The Voice of Treason

I remember when a friend was having problems with her boyfriend, so I showed up at her parents’ house to check up on her. She had cuts on her wrists and arms and was throwing herself, repeatedly, down the stairs of their town home. She was a smart girl, but this behavior was indescribably stupid. I pointed that out to her and she agreed, but instead of stopping, she just kept rolling down the staircase. I loved her parents; didn’t she realize they’d be heartbroken if they knew what she’d been doing since the start of high school?

Self-mutilation is no new concept, but it makes about as much sense to me now as it did then. And then there were the girls who could never be thin enough and starved themselves so they could fit into jeans that were too small for them. Something else that’s foreign to me. I used to think that people who had eating disorders were ones whose mothers didn’t know how to cook. As far as I’m concerned, food is something that I like more and more all the time. The thought of throwing it away, or eating it and then vomiting it up, is just sacrilege. Not only is it an obscene waste of money, but the idea that someone can treat food that way when there are people who don’t have any is…well, just profane. Humans and animals all over the world are dying agonizing deaths from hunger and you’re afraid of an Oreo? Shame on you.

I remember enrolling in a summer theatre workshop and I was there with kids from the two “good” schools in the area. Our teachers had planned to take the group to Disneyland and just before I got on the bus to go I panicked and thought that I would feel like a misfit on the trip, so I called my parents (we had these things called “pay phones” back then) and told them that they should pick me up. They did the right thing: they told me I was being ridiculous and if I didn’t go I’d regret it because I’d miss out on a great time. I was convinced that I wasn’t going to have a great time. I was painfully shy and just couldn’t see myself fitting in with these people outside of a classroom. They were rich kids from Los Altos and they were all so very cool and confident. But I got on the bus and sat next to two gay kids - one had brought his mother with him - and the other saw that I’d come with bags of cookies and invited me to join them. We munched all the way to Anaheim.

My parents, of course, were right. I did have a good time and will always have the memory of the Disneyland Seven. Seven from our group got on the Monorail, lit up a joint, and got busted by Mickey Mouse. Obviously I wasn’t one of the seven. It just seemed like a stupid thing to do. They spent the rest of the trip sitting in a room at the park, while officials contacted their families. And there was that feeling again that I would have throughout school - that strange mixture of mad and sad.

Like when my friend, who had such a beautiful singing voice, disappeared. Didn’t see it coming. She was having sex with our school Choir teacher (I might have been the only kid in school who hadn’t been aware of this) and when one of those fly-by-night carnivals came to town and set up on the school campus, she met a tattooed carnival worker and ran away with him. I’d get letters from her. They lived in a garage in Fort Wayne, Indiana; she was going to have a baby and she was just so happy. Her parents were devastated.

Another friend ran away with someone. We’d been friends since middle school and I used to wonder why she and her sister were so completely different. They looked nothing alike. I finally discovered that the older Mormon couple who were raising them had adopted the girls and they had different biological parents. Her father recruited us for the church volleyball team. What I didn’t know was that both girls were utterly miserable: the mother used them as built-in maids and the father sexually abused them. The one girl left home to attend Brigham Young; the other ran away with some guy she barely knew. I found out later that the sister at BYU was a lesbian.

But that was long before I discovered that our homecoming king should have been crowned homecoming queen. He was this tall lanky black kid who was involved in every school activity and still managed good grades. He was funny and talented and everyone congregated around him. All the girls had crushes on him because he was “just so sweet.” A friend confirmed how sweet he was when he told me that our homecoming king, like Robyn’s mother, used to go up to San Francisco and pick up guys.

“How do you know this?”

“He told me.”

“When?”

“Right after he gave me a blow job.”

This was a friend - heterosexual - who seemed to accept them from anyone at anytime. His philosophy reminded me of the old Florence King line: “Judge not, lest ye be judged judgmental.” He could never understand why I would work myself into a lather over other people’s decisions.

“Just let them live their lives and don’t let it bother you. It’s obviously not bothering them, right?”

“But they’re making bad decisions. They’re hurting themselves and the people around them.”

“What’s a bad decision? They don’t think they’re hurting anybody - they’re just living their lives. Let them be.”

He also admitted that our middle school teacher - the twitchy one who taught Rock Poetry - had sex with him, too. My friend neatly compartmentalized all aspects of his life: for him, there was nothing wrong with having sex with this teacher and they continued a platonic friendship all through high school, college, and beyond. (I recently discovered that my old friend now has his Master’s in psychology, counsels executives, and has built his professional life around the concept that to create and maintain change, it is essential for an individual to shift his personal belief systems and bring personal values in line with behavior. Uh…yeah, whatever.)

Then there was the English girl who got a job making salads at the popular Palo Alto restaurant and ended up having a torrid affair with her boss. Years later, after college, I worked with a high school girl who had been having an affair since she was twelve with the guy next door: he was her parents’ friend, the sports coach, the successful businessman, the respected member of the church. She went to school with his kids. A coworker was so smitten with her, but she wasn’t interested: her heart belonged to the pedophile next door. She just reminded me so much of my friend who kept throwing herself down the stairs.

Later, at the same job, another young girl who I just adored because she was so smart and so feisty, told me - after I asked her if she was using some new hair product because her hair was just looking so shiny lately - that it was because she was pregnant. She told my boss - a quiet, middle-aged guy with several daughters of his own — and I’ll never forget the look on his face. He went into his office, closed the door, and wept. I waited until I was in bed that night.

It turned out badly: she had the baby, her boyfriend was a goof, and neither one of them was ready for the responsibility. She thought that having something to dress up and play with would be fun, but this kid had no off switch. One of those toddlers that got into everything, punched, screamed, kicked, and stomped a lot. Her favorite word was “no” and she’d scream it endlessly at her mother. All my little friends’ plans were put permanently on hold.

But back to high school. Even the girl who had won all the awards and the scholarship to Stanford had problems. It was Thanksgiving, I was home from college, and my mother had the newspaper.

“Hey! Isn’t this that girl who couldn’t even add?”

“Yeah. What about her?”

“Her family’s in trouble.”

“How?”

“They were all involved in that cult.”

“Cult?”

“Yeah, yeah - that whole mess in Guyana.”

Oh…that cult.

To be continued…

My high school friends’ parents should have had noses like that. I always felt bad for them because their kids were always up to no good. I spent my freshman year with friends I’d made in junior high, then watched them, one by one, destroy their lives.

I was sitting in a Geometry class with “my group” one day and Julie passed me a note. I started to read it aloud. “I have…wait a minute. That’s not how you spell gonorrhea!” Then I dropped the note. Julie was a pretty blonde whose family, like Robyn’s, collected welfare. I remember giving her a birthday gift and she asked me if I would give her cash instead because she wanted to buy drugs and that would make a much better present. Amy Vanderbilt would have had a stroke on the spot.

And now she had a social disease and needed someone to go to the free clinic with her. The last place I wanted to be seen in was a clinic, but no one else would do it, so I went with her. As I sat there in the waiting room with a cast of colorful characters, I made a note to myself. (As God is my witness, I will nevah be in a free clinic again! Cue “Tara’s Theme.”) When we left I asked her what she was going to do next.

“What do you mean?”

“Your deadbeat boyfriend gave it to you, right?”

“Yeah. So?”

“Aren’t you curious about how he got it?”

