Category Archives: Life

High School wasn’t so much a place as it was a state of mind. It was more like “Always High” School. Truth is I just didn’t care. I was in an “I just don’t give a shit” state of mind from 1982 to 1989. As rebellious as they come and every so often pretty dangerous to myself and those around me. I did just enough work to get by, and wasted a great deal of my potential. As you get older you realize that while you cannot go back, you can move forward. I feel a strong obligation to make sure that the next generation of family and friends do not repeat the mistakes of my past.

1982, was not the most progressive year in the field of Jewish Education. The only person who seemed more screwed up than me was the principal. He was a bit crazy. In hindsight I think I played a big part in his insanity. All my predecessors at the school probably brought him to the breaking point, but by senior year, I was the kid that made him snap. I feel awful about that. But, he was quite mad when I met him. More precisely the schools conflicted ideology drove me and all my predecesors crazy, which then in turn helped to unhinge the principal, and perhaps much of the rest of the academic staff.

I arrived at the Frisch High School  sophmore year. It was after a series of disturbing events, culminating in one really screwed up experience, as a freshman at the Yeshiva University High School called as M.T.A……. An all Boys school which I still find to be a very unnatural concept. I could review all the strange behavior of the principal, the wrestling team practices, the Rabbis’ violent tempers and the study of barbaric rituals of punishment for the most obscure and odd religious transgressions, but it was one final event that was the tipping point that allowed me to finally escape that demented school. There, at the mature age of 14, on the last day of school while most of my class was taking NY State Regents exams inside the school, which I and a few others had taken in eighth grade, I found myself playing an arcade game in a Diner on 186^th and Amsterdam Avenue in Washington Heights, a quite insane address for a Jewish Private School, but hell, who am I to question the wisdom of my elders. There I was playing a classic arcade game called Digger at the front of the diner, the back of the arcade game facing the storefront window. I heard a few popping sounds. POP! POP! POP! And then I saw little holes appear in the glass above the arcade machine. Everything felt like it was in slow motion. The game screen got fuzzy and shook as a bullet hit the back of it. The fluorescent lights above the dining booths shattered as bullets pierced the fixtures. All hell broke lose and people were yelling, “get down”, “get the F**k down”. “It’s a drive by shooting”. Anti Semitism? Maybe. Just as likely in 1982 that it was a drug driven joy ride by a local gang who happened not to like Jews but were not ideological about the whole thing. I am told that their weapon of choice was an AK47. Again, great location for a high school. I have no idea how long I crouched beneath the table I had crawled to on my belly. Glass was everywhere and my ears were ringing with the screaming and shouting of whomever had been unlucky enough to be in that diner, that fine June morning. The following is the only excerpt from the NY Times web site, that I could find referencing the shooting.

THE CITY; F.B.I. to Examine Yeshiva Shooting

Published: June 25, 1983

The Justice Department yesterday asked the F.B.I. to conduct a preliminary inquiry into the shooting Wednesday of three students in a restaurant across the street from Yeshiva University in Washington Heights. A Federal Bureau of Investigation spokesman in New York City said the inquiry would be undertaken at once.

William Bradford Reynolds, the assistant attorney general for civil rights, said the inquiry was to see if the incident, and two other recent shooting incidents in the area involving the university and a Jewish hospital, represented a violation of Federal civil-rights statutes that would warrant a full-scale investigation.

The inquiry had been requested by the Metropolitan Council of the American Jewish Congress. On Thursday, Mayor Koch announced a $10,000 reward in the case. The New York chapter of the American Jewish Council yesterday pledged an additional $10,000 in reward money.

I don’t think they ever caught the culprits. I was lucky to be alive. But in my own F**d up way of manipulating situations I quickly realized that this was my ticket out. There is no way my mother could turn down my wish to transfer schools now. I was overjoyed. Yes for a few moments I actually thought how lucky I was to be in this restaurant. Yes that seems pretty screwed up. But I examined myself quickly, realized I was alive and acclimated quickly to the predicament. I had seen enough movies to know the drill. Fort Apache The Bronx, The Warriors, Night Hawks, and Scarface were just a few of the movies that helped children in the late 70’s and early 80’s prepare for drive by shootings. Reality set in. The ringing in my ears was replaced with moans from some wounded and sirens as the police rapidly arrived on the scene. Those of us not hurt were ushered into a classroom in the school. We were checked over and each given a chance to call our parents in private and tell them we were ok. Right before I got off the phone with my tearful mother, I quietly asked “Mom, may I please change schools now?” “Of course Jeremy” she said, “I promise”. And I knew it was sealed, she would not break her word to me. I hated that school but more importantly I did not like the Principal, George. Not liking authority figures, particularly school principals had  become a bit of a habit for me. Again not too proud of that. With age comes wisdom and, I am discovering, a decent amount of remorse.

