As the school year progressed, my acne was getting worse. It was so bad that on some days I didn’t want to go to school because I was getting picked on because of my acne. It was like puberty was punishing me.
My mom knew how unhappy I was feeling about my acne and I think that she felt my unhappiness. She made a special trip to the drug store and bought me a tube of Clearasil for my acne. This was the medicine of choice for many teens experiencing bad acne during this time.
I followed the directions explicitly. I would wash my face to get the oil off as directed and then rinse with cold water. I would let my face dry before applying the ointment in all the areas that were bad. But this didn’t work.
My acne was not improving. The continuous nights of applying, rinsing, repeating, failed to clear up those pesky pimples with those very noticeable large whiteheads on my face were still haunting me.
Many of the boys at school were picking on me because of my very bad acne. I would even say that their comments to me were very disturbing and hurtful. One boy called me crater face. Another boy was telling everyone that NASA was using my face for practicing to land on the moon.
And the girls looked at me like I was diseased.
Other boys in my school also had some bad acne as well. I would often wonder if they were also being picked on like I was. And with the bad acne came very odorous body smells.
Yep, puberty was punishing me.
All the harassment really began to affect me. I would tell the boys to shut up but they didn’t. They just kept on with the insults. And I didn’t want to get involved in another fight because of the bullying.
I would often find places to hide until the bell rang and then showed up for class late. This would get me in trouble with the teacher. But this trouble was nowhere near the impact of the boys harassing me to the point of tears.
One day, my good friend, the one I punched in the face in our fight, stood up for me. He witnessed some boys tormenting me with their disgusting words and took some action. And this helped me feel protected. He had grown quite a bit during the school year and was much bigger than me now. He had told me that he was going to play football when he goes to high school.
I supported his dream because I knew he would be good at playing this sport.
After he interjected his body between mine and the other boys who were picking on me, they quickly stopped with the insults and the bullying. I think they realized that they would have to pick on someone else now. With his interjection, I was now officially off limits. This was a good moment for me.
He was more than just a friend. I thought of him as my protector now. His oversight of my safety would also let me focus on the rest of the school year. I was also now growing in height.
I was thirteen and starting to look more like a young man than a child. And I was growing some darker hair on my upper lip.
I knew that summer vacation would be here in a couple of months. To get through this school year was a goal for me so that I could start this summer off with a positive feeling.
For me, this would be a new season of going to the pool and getting a dark tan. While I did get a good tan last summer thanks to the short trip to Miami, I wanted to improve on my efforts this year.
My plan was to get tanned before the end of summer. I wanted to be at my best when the new school started since it would be my last year in junior high. And for the first time I wanted to find a way to impress the girls. At least one. Yes, I had a crush developing.
And I wanted to be noticed.
Also, this would be the first summer when it would be only me and my mom. There were no other men in our lives now. This was something that I celebrated in secret.
I was looking forward to my upcoming summertime break.
And then my mom announced that we would be moving during the summer to a new place. What is up with my life taking turns every damn summer. We are going to move again! But my mom said only to a different part of my school district so I would still be going to my junior high school in the upcoming year.
While this was good to hear, I asked her why we can’t just stay in our house. This is when the news of her divorce was presented. And the house had to be sold in the settlement including the furniture.
We would be starting all over again.
Before we moved away from our neighborhood, three big events happened for me.
A new family moved into the house directly next to ours. They were both professors at the university. The husband was also a special tour guide at Boulder Dam, also known as Hoover Dam. He told my mom that he could give us a private tour after the regular tours concluded. I yelled out, “Yes.”
This was the dam we crossed when we moved from Phoenix to Las Vegas many years ago.
And sure enough, a promise was kept. We met him at the dam around four o-clock one day and he gave us a private tour that took my mom and I to places that the regular tours didn’t go on.
I remember taking the elevator down to a service corridor as he called it, to go see where the dam meets the canyon wall. I can say that I went up to the canyon wall and touched it. The exposed stone was cold when I touched it.
This was the stone wall that the dam pushes against as he described the engineering of the entire dam structure. And I could see the scrape marks on the stone indicating just how far the dam had moved since being built. This was fascinating to see.
And then we toured the generation plant and looked at where the water spilled out. I remember looking over the edge of the dam down to the area that I was now standing at when we stopped to walk along the top and I looked over the edge only to get vertigo.
To this day I have not forgotten the places we went to in the dam.
The next event was when our Filipino neighbors were celebrating their daughters christening. This was a weeklong celebration culminating with a roasted pig being served at a huge family dinner. And I was the one roasting the pig, well most of the time.
For me, this was an honor bestowed on me by the family. My little chef skills were at their best.
And little did I know, but I would find out in the future, that my mom met a young Filipino man at this celebration that caught her eye. I could see them talking a lot and sharing cigarettes. Not again I thought to myself. Ugh!
The last event was just horrible to witness.
One night I was awakened by flashing red lights penetrating my window and the loud sounds of sirens. Also, there was this odd red orange yellow flickering glow also penetrating my window. The two-story house next to the professor’s house was on fire.
The boys were already out of the house. But their mom and dad had to jump from their bedroom window. Luckly, no one was injured. This was a scary scene. Fire hoses and water running were everywhere. I was a gallant effort, but the entire house was in flames.
By the time the fire was extinguished, there wasn’t much left.
We learned later that their teenage boys had put some cigarettes butts into the garbage without knowing that the butts were still burning. I had on occasion hung out with the boys because they were older than me and treated me like a little brother.
They rebuilt their home and it was better than the original one. We visited them after we settled into our new home, a home that was on wheels.
Yes, I was going to miss our neighborhood when it would come time to move. My friends and the families that made this neighborhood special to me would now become part of my memories. And in a way, there would come a time when there would be reconnections in the future.
Until then…
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