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My Final Year in High School<\/p>\n
though stuffed with people was a rare sight: my classmates for the most part thought I was really<\/em> peculiar<\/em> to have eschewed the popular Fords and Chevies they drove.<\/p>\n Though my \u201ccareer\u201d as a writer would come much later, I did<\/em> do a lot of writing in\u00a0 high school and college. I still have a large binder with my oeuvre from that time collected in it: looking over it now, I realize how clear it must have been to adult readers (teachers, councilors, and so forth) that I was queer: my regret is that it wasn\u2019t equally clear to my classmates, who probably would have rewarded me with a lot of rampant cock, if only they had known! How I would have loved it, if only I had known<\/em><\/strong>.<\/em><\/p>\n My English Lit teacher was amused by several of my poems. The most famous one, submitted to (and rejected by) numerous contests was this quatrain:<\/p>\n The day was cold<\/p>\n The food was old:<\/p>\n Soon it was covered<\/p>\n With ugly mold.<\/p>\n Only slightly more serious, if a trifle\u00a0 longer, was a parody (1951) on a famous poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay:<\/p>\n DIRT WITHOUT MUSIC<\/strong><\/p>\n I am not resigned to the dumping of dirty dishes into the hot water.<\/p>\n So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been for time out of mind:<\/p>\n Into the water they go, the dirty, the greasy.<\/p>\n Crowned With bones and scrapings they go:<\/p>\n but I am not resigned.<\/p>\n Scraps and bones, into the garbage with you,<\/p>\n Be one with the gravy, the indescribable mess.<\/p>\n A fragment of what we ate, of what we chew,<\/p>\n A\u00a0 tidbit, a morsel remains, but the best is eaten.<\/p>\n The celery crisp and green, the stewed tomatoes,the onions, the beets<\/p>\n They are gone. They are gone to feed the dogs.<\/p>\n Elegant and curled Is the broccoli. Fragrant is the broccoli.I know.<\/p>\n But I do not approve<\/p>\n More precious was the taste of that lamb than all the Four Roses of the world.<\/p>\n Down, down, down, into the suds of the dishwater<\/p>\n Gently they go, the greasy, the gummy, the gooey;<\/p>\n Quietly they go, the handle-less, the broken, the chipped<\/p>\n I know, but I do not approve, and I am not resigned.<\/p>\n So that year my mischievous nature asserted itself: I pulled off numerous pranks, harmless kid-stuff, which nevertheless greatly vexed the Dean of Boys, in whose office I found myself quite regularly. The man was a pompous fart who harangued me about such things as morality, living an upstanding life, and so forth (remember, he was convinced I was queer and active, but unaware that I was not even out to myself<\/em><\/strong>). He reported to my father regularly, and may have been surprised when Dad refused to chastise me for any of it: he knew I was just \u201cfeeling my oats\u201d and testing the system, something quite normal for a late-blooming teenager. As for the Dean, he\u00a0 became a role model (years later) for Newt Gingrich. The day after his wife announced she had cancer, he filed for divorce and took up with a young bimbo half his age. This was too much for red-neck Modesto: he was fired and run out of town. I went on to graduate, a gangly nerd with a lot of very strange habits, totally out of synch with my classmates.<\/p>\n This is me in rented drag for High School Graduation.<\/p>\n To be continued \u2026<\/strong><\/p>\n \nemail: \u00a0 \u00a0 MYOB@BruceBramson.com<\/p>\n NEXT<\/p>\n\n\n Go to COMING OUT TO FAMILY<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Finally, I got to call myself a Senior! (Funny what a thrill that was then, but now that I\u2019m a senior again, the appellation has lost its luster!) I pretty well had a lock on graduation, having managed to get passing grades in everything, even PE. Secondary sexual characteristics were finally making their appearance, so […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-350","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucebramson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/350","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucebramson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucebramson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucebramson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=350"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/brucebramson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/350\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":560,"href":"https:\/\/brucebramson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/350\/revisions\/560"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucebramson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=350"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucebramson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=350"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucebramson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=350"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![](\"https:\/\/brucebramson.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/12\/184a.jpg\")
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