As Luck Would Have It (6 page)

Our adolescence was fully in bloom by that summer and now
my
mind began to drift
away from baseball and bike riding, to
a new
and somewhat unexpected
place entirely. 
Suzie Butlerman and her girlfriend would hang out at the same mall that had become our favorite destination.  Suzie was
the
prettiest girl in our class, but even though this fact had not escaped me before, and
it clearly
seemed to have been
the
nearly unanimous
opinion
among the other boys
in school, it hadn’t
meant
a hell of a lot to me until just about now.

Isn’t she hot Joseph?
He just shrugged his shoulders with a noncommittal agreement in principle.  If Joseph liked girls, ther
e was no outward expression of it; though I certainly hadn’t given much thought to it and doubt that either of us could have comprehended what that did or did not signify exactly.  At the time, my attention was focused on other things, or should I say, other people, or more specifically one
p
erson, Suzy Butlerman. 
The problem was that whoever
it was
Suz
ie
was
focused on
;
there could be no
doubt that it was someone other than me
and there wasn’t a chance of me
actually
going up to her and saying something.
It wasn’t for a lack of confidence on my part necessarily, but as the saying goes, it didn’t take a rocket scientist
,
and self-inflicted pain was not yet something I wanted to pursue.

Joseph’s apparent lack of interest in the opposite sex had little, if any effect on me.  We went to dances that the school put on for
us
and got invited to our share of parties, which I enjoyed a lot more. 
I was always more comfortable in the smaller, more intimate space of
a
friend’s home than the large and sometimes cold expanse of the school gymnasium.  Being with the right crowd and g
etting invited to the right parties was a very big deal in those years and
there was
no fear
greater than that of being unpopular.
  Once labeled as a
nerd
or a loser, the deal was pretty much up and you could figure on spendi
ng your Saturday nights with sim
ilarly unpopular guys, or worse, alone at home
.

The realization that Joseph liked other guys came on gradually and there was no
actual
point
in time
when I suddenly said,
o
h shit, he’s gay.  And because this knowledge progressed slowly over a period of time, he was spared
the dreadful event of actually coming out to me, safe not only from having to make such a personal and difficult affirmation
, but also from the possibility that I might react negatively, even reject him.  I came to learn in the years that followed that this fear could be overwhelming, and I understood that such a confession might, for some people,
result in virtually catastrophic consequences.  For me, the reality was simple actually.  Joseph was my best friend, queer or otherwise. 
He was as likely
or more
to reject me, in my mind anyway,
since
my
list of faults outnumbered his by a long shot. 
I’m fairly sure that at 14 he intuitively knew all of this, but I’m even more certain that he understood
clearly
that there were real
peril
s
lurking beyond me and
real
reasons to fear how others were likely to react to his
not
so pleasant admissions.

For even the well adjusted and reasonably self-confident among us, middle school was a difficult place to steer through; a
stormy and potentially dangerous place where I didn’t want to be. 
I suspect, though I have nothing to back this up with, that this was even more the case in the 1970s than it is today.  Never having children of my own to watch suffer through these dreadful years, I'm basing this conclusion on the assumption that educators and administrators are more enlightened these days, or at least have learned some lessons from their own experiences or those of their now aging baby boomer colleagues.

But we should resist the urge to jump ahead to the next century to ease our consciences for what we ignored or neglected to see forty some odd years earlier, or worse, to refer to them nostalgically as the wonder years, for if you are defining wonder as something marvelous or extraordinary, then you probably already know, or you will as you read on, that middle school was anything but that.  Or perhaps you were thinking of the term as a verb, meaning to speculate about something or being amazed at something; in which case these middle school years were indeed wonder years and you can now stop speculating and share in my amazement that we somehow managed to get through them relatively intact and to eventually become, in the majority of cases
anyway
, more or less fully functioning human beings.  But if you must reminisce for a simpler, more innocent time, then know with certainty what we knew to be perfectly clear from the first day we entered the halls of what would become our seventh grade; this was going to be much, much worse than elementary school.

In middle school I was to discover two groups of people that I had little or no experience with in grade school. The first group consisted of teachers who hate
d
children.  I know what you're thinking, come on Clifford, why would someone who hates children pursue a career as a middle school teacher?  That's like a dentist who hates
inflicting
pain.  I can't tell you why they do it anymore than why people who hate children continue to have their own, except that they do have them and make a lot of people miserable in the process.  Maybe these teachers were better at parenting then they were at teaching, or maybe they didn't hate children as a prerequisite, but setting aside their possible motivations, I've considered the likelihood that
at least part of
the reason they hate them is because of their experience with the second group of people that I have made reference to but have yet to describe
,
that being the bullies.  The bullies had somehow morphed from the minor brats and harmless pranksters they were in grade school into the fully grown demons who roamed our hallways, our bathrooms and our playgrounds.

While these two groups may seem quite dissimilar at first, you begin to understand over time that they actually have a lot in common, not the least of which is their total contempt for
one another
; for I am certain that they made each other's lives even more miserable than our own.  It is fortunate for us then that so much of their energies are consumed battling each other, so that they are often sufficiently depleted and weary as to be more easily avoided.  But not totally.  Their mean-spirited cores are readily recharged and one has to keep a watch out for them, especially those of us in the seventh grade, easy targets for both of these predators.

