Spinning Gold From Dull Yarns — A Peek Into The Darker Side of Beverly Hills
I nervously enrolled at the legendary Beverly Hills High School in September 1990—the same lousy year 90210 debuted on Fox. The primetime soap was widely popular among my classmates, but I always felt embarrassed by its outlandish depiction of our formative years.
Incidentally, our old, spooky house on Beverly Drive had once been home to the show’s creator, Aaron Spelling. But he’d vacated it after divorcing Morticia Addams, who sold it to my eccentric mother, Eleanor.
Spelling had a knack for spinning gold from dull yarns.
He knew his audience wanted to escape from the daily grind and journey far from home. And 90210 served up that fantasy — it was a formulaic, non-contextualized diorama of opulence.
Yet unlike Spelling’s melodrama, there were no extravagant perks at the real Beverly High, like Perrier in the water fountains or valet parking. Kids had flashy cars, but not me. I drove my father Ray’s used sedan, an ’84 sunburnt Cadillac with torn leather seats, dented bumpers, and a hundred thousand miles on it.
Like a foreign exchange student, I felt out of place from day one, partly because of a pronounced red rash beneath my nose. I’d foolishly shaved before my beard came in. The blade had stunted the growth of skin on my upper lip, which remained discolored. So, on top of a typical teenager’s complexion, I started ninth grade looking like Pedro from Napoleon Dynamite.
Luckily, I found a welcome wagon in the school’s drama department.
Marleigh, my older sister, had starred in their plays, and teachers remembered her fondly. And at Beverly, drama nerds weren’t ostracized. We were in the entertainment capital of the world, after all.
As a sophomore, I tried out for Oliver!, ending up in the chorus as one of Fagin’s orphans. On opening night, as I nervously crouched beneath a set piece, a castmate pointed out a distinguished gentleman with silver tips and a chiseled face in the front row of the audience. He’d passed out snoring, and we couldn’t help but crack up. But when the curtain came down, a stagehand snapped at us for laughing at her uncle — Frank Sinatra.
I confessed my embarrassment to Dad as soon as I came home. To make me feel better, he told me how he’d once run into the singer in the john. But while he could sense something else was bothering me, he didn’t probe much further. Dad loved me but never really knew how to reach me.
The closing night of that coming-of-age musical would be my final acting performance. It had nothing to do with insulting Sinatra, though.
My acne had flared up and became so distracting that classmates couldn’t concentrate on their lines while rehearsing. My parents and sisters were the only ones who could look at my face without losing their train of thought. Eleanor took me to see the city’s best dermatologists.
Nobody could help.
Shunned by my peers, I roamed the empty halls of school during lunch each day, pretending I was on my way somewhere or late for something. Yet I had nowhere to go and no one to talk to. My only friend, Scotty Sterling, had been placed in a different school, and we’d drifted apart.
After class one afternoon, the drama teacher, Ms. Evans, a dilettante unsuited to be an educator, took me aside.
“Rafie. How do I say this nicely? Your pimples, honey. I was in the balcony section today and could see them up there. Hasn’t your mother tried to take you to see a doctor?”
“Yes, I told her,” for the hundredth time.
But she was right. My face was a minefield — every inch covered in bumps. And while blaming me for something beyond my control was outrageous, I was too self-conscious to defend myself. Deflated, I never stepped onto a stage again.
All I could do was walk those halls alone, wallowing in my gloom, until the school bell freed me. Like Mom and Michael Landon, I ran home, taking refuge from the ridicule behind the steam of hot showers and reading through biographies I’d brought back from Paris.
It wasn’t my fault I was revolting. Still, I believed I deserved to be unsightly for my sins — smoking with Scotty, drinking in school, cussing at women, and disobeying authority. Cystic acne was my prison sentence for being rotten to the core. And I convinced myself that God had molded me into an introvert for my own good.
By the onset of junior year, my face had gotten worse. Friends hadn’t come around, and I grew despondent. I began to think life would be better if I just took my mom’s revolver and killed myself.
Then a little miracle happened.
