Both Sides Now

I went to University High School in the early 1960s and hated the place. To cut school, I’d usually walk past the principal’s and vice principal’s offices, past the attendance office, glance up at the fine Art Deco white-on-navy-blue neon sign advertising adult education, walk down the long diagonal path that juts out the double front doors and into the streets of West Los Angeles. Trotting straight out under the noses of the gatekeepers was both daring and successful for its improbability. After all, I was a Good Girl. The only other way out was through the students’ parking lot in back, a hangout for the juvies with high-maintenance hairdos (boys and girls), girls with thick makeup and thin clothes and guys with switchblades (or so it was said). My mother and I had a deal: I’d call her when I was cutting school and let her know where I’d be, so if the school called, she’d cover. All this, as long as my grades were decent. A good deal.

Uni Hi was and is enclosed by a tall chain-link fence. When I went there, student “guards” wearing sashes were deployed at each gate, barring exit. These were our peer police. Now Uni, like every high school in the Los Angeles Unified School District, has its own gun- and billy-club-toting school district police officer. But, except for a recent undercover drug bust--as part of the Los Angeles Police Department’s continuing districtwide School Buy program--the Law According to Uni is dispensed mostly by a quasi-cop staff member.

Robert “Rob” Eiseman, 38, started teaching science at Uni in the early ‘90s. Now his title is dean of students; he calls himself, more accurately, “dean of discipline.” “I’m being punished by God right now,” he says. The dress code is one of the policies Eiseman enforces. Among the provisions: no visible underwear and no hats other than Uni hats. The latter is to help keep Uni “gang neutral.”

When I was a Uni student, there was a no-hat rule, too--one I frequently violated with a beret. Then, in that beatnik to hippie cusp, the rule was probably to keep the school “Bohemian neutral.” The girls’ vice principal, a Miss Feutzer or some such pre-Ms. name, kept calling me into her office for the hat infraction, also for showing cleavage, though she certainly had an ample display. She kept too much track of my doings in general, criticizing me for wearing too much black, having college-age if not always college-attending boyfriends, for writing plays about Sacco and Vanzetti and for my presentation on the Wobblies--with song, no less--for a U.S. history class.

The one bright light in that burnt-out beacon of middle education was Fred Holtby. He taught English and literature to the officially “bright” kids. Now 68, Holtby is still at Uni, though it’s been four years since he’s taught English. Holtby oversees the referral room. It’s where kids are often sent before they get to Dean Eiseman. These days, instead of decoding poems and magazine ads with his students, Holtby gets down to basics with the “bad kids”: the baseball-cap wearers, the gum chewers, the talks-back-to-the-teachers and especially the tardies. Being late to class has become a big deal at Uni. An “on-time” policy guarantees Holtby will have some of his desks filled. He says what he’s doing now is “more real” for the students. They need to figure out how to stay out of the referral room; he aims to help them. Holtby wears a team jacket. Where the Uni emblem would be, there’s a theta appliqued instead. He explains that it’s to represent Thoth, the Egyptian god of wisdom and magic. “Not sleight of hand,” Holtby emphasizes, “but real magic, and learning and language.”

In the ‘60s, Holtby would write on the chalkboard in Greek letters: Ta pathemeta mathemata, “the suffered is the learned,” and poiema pathema mathema, which he translated as “purpose, passion, perception.” Holtby believed we could talk about Prufrock and Olaf, semiotics, semantics, worlds in collision, the Iliad and William Saroyan. He’s not entirely sure about the students he encounters now. The ways students express themselves have changed, as Holtby sees it, because “nobody has a dinner table.” Kids and parents don’t do stuff together and talk about it afterward. It makes getting through to them harder. But once he does, he’s discovered--indulging in some hyperbole--”There is genius there that is just as smart as you guys.”

