When I was in third grade I was picked to go to this convention held by Read Magazine. They did a lot of publication for elementary schools. I had written some piece of creative writing and me and Leslie Paige Birdwell were chosen from our district. I don’t know why I just used her real name, but I’m sure this entry won’t incite anyone to track her down and I’m thinking she doesn’t go by that name any longer. I’m assuming she is, however, still alive. I talked to her about a decade ago.
She probably wrote something lush and polished and I wrote something crude and wildly creative. We were friends. Despite all the weird shit that eventually ensued we sort of remained friends. No weird shit ensued at the Read Young Authors convention. The most impressive thing about it, or at least the most memorable thing about it, was all the kids gathered together in an unfamiliar setting.
I’m sure they said very nice and encouraging things to us and the kids at our school were all curious about it for a day or two. We were both humble and dismissive. I don’t think we had read one anothers work. I always make it sound like there weren’t clicks (I’m doing the phonetic spelling because I have a brain fart and spell check wants to spell cliché ) in secondary Ed here in this liberal little hamlet. There were and they were as clearly defined as any click in an 80’s high school comedy/drama, footloose, sixteen candles, pretty in pink, some kind of wonderful, you know whatever (hmm, 70’s maybe).
It’s just that I could float in between them all. By high school I was a good enough athlete to hang with the jocks, a good enough scholar to hang with the nerds, a good enough smoker to hang out with the burnouts and enough of an enigma and nice guy to hang out with the bullies; I even brokered occasional peace between click factions. Leslie stayed a nerd until she took up smoking but she didn’t speak burnout very well.
For all the liberal hamlet shit it would have been damn hard to be a queer at ELHS. I mean I knew most of them, as, I assume, Leslie did, none were out of the closet. Oddly enough racial clicks weren’t really a thing. And yeah we were all grade school kids when race riots set Detroit on fire in the late sixties, but still, it wasn’t a big deal. Just being black or Mexican didn’t put you in a group, you had to still be a jock, nerd, burnout or bully. Also MSU is an agricultural college, so there were students, some with families, from all over the world, it wasn’t just white, black, latino, there were shades and accents in between, the Asian kids, for instance, were actually from asia. Again, clicks weren’t racial ones, if the Asian were a track star he was a jock.
In the sixties and seventies a lot of countries were looking to update agricultural techniques and MSU was sort of cutting edge with food crop variants.
My story was something like Prince Intrepid; Blood lord. Everybody died graphically and heavy was the head that wore the crown.
Wait, race. Yeah, so, the hottest summer in Detroit is well documented, the race riots there really did burn the city. In Portland I was surprised to learn that people thought there had been and continued to be real black and white trouble. It seemed so very, I don’t know, mild. My employment had me working closely with the African American community, most were not my best friends. Among the few that were (I’ve really never broke down the stats of race creed, color or sexual proclivity of my best friends at any given period in my life) was Ray, a black guy from Rhode Island. I think I told him once that I didn’t know there were any black guys in Rhode Island and he said, yeah, well, he moved to Oregon.
Ray was as surprised as I was that Portland thought they had race problems, and we secretly made fun of the BET ebonics that was popular on the mean streets of the Rose city in the forboding Victorians all grimy with inter-city hardship and wisteria. Ray thought ebonics was hysterical, he had crisp and soft enunciation, and didn’t understand why someone wanted to sound stupid because the man had them down.
Hmmmm, come to think of it … nevermind. Sunny, who was from Vancouver and had lived in NY,NY for six months and Salt Lake for three and thought that made her travelled, had this thing about the mean racist streets of Portland too and how she married a black guy. I met the guy, years later of course. He didn’t do ebonics either and he was from NY. I think him and I and Ray had seen some shit that vancouverites probably hadn’t.
When I was hitchhiking in the north people always wanted to warn me about heading south where they didn’t abide hippies or darkies. I always found things polite in the south and when they didn’t abide me they politely asked me to move on, and though there was segregation it was like ELHS, I was allowed everywhere.
Now I’ve forgotten where I was going with everything. EL is un-self-consciously integrated, always has been. I was always way too encouraged and not stopped anywhere near as often as I should have been. And I’m spent.
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