Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard - Yearbook - Chapter 3: Insecurity

Episode Date: December 1, 2023

Like every high schooler, Chad wanted to be cool and wanted to be liked. He twisted himself in knots trying to be popular, trying to be an athlete, and trying to be a lady’s man. But some kids never get the luxury of normal teenage angst… Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

One day I was driving you to school and you were just very quiet that day and bummed out. I must have said something like, what's wrong? You just said, mom, I just realized that all my friends are white. You were very upset and you started just crying in the car. And you said, all my friends are white and I try my best to make friends with the black kids. And they just don't want to have anything to do with me because they see me with these white kids all the time. And you were very, very upset about it. And so was I, quite frankly, because I didn't really know what to do about it.

And I said, well, what about church? You know, you have all your Boy Scout friends and you were in Jack and Jill. You really did a lot of stuff. But school is very primary for young people. And I know that. And that's their main circle. So I spoke to your dad about it. And he said, don't worry about it. Once he gets on the basketball team over there, it's going to be cool. And indeed it was.

He was right. I mean, the conversation was longer than that. But that was the upshot. He said, eh, he'll make some friends. And indeed, that's what happened. So that's my mom talking about a conversation we had in seventh grade, talking about me feeling sad and probably angry in a way that I wasn't communicating that I had so many white friends at that point in time. But I think what I was also saying was, I don't know where I go. I don't know what shelf on the bookshelf I go on.

And I think it takes a lot for me still because my parents, it's so scary to talk about your parents into a microphone. My parents, when they have your attention, it can feel very intense. Like when they're looking at you, they're really looking at you. When you're telling them something's wrong and they decide to take their turn to fix it, they really take their turn. And so as a result, I don't often tell them when something's wrong until it hurts so bad that I don't know what else to do. I heard somebody say this about German shepherds. I have one, which is they are so tough as animals. If they whimper, you really have hurt them. That, I think, is who I was at that age.

So as I remember it, that was a very tough day. Very specifically, what was going on was that I had kind of like a new girlfriend at the school who was Black, who wasn't in the program. Okay, I didn't in the program. And some of the other boys and, and probably honestly, some of the girls too, they weren't feeling it. And they felt like, you know, like I was an imposter. And you're just a newbie. And, and just as dad said it, I got on the basketball team. Everything at that school was different for me for the next two years. Because at that point, I had this kind of value for the school, which was that I was a ball player.

And it's performative. People come to the game. They see you. They talk about you. Oh, the kid on the basketball team. Everybody knows you. I knew some. And then there were other Black kids on the team.

The coach is Black. So all of a sudden, I had this new social group. And then when it became a little bit was in my classes, then at that point, then it was those kids, the white kids being like, you're the cool guy now, but I was, I could live with that. They weren't intimidating. I could deal with that. So that was one time. Now, the next time I told you I wanted to leave my school. So we researched and we decided that we really wanted you to go to Blake, which was a brand new school, excellent principal, excellent resources, lots and lots of good things. So we decided we were going to do that. But I made a deal with you and I said, OK, we can do that. But you have to stay in the band.

Don't ask me why I thought that was so. But I just wanted you to stay in the band. And't ask me why I thought that was so, but I just wanted you to stay in the band. And you said, okay, I will. Well, I think you didn't want to see me become one dimensional. You didn't want to see me try to flatten. And just be an athlete. There were elements of that experience that I love. I love music. I love making music. It's fun to learn an instrument, although extremely challenging. And I tried to quit a lot, both piano and trumpet yes you did but a lot of times I think when you saw me trying to avoid something it just felt so sensitive the line I had to walk which was yeah I bet continue to stay on this track with the

gifted and talented kids because you know it's important your parents care about it but I needed my friendships with the black kids and I've written those were my real friends and they're still my real friends to today and I didn't want to be pushed out of that community because they thought I was a cornball I spent a lot of time and energy as a kid so focused on the minutia of trying to manage that process. And I saw where other kids didn't manage it well, and it seemed to make life harder for them. And I'm still trying to manage it. And I really want to let go of that. When I think of high school, I think of an arena more than I think of a place for learning. I think of being in that cafeteria and each table was like a path of options. Who do I want to be today?

