One of the subjects in which I have always excelled has been English, due to my large vocabulary. This, in turn, promoted very good if not excellent writing, at least when it came to term papers and such. As a result, while I was at Juvie I was placed in Advanced Placement English courses, which provided College Credit.
My first Semester – the Summer Semester – I was placed in AP Sophomore English, and my Teacher was Dad’s current flame – Tessa. She was an attractive twentysomething who supposedly had an IQ in the 180 range. She liked to dress up in tarty clothes and go out on the town, and she liked to show her pictures off to her students. She was an Intellectual and read voraciously. I also learned later (from Dad) that she was obsessed with Vampires and something of a hedonist. She had a four-year-old son, Charlie, who swore like a sailor, because of his Mom’s influence. In any case, we spent most of the semester discussing lofty Intellectual concepts rather than doing schoolwork.
One of the things that made the Summer Semester so great was, Tessa’s mother, Dawn, gave me the key to her Classroom. I was able to go in there any time I wanted and play on her Commodore 64 Computer, which I did often. She had an Adventure Construction Set (I think by famous game designer Bill Budge) which you could use to create games. (I tried to make a copy of it for my personal use, but the disk never worked properly due to Copy Protection.) I also remember playing a lot of the old space trading game Elite with Alan, a boy I’ve mentioned earlier.
One time I got in a fight over the room. I was told to never let anyone into this classroom that didn’t have her personal approval, and one day my room-mate followed me to the door and demanded to be allowed entry. I refused to do so. We grappled for awhile and threw each other around, and then he grabbed my head and slammed it into his knee. I slipped quickly into the door and locked it behind me, from the other side of which the boy shouted curses. Another boy who witnessed the fight called me “quite a fighter,” which I thought was strange, since I definitely wasn’t one.
Juvie had a small parking lot between two Dorms where students were permitted to smoke, even though cigarettes were not sold on Campus and students had to bring them from outside. This smoking area also doubled as a “Fighting Pit,” and two students who had a beef with one another would gather there to duke it out with fisticuffs. The two Duelists would square off in the center of the parking lot, and almost the entire school would gather around, hooting and hollering. I don’t ever remember staff members breaking these fights up, and I have no idea why they didn’t.
My next Semester – in the Fall – I was placed in AP Junior English, and the entire class was resentful of me because a 14-year-old boy was attending such an Advanced course. Understandable, really. The teacher was Dawn, the mother of Tessa, and she was even more of an Intellectual than Tessa was. She was an aged, dignified woman – the type who wore glasses with a neck chain or strap. We spent most of the semester talking about Transcendentalism, and Dawn was obsessed with Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Thoreau, and Walt Whitman. She spend hours gabbing on the axiom carpe diem, or “seize the day.” She was about living life to its fullest, but her actual life was rather boring.
Dawn also headed up the Academic Team, both Varsity and Junior Varsity. I was on the Junior Varsity Team. We would go around to various Public and Private schools in the area, answering academic questions in a “Game Show” format and competing for points. I was a terrible competitor. Because of my awful home-schooled education, I had nowhere near the amount of knowledge to answer most of the questions. I was dead weight. Most of the success we had was due to Robbie and Chuck, the last names of whom I can’t remember at the moment. They were two vicious, sarcastic youngsters who heavily resented me and another paperweight on our team, Thomas, precisely because we were useless. I remember me and Tom had a little joke where if we didn’t know the answer to a question about an author, we would simply guess James Thurber every time.
I remember there was a brilliant young man named William on the varsity team, who answered maybe 75% of all the questions in competition, and got most of them right. He was a lanky, Bill-Gates looking fellow who was obsessed with proper pronunciation. I remember him insisting in a tirade one time that “root” is supposed to be pronounced like “foot,” not “roof.” I also remember he claimed to be almost finished with a novel which basically amounted to an Outer Space Western.
I remember one time on a trip with the Academic Team, somehow the conversation among the students turned to automatic weapons. I bellowed, “Yeah, those are great because you don’t have to aim, you just have to point and wave!” Dawn snapped at me, “Don’t talk about things you don’t know anything about. It just makes you look like an idiot.” (I learned later that automatic weapons do, indeed, require aiming.)
I was considered the “Ditz” of the Academic Team. I was always forgetting things and misunderstanding concepts, and one of Dawn’s assistants (forget his name), a portly fellow, was always telling me I should have been born blonde. I think it’s funny how everywhere else in my life I was considered a Genius, but when I encountered the exceptional students at Juvie, I was basically an Idiot. This is a metaphor, I think, for my whole life experience. Coddled and pampered, and shielded from any true competition out there, and thus unable to function when confronted with it.
The Academic Team also promoted a Field Trip of sorts, where the students would travel to the State Capitol, Frankfort, to take part in a “junior legislative session:” writing bills, submitting them to the floor, arguing for and against them, voting on them, and passing resolutions. It worked just like the House or Senate did in the state. I felt intimidated by all of this and attended only as a “Page,” which meant I spent my time delivering messages between offices. I also sat in on a lot of legislative sessions. I remember one time I got extremely angry because the legislative body wouldn’t pass a law forbidding abortion, despite what I thought was an obvious argument that it should be illegal. (Most of the participants were from public schools across the state.)
Before I left for this “Field Trip,” Tessa came up to me and complimented me on the suit I was wearing. She told me I would certainly be attractive to girls, and if anything happened in the hotels, it was part of the maturation process and I should “go for it.” She basically insinuated that I was definitely going to have sex at some point during the trip, and gave her stamp of approval. (Dad just stood behind her and said nothing, looking dumbfounded.) Of course, I was completely ignored by all the girls, and that never happened.
My time in Dawn’s class and academic team took a dark turn when I failed to complete a term paper on time, and I was facing an F in a part of the class that comprised the majority of the grade. I was saved, as usual, by being removed from the school at the last minute.
That’s about enough for today. I’ll conclude this series on Juvie in the next entry (hopefully). I wonder why I remember so much about it? My whole time there comprised a little less than a year, but it has taken up two entries thus far. My entries on previous times in my life are much shorter. I guess so many things stick out in my mind because the experiences were highly unusual and mostly negative. We remember bad things better than good, after all.