Finish High School at Home: A Novel

By Charles S. Clark

The 60s have flickered into the 70s, and hippie influences have trickled down to the high school. A charismatic young messiah quits college and returns to his old high school to lead the kids in an anti-racism demonstration. The students are catalyzed and rise up to battle the suburban power structure. The trouble starts when this 60s legend is shown to be losing touch with reality. Our narrator struggles to understand the messiah's descent, postponing all planning for college as he and his friends take on the social Darwinist hierarchy of high school. The more comic the events, the deeper the menace grows as this dizzying senior year unfolds.

The clash of forces comes during a seminal era when the anti-war movement, feminism, counterculture and black power combined to singe the letter-sweaters and pom-pons of classic high school culture. "As so often happens when history is being made, youth becomes the conscience of society," says our narrator in his belated college application. "But there were fissures in our ranks we all hailed from different social categories."

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Mar 23, 2000
• ISBN: 9781469773070

Charles S. Clark

Charlie Clark is a senior editor with an education association in Washington DC. A former staff writer and editor with Congressional Quarterly, The Washington Post, National Journal and Time-Life Books, he regularly publishes freelance feature, commentary and humor articles. He lives in Arlington, VA, with his wife and two daughters.

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All Rights Reserved © 2000 by Charles S. Clark

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the publisher.

Published by Writers Club Press an imprint of iUniverse.com, Inc.

For information address: iUniverse.com, Inc. 620 North 48th Street Suite 201 Lincoln, NE 68504-3467 www.iuniverse.com

ISBN: 0-595-09173-3

ISBN: 978-1-4697-7307-0 (ebook)

Printed in the United States of America

Contents

Epigraph

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Epilogue

To

Ellen, who let me

Epigraph

A human being will often choose another human being from whom he must compel recognition, in whose eyes and behavior he seeks to read, to make graphic, the whole truth of his own identity.

—Hegel

You’re still young, that’s your fault. There’s so much you have to go through.—

Cat Stevens

Chapter One

Golden State University

Admissions Application, page 4

What was your most interesting high school experience? (You may attach additional sheets if necessary.)

AUGUST 1970

My friend Norman was a natural student leader. Except that his leadership skills lay buried in some prolonged latency phase.

So I can’t say he led our march on the Zoysiadale Country Club. He did accept being jostled and shoved and ignored while he slouched inside our half-disciplined oval of starry-eyed high school protesters.

Shut up and chant! squeaked our frizzy-haired comrade as someone’s elbow knocked his glasses askew. It was less a command than a suggestion.

This was a fine day for losing one’s political virginity, and we were dead-set upon it. We had homemade placards sprayed with exclamation marks (in school colors!). We had news cameras trained on our stern faces. And we had the noblest cause in the history of the subdivision.

Only problem was, we hadn’t rehearsed any chants. There we were, courting danger in front of the club’s morally stained colonnades, late-summer breezes hinting of epic changes a-coming, and yet our slogans seeped through pitifully, out of unison, fading and canceling one another.

Zoysiadale unfair to…well, how should it go?

Racial justice…in the pools! Right?

SHHHHH! Practice swimming, not discrimination!…, well, you say it!

In panic, our group of 70 eyed one another uncertainly. Norman tried again, this time opening his jaws to let fly a philosophically explosive…nothing. The drivers cruising Sphagnum Street—indeed, even club members who were the target of our demo—ignored us. Until our unpromising launch was suddenly, majestically, set right.

Floating toward us from the club’s parking lot, like some statue that had stepped down from a pantheon, came the slow-striding figure of Ken. I spotted him first. I can still feel the way my Adam’s apple vaulted.

Smiling and with perfect choreography, Ken swung his arm to seize Norman’s bullhorn and commandeered our operation. The whole world is watching! The whole world is watching! Through the megaphone, the voice of authority seemed to bounce off the clouds.

The whole world is watching! We repeated it in sync. Now THAT was a chant.

The demo’s components fell in line like iron filings over a magnet. The placards danced authoritatively above the snaking line of teenagers. The pot-bellied television crewmen, slumping from the weight of their shoulder-mounts, crossed the street and trotted around our formation. Ken took his rightful place at the vanguard, as he had so often in the days when he was the most powerful political figure in our school.

August 25, 1970, my friend Rachel mouthed between chants. "Always pronounce the date, Marty. It helps you attend the moment!’’

