By the middle point of seventh grade I wanted only one
thing, a blue eyed girl named Tana. My friend B and I used to walk around
campus together, breaking up basketball games and then ducking into the
bathroom where he would copiously comb down his hair with a blue fine tooth
comb that he kept in his back pocket, shaping the front into a perfect wave. I’d
gotten onto the basketball team and the two of us had become friends. Though
the friendship largely consisted around me following him around campus, across
long hot blacktops, beneath copses of trees, past groups of sea gulls watching
the seventh graders eat French fries on the wall, hoping that they’d leave
something, and back towards the classrooms, where our presence was discouraged.
I don’t really know what B was up to that year or any year
for that matter. He was possessed of an indefatigable will that wasn’t verbally
expressed. He was independent and determined, but it was often difficult to
figure out what he was determined about. I followed him around lamely in part because
it took a while for me to find friends, and he was the first one. And I also
followed him around because girls seemed to like him, and I liked girls, though
they didn’t like me. I suppose I thought some of his way with women might rub
off on me, or at the very least he gave me someone to walk around with at
lunch.
We used to bust up basketball games between Jon and
Jeremiah, Jon who was to become his best friend only a couple of years later,
but that year we used to walk onto the court and take their ball, interrupt the
flow of their perfectly amiable game of one on one to enforce our own will. I
suppose what thrilled him, and what I caught on to, was the agitation that Jon
and Jeremiah expressed. Who gave a shit? It was just a dumb game of basketball
on a double rim hoop? We were off combing our hair in the bathroom and walking
around campus.
These afternoons, were, even at the time, largely devoid of
joy. I was often confused in following B, trying to piece together exactly what
he was up to on those trips across the cracked ground to the basketball court.
He spoke, but sparingly. He moved with an almost cat like grace, and I followed
him around. I, who am loquacious, introspective and conversational, was often
left in a stage of silence. It was like I was training for an event, and that
event was life, or life lived as a seventh grade boy, and I cannot think of an
event for which I was ever less prepared.
I parted my hair on the side that year, and I had a pair of
front teeth that had come in at forty five degree angles, which meant I had a
smile that only a mother could love. I still wore mostly the Chicago Bulls and
sports shirts that had been so kind to me in elementary school, where it was
accepted that everyone would play basketball and talk about sports all
afternoon before going into the classroom and excelling in all subjects. I had
found girls in my classes to be cute, but it wasn't
important then. Nor was
it a thing that I’d ever imagine sharing with someone else.
And now here I was in this strange new world. Thank God, for
Mr. Williams, an ornery, curly haired teacher, who was in his early forties
when I knew him, and who kept his class in check by walking around with a golf
club and slamming it down to make a particular point about the Russian
Revolution, or to startle some student who was dozing off or talking to his
neighbor. He raged about the classroom, and I was held in thrall. He moved
about with a manic energy, pointing a ruler, when the golf club was banned or
broke, at a country on the map and saying, “Angola,” while we chanted after
him.
I’m certain that many of the students in his class found him
abrasive. If my first class with Mr. Corey had taught me that teacher’s didn’t
need to be respected, Mr. Williams reminded me that they could also be feared.
And yet the fear was enacted within boundaries that I could define. I
understood that in order to gain his approval I just needed to shut up, learn
the material, and perform on tests. This class is not a good user’s manual for
life, and perhaps it’s why I’ve turned out to be so mediocre at it. I like to
know precisely what I’m supposed to do. You point to a place on a map, and I
say “Madagascar.” That I can do.
We had an eighth grader, Danica, who was a special assistant
in the class, who I also had a crush on. She had blond hair and was older,
which was enough for me. And on the days after tests, she’d roll out the
scantron machine and Mr. Williams would pull out a stack of tests to be run
through. That we did this as a class would probably strike someone as a sort of
public shaming, and perhaps that’s what it was. But I didn’t mind because I was
never shamed. My test flipped right through the machine, drawing only the initial
click registering the new card before gliding through unscathed. I was the best
student in the class because I had a good working memory and was terrified of
performing poorly. That I liked Mr. Williams is either a testament to his good
nature beneath the golf club swings, or to my own desire to be accepted, which
happened quite often in that class, other kids marveling as my test went
through, and me feeling a secret swell of pride as my face turned bright red.
I simultaneously wanted to be identified as smart of
exceptional, but I was beginning also to feel that first pull, in the latter
half of seventh grade, to something else. I wanted to be liked not because I
was intelligent, but because I was popular. Of course, to be popular was a
rather nebulous thing. You were either popular or you weren’t, and the
parameters, in retrospect were rather fuzzy, but went something like this. If
you were a girl, were you cute? If so, you were probably popular. If you were a
boy, did you talk to the girls who had been deemed cute? If yes, you were
probably popular or at least envied. Unfortunately, a flawless scantron did not
qualify me for popularity.
