16. Junior High School

 

I’m surprised to hear your feelings about your junior high school days.

 For some of us it was a rare opportunity to experience one of life’s few do-overs – a new school; new classmates from outside your home neighborhood. It was a time to make new friends – some we would keep for a lifetime; to have a different teacher every forty minutes, some of whom were men.  It was also a chance to figure out what that talk about hormones was all about and to explore our body – and equally importantly – those of others.

 Junior high school! Who didn’t like junior high school?

 Well, for one, me. But I didn’t realize it until much later.

 I was a victim of the ‘2-year SP.’ One of the problems with the 2-year SP was that we had to cram not only three years of curriculum into two, but also all that other stuff – the really important stuff that would carry us through life.  For example, the miracle transformation that took place in summer camp between seventh grade and the next.

 In the seventh grade we would play co-ed Chinese handball in the school yard – as many as eight or nine of us lined up. This was a co-ed sport before the word was invented. Know how to play?  Good! You’re in.  Truth be told, some of the girls must have been ringers. .  All we needed was a wall and a Spauldeen. (If you lived in Brooklyn, you know what a ‘Spauldeen’ is.)

 Come back in a year. The boys seemed to have outgrown that spastic age; you know, where they just couldn’t master the art of walking and eating an ice cream cone without it going up their nose or tripping over themselves while standing still.  And the girls seemed to have moved on to other, more productive endeavors, at least social-wise.

 Wow! Those kids that you would have nothing to do with in the seventh grade – even if you were interested in them, even if you knew what it meant to be ‘interested in’ all of a sudden became ‘persons of interest.’ Case in point:  Ritchie Goldfarb alluded to the fact that he, on occasion, shaved. As a result, Ritchie replaced the class jocks for attention from the opposite sex, at least for a while.

 The transformation wasn’t limited to the boys. There was Marilyn Cohen. Oh yes, Marilyn, who last year I viewed as a pal, someone who would save me a seat at her table in the cafeteria.  We would talk about our families; tell dumb jokes and laugh hysterically.  Yeah, that Marilyn.  That Marilyn went away to Camp Nevamind in Honesdale, PA and as far as I know never returned.  In her place was another girl, with the same name, looked a little like Marilyn but with a different hair style, who seemed to know a lot of the kids but was merely cordial to me. This new Marilyn preferred sitting in the cafeteria with the ‘non-academically inclined’ kids in 9-11 who were a year older than the boys in my 9SP2, specifically with Peter Kelly, who smoked in the school yard and whose father owned the Amoco gas station on Utica Avenue.

If Marilyn’s mother knew she would ferplotz.

In my school, the most read book in the latter half of the seventh grade and the first half of the next was ‘the slam book,’ a composition book with each page folded down the center.  The first page was a questionnaire designed by a committee of girls (usually represented by the ‘in group”) purportedly requesting highly personal information from other members of said group and wanna-be’s.   This information was highly classified. If the keeper ever misplaced the book untold misfortune would be heaped upon her.  Similarly, if a boy ever asked to see what was in the book, he would be met with a response similar to: “You ever, ever look in the book, I’ll rip your freaken eyes out and shove them up your ass.”  “Hey, Marilyn, it’s me.  Remember me from last year?” “I don’t care. Maybe you wanna splain to Petey how you pissed me off.”

Here I am in the process of being threatened with bodily harm and I still have the wherewithall to notice how grammatically incorrect the threat was.  A tribute to Miss Axelrod and ninth grade English grammar: “Never end a sentence with a preposition.”

There was nothing in that book or in any book for that matter, except for maybe the Bible, that warranted further discussion. On my best possible day I didn’t ‘wanna havta ‘splain’ nothin to Peter Kelly. So far, I was able to avoid him and his classmates.  I was happy to continue my winning streak at least until the end of the school year.

To this day I have absolutely no idea what was in the book and to add to the mystery it seems every group had its own criteria for contents.  I did, however, mull over the possible variation of Marilyn’s comment, and while moving the preposition one word to the left would have been grammatically correct, the message would have lost some of its impact.  It’s like saying “It is I” which is the grammatically correct response to “Who is it?”  Old lady Axelrod would be happy, but enough with the grammar stuff.

I had my friends – I referred to them as my ‘school friends.’ We would spend lunch period together or walk to our next class together and on rare occasions we would get together on a Saturday afternoon – always at their homes.  I lived too far away.  At the time it never bothered me.  Fast forward a lot of years and I get the same excuse from friends.  Only now, I don’t accept that as an excuse.