It took her a while to figure out that I was making a point. Finally, she realized that he had to have been with someone else. Well, duh, Julie. And she had taken the same Health Ed class with me. Time passed, and she finally got knocked up by one of her deadbeat boyfriends and had a baby. I’m not sure if she graduated or not because by that time I was associating with an entirely new group. I’d reacquainted myself with some kids I’d liked in seventh grade - including the ballet nut.

I suppose I could detail every high school indiscretion here, but there are more than enough of those to save for future entries. All I’m doing, taking this trip down memory lane, is trying to paint myself a picture of how I grew up to discover how I managed to get through the public education system without joining a gang and beating the crap out of my classmates. Or how I managed to avoid ending up like so many of my friends.

The local story about the miscreant high schoolers continues. Another recent story was about the number of drop-outs (criminy - barely half the kids in this district manage to graduate!) and the ridiculously high number of teenage girls having babies. In the seventies I was horrified by pregnant girls at school; here we are, decades later, and the numbers have only increased. It’s simply the thing to do.

And I remember that my mother was hesitant about moving us into my stepfather’s house because I’d be going to the high school that was considered “bad.” She’d heard stories and was convinced that if I went there I’d be killed. My stepfather wasn’t too worried; he’d graduated from the same school forty years earlier and never had a problem.

Looking back, there were plenty of punks at the school but the only ones who made me uncomfortable were the Filipino guys who hung out near my English classroom. But once I realized that I was over five foot six and probably weighed more than any of them - even at 115 I weighed more than they did - I felt confident that I could have defended myself. Unless, of course, I had to fight off a pack of them. Then one day I thought about it and it occurred to me that although these guys were creepy, none of them were willing to mess up their clothes. I was safe.

I didn’t have time to get into trouble. I was busy. I had interests. I liked music and art and theater and had a lot of Advanced Placement classes, so there were books to read, tests to study for, and papers to write. Once I got involved with the music and theater departments, there were rehearsals. I hung out with a lot of boys. But they were boys from the music and theater departments. They threw costume parties and I’d show up dressed as George Sand. They were harmless. We were all harmless.

A football player showed up at my parents’ house one day. His father owned a plumbing business and because he was a decent football player - and had a Hispanic surname - he won a full scholarship to Stanford. He planned to be a doctor, but all the girls joked that he’d be a gynecologist. My theater instructor had been a college athlete who auditioned for a school play and it changed his life. It was his mission to recruit other athletes (he needed more boys in the program for job security, I guess). This kid got a good part in a show we were doing and he fell in love with my cologne. My parents really liked him and couldn’t figure out why I wasn’t interested in going out with him. He was a nice kid, and any other girl would have killed her best friend to date him, but he just wasn’t my type. I looked for brains and a sense of humor and, unfortunately, most of those guys looked weird and had something really odd going on. Clubbed feet, hunched backs, horns, breasts. I’m not exaggerating. If you were witty, you could have two heads, for all I cared. Like Jessica Rabbit: “He makes me laugh.” I’m not talking silly jokes - I’m talking kids who could go to battle with Oscar Wilde and win. They existed and their lives were fairly miserable, but they knew that high school was a temporary thing and coped.

I knew some of the most brilliant kids back then. Like Linda. In Driver’s Ed class we loved it when it was her turn behind the wheel because she was such an amazing driver. Linda’s mother was from a “good” family and had several degrees from Ivy League schools, but she spent most of her time in a fetal position on the sofa. For her, the world was harsh and ugly; Linda took care of her mother and her two little brothers and dreamed of getting away and having her own life. She worked hard in school and when it was time for scholarships I thought she’d have a good chance at one. She was a welfare kid, but she was a good student and was determined to go to college. She did win a scholarship. A fifty dollar scholarship.

Meanwhile, another girl won a full scholarship to Stanford. She drove a Mercedes to school. She won every award. Her teachers loved her. I had her in a couple AP English courses and thought she was a dolt. My mother, who had never involved herself in school activities, suddenly became more involved after she married my stepfather. Somehow she had been suckered into working on a graduation party committee. This girl was in charge of the budget. My mother was furious. “That girl is an idiot! They put her in charge of the budget and I don’t think she can even add!” I told my mother she was an honor student and got straight A’s. My mother was skeptical: “Oh, yeah? There’s a saying about girls like her. Her shit don’t stink, but her farts give her away.”

I could always count on my mother to size up a situation in one phrase, and I was thrilled that she confirmed my suspicions. There were so many other kids who were smarter and deserved scholarships. Jeanne was a walking encyclopedia, but she was flunking out of school because she was smarter than her teachers and was bored because she already knew what they were trying to teach us. She was on welfare, too, and could have used money to go to a good school. Another girl was a super brain, too, but she was smart enough to get the grades she needed. Her name appeared in every Who’s Who and she took Calculus and Trig because they were fun. My best friend, Lorraine, got a perfect score on the PSAT during our junior year. She was smart, but I often wondered about her total lack of common sense and gullibility. She ended up at Berkeley and took classes in kiddie lit.

Lorraine and I edited the school literary journal and I liked her sense of humor. She had a heavy class schedule and then after school she’d put on a silk cheongsam and go work as hostess/waitress at her family’s restaurant. Asian kids like Lorraine got through school unscathed, taking refuge in classes like Chemistry and Advanced Trigonometry. I wonder if the same is true at that local high school. Are the Asian kids spared? Are they invisible, or are they getting the crap beaten out of them, too?

To be continued…

Around the same time that Richard reappeared and we walked around my neighborhood and talked, my aunt and uncle showed up to visit. This was my mother’s sister whose Greek husband, George, was eight years her junior. They had adopted twin boys who were just a couple years older than me and one had made the trip out with them. He and I went on the same walk as the one I’d taken with Richard.

“I hate her.”

He hated my aunt? How was this possible?

“My brother hates her, too. We just really hate her.”

“How do you feel about George?”

“George? George is fine. I mean, how can you hate someone like George?”

True. The man was a peach. He adored my aunt and gave her anything she wanted. He made very good money and they had a fabulous house in Seattle. She raised dogs, and one puppy, Sam, belonged to the uncle we lived with when my mother moved us out to California. The dog was a character; he looked like a big black bear and happily put up with my uncle. Drove his Volvo into a utility pole one morning. (That would teach my uncle not to leave his car running with only the dog in it.)

I digress. It’s just that I’d always liked my aunt - she was theatrical and exuberant - and I loved George. He was so quiet and so patient. He seemed to be tolerant of everybody and everything - I just couldn’t understand how my cousins could be so miserable. My first thought was that they were little ingrates. They’d been adopted and given everything, so how could they possibly be unhappy?

Yet my cousin thought I was the lucky one. “We always thought your mother was so cool.”

My mother? The little Italian who was pissed off all the time? “You realize you’re talking about the same woman who would throw anything she had in her hand at us when we walked into a room.”

“Yeah. She just always seemed to be fun. We wished she was our mother instead.”

Well, this was certainly an eye opener. I would’ve traded lives in a heartbeat, but now he had me wondering if I was the ingrate. I had a cool mother? Well, yeah, I guess on some level I knew that she wasn’t like other mothers. She was a…free thinker. It’s easy to recite everything she ever did wrong when we were growing up, but sometimes I prefer to think about the things she did right.

