Then we’d get a few holdouts, the Mrs. Minivers of education, unfazed and unflustered by tear gas, bomb threats, and debauchery. These were most often women in prim dresses and sensible shoes, policing the aisles while smacking rulers in their hands, scowling at gum chewers, and making everyone recite their prepositions by rote, pretending that nothing at all had changed since FDR declared the New Deal.
My typing teacher was right out of a fifties’ steno pool, the fabric of her life being mainly stretch polyester, fashioned into skirtsuits from Simplicity patterns using a Singer pedal sewing machine with a bullet bobbin. She had a teased bottle-blond updo and a strict bearing based on a line out of Euclidian geometry. If you looked up the word efficiency in the dictionary, she’d be there looking right back at you through rhinestone-studded cat’s-eye glasses attached to a matching chain. Her typing classes, by the way, were filled to the max with girls; the secretarial track for women was still alive and well.
One civic-minded social studies teacher was so entranced by the Cold War that she insisted Communists were hiding in our sewers and waiting for a signal to attack us. As part of a World War II lesson, she explained how her father had once attempted to shoot Adolph Hitler in a U-boat off the coast of Seattle, using a hunting rifle. My high school was in a rural area, and one day, when a black garden snake dropped down from between the ceiling panels of the classroom, her eyes took on a fevered brightness as she insisted it was a plot by the Chinese to overthrow the government (though no one noticed the reptile to be wearing any sort of armband or insignia). The Chinese, she was fond of relating, had a secret cave that could house the entire population of their country in the event of an invasion. Her true-blue students dutifully used red folders and book covers to keep things interesting.
For sheer entertainment value, my hands-down favorite was the school gym teacher/football coach/health instructor, who encouraged “walking off” all injuries, including slipped disks and collapsed lungs. He was a 250-pound former linebacker with bad knees whom the kids secretly called Franken Berry after the breakfast-cereal cartoon monster. Pacing at the front of the classroom, pitched forward as if battling a mighty headwind, he’d rail at us that “douching does not stop pregnancy,” while pounding on Resuscitative Annie’s chest for emphasis. How is it possible that he was never tapped to appear on an STD telethon?
Best in Show went to a posture-perfect peroxide-blond history teacher who sewed enough of her own brightly hued ultrasuede pantsuits to have a different one for every day of the week. Patriotic to the seams, she was fond of explaining the flag to her students as follows: “Blue is for the oceans on both sides of our great nation, the Atlantic
and the Pacific; red is for the blood spilled by our brave boys on the battlefield; and white is for virginity, which you girls know nothing about anymore!” Impervious to the civil rights movement, she determined in what order students should present their book reports by employing “eenie meenie miny, moe, catch a nigger by the toe.” The sherry-sipping widow confided to Pete and Russ that some nights she’d sit at the organ wearing baby-doll pajamas, fire up one of her beloved Winston cigarettes, and play “Embraceable You.”
Like our hippie predecessors, we wore jeans (not so flared) and
T-shirts (not so loud), but unlike them, we did our homework and did not talk back. When administrators threatened that bad behavior would go on our “permanent record,” we imagined a dossier that would compromise every college application and job interview and follow us right up to the pearly gates. If we talked back at home, we’d be talking to the back of a hand. Our fathers had fought in World War II and Korea, and our mothers had grown up being seen and not heard, and eating what was put in front of them. The result was a finely honed appreciation for the fruits of democracy, a solid work ethic, and a strong legal system. Furthermore, our parents believed in time travel, to the extent that they regularly threatened to “knock us into next week” for any type of misbehavior.
The mischief we kids got into was mere pranks and basic rebelliousness, as opposed to the rejection of any system or status quo. For instance, one of our science teachers wore a rug on which you could fly to Morocco. When he’d show a movie in class, he’d sit slightly in front of the projector. Inevitably one of the kids would inch the turning wheel toward the back of his head until it sucked up his entire toupee.
And there was the German-language teacher who was so overweight that her car permanently tilted to the left because the suspension on the driver’s side was completely shot, possibly the result of an overload of Black Forest cake. Early on, a group of students nicknamed her Frau Cow. The moniker was passed down from one generation to the next, and students who didn’t take her class never even knew her real name.
