Like A Virgin

If you're here by mistake, you're not alone. I was visiting someone else's site and somehow ended up with a blog.

The Strobis Weakly was the name of a hand-written underground newspaper I wrote while I was at prep school in the 60's. By the way, my parents made me go. I was bored shitless with high school and depressed too and turned the suicide note I was writing to my minister into the first issue. I think there was a cartoon too, but that could have been the second issue.


Editor of The Strobis Weakly 1965

The stories were all complete fabrications ("MR. EDGY AND MR. PAINTER TO WED!") , really bad poems, parodies of songs and school cheers--that sort of shit. There was a letters to the editor section telling me how great The Weakly was and what a brilliant writer I was or what a fantastic tackle I'd made on some dipshit at football practice the week before. All written by me--anonymously-- on typing paper with a piece of carbon paper slipped underneath so I could sneak into the faculty work room during lunch and run off copies on the school's Ditto machine (my school years predated Xerox) and then stick copies in friends' mailboxes before lunch was over.

The three demerits I'd get for skipping lunch was worth it. I was always getting demerits anyway. In fact I tied another freshman for the most demerits of all students that year; Mr. Callaway, the Dean of Students, told me so, adding that he was stepping down from that position--a position he'd held since 1915!-- and that I was the last student to work off demerits for him. He told me it was an honor he hoped I appreciated.

I did! Which reminds me: there were three ways of "working off" demerits. You could walk around the school four times for each demerit (which took fucking forever); you could work in a master's yard raking leaves or doing gardening for 15 minutes for each demerit; or you could sit in lower study hall in the Main Building and write "Four Columns" for each demerit.

Writing Four Columns involved taking a sheet of "four columns" paper (forty lines per page), measuring off exactly enough space across the page to make four long columns of equal width. Then you'd number each line from 1-8 five times per page. On the blackboard in the study hall was a list of eight 4-syllable words (e.g., elucidate, oblivious, etc.) you had to write in sequence, over and over in each column, until the page was filled. One page was good for one demerit. Fucking ridiculous.

I walked off all my demerits for months until a sophomore friend told me I was a fool for not going the Four Columns route, claiming it took him about five minutes for each demerit. I called him a fucking liar, so he took me to lower study hall and showed me his technique. He said Mr. Callaway was a great guy, but not terribly interested after 50 years of this shit in checking every page of a student's Four Columns for errors. "I just make shit up. I write the same word over and over. Sometimes I write them upside down. I'll write 'fornication' and 'maturbation'. Sometimes I'll just write one-syllable words. He never reads this shit."

Made sense to me. I started laying out each page as usual, but writing one-syllable words. I wrote a lot of them upside down. This was a much better approach.

The next year Mr. Phillips--a Clark Kent lookalike--took over as dean. I tested the waters with him, as did most of us; our shit came back with "margin error" or "not a word" or "misspelling" or "word out of sequence" written in red ink and "do these over and return them to my office immediately" at the top of the page. I never wrote-off demerits again.

The Strobis Weakly was over my junior year after I was turned in to Mr. Phillips by some fucking senior snitch who took issue with a parody I'd written and--for the first and only time--typed out of the Hop Committee (the dance committee) Rules, sticking copies in students' mailboxes while the varsity football team (including the snitch) was off getting its collective asses kicked by Lawrenceville Academy. He found out I'd written it and confronted me, telling me I should have been "thinking about the game"--whatever the fuck that meant--"instead of writing this obscene trash." I found out later from Mr. Phillips--who gave me 20 demerits for "vulgarity"--that this same fuckwad had wanted me charged with an Honor Code violation; since, presumably, students reading my new and improved Hop Committee Rules might innocently and naively follow rule #1 and invite only hookers to school dances. The student thought I should stand before the Honor Committee and be expelled. I rolled my eyes and reminded myself to get even one day with this bag of shit.

To top it off, Mr. Phillips insisted I tell my father about this incident--in detail! I begged him not to make this a condition of my punishment--I loved my dad, a great guy who loved me dearly, but he was a religious man who never swore. And this issue of The Strobis Weakly was littered with obscenities. But Big Al wouldn't budge. I had 24 hours to tell him. I immediately rounded up every copy of the issue I could get my hands on and disposed of them. Except for one: an upperclassman loved it too much to part with it and let me watch while he pasted it into his scrapbook.

The next day I told my dad. He was mortified. He asked to see a copy of the paper; I told him I knew he'd ask so I'd destroyed them all in advance. I confessed about my secret three-year publication of The Strobis Weakly and he looked at me and said, this ends now! I said OK. He thought that the only offense I'd committed was the vulgarity. I deserved my punishment. I agreed. I felt like shit.

The Strobis Weakly is back. I can't wait to break the news to the school's "Alumni Journal", which still refuses to publish (without explanantion) my adventures as a member of the Jungle Patrol in eastern Africa and my life among the Bandar, the fierce tribe of pygmy poison-people, in the section devoted to my class. They've acknowledged my marriage to Buffy Summers though.

By the way: This blog is not going to be about fucking high school! I don't know what it'll be about. Prep school was a nightmare I'm still trying to wake up from.