I'm always skeptical whenever I hear about someone being "ahead of their time." Usually, whenever some jagoff uses this phrase, it comes along with a sophomoric attempt to pursuade everyone that they are truly the first person to ever really understand Jack Kerouac. Or that Kurt Cobain killed himself because he didn't have any fans like the kind of fan you would have been, if only you hadn't been five years old at the time. It's one of those phrases that sticks in my craw, and so I almost never use it.

But when I talk about this one kid I went to junior high with -- Larry H. -- I have to use that phrase and many others like it.

Larry didn't have many friends. Sorry, Larry if you're reading this, but you didn't. In a school where each morning all of the girls awoke at 4am to thoroughly Aquanet themselves into perfection, and the boys slathered palmfuls of Dippity-Doo into their spiky mullets before interpreting the name of Brut Splash-on a little too liberally, Larry let his natural hair grease plaster his locks into submission. He wore out-of-style clothes, and didn't seem to like any of the cool things everyone else thought were so awesome. I doubt he owned a single Def Leppard album. It was no wonder that nobody wanted to hang out with him.

Still, none of this ever seemed to bother Larry at all.

I'm pretty sure that some of my classmates might have suspected that Larry was actually cool, because I know that I did. I noticed the first clue in social studies class, where Larry sat a few seats away from me. I kept my papers in plain, cheap folders from Kmart. Some of the other kids used folders decorated with unicorns or with the face of Janet Jackson or whatever. A lot of kids used Trapper Keepers. Larry used the empty sleeve of a Beetles album.

And really, I should have become friends with Larry right then and there. But I couldn't. In fact, it didn't even occur to me. His coolness was something I could only sense, but never actually see, like a creature from another dimension -- totally outside my realm.

A few weeks later in another class, Larry offhandedly mentioned that his brother played in a country & western band, and that sometimes he would sit in and play with them during gigs. Gigs in bars. You'd think this would have immediately given him some damn fine street cred, but I suspect that those words "country & western" spoiled everything. Among that crowd, liking country & western was like eating broccoli ice cream or biting the bubbles in the bathtub. Clearly something that only mental defectives could enjoy.

The best thing that I ever witnessed Larry do was when I was in the washroom while some other kids were bullying a 7th grader. Larry walked in, carrying his harmonica, and one of the bullies grabbed him and said, "Play your harmonica!" Larry shrugged and began to play. Soon the washroom was full of boys, shouting and clapping along. Someone came in and asked what was going on, and someone else shouted, "We're having a hoedown!" Eventually the bell rang and the hoedown came to an end.

At the end of that year, Larry disappeared and I never saw him again. I guess his family must have moved, maybe across town, or maybe to Austrailia for all I know. What I do know is that one day, when I was perhaps 25, Larry H. popped into my head and I suddenly, spontaneously realized that he was cool.

It kind of blew my mind.