And what a moment it was. Ken hadn’t been seen in Zoysiadale for over a year. Yet his charisma was fresh as morning. With that familiar upperclassman’s air, he stormed us back and forth, about-facing us like a halftime drill team. A college boy as our leader!

Ken looked older, his flaxen blond hair curling off wide shoulders, a trimmed, shallow dark beard riding his jutting square jaw. The adult-looking suit that had once made him stand out at Zoysiadale had been shed for a maroonish paisley shirt, a suede vest and curvy (yet manly) bellbottom jeans cinched to his belly by a buckleless rainbow-weave belt. His scuffed, tan boots hinted of faraway travels.

As we pounded the sidewalk in his footsteps, I felt like a player on Babe Ruth’s old sandlot team, watching the legend return to knock a few out of the park….

What’s with the notes, Marty? Are you part of the march or not? It was Lee, between chants, with today’s scolding. (At least she cared.)

Yes, impulsively, I had begun scribbling in my pad. And she doubtless assumed that as always, I was recording for the school paper.

For once she was only half-right. It was while taking those notes that I veered off and began pouring out the sort of diary, sort of scratch pad, sort of memo to the Gods of fate that would form the raw material for this essay.

The urge just ate me up. It was one of those moments when the present reattaches itself to the past, and suddenly, the future, well, screw it.

Honest, if Ken hadn’t shown that day, I might have slipped predictably into a senior year of laying out a grand plan for taking the future’s bull by the horns. I would have made myself up as one of your documented high school up-and-comers. And this application would have been in BEFORE deadline.

But the image of Ken, that style, that force. It flipped me back to an earlier era. What was it Ken had that I lacked, and yet still might obtain if I went back and worked on it? Until I learned, I couldn’t present myself with a straight face to a college….

From the hood of a squad car across the street, a monotoned voice crackled through a police megaphone: Stay on the sidewalk. You must stay off club property!

Look militant! Ken barked at our smiling marchers.

It was then I spotted Brink Satchell emerging from a stand of trees, sprinting up the winding lane that hugs the 18th fairway of the Zoysiadale golf course. As her tanned, dimpled thighs strained the hems of her stretch madras shorts, her arms pumped violently and her beehive hairdo swayed.

Mrs. Satchell scowled as she passed the small brick wall where we’d hung out and planned demo strategy. She waved briefly to the black caddies who sat propped on their haunches against the supply shed. She cleared the gateway in the hedgerows surrounding the putting green and turned onto the sidewalk facing the chalk doric columns of the clubhouse.

From our combat stations, we thrilled at the unfolding clash. This 25-hour-a-day PTA president, this specter who haunted the bleachers at every school sporting event (though she had no child on the teams), this buttinski who jumped at the slightest excuse to pop in on cam-pus—we had drawn her out!

To Mrs. Satchell, the march must have seemed just another youth prank. Round Eleven with the kids who used to summon five taxicabs to her house and then watch from the window and giggle. The kids who only a few years before had been caught sneaking in the club pool. The young generation that can’t even take a decent telephone message.

Marty, you sure the club is the bad guy here? Brent, the only club member we’d recruited for the demo, had picked mid-protest as a time to question our principles.

Your club’s been in the swimming league forever, Brent. I repeated the facts patiently while we were out of camera sights."It was only when the black swimmer joined another club’s team that Zoysiadale dropped out. THEN it gets revealed that the black swimmer is the daughter of a

U.S. ambassador. THEN it becomes a metropolitan news story. THEN…." Most Zoysiadalers thought the issue had blown over.

But as often happens when history is made, youth became the conscience of society. With no inkling that Ken Tenneson would arrive to lend his prestige, we high schoolers made up our minds to stir the pot of this black-and-white issue. We knew the step was irrevocable, one that might even blackball us from…future club membership!

Mrs. Satchell scanned us with disgust.

On the surface, of course, we had plenty to gloat about. No one had chickened out and run when Mrs. Satchell arrived; no one broke revolutionary ranks and let her hear them planning back-to-school wardrobes; and no one had to leave early to help his father clean the garage. We effectively created the impression that all we had to do after the demo was march mechanically home for some sex, drugs and rock and roll, or whatever we did to sap the nation’s youth of its will to fight Communism.

