Detention(my ninth-grade years)

my highschool career may have been exceptionally shortlived, but I ended up leaving there with an “instant party”, ready and waitin at my parents’ house. just add weed and stir….ah, but where to begin?
amongst the more-mainstream crowd, I was a little-seen entity, a pariah known only as “pirate” and rumored to be everything from schoolbathroom-lesbian-sex-fiend(nope) to the sort of person that they warn kids about in film strips on the dangers of reefer—(hell, I already had a line at my door, it wasn’t like I was actively seeking recruits to the afternoon potsmokers’ club)….
course, I did smoke up pretty much everyone who had any interest in learning about weed—I was that kid who invited “squares” and “geeks” over to get stoned with the druggies, if they were curious. but they always came to me, contrary to all film-strip-endorsed claims involving innocent, gullible children and a dark, seedy character in bellbottoms, beckoning from the sidelines, “everybody’s doing it…”
I remember once in fourth grade, this cheesy little bit about the unbelievably terrible dangers of LSD. as crazed, dazed looking long-haired “trippers”danced about on the pull-down screen atop the chalkboard, a very authoritative male announcer bellowed, “people under the influence of LSD have stared into the sun until going blind. some have jumped out of buildings to their deaths, thinking they could fly. those who survived the experience describe sensations of feeling colors and tasting sounds…..”
man, after watching that, I could barely wait to try the stuff for myself! this, I did a couple years later, at first opportunity. it was almost as good as advertised, too.
in fact, on my first day of high school, I was still experiencing the effects of hits I had eaten the night before. the hallways were sparkly and the air had a prismed snowflake-like quality to it, which, upon later inspection, seemed amazingly out-of-character with the rundown, leaky public-school building I found myself attending.
as that first schoolday dragged on, the major memory I have is one of looking out of a basement window during a 10th-grade geometry class I had tested into. the teacher was a bitch—my first impression was later reinforced by her constant currying of favor with the shallow-yet-popular girls who made up the majority of the classroom population, and the fact that if I ever showed up to her class, she would find a reason to send me immediately to the principal’s office. I figured she had wanted to be popular when she was a kid, but instead became a math teacher who vicariously enjoyed the social status of girls she taught, rewarding her pets with easy grades and a free-for-all on cutesy-yet-cutting remarks aimed at the outcast of the classroom, namely, yours truly. fuck that.
but as I sat there on that first day, my bleak school career stretched forlornly out before me, I turned my head towards the one window in the room, and there, stretching out like the proverbial promised land, was a grassy field at the forest’s edge. in my heart, I longed to be running across that grass right then, barefoot, heading away from that awful basement geometry class. it surprised me, how very badly i wanted to be hurtling towards the cool shade of those distant white pines, how painfully I just desired to be “not where I was”. it felt like somebody had shoved their hand into my chest and was twisting my heart in a clenched fist; it took my breath away.
instead, I went to the bathroom for a smoke. that is how, over the first weeks of school, I met most of my friends. nicotine as a social enabler.
the rest, I met either thru my prolonged stays in the school bandroom, or my neverending quest for herb. it’s always good to have a few backups, in case your main supplier runs out.
a couple kids, I met just thru sheer attraction by intelligence—I may have been reputed to be a no-account druggie, but I also was among the brightest kids in the school, and it seemed that some people liked my conversation for its intellectual content. so I was in the unique position of being friends with a cross-section of the social minorities of the highschool: the “lost souls” gravitated to me, and I introduced them to my “nerd” and “band geek” friends; I sought out and soon was on good terms with the school drug dealers and their outside associates; I knew every kid who came to detention hall, due to my continued presence there; and, being a juvenile delinquent, eventually “segregated” from the “mainstream” population, I got to know the school badasses really quite well also.
this ability to get along with a varied array of people, I used as a sort of social experiment: my sisters and I would hang out with a group of kids who had previously been near-strangers, on my parents’ screened backporch. we would get them stoned outta their minds and then watch them become fast friends with eachother. this is how I ended up with a sort of homegrown clique of people springing up around me—freshmen to seniors, flunkies to honor students, they all smoked up on my porch with myself, annie and lill. sometimes, we three would amuse our stoned selves by inciting our guests to talk philosophy. some kids likely didn’t even know what the word meant, and you would never be able to imagine the phrase “meaning of life” emanating from their mouths if ya hadn’t been there…..finding that hidden depth in people has always been a hobby of mine.
another group of people I came to be friends with were the school janitors, who admired my work ethic, as displayed during vacations and the weekend punishment sessions I privately attended, in which I paid for my numerous studently transgressions. I was the only person brave enough to clean the Home Ec room, ever, they admiringly told me. it was better than just hanging around, doing nothing, I had answered, modestly.
