My high school had quite a basketball tradition. We were the powerhouse of our conference, having won it for the entirety of the 60s. We had gone to the state championship back in 62, only to lose in the final game. When I was in 8th Grade we would go to the games in the gym, not being satisfied with a victory, but instead chanting We Want a Hundred, which, we sometimes got.
We had great teams in the mid 60s but some bad luck. In 65 a new school, Bridgewater Raritan Regional, had a kid named Mike Grasso who was 6-8, and altho our team had overall more talent, the new school with the big kid beat us in the regional final. And 66 and 67 should have been our years as well, except for a Weequahic team from Newark that sported a front line of 6-11, 6-10 and 6-9 and was No 1 in the country. It was said that the only team that could beat them was UCLA.
Nonetheless there was no reason to suspect that we would capture what we felt was our birthright again this year, 1968, the Shore Conference Championship.
But stuff went wrong.
First of all, our "new" school was built in 1959, and we had never lost a game there. But in 1968 it happened. The fact that it was an afternoon game, made necessary by the riots and fights in the football season, gave it a surrealistic air.
Then we lost in the Shore Conference tournament. For the first time in recent memory, some other school was the champ.
By the time the state tournament rolled around, no one thought we'd last very long.
But we won the first round game, then the sectional semi-final, and lo and behold, there we were, going to play Trenton, the team that surprisingly knocked us out in the sectional final the year before, for the sectional championship.
The bad news was, we were going to have to play them in Trenton. The state tournament, especially in the later rounds, was supposed to hold its games at neutral sites, but it so happened that the neutral site for the sectional final that year had been chosen as the Trenton Armory. We'd have to travel 40 miles, they'd have to roll out of bed.
In order to make things more supportive of our team, the school decided to run some buses of students to the game. There were going to be something like 5 or 6 buses of students going. The JV team got to go in the same bus as the varsity and cheerleaders, but we lowly freshman on the freshman team had to go with the general school population. I decided to go with a couple of friends.
The Sixties was an odd time in the sense that many places were in transition - economic transition, social transition, racial transition. Trenton, and old Revolutionary town cum old manufacturing town, was losing its European ethnic immigrant character and becoming more and more black. But right at that moment in time, Trenton Central was somewhat of a mirror image of the racial character of our HS - half black, half white.
Trenton was favored and had a top notch, all state player named something like Sandy Smith, but the game was close throughout. Smith had a great game, but it came down to the last minute. Ultimately and improbably, we prevailed.
Fans rushed the court in celebration, but off to my left, before I could get involved in the celebration, and ugly roar started up. As I mentioned earlier, riots have a way of spontaneously and suddenly materializing. You could see in the stands at midcourt a sort of movement of energy, compressing and then expanding. Heads turned in that direction. Adults started moving in that direction. Cops started moving in that direction. The riot, like a storm, suddenly defined its vortex, and it was as if bodies were being drawn involuntarily toward it, like debris in a tornado. Ironically, Trenton's team's nickname was the Tornadoes.
The times being the times, black kids sat with black kids and white kids with white, even tho we all came up on the same bus. So there were four blocks of student sections - white Neptune, white Trenton, black Neptune, black Trenton. At this point the movement was centered around the interstice of the two black sections, so it was not racial at all.
But then, even closer to me on my left, another roar went up. Where a moment ago the two white sections were stunned and silent on-lookers at the black on black fracas, now a louder, uglier roar went up in the white area. Pushing and shoving occurred. A second vortex developed, replete with shouting and flailing arms.
A wall of cops came rushing now at us. Whether it was instintual or the residue of my father's sage advice - when you see a cop, run the other way - I started scrambling down the stands and away from the centers of the storms. Since both rumbles were happening to my left, my friends and I started moving to our right. Actually, one of my friends, a friendly, likable but crazy guy, decided to go towards the center of the white storm, but the rest of us were beating a path to the exits on the right, onto the street and into the buses.
Since all available cops had converged on one or another of the fracases there were none by the exits. Nonetheless, all of "the old guys", ie, the adults who had come to see the game, were moving in an orderly fashion out of the doors and that helped move everyone who wanted to to get out without a fuss. There was some white on white shouting and instigation going on right outside the door, but the "guys in hats", as the adults were known as, were in greater number and succeeding in keeping the kids apart and moving along.
I looked over my shoulder back at the Armory floor. Cops were holding kids of both races, moving them involuntarily out of the center of the mess. In the black rumble it appeared that both sides were starting to unify against the police, at least verbally, while the white rumble still seemed all about fighting each other.
Fairly soon and without much incident, we were out of the Armory and onto the street. Our buses were lined up on the curb. Before we got out when we arrived we were told to remember the number of our bus so that we could get back on the same bus at the end, expediting and simplifying things. We walked quickly past bus after bus. Ours was the last one in the line.
By now things were kinda quiet and orderly, but while other kids were getting on their buses, ours had its door closed. This was odd, and one of the black students started banging calmly on the door to have the bus driver open it.
The energy of the riot inside the building may not have had much presence outside initially, but after waiting outside the bus for the doors to open all of a sudden one of those waves of energy passed thru and by us. Suddenly kids are racing by and the adults have started jogging. There is palpable tension in the air.
The black student in our crowd sees this and begins banging on the doors of the bus with greater urgency. Then the doors on the buses ahead of us close and they start pulling away. The kid is really upset at this, slamming the doors with his fists and banging against them with the full force of his body.
As I watch this suddenly many of the kids lined up to get into our bus start screaming and running the other way. I turn to see what they were so upset about. A wave of angry unknown kids is running towards us. I can see out of the corner of my eye that they have caught up with some of our guys and fighting has begun. But my eyes are by now focused on the immediate threat to me, a kid with a big afro coming right at me.
Stuff happens fast in riots. That's all I can say. You sit back in hindsight and ask yourself, why didn't you run away when the other kids did? Why did you turn around to see what was happening? Why did you just stand there when that kid was coming directly at you? All good questions, but they don't occur to you because stuff is happening lightning quick and you are drinking up, if unknowingly, the ambient tension and panic and violent energy in the air.
I was by now standing in the gutter in front of our bus, off the curb. The kid was coming at me from the side walk. I had no idea what I was going to do, what I could do. But here he came, lunging at me.
I don't know if he tripped or if the step down from the curb along with his velocity made him go lower than he had hoped, or whether he was trying to tackle me. But what I did was grab his hair on either side and kneed him in the face.
This was a good move in the sense that it immobilized him. I can't tell you if he was knocked out or what. I don't remember him saying anything or screaming or making any other kind of noise. I don't know if I recoiled or not. What I DO know is that I did not lose my balance. I was mobile and not in danger of an immediate counter attack.
For some reason, at that exact moment, the doors of the bus opened. I was one of the first to clamber up the stairs and into the bus. Fairly soon thereafter the other kids started running frantically onto the bus as well. The kid who had been banging on the doors and who looked like he might have been in a fight was shouting at the bus driver - Shut the doors! Shut the damn doors!
A wave of cops had swooped by, allowing our people to get onto the bus without being seriously accosted. All the seats were filled. The other buses had left awhile ago. Shut the door! Shut the damn door!
Finally, after what seemed to be hours, the driver shut the doors. But he didn't move the bus. What the hell are you waiting for?? For the first time the bus driver, a white guy with frizzy red hair and glasses in his 30s perhaps, spoke - I haven't been given the order to leave yet.
What?? While the black kid yelled at him, both for not leaving and for not opening the doors while "niggers' hearts are being cut out", a new threat arose. Out of the darkness a new wave of unknown kids rushed our bus, slamming into it and banging open handed on the windows. The bus driver began to open the doors but we shouted that they were not our kids, they were Trenton kids.
Next thing you know, the bus is rocking side to side as the Trenton kids start pushing on it. Move, damn it! But the bus driver is not moving! It's incredible, but here we are, the bus going to get tipped at any moment and this asshole is not popping the sucker in gear and getting out of there!
Panic spread, like the scene in Ben Hur when the ship is rammed and the galley slaves are trying to pull their chains out of the wood to escape drowning. I began thinking about whether it would be better to lean towards the side that was likely to hit the ground first, or towards the other side where the kids who were pushing us were so that when the bus tipped I'd be towards the top, able maybe to crawl out the window if only into the arms of our assailants.
Then yet another sudden surprising thing happened - a new wave of cops came, this time with dogs! The cops wailed away on the people pushing the bus with nightsticks while the dogs literally chewed some of the others off the bus. One cop rapped the windshield with his stick, gesturing vociferously for the bus driver to pull away and get moving. Finally, with dogs and nightsticks in our wake, our bus moved away and into the night.
The black kid who had been most vocal yelled and screamed at the bus driver for most of the hour long trip back. All of the kids joined in, white and black. We had no other adults on our bus - apparently the chapperones had gotten on other buses when ours wouldn't open up.
When we rolled back into town, still yelling and screaming at the bus driver, a lot of people had lined the main drag with their cars, beeping and cheering and giving our bus the thumbs up. Apparently they thought we were the team bus since we were rolling in long after the other student buses. This distracted us and kids started leaning out the windows, responding to the cheers.
When we got back to the HS I tried to stand up but my knee wouldn't bend. I had apparently injured it in some way and it had blown up to twice its normal size. Two of my friends (including the one crazy guy who had run TOWARDS the action) lifted me, one under each arm and helped me off the bus. It was clear that I could not walk the mile or so home, so they continued to help me along, all the way home.
Both of my parents were home when I got back. I remember how shocked they were when my friends carried me in. Don't worry, he's all right. Yeah, I'm all right. So what happened? WE WON! My father chatted with my friends about the game and the prospects of going to Atlantic City for the finals. My mother continued to fret that I might have broken something. I assured her that until I tried to stand up I didn't even know it was swollen.
The next day the swelling was gone but there was a bodacious bruise on my kneecap. I was ready for the finals.
But here it was, freshman year, and I had already been in two more riots than all my children, altogether have so far and hopefully would ever have. And still 3 years to go!
Friday, May 2, 2008
OH - !
So there it was, last practice of the season, in that dingy girls gym, where the white kids looked green and the black kids looked greener. Shooting around. We had a mediocre year, 13-9, very disappointing. I hadn't played in several games.
Shooting around...
So I'm just standing there, on the line, dribbling mindlessly while talking to some kid, and OH-!
It was like someone had stabbed me, in the mid back, on the right hand side. It literally took my breath away.
I felt like I couldn't breathe in, and since I had been inhaling, I couldn't breathe out. I tried, very tentatively, to sip in some more air. OH-!
I began to get a little worried, and clutched my side. Tried a small breath again - OH-!
The kid say, Hey, you all right, man?
I bent over, slightly panicked. You get that flight response, like, hey, you're in danger! Rather than just stand there, I let out what little air I could, and straightened out again, trying to gingerly inhale as I did so. This time no pain.
Yeah, yeah, I'm okay, just got a twinge or something. I resumed dribbling, but I'm sure I wasn't smiling. I pushed myself a bit, ran after my own rebound, went up to get it. Fine. Shot around some more. Fine.
I went thru the rest of the practice, wherein I played my now usual role as opponent straw man, without a hitch. Fine.
I more or less forgot about it. One of them things that just happens. Once, when I was 12, I was walking from the livingroom to the kitchen when I just felt my body let go - I just collapsed to the floor like a pile of bones. My mother, whom I was speaking to, came over, concerned. I was all right and got up, and went on with my day, and my life. Never happened again. So there was reason to believe that this was just one of those things.
Then, a few days later, I was walking down the hall to class and OH-! Again, I could not inhale without feeling like I was being stabbed. I did what had worked in the gym - I bent over, exhaling, and inhaled as I straightened up. No problem.
But I was shaken.
The season was over and the drinking continued. Everything was cool, except that during one CYO dance I did feel like my whole insides, towards the back of my body cavity, were seizing up. I could breathe fine, but bending over wasn't helping. I had learned that the best way to deal with being drunk was to focus all my remaining attentive powers at self control, to not let myself just "go with it". I was drunk, but I was now focused on what was happening. I was not nauseous or about to pass out - on the contrary, I was almost shocked into sobriety.
But something was up.
You're 15, nothing's ever happened that won't pass, so you figure, aah, just some weird shit...
But I knew, something was up.
Shooting around...
So I'm just standing there, on the line, dribbling mindlessly while talking to some kid, and OH-!
It was like someone had stabbed me, in the mid back, on the right hand side. It literally took my breath away.
I felt like I couldn't breathe in, and since I had been inhaling, I couldn't breathe out. I tried, very tentatively, to sip in some more air. OH-!
I began to get a little worried, and clutched my side. Tried a small breath again - OH-!
The kid say, Hey, you all right, man?
I bent over, slightly panicked. You get that flight response, like, hey, you're in danger! Rather than just stand there, I let out what little air I could, and straightened out again, trying to gingerly inhale as I did so. This time no pain.
Yeah, yeah, I'm okay, just got a twinge or something. I resumed dribbling, but I'm sure I wasn't smiling. I pushed myself a bit, ran after my own rebound, went up to get it. Fine. Shot around some more. Fine.
I went thru the rest of the practice, wherein I played my now usual role as opponent straw man, without a hitch. Fine.
I more or less forgot about it. One of them things that just happens. Once, when I was 12, I was walking from the livingroom to the kitchen when I just felt my body let go - I just collapsed to the floor like a pile of bones. My mother, whom I was speaking to, came over, concerned. I was all right and got up, and went on with my day, and my life. Never happened again. So there was reason to believe that this was just one of those things.
