ROGER FARMINGTON GOES TO MIDDLE SCHOOL

MARK ANTHONY MIDDLE SCHOOL, the nom de plume had nothing to do with a Latin music pop star. Instead, the name was a throwback to the neighborhood first populated by Italian immigrants in the 1930s. The school had a few makeovers in the twenty-five years since it was first commissioned, but it still smelled of old tennis shoes, cheap paint, and Lucky Strikes. The Mark Anthony school compound was demoted from a high school to a middle school in 1968. The playground had significant shrinkage, losing acres and replacing the baseball outfield with government-provided section 8 housing, crime, and nightly gun battles. The practice football field was reduced to a grassy spot 25×45 yards, with both sidelines now parking areas for the faculty.

Mark Anthony’s façade was embellished with six faux marble columns as an entrance to the school. Walking up a series of cracked multicolored steps into the front door saw a series of inlaid gargoyles perched overhead, keeping watch for evildoers. Unfortunately, the demon protectorates didn’t do much protecting for the underclassman. 

As a new seventh-grade arrival at Mark Anthony, I knew sooner or later, I would have to venture into the cafeteria. Hell, I can’t go three years without noon-time chow. So, I decided to wander down the hallway, make a quick left into the eatery, and experience the tumult, insults, and threats to my manhood. I was terrorized by my first encounter with this common enmity, the cafeteria topography. 

Perched in the corner was the lunchroom monitor other teachers surreptitiously called Emperor Diocletian. He was constantly surveying his imperium, scrutinizing threats to his scepter. The PE teacher, Mr. Lynn Skynyrd, was maneuvering between tables, acting as a Praetorian prefect, ensuring all behaved themselves. The lunch lady, always smiling, wearing her hair net and a shadow of a mustache, was dispensing Etruscan cuisine, fish, pasta, and olive oil. Actually, fish sticks, slightly cooked noodles, and watered-down Italian dressing. Walking into this cluster fuck was emotionally painful. Entering the cafeteria was akin to being a condemned Christian dragged into the Roman Coliseum. The lions were eagerly viewing me as their main entree.

For the last three years of grade school, I had been comfortable with my social strata; there was order in the university at Saint Paul XV. I’m now starting over at the bottom of the pig pile, a seventh grader in a new school, with eighth and ninth graders searching for their prey. Three months ago, I was the big man on campus and today I’m trying to suck up to the HMFIC. I had dropped three rungs on that evolutionary ladder, feeling like a drudge apparatchik in a dystopian novel. The motivation now wasn’t to excel but to survive and not get eaten by the carnivores; I was meatloaf surrounded by hungry rabid dingos.

To add insult to injury, I came from a prestigious private school, so my cohorts thought I was intelligent, elite, and snobbish. Little did they know, my calm demeanor was more of a defense mechanism than a “Better than you” attitude. I was quiet because I didn’t want to say anything stupid. I was standoffish because I didn’t know whom to trust. I didn’t volunteer for anything for fear of screwing it up. This gave me a Steve McQueen facade when my emotional DNA was closer to Mr. Rogers.

Regarding academics, I was the victim of a “Harvard B .” I would learn later in life the “Harvard B” was real. It was an actual phenomenon prevalent by cooking the GPA books in the Ivy League grading system. Once you join the club as an Ivy League student and pay 100K a year for tuition, the expectations were never to receive a grade lower than a B. All you had to do was occasionally attend class, turn in the right assignments with the right colloquialism, on time (or close to on time), and ensure the registrar receives your parent’s tuition check before the semester starts, ala, The “Harvard B.”

Transferring from one of the more challenging and prestigious private schools in the state, I got labeled smart. Unfortunately, my transcripts from Saint Paul XV were only a reflection of the “Harvard B” in action. My parents weren’t going to pay 25K a year for me to bring home C’s, and the nuns weren’t going to forfeit a sizable check twice a year. When I arrived at Mark Anthony, they read my transcripts, saw the grades, and placed me in an advanced grade level. So not only was I labeled a pocket protector-wearing geek, but the curriculum required extra work and study time. Extra work and extra study time! Damn, when would I have time to screw off, do stupid crap, and be a degenerate? I’ll have to wait till my college days for that.

Patrick was my best friend all through grade school. We played sports together, we went to movies together, we vacationed together, and we’d get in trouble together. Everyone at Saint Paul XV knew where to find Patrick and me, attached at the hip.

