Sherwood Forest

The Vikings

For me, going from middle school to high school was going from night to day. I loved high school. We were the Parkview Vikings, and I knew a lot more about being a Viking than I did about being a Trojan.

Parkview was a newer building, and even though the two schools were only about a mile apart, Parkview was in a much better neighborhood.

It's called Parkview because it has a park with a swimming pool next door, at the bottom of a hill across a bridge. The bridge was where we went to when we wanted to fight somebody, and behind the pool house is where we would go to smoke cigarettes, or whatever else.

Parkview is made of a bunch of big glass windows, and it would get pretty hot in the last couple of weeks before summer vacation. Looking at that pool would drive us pretty mad with anticipation.

Parkview is on Campbell, which is the main street of Springfield. About a mile south down Campbell is the original Bass Pro shop, which even in the 80s was a pretty cool place to hang out. Arcades started becoming a big deal right about then, and Bass Pro had a Showbiz close by, where we would all meet up after school.

I would make a lot of friends at Parkview, and I had some pretty good teachers. Miss Rahmeyer was my favorite. She was a very intelligent and interesting person, and would go on to be a judge on the Missouri supreme court. She was always inviting politicians to come in and talk with us.

Miss Kelly's drama class was pretty cool, too. Most of the class was my good friends.

And then Springfield got MTV, and everything got even cooler.

My freshman year I made friends with a couple of sisters named Midge and Betsy. Midge and Betsy were the two sweetest and preppiest girls I ever met. They were both cute as hell, but I never was interested in them as anything but friends. They were like kid sisters to me.

They lived halfway between Parkview and Showbiz, so after school we would stop at their home on the way. They were the first people I knew to get MTV, and the first video they showed me was "When Doves Cry". When I said that I didn't know who Prince was, they told me he was the guy who made "1999" and "little Red Corvette".

Within three months I was the biggest Prince fan in the world. I still think he was the best stage performer ever, beating out Michael by a mile.

For many kids like me MTV was the first time we ever saw gay and androgynous people. Before that you only had the Village People and Billy Chrystal on "Soap", and whatever rumors we heard about Rod Stewart. We had never seen acts like Bowie, Queen, and Elton John. We had only heard their music.

I was with Dee the first time I saw an interview with Boy George. We both thought he was woman. We finally figured it out, and looked at each other like "What the hell is this?".

Then we heard him sing, and stopped caring what he looked like.

That boy could sing.

By the time Frankie Goes to Hollywood came out, we could care less how they looked or acted. We just wanted to hear the music.

Parkview only had one openly gay male student while I was there, although many of my classmates would come out years later. The one I knew about was a black drag queen named Marlin. I was friends with Marlin's sister, but I didn't really get to know him until later.

The first time Marlin showed up to school in drag it shocked everyone, me included. Again, back then the only man we had ever seen in drag was Klinger from MASH, and he only dressed that way to show how crazy he was.

I didn't even see Marlin that first day. I just heard from others. I don't even think it was full drag. I think it was like a halter top, or something. But everyone was talking.

I was shocked, but kind of impressed. Springfield in the 80s was not a good place to be gay, and being black didn't help. He could have been killed, easily.

The weird thing is Parkview had a lot of openly gay girls, and nobody ever cared or said anything. We had so many they had their own bathroom, and all the straight girls would go somewhere else.

It was a weird double standard.

I was friends with most of them, and very close to a couple. I was one of the few guys invited to hang out in their bathroom.

At Parkview I briefly knew what it was like to be popular. I hung out with everyone; the computer kids, the country boys, the dungeon and dragon crowd, and the stoners behind the pool.

But I would say the lesbians were the crowd I fit in with best.