But what she couldn’t have known was that there were fissures in our ranks. The brave students who marched to build a better world all hailed from different high school social categories. Inevitably, their friction would distract us from our political principles—in ways the cameras could never show.

Norman, though he’d failed as chant leader, was so keyed by Ken’s presence that he repeatedly held up the procession to stuff his fist in the air and hang his head like a militant black Olympic athlete.

Brent, the traitor to his own Country Club, was so repulsed by Norman that he lowered his shoulder and rammed him for short yardage.

Lee, Zoysiadale’s first female student body president, simply refused to chant at Ken’s command, applying her startlingly basso voice to some rival sloganeering.

Rachel, who absolutely would not keep formation, kept pirouetting onto club property, which brought continuous blasts from the police.

Cedrick, the only actual black in our group, had arrived with three separate dashiki shirts, which he would alternate under cover of other demonstrators to convince news cameras that many blacks were marching. (His facial expression was the meanest in our arsenal, even if the Afro comb jutting from his pocket looked like Dennis the Menace’s slingshot.)

And finally, me. Though we all stretched our notions of reasonable risk, I single myself out for living dangerously. On the very day of the march, my parents expected me to be packed and riding with them to the airport. I was to take my first plane flight out West and vacation with them, swinging by the Golden State campus for a look-see. Instead, they got a note from me under the salt shaker. Said I was sorry to waste the airfare but I had to stay and right society’s wrongs.

And help with publicity for the cause. Like Graham Nash says, no one else could take my place. Certainly not the TV newsman or local press hacks. They had no inkling that clashes between Ken Tenneson and Brink Satchell reached back years in Zoysiadale history.

As the marchers struggled to maintain unity, Mrs. Satchell came to a stop on the club pelouse. She stared at us, her arms akimbo, and we continued chanting. Suddenly from behind her, the oak double doors of the clubhouse parted. From the mysterious sanctum stepped the white leisure shoes of Battlin’ Dave Pack, Mrs. Satchell’s colleague on the club’s Board of Directors. It was a bonus we had not foreseen.

As the area’s most visible Chevrolet dealer, Pack had bestowed on himself a nickname that touted his low-low prices through his incessant radio jingles. Since our early childhood, his metallic nameplate rode glued to a sizable share of Zoysiadale cars, and the plastic clock at the Zoysiadale Deli boasted of Dave Pack time. Such purchased prominence qualified him to speak on many important political issues.

As his silver hair and royal blue slacks glistened in the sunlight, Pack looked at the parking lot full of Cadillacs, drew his inspiration and bellowed: This is a private club. You kids must respect that! He drew closer and repeated it to the three closest girls in the picket line. You have no business passing judgment on club policies.

The girls eyed each other nervously as they chanted.

Fascist! somebody shouted.

Yeah, fascist! said the girls one by one. The club has too many fascists!

You children are violating the anti-loitering ordinance! Now, move on or we’ll call the police!

That was when Ken moved in. The police are already here, he chided Battlin’ Dave. And the anti-loitering law was repealed two years ago. I was there when the county board signed off on it.

The veins in Pack’s forehead looked ready to burst. I’ll take names. Your parents will be told. You kids have got to respect private property.

Ken replied by conducting nearby girls in a chorus from Pack’s radio ads. I’d give ‘em away but my wife won’t leeeet me! I’d give ‘em away….

The TV crew zoomed on Pack as he lumbered, sputtering, back toward the club.

Zoysiadale must play fair! we resumed chanting.

Swimming pools to the people!

Mrs. Satchell could stand it no longer. She headed purposefully toward our loop. The marchers turned up the volume. One, two, three four, ain’t gonna ‘scriminate no more!

Without searching the line, without stopping to commiserate with Pack, without asking who’s in charge, Mrs. Satchell beelined for Ken Tenneson. The cameras followed. And like drones piling around the queen bee, our formation collapsed as students gathered for the confrontation.

Ken grinned as the lady fascist approached him, rocked on his heels and stuffed his hands in his rear pockets. This, he said, is democracy in the streets.

Mrs. Satchell’s tone was schoolmarm sharp. If you students have opinions on public affairs, there are appropriate forums.

The snickering among marchers helped smother our fear. Each one knew that to be seen demonstrating by Mrs. Satchell represented a coming out, a declaration of radicalism, a new and untried you. The threat loomed doubly with school starting on Tuesday.

