As a kid, I attended what was then Westwood Elementary School in West Los Angeles. It's now Westwood Charter School and still in the same location. When I drive by these days, the only structure that seems to still be there from my era is a freestanding handball wall in the northwest corner of the playground; that and a few of the cheese sandwiches they used to serve in the cafeteria there. The cafeteria is gone but those cheese sandwiches will be found and studied by Paleontologists of some future century. And based on the many fingerprints of the cafeteria workers, they will reconstruct Cro-Magnon Man.
Westwood was a good little school and one of the main reasons was the principal, Mrs. Kermoyan. I'm trying to think how old she was then, keeping in mind that when you're between six and 11 as I was, everyone over about 16 looks either forty or near-death. I'll say late thirties, early forties. She was a bright, conscientious administrator who cared about all her students but who took a particular interest in me. I saw a lot of her and not because I was ever in any trouble. I was never in any trouble. Not long before I graduated Westwood and moved on, I accidentally got a peek at my cumulative record.
This was a file students weren't supposed to ever see as it contained everything the school system knew about you and your parents, and included candid remarks from each of your teachers. Mine was filled with glowing statements about how oh, if only all students could be like Mark! The worst thing in there was that Mrs. Preuss wrote, "Has annoying tendencey to correct adults and be right." I laughed at that and decided to try not to do that so often. I started by not telling Mrs. Preuss that she'd misspelled "tendency."
Mrs. Kermoyan took a special interest in me and because of it, she and her associates unknowingly ruined my life for a while…then knowingly and happily made it just about all right. That's the story I'm about to tell you but first let me tell you a little more about the school. It was a nice, happy place located just barely within walking distance of where I then lived. The faculty was all female but for two teachers.
One was Mr. Manitzas, who proved to be one of those unforgettable educators who leaves a lasting and positive impact on those he tutors. He was fascinated with art and he'd often speed through Arithmetic and History so he could spend more time showing us slides of great paintings, especially every single canvas to which Vincent Van Gogh ever put brush. Years ago out of curiosity, I Googled "George Manitzas Westwood" and found a bevy of blogposts and message board chatter from former students who remembered him fondly and credited him with great inspiration. There are still a few of them up and I intend this posting to add to the search results about him.
The other male teacher was a Japanese gentleman named, I'm afraid, Mr. Fukushitma. Is that the worst last name you ever heard in your life? Should someone with that name even be allowed to reproduce? And he even pronounced the first syllable as if it had a "c" in it. I was never in his class but I do recall that no one on campus, be they pupil or faculty, could refer to the man without snickering.
In L.A. city schools at the time, and I suppose it's still this way, the first elementary school grade was B-1. When you were promoted, assuming you were promoted, you went into A-1. Then came B-2, then A-2 and so on. After you completed A-6, they shipped you off to a junior high school and to the seventh grade, therein. At some point, at Mrs. Kermoyan's suggestion, an expert was brought in to test me and determine if I was sharp enough to skip a grade here or there. I skipped a few and then at one point, I missed a semester due to a messy bout of Scarlet Fever. The result? Well, my parents were quite proud and I briefly felt like I'd won a prize or something. I soon found out otherwise as I kept finding myself in a different class from the other kids I was getting to know.
School, after all, is as much about learning how to get along with others as it is about mastering long division or basic grammar. Arguably, the social aspect is more important. With my advancement, I lost all the friends I'd had and found myself in with a new group, all a year older. A year isn't much of an age difference when you're in your thirties or older but when you're in the single digits, it matters a lot. As I was younger and heralded as some sort of smarter-than-they-were prodigy, none of them were particularly interested in being around me.
I could get along fine in the classroom, especially in Reading and Writing, which were the areas that had most prompted my advancement. And I could at least sound like I understood Arithmetic and History and everything else. What I was lousy at were the three most important activities of the schoolday — Recess, Lunch and After Lunch Play.
I ate my lunch largely alone every day for a year or two. And then after lunch or at Recess when the games commenced, I couldn't seem to get on a team. They had this system where each week, two boys were designated as captains and when it came time to play Sockball, they'd take turns picking other kids to be on their squads. Egos were forever decimated or magnified based on how soon you were picked. It was embarrassing to be picked last…so you can imagine how I felt. I never got picked at all.
