5.
When I told my father I was dropping out of college to bum around the country for awhile, he was surprisingly supportive. A Goldwater Republican, he thought it would do me good to see the world, find out what the real world was like.
My friend Bill from Pine Lake, who now called himself William, had also decided to drop out of the University of Denver and travel with a band he was in. He played guitar. Our friend John Bell from Pine Lake had taught him how to play, and they formed a band with William’s cousin Jeff called The Brute Force Folk Ensemble. They were riding the wave of the folk music revival, and played such songs as “Railroad Bill,” “The Banks of the Ohio,” “Frankie and Johnnie.”
I hitchhiked down from New York and joined them where they were staying and playing at a Holiday Inn between Norfolk and Virginia Beach, Virginia. The band leader, Rick, had a tendency to piss off the management by pushing the envelope. Between sets when they were tuning their instruments, he’d say things like “this is what they call folk-tuning, or just folking around.” There were five of them in the band, and they all wore matching blue work shirts and jeans. William and John on guitar, Jeff on bass, another guy Mike on harmonica and banjo, and Rick on vocals. They were pretty good, drew a strong crowd every night, developed some devoted fans.
I was sleeping on the floor of their suite. The motel management got wind of my presence and decided to use it as an excuse to fire the whole band – they were really fed up with Rick and his forays into obscenity. Mike blamed me for the firing and said I should pay them what they lost, but then the management offered them the gig back if they got rid of Rick. The band refused, and relocated to Virginia Beach, where they found another gig right away.
We moved into the downstairs of a house that was under reconstruction. We slept in cots in a room with a half-completed floor and open walls of 2 x 4s without sheetrock.
There was another guy, Josiah, who lived there in his own room, which had been completed. He was a working class white boy, worked at the local gas station.
I decided to get a job. I started by asking at restaurants along the beach. One Italian guy fired his black dishwasher and hired me on the spot. I washed dishes that whole night. The next day I went back and he told me his partner had balked at him firing the nigger, so he hired him back.
I went to the Virginia Employment Office, filled out the papers, and waited. There were about 20 other men waiting, all black. I was the only white applicant, though of course all the workers there were white. After about 10 minutes, one of the employment counselors came up to me very conspicuously, pointed at me, and said,
“You! Come with me!”
What could I say? I had never experienced overt discrimination like this before. But, I needed a job.
The employment counselor sent me to the local Chevrolet dealership to work in the body shop. I became an apprentice to a lanky, curly headed man, no more than 30. He talked about how the technology had taken the skill out of the job now, what with the fiberglass fillers they used, and body and fender work had become nigger work. I liked the guy though, and made the mistake of telling him I’d been to college. I’m pretty sure he then got the idea that I wouldn’t last at this work and since I wasn’t very good at it, he let me go after about a week.
One night, I decided not to join the band at their gig and stayed home, hanging out with Josiah drinking beer and listening to Dionne Warwick, “Don’t Make Me Over.” Josiah liked to badmouth the “niggers” a lot, but he had to admit in Dionne’s case, “they sure can sing.”
A bunch of his friends came over and we all sat around for awhile drinking. One greasy looking fellow got the idea, “Let’s go down to Niggertown and stir up some shit!” This idea took hold.
“You don’t want to do that,” I said. They got quiet and looked at me.
“Why not?” the greasy fellow asked.
“They have as much right as we do.”
They began poking each other, laughing. “Who IS this guy?” the greasy fellow asked Josiah.
“He’s a Yankee,” Josiah said. “He doesn’t understand.”
“Let’s help him,” said the greasy guy and he grabbed a can of Josiah’s shaving cream and began to spray me with it while the others laughed uproariously. I tried to be a good sport and laughed with them. They took turns with the can and soon I was covered head to toe in shaving cream. The boys seemed to want more, but Josiah stopped them. “That’s enough,” he said. “Let’s go.”
So they filed out of the room and jumped into their good-ol-boy pick up with the confederate flag on the bumper and rode off toward Niggertown, leaving me, a giant abandoned marshmallow, behind.
It had been my first stand against racism, and I felt good about it.
A week or so later, the band was out of work again and tensions were rising between the members. I wanted to move on to New Orleans and I wanted William to go with me. I was jealous of the band and not very aware. Putting my own interests above his, I urged him to leave the band. He did, and soon he and I were off to the land of dreams in his Ford Fairlane station wagon with the fake wooden sides.
By the time we crossed that endless bridge across Lake Ponchartrain into the Big Easy, we were broke. We took the car to a sleazy used car dealer and William sold it for $75. It was doubtlessly worth much more, but we didn’t care. We wanted to be without money. All our lives, we had never wanted for money and now we needed to know what it was like not to have it.
We got a room at the Burcon Hotel in the French Quarter before it was chic, Bourbon and Conti Streets, $5 a night. We slept on a sagging double bed with a pink chenille bedspread, but never considered having sex. Somewhere along the way, William had lost his wallet, so I kept the money. The hotel despite its seediness and putrid coral paint job, had a filigreed balcony right outside our door overlooking a courtyard with a fragrant magnolia tree. I sang that Billie Holiday song to William as we settled into the room:
Scent of magnolia, sweet and fresh,
Then the sudden smell of buuurn-ing flesh…
Lying back on the bed, resting from the long trip, I said to him, “You know, they like to talk about us who know-it-all at 19, but you know what? We do know it all. We know all there is to know: it’s all fucked up.”,
“Exactly, Hank, exactly.” He strummed his guitar. He played “Freight Train.” I played along on the harmonica, my instrument of choice, the one song I had more or less mastered. William’s mother had been divorced twice and was headed for a third divorce from her Pine Lake Brumder drunk. Despite William’s gifts – his blond, curly-headed good looks, his excelling at athletics, his way with the girls, and now his newly discovered musical talent – he was just as confused and unhappy as I was.
I continued philosophizing. “I mean, I’ve learned to really, really not care about anything. But it’s like not a negative thing. It’s a positive not-caring, like not getting hung up on petty things like what people wear or how they talk.”
“I know what you mean.”
During the day, I read Nietzsche and Anna Karenina. When it got too hot, as it inevitably did, I went to the ultramodern main library where they had air conditioning. The second night, William got a gig at one of the French Quarter dives.
“Let me play harmonica with you,” I asked him.
“No. You’re not good enough, Henry.” So much for not-caring.
At the time, the French Quarter was nearly as sleazy as Sculley Square in Boston, but with a lot more old world charm. The white bricks, the high curved windows, the green shutters, the alcoholics and other bums, but most of all the overwhelming sense of ruin and decadence combined with the oppressive humidity of the climate matched our mood precisely.
I went to the state employment agency, but wasn’t as lucky as in Virginia Beach. I had to wait with the others, with the Negroes, and wait, and wait, and wait.
There was a girl named Sam who was an ex-girlfriend of John Bell, one of the band members. She was blond, blue-eyed, with a sweet drawl and a devil may care attitude. William and I met her for drinks, and I promptly fell in love. Given my lousy record at competition, my pattern at the time was to fall for gorgeous women who were self-evidently way out of my league. That way I got to play the role of the perpetually heartbroken victim, and since that’s the way I felt girl or no girl, this attitude gave me a bluesy authenticity. I could tell of course that she liked William – everyone did.
The next day, William simply disappeared. He didn’t come back to the hotel that night. He didn’t come back the next morning. I was sure that he was out with Sam somewhere. By that next night, I was mad enough to take what money we had left and go down to the bars along the wharf near Jackson Square where the big, yeast-billowing Jax brewery was.
I sat at the bar drinking boilermakers. A woman approached, an ugly woman in her 50s at least, missing some teeth. “Buy me a drink, Mister?”
I did, I bought her a bunch of the watered down drinks that the bartender proffered to her. “You want to go upstairs? Ten dollars.”
I gave the bartender our last ten dollars and followed her through a kind of a trap door in the back wall, to a small room with a cot smelling of sex. I tried to make small talk. “Can we do an around-the-world?” I was eager to try sex acts that I’d read about in books.
“No, honey, I just like to fuck.” She quickly stripped off my pants and lifted her dress. She wore no underwear for efficiency sake. She stuck me inside her and wiggled her hips. It was over within three minutes.
I returned to the hotel, satisfied that at least I had gotten my revenge from William for stealing “my” girl.
By the next day, I was worried. I called Sam and found she hadn’t seen him. I went over to the house of a musician friend Eric we’d met our first week in town, a referral from one of the other band members. When we first visited, he sang of one of the songs he had written about “a dark cloud hiding the sun,” – the threat of nuclear annihilation.
“I haven’t seen William in 3 days,” I told him.
Eric took charge. “Did you check the hospitals? Did you report him missing to the police?” I hadn’t of course.
He made some calls and within 15 minutes determined that William was in jail. Eric and I rode the streetcar named Desire to the city jail, where it was inscribed above the door: “We are a Government of Laws not of Men.” A quote I later learned was from John Adams, but at the time it seemed like the coldest proclamation imaginable.
William had been arrested for vagrancy because he had lost his wallet and had no ID. Eric was able to convince the jailer that William wasn’t a threat to society, that he was an accomplished musician, and that we – he and I – were just passing through.
Freed from jail, William now exuded a new level of darkness, like he was beginning to reach the limit of what I called our upside-down status seeking.
When I told him later I had spent all our money on a whore because I thought he was boinking Sam, he just looked at me with a sadness that went down to the bone.
A silence came between us. William wouldn’t talk about what went on in the jail, but I could tell it wasn’t pretty. He was sinking out of my reach.
Eric took us back to his house, where we spent the night, but he was clear we couldn’t stay with him. We were starving the next morning after Eric left for work. We made sandwiches with white bread, mayonnaise, and garlic powder, all we could find in the house.
