In 1973 when I was eleven our family left the San Francisco Bay Area for my father’s Peace Corps stint in Nairobi, Kenya, during which time I happily played with G.I. Joe Dolls (actually the British Action Man version, as that’s what they sold in Africa). But when I returned to the States in 1974 and attended Earl Warren Junior High, I realized I had become oblivious to the pop cultural trends of my twelve-year-old friends. I was, for example, woefully ignorant of the ubiquity of smoking pot and had gleaned, erroneously, the lexicon of pot smoking.
This became apparent one afternoon after lunch on the plaza when I divulged that I had thought that the term “doobie” referred to an extra large marijuana cigarette, which was the size of a bloated banana. The cool clique standing beneath the oak tree laughed at me, but soon forgot about my blunder when the nearby snack bar window opened. My friends ran toward the snack bar to buy ice cream and as a reflex I ran along side them.
However, before reaching the snack bar, I stopped in my tracks. I realized my parents, as was their policy, only gave me exact lunch money, none leftover, so there was nothing I could buy.
Some girl who had been sitting in the oak tree about five foot above the cool clique began laughing at me and she let out a schadenfreude-fueled shriek of delight, shouting, “Ha! McMahon doesn’t have any money!”
Frozen, I tried to create an insouciant expression as if I didn’t hear her and as if I was not stopping before reaching the snack bar for lack of funds, but was simply contemplating some deep thought that was so rich in substance that it required my absolute stillness. In truth, I felt humiliated and I felt my cheeks go flush.
What’s amazing is that thirty-seven years later when I am drifting into a luxurious sleep, I am sometimes awakened by the shrill shriek of that girl’s voice, a disembodied oracle of humiliation, and I am jettisoned from my nap, my face covered in sweat.
My God, the absence of money can be a source of humiliation, I think, and I now wonder in our country’s current economic woes, if those who’ve been driven out of the job market for a length of time, suffer the cruel voice of some similar imp.
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