Next to Berner High School was a vacant wooded lot through which ran a modest stream whose source no one knew. The hideaway was nicknamed Zappaland, or just Zappa for short. Frank Zappa’s songs, and especially his lyrics, were favorites of the crowd who gathered there to smoke pot at 7:15 a.m., right before the assembly bell. These were the most dedicated of pot smokers. Long before the advent of medical marijuana, they smoked it like it was medicine. They smoked pot like they were on the U.S. Olympic Pot Smoking Team. I wondered what these youths might have achieved if they put as much energy into other, more constructive activities as they did into smoking pot. They lived on a kind of academic sideline. They didn’t care about Gian Carlo Menotti or the Sykes-Picot Agreement or even where the stream originated. They just wanted to kill time and get numb. Eventually, I smoked a handful of times with that crew, but I couldn’t keep up. I ended up sitting in calculus class, stoned, wondering if calculus could help me fly out of the window, away from calculus class.
In high school I played football and lacrosse, neither of them well. I was skinny and had no desire to physically pummel other people, so my choice of athletic pursuits was a poor one. By the time I was in ninth grade, however, I began to think I wanted a girlfriend, and that being on these teams might facilitate that. But everything was filtered through the realities of our house. I remember my parents arguing in another room, my mother yelling something about my father giving up his pretensions about living among professional men. In our neighborhood, there were doctors and lawyers and businessmen. Their waterfront homes were well kept, with boats lolling in canals in their backyards. It was easier to attract someone if you had a giant TV or a boat or a swimming pool with a gleaming barbecue nearby. Getting laid, I suppose, would have been easier if someone, anyone, had folded the laundry and cleaned the kitchen after baking a pile of chocolate chip cookies for my friends before we headed out on my boat. But that wasn’t my situation.
The mood in our house was tense. It seemed, at times, to be every man for himself. Trudging my lawn mower from house to house, cutting grass and all alone, didn’t seem appealing anymore. Also, I needed more money. Someone hooked me up with Steve, a tough guy who ran gangs of kids who cut grass and charged more money by calling it landscaping. Steve wanted to get this work over with as fast as possible, get his money and go party. So he’d drive us to a house, we’d leap out of the trailer, and hit the sidewalk. Steve would start his stopwatch. We had fifteen minutes, give or take with the size of the yard, to cut, edge, and blow before rolling on to the next house. Two or three guys handled mowers, and two guys worked with edging tools and blowers. I think he paid us by the house, not the hour. Perhaps I did it to be with the “squad,” as opposed to being by myself all summer while working.
There is an image I retain from high school, perfect in that it matches sight with sound, touch with smell. After football practice, my teammates went home to places where their uniforms were tossed into washers and dryers and came out clean and ready to be bundled into a gym bag and toted off to school the next morning. I often put my uniform, damp and soiled, back into my locker, unable to bring it home because our washing machine was broken and the following day was not one of the two days a week when we drove to the laundromat.
The image I can’t erase is of me standing along a curb, waiting for my mother to arrive with my clean uniform in time for afternoon practice. Behind me, my teammates walked from the locker room to the playing field. A perimeter roadway separated the building from the field area, and as they crossed it, I could hear their metal cleats striking the concrete. The procession went on for two minutes or so. I kept my back to them, straining to see my mother’s car, knowing I was late, convinced that each of these guys behind me knew I had no washing machine in my house. The team marched up a concrete staircase to the field level. By the time the sound stopped, they had all hit the grass, ready for warfare. I was still in my street clothes. When my mother came, she handed me the clothes, sometimes actually wet, moaned her excuse, and left.
After playing football in ninth grade, I came to my sophomore year with a very big chip on my shoulder. I began to wonder, had I not bothered to suit up, would they have even noticed. I felt like I didn’t want to be there and they didn’t care either way. My sophomore year, I walked off the field and quit the team. The coach was an acquaintance of my dad and, unbeknownst to me, the strings were pulled to get me back on the team. My father drove me to the school himself on a Saturday, which was rare and a clear sign of how much this all meant to him. I went in, sat and listened, and walked out. When I got in the car, my father seemed anxious. A father wants to believe, particularly as a child grows up and is no longer a baby in the arms of its mother, that he will help guide and advise his children. This is his time, when he wants to teach them how to make difficult decisions, especially his sons. He wants them to listen and heed his advice. I told him that I had not taken the coach up on his offer and that I would not rejoin the team. And although he accepted that it was useless to make me do it, I could feel something change between us. My father, pretty reticent to begin with, didn’t speak to me for a month.
I had been hanging out with guys whose parents didn’t want them around. We shared a need to temporarily run away, for different reasons, all wanting somewhere to go that wasn’t home. Sometimes we would pop into someone’s house to take liquor or money. But what mattered was that we were outdoors, cracking jokes, smoking cigarettes, or drinking beer year-round. In the dead of winter, we were outside, keeping the flame burning, literally. This crowd didn’t drink or smoke pot more than the football team, who were among the more degenerate drinkers and partyers I’d ever known but whose athletic status gave them a legitimacy that the street kids lacked. I didn’t fit in either place, but this gang seemed easier at the time. I didn’t feel that I was better than them, although many of them struggled greatly in school. But at least I didn’t feel like I was less than them either.