Seventh grade was hard. I felt like I was wandering onto another planet. The first few days memories still have a tug on the gut. I can remember nausea rumbling while hearing Taco's Puttin' on the Ritz on the radio in the morning waiting to leave for the city bus.
Not only would I know absolutely no one as I traversed from elementary school to Junior High because of a district switch, I had to ride to school with very few kids my age, but a lot of adult strangers. Many who talked to themselves. Many elderly.
Many crying babies.
It was all so intimidating. A nice windy additive to the cyclone my life had been since Dad got sick. The teachers were also a series of anomalies. Particularly Mr. Malone.
Dude was hard to figure. He taught Social Studies, and he did know his shit. But he was odd. He'd go into these internal monologues when angered by a student's chatter, outright rudeness, or lack of classy behavior. Mr. Malone would stare you down. He would develop an evil, guttural chuckle and bitterly sarcastic grin as he dressed you down. He'd narrow his eyelids and begin muttering to himself about failed psychologies; "I'm okay, you're okay...." Flat out irritated by the immaturity of his 12 and 13 year old Social Studies students. Us Current Events aspriationals.
One day, because there was a little too much effort behind a yawn, that ire was directed at me. I got that treatment I had seen so many times before. I was embarrassed. I was downtrodden, and didn't want to destroy my school year. This other outside shit, the strangers, the buses, the inner city school student body, often gang members (sometimes stoned) that I wasn't used to being around.
The mocking. The bullying. The instantaneous violence.
All that shit was too much already. I didn't want to condemn my academics.
This end I could control.
So I went to visit Mr. Malone after class to apologize for the yawn. We spoke for a little while, talked it out a little. He made it seem like we were good. Then he said something to me, without a true facial expression, without a smile.
"You seem different from the rest."
That felt weird. But I felt like I had accomplished what I needed to do. Later in the year, when end of the day "clubs and groups" were formed, I joined Mr. Malone's hiking club. Basically we walked as a group down to Lake Michigan and back. As summer's frothy head deflated down to fall, it transformed into The Chicago Cubs Club, which corresponded to the Cubbies 1984 run at the playoffs. Somewhere the North Shore boys hadn't been in decades. The Cubs were better than hiking, an activity that gave Tom Murphy the opportunity to turn around, and just before hawking a monster loogie at me, chortle out "Dance, Buddy".
Fuckin' nonce.
We gathered viewing materials, Mr. Malone rolled in a TV set and we watched the Cubbies run at it. My Dad was a big newspaper reader, and every Saturday Morning during this exciting season I would run with a quarter to the row of newspaper machines in the covered walkway of the plaza across the alley from our house. That quarter gave me a Chicago Sun-Times and a fresh full page color poster of one of the Wrigley Field Warriors starting players.
Mr. Malone used my newsprint substrate mini-posters to help create a display in one of those glass encased hallway windows for our club. I was pretty proud to make such a major contribution to it. I didn't get along with the kids in the club at all, most of them were a clique of diques, but Malone? Thanks to that Mr. Malone guy, despite how most of the 7th grade felt about him, despite how angry and strange he could be, Malone was all right. He had valid reasons to feel the way he did, teaching was turning a corner into not just being difficult at this point.
Mr. Malone was spittin' jewels at us. Pearls before swine. He knew his stuff, was well versed on 200 plus years of American History, from the Constitution to the Falkland Islands crisis blasting at us from Roger Mudd every night. No one respected that nearly enough.
I could deal with the other kids thanks to all of that.
I never did get my mini-posters back. Never was able to hang Rick Sutcliffe, Bob Dernier, Gary "Sarge" Matthews, or Ryne Sandberg on my bedroom walls.
But, as far as the Cub Club kids, I know that I was different from the rest of them. Because Mr. Malone said so.
And I still am.
HERE IS MR. MALONE'S OBITUARY.
ADDENDUM: In the winter of 1984, Mr. Malone assigned us a brief essay on something out of the days news. I picked the budding negative controversy surrounding the horror film, Silent Night, Deadly Night and its depiction of a murderous Santa Claus. I even attached a newspaper theatre ad from the same day's paper to highlight my eloquent observations about the silliness of the whole thing.
Mr. Malone, I have since learned, was a conservative. I got an A anyway. That's who he was.
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