After my brief, and colorful, stint as a pre-teen the next logical step was to become a teenager and attend High School. Actually, it was something about which I really didn't have a choice, because if I had, I probably would have skipped that part. I entered High School thirty-five years ago, and although I have my own three kids who have graduated from the institution within the last several years, I am not very well informed on the current mind set of the modern High School Student. All I really know is that in my day the mature and current High School student was seemingly obsessed with toilet humor.
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| My Freshman year 1979-1980 |
I mentioned in the first part of this blog, Once, I Was A Child, that a large part of Freshman hazing by the older students involved pushing a penny around a toilet seat with your nose, either as a solo act or as part of a race. This race was largely similar to a potato sack race.....with a toilet instead of a bag and a penny instead of a rope around your ankle. And actually, now that I think about, pushing a penny with your nose around a toilet seat really didn't involve jumping either, (unless of course your coach who was standing in the bathroom stall behind you while you knelt in front of the toilet would kick you in the backside, urging you on to greater speed because the other guy was making the broad turn at the top of the seat and you were still on the first leg). So, in looking back to a moment ago, I would have to say that referring to these two races as mostly similar, was over stating the matter. They were only similar by the definition that they were both races.
Being singled out to come face to face with a toilet seat was bad enough, but there was another reason for my trepidation about walking the halls of higher education. If you entered High School with someone in a grade or two above you that was already holding a grudge against you than your life was pretty much over. Your being singled out for various humiliations or random acts of physical pain were no longer mere happenstance, but deliberate acts of vengeance. We are now at the place where I re-enter the story because I had such a personal attendant.
His name was Steve, and he was a Junior when I entered as a Freshman. The only explanation that I can come up with for Steve not being my biggest fan was possibly because his sister was in my class and she definitely was a fan. But I was indifferent towards her and probably a little cruel if truth be told because I was just too cool, (or so I thought). I say that this is a possible explanation, but who really knows. Maybe someday I'll figure it out. Except for the few of the one-sided good times that I had with Steve, life while attending High School my first year was really not too bad. I would be standing by my locker with several friends, and a few of them would win the lottery and be selected to answer for their crime of having dared to enter the halls of teenage education. The imagined trespass was swiftly, and some times harshly, dealt with in one creative way or another. And even though I had friends and acquaintances who had to push a penny, I never did, nor did I ever get invited to have a face to face interaction with the toilet seat.
All of that happened from Monday through Friday, but the weekends were a different story altogether. There was a time during my Sophomore year when one of my friends decided to drive five of us to a Drive-in Theater on a Saturday night. Some of the local theaters charged a flat rate per car, no matter how many you had in the car, and others would cost a few dollars for each passenger. We decided on the movies that we wanted to see and realized that they were showing at a theater that charged a per-customer fee. So, being the socially-responsible, and civic-minded teenagers that we were, we decided to take the friend's family station wagon that night so that we could smuggle three of us in the back, thereby successfully avoiding the cover charge, saving us a cumulative total of nine dollars. Of course, the driver and his passenger had to pay, but the six dollars was absorbed by everyone.
I don't remember a lot of details of the events that happened DURING the movie, but I will never forget the after part. It was about one a.m. in the morning, and we decided that it appeared to be appropriate to light some M80 firecrackers in a few quite neighborhoods and wake some people up. We thought that it might even be a fun idea to put a few in random mailboxes and blow them up. My friends told me that the M80 was a quarter stick of dynamite, but after a friend had one go off underneath his foot, I was skeptical. Oh, they were large, and the explosion was impressive, but I'm sure that he would have lost his foot if the M80s were really a quarter stick of dynamite. The way this all came about, was as follows. I was riding in the front with the driver, and the others were in the back. The three in the back seat were rather cramped as they were relatively big kids. We had just started the early morning entertainment and the boy in the middle of the backseat was going to be the first to light one of the large firecrackers and toss it out the window. He proceeded to light it, waited for a second while it burned half way down the fuse, and threw it at the side window, where it promptly hit the door post and bounced right back between his legs. Well, as I'm sure you can imagine, there was some very frantic activity as the boy in the middle tried to stand up to get away from the burning bomb, and the other two boys tried to help, but at the same time, get as far away as possible, which really was only a few inches. The driver attempted to pull over and stop while all the action in the back seemed to be happening in slow motion, that is until about one second later when there was a muffled explosion under the foot of the kid in the middle, who had managed to step on the firecracker, which was still burning, and now between his foot and the seat. The explosion was loud in the confines of the car, and the small space was instantly filled with smoke and floating seat stuffing. The firecracker had blown a large hole in the backseat, and when we were able to stop, the hapless victim hobbled out of the car, hopping around, howling in pain and shock, as his shoe smoked and we waited for the car to air out. I suppose the guy was lucky that something soft was under his foot when the explosive went off because it appeared that a significant portion of the blast was absorbed by the car seat.
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| This picture was taken during my Junior year and was the 81-82 school year. |
After my first two years at a large public High School, I transferred to a small private school. What do I mean by small? I went from a school with about 2000 kids to a school with about 120. There were several reasons for doing this. One was that it was the school that my dad had attended and I really enjoyed the stories he would tell of his experiences and adventures while there. Another was that it just seemed to be a better fit for me. I was somewhat lost in a big student body and actually kind of a timid kid. I also had an innocent face and demeanor about me, which meant that I could mastermind a lot of mischief and not be a suspect. A good example of this happened during my junior year. I was in my fourth period U.S. History class, and we were going to be shown a movie that day. In the early eighties, there was nothing that even remotely resembled digital media, but class room movies involved a projector on a large metal cart and reels of film. The full reel was mounted on the front of the projector, the film wound its way through where the image was cast onto a large viewing screen, and then taken up and rewound onto a take-up reel mounted on the back end. The empty take-up reel system usually worked flawlessly, unless of course, somebody had put a pencil into one of the holes in the empty reel resulting in a pile of film on the floor because the take-up reel no longer was able to freely spin. I did just such a thing that day in fourth period U.S. History. I was served well by my innocent look because even though I was the one who was sitting right next to the projector, and even though I was now the only student clearly without a pencil on my desk, (meaning there was an excellent chance that the pencil used in the film reel caper was mine), the teacher pointedly asked several other students who had done it but did not once look at, or ask me if I had done it.
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| My Junior Year...being a typical goof-off. |
Towards the end of my junior year, various students began to campaign for the next year's student council offices. I got involved in the fast-paced world of small school politics by helping to run a friend's campaign, which actually just included water painting cheesy slogans on a square of white butcher paper. At the end of a brutal three-week campaigning trail, the student body would all gather at a local park for lunch and an afternoon of well-planned candidate speeches, after which we would return to the school, and the voting would begin. On the morning of the big day, about two hours before we all went down to the park for the speeches, one of my friends approached me and suggested that I should run for the Student Body President. At first, I thought he was joking, and then I thought, "why not?". So I went to the park that day, stood up before the gathered students, and gave an entirely impromptu speech. It must have been pretty good because I won, beating out two other strong opponents. I really don't know what I said, it being over 35 years ago, but I spent the eighty two-eighty three school year as the big cheese,( emphasis on cheese ).
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| Senior Picture 1983 |
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| Senior Picture !983 |
So, even though this did not cover every part of my High School career, I felt like what I shared here covered pretty much how the four years went for me. In the first installment of this blog, I stated that it would be a two-part series, but I have decided to extend it to include my college years. It will be titled, I Even Went On To Higher Education, Once. I will begin working on it in the next couple of days and post it soon.
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