Chapter 7: Growing Up

A few days after starting my brokerage account, Dad drove me up to the Miyagi Dojo up on York Road. Mom still wasn’t all that happy with either one of us for not giving her the money to put in the bank. It’s not that she was going to steal it, but if I gave her twenty grand to invest, all I would ever see was the twenty grand, spent on college. If college were to cost less, she would hold onto the money until I needed it later. It would be used to pay their portion of any wedding expenses. Forget about earning interest on the money!

She was just starting to get over her mad when Dad took me to Miyagi’s. That just got her started on why I needed to learn to fight. I would just get in trouble and go to jail again, and this time she wouldn’t let me come home. Or Dad either. Later I told him that jail might be quieter. He just grinned and swatted the back of my head.

Lance had been in my grade going through Hampton Elementary. Almost all, about ninety-five percent, of the students there ended up going to Towsontown Junior High. Not all, however; the school boundaries between elementary schools and between junior high schools were not exactly identical. There were always a few kids each year who got caught in the overlap. Lance had ended up at Ridgely, which was to the north of us.

I hadn’t seen Lance in a couple of years. He was the only kid in the entire school who hadn’t been Caucasian. He was Japanese-American, though none of us knew how many generations ago they had come here. Mind you, this was during the Sixties, when the northern Baltimore County suburbs were about as white as chalk. If you went there now, they’d be just as rich, but as integrated as any other suburb. Nowadays right next door to St. Paul’s is a Korean Catholic church, and they are at least as large. In 1969, being a Jap in Timonium was pretty damn unusual.

I didn’t care. He was a nice guy. I always figured he would have more problems being gay than being Asian. This was a major no-no back then and could get you arrested and jailed. He kept it quiet, but when I was around him, my ‘gay-dar’ would start pinging like crazy. I know that most women don’t believe in gay-dar, but most guys do. We can tell. It’s not a hundred percent certain, maybe more like ninety percent, but we can tell. I have known only a few guys in my life who I have known were gay who I couldn’t tell, a fellow teacher at MVCC for one, and one of my cousins, who I was never completely sure about anyway, for another.

It’s not like I care. I am able to distinguish between the act and the person. I don’t care if you fuck donkeys, as long as they’re consenting adult donkeys. I have never understood the bit about how the gays are going to lead the youth of the world astray. Sure, sounds like fun - be ridiculed and beaten up by yokels, have family members shun you, be jailed and lose jobs! I bet you can get lots of people to sign up with a membership package like that! And I have also never understood how this might be tempting to a young person who is still ‘learning about his sexuality.’ If you have to learn, you’re already gay. Ever since I was old enough to figure out that I could use my gizmo for more than just writing my name in the snow, I’ve known I was totally straight.

So, although Lance wasn’t a flamer, it was obvious that he was ‘as queer as a three-dollar bill’, that being one of the catchier descriptions of the day. He was also already a black belt, so it wouldn’t do to make a smart comment about it.

The Miyagi Dojo didn’t teach karate, but taught aikido. When I heard that I thought it was pretty cool. Dad had never heard of it but at the time nobody had ever heard of Steven Seagal. He became a movie star much later. I remember seeing him in a bunch of movies, and he was a for real 7 ^th degree black belt in aikido. He didn’t chop you or kick you, but he could toss you all over the place. That looked infinitely cooler, so I signed up. It wasn’t terribly expensive, but it would all come out of my pocket, and I would need to ride my bike there after school. The only way I would get my parents to take me was if it was raining or snowing.

Aikido is not one of the more glamorous martial arts, in that nobody is breaking any boards or concrete blocks. Those are all ‘hitting’ arts, like karate or kick boxing. Aikido is a ‘grappling’ art, like judo. In a perfect match, your opponent tries to attack you, and then you avoid the attack, and use his momentum to make him do something he doesn’t want to do. So, for instance, if he punches you, you can duck inside and then throw him over your shoulder, or maybe duck him from the outside and grab his arm, to twist it and flip him on his ass.