That all changed as we turned twelve and entered public middle school. Our homes were a baseball throw apart, and Mark Anthony Middle School was only two blocks from our houses. Sometime during the summer months before starting the school year, Patrick’s parents received a disconcerting letter from the superintendent of schools. Patrick’s name was placed into a blind lottery with other black students. The purpose of the raffle was to pick candidates for busing and integrate a suburban school system. Eight students were selected to attend an all-white middle school across town with a three-hour round-trip bus ride. The newspaper, above the fold, celebrated the move with the headline NEGRO STUDENTS BEING BUSED TO ALL WHITE SCHOOL FOR RACIAL INTEGRATION.

Integration! Hell, we couldn’t spell the word, let alone understand the social ramification of this repugnant experiment. All I knew was that we had four blacks on our basketball team, six playing baseball, and thirteen on our football team. Parick was our starting quarterback. Everyone got along in school and socialized in the hood. Sounds like integration to me. At twelve years old, that was all I needed to know about social justice, the sins of Jim Crow, and Stokley Carmichael. We referred to the yellow school buses as slave ships taking their human cargo to the plantation. No one thought this a good idea except the Harvard B-educated superintendent and his sycophants.

Patrick’s mom now had to travel over two hours, round trip, for a parent-teacher conference, special events, and curriculum issues. Patrick’s dad had to pick up Patrick after school for athletic events, cutting short any much-needed overtime at the warehouse. The family lost control and visibility of their son’s scholastic journey. This campaign eroded the community school and support neighborhoods had for their local school, increasing truancy and discipline problems within and outside the school. The burden on the bused students and families would be immediate chaos. School busing began decades of “White Flight” to the suburbs and a precipitous decline in the public school education system. No measurable social value was derived from this goat rope, with only pats on each other back from virtue-signaling white liberals. As for my journey, I would have to spend the next three academic years eating lunch without Patrick and ensuring my back was always to the cafeteria wall in the Deadwood arena.  

On a crisp fall day in October, an event would cause me immediate sleepless nights. I would experience what I later referred to as my first love. Mrs. Gilbey, our social studies teacher, took a sick day. Little did I know this day would be a watershed moment in my odyssey toward manhood. Moreover, this sentinel event would shape my proclivity toward older blonde girls.

Five minutes after the bell rang to start class, in walked through the door and into my woolgathering fantasy a substitute teacher. She presented the most exquisite formation of physical womanhood my puerile eyes had ever seen. My brother Hanks’s Miss September Playboy foldout could not rival this femme. She wore a red loose-fitting skirt, black 3-inch heels, and a sweater that filled out all the right places. As she stood there, her soul seemed to unfold like a lotus with countless petals. I guessed she to be twenty-one years old. I didn’t see a problem with our age difference. Twenty-one, heck, I’ve got baseball cards older than that.

She walked in beauty, working the room with her eyes as if participating in an elegant sporting event, vying for the championship. I knew not what would half inspire this nameless grace. Still, I soon would imagine the purpose of every wave in her Nordic tress. How dear became the dwelling place that reserved my primal thoughts, securely entrenched in my brain housing group. 

She introduced herself as Miss Davis, a sophomore at the university majoring in Education. Her purpose today was that of a substitute teacher, instructing day seventeen of Mrs. Gilbey’s syllabus. I was praying she wouldn’t call on me. I knew my nervousness would mumble and stumble out the wrong answer. She needed to see me as suave, sophisticated, and mature, older than the rest of the rubs in the class. I could not hear the words as she spoke, just the sonnet she performed with melodic subtlety. I secretly knew her lecture on the “Necessary and Proper” clause of the US Constitution was a disguised suggestive comment, a connection for only me. I even heard her ask me to call her by her first name; I think that’s what I heard. As soon as I find out her first name, I will respond accordingly.

Dennis kept interrupting my Don Quixote moment by talking over Miss Davis. I finally told Dennis to shut his trap, or I’d punch him. The threat was not so I could hear the lectures but to continue injecting her celestial prose, mainlining each vowel into my welcoming vain. From that forty minutes when my tongue first whispered our love, I hoped her heart would be mine someday.

The social studies period ended. My nymphet was gone with the sound of the bell, disappearing as quickly as her incoming tide. When we two parted in silence, I knew my half broken-heart would be severed for years. Pale grew on my cheeks and blackness engulfed my soul as she sashayed out the door. Truly our meeting would be foretold as a sorrowful relationship.

I snapped into reality and realized that my twelve-year-old chassis had no chance for this aged beauty. The space-time continuum was too deep a chasm to cross. This realization was disfavorable and non-conforming. Youth is for the young, and father time can be a cruel assassin. But I had faith in the future; I now would live for the future. I knew I could wait a few years. Time would be on my side until I’m at least a freshman before I could start dating my high school social studies teacher.