I like to think our teachers revived slightly when the bright yellow smiley decals came off and were replaced by stolid green Izod alligators, and the dashikis gave way to button-down-collared shirts with straight-leg jeans, making kids unable to sit cross-legged for long periods of time. Ponchos with fringe (thankfully) disappeared and Windbreakers appeared. Okay, a number of us sported Mork-inspired rainbow-colored suspenders, but this represented a slavish devotion to a sitcom alien, not a call for revolution. Pop tart Madonna, the Material Girl, would not begin to fuel the fashion of underwear-as-outerwear until the year after we graduated. Likewise, multiriveted body parts were still on some silver miner’s drawing board and butt-crack tattoos had not yet become widespread
Survivors liked to tell stories about life back when the flower children had taken over. Mr. Hardy, a French teacher shaped like a bottle of Shalimar who perspired at the very mention of physical activity, had been in charge of one particularly raucous hallway where all the juniors and seniors were assigned lockers. It was his job to ensure that none of the pot-slinging hipsters left their classrooms before the bell rang to signify the end of the final period of the day. He told us how marauding gangs of the discipline-challenged used to mow him right down. The tales were so vivid in the retelling that potbellied Mr. Hardy would break into a flop sweat and take out a handkerchief to mop his brow.
Finally, in the late seventies, the school’s administrators were able to reinstate the ban on smoking and dropping acid in Cafeteria B and, to a large extent, restore law and order to a postapocalyptic public-education wasteland. The end of the Vietnam War, a drop in horoscope enthusiasm and Ouija board–driven career choices, and a slightly reduced
student population greatly assisted in this crackdown. Jazzercise would be permitted, but only in the gymnasium. Yet the new regime was unable to do much about the practice of free love, other than to ensure that students remain clothed. Dry humping was tolerated in my school system, whereas the parochial schools and some nearby public-school districts banned such displays of unfettered passion. At any given time, walking down the halls was like threading our way through porn-movie auditions, with couples clinching up against lockers and huddled in doorways and corners, darkened or not, having peak physical experiences under an almost visible cloud of hormones, while facing the despair of spending the next forty-five minutes apart.
***
The faculty at the senior high had for the most part been hired the year the school was opened, in 1963; therefore, by the time my class came along in 1979, almost all were in their forties, about the same age as our parents. When they attended teachers college in the late fifties and early sixties, our future instructors surely believed their days would be spent standing nobly at the front of a classroom and imparting knowledge to eager, obedient, and appropriately dressed students. They graduated, found jobs, and after that came the tie-dye deluge.
Granted, a number of them had enrolled in teachers college during the Vietnam War. And with regard to the dozen or so immensely lazy teachers, a student couldn’t help but wonder if becoming an educator had not been a lifelong dream and dignified calling so much as a way to avoid the draft.
The hippies who had gone through the decade before were
just then starting to become parents and professionals. Our parents, like our teachers, were people of the fifties. And not the fifties that happened in New York City, San Francisco, and New Orleans, but the fifties in Detroit, Pittsburgh, and Cleveland.
Parents in my neighborhood were the Beat Generation only insofar as they’d spent the decade working their way through college, traveling to the United States from someplace that held no opportunity for them, or in the military. Thus, they were just plain beat. Still, they’d been taught to consider themselves incredibly fortunate because most of their parents had worked on factory floors and loading docks, in steel plants and grain elevators. Many were the children of immigrants who’d fled war-torn Europe, poverty, religious persecution, and even death camps. And for those who had been too young to clearly remember the Depression, their parents (our grandparents) had reminded them of it at least once a day, so they now felt as if they had experienced it directly.
As a result, our parents greatly appreciated the tranquility of a leafy suburban neighborhood, job security, health insurance, indoor plumbing, the public library, decent schools, and the arrival of such fabrics as nylon that replaced itchy wool socks. If they had to travel during the week because of a sales job, then when the weekend came they were thrilled to be off the road. The only howl they emitted was not about jazz musicians, political radicals, and psychiatric patients, but about the sky-high heating bills that started arriving in October. The only acid dropped was sulfuric, and that was to unclog the drain in the kitchen.
