1975 to 1979
A couple years before my freshman year, the state of Illinois started busing students from Markham to a high school in a nearby, more affluent, white suburb. My first year in high school, I was one of those students.
I made some new friends that year, but I only saw a few after school. They just lived too far away and winters are damn cold in Illinois. During the warmer months, I would make long walks to some close friend’s houses. It wasn’t intentional, but starting in high school I began to hang around people that were wealthier than me. We just had more in common. Almost all of them read. You’d walk down the hallway during class change and see many of them had a book in addition to ones covering subject matters. Everything girl I dated in high school, read. Don’t get me wrong, while many of them read, some of these white kids were really fucked up. They were worse than the kids in Markham, as far as drug use went. My high school was the Midwest equivalent of Fast Times at Ridgemont High. A large percentage of the student body, and even some of the teachers, partied. I would start my drinking and drug experimentation during my sophomore year.
In my second year of high school we moved to the suburb where my school was located. My parents bought a house in the all-white subdivision that was located across the street from it. This is when I started to party. I was much closer to many of my friends.
Before I took any drug or even smoked pot, I read about them. (Hell, at one point I had a PDR.) No one put a gun to my head, but most of the literature was positive. Leary and his cohorts were talking about the mystical value of taking various hallucinogens. I read Castaneda, so I had to try peyote and mushrooms. NORML was lobbying for the decriminalization of cocaine. (This was before Richard Pryor’s free-basing and emoliation period.) There was a lot of nose candy in those days. It was the disco era. So…
I got a fake ID at 14, so I starting going out to night clubs and bars. I had a 16 year old girlfriend that looked like a young Cher, without the nose. Bouncers in the Chicago area were letting her, as well as a lot of other pretty under aged girls, into bars and nightclubs all the time. It’s Chicago.
Through friends of friends, I met even wealthier people that went to neighboring high schools. Some of these kids were interesting. They all drank, some of them rather heavily, and many smoked pot and took drugs.
In Illinois, we have these huge parks called Forest Preserves. During the warmer months we’d get together, open our trunks, jam out and get wasted. One particularly park was literally an open air drug market. You’d drive through and people would yell out what they had. “Four fingers lids of Jamaican”. “Hits of Mr Natural for two fifty”. Practically, everything under the sun was there except heroin. People I hung around with just didn’t do it. I knew no speed freaks either.
I kept journals all throughout high school. I made a point of writing while under the influence of various drugs that I tried. Unfortunately, those writings were soon lost after I left my parent’s house. They had some really trippy observations.
I tried a lot of different things in the last three years of high school. I even tried PCP. Don’t do this at home kiddies. It makes you feel like a robot in slow motion. It fucked up some people I know. A kid at my high school was on that shit, took an ax to both his parents and burned the house down. One of my siblings damn near died from it. Apparently, he saw God and became a born-again Christian after that.
With the exception of myself, everyone in the immediate family soon followed his lead and starting attending a Baptist church. No one in my household, as far as I know, had stepped into a place of worship for about nine years. I went a few times, but just didn’t like it. One particular preacher I immediately took a dislike to. Years later, he would skip town after stealing a bunch of the church’s money. Like I stated earlier, I never converted. I married a Catholic girl. (Vague references to that will follow in a later chapter.)
I got a little cosmic in high school.
e.g.
Aware is the man that hears
The silent song of fear
The melody of madness
The ballad of distress
The symphony of cynics
With whom I lay rest
The medley of ethereal carnage
The unconquerable ridge
I forgot; repressed most of the bad that happened to me at an early age and actually became a little naïve. The remnants of the whole hippie vibe were strong at my high school. Bell bottom Levis and concert shirts was the uniform for some students. (I would become one of those.) Between the philosophic and religious texts I had read, some of the substances that I had tried, and the zeitgeist of the times, I had this Pollyanna version of reality. I would exist in this state for the next few years.
My high schools years were a lot of fun. I went to quite a few parties because I had friends in most of the social groups: burnouts, brains, jocks, socialites, weirdos/artists, etc. I met some people that became very successful. I dated some girls that became very successful. My original goal was to major in Psychology, get a teaching certificate and go into special education. That did not happen.
© John Bielecki 2024
