by Doug Merlino
The school administration scrambled to get him back, conferencing with his parents. One of our more amiable classmates was dispatched to go to the Hampton house and play with Eric. Eric heard his mom and dad shouting at each other—his dad wanted him to go back, while his mom said he should be allowed to make his own choice about where he wanted to go to school. Finally, it was agreed that Eric would give Lakeside another try.
No one among the students at Lakeside said anything about Eric’s absence. Our English teacher, Mr. Bayley, finally broke the silence, telling us at the end of a class period that there was something he wanted to talk about. Our small class sat around the perimeter of four long oak tables that had been arranged to make a square as Mr. Bayley—who, like every single teacher at the school that year, was white—stood up in his brown cardigan sweater with a look of disappointment on his face. He sucked in a long, deep breath and began to speak very deliberately.
“I’m sure that you’ve noticed that Eric Hampton has not been in school,” he said. “We’ve been talking to his parents, and he’ll be coming back tomorrow. He’s had a hard time adjusting here. You should treat him like you treat anyone else. Just because he’s black doesn’t mean that there is anything different about him. Please make an effort to make him feel comfortable. I want you to go home tonight and think about it.”
We collected our books and filed out silently, hanging our heads in the exaggerated way kids do when they’re expected to look contrite. I felt guilty but didn’t really know why. The first few weeks had been a disorienting battle to be accepted. Eric’s isolation came largely from his own shyness, which was compounded by his one obvious difference from everyone else. You wanted to be friends with him but didn’t know what to say—his race was something you registered but also tried to ignore. The easiest thing to do was to stay quiet.
To get to school throughout his years at Lakeside, Eric caught the bus and rode downtown, where he usually met up with “the other little black kids from Lakeside.” They transferred to another bus that took them up to the North End. They were, both literally and figuratively, traveling away from a public school system that had been in disarray for years.
As Seattle’s black population grew throughout the 1950s and 1960s, its public schools became increasingly segregated. Garfield High School, for example, went from 4 percent black enrollment in 1940 to 75 percent in 1972, the year Willie McClain graduated. By then, black and Asian kids also made up the majority enrollments of several elementary and middle schools in the Central Area; schools in the North End were almost entirely white.
In the 1970s, school desegregation became a civil rights battleground across the country. Activists, looking for ways to implement the legislative and legal victories of the previous decades, began to file lawsuits against school districts that had not integrated. In Boston, where a federal judge in 1974 ordered a mandatory busing plan, whites rioted and threw bottles and rocks at buses full of black students. Seattle by then had already tried voluntary desegregation, which had failed after too few families took up the offer. With civil rights groups threatening litigation, the city had to take action. It came up with its own mandatory busing plan, which went into effect at the start of the 1978 school year.
As you would expect in a town that takes pride in its politeness, the implementation of the program was orderly. That didn’t mean it was popular. “No one should be lulled into believing that because schools opened peacefully, without violence, that there is support for this crazy busing nonsense,” the president of a group working to overturn the plan told the Seattle Times in 1978. “This only means that Seattleites are law-abiding and have faith in our democratic system.” A referendum the group put on the city ballot to end mandatory busing passed with 61 percent of the vote but was ruled unconstitutional by the courts.
Instead, whites simply deserted the Seattle public schools. In 1976 there were 41,600 white students in the Seattle public schools and 10,800 African-American students. Four years later, the number of black students in the system was nearly unchanged; white enrollment had plummeted 34 percent, to 27,300.
When I was one year old, my family moved from Seattle to a suburb five miles north of the city’s boundary. Later, when I asked my mom why we left Seattle proper, she said, “For the schools. I didn’t want you to be bused.” According to statistics kept by the state, my public elementary school had 327 students when I began fourth grade in 1981. Of those, 315 were white, 9 were Asian, 1 was Native American, and 2 were black.
By 1986, when our team played together, a major issue in the Seattle schools was “disproportionality”—African-American and other minority students were getting lower grades than white students and getting kicked out of school at much higher rates. For example, in the 1984–1985 school year, 56 percent of African-American high school students in Seattle had a D average or below, compared to 24 percent of white students. In the same year, 35 percent of black middle and high school students were suspended or expelled, opposed to 15 percent of white students.
Though busing had taken some of the edge off the dramatic segregation of the early 1970s, there were still huge imbalances between schools in the northern and southern parts of the city. As a kid, Damian saw them firsthand when he was bused to an elementary school in the North End, where he was one of a few black students in his classes. “The schools were way better,” Damian says, looking back at the experience. He saw the difference not only in obvious things such as the North End schools having art supplies and other extras, but also in the standards the teachers set for the students.
The contrast really struck Damian a few years later, when he was assigned to middle school in the South End. In the mornings, the seventh- and eighth-grade kids rode the bus with high school students. Some of the older kids openly smoked pot during the ride, but the drivers never disciplined them—Damian thinks they were afraid to say anything. Students were issued books with the covers torn off, and the bathroom stalls were missing doors. Expectations were minimal. As long as you didn’t do anything egregious, you would sail right through. “Teachers weren’t there half the time, kids fighting, people skipping class, people shooting dice at lunchtime, getting high, messing with girls and boys in the bathroom, oh man, it was crazy,” Damian says. For guys like Damian, Willie Jr., and Tyrell, it meant that school was fun. Without any homework, there was a lot of time just to fool around. Myran had a harder time. He would get by for a while, but then—displaying a troubling moodiness that he tried and failed to contain—he would get in a fight or otherwise act out. He was kicked out of one school after another.