I was reacquainted with Kris, the castmate with whom I’d poked fun at Frank Sinatra. I’d been wandering the halls when I found him with his back against a locker, wearing a long-sleeved flannel and doodling in his notepad.
“What’s up?” he asked, his blond bangs covering his face like the crest of a wave.
“Hi,” I said, delighted somebody was talking to me.
“It’s Kris from drama. We were in Oliver! together, remember?”
“Yeah, I know,” I replied, warming up.
Kris saw my ugly mug, smiled, and continued drawing. He was the first kid who’d spoken to me socially in forever. I wondered if he’d heard what people were saying about me. Their comments were so tormenting that I’d cordoned myself off, like a condemned building awaiting demolition. But Kris didn’t seem to give a damn. We sat together that afternoon, chatting until lunch was over.
My new friend was an accomplished child actor. He despised the profession, but his mother had dragged him to auditions from infancy, and casting agents loved him. Kris was still in demand when we met, doing Dr. Pepper commercials and playing the character Lonnie on Roseanne alongside Sara Gilbert in the role of Darlene. He said she’d also given him the cold shoulder on set and advised that I not take it to heart.
And though he’d been the breadwinner for most of his life, his family treated him like a workhorse. He lived with his alcoholic mother in a moldy one-bedroom she never cleaned. Having long divorced his father, a liquor store delivery man, her motherhood was spent sponging off Kris. She’d robbed him of many things, foremost his education.
That’s one reason he was hanging out in the halls. He didn’t have time to develop friendships because he was always on the clock. As we bonded, he opened up about his battle with scoliosis and why he never took his shirt off in gym class. The disease would contribute to his drinking and lead him down the same spiral as his mother. And as his body changed and he grew stubble, work began drying up. Soon they would be thinking of replacing him on Roseanne.
In the meantime, we’d be there for one another and need that support because the following semester, we’d take biology with the most feared teacher in the history of Beverly Hills High.
Mr. Hale was menacing — a carbon copy of boxer Muhammad Ali, with beefy forearms, scarred knuckles, and a perfectly cut Afro. Even his chubby cheeks looked mean. He sat the entire lecture, staring at us like plebs. We were terrified of this man.
“Open y’books,” he’d say in his baritone, snorting as class began.
He never told us what page — just open y’books.
Licking his chops, he’d continue, “Okay. Photosynthesis…”
It was monotonous, bell to bell. Only fear kept us from falling asleep. The best and brightest, including my sister, flunked. But neither Kris nor I could stand the thought of summer school. After class one day, we decided to approach the stoic figure.
“Mr. Hale?” I asked, swallowing my words.
He turned around like a medieval hangman, a small gold cross around his neck.
“What do you boys want?” he asked, tapping his fat fingers on a Bunsen burner.
“Uh. Mr. Hale. Uh. We were wondering — ”
“Wondering what, boy?” he roared, his walnut eyes widening. “Spit it out!”
“If there’s something we can do. To get a better grade,” said Kris.
Mr. Hale leaned against a lab bench and stared at us for a few minutes.
“Tutoring. Every Thursday. Lunchtime,” he said, expressionless.
Nodding, we backed out of the classroom like we’d stared down a grizzly.
Yet we showed up each week and broke bread with that surprisingly magnanimous man — the only two kids that year to take him up on the offer. He made us laugh and took a genuine interest in our future. And we learned!
But when the final came, he proctored like a corrections officer. Nobody dared to cheat. Everybody finished early, including the valedictorian, who threw his arms up and shook his head as if a great injustice had occurred.
“Since we’re all done, how about we grade these?” Mr. Hale asked, waving the tests in the air and looking at Kris and me. “Boys, go on up and put these things through the scantron machine.”
He handed us the tests and answer key, and we dashed into the stairwell to the second-floor teacher’s lounge, where they kept the computer.
Halfway up, Kris grabbed my shirt.
“Wait, Rafie. Mr. Hale’s trying to tell us something,” he said, a devious look in his eyes.
It made me skittish that he was proposing we cheat. But I wanted it to make sense. We’d built a rapport with Mr. Hale, and he liked us. And I’d never gotten a better grade than Marleigh. We sat on the steps and agreed to update our answers.
