MHS74

Massapequa High School  1970-1974

We never stumble, we never fall

We only drink from dry alcohol
When we yell we yell like hell
for the glory of Massapequa High,
high, high, high

There were academic tracks back then.  A track, B track, C track, depending on how smart the school thought you were.   We all knew where we all belonged anyway, without really asking.   We all grew up with each other, so we always knew where everybody belonged, mostly because they told you where you belonged.

When you were a freshman you got one of the lockers down in the basement, down by the rifle range.   Yes, real rifles for high school kids, and they gave us 22 caliber rifles to shoot at targets.  Scratch Bull at 4.  I think it was Mr. Baldwin that managed the team.  Alec's dad.

Sophomores through seniors got full lockers on the first to third floors.  Higher the classmen, higher the lockers.   Locker time in the morning was its own world, and everybody noticed.  Who hung out at whose lockers. 

Study hall meant you were free to leave the school grounds, and by the time you were a senior, you only had english and maybe a social studies class out of the eight periods of the day, so you tried to place your requirements in periods right next to each other, so you could leave campus for most of the rest of the day, maybe hang out at Bar Harbor, where there was a supermarket, a liquor store, a pizza place and not much else.  Maybe a clothing store that my sisters knew about, but I never went t0.   We would play pong for a quarter a game at the pizza place to waste an hour or so.

You tried to arrange your classes so that you didn't have to go in until 3rd or 4th period, and that way you could meet with your friends in the morning at the IHOP on sunrise highway.  Drink coffee and laugh.    Then go back to the high school, and try to BS Mrs LeBoza at the front desk on why you were late.   I don't think she was ever fooled.   Once she knew your name it got harder to charm your way past her.

Half the kids I knew had cars, their parent's station wagon, either that or they had jobs and had money and would buy some crappy car like an old 442 or an old 'vette.   Kids would drive to school, and the parking lot was its own sub culture of girls and guys and cars, everybody smoking cigarettes, with the occasional joint being passed around.  Music blaring everywhere.  The Dead.  The Stones.  The Allman Brothers. Alice Cooper.  Deep Purple.  Pink Floyd.  The Music of our Time.

You drifted through classes, the teacher's doing their own kind of time, you doing yours, everybody doing their dance moves according to a predefined script.

And now its 2018 and here is the strange thing to me.  Everybody back then would talk about what they were going to do with their lives, and now suddenly its 45 years later, and it seems like yesterday, and I find these same people on facebook,  and the last time I talked with most of them we were all 18, looking forward, and had long hair and getting stoned and driving around massapequa all the time, and now its like the next week but its really decades later, and I see us all, and we are all grandmas and grandpas, and anything that we wanted to accomplish in life we either did or its too late now.   All of us are looking back now, mostly.    I think of Billy, and Bobby, and Timmy, and Chuck, and Chris and Lisa and Peggy and their faces are all still young, even though I have to tell myself that they are all now 62 like me.    How can that be?

I still can't believe it.