The little shits abused their power. Hunt and Shapero backed them up. It was minidrama worthy of a mini-Camelot–and as futile as JFK’s attempts to suppress Fidel Castro.
You couldn’t quash the exuberance oftheJ.B. rank-and-file kid. You could infiltrate his imagination and hope your lessons took. The J.B. rank-and-file teacher knew this. He knew he was up against a big ego and a spongelike mind eager to soak up the latest and greatest knowledge–if it was sold in a boredom-proof package. He learned to digress off his basic curriculum and work in topical angles. He never played down to his kid audience.
I had my act. The teachers had theirs. We shared the same audience.
I infiltrated it as aJ.B. student. I stood apart from it as a grandstanding leper afraid of his peers.
It’s fall I hitJ.B. I scope out the turf and rule out assimilation. I’m a stranger in a strange fucking land. Ike is still in the White House. I don’t know from Camelot. I don’t know that I’m about to embark on my first and most formative season of discourse.
With:
Little sharpsters with hungry eyes and paperbound copies of Exodus in their hip pockets. Jokesters who said, “Did you know Abraham Lincoln was Jewish? He was shot in the temple.” Twelve-year-olds who’d read more books than I had and could recite baseball stats back to the time the Nazis ran Mom and Dad out of Poland. Hancock Park surfers who dry-surfed the main building on slick-soled penny loafers. Girls with stunning big features die-cast for sex appeal generations back in the shtetl. Girls bred breathtakingly blonde and raised refined by the back nine at Wilshire C.C. Kids with their own acts. Kids who could spiel, spritz, run shtick, and perform without hocking their soles.
I settled in.
I listened. I learned. I performed.
I observed.
Formal learning came easy. I read fast and retained well. My father did my math homework and supplied me with crib sheets. I gave oral reports on real books and books that I concocted extemporaneously. I hipped a few kids to my ruse and watched them howl. No teacher ever busted me for book-report fraud.
J.B. had some très hip teachers. Lepska Verzeano was Henry Miller’s ex. I asked my father what this meant. He waggled his eyebrows at me.
Walt Macintosh killed Reds in Korea. His gun barrel melted during a Red death charge. He doped out the ’60 campaign and held a classroom election. The Jewish kids backed JFK. The Hancock Park kids backed Nixon. I backed Tricky Dick–because my father said that JFK took his orders from Rome.
Laurence Nelson got me hooked on classical music. Beethoven wrote the sound track for myJ.B. years.
I fell for an English teacher named Margaret Pieschel. The kids called her Miss “Pie-Shell.” She was dark-haired and slender. She had bad acne. The J.B. boys considered her a dog. I sensed her inner torment and caught her sex vibe full on. It was Beethovian. I stared at her and tried to zap her telepathically. I tried to tell her, I know who you are. I looked at her and knew what it was like to love a lonely woman to death.
J.B. teachers were classifiable and divisible by two. Call them the Quick and the Dead.
The Quick contingent swung hip. They dug the Peace Corps, cool jazz, and Mort Sahl. The Dead contingent swung limp–as in elderly and sincere and content to rest on J.B.’s hot rep. The Deads were a needle stuck in the groove of a looooong-play record. The Quicks faced a Camelotian dilemma: whether to toil for chump change in the L.A. school system or strike out and try to make it in the real world.
J.B. kids were classifiable and divisible by two. Call them the Naked and the Dead.
The Dead contingent swung square–as in no spiel, spritz, shtick, or performance capability and no sexy angst. The Deads did not know from discourse. The Deads accepted J.B.’s social stratification–regardless of their status. The Naked contingent swung hungry–as in voluble, argumentative, hormonally unhinged, and hip to the fact that the world rocked to a Rat Pack beat and lots of people got fucked in the ass. The Nakeds faced a Camelotian dilemma: whether to accede to the realities of social stratification and capitulate to appearances as eveiything and deny your own hunger and seek contentment in conformity and tone down your spiel, spritz, shtick, and performance capability and rework it to suit a mainstream audience-or go iconoclastic all the way and fuck this overweening adolescent urge to BELONG.