As I mentioned in a previous post, I worked as a custodian at a Jewish community center (back then it was called a YM-YWHA) while I was in high school. I worked with a couple of guys my age who, to be honest, were likely to continue working as janitors after high school ended.
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| Robert Moses was streets smart, amirite? |
I generally fit in with everyone, and there were plenty of crude jokes, profanity, and insults traded about. The one thing that made me a target was the fact that I did pretty well in school — better than my co-workers, at least — so this one guy in particular, I'll call him Freddy, liked to toss out this canard every now and then:
You may be book smart,
but you ain't street smart!
(This is an abridged version of his statement, as Freddy's vocabulary normally injected an average of three f-words per sentence.)
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| Does not count as book smart. |
Whenever I did something that was stupid or embarrassing, which, given the nature of the job, was admittedly frequent, Freddy took the opportunity to brandish that particular taunt. If I put the trash bag into the garbage can incorrectly, it's because I wasn't street smart. If I got too close to the bathroom tiles with the pressure washer and blasted a few right off the floor, it's because I wasn't street smart.
Up till this point I had assumed that the only things you learned in "The Streets" was how to properly tape a stickball bat, open a fire hydrant on a steamy day, and hide from the coppers when you're caught snatching an orange off of Giuseppe's food cart. Apparently there was an entire streets-based education that I had been missing. Then again, Freddy must have been home sick from street-school when they taught that you shouldn't try to open a bottle of beer with your mouth, because it could split your molar in half, as it did Freddy's. Hell, I wasn't even street smart, yet I knew that fact quite intuitively.
That being said...