I also maintained the dubious distinction of being the only student at the school to get more detentions in a matter of months than could ever be repaid, even if I served one every day for the rest of my highschool career. how did I get into so much trouble, anyway? oh, let me count the ways….but first, back to the social end of things.
not all of my friends were interested in meeting eachother, of course. some were sworn enemies and the like. others just moved in separate circles. what all of us had in common, besides the enjoyment of far-out conversations, was fucked-up family life. my parents’ house was our hangout of choice due to my parents’ prolonged absences from it, and their accompanying lack of vigilance over their well-stocked supply of cheap liquors.
my friends were kids with crazy parents, no parents, alcoholic parents, abusive parents, dads who killed their pets, relatives who molested them at gunpoint, parents who chained them to a cinderblock in the backyard rather than pay for childcare. they got farmed out to foster homes sometimes. one kid had a vietnam-traumatized dad and a schizophrenic mom, and his house was literally falling down around him. in fact, none of us had a nice house to call home. we were the kids who went home to dwellings filled with catshit, or dominated by wrathful, destructive tyrants. our houses included one ramshackle trailer with seven occupants, a one-room apartment, an aging subdivision house with no working toilets and the infamous “doorway to nowhere”, where a deck had sheared right off the second story kitchen. a few had small, drab concrete shacks, and others lived in apartments in buildings with saggy floors and leaky roofs. we were the kids who hoped to be able to walk to the bus stop a few blocks, so as to avoid getting shit from our delightful, parentally-cared-for classmates.
so, I knew that my sisters and i didn’t have it that bad, on the whole. at least our parents weren’t home too much. how some of my best friends could be expected to show up and focus on school, with the horrors of their homelife looming over them, was beyond my comprehension. it always seemed so “wrong” to me that these kids lived in hell, came to school dazed and on edge, and then got further punishment for their lack of classroom concentration. how can someone be expected to care about school if they are going home to get beat on, go hungry, get molested? and most of these kids didn’t get even the benefit of any extra school services—they suffered in silence, fell thru the cracks, and just got ignored whilst a small minority of vocal juvenile delinquents got all the “help”, the attention, the understanding. it made me angry to watch. what about kids like my friend marcia?
marcia was one of my closest friends in highschool. she was enigmatic, to say the least—a short little freckled thing with a very sexy feminine body, who always hid it under layers of loose-fitting clothing and a boyish demeanor. marcia was a great storyteller, of the type who swears up and down that whatever wild tale she tells is true, and almost convinces you to believe her, she is so wide-eyed and smooth-spoken about it. marcia also had the ability to slide easily between social circles, although her taste in social contacts didn’t always overlap mine perfectly. she was madly in love with a pimply, greasy-string-haired, unbathed, womanizing thing named Andrew, whose merits remained obscure.
this matter was only further confused by the fact that Andrew had cheated on her with a fat, unwashed, apparently-more-willing-to-do-the-nasty, girl named Kate, during andrew and marcia’s four-month fling, then dumped Marcia. also, she had a much nicer, more-faithful, and better-looking boyfriend, named, coincidentally, phil(“her”phil’s birthday was the same as “my” phil’s, oddly enough.) I liked phil.
years later, I learned that “her” phil had spent huge amounts of time pining away for me. he told me this after we had downed a rather large bottle of vodka together, waitin on marcia to show up someplace(she had a way of arriving late)….the poor kid went on about how cool he thought I was, and how bad he had wanted me all these years. i was very kind to him about it, and since we were both the “honest” type, we just kept on drinking and never mentioned it again.
funny how I had never suspected before. sometimes I was(and still likely am) a bit clueless with regards to males actually liking me in a normal social context. I just had always assumed that folks wanted to chat with me, while going for my numerous cuter female friends. I didn’t mind—a little intrigue is an integral part of a good party, i always felt. thus, my parents’ queensize bed likely got more action from my friends having sex on it than it ever will get from my parents. guess the joke’s on them.
