Chapter 1: Love can kill
In the 1959-60 school year, I was in eighth grade in the Dr. Susan S. Sheridan Junior High School in New Haven, Connecticut. Our curriculum included a course called “Core” that combined English and history.
Our Core teacher was an elderly spinster named Winifred P. Shea. She was a stern prude, who, if Catholic, would probably have been a knuckle-whacking nun in a parochial school.
Her sole concession to levity in our classroom was a life-size cardboard Santa Claus that advertised Coca-Cola. When Fidel Castro was in the U.S. to visit the United Nations, “Winnie” wore a black armband to protest his presence.
Much of our class time was spent diagramming sentences, and copying what Winnie wrote on the blackboard.
She explained that her words would make a stronger impression on our young minds if we had to write them down, than if we merely heard them, or read them on a mimeographed handout.
The real reason was probably that if we were busy copying from the blackboard, she wouldn’t have to teach.
In one blackboard lecture, Winnie warned us that “any writer who uses writing as a source of income is unworthy of being read.” Better cross Shakespeare, Dickens, Melville, Fitzgerald and Hemingway off our reading list. The list of potentially worthy writers was made smaller still, because Winnie declared that any writer who mentioned sex or love was off-limits to young teenagers. There go Aristophanes and King Solomon and Charlotte Bronte and me.
When the young teenagers in our class giggled at the line, “Stand like harpers hoar, with beards that rest on their bosoms” in Longfellow’s Evangeline, Winnie barked at us, with orders to “get your minds out of the gutter,” and a reminder that “the body is a temple.”
One time while walking around the classroom, Winnie spied a paperback book on Alan Melnick’s desk. It was a copy of The Untouchables — the basis for the TV series starring Robert Stack as FBI agent Elliot Ness.
Curious, Winnie picked up the book, and flipped through the pages. When she realized that the cover illustration showed an FBI raid on a whorehouse, she dropped it as if it was on fire, and ran to the sink to purify her hands and soul. The next day, Winnie was absent from school.
Our substitute teacher was Elizabeth Krick, an equally old, old lady, but Winnie's polar opposite in personality, politics and prudery.
Winnie was out for a long time, and the months when Mrs. Krick replaced her, were a trip to an intellectual Disneyland. The dreaded sentence diagramming sessions were gone, there were no notes to copy from the blackboard, and we were encouraged to read ANYTHING we wanted to read.
I found a strange paperback entitled The Wayward Comrade and the Commissars, by Yuri Karlovich Olesha — definitely not a book that commie-hater Winnie would approve of.
It contained one novelette, and three short stories; and Mrs. Krick agreed that Alan Melnick would report on the novelette, Envy, and I’d cover the short stories.
Alan got the best part, which included the memorable line, “How pleasant my life is. Ta-ra, ta-ra. My bowels are elastic. Ra-ta-ta-ta-ra-ree. My juices flow within me. Ra-tee-ta-doo-da-da. Contract, guts, contract. Tram-ba-ba-boom!”
My part of the book was not as stimulating, but a deal is a deal, so I started reading and writing.
On the day we were to deliver our book reports, the sky was dark, Mrs. Krick was gone, Winnie Shea was back, and I was in shock.
There was no way in hell that Winnie would accept a “book report” on three short stories, especially one written by a Russian.
I had to do some quick improvising. I decided to verbally inflate one of the three short stories into a full-length book, and hoped to bullshit my way through the crisis.
Unfortunately, the one short story that had enough of a plot to support embellishment was titled Love.
When it was time for me to deliver my report, I quivered at the front of the classroom, put a hand in front of my mouth, and mumbled something like “I am reporting on Grphshnrf Moknop Cribnuk by Hrebdrop P. Fnarp.”
Winnie asked me to repeat it, and I mumbled something like “I am reporting on Klapfnak Heebdump by Fligglediggle Narknark.”
That didn’t satisfy Winnie either, and she demanded that I speak CLEARLY AND LOUDLY.
The jig was up. I was caught with pants down. There was no turning back. I couldn’t claim that my dog ate my homework.
So, I looked down at the floor and inhaled deeply, then raised my head, stared straight at the back of the classroom, and proudly announced to the world that “I am reporting on LOVE, by YURI KARLOVICH OLESHA.”
Winnie clutched her chest, screamed, and ran from the classroom.
Love gave Winnie a heart attack.
The next day the sun shined brightly, and Mrs. Krick was back at the desk in the front of the room.
Chapter 2: Runaway
While in college and for several years thereafter, I was involved in a number of unpleasant relationships.
They all started out fine, of course, with young women who were beautiful, smart, sexy, funny and good cooks; and — wonder of wonders, miracle of miracles — they somehow perceived me as handsome, smart, sexy, funny and a good cook.
Invariably, they turned out to be less than perfect.
Two were heavily into drugs. One of them was a dealer.
One was a thief. She even stole a Fillmore West concert poster from my apartment.
One decided she wanted to try being a lesbian for a year. I was scheduled to be her last man. That was a big burden. Would it be my fault if she didn’t come back?
Another thought she could finance college through prostitution, and wanted me to be her pimp.
And another wanted me to help her make bombs.
Although the sex, food and conversations were good; there was clearly something missing in the stability department; and I wondered if it was my fault.
Did I make them this way?
Do I attract nutty women, or do I drive women nuts?
These days I don’t remember which alternative I thought was better.
And I’m not even sure that one is better.
Back then, though, I wanted to find out.
It was time for an experiment.
I abruptly ended the relationship I was in, and decided that for 30 days I would become socially passive. If Sophia Loren was standing naked next to me in the supermarket checkout line, I resolved to not look or speak, unless spoken to first.
I planned to just go through life, minding my own business for a month, keeping my mouth shut, and I’d see who'd show up.
The first few weeks were boring and tempting. I never saw naked Sophia at Stop & Shop or Ursula Andress in a wet white bikini at the Post Office, but there were a few hot babes I would have at least spoken to under normal circumstances.
Late one night I was on a bus operated by Public Service Coordinated Transport, somewhere in the middle of New Jersey. The bus stopped at a rural convenience store. I was sleepy and there wasn’t much light, but I saw two people get off the bus, and then an absolutely gorgeous red-haired woman got on, carrying a small suitcase.
The bus was nearly empty. She could have had two seats for herself, or sat behind the driver or next to a jock, a priest, or a potential movie star; but somehow she decided to sit next to me. I was flattered, curious, horny and hopeful.
Even if I didn’t complete my research project, maybe I’d get lucky.
We immediately started talking and laughing and touching. It was wonderful. We were soulmates. This was the match made in heaven. After ten minutes I thought we’d known each other for years, and I was ready to spend my life with her.
We had some long kisses in the moonlit bus, and eventually got around to learning each other’s names, biographies, and travel plans.
She told me her name was Cheryl, she was 24, born in Hackensack, and had graduated from Montclair State University with a BA in anthropology.
She also told me she had killed her husband, was running away from the Greystone Park State Psychiatric Hospital in Parsippany, and would perform oral on me if I gave her enough money to get to Pittsburgh.
How did she know to sit next to me?
Chapter 3: Cat Woman
When my best friend Howie Shrobe learned that my junior-year English teacher would be 60-ish spinster Bertha K. Frehse (appropriately her last name rhymes with “crazy”), Howie told me that his mother was in her class years earlier, and that Frehse was NUTS then and NUTS now.
“Crazy Frazy” had day-glow complexion and orange hair like Clarabell the clown on Howdy Doody; and had been torturing students for decades before it was my turn.
It was alleged that she had held onto her job despite countless criticisms, because she provided excellent investment advice to the school principal. Apparently they bought Texas Gulf Sulphur just before a big spike in share price.
Frehse was crazy about (among other things) cats.
Her house was filled with long-clawed felines that hissed and leaped from floor to furniture to the shoulders of unfortunate visitors. Her classroom was filled with pictures of cats. Frehse even purred like a damned cat.
When she wasn’t purring, this teacher of English often talked baby-talk.
Favored cats, and favored students, were called “foofums.” Frehse rewarded the most favored human foofums by showing them cat books, page by page by interminable page.
When she wanted to point out something that impressed her, she’d murmur like a two-year-old: “Saaaaaaay, look uh nat.”
Hillhouse High School had a central courtyard, with a few benches, bushes and scraggly trees. One tree, the foof-tree, was favored by Frehse. A lot of our class time was spent looking at, and, at Frehse’s command, waving at, purring to, and talking to the damned tree.
Some students were punished by Frehse and commanded to water the foof-tree. Some students kissed Frehse’s ass by voluntarily watering the foof-tree. Many students wanted to chop down the damned foof-tree.
We never knew what to expect when we entered the classroom.
