The subject of nightmares for years to come.
Once you were in homeroom, the teacher distributed locker numbers and combinations. Then you try it out. The noise was crazy, made worse by the unworldly echo of the second floor. Some lockers always jammed, and half the time kids were screwing up the numbers, then saying it was busted.
These lockers were OLD–creaky hinges, slow dials, doors that had to be slammed. In more polite words, pieces of shit. Rule 1: No one goes in their locker except between classes. Yea, right. You quickly learned that once you got the shithouse pass, you could run to the locker and just close it quietly.
Rule 2: Nothing taped inside the locker. Us boys must have had the reputation of being porn connoisseurs. Foon was obsessed with this. There were regular locker checks when janitors opened all lockers and Foon inspected them. That was his way of making sure no one had heroin or cocaine; these middle class kids could be pre-teen pushers, you never know.
However, Foon was a creature of habit (emphasis here on ‘creature’). Whenever the janitor was up and about (instead of wherever his hide-dee hole was), then it was locker audit time. Topless pictures (yea, there were some kids who did it) went in books. The few juvenile delinquents (gasp!) who smoked cigs either had them well hidden (gym bags with dirty gym clothes were a safe bet) or kept them in pockets. No one left their gum in the locker, it was simpler to keep in your pocket.
The real sadists would tape a piece of blank paper or an empty gum wrapper to the back of the locker. Foon would have the poor janitor hacking away at the thing, only to discover it was blank. Later in the year, I was occasionally tasked with rescuing contraband from a friend’s locker. Kids in the band always had safe hiding places for forbidden objects in instrument cases. Always up for some low-level felonies, that’s me.
We actually had more kids than lockers, so some 7th graders had to use a room with desks that held books, pencils, etc. Kids hated it, cuz you couldn’t sneak into the room to get stuff and teachers hated it cuz there was always a rush of kids into and out of the room during class changes.
For many years to come, I had recurring nightmares of forgetting my locker combination, and I had to go to Foon’s office to have the secretary copy it down for me again, while Foon gazed down upon me “Have you had a lobotomy, my child?” And of course, that combination never worked and either: a) I had to catch the bus in 30 seconds, b) I had wicked contraband hidden, or c) Joey Heatherton was in my locker, sans clothes. (Alright, maybe not the last one……)
So, anyway, that was a true weird nightmare!