Her philosophy was simple. She believed that because she had brought us into the world that she had the right to take us out of it. We were convinced that when she told us she would kill us, she wasn’t kidding. For someone who was so strict and had so little patience with misbehavior, she actually gave us a considerable amount of freedom. After all, we practically raised ourselves.

I always remember kids telling me that they weren’t allowed to see a certain movie or read a certain book. My mother never believed in censorship so we were exposed to all sorts of things. I remember how angry she was when, after she bundled us up and got us on the L train to go see West Side Story, my father told her that he’d heard from a woman he worked with that it was “dirty.” “You let her take those children to see that filthy movie?” (She took us again.)

As my siblings grew up and cultivated social lives, I was the one who was dragged to every movie with my mother. When we lived in Rogers Park there was a movie theater right across the street and another just a few blocks away. She took me to see My Fair Lady, Dr. Zhivago, the Beatles movies, the Bond movies - everything. I don’t remember ever going to see kids movies; we went to the movies she wanted to see. I even remember her taking me to see Wild in the Streets. Fourteen or fight.

She and my father were an interesting pair. He was much older and preferred that my mother and his daughters wear their hair long. He liked dresses - satiny, velvety, feminine ones with lace and sashes. We liked him because he treated us like actual people and spoke to us as if we were adults. He took my sister to taverns with him and that would remain one of her fondest childhood memories. On birthdays he’d take us kids to restaurants where women wore strapless cocktail dresses and fabulous jewelry, and he’d order me a Shirley Temple. After dinner we’d go into another room and dance. I loved those kiddie cocktails, the dim lighting, the music, the candlelight. A place like Chuck E. Cheese was just not up my father’s alley. To him, we were people - just shorter than the ones he generally hung out with.

When he left, my mother immediately cut her hair short and ours came off, too. Wardrobes were suddenly more practical: slacks, sweaters, jumpers. My mother was an Anglophile and went mod. I remember her buying me Carnaby Street clothes, including a pale blue brushed denim double-breasted jacket, then dragging me all over Chicago to find the matching “John Lennon cap.” I imagine she was influenced by her father, who took her to movies, too, and bought her all the Shirley Temple and Deanna Durbin clothes.

She didn’t smoke or drink, but my father did. There was always alcohol in the house and she’d make us sloe gin fizzes. We had access to beer, wine, whiskey, scotch. She told us if we were going to smoke we would have to do it in front of her - no sneaking around. Only two of us ended up smokers and, although she let me smoke a few when my sister started buying cigarettes, I never developed the habit. I’m convinced if she had made booze and cigarettes taboo, I would have sneaked around like my friends. As a result, none of us are drunks today. She prided herself on reverse psychology. And none of us are criminals. One day she got a call about my brother who had stolen a pack of cigarettes.

“We’ll send him home. We just wanted you to know.”

“No! Keep him there.”

“M’am?”

“Keep him there. Do what you want. Just make sure he’s terrified.”

“Uh, m’am, ordinarily parents say that their kid didn’t do it.”

“If you said he did it, he probably did it. I just don’t want him doing it again. I want the shit scared out of him.”

“Yes, m’am!”

It worked. None of us are thieves. We even tell store clerks when we’ve been undercharged.
But my mother was always honest - she’d even tell her customers what they shouldn’t order, and they seemed to appreciate that.

“I’d like the parmigiana.”

“Uh, no, you won’t.”

But I don’t remember ever being told I couldn’t watch a certain movie or read a particular book. She had trashy novels all over the house and we were free to pick them up and read them at any time. I now understand why. We never had to talk about the birds and the bees - she had Harold Robbins on hand to explain it for her. (This was a woman who kept a copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover in her beach bag.)

I remember my father and my siblings sitting on the back porch of our apartment building looking at the Chicago skies, searching for UFOs. My mother talked openly about ghosts and we’d sit on her bed and look at the “face” on her bedroom window shade. We thought it was caused by tree branches and streetlights, but she was convinced that it was something evil that was trying to kill her. She’d been sick for a long time, and when the face disappeared she got better. When our cat bit her and her foot was infected, she sent me all over looking for a particular leaf so she could heal the wound. She believed that garlic, Vicks VapoRub, and this leaf would cure anything. And she let us stay up late and watch horror films. Mr. Sardonicus. As a result, we’re all pretty open to weird ideas and strange thoughts.

She never told us that we couldn’t associate with certain people, but she was comfortable pointing out who she didn’t care for. She was convinced that the lady who fed the pigeons was nuts, but when I told her that I often went inside her apartment and talked to her - and helped her feed the pigeons - my mother never told me I couldn’t do it. Now if I had come home from school and told her that my class was planning a trip to Aruba and that I intended to go, she would have said: “The hell you are!” And that would have been the end of that story.

I guess she figured if we were home drinking sloe gin and 7Up and reading Peyton Place, we wouldn’t be out getting abducted, raped, and mutilated in some basement apartment. She’d always remind us that kids would be cut up in little pieces and dumped in the river. “You don’t want to end up in that filthy river, do you?” My brother was always helpful. “The turds will get in your eyes…your ears…your mouth…” Aaaarrrggghhh - stop!!!

But we were never sneaky. I was convinced she would know where I was and what I was doing. Sometimes I’d walk in the door and she’d sniff me. One sniff and she knew where I’d been. Those Italian noses, I tell ya…

To be continued…

Since I’d made the decision on my first day of kindergarten that I would never breed, the thought of being a pregnant middle schooler was repugnant. The black girls who were bused in from East Palo Alto with their kids had made an impression. I’d assumed that everyone else would have the same reaction, but soon I was noticing that several girls got to “sit out” during P.E. I hated our gymsuits and would have loved to sit out, too, so I was curious. Why did these girls get to avoid participating in mindless team sports? Someone finally explained it to me. They’d been knocked up.

Ghosts, goblins, werewolves, and vampires didn’t scare me, but the prospect of being a knocked up seventh-grader was terrifying. Why on earth would someone want to get pregnant, anyway? I soon discovered that the girls who got pregnant were the girls who also did a lot of drugs. Not in all cases, but in enough to make me make the connection. I wasn’t one to believe that if I smoked a little hemp it would lead to harder drugs and then one day I’d be toothless, turning tricks in an alley for a shot of heroin. No, my mind worked in other ways. I heard hemp, I thought hump. If I went to the park and smoked dope with my friends, I’d end up pregnant. A toke and a poke and my life was ruined.

See, most of my friends were boy crazy, but I wasn’t. Since I was comfortable having friendships with boys and could talk to them about things we both liked, their mystery was somewhat diminished. But I do remember actually dating someone in junior high. His name was Richard and on our first date we went to a movie. My parents and sister tagged along and sat somewhere in the theater. There was something charming about this, and practical, too. I don’t think we would have been allowed into the theater if my parents hadn’t been there. This was an “R” rated film, after all. Anyway, my parents had nothing to worry about; as soon as the movie started, I was riveted. If Richard was there to neck, he was out of luck. This was the first time I’d seen The Godfather and I wasn’t about to take my eyes off the screen. All I could think was: “Man, I can’t believe how Al Pacino is stealing this movie right out from under Marlon Brando.” To this day it’s still one of my top ten favorites of all time.

“Fredo, you’re my older brother, and I love you. But don’t ever take sides with anyone against the family again. Ever.”

