The Eighth Grade, Part I

Lately I've been walking around feeling like my Inner Eighth Grader is exposed.

We've all got one. I don't know what everyone else's Eighth Grade was like, but I'll tell you, mine was about a miserable as the Eighth Grade could get.

In the Eighth Grade, I was chubby and bespectacled, and not very attractive.

I had bad teeth. I had too many teeth for my mouth, so my teeth were crammed into my face with two canines that never descended to the same level as my other teeth. Giant snaggly sabreteeth. It would take the sacrifice of four healthy molars and two years of orthodontia before it was revealed that I actually have a perfectly acceptable smile.

Later on, I would gladly give up four bone-impacted wisdom teeth in a general-anaesthetic surgical procedure to keep them from re-adjusting that four-figure smile that I know was a financial hardship for my parents.

My dentist to this day complains that I have an extremely small oral cavity which makes it hard for him to reach my back teeth. I leave his office on 57th Street with the muscles of my jaws stretched so far that I am, literally, slack-jawed.

No man that I have ever dated has ever complained about my extremely small oral cavity.

But when I am smiling with every muscle of my face, my upper lip will pull up on the right side as if it remembers the huge canine tooth that it used to snag.

I was also very, very brainy and bookish in the Eighth Grade.

So. A fat, glasses-wearing bluestocking. Can you guess what the Eighth Grade was like for me?

Oh, wait. I was in the band, too. But I didn't play a cool instrument like the flute or the drums. It seemed like all the girls who played the flute were pretty and petite. And the boys who played the drums were delinquents-in-training who were just cooler than all the rest of us band geeks. They smoked and chewed tobacco that they spat into empty milk cartons and sat at the back of the bus. They carried their drumsticks in their back pockets like switchblades and were prone to whipping them out to rattle out paradiddles on desks and cafeteria tables.

I played the clarinet. An instrument that you played sitting rigidly upright with your right foot tapping rhythm on the riser. Quite possibly, with the exception of the oboe or bassoon, the most un-cool instrument that you could play. Even the instrument's case looked uncool -- like a little briefcase that I was toting around school. We clarinet players looked like actuaries on our way to the office as we entered the band room.

So there I was in the Eighth Grade, a fat, glasses-wearing, clarinet-playing bluestocking.

I did have a small coterie of friends -- Tina and Beth and Susan. Tina and Beth were both Flute Players. They were pretty and petite. Tina was the most developed girl in the Eighth Grade and Beth was one of the prettiest girls in school. I couldn't figure out why they wanted to be friends with me.

Susan played the violin and piano and she was serious and studious. She was the first person I knew to buy "Never Mind the Bollocks Here's The Sex Pistols." The four of us sat in her bedroom and listened to "God Save the Queen." We were mystified and delighted at the same time.

We used to ride our bicycles to each others houses and camp in Susan's backyard next to the trolley tracks, scaring each other with stories of Green Man, a Pittsburgh legend.

We had our own code that we used to write each other notes.

On Friday nights in the winter, along with every other Eighth Grader at our school, we went to the Corrigan Drive Skating Rink and made aimless circles of the rink, coming in from the cold to eat french fries and drink Cokes.

We all agreed that the cutest boys in the band were Mike P and Ricky P. Mike was a drummer and Ricky played the trombone.

Somewhere along the way, in the Eighth Grade, I acquired a Tormentor.