The Bollingbrook Day School

~ 1980 -- Bollingbrook day school was a private K-12 where Judy Weiss sent her fourteen year old daughter. They had a lower and upper school, each with a principal and vice principal, all of whom were credentialed with master’s degrees. At minimum. Dr. Boschen, the principal of the upper school had a PHD from Harvard -- which my mom always pronounced as Harbor. Total enrollment was 254 students, and each grade had just one class. There were two colored students and one oriental.

In 1979, the tuition was a little over five thousand dollars a year per student which was one fourth the cost of the house I lived in. My father was a staff sergeant, and made twenty four thousand dollars a year - a bit more when you factored in TDY and the army's housing allowance. After my mom's life-changing ride in Judy Weiss's Jaguar, she became convinced that I would have to attend. In the fall of 1980, that’s exactly what happened. To help afford it, my mom quit her job at Weiss's, and got a higher paying full-time job as a bank teller with Bank of America. She continued doing seamstress work on the side for Judy on a per-job basis. My dad took on a part time job as a salesman in the Craftsman tools department of Sears at Walnut Mall. When the topic would come up with family and friends, he was quick to mention the store discount -- that, and the fact that Craftsman stood by the quality of their products, no questions asked. He got dead serious when talking about the no questions asked part, and would repeat it to you in a slower voice to really let it sink in, evoking a reverence you might associate with the raising of the flag at Iwo Jima.

I entered Bollingbrook in the second grade in 1980. The school demanded a high level of participation from the families of students, which in 1980, meant a substantial level of disruption to our established routines. My mother had exactly nothing in common with any mother in that school. Right off the bat, there was the issue of transportation -- just getting to and from school. My mother had to get a driver’s license specifically to handle this, and then make friends with a few other families to arrange for carpooling. She had to learn how to pronounce car pool. We took turns with two families: the Shavitz’s and the Nowery’s. My father had to provide a ten minute executive summary of the history of the Jewish people to my mother to minimize the chances of her saying something stupendously insensitive to one of the Shavitz's. He had to buy a moped so he could free up the car for my mom. There were odd school supplies, an endless stream of permission slips to read and sign, parent teacher conferences to attend, and fees for special trips and activities completely foreign to my parents. Every thursday was dress up day, where the boys had to wear jackets and ties, and the girls had to wear dresses.

Things were more clear cut for me. The second grade was primarily devoted to the pursuit of a couple high-value objectives. For starters, I had to prove myself academically to a small cadre of teachers and administrators who were on my mother’s enemies list. Mrs. Lee, the principal of the lower school was at the top of that list. She towered over my mother standing five foot ten - a slender woman with short black hair and a flabby back. Over the summer, when we came in for a family interview, my mother became convinced that she thought of us as berry berry row krass. My mom had to remind Mrs. Lee a few times that my dad was an enlisted man. The polite way to convey this in the military is to jokingly say my husband works for a living. I think my mother fed her that line three times on the day we came in. Each time my mother corrected her, Mrs. Lee would smile and nod, then repeat the mistake a few minutes later.

Second, I had to fit in with my classmates, and make friends. One of my first memories involves an encounter with Chad Knowles. He was the toughest kid in the class, and up until he was instructed not to do so, would actually wear white t-shirts to school with a deck of cards rolled up in one of the sleeves, pretending they were cigarettes. He wore jeans and a denim jacket almost every day, along with a set of dog tags. His dad was an ex-green beret, which explained why Chad was always talking about military history and war movies. The first time we met was my first week of school, when we had a run-in in the boys bathroom. I walked in as he was coming out. He slowed down as he walked by me on my left side, and looked right at me without saying a word, then walked right back in. I don’t remember the exact way he explained things to me, but he said he’d need to punch me as a test, and that I shouldn’t tell anyone about it.

“Where do you have to hit me?” I asked. 

“In the chest or the back. You pick.” 

“Back.” 

“OK, turn around.” 

“Are you gonna’ hit me as hard as you can?” 

“Naw, it’s just a test. Don’t worry.”

I tensed up and held my breath in, confident that I could take the hit. I heard him take a step or two backwards, then lunge at me from behind. The punch landed kind of high up in the upper right part of my back.

“Aw man, you hit hard!” I said, playing a delicate balance between acknowledging the power of his punch, but also not admitting to being hurt. He smiled. 

“You’re OK man. “ he said, grinning.

 Then he turned back to add just one more thing, smiling.

“Are you a wetback?” 

“I don’t know.” I said, also smiling.

