In the summer of 1978, Jimmy Carter was president, the energy crisis was on the news, and the Bee Gees were on the radio. I was eleven years old and my family had just moved from five acres of piney woods in Pasco County, Florida to a two-bedroom apartment on the west side of Tampa. It was a transitory time. My body had begun its great betrayal, with boobs sprouting and curves forming. I had no interest in “becoming a woman,” yet I was obsessed with Barry Gibb in his ridiculously tight white pants.
The Ginger Cove apartment complex was ritzy for the times. It boasted a waterfront clubhouse, a concrete pool, and a boat dock near the mouth of Sweetwater Creek, which fed into Old Tampa Bay. We had a corner unit on the second floor, overlooking the tennis courts. The court lights shone bright into our windows at night, and the loud whack of racquets hitting balls became the rhythm of our new life.
The earliest apartment dwellings in America were tenement style high-rises in major urban areas. The “garden apartment” concept didn’t emerge until the early twentieth century and grew in popularity as suburban sprawl increased. Ginger Cove was a typical garden-style complex, with well-landscaped greenspace surrounding many low-rise buildings. Our unit had a spacious patio that overlooked the parking lot.
My aunt and cousin had their own apartment at Ginger Cove, a ground-floor unit on the other side of the playground. Some bully kid pushed my cousin off the swing one day, and a teenager with an easy smile came to her rescue. April was thirteen and my first Tampa friend. She had a waterbed and slept in men’s silk pajamas. Ours was an instant, easy friendship that felt too good to be true from the start.
My country friends warned me that city kids would be different. I didn’t expect them to be nicer, and more accepting. But they were. I’d finished sixth grade in Pasco County just when the “girl cliques” were kicking into high gear, and I was left out more than included. At Ginger Cove, some of the kids looked scary at first — wearing heavy metal T-shirts and smoking cigarettes — but they waved and said hello. Being the “new arrival” wasn’t a big deal there. People come and go in apartments all the time.
Throughout the summer, most of the Ginger Cove teenagers hung out at the pool, where the call and response of “Marco” / “Polo” was endless. A chubby Italian kid rode his bike around the complex every day, telling everyone about his trip to Michigan where he saw KISS in concert. Two times. April and I were usually at her apartment or mine, playing cards or looking at Leif Garrett pictures in Tiger Beat magazine. I had a Polaroid camera and my cousin liked to pose on our balcony, as if she were a star. She was six and a bit of a ham, always trying to make us laugh.
By August, I was comfortable with the gang of misfits I’d met at the apartments but not sure what to expect at West Tampa Middle School. The full desegregation of Florida schools was less than a decade old at that point, which meant a lot of kids were “bused” to school, a fair distance from their homes. For Ginger Cove kids, that meant waking up when it was still dark outside and then a half hour bus ride (each way) to and from one of the oldest, and predominantly Hispanic, neighborhoods in the city.
The West Tampa Middle School was only for seventh graders, a new experiment in education at that time, isolating kids in that awkward year between elementary school and junior high. The building was red-brick, dusty, and ancient. Historic, we would say now. But it never made it to restoration. It was torn down less than a decade later.
When school began, it didn’t take more than one bus ride from Ginger Cove to West Tampa to realize how little I had in common with the apartment kids who were so friendly to me all summer. As we compared schedules, I learned that none of them had placed in advanced English or pre-algebra, as I had. While shorts and T-shirts had been everyone’s go-to attire in the summer, on the first day of school I wore a fresh polo shirt and new sneakers while they still donned their rock band T-shirts and ripped blue jeans. We went to different classes and we learned different things. But the Ginger Cove kids still waved and said hello at the bus stop, or in the halls.
Being two years older, April rode a different bus to a different school. We stayed friends and had sleepovers on the weekends, but school is such a powerful bond at that age. Our closeness faded as the months went on.
To say my world view changed in seventh grade would be significantly understating the effects of that year. Spanish was the dominant language at West Tampa Middle School, and I’d never heard more than a few words of it before that year. So, I understood only a fraction of what the majority of my classmates said to each other. I learned the curse words quickly, particularly the most common slur — usually yelled at top volume from one male classmate to another — Maricón! I’d heard the word faggot in English before but the frequency with which the Hispanic kids called each other maricón was astounding.
Even with my Leif Garrett and Barry Gibb obsessions, I knew I was queer myself, so I kept my head down and felt grateful I wasn’t a gay boy since, even in a foreign language, it was clear they were the target of the dominant disdain.
I had both homeroom and advanced English with Ms. Anderson. She was a short, barrel-shaped woman who wore Horn-rimmed glasses on a chain, and her platinum blond hair in a 1950s man’s cut. She was the first “Ms.” I’d ever encountered. Her classroom was full of signs and information about Women’s Rights and the E.R.A. The kids made fun of her mercilessly. So even though she fascinated me, and I listened intensely to everything she said, I kept a low profile in her class, never wanting to draw any direct association between me and her in my classmates’ eyes.
