"I was born lost and take no pleasure in being found." John Steunbeck (this not true of any writer...) .
*note Gladiator Skool is the name of a very long poem about my childhood,something you are getting in easily digestible bites here.
u am not a psychopath/ sociopathic personality..
i was, to use olde southern term "raised rough"..
PS 133.
in the olde days NYC schools were numbered by the number that they were built and kids were "left back: if they did not pass as expected my first school was a mere two blocks from my house and fairly modern,for Harlem< and i was terrorized by a chickenpox scarred girl bully named Corina Heard (may she roast in 7 hells). who had been left back three times and took her anger out on the rest of us and even tho i sorta liked school i feared her ( and my Mother).
PS 119..
for reasons yet unknown to me i was abruptly transferred to a dungeon school, a half mile away, PS 119, now up until them i'd had an ordinary *ACA abusive childhood being hypervigialnt in the face of alcoholism and abrupt mood swings, Father and Mother respectively...
this school as fearsome..it was old,older than most of the teachers and it had steeel doors which locked you in all day and high walls with those pointy spear tips atop them,it was awesome in all the worse ways and..altho it was an elementary school it had teens who had been left back repeatedly before graduating to a life of crime,prison and.or the military..i cannot emphasize enuff how fucking scary this place was with its long dark halls and scary toilets.
why were the toilets scary you ask?...these teens who were going nowhere and knew it, were the terror of the toilets and most had been to juvie,so if you had to piss or shit you had to pay a toll,usually your lunch money and if you didn't they stole your pants...they literally stole your pants ans sent you back to class in your underwear...Mother would've killed me if i lost my pants.
WTF? what the unholy fuck? dread Microsoft just updated my new PC and kicked me offline with no warning!!!!!.
luckily this screed was still intact to resume,
where was i?
shit, yes i shit my pants one fine day and walked home stinky just to avoid the scary toilets, i am not one to live in terror,except at home then, so my buddy Edward who was pantsed frequently and cried about it and was a role model on what NOT to be...a victim...so i allied myself with an older delinquent in my same grade, he too had been left back for failing all his tests..his name was,i shit you not,Charles Cain, and i played lookout while he stole money from our teachers purse (Mrs.Watt who was even older than the school. Cain's goals was to steal enuff money to buy snax and build zip guns (hand made ghetto firearms much like the Viet Cong)..we got caught of course and Mother placed me under virtual house arrest for the next decade or so.....
PS 197..
they built a new school right across the street from the projects where i lived and i was transferred with many others in mid 4th Grade...now in those days of left back kids the classes were numbered ,probably to shame others, so 6 -1 was the smartest class and 6 -2 below that etc etc etc.
i was in 6 -1, in no way was i the smartest kid in the class, that honor belonged to most of the girls and the biracial Bjorn Houston,both of whose parents were doctors as he was also being groomed to be.we were all groomed to be "a credit to your race" which i later learned meant college and staying out of prison and maybe being featured in the high brow black zines JET or EBONY (Mother subscribed to both along with Life,Look and The Readers Digest altho she seldom had spare time to read them when not working or hogging the sole telephone-tangent completed?
.so we got to stock the school library (the first school i'd ever been in to have one...thanx Miss Lewton 5th Grade ) and to indulge in my 6th Grade teacher's hobby of ethnic folk dancing from around the globe (which is why i dislike dancing to this very day and the more mature girls would grind against you when slow dancing ...leaving you with blue balls and a painful shaming boner which they then laughed at) we had to perform routinely for the entire school which lead to shaming and bullying from those outside 6-1.
so aside from the usual bullying ,which stopped with my sudden growth spurt in 5 th Grade, they treated me well there...except that when my Father died they did nothing, nothing!
i got a few days off while they consoled Mother then i was expected to resume classes as tho nothing had happened...i was in mourning and it was ignored so i began acting out and smart mouthing until i became a regular at the Principal's office.( i saw a huge reed UA on my class files for Under Achiever)...somehow i got thru it despite a half hearted -broken hearted effort and drawing monsters and villains and The Batman thru most of my classes.....i even won First Prize in a school finger panting art contest which my folk dancing obsessed teacher (Miss B.Alleyne who drove a Cadillac convertible) entered me in..it was a Viet Namese peasant in a rice paddy like i'd seen in a magazine.....
JHS 139..
the same sadists who designed and built PS 119 built my junior high,only larger, in addition to the concrete handball courts it had two full sized basketball courts which were always in use, weather permitting.
like 119 we were locked in behind steel doors and steel grill covered windows all day.... the entire fifth floor was for teens doing time until they were old enuff to graduate or be kicked out into the real world......i was in an SP class Special Progress which meant we did three years in two only to go to high school immature and undersized...BFD!..
everyone shoplifted small stuff from the Woolworths across the street which is why i became a loayl patron as an adult.....this was the first school where it became routine for teachers and often the cops to search us for stolen goods and weapons (zip guns and swtichblades were all the rage ibn those days) .....
nobody stole my pants as i was now over six feet tall lean and mean and used the wrestling moves i learned watching TV with Father.. the first day of school our timid teacher,Mrs.Williams, stood by as our nasty drunk gym teacher Mr.Churchill cold cocked a loud mouth student Theodore Hellinger and left him weeping on the floor..we all learned lessons in survival that day..
FUCK, this was much longer and more painful than i expected..basta y basta.
mind the gap
namaste
mega...
