Playing Hooky

I went to Junior High School in New York City. I played hooky one day instead of going to school because I heard of it. Skipping school for no reason is called playing hooky. We are supposed to all have a perfect attendance record. I didn’t know I almost died playing hooky. And I was never coming home. There are missing children. In the USA. I didn’t know I was almost a missing child. That was a long time ago when I was really, really young. May 1980 I decided to play hooky. It was Friday. I was in High School and so miserable for no reason. I heard people calling me that I was a moral teenager. I put on my jeans and T-shirts, comfortable shoes. They were platform shoes. But they were brown platform sandals with open toes. With white pair of socks getting out of the house before noon. I made a little journey to the city by taking a subway train. I got out of the subway on 42nd street & Broadway, Manhattan. It was lunch time so the people were out to lunch. I just walked with them in the big, big crowd of a mob like in New York City. Like a big herd. There wasn’t anything to do but to go window shopping. I looked at the New York City souvenirs. The miniature Empire State building, and the Statue of Liberty or painted T-shirts. I said to myself, ’I will make a trip to the Empire State Building one of these days on 34th Street’. I already was a tourist in Harlem. When I 1st got to New York city. I walked around with a pint carton of Chinese food. I also went window shopping then. I walked into a clothing store. I told a young person, a store clerk, a sales representative, 'I am just looking but I don’t think you have anything that fits me.' She said very sharply, 'No, I don’t think so. Try Chinatown!' She was a snide store clerk. I walked out swiftly. Scared of her. What she might do. Scared of lots of girls. And boys too, my age. All of sudden at the end of the block depression set in. The depression I suffered during the teenage years and into my young adulthood. It was depressing as hell. It is very painful to grow up in the USA for most people. But then again when I was playing hooky, I walked back to 42nd street and walked into a theater. I watched a movie called, 'Kentucky Fried Movie'. The whole movie was stupid. The scariest and even the forbidden were the movies they made, the Devil worshiping hookers, the homos who sold their souls for racism in show business. In retrospect. But this whole movie was about a white guy approaching the bunch of black people in the street and he yells, 'Ni**er' and runs away. The white guy was wearing a bicycle helmet. The bunch of black people laughs. People heard, they hate that. People running away from them. Because people don’t want to be ostracized. People just run when they see them. The white guy was an ostracizer too. The black people on the left and right of me started to ostracize me. I left the theater when the movie was over with the rest of the movie goers on Friday afternoon. Playing hooky on my part, and the old couples who didn’t have to work anymore. We didn’t have anything to do but to go to a movie. We left the movie theater in disgust.