DS-116 High School Hunk

FOREWORD

“The Senate subcommittee to investigate juvenile delinquency reported last year that school violence had become so common that the only difference between ‘tough’ city schools and those in the suburbs was one of degree,” stated Marguerite Michaels in her 26 February 1978 PARADE article Our Nation’s Teachers Are Taking A Beating. “In a three-year period attacks on teachers were up nearly 80 percent, assaults on students up 85 percent.”

Dr. Alfred Bloch, a Los Angeles psychiatrist, reported in the same article that teachers “suffer from the same wartime psychological symptoms: emotional tension, anxiety, insecurity, nightmares, blurred vision, dizziness, fatigue and irritability.”

But what happens when a man, an ex-GI, a decorated veteran of the Vietnam Conflict, a man trained in actual combat conditions, arrives to teach in one of these “tough” city schools? What happens when the school roughnecks suddenly find themselves confronted with a man well-trained for survival in a war zone? What happens when this new teacher begins a determined compaign to tame the worst of the lot in his classrooms, utilizing techniques that, while unauthorized in their aspects of sexual humiliation, seem to do the job?

The following novel, then, is about Ernst Klammer, who comes to Garfield High School, looking forward to something to fill the void left in his life by the ending of the Vietnamese Conflict. It is about the young men Ernst selects on whom to wage his own personal kind of war: young men so caught up in their own pseudo-butch roles that their egos are easily shattered by a man who can so obviously prove not only his mental but his physical superiority over them.

But, this is also a story of one young student, Diego Rivera, who sees through Ernst Klammer’s battle-plans and succeeds in turning the tables: not by offering genuine resistance, but by willingly entering into the bondage-discipline relationship in an effort to better understand those deep, previously unexplored needs inside of himself.

Read, then, how both Ernst Klammer and Diego Rivera learn more about those forces which drive many of us. Read how, by exploring areas of mutual trust, pain and pleasure, the two come to better understand themselves and each other.

“Even in World War II,” says Dr. Bloch, the combat pilot only had to fly fifty missions. Many teachers apply year after year without obtaining transfers.” To deal with the problem, Bloch recommends “psychological and physical training. None of the teachers I talked to had been prepared for the violence they encountered.”