School
My wife is getting ready for the fall semester she's going back after missing a year. All excitement picking courses teachers figuring schedules I am happy to see her this way. Glad to see her excitement, her interest, her hope for something better and my own hope that this will get some of the boredom out of the woman's life. I've never gone to college but I remember my high school days the old decrepit down town building with its own unique strain of cock roach the first evolutionary change in the cock roach in over a million years - survival of the fittest. The hallways were warped the paint was typical urban grey maybe some military surplus form of battleship, the special grey of park buildings, jails, basements, garbage incinerators. A greasy grey and yellow brick building sometimes floors of rickety wood or bulging ancient concrete painted grey, anything not yellow brick was painted grey. And the girls, I remember girls every size shape colour from china, India, South America Africa French Italian and beautiful black hair blue eye shy Mobilia from Portugal - America you know every kind of girl ugly pretty dumb smart holy virgins blessed sluts any description you could give me I would find there a girl to match it and I suppose this isn't unusual I mean probably every city high school is like that but when you take a young boy who has never seen more than the little girls of his suburban little neighbourhood K through 8 school, the one every one could walk to, the one with ten or fifteen in a class, when you take that young boy and put him in close closed contact with these girls, first contacts with exotic juicy sweet women, the perfect situation stuck here in this building for six hours a day and its great because you get to show off in class by either being smart or smart assed depending on what the situation called for and if you be cool you could wise off but at the same time come off as being intelligent and if you didn't come on like the true pervert that is really you well then you could make out pretty good, fish in a bucket baby and if you were me it wasn't all that easy but you had a friend named Dave and most afternoons cut the last class or get early dismissal because we had a "job" and be downtown working on a bottle of wine that we pan handle the money for and had to get one of the winos to buy it for us because we were under age but once the government dropped the age to eighteen so that the boys who were old enough to die in Viet Nam were now old enough to drink legal we were able to buy our own as our long hair and beards allowed us to pass for at least eighteen and if you had this best friend named Dave and you each had a bottle of that cheap new apple wine you hung around the alley ways and on the green checking out chicks checking out drugs which were both just coming into our lives and we'd talk for hours about California and the great adventure of hitching across the country. (Contrary to popular belief drugs were not invented in the sixties it was just when you were introduced at a certain time and its pretty much been proven that drugs invent users not the other way around) - Any way the time of our growing the time of our high school days were the times of head shops and marijuana romance, I think that even though marijuana has been around forever it has never been so romanticised before or since somewhere it lost its magic but in those high times it was in full flower, the times of war and peace demonstrations, expanding consciousness LSD every one I was ever close to was into acid (LSD) a phase perhaps like apple wine like marijuana like high school days, a phase and to this day I'm not sure every one has stopped getting into acid so much as they grew out of it or that after the seventies the quality of acid simply sucked and it wasn't worth really doing any more. Any way it was the time of our lives as is everybody's high school days I guess and my poor mother thinking I was missing out because I didn't play sports or join the glee club, she used to warn me that I'd regret not joining schools activities and well to set the story straight Ma I had the time of my life although I couldn't really explain it to you how much I was involved in certain school activities - everything was moving new exciting possible, the town was full of freaks, at night there were open parties on the green and after school me and Dave were drinking wine and hanging out meeting people of all kinds from all kinds of places, hippies, hobos, artists, musicians people who came in with news of the outer worlds. One of our new best friends was the old wino Charlie Brown I remember one day we read him his obituary from the local paper apparently someone with the same name same birth day same home town just died. The rest of the day was spent showing people the obituary and trying to get them to contribute to the wake. I can still see the little fellow, pushing through the crowd gathered at the Palace Theatre waiting for some concert by the New riders or Quick Messenger Service and there is Charlie Brown getting the crowd to make way as he called his dog to come through, his invisible dog for whom he was trying to raise funds for the re-visabling operation, of course he usually did well with the concert goers in those days most of the freaks would have some coin for him. And when they put a man on the moon and it was all the front pages of all the papers wasn't there some slight bitterness in his remark " so big fuckin deal I been to the moon every night since the end of the fuckin war"
School the time when dress codes were thrown out and we were dungareed flannel shirted stoned little vagabonds safe and secure in the confined controlled environment of school but when you had a best friend named Dave and you hung around down town you were out there baby, living, experiencing flavours, languages, violence, rip offs, sex, smell, of a living city. You were out there with people, travellers, wanderers, explorers, exploiters, beggar men, thieves, people who were human people who were making it anyway they could desperate adventurous, hopeful, wonderful, brave, crazy, evil, frightened, amazing beautifully human .
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