That afternoon, I answered an ad in the newspaper and found myself in a dingy warehouse surrounded by carts for selling hot dogs and hot tamales. There wasn’t much of an interview. That very evening, I was wandering the streets of New Orleans hawking “Hot Tamales! Get your hot tamales right here! Hot Tamales!” I ate a fair share of them myself, even after a stocky fellow in a dirty Hawaiian shirt said to me, “You know, buddy, I used to sell those things myself. Until I learned they were made out of cat meat.”
I went around to all the bars and made enough money to pay for our room at the Burcon Hotel again. Fortunately, they hadn’t thrown our stuff away when we abandoned the room.
One morning before picking up my cart, I was walking downtown when I saw Woolworth’s. In front of Woolworth’s was a large picket line, made up of mostly Black people. My stomach did a funny turn as I joined them, a giddiness came over me. I stayed about 10 minutes, but I liked the feeling.
On my way back to the hotel, I found myself on a block with one other person, a Black man. I smiled at him, trying to let him know that I wasn’t like the others. He gave me this look of sheer terror and started fast-walking away from me. I yelled after him: “Wait! I know how you feel! I hate all white people too!” He kept on going.
Since being in jail, since my betrayal of him with the whore, a chill had come between us. That night, William confessed, “I can’t do this any more.”
We had come to the end. After two months, we were failures as bums. I called my father and asked him to wire me money so we could come home. We picked up the $50 at the Western Union office. We sauntered down to Jackson Square to bid adieu to the Big Easy. As a final ritual, I took a dollar bill from our stash and burned it.
“This is what I think of your money, Father,” I said. But I only burned one dollar. The rest we took to the Greyhound station and bought two bus tickets home to Pine Lake.
The first thing I did when I got back into the Pine Lake fold was check to see if I had any connection to old friends there. Kathy Hansen came over and we got in an argument about Goldwater. I said I thought he was a fascist.
“I don’t think he’s a Communist,” she said. My mouth dropped. She doesn’t know the difference between a fascist and a Communist?
As she was leaving, she said, “I still love you, Hank.”
“Sorry. Not me,” I said, meaning I no longer loved her.
The second thing I did was get outrageously drunk and go to a debut party with another old friend, Nancy Bugbee, wearing a tux with a sheepskin vest. The private security ushered us out of the party before we could even get in.
The third thing I did was buy the new Bob Dylan album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, and play “Blowin’ in the Wind,” for my mother, with the caveat, “Listen to this if you want to understand me.”
My parents were frightened by my new level of anger. To their credit, they gave me space at this point, even as they only partially concealed their disappointment that I was not on the “professional” trajectory they had groomed me for.
The last thing I did before leaving for California where I planned to meet up with Mark was watch the March on Washington, Martin Luther King, I have a dream, and cried my eyes out. The song wasn’t out yet, but the times they were a-changing.
My grandmother sat on the wicker chair on our front porch. She was about to turn 92 and would live for only four more months. “Your grandfather Henry grew up in the South, in Washington, DC, and hated colored people. I wonder what he would think now?”
I rode with the California Winklers, my cousin Fritz, whom I adored, at 3 years younger than me. We just liked each other. And his family, being the liberal wing of the clan, was more understanding and tolerant of the transformation I was undergoing.
I remember the first glimpse of the Bay Area as we rolled through the Altemont Pass and swept toward the Bay Bridge to San Francisco. I kept saying “Wow!” I’d never been swept off my feet by natural beauty before – the dazzling blue of the bay surrounded by golden hills. It was a new day.
Saturday, August 29, 2009
Friday, August 21, 2009
College 1
4.
It is harder than you think to give up privilege. Being a screw-up at Exeter meant that you didn’t get into Harvard, where a good third of the graduates did go. Peter got his act together and got in. I didn’t even apply. I applied to Columbia, UC Berkeley, and the University of North Carolina. I got into Berkeley and North Carolina, but I was waitlisted for Columbia.
When I was completing the applications, I read an article in Time magazine that said students needed to distinguish themselves in some way in their essays. So I wrote an essay about how I liked to ride the subway and look at the people. I’ll never know whether my essay helped or hindered me. But I was called in for a consultation, as we all were, with the college admissions person at Exeter, and on the spot he called the admissions director at Columbia and noted how my grades had improved and my SATs were pretty good. My hunch is that call is what did the trick. A few weeks later, I got an acceptance letter.
New York City, like the Old Howard, was another antithesis to Exeter, especially in its offerings of sleaze. I lost my virginity during orientation week. Two Exeter classmates, Bailey Wilkinson and Myron Magnet, and I began cruising for prostitutes in Times Square. Bailey was a good old boy from Nashville, but with a sweet streak. Myron was a dandy, a poet whose mentor might have been Edgar Allan Poe.
A wiry black man approached us. “You want some girls?”
We said yeah. I was suspicious, because in Boston a year before, I’d taken a guy up on a similar offer and he took me to this sleazy tenement. In the hallway, he took my $20 and had me wait. And wait. And wait. Of course he never returned. But this was New York. We started following him, when a policeman came up to us.
“He doesn’t have any girls,” the cop said. “If you want girls, you got to go to the bars.”
We thanked him, grinning at each other, such a New York moment. I went up to the black man and said, “That cop said you don’t have any women. If that’s true, I will kill you.” Where I got this kind of nerve, I don’t know. We’d been drinking, of course, we were 18, it was even legal. The guy slinked off into the night.
We ended up in a Puerto Rican bar on W. 72nd Street that one of us had heard had girls. And there they were.
Three of them approached us, and we made our deals. Being a nice guy, none too competitive, I went with the ugliest of the women. We did it and that was that.
Bailey died in his thirties of some kind of cancer. Myron became famous. Here’s his Wikipedia entry:
[Myron] Magnet is the author of several books, and is probably most well-known for writing The Dream and the Nightmare: The Sixties' Legacy to the Underclass, which President George W. Bush has cited as a book that had a profound influence on his approach to public policy. The central premise of the book is that the dramatic cultural transformation that the United States experienced during the 1960s unintentionally created a vast underclass whose societal maladies we are still being forced to address.
The orgies of sex, drugs, and rock ‘n roll that swept through middle class white America were the cause of urban poverty – not white flight, not the collapse of the industrial base, not racism. We seemed to draw opposite lessons from our joint foray into the underclass that September night. I suspect it was his first time as well. I wrote him at the Manhattan Institute a year or so ago to remind him of our history, but I’ve yet to hear back.
That same first week, I also met Mark and Steve, who lived down the hall from me in the dorm and who became close friends. I had a single room. I cringe as I remember my first encounter with Steve. He was hanging out in my room, looking in the mirror over my sink. “You’re not Jewish, are you?” I asked out of the blue, hoping to bond with him by ragging on all the Jews at Columbia.
“Yes, I am.” Oops. “The trouble is there’s too many Jews here,” he said. How we recovered from this initial meeting, I’ll never know, but it wouldn’t have happened without Steve’s generosity of spirit. Steve was tall and dark, athletic looking without being athletic.
Mark was small and compact, with an unruly mop of curls, and a nose big enough to prevent me from making the same mistake I made with Steve. Mark and I had many adventures in Manhattan. I learned at least as much from him as from the Great Books curriculum at Columbia. We went the Cloisters, and he admired the medieval tapestries there with an appreciation way more mature than mine. At the same time, with considerably less maturity, we both enjoyed dining in one of the many mediocre restaurants on Broadway or Amsterdam Ave. above 110th, and then bolting out the door in giddy laughter before paying the check.
Mark was the first person I’d met who had the slightest degree of political consciousness. I mean there were ban-the-bombers at Exeter, but they had low status and I kept my distance. By the time I reached Columbia, I was no longer interested in status. Again in that fun filled first week, I had rushed the elite fraternity of prep school boys, but I didn’t get in. My feelings were hurt, but I wouldn’t have joined if I had gotten in. I had no idea what I wanted, but I knew status was something I didn’t want. One time Mark came in my room with a can of black spray paint.
“You know those fallout shelter signs they have all over campus?”
Starting in our own dorm, we sprayed peace signs on all the fall out shelter signs we could find. I hadn’t felt such a thrill since going through the Brumder gate.
Mark’s parents had been Communists, a word that made the hair on my arms stand up. At Exeter, I had written my major history term paper on Joseph McCarthy because he was from Wisconsin and so was I. I interviewed his personal physician. I had a hard time coming up with a thesis. It finally came out something like: “It really doesn’t matter.” McCarthy was a jerk, but so were the Communists.
But now at Columbia, it was 1963. There was an energy coming from the south that was calling into question all previous assumptions.
On the roof of the student union one night drinking tequila, Mark and I wrote a rock ‘n roll song, to the tune of “Earth Angel.”
Shall I compare you to a summer’s day-hey-hey-
Thou art more lovely and more tempora-a-a-te…
I contributed the background vocals:
Eli eli lema sabachthani
Eli eli lema sabachthani
One night we went into Harlem together, to a bar I’d been to before with Bailey, the Morningside, right on Morningside Park, 110th and Lenox Ave. Yes, they had girls. I hooked up with a woman named Jasmine, black of course, but with long hair down her back, possibly a wig. I fell in love with her. We made love in a dingy flophouse of a hotel next to the bar. Mark went with a woman too, but when we met up again at the bar, he told me nothing happened, he couldn’t go through with it.
At 2 in the morning, we waked back through Morningside Park, reputed to be among the most dangerous in the city. I yelled as we walked through, “Hey, anyone here? Anyone want a fight?” Fortunately, no one responded to my challenge.