Sometimes as we marched in, a student would be pinched on the shoulder and commanded to go to the blackboard and “write ten beautiful words,” or “write 200 words about tobogganing,” or “list 500 reasons why Elvis should be president,” or “explain why striped cats are superior to spotted dogs.”
One time an entire class was ordered to write 500 words on “how Capri pants have been the downfall of western civilization.” As we sat at our desks writing exams or compositions, Frehse would scurry around the room, purring like a damned cat, and sticking a pin into our arms and shoulders. (Fortunately, this was before HIV.)
One regular classroom activity was centered on a grammar workbook developed at Manter Hall School in Cambridge. Frehse’s “Manter Hall Day” was like a perverted TV game show, and could have been invented by Monty Hall. Or Monty Python.
One third of the class would be seated in chairs spread across the front of the room, with titles like Number Boy, Card Girl, Question Girl, and Third Assistant Alternate Score Keeper; and they administered the quiz to the rest of the class.
Frehse was emcee, seated in the middle of the stage. She’d shout "Number Boy!,” “Card Girl!," and so on; and if any Vanna White prototype missed a cue, she lost the job and joined the less-lucky classmates who had to answer the questions.
The only relief was to sneak into Frehse’s classroom, and steal the card with your name on it. Yes, I confess that I did it. I was also half of a two-man commando team that stole the pussy cat door knocker from Frehse’s house. Alan Disler was the other half. Our exploit was too good a story to keep to ourselves, and we couldn’t resist displaying our shiny trophy at school. Word traveled fast and we were quickly confronted by the indignant cat lady. We went back to her house and replaced the knocker. At least we weren’t arrested.
Getting a bad mark from Frehse was no reason to be upset, unless you wanted to satisfy your parents or get into college. In a strange effort to make failures feel better, she claimed that “an F is the mark of true genius,” and often said, “I only flunk my brightest students.” Unfortunately, very few college admissions officers knew that Frehse's F was the equivalent of another teacher's A.
Frehse lost an exam of mine during the first marking period. She accused me of playing hooky that day and failed me for several months' work.
The next term I earned an apparently indisputable A average, but Frehse gave me a C.
The orange-haired cat lady said that she knew I deserved an A, but it was “too great a jump to go from an F to an A,” so I was stuck with the C.
This was during our junior year in high school, when our marks would affect college admission and influence the course of the rest of our lives.
In my yearbook, Frehse said I was “a wonderful person,” and I suppose, it’s nice to know that I was one of her brightest students. Kevin McKeown, an even brighter Frehse failure, skipped a couple of grades and went to Yale.
Chapter 4: Drugging Miss Daisy
One summer while I was in college I needed a job and the Pennsylvania state employment office directed me to the PairAway ShoeCenter in Bethlehem.
It was a huge self-service store with a huge animated neon sign that proudly proclaimed “2 Pairs for $5.”
If you only needed one pair, you paid $2.99, but hardly anyone ever bought just one. If someone needed just one, she'd hang around the store and partner with someone else who needed one, so they could share the five-buck deal.
Five bucks paid for style, but not much quality. These shoes were made of plastic, cardboard, glue and staples. If you wanted footwear constructed with thread and the skin of a cow or a pig, you had to shell out the big bucks at PairAway, at least $5.99 for a pair. Few of the expensive shoes were sold, mostly prom shoes, and the $8.99 steel-toes that were necessary to protect steelworkers' lower extremities.
I was vastly over-qualified for a self-service shoe joint, because I had experience working in a real shoe store and actually knew how to measure feet and could judge if shoes fit. But they needed someone, and I needed a job, so a deal was done.
The store manager was Davey, who had recently returned from a few years soldiering in Viet Nam. He was aware of my anti-war politics, and agreed with them. Second in command was Daisy, the wife of a Marine then in 'Nam. She was still in the “my country, right or wrong” state of mind, but never argued about the war with Davey or me, and hoped that the war would end before her husband got killed.
Miss Daisy drove a bright red fastback Chevy Impala with a USMC decal on the rear window and a noisy exhaust system. The car looked like it was 40 feet long. She drove it very fast and got a lot of tickets. The cops couldn't miss a loud and long bright red Impala.
Daisy's sister Janie worked at the nearby “Just Born” candy factory, and often brought Daisy bags of chocolate-and-molasses coated Peanut Chews, which Daisy eagerly scarfed down, apparently to compensate for the absence of her husband, Gary.
Thanks to the Peanut Chews, and a daily Whopper-with-cheese from the nearby Burger King, Daisy put on about 20 pounds in two months. Then she panicked when she learned that Gary would be coming home for some unanticipated “R&R” (rest and recreation.) Not wanting to scare him away, she determined to quickly shed the effects of the excess eating and regain the body she had on their honeymoon. She made an appointment with a “diet doctor,” who sent her home with a supply of Dexedrine brand amphetamine diet pills, known outside the doctor's office as “speed.”
Davey and I were amazed at the effect the Dexedrine had on Daisy. Not only were the pounds evaporating, but she was absolutely energized. She started coming to work earlier than she had to, and working later than she had to, and was actually waiting on customers instead of just sitting behind the cash register.
Daisy soon looked so good, that Davey said he would have tried to take her to bed if she was not his employee, and if her husband was not a massively muscled Marine. I, too, was attracted to the new Daisy, and I wasn't her boss or afraid of her husband. However, I had a girlfriend; and wasn't interested in an affair with someone else's wife.
Just as Daisy's sister Janie had shared her supply of Peanut Chews, Daisy offered to share her speed. Davey readily agreed. I was not a good pill-taker, having only recently made the transition from rectal aspirin to oral, but I had tried LSD and marijuana, and this was the sixties, so why not?
The next day, after sampling Daisy's supply, Davey and I met with her doctor. This was a time when doctors could actually sell medication to their patients, and did not demand much proof of the need for speed. Soon there were three pill-popping amphetamine-addicted idiots working at PairAway.
We were excellent employees. We were hyper-employees. The store looked GREAT. I made beautiful window displays. Davey made beautiful signs. Daisy kept the store clean. As soon as a speck of dirt appeared on the carpet, out came the vacuum cleaner. As soon as a fleck of dust or a fingerprint appeared on the front counter, out came the Windex.
When a pair of shoes was sold, leaving a gap on the shelves, we'd immediately start shifting the stock to fill in the space, so it looked perfect. There were times when we three stayed in the store for days at a time, only going home for a quick shower and a change of clothes.
We seldom ate, seldom stopped working, and never stopped talking, or drinking Pepsi to lubricate our perpetually dry mouths.
One day my parents drove to Bethlehem for a visit, and took me out to lunch. I was whacked on speed, and would not shut up. During a brief moment of sanity, I was able to step outside my body and observe the sick scene.
I realized I was acting like an asshole, and after lunch, I went back to PairAway and gave my remaining speed to Daisy. She gave me a bag of Peanut Chews. I think I came out ahead on the deal.
Unfortunately, Gary's Marine platoon was ambushed in Chu Lai and when he returned to Bethlehem, it was for his funeral, not for R&R.
A few months later, the still slim widow Daisy quit her job at PairAway and married her former boss.
Chapter 5: Freedom for the Phantom Schmuck
If you've ever spent any time wandering around airports or municipal buildings, you’ve probably passed by a Freedom Shrine.
The shrine can be a spotless and spotlighted room, a few feet of hallway, or a dust-shrouded basement corner. It displays replicas of historical documents provided and maintained by the local Exchange Club.
The documents range from obscure articles of surrender and presidential correspondence, to the Declaration of Independence and Bill of Rights.
Several dozen different pieces are usually displayed. There is seldom any discernable order, sequence or pattern; but the unmistakable themes are rebellion against tyranny, and FREEDOM.
Hillhouse High School had a Freedom Shrine Room. It measured about eight by eight by twelve, had bright lights, a glass wall and no ventilation.
In the ultimate irony, our shrine to freedom was our detention room! — the place where the bad kids were kept.
The shrine was not quite as inhospitable as a Viet Cong “tiger cage,” or a prison cell in Abu Ghraib, but temperatures were often above 100. And of course, boys in Hillhouse — a public school — were required to wear ties and either sport jackets or sweaters.
Each morning during homeroom period, assistant principal George Kennedy’s voice would boom over the PA system: “The following students will please report to the Freedom Shrine Room;” and we’d hear the names of hooky-players, class-cutters, test-cheaters, glue-sniffers, toilet-stuffers, library-smokers, fire-alarm-yankers and sundry suspected terrorists.
There was a regular group of hard-core Shriners. Camille Frosolone, John Belbusti and Gus Dubovik made the list almost every day. Occasionally there’d be a new name, but it wasn’t always a real name.
