SOCIOLOGY LESSON

 

            One day, this chick with green hair turns up at my school.  It's no big deal -- there's hair every color of the rainbow there already.  It's 1966 and the whole Carnaby Street thing has almost died out, but kids still come into class every day with pink and blue dynel hair, and the girls are piercing each other's ears in the lavatories so they can wear those groovy mod earrings that drag their earlobes down to their shoulders.  Bored city punks with nothing better to do than mutilate themselves, my brother Mike says.  He also says that he doesn't miss that scene one bit, which is bullshit.
            The girl's name is Cora.  The teachers like her right off because she can read.  They keep trying to push the two of us together, since I'm a reader myself, but I steer clear of Cora until I can find out whether Patti Roberts thinks she's cool.
            It's important to be cool.  If you're not, then Patti Roberts and her gang stomp on you, to demonstrate to you where you belong in the social strata, as Mike puts it.
            "Hey, punk, it's only sociology," he would try to comfort me when I'd come home with dirt all over my face.
            Sociology means being jumped on your way home from school, usually while you're waiting to cross Livernois, the busy street with all the gas stations and auto repair showrooms.  I'll be standing there waiting for the light to change.  All of a sudden this gang of girls will come at me, knock my books into the gutter, and start slapping me around.  Meanwhile, they're insulting me.  "Hey, girlie -- why you so UGLY?  Bet your mama fucks DOGS!"
            Patti and her gang are white but they try to sound like the black kids, since the black kids are cool.  But the black kids never bother with the whites -- it's the tough white girls who like to torture people like me.  On the other hand, as soon as you start crying, they leave you alone.  Being a wimp, it gets so that all I have to do is see three or four of these mean-faced girls coming at me and I burst into tears.
            So if Cora were merely uncool, there'd be no problem.  They'd beat her up some and then leave off.  But it's kind of clear that Cora is cool.  Just the way she'll walk down the hall tossing her weird green hair around like she doesn't give a damn what anybody thinks about her, and the way all the boys watch her, is cool.  She's always real quiet, but she's taking in all the details, which I know because I'm trying to do that too, since for me it's one of the Groundrules.
            Mike came up with the Groundrules.  He sometimes calls them the ten commandments to tease our mom.  Mom is sort of a religious nut.  She was born again a year after Pop died.  She tried to get me and Mike to be born again too but Mike said once was all he could handle.
            One of the Groundrules is that you have to stay alert and be on top of things.  You have to always be paying attention but you can't let Them know.  The one minute you stop paying attention, says Mike, is the one minute They'll drop the truck on your head.  Mike should know -- he was walking down this trail over in Nam one day and he heard a bird call that sounded just like an oriole so he looked up for just a second and walked right into a wire that tripped a mine.
            Still, it's uphill for Mike to get me to pay attention because I've always got my nose in a book.  Before Mike started working on me I never noticed anything, so he starts quizzing me on detail every day when I get home from school.
            "Who was on the playground?" he'll ask.  "What did they have to say to each other?  Who's messing around with who?  Who's teaming up and who are they fighting?"
            Normally, he wouldn't have cared about what a bunch of 7th graders were up to, but he's bored silly sitting home in a wheelchair all day so he grills me on the playground news to keep himself entertained.
            Even Mom asks him sometimes what he does with himself all day.
            "I'm gathering momentum, lady!" he'll say grabbing her around the waist and giving her a big bear hug.  "I'm trying to reach escape velocity!" or anything else to make her laugh and stop bugging him.  Actually, what he does is watch a lot of t.v. and write a shit load of letters to try to get the government to pay for all the operations that will enable him to walk, or, as he says, to shuffle.
            Anyway, for a couple of weeks, nothing much goes on at the playground with Cora except for her and Patti Roberts kind of checking each other out.  Of course, Cora also picks up on my signal immediately, but neither of us says anything to each other.
            Soon as I mention Cora to Mike, he begins asking me questions about her:  What does she look like?  Is she smart?  What does she have to say for herself?
            It's already November when Cora first shows up, after the school year has started.  You can catch your breath in your mittens and it's almost too cold to hang out on the playground.  The playground is a gravel-covered yard, a block square, surrounded by a high chain fence.  Each group has a piece of it staked out and we're always fighting for space.  We hang around and shoot the shit and insult each other and the girls gossip and jump rope and the boys fight.  All the girls are eyeing Cora, but nobody is going to make a move until Patti defines her.
            At first she stands around by herself, watching us back.  Then after maybe a week Patti and a few of her girls start walking by her and giving her a friendly kind of push from time to time and asking her questions about her make-up and stuff like that.  Then, when everybody is just about sure that Patti is going to invite her to join the gang, Cora starts hanging around with the goonsquad.
            The goonsquad is all the queer kids.  The retards.  The stutterers.  They're such losers that nobody even bothers to beat up on them.  But Cora starts talking with them and holding their jump ropes and sharing her chewing gum with them.  They're thrilled, of course, but this kills her chances with Patti, who sees it as a real slap in the face.
