Buffalo Bangkok: Juvenile Delinquent The rest of my middle school was spent in a haze of weed, cigarettes, LSD, liquor, and shrooms. Mostly by the end of it, we’d chilled out, as far as pranks and violence. Our routine generally consisted of us gathering at Taylor’s house to smoke up, play video games, listen to tunes, and pass out on the floor.
(Taylor’s parents were old hippies that’d become businesspeople and were usually away on business trips. They didn’t care that we smoked weed, did whatever drugs. As long as we did it at their house. And not on the street. I guess they figured it was better us doing it there, where we could avoid arrest, other indignity.)
((It was cool of them, for sure, to allow the house, the basement, to be party central. But fuck, if that wasn’t the dirtiest house. No one would ever clean it.
There’d be half-eaten food in the kitchen, dirty pots and pans, plates everywhere.
The bathroom was straight funky, covered in soap scum, mold, and stray hairs.
We’d crash there, party there, but no one ever wanted to shower there…
Amazingly, though, I don’t recall any insect infestation there, in that house…
Maybe it was even too dirty for the cockroaches…)) Our crew had become quite chill, for a while. Playing video games, hacky sack, and passing out high, drunk, fucked on whatever had become the mission of each and every night.
I remember our friend Armando, always passing out in this big brown comfy La-Z-Boy recliner. Dude’d melt into that chair. Become one with it. Dude had skin like crude oil and a shaved head and when he’d fall asleep with his tongue out he’d look like a high, incapacitated, Cuban Michael Jordan.
By then we’d become a crew of aspiring Cheech and Chongs…
It wasn’t until high school that things took a darker turn.
High school got off to a bad start when I was shipped to another school, separated from my friends.
I’d been banished because throughout most of middle school, I was a true truant and preferred not being in school, trapped in a classroom, seeing the golden sunshine from barred windows. I preferred not being around bullies and didn’t like being told what to do and what to learn. What I preferred was ditching class
Buffalo Bangkok: Juvenile Delinquent to read Stephen King books in the library, taking walks in the sun, smoking whatever I could find, or going to the local guitar shop, jamming with whomever was around.
So, yeah, it was because of my habitually skipping school that I’d been assigned to a “Level 4” program for at-risk youth. The program was located at another local high school, one slightly farther from my home, not the school I’d have normally attended.
The program had half its classes in the high school’s mainstream classrooms and the other half in a “special” classroom, a containment unit with a teacher’s aide and special needs teachers, plus a program coordinator, who was like our principal and in charge of disciplining us.
Beside our special containment classroom sat our program coordinator’s narrow little oblong office, where he, Mr. Maroni, a dude who bore a striking resemblance to TV’s original MacGyver, sat hunched over his overflowing desk, doing paperwork, watching us like a hawk through the translucent rectangular window cut between his office and our classroom. The window was about the size of a coffin. Once a week he’d summon us into his office for progress and performance evaluations.
It was sort of good practice for the corporate world, I guess.
The other kids in the school knew we were fuckups and usually kept their distance. Most were scared of us and our ilk. And with good reason.
One time on the way to class I overheard a couple of the school’s mainstream students discussing our program. Both were in standard preppy attire, collared shirts and blue jeans, white baseball caps. They both appeared as if they’d later be Duke students.
“Hey, what’s that?” one asked the other, pointing at our classroom, his blue eyes narrowing.
The other tilted his head and giggled, then said, “Oh that, that’s a special program for students who, like, kill their teachers and shit.”
But that was far from the worst indignation. The worst was being forced to ride the short bus with the mentally retarded kids.
Buffalo Bangkok: Juvenile Delinquent Not that I had anything against them. It wasn’t the best optics, though, making us ride in the short bus with them. And I did hate the bus driver.
The bus driver and her assistant, both fifty to sixtyish Black ladies doted on the retarded kids but completely reviled us, we the other, less helpless, but still special needs kids.
If the retarded kids weren’t at that bus stop, the bus would wait five minutes, and the driver’d go up to their door, knock and ask about them. But if one of us wasn’t there, right when the bus showed up, they’d peel off. Once or twice I saw the bus from down the street, and I chased after it to no avail. I suspected they’d seen me in the rearview, too, and sped up.
Another guy, Stan, in my program had the same problem; he hated that fucking short bus. We were friendly and it so transpired that he lived nearby me. He was a few years older than me, and when he got a car, he’d give me rides to school.
He was a big burly meathead dude and used to be a star running back for the high school in our immediate neighborhood, where we should have gone, if we hadn’t been fuckups.
A virtual high school football legend, folks all around Miami would talk about his exploits on the field, him breaking records, running for 300 something yards per game.
Recruited by several D-1 college programs, he shocked everyone and quit the game. Never told a soul why. Just stopped playing. Stopped going to school. His grades plummeted, and he got sent to the same “at-risk” program as me.
