High Times in '79

Flashing back to "that guy" in 8th grade math class

By the time I entered eighth grade at John Burroughs Junior High in Los Angeles, I’d been bumped up to the advanced placement level courses. I acquitted myself well in all of them, with the lone exception of geometry, where I was absolutely useless.

Mathematics had never really been my strong suit. A few years earlier, I had managed to “trick” myself into learning long division via the realization that you needed it to calculate various sports statistics — I got through every equation by pretending I was figuring out a baseball player’s batting average, a pitcher’s ERA, a team’s winning percentage, etc. But beyond a few things related to the dimensions of baseball diamonds and other playing fields, I could find no such immediately applicable use for geometry, and thus spent every class trying to keep my eyes from filming over with puzzlement and frustration.

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The two people that kept geometry class interesting for me were Eric and Mark. Eric was a small, wiry Black kid with a mile-a-minute mouth who sat directly in front of me and flipped me constant shit over the fact that I listened to rock music. He was deep into the P-Funk universe; he’d draw pictures of Dr. Funkenstein, Sir Nose and other Funkological characters on his notebook or math papers, then turn around and explain to me what they were all about. I was relatively new to the whole P-Funk thing — “Flashlight” and “One Nation Under a Groove” were their only songs that I knew by heart — but I was nonetheless fascinated.

I was equally fascinated by Eric’s propensity for talking massive shit to the other Black guys in the class. This didn’t seem to be good-natured shit, either; he would spew the “N-word” and several other deeply derogatory racial terms in jagged clusters, and dish out nonstop withering insults about their lack of brainpower and abundance of melanin.

I had no idea at all what possessed him to behave like this, especially when the guys he insisted on insulting all seemed to be literally twice his size. I would always be on the lookout for any incoming textbooks (or worse) that might be hurled at his head from across the room; but none ever came, because none of these guys seemed to be remotely rattled by Eric’s constant ragging. “I got more hair on my dick than your mama got on her head,” was about the most hostile reply I can recall one of them serving up.

Mark, on the other hand, didn’t talk to anybody, and unlike Eric — who always greeted me on the way to our seats with a hearty “Rock Sucks!” — he probably didn’t even know that we were classmates. I was fascinated by Mark because the word around school was that he’d “do anything to get high,” and rumor had it that he’d been busted in shop class for sniffing cans of paint. I totally believed it.

Mark had sun-bleached, center-parted blonde hair, doughy cheeks and pale, freckled skin; but the first thing you always noticed about him was his perpetually glazed eyes and slack jaw. A few years later, Fast Time at Ridgemont High would introduce us to Sean Penn’s beloved Jeff Spicoli character; Mark was kind of like Spicoli, I guess, only minus the good looks and the surfer’s swagger. He was simply stoned to the bone and thoroughly checked out; he’d make it to class just before the bell, then float wordlessly to his seat at the back of the room without making eye contact with anyone.

I can’t remember our math teacher’s name, but I do recall that she looked kind of like Anne Murray, only minus the Canadian warmth. Whenever she would get annoyed that the same three students were always raising their hands to answer her questions, she would start randomly calling on other kids to solve the equations, identify theorems, etc. It was the worst; she was not particularly encouraging if you offered up a wrong answer, and she’d usually say something that made you feel even more stupid than you already did for not understanding the problem.

One afternoon that November, she was doing her usual random call-out routine when she landed on Mark. “Mark,” she said, pointing at a circle she’d drawn on the board and divided evenly into four quarters. “What formula would we use to determine the area of each quadrant?”

All eyes turned to Mark at the back of the class. He seemed frozen in his chair, his face an unmoving oval of uncomprehension.

“Uhhh…” he finally croaked. “Quadrophenia, man?”

The entire class exploded with laughter. For once, our teacher didn’t have a cutting comeback; and for the rest of the semester, Mark was hailed as a conquering hero wherever he showed his stoned face on campus.

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