And another valuable life lesson. I can’t go to a movie on a date. I actually broke up with someone shortly after he took me on a double date because the other couple wanted to see Dirty Rotten Scoundrels and I thought the reason I was there was to see Field of Dreams. Do not make me watch a movie I know I don’t want to see. Ever.

Anyway, I’m reminded that Richard moved away and several years later he suddenly reappeared. We went for a long walk and talked about what we’d been doing during the time he’d been gone. Let’s see. His parents divorced, he’d run away, gotten deeply involved with drugs, had a lot of strange sexual experiences and brushes with the law, and hid out in Colorado to be closer to nature and be away from the rest of the world. He’d been a very normal kid, but his life had gone off track.

This, to me, was a mystery. How could this kid who had had so much going for him get so screwed up so quickly? I’d known a lot of kids who took their parents divorces really hard, but I always thought they were still pretty lucky because, technically, they still had both parents. My mother and father had separated when I was very young and I barely remember the time when my father was living with us. Around the time I was convinced that he’d retire, leave Chicago, and move to Arizona to live with us, he had his fourth and final heart attack.

I imagine there are bitter breakups, but if both parents are still functioning and aren’t dangerous, a kid should have access to them. Richard was a good kid and he was smart. I liked him because he was quiet and classy for an adolescent - he seemed older and knew a lot about things I was interested in. He was articulate. There was potential there. But now, a few years later, he’d already been beaten up by life and had made mistakes that couldn’t be fixed. He was never going to be right again. I knew it, he knew it, and we were both sad about it. And then he said goodbye and that was the last time I ever heard from him.

It always bothered me. How could a kid who had so much going for him end up so badly? It’s odd, but I couldn’t help think that maybe things would have turned out differently if it had been his parents who took him and his twelve year-old date to see The Godfather. After years of envying friends who seemed to have perfect lives, I started to realize that no one had a perfect life and that as peculiar as mine seemed there was a lot about it to appreciate. That all became abundantly clear in high school.

One day I was walking home and it was so windy that I wrapped my arms around a pole so I wouldn’t get blown in front of a bus on El Camino Real. I heard someone calling my name, so I turned and saw one of my teachers in her car. “Get in before you get killed!”

I only lived a few blocks from school, so she drove me to my stepfather’s house. My mother never liked the house - it was a typical California post-war bungalow - but my teacher was impressed. “You are just so lucky to live in such a nice house on such a pretty street.”

I looked around and tried to see what it was she was seeing. And then it was clear: I was lucky. It was one little tree-lined block between two busy streets, but it was quiet and things grew and it was secure. I thanked her for the ride, waved goodbye, and ran to the front door.

To be continued…

“I’m all for bringing back the birch, but only between consenting adults.”

- Gore Vidal on corporal punishment

I’d mentioned that my elementary school in Arizona had integrated corporal punishment into their program and it worked like a charm. My teachers, all highly qualified, wouldn’t tolerate any discipline problems. There were no surprises: we knew if we stepped out of line there would be consequences. The teachers were consistent about that. The end result was that students were civil to one another and respected the teachers. There was just this feeling that the ones at that school took the business of education very seriously and actually wanted to be there.

The focus was primarily on learning and our teachers had high standards. We were challenged and treated like adults. They expected a lot from us and liked to keep us busy, because if we were busy, we didn’t have time to get into trouble. I wasn’t one for extracurricular activities - I was happy to curl up with a book - but a teacher recruited me for the track team, then suggested I join a softball team in the summer. My dance card was full.

For the most part, kids behaved and were productive. There was such freedom in that. A kid knew that, while he was there in school, it was all about books and study. We were free to concentrate on just that. No one wanted punishment; it was a distraction. In addition to escorting students into the side room for a good swat, teachers were quick to assign extra work if we misbehaved to a degree punishable by extra responsibility, but not to the degree where we deserved to be whacked. At that point, essays were assigned and, if a kid acted up again, an additional hundred words were tacked on to the original number. I don’t remember ever being led to the side room, but I did write my share of essays. Long ones. It only prepared me for the lengthy term papers I would have to produce in college and all those journal assignments. I could churn out several hundred pages easily. Thank you, Arizona teachers.

This sort of thing would have been helpful in junior high school, but instead seventh and eighth grades were a free-for-all. The majority of teachers were weak and had little control over their classes. The principal and vice principal were engaged in some kind of popularity contest and surrounded themselves with punks. The message was clear: if you misbehave or have some kind of issues, you will get special attention. There was little reward in being smart, completing assignments, following rules, or excelling. Miscreants were getting special treatment, so why behave?

I watched my friends, who were straight-laced and wholesome in sixth grade, suddenly go nuts. Somehow they figured out that they could play both their teachers and their parents like fiddles. Kids bragged that they could make deals with their parents who were busy with their own lives and couldn’t waste valuable time supervising or disciplining them. I can bribe them and get my way. They’ll buy me clothes. I’ll get a new stereo. I’ll get to stay at my friend’s house this weekend. Nothing less than extortion.

It was at this point that I could have gone with the pack. It was before my mother married my stepfather, and before my siblings moved to California. My mother was always at work; I’d come home from school and be alone. Total lack of supervision. Free to do whatever I wanted. So what did I do? I’d come home, turn on either the TV or The Who for background noise, make something for dinner, and do my homework. Daisy, the Basset Hound who lived down the street, would escape and sit outside our apartment, baying at the door. She had a terrible crush on our dog, so I’d let her in and she’d nap on our couch all night. She was beautiful but had that eye-watering hound smell; her family always doused her with Evening in Paris in an attempt to disguise it. Uh - cough - it didn’t help.

Our cats, too, had an active social life. I’d look up from my schoolwork and there’d be a new one in the livingroom, staring at me. Our cats were bringing home strays. But this is not to say that I didn’t have friends. School was a veritable smorgasbord. I picked friends from every faction and created a collection of odd groups to associate with. One friend was obsessed with ballet and The Moody Blues. Like me, her father had died and she was living with her mother. Her brother, whom she idolized, was in the Peace Corps and had recurring bouts of malaria. I liked that she could be so in love with something like dance and take classes when it was clear to me and everyone else around her that she would never, ever work with New York City Ballet or the American Ballet Theatre. Neither Nureyev nor Baryshnikov would ever be able to lift her. It wasn’t that she was fat - she was just very tall and extremely large boned.

Another friend was fat. Huge. I liked her because she reminded so much of Victor Buono. Her hippie parents and siblings lived near a park in this great house with big windows, and had a fabulous record collection. They were never home, so I’d go there and we’d listen to albums and bake apple pies. She wore ponchos and sandals and smoked dope. (She knew where her parents kept it and helped herself.) I used to sleep over at their house a lot, but when her entire family contracted something that was classified as a “social” disease, my mother asked me to curtail my visits. Another friend - her name was Candy - was the original good time who was had by all. Her parents were Marin County types who entertained a lot, so she’d come home from school and make herself snacks with party leftovers: grapes, cheese, imported crackers, wine. She’d light candles on the patio, smoke cigarettes, sip wine, and nibble expensive cheese. (This, to me, was so much more fascinating than settling in on the couch with a jumbo bag of nacho cheese Doritos. I was mesmerized.) But Candy was immensely popular with boys of all ages and didn’t use Vaseline just as a lip gloss; her mother quickly put her on birth control to have “peace of mind.” Then there was another girl who I spent a lot of time with and now I don’t even remember why - but I do remember that her father was a plumber and that’s when I learned that plumbing is lucrative. Her family had traveled all over the world. Dozens of friends, all very different. At some point Robyn and I had developed different tastes in acquaintances and I was getting increasingly annoyed with how well she was living off taxpayer dollars. We were simply traveling in different circles and eventually stopped associating with each other.