Who do I have to make laugh today? The stakes feel so high. The dumb thing, the silly thing, the vulnerable thing that you say that someone catches, that can be your identity for the rest of the whole experience. As I went through puberty being like, how exciting, we're all in the locker room together. Dudes are taking off their clothes and stuff. Everybody's

got these different bodies or whatever, but also feeling at the same time, so scared. What if my body's wrong? What if I find out they all have this and I have this, then what? And I can't even say high schoolers who live out of this place of feeling are wrong. It feels like the risk of abandonment is sky high. And it is. I'm still close to so many of my high school friends. I mean, especially the guys on the basketball team. I cared so much that I tried to adopt identities around stuff that I knew that they liked that would make them continue to like me. I crafted an identity as the ladies' man kind of thing. I was like, oh, these guys think it's cool if girls like you. So I really tried to figure out how to do that.

I saw how much they loved my dad. So I brought them around him a lot. When I got a car, I was always trying to drive places so that they would jump in with me. I just really needed them to love me. I just really needed them to love me. And I really needed them to like me. You want to know what I did to look cool? Let's get real about it.

Y'all, some of you guys don't even know what this is, but my Black Planet profile, I used my friend's do-rag. I put that on my head, which I never even owned a do-rag. I held one of his Jordans in the shot, his little baby Chad holding a Jordan 12, I believe, with a black do-rag on and a white tall tee. I had like a hundred different vernaculars that I would use. I would talk one way with my friends who went to paint branch. I would talk another way with my friends on the basketball team, talk another way with Alicia's parents, another way with my parents. Oh my God, if you hear me and my sister talk,

you'll be like, I don't even recognize this person. And then the thing is that you don't have a wardrobe to keep up with all these identities. Nobody can have a hundred different ways to dress. And what that eventually became was over time in my adult life, I just started wearing the same thing every day because I couldn't keep up with this roulette of personalities. It was too much. Laleh became a costume designer in New York and she ran our high school fashion show. I've never seen Laleh be a different person. I've never seen her do personality roulette and I've been around her in so many environments. reality roulette. And I've been around her in so many environments. I never felt like I was meeting the bar, basically my whole life. In high school,

especially. I was on the team, but I wasn't a star. I got good grades, but I didn't get straight A's. I was in the band, but I wasn't first chair. Do you know what I mean? I do, because that's what I was saying about Alicia. She was an artist. I was just lower grade competition in, you know, in the same class. And I think that's, what's cool about what I remember of my high school experience was none of us just got by. We did really well, but we also went out and partied on the weekend and never got in trouble. We weren't bad kids, but we were partying. I would say, oh yeah, I'm sleeping at Jennifer's and we're out until 4am doing whatever. And I think that's what's so fascinating about it. We were just towing the line of what parents might consider bad kids, but we got away with it because we did get good grades. It depends on whose eyes we're looking at ourselves from. I don't know,

that wasn't very poetic, but some of my friends on the basketball team definitely thought I was a nerd, but they also felt connected to me. And in band, I felt less accepted by them, less welcomed by them than my teammates. And I know everybody's the hero of their own story and probably thinks they were different and imposter and separate and all these things. But that's really how I sort of felt. I'd say that more of your lack of confidence would come out in decisions that I would talk to you about. I remember Kenny, he had came and told you, you were talking to Ashley or something. He was basically like, yo, that girl's a bam. I'm like, she's not cool. And I remember like seeing you, I was witnessing that and let that happen. Then it was the next day you had treated it to goings like, yeah, whoa, whoa, whoa.

And I'm like, whoa, Chad, come here. Yeah. You can't go like that just because Kenny said she's not cool. Yeah. Right. And I think that came from a lack of confidence of you wanting to be cool with everybody that was cool. Right. You wanted to be like how they were.

And I think that's something that I noticed that you grew out of. At some point, you left that behind, the idea of needing to fit in with other people. I changed schools a lot growing up. And when I got to Blake, it was like, please let this be the last time I have to change schools. Because every time I have to change schools, I have to ingratiate myself. I have to earn the affections of the kids again. The cool kids, the white kids, the black kids, the band kids. I have to do this all over again. And

so at some point, I think I got very mechanical about it, which is just like, oh, that's the way the cool kids are going. All right, I'm doing that shit. The thing that I wanted to be a certain way and it wouldn't be was me. I was on the basketball team. That was really exciting. But there were dudes on the basketball team doing fucking 360s. There were dudes that the cheerleaders had chants with their names in them. My dad is a college basketball player. To be close to something that's great and not be it is incredibly frustrating. I wanted to naturally be someone that dressed cool, talked cool, still got good grades, still was good at sports and in the band and all this stuff. I wanted to be good at those things because I could see that other people revered people who were good at those things. I saw how they revered me when I

