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Many years ago, I knew a young guy who worked at a gas station in Fairfield. I saw him most mornings when I stopped for coffee. He was outgoing, funny and had a slightly skewed outlook on things. Amend that, it was more than slightly skewed. Each morning we would briefly exchange some thoughts and laughs. Turned out I knew his father, a retired Bridgeport school principal. On his blue work shirt the young man wore a nametag that said "John." He was mad for music, and would tell me about various pieces of equipment he would buy with his gas station savings. He was, he told me with conviction, going to make it. John was a recent graduate of Fairfield High School. I'm not sure how many people took him seriously when he was 18, but I admired his determination. "Hey, John, go for it, kid," I would say. One day he said he was leaving the gas station to go to the Berklee College of Music in Boston. And then he was gone. A couple of years later I bumped into him outside the gas station. He'd stopped back to visit. We chatted briefly. He was in a hurry. You don't want to be late, after all, for your appearance on Jay Leno. Most people take John Mayer seriously these days. He earned millions of dollars in 2004 and added two Grammy nominations to the Grammy he won two years ago for "Your Body is a Wonderland." The other day, as most newspaper readers know, he showed up at what is now called Fairfield Warde High School not entirely unexpected, by the way for a ceremony at which tennis player James Blake and golfer J.J. Henry were to be inducted into the high school's Hall of Fame. John was to have been inducted, too. But he didn't let them know he was coming until it was too late, the school officials said, to arrange for adequate security. The night before the ceremony, Mayer ran into Blake somewhere in Fairfield, told him what had happened and the two agreed that Mayer should just show up anyway. But when he did, school officials put him under wraps in the headmaster's office. While the ceremony proceeded in the auditorium, they walked him to his car. He was stunned, angry and hurt. He sent me an e-mail with a phone number. I called and later that night he called me at home. He was angry, but what struck me was how hurt he sounded. "I got excited about it, so I said, 'I'm going to make it cool.' I was going to donate a guitar I used on tour. I had an idea about creating a CD library at the school. "I got there, and I saw James (Blake) and his mom and then a teacher came up to me and took me by the elbow and I said `What's goin' on?' and she led me into the office," where he met Headmaster James Coyne. The conversation, he said, started taking strange turns. "Then I realized they were stalling me. And they were talking to me like I was a sophomore, condescendingly, and talking about me in the third person. "I said at one point, 'It seems to me I'm not welcome here.' "Why would they do that? Why sever a relationship when you don't have to?" At a couple of points during a nearly 45-minute conversation, he was sputtering. He sighed at one point. "I just want people to know I made the effort to be there." This was John Mayer's first visit back to his high school. In his first hit, "No Such Thing," Mayer sang of the bittersweet high school experience, of adults who want people to stay inside the lines. And he sang of returning triumphantly for his 10th reunion, running through the halls and busting down the double doors. For the 27-year-old 1995 graduate, that 10-year reunion would be this year. High school was not all laughs for Mayer, a kid who marched to the beat of a different drummer. Literally. Listen to the lyrics of his first hit, "No Such Thing." It's not fiction. It opens with a teacher talking condescendingly. John Mayer is in that song and on that day last month he was reliving it. High school can be a tough time. Slights, disappointments, blunders, embarrassing moments, they have a way of staying with us. "I played music at the graduation," he recalled the other night, "but I didn't graduate. The feeling sucked." He did subsequently graduate. Coyne this week said he thought Mayer was cool with the school's concerns about security. "He was very gracious with me," Coyne said. I guess that says something else about John Mayer. "I did say to him 'I'm not going to argue with you,'" Mayer said. Mayer wasn't the only person who thought the treatment was shabby. Blake, a stand-up sort of guy and equally capable of creating a frenzy, concurred. "I actually thought it was a bit disgraceful." "It was a great day for me and one I won't forget because I was accompanied by my family," Blake said. "But I truly wish it could have been shared with another deserving hall of famer and a good friend of mine, John Mayer." High school kids can see Mayer anywhere MTV, VH1, on his Website, in magazines, you name it. It would have been nice for them to have seen him in the flesh. He's in Fairfield fairly regularly, by the way, and there hasn't been a riot yet. High school kids should know about him because he had a dream, worked his butt off and reached it. When he called the other night, the voice I heard on the other end of the phone was not that of some petulant star denied yet another photo opportunity. Like he needs that. It sounded like that young guy John I knew, like that of a guy slighted and injured once again. "It was hurtful," he said. "We could have worked something out." Michael J. Daly is managing editor of the Connecticut Post. You can reach him at 330-6394 or by e-mail at mdaly@ctpost.com
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