In an effort to free the Freedom Shrine, the class of ’64 took the “Who’s Dick Hertz” joke to a new level.
Our school had a nice swimming pool, and we went swimming each week, with instruction available for those who needed it. At the first class in September, teacher James J. (“JJ”) Davin distributed index cards for us to record our name, homeroom, division, swimming ability, next-of-kin, and so on.
Someone got an extra card and signed up a phantom named “Steve Schmuck.”
Steve became part of the official class roster, and JJ read his name when he took attendance at the beginning of each class.
For the first few weeks, one of the co-conspirators would yell out “yo” or “here” to establish credibility for our invisible classmate. But there was no way we could come up with an extra body to take the upcoming swimming test, so we stopped answering when Steve’s name was called.
After Steve seemed to miss a few classes, JJ inquired about his welfare and whereabouts, and some of the guys said that they had seen Steve earlier in the day in biology or algebra.
J reported Steve for skipping class, and the following morning our phantom friend achieved a new level of legitimacy and fame.
More than 3000 students and teachers heard assistant principal and resident tough guy George Kennedy announce, through loudspeakers in every classroom, hallway and other place of actual and potential habitation, “Steve Schmuck, please report to the Freedom Shrine Room.”
That was the only time our Freedom Shrine deserved its name.
The Shrine was freed by the Schmuck. I can still hear the cheering and laughter.
Chapter 6: What’s a nice word for “fart?”
Eleanor Browne taught junior high English. She was a vicious and sadistic misandrist — a man-hater — and our class had 31 men-to-be, and not even one young lady.
Browne made our lives MISERABLE. She tortured us at test time (“What five adjectives did Dickens use to describe the horse pulling the cart up the hill in A Tale of Two Cities?”), and she had a strange aversion to basic bodily functions.
Outside of medical school, few people like to discuss excretion and secretion, and perspiration is certainly unpleasant. But Browne found even nasal emissions offensive; and she demanded that we ask her permission to leave the room to sneeze or blow our noses. If she was in a particularly sadistic mood (which happened often), she’d ignore a franticly waving hand until the unfortunate penis-bearer turned bright red or pale white and finally yanked his hanky without permission.
The punishment for unauthorized use of a human nose was temporary banishment to the hallway outside the classroom, where the malefactor could wheeze and sneeze in peace.
Browne had a particularly low, gravelly voice.
One time she was talking in the front of the room, and I farted in the back of the room.
She dragged me to the office of the assistant principal Lou Rubano, but she did not accuse me of committing the vile anal act.
She told Mr. Rubano that I was MIMICKING HER VOICE.
Browne left me with Mr. Rubano, who took me into his private office to get my side of the story.
I was momentarily speechless. I was afraid to say “fart,” had not yet learned “break wind” or “pass gas,” and was embarrassed to use the family word, “boompsie.”
I thought for a while, and then told Mr. Rubano that I had “involuntarily generated anal gaseous emissions that produced simultaneous aural and nasal stimuli.”
He looked at me, and looked at me, and looked at me; and then started laughing hysterically.
“Oh, you FARTED,” Mr. Rubano shouted. “I guess you can’t be punished because her mouth sounds like your asshole.”
He said he’d tell Browne that he took care of me, and informed me that “flatulate” is the nice word for “fart.”
Chapter 7: You can't always get what you want, or what the doctor ordered
Although my parents were commoners (in the British sense) and I’m not a prince, I was born in the Royal Hospital in 1946. The hospital was on the Grand Concourse in the Bronx, back when the Bronx was grand.
I was scheduled for a return visit to have my tonsils re-moved in 1952. The hospital was over-booked, and I was in-stead sent farther west to Mother Cabrini Hospital.
Not only was it not Royal, but it provided my first ex-posure to nuns. I had never seen nuns before, and these were not like Singing Nun Debbie Reynolds or Flying Nun Sally Fields. They had scary black clothing — like witches — and stern demeanors, and they poked needles in my ass.
I endured the horror and pain however, by focusing on my future sweet reward.
I was less than happy about the prospect of being cut open to have part of my body removed; but kindly Dr. Cas-son had assured me that the surgery would not hurt, and that when it was over, I could have any flavor of ice cream that I wanted.
That was a deal I could live with, and Dr. Casson wrote in his notebook that I was to get fudge ripple, my favorite.
Had I known when I was led to my hospital bed that his promised prescription applied to Royal but not to Cabrini, I probably would have tied bed sheets together and gone out a window and hitchhiked home.
In blissful ignorance, I kept my eyes on the prize.
I endured the anesthesia and surgery, and awoke in the recovery room happily anticipating a pint of fudge ripple.
Then scary Sister Evil appeared, carrying a bowl.
She reminded me of the wicked witch that stirred the boiling cauldron in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. That scene had scared the shit out of me a few months earlier and I made my grandmother take me out of the movie theater.
The nun-witch put a bowl of reddish glop in front of me.
I thought she was showing me the tonsil-lectomy guts that the doctor had cut out of me. Timidly, I asked what the stuff was.
She said it was my strawberry ice cream.
With a very hoarse voice, but as forcefully as a fright-ened six-year-old who had just endured surgery could be, I tried to explain that there must be a mistake. “Please lady. Dr. Casson said I could have fudge ripple,” I pleaded.
With much more force, Sister Evil then replied, “You get what you get or you don’t get any!”
I’ve remembered her exact words for 56 years, and in those 56 years, I have never eaten strawberry ice cream.
I’m not too happy about nuns, either.
Chapter 10: Health can be unhealthy
In the early 1960’s Patrick J. Leone taught health and science at the Dr. Susan S. Sheridan Junior High School in New Haven, Connecticut.
Leone preferred that his name be pronounced as a two-syllable anglicized “Leon,” and was obviously shaken if anyone acknowledged his Italian ancestry and pronounced the final vowel. (Another Italian-American teacher would deliberately piss him off by calling him “Pasquale” or “Patsy.”)
Unfortunately, Leone had lower standards for his own verbalizations than for others, pronouncing health as “helt” and science as “sines.”
His speech defect was complemented by a persistent memory problem. Every time my class entered his room — three times a week for ten months — he’d look at us plaintively and ask, “Division Eight, helt or sines?”
He did not know which subject he was supposed to teach us; and even when we confirmed that we were in his classroom to learn about helt, he frequently tried to teach us sines.
Unlike our friends who had other teachers for helt, or health, we had no textbooks. Leone blamed the problem on the “Board of Ett,” and for months he assured us that the texts would be arriving soon.
Leone gave no lectures. There were no discussions, and few quizzes. Most of our class time consisted of laboriously copying into our notebooks, the words that he had laboriously written onto the blackboard.
Sometimes one of us would notice an error on the board, such as a “to” that should have been a “too.” Usually Leone would blame “juvenile delinquents” who’d sneak into his room during lunch period and change his words. Other times he’d try to justify his writing and deliver a long dissertation on grammar, complete with parts of speech we never heard of in our English classes. A few times he blamed defective chalk that twisted in his hand.
Leone was a frustrated performer/producer/director; and parents visiting day was SHOWTIME.
Parents would be welcomed by the class singing the Brusha Brusha Brusha song from an Ipana toothpaste commercial (starring Bucky Beaver), and then he sailed an embalmed bat around the room like a balsawood model airplane. For his grand finale, he squirted the children with water from a hypodermic syringe.
I was not the only Michael in the class. Michael Zagranisky, whose name Leone mispronounced as “Zagransky,” got sick early in the school year and was out for many months. Leone confused the two Michaels, and frequently reported me for skipping class.
Throughout the year, there was a mysterious stack of cardboard boxes gathering dust in a corner of the classroom. In June, with summer approaching, the kids were feeling frisky, and one of them dared to sneak into the unoccupied classroom during lunch.
He cut open the cartons and found our missing text books, which had been in the room since September.
The burglar noticed that one carton had been opened previously. It became obvious that Leone had removed one of our books, and each week he secretly copied a chapter onto the blackboard, and we’d spend three days copying from the blackboard into our notebooks.
Apparently Leone found it much easier to copy, than to teach.
He was not a helty man.
Chapter 13: The last girl on Earth (and hiding hard-ons and nipple hunting)
Suzanne was a petite seventh-grader with an enormous ego better suited to someone twice her size with greater beauty, brains and talent.
So great was her opinion of herself, and so low the opinion that others had of her, that there seemed to be perm-anent graffiti in the street in front of her house proclaiming that “Suzanne IS CONCEITED.”
She and I attended Cotillion, a dancing school that also attempted to teach the social graces to young teenagers on Friday nights.
One Friday night was also Halloween night, and Co-tillion management wisely realized that the only way they could get 12-year-olds to forsake trick-or-treating for dancing school was to have a costume party with prizes.
