Page 435 - NIXBOOK

I hung out a bit with the teachers, and mingled with the kids a lot. One time a
couple girls came into my office and wanted to know if sex while driving a car was
illegal. “Uh, yeah..” I said. “What if it’s oral sex?” they asked, giggling and smiling.
“Yes, that’s totally illegal. It’s called embracing while driving,” I explained, feeling
not comfortable with this topic at all. “Okay well what if the girl is driving (and she
pointed to her friend) and she’s receiving oral sex?” Trying not to think about it
too much, I had to politely tell both of them to get out of my office immediately,
announcing an end to that whole conversation.
There was a pottery class at the high school, which drove me crazy because it was
a full semester for each course. I don’t know why making clay pots warranted a full
semester. A week or two or maybe three with the other art classes, sure. Along with
oil painting, watercolors, sculpture, charcoal drawing, etc….why does pottery class get a whole stupid course all to itself? Now if
the school had a glass blowing course, sure that could be a whole semester.. but clay…pots..? Really? I remember this because
the old lady who taught the pottery class was no good at spotting covert marijuana smoking pipes and bongs. She learned though
to call me in regularly to inspect the pieces going into or coming out of the kiln. “Uh, yeah, check out this really weird teapot
looking thing here,” I’d say to her, pointing to a suspicious indentation in the side. “This spot here is very thin and weak, so a
kid can poke a hole here and made a carburetor hole. Which means this going to be used to smoke dope, not pour tea.” And the
pottery teacher would thank me and go confront the student about it. She started using me as a resource after putting a few
clay items on public display at the school district headquarters. And some of them clay things were quite clearly creatively
designed to be drug paraphernalia. Eventually she retired and the pottery program was cut and all the kilns and clay and tables
went away and the room was used for teaching other, much more important things.

In the high school student parking lot, there was a large boulder out by the street that the kids were allowed to paint. It got
completely repainted about once a month, or sometimes once a week. Variations of purple and gold were the most common,
those being the school colors. On occasion, kids from a rival school would sneak over and paint the rock in their school colors,
which of course would never last more than a day or two. One time some presumably Hispanic kids painted a large Mexican
national flat on the rock; a day later it was covered over with an even larger American flag. I always thought about cutting into
that thing and getting a core sample to see how thick the paint layers on it were, because it has been there going on 50 years
now.
Sometimes the teens would get carried away and after painting “The Rock” they’d spread graffiti out onto the sidewalks or the
road or the parking lot but most of them time they behaved themselves and kept the paint just on the rock. It was almost always
repainted during the hours of darkness and it is fair to say that I saw that rock in every color scheme imaginable over the years,
including one time when the principal’s son got extra-creative and glued green Astroturf all over it. When I was working night
patrols – especially on warm summer nights – I’d frequently see kids painting the rock. I’d always stop and watch and even light
it up for them with my spotlight and high beams. They thought I was just being cool and helpful (which I was) but I was also
making sure they painted just the rock and not the sidewalk next to it.

Speaking of relatively harmless pranks, one time at the high school - about 3 weeks before school let out for summer – some
kid noticed that a lot of the lockers were getting emptied and unused. So he went to the Central Market grocery store and talked
the seafood department out of a large amount of fish heads, which he said he wanted to use for crab bait. The fish heads were
put in open plastic bags and set into six of the empty lockers, and he then locked them with padlocks. Nothing happened for
the first week. The second week the smell started to spread. The third week the security staff and I were able to zero in on one
of the lockers. Fortunately for us, the kid who did that used 6 identical key padlocks and the school security staff and I were able
to quickly realize rotting fish head smells were coming from every other locker with that exact same kind of lock. Once the fish
heads were gone, the smell cleared up. I was actually disappointed that the prankster (we never caught him) didn’t go to the
extra effort to use more normal and common dial locks – we would not have been able to pinpoint the offending lockers then
so easily.
Every spring the senior class would get a group photo taken on the football field. A professional photographer would be given
th
access to the roof of the stadium/stand, and the 12 graders would spell out the last
two digits of the year, like “98” or “99” etc.. I’d usually be up there too, and every
year it cracked me up because we’d get the kids in formation and do a big countdown
from 10 for the picture. At the end of the countdown, when the kids thought the
picture would be taken, most of them broke formation with wild gestures or
jumping. Of course all during the countdown the photographer was snapping away
getting the real photo; when we got down to the “1” he didn’t even bother anymore.