My high school years leave fewer memories than the ones that preceded and followed them. Trying to avoid the relatively tough neighborhood high school (there were white gangs—mythic and real—and racial conflict), I took the exam for the city’s elite public high schools (Science and Stuyvesant) with little sense that I would pass. I was a notoriously weak math student, and it comprised half the exam. However, I was also an omnivorous reader—a great deal of American fiction (e.g., Steinbeck, Dos Passos, Richard Wright, Sinclair Lewis, and James Farrell)—and I must have done extremely well on the reading comprehension and vocabulary parts of the exam to surprisingly be admitted into Bronx Science.
I had mixed feelings about being accepted; the school, with its emphasis on math and the sciences, was a not a good fit for me intellectually. (I wanted a public high school that emphasized history, politics, and literature, and that didn’t exist in the city at that time.) However, my parents loved the fact that I passed the exam to one of the city’s elite schools, and I felt a touch of pride that I somehow got in. Still, the three years I spent there were not particularly eventful, nor did I grow at all emotionally, and only slightly intellectually.
The first year was spent in an annex about 10 or so blocks from the main building. And I felt little connection to the school, running home after my last class to play ball in the neighborhood and then at night doing my homework in a bedroom I shared with my ailing grandfather. I had neighborhood friends who had gone to junior high with me and a couple of them attended Science. So, I wasn’t bereft of human connection, and I stood in the middle of the class in my grades, except in history, where I was confident and shone. But the days at school still felt lonely, and I felt anxious and unsure of myself both socially and in most cases academically.
My junior and senior years at Bronx Science were a bit easier. My classes were in the main building right off the Grand Concourse, near Fordham Road—the prime Bronx shopping street. The school felt more alive, and I understood more about the sociology of the school’s student body (upper middle class, aspiring Ivy leaguers, a small bohemia, and the large mass of us that hadn’t defined ourselves), but I ended up eating lunch for a year at a table where I found myself barely and unhappily uttering a word to the students with whom I sat. During those two years, I also began to date, but I rarely took a risk and went out with anybody with whom I could emotionally or intellectually connect. The neighborhood still held me, and I felt unable to venture outside of its narrow confines and routines, and that was true of most of my best friends then, who seemed equally stifled. What moved me to begin thinking about the world differently was reading writers who wrote about existential choice, like Camus and Sartre, which meant for me transcending convention and the values that shaped my early life.
It took a while before I could transform myself, and of course, I still carry the past with me. (Nobody ever truly transforms themselves.) However, I did marry someone I shared a world with, and I became more confident and less anxious as the years went on. But high school was a difficult time, and an experience I could have done more with, if my sense of self had been stronger—and if I knew myself better.