“Try to miss some, so it isn’t obvious,” Kris whispered, hurriedly filling the ovals.
“Okay,” I replied, ensuring a few were incorrect.
We ran the tests through the machine, returned to class, and tried to slip away.
“Hold on there, boys. Hold on,” Mr. Hale said. “Let’s see how everybody did.”
Kris and I gulped as he began reading the results. They were worse than we expected — even the valedictorian barely passed. Finally, he came to our names. Our scores were ninety-six and ninety-two, respectively. The class erupted, knowing something was awry. But Mr. Hale shut them down by slamming his fist on the table.
He removed his glasses, rubbed his eyes for an eternity, and said, “Boys. I’m gonna ask you this one time. You have anything to tell me?”
The next day, Mr. Hale let the class go early but held me back.
“Rafee-el.”
I shuffled towards him in my oversized hoodie as he scribbled in his grade book.
“Where’s your little friend?”
Kris hadn’t shown up, and neither had several kids that day.
“I’m not sure, Mr. Hale,” I answered truthfully.
“What y’all did yesterday, proud of it?”
My stomach sank. Not because I thought he might fail me but because I’d betrayed his trust. He lowered his reading glasses and addressed me like a son.
“Been teaching this class for over twenty-five years,” he stated, pinching the bridge of his nose.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Hale.”
“No, nope. Don’t apologize,” he said, pointing at me. “You’re not the first. Not the last. But what you need to learn here, and I’ll tell your little buddy this too, is this — anyone can spend life lying — all of it. Might even get away with it. Might even get away with lying to me. Never happened yet. But that doesn’t matter because you’ll never be able to lie to yourself.”
He wasn’t just right.
He was the greatest teacher I ever had.
I retook the exam at lunch and scored a B+. He dropped it to a D, a penalty for my academic dishonesty. I wouldn’t see the man much after that, but his words would stick with me. At the time, though, his mercy and wisdom weren’t enough to get me on the straight and narrow. I was incorrigible.
Yet I felt lucky to be alive after running into Kris the next day. He was wearing his flannel, his hair was disheveled, and he’d been crying.
We shared a meatball sandwich at lunch, and he told me what had happened two nights earlier. A classmate he’d known since kindergarten had been riding his mountain bike up in the canyons a few blocks from my house when a vehicle struck him. He was taken to the emergency room and succumbed to his injuries within hours.
The boy was seventeen, like my brother Albert.
After school, I shared news of his passing with Mom as she fixed a wig in her vanity. She became still when I uttered the boy’s name, Elione. Setting down her comb, she covered her lips. Then, harkening back to when “she was pregnant with me,” she recalled a foreboding exchange she’d once had with an expectant mother.
The woman had been strolling past our house one afternoon and was intrigued by the sight of Mom’s Rolls-Royce. She glared at it, polished and poised like an exotic animal, asleep on our new brick driveway. The clean blue California license plate, ELIONE, glimmered in the sunlight, calling to her.
Somebody had left the front gate open, so the woman stepped up to our porch, knocked on the door, and Mom answered.
“Hello. I’m sorry. I don’t mean to be a bother, but — ”
“It’s no bother, dear. How can I help you?”
“Your car,” said the woman, gesturing toward the Rolls. “It’s majestic.”
“Thank you,” Mom replied.
“I hope I’m not imposing, but what does it mean? The plate, Elione?” she asked, besotted with the vehicle.
“Oh. It’s kind of after my name, Eleanor.”
“I like it very much,” she remarked, soothing her belly.
The woman left, and Mom, still in a fog over Albert, hadn’t thought about the incident since. Their connection was diabolical, though — two mothers whose precious sons had died the same way, at the same age, tethered by that chance encounter.
That day was tailor-made for Eleanor to tell me everything about where I came from. She didn’t. Yet no matter how great her deception, I’m still here to tell you about it. And living in the dark, even for thirty years, is nothing compared to what those boys lost.
I was the lucky one.
Kris was never as fortunate.
