Worst Years of Your Life

Introduction At age twenty-six -- broke, unpublished, and having recently finished a second master's degree of doubtful utility -- I took a job at a private school in Phoenix, to teach eighth-grade English to fifty (mostly) rich kids. Developing the curriculum, grading stacks of papers, and lecturing on the use of semicolons was unpleasant in its own inimitable way, but it was nothing compared to the stress I felt being a part of the chaos of middle-school culture again -- even at this tony little academy in the shadow of Camelback Mountain. Most of the eighth-grade girls could have passed for college coeds: tall, already curvy, and dressed in the same clothes that women wore down the road at Arizona State. They were only slightly uncomfortable in their new bodies, and many already knew how to use them. They were evil girls. Really evil. They turned on each other like starving coyotes, and it was difficult to know from day to day who was leading the snarling pack. The boys were all dorks. Most of them were short and baby-faced, and the few who were tall were gangly messes of raging hormones. Some had vague smudges of mustaches, and all of them were obsessed with sex. With no other publicly appropriate outlets for the sexual energy coursing through their bodies, the boys spent their free time shoving and hitting each other, or grunting along to gangster rap that seemed utterly irrelevant to their privileged lives of private school, tennis lessons, and backyard pool parties. Couples would form and pubescent hearts would be broken, but for the most part, the girls failed to recognize their own value and continued to have crushes on their unwieldy male classmates -- despite my advice to shop for dates across the arroyo in the upper school. And there I was, in the swirling center of it all, with the same clenched feeling in my gut that I'd had when I was a skinny spaz in eighth grade. I actually worried once again about wearing the right clothes, if the students would laugh at my jokes, if I had offended the queen bees, if the students could tell I was gay -- I was deep in the closet at the time. I found myself at the mall, making sure I bought the correct Doc Martens or low-top Converse One Stars -- the shoes of choice for the middle school set in 1994. I knew who was "going with" whom, which liquor store in Scottsdale sold porno to the boys, and what had happened at Michael K's bar mitzvah. This was wrong. I was reliving the worst years of my life. As an eighth-grade teacher, I was given a time-traveling mirror to look back at myself in middle school, and what I saw was gruesome. My actual pubescent years were full of mindless Atari video games, biweekly trips to Tucson Mall, skateboarding, then roller-skating, then skateboarding again, seething hatred toward my father for wearing poly-blend slacks, furtive reading of the sex scenes in my mother's Jackie Collins novels, headache-inducing afternoon reruns of M*A*S*H and Barney Miller, and masturbation, lots of masturbation -- including a committed relationship with the water filter jets in our swimming pool. I spent whatever money I had on Donkey Kong and Ralph Lauren Polo shirts, and I went from being an avid reader, excellent student, and amateur herpetologist to a lazy, sarcastic asshole who did his homework right before class, if at all. I gauged my self-worth (and others') with high scores in the arcade and brand-name clothing. My friend, whose oldest son just entered middle school, can barely stand to talk about her life at his age. She's embarrassed, but mainly frightened for her twelve-year-old son, who only recently stopped believing in Santa Claus. At age twelve, my friend had already learned why bongs were better than standard ceramic pipes, and had hitchhiked all over suburban Boston in a bikini top and cut-off Levi's that she rolled up to make shorter. Alcohol, shoplifting, lesbian experimePoirier, Mark Jude is the author of 'Worst Years of Your Life ', published 2007 under ISBN 9781416549260 and ISBN 1416549269.