As I headed from the comfy eight grade at Washington Junior High School in Mount Vernon, New York to the new grown-up ninth grade at the building shown above, I had more fears than usual. This was a new world and, unlike what Aldous Huxley thought, not a brave one as far as I was concerned. This was the first official game changer of my life.
From kindergarten to the eighth grade, I was snug as a bug in the school system sequestered in my local neighborhood. Up to the sixth grade at Grimes School, four blocks from my house. The seventh and eighth grade at the aforementioned Washington Junior High, nine blocks from my house. All within walking distance. You generally went home for lunch, giving you a sandwich and an hour of television that broke up the dreary day. It was all so carefree and easy.
Even better, I had classmates that had traveled with me all through those years. Some of became good friends. Our mothers got chummy. Lots of nighttime phone calls trading gossip and homework assignments. Bonding together against the teaching pain-in-the-ass-de-jour. Like it or not, we had all fallen into a wonderfully comfortable warm sweater of a lifestyle.
On the eighth grade day we donned those caps and gowns and marched around to "Pomp and Circumstance," I doubt that any of us realized how our lives would hit the reset button in just two short months. Because we were leaving our cocoon. Back then, all the elementary and junior high schools in Mount Vernon would siphon directly into one big silo.
The high school.
Indeed, we were thrown an even sharper curveball with this prospect. Back in that day, they were building a new Mount Vernon High School way over on the far side of the moon. Except they finished this construction in spurts and, for a while, they only had enough room for grades ten through twelve. No worries, said the schmucks at the Board of Education. Temporarily, we can host the ninth grades at the old high school facilities, which was formerly A.B. Davis High School. They renamed it the High School Annex and that was our home for the ninth grade.
An old building with no bells and few whistles, the Annex was not as far away as the new high school. But, for me, it was far enough. A very, very long walk away. Certainly there would be no more lunch hours at home. Out the window went my daily Taylor Ham sandwich and the Hollywood Squares. I would be in school from beginning of the day to the very end. Gee, even prisoners at Sing Sing got more perks.
I dreaded the oncoming Annex for all those reasons. And more.
On the very first day, I crawled up those never-ending stairs (see above) to the fortress on a hill as high as Mount Fuji. I walked into my homeroom and looked around.
All strangers to me.
My grade school pals and I had been thrown into a human-being mix master and now we were all on our own. And forced to socialize with people we had never met before. All this and goddamn geometry, too. Do these Annex windows open and can I throw myself out one of them?
To make matters even horrid, our class schedules were not as a group, but an individual. Each student was his or her own island. You travel around by yourself from appointed subject to appointed subject. There was no longer safety in numbers.
You were on your own.
Gasp.
I remember that my very first class in the AM was Social Studies. Because of my grades, I was in the upper echelon of students and usually in what they called "Level 1." As I arrived for my daily hour with Mr. Crews, I looked around at these people I didn't know. For the first time in my entire school life to date, my entire class was...White.
I had grown up on the South Side of Mount Vernon. It was predominantly Black but that's where I went to school because that's where I lived. I had heard rumors that the North Side of Mount Vernon was very different. This was complete validation.
Those kids were all White.
And, in another new phenomenon to me, mostly all Jewish.
From my vantage point, the North Side of Mount Vernon might as well have been Mars.
I mean, up to this point in my life, I probably knew no more than two Jewish kids. Of course, back at home, we had Jewish neighbors. But they were all senior citizens and likely crossed the sea with Moses. My mom had a Jewish friend with two children. But that was it.
Now I finally figured out why the Mount Vernon School System always gave us those September High Holy Days off. It was a big deal for those kids on the tonier side of the train tracks.
Wandering around the school premises from aimless class to aimless class, I felt incredibly alone. Every so often, I would run into an old grade school friend in passing through the hallways. I had the urge to hug and/or kiss them. But this huge melting pot would force me to branch out and...horrors...make some new friends.
Like it or not.
Generally, you'd wind up talking to the kids sitting in class around you. Because we were often seated alphabetically, you suddenly found that your social world orbited around last names with letters that were four or five away from your own last name. How limiting was that? In this manner, it was very unlikely for me to be friends with somebody named either Anderson or Williams.
