The Nakeds formed the bulk of the J.B. student body. I was an uber-Naked. I was genetically programmed for self-destructive kid iconoclasm. I expressed it in a buffoonish manner that marked me as harmless. My antics amused on occasion. My antics reminded the rank and file that they weren’t as whacked-out as I was. I made them feel secure. They rewarded me with tolerance and a few pats on the back. I listened to their spiels, spritzes, and shticks. I performed impromptu or on command. My three-year J.B. discourse was rarely interactive.
I went for my own jugular. I trashed liberal pieties and ragged JFK. I trashed Jewish pieties and yelled, “Free Adolf Eichmann!” I listened to sincerely fevered classroom debates, measured their value, and voiced ridiculously reasoned opinions calculated to agitate and spawn belly laughs. I inspired a few sad-assed guys with no riffs of their own. We became friends. We dissected the J.B. boys and stalked theJ.B. girls that we craved.
I bopped around the lunch court with my stooge, Jack Lift. We lurked, loitered, listened, and leched.
There’s David Friedman. He pulled in a bundle for his bar mitzvah and laid it down on blue-chip stocks. There’s Bad John and his fat sidekick, “Hefty.” The word: they pour glue and glass shards on cats and blow them up with cherry bombs. There’s Tony Blankley–a weird kid with a British accent. He’s some kind of child actor–catch him in that Bogart flick, The Harder They Fall. There’s Jamie Osborne. Check his British accent. He says he’s James Mason’s nephew.
There’s Leona Walters. She’s a tall Negro girl. I danced with her at “Co-Ed”: the mandatory gym class hoedown held on Friday mornings. Negro kids are accepted magnanimously. They rate high on the Coolometer. Teachers and kids dig their victim status and try not to act condescending. I told my father that I danced with Leona and blushed the whole time. He said, “Once you’ve had black, you can’t go back.”
Howard Swancy is the alpha dog in J.B.’s black litter. He’s abrupt and outspoken and a great athlete. He’s always scoping out weakness in white kids. He’s a dancing motherfucker. He did the Twist with Miss Byers–this redheaded English teacher with wheels like Cyd Charisse. The other twisters froze and watched. The boys’ gym dance was never the same.
Steve Price is a little Lenny Bruce manqué. He’s the spritz personified. He’s always trawling for straight men. He knows how to mine current events for big yocks.
Jay Jaffe is any doppelganger. He’s a popular kid with edgy nerves and some kind of wild hunger. He’s socially deft and a great baseball player. He’s got the stuff to get by on laced in with some crazy shit. I observe him obsessively. If I could bite his neck and mix his DNA with mine, I could remake myself and not cede my own essence.
Lizz Gill is a pixielike Hancock Park girl. She works for wholesome laughs. She knows the BigJ.B. Kid Truth: Sex is the ridiculous, consuming thing that life is all about. There’s something subversive in her pedigree. She probably wouldn’t judge me for the dog shit on my living-room floor.
Richard Berkowitz refers to himself in the third-person. He says, “I, the Great Berko have decreed” and “The Exalted Berko welcomes you” routinely. He doesn’t talk much beyond that. He’s a restrained shtickmeister in a frenetic crowd. His stated ambition: to serve as the towel boy in the girls’ gym forever.
The girls’ gym adjoined the boys’ gym. There were no secret passageways between them. They were separate outposts of Camelot. The boys’ gym was a comedy club. Monomania reigned. The one joke was sex and the breathlessly close proximity of the girls’ gym. One shtick lasted three whole years. Boys fluffed out their pubic hair and crooned, “Kookie, Kookie, lend me your comb!”
The standard J.B. romantic form was the serial crush. Love affairs came and went sans physical contact or mutual acknowledgment. Crush objects rarely knew that they were crushed on. It was all decorous and voyeuristic and abetted by intermediaries.
Crushers crushed on crushees and detailed their lust to their crush confidantes. I cranked my crushes and confidant duty up to sustained surveillance.