If you're not over 60, this story will make no sense at all to you.
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I admit it: I'm a geezer. But it wasn't always this way. There was a time when I was young, a time when I could do anything. A long time ago, so long ago that I have almost forgotten what it was like. Almost.
When I was a little kid, my friends and I would get involved in all sorts of escapades. We'd roam the streets, looking for excitement. When the water department tore up the streets to put in a new storm drain, they left the huge (to young eyes) concrete pipes in the street, awaiting installation. We'd climb in them, slap the sides and marvel at the echoes, use them for forts, and do what all kids with an ounce of imagination did. And when the pipes were finally installed and the roads were paved over again, we found that we could get into the system by climbing down through the drains in the street. The bars blocking the drains were just far enough apart for a small, really stupid kid to wiggle past. We'd climb down the ladder and, giggling the whole way, walk down the pipes, exploring. Every now and then, we'd hear a noise that we were convinced was someone flushing a toilet. We'd laugh, of course, not knowing that the storm drains drained only the roads and had nothing to do with the sewer system. In our exploration, we discovered that the storm drain lead out to a concrete bed by the airport. We'd climb out and look at the vista that was the airport. We'd run around, chasing rabbits and breaking the little lights that showed where the landing strips and connecting roads were. Once, we used some wire to tie a tumbleweed to a tree, running the wire across the road that lead to a radar station, giggling at the thought of some driver being surprised when he drove past the tumbleweed, only to see it mysteriously slam into the side of his car.
In short, we were assholes.
Eventually, we grew up a little, but not much. When we got to junior high school, as it was called back then, we'd walk to school early in the morning and talk about things. It seemed like the right age to talk about sex, so that's what we did most of the time.
"I saw someone doing a 69," Billy said.
"A 69?" I asked.
"Yeah, a 69," he said. "You know what this is, right?"
"Of course I do," I said, rolling my eyes. I was pretty sure he didn't believe me, but he didn't press the point. I'm guessing he didn't know either.
We talked about all sorts of things, trying to figure out the mystery. The shop classes were where most of the talk happened, perhaps because of the type of kid who took shop classes. Radio was the kid who brought in The Book. I got only a quick look and saw a picture of a woman on her knees, and a guy with a hard on standing in front of her. Radio said it was a blow job. I didn't see how blowing on a guy's dick from that distance would do much, but I accepted his word on it. He was Radio, after all, and knew stuff.
Once we had an assembly where the fire department showed us the dangers of pipe bombs. The assembly was successful, since nothing could induce a kid more to build one than to see what they could do. While we were watching the fireman put a single drop of gasoline into a pipe with a spark plug in it and fire off the plug (with a really great explosion), I was getting annoyed because someone was putting a foot on the back of my chair. Finally I got fed up enough to push on the foot. I reached back and pushed the foot off my chair. I felt stockings. This was junior high school, we were about twelve years old, and I felt stockings. I turned around to look at the girl who was rude enough to put a foot on my chair and the prettiest girl I had ever seen said, "Oh, you're cute." That was a very effective defense.
I'd have to say I didn't learn much of any use by the time I got to high school. There were girls around, but I was pretty shy and really dense. I remember one girl talking to me in class one day, saying things that I figured out were flirtatious. The problem was, I didn't figure it out for several years. She was a cheerleader, really smart (straight A's, I think), and interested in me. She was so smart, in fact, that she figured out I wasn't interested in her, so she left me alone. She was wrong, but I couldn't explain to her that I was socially awkward and would have no idea what to do on a date. I still think about her sometimes, wondering about the path I chose, even if the choice wasn't entirely mine.
One summer, I took art and auto shop in summer school. Both were a lot of fun. Auto shop was really cool because you got to tinker with engines and stuff. Most of the kids taking auto shop were the sort who couldn't make it academically but were good with their hands. I found out later that many of them could make pretty good livings, as long as they were honest and did their best to do a good job. Of course, most of them weren't that honest and didn't have that much integrity.
Art class was different. The kids in that class were brighter and more inventive. One of the kids was a beautiful girl I had trouble looking at, let alone talking to. But eventually I managed to talk to her, at least a little bit. I walked her out to her car one day, after class. She drove off in a Lincoln Continental, her father's car. Her father was a surgeon and they lived in a very expensive part of town. Later in the school year, I discovered her locker was right outside my calculus class. Sometimes I would wait for her, holding out until the last moment, hoping she would show up. Once or twice, she did and I would say hi. I wanted to take her to the movies, but I couldn't work up the nerve. I think about her, too, sometimes, wondering again about the path I took.
In junior high school, when I took physics, the teacher showed me a linear accelerator that one of his students made. It was a plastic tube with bands of metal foil along it. The teacher said the student would run hydrogen through the tube to cut down on air resistance, then apply an alternating voltage on the bands to accelerate particles down the tube. I don't know if it really worked, but it stimulated my interest, so I started reading up on it. It was pretty interesting to me. That was my dive into the sciences. When I got to high school, I discovered one year that there were kids taking a chemistry class after school. I thought it was interesting, so I joined. The teacher was one of those cool guys who hadn't gotten disillusioned yet. We learned all sorts of advanced things and it was fun. It was only after a couple of months that I found out the rest of the kids were taking the class because they wanted to compete with other kids in some sort of chemistry competition. I was taking the class because it was fun, but I was the only one. I took the test at the end of the class and did okay, but I was disappointed. The teacher pointed out that I scored in the top 20% of the kids who took the test and the kids who took the test were probably the top 10% of all the kids in school. I felt better after he explained that.
In my last year of high school, we were taking all sorts of tests and I had no idea what they were for. I did the best I could, but they all seemed pointless to me. One test, I found out later, was for placement in the local university. I did pretty well on it, as did my best friend and a girl who was pretty smart. The three of us were given an opportunity to go to the university and take classes there, leaving high school early when we needed to. We decided getting out of school early on some days was a great deal, so we took it. We all decided to take a class on mathematical logic in the philosophy department. A funny old man was teaching logic to the three of us and about two hundred other kids. I and my friends got A's in the class and maybe learned a few things. I found out many years later that the funny old man who was teaching the class was a world-famous logician. Pearls before swine.
When we were seniors in high school, we had to write something for the yearbook. Each of us had to write about our plans, in twenty five words or less. By the end of my free education, I had clearly gotten interested in the sciences, but I really enjoyed the shop classes I took. For the yearbook, I explained that my plan was to become a physicist or an auto mechanic. I liked them both. I ended up becoming a physicist, but I think about that sometimes and wonder what would have happened if I had chosen differently.
Since I was already taking classes at the university, I was told I could just keep going there, if I wanted. I said "sure" and never bothered taking the SAT or applying to any colleges. I avoided what most others found to be an excruciating experience. Just luck, of course, but I was grateful, once I figured out how lucky I was.
