I began my freshman year in 1963 when I was 14. The ride to Freehold High was my first test of the day. The bus hobbled like an old water buffalo, stopping every half mile to pick up startled lemurs or slouching vultures on country roads. I wasn’t at the bottom of the food chain, so I had a chance. I tracked what climbed aboard—avoided eye contact with short-tempered hyenas but glared menacingly at clumsy rodents stumbling in the aisle.

At journey’s end, the bus unloaded its hapless menagerie at the school’s doors. Once inside, hallways echoed with slammed lockers and reeked of teenage resentment. We were resentful because we were in our prime to enjoy fun and sex, but had less fun than we wished, and zero sex. As the rumbling herd filled the halls, I migrated to the middle, a survival tactic of African wildebeests I read about in National Geographic. Safer in the tall grass to avoid bored jocks, greasers, or freelance jackals.

It was harder to find tall grass in the classroom. After Mr. Hoffman asked for comment on the quadratic formula, I burrowed my head deep into my collar. Rather than solving for X, I fantasized about another kind of X … Charlene, a sophomore across the room. I tried sketching her sumptuous bearing in my notebook, but the best I could manage was a stick figure in a tight sweater. Good times happened only in my imagination. Boredom and anxiety occupied the vast, empty space of my life.

I stayed alert in civics because Phil sat behind me, and I wanted to survive. His exposed forearms looked like pale clubs with mallets attached. During our first week, Mr. Bartolo wrote executive and legislative on the board and called on Phil to name the third branch of the government. Phil performed an unconvincing thinking pose for a long time. I intervened, raised my hand, and smugly offered, “That would be the judiciary branch.” Sometimes I just couldn’t keep my big mouth shut! As Mr. Bartolo chalked judiciary on the board, Phil delivered a knuckle swat to the back of my head. “Sneak Attack,” he hissed—his nickname for me, à la Pearl Harbor. Who was stupid now?

I stumbled through German. Frau Munch assigned me detentions for neglected homework. I enjoyed singing, “O die Schönheit auf dem Wand, ist das nicht ein Schnitzelbank?” Those zany Germans and their woodcarving songs! I honed my bilingual skills exchanging insults with other detention inmates. Screw you, Scheisskopf!

English and art classes were different watering holes. Mrs. Sabo, a snappy dresser and taskmaster, ignored me in class but wrote encouraging notes on my compositions. I used vocabulary from weekly quizzes—like malinger, litigious, clandestine, ennui, ludicrous. Some classmates found my big words obnoxious. I didn’t argue; I wasn’t the litigious type. Miss Hurst, my art teacher, taught perspective, and approaches to drawing the human form, useful to a guy trying to draw the female form clandestinely.

Boys settled disputes on a spectrum that began with ambiguous slights and escalated to sneers, shoves, or elbow jabs. If you wanted to raise a grievance to an existential level, you scheduled your beef in the parking lot. The buildup was lengthy and gossipy; the fight itself was sloppy and quick. Girl fights were rumored to be thrilling, with glimpses of torn blouses or disheveled skirts. I witnessed but one, and there was no thrill to it. Two girls stepped off our bus screaming. As the bus sputtered away, we saw the girls still pulling hair, slapping, and kicking as we passed the vanishing point. It was enough girl fight for a lifetime.

Whether you were the object or purveyor of insults, hostility was part of male socialization, a method for avoiding violence by articulating your feelings by name calling. You applied time-honored formulas, compounding a foul word with an anatomical feature, like your head or your face. Hence, you have imaginative monikers such as fuckhead, or shitface … etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.

It was an improvement over baring your teeth and snarling like a baboon … or not. More often we relied on the democratic classic, asshole, because everyone has one and, if honest, has been one. I’d ask for a show of hands if this is true for you, but that would be … ludicrous!