            So for a couple of weeks you can see Cora's weird green hair over there in the goon corner, and Patti and her gang cut her cold, but the boys start flirting with her anyway and patti is pissed off -- you can see that she's just itching to get even.
            Meanwhile, Mike is still asking me Cora questions.  He zeros in on the green hair.  "Find out for me why the hair is green," he says to me.  "Five points if you find out and ten points if it's because she's from Mars."
            So about a week after Cora starts hanging out with the retards, I do a really brave thing -- I go up and talk to her.  She's standing over by the fence where it's all reconstituted because some twelfth grader got high one night and tried to drive his Mustang onto the playground.  She's got her back to the playground, watching the little kids crowding around the Good Humor truck that always parks in the corner during recess.
            The Good Humor man sells reefer on the side.  I remember being one of those little kids and not knowing about the reefer yet.  The rumor is that he also peddles smut.  Also that he's a homo.  Also that he hustles kiddie porn and that he's an ex-con and that he killed a kid once.
            "Bullshit," says Mike, who knows the guy.
            The guy sees me standing there next to Cora and smiles at me and waves.  "Say hello to your brother," he says.
            Me and Cora stand there watching the little kids.  First graders being cool, striking poses.  Fast-talking little punks gesturing at each other, eating their ice cream, saying fuckin' this and fuckin' that.  A few third graders smoking and coughing up a storm.
            I smile at Cora.  She smiles back.
            "Where are you from?" I ask.
            "New York City."
            "Why'd you move?"
            "Mom got transferred."  Most kids would ask her about her dad but being without one myself, I know enough not to.
            Then I get to the point.  "Why's your hair green?"
            "Because of swimming."
            "I don't get it."
            She looks at me like I'm a retard.  "It's really blonde," she says, "but the chlorine in the pool turns it green."
            "Oh, Sure," I say knowingly, but it's still a mystery to me.  If swimming made my hair turn green, I'd stop swimming.
            She looks back at the little kids.  "You have a brother?  She asks all of a sudden.
            "Yeah.  His name's Michael.  He was in Nam."
            "I wish I had a brother," she says, "Or a sister."
            "You an only kid?"
            She nods.
            "That's the way the ball bounces," she says.
            "That's the way the cookie crumbles," I say back.  Then the bell rings and I walk back into the building with Cora.  If I'm going to get my ass kicked by Patti for daring to talk to Cora, I may as well walk in with her too.
            Patti has decided to get Cora.  Not only has Cora insulted her by befriending the goonsquad, but cora is clearly pleased with herself, which pisses the shit out of Patti Roberts, who has a lousy life and knows it.
            Before Patti's parents split, you could hear them shouting at each other and throwing furniture around clear down the block.  I remember walking by their house one day on my way to school and there was this huge stereo console television set thing lying smashed on its side in the middle of the driveway.  I couldn't imagine just one of them managing to get that sucker across the room and out of the window, so it had to have been teamwork.
            When I got to school, the rumor was that Patti's dad had taken off.  He never did come back.  Patti's mom never cleaned up after the television set either.  It lay on the ground and rusted there for months.
            In the old days when Mike was still in college, he used to explain that I should feel sorry for Patti because of her screwed up family.  I would come home crying with mud all over my dress, grief-stricken and humiliated, and Mike would explain that pity was the appropriate emotion.
            "Mom may have been born twice," he would say, "but she's behind the two of us 200%.  And Pop was on our team right up till the day he died.  But poor old Patti doesn't really have a friend in the world except that sad bunch of sheep that follow her around, and her folks are turds.  You have to feel sorry for the kid.
            Maybe I had to but I didn't.  She scared the shit out of me and I hated her guts.  I wanted Patti's head on a platter.
            But this pity stuff was before Mike went off to the war.  When he came back, pity was still on the menu, but so was karate.  That's when he started the Groundrules, and one of them was trying to teach me to pound the shit out of anybody who dared lay a finger on me.
            "We're through taking shit around here, kid," he'd announce, thumping his fist down on the chair arm.  He began teaching me karate moves, as best he could without being able to demonstrate the leg stuff.  I thought it was a waste of time since I was still a wimp at heart, but we both got a kick out of it anyway.
            So I start hanging around with Cora, because she's neat and weird and uppity and I'm kind of a lonely kid.  At the time there really aren't a lot of kids in the Detroit Public Schools who can read.  But I'm worried because it's clear that Patti is planning to nail Cora.  She's already saying nasty things about her behind her back and giving her a little shove in line now and then, Accidently-On-Purpose.
            I try to hang out with Cora at safe times, like walking to school when Patti's gang isn't around or kind of bumping into her at the playground.  I'm careful not to have anything to do with her when she's hanging out with the retards.  I don't understand what she sees in them anyway.  I asked her about it one day when we're walking home.
            "They're nice," she says.
            "But they're queer."
            She lifts her eyebrow at me.