Then, a few days later, I was walking down the hall to class and OH-! Again, I could not inhale without feeling like I was being stabbed. I did what had worked in the gym - I bent over, exhaling, and inhaled as I straightened up. No problem.
But I was shaken.
The season was over and the drinking continued. Everything was cool, except that during one CYO dance I did feel like my whole insides, towards the back of my body cavity, were seizing up. I could breathe fine, but bending over wasn't helping. I had learned that the best way to deal with being drunk was to focus all my remaining attentive powers at self control, to not let myself just "go with it". I was drunk, but I was now focused on what was happening. I was not nauseous or about to pass out - on the contrary, I was almost shocked into sobriety.
But something was up.
You're 15, nothing's ever happened that won't pass, so you figure, aah, just some weird shit...
But I knew, something was up.
Saturday, April 26, 2008
Violence
I have spent much of the last 40 years trying to figure this out - Why was there so much violence in my life?
I have 4 sons, two of whom were in grade school in the 80's and 90s, two of whom are in grade school now. Not only have none of them ever been suspended or been forced to march up to the principal's office for fighting, none of them have even had a fight that I'm aware of. My oldest son did get his face busted in HS, but that was not as a result of a fight - it was a random act of violence by a troubled kid from another town, already in "the system", who cold cocked my son with brass knuckles. No words, no warning. But not a fight, either.
When I grew up, where I grew up, fighting was just part of living. Beginning in fifth grade or so, the average kid got in perhaps 2 fights a year. Usually they happened at the playground, usually after school, but fights were known to break out at recess or gym class as well. In the early 60s there seemed to be some unspoken rules about how teachers and adults handled it, which could be summarized by "boys will be boys", whatever the hell that meant. If you got into a fight, as long as nobody got a bloody nose or a black eye, the fight was broken up, you got a stern talking to, and that was that. Sometimes the fight would resume after school, but the teachers (mostly women) were not responsible for keeping the peace 24-7. Most of the time, tho, the reason for the fight was forgotten pretty much as quickly as the fight had broken out.
The ones that resumed after school were particularly brutal. There had to be real, long standing animus to impel such events. Kids would look forward to these "street fights" all during the school day like fight fans anticipate a heavyweight championship fight. The fights themselves were nasty - kicking, biting, punching, lots of blood, and only ending in one of the combatant's humiliation. That's what these fights were all about - inflicting and absorbing humiliation.
By the mid 60s the deal had changed. Maybe it was because we were bigger, stronger and more prone to injury and injuring. But it seemed like in general schools had had it with fighting. There was no particular litigious reason for this - it's not like there had been an uptick in suits against schools or insurance claims. It was just a change in the Zeitgeist - fighting was not to be tolerated at all.
The deal became, you get in a fight, you go to the office, and you probably got suspended. I am here to tell you, this was a very bad idea. Four decades later, I STILL think this was a very bad idea.
What this policy did was make those who had nothing to lose by being suspended, the "troublemakers", more bold, and those for whom the worse part would be dealing with their parents when they got home, the "good kids", more timid. This policy basically invited the trouble makers to make more trouble with effective impunity, and force the good kids into the role of ready prey, and be punished for afterwards for it to boot.
I often said then, only a woman would come up with this policy. That's unfair, I know, but we had just gotten a new principal, and she was the one that laid down this new law.
And of course, when the inevitable happened, and you found your ass cooling your heels in the waiting area of the principal's office, waiting for one of your parents, usually your mother, to come in, if you were the prey you just seethed at the injustice of it all. Some kids got suspended even when all they did was cover their heads as they got wailed on. Didn't matter. Got in a fight? Gettin' suspended.
And the other kid? They were lucky if they could even locate that kid's parents. Generally, they didn't care - that's why the kid was a troublemaker. Duh! One time tho one of these kid's fathers did come in. He didn't wait to talk to the principal. Instead, he went right up to the kid, smacked him around, and then basically kicked him out of the office and down the hall. That was pretty bad. For once, justice.
When it happened to me, my parents had very different reactions. My mother lectured me on how it was unacceptable behavior. My father wanted to know if I had held my own. This was typical, and typical of the age. My mother was quite a by the book idealist, but the old man was from the street - and the old country. His parenting philosophy was "hit first, ask questions later". When President Kennedy was shot, late in the school day, I ran across the street home to tell my father the news. He was in the bathroom, shaving, getting ready to go to his second job, and was not in a good mood. "Pop - President Kennedy's been shot!" Without a second thought he wheeled around and smacked me across the face. "You don't joke around about something like that!" In shock, it took me a while to regain my wits and talk him into turning on the TV.
I was the tallest kid in my class from 5th to 8th grade, and one of the strongest, but I didn't want to fight if I could avoid it, irrespective of the consequences. I was too strong to be beaten, but not mean enough to beat the other kid up. What would ensue would be these ridiculous clinches, the other kid red with rage, and me having let the emotions of the moment pass. We'd dance around as he'd try to trip me to take me down, and I tried to keep him at arms length. Then a teacher would come and off to the principal's office we'd go!
What a waste of time, and what a pain in the ass.
So what I would do is try to disarm my opponent with jokes, trying to make him laugh, trying to give him an opportunity to save face by pushing off while the spectators laughed at my jokes. This strategy worked pretty well for a while.
Unfortunately, one time when I was in 8th grade, a 7th grader mistook my joking around as a sign of weakness, something to be mocked. He started to make fun of me, in front of my peers. His taunting was mean spirited. I light heartedly warned him to stop, and a few kids told him not to mess with a kid much bigger than he, but he persisted. I was being humiliated and, given my upbringing, I was vulnerable to getting enraged when humiliated. It was one thing to get into a fight during a football or basketball game due to some misinterpreted contact. I could let that go. But humiliation I was not able to let go of easily.
I changed the expression on my face and warned the kid, who was kinda straddling his bike, to stop. He kept on. I walked up to him, put my face in his, and told him he better fucking stop. He didn't.
I snapped. When it was over the schoolyard had emptied, my hands were sore and bloody, but not with my blood. That poor kid was on the ground, whimpering, bleeding. You could not tell where he began and his bike ended. He cried and cried as I huffed with afterrage.
I didn't help him up. I didn't say anything. I just stood there, over him, huffing, letting my rage unblind me. I was horrified. It was intellectually obvious that I had done the damage, but it was like I had come upon the aftermath of somebody else's handiwork.
He didn't ask for help or beg for mercy. He just wailed. I stared for a while, then turned and walked slowly home.
As I trudged I was in disbelief - did I do that? Am I responsible for that? To this day, I have never forgotten that moment, nor have I fully forgiven myself.
In 1968 that event was less than a year in the past. I had managed to avoid one on one fights since.
Then I made the mistake of walking into a pizza parlor at the same time that some drunk older kids were walking out. We bumped into each other. They didn't take it kindly.
I knew who these guys were - they were actually out of HS and in college, locally. Despite the fact that I was with three other of my frosh friends, I was the same height as these older guys, with a full beard. And let's not forget - they were "sensorily impaired".
They proceeded to push me around in the tiny vestibule of the pizza joint. I knew their reputations - they were bad guys. I pleaded my case, with the best defense I could think of - Hey, I'm a freshman!
A freshman, see? Picking a fight with a freshman when you were a junior or above was like picking a fight with a girl. There was no honor in that - in fact, it would detract from your rep if you were going around beating the shit out of little freshmen. But they didn't believe me.
My companions were obviously freshman, much shorter than I, years from shaving. They tried to help me out. "He is! He really is a freshman." This also had no effect. The drunk guys grabbed me and dragged me out in front of the blank wall on the side of the building.
I continued to plead my case. C'mon, man, what's the big deal about beatin' on a freshman? But these guys were getting ready to wail on me.
So, confronted with my new reality, I quickly calculated that I had one chance. I could get in a few shots if I acted right away, maybe knocking them off balance. Them being drunk and me being a sprinter, I figured I had a pretty good shot to run the two blocks into the woods before they could get up, amble to their car and come after me. In theory.
So I did it - Pop! Pop! I thought they were two pretty good shots. Apparently, not good enough.
I got the shit kicked out of me pretty bad. What they lost due to inebriation the wall I was up against made up for. To their credit my companions did not scatter but stayed on the sidelines at a distance until it was done. I was able to protect my face, so only my body took the brunt, and my arms. They lost interest, weaved their way to their car and sped off into the night. My friends came over, helped me up, and told me how bad I got my ass kicked. But in an empathetic kind of way, if that's possible.
I hadn't been looking for a fight, and had I entered the pizza parlor a minute earlier or a minute later, I would not remember that night.
But such was the quotidian violence that was my life at that time.
My freshman year was also my first year in an integrated school. We had had one black kid in my 8th grade graduating class. But we were a sending district for a larger high school district, and that larger district was largely black.
I had no problems with blacks. I had played football in 7th and 8th grade with them and they respected me. I had played music with them in a band program, making friends with two really nice guys, one of whom would go on to be student council president in HS when I was his VP. And I had had a great act of kindness bestowed on me by a black HS kid when I was in fourth grade and had fallen down on the asphalt basketball courts in the schoolyard and scraped my knee quite badly and bloodily. None of my white friends came to my aid. The HS basketball team had a summer camp at my school, and none of the white guys on the HS team came to my aid. But one of the black guys did, helped clean up my wound, helped me on my feet, and made sure I was okay. I had no reason to hate blacks, and lots of reasons to feel okay about them.
Nonetheless, things were tense in high school. Several times fights broke out, particularly in stairwells, probably because they were out of the eyesight of any teacher. These fights, called rumbles, would gather a crowd, the white kids chanting "Fight! Fight! Nigger and a white!", the black kids chanting "Kill that honky mutha fucka". I stayed clear of this kind of crap, but it was there, and with some frequency.
But in my life, even the teachers were a threat. Remember Mr. Apito? Well, he was buddies with my cousin on my mother's side, a guy named Sonny, who was also a teacher in the school. I guess they thought I needed some toughening up, because every once in a while, when I wasn't on my guard, Apito would grab me from behind and pull me into a doorwell. He would hold my arms behind me while Sonny would punch me in the stomach. Weird, huh? But what am I gonna do? I would tighten my abs and let him wail away. It would only last 10-15 seconds, then they'd let me go and pat me on the back, calling me a good sport.
Was this normal? Did I ask for it? Was I that much of a wise ass? Were other kids jealous of me? Did I come off as so much of a pansy that even the adults felt like they needed to toughen me up?
Maybe I had something to do with that, but even still, independent of me, there was other violence that engulfed me.
Our high school got in so many rumbles with other schools at sporting events that we got to be known as the "riot school". It seemed to start in my freshman year, and ultimately wound up with two major riots in the school itself, one requiring the State Police SWAT team, the other, in my senior year, the National Guard. But that was years away. There would be so much trouble in my freshman year that basketball games, forever the province of the winter night, were moved to the mid-afternoon daylight hours as a deterrence to violence.
My introduction to this larger environment of violence came at the first varsity football game of the season. It was a close game. I was on the freshman team so I wasn't suited up and was instead in the stands. I wasn't watching the game much, intent as I was in flirting with a gorgeous girl named Carol, who happily returned the flirting. (We soon went steady for the requisite month. I went to her house. She introduced me to her mother, "Doesn't he look dumb? But he isn't! He's smart!") Ultimately the game ended with us winning 25-19, on the road. The home team fans didn't like the outcome apparently, or perhaps it was something else, but all of a sudden a riot broke out.
In those days most of the fans at a HS football game, always played on Saturday afternoons, were students, kids. Few if any parents were there, few if any adults. (This might have been abetted by the fact that our parents were blue collar people in the kind of jobs that had shifts and afforded days off during the week, rarely on weekends.) So when a fight would break out it wouldn't take much to become a riot, since there was a lot of fuel, as it were, to add to the fire.
There is a painting by an artist, Boccioni (an interesting figure who spanned every turn of the century school from Romanticism to impressionism to pointalism to cubism) named "Riot in the Galleria". Altho it is a painting, and obviously a still impression of the event of a riot (oddly, among women!), nonetheless it is an eerily accurate portrayal of the circular, cyclone/hurricane like violence that sweeps around and around during such a phenomenon. I recommend viewing it. I have a print of it in my dining room to this day.
A riot can break out quickly, spread quickly, engulfing tens of people, then just as quickly and for no apparent reason, suddenly dissipate. That's what happened here as well. Carol jumped into my arms. (She had beautiful, large breasts, so it was an odd mix of fear and lust that overcame me at that moment...) Before we could figure out what to do, where and how to flee, the riot dissipated.
These things don't stick with you at the time. They register in the agenda of events of your life. They have no emotional truck. It was violence. Part of life. Nothing remarkable. It is only now, 40 years after the fact, that I reflect on how actually unusual it was, how outrageous, for young people to be exposed to so much violence in so many avenues of life, all of the time.
Playground. Pizza parlor. Stairwell. Classroom. Stadium. Home.
Nam.
Everywhere, violence.
And how much, I still wonder, was me?
I have 4 sons, two of whom were in grade school in the 80's and 90s, two of whom are in grade school now. Not only have none of them ever been suspended or been forced to march up to the principal's office for fighting, none of them have even had a fight that I'm aware of. My oldest son did get his face busted in HS, but that was not as a result of a fight - it was a random act of violence by a troubled kid from another town, already in "the system", who cold cocked my son with brass knuckles. No words, no warning. But not a fight, either.
