Did you ever skip school? During my senior year I skipped most Fridays and forged a note from my mother.

No, although I did skip classes (and yet I still graduated with straight A’s).

  Once, exactly ONE time. It was called “ditching” back then, I was the bookworm, a nerdy kid who never broke the rules, and my best friend was the one who always in trouble and was was a master at ditching.  He had been after me for some time to go along with him on his self-appointed wandering from the halls of education, and one day he finally talked me into it. I was still reluctant, but he convinced me that it would be a cinch to get away with it and that it would be a whole lot of fun.

  We embarked on our journey, but I was a neurotic wreck the entire time, afraid of every shadow and jumping to the conclusion that we would be caught at any moment and hauled off to the hoosegaw with life sentences at hard labor. In fact, a police car rolled by us at one point, and I panicked, practically throwing myself on the mercy of the court. My buddy, long an acquaintance of run-ins with all types of authority figures, talked me down from the tower and the police car passed by within ten seconds and the emergency was over. 

  We ended up doing a lot of walking around the downtown area staring into store windows (I doubt we had more than a bus fare‘s amount of money between us), and the great excursion that I had been promised didn’t seem to be materializing. I don’t know what I had expected, but between my agonizing over class work that I was missing, my whining about going afoul of the law, and continually bugging him every ten minutes as to what we were going to do next, I was bored out of my gourd. I found absolutely nothing fascinating about the trek, and could not fathom why anyone ever did it. 

  We soon found ourselves sitting on the steps at a side entrance of the state capitol building at midday, eating cold tamales wrapped in foil. A trio of sharply-dressed, pretty girls our age happened by right at that moment and saw us in mid-chew, a chubby Mexican-American guy and a skinny black guy, like garden variety teenaged version of the Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy comedy duo. When I saw those three girls, I thought it was the highlight of our day, the reason to live, a light at the end of the tunnel!  [Sidebar: at that tender young age, I had not yet become the rake that I am today with the ladies, I was still a shy, shrill, awkward kid who didn’t know the first thing about how to talk to girls.]  

  The three girls were Mexican-American, just like my buddy, so I automatically assumed that meant he’d have some special kind of magic with them if he tried to talk to them for us.  I turned to him excitedly to urge him into making a move on our behalf, only to find that he and the three girls had already made eye contact with each other, whereupon he immediately turned away from them in complete embarrassment, trying to hide from them the tamale he held in his hand. The three girls in turn snickered and giggled between themselves and rolled their eyes as they covered their mouths with their hands and began to chide us between themselves. One of them said something in Spanish, which at the time I did not speak, but my buddy was 100% fluent. The other two girls guffawed at what she had said, all three of them turned their backs, walked away laughing at us, and leaving me confused as to what our faux pas was. My buddy, normally a glutton, immediate lost his appetite and threw his tamale away. It took some doing, but I later got him to explain to me what was going on, and it turned out to be completely cultural. My buddy was embarrassed because of some class difference between the obviously more sophisticated status the girls held and the street-thug type of scenario we represented sitting there on the ground eating low-class food like a couple of vagabonds.  He never did tell me the word we had been called on Spanish, but it wasn’t anything good.

  Alas, the day ended uneventfully, no great adventure ever ensued, but at the sane same time, I never got caught by my mother. I don’t remember the ramifications at school, which means that they were probably either minimal or zero.  I never ditched again, or played hooked, or skipped school. Fear and boredom don’t make good fodder for repeat offender status. 

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