For me, this was the second best reason to go to Co-tillion. The best reason was to dance with the 18-year-old female dance instructors who had breasts and hips.
Halloween was always my favorite holiday. I started preparing costumes in mid-summer and consistently won prizes for my efforts.
I don’t remember what I wore that year, but as I expec-ted, I won “Best Boy,” and my peers applauded. My prize, unexpectedly, was not a trophy or even a big bag of candy.
I got to choose to dance with any girl I wanted to.
Conceited Suzanne assumed she was the leading candi-date, and aware of my rock-bottom social status, she tried to hide behind some taller friends.
She wasn’t completely hidden, however. I moved close to the microphone, looked toward her, and announced in a deep FM deejay voice, “Don’t worry Suzanne; I wouldn’t pick you if you were the last girl on earth!” There was thunderous applause, especially from the other girls.
Then, instead of skinny flat-chested conceited Suzanne, I picked one of the 18-year-old dance instructors who had breasts and hips.
Wendy was much nicer than Suzanne and gave me a kiss on the lips to congratulate me, and then we did a slow Foxtrot in the spotlight. We danced much closer than normal for 12-year-olds, but probably normal for 18-year-olds.
I can still remember the Foxtrot steps from 50 years ago: Forward. Sidestep. Back. Feet together. Feet together. Slow. Cross that foot.
Wendy gave me a woody.
It lasted for a long time and fortunately I didn’t dance close with the next girl or I might have been banished from Cotillion for being a pervert or a potential rapist.
In seventh and eighth grade as our female classmates were starting to “develop,” and male hormones were also raging, schoolboys often had wet dreams at night and inflated pants in school during the day.
One time I was called to the blackboard in Spanish class while aroused. I walked bent over at the waist to avoid re-vealing my erection and then practically buried my dick in the wall at the front of the room.
I suppose in the 21st Century, teenage boys are proud to wave their flagpoles in the classroom, but back then we were advised to wear our jock straps every day and to take a lot of cold showers and to stop thinking about breasts.
It’s impossible for teenage boys to not think of breasts.
Summer times were great for boob watching. At our beach club, the 15-year-olds in Titty Club would float in the deep end of the pool with diving masks and snorkels, facing the diving board, og-ling females who’d dive off the board. When they’d plunge down to the bottom of the pool and quickly reverse direction to swim up to the surface, sometimes their bathing suit tops would pull back and we’d actually spot a NIPPLE.
A few times we got really lucky. Some girls had not tied their bikini tops tight enough before diving and they lost them in the water, and we got to see TWO COMPLETE BREASTS. Our diving masks made them look even bigger.
For a change of pace, the horny divers could just swim around the pool to try to spot pubic hairs popping out from teenage female crotches, or head for the shower shows.
One of my curious friends and I had made undetectable peep holes under the benches in the individual shower rooms, and we’d go into the showers whenever a hot female went into the next shower. Sometimes our view was blocked by a towel, but we saw a lot.
We gave our subjects nicknames based on their physical characteristics, just like an anthropologist studying apes in Africa. A woman with oversize areolas came to be known as “Helmet Nipples” and was one of our favorites. So was her young teenage daughter, “Helmet Nipples Junior.” Years earlier I had played doctor with her and we got naked and wrapped each other with gauze. Later I was her first date.
Chapter 16: Grandma, the lesbian painter, and arroz con caca
After numerous changes of curricula and colleges, I ended my formal education in early 1970 and moved to New York to become a magazine editor.
I spent the first week living in the Bronx with my grandmother, but we were the Odd Couple.
Grandma Del was like a fastidious female Felix Unger. She was a neat freak who ironed shoe laces and wrapping paper (not kidding) and had floors that were clean enough to eat off of (not kidding about that either).
I was more like Oscar Madison. I was a 23-year-old male who had been living un-supervised since graduating from high school, so my standards were different from my grandmother's. Very different.
We loved each other, but we could not live with each other, so I had to move out. That sounds like some marriages.
Although I had the title of Assistant Editor, my salary was only $115 per week, and even in 1970, that didn't pay for much real estate. I schlepped my suitcases downtown and checked into the Grand Central YMCA, where I could afford a cell-size cubicle within walking distance of my office. I spent weekends wandering the streets of Manhattan looking for a more permanent and appealing residence, where I could bend over in the shower without unauthorized anal penetration if I dropped my soap.
I quickly found out that I was about 20 years too late for a $100-per-month loft in Greenwich Village, so I looked at the East Village. There, I found places that I could afford, but didn't like; and places that I liked, but couldn't afford. There were novel architectural touches, like bathtubs in the kitchens, roaches in the bathtubs, and drunks and drug dealers in the hallways.
Then I had a revelation. If I did somehow find a suitable place in the East or West Village, I'd have to take the subway to and from work, which would probably take about 20 minutes in each direction. Since I had to be on the train anyway, why not consider living in one of the “outer boroughs,” outside Manhattan, with a slightly longer commute?
I could have gone to Staten Island, Brooklyn, or Queens, but I was born in the Bronx. It was familiar turf. That's where Grandma's familiar cooking was, I knew the stores and restaurants, and it would be an easy ride on the train.
I went to a real estate agency that specialized in apartment rentals, and was directed to a potential home on Walton Avenue, near both the number four train that goes down Lexington Avenue in Manhattan, and the D train that runs on Sixth Avenue. (Tourists call it “Avenue of the Americas.”)
The apartment was no palace, but it was affordable ($66.21 per month, thanks to New York's rent control laws), convenient, and good enough. It was considered to be a “professional apartment,” the type of dwelling often rented by a doctor, on ground level with its own private entrance. My front hallway turned out to be the perfect place to park my Vespa motor scooter.
The law required the landlord to paint the apartment for each new tenant, but he refused, and wasn’t worried about prosecution.
He was, however, willing to give me a free month's rent and six gallons of white paint and some brushes, rollers, trays and drop cloths if I agreed to do the work myself. A girl I had recently met, and liked a lot, offered to help me paint. I hoped for a romantic weekend, but after I kissed her, she told me she was a lesbian. That's another story. Maybe it’s another book
Anyway, I got the place painted and furnished and began my life as a New Yorker. I enjoyed exploring and taking pictures and seeing how much had changed, and had not changed, since I had moved to Connecticut in 1952. For a while I thought I'd write a book about my discoveries. It's tentative title: In the Bronx, Boys Still Piss in the Street.
At about 4AM on a Sunday morning, about a year after I moved in, I heard a strange gurgling sound. I got out of bed, checked my bathroom and kitchen and found nothing abnormal, and went back to sleep.
Around 7AM, I heard much more gurgling, and much louder gurgling, and got out of bed. I was horrified to see a stinking slimy mixture of RICE AND SHIT (“arroz con caca” in the Bronx vernacular) oozing out of my bathtub, sink and toilet and rapidly coating the floors of my apartment!
I remembered the old joke about someone falling into a septic tank and yelling “FIRE,” because no one would come to help if he yelled “SHIT.” I called the fire department, and asked them to pump me out. They wouldn't, but they did arrange for the city's Emergency Services Department to clean up and find out what caused the disaster.
Apartment buildings have vertical waste “stacks” — pipes that run from the basement to the roof and connect to the drains in each apartment. Typically, there is a stack for all of the bathrooms in the “A” apartments, all of the “B” apartments, etc. and other stacks for the kitchens in each apartment line. At the top, the stack is open to the air on the roof to help the waste to flow downward. At the bottom, below my ground-floor apartment, the stack made a turn so it could run almost horizontally through the basement and then go underground to the sewer in the street.
Investigators found that some wise-ass kid had gone up on the roof and dropped a 7-Up can down the waste stack. It passed through six floors to the basement below my apartment, but couldn't make the turn to the street, and blocked the path to the sewer. As people in the building awoke and started cooking, eating and flushing, whatever should have gone to the sewer, backed up, squirted out, and ended up in my carpeting.
Two months later, it happened again, and I moved out.
Chapter 18: Do you really want to know what goes into the world’s greatest coleslaw?
Around age six, a favorite restaurant in Yonkers, New York, not far from where we lived in the Bronx, was demolished to make room for a huge shopping center, and I stopped eating ketchup and coleslaw. Nearly two decades passed before I again painted my fries red, but at age 16 I tasted some extremely good coleslaw, and got hooked.
It was not at a gourmet restaurant, or even at a kosher deli, but at the lowly lunch counter of a W. T. Grant’s five-and-dime, next to a store where I had my first summer job.
It was perfect. It was crunchy, not slushy, with cabbage shredded not chopped. It had just the right bite of vinegar, and I got a decent size portion with a 75-cent roast beef sandwich that fit my $1 lunch budget.