He means me and my former Uni school, and especially out-of-school-mate, Randa Haines. We’ve come to visit him together, as a surprise. Randa’s a Hollywood director. Her first feature film, “Children of a Lesser God,” was nominated for five Academy Awards. Her recent film, “Dance With Me,” didn’t do well at all. She was just finishing it when we went to see Holtby. Randa and I agreed that he taught us about storytelling. About codes and breaking them and making them, too. Stuff we use in our work now.

Three years ago, I saw Fred Holtby for the first time in three decades. I’d gone there to do a story for National Public Radio. It was one of those mind-blowers to walk into the same classroom with, I swear, the same desks, to see a man who still looked like my 10th- and 12th-grade English teacher. Buzz-cut hair, though white now, an intensity, a focus--and a touch of oddness: the striped shirt, floral tie, a cardigan, the bicycle in the corner. In the ‘60s and now, Fred Holtby’s students agree that the man is weird.

“Sometimes Mr. Holtby is just like in his own little world,” is Ebony Beasley’s verdict. Although she is a regular visitor, other people, she says, try to stay away. That, of course, is what attracted Randa and me, and others who were out with the in crowd. Beasley says she wants to be a psychologist and a journalist and a teacher. She used to live nearby, but now makes a long commute just to keep going to Uni. She used to say that Uni was “whack,” as in boring and uncool, but changed her mind after going to school in Virginia for six months. Among the reasons why she kissed the Uni ground when she returned is that you can dress any way you want (within the strictures of the dress code, of course) and because the student body is so diverse. Just under 18% of Uni’s 2,283 students are African American, Ebony among them. The percentage keeps rising, as it does for Latino students, who now make up 40% of the student body. White kids make up less than 30%. These figures don’t reveal the increasing number of Iranian students or give a breakdown of where all the Asian (12%) and Latino kids are from.

When I was at Uni, almost everyone was white. There were a number of first-generation Japanese American kids, a small group of Mexican nationals and probably fewer than 1% blacks. The old yearbooks show, in black and white, the rows of white faces. Our lunchtime divisions were by interest group and social ranking: the “soshes,” or social kids, those in clubs with names such as The Parees and their own jackets they could only wear outside of school; the basketball players and the other jocks and their sexually experienced groupies; the seriously studious and seemingly dull; the hoods into hair and cars; and us, the weirdos, the arty types, who ate together in The Grove. If such cliquishness spawns violence, as so many people chanted after the killings at Columbine High in Colorado, it never surfaced then.

And now the ground has shifted. The divisions at lunch are different. Most of the kids who hang together in threes or more speaking Farsi and Spanish and Korean are bound by cultural background. Most students can’t even tell you where everyone else is from, and make their own divisions, different from those sanctioned by social studies class and geopolitics. Ebony counts among her friends “Persians--you know, Iranians--people who are Portuguese, people who are Ethiopian. I know many different cultures.” She says she’d rather roam during lunchtime than join in one of the cliques.

Another of Holtby’s ‘60s students, another weirdo who doesn’t want to be named, says she keeps rereading Saroyan. Now, she’s a professor and a lawyer. Then, she was our baby Brigitte Bardot. The girl was ooh la lah! Cleavage, tight furry clothes that unbuttoned down the front, a pout. And she was smart! She carried books by Freud and Sartre and actually spoke decent French. Our French teacher was clearly impressed. It would have been hard not to be. She’s still got great legs and a fine mind, but like the rest of us, she’s proof of the law of gravity.

Until a few months ago, her daughter’s boyfriend’s daughter--a 17-year-old--went to Uni. The different, multi-culti Uni. She is white; the boyfriend’s daughter black. She thought she wanted to be an obstetrician, now she’s thinking about being a psychologist; meanwhile she remembers liking the story she read in English class about this guy, “in the Navy or Army or something.” Mr. Roberts. Ultimately, though, she, too, found Uni “whack.”

