High School

High School

The Best Years of Your Life?

As fourteen-year-olds entering high school during the 1960’s, my friends and I were blissfully ignorant of the social turbulence created by the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights Movement. We were more consumed by feral thoughts about sex and how to get to first base with a girl, any girl. The catch being, none of us knew where first base was; let alone what to do once we got there. Arriving at first, do we slide or go in standing up?

It was a mystifying time. Formal sex education was non-existent. Our primary option was sneaking a peek at the dog-eared copy of Playboy magazine (Miss March, blonde, big bazooms),  that my friend Tony always kept handy in case one of us had a run-away puberty attack. 

Given our lack of knowledge, I concluded that the freshman girls were smarter and had much headier thoughts than we boys. They were trickier too. They knew where first base was, but they weren’t talking. I was convinced they were thinking more thoughtful things like how does my hair look, is my slip showing, and why aren’t my boobs as big as that cheerleader, Darlene?

Next to finding first base, I was preoccupied with figuring out ways to get out of taking a shower with the thirty-five other sweaty, self-conscious freshman boys after our mandatory P.E. classes. Granted, P.E. taught us valuable skills like butt towel snapping, playing drop the soap, and how to make farting sounds with our armpits, but regrettably none of these abilities ever translated into any lasting, transferable skill sets that one could place on their resume with any amount of pride.

At our freshman orientation, the girls were marched off into a separate, well guarded building where they were instructed by the dean of girls how to avoid contact with horny, pimply-faced freshman boys whose only goal in life was to get to first base with them. The boys were sequestered in the school gym where a lingering haze of foot powder permeated the air making everyone’s eyes water uncontrollably. Our dean began by admonishing us to always wear a jock strap during P.E. class. He then had the school’s football coach demonstrate how to properly fit one of these slingshots on our ‘boys’ by using a headless tackling dummy with a small, but virile looking, cucumber and a pair of golf balls strapped to its pelvic area with duct tape, as his model.  After his demonstration, he suggested we check ourselves daily for jock rash, athletes’ foot, and other fatal contagions pubescent boys are easily prone to. Sure, no problem, I thought, let me take a peek at my ‘boys’ during my English class. That should win me points with my classmates.The rest of the year, I was obsessed with trying to impress a girl in my second hour biology class by belching the alphabet on the way into the classroom. Not the best strategy, but it was all I had. My logic was, surely she would be impressed with my improvisational skills so much so that she would spill the beans to me where first base was. No luck. Failing this, I began plotting where to sit in my last hour Algebra class in order get the attention of the bosomy blonde sitting in the front of me all while our algebra teacher droned on about everything but algebra. His favorite subject matter was speaking to the possibility of alien spacecrafts infiltrating our air defenses. Once, he was so wrapped up in his out of the world theories, the entire class sat transfixed watching him as an enormous fly took a unhurried stroll across his cheek, over his nose and crossed over to the other cheek. I was ready to scream at him, for god’s sake man, there’s a fly crawling all over your face, but before I could work up the nerve, he finally moved his hand up to shoo it away. Not surprisingly, I learned little math that semester and the bosomy blonde in front of me, Bambi, my fantasy name for her, never looked my way.