Clearly, I was in. When I returned to my classroom, I didn’t mention anything about the punch, but wondered what a wetback was. I thought of our run-in in the bathroom, and concluded that it must’ve been a nickname for people of unusual toughness who passed that test. At school during lunch, Chad waved me over to where he sat in the cafeteria to explain a game they all played at recess called smear-the-queer. It involved a group of players huddling up in a circle with one person designated as the ball tosser. The football is tossed high up in the air, and one person - anyone with the guts to do so - had to catch it or pick it up off the ground. That’s the queer. Everyone else had to run after and tackle the queer until a fumble is forced. If a fumble happens, someone else has to grab the ball to become the new queer. That’s how it worked.

“So what’s the point?” I asked.

“Whaddya mean? You wanna’ not get tackled.” he said.

“I mean, isn’t it kind of cool to be the one with the ball? If you’re fast?” Right? Was I missing something? I didn’t want to tell Chad, but it seemed to me that being the queer was the coolest position - as long as you didn’t get tackled. He looked at me like I was a retard, so I didn’t push it. We spent the rest of lunch talking about tv shows.

Chad was without a doubt, the best improvisational storyteller I ever knew, and loved to recount the missions his dad would go on in Vietnam. To this day, I’m not sure if he made up all or parts of those stories, but to me, it didn’t matter. He always had us on the edge of our seats. Chad had an older brother, Mo, who wound up getting expelled from school before I started attending. Mo went to military school somewhere in northern Virginia, and passed along horror stories of beatings and hazing rituals to Chad, who in turn, would retell them in graphic detail to scare the piss out of whoever was listening.

On the same day I became friends with Chad, I also became friends with Flynn. His mom was the girl's PE teacher at the school, and wore a whistle around her neck at all times. She liked to wear a white canvas baseball cap with the bill pulled down low. Flynn was a natural athlete; the best at catching a ball, throwing a ball, the last one standing during dodgeball, and absolutely uncatchable.

One day at recess, while being chased by Jamie Zoldark during smear-the-queer, he turned himself all the way around at full speed so that he was running backwards. I observed this all from a hundred feet away where I had stopped to catch my breath. Flynn easily parried the other boy's attempts at grabbing him by zig zagging like an NFL running back. I had never seen a nine year old boy move like that. He had the footwork of Sugar Ray Leonard. He shuffled his shoulders and head to feint in one direction, only to accelerate in the other, all the while doing crazy ball fakes like the Harlem Globetrotters. On one of the zig zag maneuvers, Jamie nearly grazed Flynn.

"I GOT YOU!" Jamie's face was red.

"No you didn't!" It was a cheerful retort.

Jamie stiffened up with both his fists balled up tightly, and twirled around once dramatically before freezing in place. He stood very still, tears rolling down his face, both hands slammed down by his sides. He raised his right arm and pointed a finger at Flynn as he let loose a barrage of words I couldn't understand, which spiraled into uncontrollable sobbing. Snot ran from his nose down to his mouth, and sprayed out in a cascade of incomprehensible curses. All the while, Flynn just jogged slowly in circles around the other boy, palming the football at him and pulling it back. Jamie's mouth was wide open. His right arm stupidly hung in the air with a single finger pointed at Flynn, whose footwork had slowed to a shuffle. He approached Jamie with the ball outstretched, this time no ball fakes, no taunting. Jamie continued to wail, but the hand with the pointed finger relaxed into an open palm, ready to receive the ball.

When the boys were maybe 3 feet apart, Flynn made a sudden darting motion with his head and hawked a loogie right into Jamie's wide open mouth - dead center mass, a fucking bullseye. Then without turning, he accelerated into his backward trot and glared at Jamie as he let out a few bursts of high pitched laughter. The mouth shot was extraordinary, something out of a Looney Tunes cartoon. Jamie's reaction was swift: he fell to the ground as if hit by a round from a 50 caliber machine gun. He writhed around coughing and spitting for all of half a second, then shot up to his feet, and charged full steam at Flynn. Flynn was still running backwards, and allowed Jamie to close the distance to about 10 feet. He started in on the zig zagging and ball pumps, then turned around so that he was facing forward, and sped away like it was nothing. His feet moved insanely fast, and he kicked up a trail of dust clouds. Jamie sped up too, but couldn’t even come close to matching Flynn. Poor Jamie ran around in large figure eights for at least five minutes, like a malfunctioning robot, just screaming and pointlessly throwing his arms around. I felt bad for him, but not too bad. During gym class earlier that week, he threw a volley ball as hard as he could right into Flynn’s face.