I was a "good" child. Not a perfect one by any stretch of the imagination...I got into a fair share of mischief and other incidents borne out of the kind of faulty judgment that only a kid can indulge unabashedly (some of these even managed to escape my mother's seemingly-omniscient knowledge though, as is most often the case with mothers and other world-class psychics, my Mom managed to find out about the majority of my escapades.)
Still, despite my few and fleeting forays over to the dark side, I was by and large a well-behaved child during my formative years (this is not, by the by, something I'm all that proud of...there were many occasions when I'd have rather cut loose and been BAD but even then I kept a tight rein on my "baser" emotions and hid behind my carefully-erected, closely-held facades. My brother, on the other hand, indulged his every anti-social whim and kicked up more than enough fuss for both of us. These things balance out on a cosmic scale, I suppose.)
All of this is by way of introduction to the story of my great ditching adventure, which was (I was later told over and over) quite out of character for me.
It began in that (sometimes) most degrading of High School activities, gym class. It was the spring of my 10th grade year and I had been placed in the class of a sadistic septuagenarian who had very little good to say about sports, kids, or life in general (his name escapes me now...post-traumatic shock no doubt.) He was on his last legs and was bound and determined to go out sharing as much bile and acrimony as he possibly could.
The assignment to his class didn't thrill me. (It did, in fact, almost send me back to ROTC, which I had toiled in during the previous semester in lieu of P.E.)
My school...good ol' Alexander Hamilton High...was a multi-cultural mix of mostly middle (“lower-middle” to “middle-middle”) class students (more or less) peacefully coexisting the hallowed halls for three mostly benign years (this was the early 70's...a transition period between the revolutionary-breeding that schools had found themselves doing during the late 60's and the yuppie-breeding that they specialized in during the 80's. We were blissfully non-dogmatic.)
Now it happened that the one thing that wasn't taken into account during the pre-school shopping spree that was the bane of every child's summer was the acquisition of a regulation gym outfit: green trunks and a reversible green-and-white short sleeve sweatshirt, each emblazoned with the name of the school and highlighted with a space upon which our names were supposed to be written in indelible ink (as if there was really somebody who really wanted to steal gym clothes drenched in the vilest substance known to man: the combination of the sweat and the pre-Right Guard odor of pubescent boys.)
No sweat (no pun intended), thought I, come my mother's next payday, the regulation togs would be acquired and things would be...um...groovy.
The old man had other ideas.
On the third day of the semester (two days before the aforementioned payday), he issued an ultimatum that scared me to my very sensitive, hormone-ravaged soul: anyone not wearing the regulation gym suit on the next day would have to strip down to their underwear in the middle of the gym and then be made to participate in that day's activities thusly clothed.
A palpable chill rocketed through the 5 of us who were waiting for out parents' next paycheck to acquire the green shorts and reversible sweatshirt.
To this day, I have no idea if he was serious but at the time he seemed quite earnest and quite capable of carrying out the threat.
Being "blessed" with an abundance of both imagination and shyness, my mind reeled feverishly spinning out the most humiliating scenarios possible.
I spent the rest of the day in a daze.
The next morning, panic set in.
I hadn't mentioned any of this to my mother (I didn't want her to feel bad because we couldn't get the gym clothes until the end of the week), so I got up and got dressed as usual. I took my lunch and my notebook and started walking towards school.
And then I made a left turn and kept walking west until I hit the
I also realized that I had added another problem to the mix (to wit: I couldn't get back into school without a note from my mother) but I had committed myself to a course of action and I was stuck with it at that point.
I wandered around
I jumped out of my skin every time the phone rang that night...but the school never called. My attendance record was such that if I missed a day they just KNEW that I must be sick.
Being a "good" child kept me safe...for a while.
During the next two weeks I got up every day and left the house like I was going to school. Most days I went to the L.A. County Museum of Art (too many weird people at the beach I had decided...I was a semi-fugitive but I didn't want to become a statistic) which I explored...unmolested (though I thought every other person was a truant officer with my photo in his or her pocket)...from top to bottom (in the process, I gained an untutored appreciation for the High Renaissance as well as the boyish conviction that much of what passed for "modern art" was really a scam [as evidenced by the seemingly-Xeroxed Campbell Soup Can "painting" and the 12' x 12' white canvas with only three blobs of paint on it].)
I began to feel invulnerable...like this situation could go on forever. And so, of course, reality slammed me down to Earth. Hard.
I came home one day...going in through the kitchen door, for reasons I'm still unsure of, instead of through the front door as was my usual habit. I could hear my mother talking in the next room...the school had become concerned (worried, perhaps, that I had died) and had finally called.
The jig was up. My goose was cooked. The fat was in the fire. The clichés were flying fast and furious. My only options were to confess or flee.
Using the always-infallible wisdom of youth, I decided to flee. I slipped back out the kitchen door and ran into the day with absolutely no idea of where I was going.
I spent what remains to this day the worst night of my life wandering the west side of Los Angeles...first at the beach, which was far too blustery and cold at night for my tender sensibilities and eventually in an all-night laundry wherein I could get warm by turning on all the dryers in the place at once ("free dry" is one the great bygone treasures of our times.)
That night convinced me that I was too soft and too spoiled for life on the streets. I wandered back into my neighborhood and allowed myself to be "caught" by my Uncle.
Everybody...my relatives, my teachers, my principal...was so "disappointed" in me that it was almost unbearable (I honestly would have preferred them to have been angry at me...anger was something I could have managed...disappointment is far too daunting a burden for a teenager to bear) that I almost wished that I had taken my chances on the street rather than having to face the awful burden of adults’ dashed expectations.
My mother was disappointed, too...but she kept her counsel. She was extremely happy that I was home alive and safe...and she kept her counsel.
She waited patiently until I was ready to tell my story (which, of course, sounded perfectly ridiculous even to me when I repeated it out loud...all the perfectly good rationalizations I had used to justify my actions to myself deserted me in the cool light of reason.)
And somehow she understood it in her own way. She even accepted a portion of the blame. (That didn't make me feel any better about myself...but, through the guilt and embarrassment...I appreciated her understanding in ways I could never explain.
We spent the next day together, my mother and I. We bought gym clothes and a Roberta Flack album...she in reflective quiet, me in guilty silence.
The day after, I went back to school, faced the disappointment of the Boy's Vice Principal and my favorite English teacher. I got a new gym class (with a sane teacher) and life went on.
But I've never forgotten my “adventure". I wonder if my mother has.
2 comments:
The great adventures of youth. :) I was also a mostly good child that not too many thought ill of, outside of those I ruined the grade curve for whatever class.
One night, in my adulthood, my mother and I had a few drinks for some occassion and then, with my sister and Aunt in attendance, went down a list of things I did. She was well aware of 95% of them. Since my sister was still living in the house, it should have warned her but some do not learn unless they experience something directly.
Wonderful post.
Rose
Thanks for this entertaining glimpse into your childhood. That teacher should have known better to say such a thing even if he didn't mean it! But then again, you would never have had this "adventure".
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