Scary High School Textbooks From the 1960s

A smattering of the academic fare that was discovered in my attic. (The former owner of the home being a parochial school administrator.) There are many of these books. Here are some of the more alarming of the batch.

 Everything you've always wanted to know about sin, sluts, interracial marriage, and nudity, answered by your favorite cut-up, "Monsignor J.D." 

"Yes, unless you're a totally rude fuck!"—Monsignor J.D.

"I am a bit out of touch with techniques. Are you referring to the cheeks of the buttocks? If so, a light grazing is acceptable in the eyes of the Lord, but more vigorous 'pressing' or 'grinding' would be considered immoral. As would any ape-like maneuvers."—Monsignor J.D.

I took the Dysfunctional Method. 

And it led to this!

Repeat: Boys and girls should not be allowed together in the same room.

Oh! What if I wish to know very little? Does this book cover that?

I don't think that car has seat-heaters or Sirius XM OR airbags.

If you are white and prosperous. If not, youse fucked.

Perfectly healthy, normal teenagers.

A mentally ill teen who daydreams of lustful car trips with older women!

The fear of the "unknown" is worse than being chased by a maddened cow? I think not.

For shame, Puerto Rican children who are having a delightful time in a water sprinkler. This is by no means the best outlet for your youthful energies!

This photograph was found inserted inside Problems and Opportunities in a Democracy. It puzzles me in several ways. For one, is the mannequin intended to be homosexual? Where are #s 1 and 2? Why does Bobby Sue look happy with her date but Mary Lou look like she just got stuck in the arse with a pickle?

"If you run too much water into a bathtub, some water will overflow from the tub."
(Is that statement about the left testicle really true? Need to know!)

Living things are slumped marionettes dangling from a crucifix.

OK, I'll give this a shot; I'm only slightly "high."

That big chunk of text helps SOOOO much. Thank you, Robinson's New Higher Arithmetic!

I Once Accidentally Spied the Weiner of Lyle Menendez

I recently unearthed my high school yearbook, and found this photograph of my famous classmate:

My friend Claire wrote on the page: "Methinks he'll make ugly babies..."

Yes, it is Lyle Menendez, of the notorious Menendez brothers. He and sibling Erik shot their parents at point blank range while they ate strawberry shortcake in their den. They went to high school with me. For real!

You may wonder: What did I know of this villain? Sadly, not much. Lyle did not deign to speak to me more than a handful of times. I was not of his ilk. His ilk wore tennis whites all day long, in the hallways and classrooms. I tended to hang around behind the school and smoke cigarettes. I was invited to his senior year class party along with everyone else, however, and went up the driveway past the fluttering balloons tied to the mailbox and shook hands with his soon-to-be-dead parents and jumped into his swimming pool.

I was on the JV tennis team, and he on the Varsity. Therefore, we would often pass on the way to the courts. Lyle was usually stuffed with self importance, his dark eyes shining with pride and athleticism and a grandiosity that repelled me. He didn't concern me much, but one day I turned to my pal as we lurked in a bush and had a surreptitious smokie treat. "That old Lyle looks like a Class-A prick," said I.

"He is a Class-A prick," she replied, and took a deep drag.

The only story I have of him is thus. I shared an English class with him, and as we were scribbling away at a freewrite I chanced to glance up. He was wearing his tight, white tennis shorts as he always did. He let his left leg swing out, lazily, blissfully, and his weiner dangled right out of the shorts. I glanced away, horribly embarrassed. But throughout the class my eyes kept flicking over there, against my will—and the weiner kept winking in and out, like a turtle in a cave. He was totally ignorant of the thing. He just kept staring at the English teacher with a dumb, vapid expression.

I wanted to yell out at him: "Put away your weiner, man!" But he was a serious sort of dude. I would never have spoken to him in such a light manner. He had these strange, dark eyes.

That's all I really remember about him. Methinks he'll make ugly babies.

Lyle and Erik Menendez. Remember this shot? I do! Remember the Made For TV movie? I do!

UPDATE! Just remembered the story that my mother told me back in the 90s. She said "I met that Kitty Menendez once, and I did not care for her. She was rather rude."

Oh! Dyslexic Goats!

When I was in high school, my best friend and I became very interested in two things:

1. Rodents
2. Root vegetables (and also cruciferous vegetables, such as the cabbage)

It has occurred to me in recent years that these obsessions were, perhaps, a bit strange. I do not use the word "obsessions" lightly. We were deeply, religiously, and pathologically obsessed with rodents and unattractive veggies. The more empurpled, lumpish, slitty-eyed, and fanged the better.

The rodent category included such creatures as chinchillas, marmots, marmosets, ferrets, bunnies, weasels, and squirrels--with the occasional bird or odd animal (vulture, auk, elk) thrown in for fun. As for root vegetables, we were highly intrigued by turnips, rutabagas, parsnips, and beets--with the occasional fruit product (kumquat, banana) also thrown in for laughs.

In our discussions, we imagined that the rodents and the veggies would breed with one another to produce an uber-race of bizarre fiends. The Supreme Leader of the rodent-veggie race was a being called Lumpen. He was a giant rabbit with a wart under one eye, carroty red hair, and horrid sharp fangs. He didn't walk, he "lumped" about. He made strange noises such as "Bok, bok, bok!" He crept around people's gardens at night and growled menacingly. (I must confess that the inspiration for Lumpen was a particularly annoying high school teacher who happened to be red-headed and to have a small wart under one eye.)

One had to merely mention a turnip, stoat, or weasel to send my friend and I into an apoplexy of laughter. Once I made my friend piddle her pants by impersonating a cabbage, and how it might sound if poked with a stick and angered. (Another time I caused her to piddle when I impersonated Skeletor, ruler of all Eternia, but that's another story.)

At a time when most girls were fascinated with Revlon, curling irons, and footwear, we were making up songs and doggerel about rodents and rutabagas. One simple verse went like this:

20 rotten rutabagas sitting in a row
100 weasels in a vat
Stab me with a crow!

Our mythology grew and began to reach epic proportions. We drew sketches of "attack weasels" and turnips with piggy eyes and teeth in the margins of our notebooks, called ourselves "The Ferret Force" (teamed with a third peculiar girl who grew to share our obsession), and shot each other feral, toothy glances across the schoolroom. The panoply of veggie marauders and their rodent minions grew to include an evil carrot, some demon-like potatoes with dangling "eyes" that stuck out like swords, and hell-ferrets who launched themselves from cliffs to sink their fangs into the unwary. (The "unwary" were usually sketches of fellow students who we didn't care for.) We eventually had notebooks filled with this stuff, as well as bags of loose pages and hidden passed notes. We should have become cartoonists, but we were too stupid.

Now, looking back on that, it reminds me of something from another era--a story my mother might tell of her fun with "school chums" growing up in New Jersey. How they all wrapped dental floss around their noses and turned them tomato red, how they dressed up in costume and pretended to be pirates, or the time she trimmed off her eyelashes in the hopes they'd grow back lusher. A charming time, when silliness reigned and girls giggled for hours in their rooms without getting in a wit of trouble.

Were we dorks? Quite possibly. Ah, but we were slutty, drunken dorks! In addition to beets and stoats, we also liked boys and beers. In between assignations with both, we penned poetry like this:

Brussels sprouts wearing wigs.
Hyperactive stoats!
Fanatical ferrets in pea soup.
Oh! Dyslexic goats!