NEWSLETTER

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1996 - 2000

Jocks and Cheerleaders:
The de facto heads of the school. The guys who were on the team took football really seriously, but nobody else gave a shit. About half the guys and girls in this group weren’t really involved sports, and could better be described as something like “friends of jocks.”

This was at the height of that baggy, vibrant preppy thing’s popularity with white kids, so the guys were all decked out in Hilfiger cargo jeans and big Nautica polos and jackets, while the girls wore CK or DKNY shirts under a pair of overalls or those flared black stretchpants with a Wet Seal blouse and jellies. On weekends they’d head to the house of whomever’s parents were out of town to binge drink. The biggest cars with them were Celicas and Accords—you could tell the gender of the driver from a distance by the presence or absence of a spoiler. The slightly timid girls would often go more in the direction of “cute” with one of those then-new VW Bugs or Jettas.

Hair was always pretty basic: The girls folded theirs back into an alligator clip, while the guys ran one dollop of gel straight up the front and left the rest untouched, making it look like they were wearing an invisible visor.

Guidos: At this stage in guido evolution, the guys wore wife-beaters with really thin ribbing, multiple gold chains, and Paco jeans or shorts. The girls were big proponents of the scrunchie, using it to cinch their dyed-platinum hair into so tight a ponytail that they had the constant appearance of mild surprise. They generally wore something along the lines of a bright pink scoop-necked FCUK shirt with black Blue Asphalt stretch flares, though it bears mention that breakaway track pants were a pretty big guido unisex option. By the time they were old enough to get a license every one of them had at least one eyebrow ring. Also, sometime between the early and mid-90s the Trans Am was fully replaced by the Honda Civic as the tricked-out guidomobile de rigueur.
South American Immigrants: Not sure what caused the glut of these guys at this time, but they easily outnumbered the Asian and Indian kids you’d expect to dominate the immigrant scene. Learning English wasn’t too big a priority for most of them. They seemed to know only the bare minimum to avoid being kicked off the soccer team. For all their fervor in trying to imitate American hip-hop culture, none of them seemed concerned with nailing down the details. The result was a hodgepodge of slight missteps, like shorts with not one NBA team’s logo but all of them, and hair gelled straight up, which ran straight down into a sloppy fade. The girls may have been similarly cribbing the black girls’ disgust with their classmates, but nobody could ever be sure since they would not speak to anyone except for each other.
Hip-Hop Kids: In tribute to Bone Thugs-n-Harmony and Latrell Sprewell, everybody on the basketball team had cornrows that hung stiffly off the back of their heads like braided pipe-cleaners. Another big thing with the ballers was tattoos, mostly consisting of a boastful word or phrase in gothic typeface and often misspelled (one particularly huge dude named Arsernie had a piece on his arm reading “Un-Stopable” that no one ever called him on). If not really buds with the football jocks, the black guys at least were chill with the rest of the kids in school, whereas the girls absolutely hated the white kids they were surrounded by and made their feelings expressly known very, very often. Because the regular cheerleading squad didn’t cater to their more boisterous and rhythmic style of spirit, they had a separate group called “Drill Squad,” which was way more accomplished than any of the other athletic programs at the school. The basic guy outfit consisted of some manor of outsized denim pants, a replica jersey of their fave player (meaning those really expensive authentic ones with the lettering stitched in and all the official patches, no ratty bootlegs), and a weekly rotation of brand-new Nikes. The girl version was basically the same clothing but extremely tight instead of billowing and with logo tees subbed in for the jerseys. It was not uncommon to see them hanging around the school parking lot in velour jumpsuits hours after classes had finished.
Neohippies: The Dave Matthews crowd. These guys were all old buds from Jewish summer camp and would typically hang out in the backyards of the condo buildings their parents lived in, smoking copious amounts of weed and talking about how there was no more acid around anymore. Maybe sublimating their parents’ aspirations for them, they rocked kind of a pre-collegiate vibe: Light beer at all the parties, ultimate Frisbee in the park, visors, flip-flops, and khaki shorts year round. The girls they mixed with were generally more low-key about their pot intake and into the tail end of the jam-band spectrum, like Guster and MOE.

RYAN DUFFY, WEST ORANGE NEW JERSEY HIGH SCHOOL
DRAWINGS BY MILANO CHOW


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