Let's Go!

The red four square balls sailed through the air, bound to knock a player out, crossing the street-yellow complexities of lines, boxes, corners. The soft small rain drifted through the doug firs that sealed the Ainsworth annex off from the strange big and vaguely haunted house below (once a country club I hear, then dilapidated but occupied, now gone) and the grey rush of Vista above. The fourth and fifth graders had their own remote domain exiled away from the red brick kingdom of the old school down below. I was in Miss Madden’s class: she read us ‘Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing’ and taught us how to get a sun tan at recess (‘You can feel where the sun is with your eyes closed’) and had her coffee cup half full of Diet Pepsi, which at the time I thought was scandalous. This place was strange. Next door, Mr. Gable’s class. He was fun and rambunctious; he had no compunction about dominating the lunch-time four-square battles on sunny days. I learned what spring fever was, not from being told by him, but hearing other teachers talk about him. I went to math in Mr. Gable’s room for parts of some mornings, like that rainy one. It was not—I don’t think—his expert math instruction that shunted me to his class, but because there was a back corner of his room with a small work area (tables, chairs), enclosed in low bookshelves, near the brown streaked linoleum and a sink and one of those ancient pink powder soap dispensers. I had no idea why I was in ‘advanced math’ nor did I think about it: it could have been some fortunate bubbling of test sheets or some parental remark to the ‘right’ person or something else, but I was in this advanced math group and it was terrifying. Zan, Elisabeth, Karen, they all seemed to move through the worksheets with ease. I didn’t even like to pick one up, knowing the work it took to get through it. Back by the sink, faking my way through—it was like mime, which I had just learned about in a library unit on Marcel Marceau, whom Ladybug Anderson reported she actually got to meet one time—I listened to Terry Butler talking about this movie called ‘Rock ‘N’ Roll High School’. It scared me witless. At this place, in that time, whether one wanted to or not, it was imperative to proclaim allegiance to the Rolling Stones and to the Grateful Dead; this may have been because of their logos (the Stones’ tongue, the Dead’s ‘steal your face’ skull), just as it was imperative to proclaim allegiance to Izod and the even more exalted (and at that point very rare) Polo, again, probably because of the logos (Izod’s alligator and Polo’s polo player). Ainsworth was a cut-throat social hierarchy and these sorts of markers were complexly performed and displayed as some possibly non-existent circle of insider popular kids passed irreversible judgments: it was like Olympic figure skating: bladed and icy, but smiles all around, as on the day when, on the steps of the auditorium after music class, Matt Chick looked at my clothes—I had somehow got a hold of a long sleeved striped alligator shirt which I wore as often as good sense allowed—and asked, ‘Are those Levi red tags?’. It was too late to pull the shirt tails lower. ‘Umm, no’. ‘Too bad’, he said, ‘so close’. When a non-Rolling Stones and non-Grateful Dead (a band I actually had never even heard in my cable television trollings for ‘Video Concert Hall’ and certainly not on the radio) reference was made, I grew gelatinously cold, knowing it best not to say anything. This could be a test. Work sheet rustling, pencil sharpening, quiet withdrawal to the math table. And Karen was there with her worksheet. ‘Matt, do you know the answer?’ And, I, idiotically (in perpetuity) confessed: ‘I never heard of the Ramones’. Karen looked at me very funny. ‘No. The question’. I was doomed. Now another kid knew I didn’t know who the Ramones were. Were they part of the canon like the newly anointed Police? Would I get another ‘too bad so close’? A blow as brutal as any the years of Toughskins and liking M’s ‘Pop Muzik’ could offer. ‘Let’s try and do the question’ she said. I think I felt the air cool my tense skin. I ventured a look. ‘The problem?’. We shoved our chairs together. I only found out years later she loathed advanced math like I did and felt just as much an alien there. I was out by the end of the year anyway. And the Ramones weren’t so scary. They attack the 1960s angrily, longingly, and with stupid sweetness; they look back like I look back.

The Ramones - Do You Remember Rock 'N' Roll Radio?