Toward the end of junior year, he was expelled for bringing a prop gun to school at the drama teacher’s request. When confronted by the principal, Ms. Evans cowered and threw him under the bus. Police arrested and made an example of him — the gun charge trumped up because of recent school shootings. He was sent to a crummy one-room building for exiled students at the edge of campus. But Kris’s social standing, or lack thereof, made it easy for the administration to throw the book at him. His mother tried to advocate for her son, but her disorganized pleas hurt his case. And much like my Swiss boarding school, Beverly High had a double standard of its own.
A week before his expulsion hearing, I was sitting on the steps outside French class when a boy named Mort Sahl, Jr. pulled out two real guns from his backpack. He’d stolen them from his father, a well-known comedian and satirist. Mort was a fellow hall wanderer, but we weren’t close friends. Though we were both shy, cerebral, and decidedly out of place at Beverly, Kris had warned me that he was too far out, even for a misfit like me. But while his guns were a red flag, I didn’t report him. Everything happened so fast that I couldn’t process it.
“Where did you get those?” I inquired.
“They’re my dad’s,” he admitted. “Told me I could borrow them.”
I couldn’t tell if he was serious or inherited his sense of humor from his father.
“What are you going to do with them?” I asked, alarmed.
“Not sure yet,” he said, grinning at me. “What do you think I should do?”
“Keep ’em in there,” I replied, trying to act cool.
He described their mechanics in detail, brandishing the firearms like collector’s items. As the first bell rang and students began to arrive, he tucked the weapons into his bag. I followed him into the classroom, shaken by what I’d seen, but what might happen next never crossed my mind.
Our teacher, Madame Kinneman, didn’t either.
Madame was a time capsule. She could have been an extra in Hairspray or played a rigid proctor in Pink Floyd’s Another Brick in the Wall. A staunch disciplinarian, she’d have slapped you on the knuckles with a ruler if she could get away with it, but boy, could she teach. Those educators, to me, were the finest — strict yet benevolent when it mattered. Her cheeks were layered in powder, so much so that when she stood on her toes to write on the chalkboard, you couldn’t tell if it was chalk dust or makeup falling off her face. She wore a pungent perfume that could have been a home concoction. And when Madame smiled, which was seldom, there was an impressive gap between her front teeth.
She avoided eye contact and lectured with her back to the class. I kept my sights on Mort because of what he’d shown me minutes before. But when I shifted focus momentarily to find my place in the textbook, a collective gasp sucked the air out of the room.
There was Mort. Standing beside his desk and pointing his gun at the back of Madame’s head. We were paralyzed with fear — even the jocks.
“What is all the commotion back there?” Madame asked, cluelessly jotting down the day’s lesson on conjugating verbs. “Je suis, tu es, il est, nous sommes, vous êtes, ils sont.”
My classmates looked at one another, mortified. Yet, I was less afraid because of the baffling way Madame handled the situation. Not once did she turn around.
“For heaven’s sake. What is going on?” she asked again.
“I’m pointing a gun at you, Madame,” Mort said, still aiming at her.
“A gun, monsieur?” she paused. “Do you mean pistolet?”
“Yes, Madame,” Mort answered.
It was as if we were watching Bud Cort’s tour de force in Harold and Maude. The gun could have gone off at any moment.
“What is the pistolet for, monsieur?” Madame asked.
“To kill you, Madame,” he responded.
She set the chalk down and sighed.
“Monsieur Sahl. Do us all a favor and sit down this instant. We’ve wasted too much time,” she vented, resuming her lesson plan.
Inexplicably, he sat down and hid the gun in his backpack. Why? I never understood. Maybe he was starving for attention, something he might not have gotten enough of at home. But thank heavens.
At the end of that day, I sat with him on the school steps and watched as his dad picked him up in a red Ferrari. Mort got in and gave me a thumbs-up.
“See you tomorrow, Raf,” he said as the pistons fired and the roadster took off.
Despite a class full of witnesses, he faced no consequences. Mort died two years later, more or less the way Scotty did.
I’ve watched that tragic scene up close too many times — troubled young outcasts like me whose fates were sealed by loving yet misguided parents. Draping over the mirrors reflecting the turmoil within their children’s souls made them undoubtedly more vulnerable to their monsters.