Toward spring, another friend from Exeter, Huck, as tall and aristocratic as his namesake wasn’t, fixed me up with a Barnard girl from Argentina, Christina Ochegavera. I was grateful that Huck and his girl had predetermined that this girl wanted sex. So we went out, to the West End, one of my favorite hang outs. We didn’t have much to say to each other. I wasn’t attracted to her. She had an okay body, but a face like a dried up apple doll. I took her to the nearby Hotel Earle, $10 a night, or an hour. We fucked. That was about what it was like. Afterward, she said, “You don’t know much about life, do you?”
We went together for about a month. We did enjoy making out. And I learned a few things about life.
In April, she dropped out of school and was returning to Argentina by freighter. I took her to the dock and got on the boat with her. We made out lustily among the rigging and those trumpet-like vents. The boat cast off from the dock.
At considerable trouble and expense, the tug accompanying the ship had to twist around and make itself available for me to disembark the ship and return to land.
At the school itself, I was having trouble paying attention. My nascent social conscience was giving me an excuse to outright reject this phony attempt to provide an Ivy League education in the heart of Harlem. I went to class and eeked out a C average, but my spirit was in the subways, just as I promised in my essay.
The school song was over the top: “Oh, who owns New York, oh who owns New York, C-O-L-U-M-B-I-A…” Mark and I discovered that it was not only a disgusting claim, it was disgustingly true. Columbia University owned the land under Times Square and about half of the slums of Harlem.
Mark and I both decided at about the same time that spring to drop out of college for good.
It is harder than you think to give up privilege. Being a screw-up at Exeter meant that you didn’t get into Harvard, where a good third of the graduates did go. Peter got his act together and got in. I didn’t even apply. I applied to Columbia, UC Berkeley, and the University of North Carolina. I got into Berkeley and North Carolina, but I was waitlisted for Columbia.
When I was completing the applications, I read an article in Time magazine that said students needed to distinguish themselves in some way in their essays. So I wrote an essay about how I liked to ride the subway and look at the people. I’ll never know whether my essay helped or hindered me. But I was called in for a consultation, as we all were, with the college admissions person at Exeter, and on the spot he called the admissions director at Columbia and noted how my grades had improved and my SATs were pretty good. My hunch is that call is what did the trick. A few weeks later, I got an acceptance letter.
New York City, like the Old Howard, was another antithesis to Exeter, especially in its offerings of sleaze. I lost my virginity during orientation week. Two Exeter classmates, Bailey Wilkinson and Myron Magnet, and I began cruising for prostitutes in Times Square. Bailey was a good old boy from Nashville, but with a sweet streak. Myron was a dandy, a poet whose mentor might have been Edgar Allan Poe.
A wiry black man approached us. “You want some girls?”
We said yeah. I was suspicious, because in Boston a year before, I’d taken a guy up on a similar offer and he took me to this sleazy tenement. In the hallway, he took my $20 and had me wait. And wait. And wait. Of course he never returned. But this was New York. We started following him, when a policeman came up to us.
“He doesn’t have any girls,” the cop said. “If you want girls, you got to go to the bars.”
We thanked him, grinning at each other, such a New York moment. I went up to the black man and said, “That cop said you don’t have any women. If that’s true, I will kill you.” Where I got this kind of nerve, I don’t know. We’d been drinking, of course, we were 18, it was even legal. The guy slinked off into the night.
We ended up in a Puerto Rican bar on W. 72nd Street that one of us had heard had girls. And there they were.
Three of them approached us, and we made our deals. Being a nice guy, none too competitive, I went with the ugliest of the women. We did it and that was that.
Bailey died in his thirties of some kind of cancer. Myron became famous. Here’s his Wikipedia entry:
[Myron] Magnet is the author of several books, and is probably most well-known for writing The Dream and the Nightmare: The Sixties' Legacy to the Underclass, which President George W. Bush has cited as a book that had a profound influence on his approach to public policy. The central premise of the book is that the dramatic cultural transformation that the United States experienced during the 1960s unintentionally created a vast underclass whose societal maladies we are still being forced to address.
The orgies of sex, drugs, and rock ‘n roll that swept through middle class white America were the cause of urban poverty – not white flight, not the collapse of the industrial base, not racism. We seemed to draw opposite lessons from our joint foray into the underclass that September night. I suspect it was his first time as well. I wrote him at the Manhattan Institute a year or so ago to remind him of our history, but I’ve yet to hear back.
That same first week, I also met Mark and Steve, who lived down the hall from me in the dorm and who became close friends. I had a single room. I cringe as I remember my first encounter with Steve. He was hanging out in my room, looking in the mirror over my sink. “You’re not Jewish, are you?” I asked out of the blue, hoping to bond with him by ragging on all the Jews at Columbia.
“Yes, I am.” Oops. “The trouble is there’s too many Jews here,” he said. How we recovered from this initial meeting, I’ll never know, but it wouldn’t have happened without Steve’s generosity of spirit. Steve was tall and dark, athletic looking without being athletic.
Mark was small and compact, with an unruly mop of curls, and a nose big enough to prevent me from making the same mistake I made with Steve. Mark and I had many adventures in Manhattan. I learned at least as much from him as from the Great Books curriculum at Columbia. We went the Cloisters, and he admired the medieval tapestries there with an appreciation way more mature than mine. At the same time, with considerably less maturity, we both enjoyed dining in one of the many mediocre restaurants on Broadway or Amsterdam Ave. above 110th, and then bolting out the door in giddy laughter before paying the check.
Mark was the first person I’d met who had the slightest degree of political consciousness. I mean there were ban-the-bombers at Exeter, but they had low status and I kept my distance. By the time I reached Columbia, I was no longer interested in status. Again in that fun filled first week, I had rushed the elite fraternity of prep school boys, but I didn’t get in. My feelings were hurt, but I wouldn’t have joined if I had gotten in. I had no idea what I wanted, but I knew status was something I didn’t want. One time Mark came in my room with a can of black spray paint.
“You know those fallout shelter signs they have all over campus?”
Starting in our own dorm, we sprayed peace signs on all the fall out shelter signs we could find. I hadn’t felt such a thrill since going through the Brumder gate.
Mark’s parents had been Communists, a word that made the hair on my arms stand up. At Exeter, I had written my major history term paper on Joseph McCarthy because he was from Wisconsin and so was I. I interviewed his personal physician. I had a hard time coming up with a thesis. It finally came out something like: “It really doesn’t matter.” McCarthy was a jerk, but so were the Communists.
But now at Columbia, it was 1963. There was an energy coming from the south that was calling into question all previous assumptions.
On the roof of the student union one night drinking tequila, Mark and I wrote a rock ‘n roll song, to the tune of “Earth Angel.”
Shall I compare you to a summer’s day-hey-hey-
Thou art more lovely and more tempora-a-a-te…
I contributed the background vocals:
Eli eli lema sabachthani
Eli eli lema sabachthani
One night we went into Harlem together, to a bar I’d been to before with Bailey, the Morningside, right on Morningside Park, 110th and Lenox Ave. Yes, they had girls. I hooked up with a woman named Jasmine, black of course, but with long hair down her back, possibly a wig. I fell in love with her. We made love in a dingy flophouse of a hotel next to the bar. Mark went with a woman too, but when we met up again at the bar, he told me nothing happened, he couldn’t go through with it.
At 2 in the morning, we waked back through Morningside Park, reputed to be among the most dangerous in the city. I yelled as we walked through, “Hey, anyone here? Anyone want a fight?” Fortunately, no one responded to my challenge.
Toward spring, another friend from Exeter, Huck, as tall and aristocratic as his namesake wasn’t, fixed me up with a Barnard girl from Argentina, Christina Ochegavera. I was grateful that Huck and his girl had predetermined that this girl wanted sex. So we went out, to the West End, one of my favorite hang outs. We didn’t have much to say to each other. I wasn’t attracted to her. She had an okay body, but a face like a dried up apple doll. I took her to the nearby Hotel Earle, $10 a night, or an hour. We fucked. That was about what it was like. Afterward, she said, “You don’t know much about life, do you?”
We went together for about a month. We did enjoy making out. And I learned a few things about life.
In April, she dropped out of school and was returning to Argentina by freighter. I took her to the dock and got on the boat with her. We made out lustily among the rigging and those trumpet-like vents. The boat cast off from the dock.
At considerable trouble and expense, the tug accompanying the ship had to twist around and make itself available for me to disembark the ship and return to land.
At the school itself, I was having trouble paying attention. My nascent social conscience was giving me an excuse to outright reject this phony attempt to provide an Ivy League education in the heart of Harlem. I went to class and eeked out a C average, but my spirit was in the subways, just as I promised in my essay.
The school song was over the top: “Oh, who owns New York, oh who owns New York, C-O-L-U-M-B-I-A…” Mark and I discovered that it was not only a disgusting claim, it was disgustingly true. Columbia University owned the land under Times Square and about half of the slums of Harlem.
Mark and I both decided at about the same time that spring to drop out of college for good.
Saturday, August 15, 2009
High School
3.
My real schooling in the art of competition began when I started boarding school at 15. My father had gone to Phillips Exeter Academy for a year after graduating from public high school in Milwaukee. It was assumed that I would go there as well, and I wanted to. I wanted more academic challenge than I was getting at Country Day. Most of all, I wanted the prestige of going to one of the pre-eminent prep schools in the country.
My parents drove me there from Wisconsin. I remember the feeling as we arrived on campus, the feeling of arriving. I had made it. I was in precisely the place I needed to be. I looked forward to the hard work, to the challenge, to the competition.
The campus was impressive: beautiful red brick ivy covered Colonial style buildings, spacious grounds. Swarmed over by boys in sport jackets and ties, rushing to their classes, where they sat around the famous oval Harkness tables in groups of 12-15. I was eager to join the ranks of the truly well educated.
