Rivethead - Ben Hamper [14]
We had an English teacher named Miss Kane who took a particular shine to my budding enshrinement as the poet laureate of Powers High. She often mimeographed my poems and passed them around her Creative Writing class. She'd read some of my poems in front of the class and the girls all smiled brightly in my direction. I smiled back, thankful for their innocence and terrible judgment of talent. Meanwhile, the guys all slouched down in their desks, half pissed that they hadn't stumbled onto such an ingenious scam.
By my junior year in high school, strange new vices had risen from out of the murk to pull me under. I exchanged my textbooks for Mothers of Invention albums. I grew my hair down to my ass and attended classes on an infrequent basis. I exchanged my loner personage to join up with a small band of brooding hooligans. I spent most of my time swallowing or inhaling every type of illegal substance they would pass me. Needless to say, my two-year run on the honor roll dissolved in one glorious heap of incompletes and lazy failures.
I was feeling more and more pressure trying to hold the family together while my mother worked. The occasional runins with my old man were tense. He'd rip into my ass about the length of my hair, my hoodlum pals, my grades, my wardrobe, anything he could find. I would stand there in silent rage. All I could really dwell on was kicking his drunken ass. My fists would ball up and then recoil.
In the end, I was just too chickenshit to try the old man. I turned to the bonds I had made with my new friends. We ate acid at every opportunity. I sat in the back of the classroom throughout my junior year stoned to the gills on orange barrel mescaline or windowpane acid. Sometimes I laughed so hard at the proceedings taking place around me that the teacher would ask me if I had a problem. Outside of the fact that I hardly knew my name and everything around me had this incredible purple glow, there was no problem at all. Acid replaced lots of things. Most importantly, it took down reality.
By the time my senior year rolled around, things were beginning to get jumbled. My father had mysteriously slid away one autumn night and the only information any of us had was that he was shacking up with some bar floozie somewhere in southern Florida. He'd taken off without so much as an adios or a fresh change of skivvies. This desertion again thrust me into the role of surrogate dad while my mother toiled long hours on the hospital night shift.
My devotion to school matters became a complete joke. I rarely attended class, preferring to hang out at a friend's dreary apartment with a bunch of fellow lunks who were most certainly headed for jail, the morgue or General Motors. Our scholastic majors ranged from chemical abuse to hashish peddling. My long-standing reign as love poem ambassador dissolved into a mire of radical blatherings. Quaaludes became the new curse on campus and I gobbled my fair share, often falling asleep in various stairwells and auditorium catwalks.
Having arrived this far on the academic route, it was time for all students to start funneling a vision career-wise. They had guidance counselors who summoned you into their offices attempting to find what kind of mold fit you best. Doctor? Attorney? Accountant? Shoprat? No, no, no—they never mentioned shoprat. Nor did they mention serial killer, pimp, poet,