The reality of the bad teachers would seep in over time, as would my defenses and strategies for dealing with them.  But the existence and the menace of the bullies, or greasers as we referred to them,
was
almost immediate; by the end of our first week many of us had been intimidated by them and I'd heard rumors of a couple of kids that had been bloodied enough to necessitate a visit to the school nurse.  No one had warned me of this; no older brother to sit me down and explain what the deal was.  My
parents,
bless them, had no clue about what the school was actually like.  Each morning my mother would send me off with a hug and the lunch she had prepared, pushing me out the door into a hell she did not know existed.

I'd normally stop by Joseph's house first and we'd walk the
twelve
blocks to school together.  I was fairly confident that I would be able to take care of myself without getting my teeth knocked out and it was those teachers that I had minimal respect but plenty of disdain for that
might be my
greater challenge.  I watched Joseph and wondered if I would be able to protect him; as he skipped a bit as he sometimes did instead of walking and
he
giggled when I mentioned Suzy Butlerman's tits, who by total luck had landed in both our homeroom and
science
class.  He was happy and carefree, as he should have been; with a nice house and an older brother and
parents
who sent him to camp in the summers.  He was good and kind, but with a softness and vulnerability that someone might just try to stick something into.  Once people realized just who Joseph was, what would they do to him?  Would they really hate him just for liking boys instead of girls?

Being in middle school was in many ways like being in prison, except that parole came every day with the 3:00 dismissal bell instead of at the end of some indeterminate term of confinement.  The rules were exacting, non-compliance was rarely forgiven and nearly always harshly dealt with.  The assistant principal, Mr. Strickmann, handled all disciplinary matters, while the principal, Mr. G
ild
man
,
saw to the actual administration of our education.  They were an odd couple to rule the prison, or
the school if you prefer; Mr. Gildman
being a warm and reassuring man, Herr Strickmann, as stern and cold as a Nazi guard.  I doubt that Mr. G
ildman
had anything to do with the selection of his assistant, the school board undoubtedly placing him in the position of assistant
principal
primarily for the purposes of intimidation and punishment.

I'm not sure what values were supposedly being instilled in young adolescents by subjecting them to such unreasonable and unwavering conventions.  The list of infractions and prohibitions were endless; chewing gum, wearing blue jeans, listening to a radio, eating candy, being in the hall without a pass, speaking without being called on, being in the cafeteria after you finished eating, going outside at any time, going to your locker except at designated times, going to the bathroom without the monitor; it went on and on until the average kid would just follow along blindly, in single file no less, from class to class, from hour to hour, from the gym to the library to the auditorium and back again.  Nearly every conceivable freedom, choice, decision or option had been completely stripped away from us each day from 8:30 to 3:00.  It was in this environment, among the greasers and
insufferable
teachers that
young minds were expected to learn.

These same young minds were resilient and adaptive, so that despite these conditions, which I believe were deliberately set upon us to make things as intolerable as possible, we did manage to learn some new things.  We learned a new level of disrespect for adults that previously would have been unthinkable.  We learned to be rebellious and not to accept what we were being told at face value.  We tend to assume that such defiance exhibited by teenagers was a function of their biology, that puberty and hormonal changes associated with their age was the primary, if not the sole cause of this behavioral transf
ormation.  But I suggest for you
to consider more carefully the other factors, some of which we have discussed, that may account for these rather drastic changes in conduct. 
T
he environment must play more than an insignificant role here, that is to say that this new and sudden shift in the situation that was thrust upon us must have forced us, at least to some degree, to adapt to our surroundings in different ways.  Consider then what I believe to be true, that the rebellious student was not strictly a product of his natural ecology, but rather
he
was exhibiting new behaviors and learning new strategies to defend and protect himself.

At the end of three years of all of this learning, we were expected to graduate and make the transition to high school, where presumably we might begin to learn something that could help prepare us for whatever might follow.  The fact that some of us were unlikely to make it smoothly across this bridge should have been evident to our educators; for if someone like me, who is trained in business as opposed to education could understand this, then certainly they could as well.  But Mr. Strickmann either did not understand it, or more likely didn't give a shit.  The prospect of being sent to his office, even for some minor violation, sent shockwaves of fear right to the bones of our pubescent bodies.  I learned in just the first weeks of being in middle school that discipline was going to be extracted from us one way or the other, and that I was going to have to avoid making any unplanned social calls to the vice principal's office.

There was only one thing more important than popularity in middle school and that was conformity.  In the early 1970s, the idea of appreciating differences was yet to fully develop and for us, not even conceived.  Still in the shadows of the painful fight for civil rights, America was continuing to struggle with the notion of tolerance, and the one size fits all mentality
that
was prevalent in the Midwest and maybe everywhere else.  The Stonewall rioting in New York had been a mere four summers earlier and the tragic murders of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King just one year
prior to that.
  Changes in the way we were to view one another would advance slowly, and in varying degrees,
and
these conventions would continue to be reinforced for
many years
to come.  But for us conforming was the law, and if you broke the law you were in trouble.  Anyone who stuck out in any way was inevitably going to be subject to ridicule or worse; straying even a little from your perceived role was going to be a big problem.  To the extent that society frowned on nonconformity, the school administration abhorred it.