The Graduate

One flew east, one flew west…  I teach high school seniors.  Watching them prepare for graduation has become an exercise in keeping my emotions checked.  “Oh, my babies they’re all grown up.”  Two years later I can’t remember their names.  Observing the ritual of this year’s group of seniors has synchronized with my mid-life crisis.  Last week I chaperoned a prom.  It was more fun then my own high school prom.  I am observing teenagers who are responsible, although not well educated; prepare to enter a phase they are completely unprepared for.  And neither was I in 1981.  I packed up for college listening to Bowie sing, “Win” over and over and over again.   I hadn’t a clue why I needed that particular song.  These kids I watch have not one clue about life.  I didn’t.  I didn’t know how to “Win.”  These kids think what they have now will be forever.  They don’t realize that one day they will think back to that “wobble song” and it will bring tears to their eyes. 

I went to my prom with someone who was murdered.  Murdered by his neighbor, chopped into pieces and buried in his own backyard. This had something to do with a drug dealer and a homosexual couple.  The details are not clear in my mind.  My prom date was part of the homosexual couple.  He was my friend, not a date, date.  I see this happen more frequently, and it makes me happy.  Why do I disdain romance?  A voice in my head screams, “it will never work out, it will never work out!!!”  On my prom night we picked up a third party.  She needed a ride to the post-prom party held at some awful NYC disco club.  She and I spent most of the night in the bathroom snorting cocaine made up of talcum powder.  She’s dead too.  Became a crack head.  I could have seen that coming.  When my family tells me I wasn’t very impressed with my prom, there are mitigating circumstances.  For me, “my prom date was murdered,” is enough.

I took a "not date" date to the prom because at the time I was dating a thirty-two year old man.  He was my guitar teacher.  A hot New Jersey ‘had been’ musician, train wreck.  At some point instead of teaching me how to play “Smoke on the Water” our music sessions, which my father was paying for, transitioned into long make-out sessions.  I was seventeen. There was no way I was asking him to go to prom.  He had an old, beat up VW, a wife who did low-level music publicity.  She supported him.  They were getting divorced.  He lived in a Bukowski-esque one-room apartment off of Route 17.  It had a hot plate, and I loved it there.  When his wife was out of town he invited me to spend the night in the tiny house they once together lived in.  He cooked beef stroganoff.  We had sex in their bed.  The next morning he hustled me out of there, a frenzy of nerves.  It still never occurred to me that once out of the nest, my life might change.  I remember she had scarves hung all over her bedroom.  As I grew older I always hung scarves on my walls and thought of her. 

When washed up musician guy broke up with me, in Johnson Park between my freshman and sophomore years of college I lost all my baby fat plus my freshman fifteen.  I should have written him a thank you note.  Years later he called my house.  He asked my mother what I was doing.  I was a record executive by then.  I felt triumphant.  I imagined him old, bald, living in a one-bedroom apartment full of vermin and a single hot plate.  By then I knew life did change, and I had already forgotten most of the people I attended high school with.

High school was the place I began to make mistakes that today I recognize as patterns.  I watch my students develop patterns; forks in the roads they will travel.  There are healthy patterns, but I tend to focus on the negative, “Oh no, oh God, do not do that thing!!!”  Gotta work on that.  My big high school pattern was I dated boys who did not appreciate me.  Befuddling, because I knew then as I do now that I am fairly fabulous. 

My “main” high school boyfriend was obsessed with another girl, although while we dated he was quite frank about it.  This chick was a tall anemic, plain looking blonde with a horsey face.  I was pretty and oozed cool.  I constantly gave him blue balls in the backseat of his car.  One day he drove off while I was sitting on the hood of that car.  In front of all my friends, I hit the pavement of the high school parking lot straight on my ass.  It was the former that caused the real pain. Base and mean an act of aggression that could have broken a bone alongside my ego.  What was I doing to make these boys so angry? It’s something I still do.  However, moving forward no one has ever again attempted to run me over.  I consider this a sign of progress. 

The twins were cute.  I dated both. We were hippies.  It was the late 70’s.  We should have been punks.  I jumped on that bandwagon in the early 80’s.  Thank you WFDU, Uncle Floyd, The New York Dolls, Creem Magazine, The Runaways, and that Sex Pistols album. The twins had a band together.  They would play Battle of the Bands concerts and I would show up wearing satin pants and platform shoes.  Once I attended a show with full on Paul Stanley make-up wearing black velvet Stevie Nicks get-up.  Nobody in 2015 is walking around in kabuki make-up like it’s no big thing.  Still, I am audacious enough to make fun of the “pants on the ground” boys of today, and I recently asked what a 22” Brazilian was because I imagined being waxed from the eyebrows on down.

