Rage During my junior and senior years in high school, I wrote my first novel, then titled Getting It On. I suppose if it had been written today, and some high school English teacher had seen it, he would have rushed the manuscript to the guidance counselor and I would have found myself in therapy posthaste. But 1965 was a different world, one where you didn’t have to take off your shoes before boarding a plane and there were no metal detectors at the entrances to high schools. Also a world where America hadn’t been constantly at war for a dozen years. Getting It On concerned a troubled boy named Charlie Decker with a domineering father, a load of adolescent angst, and a fixation on Ted Jones, the school’s most popular boy. Charlie takes a gun to school, kills his algebra teacher, and holds his class hostage. During the siege that follows, a kind of psychological inversion takes hold, and gradually the class begins to see Ted rather than Charlie as the villain. When Ted tries to escape, his supposedly well-adjusted classmates beat the shit out of him.
