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Show 25, Jeffries, Islamorada But now his classes. The "D' tracts. A counselor's balance of underachievers and the weak-minded. They're giving me their tired and their poor, he thought. Hyper on a food-coloring jag. Red-eyed. Up half the night, wide-eyed in a manic non-response to a Charles Bronson film. And in the classroom, the fine humor of Washington Irving and even Poe passes over their heads. "It's over their heads," the principal stated gruffly, on a rare visit to Clayton's high box canyon of a classroom. "It's the social promotions, we call 'em eighth graders, see, but they test to be third graders-give 'em bat, cat, rat. . ." But these pupils, or sweathogs, as some of the louder ones had come to call themselves, were not without a disturbing brand of low humor which they brought to the classroom, the fascist probing of a Rickles, or the self-congratulatory teasing of a Freddie Prinze, 'streetwise' in the sense that the medieval black rat was 'streetwise.1 There was something in the streets that reminded him of the urban mutants in a piece of bad science fiction. Driving that Corvette, that great beautiful toy and the expression of his boredom, he'd see the older brothers of his students, running in |