showed flashes, but I just couldn't lasso all of it. I couldn't grab it all and be all of it at once. That made me so angry. You might hear people say this about exercise or yoga or whatever. All of that anger that was pointed at myself for not being all the things I wanted it to be, it being me. Basketball was a place where I could exhaust that. Basketball was a place where I was supposed to be angry. I'm like, here's how I can get it out. God, I'm fucking sad that my friend died. I'm mad that I'm not more masculine or more feminine shit or more sensitive or more whatever. I'm mad. I'm not perfect yet. I'm not perfect yet. Basketball was the place where you could go and be a nut on purpose. Chad came into our school. He came in with his classics, red pro models.

You just have this weird guy coming in, hooping in red shoes, hooping with a lot of emotion and a lot of rage. Anger. Yeah. Sometimes if you didn't know him, if you weren't his friend, you'd think he, quote unquote, faked it. But it's really just competitiveness and this chip that he had on his shoulder. He was very mature as a young man, but also could fly off the handle any second. He's a kid. Man and human.

Me and Chad, we came to Blake around the same time. My junior year, his sophomore year. In the beginning of the basketball season, I just see this. I call him ninth. I said, yeah, he definitely like a ninth grade. He's for sure our manager. So I'm thinking Chad is the manager. So I never seen like JV workouts or JV practice, but it was our first game against paint branch. And I see two guards on the floor. James Wish

was the point guard and he was five one and ninth. He was five two2". These two little guards. And I'm just amazed. I'm like, wow. These boys is dominating. Scrappy. It don't matter who in front of you. And just to put that in perspective, you had on glasses, big head. This is not the same guy.

He is a nerd. this is not the same guy. He is a nerd. And then, and still to today, I call him Knife because he just looks like a baby. But what was cool about Knife was he had the baddest girl,

right or wrong? And his girl had the baddest friends. So, Chad, I'm like, yo, I need to be friends with Knife. He is the plug. So I'm like, yo, I don't understand how these girls like this baby.

In a nutshell, he was very feisty on the court and then very subtle off the court. You wouldn't even expect that to be the same guy that you saw last night at tip-off. Pitbull. Pitbull. But not even a pitbull. It got to be like a sneaky dog where you're going to inspect him like a Dalmatian or something. You trying to pet the Dalmatian, you're going to bite the shit

out of him. He got a nice cover-up to his toughness. You would think he's a sweetheart. He's definitely a sweetheart. Yeah, but... Yeah, it's layers. It's layers.

Yeah, but that's my ninth. I've been such a precious snowflake during this entire episode. So I'm excited now to take the spotlight off of me for a little bit. You know, my stuff was internal. It was real to me. It was in my brain. It was in my body. It was defining my actions, but I had support. I had my parents. And as my friends said, girls did like me. I had stuff to buoy my sensitivity

with adult insight. I can see, oh, that was hard, but high school's hard for everybody. It wasn't that hard for you, boy. But the guy who was driving the car when the car hit the pole and Alicia died, he never had even the raw materials that I did to fit into all of those little boxes, to be all those different things that people's eyes were telling him to be. This is post 9-11. This is an Indian dude who looks like he's from the Middle East. He's got no eyebrows, no hair. He's trying out for the sports teams and not making it.

He looks like what you imagine as a high school outcast. So I knew friends of his and I knew him. It's not like we hung out on the weekends, but we were friendly. I knew him enough to say hello in the hallways and catch up with him every once in a while. So I don't know what his experience was after 9-11, but I know that to a degree, I was guilty of a lot of the prejudices that were being exercised against Muslim Americans. I felt a certain way about people. It didn't make me avoid anybody, but I think that I was guilty of didn't make me avoid anybody. But I think that I was guilty of just a fear surrounding Muslim people after 9-11. And I think I got over that pretty quickly. And public school has a wonderful way of doing that, I think, where you're surrounded by all different sorts of people. And I think it helps you get over your prejudices. But I don't know exactly what his experience was after that. I think what defined for a lot of people was not religion,