Then I got hit with David Copperfield. I had always liked to read, but I wasn’t a terribly fast reader. I had never encountered a book anywhere near as just plan thick as David Copperfield. We were given assignments of 50 pages per night. Plus, I was taking French, German, Math, and Physical Sciences, all with ample amounts of homework.
I would lie on my bed surrounded by books, a flutter of panic in my chest, and fall asleep. For the first time in my life, I just couldn’t keep up.
It got so bad, that going against my complete terror of admitting that something was wrong or of saying much of anything for fear of saying the wrong thing, I lingered after class one afternoon and spoke with my English teacher, Mr. Wheat. “I’m having a hard time with David Copperfield, Mr. Wheat,” I said timidly.
“Well, Hitz,” he said authoritatively. “You’ll just have to read it twice.”
It was years before I ever asked a teacher for help again.
I got a D in English on my first report card. I was devastated. I went into a funk so deep that the only way I could feel remotely human was to give up.
My sister Lisi, the one true intellectual in my family who was 12 years older than me, had given me Catcher in the Rye and The Billie Holliday Story, that previous year. On my own I had discovered On the Road. My D in English inspired me to embrace a rebellious persona. I started dressing as sloppily as I could without violating the dress code and hanging out in the butt room – a room in the dorm where students with parental permission were allowed to smoke, and spent most of my time “punting” – just not bothering to do my homework.
I was even able to redeem my English grade a bit by writing a disingenuous satire of the beats that earned me my first and only Exeter A+.
But in retrospect, that D set off in me a depression that sank me for years. I had descended from second in my class of 20 at Country Day to 150th out of 200 in my class at Exeter. The fact that the playing field was more prestigious didn’t much mitigate the gloom.
My roommate Peter Aldrich was having difficulty as well. Peter was an affable Catholic boy from Wellesley, and we got along. He had the distinct advantage of having an older brother at the school who was a hockey player and a brain, a member of the coolest house filled with the students who excelled in both athletics and academics, but were cool about it, not all “Pozo.”
There was this odd cultural debate going on at Exeter at the time between the “Pozos” and the “Negos.” We were so special, the debate was even written up in Time Magazine, though how the debate got started and who coined the terms I couldn’t say. It wasn’t very profound: the Pozos saw the glass as half full, the Negos, half empty. About that deep. I quickly adopted a persona which was the “Negoist” of the Negos. The glass is completely empty, I would have said.
Being Peter’s roommate, I got to sit with this elite bunch in the dining hall, so I was able to at least seem like I was with the in-crowd. That protected me from the worst of the hazing. It didn’t take long for me to figure out that the real curriculum at Exeter was hazing.
The hazing ranged between a mild jockeying for popularity points to cruel applications of shaving cream. The iconic gesture was a cock of the head and the squealing of air forced through pursed lips targeted at anyone, even a friend, who might say something slightly uncool, or a scapegoat for whom the raspberry was a gesture of utter contempt.
I remember one point in my first winter. It was already dark when I was on my way to the dining hall, filled with anger probably about having to put up with so much pettiness in my classes. A small tow-headed boy with glasses, a “prep” as we referred to the freshmen, made the mistake of crossing my path. I slammed him into the snow bank with a full body block.
Peter’s brother Dwayne witnessed this assault. “Did you just slam that kid into the snow?”
“I did,” I said, smiling proudly.
“Wow,” Dwayne said admiringly.
There was an elaborate, arcane language to the hazing that went something like, “Du bist ein nammmmmy-keeehoouutt!” that would be hurled at some target, a dominance gesture similar to what baboons might make in the wild, an utter dismissal of the target’s humanity.
With few exceptions, the teachers were stern and cold. They expected excellence, and if you didn’t measure up, you were subject to scorn. My French teacher, Mr. Beaumont, was a classic example. He had a twitch himself, rumored to be the result of a World War II trauma. His eyes would blink at odd times, his body would suffer periodic tremors. My French pronunciation was admittedly weak, and I was exceedingly nervous performing in front of the class. Mr. Beaumont took great enjoyment out of belittling my accent, mocking me, inciting the rest of the class to laugh at me. “Monsieur Eetz,” he would say. “Did you DO the homework?” Sometimes I had done it, and sometimes I hadn’t, but the harder he mocked, the less I did.
Thanks to Mr. Beaumont, I do not currently speak a language other than English, though I am seriously challenging my embarrassment to learn Spanish.
Between Mr. Wheat, Mr. Beaumont, and my second year English teacher, Bobby Bates, I had some of the worst teachers imaginable at what was supposed to be one of the best schools imaginable. All told, at Exeter, of the ones I can remember, I had 2 excellent teachers, 4 so-so teachers, and 3 rotten teachers – a ratio I suspect that is not that different from what most students experience in High School.
With class sizes of 12-15, there was no excuse not to get individual attention. But with the exception of the two aforementioned excellent classes, I got next to none.
There was one adult in the entire school over three years that took a genuine interest in my welfare, who talked to me about things I needed to talk about, who manifested any human warmth: the janitor of my Hoyt Hall, my dorm, Lon. I don’t recall his last name. He was a down home New Hampshire man, full of the ay-yups and other distinguishing features of the dialect. He was probably about 50 years old, tall, with thinning, gray, wavy hair. He wore khaki work pants and a matching khaki work shirt every day. He had a thousand keys on his chain, and you knew when he was coming by the rattle of his keys. He would joke around with us about sex. We could talk to him of the girls we fancied. It might have even been he that slipped us the 2 inch by 2 inch blue copy of “Behind the Green Door,” more than a decade before the movie. Here in this rarefied enclave of the owning class filled with heirs to unimaginable fortunes, the one breath of humanity came from the working class. This lesson was not lost on me.
As I later came to embrace Marxism, it became clear to me that this school was training us to ruthlessly exploit the working class, to be the oppressors of the empire. The coldness and cruelty were deliberate efforts to force us to stuff our own feelings so that we too could become cold and cruel with impunity in the face of the blatant moral iniquity that our privilege represented.
At my 25th Exeter Reunion, in the middle of the major fundraising pitch immediately following the lobster dinner, I made a speech. “My unwritten Exeter novel is entitled ‘Gadfly in the Ointment,’ so I would be remiss if I didn’t fulfill my role. What’s wrong with this picture? You take a magnificent campus, fill it with the finest teachers, state-of-the-art libraries, laboratories, and gymnasiums, class sizes of 12, you take all these fabulous educational resources and you lavish them on the people who need them absolutely the least…” Peter, one of the leaders of the meeting, said, “That’s my old roommate,” not proudly I would say, “Exeter alumni are very generous in their communities…” said another leader.
A surprising number of people came up to me afterward and thanked me, but most of the rest of my classmates simply kept their distance.
The irony, though, is that lavishing all those educational resources on the privileged still doesn’t result in very good education. As long as we have an economic system based on competition, the entire school system, including the ghetto schools and the elite academies, will serve that system, and will itself be primarily based on competition. In the arena of social competition, the vast majority loses, and the winners win but a few crumbs of privilege at the expense of their humanity.
A small example: Exeter routinely taught calculus to its seniors, and I learned all the formulas and thought I more or less got it as it referred to the area under a curve. It wasn’t until I studied physics in college that someone told me that calculus was invented by Newton to explain the acceleration of gravity. How much more meaningful it would have been to have known that from the beginning. This goes back to the argument about constructivism: students learn from their experience. What if the teacher had led us through Newton’s process of deriving calculus by experiment?
I did get one important thing out of my education at Exeter: I learned how to write fiction. We were given assignments to write short stories, at least 3 or 4 a year. By my senior year, I had figured a few things out. One was not to take so many classes. I even found time to write a short story for extra credit for Mr. Finch, one of the two excellent teachers I experienced. The story was about a man walking alone in the desert, dying of thirst. He hallucinates a bus stopping for him, and tries to get on, but the bus is a mirage, and he dies. The story was a good summary of my emotional landscape at the time.
Years later after my son Benjamin graduated from Lowell High in San Francisco, itself a prestigious school, albeit public, I asked him how many short stories he had been assigned to write.
“None,” he said.
I wasn’t particularly homesick at Exeter. I wasn’t aware of missing my parents, for whom I had little respect. I missed my friends, but compensated for it by writing them letters and mailing them with obscene references on the envelope: “Don’t give up the shit.” To the dismay of my friends’ parents.
When my youngest son, Slater, now 14, expressed interest in going to Exeter a few years back, I told him no. Even if the school had changed now that it was co-ed, I wasn’t willing to sacrifice my relationship with him. Because even the students who flourished at Exeter or any boarding school for that matter will lose much of their relationship with their parents. In the adolescent years, you need your parents more than ever, even as you believe the opposite. You need someone to stand up to the awful feelings that spew out of you, someone even to target them at so that you don’t turn them inward against yourself. That’s the role of the parent of an adolescent: give them something real to rebel against, something, or someone, who knows deep down that you don’t really mean all the mean things you need to say.
Even as it cost me my relationship with my parents, I liked the independence I had at boarding school. My sister, Lisi, who was in her late twenties, lived outside of Boston at the time, which was 50 miles south of Exeter. She was a curator at Sturbridge Village, a restored Colonial town that demonstrated how New Englanders lived 200 years before. She signed me out to go to her house on Thanksgiving my first year, and got me drunk on martinis. After that, she would sign me out whenever I asked, so that I would go wherever I wanted.
On my first trip to Boston on my own, I went to the famous Harvard Liquor Store on Harvard Square, where they reportedly served anyone, and nervously tried to buy vodka. “How old are you?” asked the elderly clerk.
“18,” I said. In reality, I was 15.
“You have to be 21,” the clerk said.
