Chapter 1

September 5, 1973

The story as told here, begins in September 1973 in a lunchroom located inside a high school of an upper middle class suburb of Oklahoma City. The story’s actual beginning is not quite so clear. One can say that the telling could begin in December 1957 or in June 1972 or in September 1973 or in August 2017. It’s really hard to say where this story begins or ends.

A new school year had just begun. In 1973, in Oklahoma, the school year was bracketed by two holidays. It started after Labor Day and not in the middle of August. It ended before Memorial Day and not in the middle of June. As the second day of school, it was early enough in the school year that the students hadn’t yet settled into the activities that would become habits for the next nine months. Old friendships were being renewed and new friendships were being forged.

This year, the school was a little more crowded than usual. The junior high school had been damaged by a tornado years earlier and patched together, but it had suddenly developed some structural issues that made it unsafe; although to be more accurate, one could say that the structural problems became too serious to ignore. While the high school normally held the ninth through twelfth grades, this year they had squeezed in the eighth grade. The seventh grade had been squeezed into several elementary schools. Everyone was confident that this situation would last only a single year.

The school had been built in the early 1960s to deal with burgeoning population of high school students of the baby boom. Built as inexpensively as possible using cinder block, it had an institutional, almost prison-like, appearance with small narrow windows, heavy metal doors, and a dull gray brick exterior. The school board did add a touch of class with ceramic tiling of some indefinable color (like the flesh color crayon, but not quite so creepy) which must have been the result of some dye injection error in the manufacturing process. If not, then school administrators all over the country must suffer from the some weird visual impairment which sees it as a soothing color. Only the sections along the hallways between the long banks of dull gray lockers were tiled. Interior classrooms had painted cinder block on the inside and outside walls with wallboard between classrooms. They were painted a nice generic ‘yuck;’ which is a real color, but of an ill defined location on the color wheel.

Fortunately for the peace of mind and sanity of the students, the exterior was only an issue while arriving and departing school. The hallways were normally filled with a mass of students rushing from one class to another; and the classroom walls were hidden behind blackboards, posters, maps, and other instructional aides. One had to pity the poor janitors who actually had to see the interior without obstructions, while keeping the school clean once it was emptied of students. It was particularly depressing under the flickering fluorescent lights.

With the large population of students, lunch periods were split into three 30 minute periods with the imaginative names of lunch periods A, B, and C. There were typically a little over six hundred students in each lunch period. One would think that with that many students that it would be difficult to be isolated from others, but it wasn’t. A percentage of the students ate their lunch, come rain or shine, in the official smoking area: an exterior cull de sac at the back of the school building. Smoking was permitted in the parking lot, the smoking area, and in the bleachers during football games.

The fashions worn by teenagers in 1973 were diverse. There was a crowd who wore the trendy ‘hippy’ fashions with bell bottoms, tie dyed shirts, and peace symbols - girls in this clique occasionally went braless. There was a crowd who wore western blue jeans, boots, and work shirts. There was the conservative crowd of boys who wore corduroy pants, button down shirts, and black shoes and the conservative girls who wore knee length skirts, button up shirts, and practical shoes. Then there were the religious kids, only a handful in the entire school, with boys wearing black pants, white shirts, and ties with girls wearing dull gray dresses.

Hair length was a very big thing in 1973 with a strong correlation between social clique and hair length. Almost all of the females had long hair that came to the shoulders at a minimum, with a style that ranged from long straight hair to the wild wind blown look. Long hair was almost mandatory for boys with styles that ranged from the traditional regular cut all of the way to pony tails.

The tables in the cafeteria were occupied by groups, small and large, of people with common interests and fashions. There was a continuous murmur of conversation that served as a white noise background. Unless you were seated with a group it was hard to make out what was being discussed at the table. Sprinkled here and there throughout the room were a handful of students sitting in isolation, some wishing to join in with others while the rest were happy at being alone.

Much as he did everyday at school, Benny Baker was seated alone in the school cafeteria eating his lunch and reading a book. Today he was reading a college book on partial differential equations that he had purchased from a kid who had just dropped out of college. He found it hard to believe that someone would sell a textbook rather than return it to the bookstore less than a week into the semester. He just assumed drugs were involved. He wasn’t going look a gift horse in the mouth. Normally one might consider the content of the book a bit advanced for a 15 year old, but Benny was different. To him, the book was good review material and far more interesting than anything he would be getting in class.

For the previous school year, Benny had been passed through his classes taking only tests. His attendance was mandatory since the school was reimbursed based on the number of butts in chairs at 8:30 in the morning. He could read anything he wanted so long as he sat in the classroom and didn’t disrupt any of the ‘official’ classes that he was taking in accordance with the school policy. Benny was universally considered the weird kid who sat at the desk in the back corner of the room reading ‘things.’