One twin dumped me the moment his ex-girlfriend, the love of his life, moved back into town.  A nice girl, but, but, but, I was prettier and much cooler.  Plus, to think you’ve found the love of your life at sixteen is stupid.  Unless you really have found them, otherwise you are “whupped” as my students would say. I have only one student who is whupped.  He will most likely end up married, have a kid then divorce because he is going to be an alcoholic, and she looks smart enough to kick him out and let him find his bottom. Back to me, for revenge I momentarily dated the other twin who could hold deeply philosophical conversations on the revelations of every Led Zeppelin lyric.  The problem was he thought the Vietnam War was still going on.  I have students who are clueless when asked about Saddam Hussein, but they can recite every single fight that has ever happened in the high school cafeteria.

One young boy loved me too much. We were only in the 8^th grade.  I think he even gave me my first oral sex experience while rolling around underneath the kitchen table. Then his dad came home.  That yummy boy was a glue head.  Addicted to the rush of psychedelic grandeur, then nothing left but to do it again.  I didn’t like it much, the glue huffing.  I needed pleasure to last longer.  Recently he sent me song lyrics via social media they were “ZOSO.”  You know, the king and the queen are in love and then separated.  Alas, the king never forgets his queen.  He wants to be sure his queen forever remembers their love.  I don’t mean to make fun, because it was very sweet, but I recovered from “The Song Remains the Same” decades ago.  The era around the The Clash and Ramones was a time when the hippie boys and The Who posters had to go.  Anyway, I couldn’t be around a guy who was nice to me, even if he was a glue head. I think glue huffers are creatures of the past.  I am fairly certain there are none graduating among our class of 2015.

I have made up for all my young, screwed up boyfriends in other areas of my life.  I am not unforgiving; nope I am fully cognizant that I am as guilty as any mentioned or unmentioned party.  Not to say I don’t still succumb, but I overcome.  I graduate.  I graduated.  Somehow I got into a college that is now considered elite, even though I had truly absurd SAT scores, couldn’t do math and still can’t.  Today this is impossible.  My students need the outstanding test scores, the GPA, to have run twelve clubs and played five sports in order to even be considered entry to an estimable college.  On the other hand, I surrounded myself with people I could learn from.  Badly chosen boyfriends are usually intelligent. They might not know how to be nice to girls, or to girls like me, but they know about records, books, photography, magazines, comic books, theater, film, art, and poetry.  All of which fed my other needs.  My students don’t have the same appetites.

Reading was important in the 1970’s and 1980’s. It’s not important anymore.  My generation and yours, if you are reading this from Face Book, are irrelevant.  If you say Face Book to an eighteen year old, you might as well be saying Friendster.  My students Instagram, Vine, Tumblr, text, text, text, and tweet, they love the hash tag.  Reedit to them is like saying NPR. 

I see who controls the reigns.  I watch them graduate year after year.  They mean well.  They can’t read, and they can’t write.  Literacy no longer exists. There may be one or two out of sixty graduates who have the capacity to be curious.  Most of them are medicated.  God, what happened to self-medication?  Partying?  A gathering of people.  Isolation is killing society, and the creation of community.  The newbies are connected through “the cloud.”  Maybe because they are connected it is a society and I don’t understand this form of technology based community because I am old.  I still don’t see the point of an iPad.  

These kids are careful.  There is minimal risk in interacting through a screen (unless you encounter an Isis recruiter and that isn’t even funny).  On a midnight stroll through the LES an ex-boyfriend proclaimed, “Where are all the 20-somethings trying to wreck their lives?”  Jeez, we read On The Road and then wanted to do it.  Some of us did, or tried and got grounded, but at least we tried to have an experience, even if it was in our heads. Overall, the class of 2015 are far, far, less fanciful, and I think this is what gets under my skin most.  They have lost their imaginations, sacrificed them to an emoji. The other is, they don’t read!  I would like to force them to eat a book just to get ONE into their system.  Isn't The Sun Also Rises yummy?  Just like Burger King, see, told you.

One last thing and then I’ll go away, why is the media naming a new set of generations every time I turn around? Gen X, Millenials, Gen Y, Gen Me, Gen We…  Have that many decades gone by?  Why do I feel like “Baby Boomer” lasted for thirty years and all of a sudden every five years we have a new generation?   I am already confused about my youth, my mistakes, my successes, the kids I see today, my imagination roaming around their lives trying to figure out where they will land, when I have not yet managed to land.  Then again, mmmmmy generation was screwed up and we managed, we keep managing.  I do, so I assume you do too. In the end, we were alright.  Okay, so I ripped all their posters off the wall, still, The Who was onto something, the kids are alright.  I’m going to watch these students graduate and then I’m going to go listen to “ZOSO.”

Dedicated to Gary Harris who wonders how the girl from Hackensack became the girl he knows today (well Gary here’s part of the early shit).