“Oh, I thought it was 18,” I mumbled on my way out. Disappointed, I made my way back to town, got a $10 room at the Copley Square Hotel, and wandered around downtown Boston. It wasn’t long before I came upon Sculley Square, the closest Boston had to a Skid Row. And what should appear before me like a revelation but the Old Howard Burlesque Theater. The sign said you had to be 18, but they didn’t check. I paid my $3.00 and settled into the dingy darkened theater that smelled of urine and the deodorant cakes they put in the urinal. There were perhaps 10 other denizens of the street in there with me. They had a terrible live orchestra and some seriously awful comedians. But the girls! The strippers! Dancing, prancing across the stage in their sparkling outfits. These moments made it all worth it. Off came the wardrobe parts, one by one. First the sparkly gloves, the sequined vest, the shimmering blouse, the dazzling skirt, down to sparkly bra and g-string. The bra snapped off and her nipples had pasties on them with dangling jewels she loved to swing around. And on my very first visit, in puritanical Boston in 1959, Miss Tempest Storm shimmied her g-string loose and revealed her magnificent bush of pubic hair, and I came in my pants. My romance with sleaze had begun.
The Old Howard was the antithesis of Exeter, a monument to failure, and I felt right at home.
In the spring of my Lower Middle year (that’s sophomore in English – places like Exeter always have to be different), I made another foray into Boston, this time armed with a newly minted fake ID. It was crude as hell, Naval ROTC, but it was laminated and had a picture of me, and it apparently took the liquor dealers sufficiently off the hook to make a sale. I scored 3 pints of Smirnoff, stocking up
for the Spring Dance.
I had invited a girl from Pine Lake, one of my gang who was spending the year at a Boston finishing school. We’d gotten drunk together and made out the previous summer, though the next day she made sure I got the message that she didn’t mean it. But I was sure she was as hungry for friendly companionship as I was, so I was certain she would come. I rented a tux and everything.
She decided not to come, and I decided, unconsciously, to see if I could get kicked out of school. I dressed myself up in the tux and drank one full pint of the vodka. I sang that song from a few years back all over the dorm: “A white sport coat and a pink carnation, I’m all dressed up for the dance.” (“Once you told me long ago, to the prom with me you’d go, now you’ve changed your mind it seems, another boy will have your dreams…”)
Mr. Dunbar, a straight-arrow math teacher and baseball coach, a guy who had upbraided me for my slovenly appearance on more than one occasion, made his dorm rounds as usual and came upon me puking in the bathroom. He said to one of the other students (my roommate Peter had of course gone to the dance with his girlfriend from Wellesley, MA), “Get this guy cleaned up and put him to bed.”
So there was a spark of humanity on the faculty after all. I didn’t get kicked out.
Why I stayed at the school is a question. While my father would have been disappointed if I had dropped out, he at one point in the summer before my Senior year, did give me that option. It was summer. You can forget how much you hate school in the summer. And, the promise of the prestige of an Exeter diploma kept me going. To say nothing of those wild weekends at the Old Howard Burlesque Theater in Boston.
Fortunately or unfortunately, drugs other than alcohol, cigarettes, and caffeine hadn’t hit Exeter yet in a big way. There was a story of a track star who attempted to buy peyote from a Texas mail order house. It was still quasi-legal, but they would only sell it to doctors or scientists, so he had to forge the name of the chair of the science department, whose name was John C. Hogg. The track star must have been a little nervous, because when he signed the name he wrote Hoggg. He got caught. For an ordinary mortal, this would have been cause for expulsion or even prosecution. But he had broken half the track records at Exeter (probably on benzedrine), so he was given restrictions, the mildest form of punishment. He had to be in his room at 8 o’clock every night for a month.
Some of the lessons of my Exeter experience were bitter. Prior to Exeter, I was overly shy and athletically spastic, but I knew I was smart. Exeter took that sense away from me and I hated it for that. My fantasies hadn’t developed a politics, but they were angry. On Saturday nights, the school showed movies in the gym. Not ordinary movies, not Ocean’s 11, or Visit to a Small Planet, or Sparticus, but artsy-fartsy movies like The Seventh Seal, Sundays and Cybelle, and Jules and Jim. I enjoyed what I could understand of the movies, but my favorite part was my fantasy of climbing up on the basketball hoops with a machine gun and mowing down every last one of the students. The name of that movie was If, which didn’t come out until 1968, about a group of British boarding school boys taking over their school with guns, which resonated with me absolutely.
Toward the end of the summer before my senior year, there appeared in the Milwaukee Journal, a letter entitled “The Pine Lake Snob Curtain.” It told of an experience the writer had of fishing on Pine Lake. Residents of the lake sailed, they didn’t fish, by and large. The fishermen were working class folk who brought their boats in on trailers and launched them at the required (and resented) public access point at the north end of the lake. The letter writer’s companion made a bad cast, and the hook went into his – the writer’s – eye. They docked their boat at the nearest pier and went up to several of the mansions, but no one would let them in even to make a call.
The last party of the year on Pine Lake on the Labor Day weekend was called Cup Night, at the Country Club, where they handed out trophies to the winning sailors. I wasn’t among the winners – I had given up that competitive struggle several years ago when we graduated from sluggish X class kid’s boats, -- with which I had won some races – to 20 foot C class scows, which were too big for me to handle properly. But I could party, and the Club didn’t hesitate to furnish us with champagne in exchange for our signatures on our parents’ accounts. So by 1 AM, I was fairly looped. I had my own jeep, which my father bought to haul boats, not explicitly for me, but I was the one who drove it. And that night, after the party, I intended to drive it to my friend Bill Wright’s house.
We lived at the end of a mile long private road which intersected near our house with another road through the Brumder estate, a collection of houses, perhaps 10 in all, of people related to the Brumders, an old Milwaukee family with fingers in most of Milwaukee’s main industries. But the Brumder Road had a gate constructed of chain link fencing, and the gate was sometimes locked, as it was this night. In my mind, this gate represented the Pine Lake Snob Curtain, and I wasn’t going to let it keep me from visiting my friend.
So, I switched the jeep to 4 wheel drive and drove right on through, bending the gate a full 15 degrees until it popped open. Exuberantly, I drove to my friend’s. It was thrilling of course to do something so terribly bad, of course. But there was a righteous political edge to this thrill. I was fighting the system for the working class fishermen.
The next morning, my mother woke me claiming the Chenequa police wanted to see me. I got up, still slightly high from the previous night’s celebrations.
“Did you drive through the Brumder Gate last night, Henry?” Chief Lutz asked point blank, an elderly cop with a big belly.
“Me? No, I didn’t.”
Like real policemen, they had me drive the jeep to the scene of the crime in order to re-enact it. My father accompanied me. The jeep had a red hydraulic lift on the front, and it fit the damage just perfectly, leaving tiny flecks of red paint on the galvanized wire diamonds.
“All right, I guess I did it,” I mumbled. Oddly, I didn’t feel bad, certainly not about doing it, but not about getting caught either.
My father spoke. “Well, Chief you do what you have to do. These kids have been experimenting with alcohol, and I’m sure that had something to do with it. But if you need to arrest him, you go ahead.”
“That’s okay, Dr. Hitz. We’ll leave it in your hands.”
If I hadn’t been white or from a family of means, I would have no doubt gone to jail, or at least juvenile hall. My father ineffectually grounded me for the last weekend of the year, and both he and my mother let me know with a barrage of darts from the eyes and little tsks from their lips just how disappointed they were at me, mostly for lying. But I could only marvel at how powerful the act had felt.
As I was leaving to return to school, I stopped by my grandmother’s cottage to say goodbye. She was 90 by then, but still living on her own. She hugged me. “I hear you got in some trouble,” she said. She slipped me five dollars. That woman had class.
I had to meet with the Brumder family lawyer and he got me to agree to make restitution. A month later from Exeter I sent the family patriarch a check for $200, with a note asking him to excuse “my usually but not always latent juvenile delinquent tendencies,” and he sent a message back through my father that all was forgiven.
My real schooling in the art of competition began when I started boarding school at 15. My father had gone to Phillips Exeter Academy for a year after graduating from public high school in Milwaukee. It was assumed that I would go there as well, and I wanted to. I wanted more academic challenge than I was getting at Country Day. Most of all, I wanted the prestige of going to one of the pre-eminent prep schools in the country.
My parents drove me there from Wisconsin. I remember the feeling as we arrived on campus, the feeling of arriving. I had made it. I was in precisely the place I needed to be. I looked forward to the hard work, to the challenge, to the competition.
The campus was impressive: beautiful red brick ivy covered Colonial style buildings, spacious grounds. Swarmed over by boys in sport jackets and ties, rushing to their classes, where they sat around the famous oval Harkness tables in groups of 12-15. I was eager to join the ranks of the truly well educated.
Then I got hit with David Copperfield. I had always liked to read, but I wasn’t a terribly fast reader. I had never encountered a book anywhere near as just plan thick as David Copperfield. We were given assignments of 50 pages per night. Plus, I was taking French, German, Math, and Physical Sciences, all with ample amounts of homework.
I would lie on my bed surrounded by books, a flutter of panic in my chest, and fall asleep. For the first time in my life, I just couldn’t keep up.
It got so bad, that going against my complete terror of admitting that something was wrong or of saying much of anything for fear of saying the wrong thing, I lingered after class one afternoon and spoke with my English teacher, Mr. Wheat. “I’m having a hard time with David Copperfield, Mr. Wheat,” I said timidly.
“Well, Hitz,” he said authoritatively. “You’ll just have to read it twice.”
It was years before I ever asked a teacher for help again.
I got a D in English on my first report card. I was devastated. I went into a funk so deep that the only way I could feel remotely human was to give up.
My sister Lisi, the one true intellectual in my family who was 12 years older than me, had given me Catcher in the Rye and The Billie Holliday Story, that previous year. On my own I had discovered On the Road. My D in English inspired me to embrace a rebellious persona. I started dressing as sloppily as I could without violating the dress code and hanging out in the butt room – a room in the dorm where students with parental permission were allowed to smoke, and spent most of my time “punting” – just not bothering to do my homework.
