Those Carrie Whites

I was ambushed by a sudden rainshower halfway from the office to the nearest train station on my way home from work. I headed to Megamall to kill time and to wait for the rain to subside. I usually loiter around bookstores. Nobody gives a damn whether you’re gonna buy something or not anyway. Unlike clothing shops where they have annoying personnel trailing you as if you’re a parolee up to no good. I was contemplating on opening the SWAMP THING graphic novel I’ve seen during my last visit, when I came upon the Stephen King section of the shop and found an opened copy (the plastic wrapper of the paperback was shoved unceremoniously between The Stand and Insomnia) of his first bestseller Carrie. I haven’t read the book but I saw Brian De Palma’s movie adaptation in Betamax back when I was in third grade.

I rented the video, of all places, in a squalid billiard hall that also moonlighted as a video rental store (carrying mostly x-rated flicks that starred 80s porn stars like Ginger Lynn, Traci Lords, and Seka) found in the center of the local flea market in our town. I just got a hair cut from my barber a few doors down when I passed by the place and saw the hall screening what looked to be a zombie movie (The Return Of The Living Dead, actually.) and found, to an 8-year old’s amusement and delight, the shelves by the TV stacked with hardcore, original copies of Beta and VHS tapes with titles like “Behind The Green Door”, “Oiled For Orgasms”, “The Ballbusters”, “Taboo”, and probably 20 other titles that are way too obvious even to a third grader. 


The clerk, an elderly woman eating a banana-cue regarded me with a menacing stare that is, again, another synopsis in belaboring the obvious. I knew even if I had a million bucks the clerk would even STOP TO THINK about letting me rent those. And I was far from being being a millionaire. I was a snotty-looking kid with only 20 bucks spare for a single video. I liked horror movies---and I still do---so I looked for anything that could fill in for the skin flick that I should’ve rented. It’s a good thing it’s all original copies; bless the seaman who owned the joint, at least you’d get a rudimentary idea on what the movie’s all about by reading the synopsis in the jacket. I saw Carrie. I Saw Sissy Spacek’s blood-soaked image at the back of the tape. I saw the name Stephen King. I forked the twenty and jumped the nearest tricycle back home.

The movie was, for the most part when I was watching it, just okay. But not scary in the “zombie-psycho slasher-aliens from outer space” type of scary. John Travolta was in it, and I hated him then because of his Saturday Night Fever dance number and the film looked outdated and so big a relic of the 70s---a decade that I really loathed---that I was a bit nauseus on some parts. But most of all I hated it because it reminded me so much of a classmate named Rio.

She transferred to our school during first grade (our class was together since kindergarten); and everybody was more than willing to alienate the new girl with a dumb look on her face. Stephen King described it as “bovine-like” and it’s true. Class freaks do have the expression of total submissiveness and apathy akin to that of cows about to be lead to the slaughterhouse. She was not pretty to start with, and kids at this age are brutally frank and cruel in expressing their dislike to a person who’s not likable at all. She was the butt of all jokes, even earned the moniker “Rio Kalbo” courtesy of the meanest duo ever to walk the grounds of WVSU Elementary School SEAFDEC Campus: Peter and Paul---the twin masters of disasters from 1st to 6th grade. The class bullies. Every student has had a taste of the two’s nastiness but Rio got the heaviest blows most of the time. 

And every time everybody’s ganging up on her I participated and razed her with extreme prejudice as well. There was something about her not being pleasant to look at and not acting like a normal girl does that just makes it feel extremely good to hate her---even if she did not do anything to you, much less look at your direction at all. After the heckling stops she’d just go back to her seat and take out a textbook and pretend to read while others resumed their everyday elementary business. That was the only reprieve she had. Once or twice I caught her wiping her eyes like there was some irritant stuck in them and knew she was crying. The entire class and I enjoyed seeing her suffer. This went on for six years. I can only imagine how ecstatic she probably was when we graduated. I don’t know. I didn’t notice. I was too busy with myself to even notice she was there.

I didn’t think about her again until I read the foreword to the book just a few hours ago. It’s about Stephen King’s personal experience with the “Carrie Whites” in his school and I realized how very close they were to my own.

Feeling bad about it won’t change a thing.

I wonder how those twins are holding up?