Alternate Educations

My favorite subjects? In High school, it was cutting classes. It eventually led to my expulsion, but it also introduced me to new paths in life that my uptown peers never encountered.

I would cut classes and promptly head to Hanrahan’s pool “Parlour.” I was, and still am, awful at playing pool. But you can’t justify some things; only wonder at the sheer stupidity of enjoying them. And pool, by comparison to anything taught at George Washington High School, was preferable.

After the expulsion, I needed to find a loose alternative because I knew that my Father would go nuclear. If I was scared of anything, it was my Father. The physical confrontations ceased the day I came home from judo class to find him angry at some idiot thing I had done. He attempted to strike me, and I automatically threw him to the floor.

He came up fighting. But as he came up, he sensed that the match was now even and someone would get badly hurt. It very well could be him. But while he no longer hit me, it was his home, and I would listen to non-stop harassment until I begged my way back into the educational warehouse that high school had become. It wasn’t about education – it was about keeping students like me in a holding pattern until we hit an age where the State Of New York said the School Department could permanently lose us.

So, I made the big plunge and expanded my contacts in New York’s Greenwich Village. I’d been going down to play in the coffee houses for a few years occasionally. But this was different, and I would become a habitue of the Village. I would play there, live wherever I could, and participate fully.

Over the following months, I had a foot in two worlds, the Village and the uptown life, with a girlfriend and buddies. Like continental drift, I found it increasingly difficult to reconcile the two. The cultures were vastly different. My uptown girlfriend had parental pressure to ditch me ( he’s a loser!), and my buddies did not “‘get” the new life. They were all headed to college or trades in a year or two. But I played guitar and hung out with a bunch of “Beatniks.” 

It was a veritable deluge in terms of a shift in culture. Even the language was different. My work as a folksinger involved playing gigs. The police were the Fuzz. Something called a freebie was ideal in preferance to paying for something. A cat was not a feline, it was someone who was hip. And, of course, to dig something was to be very heavily into it. 

Many of these terms survive in English today, but they were alien to middle-class uptowners at that point. Many terms were borrowed from the Jazz music scene and were automatically suspect. 

So, the big change in life meant a shift from academics to survival mode. I soon learned from my new peers that a slick patter on stage and my guitar were my path not to glory or wealth but to feed and house myself. I put in hours every day at practice. If I wasn’t performing at night, I listened to other performers to learn from them. I even took a crack at playing bottleneck guitar. Oh, what a sad adventure that was!

I became a regular at coffeehouses frequented by my peers and those I sought to emulate.

So, my favorite subjects changed from a juvenile fascination with pool to things that were both educational and necessary for my survival.

Many uptowners visited the village on weekends, dipped their toes in the water, and went home. I was immersed and thereby baptized.