There has never existed a group of young virgins (with maybe a few non-virgins) more likely to plunge a shy young man into the hell of hormonal imbalance than that at Orville Wright Junior High School when I was a ninth grader there. Susan Purcell! Barbara Meyers! And then, halfway through eighth grade, Marilyn Monroe’s younger double, Pat Wymer. How was a boy supposed to think straight, much less win the coveted (by maybe around four of us) Creative Writing award two years running, as I did, with these beauties two rows away, exuding desirability and unapproachability in equal measure? Not even the alphas among us got anywhere with them, for they reserved their favors for older men — boys at the local high school with their own cars. And me on my bicycle! I drew La Purcell cartoons like those in the surfing magazines all the cool kids read, and mailed them to her anonymously. She broke my heart by not hiring a private detective to ascertain my identity.
Back at Loyola Village School, the alpha boys, imagining themselves to be emulating Elvis, had taken to going beltless, and wearing their trousers very low. Vice principal Mr. Dickhead (I may not be remembering correctly) had instituted a policy of tying a length of twine around the waists of all such delinquents. Naturally, a length of twine quickly became my school’s most coveted badge of honor. Mr. Dickhead’s counterparts at OWJHS weren’t quite that stupid, but the boys’ monobrowed vice principal was known be quite happy to use the paddle in his office on the butts of the rebellious. For her own part, Mrs. June Gerber, his female counterpart, was content to drone on and on at us at assemblies about how important it was to be mature, whose second syllable she pronounced tour.
I, the dutiful Jewish son, got in trouble only once, for cheating. Miss Titangos, whose surname and well-filled bullet bras launched a thousand nicknames, asked me, as one of the stars of her English class, to administer a makeup spelling test to Lance Matson, who was no great genius, but who had done me no wrong. When I asked him to spell schedule, I sounded it out, skeh-do-lee. Miss T pretty nearly had a cow, man. I played percussion in the school orchestra.
All the coolest kids professed to be fans of Soupy Sales' late-afternoon children's show. I think the idea was to demonstrate you were developing an adult's sense of irony, but suspected at the time that the whole thing might have been the result of one of our lower IQ-ed alphas finding it genuinely hilarious. I do know that I didn't enjoy being told I resembled Soupy, and that his two sons went on to play with Bowie.
Given the huge Jewish population at OWJHS, there was an awful lot of overt anti-Semitism. Tough boys would roll a cent (we don’t have pennies in this country, you know) at someone he hoped to humiliate. If the second boy stooped to retrieve it — and let’s bear in mind that a cent in those days would get you a delicious Tootsie Roll or piece of bubble gum — the tough boys would gleefully rub their noses so as to indicate they’d recognized him as a Jew. But Jewish patsies had it soft compared to poor Billy Snyder, whose cerebral palsy inspired the most appalling acts of cruelty I’ve ever witnessed first hand. I think his tormentors were a little easier on Walter Daniels, our sole black kid (unless you count the gorgeous Sandra Lucas, who was sticking to her story about being Spanish) because he was good at sports. Billy was perfectly awful at them.
I scored in the annual Faculty vs. Ninth Grade All-Star basketball game, which I got to play in because of my diligent, if inept, participation in after-school sports. I happened to be standing under the basket, trying to appear purposeful, when a teammate’s missed shot bounced right into my hands. I banked it in and my teammate Tim Thomas, who at 15 was already 6-2, marveled, “Way to go, John!” It was even better than getting to make a speech at graduation after winning the class-wide public speaking contest. I can honestly say that nothing I’ve done since has made me much prouder.
