panic washed over me, but let’s say it was a splash. I was five minutes into algebra class, the second day of my freshman year of high school. As the guy behind me tapped my shoulder with his paper, I raised my hand.
“I didn’t know there was homework,” I said, reaching back without looking. I had missed class the day before because there was a mix-up with my schedule. Besides, who gives homework the first day?
“Then you should have asked a friend, Nickie,” Mr. Fuller said. I’d heard Fuller was a hard-ass, a Vietnam vet prone to outbursts.
“I didn’t know who was in the class,” I said.
“You don’t have any friends?” he said. “Well, we need to fix that.”
Fuller went to his desk and scrawled something on a sheet of paper before taping it to the wall. The sheet had FONU in huge letters.
“Who wants to join the Friends of Nickie Union club?” he said. “Now she’ll know who to call the next time she blows off class.”
For a long, long minute there was just a stunned tittering, and no one got up. Finally, the guy behind me walked over to the sheet and wrote his name. Ray Martinez. When he sat down, I turned to him.
He leaned in to whisper.
“Do you like Salt-N-Pepa? Have you heard ‘Push It’?”
Cue the music. Ray Martinez was a sophomore who had just transferred with his little sister Kristen from somewhere in New Jersey. She was a year younger than me, and everyone called her Sookie. They were Puerto Rican, which people not so lovingly referred to as “Mexican.”
Pretty soon after the FONU incident, Fuller took an extended sabbatical. The big rumor was that he’d had a Vietnam flashback and thought a kid was Vietcong. In any case, we had a slew of substitutes for the rest of the term. None of them were real algebra teachers, so the subs basically just gave everyone a passing grade no matter what. We had it made for the rest of the year.
Ray was on my track team, and he could already drive any car he could get his hands on. We’d hang out all the time, bonding over our love of dance music. He had a yellow Sony Walkman with him at all times, and we would listen to the TDK and Maxell tapes his cousins made for him off the radio in New York City. We didn’t have BET, and MTV barely played black music by people whose last name wasn’t Jackson, so these tapes were golden. The music of KISS-FM and WBLS, freestyle, house, and hip-hop, exuded so much emotion, and we were there for all of it. We started cutting class together, making a pilgrimage to Rasputin’s, a record shop in Berkeley, to find dance singles. We’d return in time for track practice, having car-danced the whole way back.
Ray and Sookie’s stepdad, Jim, had an old-fashioned Studebaker, and Ray figured out how to jump-start it without the key. Ray and Sookie would roll over in the Studebaker, playing his cousins’ tapes, and we’d joyride around, transported to New York by the master-mixes of black and Latino DJs. One time we decided to write a rap song of our own. I say song, but it was just a bunch of dirty sexual lines with cuss words written on notebook paper. Ray put it in his pocket and Jim found it in the laundry. Jim declared me a bad influence and forbade me from ever seeing Ray and Sookie again. That lasted two hours.
Ray started hanging out with all my other girlfriends right away. In his Z. Cavaricci pants, Ray could blend in with the boys, but he took dance class. That was a tell for a lot of the adults around us, who could detect in him what we kids were oblivious to. When it came to Ray, all of our parents were . . . well, there is no nice way to say “homophobic.” Not my mom, but certainly my dad. He and all the dads had nicknames for Ray. Sweet Ray, Sugar Ray, and one even referred to him as Ray-Gay. It’s not surprising. These were the dads who drove us kids into San Francisco to go to Pier 39, saying, “You’re listening to K-F-A-G San Francisco, rocking you from behind.”
When everyone you meet says, “fag,” it becomes part of your own language. I would use that word to describe a thousand and one things. Saying “You’re a fag” was akin to