I had my friends - an exotic lot - but I also had my priorities. Since I was able to choose, like college, which courses I wanted to take, school was appealing enough to keep my interest. History, political science, mythology, theatre, choir, creative writing, science fiction, geography, biology. And frankly, after watching how my friends were turning out, I’d made the decision that I didn’t want to be like them.

To be continued…

It was about the same time that my mother met the man who would become my stepfather. It’s also why my sisters wanted me to come to Chicago - they wanted to pump me for information. Who is this guy? Is he a loser? Convinced that my mother was dating some kind of deadbeat, my sisters and my brother all managed to get to California to check him out. They had little reason for concern except that my mother didn’t want to get married. She told him she’d be perfectly happy to live together, but he would never have considered it. This one was a winner, we knew it, and we were determined that she would marry him.

Probably the smartest thing my mother ever did. My stepfather had never been married and suddenly he had a wife and a daughter — and all her friends. He actually liked Robyn very much and I could tell he shared my concerns about her future. When I was in high school he helped her get a job working for the city. Our friendship had ended before we even got out of junior high, but my stepfather remembered her and wanted to make sure she had a chance at a better life. I’d gone off to college and asked him how she was doing. “Fine. When she manages to show up.” It was part of a government program that placed “disadvantaged” kids in jobs. This was a really great opportunity for her and she was blowing it. They cut her a lot of slack because she was smart and everyone liked her…and felt sorry for her…and when she was there she did a good job. Those few times when she was actually there. Then she just stopped showing up completely.

One time when I was home from college, my parents and I were shopping for holiday groceries. I saw a tall thin girl in line ahead of us. Tight jeans, a skimpy boutique shirt, perfectly cut hair, a designer purse, and a cart full of stuff that I wished we were buying. And then I noticed the kid. My heart sank. We talked for a little bit while her groceries were rung up. She wasn’t married, she had an apartment, she had this baby, and then she pulled food stamps out of her purse. She’d promised me when we were twelve that the cycle would stop, that she was going to be different. But I guess it was more fun to do drugs and go shopping than show up at that job every day. And how could she work, anyway, when she had a daughter to worry about? I looked at the baby in the cart and thought of Robyn’s niece.

My stepfather was quiet. My mother wasn’t. And I was pissed again. She had been given so many advantages, but she chose the same path as her mother and sister. She lied to me and ended up just like them. And I wish I could say that Robyn was the only kid I knew who lived that life. There were a lot of them and I could see that kids were already deciding their paths in junior high school: the giant social experiment that failed.

The first thing that I noticed about junior high school was how students were grouped. In Chicago, I remember taking a series of tests. It seemed like we were doing this for days, one test after another. There were word problems and there were pictures of different shapes and we were asked to choose what shapes were similar and which were different. The tests were like puzzles. I’d answer all the questions, then put my pencil down, and fold my hands on top of my desk. The kids around me would still be working. Uh-oh. Had I done something wrong? Did I skip a page? Was this harder than I’d thought and I just answered all the questions incorrectly? And what were these tests for, anyway? No one ever told us anything.

Time passed and one day we were divided into groups. We had all stayed in the same class with the same teacher, but suddenly we broke into groups and went to different classes with different teachers once a day. I went to a French class. Most of my friends went into the Art class. I wanted to be in that class because they seemed to be having fun and there was very little fun in French class. The other kids went to…well, I’m not sure really. No one talked about where they went so we figured it probably wasn’t as fun as the Art class and easier than the French class. It didn’t occur to me until I was older that the Chicago public school system was dividing us up by our test scores. Somehow I got into the French class with the supersmart kids, but I wanted to be with the artsy kids. The other kids…well, I still don’t know where they were going, but I suspect it was remedial whatever it was.

What was maintained was diversity. There was a mix of kids in every special class - color, religion, economic status. The only thing that classified them was brains and skills. Someone looked at my test scores and thought that I should be learning French. How old was I? Eight? Nine? I knew then that learning French wasn’t going to helpful unless I learned enough to talk to the Algerian family who lived next door. This seemed like a waste of time, but I didn’t have a choice. The Board of Education had a plan for me.

In a California junior high school, there was a new plan. To some degree, kids were divided by intelligence. If you were smart, you could take harder classes. But there was also division, for the first time, by type. Black girls were bussed in from East Palo Alto with little kids. I wondered why their little brothers and sisters were coming to school with them. “Duh, stupid. Those aren’t their brothers and sisters.” I was eleven when I started seventh grade and thirteen when I started my freshman year in high school. How could junior high school girls be bringing their kids to school? (I swear, sometimes I felt like Dorothy telling Toto that “I’ve a feeling we aren’t in Kansas anymore.”) The black girls thought I was funny and asked if they could play with my hair. Super fros were in and they had super duper ones. My hair was long and straight and they’d sit behind me in class and play with it. But they were only in one or two of my classes. Electives like Cooking and Crocheting. History of the Middle Ages? Not in there.

But they were in the Black Student Union. There was a Chicano Club, too. Asian kids had their own group. The rest of us, if we wanted to belong to a group, had to be on a team, be in the school band, be a cheerleader, or form some kind of language or literary club. Soon everyone was sitting with their own groups at lunch time or on the bus after school. Groups stayed separate and didn’t mingle much with other groups. At school functions, groups sat apart from other groups and had signs that told other groups which group they were. Groups were photographed for the yearbook. In one English class which wasn’t called English but was called “Rock Poetry,” kids from one group started beating the stuffing out of another group.

I wasn’t sure I understood the whole group concept. It seemed to me that some groups were being treated differently and were favored by some teachers. This seemed unfair. Also, before I started junior high I made friends with a kid who lived on our block. When my mother met Darryl, she just stared at him. “Do you realize how beautiful you are?” Darryl was black, but had skin, hair, and eyes all the same cinnamon topaz color that made him look, to me, like a lion. Kids like Darryl had trouble in junior high because they didn’t quite fit perfectly into particular groups. He wasn’t at that school very long.

The Rock Poetry class was just one example of a system that was destined to crash and burn. I liked the teacher. He was a tall, skinny, unhealthy looking individual with longish hair and little wire framed glasses. He was soft spoken and had peculiar twitchy habits. He blinked a lot. He should have been teaching at a university, but he was here at my junior high and had no control over any of his classes. The only time I ever saw him angry enough to raise his voice and actually put his foot down was when I was sitting in his Science Fiction and Fantasy class and a group of boys were bouncing spit balls off my breasts. I looked at him like he should grow some testicles and take some control over the delinquents who were making his classes unbearable and he actually did something for once. He said they needed to stop the behavior or else he would assign them extra work. They told him to f*ck off and mind his own business.