I was even able to redeem my English grade a bit by writing a disingenuous satire of the beats that earned me my first and only Exeter A+.
But in retrospect, that D set off in me a depression that sank me for years. I had descended from second in my class of 20 at Country Day to 150th out of 200 in my class at Exeter. The fact that the playing field was more prestigious didn’t much mitigate the gloom.
My roommate Peter Aldrich was having difficulty as well. Peter was an affable Catholic boy from Wellesley, and we got along. He had the distinct advantage of having an older brother at the school who was a hockey player and a brain, a member of the coolest house filled with the students who excelled in both athletics and academics, but were cool about it, not all “Pozo.”
There was this odd cultural debate going on at Exeter at the time between the “Pozos” and the “Negos.” We were so special, the debate was even written up in Time Magazine, though how the debate got started and who coined the terms I couldn’t say. It wasn’t very profound: the Pozos saw the glass as half full, the Negos, half empty. About that deep. I quickly adopted a persona which was the “Negoist” of the Negos. The glass is completely empty, I would have said.
Being Peter’s roommate, I got to sit with this elite bunch in the dining hall, so I was able to at least seem like I was with the in-crowd. That protected me from the worst of the hazing. It didn’t take long for me to figure out that the real curriculum at Exeter was hazing.
The hazing ranged between a mild jockeying for popularity points to cruel applications of shaving cream. The iconic gesture was a cock of the head and the squealing of air forced through pursed lips targeted at anyone, even a friend, who might say something slightly uncool, or a scapegoat for whom the raspberry was a gesture of utter contempt.
I remember one point in my first winter. It was already dark when I was on my way to the dining hall, filled with anger probably about having to put up with so much pettiness in my classes. A small tow-headed boy with glasses, a “prep” as we referred to the freshmen, made the mistake of crossing my path. I slammed him into the snow bank with a full body block.
Peter’s brother Dwayne witnessed this assault. “Did you just slam that kid into the snow?”
“I did,” I said, smiling proudly.
“Wow,” Dwayne said admiringly.
There was an elaborate, arcane language to the hazing that went something like, “Du bist ein nammmmmy-keeehoouutt!” that would be hurled at some target, a dominance gesture similar to what baboons might make in the wild, an utter dismissal of the target’s humanity.
With few exceptions, the teachers were stern and cold. They expected excellence, and if you didn’t measure up, you were subject to scorn. My French teacher, Mr. Beaumont, was a classic example. He had a twitch himself, rumored to be the result of a World War II trauma. His eyes would blink at odd times, his body would suffer periodic tremors. My French pronunciation was admittedly weak, and I was exceedingly nervous performing in front of the class. Mr. Beaumont took great enjoyment out of belittling my accent, mocking me, inciting the rest of the class to laugh at me. “Monsieur Eetz,” he would say. “Did you DO the homework?” Sometimes I had done it, and sometimes I hadn’t, but the harder he mocked, the less I did.
Thanks to Mr. Beaumont, I do not currently speak a language other than English, though I am seriously challenging my embarrassment to learn Spanish.
Between Mr. Wheat, Mr. Beaumont, and my second year English teacher, Bobby Bates, I had some of the worst teachers imaginable at what was supposed to be one of the best schools imaginable. All told, at Exeter, of the ones I can remember, I had 2 excellent teachers, 4 so-so teachers, and 3 rotten teachers – a ratio I suspect that is not that different from what most students experience in High School.
With class sizes of 12-15, there was no excuse not to get individual attention. But with the exception of the two aforementioned excellent classes, I got next to none.
There was one adult in the entire school over three years that took a genuine interest in my welfare, who talked to me about things I needed to talk about, who manifested any human warmth: the janitor of my Hoyt Hall, my dorm, Lon. I don’t recall his last name. He was a down home New Hampshire man, full of the ay-yups and other distinguishing features of the dialect. He was probably about 50 years old, tall, with thinning, gray, wavy hair. He wore khaki work pants and a matching khaki work shirt every day. He had a thousand keys on his chain, and you knew when he was coming by the rattle of his keys. He would joke around with us about sex. We could talk to him of the girls we fancied. It might have even been he that slipped us the 2 inch by 2 inch blue copy of “Behind the Green Door,” more than a decade before the movie. Here in this rarefied enclave of the owning class filled with heirs to unimaginable fortunes, the one breath of humanity came from the working class. This lesson was not lost on me.
As I later came to embrace Marxism, it became clear to me that this school was training us to ruthlessly exploit the working class, to be the oppressors of the empire. The coldness and cruelty were deliberate efforts to force us to stuff our own feelings so that we too could become cold and cruel with impunity in the face of the blatant moral iniquity that our privilege represented.
At my 25th Exeter Reunion, in the middle of the major fundraising pitch immediately following the lobster dinner, I made a speech. “My unwritten Exeter novel is entitled ‘Gadfly in the Ointment,’ so I would be remiss if I didn’t fulfill my role. What’s wrong with this picture? You take a magnificent campus, fill it with the finest teachers, state-of-the-art libraries, laboratories, and gymnasiums, class sizes of 12, you take all these fabulous educational resources and you lavish them on the people who need them absolutely the least…” Peter, one of the leaders of the meeting, said, “That’s my old roommate,” not proudly I would say, “Exeter alumni are very generous in their communities…” said another leader.
A surprising number of people came up to me afterward and thanked me, but most of the rest of my classmates simply kept their distance.
The irony, though, is that lavishing all those educational resources on the privileged still doesn’t result in very good education. As long as we have an economic system based on competition, the entire school system, including the ghetto schools and the elite academies, will serve that system, and will itself be primarily based on competition. In the arena of social competition, the vast majority loses, and the winners win but a few crumbs of privilege at the expense of their humanity.
A small example: Exeter routinely taught calculus to its seniors, and I learned all the formulas and thought I more or less got it as it referred to the area under a curve. It wasn’t until I studied physics in college that someone told me that calculus was invented by Newton to explain the acceleration of gravity. How much more meaningful it would have been to have known that from the beginning. This goes back to the argument about constructivism: students learn from their experience. What if the teacher had led us through Newton’s process of deriving calculus by experiment?
I did get one important thing out of my education at Exeter: I learned how to write fiction. We were given assignments to write short stories, at least 3 or 4 a year. By my senior year, I had figured a few things out. One was not to take so many classes. I even found time to write a short story for extra credit for Mr. Finch, one of the two excellent teachers I experienced. The story was about a man walking alone in the desert, dying of thirst. He hallucinates a bus stopping for him, and tries to get on, but the bus is a mirage, and he dies. The story was a good summary of my emotional landscape at the time.
Years later after my son Benjamin graduated from Lowell High in San Francisco, itself a prestigious school, albeit public, I asked him how many short stories he had been assigned to write.
“None,” he said.
I wasn’t particularly homesick at Exeter. I wasn’t aware of missing my parents, for whom I had little respect. I missed my friends, but compensated for it by writing them letters and mailing them with obscene references on the envelope: “Don’t give up the shit.” To the dismay of my friends’ parents.
When my youngest son, Slater, now 14, expressed interest in going to Exeter a few years back, I told him no. Even if the school had changed now that it was co-ed, I wasn’t willing to sacrifice my relationship with him. Because even the students who flourished at Exeter or any boarding school for that matter will lose much of their relationship with their parents. In the adolescent years, you need your parents more than ever, even as you believe the opposite. You need someone to stand up to the awful feelings that spew out of you, someone even to target them at so that you don’t turn them inward against yourself. That’s the role of the parent of an adolescent: give them something real to rebel against, something, or someone, who knows deep down that you don’t really mean all the mean things you need to say.
Even as it cost me my relationship with my parents, I liked the independence I had at boarding school. My sister, Lisi, who was in her late twenties, lived outside of Boston at the time, which was 50 miles south of Exeter. She was a curator at Sturbridge Village, a restored Colonial town that demonstrated how New Englanders lived 200 years before. She signed me out to go to her house on Thanksgiving my first year, and got me drunk on martinis. After that, she would sign me out whenever I asked, so that I would go wherever I wanted.
On my first trip to Boston on my own, I went to the famous Harvard Liquor Store on Harvard Square, where they reportedly served anyone, and nervously tried to buy vodka. “How old are you?” asked the elderly clerk.
“18,” I said. In reality, I was 15.
“You have to be 21,” the clerk said.
“Oh, I thought it was 18,” I mumbled on my way out. Disappointed, I made my way back to town, got a $10 room at the Copley Square Hotel, and wandered around downtown Boston. It wasn’t long before I came upon Sculley Square, the closest Boston had to a Skid Row. And what should appear before me like a revelation but the Old Howard Burlesque Theater. The sign said you had to be 18, but they didn’t check. I paid my $3.00 and settled into the dingy darkened theater that smelled of urine and the deodorant cakes they put in the urinal. There were perhaps 10 other denizens of the street in there with me. They had a terrible live orchestra and some seriously awful comedians. But the girls! The strippers! Dancing, prancing across the stage in their sparkling outfits. These moments made it all worth it. Off came the wardrobe parts, one by one. First the sparkly gloves, the sequined vest, the shimmering blouse, the dazzling skirt, down to sparkly bra and g-string. The bra snapped off and her nipples had pasties on them with dangling jewels she loved to swing around. And on my very first visit, in puritanical Boston in 1959, Miss Tempest Storm shimmied her g-string loose and revealed her magnificent bush of pubic hair, and I came in my pants. My romance with sleaze had begun.
The Old Howard was the antithesis of Exeter, a monument to failure, and I felt right at home.