You, of course, got tossed into a lunch period and, once again, I was lost. I knew no one in my lunch period and was forced to make snap judgments on the accessibility of people I barely knew. I noticed that a lot of the Jewish kids from the North Side were incredibly good looking. And, sadly, they knew it. And that's one of a thousand reasons why I would take my lunch tray of a Sloppy Joe sandwich with a side of lime Jell-O and move on.
I had to pick a lunch table carefully. You wanted to find kids who were nerdy enough looking to accept you, but not nerdy enough looking to get laughed at by everybody else.
I spotted a group of three guys. Acne, glasses, and horrible color coordination of wardrobe. Perfect. And they let me right in. One of the kids was in my social studies class. We had some sort of feeble connection. I looked around at them. All had brought their lunch from home. I started to do so as well. A daily sandwich of Taylor Ham and mustard on a roll. Plus a piece of fruit.
I had made friends. Well, lunch table acquaintances.
Meanwhile, as I wandered aimlessly from class to class, I tried to cope with this new all-day-at-school phenomenon. There was an English class with Mrs. Taylor, who looked sixty but probably was no more than 30. She professed that her life was made richer by not having a television at home. Despite this lunacy, I thoroughly enjoyed the tour she led through great American literature. I read some classics.
Geometry class was led by some bearded, young hippie who liked to flirt with the girls. I have heard since that he did more than flirt and he apparently liked to get some of the prettier students into some of his own obtuse angles. While I had always been good at math, I had no feel for these rhomboids and tangents. I barely squeaked by.
In our ninth grade world, you had to take some electives to fill out your already torturous day. I took a Current Events class and we all had to read the New York Times every morning. The teacher instructed us on how to fold the newspaper so you could read it easily on the subway. Huh?
To appease my dad, I took a typing class with Miss Flynn who might have been there the day the first Smith Corona rolled off the assembly line. My father wanted to know that I learned something worthwhile in school. He even made me type in front of him at home. I got an A plus from Miss Flynn and a B minus from Dad.
Much to my chagrin, you still had to take gym class in high school. But, since the classes were much bigger, you could easily lose yourself under the bleachers on those days when they were doing dreaded gymnastics. I'd keep moving to the end of the line and then, if I timed it right, the bell would ring and I'd never have to do a forward roll. All achieved without the usual note from the school nurse.
In the now more racially-balanced gym class at the Annex, I discovered one benefit from this new mix of students. Prior to this year, most of the kids in my gym class were Black. While I'm not subscribing to a stereotype here, they were all terrific athletes. And I always looked spastic. The last to be picked for any team of any sport.
But at the Annex, there were more White and Jewish guys. And I discovered that I was not the only clod in Mount Vernon, New York. There were kids who sucked equally on the North Side. I remember one dude in particular. He threw like a girl and I think he later became one. Suddenly, I was the one on the sidelines giggling at somebody's ineptitude. Thanks to him, I was now the next-to-last to be picked for any team of any sport. Success!
When the day ended and the final bell rang, I'd crawl down that big staircase which never seemed to be cleared of snow or ice during the winter. I would walk down to the church on the corner and wait for the city bus that would wind its way around downtown Mount Vernon until it eventually hit my home street corner.
Sitting there on the church steps with my book bag, I would think back about my schooling prior to the ninth grade. Why had that been so easy and wonderful while the Annex was so hard and rigorous? Every afternoon, I would lose myself in the past and detest the future. It was depression that arrived on time every day just like that bus I was waiting for.
During the spring of that ninth grade, I was still there waiting for that bus every day. But I noticed my lunch room/social studies acquaintance also passed on his walk home. We'd always have a comment or a funny line ready for each other. We discovered that we were both Met fans. As baseball began, our bus stop dialogue usually included a reference to last night's game or the one scheduled for that night. It all became very seamless as we wandered our way into a friendship.
Who knew that, decades later, he would remain as one of my very closest of friends?
So, despite all the angst and drama of an uncertain ninth grade, there was one singular benefit of it all.
A lifelong friend.
Dinner last night: Turkey burger at the Pig N' Whistle.
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