Tom Wolfe’s paean to the Beats, The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, arrived in 1965, the year I was born. However, bedside tables in my neighborhood were more likely to hold copies of Reader’s Digest and Dr. Benjamin Spock’s best seller on raising babies. By the middle of 1967, dubbed “The Summer of Love,” sex was the last thing on our parents’ minds as they ushered squalling toddlers through potty training and spent nights trying to put colicky babies to sleep.
As for the Age of Aquarius, with the economic slowdown that began in the late sixties and carried through the seventies, for our parents it was the Age of Financial Precariousness. There were children to feed and clothe, while Detroit continued to produce station wagons that not only guzzled gas but were in constant need of repair. American automakers were about to realize that planned obsolescence, a manufacturer’s decision that the product will become nonfunctional within a defined time period, would soon translate into carloads of consumers singing, “I think I’m turning Japanese”; lemon laws would not go on the books until 1984. Most moms weren’t in the workforce, and, unlike today’s shoppers armed with never-ending rounds of credit cards, when our parents ran out of money, they simply stopped spending it.
Throughout the seventies, Bethlehem Steel continued to lay off workers while other factories closed entirely. It grew harder and harder to find a job in Buffalo. If a person had one, salaries stayed put or decreased due to hours being cut back, while prices continued to spiral upward. One joke went that things were so bad, a local guy decided to drown himself in Lake Erie. Another fellow spotted him from shore and swam out. The drowning man shouted, “Don’t save me! I don’t want to live!” The guy swimming out to him replied, “Don’t worry, I won’t. I just want to know where you work.”
Those of us attending high school in the early eighties were able to escape some of the seriousness through the usual teen pastimes: tunes, TV, and movies. B-52s didn’t conjure up images of the Boeing jet bombers that had been used extensively in the Vietnam War. No indeed, the B-52s were an adventurous New-Wave indie-rock band with songs like “Rock Lobster” that we could freestyle dance to while our parents, who leaned more toward Frank Sinatra and Lawrence Welk, shouted, “Turn down that racket!”
Pink Floyd’s chart topper “Another Brick in the Wall” debuted in 1979 and was to rule the airwaves for many months, essentially morphing into our class anthem. Particular emphasis was placed on the chorus, regularly chanted in school hallways and on the bus: “We don’t need no education…Hey, teacher, leave those kids alone!” We shouted it from the bleachers in the gym, but we also dutifully went to class, did our homework, and competed for grades and prizes.
Just after I started high school, disco adopted a thumping funk bass with Kool & the Gang’s “Celebration.” And every teen knew the words to Rick James’s 1981 “Super Freak.” Not many people knew that Rick James was born in Buffalo as James Johnson Jr. in 1948. Apparently he had no great love affair with the city, as he ran away at the age of fifteen.
It wasn’t long before disco was dead, with the necessary bumper stickers and Disco Sucks T-shirts to prove it. Ready to take its place and become the sound track of our adolescence were rock groups like The Police, Devo, Talking Heads, Michael Jackson gone solo, and a bubblegum girl group called the Go-Go’s, with their smash single, “We Got the Beat.” My friends covered their lockers with stickers for the bands Styx, Aerosmith, Queen, the Eagles, and spacey Led Zeppelin, and the more artsy among us transferred their names to our blue denim-
covered three-ring binders. For the studded-leather-and-Dodge-Charger crowd, whom we referred to as burnouts, there was satanic Iron Maiden, the garishly costumed Kiss, and AC/DC’s Back in Black, which sounded to most adults as if all the household appliances had been turned on at the same time and someone was screaming because his arm was caught in the disposal (this album is now available in cell-phone ringtones!). The coolest thing in the world was to attend a concert and wear the
T-shirt to school the next day.
