Speaking of me, well, you know that kid beloved by all adults, the teacher’s pet, well-behaved and perfect in every way? Have you got a good mental picture of that child? Well, that’s not me.
Look over to the other side of your mental picture. See that other kid, the one with the sneaky grin? The kid being glared at by the teachers? The class clown, who had to be talking and getting out of his desk no matter how often he was warned, no matter how many times he got into trouble? The class champion of time-outs?
Yeah, that one. That’s me.
During the eighties, attention deficit disorder (ADD) and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) were first emerging as real issues of children’s health. Although I wasn’t formally diagnosed, everyone knew there was a problem. The doctor explained to my mom there were reasons I was out of control, reasons that could be managed through various options.
She suggested Ritalin, which inhibits those impulses, but my parents weren’t comfortable with that strategy. Instead, they opted for the Feingold diet, a way of controlling behavior through meal choices. For years I couldn’t eat anything with artificial flavors, preservatives, or colors. It’s fair to say the diet had mixed results. I definitely wasn’t an enthusiastic Feingold kid.
A plan was needed to avoid eating bland food. How do you convince your peers to trade you their lunch for the uninspiring Feingold diet choices that lay in my lunch box? Well, you learn the art of salesmanship at an early age. These skills would come into play years later.
The broader lunch selections were great for enjoyment, but horrible for my behavior. My issues came to a head when I was in seventh grade. Miss Franklin stepped out of the classroom one day. Crawling under her desk, I seized an opportunity for entertaining my classmates. They were already starting to laugh, eager to see the next episode of the Robby clown show, when the teacher walked in. I froze under her desk. She sat in her chair about to roll into the desk. Busted.
“Mr. and Mrs. Gallaty, it’s time to do something about Robby’s behavior,” declared the principal.
That was the end of my time at St. Mark’s. My parents moved me to Holy Cross, a Catholic school for boys, where the Catholic brothers were armed with paddles and ready to strike at any time. They would chew up and spit out class clowns far worse than me, and I knew I’d fallen into desperate circumstances. I was utterly stifled.
Worse, I found myself in the middle of an academic enigma. I excelled on my entrance examinations, qualifying me for honors work. My parents were thrilled by this, of course, and so was I—until I realized it meant more studying. I hadn’t read the fine print on this one. A trap!
So here I found myself in a highly regimented Catholic school with twice as much schoolwork and an unlimited supply of bottled up energy. It took me a full semester to get downgraded from Honors. By that time, I was entering eighth grade, a tough year for most kids to begin with. It was going to be even worse for me because I had no friends. The gifted crowd thought I must be a dunce because I hadn’t made it in their group. The “regular” class thought I was a nerd, because I’d at first been lumped in with the smart kids.
The ultimate punishment for a class clown is to be an outcast, and of course, I was an outcast with deadly paddles threatening me at every moment with schoolyard work awaiting those who broke the rules. In short, I was in the midst of adolescence and not loving life.
By ninth grade I had managed to accumulate a grand total of two friends at Holy Cross, so I clung to them tightly. One of them was named Keith. I remember him passing on at recess what he felt to be one of the great secrets of the universe. “Robby,” he said, “there are two types of people in this world: those who listen to Jimi Hendrix, and those who hear Jimi Hendrix.”
“Wow,” I said, “that’s deep.” It sounded like he was really onto something. He gave me further instructions to intensify the experience: “Turn up the volume, burn some incense, and lie on your back to take in the music.”
I convinced Mom and Dad to drive me to the French Market downtown to purchase incense to accompany my musical endeavor of “hearing” Jimi Hendrix. For obvious reasons, they weren’t as eager as I was, but they complied.
Even with patchouli incense sticks burning in my bedroom as Are You Experienced? by Hendrix blared from my stereo, I didn’t exactly take in the effects that were promised. Keith, I’d later discover, had forgotten to mention one crucial ingredient: smoking marijuana apparently aided his kind of “hearing.”
The whole Jimi Hendrix experience didn’t seem to work out, but I had discovered my own kind of secret of the universe: There were those who listened to schoolteachers, and those who heard them. I listened, not so much to learn what they were teaching, but to pick up their speech patterns and pet phrases. I developed a knack for impersonating most of the faculty. I’d take close notes of not Mr. Frederick’s physics lectures, but of Mr. Frederick himself, picking up on all his little affectations. Then, in the lunchroom, I’d do a spot-on impersonation.
The students loved it. Once again, the class clown was
