By Scott Levin

A locker to call my own

I did not feel like this school gave me a warm welcome. When I was a freshman, a year younger and an inch shorter, I came to Los Altos for the first time as a student for Orientation Day.
There were the demeaning name games, but the true insult came when it was time to get a locker. I came at the tail end after having enjoyed a free steamed hot dog from someone at the Foods Room, who obviously was a former prison worker in a state where there was definitely capital punishment.
As I got to the front of the line, I quickly realized something was wrong. People were putting their names on a list. And this was 2003, so I knew Ralph Nader wasn’t desperately trying to get on a ballot. It was a waiting list for lockers.
To whom had all the available lockers gone? To seniors, juniors and sophomores. And freshmen who hadn’t eaten the free steamed hot dog just because it was free. So I was left with nothing, lockerless.
I don’t think I was scarred too badly by the experience, although I may never eat a hot dog again. And I was happy when my mother called this summer, a year after my initial denial, to tell me that the locker policies had been revamped to be more fair.
All freshmen receive a locker, my mother excitedly told me. I gasped. Then I whooped for joy. Then I stopped whooping. Then I realized I was no longer a freshman. Then I whooped again, realizing that freshman year wasn’t that great anyway. Then I gasped, “Wait, that doesn’t mean I’m getting a locker.”
No, there was no locker for me, I was told, although seniors and juniors with parking permits would not be getting one either. I swallowed hard, as if someone had tried to force feed me a steamed hot dog.
But then, on the first day of school, I found a new hope for my locker struggle. Over the announcements, I heard a beautiful promise, “A chicken in every pot, a car in every garage and a locker, provided that you have a buddy with which you may share it.”
So I entered the lottery with a buddy and with enough separate entries under pseudonyms, I won.
However, this fairy tale doesn’t exactly end happily ever after. It’s the version of “Little Red Riding Hood” where the wolf doesn’t regurgitate the grandmother after the woodman cuts him in two.
It’s the buddy I chose. The locker application was prophetic in its antiquated warning: “Do not share a locker!” It’s good advice, but I had no choice.
I just remembered a very important fact about my locker “buddy.” It’s an eighth grade memory when all students had lockers and frolicked in meadows.
My buddy had a locker right by the office back in eighth grade. He planned to stage a big prank before he left junior high. Junior high pranks are all very juvenile, but his idea was somewhat evil. His idea was to buy a fish and leave it in his locker. The smell of fish would drive those administrators insane.
I remember late-night conversations with my buddy, as he ran down the price quotes from Safeway. He wanted to find the smelliest fish at the best price.
My buddy never actually went through with his scaly plan. Yet today I am left scared. What if my buddy is still hungry, still yearning to prank his school with a smelly fish?
So you see, the locker is a double-edged sword, which sounds physically harmful but in this case, is more of an attack on the senses. I finally get a locker, but at what cost? Is having a place to store my chemistry book worth the smell of herring?
What this school needs is equal locker rights. There should be a locker for each student who wants one, without having to share. I say this even if it means buying more lockers and putting them in the men’s bathroom, whose smell, as horrible as it may be, is better than that of an old fish.