I somehow got chosen to be one of the speakers at my high school graduation ceremony. I have no idea how this happened. I was desperately trying *not* to be noticed that year. I was an utterly self-absorbed and committed truant at the beginning of my senior year. I was, in fact, absent 44 times before November. My parents were getting divorced, and I had just begun what would be my 10-year all-consuming love affair with drugs and alcohol. Mary and Vince were both out of the house by 8:00, the school day began at 8:05, and by 8:30 the school would call my house to see if I was home sick. “Oh, yeah, I am sick,” I would lie, and by 9:00 I would be on a train to New York City, where I spent that fall stoned and stumbling around but getting a great education at the Guggenheim, the Museum of Natural History, and the like — and a very different education in places like Manny's Music and all the other stores on Music Row on 48th Street and in Washington Square Park, which, simply put, looked nothing like it looks today. In short, I was a ghost my senior year, so how the hell did I get chosen to be a commencement speaker?
Fifteen Minutes Before I Left for High School Commencement
It gets better — or worse, I suppose: I also got chosen, along with Steve Marsar (drums), Lucy Patty (bass), Scott Mounsey (vocals), and Dennis Rothchild (electric piano), to play music at our commencement ceremony. Again, I have no idea how this happened. Who was in charge of these processes? And what were they thinking? And more to the point, what the hell were *we* thinking, because of all the songs in the world we could play at graduation, we chose to play a medley of Pink Floyd’s “Breathe” and “Time”:
Run, rabbit, run / Dig that hole, forget the sun / And when at last the work is done / Don't sit down, it's time to dig another one.
For long you live and high you fly / But only if you ride the tide / And balanced on the biggest wave / You race toward an early grave.
My memory is decidedly faulty, but I am pretty sure that the following things also happened at the 1980 Wantagh High School Graduation Ceremony:
Marching out from the school building to the football field for the ceremony, someone tossed off an M-80 or a cherry bomb or an equally large explosive from under his/her robes, and the sound was terrifying, especially as it echoed off the big brick wall at the back of the school. Such an act these days would appropriately warrant a lockdown, criminal investigation, and expulsion.
Once we were done playing our dirge Pink Floyd medley, our little band jumped straight into “Johnny B. Goode” — without telling anyone we were going to do this — which got students up and dancing, some on their chairs. There was no way for anyone to stop us at this point, of course.
About five sentences into my commencement speech, my meticulously crafted note cards, with carefully rendered indicators of when to breathe and gesture and pause, blew off the podium in a single “poof” and were gone. I was horrified and distraught for about five seconds, until the Principal handed me a typed copy of my own speech. How the hell did he get that? And why did he have it? Precisely because they suspected I would go off-script and wanted to be prepared to cut the mic at a moment’s notice, I am sure.
During the presentation of the John F. Kennedy Citizenship Award, which was being presented by the Captain of the Police Auxiliary, someone set off a Vietnam-style smoke bomb, which covered the entire football field in an opaque orange cloud. When the smoke finally cleared, the poor gentleman trying to present the award was visibly shaking with rage. The Superintendent of our school district, Dr. Seymour Bixhorn, came up to the mic and said, and I quote, “You are, without a doubt, the worst class of students I have ever had the displeasure of working with in my entire career,” to which we we replied with cheers.
My intent here is not to suggest that we were bad asses, some kind of Ferris Bueller anti-heroes. Rather, I am trying to figure out what the hell was wrong with us. For me, part of this sociopathic behavior came, in part, I think, from the fact that this was 1980, and I was genuinely convinced — genuinely convinced to my core — that the world, well, that *I*, was going to be incinerated in a thermonuclear holocaust, which allowed me to rationalize all sorts of self-destructive and antisocial behavior. The adults in our lives at that time literally had us line up in the hallway for air raid drills in which we would put our thumbs in our ears, cover our eyes with your hands, and face the wall — which was somehow supposed to protect us from the vaporization of Times Square 30 miles away. For me, at least, some of this was carpe diem with a vengeance. And, of much of it, I suppose, was simple, inevitable teenage angst and self-righteousness: I hated my hometown and its racist, classist, sexist, materialistic, surburban values almost as much as I hated myself. I simply had to bite the hands that had fed me and cared for me so well that I had the luxury of being a rebellious snot.
Yours truly, Clare Eidenweil, and Dennis Rothchild immediately after commencement
I am telling this story to remind myself that we need to cut young people a fucking break, that who and what we are at 18 is hardly who and what we can and will become, that who and what we are at 18 is a wickedly sharp and painful awareness of the breadth and depth of human failings combined with very little knowledge or experience of how frequently and inevitably and, in the end, successfully we will walk through the horrors we do to each other, a bewildering and terrifying combination at best. No wonder we were flailing.
Then again, my parents were flailing, too, at that time. I have recordings of both my speech and “Breathe/Time/Johnny B. Goode” because my mother — who had divorced my father by this time and married an alcoholic who beat her — was sitting under the bleachers with a cassette recorder that morning getting drunk. Less than two years later, though, she was back living with us, and about six years later my parents remarried each other. Who and what we are in our middle age, too, is hardly who and what we will become. Commencement, I am thinking, is a lifelong process for those who are paying attention. This website and the work I am trying to do here is a testament to that possibility.