As Luck Would Have It by Mark Goldstein Read Free Book Online Page B

believe to be true, that the rebellious student was not strictly a product of his natural ecology, but rather he was exhibiting new behaviors and learning new strategies to defend and protect himself.
    At the end of three years of all of this learning, we were expected to graduate and make the transition to high school, where presumably we might begin to learn something that could help prepare us for whatever might follow.  The fact that some of us were unlikely to make it smoothly across this bridge should have been evident to our educators; for if someone like me, who is trained in business as opposed to education could understand this, then certainly they could as well.  But Mr. Strickmann either did not understand it, or more likely didn't give a shit.  The prospect of being sent to his office, even for some minor violation, sent shockwaves of fear right to the bones of our pubescent bodies.  I learned in just the first weeks of being in middle school that discipline was going to be extracted from us one way or the other, and that I was going to have to avoid making any unplanned social calls to the vice principal's office.
    There was only one thing more important than popularity in middle school and that was conformity.  In the early 1970s, the idea of appreciating differences was yet to fully develop and for us, not even conceived.  Still in the shadows of the painful fight for civil rights, America was continuing to struggle with the notion of tolerance, and the one size fits all mentality that was prevalent in the Midwest and maybe everywhere else.  The Stonewall rioting in New York had been a mere four summers earlier and the tragic murders of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King just one year prior to that.   Changes in the way we were to view one another would advance slowly, and in varying degrees, and these conventions would continue to be reinforced for many years to come.  But for us conforming was the law, and if you broke the law you were in trouble.  Anyone who stuck out in any way was inevitably going to be subject to ridicule or worse; straying even a little from your perceived role was going to be a big problem.  To the extent that society frowned on nonconformity, the school administration abhorred it.
    This need to conform at school was constantly being reinforced in all aspects of our lives; our clothes, our hair, our speech, what we read and what we thought were all programmed into us, producing, they hoped anyway, young clones that would not question the mores and values that they cherished.  And nowhere was drifting from the norm more dangerous or more thoroughly loathed than from one's perceived gender role.  Psychologists had only begun to explore sex roles and gender stereotypes by the mid 1970s and the topic was totally absent from our curriculum and realm of discussion.  To the degree that the civil rights activists had paved the way for the now swelling feminist and gay rights movements, we were not supposed to be aware of it apparently and the subject was off limits.
     
    *****
     
    Jamie Dobbs was a greaser with a wicked mean streak.   I didn’t know much about him other than that his older brother Chuck had been expelled from high school because he showed up one day with a knife and threatened to use it on a particular teacher that gave him a bad grade or maybe a bad time.  Jamie led a small group of similarly minded punks who wandered the school in search of easy prey; apparently thinking they'd found it in Joseph.  I had overheard Jamie before making unflattering remarks about my friend, but we had managed to stay out of his way for most of our first semester.
    Hey Andrews, is that your new girlfriend?   There he was behind us in the hall with two of his slimy-looking friends.  Classes had just ended for the day and the school was thinning out now, with just a few students scattered around and heading for the nearest exit.  He was an eighth grader and bigger than me.