At Lakeside, parents—usually moms—prowled the halls every day, buttonholing teachers and administrators. If they were not happy with something, they raised hell. During my time from fifth to eighth grade, parents mobilized to get three teachers they considered not up to standards fired. There was no formal review, teachers’ union to lodge a protest with, or even a process of appeal. The headmaster made the decision and, at the end of the year, the contracts of the teachers in question were not renewed. Lakeside parents expected to be heard and obeyed. With only the father working in most cases, they had more time to pay attention to everything that happened at the school.
After school and on weekends, my Lakeside classmates participated in structured activities that almost always cost money: tennis, violin, soccer, skiing, summer camp, gymnastics, ballroom dancing, French. My mom subscribed to the Seattle Children’s Theatre, which she clawed my younger brother and me away from our Saturday morning cartoon regimen to attend. Each time we went, I sat resentfully until about fifteen minutes into the play, when I started to enjoy the story despite myself. After the play, the actors came back out on the stage to talk to the kids about their characters and how they played them, which intrigued me.
Damian and the other kids from Willie McClain’s team often headed to a local playground, where they scrapped in games with other kids, older boys, and even men, the winners staying o
n the court to take next game, losers sitting out. I would have traded the theater for the basketball court in a second, but, of course, all of us were already being socialized to operate in very different spheres.
My performance in my first few years at Lakeside was completely erratic: I sailed through some classes and bombed others. In sixth grade I got in a couple of playground fights—won one, lost one—with a popular preppie from Madison Park (with his pink Oxford shirts and bouncy blond hair, he looked like he had walked off the screen from a John Hughes movie). In the summer before seventh grade, the school headmaster threatened me with expulsion and instructed me to write an essay explaining how I planned on doing better in the coming year.
Most of my capricious behavior flowed from a fault line between my parents that Lakeside exposed. My dad, at best, was ambivalent about my attendance at the school. He had gone to Catholic schools and didn’t see the need for Lakeside. He’d taken over our family business leasing coin-operated washers and dryers to apartment building owners, which was financially lucrative if not especially glamorous. He still hung out with the same friends from high school and college, and showed no interest in joining a golf club or anything else that might indicate social climbing. At one parent meeting he went to right after I started at Lakeside, every other father was wearing a tie; he felt that they looked down on him when they heard what he did for a living.
My mom was the daughter of an engineer who had moved west during World War II to work on the Manhattan Project at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Eastern Washington—the same place where Charlie Hampton took a job twenty-five years later. Richland, the town where my mom was born, was essentially built by the government to house the nuclear workers; those with higher social standing, such as engineers, got better housing. From this, my mom grew up with an ingrained—and not unfounded—belief in the role of education as the engine of upward class mobility. She was proud that I was going to the best school in Seattle.
In contrast to my experience at public school, classes at Lakeside generally allowed for creative problem solving and student initiative, and I enjoyed them. But another part of me felt that if I did too well, I would be selling out to the snobs. All that mixed with a begrudging fascination I had with some of my classmates, especially the poised self-assurance that many of them projected. I made efforts to fit in, adopting fashion symbols such as Stan Smith tennis shoes; but I also got deeply into heavy metal—from Metallica to Ratt to Iron Maiden, the more bombast the better—which was far from the music of choice at Lakeside.
In the meantime, Eric Hampton had a separate struggle to fit in, which he sums up succinctly: “I wasn’t wealthy and I was a minority.”
After his brief disappearance at the start of fifth grade, Eric—who was quiet but had a gently scathing sense of humor—had become an accepted, if not overwhelmingly popular, part of the class. He tried to dress like everyone else and to evince enthusiasm for bands like the Police and Men at Work. At times it flipped, and he became the school’s representative of everything “black.” For example, after the show That’s Incredible ran a segment on break dancing just as it was coming into national style, the consensus at Lakeside was that it was “stupid,” an opinion Eric pretended to agree with. The next year, though, after break dancing became genuinely popular, Eric was naturally seen as the guy who would know all about it. “Everybody’s asking me, ‘Can you show me how to break-dance?’ ” he says with a laugh. “Everybody assumed I could break-dance. I couldn’t.”
Eric noticed that before school vacations kids would talk about Sun Valley, and he always wondered what they meant. He didn’t realize it was a ski resort in Idaho until years later. “You feel inferior because of the simple fact that you’re different, but also because you’re poor, and that’s the biggest thing,” he says. “If you have the resources, it makes life easier—you can at least maintain your self-esteem, your self-respect.”