Half-Japanese, half-Latin, very few knew he was half-Japanese, and when the kids in our class would taunt, fuck with this Chinese kid in our class, for being Asian, Stan’d simply up and leave the classroom. My teacher told me later why, that he was part Asian, which I’d previously had no idea.
(Not that it mattered anyway, and I never participated in the racial abuse of the Chinese kid. It’d grossed me out, honestly. And I regret not speaking up about it.
Racism wasn’t a thing I ever appreciated, in any form. I find that most people are equally shitty in various aspects. No one’s passing a purity test...)
Buffalo Bangkok: Juvenile Delinquent Our homeroom teacher was the person who told me about Stan’s football history, which I’d also not known. The teacher had been a former high school and college football player himself and had treated Stan with a certain reverence.
(Lucky for those kids that Stan was a nice guy. He was big enough to whip any one of them for being such racist pricks. And he’d have had every right to do so…) Stan and I got along well, I think, because, unlike everyone else, who’d try to get him to play football again or talk football, I didn’t care about football. And I never joined in with the other kids fucking with the Chinese guy.
Stan and I liked a few of the same video games, TV shows, and we both smoked weed, got high a few times in his car, on the drive together before school. He was a kind, gentle giant, Stan. But soon enough he got irregular with the rides, not showing up, several times, ditching school. Since I’d missed the bus, I had to pay, from my own pocket, for a cab, since no public transportation went to our school.
Finally, I had to go back to the short bus.
Last time I saw Stan, he offered me a ride to school the next day and was disappointed when I politely declined.
I didn’t see him much anymore after that. He attended school only sporadically, and I think he dropped out or was forced to leave. He’s disappeared into the fog of my adolescence, too, and I never saw or heard of him around the neighborhood, either. I bet he probably had CTE or a condition to that effect.
Probably had it far worse than me. I hope he wound up better than Junior Seau...
There were a few other memorable kids from that program. One, a big Black dude, named “T,” once pulled me aside, asked me if I was selling weed. I told him no. Which was true. I was only smoking it. My stepsister’s crack dealer boyfriend supplying me with killer Jamaican.
I smiled and asked him if he was selling. He smiled back. I knew the answer. It was his turf, and I respected that, at that time I wasn’t selling at all.
He turned out to be a chill dude, and we smoked weed, cigarettes a couple times together at lunch in the woods near school.
Buffalo Bangkok: Juvenile Delinquent The only time I ever saw him get ugly was when a skinhead, this weird fuck, named Bobby, threw a pencil at him, and the pencil hit T’s head.
I was sitting in the desk behind Bobby, and T stalked over, pissed as fuck. For a second, I worried he might do something to me, but fortunately our teacher yelled at Bobby for throwing the pencil, so T knew exactly where to assign blame.
T walked right up to Bobby and punched him in the face. Landed around the side of the forehead. Hard. So hard it echoed, made this cracking sound like wood being chopped.
Bobby was himself a large fellow, but T struck him with such force that Bobby crumpled into the desk, and, amazingly, no blood was drawn, but Bobby was woozy and had to be helped to the nurse’s office.
Looking back at it, though, Bobby deserved it in more ways than one. It came out later he’d raped a ten-year-old girl in the bed of a pickup truck, and he went to jail for it. Fuck that guy.
A memorable girl from the program was named Lily. And man, she was hot! She had a killer, round, tight little ass. One of the tightest, shapeliest asses I’ve ever seen, and she had a doll-like, super cute face, and fluffy, long blond hair and these big bulbous strikingly crystal blue eyes. Her eyes were like saucers…
She’d been a party girl, often drinking. She came from a rich family. When she began getting into trouble, grades slipping, she was put into our program.
I never partied with her or knew her personally but had friends who did. She ran in the same circles, though we never crossed paths, aside from being together in class, for a brief time.
It was only a brief time, though, that we were classmates. And it was for the best that I wasn’t too close with her, because she, at age 16, driving her BMW
convertible, driving drunk, doing about 100 mph, wrapped the car around a tree.
She and her friend in the front seat were killed instantly. One of them was ripped in half.
The accident happened not far from our high school. Whenever I’d pass by or drive by the tree she hit, it’d have flowers, wreaths laid by it. For a while there was a ribbon tied around the tree.
Buffalo Bangkok: Juvenile Delinquent She was the first person my age, who I knew, who died. It was eerie, fucking petrified me, because as a teen I thought I was invincible. I guess that’s youth, though. You think nothing can break and that everything will last forever. It’s often when you’re older and sore in the morning and more and more people you know and love die, that’s when you discover otherwise… But I really had a taste of death and life’s fragility then, and it was sobering…
It altered my whole perspective. It was a thing that I couldn’t see happening in real life. Maybe in movies or TV, but not in my life, not in my school, not to my classmate. But it did. It did happen… Reflecting on it, it probably should have pushed me away from my dark path. But it didn’t…
A friend of hers, Dan, I became close with. He was a chubby Jew with handsome, dark Sephardic features and a puffy shock of curly black hair that stood straight up in the air, like he’d stuck his finger in an electric socket. He was also in the program at our school, for fuckups, and he was also from a rich family. His dad had started a chain of supermarkets, and he lived in a mansion near the school.