When I grew up, where I grew up, fighting was just part of living. Beginning in fifth grade or so, the average kid got in perhaps 2 fights a year. Usually they happened at the playground, usually after school, but fights were known to break out at recess or gym class as well. In the early 60s there seemed to be some unspoken rules about how teachers and adults handled it, which could be summarized by "boys will be boys", whatever the hell that meant. If you got into a fight, as long as nobody got a bloody nose or a black eye, the fight was broken up, you got a stern talking to, and that was that. Sometimes the fight would resume after school, but the teachers (mostly women) were not responsible for keeping the peace 24-7. Most of the time, tho, the reason for the fight was forgotten pretty much as quickly as the fight had broken out.
The ones that resumed after school were particularly brutal. There had to be real, long standing animus to impel such events. Kids would look forward to these "street fights" all during the school day like fight fans anticipate a heavyweight championship fight. The fights themselves were nasty - kicking, biting, punching, lots of blood, and only ending in one of the combatant's humiliation. That's what these fights were all about - inflicting and absorbing humiliation.
By the mid 60s the deal had changed. Maybe it was because we were bigger, stronger and more prone to injury and injuring. But it seemed like in general schools had had it with fighting. There was no particular litigious reason for this - it's not like there had been an uptick in suits against schools or insurance claims. It was just a change in the Zeitgeist - fighting was not to be tolerated at all.
The deal became, you get in a fight, you go to the office, and you probably got suspended. I am here to tell you, this was a very bad idea. Four decades later, I STILL think this was a very bad idea.
What this policy did was make those who had nothing to lose by being suspended, the "troublemakers", more bold, and those for whom the worse part would be dealing with their parents when they got home, the "good kids", more timid. This policy basically invited the trouble makers to make more trouble with effective impunity, and force the good kids into the role of ready prey, and be punished for afterwards for it to boot.
I often said then, only a woman would come up with this policy. That's unfair, I know, but we had just gotten a new principal, and she was the one that laid down this new law.
And of course, when the inevitable happened, and you found your ass cooling your heels in the waiting area of the principal's office, waiting for one of your parents, usually your mother, to come in, if you were the prey you just seethed at the injustice of it all. Some kids got suspended even when all they did was cover their heads as they got wailed on. Didn't matter. Got in a fight? Gettin' suspended.
And the other kid? They were lucky if they could even locate that kid's parents. Generally, they didn't care - that's why the kid was a troublemaker. Duh! One time tho one of these kid's fathers did come in. He didn't wait to talk to the principal. Instead, he went right up to the kid, smacked him around, and then basically kicked him out of the office and down the hall. That was pretty bad. For once, justice.
When it happened to me, my parents had very different reactions. My mother lectured me on how it was unacceptable behavior. My father wanted to know if I had held my own. This was typical, and typical of the age. My mother was quite a by the book idealist, but the old man was from the street - and the old country. His parenting philosophy was "hit first, ask questions later". When President Kennedy was shot, late in the school day, I ran across the street home to tell my father the news. He was in the bathroom, shaving, getting ready to go to his second job, and was not in a good mood. "Pop - President Kennedy's been shot!" Without a second thought he wheeled around and smacked me across the face. "You don't joke around about something like that!" In shock, it took me a while to regain my wits and talk him into turning on the TV.
I was the tallest kid in my class from 5th to 8th grade, and one of the strongest, but I didn't want to fight if I could avoid it, irrespective of the consequences. I was too strong to be beaten, but not mean enough to beat the other kid up. What would ensue would be these ridiculous clinches, the other kid red with rage, and me having let the emotions of the moment pass. We'd dance around as he'd try to trip me to take me down, and I tried to keep him at arms length. Then a teacher would come and off to the principal's office we'd go!
What a waste of time, and what a pain in the ass.
So what I would do is try to disarm my opponent with jokes, trying to make him laugh, trying to give him an opportunity to save face by pushing off while the spectators laughed at my jokes. This strategy worked pretty well for a while.
Unfortunately, one time when I was in 8th grade, a 7th grader mistook my joking around as a sign of weakness, something to be mocked. He started to make fun of me, in front of my peers. His taunting was mean spirited. I light heartedly warned him to stop, and a few kids told him not to mess with a kid much bigger than he, but he persisted. I was being humiliated and, given my upbringing, I was vulnerable to getting enraged when humiliated. It was one thing to get into a fight during a football or basketball game due to some misinterpreted contact. I could let that go. But humiliation I was not able to let go of easily.
I changed the expression on my face and warned the kid, who was kinda straddling his bike, to stop. He kept on. I walked up to him, put my face in his, and told him he better fucking stop. He didn't.
I snapped. When it was over the schoolyard had emptied, my hands were sore and bloody, but not with my blood. That poor kid was on the ground, whimpering, bleeding. You could not tell where he began and his bike ended. He cried and cried as I huffed with afterrage.
I didn't help him up. I didn't say anything. I just stood there, over him, huffing, letting my rage unblind me. I was horrified. It was intellectually obvious that I had done the damage, but it was like I had come upon the aftermath of somebody else's handiwork.
He didn't ask for help or beg for mercy. He just wailed. I stared for a while, then turned and walked slowly home.
As I trudged I was in disbelief - did I do that? Am I responsible for that? To this day, I have never forgotten that moment, nor have I fully forgiven myself.
In 1968 that event was less than a year in the past. I had managed to avoid one on one fights since.
Then I made the mistake of walking into a pizza parlor at the same time that some drunk older kids were walking out. We bumped into each other. They didn't take it kindly.
I knew who these guys were - they were actually out of HS and in college, locally. Despite the fact that I was with three other of my frosh friends, I was the same height as these older guys, with a full beard. And let's not forget - they were "sensorily impaired".
They proceeded to push me around in the tiny vestibule of the pizza joint. I knew their reputations - they were bad guys. I pleaded my case, with the best defense I could think of - Hey, I'm a freshman!
A freshman, see? Picking a fight with a freshman when you were a junior or above was like picking a fight with a girl. There was no honor in that - in fact, it would detract from your rep if you were going around beating the shit out of little freshmen. But they didn't believe me.
My companions were obviously freshman, much shorter than I, years from shaving. They tried to help me out. "He is! He really is a freshman." This also had no effect. The drunk guys grabbed me and dragged me out in front of the blank wall on the side of the building.
I continued to plead my case. C'mon, man, what's the big deal about beatin' on a freshman? But these guys were getting ready to wail on me.
So, confronted with my new reality, I quickly calculated that I had one chance. I could get in a few shots if I acted right away, maybe knocking them off balance. Them being drunk and me being a sprinter, I figured I had a pretty good shot to run the two blocks into the woods before they could get up, amble to their car and come after me. In theory.
So I did it - Pop! Pop! I thought they were two pretty good shots. Apparently, not good enough.
I got the shit kicked out of me pretty bad. What they lost due to inebriation the wall I was up against made up for. To their credit my companions did not scatter but stayed on the sidelines at a distance until it was done. I was able to protect my face, so only my body took the brunt, and my arms. They lost interest, weaved their way to their car and sped off into the night. My friends came over, helped me up, and told me how bad I got my ass kicked. But in an empathetic kind of way, if that's possible.
I hadn't been looking for a fight, and had I entered the pizza parlor a minute earlier or a minute later, I would not remember that night.
But such was the quotidian violence that was my life at that time.
My freshman year was also my first year in an integrated school. We had had one black kid in my 8th grade graduating class. But we were a sending district for a larger high school district, and that larger district was largely black.
I had no problems with blacks. I had played football in 7th and 8th grade with them and they respected me. I had played music with them in a band program, making friends with two really nice guys, one of whom would go on to be student council president in HS when I was his VP. And I had had a great act of kindness bestowed on me by a black HS kid when I was in fourth grade and had fallen down on the asphalt basketball courts in the schoolyard and scraped my knee quite badly and bloodily. None of my white friends came to my aid. The HS basketball team had a summer camp at my school, and none of the white guys on the HS team came to my aid. But one of the black guys did, helped clean up my wound, helped me on my feet, and made sure I was okay. I had no reason to hate blacks, and lots of reasons to feel okay about them.
Nonetheless, things were tense in high school. Several times fights broke out, particularly in stairwells, probably because they were out of the eyesight of any teacher. These fights, called rumbles, would gather a crowd, the white kids chanting "Fight! Fight! Nigger and a white!", the black kids chanting "Kill that honky mutha fucka". I stayed clear of this kind of crap, but it was there, and with some frequency.
But in my life, even the teachers were a threat. Remember Mr. Apito? Well, he was buddies with my cousin on my mother's side, a guy named Sonny, who was also a teacher in the school. I guess they thought I needed some toughening up, because every once in a while, when I wasn't on my guard, Apito would grab me from behind and pull me into a doorwell. He would hold my arms behind me while Sonny would punch me in the stomach. Weird, huh? But what am I gonna do? I would tighten my abs and let him wail away. It would only last 10-15 seconds, then they'd let me go and pat me on the back, calling me a good sport.
Was this normal? Did I ask for it? Was I that much of a wise ass? Were other kids jealous of me? Did I come off as so much of a pansy that even the adults felt like they needed to toughen me up?
Maybe I had something to do with that, but even still, independent of me, there was other violence that engulfed me.
Our high school got in so many rumbles with other schools at sporting events that we got to be known as the "riot school". It seemed to start in my freshman year, and ultimately wound up with two major riots in the school itself, one requiring the State Police SWAT team, the other, in my senior year, the National Guard. But that was years away. There would be so much trouble in my freshman year that basketball games, forever the province of the winter night, were moved to the mid-afternoon daylight hours as a deterrence to violence.
My introduction to this larger environment of violence came at the first varsity football game of the season. It was a close game. I was on the freshman team so I wasn't suited up and was instead in the stands. I wasn't watching the game much, intent as I was in flirting with a gorgeous girl named Carol, who happily returned the flirting. (We soon went steady for the requisite month. I went to her house. She introduced me to her mother, "Doesn't he look dumb? But he isn't! He's smart!") Ultimately the game ended with us winning 25-19, on the road. The home team fans didn't like the outcome apparently, or perhaps it was something else, but all of a sudden a riot broke out.
In those days most of the fans at a HS football game, always played on Saturday afternoons, were students, kids. Few if any parents were there, few if any adults. (This might have been abetted by the fact that our parents were blue collar people in the kind of jobs that had shifts and afforded days off during the week, rarely on weekends.) So when a fight would break out it wouldn't take much to become a riot, since there was a lot of fuel, as it were, to add to the fire.
There is a painting by an artist, Boccioni (an interesting figure who spanned every turn of the century school from Romanticism to impressionism to pointalism to cubism) named "Riot in the Galleria". Altho it is a painting, and obviously a still impression of the event of a riot (oddly, among women!), nonetheless it is an eerily accurate portrayal of the circular, cyclone/hurricane like violence that sweeps around and around during such a phenomenon. I recommend viewing it. I have a print of it in my dining room to this day.
A riot can break out quickly, spread quickly, engulfing tens of people, then just as quickly and for no apparent reason, suddenly dissipate. That's what happened here as well. Carol jumped into my arms. (She had beautiful, large breasts, so it was an odd mix of fear and lust that overcame me at that moment...) Before we could figure out what to do, where and how to flee, the riot dissipated.
These things don't stick with you at the time. They register in the agenda of events of your life. They have no emotional truck. It was violence. Part of life. Nothing remarkable. It is only now, 40 years after the fact, that I reflect on how actually unusual it was, how outrageous, for young people to be exposed to so much violence in so many avenues of life, all of the time.
Playground. Pizza parlor. Stairwell. Classroom. Stadium. Home.
Nam.
Everywhere, violence.
And how much, I still wonder, was me?
Bip!
Bip!
Just like that, right there on tv. Bip!
Some guy hand cuffed, right on the street in Saigon, forced to get on his knees. The other guy takes out a hand gun, puts it to the guy on his knees' head and Bip!
I'm in the living room, eating dinner on a tray table. We had a very loosely coupled family in those days - my sister off to college, my father working two jobs, my mother involved with Citizens Against Water Pollution and/or grad school classes, me fending for myself. I had been doing my own laundry and cooking for myself since I was 12, so it was not a big deal.
There I was, then, eating something and Bip!
WHOA! It was hard not to recoil. I didn't know it then, but at that very moment my whole perception of Vietnam changed.
Even with Iraq and Afghanistan going on right now, it's hard to explain to people who were not around back then how surreal Nam was. The hot war had been going on since 61 or so, and full force by 65. This was nearly 3 years later. Every night the news opened with Nam, segued into the Civil Rights movement and then, with the time remaining, focused on other stories that emerged from time to time - drugs, sex, rock 'n' roll...
Nam was the constant. It's cliched now, but there were body counts. The VC always lost like 2000 men, we'd lose like 250. In 67 it was clear we were gonna win, just a matter of a year or two. We always had, so there was no reason to expect otherwise.
But Nam was not like a real war, like THE war, y'know, the big one that everybody's father fought in. This was the GoGo Sixties, the time of great prosperity, of technological wonder, or leisure time, of the certainty of going to college if you had half a brain, of nice houses, bigger houses. The last vestiges of "Depression-itis", of that odd frugality and modesty born of the 1930s, were falling away. Middle aged women, like my mother and most of my brunette aunts, suddenly became blonds. Cellars became rec rooms, people got in ground pools instead of bomb shelters, every house had an attached two car garage.
