September 5, 1974

I ate lunch today with Chris, Steven, Jimmy, etc. I’m really having fun in the Jr. High. But It’s gonna be tough. Well Nanny came over tonight. So I guess I’ll be a going to bed.


That “a-going to bed” quality of my journal entries is some sort of mock hokum thing. I don’t remember being like that at all. But you know how it is when you’re a kid, trying on hats, making different noises, being a character was more fun than being yourself.

The three guys I ate lunch with were all a year older than me, from my neighborhood. I had spent the summer with them and a whole bunch of other people playing a lot of bumper pool, smoking, and drinking Boone’s Farm Apple Hill and Cherry Orchard Wine. I don’t remember what I ate at that lunch, but I do remember the feeling of belonging. We were all trying to be so cool, well I was. They were already very cool. It was 1974 in the suburbs of New York, which is like 1968 in San Francisco. I remember we ate in the eighth grade lunch room. You didn’t have to be in eighth grade to eat there, but most of the seventh graders didn’t so I felt like I was given an upward social bump. It was mayhem, that lunch room, packed. A cool looking old room with very high ceilings and highly polished old wooden floors. The guys, Chris, Steven and Jimmy, ate as quickly as possible because the deal was, you only had about thirty minutes for lunch. So, you’d woof down some food and then go out to “the shed” which was an aluminum utility shed in this rocky copse of trees behind the school. All around it was wide open playing fields. The shed area was not too big, but the trees gave cover so we could all smoke. Once the vice principal started making regular visits to the shed, we eventually gave it up and started hiding in the row of pine trees along the fence on the north side of the soccer field. Once that was discovered, we’d hop the fence, which was the only thing separating the school grounds from the grassy hill that rolled down to the New York State Thruway, and smoke there. There was so much smoking going on in Junior high of 1974.