but was probably his appearance. Because I can't speak to why, but he didn't have eyebrows and he's bald and he didn't have facial hair. So, you know, I didn't know whether it was alopecia or something more serious. But I think people kind of saw him as an entity unto himself, independent of

religion or color. Yeah, I would agree with that. You said that after Alicia's death, you felt inclined to defend. What made you feel like he might need defending? Just the fact that he came back to school was something that I admired. I don't know that I would have come back to school, but it was sort of like that ethos of finishing what you started and not running away from your problems. I admired that. And just simply by virtue of that, I felt like he needed defending in it. And, you know, anybody who gets in a car wreck and kills somebody that they cared a lot about, I don't think that that person is deserving of scorn or harassment or certainly not verbal harassment in the hallways of a high school. He was fighting an internal struggle, an internal battle that I can't even possibly imagine.

And I didn't like seeing people add on to that. It's not like he was gloating is what I mean. If he was gloating, then that's a different thing. But there were people at the school that felt that his returning to school was him gloating. I didn't feel that way. Did people say shit like that out loud or was it a feeling? Was there an energy there? Where'd you get that sentiment? I think that people would say things out loud that he could hear. So I never saw anybody start a confrontation with him. But as people would pass him in the hallways, I think daily he heard some kind of comment about what he had done. And I didn't think it was fair.

There was something really cool about him. Even though he was a complete outcast, I envy how... He came to basketball tryouts after that. She died in the car. He went into a coma. He came back to school knowing that everybody was doing this little anger performance.

And then he fucking came to basketball tryouts. Like he came into the arena within the arena. Got cut from the basketball team and still just walked around like himself. He's a fucking icon. How can you do that? That's impressive. I had all these

feelings that were so loud in my head but the burden, the burden he had to carry, I just can't even imagine it. I started researching the story about Kenesha, the girl who was killed in the parking lot. And the other girl, and I'm calling them girls because they were girls, you know, they were kids. The girl who killed her, the name the courts gave her is Juliana. The court records hit her last name because she's a minor. But Juliana's defense lawyer defended her by saying that this was the first time she ever got in trouble.

She was an honors kid. She was a good kid. She was just a kid. It was a freak accident. I mean, it's like, if someone were describing me in high school, they would describe me as the exact same thing, the boy version of this girl, Juliana.

She probably walked around with her cool face on. She probably felt tried by people who stepped on her shoes or liked the same boy as her or talked to her any kind of way. Whatever you're imagining, because you hear my voice and you hear how I talk, whatever you think I was that's different from her as a kid, it is not so. We were the same kid from the same town. I am probably just as likely to have done what she did as I am to have done what the driver in that car did.

The girl who was killed, most people, white people, would say she didn't look like a good kid. They were just kids, man. So I found Kenesha's principal at the time. Her name is Deborah Monk, because I wanted to hear more about her life, the girl who was killed. Well, this is something you don't forget. You know, there's a lot of things that happen when

you're a high school principal, but this really stands out in my memory. I was not, of course, at the game. It was not my school that was playing. And as I was headed for bed, the phone rang and my director called me and told me that I'd had a student who was stabbed and who had passed away. When you first hear something like that, it just seems so unreal. I mean, really Montgomery County, you know, how does something like this happen? But what was interesting was when he told me who it was, I knew immediately, which is odd because I was a new principal. I was new to the school, so I didn't know the kids all that well yet. And she was a freshman. She had only been

with us, you know, for what, a month? So why should I know her? And there were two things about her that stood out. First of all, one of the things that I had my assistant principals do is I like to screen kids. I'm always looking for talent that is hidden. You always have those high-performing kids, but lots of times you have a really smart kid who's underperforming or who hasn't been recognized. And I love to scan through test scores and find those kids. And often they're minority kids, very often. And Kenesha was one of those kids. And so I conversed with the assistant principal about this, and we decided to bring her in, show her her test scores and say, Kenesha, you are really, really a bright girl. And we decided to bring her in, show her her test scores and say, Kanisha, you are really,

really a bright girl. And we want to put you in honors classes. And she was kind of starry-eyed and couldn't believe it. And we said, let's try one honors class, but we really think you can do this. And so that's what we did. So she had started into honors classes. And I mean, we had had So she had started into honors classes. And I mean, we had had no behavior problems with her or anything.