In Rock Poetry, there were no desks. We sat in chairs, on sofas, or on big pillows on the floor. There were posters all over the walls. One was the cover of Who’s Next. The teacher played records and passed out song lyrics for us to read. We listened to The Who, The Mothers of Invention, Curtis Mayfield, Marvin Gaye, The Moody Blues, and Swamp Dogg. We discussed lyrics about peace and tolerance and understanding and war. Then one broke out in class and everything went to sh*t. A class without books and desks is a recipe for trouble. When my professors told me to ditch the books and desks when I started my student teaching, I panicked. Been there, done that, and it sucks.

Rock Poetry wasn’t a class, it was a combat zone. The school brought in a second teacher to help curb the fisticuffs and, after we were asked to “share our feelings,” we were asked to do the same types of exercises that some of us were doing in theater classes. One memorable exercise was when we were asked to split into two groups (more groups again) and get on opposite sides of the room. We were told that the room was filled with oatmeal and that we had to get to the other side. Then, in slow motion, we had to pantomime swimming across the room filled with oatmeal. This had been an English class. Now it was group therapy.

Years later, when I was asked to hire instructors for corporate Low Ropes training because coworkers couldn’t manage to be civil to one another, I was reminded of that semester I spent swimming through oatmeal.

To be continued…

Robyn lived in the building across the street and down the block near the entrance to the expressway. There was something different about it, but I wasn’t sure what that was until my mother said it was “subsidized.” I must have looked at her like a poleaxed steer because she leaned in and said slowly: “It’s all welfare.” I’d heard the term when we lived in Chicago and finally figured out that “welfare,” “on the dole,” and “on relief” were all the same thing. I assumed it was something undesirable because it was something that didn’t apply to us.

When my mother broke her leg and couldn’t wait tables, and she’d spent most of her savings moving us to California and then into a new apartment with brand new furniture, everyone told her to “just go get welfare.” This was a foreign concept to me. In Chicago, there were people on welfare but I don’t think I knew any of them personally. If I did I would have known what welfare meant. I’d heard that there were black families in Gary, Indiana on welfare. And I think I heard there were families in West Side neighborhoods who were on welfare. We lived in Rogers Park. If there were people on welfare they kept it a secret. I did know it had something to do with the government and no one ran around announcing they were on welfare.

But they did in California. Suddenly when I mentioned welfare I discovered that everyone I knew knew someone on it or they were getting it themselves. And everyone knew how to go about getting it and offered to help my mother get it, too. She smiled and said that we’d be fine without it, then changed the subject. When I told her that it seemed like everyone was on welfare so it couldn’t be a bad thing, she glared at me. I got the distinct impression that I’d been somehow misinformed. I decided not to tell her that Robyn was on welfare.

Things were grim. My mother rationed out money and handed me a list; I’d go to the store and buy eggs, bread, and bologna. We ate a lot of fried bologna and egg sandwiches. Two sisters were in Chicago, and one was starving herself because she was sending us most of her money from a minimum wage assembly job at Motorola. She and my other sister would pull their resources and buy clothes for me and ship them out so I’d have something to wear when school started. When my sister called my brother who was stationed in Texas and told him he needed to help, he told her he couldn’t - he “had expenses.” He’d developed a fondness for shirts from Neiman Marcus. (Ironically, my brother is the only liberal in our family.) Anyway, to be fair, he did cough up a check for my birthday so I could get a new bike. He often reminded us of that.

So when I discovered that my mother had packed up a lot of my things and had given them to Robyn, I was pissed. Desperate, my mother had soaked in a bathtub and cut off her cast so she could go back to work with a broken leg. The woman never drove (thank God) and walked everywhere. She’d walk to work, then be on her feet all night waiting tables, then she’d walk home. I’d hear her in the bathtub at night, crying. She wore support hose to keep her knee more secure. It disguised, to some degree, the swelling and discoloration.

Robyn’s mother had a job, too. On the weekends she’d go up to San Francisco to earn extra money to supplement what the government was sending her. Robyn explained her mother’s job to me, and I, in turn, explained it to my mother. My mother just looked at me and said: “Your friend’s mother is a prostitute.”

And then it all made perfect sense. The clothes, the high heels, the makeup, the jewelry, the wigs. There were four people in that apartment: Robyn, her mother, Robyn’s sister, and her sister’s daughter. All four had different last names and all four received checks from the government. Her mother and sister sat and drank beer and smoked cigarettes during the day. I remember her mother wore black wigs and a lot of makeup, and was younger than my mother but looked much older. Robyn’s sister had dark curly hair and was very pretty. She’d gotten pregnant and married some guy who was a heroin addict. They broke up after the baby was born, and her daughter, who was two years-old, had his last name. It was Spanish. Robyn’s last name was Swedish, and her sister’s last name sounded French. Her mother’s last name was sort of French-sounding, too. Robyn explained that it was this guy’s fault that her sister had drug problems. She explained, too, that her sister dated a lot. Robyn took care of her niece when her sister went out. She’d mentioned that some of her sister’s boyfriends molested her niece so it was better if she was left at home and didn’t go on dates with her mom. Robyn would always laugh at me and say: “Don’t worry! I’m not going to end up like them. Really!”

And I wanted to believe her. Robyn was very tall and thin. She had long silky blonde hair, blue eyes, perfect skin with just the right amount of pale freckles, and straight teeth. She had the most beautiful feet I’d ever seen on a human being. “I could be a foot model. They make tons of money, you know.” She could have been a model - period.

So why was I pissed when my mother, moved by Robyn’s sob stories about being poor, gave her the clothes my sister went without food for? Robyn had plenty of clothes. Expensive ones. She shopped at exclusive boutiques and wore designer jeans. Her hair always looked perfect because she had it cut and styled by professionals and used only salon products. She never had a zit because she had regular appointments with a dermatologist and used special skin care prescribed by her doctor. Her teeth were perfect because she’d had her braces removed and her teeth were polished regularly. She wore contact lenses. I was wearing the same crappy pair of glasses my mother bought me before we’d left Chicago and I would have still been wearing them into adulthood if my sisters hadn’t talked my mother into sending me to Chicago for the summer so they could take me to an old German optometrist who made the most perfect lenses in the world. When I got my pair of new glasses I sat in my brother-in-law’s VW and read all the signs on buses and buildings and street posts, then wept. It was the first time I was really able to see and it was overwhelming. He didn’t say anything - he just kept driving so I could see Old Town and the Loop with new eyes.

When I’d told Robyn that it was the first time I’d been able to really see she laughed: “That’s the weirdest thing I’ve ever heard!” I saw, with those new glasses, the horrid little apartment my sister lived in and how thin she was because all she could afford to eat was cheap caramel corn. My sister, who had never been thin, joked that she was dieting, but I knew it was untrue. After she’d paid rent and subway fare, any extra money had gone to me and my mother.

It was time to explain to my mother that Robyn wasn’t as poor as she claimed to be because my mother - and people like her - worked and paid taxes so that Robyn could go through adolescence without a pimple or a cavity or a bad hair day. Call me petty, but I was bitter and resentful, and mad that my mother and sister worked like dogs and none of us had ever even been to a dentist.

The seeds of conservatism were sown back in the summer of ‘68 when I saw Bill Buckley debate Gore Vidal. I was riveted.

Vidal: “As far as I’m concerned, the only sort of proto- or crypto-Nazi I can think of is yourself. Failing that, I’ll only say that we can’t have–”

Buckley: “Now listen, you queer, stop calling me a crypto-Nazi or I’ll sock you in the goddamn face and you’ll stay plastered.”

