The Journey to the West (9)

The outline of my journey continues:

It might be said that my Journey to the West passed one milestone when I finally became a genuine teenager. I believe my teens were perhaps the most important years of my life. This was mostly due to two developments that came at about the same time: I acquired a girlfriend and I discovered the Pool Room. Let me discuss the first of these achievements first. It might be more appropriate to say that a girl I knew acquired me as a boyfriend, as I do not know exactly how it happened that we became a couple, but we did. From the eighth grade until I graduated from High School I had the same girlfriend. There were a few times when we temporarily broke up, but those times never lasted more than a few days. I have never truly understood why this girl chose me as her boyfriend. I was skinny, not very big, wore glasses, and was neither very handsome nor important during our school years. But we were quickly identified as a couple and I am sure everyone thought we would inevitably marry.

I was a terrible boyfriend, sexist, possessive, jealous, and controlling, but this did not seem to matter much to her as she stuck by me no matter what. I guess you might say we were “in love” although I do not recall that expressions of love between us were terribly common or exuberant. She was much more inclined along those lines than was I. I knew next to nothing about romance and even less about sex. And as there was no such thing as sex education in those days, it was all experimentation, trial and error. With a steady girlfriend and teenage hormones it was inevitable that virginity was quickly lost, although for various reasons it was more difficult than you might think. As we were young, had no place of our own, no automobile, nowhere much to spend comfortable time alone, our love life was not only erratic, but creative in the extreme. We managed. That we managed without a pregnancy (except for one frightening false alarm) I thought was most probably miraculous.

At the end of the eighth grade we moved across the street into the ninth grade and High School. It wasn’t much different, we still took English, History, Math, Social Studies, and such, but we also had to take Chemistry and Biology. We could elect to take Journalism, Typing, and Accounting, the latter being the most boring subject I had ever encountered. I was not a good student. I did well in the few classes I liked, but I was hopeless in ones I did not like. Algebra and Geometry, along with Accounting, were just not for me. But High School was not all bad, there were parties and pep rallies and football and basketball games to attend, and frequent dances and lots of laughs. We roller skated with those old fashioned skates that you put on your regular shoes with a key to tighten them. In the summers we fished and played in the mountains and swam in Placer Creek until the city turned our tennis courts into a swimming pool (hardly anyone ever played tennis).The pool was a Godsend and we spent most of the summers there, tanning ourselves dangerously dark. I desperately wanted to learn to do fancy dives but failed anything but the simplest.

The war, of course, dragged on. We were not doing well for quite a long time but eventually it started to turn around. I had my first real job, stacking shelves in our small Safeway store (I still have my original Social Security card). I earned the less than staggering sum of 25 cents per hour. There was no television so we listened to the radio and read whatever books we could find. Amos and Andy were still on in those days. No one ever suggested it was in any way undesirable. And there were movies. We all went at least once a week, on Saturday, and followed the serials faithfully, Hopalong Cassidy, Flash Gordon, Roy Rogers and others that were really corny and far-fetched. Tom Mix and Ken Maynard still survived but were fading. There was in those days a News Program that came on before the movie (Movietone News of the Day). We saw some war footage and received brief reports on the battles that were raging in far off places we had never heard of before. The young Frank Sinatra crooned and loosened his bow tie while hordes of girls screamed and swooned.

I was rarely ill in High School. Whenever I was and stayed home my mother would bring me a chocolate milk shake. She seemed to think chocolate milk shakes had some curative powers I guess, because she never failed in this endeavor. Almost every school day my girlfriend and I would walk home to my house for lunch. Mother would give us soup or sandwiches. She was very fond of my girlfriend and used to caution me about “getting in trouble, but if I did she would always stand by me.” I guess she thought it was comforting, but to me it only caused more anxiety and worry.

It was also at this time that the kids from Burke began attending our High School. The school in Burke only went to the eigth grade, so those students who wanted to continue had to be bussed to our High School. As these kids had a well-deserved reputation for being tough they posed a threat to our status quo. This was especially true for me as one of them had been my girlfriend's previous boyfriend and was rumored to be still interested in her. Problems, problem, the journey to the west is always fraught with them.