Life Magazine had done a big spread about the Class of '65, how they were the best and the brightest in history and would remake the world. Hollywood put out movie after movie about Americans going abroad, basically to marvel at how backwards the rest of the world was and how it was our burden, our duty, to spread plastics, the frug and indoor plumbing.
In this time, Nam was half soap-opera, half sporting event. The country had become obsessed with keeping score, and body counts were just the ticket. The first Super Bowl had been played the year before; we had gotten our first color TV in time for it, with its massive round green picture tube. It was in a "console" - a six foot cabinet with big speakers, an AM/FM radio tuner and a turntable for both 45s and LPs. It was the centerpiece of not just ours but everyone's living room.
Nam was far away, and not just in distance. The current revisionism, also popular at the time with people like my Normandy vet old man, that the government didn't do a good job of propagandizing the war is just total crap. Nam was everywhere. Every night, every headline, every radio newscast. Nam was everywhere - everywhere but here.
In February of 1968 there were only two ways you could find yourself in a rice paddy - either you were too dumb to get a deferment, or you were dumb enough to enlist. I'm not talking academically dumb - that didn't matter. College campuses were places where Nam was opposed. Whether out of principle or recognizing an opportunity when they saw one, colleges bent over backwards to admit people to college. In those days California set the cultural trends of the nation and thus the world. Their public education system was the envy of every other state, if you can believe it, and they had instituted not just two large university systems but a vast community college and junior college system as well. If you got into college you got a student deferment, no questions asked. In California you were accepted as a matter of right, irrespective of your high school performance or abilities. No problem - in many junior colleges, remediative courses were the most well enrolled.
But I'm not talking academically dumb - you could get in. No, you just had to be dumb, like in head in the sand dumb, or like we said in our dialect, stunata. If you couldn't get into a 4 year college, fine - you could get into a 2 year, and for cheap - most community colleges cost less than $200 per semester. Two years and the war is probably over. But if you didn't wanna mark time in a classroom you had at least two other things to try.
First, you could get married. Back in those days, married guys didn't have to get assigned to combat. You could either get deferred, or at worst get drafted and go to Germany. Or Korea. Or Okinawa or the Phillipines. Even Guantanamo.
Another thing you could try - the 4F route, altho this was usually the province of the upper middle class. In the upper middle class town where my cousins lived, everyone had a friend who had a father or uncle who was a doctor who could find something to diagnose you with that would disqualify you - scoliosis, some respiratory thing or the ever popular flat feet. Many scions of doctors in the 60s became doctors themselves courtesy of a 4F qualification which allowed them to stay out of the heat and go to med school.
(Of course, few doctors would help low middle class kids like us get 4Fs. The attitude was that we were going nowhere fast anyhow, might as well join the Army and "become a man". Yeah, the Army was the perfect place for THOSE people. And many of those doctors had come from THAT side of the tracks, joined the military in WWII, become men, and gone to med school on the GI Bill. Didn't hurt them - in fact, it had given them a golden opportunity. So by not providing us an excuse to get out of service, they were actually doing us a favor. Funny, though, how it didn't seem proper to give their own sons that same golden opportunity...)
You also could get lucky - you might be the sole male survivor in a household. This was a big one in WWII, when so many families lost all their sons early on in the war. A more agrarian society back then, it was seen as destructive to family farms and small businesses to have all male heirs get taken out in shooting wars.
There were tons of ways in early 68 to get out of being drafted, but what made all the wheels turn in this industry of deferment was that at that time there was no pressure for the vast number of troops we would soon need to be drafted, and that was because there were so many enlistees.
In the mid 50s, movies like Rebel Without a Cause and the Wild One, West Side Story and even Marty, portrayed a lost generation of youths who found no meaning in the standard American model - high school, work, family, suburbs. Malcontented generations always sprung up after wars - consider the expats of Hemingway's movable feast - even the Civil War, where Go West Young Man meant getting out of having to conform to the expectations of a more rigid social, economic and familial set up. The Post WWII era was no different, and the nihilism portrayed in the 50s was real.
Nam provided a way for obstreperous, disaffected youth in the early to mid 60s to find adventure or at least escape the boredom and certainty of what was a fixed, predictable game for them. Enlist and you might see the world, maybe not, but you sure as hell would get out of your hometown, your old circle of boring predictable aimless friends, your semi-commitments to your girl friend and most of all, your family.
In my home town only about 25-30% wound up going to college anyway, so what were you gonna do? Get a job, get drunk, get laid, get in trouble. We lived in a resort area where most of the jobs were service jobs - not manly pursuits. The few factory jobs around required you to know somebody, as did the trades - electrician, carpenter, dry wall, plumber. Fathers, who had grown up in the aimless and hopeless unemployment of the Depression, had told their sons that the Army was the best thing that ever happened to them, despite the fighting. So many guys figured, what the hell...
In early 68, in a back water place like ours, there were no drugs really. The only ones who smoked dope (as we called it) were the ones that came back from college, where it was plentiful and readily accessible. If you wanted to get marijuana you had to know somebody on "the Ave", the main drag of the nearby black district a couple of towns over. Only the elite schools offered LSD and other psychodelics and there weren't any guys from our town who went to those places, so there weren't many who could come back to spread their gospel.
Booze and beers were the drugs of choice, or, rather, the only drugs around. The cops didn't mess with you as long as you weren't a complete asshole about it. Guys would get drunk, get in fights, get in trouble, but it was tolerated. A guy could work as a mechanic at a gas station, get paid, and on weekends get in trouble. Nobody sweated it.
But it was boring as hell...
No, if you weren't the type to go to college, and most of us weren't, the Army looked like a great way to get the hell out of there.
Nam was wallpaper. Nam was background. There was the GI bill, with its educational benefits, but more importantly its housing and training benefits. By 68 there had been a good 10 years of guys who had joined up, gone to Germany or one of those Asian outposts, had a piece of cake tour of duty, and comeback with honor, maybe some skills, and some cachet that employers loved. And you had gotten the hell out of here without having to sit yet again in stupid classrooms "becoming astronauts" - that is, taking up space.
What happened tho, was that occasionally Nam would reach out and tap you on the shoulder and remind you that it was there, still lurking in the shadows. Somebody would have a cousin, boyfriend, uncle - always from another town - get killed. When it happened it was surreal, like being struck by lightning. Unlike the stories we'd heard about every family losing someone in WWII, virtually no one had lost anyone in Nam. On those rare cases when it did happen, the grieving family was looked on as particularly unfortunate, and maybe even cursed. Not honored, but rather treated like lepers - unfortunate, but to be shunned, since their tragedy was so out of tune with the rest of what was going on, which was prosperity, upward mobility and by all means fun.
But by the beginning of 1968, despite perhaps a hundred of enlistees out of our little town, nobody had been killed. Enlisting was not seen as a risk of death really. You sign up, you do basic, they ship you somewhere, you do your tour, and you come back. Just like as if you had gone to college, but a lot more fun and mayhem.
Nam was solidly in the background of my life. Then, Bip!
It happened quickly. It was shown in a montage of the clean up after the so called Tet Offensive. The VC had launched a whole series of surprise attacks that shook everyone up, but by mid February it was clear things were back under control. At least that's what was said.
But there was something different now. The body counts continued, like the scores of an undefeated team, but there was a new dimension. It's hard to put one's finger on it, but the best I can do, even 40 years on, is to say that there was now a moral dimension.
God knows who that poor wretch was that was eliminated, "execution style" as they say, or what he had done. He might have killed babies for all we knew, drank their blood and used their bodies for sandbags. We had been continually told how savage and backwards the VC were, so nothing could be put past them.
Even still, we were the Americans, the good guys, the ones who treated prisoners well and helped rebuild our enemies after they were vanquished, even if they were as brutal and cruel as the Japanese and Germans. We were not like them godless Commies who were capable of tremendous unfeeling cruelty.
But even tho it was another Vietnamese who rubbed out the prisoner with so much dispatch and disregard right in front of us from Coast to Coast, nonetheless he was our guy, our representative, our ally, and to watch that happen sent several new and disturbing messages.
Were they guys we were fighting with, fighting for, just as bad as the bad guys? Were we putting up with this unacceptable, unAmerican behavior?
Or had things taken a bad turn? Were things really so bad that such desperate measures were justified merely to keep things under control?
Whatever it was, whatever the voice over and body counts said about our "victory", the emotional impact gave a very different message indeed.
Nam was not a soap opera. Nam was not a sporting event. Nam was spinning out of control, and about to enmesh us in its web in a way that threatened to take us way, way out of our prosperity drenched sunlight and into the fog of terror, tension and cruelty.
I was 15. I had 3 years of HS left. Three years is a long time and the war would certainly be over by then. I was going to go to college. I would not have to enlist, and I would not get drafted. Nam was far away, and like the Berlin Wall and the Cuban Missile Crisis, it was just part of the furniture of the Cold War, which, by 1968, was a negligible part of the prosperity of the times. I had nothing to worry about.
Still, that image stuck. Bip! I don't think it took more than 3 or 4 seconds. Gone. Just like that. Right on the street in Saigon.
There was something wrong with this war. Something wrong, something turning us into someone we didn't want to be, someone we were not back here, back home, back in the USA. Maybe those college kids knew something we didn't, those kids going door to door for McCarthy in New Hampshire.
I didn't know.
All I knew was this guy threw this other guy down on his knees and then Bip!
And things would never be the same...
Just like that, right there on tv. Bip!
Some guy hand cuffed, right on the street in Saigon, forced to get on his knees. The other guy takes out a hand gun, puts it to the guy on his knees' head and Bip!
I'm in the living room, eating dinner on a tray table. We had a very loosely coupled family in those days - my sister off to college, my father working two jobs, my mother involved with Citizens Against Water Pollution and/or grad school classes, me fending for myself. I had been doing my own laundry and cooking for myself since I was 12, so it was not a big deal.
There I was, then, eating something and Bip!
WHOA! It was hard not to recoil. I didn't know it then, but at that very moment my whole perception of Vietnam changed.
Even with Iraq and Afghanistan going on right now, it's hard to explain to people who were not around back then how surreal Nam was. The hot war had been going on since 61 or so, and full force by 65. This was nearly 3 years later. Every night the news opened with Nam, segued into the Civil Rights movement and then, with the time remaining, focused on other stories that emerged from time to time - drugs, sex, rock 'n' roll...
Nam was the constant. It's cliched now, but there were body counts. The VC always lost like 2000 men, we'd lose like 250. In 67 it was clear we were gonna win, just a matter of a year or two. We always had, so there was no reason to expect otherwise.
But Nam was not like a real war, like THE war, y'know, the big one that everybody's father fought in. This was the GoGo Sixties, the time of great prosperity, of technological wonder, or leisure time, of the certainty of going to college if you had half a brain, of nice houses, bigger houses. The last vestiges of "Depression-itis", of that odd frugality and modesty born of the 1930s, were falling away. Middle aged women, like my mother and most of my brunette aunts, suddenly became blonds. Cellars became rec rooms, people got in ground pools instead of bomb shelters, every house had an attached two car garage.
Life Magazine had done a big spread about the Class of '65, how they were the best and the brightest in history and would remake the world. Hollywood put out movie after movie about Americans going abroad, basically to marvel at how backwards the rest of the world was and how it was our burden, our duty, to spread plastics, the frug and indoor plumbing.
In this time, Nam was half soap-opera, half sporting event. The country had become obsessed with keeping score, and body counts were just the ticket. The first Super Bowl had been played the year before; we had gotten our first color TV in time for it, with its massive round green picture tube. It was in a "console" - a six foot cabinet with big speakers, an AM/FM radio tuner and a turntable for both 45s and LPs. It was the centerpiece of not just ours but everyone's living room.
Nam was far away, and not just in distance. The current revisionism, also popular at the time with people like my Normandy vet old man, that the government didn't do a good job of propagandizing the war is just total crap. Nam was everywhere. Every night, every headline, every radio newscast. Nam was everywhere - everywhere but here.
In February of 1968 there were only two ways you could find yourself in a rice paddy - either you were too dumb to get a deferment, or you were dumb enough to enlist. I'm not talking academically dumb - that didn't matter. College campuses were places where Nam was opposed. Whether out of principle or recognizing an opportunity when they saw one, colleges bent over backwards to admit people to college. In those days California set the cultural trends of the nation and thus the world. Their public education system was the envy of every other state, if you can believe it, and they had instituted not just two large university systems but a vast community college and junior college system as well. If you got into college you got a student deferment, no questions asked. In California you were accepted as a matter of right, irrespective of your high school performance or abilities. No problem - in many junior colleges, remediative courses were the most well enrolled.
But I'm not talking academically dumb - you could get in. No, you just had to be dumb, like in head in the sand dumb, or like we said in our dialect, stunata. If you couldn't get into a 4 year college, fine - you could get into a 2 year, and for cheap - most community colleges cost less than $200 per semester. Two years and the war is probably over. But if you didn't wanna mark time in a classroom you had at least two other things to try.
First, you could get married. Back in those days, married guys didn't have to get assigned to combat. You could either get deferred, or at worst get drafted and go to Germany. Or Korea. Or Okinawa or the Phillipines. Even Guantanamo.
