The Village School
Brief Stability
Next began a period of brief stability back in Great Neck. In the summer of 1975 my brother was living upstate with my father, and I was home at my mom’s apartment. I had just turned 17 in May. That summer I took driver’s education at some driving school in Flushing, Queens, and reconnected with friends from 9th grade. The scene with high school kids had changed a bit in the time I’d been gone. Before, in junior high, there were different kinds of kids, freaks, greasers (black leather jacket-type like the Fonz, only meaner), and jocks. Now, coming back just before my senior year, there was only one type of kid that I could see: the kind that got high, had long hair and listened to rock and roll. The whole place, on the teenage level, was getting stoned and hanging out.
By good fortune I met Gary Bates, who lived around the corner and through the park. Bates and his partner Murph and I became fast friends in the summer of 1975. Bates had a car and a job and we could hang out at his house because his father was a great guy who