In the spring of my Lower Middle year (that’s sophomore in English – places like Exeter always have to be different), I made another foray into Boston, this time armed with a newly minted fake ID. It was crude as hell, Naval ROTC, but it was laminated and had a picture of me, and it apparently took the liquor dealers sufficiently off the hook to make a sale. I scored 3 pints of Smirnoff, stocking up
for the Spring Dance.
I had invited a girl from Pine Lake, one of my gang who was spending the year at a Boston finishing school. We’d gotten drunk together and made out the previous summer, though the next day she made sure I got the message that she didn’t mean it. But I was sure she was as hungry for friendly companionship as I was, so I was certain she would come. I rented a tux and everything.
She decided not to come, and I decided, unconsciously, to see if I could get kicked out of school. I dressed myself up in the tux and drank one full pint of the vodka. I sang that song from a few years back all over the dorm: “A white sport coat and a pink carnation, I’m all dressed up for the dance.” (“Once you told me long ago, to the prom with me you’d go, now you’ve changed your mind it seems, another boy will have your dreams…”)
Mr. Dunbar, a straight-arrow math teacher and baseball coach, a guy who had upbraided me for my slovenly appearance on more than one occasion, made his dorm rounds as usual and came upon me puking in the bathroom. He said to one of the other students (my roommate Peter had of course gone to the dance with his girlfriend from Wellesley, MA), “Get this guy cleaned up and put him to bed.”
So there was a spark of humanity on the faculty after all. I didn’t get kicked out.
Why I stayed at the school is a question. While my father would have been disappointed if I had dropped out, he at one point in the summer before my Senior year, did give me that option. It was summer. You can forget how much you hate school in the summer. And, the promise of the prestige of an Exeter diploma kept me going. To say nothing of those wild weekends at the Old Howard Burlesque Theater in Boston.
Fortunately or unfortunately, drugs other than alcohol, cigarettes, and caffeine hadn’t hit Exeter yet in a big way. There was a story of a track star who attempted to buy peyote from a Texas mail order house. It was still quasi-legal, but they would only sell it to doctors or scientists, so he had to forge the name of the chair of the science department, whose name was John C. Hogg. The track star must have been a little nervous, because when he signed the name he wrote Hoggg. He got caught. For an ordinary mortal, this would have been cause for expulsion or even prosecution. But he had broken half the track records at Exeter (probably on benzedrine), so he was given restrictions, the mildest form of punishment. He had to be in his room at 8 o’clock every night for a month.
Some of the lessons of my Exeter experience were bitter. Prior to Exeter, I was overly shy and athletically spastic, but I knew I was smart. Exeter took that sense away from me and I hated it for that. My fantasies hadn’t developed a politics, but they were angry. On Saturday nights, the school showed movies in the gym. Not ordinary movies, not Ocean’s 11, or Visit to a Small Planet, or Sparticus, but artsy-fartsy movies like The Seventh Seal, Sundays and Cybelle, and Jules and Jim. I enjoyed what I could understand of the movies, but my favorite part was my fantasy of climbing up on the basketball hoops with a machine gun and mowing down every last one of the students. The name of that movie was If, which didn’t come out until 1968, about a group of British boarding school boys taking over their school with guns, which resonated with me absolutely.
Toward the end of the summer before my senior year, there appeared in the Milwaukee Journal, a letter entitled “The Pine Lake Snob Curtain.” It told of an experience the writer had of fishing on Pine Lake. Residents of the lake sailed, they didn’t fish, by and large. The fishermen were working class folk who brought their boats in on trailers and launched them at the required (and resented) public access point at the north end of the lake. The letter writer’s companion made a bad cast, and the hook went into his – the writer’s – eye. They docked their boat at the nearest pier and went up to several of the mansions, but no one would let them in even to make a call.
The last party of the year on Pine Lake on the Labor Day weekend was called Cup Night, at the Country Club, where they handed out trophies to the winning sailors. I wasn’t among the winners – I had given up that competitive struggle several years ago when we graduated from sluggish X class kid’s boats, -- with which I had won some races – to 20 foot C class scows, which were too big for me to handle properly. But I could party, and the Club didn’t hesitate to furnish us with champagne in exchange for our signatures on our parents’ accounts. So by 1 AM, I was fairly looped. I had my own jeep, which my father bought to haul boats, not explicitly for me, but I was the one who drove it. And that night, after the party, I intended to drive it to my friend Bill Wright’s house.
We lived at the end of a mile long private road which intersected near our house with another road through the Brumder estate, a collection of houses, perhaps 10 in all, of people related to the Brumders, an old Milwaukee family with fingers in most of Milwaukee’s main industries. But the Brumder Road had a gate constructed of chain link fencing, and the gate was sometimes locked, as it was this night. In my mind, this gate represented the Pine Lake Snob Curtain, and I wasn’t going to let it keep me from visiting my friend.
So, I switched the jeep to 4 wheel drive and drove right on through, bending the gate a full 15 degrees until it popped open. Exuberantly, I drove to my friend’s. It was thrilling of course to do something so terribly bad, of course. But there was a righteous political edge to this thrill. I was fighting the system for the working class fishermen.
The next morning, my mother woke me claiming the Chenequa police wanted to see me. I got up, still slightly high from the previous night’s celebrations.
“Did you drive through the Brumder Gate last night, Henry?” Chief Lutz asked point blank, an elderly cop with a big belly.
“Me? No, I didn’t.”
Like real policemen, they had me drive the jeep to the scene of the crime in order to re-enact it. My father accompanied me. The jeep had a red hydraulic lift on the front, and it fit the damage just perfectly, leaving tiny flecks of red paint on the galvanized wire diamonds.
“All right, I guess I did it,” I mumbled. Oddly, I didn’t feel bad, certainly not about doing it, but not about getting caught either.
My father spoke. “Well, Chief you do what you have to do. These kids have been experimenting with alcohol, and I’m sure that had something to do with it. But if you need to arrest him, you go ahead.”
“That’s okay, Dr. Hitz. We’ll leave it in your hands.”
If I hadn’t been white or from a family of means, I would have no doubt gone to jail, or at least juvenile hall. My father ineffectually grounded me for the last weekend of the year, and both he and my mother let me know with a barrage of darts from the eyes and little tsks from their lips just how disappointed they were at me, mostly for lying. But I could only marvel at how powerful the act had felt.
As I was leaving to return to school, I stopped by my grandmother’s cottage to say goodbye. She was 90 by then, but still living on her own. She hugged me. “I hear you got in some trouble,” she said. She slipped me five dollars. That woman had class.
I had to meet with the Brumder family lawyer and he got me to agree to make restitution. A month later from Exeter I sent the family patriarch a check for $200, with a note asking him to excuse “my usually but not always latent juvenile delinquent tendencies,” and he sent a message back through my father that all was forgiven.
Sunday, August 9, 2009
Jr. High
2.
By seventh grade, my father decided that I needed more rigor in my education, so we rented a house in town (Milwaukee), Doggie Mann’s house, what a great name. My sister Nicki, who was 3 years older, went away to an Episcopal girls’ school, and I went to Milwaukee Country Day.
The summer before, I remember seeing my Stone Bank Moose Lake friend Jeffrey Trapp one last time in late August. He wore jeans down on his hips and a thin belt, an Elvis Presley look. I wore madras Bermuda shorts. I said to him judgmentally: “Jeffrey, you look so boppish,” and he mocked me, “Jeffery, you look so boppish.” Thus did I leave the working class in my wake, didn’t see Jeffrey again for at least 25 years. When I did finally look him up, he had become a redneck hippie gun dealing heavy metal sculptor. I became his biggest collector.
At Country Day, I was a hayseed, and a victim of considerable hazing. Some highlights of that competitive atmosphere: Bobby Brennan, my nemesis, a pudgy boy himself desperate to stay in the high status group, threw a rock at me that hit me in the head on the way to the school library. Helplessly, I burst into tears. The wrinkled prune woman of a librarian blew up at me over the crying (without investigating the cause), and I didn’t cry in public again for 30 years.
I developed bad acne, and my name quickly degenerated from Hitz to Zits.
My nipples began swelling as I’m they sometimes do in pubescent boys, and Bobby Brennan in the locker room shouted, “Look, he’s got tits!” My name degenerated one more level to Tits, and I just wanted to die.
Then I hooked up with Bill Wright, the most popular boy in the class. He too stayed at Pine Lake on the weekends with his mother and drunken step father (alcoholism was endemic to Pine Lake), while staying with his Dad and step mother during the week. He was everything I wasn’t – blond curly-headed handsome – his step father liked to taunt him with the nickname “Adonis” – athletic, confident, a sharp dresser, a boy the girls all swooned over. For some reason, he liked me. Maybe because I excelled in the one area he didn’t, academics. Maybe because I was funny. We cemented our friendship on New Years’ Eve during 7th grade, when his alcoholic mother got us drunk on champagne until we both puked our guts out all over each other.
Alcohol was another arena where I learned to successfully compete: I could get sloppier drunk than anybody, and for some reason that added considerable points to my status. I also could easily score liquor from my father’s abundant stash in the basement.
7th Grade was when I discovered anti-Semitism as another key to the competitive advantage of popularity. We were studying Ancient Egypt, and a Jewish boy named Bill Cash knew a lot about it since he went to Hebrew school. So he kept raising his hand and shouting out the answers. Our teacher Mr. Roy’s face turned livid. You could see the bones in his skull as he seethed. “Cash!” he shounted. “Just because you’re Jewish doesn’t mean you know everything!” Cash shut up. I squirmed in my seat, ever grateful that I wasn’t Jewish. Mr. Roy went on to become the Headmaster of the school a few years later.