Another thing you could try - the 4F route, altho this was usually the province of the upper middle class. In the upper middle class town where my cousins lived, everyone had a friend who had a father or uncle who was a doctor who could find something to diagnose you with that would disqualify you - scoliosis, some respiratory thing or the ever popular flat feet. Many scions of doctors in the 60s became doctors themselves courtesy of a 4F qualification which allowed them to stay out of the heat and go to med school.
(Of course, few doctors would help low middle class kids like us get 4Fs. The attitude was that we were going nowhere fast anyhow, might as well join the Army and "become a man". Yeah, the Army was the perfect place for THOSE people. And many of those doctors had come from THAT side of the tracks, joined the military in WWII, become men, and gone to med school on the GI Bill. Didn't hurt them - in fact, it had given them a golden opportunity. So by not providing us an excuse to get out of service, they were actually doing us a favor. Funny, though, how it didn't seem proper to give their own sons that same golden opportunity...)
You also could get lucky - you might be the sole male survivor in a household. This was a big one in WWII, when so many families lost all their sons early on in the war. A more agrarian society back then, it was seen as destructive to family farms and small businesses to have all male heirs get taken out in shooting wars.
There were tons of ways in early 68 to get out of being drafted, but what made all the wheels turn in this industry of deferment was that at that time there was no pressure for the vast number of troops we would soon need to be drafted, and that was because there were so many enlistees.
In the mid 50s, movies like Rebel Without a Cause and the Wild One, West Side Story and even Marty, portrayed a lost generation of youths who found no meaning in the standard American model - high school, work, family, suburbs. Malcontented generations always sprung up after wars - consider the expats of Hemingway's movable feast - even the Civil War, where Go West Young Man meant getting out of having to conform to the expectations of a more rigid social, economic and familial set up. The Post WWII era was no different, and the nihilism portrayed in the 50s was real.
Nam provided a way for obstreperous, disaffected youth in the early to mid 60s to find adventure or at least escape the boredom and certainty of what was a fixed, predictable game for them. Enlist and you might see the world, maybe not, but you sure as hell would get out of your hometown, your old circle of boring predictable aimless friends, your semi-commitments to your girl friend and most of all, your family.
In my home town only about 25-30% wound up going to college anyway, so what were you gonna do? Get a job, get drunk, get laid, get in trouble. We lived in a resort area where most of the jobs were service jobs - not manly pursuits. The few factory jobs around required you to know somebody, as did the trades - electrician, carpenter, dry wall, plumber. Fathers, who had grown up in the aimless and hopeless unemployment of the Depression, had told their sons that the Army was the best thing that ever happened to them, despite the fighting. So many guys figured, what the hell...
In early 68, in a back water place like ours, there were no drugs really. The only ones who smoked dope (as we called it) were the ones that came back from college, where it was plentiful and readily accessible. If you wanted to get marijuana you had to know somebody on "the Ave", the main drag of the nearby black district a couple of towns over. Only the elite schools offered LSD and other psychodelics and there weren't any guys from our town who went to those places, so there weren't many who could come back to spread their gospel.
Booze and beers were the drugs of choice, or, rather, the only drugs around. The cops didn't mess with you as long as you weren't a complete asshole about it. Guys would get drunk, get in fights, get in trouble, but it was tolerated. A guy could work as a mechanic at a gas station, get paid, and on weekends get in trouble. Nobody sweated it.
But it was boring as hell...
No, if you weren't the type to go to college, and most of us weren't, the Army looked like a great way to get the hell out of there.
Nam was wallpaper. Nam was background. There was the GI bill, with its educational benefits, but more importantly its housing and training benefits. By 68 there had been a good 10 years of guys who had joined up, gone to Germany or one of those Asian outposts, had a piece of cake tour of duty, and comeback with honor, maybe some skills, and some cachet that employers loved. And you had gotten the hell out of here without having to sit yet again in stupid classrooms "becoming astronauts" - that is, taking up space.
What happened tho, was that occasionally Nam would reach out and tap you on the shoulder and remind you that it was there, still lurking in the shadows. Somebody would have a cousin, boyfriend, uncle - always from another town - get killed. When it happened it was surreal, like being struck by lightning. Unlike the stories we'd heard about every family losing someone in WWII, virtually no one had lost anyone in Nam. On those rare cases when it did happen, the grieving family was looked on as particularly unfortunate, and maybe even cursed. Not honored, but rather treated like lepers - unfortunate, but to be shunned, since their tragedy was so out of tune with the rest of what was going on, which was prosperity, upward mobility and by all means fun.
But by the beginning of 1968, despite perhaps a hundred of enlistees out of our little town, nobody had been killed. Enlisting was not seen as a risk of death really. You sign up, you do basic, they ship you somewhere, you do your tour, and you come back. Just like as if you had gone to college, but a lot more fun and mayhem.
Nam was solidly in the background of my life. Then, Bip!
It happened quickly. It was shown in a montage of the clean up after the so called Tet Offensive. The VC had launched a whole series of surprise attacks that shook everyone up, but by mid February it was clear things were back under control. At least that's what was said.
But there was something different now. The body counts continued, like the scores of an undefeated team, but there was a new dimension. It's hard to put one's finger on it, but the best I can do, even 40 years on, is to say that there was now a moral dimension.
God knows who that poor wretch was that was eliminated, "execution style" as they say, or what he had done. He might have killed babies for all we knew, drank their blood and used their bodies for sandbags. We had been continually told how savage and backwards the VC were, so nothing could be put past them.
Even still, we were the Americans, the good guys, the ones who treated prisoners well and helped rebuild our enemies after they were vanquished, even if they were as brutal and cruel as the Japanese and Germans. We were not like them godless Commies who were capable of tremendous unfeeling cruelty.
But even tho it was another Vietnamese who rubbed out the prisoner with so much dispatch and disregard right in front of us from Coast to Coast, nonetheless he was our guy, our representative, our ally, and to watch that happen sent several new and disturbing messages.
Were they guys we were fighting with, fighting for, just as bad as the bad guys? Were we putting up with this unacceptable, unAmerican behavior?
Or had things taken a bad turn? Were things really so bad that such desperate measures were justified merely to keep things under control?
Whatever it was, whatever the voice over and body counts said about our "victory", the emotional impact gave a very different message indeed.
Nam was not a soap opera. Nam was not a sporting event. Nam was spinning out of control, and about to enmesh us in its web in a way that threatened to take us way, way out of our prosperity drenched sunlight and into the fog of terror, tension and cruelty.
I was 15. I had 3 years of HS left. Three years is a long time and the war would certainly be over by then. I was going to go to college. I would not have to enlist, and I would not get drafted. Nam was far away, and like the Berlin Wall and the Cuban Missile Crisis, it was just part of the furniture of the Cold War, which, by 1968, was a negligible part of the prosperity of the times. I had nothing to worry about.
Still, that image stuck. Bip! I don't think it took more than 3 or 4 seconds. Gone. Just like that. Right on the street in Saigon.
There was something wrong with this war. Something wrong, something turning us into someone we didn't want to be, someone we were not back here, back home, back in the USA. Maybe those college kids knew something we didn't, those kids going door to door for McCarthy in New Hampshire.
I didn't know.
All I knew was this guy threw this other guy down on his knees and then Bip!
And things would never be the same...
Saturday, April 5, 2008
Flask
I love basketball.
It was my best game. I played football and ran track, but I hated football practice and didn't want to be a lineman. I played center as a legacy of Intermediate School football, when I was huge and smart, but by freshman year I wasn't as relatively tall and there were many guys I went up against who outweighed me by 50 lbs or more. Hike the ball, make sure the QB gets it right, then get your brains bashed in. I felt I should be an end, a receiver, but it took a long time to talk the coaches into it.
Basketball was another story. In basketball practice you don't do inane, boring, unrelated drills like you do as a lineman in football. In basketball practice, you play basketball.
As I previously mentioned, in 8th Grade I was quite the basketball star. But I failed to grow over the next year, so instead of playing center or even power forward I was moved down to the 3. This was okay, but it required a lot more dribbling than I was used to, and less rebounding and layups, both of which I excelled at.
To make matters worse, I wasn't starting. I had gone to grammar school in another town, a sending district. All the other kids had come up thru the normal Intermediate School and the Frosh coach knew them and was comfortable with them. Thus his starting five were kids he knew. I felt I was much better than they, but I had to wait for my opportunity.
Meanwhile I spent a lot of time on the bench. There were a lot of marginal players on the bench and that stuck in my craw as well, to be lumped in with such a bunch. One of those kids was a short kid, barely 5 feet tall. He lacked skills, but not confidence. "See these feet? They're the feet of a six footer!" he would pronounce confidently, as if it was just a matter of time before he would be a starter. He also had a motor mouth. Yap, yap, yap, six footer, six footer, six footer... Cut me a break!
I finally got my chance one game. One of the starters got into foul trouble early. The coach looked down the bench and there wasn't much there. He called my number. Well, I went in and kicked mofobo. I got rebounds, steals, scored 17 points, all in about a quarter and a half. The crowd went nuts (it was a home game), helped by members of the harem. It was by far the best single performance by anyone in the young season. I was sure I was starting.
I did indeed start the next game and did equivalently well, on the road. And I started the next one too. I was getting into my new role as a swing man, and altho my shot wasn't that great, my moves were and I had a habit of getting my own rebound and putting it in. Altho there were a few guys taller than I on the team, I was by far the best jumper, so I jumped center, even tho I played the 3.
Then one day early in January the coach called me into his office. "Listen, I'm not gonna start you tomorrow..." Why not?? I've been playing well. I'm one of your main scorers and rebounders. I jump center, for chrissakes!
The coach kinda shifted in his chair. "I know that. Doncha think I know that?" Okay, so what's the problem?
"The higher ups wanna give some other guys some more playing time." The "higher ups" was the varsity coach. "Some other guys" were the taller, less talented ones. I can't blame him, he had to look at the future. They had 4 or five inches on me. He didn't want to depend on a 3 who was 5'11" and quite likely had stopped growing. I couldn't do anything about it, the frosh coach couldn't do anything, either. I accepted it.
We tanked as the taller guys struggled. None of them ever made varsity as it turned out. But hey, they had to look to the future, they made their bet, and it didn't turn out. We struggled the rest of the season and finished a game or two over .500.
Towards the end of the season I wasn't playing much. I'd pack my uniform, go on the bus, sit the bench, take a shower, get back on the bus.
One time we had a Saturday afternoon game. It was a home game and gonna be over at around 6. The CYO dance started at 7:30. The plan was to go right from the game, meet up with Bruiser and Fatty, do some drinking and go to the dance.
Since I wasn't playing much, my gym bag became the most convenient place to keep my books. They stayed in there, rather than in my locker, even on weekends. I wore my cons all the time so all I needed was my uniform to play; I didn't even keep a jock in there.
Given that I was going drinking right after the game, and given that I made my own wine, I filled a flask that my father had lying around and put it in my gym bag. It was a glass bottle, one that had had whiskey in it that my father hadn't touched in what seemed to be years. There was maybe an ounce at the bottom. I figured he wouldn't miss it. I poured out the whiskey (which I detested) and filled it up with my wine.
Now my gym bag was rugged. I lugged it to school every day, it went to all my classes, it went on the bus to away games, everything. It still looked new, tho, because nothing ever happened to it.
But don't it always seem to go like this? The ONE day I have a flask of wine in my bag, THE ONE DAY, and one of my teammates, who had no way of knowing I had anything but books and my uniform in there, who had to know that it was heavy, decided to kick my bag! Kick it! While I was carrying it! Kick it! What, was this guy nuts? He coulda broken his foot, it was so heavy! He kicked it!
Needless to say, he kicked it right where the flask was, and it broke. And he hurt his foot! He's complaining, dancing around, and meanwhile purple liquid is dripping from the bottom. Now I've got a big problem. I run into the boys room, dripping wine with every step. I grab as many paper towels as I can, mopping up the floor in the bathroom, tracing my steps, mopping up the mess in the hall, saying "Shit! Shit! Shit!" all the while. Aside from smelling like a winery, the hall floor still has drips and drabs. I realize holy crap, I have to clean up the bag... THE BAG! Not only are all my books in there, my UNIFORM is in there. And it's a home game so the jersey is WHITE. Oh Christ! Not any more...
I quickly duck back into the boys room, mopping with my foot as I go. I get into the boys room and survey the damage. I pull out my uniform. Shoot! The jersey is not bad, but the spot is noticeable. I quickly rinse it out. Rinse, scrub with hand soap, wring, scrub again. The jersey is wet and I gotta use it in a half hour. How the hell am I gonna dry it.
Luckily there was one of those hand air dryer things. Usually they don't work in schools, but our school was brand new so this one worked. I put it under there for what seemed to be 20 rounds. It was finally dry. If you looked really hard you could see where the stains were, but in those funky gym lights no one would notice. Especially sitting on the bench, no one would notice, altho it did take on the smell of that nasty hand soap.
Relieved, I took a deep breath. Then I remembered, oh no, my freaking books! I slipped on my uniform over my clothes and frantically began to empty the bag. There was broken glass, but since it had been full, the flask was broken into big pieces. I carefully removed them, and then began taking out my books, one by one.
