Ah, to bathe once again in hormones………
One of the first things I had to do in junior high was bring the nurse my hay fever meds. Until that wonderful first frost lifted the curse of the cat people, I needed my pills to keep from devolving into a sneezing pile of protoplasm.
So I sit on the waiting bench and within a few minutes, a girl sits next to me. Beautiful flowery dress, legs that stretched into the next county, and brand new high heels. And this one wasn’t even in any of my classes.
I should pause to relay Steve’s tongue in cheek rating of girls’ heels. Almost all of them had what us boys in the boonies would call ‘heels’, but some girls also had ‘serious’ heels, as in ‘yea, that’s right look at these legs.’ Heels that you could see hot women like Joey Heatherton wearing. Ah, such a connoisseur of girls, I listened like a Buddhist trainee.
Hot girls abounded and even some that weren’t hot were interesting. We walked around with tongues dragging on the ground and spent half our classroom time looking at these new females with lustful daydreams (of what, I dunno, we certainly knew next to nothing about sex).
No longer one room for all lessons–now we moved from room to room, and floor to floor. Ponder this for a second–you’re 13 and for the first time, you’re: a) riding a bus, b) going room to room 7 times a day, c) walking up and down stairs all day long, and d) using a locker (more on that later). At least the lusting for girls helped you get over all that new stuff.
In other news, we were next to a firehouse. No siren–it had a huge bullhorn atop the tower, emitting a guttural howl that could be heard miles away. Our house was at least ten miles away and I had heard it clearly growing up. If you were on the firehouse side, you jumped out of your seat when it went off and it took 5 minutes for your corpuscles to dis-entangle. All over town, dogs always went apeshit when the thing went off; hell, even miles away in my neighborhood, dogs outside heard it and howled.
All rooms had an intercom speaker and a call button. I knew what an intercom was, cause the old man put one in when I was around 6, so they could watch tube in the cellar and listen in as I slept. Mornings the Foon playing classical music for our edification; oh gee, how wonderful. We jumped when the classroom box pinged sharply. 2-3 times a week, it went off school-wide with the secretary announcing “Mr. Scalese Please call in, Mr. Scalese please call in.” He was the janitor. One teacher joked that Scalese was actually a ghost who walked through walls. I later found out it was nothing so mysterious–there was a bathroom deep in the bowels of the elementary building near the boiler. He’d hang out there and sometimes get pissed as a newt.