Damn if that woman can’t arrange almost anything, said Norman. A crummy homeroom assignment, an out-of-the-way locker, God knows, even detention.

She studied under the wicked witch of the west, Rachel whispered from behind a placard.

Ken braved on in spite of Mrs. Satchell. This will be big, the college boy said. Big as Selma, big as the Paris Commune…. The young of this country are taking up the call.

With an eye on the news cameras, Ken planted his foot on the club’s clipped grass. Mrs. Satchell’s reaction was swift. Officer, arrest this boy, he’s on club property! She waved frantically. Across the street, a policeman started forward but stopped when Ken withdrew to the sidewalk. I could see the cop stifle a yawn.

Calmly, Ken strolled down the grass median and hoisted himself on a fire hydrant. To the delight of demonstrators, he balanced himself with his arms on their shoulders. The cameras followed. Hydrants belong to the people, he declared. I’ll take questions later, people. Right now I want to say that we in the youth community feel that this club stinks of racism. We staged this demo because we feel the adult citizens of Zoysiadale could better adhere to professed democratic principles. We ask no less of ourselves.

Mrs. Satchell wheeled around to the reporters. This boy is no longer even a Zoysiadale student, she said. We thought he was off at university, but he’s back making trouble. Has he nothing better to do?….

It was Leon Trotsky, Ken continued, who said that the student is not bound by any responsibilities and—at least objectively—is free in his judgment of right and wrong….

Slow down, a reporter mumbled as he scribbled.

….at this period, everything within him is fermenting, his class prejudices are as formless as his ideological interests, questions of conscious matter very strongly to him….

Ken’s delivery was authoritative, but the words seemed natural as his own. That’s why in an adult world riddled with hypocrisy, he said, youth is the repository of justice.

Authority has gone to the dogs, Mrs. Satchell screamed. Officer, do your job!

The marchers jeered.

Are we under her skin or what? Cedrick said.

By now, the crowd was accustomed to the steady hum of traffic, as cars stuffed with rubberneckers slowed to scope us. The policeman took another step toward Ken, but was startled by the roar of a mufflerless engine.

Screeching a dubious U-turn on the lane abutting the tennis courts—ripping through the rose-petal quiet of the residential neighborhood—came the familiar orange low-ended, GTO convertible with the lightning-bolt decals. It emitted a puff of smoke and laid rubber. At first there was no driver behind the wheel. Then Mrs. Satchell’s own son popped up sitting on the passenger’s side, steering with his extended arm. As the policemen leapt in his squad car to follow, laughter rippled through the demonstrators.

Need I say more? Ken’s expression seemed to say.

Mrs. Satchell winced like she was sucking on a lemon. She grabbed Battlin’ Dave and stormed into the clubhouse. Our crowd let out a whoop.

Two hours that shook the subdivision! Ken shouted to the reporters. There’s your headline. He handed the bullhorn to an awestruck Norman, and, without a hint that he would ever look back, motivated silently around the side of the club and disappeared over the hill.

We who remained stood and looked at our group. We looked at the TV cameras. We looked at the not-so-imposing clubhouse. And lo, it was good. I glanced at the black caddies expecting a round of applause. (The men merely shook their heads.)

Still, we earned crisp coverage on the six o’clock news (though it exaggerated the extent to which Ken was brains behind the protest). We expected national exposure, capitulation by the club, and justice in American life within the week.

What really mattered, my friend Norman assured me, was that Ken Tenneson was back. The cue ball that—crack!—sends the rack of balls knocking chaos from cushion to cushion, Marty, he’s gonna completely rejigger senior year." In the end, we would leave a school completely different from the one we came into.

The tabula-rasa minds of adolescence often seek meaning by latching onto a major social force—like a skier grabbing the bar of a lift. I realized on that day at the club that my planning for the future had been preempted by a journey to myself. It’s something the admissions office might view as kind of a self-imposed prerequisite.

I’m submitting this essay in hopes of fulfilling that prerequisite. If it appears to fall short of its promise, well, some settling of contents may have occurred during shipping.

Chapter Two

The first day of school, by YEAR 12 of your sentence in the system, is no longer the D-Day it was during butterflied mornings of childhood. Seniors slouch onto campus rolling their eyes at the neat creases of the lower classmen’s back-to-school wardrobes, issuing coolness statements with their summer jeans, burying vestiges of youthful eagerness under studied nonchalance.

