We went to Point Loma High School, which at that time was full to overflowing with kids born in the years following World War II. There were 547 kids in my graduating class, and about that many in both tenth and eleventh grades too. A pretty big school, housed partly in an old building built back in the 1920s when San Diego started to expand. The original building was torn down a few years ago when everyone got so worried about earthquakes, but back then it sat on the top of the range of hills that formed the Point and protected San Diego Bay. No other building was as tall, and the jet fighters taking off from the naval air station at North Island just skimmed over the top. Teachers had to stop talking when they roared by, and once I remember looking out the windows of Mrs. Rutherford’s third-floor class to see a plane level with us. You could actually see the pilot in the cockpit.
This was not the time of a shooting war, of course. Vietnam was just around the corner, and Korea was in the past. But the Cold War was always in the background. Every once in a while as we were growing up there’d be something in the papers about the targets the Soviets would go for in the event of nuclear war, and we were surrounded by them. North Island, the fleet in the Bay, the airport, the aerospace plants, the research facilities: where we lived and went to school always showed up in those “circles of maximum destruction” that surrounded the targets on the maps the Civil Defense folks put out.
And the town was full of military personnel. When we were thirteen or fourteen, and just beginning to look grown-up, it was kind of fun to have sailors try to pick us up when we were waiting for a ride downtown or something like that. But later we got wary. Not that they were dangerous, they were just outsiders, and we weren’t.
When you’re sixteen or seventeen or eighteen what matters is what is happening then. Kids like me don’t think too far in the future. I expected to have some good times in high school and then go to San Diego City College and then work for a while. I’d get married, I’d be happy. Mrs. Rutherford changed that, though, when she saw that I took physics in my senior year.
Gus Fraser said that he and I were her “equal opportunity” kids. Not equal opportunity as in “civil rights,” because we were white as they come, but as in “encouraging some poor kids.” My mother would have caterpillared if she heard that, because we definitely weren’t poor, we had this nice house and several cars and always more than enough to eat. And Gus’s dad did even better than my dad. He was a skilled tool and die maker at Convair, he was the one all the engineers wanted to get when they were making a prototype for a missile or a jet plane, he was at the top of the wage scale, and he worked lots of overtime.
But Point Loma was a school designed for the children of doctors and lawyers and navy officers and corporate executives and rocket scientists. They all expected their kids to go to college, they wanted advanced placement this and enriched that, and they saw that their kids were signed up for all of them, whereas my folks didn’t see the point. Office practice and business math, maybe a little Spanish because that way you could talk to customers from Tijuana: yes. But doing three years of a foreign language and biology, chemistry, physics, and math beyond geometry wasn’t necessary. For a girl it might not even be desirable.
Gus didn’t care what he took as long as he could go surfing when the surf was up. That’s why he liked classes on the third floor, because you could see out across the low buildings to the beach. On days when the surf was up, he and his friends left at lunchtime. That meant that he missed a lot of labs and got sent to the vice-principal’s office often and just barely got by on the exams.
But he got by, he never flunked flat out, which says a lot about just how smart he was, so I guess it’s not so surprising that Mrs. Rutherford pushed him. She pushed me, too, which means that she must have seen something in me that I didn’t see myself.
So there I was in physics senior year, on a lab team with Gus and R.J. and some girl who was already talking about going back east to school. I felt out of place, but Gus took it all in stride.
“Hey, man, my mom said you’d be back here this year, but I didn’t think we’d have any classes together,” Gus said to R.J. as soon as we were told to go over and check out the equipment. “How’s your mom doing?”
I didn’t know it then, but Gus’s mother and R.J.’s mother had been friends for a long time. That was unusual in a stuck-up place like Point Loma where a doctor’s wife and a skilled mechanic’s wouldn’t know each other ordinarily unless they were on the same PTA committee or something like that. But somehow they’d discovered that they both hated housework and liked to drink martinis on the beach in the afternoon, so there was a long period when R.J.’s mother would paint while Gus’s mother did horoscopes and the boys would play together.
“She’s better,” R.J. said. I remembered hearing something about her having breast cancer, and from the way he looked around quickly at me and the other girl, I guessed he didn’t want to talk about that. It was bad enough to have cancer, but the very term “breast cancer” was embarrassing.
Our eyes met for just a second. His were lovely grey-green ones, which I’d never noticed when we were younger and we went for a while to the same elementary school. Since then he’d grown, he was a little shorter than Gus but a good five, six inches taller than me. His hair was light brown and cut short, and he was tanned like most of us were at the end of the summer, with the hair on his forearms bleached white. Yes, very nice looking, I thought.
The other girl knew him from some country club place she belonged to. “Didn’t I meet you last winter at the Kona Kai Christmas dance?” she asked. “Weren’t you home from that boys’ school up near Ojai?”
His face turned red under his tan. Boys’ school? Boys’ boarding school? Like I said, Point Loma High had pretensions—and over the years it produced some hotshots, like Dennis Connor, the guy who did those America’s Cup races, and Sharon Patrick, who was president of Martha Stewart’s empire. When we were there it was considered, if not the best high school in San Diego, then right there at the top of the list. Even folks who had ambitions for their kids sent them to Point Loma and not to private schools, unless they were strong Catholics who might try to remove their kids from temptation by sending them to a parochial school. Or, and this was much rarer, a family going through some kind of crisis might ship a kid off to a boarding school. But to have either happen meant you were really different from everyone else, and nobody wants to be different at that age.
R.J. sort of nodded at the girl. It was a yes, but it was like he didn’t want to admit it.
Gus rescued him. “And this is Annie Wallace, she’s the one who’s going to see that we all get through this course. Annie takes truly excellent notes.”
I laughed, because he was kidding me. Last year when we’d been in the same chemistry class he’d copied some of my lab reports, but I hadn’t got one of the formulas right so we’d both just barely passed that unit.
The other girl sniffed, like she didn’t believe him. “Do you take good notes, too?” Gus asked, putting his arm around her. “If you do, that’s terrific. I’ll never have to do any work.”
“I, I, I, I ...” she tried to say something, but she couldn’t get anything out. She wasn’t the kind of girl who let anyone copy anything, but I could tell she liked having Gus holding her close to his side. He was cool, he might not go to Kona Kai dances, but in the high school world (which in one sense was all that mattered then) he was legendary. He was the latter-day incarnation of the Great Kahuna, he was the king of Ocean Beach, the prince of Sunset Cliffs.
Later, during those long nights Gus and I talked when I was working the 11:00 P.M. to 7:00 A.M. shift, he told me that his mother had insisted he try to help R.J. out. She didn’t ask him to do anything like that very often, so he knew she put a big store on making things easy for R.J. “And besides,” he said all those years later, “he was an okay guy.”
I thought so too. At that point I didn’t do anything more than think it, though, because I was sort of going steady with my brothers’