Now, four years later, thanks to Robyn and her family, those seeds were in full sprout.

To be continued…

I remember when I began my student teaching in a Northern California public high school that there was one thing everyone seemed to agree on: If you plan to teach, choose the elementary grades or high school. Avoid junior high at all costs. When I look back at my own experience the word that comes to mind first is “turmoil.” There was just something about junior high that suggested mayhem. Confusion. Chaos. Too much stimuli.

In Chicago, my elementary school was K-8 and the high school I would have attended was right across the street. There was a certain stability in that. A kid knew that that was where he was going to be spending his formative years and he knew the building, the neighborhood, the kids, and the teachers. He probably had older siblings at the same school who knew the teachers and could advise accordingly. These siblings would graduate and attend the school next door; the younger siblings would know what to expect when it was their turn. There was a structure, a master plan. Kids weren’t befuddled by too many choices because, frankly, there weren’t any.

Most of the families I knew were fairly stable, too. Relatives either lived in the city, in nearby suburbs, or in the same home. My mother had moved to Chicago specifically to be someplace that would ensure that her family would be someplace else. It was rare that they visited. Her mother died in 1932; her father died in 1962. My father’s family was a complete mystery, and since he was born in 1906, his parents had assumed room temperature decades earlier. I had no grandparents. Friends talked about aunts, uncles, cousins - it was all foreign to me.

If someone had an “unusual” family situation it wasn’t advertised. Chances are every family had a glue-sniffing brother, or an alcoholic father, or an abusive mother, or a perverted uncle, or a crazy aunt, or a sister who made out with strangers. It just wasn’t discussed. If anything was so bad that it was obvious or even questionable, families had a story rehearsed and plenty of euphemisms to dress up any ugly circumstances. Consequently, most kids didn’t know the truth about their own families, assumed they were related to normal people, and didn’t know any better unless they overheard family members or neighbors whispering something that made them start comparing their situation to other kids’ situations. There was something comforting in not knowing all your family’s secrets and thinking you were like everyone else.

What was odd about California was that unusual family situations were the norm and kids weren’t muzzled. They knew all the family dirt and were eager to share every detail. My first close friend in California was Wendy, a fashion diva who made matching outfits for her Barbie dolls. Her hair was dark and kinky, her skin was cappuccino, and she was younger than me but looked and acted older. My mother said she was black, but I carefully explained that she was not. “She’s Puerto Rican. She and her grandmother speak Spanish when I’m at her house.” Something was peculiar about her family but I didn’t ask a lot of questions. I figured that it was none of my business and if someone volunteered information I would be polite and listen, but I’d never probe.

It didn’t really matter to me, anyway, what was happening in her family because she seemed to be normal. She knew how to sew, knit, and crochet and taught me to crochet. She was extroverted, bright, and perfectly charming. It seemed to me that no matter what happened to her she would manage to have a successful future. The kid was grounded.

Another girl who seemed much older and very grounded was Barbara. She came from a huge family who owned a lot of land in the area. She explained that her family was Spanish and had been in California for generations. I couldn’t believe we were the same age, because she seemed so much older. She was just one of those girls who was capable of taking care of a family and was comfortable with the idea of getting married and having a large one of her own. She was unusually responsible and had common sense. Smart, too. I can picture her: long black wavy hair, big glasses, and peacoat with a knit hat and scarf. The teachers trusted her to supervise the other kids on the playground. She was one of those people who just makes you feel safe when she’s around.

My other close friend was Bernadette, the Amazon. She seemed at least a foot taller than anyone else in school - including most of the teachers. She had long blonde hair to her waist and terrible skin. I thought her name was really “Giraffe” until I realized that what the other kids were calling her was an insult. I decided that I would be her friend. She was smart and had a wicked sense of humor, a sense of adventure and daring, and a mother who was a whacked-out nutcase who booby-trapped their house with small area rugs on highly polished floors. Sometimes Bernie spoke Spanish, too. Her father was a mystery, but I think that’s where she might have learned the Spanish. Her mother was secretive and stayed in the house, layering more and more wax on their floors. They were shiny, yes, but deadly.

Just when it seemed like there were a lot of kids like me who were being raised by their mothers, I made friends with two sisters who didn’t have one. They lived with their father and one day he moved them to Rhode Island. It was a good thing that I was making a lot of friends because they were disappearing and being replaced by new ones faster than I could keep track.

Once I’d established some sense of stability for myself and surrounded myself with people I really liked, it was time for junior high. That was around the time my mother moved us into a split-level apartment a couple blocks from my elementary school, then fell over an overpass and shattered her knee. The other surprise was that school districts were gerrymandered in such a way that many of my friends ended up at the other junior high in town. I hadn’t seen that one coming at all. Suddenly all the friends I’d made were scattered and I was getting ready to start over at a new school, not knowing which kids I’d know from sixth grade.

And we were in this apartment building full of adults. The manager and his wife had moved there from someplace in the South; he was in his early twenties, his wife was sixteen, and they had a creepy little dog with a crooked jaw and jutting teeth who was named…well, let’s just say it’s an unpleasant slang term for female genitalia - one I was completely unfamiliar with until someone clued me in. And it was a male dog. And he liked me. And he liked to eat bugs. He sucked a caterpillar off the sidewalk one day, then looked up at me and smiled with that crooked little jaw. I can’t say I’ve ever disliked a dog, but this was one I wouldn’t have wanted to live with. And he was one dog I wouldn’t eat after.

Then there was the couple who liked to party all the time. She had a poodle and two kids from a previous marriage - a boy and a girl - and she seemed to have some kind of job. Her live-in boyfriend, who had a moustache and a British sports car, did not. He walked around without a shirt or shoes and always had a cigarette and a drink in his hand. He’d cook on the patio and invite us over to socialize. A lot of socializers in this building. The sailor who lived across from my bedroom window and had the expensive stereo system was extremely social. I knew this about him because he kept his door open a lot, played The Who and The Moody Blues - loud, but didn’t play them loud enough to drown out the girls who were always in and out of his place. They were really loud.

I was eleven and living in a Harold Robbins novel. It was time to scope out the area for kids my age and see if any of them were going to go to my junior high. The party couple’s kids were okay to hang out with, but the sister was more masculine than her brother. Denise had no female friends - she played with all her brother’s friends. Just as we were all becoming inseparable, the couple, the kids, and their poodle moved away.

I soon realized that a lot of the apartment buildings on that block were designed for adult renters. People hung out on patios and in swimming pools, sipping boxed wine and smoking cigarettes. Kids were scarce. I don’t remember how we met exactly, but one day this girl Robyn and I discovered each other and became soldered at the hip.

To be continued…

At some point my mother lost interest in moving all our things across the street and announced that we were officially relocated. One morning, just seconds after the sun had begun to rise, I heard noise. I looked out the window and saw that our old apartment building was burning. It was a thing of mystery; buildings that were scheduled to be razed always caught fire. I asked my mother and sister why this was so and they said: “Insurance.”

But the Chicago Fire Department was first-rate - they showed up fast and put the blaze out before it destroyed the building. A fence went up around the place. Every day I walked past it on the way to and from school and looked at our old apartment. The windows were broken and the charred window shades hung cattywampus. A lot of our things that we’d left behind were strewn all over the lawn. My favorite stuffed bear was there, crumpled and singed. My mother had refused to let me take it when we moved.