I had tried other coleslaws since The Adventurers Inn closed to make way for the Cross County Shopping Center in Yonkers, but nothing impressed me until I tried the slaw at Grant’s.
I was curious about what made it so great, but since I had no interest in making it myself, I was not curious enough to ask for the recipe.
One morning around ten, I was sent to Grant’s to pick up coffee and a toasted corn muffin for my boss.
While waiting for the muffin to be toasted, I learned the secret of the slaw.
There was a huge stainless steel pot on the back counter, filled with the coleslaw ingredients. Mary, the tiny chief cook, was standing on a stool, and was arm-pit-deep into the pot, stirring, squishing, mashing and mixing. She was wrestling with, almost strangling, the cabbage and carrots.
She then withdrew her arms, and squeegeed each arm off with the opposing hand, into the pot.
I could then see that her arms were like King Kong’s arms.
The secret ingredients in the world’s greatest coleslaw were hair and sweat.
It was many years before I tried coleslaw again.
Chapter 19: French, Fried
On TV's Saturday Night Live, Beldar Conehead feared his family would be harassed if Earthlings knew they were aliens from the planet Remulak. The Coneheads couldn't conceal their strangeness, so they claimed to be from France.
Our high school principal was also strange. He capitalized a letter in the middle of his last name so we'd think he was French like the Coneheads. Little Bobby Levine grew up to be Mister (or maybe Monsieur) Robert T. LeVine. He had a smarmy mustache and reminded me of Sergeant Schultz on Hogan's Heroes.
LeVine was obsessed with IMAGE. Although many of his students aspired no higher than a life of soldiering or hairstyling, LeVine ran Hillhouse High School like a pretentious private prep school.
Young ladies could not wear trousers to school. Young gentlemen could wear denim trousers only if they were not dark blue, and dark blue trousers only if they were not denim.
Each young gentleman had to wear a necktie plus a sweater or sports jacket, to prepare us for college, where we wore inside-out sweatshirts with the sleeves cut off.
Because of cost-cutting dumb designs, classroom temperatures were often above 90 degrees, and the only air conditioner in the building was, of course, in LeVine’s office.
In June, final exam papers were often soaked with perspiration.
Kids rebelled by dressing like bowery bums for “Clash Day,” or wore high-neck sweaters and no ties, or pulled fire alarms to cool off outdoors. LeVine wouldn't let boys leave the apparently burning building until he yanked down sweaters to check for ties.
Coincidentally, Elliot, Arthur and I owned a shirt, a tie and a jacket made of the same “batik” cloth. Periodically, we’d loan apparel to each other so one lucky guy could wear all three matching items and make it appear he was tie-less — just to piss-off math teacher Harry Leviton, who was LeVine’s prime tie inspector.
On our graduation day, about eight hundred blue-gowned seniors marched one-by-one onto the stage of Yale University’s ornate Woolsey Hall to receive diplomas from the less-than-loved principal LeVine.
As he shook the students’ hands, some looked him in the eye and said with sincerity, “Fuck you very much, Mr. LeVine.” Some of us even called him “Levine.”
The diplomas had been already issued. The class list had been sent to the newspaper. Colleges had already said “yes.” There was nothing he could do but squirm.
In the '64 yearbook, LeVine wrote “our nation must have intellectual superiority so our kind of society will survive;” but the IMAGE of intellectual superiority was easier to attain than the real thing.
LeVine was suspended for “gross incompetence” in handling school transcripts.
Following complaints from colleges, investigators found some 1,300 grading discrepancies. One student received grades of D+, D-, and D from his biology teacher. The official transcript showed a C for the year.
In 1965, Time magazine said “a lot of kids got a break they did not deserve, and others, perhaps, lost out as a result.”
LeVine was forced to retire early, and the ties went with him.
In the ultimate posthumous irony, if you type “LeVine” using Microsoft Word, the software wants to change our principal’s phony French name back to “Levine.”
Bill Gates knows what’s right.
Chapter 27: My career as a beard, and a profit center
I got into the advertising business by accident.
In 1971 and 1972 I was audio-video editor at Rolling Stone magazine, and wrote reviews of lots of products. When I wrote good reviews, it was common for the manufacturers to ask permission to quote me in their ads. This was good for the manufacturers, good for Rolling Stone, and good for my ego. I almost always agreed, but insisted on the right to review the ads before publication to make sure I was being quoted correctly, and not made to seem like an ass hole.
At one point I said something nice about a turntable, and I got a call from someone at Kane Light Gladney, the turntable manufacturer's ad agency. He explained that they had done an ad with a quote from my review, and would like to buy me lunch, if I'd come by and take a look at the ad. Their office was near mine, so I agreed.
I met a couple of their guys at a restaurant, and then the three of us walked to their office, where a bunch of “rough” ad layouts were tacked to the walls in a conference room. I took a quick look, and saw that while the quotations were accurate, the ads absolutely sucked; and I did not want my name to be associated with them.
With permission, I yanked a couple of layouts off the wall and sat down at the conference table, and within minutes I was an unpaid copywriter. It was easy, and I enjoyed it, and my hosts were impressed. They asked if I could come in on the following Saturday to do some writing for pay.
The Saturday freelancing went on for about a month, and then they asked a powerful question: “How would you like us to triple you salary?” They didn't realize it, but at the time I was only freelancing at Rolling Stone, so the proposed advertising salary was MUCH more than I had been making, and I had a new wife. I said yes immediately.
It was a strange change in environment, with a whole new set of policies and politics to get used to. When I started work, there was a plaque on my door that said “Mr. Marcus.” It was removed a few days later, and the next week a new plaque was attached that said “Michael Marcus.” I found out later that the office manager got into trouble with one of the partners for labeling me a “Mr.” before I had been on the job for a year.
My business card had an impressive title, “Associate Creative Director.” After a few months I learned that the agency's one other copywriter also had the same title. I also got to serve as the “account guy” sometimes, which meant I got taken out to expensive restaurants to hear pitches from boring media salesmen.
I was often in an awkward position, creatively. My bosses were frequently too timid to show our clients what I felt was my best work. They were constantly telling me to “tone it down,” but I had an edgy style, and was in my early twenties, writing for my contemporaries, as I had done when I was at Rolling Stone. We had several showdowns where I said, “you hired me because you like the way I write, so either show my work, or fire me.” They usually caved in.
Sometimes I'd come up with far-out ad concepts, and hold secret meetings with our clients and sell them on my ideas. If the clients liked my stuff, my bosses had little choice but to go along.
There were other times I went to another kind of secret meetings.
In addition to our work turning out ads, press releases and sales promotion gimmicks, we also were procurers — arranging “dates” between our clients and Penthouse Pets and Playboy Bunnies, part of the benefit of advertising in those magazines.
Jack, boss of one of our client companies, had a long-running affair with one of the Pets, and sometimes when he was in town to be with her, I went along as the “beard,” so if any people saw the three of us, and knew that Jack was married, they'd assume that I was with the Pet. I suppose I might have been flattered, but it was really a waste of my time. After dinner in a hotel dining room, the three of us would go upstairs in an elevator, but I'd make a U-turn and come back down and go home.
I learned a lot about the ad agency business at Kane Light Gladney, but it was not always a pleasant educational experience. The partners started referring to me as a “profit center,” and urged me to work faster. In April, my boss told me that I had accomplished so much, that there was no need for any more ads to be done until September, and I was fired.
I quickly got a job as a copywriter at Muller Jordan Herrick and helped them to steal the Columbia recording tape account away from Kane Light Gladney, who had taught me the ad business very very well.
Muller Jordan Herrick wasn't a perfect place to work, but it was a lot better than KLG.
Our office was at 666 Fifth Avenue, in the Tishman Building, opposite St. Patrick's Cathedral. The floor below us was bigger than our floor, and on nice days, we'd open our windows, and move out our chairs, phones, tables and typewriters and use the roof of the lower floor as an al fresco office and tanning salon.
I won a prestigious Andy award from the Advertising Club of New York while at Muller Jordan Herrick, and we had mostly good clients, and a few idiot clients. The worst was United Jersey Banks, where marketing was controlled by dullards in the legal department.
One time I was writing a routine ad about savings account interest rates, and some government-intimidated ball-less shyster insisted that I write “a minimum deposit of at least $500 or more.” I tried explaining to this testosterone-deprived wimp that this was repetitive and redundant and superfluous, that we did not need to say all three! He would not give in. I told him to find someone else to write the ad.
My office had a weird phone with two number seven keys on it, but no eight, and a very nice couch, inherited from the previous inhabitant.
