Easy Money Part 1

While I was not a stupid kid, I wasn’t such a great student either, and for some reason which I still don’t understand, I was accepted to Stuyvesant High School. This was a special advanced high school which had a strong educational emphasis on math and science. My parents were adamant that I should take the test for the school and, unbelievably, I was chosen. The system must have recognized something in my ability that my teachers did not. I soon discovered that I hated math and science but loved English and history. Out of a class of 699, I ranked 672 at the time of my graduation. This wasn’t too surprising to me, since I simply didn’t have any interest in the required curriculum. My folks were really disappointed as each year passed and my grades were consistently poor. I think ‘pissed off’ would more accurately describe their feelings. After being told that I had a very high IQ, they figured that I was on the road to a wonderworld of scholastic endeavor that would be followed by a huge income and galactic recognition.

On my first day at Stuyvesant, I was surprised to see a familiar face from my neighborhood. Chris B had apparently also been accepted to the school and we immediately began to spend time together. The school was loaded with all sorts of exceptionally brilliant kids, most of whom qualified as being typecast as original nerds. About halfway into the first term, I had a major disagreement with one of the guys in the lunchroom and he challenged me to a fight after school. Happily, this was a whole different atmosphere than I was used to in Astoria. However, at precisely three o’clock, with mounting apprehension, I marched to my fate at the rear entrance to the school. Chris and I had fallen in with a crowd of street-wise guys. They were all offering advice as to how to deal with this fight, but I was basically pretty scared since I had never taken part in any of the riots back in Astoria. A crowd gathered and this kid, who was three or four inches taller than me, appeared right on schedule. He then proceeded to announce to me and the audience how he knew karate and was required by law to advise me that his hands were considered lethal weapons. While he was saying this, he began to remove his overcoat. As soon as his overcoat was half off, I charged him, tackled him, pinned his arms in the coat, and began banging his head against the sidewalk. He never threw a punch, and nobody was too anxious to fight with me after that.

Melvin was attending Long Island City High School while I was traveling each day to school in Manhattan. In the middle of our sophomore year, he was sneaking around in the basement of his school and discovered a box of keys in the janitor’s office. Among these keys was a grand master key for Sargent locks. As it turned out, these Sargent locks were the standard used throughout the New York City School system. Armed with this key, Melvin was able to penetrate the various offices at his school and abscond with a horde of other items which were used all over the city. There were passes of all description, from elevator passes (which were used primarily for handicapped students and faculty), to guidance passes (which were sent by school monitor to classrooms as a summons from deans and guidance counselors for individual students to appear in their offices forthwith).

Chris and I arranged a plan where he would show up at my classroom posing as a monitor, show the pass to my teacher who would then release me from class to answer the summons. Chris would then enter his class a little late, and after a few minutes I would perform the same charade for his teacher. This scheme led to a virulent class-cutting binge where we found ourselves doing a brisk business as the passes proved to be a valuable commodity. We had been rubber-stamping the passes with the signature of Dean McGowan, a tall, red-faced, rotund alcoholic who served as the Dean of Student Behavior. (Through connivery and by using duplicates of Melvin’s invaluable grandmaster key, we had been able to steal one of Dean McGowan’s rubber stamps and have it duplicated.) Our success, however, soon turned to greed, as we found ourselves selling the passes to our friends and anyone else who would pay the fee. Ultimately, one of these customers had a problem which led to his appearance before Dean McGowan. He spilled the beans to the Dean who, in a fit of rage, went personally to my classroom only to discover from the teacher that a monitor had taken me to his office earlier. This confirmed the story he had been told leading to my immediate suspension and requiring my mother’s appearance for an audience with Dean McGowan. During this meeting, I was repeatedly asked to inform on my source for the illegal passes and key, but I just couldn’t bring myself to implicate Melvin. After some well-deserved punishment, coupled with a multitude of promises of good behavior, I was reinstated and allowed to return to classes.