I'm not sure if it was because none of them knew me or because I was younger and therefore punier or because I lurked in the back and never spoke up. It might have just been that I'd never demonstrated that I could play the team sports, which was in part because I wasn't certain how any of those games were played. I kinda figured them out from watching but I never felt secure enough to dive in and participate. Or to point out to anyone that I'd been left off the roster so I never got to be captain.
Sockball was the big game on the Westwood playground. It was a lot like baseball except that you socked a big, inflated rubber ball with your fist as hard as you could and then ran the bases. You were out if someone caught your ball or threw it to a baseman before you reached his base. Everyone on one team got an "at bat" each inning and you'd see how many runs that side could score. Everyone on the other team was either one of the four basemen (home plate had a baseman, not a catcher because nothing was pitched) or was in the outfield, so there might be ten or twenty guys in the outfield.
I would plant myself deep in center and just stand there for the entire game. If the ball came near me, I let someone else handle it. When it came time to switch sides, I'd stay out in deep center because I wasn't on either team. It became a great metaphor for my early years and there are still days when I feel like that.
There were other games. One was Dodgeball and while the basic concept seemed pretty simple — i.e., dodge the ball, you jerk — I didn't know what else to do. So the first time anyone (me or any other kid) got hit, I'd go "out" and stay out. There was also a game I never understood called Four Square that involved another big rubber ball and four squares that were painted on the asphalt. Don't write and tell me how Four Square is played because there's little chance of me taking it up at this age.
The point was that throughout my early school years, no one really talked to me outside class and I felt increasingly like an alien presence. I was younger, weaker, smaller and worst of all, allegedly smarter. Being "Class Brain" because you skipped grades may make your folks beam but it's a great way to not relate in any way to your peers. Away from school, I was a happy kid but at Westwood Elementary, I felt like I was functioning in a parallel universe all my own.
It wasn't like being the New Kid in Class. We had new kids in class all the time…and since they were new kids, they were introduced and put on teams and placed into the rotation of team captains, and they were even taught how to play Four Square. Nobody ever did any of that for me. I'd see a foreign exchange student who barely spoke English start to fit in within days but I just felt more and more remote from those around me. I became withdrawn and dour…but only at school. At home, where I felt like I belonged, all was fine.
It got worse when my one teacher decided that in reading from her class textbook, I was working too far below my level of comprehension. That was bad, they said…so meetings were held and the faculty debated what to do about the Evanier boy. They finally decided to adjust the times of the Reading lessons in the another class that was a year past mine to coincide with those in mine. Then when it came time for Reading, Mark would be sent down the hall to take Reading with students a year older. This meant that I would come in like some mutant freak and the pupils there would glare at me and resent the snotty young kid who was showing them all up with his unnatural command of the language.
You can imagine how much I looked forward to that each day: Oh, boy! Another whole group of kids to not fit in with.
The plan was that as I progressed through school, I would always take Reading with the class ahead. I, of course, asked what would happen when I got to sixth grade since the next class up was at another school across town. "We'll deal with that when the time comes," I was told — and of course, when the time came no one had the slightest idea what to do so they just sent me to the school library every day during that hour. I'd mostly sit there and draw Fred Flintstone.
So I hated school throughout those years…and Mrs. Kermoyan knew that I wasn't happy but she had no idea why. When I tried to tell her, my vaunted command of the language failed me. I started to explain to her about eating lunch alone and spending Recess standing in center field, not being on either of the teams that were playing. Somehow, she didn't understand, muttering something about how advanced students need challenges to stimulate their minds…or something. In hindsight, I could later understand that when I said, "I'm always alone," she took that to mean I was more advanced than the other kids around me so maybe I needed to be around older ones still.
Finally though, I was beginning to feel like I was almost on the same planet as the other students. Almost, not quite. I think it started one day in class when I did something unprecedented in my then-brief life or, as far as I could tell, any classroom I'd been in. I made a funny.
By then, I'd read hundreds, maybe thousands of comic books and I remembered every word of every one of them. I remembered every joke I heard on TV, too. One day in class, one of my fellow pupils, Fred Stern, was reading a book report — some book about the Dark Ages. It was one of those vague speeches that made you wonder if he'd even read the book. I guess the teacher was thinking that maybe Fred hadn't. When Fred finished, the teacher asked him, "Fred…why were the Dark Ages called the Dark Ages?"
We all watched the color drain from Fred's face like a plunging thermometer. He didn't have a clue.
It was during that awkward silence that I realized our instructor had unknowingly given the set-up line to a joke I recalled from an issue of Archie's Joke Book. For the first time ever in my life, I spoke up in class without being called on. I said aloud so everyone could hear me, "Because they had so many knights!"