I liked to close my door at noon time for a siesta, but my boss Andy Weiss hated closed doors and had a nasty habit of opening the door and interrupting my naps. For some unknown reason, he didn't mind if I took an hour to eat, but he didn't like the idea of me taking five minutes to eat and 55 minutes to sleep.
After a while, my couch mysteriously disappeared.
Chapter 32: SHORT STUFF
This is a collection of really short, short stories that have nothing in common except their size. By putting them together instead of giving them their own chapters, I may have saved half a tree. (There are more in the real book than in this online preview.)
What a putz!
In the Pennsylvania Dutch dialect, a “putz” is a three-dimensional nativity scene — a crčche.
In Yiddish slang, however, the word is the equivalent of “schmuck,” and means both penis and fool.
Bethlehem, Pennsylvania’s Christmas customs received the attention of a women’s magazine in the late 1960s. It described the special meals and music, the decor, and the elaborate putzes assembled in many homes.
The small Jewish community in Bethlehem had a good laugh at the magazine's suggestion that tourists might “knock on any door in town and ask to see the family putz.”
Oh Uncle Herman, there's someone here to see you.
Vinnie’s water closet
In what used to be the British Empire, water closet, or “WC” is a euphemism for toilet.
In the late 1950s, in the Dr. Susan S. Sheridan Junior High School in New Haven, Connecticut, there was a real closet that often had water in it.
The old, original part of the school, like many schools built in the early 20th century, had a “cloak closet” across the rear of the room, where kids would hang their jackets and coats. Heavy wooden doors moved vertically in tracks, attached to sash cords like old-fashioned windows.
When the doors were down, there were open spaces above and below them.
Vincent Vetrone taught math at Sheridan. If he had reason to punish a student, the cloak closet made an excellent jail cell. And the space above the door was just the right size for Vetrone to dump in a bucket of water, onto the kid’s head.
It wasn’t as bad as waterboarding at Abu Ghraib, but it sure wasn't pleasant. And a lot of kids’ coats got wet, too.
Always a wiseass
In September, in the first swimming class at Hillhouse High School, instructor James J. Davin distributed 3 x 5-inch file cards to every boy.
He instructed us to “write down your name, home room, division, and YES or NO. If you can swim, circle YES. If you cannot swim, circle NO.”
I yelled out, “if you can row a boat, circle OR.”
A platinum card is just as good as Medicare
Years after I moved out of the Bronx, I was visiting someone in the Bronx.
I saw posters and heard amplified announcements proclaiming the availability of FREE CHEESE, being distributed by the Department of Agriculture. Apparently our taxes subsidized the dairy farmers and they over-produced, so this was a way of paying back something to the taxpayers.
I didn't need the cheese, and if I did, I could afford to buy my own, so I ignored the announcements.
After awhile, the audio announcements turned frantic. Apparently, any cheese that was not given away by 4PM would be thrown away. There was no provision for storing it locally, or returning it to government warehouses or to the dairies that made it. Our government agents were BEGGING us to take it away.
I did not want to turn down my government in a time of need, and accepting free food was certainly less of a burden than joining the army, so I went to the community center and joined the giveaway line.
When it was my turn, I was asked for my welfare card. I said I didn't have one.
Then I was asked for a Medicaid card. I didn't have one of those, either.
Then I was asked if I had a Medicare card, and I didn't have one of those.
The woman on the opposite side of the counter said, “Sir, we'd really like to give you the cheese, but Federal regulations require us to see some identification.”
I smiled and asked, “do you take American Express.” She said, “sure.” I showed the card and I got a huge 10-pound block of cheese.
Thank you, Mr. President.
Maybe I don't know as much as a caveman
The younger sister of a girl I dated in college was given a horse for her birthday. She named the horse “Vida,” in honor of the Iron Butterfly song In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida. The family didn't have much money, and couldn't afford to hire a trainer. I volunteered to try.
I had generally been successful with animals. One of my tropical fish, a Kissing Gourami named Carl, grew huge and lived for six years. I liked dogs. Most dogs liked me. Some dogs obeyed me. And a horse is just a tall dog. Isn't it?
Besides, 15,000 years ago, the first Cro-Magnon who rode a horse didn't read any horse books or watch a horse DVD, and probably didn't know any more about horses than I did.
I decided to walk into the corral with an apple and a smile, and see what would happen.
I got kicked. I got pushed. I got knocked over. I got bitten. Vida stomped on my foot and pushed it into the mud. Vida wouldn't even take the apple from me.
I have a new appreciation for Cro-Magnons.
Maybe grandsons are interchangeable
One time while I was in college, I took a weekend away from campus and drove to spend some time with my aunt and uncle on Long Island. While there, I called my grandmother in the Bronx, and we had the usual grandmother/grandson chat.
I said “Hi grandma,” and asked how she was. She told me about a few aches and asked how I was. She asked about my folks, my brother and my sister. I asked about some relatives. She asked about school. I asked about her neighbors. She asked me about Uncle Steve and Aunt Judy.
I said, “who?”
She repeated, “Uncle Steve and Aunt Judy.”
I said, “I don't have an Uncle Steve and Aunt Judy. I must have called the wrong grandmother.”
She said, “That's OK. I enjoyed talking to you. Please call me again. My own grandson never calls.”
Chapter 36: OK, so maybe baseball isn't child abuse
When I lived in the Bronx, I lived just a few miles from Yankee Stadium, and only a few more miles from the Polo Grounds in upper Manhattan where the New York Giants played before they moved to San Francisco in 1958.
Despite all this nearby major league activity, I was no sports fan. I didn't give a damn about baseball, and couldn't understand why others did. When other kids asked who my favorite player was, I'd quickly answer “Mickey Mantle.” It was an easy answer, because Mick and I shared initials, and no kid in the school yard would challenge my choice. Fortunately, none of them asked me for his batting statistics.
My mother's parents, who lived near us in the Bronx, were big baseball fans, and wanted to convert me. They surprised me with tickets to a double-header, and it was a double-dose of torture.
It was the longest day of my life. Maybe it was the ten looooooooooooooongest days of my life. I spent hour after interminable hour staring at white spots on a green field, listening to old men belch from their beers, and asking my grandparents, “can we go home yet?”
I loved Gramma Del and Grampy Jay, but this was child abuse.
In later years, I didn't get to like ballgames much more. In mandatory games during gym class, my favorite position was to be “left-out.”
In college, I went through a strange metamorphosis. There was an intramural softball program, and a bunch of hippies and assorted misfits thought it might be fun to form a team to play stoned, with absolutely no intention of winning. We'd get to smoke some weed, enjoy the great outdoors, and get free T-shirts. It sounded like a good plan.
What I didn't plan on, was that I turned out to be a “power hitter,” a “homerun king” just like Mickey Mantle. I found no joy in running around the bases, or catching balls hit by the opposing teams, but I loved whacking those balls as far as I could.
My team mates thought I was a traitor to the cause. The team fell apart, and it was many years before I picked up a bat or saw another ball game.
Around 1995, my nephew and nieces nagged me to take them to a Yankees game, at the site of my long-ago — but not forgotten — abuse. I really didn't want to go, but I like the kids, so I agreed. I packed a radio with a headset, and plenty of reading material, and glumly resolved to pass the hours as pleasantly as possible.
I tuned my radio to WCBS, allegedly an all-news station, and was disappointed and shocked to hear a play-by-boring-play description of the game in front of me. For some unknown reason, I didn't immediately select another station, and soon, for the first time in my life, I understood what baseball was all about.
In baseball, it always seemed to me that the hitters were the heroes. People like Babe Ruth, Ted Williams and Mantle (and even me) hit the homeruns that drove up the scores that won the games and the pennants.
But what I learned from listening to the radio that afternoon was that it was the CATCHERS and PITCHERS, not the hitters, who were really in control. Balls, not bats, made the big difference. Throwing was more important than hitting; and it was the sneaky, stealthy, silent catchers, squatting in the dirt behind home plate, who signaled secret instructions to the pitchers who caused hero hitters to strike out.
Because of those good pitchers, even really good hitters seldom got a good hit. And when they did, the balls were usually caught by really good fielders, and the hitters did not score homeruns.
I actually enjoyed baseball that day.
If someone had properly explained baseball to me in 1950, my life might have been very different. I might have liked baseball enough to become a homerun king for the New York Yankees.
As Marlon Brando said in On the Waterfront in 1954 — shortly after I left the Bronx — “I coulda been a contender. I coulda been somebody.”
Chapter 43: Even Pennsylvania has hillbillies, but why is their town named after the capital of Libya?
Pennsylvania is smaller than Texas, but it's still a big state.
The western end is mid-western, with steel mills, coal mines, oil wells, forests and deer hunters; and it touches Great Lake Erie.
