In spite of growing up in a backwater, rural, “Leave it to Beaver” type town, I managed to have the closest thing to an inner city high school experience without actually having to live in da ‘hood. It was close enough, believe me.
Allow me to explain.
There was only one public high school (this was before the whole open enrollment business) in Marion. So this was a small town with a very large, very overcrowded high school. The principal’s naivete was astounding, which didn’t help matters. I remember his bellicose and positively fictional speech to the parents and student body at one of the school open house events (1985) in which he proudly declared, “We don’t have a drug problem here at Harding.” Yeah, right. Charlie Sheen is high on life, too.
Today I would rebut the principal’s rhetoric with far more cynical, and likely far more accurate commentary, as in, “Don’t piss off your supplier, because you’re getting the really good shit if you are that stoned.” In fact, since this guy was a likely a draft dodger from the 60’s, he should have known drugs a lot better than any of us young punks. No one had a problem finding or buying drugs, so in that respect, there was no drug problem. You want drugs, they’re everywhere, buy ’em here, buy ’em there, toke and snort away- no problem!
The guy in the locker next to mine sold cocaine, pot and God knows what else out of it. My friends smoked cigarettes and pot in the crapper every chance they got. The surrounding school systems had the Sheriff’s Department come in for regular, unannounced K-9 raids in their high schools, but we never had a single K-9 raid in the four years I was there, announced or unannounced. You can’t fool narcotics dogs. That’s probably why the narcotics dog was never brought in!
I went to school with some downright demented individuals. Everyone did, but there was an amazing range of bizarre and abnormal pathology in my high school. There was the kid with the green teeth, the booger-eater, the kid who killed and ate flies, and the kid who puked at lunch every single day, so the custodian pretty much followed him around with the Vo-Ban all afternoon. I can never forget the smell of Vo-Ban and slightly used chocolate milk no matter how hard I try. That was back in the day when I actually had a sense of smell. It’s tragic that I would have that sort of dreadful olfactory memory. Why do I forget the delightful fragrance of fresh peonies in May, but I sure can remember the stench of used chocolate milk and Vo-Ban? Sometimes I wonder about myself. A lot.
Imagine one of the above “sanitary napkins.” Then picture it used. Then imagine yourself sitting on the crapper in the school bathroom stall. Look up, and what do you see? One very heavily used “sanitary napkin” precariously stuck to the ceiling with a tiny little bit of previously used adhesive, poised to come loose and land directly, nasty side down, in your hair. That was the first and last time I found the courage to step foot in that bathroom.
Imagine sticking your hand into your book bag and retrieving this. Yep. Mayonnaise or someone’s spunk? I did not bother to put it under the microscope to find out. I threw out the book bag and everything else that came into contact with this little “fun bag.”
Admittedly I got pranked a lot. But the disgust and downright visceral sense of nausea and violation I experienced when I stuck my hand in that nasty mess sticks with me to this day.
ELYSIANHUNTER, ALWAYS INCITEFUL: 
I graduated in 1987. We did have two high shcools – one that had nothing but rich kids and one for the rest of us plus the rest of the rich kids. There was drugs galore. I would have wanted to give somone a good smackin’ over the condom!
1986. You and I are very close in age. Should have been ’87, but I was put ahead a year because I could already read. I could read when I was two years old. No, I can’t explain it. I never had any “enrichment” bullshit at home, unless you count being born with pneumonia and then coming home a week later only to have my oldest sister try to kill me the very same day by smothering me with a pillow. (Just let the insanely jealous, psychopathic, not-quite three year old right in there with a medically fragile newborn- there’s a fantastic parenting choice!) But, my mother’s bi-polar, and wasn’t medicated until I was in high school. I am damned fortunate to have lived to Week 2, and probably wouldn’t have save for my grandmother’s intervention. My family was poor, and Mom spent most of my early childhood on her own little planet, so the early reading thing doesn’t make much sense.
I have been able to read as far back as I can remember. By the time I was five and bored out of my skull in first grade I was reading dictionaries and encyclopedias and scientific journals for fun as the normal kids were struggling with “See Spot Run.”
Of course in the backwater where I grew up, no one had ever seen a hyperlexic kid. None of the elementary school teachers wanted me in their classes. I speed read, always have, and I used words some teachers couldn’t define. I’d not yet learned to adjust my word choices to fit the audience I was trying to communicate with. They didn’t know what to do with me, other than try to keep the other kids from kicking my ass quite so much.
I never really enjoyed school until (when I was in high school) the guidance counselor got me out of the building in the afternoons to take college classes at Ohio State. I was the first one who got to do that…so they didn’t have to deal with me! The high school teachers (with a few exceptions) had no idea what to do with me either. Hell, I don’t know what to do with me half the time.