Now, a gym bag in those days was sort of pyramidic. Thus you placed your books in them in pyramidic fashion, largest ones on the bottom, working backwards until the smallest ones were at the top. My 3 ring binder notebook was mounted on its spine, but it was plastic, and the big rings kept the paper from getting stained. It was easy to clean up. As for my book pyramid, all the liquid had drained to the bottom, so only the bottom book was affected, the largest - my Western Civilization textbook. By a stroke of luck, altho it had a cloth bound heavy cardboard cover, it was purple. Aside from the smell and the slight warping, you couldn't notice. I daubed it dry, and mopped up the book bag, then refilled it.
The next day, as I began my homework, when I cracked open my Western Civ book I realized I had not been so lucky. Wine had seeped around the edges and up the spine, bleeding into the white pages like a Rorschach. Page after page had a noticeable purple tint, a psychedelic stain. Oh shit...
Fast forward to June. Last day of school. Gotta hand in your books. When my name gets called to turn in my book, I bring it up and present it. The teacher, Mr. Apito (more about him, later), goes to perfunctorily leave thru the pages but is surprised by the purple moire's on just about every page.
"What the hell happened here?"
I decided to tell the truth. Why, I still don't know... "It's wine stains. I had a flask of wine in my gym bag and some kid kicked it, it broke and the wine got all over my book."
Apito looked at me, half stunned, half angry. I began to question the wisdom of my move. I was sure I was going to the office, gonna get suspended on the last day, maybe carrying over into sophomore year. And my mother would find out! I was toast...
"Don't hand me that crap! You didn't spill wine on this book!" I didn't know what to say to that! Was this guy delusional? Shoot, if you sniffed it really close you could freaking SMELL the wine! I was silent. I had no idea what to say or do.
He bailed me out. "This is grape juice! You spilled grape juice on it, didn't ya!"
I stared at him. I just stared at him. I musta blinked, I stared so long.
"You spilled grape juice on this perfectly good book. I really oughta make you pay for it, for the whole book, to replace it." He shook his head in annoyance. He muttered something out of frustration, probably profanely. I just stood there.
"Yeah, grape juice" I said. "You got me."
"Aaah, go siddown. Just go!" He shooed me off dismissively, like I had just ruined his whole school year. I turned around and went back to my seat, feeling like someone who'd just survived 5 rounds of Russian Roulette.
I could swear I heard him mutter as I walked away, "Goddamn grape juice..."
It was my best game. I played football and ran track, but I hated football practice and didn't want to be a lineman. I played center as a legacy of Intermediate School football, when I was huge and smart, but by freshman year I wasn't as relatively tall and there were many guys I went up against who outweighed me by 50 lbs or more. Hike the ball, make sure the QB gets it right, then get your brains bashed in. I felt I should be an end, a receiver, but it took a long time to talk the coaches into it.
Basketball was another story. In basketball practice you don't do inane, boring, unrelated drills like you do as a lineman in football. In basketball practice, you play basketball.
As I previously mentioned, in 8th Grade I was quite the basketball star. But I failed to grow over the next year, so instead of playing center or even power forward I was moved down to the 3. This was okay, but it required a lot more dribbling than I was used to, and less rebounding and layups, both of which I excelled at.
To make matters worse, I wasn't starting. I had gone to grammar school in another town, a sending district. All the other kids had come up thru the normal Intermediate School and the Frosh coach knew them and was comfortable with them. Thus his starting five were kids he knew. I felt I was much better than they, but I had to wait for my opportunity.
Meanwhile I spent a lot of time on the bench. There were a lot of marginal players on the bench and that stuck in my craw as well, to be lumped in with such a bunch. One of those kids was a short kid, barely 5 feet tall. He lacked skills, but not confidence. "See these feet? They're the feet of a six footer!" he would pronounce confidently, as if it was just a matter of time before he would be a starter. He also had a motor mouth. Yap, yap, yap, six footer, six footer, six footer... Cut me a break!
I finally got my chance one game. One of the starters got into foul trouble early. The coach looked down the bench and there wasn't much there. He called my number. Well, I went in and kicked mofobo. I got rebounds, steals, scored 17 points, all in about a quarter and a half. The crowd went nuts (it was a home game), helped by members of the harem. It was by far the best single performance by anyone in the young season. I was sure I was starting.
I did indeed start the next game and did equivalently well, on the road. And I started the next one too. I was getting into my new role as a swing man, and altho my shot wasn't that great, my moves were and I had a habit of getting my own rebound and putting it in. Altho there were a few guys taller than I on the team, I was by far the best jumper, so I jumped center, even tho I played the 3.
Then one day early in January the coach called me into his office. "Listen, I'm not gonna start you tomorrow..." Why not?? I've been playing well. I'm one of your main scorers and rebounders. I jump center, for chrissakes!
The coach kinda shifted in his chair. "I know that. Doncha think I know that?" Okay, so what's the problem?
"The higher ups wanna give some other guys some more playing time." The "higher ups" was the varsity coach. "Some other guys" were the taller, less talented ones. I can't blame him, he had to look at the future. They had 4 or five inches on me. He didn't want to depend on a 3 who was 5'11" and quite likely had stopped growing. I couldn't do anything about it, the frosh coach couldn't do anything, either. I accepted it.
We tanked as the taller guys struggled. None of them ever made varsity as it turned out. But hey, they had to look to the future, they made their bet, and it didn't turn out. We struggled the rest of the season and finished a game or two over .500.
Towards the end of the season I wasn't playing much. I'd pack my uniform, go on the bus, sit the bench, take a shower, get back on the bus.
One time we had a Saturday afternoon game. It was a home game and gonna be over at around 6. The CYO dance started at 7:30. The plan was to go right from the game, meet up with Bruiser and Fatty, do some drinking and go to the dance.
Since I wasn't playing much, my gym bag became the most convenient place to keep my books. They stayed in there, rather than in my locker, even on weekends. I wore my cons all the time so all I needed was my uniform to play; I didn't even keep a jock in there.
Given that I was going drinking right after the game, and given that I made my own wine, I filled a flask that my father had lying around and put it in my gym bag. It was a glass bottle, one that had had whiskey in it that my father hadn't touched in what seemed to be years. There was maybe an ounce at the bottom. I figured he wouldn't miss it. I poured out the whiskey (which I detested) and filled it up with my wine.
Now my gym bag was rugged. I lugged it to school every day, it went to all my classes, it went on the bus to away games, everything. It still looked new, tho, because nothing ever happened to it.
But don't it always seem to go like this? The ONE day I have a flask of wine in my bag, THE ONE DAY, and one of my teammates, who had no way of knowing I had anything but books and my uniform in there, who had to know that it was heavy, decided to kick my bag! Kick it! While I was carrying it! Kick it! What, was this guy nuts? He coulda broken his foot, it was so heavy! He kicked it!
Needless to say, he kicked it right where the flask was, and it broke. And he hurt his foot! He's complaining, dancing around, and meanwhile purple liquid is dripping from the bottom. Now I've got a big problem. I run into the boys room, dripping wine with every step. I grab as many paper towels as I can, mopping up the floor in the bathroom, tracing my steps, mopping up the mess in the hall, saying "Shit! Shit! Shit!" all the while. Aside from smelling like a winery, the hall floor still has drips and drabs. I realize holy crap, I have to clean up the bag... THE BAG! Not only are all my books in there, my UNIFORM is in there. And it's a home game so the jersey is WHITE. Oh Christ! Not any more...
I quickly duck back into the boys room, mopping with my foot as I go. I get into the boys room and survey the damage. I pull out my uniform. Shoot! The jersey is not bad, but the spot is noticeable. I quickly rinse it out. Rinse, scrub with hand soap, wring, scrub again. The jersey is wet and I gotta use it in a half hour. How the hell am I gonna dry it.
Luckily there was one of those hand air dryer things. Usually they don't work in schools, but our school was brand new so this one worked. I put it under there for what seemed to be 20 rounds. It was finally dry. If you looked really hard you could see where the stains were, but in those funky gym lights no one would notice. Especially sitting on the bench, no one would notice, altho it did take on the smell of that nasty hand soap.
Relieved, I took a deep breath. Then I remembered, oh no, my freaking books! I slipped on my uniform over my clothes and frantically began to empty the bag. There was broken glass, but since it had been full, the flask was broken into big pieces. I carefully removed them, and then began taking out my books, one by one.
Now, a gym bag in those days was sort of pyramidic. Thus you placed your books in them in pyramidic fashion, largest ones on the bottom, working backwards until the smallest ones were at the top. My 3 ring binder notebook was mounted on its spine, but it was plastic, and the big rings kept the paper from getting stained. It was easy to clean up. As for my book pyramid, all the liquid had drained to the bottom, so only the bottom book was affected, the largest - my Western Civilization textbook. By a stroke of luck, altho it had a cloth bound heavy cardboard cover, it was purple. Aside from the smell and the slight warping, you couldn't notice. I daubed it dry, and mopped up the book bag, then refilled it.
The next day, as I began my homework, when I cracked open my Western Civ book I realized I had not been so lucky. Wine had seeped around the edges and up the spine, bleeding into the white pages like a Rorschach. Page after page had a noticeable purple tint, a psychedelic stain. Oh shit...
Fast forward to June. Last day of school. Gotta hand in your books. When my name gets called to turn in my book, I bring it up and present it. The teacher, Mr. Apito (more about him, later), goes to perfunctorily leave thru the pages but is surprised by the purple moire's on just about every page.
"What the hell happened here?"
I decided to tell the truth. Why, I still don't know... "It's wine stains. I had a flask of wine in my gym bag and some kid kicked it, it broke and the wine got all over my book."
Apito looked at me, half stunned, half angry. I began to question the wisdom of my move. I was sure I was going to the office, gonna get suspended on the last day, maybe carrying over into sophomore year. And my mother would find out! I was toast...
"Don't hand me that crap! You didn't spill wine on this book!" I didn't know what to say to that! Was this guy delusional? Shoot, if you sniffed it really close you could freaking SMELL the wine! I was silent. I had no idea what to say or do.
He bailed me out. "This is grape juice! You spilled grape juice on it, didn't ya!"
I stared at him. I just stared at him. I musta blinked, I stared so long.
"You spilled grape juice on this perfectly good book. I really oughta make you pay for it, for the whole book, to replace it." He shook his head in annoyance. He muttered something out of frustration, probably profanely. I just stood there.
"Yeah, grape juice" I said. "You got me."
"Aaah, go siddown. Just go!" He shooed me off dismissively, like I had just ruined his whole school year. I turned around and went back to my seat, feeling like someone who'd just survived 5 rounds of Russian Roulette.
I could swear I heard him mutter as I walked away, "Goddamn grape juice..."
Brillo
In June of 1962, when I was 9 going on 10, I was running across the school lawn to the yard behind to shoot some baskets. It happened to be Graduation Day at the school, a grammar school, and some guys were hanging out outside on one of the stoops of the doors. They were singing acapella, "As we stroll along to-oo-ge-e- ther..."...
I stopped in my tracks. I was transfixed. I think they were in high school, probably only freshmen, there to egg on some buddy of theirs graduating that night. I stood there, enraptured. When they were done I clapped. They threw things at me (like I think empty beer cans) and hurled insults at me, driving me off. I ran off to go shoot hoops. I didn't realize it then, but I had fallen seriously in love. With acapella.
Fast forward five years. The world had changed, particularly music. Doo-wop was long dead. White groups were all trying to be like the Beatles. But black music, "soul" music, still had singing, and harmony. I had abandoned the "white" radio stations (WABC, WMCA, WINS) back in 6th grade for the "black" ones - WNJR, WWRL and WLIB, primarily so I could still hear that vocal harmony.
Once again it was Graduation Night, this time my own, from 8th Grade, from the same school. One of the girls in my class had a party, so I went. It was pretty much a 45s make out party, a lot of dancing, that kind of thing.
All of a sudden, this girls shouts "Can I have your attention?" We stopped what we were doing and took the needle off the records. "My brother's group would like to perform a song for yiz."
We were down in the quasi finished basement and over by the cellar wall was a narrow staircase that emptied out onto a small landing. Down came these 4 white guys, "pressed out" as we used to say, in their banlon shirts and smoking jackets, pimpin'.
"I know you wanna leave me," one of them called out, holding his hand as if he were clutching a mike, "but I refuse to let you go-o-o". The other three were dippin' and divin' as he sang. Soon they were joining in, in unison, aping the Temptations.
I use the word "sang" loosely. The histrionics were great, but not only was the singing in unison, it was off key. They finished to rousing applause and went back upstairs.
I knew her brother. He had gone to Catholic school but hung out at the school yard at the other side of town, and I had played stickball and basketball with him. He was a nice guy and altho I feared him physically (his nickname was Bruiser, and he was quite muscular) he was very friendly to me and quite approachable.
More important - what they had done struck a chord with me. My old love of vocal harmony was rekindled. I ran upstairs after them.
Nowadays it seems things are different, but back then your grade in school was pretty close to your caste. You did not travel above or below except in rare circumstances. The fact that I was a newly graduated 8th grader and they were in HS magnified this. Me going upstairs to talk to these guys was an extreme broach of social etiquette, risking unnamed social consequences. To say nothing of humiliation and embarassment.
Nonetheless, my love for acapella won out. I would take the risk.
I went all the way up to the second floor of the house and knocked on Bruiser's door. One of the other guys opened the door and scowled, but Bruiser smiled and welcomed me in. "Hey, guys, that was great, but you should sing the background like this - " and I pointed out some harmony parts. The other guys didn't like the advice, but Bruiser was supportive. "Yeah, hey yeah, that's good." He patted me on the back and escorted me out the door.