Early in the previous school year, he had pressed the issue by reading a copy of Fanny Hill in his English class, but no one said anything about it. He was pretty sure that his fellow classmates didn’t have a clue about the subject matter of the book. He knew if he were to carry it around school this year that some of the seniors would have recognized it right off. Last year, he had seriously considered reading a copy of Playboy in class but decided that protesting the futility of what he was doing wouldn’t have been recognized as dissent. Instead, it would be perceived as an advertisement that he was a horny young man (like every other male on campus) and that the young ladies in the school would require protection from his foul testosterone driven base nature. Meaning that he would probably have been suspended, and the agreement he and his parents had managed to negotiate with the school would be rendered null and void. He was willing to do just about anything to avoid that.

Cementing his standing as the weird kid in the school was the fact that he was only one of three males on school grounds who had a buzz cut: him and the two football coaches. Though to be more accurate, the two football coaches had flattops. Benny just had a fine coat of hair that was a quarter of an inch thick. Every Sunday night, he picked up the home hair trimmer with the quarter inch hair guard attached to it and ran it across his head - top to bottom and front to back.

It was not a fashion statement on his part. He was cursed with hair that seemed to take off in different directions as soon as it reached more than an inch in length and wouldn’t lay flat until it was unacceptably long, at least unacceptably by his father’s standards and that of the school. Regardless of the amount of Brylcreem used to mold the hair in place, his hair managed to take off in random directions however it wanted. That was saying a lot since Brylcreem was popular among World War II pilots who wanted to keep their hair perfectly in place even during intense air battles. Benny’s hair defeated Brylcreem.

This was all because Benny’s father hated his hair when he let it grow out. It wasn’t simple disapproval, but outright hatred. For two years it had been a constant source of tension in the household. He had grown his hair long so that he wouldn’t stand out in a negative way. His mother, being a social animal, thought she understood his situation thinking that he wanted to fit in with his classmates. His father, who worked in a very conservative engineering firm, would glare at him from across the room and snipe at him to either cut his hair or get it under control. In June of 1972, in move that shocked the entire family, Benny dug out the clippers and sheared his head.

Even his father quickly backed off on his stance upon seeing just how out of step with everyone else Benny looked. The fact was that Benny didn’t care about being in step with everyone else. A wall had always existed between him and the rest of the world. Benny was smart, very smart. He thought differently, he approached things from odd angles, and he had a good memory. He was also impatient with people slower than him.

Just recently, that wall between Benny and his classmates had grown taller and thicker. That wall couldn’t be crossed by growing his hair a little longer or fixed by wearing more fashionable clothes. Even his parents could see that he had no chance of fitting in socially with his classmates.

In June of 1972, Benny had gone from being a normal smarter than average fourteen year old kid to being a super genius. It was an overnight transformation. It was impossible not to notice that Benny had changed. His speech patterns become more precise, his mannerisms became muted, and his opinions matured. His family, terrified that he had taken some kind of strange psychedelic drug, rushed him off to be tested. No drugs were found in his blood. Several X-rays, EEGs, and physicals later, he was declared physically healthy and drug free, although not a particularly impressive physical specimen.

Then his IQ test came back with a score of 183. That’s a score that’s so high that the value isn’t even viewed as possibly accurate. The IQ test can’t adequately measure an intelligence that is higher than 160. Another test was administered with a similar result - a value so high that it was essentially meaningless. He ended up taking the Stanford–Binet, Woodcock–Johnson, Raven’s Progressive Matrices, and the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale tests. All had the same result, Benny had an IQ that was totally off the charts.

It doesn’t matter if one believes in IQ tests or not. It is clearly not a marker for potential success. It might not even be related to the quality of thought. It might have nothing to do with real intelligence, whatever that may be. However, having a score that is that far from the mean, suggests something is going on in that mind that is different from just about everyone else.

That difference between Benny and his peers was obvious. It wasn’t intentional. It wasn’t an act. It was just that interacting with people his own age took on an unpleasant edge. His tone and mannerism projected all of the characteristics of a crotchety sixty year old man talking down to a young whippersnapper, with an impatience at the naivete and belligerence that only the abrasive young can combine in such an arrogant manner.

If his new persona irritated the young, it infuriated middle-aged adults. Words of wisdom, even if they aren’t that wise, coming from the mouth of someone in their seventies is one thing. It is acceptable even if a little irritating. It is entirely different when the advice is from a punk kid. The youthfulness steps up the negativity an order of magnitude. He was fifteen and that made him a punk kid as far as any adult was concerned.