His house was huge, built in a French chateau style, with a chalky white exterior, red stucco roof, and an Olympic size swimming pool in the back. It was the second mansion I’d been in, the first being a friend of a friend whose house I’d visited a couple times, that mansion being even more palatial.
But this one was not too shabby, either.
Dan’s parents had divorced, and his mother was rarely home. When she was, she didn’t care too much what we did, so we smoked weed, partied all the time at his place.
(He had a strange relationship with his mother, too. Always commenting on her body, scoping her ass, talking about it, especially when she wore swimsuits at the pool. I never knew how to respond to it.)
Dan and I shared many of the same musical tastes, mainly classic rock, and we started a band. By this time, I’d gotten heavier into playing guitar and was halfway decent at it.
Buffalo Bangkok: Juvenile Delinquent Our band, consisting of a drummer, Bert, another guitarist, Alan, and this spastic kid, Earl, who was like our mascot and would make funny sounds with various parts of his body and do wild dances.
We were actually okay. We played mostly covers of Skynyrd, Pink Floyd, and a few originals.
We’d played a couple house parties, had neighborhood girl groupies. It was fun, exciting, playing parties at his mansion and a couple other rich kids’ houses.
Finally, we hooked up with another band, from another high school, who also had a small following, cassette tape demos of their shows, bootleg band practices being traded around town, like us, at that point.
Together we booked a large coffeehouse for a concert, co-headlining, and we promoted it with fliers plastered all over our respective schools.
I wasn’t expecting there to be many people there, outside of our immediate group of friends, a gaggle or two of their friends.
But when we arrived at the coffeehouse, high and drunk as fuck, there were people lined up around the block, far as I could see.
I was amazed there were so many folks there. There were cool kids from school.
Hot girls. People I’d seen but never met.
The show went off without a hitch, and we did a cover of “Sweet Home Alabama”
that brought the house down.
I’m sure that if I saw it now, or still possessed a recording, I’d be like, what the fuck, and I’m sure Skynyrd would want to sue us for irreparably harming their masterpiece, and I wouldn’t blame them, but at that time, for us, in our heads, in our world, it was magnificent.
For that night, at least, I was a fucking rock star.
Sadly, the band came to a disappointing end. A week or two after the show, I’d broken my arm playing a stoned game of backyard basketball, diving for a loose ball, and we had to cancel a string of shows. Then, we had a falling out, partially over the spastic kid owing my friend money, a drug debt, he’d refused to pay, and
Buffalo Bangkok: Juvenile Delinquent we’d generally lost touch, stopped hanging out as much when I transferred to another school.
There was an angry phone call, where we cursed each other out, Dan’s older, big, and I mean big, and rotund, brother threatening to shoot me, “go to war” with me and my drug dealer friend, and fortunately, for their sake, the dispute didn’t involve my stepsister’s crack dealer boyfriend. It was a kinder, gentler drug dealer I’d felt the need to stick up for.
After our falling out, I went by Dan’s house to pick up my amp, my gear, and one of them, Alan, the guitarist, came out, and tried to argue with me, put me down.
Dan didn’t say shit. Just handed me my gear. I didn’t argue with Alan. Because the spaz had repaid the debt and apologized, so it was over, as far as I was concerned, and I didn’t care about it anymore.
When leaving Dan’s mansion, with my friend, in his car, Dan, Alan, and Dan’s brother stood in front of the house, giving me the evil eye, smoking cigarettes.
We never spoke or saw each other again.
I’d heard that Dan, a few months afterwards, got disowned by his father. He’d been using his dad’s ATM card, withdrawing tons of cash to spend on drugs, and he’d even written a song about his thievery, a sappy ballad called: “It’s on Ivan”
(his dad’s name).
His dad, upon finding out, cut him off entirely, at least at that time; I don’t know if it was permanent. Then his mom sent him out to California, for what he believed to be music school.
However, when he got there, arrived at the airport in L.A., his guitar case in hand, he was ambushed by tall muscular, shaved head dudes in white jackets. He must have thought, at first, that he was getting kidnapped by neo-Nazis or something.
But really, he was being taken into the custody of a drug rehabilitation center! His mom had had him committed! He was cuffed, dragged away against his will, like a criminal or a dissident in a totalitarian country…
I’m not sure what became of him, after that. Not long ago, on Facebook, I saw a
“friend” suggestion with his name, and a picture of an airline pilot. Was it him?
Perhaps. I didn’t send a request. And never did he.
Buffalo Bangkok: Juvenile Delinquent Thinking back on that situation, that ending, it was pointless, a stupid thing to fight over, the spaz’s drug debt. It could have been handled with more tact. And it was stupid to burn bridges.
But I guess when you got two fuckups together, not much good is going to come out of it.
It wouldn’t be the last time my temper and lack of better judgment got the better of me. Especially in high school.