A Senior

Tommy was trying to get out of the house without leaving. He rented a trailer with some other fellows in the same park as his mother and stepfather, but there was trouble and Tommy and the others were forced to leave, so he moved into an apartment building with Donny and two other fellows I didn't know. He got a job working in a Tenneco gas station and mini-mart. He was working nights and giving away gas and beer to all his friends, so we al thought it was great. Tommy liked it because he didn't have to bust his knuckles every day.

But the crowd that came to that apartment was a strange one and growing. Donny was always able to attract the worst people imaginable. Being around the twisted and disturbed made him feel more normal, I thought. But the effect on him wasn't good. He was beginning to seem no more than a step away from the penitentiary.

The drugs were becoming harder, too. Randy and Rhett were dealing in heroine. Fellows were beginning to put needles in their arms, depressing the plunger, falling, falling. Tommy spent his time listening to The Moody Blues.

I went into my senior year. This was it. All I had to do was make it through. We were top of the food chain, and there seemed a liberation in that. When we walked through the hallways, there were no older kids. We were it.

Overnight, it seemed, there were hippies, kids with long hair and new attitudes. Some had become political. Our classes were. We all had to take a course called "Americanism vs. Communism." It was taught in an auditorium that combined three classes. I had the football coach for mine. He was an idiot. We learned that we didn't want to be communist because you were told where you would live and where you would work and you would have to wear shoes made out of cardboard.

In contrast, I had Sociology with one of the oldest faculty. And the most radical. Everything we learned in that class seemed to challenged what we had been taught before. Those of us lucky enough to be in his class looked at one another with eye-popping surprise. The man was a wonder. One day we were asked to break into groups for a long term project, and he let us come up with our own team names. The group I was in decided on the moniker "Panama Red." We were shocked that he knew what that was. He told us to watch a new television show called "All in the Family." He would spend part of every class talking about it the day after a new episode came on. He seemed to know everything that our other teachers did not. He liked us, we thought, and that was something.

But I had history class with the same coach who taught "Am. vs. Com," and he was a jerk. He spent most of every class talking about the football team, and if not that, something equally mundane. He didn't like hippies and was always on the lookout for hair that was too long, so I had to slither into and out of his class and try to make my hair look as if it complied. One day, however, I caught his attention, and he sent me to the office. Again, I was sent home to get a haircut.

But there was a boy that year who had refused to cut his hair and instead had bought a short haired wig and put his own hair into that. When he left school, he would take it off and his hair would fall to his shoulders. I decided to do the same. Rather than going to get my haircut, I went to a department store and bought a wig. I, too, would wear the hair hat. I would not get my hair cut. I would let it grow.

But when I went home and put it on, I looked ridiculous. My wig was cheap and looked it. The other fellow had gotten one that was much, much better. But all I had to do was get back into school, I told myself. After that, I would take my chances.