5/11/23
Newsletter #333
The Crack of Dawn
In 9th grade when I was 14, I had the longest hair in the school, and I was the only student with a beard. In fact, the only two people in the school with beards were me and Mr. Frido, the assistant principal. I got along with all of my teachers, except one – Mr. Collins, the shop teacher, who was a pushy guy with a bushy mustache. In his class, if you wanted to go to the bathroom, instead of giving you a normal hall pass he would have you grab a piece of wood from the scrap wood box and he’d sign it. However, in my case, he would make me take a full-sized, 5-foot by 4-foot sheet of plywood that weighed 50 pounds.
On the very last day of 9th grade, which was the end of junior high and I’d begin high school the next year, at the end of day I went out of my way to visit the shop. There was Mr. Collins wearing an apron, all by himself, sweeping up. I said, “You know what the best part of graduating junior high is?” He shook his head and said no. I continued, “The best part is never having to see you again. I hate you.” Entirely unphased, Mr. Collins said, “Oh yeah? I hate you, too. It’ll be a pleasure not seeing you.” I was aghast. How dare he. At a complete loss for words, I turned and left.
Come September, on the morning of the first day of high school, who should I encounter but Mr. Collins. To my horror, he had been made assistant principal of Groves High School. He grinned beneath his bushy mustache and said, “Thought you’d never have to see me again, huh?” I couldn’t even respond; I was honestly speechless. Then for the rest of the year he was nice to me. Just the sight of me seemed to amuse him.
Here's a picture of high school, 1973, which is about 10 years earlier than that which is depicted in Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982), but similar. The two big hit songs that played all the time were Blinded by the Light by Manfred Mann and Goodbye Yellow Brick Road by Elton John. At the end of every hall, just outside the door, was the Designated Smoking Area. There were 2,000 students in the school, and 1,000 of them would smash into the DSAs between classes. Being a pot dealer, I moved a lot of weed out there between classes. And in their infinite wisdom, the school was experimenting with the policy that you could skip a class 19 times without a problem, but the 20th time you got kicked out. Therefore, even though you may never have skipped that class in the past, now you would certainly skip 19 times because they were free. The experiment failed.
There was a plethora of hallucinogenic drugs available. There was LSD in many forms: Windowpane, Mr. Natural (compliments of R. Crumb), microdot in various colors, Mescaline, and a white pill called THC, whatever it really was. One day my buddy Robert introduced the school to Angel Dust. He put it in skinny joints rolled in blue or red papers, charged a dollar each, and at lunchtime sold out in fifteen minutes. Nobody knew what it was or what it would do. Half of the students smoked this shit. We all got so high that none of us could go back into school when the bell rang, and I’m talking about 600-700 people. We obliterated stoners were strewn across the parking lot, the football field, the baseball field, the bleachers, and all of us were unable to stand up.
One day in the bathroom at school I was making a dope deal. A fellow wanted to trade his extremely realistic-looking Colt .45 CO-2 BB gun for a bag of weed. Abso-fuckin’-lutely.
I had moved my bedroom into the basement by building a wooden wall with a door. Outside the door was a shitty, uneven, plywood pool table (where Ivan Raimi and I played thousands of games of pool). Back in those days you didn’t throw away lightbulbs, you returned them to Edison and they just gave you new ones. So, there were a couple of grocery bags full of dead lightbulbs in the basement. I set a cardboard box on the pool table, punched six holes in the side of it, then put light bulbs into the holes in a row. From my bed it was a straight shot through the door to the pool table and lightbulbs. I sat down on my bed and with my new Colt .45 BB gun began shooting out the lightbulbs, which emitted a loud pop when I hit them. The gun itself was great: solid steel with a working hammer, a chamber that actually turned, and when it fired the CO-2 gave off a satisfying pop.
Speaking of pop, meanwhile upstairs, my dad arrived home from work, no doubt smashed. Though he was actually a realtor, if you asked my dad what he did for a living he always replied, “Drink.” So, I guess my dad heard one of these pops from the gun firing or the lightbulbs blowing up, and asked my mom what it was, and good old mom said, “Josh got a gun,” failing to mention that it was a BB gun. My dad came stomping down the basement steps and the first thing he encountered was our snow skies lined up against the wall. He grabbed a ski pole on his way to my room. He found me sitting on the bed with the gun. My red-eyed, drunk, furious dad raised up the ski pole and said, “You’ve got a gun?” I aimed the pistol right in his face and said, “Drop the ski pole.” Man, you should have seen his face – open-mouthed astonishment, mixed with a dash of fear. He froze. I repeated, “Drop it.” He dropped it. I handed him the gun and said, “It’s a BB gun.” He looked at it in utter confusion, like it was made of Kryptonite. “Your mother said you had a gun.” I replied, “I do. That’s it.” I honestly considered adding, “I traded a bag of weed for it,” just to piss him off further, but I could see that he was sufficiently befuddled as it was and uncharacteristically shut up. He handed me back the gun and said, “Don’t shoot it in the house.” I said, “OK,” and he left. I’d already shot about 20 lightbulbs and had a major mess to clean up on the pool table. But something changed between dad and I at that moment. I think he saw that I was perfectly happy to shoot him in the face if he tried to hit me with that pole. I wasn’t willing to shoot him; I would be pleased to shoot him, even if it was a real .45. What can I say, dad and I had issues.
Day’s begun, hey, where’s the sun?