Singing antiestablishment rock songs, drinking beer, and wearing T-shirts that adults didn’t approve of (featuring marijuana leaves, skulls, and anything suggestive of Satan) was about the scope of our rebellion. Few kids in my neighborhood had money for drugs. Most parents were killing themselves to save enough for us to attend college if we could earn the grades to get in. We knew this. Even the burnouts worked hard in their shop classes so they could become auto mechanics and car thieves after high school.
When Saturday Night Live began in 1975, it left its mark. The impact was heightened because the cast was largely made up of midwesterners and Canadians, and their brand of humor spoke directly to us. All week long kids would reenact sketches and pretend to be favorite cast members. We worshipped the characters created by Bill Murray, John Belushi, Chevy Chase, Dan Ackroyd, and Gilda Radner. Especially beloved were the Loopners in the nerds sketch and Dan Ackroyd arriving as the refrigerator repairman with six inches of butt crack exposed. Things got even more boffo when Eddie Murphy joined the show and riffed on Mr. Rogers
and Buckwheat. Don Novello played Father Guido Sarducci, giving updates on the tricky road to sainthood and taking aim at education with the “Five-Minute University” sketch. To this day, friends still do the Land Shark dialogue whenever speaking into an intercom.
In 1979, Steve Martin was a wild ’n’ crazy guy on Saturday Night Live and the star of a wacky full-length feature film called The Jerk. It was the time of cult classics such as Bob and Doug MacKenzie’s Great White North, Cheech and Chong’s Up in Smoke, Meatballs, and of course, Caddyshack. We learned about the Dalai Lama not from history class, local Buddhists, or enlightened movie stars, but through Bill Murray as Carl the groundskeeper: “Gunga galunga.”
In truth, these depraved characters appealed more to the boys. Teenage girls had fallen under the strong influence of a recently released movie and homage to the fifties called Grease. Girly girls knew all the lyrics, were pros at doing the hand jive, and on Halloween dressed as bobby-soxers by raiding the back of Mom’s closet for a poodle skirt, cardigan, and chiffon scarf to tie around the ponytail and neck.
The humor of 1980’s Hollywood Knights cast its sophomoric spell, resulting in such copycat antics as placing a brown bag of dog crap on someone’s front porch, setting it on fire, and ringing the bell. The object was for them to answer the door and stomp it out, while we laughed ourselves silly behind a nearby hedge. Also popular
was climbing fences to skinny-dip in neighbors’ pools and then steal each other’s clothing. At the induction ceremony for the national honor society and also on parents’ night, we spiked the punch. There was endless mooning out of car and bus windows. And if we wanted to brave the downtown scene, the motorhead crowd held Friday and Saturday night drag races on Buffalo’s Ontario Street.
The following year, the Canadians gave us the movie Porkies, which inspired juvenilia such as paging Mike Hunt over the loudspeaker at the rec center and trying to get the name worked into the high school announcements, along with our own creations, such as Hugh Janus. Boys would go to any length to see girls naked, whether this involved power tools or periscopes. And Chinese fire drills while driving to and from school were popular, where everyone hopped out at a red light, raced around the car, and quickly climbed back in before it changed to green.
Inspired by movie mischief, late one night in the dead of winter, Mary and I cut up several dozen sherbet-colored Styrofoam egg cartons and went through the neighborhood attaching them to tree branches. When we walked around the next morning to view our handiwork in the daylight, we decided they actually looked pretty—pastel pink, yellow, blue, and purple “flowers” on otherwise bare, dark branches against a cold, gray vault of sky. Apparently the “vandalized” neighbors were of the same opinion, and almost all left them up until spring (that Styrofoam can survive a Buffalo winter makes it obvious why this material is a major problem in landfills). And so it happened that our big attempt at a prank turned into a public service.
Twenty-Three
Real World 101
On November 4, 1979, sixty-six Americans were taken hostage at the American embassy in Tehran, Iran, by militant student followers of the Ayatollah Khomeini. (On TV, some of the student activists appeared to be slightly older than my parents.) Khomeini demanded the return of former shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who was undergoing medical treatment in New York City (where I’m certain that all sick Iranians were dispatched, regardless of economic standing).
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