“The thing stinks. It smells like a real bear. It stays here.”

Early one morning a wrecking ball smashed into the side of the building and I watched the historic structure crumble. One of those contemporary, boxy, multi-storied monstrosities that were so popular in the Sixties took its place.

The city was changing. One night, when my mother was walking home from the restaurant, a police car pulled up to her. The officer rolled down his window.

“Ma’m? No offense, ma’m, but are you stupid?”

He explained that it was obvious that she waited tables - she wore a uniform and special shoes. “Your purse there is full of tips, right? If I can figure that out, any lowlife scum walking down the street will figure it out, too. You know what I’m saying?”

I’d written before about how my mother was getting ready for work one day then suddenly called in sick. She never called in sick, but she said she just had a bad feeling. That night the train she would have been on was robbed and many of the passengers were stabbed. One of my sisters had married her Jewish boyfriend; my brother had joined the Air Force; my other sister and her Polish husband lived in Tempe. My mother announced that she was moving my sister and me to Arizona. We protested.

“Shut up! You watch that High Chaparral show every week - it’s the same place. We’re moving.”

A new place, a new school, and another motley group of friends. There was a real mix of kids and this was the wild west. They should have been beating the stuffing out of one another but it didn’t happen. I maintain it was because of the use of corporal punishment. The teachers wouldn’t put up with any discipline problems; kids would be whisked away and dealt with immediately. No phone calls home, no conferences, no forms, no meetings with the district’s law team - the kids were brought into a small room and…well, physically disciplined. Worked like a charm. We were all civil to one another.

Our school principal was gay as a paper hat. He was so extraordinarily flamboyant that we all imitated him and wondered how he ended up running this old mission school in the high desert. He wore enormous pieces of Southwestern jewelry all over his body - rings, bracelets, necklaces. And he wouldn’t put up with any crap from us. I thought he was the most fascinating creature on earth.

It was the happiest year of my childhood for reasons I still can’t explain. When my mother moved me to California a year later, I was devastated. I finished elementary school in the Bay Area and, to my surprise, there was much to love. Rain, fog, fresh fruit and vegetables growing everywhere, and - for the first time - I took the bus to school. I toted lemons with me every day; it’s a miracle I have enamel left on my teeth.

California had modern campuses - no enormous brick institutions with long hallways and slick waxed floors. But it seemed to me that the curriculum was lagging. School was easy - I’d already learned this stuff years ago. And I adored the teacher. A tiny rodent-like woman with very short hair and glasses. She read to us - a series of books that I still think about today. Our spelling tests were a thing of beauty. She’d open a massive dictionary and choose words randomly. She’d give us the word and its definition, then we’d attempt to spell it by sounding it out. Later we’d get the correct spelling, memorize it, and be retested on the same words. They weren’t standard grade level vocabulary. She chose words that were multisyllabic and well, there’s that word again: exotic. Catarrh. After all these years I can still spell it. She loved to pull out medical terms and diseases. Each word was spectacular. Every time she’d open that dictionary, it was like taking the lid off a candy jar.

A lot of different cultures and our teacher encouraged discussion of them. Occasionally we’d choose a particular one and she’d build an entire lesson around it. We’d discuss history, geography, cuisine. Then we’d cook something. There was an element of fun and freedom, but she never lost control of us. One day there was a scuffle on the playground - two boys almost twice her size started rolling around on the tetherball court. Like a falcon, she came out of nowhere, swooped down on them, grabbed their necks with her tiny hands, then lifted them and shook them like rattles. She encouraged expression but wouldn’t tolerate disruption. It was clear we had boundaries.

And all that went to hell in junior high.

To be continued…

Joey had a gang. He was Irish, short and wiry with blond hair, vivid blue eyes, perfect teeth and skin, and rosy cheeks and lips. He looked perfectly angelic, the little sociopath. One of his thugs was a big Irish kid, Jimmy, with a head like a beach ball. Maybe the kid had flunked previous grades - he seemed so much bigger than the rest of us. Then there was Ronald, the Jewish kid who did terrible things to people with large safety pins. A short Greek kid was the only one in class who could out run me - but only if he had a head start and was waiting behind a bush to grab me as I sped by.

Joey’s gang tried to beat the crap out of me every day after school. They attempted to foist a blue stone ring from a gumball machine on me - from Boss Joey - and when I’d reject it, they’d pound me. This wore thin pretty quickly, so I went to my teachers to complain. The Gym teacher, who always called me by my siblings’ names (male or female), laughed at me.

“Joey likes you.”

“He has a strange way of showing it.”

“That’s what boys do.”

I thought it was twisted that this kid showed how much he liked me with his fists. “I don’t want him to like me quite so much.”

“Ignore him.”

“He has a gang.”

“Ignore them.”

“They’re armed and dangerous.”

“Armed? With what?”

“Safety pins. Big ones.”

He laughed and told me that he’d let me out the door first so I could start running. When we got our class pictures I pointed Joey out to my mother.

“He’s beautiful. Those damned hillbilly kids always are. Perfect features.”

“The what kids?”

My sister offered assistance. “White trash. You know, like that family who just moved in upstairs?”

They lost me. “White trash?”

“Yeah, all those people who moved here from Appalachia. Places like Kentucky. Blue eyes, blond hair, perfect skin, perfect teeth. The ones who are pissing in the hallways.”

Oh. Them. A family with a bunch of kids had moved in and the hallways were starting to smell weird. The staircase was laced with intricate “gingerbread” - the building was over a hundred years old. Now it had all been kicked out and was left, in pieces, on the tile floor below.

One night we watched their mother entertain some guy who was clearly not her husband on the back of a Chevy parked in the alley. The father’s name was identical to the famous bourbon that he always smelled like. One day, reeking of it, he appeared at our back door with a large knife to inform us that he intended to kill my sister’s dog. He had jumped up on one of the girls and scratched her. My sister apologized when it happened and the girl assured her it was no big deal. Obviously it was.

Time to move. My mother was dating someone who tried to convince her to go to Georgia with him. One day I asked my sister:

“Mom’s boyfriend’s from Georgia. Does that make him white trash like the drunk neighbor who tried to kill your dog?”

“I think it’s perfectly reasonable to assume that.”

We weren’t fond of this guy, our mother let him “get rid of” my sister’s dog, and we didn’t like the idea of being moved out of Chicago. One day my mother announced that we were packing and moving away. I was mortified. “Where?”

My mother pointed to a building across the street, katty-corner, on the lake side of Sheridan Road. “There. Fourth floor.”

We carried everything across Sheridan when we moved to the new apartment. There was a large bird cage to transport - a wind came from the lake and blew the top off of it. Every now and then we’d see one of our birds and wave hello. While we were moving out of the old place, someone broke into the apartment and stole some of our things. One day my sister and I were walking and saw the girl - the one who was scratched by our dog — and her little sister, and they were wearing red and white polka-dot party dresses. They saw us and turned away.

“Those are our clothes. Why are they wearing our clothes?”

“Shhhh. I never liked those dresses much.”

Then I realized what my sister was saying. That the dresses - all flounces and ribbons, velvety red circles on pale chiffon — were probably the prettiest things the kids had ever owned. Let them enjoy those dresses. In a few years, they might be the only fond memories those kids would have.

To be continued…