Mount Vernon Junior High, AKA “Mount Vermin,” AKA “Mau-Maunt Vernon”: Niggerland, U.S.A. Beware! Beware! Frequent homicides and race riots on campus.
I was slated to attend John Burroughs Junior High, AKA “J.B.” I asked about it. Nobody had a riff down pat.
I spent three years at J .B. It was the buffer zone between my dark childhood and bleak postadolescence. J.B. was Camelot writ small and contained and unimpaired by hokey images of lost innocence to come. It was my taste of earned privilege and potent destiny and the unacknowledged secret pulse of my wild L.A. trip.
J.B. stood at 6th and McCadden. It was the southwest edge of Hancock Park. Kosher Canyon kicked in a few blocks away. J.B. divided two diverse and significant hunks of Central L.A.
Pedigreed goys and big-ass homes to the east. Hard-scrabbling Jews in duplex pads and stucco huts to the west. A legacy of entrenchment and a prophecy of powerful emergence. A contentious demographic. Two gene pools programmed to spawn swift kids.
J.B. was red brick and built to last. The main building and north building were contiguous and joined at an L-shaped juncture. Offices and classrooms covered two floors linked by wide stairwells.
The main building adjoined a large auditorium. A blacktop athletic field stretched south to Wilshire. Shop bungalows and two gyms abutted the main and north buildings perpendicularly. They enclosed the “Lunch Court”–a paved space dotted with benches and green-and-gold trash cans.
J.B. was named after a dead guy who fucked around with plants or soybeans. Nobody stressed his accomplishments or gave him much play as an icon. He was stale bread.
The student body was 8o% Jewish. I didn’t know from Jews. My father called them “Pork Dodgers.” My Lutheran pastor called them complicit in the famous Jesus Christ homicide.
Fifteen percent of the kids hailed from Hancock Park. Their parents preferred J.B. to prestigious prep schools. My guess: they wanted their kids to compete with Jews so they’d grow up tough and kick ass in business.
The final component: Gentile riffraff and a few Negro kids who escaped restrictive housing laws and certain death at Mount Vermin.
There’s J.B., ’59. I storm Camelot on my steed–a two-wheel taco wagon.
I’m tall. My dog shits on my living-room floor. I pick my nose with gusto. I stick pencils in my ears and excavate wax in full view of other kids.
I’m afraid of all living things. I pull crazy-man stunts to attract attention and deter kid predators. My psycho act is now in its third or fourth school year. The performance lines are starting to blur. I can’t tell when I’m putting people on and when I’m not.
It’s ’59. Performance Art has not been conceptualized. I’m prescient and avant-garde and unaware that I just got lucky. Art requires an audience. Camelots play out on stages–large and small. I hit the one place that would tolerate and occasionally laud my amped-up and wholly pathetic act.
I didn’t know it going in. J.B. was regimented and rule-bound.
A dress and appearance code was strictly enforced. Jeans, Capri pants, and T-shirts were banned. Boys kept their hair neatly trimmed–under threat of swats on the ass. Girls wore oxford shoes and maintained low hemlines.
The boys’ vice-principal ran J.B. His name was John Hunt. He was a short, blustery man. He had bloodshot eyes and ruptured veins and strutted like a low-rent Il Duce.
Hunt stressed hard work, hard play, and physical reprisals for fuckups. He addressed Boy’s League assemblies and got borderline bawdy. He said shit like “You’re young men now, soon you’ll discover that broads should be broad where they ought to be broad,” and “I know you’re studying hormones in science class. You know how you make a hormone? Don’t pay her.”
Hunt dispensed swats with a space-age paddle. Air shot through holes on the downswing. He made you drop trou. The aftermath exceeded the impact. The welts, blood dots, and sting lingered loooooong.
Hunt had a teacher/goon named Arthur Shapero. Hunt was 56″. Shapero was 64. He looked like Lurch and Renfield from Dracula. I kept waiting for him to say, “Master, I come!”
Shapero hulked around the lunch court. Hunt kept him on a long choke chain. He ran the Space Cadets, Space Legion, and Solarons–kiddie cops empowered to cite other kids for littering and dress-code infractions.