A few minutes more of settling in the classroom and receiving instructions from George. “Children, we will be escorting you to your school busses to take you home. There are many reporters out there. Do not respond to any questions or we will take disciplinary action with you”. Real nice presentation to a bunch of mentally scarred kids. I had no idea what the hell he was talking about, or why we couldn’t talk to the reporters, nor did I care. I was out of there. 10 more minutes and I would never step back in that insane asylum ever again. Freedom and more importantly my new high school was coed. As we stepped out of the school in single file marching toward the busses, rabbis, teachers, police and reporters all over the place, all the kids looked down. They were frightened of the Principal’s warning and would not make eye contact with the reporters. All of a sudden there was a microphone shoved in front of me, “Were you afraid?” a young female reporter inquired of me. I could feel George, who again, was not particularly fond of me, or me of him, staring right at me. Slowly I turned to look at him. I gave him a big “F**k You Smile” turned to the reporter and gave her my full expletive recounting of the event. There was pandemonium as the Rabbis rushed to push me on the bus. All the kids were cracking up as all the reporters converged on us while we were racing in full sprint to the busses. It was pandemonium. I turned to see George’s gauntly raging face staring directly at me. I waved goodbye, both of us knowing we would never see each other again. And we didn’t.

At 14 I was evolving from that “living in my own world, in my head stage.” Many 14-year-old boys experience it. Looking back on it, 14 was like one year of a single long “trip” where you wake up in the real world. Freshmen Year is that transition period. Some kids experience it a bit earlier some a bit later but it is all the same in the end. It’s the year a guy changes over to kissing chicks from karate kicks. It’s the year you move from enjoying action movies to getting “some action” at the movies. You transition from riding your bike to the 7/11 for a Slurpee, to riding the bus to Time Square for a peep show of a girl named Slurpee. I was being weaned off of Jan Michael Vincent movies like Defiance and Bruce Lee’s enter the dragon in favor of watching Jennifer Beal’s strip in Flashdance or Jodie foster getting high in foxes. Dungeons and Dragons is replaced by some violent first person killing video game, and flipping baseball cards is replaced with a game of poker, risking bar-mitzvah money for some kid’s Warriors VHS tape or handheld Coleco football game. It’s also when that blindfold gets taken off and you finally see your parents as parents not mommy and daddy. Parents are very different than mommy and daddy. Mommy and daddy say “no sweetheart, please don’t use those words” parents say  “&*@&%$  %@$#* @$%^”. One year you’re home sick at camp and the next year, you are sick at the notion of returning home after living free in the wilds of summer camp.

My group was referred to in more than a few conversations as “the f**k ups”, it meant that we had all this promise and potential, but we kept wasting it. Of the 55 kids in my grade, we represented about 20%. I had a bad attitude. The Jewish private school, or the more prominent “modern orthodox yeshiva”, as it was known, was a world of rules. We spent half the day in secular studies and the other half studying the religious rules that were to encompass our life until the day we died at which point we were told we would be greatly rewarded for obeying the rules. The reward was kind of vague, but the alternative, the punishment, I understood. I was alittle fuzzy on Heaven, but Hell seemed crystal clear. As a teenager I wasn’t a fan of rules in general. This is not something I am advocating but rather an attempt to establish a point of reference. Refer to this point the next time you are sitting at a parent teacher meeting right there in your kids own desk as you get a lecture on how your child has no respect for authority and is undisciplined. That same kid who the next morning will occupy that desk may grow up to be a wonderful husband, father, respected in the business community and involved in outreach and charitable programs. He may have scores of employees who rely on his discipline and authority to maintain the balance at a business, day in and day out. Then again he may turn out to be pretty screwed up as well. Either way, food for thought.

I often confused no with yes and yes with no. I believe it’s genetic, as I have found my children today stricken with a similar disorder. As high school progressed I became more aggressive, it was more than just my attitude, it was calculated. I took thinking everything through to an extreme. I started to see the whole world as a giant game of Stratego. I wasn’t a big chess player, Stratego was more my speed. I was able to see how actionstaken in the present would affect the future. I became obsessed with mapping out my future. My aggressiveness led to a sort of internal as well as external expectation of personal success. This then led to a form of self confidence and security that others found off putting and probably arrogant, and in hindsight was on my part, quite delusional.  It was more of a sense of self-inflated purpose, or a bit too much self-awareness. It rapidly evolved into a hunger for success. An exaggerated desire to win.  I became insanely competitive. Not in the classic sense where I couldn’t stand to lose a board game. More in the disturbed sociopath way where I actually believed the whole thing was one big competition. Life was just a long ongoing game. Ultimately this natural progression led to competing with myself, constantly trying to one up myself…… A competition in which the only way for you to win is for you to lose. Then you hit bottom.

“The more freedom you have in life the happier will you be. I strongly believe that in order to reach the top in life – you need to hit rock bottom first. You just have to be down there if you want to get the willpower and motivation to climb to the top of “Mountain Success”. (Fight Club)

Credits end.