The Hell of Hormonal Imbalance

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.

Getting From Here to There

I have no reason to believe I was late to walking, and as best I can recall mastered the tricycle pretty quickly too. The trouble started when it got to be bicycle time. My bike (that which my dad, posing as me, had won in the ThriftiMart coloring contest) was too big for me, and thus intimidating, and my remarkable lack of equilibrium unveiled itself with a flourish. Nearly 50 years later, a videotape of the Ministry of Humour’s final performance in London would show me, sober as a judge, nearly falling off stage at one point while doing my best to remain still.

I was well into my ninth year before I figured out that one propelling himself forward on a bicycle with sufficient gusto is unlikely to fall over. Once having done so, what an avid cyclist I became. I pedaled back and forth each day to Orville Wright Junior High School as I entered puberty, and my calf muscles, which I still have, went BOING! I gave it up only on realizing that the cool kids all tempted fate by hitchhiking.

I thought I would never get my driver’s license. Trying to parallel-park the family Buick Le Sabre was approximately like trying to parallel-park an aircraft carrier. At my second failed test, I huffed and puffed and dripped sweat trying to achieve exactly the right angle at which to back in until the examiner asked with a chuckle if I didn’t think I’d better turn the engine back on; I’d no idea I’d stalled. I finally passed, barely, on my third try, which I had the perspicacity to take the day before Xmas.

The first time my parents let me take the Buick out alone, I drove up to a playground in Pacific Palisades to hit tennis balls against a wall. Leaving, I managed to leave a big dent in the car beside me, but beat a hasty retreat, a karmic miscalculation that would result in lots of fellow motorists damaging my own cars — successively, a VW microbus, a Porsche Super 90, an Austin Marina, a Renault LeCar (my favorite of the lot!), a Toyota Corolla, a Toyota Camry, and the present Subaru Forester — over the years, and leaving no notes.

I’ve never been in a bad accident, but oh, have I come close. Shortly after the Pacific Palisades tennis episode, on a then-lonely stretch of Pacific Coast Highway north of Malibu Canyon, it occurred to me that it would be hugely droll to pull up alongside and then remain right beside another car at 70 miles per hour. If I’d noticed a millisecond later that someone was stopped up ahead in my lane, waiting to make a U-turn, someone else would be delighting you with these reminiscences.

A dozen years later, my band The Pits rehearsed out in Calabasas. One afternoon, speeding thither in the fast (diamond!) lane of the Ventura Freeway, I got into an animated dispute with one of my passengers, either bass player R. d’Andrea or girlfriend M—, only to realize that everyone had suddenly stopped ahead of us. Between my stomping the brake pedal and our coming to rest approximately a centimeter behind the plumber’s van ahead of us, I relived my entire life to that point, and not pleasurably.

I picked up my daughter one Friday night in Santa Rosa in 1996, and was driving her home to San Francisco in Nancy’s Toyota MR2 when it began to rain vengefully in Marin County. At the foot of the Waldo Grade (leading up to the Rainbow Tunnel and then the Golden Gate Bridge), we hydroplaned into a 540-degree spin, winding up facing oncoming traffic in Highway 101’s fast lane. Attention, adrenals: Secrete! Secrete! Shaking like, you know, a leaf, I somehow got us turned around and over to the shoulder of the freeway, where I observed that God seemed to have plans for us. My daughter would reportedly go on to become a born-again Christian, I to compose and record Sorry We’re Open. Product placement!

When I’d begun courting Leslie, who would become my first wife and Brigitte’s mom, she lived in Santa Monica and I in one of the upstairs bedrooms of an art hovel on the western edge of LA’s Koreatown. With calf muscles all a-bulge, I would pedal my bicycle 12 miles down Wilshire Blvd., commonly enjoying music on my Walkman (The Clash, for instance) that I have never been able to enjoy while stationery.

Flying terrifies me, but my fear never keeps me off the plane.

[Hear Sorry We're Open here! Facebookers: Read more All In Tents and Porpoises essays and subscribe here.]