You mighta thought that was the end of it, but a week later Bruiser called me up. "Hey, were starting up a new singing group and we'd like you to audition." This was a guy gonna be a junior in the fall, and I was a mere freshman. "Sure, you kiddin'? But what about those other guys?" He didn't want to bash them, since they were his friends, but it was clear he understood that when it came to real singing, these guys we'ren't gonna cut it. "We wanna move in a new direction". I jumped at the chance. "I can really help you out a lot. I know harmony, and music and..." He wanted to make sure I understood that it was just a try out, that I might not make it, that nothing was guaranteed. I understood.
The "audition" actually turned out to be he and I auditioning other guys, to see who could actually sing, actually hear. We wound up taking nobody.
Bruiser was confident that one of his original four, a kid nicknamed Fatty, would work out, as long as we could pry him from his social calendar. Fatty was a year younger than Bruiser and a year older than I was, but his easy going character and gregarious manner made him quite popular, even with older kids. Bruiser and he had played football together and they were two of a kind in the way in which they could get everyone to like them. It took a week, but Bruiser finally coaxed Fatty to "try out".
Fatty had the best ear by far of any of the guys we tried out, and by the end of the session the three of us were doing basic three part harmony, pretty well. Our voices had complimentary timbres and it sounded pretty good. I knew we had found our man. Bruiser was optimistic as well, but Fatty hesitated. It seemed like a big commitment. But Bruiser talked him into it. We needed a name - the Fabulons (my suggestion) were born.
We practiced all summer long, particularly under a bridge by the beach we all went to - that is, that the older kids like Bruiser and Fatty went to. We developed quite a tight harmony. Our singing gave us extra cachet with the girls, which was a plus for Bruiser and Fatty, but not for me, since I was clearly below caste. We got to sing at a couple of sweet 16's and things like that, using various personnel. But I sang lead in those cases, and the background clearly suffered.
When the fall started, fall of my freshman year in 1967, we had a really good and tight background, but no lead. You might have thought it would be easy to find a lead singer, given how reliably good we were and how much glamour was associated with it, but we spent almost all of the fall trying to find one. We found guys with personality that couldn't sing a note, and guys who could sing but had the personality of a polenta.
Fun as it was to learn new backgrounds and groove on how good we were, it was getting to be a drag not being able to sing out due to the lack of a lead. This led us to take several risks. We even tried out a guy who was several years older than we were, who turned out to be an ex-con and way too full of himself for us.
Finally, around Christmas, Bruiser suggested a kid that he had gone to Catholic school with, a guy with a dead on beautifully strong voice, with an equally legendary, flighty temper. He was half Jay Black, half Huntz Hall. And he was all Jake LaMotta.
An FBI (full blooded Italian), he had a big curly head of hair, a "whi-fro". Bruiser called him Brillo-head. This was shortened to just Brillo.
We sounded really great with Brillo, between our background and his lead, altho he never complimented us. Practicing with him was dicey - he didn't always go to school, and when he did he was in the shop program, while the other guys were college prep. His father wanted him to know the value of a dollar, so he worked nearly every day after school at his uncle's glass business, which limited the days we could sing together. And when he had an off day he was more interested in being with his girlfriend than spending time with us, understandably.
The hard work was in the background, and since he never sang background he would have to wait, fidgeting, while we worked things out. All he had to do was show up and show off, while we had to make sure we blended and followed properly. Basically, it was a drag for him to come to practice, and a drag to sing without him.
Finally, his father decided if his son was gonna sing with us we had to get something going. This guy was not a doctor or banker; he was a cab driver, and where we lived most decent, middle class people drove. The only people who needed a cab were the indigent, the welfare mothers who went shopping once a month with their food stamps, the guys who couldn't get a license, primarily since they had just gotten out of jail, the mentally dubious. His work wasn't exactly glamourous, and not exactly stable. We didn't know the details, but in the circles he frequented there were people who needed various favors from time to time, and we speculated that this cab driver supplemented his income in that way.
That's unfair, since we had no proof, but he did set us up at his favorite bar to sing a coupla numbers. It was a cold night in early February, 1968. We were pumped to finally be performing. That was lost as soon as we walked in the joint.
First of all, it was very, very dark, except for a small light above the pool table, and smoky. The place was populated by all men, and this wasn't a gay bar, not by a long shot! Fatty in particular was spooked by the place, fearing the "rough crowd" of the place. Bruiser wasn't too pleased either. Brillo was keyed up, in that Huntz Hall cum Jake LaMotta way. Me, I was just worried about everybody doing their parts right, oblivious to the surroundings. At first...
So Brillo's father herds us into the place, proud as can be, speaking words of encouragement to us and batting away his son's over-the-top argumentative comments. We slouched into the main barroom and stood against the wall. We were all underaged but no one noticed. The bartender asked us if we wanted a drink. Brillo was all set to order a scotch and soda when his father intervened and said "Get 'em all ginger ales!" He then stepped up on a little riser that was in the corner of the room. "Hey, yous guys, lemme have your attention, hanh?"
The patrons pretty much continued what they were doing, altho a few looked up, not impressed. "C'mon, hanh? I ain't gonna bite cha..." He persisted until he got the attention of the reluctant crowd, such as it was.
"These kids here, my son and his cohorts, they wanna sing for yiz, so give 'em a hand here!" He started clapping and a few in the crowd gave unenthusiastic applause as well. We mounted the riser nervously - Brillo out of aggression, Bruiser and Fatty out of worry, me out of concern for our performance.
We started singing "Till Then", the old Mills Brothers song, updated to the doo-wop style of the Classics. Brillo sounded beautiful. It was our custom in the backgroud to face each other in a small semicircle and that helped calm the other two guys, which helped them hit their parts well, which helped me relax. The Fabulons were on their way!
During the first release, for whatever reason, some old guy near the pool table began to heckle us. "That ain't the way the song goes!" Brillo was annoyed by this but kept on singing. The heckler didn't relent. "Hey, keep quiet when they're singin'!" Brillo's father yelled. The guy at the pool table waved his hand in disgust.
Maybe we shoulda been smart and end the song after the third verse, but the arrangement called for two releases, and there was no way we were gonna be able to stop easily. Besides, we sounded, to my critical ears, really good. But altho the heckler had seemed to retreat after his wave, he reemerged once we went back into the release. He actually started to boo us.
Brillo's father began to object to this. "Aaah, siddown an' shaddap!" "I ain't gonna shaddap. This is bullshit!" "Don't tell me that! You don't know music, ya deaf bastard!"
Then all of a sudden, just as he was supposed to sing "But pray that our loss, is nothing but time" Brillo lost it. Unlike his father, he didn't resort to words. Instead, he charged the guy, who had to be 40 years older than he was. Brillo's old man tried to restrain him but by then Brillo is barking right in the face of the guy, his curly hair bobbing up and down as he spit out his words.
Next thing you know, somebody picked up a chair and broke it. Things started flying, including fists. The bartender calmly ducked under the bar to wait out the melee. "Holy shit!" yelled Fatty and tried to push by me to get out of there. I was just stunned. I had not anticipated the chaos and just stood there, mouth agape. "We better get going" Bruiser said as he ushered me out the back door.
We didn't wait around for Brillo or his dad, our ride, but instead walked the 3 mile home in the cold winter night. Needless to say, that was the last time we sang with Brillo.
And we were back to not having a lead...
I stopped in my tracks. I was transfixed. I think they were in high school, probably only freshmen, there to egg on some buddy of theirs graduating that night. I stood there, enraptured. When they were done I clapped. They threw things at me (like I think empty beer cans) and hurled insults at me, driving me off. I ran off to go shoot hoops. I didn't realize it then, but I had fallen seriously in love. With acapella.
Fast forward five years. The world had changed, particularly music. Doo-wop was long dead. White groups were all trying to be like the Beatles. But black music, "soul" music, still had singing, and harmony. I had abandoned the "white" radio stations (WABC, WMCA, WINS) back in 6th grade for the "black" ones - WNJR, WWRL and WLIB, primarily so I could still hear that vocal harmony.
Once again it was Graduation Night, this time my own, from 8th Grade, from the same school. One of the girls in my class had a party, so I went. It was pretty much a 45s make out party, a lot of dancing, that kind of thing.
All of a sudden, this girls shouts "Can I have your attention?" We stopped what we were doing and took the needle off the records. "My brother's group would like to perform a song for yiz."
We were down in the quasi finished basement and over by the cellar wall was a narrow staircase that emptied out onto a small landing. Down came these 4 white guys, "pressed out" as we used to say, in their banlon shirts and smoking jackets, pimpin'.
"I know you wanna leave me," one of them called out, holding his hand as if he were clutching a mike, "but I refuse to let you go-o-o". The other three were dippin' and divin' as he sang. Soon they were joining in, in unison, aping the Temptations.
I use the word "sang" loosely. The histrionics were great, but not only was the singing in unison, it was off key. They finished to rousing applause and went back upstairs.
I knew her brother. He had gone to Catholic school but hung out at the school yard at the other side of town, and I had played stickball and basketball with him. He was a nice guy and altho I feared him physically (his nickname was Bruiser, and he was quite muscular) he was very friendly to me and quite approachable.
More important - what they had done struck a chord with me. My old love of vocal harmony was rekindled. I ran upstairs after them.
Nowadays it seems things are different, but back then your grade in school was pretty close to your caste. You did not travel above or below except in rare circumstances. The fact that I was a newly graduated 8th grader and they were in HS magnified this. Me going upstairs to talk to these guys was an extreme broach of social etiquette, risking unnamed social consequences. To say nothing of humiliation and embarassment.
Nonetheless, my love for acapella won out. I would take the risk.
I went all the way up to the second floor of the house and knocked on Bruiser's door. One of the other guys opened the door and scowled, but Bruiser smiled and welcomed me in. "Hey, guys, that was great, but you should sing the background like this - " and I pointed out some harmony parts. The other guys didn't like the advice, but Bruiser was supportive. "Yeah, hey yeah, that's good." He patted me on the back and escorted me out the door.
You mighta thought that was the end of it, but a week later Bruiser called me up. "Hey, were starting up a new singing group and we'd like you to audition." This was a guy gonna be a junior in the fall, and I was a mere freshman. "Sure, you kiddin'? But what about those other guys?" He didn't want to bash them, since they were his friends, but it was clear he understood that when it came to real singing, these guys we'ren't gonna cut it. "We wanna move in a new direction". I jumped at the chance. "I can really help you out a lot. I know harmony, and music and..." He wanted to make sure I understood that it was just a try out, that I might not make it, that nothing was guaranteed. I understood.
The "audition" actually turned out to be he and I auditioning other guys, to see who could actually sing, actually hear. We wound up taking nobody.
Bruiser was confident that one of his original four, a kid nicknamed Fatty, would work out, as long as we could pry him from his social calendar. Fatty was a year younger than Bruiser and a year older than I was, but his easy going character and gregarious manner made him quite popular, even with older kids. Bruiser and he had played football together and they were two of a kind in the way in which they could get everyone to like them. It took a week, but Bruiser finally coaxed Fatty to "try out".
Fatty had the best ear by far of any of the guys we tried out, and by the end of the session the three of us were doing basic three part harmony, pretty well. Our voices had complimentary timbres and it sounded pretty good. I knew we had found our man. Bruiser was optimistic as well, but Fatty hesitated. It seemed like a big commitment. But Bruiser talked him into it. We needed a name - the Fabulons (my suggestion) were born.
We practiced all summer long, particularly under a bridge by the beach we all went to - that is, that the older kids like Bruiser and Fatty went to. We developed quite a tight harmony. Our singing gave us extra cachet with the girls, which was a plus for Bruiser and Fatty, but not for me, since I was clearly below caste. We got to sing at a couple of sweet 16's and things like that, using various personnel. But I sang lead in those cases, and the background clearly suffered.
When the fall started, fall of my freshman year in 1967, we had a really good and tight background, but no lead. You might have thought it would be easy to find a lead singer, given how reliably good we were and how much glamour was associated with it, but we spent almost all of the fall trying to find one. We found guys with personality that couldn't sing a note, and guys who could sing but had the personality of a polenta.
Fun as it was to learn new backgrounds and groove on how good we were, it was getting to be a drag not being able to sing out due to the lack of a lead. This led us to take several risks. We even tried out a guy who was several years older than we were, who turned out to be an ex-con and way too full of himself for us.
Finally, around Christmas, Bruiser suggested a kid that he had gone to Catholic school with, a guy with a dead on beautifully strong voice, with an equally legendary, flighty temper. He was half Jay Black, half Huntz Hall. And he was all Jake LaMotta.
An FBI (full blooded Italian), he had a big curly head of hair, a "whi-fro". Bruiser called him Brillo-head. This was shortened to just Brillo.
We sounded really great with Brillo, between our background and his lead, altho he never complimented us. Practicing with him was dicey - he didn't always go to school, and when he did he was in the shop program, while the other guys were college prep. His father wanted him to know the value of a dollar, so he worked nearly every day after school at his uncle's glass business, which limited the days we could sing together. And when he had an off day he was more interested in being with his girlfriend than spending time with us, understandably.
The hard work was in the background, and since he never sang background he would have to wait, fidgeting, while we worked things out. All he had to do was show up and show off, while we had to make sure we blended and followed properly. Basically, it was a drag for him to come to practice, and a drag to sing without him.
