The Summer After Eighth Grade

You had to be there in Shreveport at the time to understand how the entire world changed for us in less than three months. I wish I would have appreciated it then as much as I do now. Life's lament.

That’s a photo from the Agnew Town & Country Day School yearbook. Liz Hancock and I had won a dance contest in the gym at a sock hop. In the immediate aftermath, my football and basketball teammates hoisted me upon their shoulders as though we had all won a championship together. I’m not really sure where Liz went, but I’m fairly confident that she’s still ecstatic that she’s not in this scene. I’m also certain that the Lightning Bolt surf shirt I’m wearing was the only one in Shreveport (LA) at the time.

I can’t remember who wrote “kiss kiss” in my yearbook. What a compliment! I had a lot of fans.

At least I did have a lot of female admirers until the first day of ninth grade when me and the rest of the popular boys (and all boys, really) from various schools like St. Joseph’s and First Baptist and Southfield assembled at Jesuit HS and Captain Shreveport HS or elsewhere to assume our positions at the bottom of the social totem pole. Freshman year was miserable: the girls we had slow-danced with inside the non-heated nor air-conditioned Agnew gym (150C during the spring and summer, -300C during the winter) were now dating sophomores who had their driver’s licenses and cars while our parents were dropping us off and picking us up en masse at Mall St. Vincent so we could play video games at an arcade named “Land of Ahs.”

My one year at Agnew after arriving from California ended poorly. I was suspended for the last week of school—losing out on the top honors for French as a result in what can only be described as bitter jealousy and retribution by the stodgy administration—because I was caught in a girl’s room on Agnew’s annual eighth grade trip. That the particular hotel room across the hallway from mine was hosting my good friend Lisa Franklin and that we were just playing cards and listening to music with her other roommates and that, all of these decades later, I am still the one receiving exclusive blame by everyone for having the trip sent home early despite there being three others (Kevin Walker, April Seal, and Melissa Palmer) who were also caught out of their rooms late at night, is still stingingly galling.

But don’t worry, I’m not bitter. Can’t you tell?

Agnew’s football jamboree. That’s Llew Cook in the shades and Scott Hilburn in the red shirt. My hair was glorious. White cleats, too!

Within the first week of summer, a few girls from different schools got together to organize a party at Pierremont Oaks Tennis Club and invited pretty much everyone who had just graduated from Agnew, First Baptist, Southfield, St. Joseph’s, and a few other junior highs to attend. This was going to be remarkable for the boys: we had not gone to cheerleading and yearbook camps together like the girls had. No. We had battled in football games at Cargill Park (the Agnew Rebels were so bad that our coaches changed several scores for the yearbook to make the losses look closer) and basketball games at the aforementioned hell house of Agnew’s gym and the pristine comfort of Southfield’s. Now, we were all going to be at POTC in a group. Would scores be settled? Would we get along? It was an unnerving mystery as we battled the concurrent effects of puberty.

But everyone got along. I was almost disappointed. Some of us were going to Jesuit, some going to Shreve, and some were going to continue at their same schools that—unlike Agnew and others—had grades nine through twelve. Maybe those guys from St. Joseph’s weren’t so bad after all.

My Agnew yearbook photo. That’s the guy that got all of the secret Valentines and crank calls? Seriously. Wow. I think the photographer used hairspray and a dog brush. Not kidding.

Driver’s education began soon thereafter. Once again, recent rivals were quarantined together and forced to assimilate in an assembly hall at Captain Shreve. Maybe it was the gym. And, unlike the dance at the country club, this was to last two weeks. Here is where my lifelong friendship with Kevin Smith and several others truly began.

Kevin and I were placed into the same car with a kid named Ronnie Byrd who was going to attend Byrd HS, my stepfather’s alma mater. Our instructor? Well, he was a gargantuan teacher and football coach named John Dilworth who had played in the NFL for the Miami Dolphins and in the CFL for the Calgary Stampeders. Of course we would be assigned to him. Perfect.

As a sidebar, Kevin’s football team at St. Joseph’s had defeated our Agnew team in the last game of the season. The final score was 13-8 or something similar and there were two very memorable occurrences. I knocked their quarterback, Johnny Leblanc, out of the game with a concussion because I hit him late and out of bounds so that his head hit the metal bleachers placed way too close to the sideline. Not really my fault, frankly. Some called it a cheap shot. Not sure. No replay available. And, late in the 4th quarter, I stopped Kevin on an extra point run with a lucky tackle (he was bigger, stronger, and faster than me) that caused one of my fingernails to be ripped off after it got stuck in his mesh jersey!

Now we were driving around Shreveport with Coach Dilworth yelling at us. I don’t remember much about our conversations in the car, but I know that I loved Kevin. He was/is so funny. I do recall Coach Dilworth shaking his head and admonishing me for singing along to the songs on the radio. And I remember something hilarious…

We were at the State Fairgrounds practicing how to go in reverse and parallel park. Plenty of open space there, obviously, for three fourteen-year-old boys under the watchful eyes of a behemoth. Each of us took our turns and, at some point when Ronnie had just come to a stop, Coach Dilworth moved in his seat—which was not easy considering his robust size—and looked at Kevin and me.