It turned out that both of us, quite separately, found the school basketball team to be a space somewhat removed from the rest of the school. For one, most of the “elite” kids at Lakeside didn’t play basketball—their sports were tennis, golf, skiing, and swimming (and later, lacrosse, crew, and even, in at least one case, polo). Then there was also just the nature of the sport. Stepping onto the court simplified life down to a few variables: You grabbed the ball, ran the pebbled leather against your hand, turned it to find the seam, squared up to the basket, propelled yourself up off the ground, lifted the ball above your head, and let it fly. Then, instant resolution: The ball goes in or it doesn’t.
After our school team started in the seventh grade, Eric established himself as the star from about the first practice. His incredible lateral speed allowed him to make steal after steal on defense and blow by defenders when he had the ball. He scored more than twenty points a game and always seemed to be everywhere on the court. In one tournament championship game, we had played poorly and were down by five points with one minute left. Then Eric decided to drop the pretense that we were a team of equals. In the last minute, he stole the ball every time their guards touched it and scored nine points in a row. When time ran out, the rest of us rushed around him and jumped up and down while he pointed his index finger in the air, let his head drop back, and screamed.
Two of my closest friends at the school also were starters on the basketball team. Maitland Finley, tall and skinny with sleepy blue eyes and shaggy brown hair, was one of the only kids in the class who spoke less than Eric. His family lived way out in the rural suburbs north of Seattle. In public school, before he enrolled at Lakeside, he’d get so far ahead of his classmates that he often ended up to the side reading alone while the teacher attended to everyone else.
Maitland was completely straightforward. If you asked him if he wanted to do something—say, play basketball during lunch period—and he didn’t want to, he just answered, with a shrug of his shoulders, “No.” As we grew older, Maitland seemed to remain above the fray as other boys became more obnoxious. When a kid made a comment about a girl in our class, something like, “She’s a carpenter’s dream—flat as a board and never been nailed,” Maitland’s face flushed and he turned away. He also never seemed to notice or care about the shifting social hierarchy within the school, who was in, who was out.
Sean O’Donnell was, besides Eric, our other weapon, solely because, at more than six feet, he was taller than any other kid in the league. Simply standing near the basket with his arms in the air made him a presence. On the court, unfortunately, Sean resembled a human version of C-3PO, the gold robot in Star Wars. He moved in herky-jerky starts and stops and had hands of stone.
The son of a stockbroker from Bellevue, a suburb east of Seattle across Lake Washington, Sean had been sent to Lakeside after his fourth-grade public school teacher told his parents that he was a “calming influence” on the other kids. His parents wondered why the other kids weren’t calm. Sean, who had straight blond hair that fell across his forehead at an angle, was more socially malleable than Eric, Maitland, or me, able to fit in across Lakeside’s various cliques. He didn’t take school all that seriously, more likely to break out his impression of Bill Murray’s golf course groundskeeper in Caddyshack than to please our teachers. He also was the first person to tell me the urban legend about Richard Gere and the gerbil, delighting in the reaction that spread across my face.
Eric’s, Sean’s, and Maitland’s fathers made up the Lakeside Middle School basketball team’s Greek chorus. Sean’s dad, the stockbroker, was a constant presence at our games, a talkative man with a balding head, a beer belly, and a bellowing voice, he always seemed like he should be chewing on a cigar and cradling a tumbler of scotch. Eric’s father, Charlie, equally loquacious, sat beside him. The last member of the trio, Maitland’s dad, Randy, was the most outsized personality of all, yelling encouragement from the sidelines and giving pointers to our coach after the game.
Randy Finley was watching our opposition as well. As we began
our eighth-grade season, he made note of two of the best players we faced. He would recruit them onto the separate, integrated basketball team he was about to form.
Dino Christofilis, who went to a Christian school in the North End, was a whirlwind at forward who went after every loose ball like his life depended on it. He had a beautiful jump shot, and valiantly hustled and rallied his teammates. He also was hard to dislike—if you made a good play, he’d come up, slap you on the back, and tell you so.
Chris Dickinson attended the Bush School, another elite private school in Seattle, and was Dino’s only rival in intensity. Tall and strapping, he walked like a gunfighter, as if his muscles bulged so much that it was impossible for his arms to fall flush. At power forward he swung his elbows around with a velocity that made you fear for your head.
I had an uncomfortable run-in with Chris shortly before we became teammates. Our Lakeside basketball team was scheduled to play Bush. On a Saturday night, the week before the game, a couple of girls from my German class called me at home. They brought up Chris, whose physique, square jaw, and well-coiffed head of brown hair made him the object of many crushes among girls on the Seattle private-school circuit. Before long, fueled by jealousy, I was elaborating on how Chris was an overrated basketball player. This information quickly made it back to him. I was told on Monday that he hadn’t received my comments well.
Over the next week, a fight was rumored for the postgame dance. I wasn’t looking forward to any kind of conflict—Chris had at least four inches of height and a lot of muscle on me. We won the game. At the dance, I tried to avoid him while pretending that I wasn’t, but the two of us were herded together.
“I heard you been talkin’ shit about me,” Chris said, puffing out his chest in his polo shirt. I noticed that his hair was damp and neatly parted. It looked like he’d put mousse in it. I was impressed that he’d taken a shower after the game. No one on my team ever did that. It made him seem more mature.