Sixth grade was a time of real inspiration for me. I wanted to get into some real-life Wayside School is Falling Down-type adventures. I did my best to create them, as evidenced by the fantastical Wayside-esque novel my twelve-year-old self wrote, incorporating real-life friends and classmates in far-fetched situations. (It’s still a work in progress.) In fact, I’m using the 1996 draft of the story and a scrapbook from that time period to piece together this post!
Let’s set the scene: It’s 1995, 1996. The middle school is a circular building in the middle of nowhere, with the nearest neighbor being a psychiatric hospital a quarter-mile away. This sounds like the setting to a horror movie full of creepy children, but it’s 100 percent true.
Each grade in the school (where Scout now teaches) got its own sliver of this circle shape and was separated into an upstairs and a downstairs “team” named after the district’s colors (blue and white). This was done, perhaps, as a way to accommodate for the fucked-up architecture of the building. But really it meant that if you were in 6-White and your best friend was put in 6-Blue, you guys were pretty much done being best friends; you wouldn’t see them for the rest of the year.
I was in 6-Blue with a zany cast that included The Raconteur, whom I’d met the year before when he scoffed at my Ren & Stimpy doodles in a fifth-grade math class. His schtick back then was being known as a goofy pervert who ate plain oyster crackers at lunch and fell in love with shiny-haired popular girls. He and I would alternate between flirting and hating each other, but mostly I had eyes for only Socks, who was like a twelve-year-old Clue Tim Curry in an gray M.R. Ducks sweatshirt. (Our love, though, was not to be: Much later in life, he revealed he was gay.)
The seating in homeroom was alphabetical by last name, so Socks sat behind me next to his friend, Trident, a Jewish boy with an interest in computers. This explains why there’s a song about Trident in the scrapbook to the tune of “Old McDonald”: “And on his farm he had a computer / Bleep bleep bleep bleep bleep!” (Computer noises, you know.) His computer interest also made it fun for Socks, always an instigator, to spread a rumor about Trident fooling around with some girl behind the teacher’s desk at computer camp. Trident’s sputtering response: “I never event went to computer camp!”
I think Trident had his bar mitzvah that year. I’d never had a Jewish friend before and didn’t know what to really expect. I assumed it’d be a kinda-fancy birthday party, but my parents made it sound serious and scary. I picked out a birthday card that had a hole in the front that asked the reader to put their finger in it to see what their gift was, and on the inside, it read something like “a genuine booger picker!” My mom nervously laughed at that, thinking it wasn’t appropriate for such an occasion. Then we were outside the temple, and she was ready to drop me off. She was like, “Are you sure about this?” and I suddenly felt like I wasn’t, so we left and got McDonald’s instead. Fear of the unknown won the day.
During recess, my friends Crayon and Parrot and I would play Holy Institution of Young Nuns (HIYN), which had an anthem set to the tune of “YMCA”: “HIYN! So come and pray at the HIYN!” Socks was the priest, who’d sit in a cross-legged pose beneath a pine tree for Confession Session, where the nuns could unburden their secrets (e.g., “I’m having an affair with a fellow nun’s boyfriend” and “I shot my husband because he wouldn’t bring me a bowl of ice cream”). Is there any other Millennial out there who played convent at recess?!?
Another game we played at recess was The Masked Marvels, where Socks, Crayon, Trident, and I would steal the plastic combs of a perfectly gelled classmate. I don’t recall us ever donning masks, but we were marvelous at ruffling perfect coifs and snatching away the combs, which the classmate had named Henrietta, Mary Jo, and Old Faithful. Even though I gleefully composed ransom notes for said combs, this classmate—a Harvard graduate—told me at our high school reunion that I was one of his school boy crushes.
There was a tremendous amount of violence in our fun. We were always slapping each other in the arms and describing all the gruesome, homicidal things we wanted to do to the friends who were annoying us. Por ejemplo, this poem titled “Socks and Trident”:
Would you say the giant happy face surrounded by music notes makes the poem more creepy or less? To continue with this cheerfully murdersome theme, here’s a note composed by Parrot and left inside my homeroom desk:
It’s a wonder we weren’t hauled into the guidance counselor’s office on a regular basis. While on the topic of inappropriateness, the scrapbook deems our creative name-calling “an essential part of sixth grade.” Some of the frequently used terminology included the following:
Note that this was a far less enlightened time when it was fun to call your friends “gay,” when what you really meant to say was something like “obnoxious, stupid, lame, pain in the ass.” Oh, the ’90s, when it was acceptable for Friends to make disparaging jokes about Ross’s lesbian ex-wife and for Ace Ventura to toilet-plunge his face for hours after being kissed by a transgender villain. Some things just don’t fly anymore.
Speaking of Friends, we were all super into that show. (I’d even asked my hairdresser for “The Rachel” and wound up with a style that looked nothing like it.) We even created a Friends ripoff TV show called Mr. Ducks and Friends for a school project—I think it was for an invention fair. I wrote the script for six of us to perform in, with multiple scenes and three acts. However, it took us so long to just get through one scene that Socks, Trident, and I, pressed for time, wound up making Mr. Ducks… a variety show instead.
A few other tidbits:
- I doodled an eyeless, jellybean-shaped creature named “Boopie” with a variety of Produce High-esque accessories. Most notable: uptight and unsatisfied “Business Guy Boopie,” “Yankee Boopie” and “Confederate Boopie,” and the gently shaded “Black Boopie.”
- I also doodled an entire imaginary sixth grade of disembodied heads.
- I stunned a classmate by eating bits of paper out of boredom. But once he got over his bewilderment, he and Crayon set to helping me compile pieces of “different types of yummy paper.” (The twenty-two-year-old scotch tape needed some reinforcement, and I fixed it while pretending I was a detective on Forensic Files.)
In short, I had a blast this school year, as I was lucky enough to have made friends who were as weird as me. Also, it appears that I dabbled a bit in making comics then, most notably one about a boring, no-nonsense Social Studies teacher. Who knows—maybe this small gesture contributed to the foundation of this website!
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