            "You know -- different," I try to explain.
            "I'm different.  You're different."
            "We're special different," I say.  "They're inferior different."
            "And you're stupid different," she says.  "If that's really what you think."
            I know she means it, but I don't understand why she feels that way, so I back off.  I'm scared that if I hang around with her too much her weird attitude might rub off on me.
            But if she knows how I'm hedging my bets by avoiding her when Patti is around she doesn't say anything.  She seems glad enough to have me as a pal when I do show up.  And I'm able to bring Mike a lot of Cora information.  Her mom is a lawyer.  Her parents are divorced.  Every day after school Cora takes the bus to the pool at the YMCA and swims five miles.  She has a swimming coach.  When she grows up, she's going to be in the Olympics and win a gold medal.
            Mike thinks Cora is a great friend for me to have.  He tells me to stick by her and ignore Patti Roberts, who has started to tease me about hanging out with weirdos and retards.  Four or five of her girls stand around me on the playground chanting that I'm a retard.  I chant back sticks and stones, but it still bothers me.
            Then they start calling me and Cora homos.  Cora just ignores them and Mike says ignore them but I can't so I stop bumping into Cora.  She never says anything about that either, but sometimes I catch her watching me in class or on the playground.     
            On the other hand, I'm rewarded by Patti, who starts spreading the rumor that I'm kind of neat, even if I can read and have a crippled brother and a nutty mom.  She starts letting me help her cheat on her English tests and her gang starts being nice to me and inviting me to their houses and sharing their secrets and telling me about which boys they've kissed.  And the thing is that once they've taken me in and started acting real nice to me, I start liking them.  They're still being shitty to the other kids and they say nasty things about Cora, but Patti's gang just doesn't seem so bad from the inside.
            And, at last, I'm cool.  I'd always wanted to be cool.  Mike gives me a hard time about it but I tell him it's different for boys and he can't argue because he knows it is.  Mike had always been cool because he was good at sports.  Girls don't give a shit about sports.  With girls, it's popularity.        
            So I'm real happy but I know that the shit's bound to hit the fan sooner or later.  Sure enough, one day Patti comes up and says that "we're" going to jump Cora while she's waiting for the bus to the pool and hold her down and cut her hair off.  I'm supposed to start talking to her so she won't suspect anything while they're sneaking up on her from behind.      
            This makes me feel so lousy that when the day comes I tell my mom I don't feel so good and when she takes my temp I stick the thermometer against the light bulb for a few seconds.  When mom comes back and looks at it she tells me I'd better stay home for the day.  She tells Mike to take good care of me and leaves for work.
            So I get to hang out with Mike, which is great.  We make popcorn and watch the soaps and I practice my karate and try not to think about it at 3:30 when the Edge of Night comes on and I know that Patti and company are beating up on Cora.
            Maybe half an hour later, when I figure the coast is clear, I sneak out and go over to the bus stop because I feel kind of bad that I hadn't at least tried to warn her.  I don't really know what I expected to see, but there's nobody there.
            At first I think that Patti has called it off but then I see a math book lying in the road and I look closer and there are little pieces of Cora's weird green hair lying around and I suddenly feel really rotten, like I'd betrayed my best friend.
            So I figure the hell with it anyway and go over to her house and Cora answers the door.  She pretends that she hasn't been crying and I ignore the way her hair looks (a lot like Bozo the Clown) and she acts so happy to see me that I feel even worse.
            We go up to her room and she says that she's phoned her mom, who is going to put her into a private school where she'll fit in better.  I realize then how much I'm going to miss her.
            I have to do something so I come up with a very simple plan -- we'll track down Patti and jump her and cut HER off and then we'll be even.  Cora doesn't want to see Patti ever again but I say I'm a black belt, which is a lie, and that I'll use my karate on Patti so that all Cora will have to do is watch.
            So we take a pair of scissors and walk over to where Patti and her gang hang out on the corner near the pharmacy.  As soon as Patti sees the two of us together she figures out what's up and starts giving her instructions, but before they can get their act together I walk right up to Patti and slug her, which has to be the sweetest moment of my entire life.  I hit her hard in the face and give her a black eye, which I will remember until I am a little old lady with a long grey beard.
            "A thing of beauty is a joy forever," as Mike said when I told him about it later.
            Then everybody jumps us at once and of course my karate is pretty much useless and they beat the stuffing out of the two of us and end up cutting my hair off too, but the whole thing is actually kind of enjoyable once you get into it.  I can see why boys like to fight so much.
            After they finish beating up on us, we pick ourselves up off the sidewalk and go back to my house.  We try to sneak in the back door but Mike hears us and comes rolling in to see what's up.  When he sees the two of us his face lights up.
            "Hey!" he says to Cora, "Another victim of a ruthless and oppressive society!  Welcome to the club!"
            "Watch it, buster," I say, because most people find Mike's clowning kind of hard to take, but Cora just smiles back at him and giggles like he's just said the funniest thing in the world.