The east end comes within a few miles of the Atlantic Ocean, and has Philadelphia, with its Philadelphia lawyers, universities, hoagies, pretzels, cheese steaks, Rocky Balboa and the Liberty Bell.
Eastern Pennsylvania is very much part of the Washington-to-Boston East Coast metroplex.
Within the Keystone State’s borders are the usual mountains and rivers and turnpikes and tunnels, and even something known as the “Grand Canyon of Pennsylvania.” PA’s diverse populace includes Philly’s steak makers, Slippery Rock students, Pottsville brewers, Pittsburgh Steelers, Carlisle tire makers, Pocono honeymooners, Three Mile Islanders, Hershey chocolatiers, and the Intercourse Amish.
The most exotic Pennsylvanians I ever encountered were gathered one Sunday in the late 1960s at Ontelaunee Park in New Tripoli. They wouldn't have seemed exotic or out of place in rural Georgia, and some of these creepy country folks could have acted, quite naturally, in Deliverance. Ba-da-bing-bing-bing.
New Tripoli, if you care, is in Lynn Township, in Lehigh County, between Allentown and Scranton, and it seemed like it had been transplanted from well below the Mason-Dixon Line. Strangely, for a reason that has been long forgotten, it is named after the capital of Libya, immortalized in the Marines Hymn (“From the halls of Montezuma, to the shores of Tripoli”). It's pronounced differently, however: nu-tri-PO-lee.
The area was settled mostly by Pennsylvania Dutch (who were really German, not Dutch), who had farms and small businesses that supported the farms. It's known for farming, country music and crappie fishing. Apparently the crappie fishing was good, not crappy. On the other hand, I think most country music is crappy; and had I known the details, I probably would never have gone to New Tripoli.
From 1929 to 1988, New Tripoli was the site of Ontelaunee Park, a woodsy recreation area with a carousel, miniature train, swimming pool, picnic tables, and a stage that featured country music performers. Over the years, the park showcased the talents of countless country performers that I never heard of, like Shelby Nestler, Al Shade and Shorty Long; as well as Conway Twitty and Loretta Lynn. I did know of them.
Although I own CDs by Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash, K. D. Lang and the Dixie Chicks, I hate most country music. When I was in college, I was a partner in a booking and management company that supplied bands for fraternity parties, bars and discos. Our bands performed Motown, classic rock, blues, psychedelic, oldies, hard rock and heavy metal, but no country.
We heard that there was going to be a “battle of the bands” at Ontelaunee Park, which promised to be an opportunity to showcase one of our groups, and perhaps even win some prize money. Unfortunately, we had no idea that Ontelaunee Park was hillbilly territory, and might not be the best place to exhibit Oredad.
Oredad (from “metal” and “father”) was a high-wattage heavy-metal group, with lots of banging and clanging, and long drum solos and minimal lyrics.
The Ontelaunee audience, on the other hand and unbeknownst to us, was into acoustic a-pickin’ and a-pluckin’ and a-twangin’ and a-strummin’ and very sad lyrics about adulterers and gamblers.
After a long and dusty ride (uh-oh, that sounds like a country lyric), we unloaded the U-Hauls near the stage, and waited our turn for what we were told would be the “rock segment.” After endless hours listening to pedal steel guitar and banjo plucking and songs about wayward wives and worn-out mules (or maybe it was worn-out wives and wayward mules), we learned that Oredad was the rock segment. Apparently other rock bands had the good sense to do some research, and stayed away.
At least we seemed to have a good chance of winning first prize in the rock category.
The musicians in Oredad were high school kids, and did not have the freedom to shave their heads, pierce their chins, grow fluorescent pink Mohawks or have tattoos like adult heavy-metal bands.
Their clothing was tamer, too. No Kiss-like leather and spikes. They wore ratty jeans, scuffed work boots and faded T-shirts like regular high school kids, which contrasted with the polished cowboy boots, fringed leathers, bandanas and 10-gallon hats worn by the other Ontelaunee performers. Oredad’s appearance marked them as alien invaders the minute they took the stage, even before a string was stroked.
The emcee announced who they were and the groupies and sisters and parents who had made the trip applauded.
The rest of the audience was cynically silent, and we heard unpleasant murmurs and rustling as people noticed the band members had no fiddles or pedal steel or dulcimer.
Oredad's performance began with the lead guitarist, rhythm player and bass player silently facing the rear of the stage. The keyboard guy stared into space, above the audience, his fingers motionless. The drummer started whaling away with sticks and feet, and began his trademark 15-minute drum solo.
Within seconds, the audience was in wide-eyed shocked silence. It was like the scene in Back to the Future when Marty McFly leads the band in a noisy version of Johnny B. Goode and startles the students and Principal Strickland, who puts fingers in his ears. The silence at Ontelaunee quickly turned into loud boos and catcalls. And then the hillbillies started throwing food at Oredad. And then beer cans. And then came the sticks and the stones.
Oredad was definitely the best rock band to perform that day at Ontelaunee Park in New Tripoli, Pennsylvania. But they took no trophy home. Actually, they were lucky to leave alive.
Chapter 39: Three in a bed
For a while in college I had the hots for a lusty and loose young lady named Nina. Sometimes she had the hots for me, sometimes for a friend of mine, or another friend of mine, and sometimes for Danny, who was our art professor.
One night Nina and I were at Danny's apartment to look at Kodachrome slides he had taken at European museums during several summer vacations. He could not afford to have prints made from the thousands of slides, and did not own a slide projector. We sat around his dining room table and held up the slides in front of the chandelier bulbs to see them. It was not much of an art exhibition.
After awhile, Danny brought out some wine, and then some joints, and put Procol Harum on the stereo; and pretty soon we three had a serious buzz on. Before the end of A Whiter Shade of Pale, Danny moved his chair so he could sit behind Nina. He started massaging her shoulders and back and occasionally reached around to massage her bra-less breasts through her thin satin blouse. He kissed her neck and exposed shoulders. Then he took her right hand, kissed it, held it, and stood up and invited her into his bedroom.
Nina stood up, too. She smiled at him, and then she smiled at me. She playfully grabbed my right hand with her left hand, and invited me to come along. This was the 60s, so I went along.
Pretty soon one professor and two students were naked and squished together on a double bed. Since it was Danny's home and he was our professor and had issued the first invitation, I felt he deserved to be first with Nina.
Unfortunately, Danny couldn't get hard, and resorted to packing poor Nina with Vaseline in an effort to ease his entry, but it didn't help. Frustrated, Danny told me to take over, and he started rubbing my penis to get me in the mood. I could tolerate three in a bed, but not another man's hands on my private parts. Danny's move got me out of the mood, and I quickly rolled out of the bed, grabbed my clothes, and got out of that apartment as fast as I could.
Danny did give both Nina and me A's in the course, and later married another one of his students. I don't know if he ever had prints made from his slides.
Chapter 44: Parental issues
I hope Mom doesn't read this
Years ago, when I was somewhere between 10 and 15 years old, my mother was in the dining room talking to a friend. I was in the kitchen, and I heard part of their conversation.
I no longer remember the details, but I do remember that my mother was talking about me and said, “I knew he was right, but I couldn't tell him.”
I didn't trust her after that. Not for a long time.
So Dad, whose fault it is?
When I was a teenager, I fought a lot with my parents. I don't remember the specific issues, other than some crappy marks in school, and them not letting me get my driver's license when I was 16.
I once planned to run away from home, but when I started writing the farewell note and got to the part where I was saying goodbye to the dog, I got weepy and threw away the paper and decided to stay.
I guess I thought they were insensitive and intolerant and didn't understand me, just like most normal parents. Sometimes I’d stay in my room, and endlessly blast Bob Dylan’s Don’t Think Twice, it’s All Right, but I don’t think they got the message.
It was probably normal for teens to fight with their parents. My parents, however, didn’t think it was normal, and sent me to an adolescent psychologist. I was the adolescent, not him.
I didn't mind the chat sessions, but they didn't seem productive; and after a while, the shrink said that he wanted my folks to come in for some sessions so he could hear their side of the story.
When I told my parents, my father refused to go, saying “I'm not going to pay $25 an hour to be told it's MY fault that you’re messed up.”
What came first, the chick or the driver's license?
I became 16 in 1962, during my sophomore year in high school.
The state of Connecticut let people drive when they were 16 years old; but my parents had different rules.
Mom said, “you don’t need a driver's license, because you’re not going out with girls.”
Hey Mom, did you ever think, that maybe the reason I wasn’t going out with girls, was because I didn’t have a driver’s license?
What's worse, mom and dad, or moo-goo-gai-pan?
When I went home from college to visit my parents, I frequently got really bad migraine headaches.
When I went home from college to visit my parents, we frequently ate Chinese food. It wasn't available in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, where I went to school.
