Grade 10

In grade 10 I switched high schools and left the suburbs to go to a school downtown. Here is a little background about Kingston: The first fact is that it takes about 15 minutes to drive from one extreme end of the city to the other, 18 if you hit traffic. Traffic lasts for about 20 minutes at 5:00 when everyone gets off of work. Consequently looking back there was a lot of great divisions culturally in Kingston squeezed into a very small amount of space. Everything seemed so far apart and every part of town had it's own feel and it's own population yet dividing the wealthiest most well manicured part of town and the poorest most dangerous part of town was separted by about 5 minutes of driving.
Driving about 7 minutes from my neighbourhood to where my high school was located made a big difference. Everyone in my neighbourhood really strived to be the same and everyone was into hockey, tapered jeans, no fear shirts and grades. Downtown everyone was into haircuts, punk rock, all ages shows, pot, acid and mescaline. Drugs didn't interest me too much but new music did so I liked all these new alternateens immediately and was soon wearing ripped oversized work pants, shirts and ties and dying my hair blue.
The other fact that I want to make known is that every area in Kingston is not referred to in a north, south, east, west fashion it is referred to by name. The west was the "township" which is where I lived and basically everything else east of that was downtown even though it wasn't all downtown. My area, the township, was divided into 3 parts. My immediate neighbourhood was Reddendale, the middle was Henderson Place, and north of that was Bayridge or more affectionately known as the Ridge. The Ridge also had Cataraqui Woods which was inhabited solely by skids.
Downtown could be easily broken up into 3 main parts north and south of Princess (street) and Rideau Heights. North and south of Princess has always been a phenomenon and as easily as I can put it the south side is rich and well kept and the north side is considerably crappier and shadier. By phenomenon I mean that literally either side of Princess st which is a two lane street that spans the city is divided into these two extremes. Not to say that north of Princess or N.O.P. was horribly bad it was just a little undesirable. I spent a better part of my youth on this end of town and most of my friends and my girlfriend lived there. My high school was south of Princess and that neighbourhood was almost exclusively inhabited by doctors, lawyers, business and property owners and Queens University professors and all their long haired, burnout kids. It was downtown and much more open minded than my neighborhood but still sheltered by money. Rideau Heights was the force in town not to be reckoned with.
Rideau Heights was the northwest corner of the city which was out of everyone's way. We didn't go to their neighbourhood and they didn't come to ours, it was a different world. It was the projects of Kingston and compared to Rexdale it probably looks like Beverly Hills but lets face it this was a sheltered, small city and this neighbourhood of criminals and bikers was scary shit where I was from. For one semester of grade 11 I went to the feeder school for Rideau Heights, Queen Elizabeth Collegiate or QE for short. A lot of QE kids families had generations of family in prison, people had dirt floors, drug addictions and parents offering you bong hits while trying to sell you stolen stereo equipment. Everyone was doing B&E's, everyone had a child of their own in grade 10 and they were feeding their infants fries and Coke. There was a fight every period, the cops came at every break to make sure everything was ok and the fire alarm got pulled almost every other day. It was the best time every had in high school. I was at QE in a special theatre program with no homework and kids attending from all over the city, I was dating a 19 year old when I was 16 and we partied every night. I got a 90% in the program and I almost got to have sex.