I hated high school. Nothing fit, or felt right, and it was boring as hell. The bus ride to and from was OK though. An unusually excited girl, Mary Beth? Mary Elizabeth? Well Mary something anyway, had dropped out of Catholic school and always sat alone on the seat in front of me so she could turn around and gush nonsense at me for the entire ride. She really was sweet and all, she was just rather clueless. Mostly I let her spew while I thought about her sitting there in her little uniform that she still wore, how clean her hair looked, how she squished her large breasts up and over the back of her seat as if on a serving platter. That part of my commute ended when I replaced the bus with a motorcycle in my junior year. Winter rides froze my hands into claws that wouldn't even start to flex until third period. All that was fine too, but once inside school, the noise, chaos, the marching from room to room for long periods of sit down and shut up time? That stuff really sucked the big weenie.
All I wanted was out.
Certainly it was no surprise that my grades were poor, given the fact that my father had been a Phi Beta Kappa at Johns Hopkins and top of his class at Harvard Law. All he cared about was academic achievement…and Mom. I not only didn’t compete with that, I actively sabotaged any possibility of getting good grades and mentally dropped out. Physically, I went to school every day, but it was rare for me to be there. On school nights, I was banished to the Gulag to “study” and get my grades up. That started at 7 PM on school nights, five days a week. Dad’s rule. It didn’t do shit for my grades but worked well for Dad’s agenda. He could watch Lawrence Welk with mom in peace, as if I didn’t exist. Cokes and cigarettes for everybody! (Except for those locked up in the Gulag of course)
Among other things, I occupied myself with a World Book Encyclopedia. Read that sucker cover to cover, A through Z, several times. I raised Drosophila and bred them for eye color… thousands of fruit flies looking out at the world beyond their mason jar through bipolar shades. Two-headed Planarian worms dared me to cut them, calling out from a covered dish that the neighbors would rather you not bring over to their party. Boiled straw added to pond water in a large container fed single celled critters and pushed them into overnight population explosions. I saw them all through the lense of my microscope, busily compiling a diary of sightings and drawings. Amoeba and their Sarcondinan brothers seemed to have inspired a 1958 Steve McQueen horror movie: "The Blob". Flagella and cilia pushed their cabs through heavy traffic... microscopic bumper cars.
It reminded me of when David Callahan had just turned ten years old and we went to the Rialto Theatre to see "The Blob" on his birthday. It was pretty scary and David tried to read a book to avoid the screen. Who brings a book to a movie theater anyway?
David was my best friend. He lived behind us, our backyards sharing a worn path between the two houses. At night we often ran that path barefoot and mashed fat slugs between our toes as they crossed the packed dirt in slow motion. We strung telegraph wire between our houses…my bedroom to the garage, to a tree in his backyard, to the window in his house where his telegraph key was set up. I had a key too, of course. So that was huge for me to bring communication with the outside world into the Gulag. David and I tapped out deep thoughts back and forth: “fuck you!”… “fuck you back!” I never thought there was anyone other than David or maybe his brother, Rick, on their end but wound up telling Mr. Callahan “fuck you!” several times even after he identified himself. I thought it was just David playing with me and I said terrible things about his dad’s infatuation with livestock. When I realized that it really was Mr Callahan, I told him that I was my brother, Kenny.
My Gulag had a built-in bar in the closet. An older friend bought bottles of Bourbon for me if I paid him double, so I had that too. For a while there I vomited nightly onto the soft snow under my bedroom window. Violent explosions of a nightmare minestrone…puke graffiti splattered and flash frozen into a mess the dog tried to eat during the day. When mom let the dog out to pee, Lucy would run around to the side of the house and come back with a frozen puke Frisbee for Mom to throw. Unlike my father, the neighbors on that side of the house cared about me. They called up Mom to offer their condolences that I must have been sick with flu out of my window “again last night”
Certainly it was no surprise that my grades were poor, given the fact that my father had been a Phi Beta Kappa at Johns Hopkins and top of his class at Harvard Law. All he cared about was academic achievement…and Mom. I not only didn’t compete with that, I actively sabotaged any possibility of getting good grades and mentally dropped out. Physically, I went to school every day, but it was rare for me to be there. On school nights, I was banished to the Gulag to “study” and get my grades up. That started at 7 PM on school nights, five days a week. Dad’s rule. It didn’t do shit for my grades but worked well for Dad’s agenda. He could watch Lawrence Welk with mom in peace, as if I didn’t exist. Cokes and cigarettes for everybody! (Except for those locked up in the Gulag of course)
Among other things, I occupied myself with a World Book Encyclopedia. Read that sucker cover to cover, A through Z, several times. I raised Drosophila and bred them for eye color… thousands of fruit flies looking out at the world beyond their mason jar through bipolar shades. Two-headed Planarian worms dared me to cut them, calling out from a covered dish that the neighbors would rather you not bring over to their party. Boiled straw added to pond water in a large container fed single celled critters and pushed them into overnight population explosions. I saw them all through the lense of my microscope, busily compiling a diary of sightings and drawings. Amoeba and their Sarcondinan brothers seemed to have inspired a 1958 Steve McQueen horror movie: "The Blob". Flagella and cilia pushed their cabs through heavy traffic... microscopic bumper cars.
It reminded me of when David Callahan had just turned ten years old and we went to the Rialto Theatre to see "The Blob" on his birthday. It was pretty scary and David tried to read a book to avoid the screen. Who brings a book to a movie theater anyway?
David was my best friend. He lived behind us, our backyards sharing a worn path between the two houses. At night we often ran that path barefoot and mashed fat slugs between our toes as they crossed the packed dirt in slow motion. We strung telegraph wire between our houses…my bedroom to the garage, to a tree in his backyard, to the window in his house where his telegraph key was set up. I had a key too, of course. So that was huge for me to bring communication with the outside world into the Gulag. David and I tapped out deep thoughts back and forth: “fuck you!”… “fuck you back!” I never thought there was anyone other than David or maybe his brother, Rick, on their end but wound up telling Mr. Callahan “fuck you!” several times even after he identified himself. I thought it was just David playing with me and I said terrible things about his dad’s infatuation with livestock. When I realized that it really was Mr Callahan, I told him that I was my brother, Kenny.
My Gulag had a built-in bar in the closet. An older friend bought bottles of Bourbon for me if I paid him double, so I had that too. For a while there I vomited nightly onto the soft snow under my bedroom window. Violent explosions of a nightmare minestrone…puke graffiti splattered and flash frozen into a mess the dog tried to eat during the day. When mom let the dog out to pee, Lucy would run around to the side of the house and come back with a frozen puke Frisbee for Mom to throw. Unlike my father, the neighbors on that side of the house cared about me. They called up Mom to offer their condolences that I must have been sick with flu out of my window “again last night”
Good of them to check on me, those bastards.
But thanks to that aging World Book set, also relegated to the Gulag doubling as my bedroom, I did learn something …mostly in alphabetical order, of course.
So now I’m prepared to take questions from the crowd…as long as they touch on subjects like fruit flies, flatworms, life forms smaller than the dot of a pencil, Morse Code, warm Bourbon with water…or any quick synopsis of subjects from A to Z based on the latest information contained in a set of the 1957 World Book Encyclopedia.
hmh
