My war against the Zoot Suits-part 2-draft

My war against the Zoot Suits-part 2-draft

fiction
edward w pritchard

The Zoot suit War started quietly in the cafeteria at lunch at Goodyear High School. I was on lunch duty and I was watching one of the seniors cruise the lunch room looking to pick up girls. He was handsome and seemed charming from what I could overhear. His line wasn't working too well with the girls his own age and he began to hit on the new seventh and eight grade girls who had been transferred up to the High School when the junior high school was closed in an effort to consolidate operations to focus resources on raising the standardized test scores. Eventually the senior who was about nineteen was hitting on thirteen year old girls who seemed to enjoy the attention.

To protect the younger girls, as the special project for the year, I initiated the policy that the male students had to wear suits to school. Men's suits to help them behave properly toward the younger female students. It seemed like a good idea; I see now my idea was misdirected meddling. Things went very wrong.

The male students in protest started to wear zoot suits.

What's a zoot suit? It's a flamboyant long coat with baggy pegged pants. What accessories go with it? The hat is called a pork pie hat, and one wears a long long key chain . Shoes have thick soles. The look was perfected by Latino's in the 1940's and in their honor our students here called themselves Pachocos. Our Pachocos were impeccably groomed and they moved about with a glide and if they were standing still they tended to pose.

Like the 1940's, oh did our male students look cool and oh did their game fascinate the girls. We had a mess on our hands and I was in the center of it.  I had disrupted the learning environment with my meddling and as our students solidified against our authority , in zoot uniform, actually a costume: the stage was set for a confrontation.  In the 1940's they called them the zoot suit riots, here and now they are known as the zoot suit wars. The only piece missing was for the teachers and administration here at the school to don a uniform and a persona of our own in solidarity and after that happened things moved quickly to the denouement.

end part 2

end part 2