*

Olga Kokino, advisor for Uni’s award-winning student newspaper, says the students in her Journalism I class are focused on graduating, going to college (most of Uni’s students do) and landing the big job. Lawyer, obstetrician, shrink. One of Kokino’s students has an unusual goal: to be a beautician in a mortuary. “Because I figure there’s a lot of people that die every day, and it’s good money. Not everybody’s willing to do it.” The 18-year-old with amazing lashes isn’t afraid of death. A former gang member, she says she’s lost friends she loves.

Kokino urges the students to ask me questions. Here, she says, is a journalist doing a piece on them. So find out what it’s like. Ask! All they want to find out is who famous had gone to Uni. Like I’d know. Then, or now. I don’t remember any of us being so future-oriented, so career-sure. We didn’t plan much, except to get away from home. Neither Randa nor I nor She Who Wouldn’t Be Named thought of Uni as central in our lives, nor did our friends. There were other, more immediate concerns. Like not getting pregnant in those pre-condom distribution decades. We talked of alleged “cures”: jumping on a trampoline; taking Humphrey’s Pills, whatever they were; douches and quinine--the latter my parents’ preferred choice the summer I graduated from Uni and thought I might be pregnant. Thankfully, I wasn’t. I got my period the day I moved out of their apartment and into my own in San Francisco.

Rather than expressing eagerness to leave home, Ebony and other girls at Uni fear that their parents will die on them. They worry about having a baby and finishing school and about AIDS. And there’s a fear, big time, of not succeeding. The smell of it was nowhere more pungent than in Jane Koehler’s honors English class. These are the bright kids: their disappointments may be in getting into Columbia instead of Harvard. They’re among the academically and, often, economically privileged students at school. For now, literature may be as close as they’ll get to the grit of life.

Standing between rows of wooden desks in Koehler’s classroom, I’m struck that today’s Uni students seem solely concerned about their own individual needs. Our concerns, or at least mine and, it seemed, many others’, were about the outside world, about what was going down in Cuba and Vietnam and the Senate and in Mississippi. Ayelet Ruppin, 17, calls the difference apathy. She cites a lack of student activism, even to oppose unpopular edicts like the attendance policy or drug testing for student athletes. “People,” she says, “they really don’t care.”

In the mostly white Uni of the early ‘60s, we marched for abstract civil rights; stuffed envelopes for SNCC; demonstrated for peace and against the bomb and HUAC, and made friends and lovers on the picket line. We were afraid in a way: of a war where boys our age were blowing each other to bits with M-16s, of a nuclear bomb falling on West Los Angeles--not that one of our peers might appear in the halls with handguns or pipe bombs. Action on such a petty scale would have seemed unthinkable to my generation. We were out to save the world.

Ebony Beasley just wants to avoid trouble and to be a success. Politics may just be “whack.” Or maybe with classes and outside jobs, these students haven’t got time or energy. One student in Koehler’s class acted in the school play, “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.” Another’s on the school-based management team to earn extra credit. A very few cited softball or playing piano or doing some other activity outside of school . . . when they had time.

They’re the exceptions. Uni is the universe for most students, and the narrower they can make that universe, the more comfortable they feel. Luis Llambias, 18, sums up the pervasive fixation with scholarship: “We’re pretty academic and we don’t really care about anything else. We don’t care about school spirit, we don’t really care about our clubs that much, except how it looks on our transcripts, and we don’t know about the outside world.”

Randa and I are doing work that makes sense to each of us; Randa’s looking for her next project, the next film; I’m thinking about making a work change, too. It’s that time. Menopause alone would be enough. Combined with mourning, it’s a powerful combination. This past summer, my mother died. Going through her things, I found my University High School diploma. 1963. I never really knew when I’d gotten out. My photo and name aren’t in any of the yearbooks, except once as a member of the Folk Song Club. Randa’s nowhere. I think we got out of Uni, and our lives, about what we expected: Holtby’s legacy of passion as a conduit to enlightenment, and knowing that if we were to get anywhere, we’d have to keep questioning and not rely on our high school education to contribute substantially to what we would become.