Finally, his father decided if his son was gonna sing with us we had to get something going. This guy was not a doctor or banker; he was a cab driver, and where we lived most decent, middle class people drove. The only people who needed a cab were the indigent, the welfare mothers who went shopping once a month with their food stamps, the guys who couldn't get a license, primarily since they had just gotten out of jail, the mentally dubious. His work wasn't exactly glamourous, and not exactly stable. We didn't know the details, but in the circles he frequented there were people who needed various favors from time to time, and we speculated that this cab driver supplemented his income in that way.
That's unfair, since we had no proof, but he did set us up at his favorite bar to sing a coupla numbers. It was a cold night in early February, 1968. We were pumped to finally be performing. That was lost as soon as we walked in the joint.
First of all, it was very, very dark, except for a small light above the pool table, and smoky. The place was populated by all men, and this wasn't a gay bar, not by a long shot! Fatty in particular was spooked by the place, fearing the "rough crowd" of the place. Bruiser wasn't too pleased either. Brillo was keyed up, in that Huntz Hall cum Jake LaMotta way. Me, I was just worried about everybody doing their parts right, oblivious to the surroundings. At first...
So Brillo's father herds us into the place, proud as can be, speaking words of encouragement to us and batting away his son's over-the-top argumentative comments. We slouched into the main barroom and stood against the wall. We were all underaged but no one noticed. The bartender asked us if we wanted a drink. Brillo was all set to order a scotch and soda when his father intervened and said "Get 'em all ginger ales!" He then stepped up on a little riser that was in the corner of the room. "Hey, yous guys, lemme have your attention, hanh?"
The patrons pretty much continued what they were doing, altho a few looked up, not impressed. "C'mon, hanh? I ain't gonna bite cha..." He persisted until he got the attention of the reluctant crowd, such as it was.
"These kids here, my son and his cohorts, they wanna sing for yiz, so give 'em a hand here!" He started clapping and a few in the crowd gave unenthusiastic applause as well. We mounted the riser nervously - Brillo out of aggression, Bruiser and Fatty out of worry, me out of concern for our performance.
We started singing "Till Then", the old Mills Brothers song, updated to the doo-wop style of the Classics. Brillo sounded beautiful. It was our custom in the backgroud to face each other in a small semicircle and that helped calm the other two guys, which helped them hit their parts well, which helped me relax. The Fabulons were on their way!
During the first release, for whatever reason, some old guy near the pool table began to heckle us. "That ain't the way the song goes!" Brillo was annoyed by this but kept on singing. The heckler didn't relent. "Hey, keep quiet when they're singin'!" Brillo's father yelled. The guy at the pool table waved his hand in disgust.
Maybe we shoulda been smart and end the song after the third verse, but the arrangement called for two releases, and there was no way we were gonna be able to stop easily. Besides, we sounded, to my critical ears, really good. But altho the heckler had seemed to retreat after his wave, he reemerged once we went back into the release. He actually started to boo us.
Brillo's father began to object to this. "Aaah, siddown an' shaddap!" "I ain't gonna shaddap. This is bullshit!" "Don't tell me that! You don't know music, ya deaf bastard!"
Then all of a sudden, just as he was supposed to sing "But pray that our loss, is nothing but time" Brillo lost it. Unlike his father, he didn't resort to words. Instead, he charged the guy, who had to be 40 years older than he was. Brillo's old man tried to restrain him but by then Brillo is barking right in the face of the guy, his curly hair bobbing up and down as he spit out his words.
Next thing you know, somebody picked up a chair and broke it. Things started flying, including fists. The bartender calmly ducked under the bar to wait out the melee. "Holy shit!" yelled Fatty and tried to push by me to get out of there. I was just stunned. I had not anticipated the chaos and just stood there, mouth agape. "We better get going" Bruiser said as he ushered me out the back door.
We didn't wait around for Brillo or his dad, our ride, but instead walked the 3 mile home in the cold winter night. Needless to say, that was the last time we sang with Brillo.
And we were back to not having a lead...
Hair
"When the moon is in the seventh house..."
Yeah, Hair opened in 1968, created quite a stir - nude bodies at the close of the first act! Can you imagine...?
But more about that later. Meanwhile I had my own hair story going...
By the end of January my brief fling with the beautiful and sincerely sweet Barbara had come to an end. (She had apparently been "two timing" me. Some other girls, eager for a chance with me, had put me on to this by dedicating a song to me at a dance - "Woman, Woman" by Gary Puckett and the Union Gap. "Have you got cheating on your mind, on your mind?")
Ok, so it ended with a little bit of drama, and now it was key to demonstrate to my public that it was not gonna faze me one bit. I went looking for a suitable substitute.
There was this girl, Bonnie. She was in my grade, but not in any of my classes. She was always smiling, in a dopey but endearing kinda way, altho she always seemed to be blushing. She didn't hang out at the dances, but she was beautiful in a pert kind of way, and she had cachet, since she had been the long time girlfriend of a guy named Tony who was a couple of grades older. Tony was already driving. He was cool, but in a long hair kinda way. It was rumored that they did acid together and, you know, were having sex...
Word had gotten out that Bonnie and Tony had broken up. I decided to make my move. At a dance (she was on the outs, so she began going) I asked her to dance. Other guys backed off. I dance with her the entire night. She seemed like she was having fun. I began calling her.
It was then that I realized why she was not in any of my classes. Let's just say, she was hard to engage in a conversation about virtually everything. Music, sports, current events, other couples and popular people - nothing. I even tried broaching the topics of LSD and sex, as if I myself had experienced them. There were many long, embarrassing pauses. I could hear her blushing over the phone.
Thus it went or about 3 weeks or so. I think we kissed once. She would go to dances with me, but she always had to go over to talk to her friends, and a couple of times I caught them pointing at me an laughing. She had that dopey, blushing face on, so I told myself they were not mocking me.
This relationship was giving me nothing, but I had a reputation to defend. One Saturday as we (meaning I) were talking on the phone, she actually asked me to go to a local park that night. It was February so the lake there was frozen, and a bunch of kids were getting together to skate. I didn't own a pair of skates and didn't know how to even if I did. I equivocated, but later on that day I got wind that Tony was gonna be there. My rep was on the line. I had to be there.
The deal was, I was not looking for a fight, but I knew I would have to confront him. There was a code of conduct. The worst case scenario was that Bonnie would just try to break us up, chide both of us. The best case scenario was that she would be impressed with me for being wiling to fight for her. In the first scenario, it would be over but I could withdraw with honor, as it were. In the second scenario, she would be warmer to me.
So I went. Bonnie was standoffish. I didn't see Tony, but he was rumored still to be coming. Bonnie could skate well and enticed me to try it, altho where I was gonna get skates, I had no idea. And the last thing I wanted to do was make a fool of myself. If I were comfortable in our relationship I'da probly done it, have some laughs. But I wasn't, and I was there to defend my rep. Being an ass was out of the question.
After a couple of hours of watching her skate around, and hovering with her friends and giggling, and not paying much attention to me, and with Tony nowhere in sight. I decided to go. She seemed non-plussed.
Monday I went up to her in the hall. Again, we didn't share any classes so the hall was the only opportunity I had to speak to her. Again, she was standoffish. I asked her what was up. She was with a friend, so it was difficult, but she had on that dopey, blushing smile and kept looking at her friend as I spoke, like, get a load of this guy!
I pushed the issue - so, I guess you don't wanna go out anymore... What is it, Tony? I guess this hit on something, because she blurted out - "Why don't you wash your hair every once in a while?"
She smiled and blushed and giggled with her friend, and then turned and walked off.
I was devastated. Forget being let down so cavalierly - she was pretty with a nice figure and all, but dumb as dirt and boring as hell. I had been going thru the motions, as had she. Tony or no Tony, this thing was terminal, and soon.
But she had cut me to the quick. She had put me in my place, and maybe just needed to say something mean to get herself off the hook, knowing that for me to call her again would be the equivalent of crawling. But I was embarrassed beyond all reckoning.
It was true - I didn't wash my hair often. I never used shampoo. This was still the Brylcream age, when slick greasy hair was cool, so having greasy hair was not such a big deal. But she had made me feel dirty. And fact of the matter was, my hair WAS dirty.
I began to think, is that why her friends were giggling and pointing at me? Was that dopey, blushing smile really embarrassment for me? Here was this girl, hanging out with an older guy who was driving, dropping acid and having sex. And here was I, little twerp with the greasy hair, playing little boy smootchy games. I felt like I was an inch tall.
Luckily, the other girls "my own age" didn't notice, or didn't care, or didn't let on that they cared. Life after Bonnie was like life before - popularity, coolness, the harem.
But I made sure I started washing my hair!
Yeah, Hair opened in 1968, created quite a stir - nude bodies at the close of the first act! Can you imagine...?
But more about that later. Meanwhile I had my own hair story going...
By the end of January my brief fling with the beautiful and sincerely sweet Barbara had come to an end. (She had apparently been "two timing" me. Some other girls, eager for a chance with me, had put me on to this by dedicating a song to me at a dance - "Woman, Woman" by Gary Puckett and the Union Gap. "Have you got cheating on your mind, on your mind?")
Ok, so it ended with a little bit of drama, and now it was key to demonstrate to my public that it was not gonna faze me one bit. I went looking for a suitable substitute.
There was this girl, Bonnie. She was in my grade, but not in any of my classes. She was always smiling, in a dopey but endearing kinda way, altho she always seemed to be blushing. She didn't hang out at the dances, but she was beautiful in a pert kind of way, and she had cachet, since she had been the long time girlfriend of a guy named Tony who was a couple of grades older. Tony was already driving. He was cool, but in a long hair kinda way. It was rumored that they did acid together and, you know, were having sex...
Word had gotten out that Bonnie and Tony had broken up. I decided to make my move. At a dance (she was on the outs, so she began going) I asked her to dance. Other guys backed off. I dance with her the entire night. She seemed like she was having fun. I began calling her.
It was then that I realized why she was not in any of my classes. Let's just say, she was hard to engage in a conversation about virtually everything. Music, sports, current events, other couples and popular people - nothing. I even tried broaching the topics of LSD and sex, as if I myself had experienced them. There were many long, embarrassing pauses. I could hear her blushing over the phone.
Thus it went or about 3 weeks or so. I think we kissed once. She would go to dances with me, but she always had to go over to talk to her friends, and a couple of times I caught them pointing at me an laughing. She had that dopey, blushing face on, so I told myself they were not mocking me.
This relationship was giving me nothing, but I had a reputation to defend. One Saturday as we (meaning I) were talking on the phone, she actually asked me to go to a local park that night. It was February so the lake there was frozen, and a bunch of kids were getting together to skate. I didn't own a pair of skates and didn't know how to even if I did. I equivocated, but later on that day I got wind that Tony was gonna be there. My rep was on the line. I had to be there.
The deal was, I was not looking for a fight, but I knew I would have to confront him. There was a code of conduct. The worst case scenario was that Bonnie would just try to break us up, chide both of us. The best case scenario was that she would be impressed with me for being wiling to fight for her. In the first scenario, it would be over but I could withdraw with honor, as it were. In the second scenario, she would be warmer to me.
So I went. Bonnie was standoffish. I didn't see Tony, but he was rumored still to be coming. Bonnie could skate well and enticed me to try it, altho where I was gonna get skates, I had no idea. And the last thing I wanted to do was make a fool of myself. If I were comfortable in our relationship I'da probly done it, have some laughs. But I wasn't, and I was there to defend my rep. Being an ass was out of the question.
After a couple of hours of watching her skate around, and hovering with her friends and giggling, and not paying much attention to me, and with Tony nowhere in sight. I decided to go. She seemed non-plussed.
Monday I went up to her in the hall. Again, we didn't share any classes so the hall was the only opportunity I had to speak to her. Again, she was standoffish. I asked her what was up. She was with a friend, so it was difficult, but she had on that dopey, blushing smile and kept looking at her friend as I spoke, like, get a load of this guy!
I pushed the issue - so, I guess you don't wanna go out anymore... What is it, Tony? I guess this hit on something, because she blurted out - "Why don't you wash your hair every once in a while?"
She smiled and blushed and giggled with her friend, and then turned and walked off.
I was devastated. Forget being let down so cavalierly - she was pretty with a nice figure and all, but dumb as dirt and boring as hell. I had been going thru the motions, as had she. Tony or no Tony, this thing was terminal, and soon.
But she had cut me to the quick. She had put me in my place, and maybe just needed to say something mean to get herself off the hook, knowing that for me to call her again would be the equivalent of crawling. But I was embarrassed beyond all reckoning.
It was true - I didn't wash my hair often. I never used shampoo. This was still the Brylcream age, when slick greasy hair was cool, so having greasy hair was not such a big deal. But she had made me feel dirty. And fact of the matter was, my hair WAS dirty.
I began to think, is that why her friends were giggling and pointing at me? Was that dopey, blushing smile really embarrassment for me? Here was this girl, hanging out with an older guy who was driving, dropping acid and having sex. And here was I, little twerp with the greasy hair, playing little boy smootchy games. I felt like I was an inch tall.
Luckily, the other girls "my own age" didn't notice, or didn't care, or didn't let on that they cared. Life after Bonnie was like life before - popularity, coolness, the harem.
But I made sure I started washing my hair!
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