad shellfish?  What was going on?

“What’s a ‘Reejus Fillbun’?”  I asked quietly.  All of the guys in the group suddenly stopped talking, their heads slowly pivoting to face me.

“What did you say?”

“Where is ‘Reeeejussss Fiilllllbunnnn’?”  I said trying to enunciate the syllables.  “Is that in Argentina?  I think I heard about a recall on tuna from there or something.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”  One kid said.  “Are you trying to say Regis Philbin?”

I shrugged.  “I guess…you guys were talking about it earlier.  What is it?”

“Wait.  You don’t know who Regis Philbin is?”  Another kid asked me, his face twisted into a mocking sneer.

“Oh, it’s a person?  What kind of a name is Regis Philbin?  Is that Turkish?”  I muttered.

“How is that possible?”  A third kid asked with disdain.  “Are you retarded?  Don’t you watch any television?”

“Well, not really.  I like cartoons, but most of the time I read books.”  I was speaking too quietly for anyone to hear.  All the guys had now turned away from me and were talking about how stupid someone must be to not know who Regis Philbin was.  Within 20 seconds, they had moved onto a new topic and we resumed our usual dynamic of me listening to snippets of their conversation as I stood quietly nearby.

For the rest of the day, I thought about this interaction.  Why DIDN’T I know who this Regis Philbin guy was?  Someone should have told me!  Why had no one in ten years ever told me who Regis Philbin was so that I could have avoided this embarrassment?  Who would do that to a child?

When my Mom picked me up from school, she got really confused really fast.

“WHY HAVE YOU NEVER TOLD ME WHO REGIS PHILBIN IS?”  I shrieked as I threw my backpack violently into the backseat of the car.  “WHAT KIND OF MOTHER ARE YOU?!”

“Honey…what?  Regis Philbin?”

“YOU KNOW WHAT YOU’VE DONE!  DON’T PLAY COY WITH ME!  I KNOW YOUR GAMES YOU CONNIVING HARPY!”  I jumped into the car after my backpack, sobbing loudly into my hands.  My Mom looked back at me as I kicked in my seat trying both to figure out where I had learned the word “harpy” and what part a TV talkshow host had to play in all of this.

I was inconsolable for most of the night.  I was convinced that my parents had intentionally kept the identity of Regis Philbin from me with malicious intent.  It wasn’t until the next day that I had settled down enough for my Mom to explain to me who Regis Philbin was.  Never before in the history of anything has there ever been a more anticlimactic moment than this one.

Basically it amounted to this: 

“Oh.”

And then I went back to reading “The Phantom Tollbooth.”