But the other distinguishing thing about Kenesha is she had a large tattoo across her chest, which is rather unusual. Back then, tattoos weren't quite as prevalent as they are now. And it was pretty visible. And so people noticed her. And when she walked through the hall, she walked with confidence. She was not a shrinking violet by any means. So it was just strange that I knew this ninth grader. And so when the news hit me, it was really devastating. There's so much that you just said that I would want to unpack a little bit.

One thing I'm curious about is the tattoo. Do you remember what the tattoo was? You know, I was afraid you were going to ask me that. I debated whether to even tell you about the tattoo. Do you know the answer to your question? I know what I've been told. Tell me. I've been told that the tattoo said sexy bitch across the chest. That's right.

Okay. You know, I think Kenesha, I think she could have been a leader. I mean, for so many reasons, I was sorry she was gone, but I saw a lot of potential in her. And I think we had a shot at moving her in a positive direction and she could have taken a lot of other girls with her. Yeah. Because she was a leader. And you're smiling while you say that, which is really something. It's really meaningful. It's like you're remembering her. You're seeing her in your mind's eye and you're smiling at what you saw there even still today with her gone. That's really sweet. I mean, there's something really powerful about that. What's underneath that smile? I'm curious.

Well, you know, I love stories where the protagonist grows and is better at the end. And I guess because I was in education, I loved that process of taking a kid, a ninth grader, and seeing them grow over four years and develop confidence and become what they can become. And sometimes you're successful, but sometimes the crumb of recognition, it makes all the difference in the world. And I would have liked to have had that chance with Kanisha. I'm sorry, because I think the raw material was there. Did you ever deal with anything like this again after Kenesha as a principal? You can't be a high school principal without having deaths of students. I had several car

accidents. I had an overdose. I had a kid who we don't even know why he just died in his sleep. I mean, I buried a number of kids and it's a principal's worst nightmare. Yeah. It's just horrible. But I have to say she was the only one that was quote unquote murdered, actually. This is now just a question of morality. What do you make of a teenager that does something like that? Do you see it differently than if it's an adult? Do you see it differently than, I don't know, you said quote unquote murdered. And that's the exact same way that I talk about it. I'm like, I guess it was a murder, but I don't know what to call it because it's a

kid. What do you think about that? Oh, I've thought a lot about this. Well, first of all, if you work with teenagers, you expect them to make bad choices. It's age appropriate. I mean, their brains are not fully formed. They're trying to separate themselves from their parents. They're trying to figure out who they are. They're going to make the biggest decisions of their lives when they're the least capable of making them. And so the goal I always felt was to try to make sure that they didn't make decisions that would have lifelong, earth-shattering consequences. Something like a car accident where they're paralyzed from the waist down, a pregnancy that they have to deal with, addiction. I mean, yeah, we can send them to rehab, but you know, all their life, they're going to be dealing with addiction. And so my

biggest goal was to let them be teenagers, but to try to help them not make mistakes that would alter the course of their lives in a negative way. Absolutely. And so this falls in that category, of course. I mean, this is the ultimate. I don't know Juliana, and I'm sure even if she's moved on with her life, this is a dark shadow that will never, never leave her. And certainly her parents and friends who experienced it. And then on the same side as Kenesha as well. But teenagers, you just expect them to make mistakes. Unfortunately, it's part of being a teenager. She knows teenagers. And she said they're supposed to make mistakes to try things and fail and eventually figure them out. They're supposed to push away from their parents.

They're supposed to fuck up. Supposed to is almost too generous. They are wired to do those things. This was a fuck up. Juliana fucked up and killed somebody. And I guess I have to admit also, the driver fucked up and killed someone. He made a mistake.

I don't even know if I can call it a mistake. He might've been driving the speed limit for all I know. It was rainy. Maybe his brakes went out. I don't know. I messaged the driver to ask him to come onto the show. It took me a whole day to write the text to the driver. I wrote so many versions of that text.

I changed punctuation. I changed words. I did so many things to try to make that text exactly what it was supposed to be. And it was brutal to finally send it. And I'm sure it was brutal for him to receive it. And now I wait for his response. And I guess the place to go next is exactly where I went in real life after Alicia died, which was the total opposite of where I was emotionally at that time, which is basketball season. With basketball season came parties, girls, shit, going into white people's houses for the first time. So that's where we're going in the next episode. 🎵 you