I lived far enough from school to warrant a bus pass.  Time out.  This is before tokens and metrocards and before discount cards where you showed the driver your card and deposited a nickel in the fare box.  In junior high school each month we were issued a new free, unlimited-use card. Wanna go to White Castle for lunch? No problem. A bunch of us would get on the Utica Avenue bus and go up the half mile and order a half dozen hamburgers. What? You never ate a half-dozen White Castle hamburgers?  Now I’m on shakey ground.  Was there a time when the Castle sold only hamburgers and soda? No French fries?.  The alternative was Pinky’s on Rutland Road – not known for its culinary skills, or The Hollywood Diner on Utica Avenue.

I was a decent student in a class of very smart kids.  I wonder if I would have been a very smart kid in a class of decent students. I liked school, I think, when I wasn’t worrying incurring Peter Kelly’s wrath. 

Two years in the school and I remember enough to fill just a few paragraphs:  The highlight? Woodworking shop where I made a combination knife-holder/cutting board.  I don’t know what happened to the knife holder (after three days the knives wound up back in the drawer with all the other utensils), but the cutting board (which even I thought was no great example of woodworking skill) appeared every meal under the unsliced bread, at least until I got married.

Phys Ed and the concept of gym spots and the ropes dangling from the ceiling.  The trip to the gym ceiling provided time to contemplate your worst fears: How often are the connections at the top checked? How much protection would those 3-inch thick mats below the ropes provide if you slipped? How come we never saw the gym teachers demonstrate rope climbing beyond the 5-foot mark? What happens if you accidentally look down from the midway point? What if there’s a fire drill?  All of a sudden dodge ball where by some unfortunate turn of events you wind up the last person standing on your team and Peter Kelly and his friends are on the other team all aiming at your head, or worse. Come to think of it, rope climbing ain’t so bad, except when some kid holding the bottom of the rope decides to swing it.

I try to conjure up what gym class must be like today: See-saws and jungle gyms have been banned from playgrounds where we now live, so dodge ball must be played with wiffle balls and both teams get trophies for sportsmanship and clean sneaker laces. 

In another blog I mention my dreaded 9^th grade English class where I learned grammar.  I’m sure we had spelling tests, wrote compositions and read literature, but it was the grammar that has been permanently implanted.  Years later I was able to exact revenge on the next generation – I taught 9^th grade English. 

Oh, I also had the first two of five years of Spanish, that interestingly helped me better understand English grammar and, later on, put me in good standing with our landscapers.  It didn’t help me in college though, since my major required that I take two years of French.

 What did help, though, was typing. Who would have thought back in the middle of the last century that typing would turn out to be the most helpful junior high school subject! I’m talking about typewriters with no letters on the keys (‘touch typing’); that did not get plugged in; that required carbon paper if you wanted a copy. Ask your grandmother what a typewriter is.

And, in the ninth grade I learned to hate my math teacher, Miss Casey. It wasn’t until much later that I came to this realization.  Until then I had no choice: one teacher for the whole year.  Make do with the hand you’re dealt.  But this realization opened up the floodgates and in retrospect I realized I had also hated Miss O’Neill, my sixth grade teacher, probably for singling me out for getting a 99 on a music appreciation test – when everyone else, and I mean everyone else, got 100. She also liked to return test papers in grade order.  Luckily, much to her dismay I’m sure, I never had to wait long to receive my tests. 

I recently discovered my junior high school graduation picture. It consisted of four groups of people:     1) girls that looked like they should be graduating from junior high school; 2) their male counterparts; 3) boys that three years later would look the same in their high school graduating picture.  And then there was this fourth group of Amazon-like females, at least a foot taller than everyone else in the picture.  Who were they?  They sort of looked familiar.  Were they teachers? students? student teachers? Parents of students? 

No, they were my classmates, all dressed up for the picture! Damn! This particular group of girls looked as though they had raided their mother’s wardrobe.

The ‘group 2’ boys didn’t realize it, but they had it together.  They knew how old they were and dressed, and looked and acted ‘age-appropriately.’  The last could explain why their social life never included any of their female classmates. Less than twelve months since they had proclaimed, “Today I am a man.” Mother Nature had not yet received the message. 

So there I was.  A graduate of the ‘2-year SP’ entering high school not quite 14 years old. Two years of math, science, Spanish, social studies, gym, shop, typing (I still look at the keyboard!) and, of course, English, and all I remember I’ve already told you.

Two years in a class with kids just like me who I have no interest in seeing – except maybe for Marilyn Cohen.