You also need to learn how to avoid this sort of thing happening to you. Bouts can be quite physical and quick. A premium is placed on speed and agility, not so much on strength and power. You have to be in good shape and have some stamina as well. If I hadn’t been running and working out with bricks and (after Christmas) barbells, it would have been very painful. As it was, although Mr. Miyagi considered me hopelessly slow, I learned and advanced.

School in the spring semester went about as I figured. I had finished the semester at Christmas with straight As, which mollified my mother. Mind you, I still wasn’t living up to my potential, whatever the fuck she thought that was, but it was a lot better that the B-/C+ which had been my previous grades. In addition to Algebra 2, I signed up for typing class, which got me a serious ration of shit from just about everyone on the planet.

If you ever saw the television show Mad Men, then you know that in that day and age, secretaries were women and only women. Only secretaries used typewriters. If a boss needed to write a letter, either he hand-wrote it and gave it to a secretary to type, or he gave it to her by dictation, personally or by tape recorder. Guys didn’t type - end of story! This was one of the reasons Missy Talmadge was such a standout at the brokerage. She wasn’t a secretary, but a broker, which was for men only.

Curiously, my father had sent me to summer school on my original run, between my eighth and ninth grade years, to learn typing. I was the only guy in the class. I have no idea why he wanted me to learn, and it may well have been as a punishment for some now long forgotten misdeed, but it was one damn useful skill. From then on, I typed all my reports; considering my handwriting, this was a vast improvement.

Maybe Dad liked secretaries. When he met Mom, she was his boss’ secretary. He went fishing in the secretarial pool!

Anyway, I signed up for typing class, and was rejected immediately by the teacher. I wasn’t a girl. I was supposed to take shop class, which was for boys. Shop class was actually three classes in one. You started out in the fall with drafting, moved into wood shop over the winter, and finished with metal shop in the spring. We did this for two years, and then when we got to high school were required to specialize, so some guys took all drafting, and some took all wood shop. Girls took secretarial classes and home economics. There was to be no mixing of the species, since no good would ever come of such a thing. It was sort of like miscegenation, which was also considered unnatural.

By the time I got to high school, the rules began to break down. My junior year, the last I had to take shop, I took a second full year of drafting, and we had two girls in the class. The teacher, an old-style geezer, simply couldn’t deal with them. He was simply stunned when they showed up. He compensated by ignoring them the entire year. He graded their projects and tests, but nothing else. He wouldn’t even talk to them.

Drafting had always proved useful to me. I had worked in several jobs where the ability to read blueprints and do design work proved quite helpful. I learned enough in wood shop to make a crappy wooden stool and know which end of the hammer was which. Metal shop was a disaster, since everything we used was either blistering hot or razor sharp, or both, and the only projects we made were totally useless. Of course, a lot of the guys ended up making high school versions of prison shivs, which for some of them would prove good training for the future.

When the typing teacher refused to let me in, I simply went down to the office and saw Mr. Butterfield. He also refused to let me in, with the same argument. I very calmly asked what the legal reason was. As soon as he heard the word ‘legal’ his ears pricked up and he stared at me.

“It’s the rules!” he sputtered.

I set the paper back down on his desk and marked a big X where he was supposed to sign. “Mr. Butterfield, please, just sign here.”

He turned bright red and spluttered some more, than grabbed a pen and scrawled his name angrily. I left quickly, not wanting to push my luck. I marched right back to the typing class and handed Mrs. Wakerman the paper. She stared at it and wordlessly pointed me towards an empty desk to the side. The typewriter was a decrepit and ancient manual Royal model, but it worked, mostly. I managed to get some time on some of the IBM electrics as well during the course.

This class was a little tougher. Typing on a keyboard is a snap compared to using a typewriter. Make a mistake and you have to go over it with a correcting ribbon. There’s only one font. No spell checker or grammar checker. No automatic centering. No automatic line return. And you have to do it all blind, because your eyes aren’t on the screen, but to the side, reading what you are trying to type. They call this touch typing, probably because afterwards you’re touched in the head.

Chapter 8 »