Stranger In My Hometown
I spent a total of five years in private schools. I spent two years in the 9th grade. The last three years at the Leelanau School I had a close-knit group of friends. I had a girlfriend I adored. I was one of the top athletes in the school.
The class sizes were 8-10 kids. I felt comfortable there. I felt at home there. The area was beyond beautiful. I had a chance to come back for my senior year, but my ego got the best of me. “If they don’t want me back, then I don’t want to come back.” I ended up going to Flint Central High School for my senior year which was one of the major Class “A” high schools in Flint. The “A” denoted the size of the school in Michigan.
There were A, B, C, and D-size schools. Leelanau was a class D to put things in perspective. Since I repeated 9th grade I was graduating a year later than the year I should have graduated. All the people that I might have known from elementary school graduated the year before my senior year. I knew nobody my senior year. Granted, I was gone from the Flint public school system for six years. I felt like a complete stranger in the town I grew up in.
I remember being in class on my first day and looking around the room to find a familiar face. There was none to be found. It seemed like everybody there were friends; they’d all been together four years or more. I was a complete outcast and I’m sure I put out a negative vibe. This was like that alternate 1984 in Back to the Future II. It was a nightmare beyond my comprehension.
I’m pretty sure I went home my first night and cried myself to sleep. “What did I do” I kept asking myself. Your senior year in high school is supposed to fun with all your friends. I agonized over my decision pretty much the whole school year I was there.
Basketball Tryouts
Lucky for me I only had four classes. The first class was a typing class. The second class was a government class. The third class was a psychology class. The 4th class was a history class. That totaled up to about a half day of school.
I was one of the top basketball players at Leelanau so I figured I’d try out for the team at Central. Practice started in late October. Going from a class D school to a class A school in terms of talent was like night and day. When the basketball practice started the football season was still going on and several players that were on the football team would be playing basketball.
Had I stayed on the team, I would have been that guy that comes in with a minute to play when the game was out of reach. I pulled a hamstring in practice one day and that put me out of commission. I decided to pull the plug on playing basketball and ended up getting my first real job which was working at a car wash in Flushing on Pierson Road. I started skipping classes at about that same time. I went from skipping one class to two classes. I would eventually go to my first class and then blow off the other three.
Day Trips
When I skipped class, I’d get in my car and just start driving. I would fire up a joint and I’d drive to Detroit. I’d go to Port Heron. I’d go to Ann Arbor. I’d go to Bay City and Saginaw. I’d go to Lansing and anywhere in between. Each day was a different adventure of skipping class, smoking a joint, Jamin to the Pioneer Super Tuner I had in my car, and visiting a new port. I would stay on the road and make it back home just in time to go to work at the car wash. My mom would ask me, “How was school today?” “Oh, it was alright,” I said. They had no clue I was skipping class like I was. I kept on skipping and nobody really said anything. I was surprised, but since they didn’t say anything I kept skipping.
My Suspension
In March of 1977, a little over two months before I was supposed to graduate I got called into the principal’s office. They read me the riot act on all the classes I was skipping and I got suspended for a week. My parents flipped out when they found out why I got suspended. Here they thought I was going to school every day grinding it out. When graduation came around the school wouldn’t let me graduate with the rest of the seniors. They basically said here’s your graduating certificate. Have a nice life and don’t let the door hit you on your way out.
Conclusion
Man, that was a tough year. It was excruciating at first. It got a little less intense as the year went on. Getting the job at the car wash was the best thing I did to curb my social anxiety. I made pretty good friends with a couple of the guys I worked with at the car wash. I didn’t make one friend while I went to Central. I kept my mouth shut, stayed in my lane and just played out the string. When the year finally ended I was ecstatic.
Epilogue
I was “Lost in Space” after graduating. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life. My dad was in the building business and the mantra was that we (my brothers and I) would be going into the building business with my dad when we got old enough. That wasn’t going to happen because my dad was winding his building business down about the time I graduated. I was kinda counting on being in the building business with my dad, but when I realized that wasn’t going to materialize I had to figure out plan “B.”
The only thing I liked doing was getting high, drinking beer, and smoking cigarettes. I’d throw in chasing women too, but I wasn’t too good at that back in those days. Meanwhile, God was nowhere to be found. None of the friends I had at that time were Jewish. They were all Gentiles. My agnostic, atheistic mindset was strong and unchanged.