For a fraction of a second, there was utter silence in the room and I thought, "Oh, I did something stupid." But it was only a small fraction because then, they all got the nights/knights pun and the entire class exploded in laughter. I mean, exploded. I can still hear that explosion and several aftershocks.
Even the teacher laughed and boy, that sure felt good. Nothing connects you with others quite like making them laugh. It was a moment of Instant Acceptance for me and later that day at lunch, other students asked me to sit with them as they repeated the joke for kids in other classes. "How did you think of that?" everyone was asking.
Another student who I suspect also felt like an outcast invited me to go over to his house after school and play games, whereupon I instantly clobbered him in Stadium Checkers. I was great at Stadium Checkers because, unlike Sockball, it came with printed instructions. The next day, a couple of other students spotted me drawing cartoon characters in my notebook and asked me to draw cartoon characters in their notebooks. That was nice. No one was really talking to me but they were talking at me so we were getting closer.
Little things like that made me feel like I was starting to belong…but then I suddenly began to get called out of class to take special tests. I recognized those tests. They were the same kind I'd taken that had prompted the school to skip me ahead an entire year. They were even administered by the same lady from downtown. Fearful, I gave a few wrong answers — just enough, I thought, that they wouldn't think I was throwing the game but would think, "Hmm…maybe Mark's reached the upper limits of his ability."
I guess I didn't throw enough. A week before my current class concluded, the teacher kept me after school and gave me a sealed letter to take home to my parents. She told me, "They're going to be awfully proud of their son" and I shuddered because I knew what it was.
I gasped, "They're going to skip me ahead again?" She answered with a smile, "Yes and your parents will be so happy." Well, maybe but I sure wasn't. I still remember the shocked look on her face when I began yelling, "No, no, no!"
"You should be happy about it," she exclaimed. I cried, "I'm not happy about it" and asked her who could undo this rotten decision. She said someone would have to talk to Mrs. Kermoyan. I announced that I was going to talk to Mrs. Kermoyan and I sprinted from that classroom and down the stairs, taking them three at a time because it sure felt like every second counted. I barged into Mrs. Kermoyan's office and began shouting.
I don't recall the first part of what I shouted and it was probably incoherent and hysterical. I do though recall the second part vividly. I told her how I always ate lunch alone and how no one would let me into a game and how the older kids in Reading class glared at me and how I was just starting to not completely hate coming to school each day. Then I saw her go pale as I asked her, "Don't you want me to have any friends at all?"
I was crying throughout all of this…but when I said that last thing, suddenly I stopped and she started.
Mrs. Kermoyan broke into tears, came out from behind her desk and squatted down in front of me. She threw her arms around me and said, "I'm sorry, I'm sorry. I did something terrible to you. I thought you were always so unhappy because you needed to be in with smarter kids. I'm so very, very sorry." Over and over, she kept saying, "I didn't mean to hurt you…can you forgive me?" And over and over, I forgave her. I still forgive her. Mrs. Kermoyan! If you're still alive and you're on the Internet and you Google your name some day and find this, I forgive you! Honest!
I must have forgiven her twenty times. She assured me I would never be skipped again in any grade unless my parents and I approved, which made me very happy at that moment. Later, in high school, I wished I could have skipped all of them and proceeded directly to my life.
But I remember sitting there in her office that day, listening in as Mrs. Kermoyan called my mother and told her that the school system wanted to skip Mark ahead again but, "he and I have talked it out and we agree it's not in his best interests. We both hope you agree." My mother replied that she'd discuss it with my father but that they'd found that "Mark usually knows what's best for Mark." Boy, that made me feel good. I felt like for the first time ever, I was in control of my own life. Better still, someone recognized that I had the capability along with the right to be. That was really what the problem was, after all.
And that "not belonging" problem? Gone for good, as of that moment…or at least, I began to feel like I belonged. It took a little longer for all my classmates to decide that but decide they did. As things turned out, I actually found myself enjoying the next class into which we all went. The next class, by the way, was Mr. Manitzas.
My existence at school more or less normalized in fourth grade. I still had that problem with taking Reading in an upper class but everything else fell into place once I realized the problem was not with me. By then, other kids were picking me to be on their teams at Recess…and not because I was a good player. It turned out, I was really lousy at Sockball and all those other games. It also turned out that it didn't matter. What mattered was that I got my turn at bat and my name on the roster.