F04 / The Wall

This is chapter 04. You can find all of the parts of the book published so far in this post.

The part of San Francisco where we lived when I started middle school was right in the geographic center of the city, a mix of of stately captain’s homes, time-worn Victorians, and working-class four-plexes, grey in the seams and lit in the early mornings by the gentle pulse of the old Coca-Cola sign on the downtown horizon. My memory of the city in those years still has daylight in it, but the colors are muted like photos of those times. My parents were both working and doing well enough that they’d bought a big place on a double lot on the corner of Hill and Sanchez, and my father would stand on the deck overlooking the southern part of the city and practice star sights with a sextant, dreaming of taking off to sail the roaring forties. My world was much smaller, limited to the few blocks I knew from my paper route and sometimes down to 24th street, still taking the big hills sitting down on my skateboard like a little kid.

Perhaps in part due to their success at work, their marriage had begun to unravel, and that, combined with the double-digit mortgage rates of the time, meant that they couldn’t afford to keep sending me to private school. That very special place that I used to take the school bus to every morning only ran through fifth grade anyhow, and so many of us kids that went there had tested so far above our grade level, that it seemed to make sense for me to skip ahead at the end of fourth grade and start sixth grade a year early.

I showed up at Everett Middle School in the fall still wearing my same football jersey and brown corduroys from fourth grade, a little kid amidst an older, bigger, and much more diverse public school population. My parents had given me half of the converted downstairs as my room—and I made sure to keep the basement door tightly shut, as I was still very afraid of the dark back corners that reached up under the old house.

At my new school I found myself way ahead of the math teacher as she tried to explain the simple geometry of a rectangle and yet very much behind the waves of pre-teen kids crashing around the high-fenced prison yard outside. Real sex was in the air—tight jeans and ESPRIT tops, lip gloss, LeSportsac purses, roller skates and Fast Times at Ridgemont High—and I was unprepared. At first I put my energy more and more into the fantasy worlds that I’d already been deep into in third and fourth grade—the adventures of Tintin and the Advanced D&D Dungeon Masters Guide led directly to a dresser drawer full of glossy 80’s porn, bulging with issues of Hustler and Oui that I’d snake from the corner store that I passed every morning on my paper route. Those intensely captivating images took me further and further away from the reality of what was happening at school, and yet also made it just possible for me to believe that the girls in the halls would all soon reveal that their sixth-grade daydreams were as triple-X-rated as the so-called letters that I loved reading in my stash of adult mags.

That first year at Everett was tough. My parents were busy and distracted, and I found myself in the deep end, all alone. School was easy—too easy—and the environment was a major downer compared to where I’d been going before. Jumping from fourth grade into the first year of middle school I found myself no longer in the beautiful, historic and inspiring surroundings of the Crocker Mansion and now, instead, locked up in a place seemingly purpose-built to make you think of escape, with thick walls, high fences, and a klaxon sounding on the hour.

I started to skip out however I could, going over the fence to buy Funyuns and Dortios at the corner store down at 18th and Church, or through the back of the library and up the stairway to the roo