I Somehow Survive What Used to Be Called Junior High School: Part 2

Coming soon: Johnny Enters Santa Monica High School, and Lives to Tell the Tale!

I am here depicted with the other short boys in my graduating class. That’s Doug Treadway right behind me. In third grade, reading aloud, he’d pronounce the indefinite article — a — to rhyme with day. It annoyed me then and it annoys me today when politicians do, trying to sound all fancy and shit.

[Part 1, if you missed it, is below. It isn’t imperative that you start there, but I appreciate that my on-the-spectrum subscribers will be uncomfortable reading Part 2 first.]

The thing to be at OWJHS was a surfer. Having been terrified of the water, as I was terrified of so much as a child, I hadn’t yet learned to swim. The thing not to be at OWJHS was a Negro — though Walter Daniels, the school’s sole black kid, managed it by being brilliant at sports — or a spastic like Billy Snyder, who inspired the most fervent sadism I have ever witnessed close up. One tormentor, on his left, would engage him in conversation, while an accomplice, on Billy’s right, would spit, unobserved by Billy, into Billy’s little carton of milk. And not once did I see anyone try to intervene on his behalf.

I was a staunch non-intervenor, and my self-loathing was never more stratospheric than at OWJHS, nor my self-confidence ever lower. My winning the school’s annual creative writing contest two years running didn’t help at all. The closest I came to anyone even noticing my presence was as a percussionist in Senior Orchestra. All eyes would be on me for about a millisecond as I played a roll on a kettledrum while two other students traipsed proudly down the sides of the big auditorium with the American and California flags. I have never been able to play a proper roll, but it’s easy to fake one on tympani.

There were no sock hops at OWJHS. There were sportsnites. Once having ascertained that one wasn’t required actually to speak to the coed with whom he was slow-dancing, I slow-danced to Mr. Acker Bilk’s “Strangers on the Shore” and Percy Faith’s “Theme From a Summer Place” with girls with whom I’d never have dreamed of trying to converse. I was dancing with Barbara Myers, the thought of whom had enriched no few self-pleasuring sessions, one evening when the least desirable girl in the LAUSD, Diane G— cut in. Babs, as no one called her, was probably much relieved, and I, in turn, mortified. A hotshot such as I could hardly be seen dancing with Diane fucking G—, could he? To my immense discredit, I excused myself after around four bars. Sixty-three years after the fact, I remain ashamed of having done so,

Adolescence is no day at the beach for anyone, but no words can describe how excruciating it was to be a paralyzingly shy, very horny 14-year-old at OWJHS when two of the world’s foremost beauties were there too.

One day in my third and final year, the campus fell strangely silent, not because the USA and USSR had started firing nuclear missiles at each other, but because Marilyn Monroe had enrolled at OWJHS. It turned out that she wasn’t Marilyn at all, but a ninth grader named Patty Wymer, who looked exactly like her. Every heterosexual male on campus was dumbstruck. Not, of course that we didn’t already have Elizabeth Taylor’s double among us, in the form of Susan Pursell, to whom I anonymously sent packets of surfing-related cartoons at one point, to no avail. (I found her on Facebook a few years ago, when she was bed-ridden and apparently dying. We had never exchanged a syllable at OWJHS. She told me that one of my messages had made her laugh. When we were in our mid-teens, I don’t think my sparkling wit would have stood up very long in comparison to the feats of the handsome high school surfers and athletes with their own cars she was thought to date.)

From around seven, I had yearned in vain to be athletically gifted, but at OWJHS one got to be on the various all-star teams just by maintaining a spotless attendance record at after-school sports. Which isn’t to deny that I actually scored in the A9s vs. B9s basketball game. I was standing under the basket, trying to look as though I knew what I was doing, when a teammate’s air ball came right to me. I tossed it back up against the backboard, and it descended through the net. It might have been the greatest moment of my life to that point, better than a thousand creative writing awards, though said awards came with a $5 ($83.64 in 2025 money) credit at a local book shop.

At graduation, the student body president and other popular kids would deliver brief addresses, but there was a speechwriting contest, whose winner would get to sit up on stage with the great and good and deliver his or her own, uh, remarks. I won it, with my visionary composition Where Are We Going in Science? Naturally, it was purest bullshit. I remember only the stirring last line. “We can, and indeed must [do something or other science-y], not only for ourselves, but for generations to come.” My parents were proud of me. I was always uncomfortable with their being proud me, as I was so not-proud of myself.