“You boys drive better backward than you do forward!”

I’ve never stopped laughing about that.

Some family vacation that summer. My stepbrother, Jordy Jackson, was a nationally ranked barefoot water ski jumper. We were waterskiing on this day. He would let me drive his Jeep around Shreveport when I was thirteen (before Coach Dilworth), bought me beers, let me hang with his LSU buddies in Baton Rouge, and most remarkably accepted the rather uncool, spastic, basketball playing weirdo me as a real relative. We lost him in December 1992.

Later that fateful summer, the same boys who had been at the dance and in driver’s ed together were taking a course at Jesuit called “SQ3R.” It was a disciplined study method developed by the school’s principal, Mr. Ernst, to help students achieve excellent marks in high school. In retrospect, it was probably a scam to bilk our parents out of money and fund Ernst family vacations. But, obviously, our folks wanted to be able to virtue signal before it was a thing so it was incumbent upon the affluent couples of Spring Lake and South Highlands and Ellerbe Road and elsewhere to have their boys participate.

Scan. Question. Read. Review. Repeat.

Or maybe the second word in SQ3R was “recite.” It’s been a minute. I think it was recite and I’m not sure why I didn’t just go back now and make the correction and avoid this explanation, but I need to dumb down these articles sometimes to appear relatable.

Jesus.

So, here follows the best part of SQ3R’s two-week boot camp with Mr. Ernst. It wasn’t reading “Flowers for Algernon” and doing a book report. It wasn’t eating in Jesuit’s cafeteria for the first time and feeling like a real high school student on the verge of getting beaten up weekly by upperclassmen.

It was being on the historic front steps of Jesuit’s main building at 921 Jordan (a street named for the family of my adoptive grandmother in Shreveport, no less) and breaking it down with guys like Kevin and Martin Morgan and a few others each morning before SQ3R began. That’s what I remember most. That camaraderie. Our parents dropped us off and we would meet there each day. It was our thing. I’m getting a little emotional at the moment recalling its glory. We had more in common than we had previously imagined as students and athletes at rival schools. We were the same and high school wasn’t going to be that daunting, after all.

My afternoons after SQ3R were spent working at Lucky Gas, a station my stepfather owned as a tax write-off to fuel the company cars and trucks for his Shreveport Alarm Company business. I loved it! I’d wash the fleet vehicles and scrub off tar from their underbellies with gas-soaked rags, something probably discouraged nowadays, then pump fuel into the cars of customers for hours.

Later, with the boundless energy of a teenager, I’d spend the entire late afternoons and early evenings playing basketball. On weekends? More basketball, then I’d ride my bike to Pierremont Oaks to go swimming even though our family had a pool of our own at the 463! That’s 463 Dunmoreland Circle for the uninitiated. Note: would love to watch a highlight reel of my three years in that home as a teenager.

A funny thing about all of us pre-licensed neighborhood boys riding our bikes to the club to get french fries and chocolate malts from the snack bar was that we would hear the high school girls we worshipped make comments about us like “Look at the cute little boys on their bikes!” as we tried to be as mature as possible leaning the bulky Schwinns up against the fence by the entryway.

Those girls were a grade above us. One year older.

Little boys. Non-threatening little boys to them.

Fuck.

Soon enough, however, I would be cruising the town in a metallic blue 1978 Toyota Corolla SR5 hatchback with 100,000+ miles already on it (paid for with my savings from sweatbox labor at Lucky Gas) and a boombox between the front seats that required eight D batteries. I can’t make this up.

That Louisiana used to issue driver’s licenses to children at fifteen as immature as me is still rather astounding.

And this is how cool I was at fifteen. Not my actual car, obviously, but we did have some good times in a similar beauty that may be shared in a future article. It did get Kevin and me to Bogalusa and back! When my sister turned sixteen in La Jolla, she was given a new Mustang convertible. Where is the justice?

We had bottle rocket wars in Spring Lake that summer with a simple rule: we were only allowed to hit people below the neck..as if we had any control whatsoever over the flight of those armed projectiles.

It was just a rampaging group of 20-30 boys and girls from overlapping neighborhoods with intersecting activities who were on the verge of young adulthood and trying to figure it out together. There was a lot of kissing with mostly pursed lips. I didn’t really know what I was doing.

But Jordy taught me how to waterski. My stepfather taught me how to play racquetball. His parents taught me the genteel graces required at the Shreveport Country Club for Sunday brunches after church. A bunch of older black guys at an outdoor court by the Pak-a-Sak (RIP) on Line Avenue took my basketball game to higher levels with their collective patience for a scrawny, competitive white kid.

And my new friends taught me everything else.

Jesuit/LCP legends framed by two Captain Shreve legends. From left to right: Cousin Joey Kent, me, Kevin Smith, and Duke Ehrhardt. Humble brag about giving a presentation at the Capitol Park Museum in Baton Rouge that day several years ago because I’m so famous.