Around this time, a theory started circulating that migraines were triggered by the monosodium glutamate that was used as a flavor enhancer in many Chinese dishes.
As an experiment, I decided to avoid Chinese food the next time I went home. I still got a migraine.
The unavoidable conclusion was that my parents made me sick.
Chapter 60: It didn’t matter to anyone but him
I had a very good friend in high school. I’ll call him “Stevie Edison” here. It’s not his real name, but I don’t want to embarrass him.
Stevie was extremely smart and witty and articulate and his last name was just as famous as “Edison;” and he claimed to be related to an equally famous American inventor.
He also claimed to be related to Jackie Kennedy’s younger sister, Princess Lee Radziwill. Stevie’s home, he wanted us to believe, was a mansion on “Edison Avenue,” which was named after an earlier generation of his family.
The phone book showed his address in a much shabbier part of town. He explained that the discrepancy was due to his parents’ need for privacy and security.
Similarly the kids from school were never allowed to visit the mansion. He did come to my house after school a few times; and was driven home in an old car. He said the woman driving was his maid, but it was obvious she was his mother.
Everyone liked Stevie, but no one understood his need to fake it. It was almost like a witness protection program. We all knew where Stevie really lived, but no one said anything or blew his cover.
Hillhouse High School was a public school — not a blue-blood private school — despite our principal’s petty and pretentious dress code. The students were drawn from neighborhoods all over New Haven. Those neighborhoods ranged from wealthy to welfare, and there was an equally wide range in students’ intellect and aspiration. Some of my classmates earned MDs and PhDs in the Ivy League; others would become soldiers, chefs, mechanics, thieves, secretaries, and hairdressers.
In school, if there were cliques, the dividing lines were based much more on intellect than on income or race or religion. It was obvious (at least to white Jewish kids) that most of the kids in Hillhouse who were headed for college were white and Jewish, but other kids “crossed over.”
Billy Priestly was probably the first black guest at one all-white country club, and many of his friends joked that he was an “honorary Jew.” Most of Stevie Edison's friends were Jewish kids from affluent Westville. He was a Catholic from “the Hill.” I think his father drove a cab.
I was never aware of any snobbery at Hillhouse, but a classmate who remembers Stevie said, “Who knows what subtle cues he might have picked up, or imagined.” Another student said, “No one ever busted him over his back-story; we had some kind of weird live and let live policy. How tolerant we were.”
Perhaps the snobbism was more obvious for girls than for boys. My father owned clothing stores. But like most of the boys, I wore the bare minimum necessary to comply with the principal’s “collegiate” dress code. Stevie, on the other hand, always wore very preppy sports jackets.
I don’t know how Stevie’s secrets leaked out, but the truth was pretty well known. Some of us wanted to help him, to let him know that we didn’t care where his father worked or how much money his family had.
But it’s tough to start a conversation with a friend by saying, “I know you’ve been lying to me, but...”
I once tried to get professional help for Stevie.
I described the situation to a guidance counselor, but he assumed I was describing my own situation, not a friend’s invented life. Nothing I could say would convince the counselor that I really was describing Stevie; and he recommended psychotherapy for me. It was a basic sitcom cliche.
I hope that Stevie eventually got the help he needed and was able to “come out.” On the other hand, maybe he did just fine. Maybe good friends were all the help he needed.
Chapter 61: The return of Daddy Demon
At a high school reunion, I was approached by another old man.
Years ago, when his hair was darker and greasier, Rick was known as “Daddy Demon.” In our high school yearbook, for his future, it says “uncertain.”
Ricky smiled, said “Hi, howya been?” and he raised his right hand to shake mine.
I kept my right hand at my side.
I reminded him that in 1958, when we were in seventh grade, he poked holes in my bicycle tires and snuffed out a cigarette on my head.
I did not shake Ricky’s hand.
I did tell Ricky to go fuck himself.
I still remember a lot.
Chapter 65: What was, and what if?
While writing this book I spent a lot of time reading old love letters, appointment books, term papers, “little black books,” yearbooks and autograph books and looking at old pictures.
I Googled a lot of names and sent a lot of email. I joined Classmates.com and Reunion.com and used Facebook and Myspace and Zoominfo and online newspapers trying to find out what happened to friends, enemies and lovers from the past half century. Some people are still missing. Some stories were not written. Sometimes when I Googled, I found my own words, but nothing new.
Looking backwards can be fun, surprising, revealing and intriguing. But playing “what if” can also be unpro-ductive, addictive or even dangerous.
Historians do it all the time. They get paid to ponder.
They contemplate how different life would be if the South had won the Civil War, if Germany had won World War II, if JFK and RFK and MLK had not been killed, and if one Supreme Court Justice hadn’t awarded the presidency to George W. Bush.
But personal retro-speculation can cause trouble. If you spend too much time rearranging the past in your mind, you can neglect the present and hurt your futur
In assessing my own life, I had to wonder about some decisions, indecisions and missed opportunities.
A few weeks into my first semester in college, it was obvious that I was at the wrong college and headed for the wrong career. I didn’t make either choice. Elizabeth Clif-ford, my high school guidance counselor, picked both.
She decided I should go to Lehigh University and prepare to become an electrical engineer. She strangely ig-nored the facts that my math College Board scores kept going down and my “verbal” scores kept going up. She knew I liked electronics. But the electronics that I liked centered on soldering irons and screwdrivers; but engineers used slide rules. I never figured out how to use the slide rule properly. Now I use computers.
This guidance counselor — who was entrusted to guide teenagers in some of the most important decisions of their lives — really didn’t know what engineers did; but she had decided that I should do what they do.
In an effort to guide me, Miss Clifford gave me an ap-titude test that revealed I had a “99th percentile common-ality” with chemical engineering students at Penn State.
I hated chemistry class. I resented memorizing the atomic numbers of the elements. The chemistry lab in every sci-fi movie I’d ever seen had a huge “periodic table of the elements” on the wall that the mad scientist could easily consult if he needed the atomic number for Bohrium.
If important professional scientists could look at the big wall chart, why couldn’t high school students?
The best mark I got in chemistry was during the marking period when I stayed home with mononucleosis. The most fun I had with chemistry was mixing water with sodium bicarbonate and filling our basement with foam.
After one semester in college, I switched from elec-trical engineering to Lehigh’s tiny but excellent journalism department — a spot that neither my guidance counselor nor I would have selected in advance.
But looking back from 2008 to 1965 it seems to have been a great place to be. It even made this book possible.
Who knew? Miss Clifford certainly didn’t.
Sure, we all know that “shit happens.” But so does ser-endipity. Lots of good things happen by accident. Even great people are born without planning.
Tenagers are expected to choose their life path — and often their life mate — with very little information and very little experience.
My junior high school expected me to decide if I would start on the path to college or not, based on five-month courses in Spanish (called “Language Exploratory”) and typing (“Business Exploratory”).
But learning to say “Mas salsa por favor, Seńor Gomez” with an authentic accent does not mean a 15-year-old is either qualified or destined to become an engineer.
And being able to type 40 words per minute without peeking at the keys or making too many mistakes does not mean a 15-year-old will become a good manicurist.
But that’s what our school system assumed.
How can a 15-, 16-, or 17-year-old pick a career that will be right at age 30, 40, 50 or 60?
Or pick a spouse that will be right at those ages?
I’m amazed at people who marry their high school sweethearts. I’m more amazed if they are still married 20 or 40 years later. How can a 16-year-old choose a 60-year-old to be married to?
Strangely, it seems to work.
The divorce rate for people married when they’re under 20 is much lower than those who get married when they’re between 20 and 24. Sadly, my high school classmates have had lots of divorces. But many married again.
Eighteenth Century writer Samuel Johnson declared that second marriages are “the triumph of hope over experience.”
The more often you’ve married, the more likely you are to have a divorce. The divorce rate for third marriages in the United States is over 70%.
While writing this book, it was inevitable that I thought about, fantasized about and played the “what-if” game about some of the high school sweethearts whom I didn’t marry.
One time, as the book progressed, I nearly blacked out during a medical procedure. In my mind, I reached out and held the hand of a beautiful 16-year-old girl.
I later found a current picture of her. She’s a wrinkled old lady now, and one fantasy has been destroyed forever.
The Three Don’ts
Œ Don’t focus on what could have been. Deal with what is. You probably can’t change much anyway.
Ť Don’t try to manipulate the space-time continuum. You’re not Dr. Emmett Brown. You probably don’t have a DeLorean with a 1.21 gigawatt plutonium-powered flux capacitor. You might not be able to come back to the future.
Ž Don’t seek a lot of information. The reality of the present can disrupt the memories and fantasies of the past. Enjoy your dreams
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