Some super-sideburned kid who was already six feet tall and as burly as a linebacker leaned into me and said, “Hey, Opium. You wanna buy a lid?” I wasn’t fluent in his terminology, but I knew that it had something to do with illegal drugs and was meant to intimidate me.
Fortunately, there was the safe harbor of my friend Noel and the game of basketball. Noel invited me to join him in a pickup game of hoops during lunch break. I was in my element, hitting one shot after another, regaining my confidence. But then I noticed that some of the spectators—girls, no less—were pointing at my groin and laughing at me. I glanced down. The zipper to my jeans was completely unzipped. I blushed inwardly, but I did not want to give anyone the satisfaction of showing how embarrassed I was. So I acted like nothing was wrong, made no effort to zip up, and simply continued playing.
After the game was over and I had discreetly rectified the situation, a ninth-grade girl waved me over to where she and some of her classmates were standing. She was wearing a very short skirt. She raised one leg up on a step, motioning to her bare inner thigh, and said, “Hey, Opie, will you sign my leg?”
Total internal panic. I don’t think she was coming on to me, but instead using her power as an older, popular girl to fluster me. She succeeded. I stammered, “No . . . No, I-I’m not gonna sign your leg!,” and scampered away.
I survived that day and actually had a fine time at Jordan over the next three years, with lots of friends and basketball teammates who liked me for who I was. But right to the end of my public-school education in Burbank, which concluded at John Burroughs High School, I was dogged by what today might be called Opie-shaming: the desire among my peers to get under my skin by taunting me as “Opie” rather than treating me as Ron. My father’s choice to train me to fight proved justified. Though I renounced violence in middle school, I benefited from toughening up.
By my senior year, I had grown into a confident young man, with a girlfriend （more on her later） and a C on my letterman’s jacket because I had been named a cocaptain of the Burroughs varsity B team. （I was too short and just not skilled enough for the varsity A team.） My name sometimes got published in the local paper, The Burbank Daily Review, not because of my acting work but because I had scored more than ten points in a game.
That felt great, and the Opie-shaming had completely dissipated on my home court at Burroughs. But at an away game that final season, the opposing team’s fans were out for blood. Every time I went to the line to shoot free throws, their band tried to psych me out by playing an abrasive, mocking version of The Andy Griffith Show’s theme song: “Da-da-dah, DAH-da-da-da, DAH-da-da-da . . .” This was punctuated by a chant of “Miss—it—Opie! Miss—it—Opie!”
I nevertheless hit five of my six free throws in that game. But I can’t pretend that those kids’ taunts didn’t affect me. They pissed me off. The word that I would use now, which I didn’t know then, is reductive. I resented that these mean-spirited teens were publicly mocking and ridiculing me for a role that I had played, and I resented the corresponding insinuations: that I must be a pampered TV star, a lame-ass, a wimp.
I’ve had a complicated relationship with that famous whistled theme song. By and large, I regard it positively: it evokes fond memories of Andy’s warmth and the joy that we took in working together. But there were times in my life when that damned song was the bane of my existence. I’d be in a public place, ballcap pulled low, calling no attention to myself, when I’d hear a faint version of the tune tootling from someone’s lips—and that’s when I’d know that I had been made. In school, I would sometimes be at my locker, minding my own business, trying to find a homework assignment that I had misplaced, when behind me I’d hear whistling along with derisive laughter—and that’s when I knew that I was being mocked for some jerk’s amusement.
FOR ALL THE aggravation that being Opie had occasionally caused me, I was devastated when The Andy Griffith Show came to an end. Truthfully, I knew that the finish line was in sight at the conclusion of the fifth season, when Don Knotts announced that he was leaving to make movies. Andy soldiered on for three more seasons, and they were good seasons—but it was apparent to everyone on set that he wasn’t having as much fun without Don.