Hiding in plain sight became my modus operandi. I was a quiet, serious student. Smart and diligent in class, and eager to “fit in” instead of stand out, in every crowd. Yet always, I was on the edge. Not disrespected; not bullied. Invisible. That became my goal.
I made a few friends in my advanced classes. White, Black, Hispanic. Everyone got along pretty well — except when someone confused a Cuban kid for a Puerto Rican, or vice versa — or a maricón! got hurled in the wrong tone of voice. Fights were known to break out at West Tampa. A switchblade or two may have been drawn, though I never saw one myself. A kid would throw a punch, or one would push another against the metal lockers once in a while. By the standards of today’s mass shooting culture, though, West Tampa in 1978 was as wholesome as a Disney movie.
In the country, I had no friends from wealthy families. And if anyone had any money, they certainly didn’t talk about it. At West Tampa, there were kids like me, who had one pair of new shoes and a new notebook to start the year; and then there were the kids comparing the purity of their gold jewelry. For the girls, the most common adornment was their first names, etched on gold necklaces. Boys wore Italian horns, or a simple cross, on gold chains. Gold rope bracelets were common, too. From my West Tampa friends, I learned to never admit something was gold-plated versus pure, and that while 14K was acceptable, 24K put you in a different league.
I often wonder how different my life would have been if we’d never moved from Pasco County to Tampa. There was no “middle school” in the country so I would have gone straight to junior high, then on to Zephyrhills High a few years later. The population there was almost entirely White. Maricón would certainly not have been the most frequently used word in the hallways; I would have never received the acceptance of a rag-tag group of apartment-dwelling stoner kids; and I likely never would have encountered a teacher who looked like Ms. Anderson.
I made the Principal’s Honor Roll at West Tampa, meaning I got straight As. This wasn’t a common achievement and the principal liked to reward the kids who managed it. So, at the end of the school year, she took us out for lunch at the Columbia Restaurant in Ybor City. It was the fanciest place I’d ever eaten. White tablecloths, elaborate chandeliers, and Spanish tiled floors. The food was some of the best I’d ever had as well. I took home a paper placemat with the Columbia Restaurant (“since 1905”) logo and kept it for years. But what I remember most about that lunch was the speech the principal gave us. There were about ten kids there and I was the only White one. The message the principal delivered to us that day was multi-fold. First, there was the message of pride. Pride that we should have for being a part of a community like West Tampa and Ybor City. A community of hard-working people who had achieved great things, not just for the city of Tampa, but for the world. The Columbia Restaurant was a famous place. When important people came to our city, they were likely to eat at the Columbia. We should be proud that we were there, too. The other side of the message was that taking school seriously would bring us a rewarding life. Studying hard, learning our math, science, languages, and history would mean more opportunities to eat delicious meals in beautiful places, among important people.
That I remember that lunch, and the principal’s speech so well, forty-five years later, is a testament to the impact it had on me. At the end of my first year of multi-cultural education, I felt proud of many things. Proud of my straight As, for sure. But prouder, perhaps, of my complete assimilation into such a new environment.
The strangest thing to realize, so many years later, is that nearly every memory I have of Ginger Cove and West Tampa is positive. The early morning bus ride and the smell of the West Tampa girl’s bathrooms might be a couple of negatives but almost everything else shines brightly in my recollection. My parents were so worried about how I would adapt to life in Tampa, after six years chasing snakes and feeding cows in rural Pasco County. But my transition from 1978 to 1979, from child to almost-teen, came out all right. I certainly fared better than Jimmy Carter’s administration, or the Equal Rights Amendment.
But on the other side of the coin, that year I also learned how to fold myself into a shell that took a lot of years to come out of. I was an excellent student. I was quiet. Serious. I had posters of Leif Garrett plastered across my bedroom walls. I got crushes on boys, and I had best girlfriends. And I didn’t show the “real me” to anyone for a very long time. Maybe not understanding three quarters of what my classmates said to each other helped me crawl further into that shell. Maybe isolating myself started to feel necessary when I liked those stoner kids at Ginger Cove so much, but I didn’t have the nerve to draw the kind of attention that smoking or taking drugs would bring.
Growing up is complicated. No matter what year it is, or where it happens. At this point, I am who I am, but I have a healthy respect for how much of that mold solidified at an apartment complex near the edge of Old Tampa Bay, and on a school bus driving across town at six in the morning, and inside the halls of an old red brick building in West Tampa that no longer exists.
We left Ginger Cove in the summer of 1979, moved to another garden apartment complex a few miles away. A few of my West Tampa friends ended up at the same junior high as I did, but most didn’t. I lost touch with April. Saw her once again a few years later, at a rodeo. She wore boots and a cowboy hat. We embraced for a long time. Letting go, we smiled so wide it hurt my cheeks. Both of us seeming to know that we’d never cross paths again.