marcia lived in a house that was literally packed with garbage. her father was what nowadays might be referred to as a pathological collector. their house was so full, you could open the front door just about a foot, and this only thru sheer exertion upon all of the crap on the floor behind it. the stairs to the second floor were not visible—the stairway resembled a mudslide of sorts, made of all varieties of trash. it covered the floors of every room, elevating them at least a foot. to walk about, you had to follow the packed-down paths that wound their way around the dwelling atop the miscellanny. step off the path, and you were likely to fall or twist your ankle, or, even worse, step in something really, really nasty.
adding to the general ambiance of the place was the lack of aeration, due to all windows being nailed shut, and absence of sunlight, due to heavy-duty privacy shades. also, there were numerous feral cats multiplying invisibly below the rubble, doing their business in places it was best not to ask about, and darting in or out of the one access-point to the outside world, the front door, as you tried to jam yourself thru it. cardboard boxes were piled high around the walls, up to the ceiling. any and all furniture was obscured, under the sea of crap. all other access/egress points were completely inaccessible, covered by piles of garbage-filled boxes. the beds were buried, so to sleep over, you had to shove mountains of stuff aside to clear yourself a spot.
there was not always heat or hot water in the winter, and space heaters sure struck me as being a bit risky. the electrical system was also unpredictable, and the hanging overhead lamp in the kitchen had a fearsome way of sparking and crackling when bumped. it was along the “pathway” to the bathroom, however, so it was hard to avoid. the stove was buried and the refrigerator was out of service, and marcia’s nonschool diet consisted of spam, warmed on a hotplate. perhaps predictably, marcia’s bathtub was filled with garbage, and the shower was not operational. that left marcia washing her hair and taking sponge baths in the school sinks on a daily basis. I used to let her shower at my house, so as to avoid this sort of embarrassment. I fed her, too.
and as if that wasn’t enough to contend with, marcia’s dad, her sole guardian, was into kids, and she was all-too-aware of it. the first thing she always told her friends before coming to her house was to be careful around her father, not to agree to go anyplace alone with him. this, sadly, was not one of her stories. you could see the truth in her eyes, and the way she treated herself. also, she never would actually come out and say it, which, for marcia, was a sure indicator of the truthfulness of an unpleasant statement.
marcia and I spent our days together, skipping school and lighting bonfires in the woods, thumbing rides, getting stoned and telling tales. we ran across that field I had wished to escape thru so badly. we got drunk together before morning classes.
in fact, marcia was fairly well-adjusted for a kid who went home to that shit, I always thought……it would have been fair to expect her to have done herself in by ninth grade, if you ask me…..
after I dropped out of school and began working at Mcdonald’s in clinton(it was about a forty-five minute commute on foot, if I walked fast and took the shortcut down the traintracks) I introduced my school-friends to my fellow-employees, further widening the circle of people I apparently brought together. we would all get together and party someplace out in the woods, and then crash at somebody’s house, waking up hungover the next morning with new funny stories to tell about who “patty the large-breasted sex-addict” slept with the night before….
patty was another pretty friend of mine who had some issues….hers were the opposite of marcia’s, though….she had a way of calling attention to herself that even made her 38-DD boobs look insignificant….it involved miniskirts, skintight clothing, and a very “friendly” way of interacting with males: young ,old, ugly, cute, smart, dull, fat, thin, you name it—patty was truly democratic in her choice of sex partners. if you were male, you were in—course, you likely had to wait your turn, patty being a rather popular young lady…..when I met her, I didn’t realize she had this odd athletic hobby….being female, I guess I couldn’t have been expected to surmise it until I saw her interacting with her “target” group…..still, I never could get over the number of times I saw patty leaving a party briefly with something that more closely resembled a drowned weasel than an actual human male….she was charitably-inclined, perhaps. goodness knows she always gave herself away. I always did wonder what was goin on in her head that would possess her to be SO active with no apparent ulterior motivation…..the only thing she got was attention, and even most of that looked to me to be negative. I still liked her alright, though. heck, her peculiarities didn’t affect me, except to make my parties a little more lively. wonder what SHE’s up to these days.