Except yours truly. I was ga-ga over my Dad’s executive decision to entrust me with his extra car. From now until graduation, as long as I remembered the brake pedal, I would not have to voyage to school in the magic-marker-scrawled, government-issue school bus we dubbed the Yellow Submarine.

Dad’s offer was a show of support for my family’s shared hopes for my fruitful senior year. I looked him in the eye and assured him that his investment would bring expected returns. But I never promised I’d take the direct route.

Tuesday after Labor Day I was grinning drunkenly behind the wheel of Dad’s non-fuel-injected, unsouped-up Dodge Dart. I was alone and barreling over the hills of my overfamiliar hometown.

I grew up in one of the dozens of subdivisions buzzsawed from ancient forest in the late 1950s, when Washington, D.C., was being transformed from an off-Broadway swamp to a Roman forum of world power. I remember tagging along on my parents’ house hunts and climbing the stacked piles of sod waiting to be laid down in the halfhour it took to convert a nail-strewn muddy lot into a storybook lawn. The finished ranch-style and colonial homes were standardized down to the intercoms and kitchen closets with preprinted inch marks for recording children’s heights. The builder, to top his work with a cherry of exclusivity, assembled a curved, red-brick wall wrought with white cursive letters at the entrance from Sphagnum Street, christening the creation Zoysiadale.

The result was a neighborhood planned without factories, slums or office buildings. And just as a Boy Scout is taught to dig the latrine away from the campsite, all the necessaries—the sewage treatment plants, the homes affordable to firemen and policemen—were filed away elsewhere.

I’d never seen Zoysiadale from the air, but I imagined its green slopes and winding streets looked a lot like the board from the Milton Bradley game of Life. With its reassuring images of basketball backboards and children straddling bicycles, our little kingdom was a triumph of the functional, each blade of grass meticulously steered to man’s purpose.

As my wheels lopped over a curb that morning, I spotted my passenger for opening day—Norman Solomon, the kid we called the Projectionist. He was rubbing his spine on a Stop the War-defaced stop sign, one skinny arm folded across his Army jacket, the other extended with a half-hearted outstretched thumb.

The Projectionist displayed new bravery that day. Bowling shoes. Red and black two-tone with the stitched numeral 9 on the back. He was avoiding the gaze of the drivers shooting by, and he wore a quizzical grimace over those fangy teeth the color of Bit O’ Honey candy. I pulverized the brake, and the Projectionist shot his fist in the air. With a rebel yell, he leapt on the hood of the car and teetered off the opposite side, smacking audibly on the pavement.

So this is what it feels like to be a senior, he grunted as he lunged into the shotgun seat. On his lap he cradled his battery-powered bullhorn.

Norman had been called the Projectionist since eighth grade. It was not a name that had the blessing of his parents, though the chances they understood it were slim. Projectionists play a peculiar role in American schools. Each must carry a card to prove he’s been trained to operate the 16mm tools designed to relieve teachers of teaching. Students view him as a suck-up who enjoys fellowship only with machines. So when the lights go down, the spitballs fly. Then there was the homework; last year, the Projectionist set a record for having eggs thrown at his house—12 weekends straight. Of all the outlets for teen ambition, the way of the projectionist is pursued by the fewest. Which left the field open for Norman.

As recently as last spring, I might have balked at being seen with the Projectionist. But on this first day of school a kind of glow was coming off him. Beware, ye fascists of Zoysiadale, democracy is pounding at the gate! his voice crackled through the bullhorn. Righteous youth shall triumph, and we’re gonna kick tail!

Put it away, midgetbrain, I said. There are neighbors who know this car.

We’re a new generation, the Projectionist sang. With a new explanation. Aiming the horn at a troop of junior high kids at a bus stop, he advised the startled kids to Eat it! Eat it every morning, you pubes! So, Marty, did you finish the article?

Gingerly I pulled from my pocket a folded copy of my account of our job on the Country Club. Norman grabbed it and read aloud in newscasterese. Students slay country club Goliath….flash!… recently integrated swimming league…flash!… club representatives maintain that leaving the league had been under consideration for some time…flash! declining interest in competition at the Club… ALL RIGHT! Ken Tenneson says this