My Co-Conspirator in High School

My best friend during high school, Jackie, helped me get through high school.  We were inseparable.  I introduced her to bicycling and LSD; she introduced me to the art of dance, Bob Dylan, and the history of the 1960’s.  I would spend the night at her house and we would wake up the next morning and start talking…one day we laid in bed and talked until 4pm nonstop. 

Jackie and I managed to make high school fun some of the time.  We would bring vodka to school and drink it in the girls’ bathroom.  I’ll never forget going to Algebra class drunk.  The teacher asked, “What is wrong with you today?”  We would also smoke pot before school or at lunch time.  I’ll never forget going to History class, where we read Newsweek magazines on Fridays and trying not to crack up over whatever it was that I was reading.  I was totally paranoid I was going to get busted.

When we started driving at 16, we would get on the highway and smoke pot until we were too stoned to drive any further.  We would get off at whatever exit we happened to be at and find the nearest restaurant to get our munchie fix.

We also did LSD a few times, which was a blast.  We never did it at school, but we did do it before going to the final school-hosted high school graduation party.  We really had no interest in going to this stupid party, but there was nothing else to do, so we dropped some acid and went and had a great time.

High School Pretty Much Sucked

I don’t know how I made it through high school.  I was so unhappy.  Not quite depressed, but definitely not happy.  I had fun and was happy at times, but I hated school and didn’t care for most of my school mates.  There were at least 1,500 kids in my school, neatly divided into clicks.  There were the stoners (working class kids), the popular kids, the black kids (there weren’t many of them but their status was somewhere near the status of the popular kids), the nerds, and the punkers.

 

I was kind of preppie and probably belonged in the popular click, but I didn’t like the popular people all that much.  I kind of fit in with the punkers because of my reckless attitude and drug use.  At the same time, I kind of fit in with the nerds because I was apparently “smart” and they liked me, but I wasn’t a thoroughbred nerd because I didn’t look nerdy, I had cool friends, and I didn’t give a f^ck about doing well in school.  I had no aspirations for the future, so grades didn’t matter.  It was just a fluke that I did well in school, because I sure as hell wasn’t trying.