In highly German Milwaukee, I had of course heard anti-Semitism before. I was 10 when my Uncle John, my mother’s brother, a fat, alcoholic, homosexual insurance salesman who my father couldn’t stand, blurted his shocking joke: “Hitler was half right. He should have killed the other half.” My mother tsk-tsked him, pursing her lips and darkening her eyes in that quiet judgmental way usually reserved for the likes of me for failing to clean my room. To her credit, she thought any kind of prejudice was in extremely poor taste.
In 7th grade, the competition for girls began it’s obsessive regime. I was dogged in this field despite my “handicaps,” severe acne and deep-seated shyness. At dancing school I forced myself to go after the girl I wanted, Jane Ewens, a perky Catholic girl with short dark hair and freckles. What did I like about her? I liked how she looked. I didn’t know her even after several dances and dates, because we didn’t talk. Perhaps more importantly, I liked that the other boys thought she looked okay too. It was my good friend Kathy Hansen that hooked us up.
Kathy lived about five houses down from us on the lake, in Sauerkraut Bay. She too was Catholic, something I appreciated as a budding atheist. I gave up believing in God in 8th grade, a year after being confirmed in the Episcopal Church. Kathy was the first person I told. What I liked about Catholics was that they at least took their beliefs seriously – if you’re going to believe in something, do it wholeheartedly. And though I couldn’t have expressed it at the time, I liked the aura of tragedy that hovered around not just the central myth of the crucifixion, but the perpetual failure that Catholics experience in their inability to live up to the expectations of the church, the tragedy of original sin.
I liked that Kathy was a little heavy set and wore glasses, because that made her somehow accessible to someone as flawed as myself. Unlike with other girls, I was comfortable with her, with her brown curls and dancing blue eyes. We laughed together a lot.
She fixed me up with the first girl I made out with whose name I can no longer recall. She was cute, that girl, tiny, also short haired – I’m a sucker for boyish haircuts on girls. And we hugged and sucked each others mouths for hours at Tony Strouther’s party.
But I never called her back. Was she too easy, too accessible, not a high enough status to impress the other boys? She liked me! There must have been something wrong with her. The old Groucho Marx axiom: I wouldn’t want to be a member of a club that would have me for a member.
Tony Strouthers was first in our class freshman year. I was second. But then he killed himself 10 years later or so. So now I’m number one. I won!
A few summers later, I realized it was Kathy I loved, and I finally got up the nerve to tell her, sitting in my jeep in front of her house, nervously shifting the gears. “I love you, too, Henry. As a friend.” Did she call me Hank? I never liked that nickname.
The kiss of death that phrase, yet I wasn’t just an ordinary friend, I was her “huckleberry friend” from “Moon River,” the Johnny Mathis song popular at the time, a song I would tear up at for the next 10 years. At least she meant it about being friends.
She fixed me up with my first real girl friend the year of her debut party at the Chenequa Country Club, a blond hottie whose name again I do not recall, whom I liked because she was pretty and alleged to “put out” and the other boys envied me or at least respected the fact that she considered herself “going” with me.
For Kathy’s debut party itself, the summer after we had all graduated high school, she – this blond hottie – actually spent the night at my house, but I couldn’t get her to put out, though she might have if I’d asked or approached her, but I lacked nerve. We were sitting on her bed in the guest room that night. We’d both had plenty to drink, for debut parties were all about our age cohort’s debut as fledgling alcoholics, but the best I could do was whine, “It seems like your so grebeci to me.”
“What’s that?”
“Ice berg spelled backwards.” Kathy had taught me this phrase. My date laughed. I kissed her. She didn’t exactly come alive with passion, so I let it drop and said good night, retreating to my own room the worst of failures. Again.
It’s amazing to me how persistent the sexual competition is. Even at almost 65, happily married, with prostrate challenges diminishing my libido, whenever I pass a woman on the street, my mind automatically judges her and makes some comment to itself on her looks and whether she is sexually desirable or not (usually in the most vulgar terms). This is very annoying, though not so annoying that I put much effort into trying to stop it. I suspect I am not alone among human males in this regard. I suspect this tendency is close to universal, the reptile brain searching for a multiplicity of mates to replicate its DNA. A reptile brain conditioned by the society’s obsession with competition.
By seventh grade, my father decided that I needed more rigor in my education, so we rented a house in town (Milwaukee), Doggie Mann’s house, what a great name. My sister Nicki, who was 3 years older, went away to an Episcopal girls’ school, and I went to Milwaukee Country Day.
The summer before, I remember seeing my Stone Bank Moose Lake friend Jeffrey Trapp one last time in late August. He wore jeans down on his hips and a thin belt, an Elvis Presley look. I wore madras Bermuda shorts. I said to him judgmentally: “Jeffrey, you look so boppish,” and he mocked me, “Jeffery, you look so boppish.” Thus did I leave the working class in my wake, didn’t see Jeffrey again for at least 25 years. When I did finally look him up, he had become a redneck hippie gun dealing heavy metal sculptor. I became his biggest collector.
At Country Day, I was a hayseed, and a victim of considerable hazing. Some highlights of that competitive atmosphere: Bobby Brennan, my nemesis, a pudgy boy himself desperate to stay in the high status group, threw a rock at me that hit me in the head on the way to the school library. Helplessly, I burst into tears. The wrinkled prune woman of a librarian blew up at me over the crying (without investigating the cause), and I didn’t cry in public again for 30 years.
I developed bad acne, and my name quickly degenerated from Hitz to Zits.
My nipples began swelling as I’m they sometimes do in pubescent boys, and Bobby Brennan in the locker room shouted, “Look, he’s got tits!” My name degenerated one more level to Tits, and I just wanted to die.
Then I hooked up with Bill Wright, the most popular boy in the class. He too stayed at Pine Lake on the weekends with his mother and drunken step father (alcoholism was endemic to Pine Lake), while staying with his Dad and step mother during the week. He was everything I wasn’t – blond curly-headed handsome – his step father liked to taunt him with the nickname “Adonis” – athletic, confident, a sharp dresser, a boy the girls all swooned over. For some reason, he liked me. Maybe because I excelled in the one area he didn’t, academics. Maybe because I was funny. We cemented our friendship on New Years’ Eve during 7th grade, when his alcoholic mother got us drunk on champagne until we both puked our guts out all over each other.
Alcohol was another arena where I learned to successfully compete: I could get sloppier drunk than anybody, and for some reason that added considerable points to my status. I also could easily score liquor from my father’s abundant stash in the basement.
7th Grade was when I discovered anti-Semitism as another key to the competitive advantage of popularity. We were studying Ancient Egypt, and a Jewish boy named Bill Cash knew a lot about it since he went to Hebrew school. So he kept raising his hand and shouting out the answers. Our teacher Mr. Roy’s face turned livid. You could see the bones in his skull as he seethed. “Cash!” he shounted. “Just because you’re Jewish doesn’t mean you know everything!” Cash shut up. I squirmed in my seat, ever grateful that I wasn’t Jewish. Mr. Roy went on to become the Headmaster of the school a few years later.
In highly German Milwaukee, I had of course heard anti-Semitism before. I was 10 when my Uncle John, my mother’s brother, a fat, alcoholic, homosexual insurance salesman who my father couldn’t stand, blurted his shocking joke: “Hitler was half right. He should have killed the other half.” My mother tsk-tsked him, pursing her lips and darkening her eyes in that quiet judgmental way usually reserved for the likes of me for failing to clean my room. To her credit, she thought any kind of prejudice was in extremely poor taste.
In 7th grade, the competition for girls began it’s obsessive regime. I was dogged in this field despite my “handicaps,” severe acne and deep-seated shyness. At dancing school I forced myself to go after the girl I wanted, Jane Ewens, a perky Catholic girl with short dark hair and freckles. What did I like about her? I liked how she looked. I didn’t know her even after several dances and dates, because we didn’t talk. Perhaps more importantly, I liked that the other boys thought she looked okay too. It was my good friend Kathy Hansen that hooked us up.
Kathy lived about five houses down from us on the lake, in Sauerkraut Bay. She too was Catholic, something I appreciated as a budding atheist. I gave up believing in God in 8th grade, a year after being confirmed in the Episcopal Church. Kathy was the first person I told. What I liked about Catholics was that they at least took their beliefs seriously – if you’re going to believe in something, do it wholeheartedly. And though I couldn’t have expressed it at the time, I liked the aura of tragedy that hovered around not just the central myth of the crucifixion, but the perpetual failure that Catholics experience in their inability to live up to the expectations of the church, the tragedy of original sin.
I liked that Kathy was a little heavy set and wore glasses, because that made her somehow accessible to someone as flawed as myself. Unlike with other girls, I was comfortable with her, with her brown curls and dancing blue eyes. We laughed together a lot.
She fixed me up with the first girl I made out with whose name I can no longer recall. She was cute, that girl, tiny, also short haired – I’m a sucker for boyish haircuts on girls. And we hugged and sucked each others mouths for hours at Tony Strouther’s party.
But I never called her back. Was she too easy, too accessible, not a high enough status to impress the other boys? She liked me! There must have been something wrong with her. The old Groucho Marx axiom: I wouldn’t want to be a member of a club that would have me for a member.
Tony Strouthers was first in our class freshman year. I was second. But then he killed himself 10 years later or so. So now I’m number one. I won!
A few summers later, I realized it was Kathy I loved, and I finally got up the nerve to tell her, sitting in my jeep in front of her house, nervously shifting the gears. “I love you, too, Henry. As a friend.” Did she call me Hank? I never liked that nickname.
The kiss of death that phrase, yet I wasn’t just an ordinary friend, I was her “huckleberry friend” from “Moon River,” the Johnny Mathis song popular at the time, a song I would tear up at for the next 10 years. At least she meant it about being friends.
She fixed me up with my first real girl friend the year of her debut party at the Chenequa Country Club, a blond hottie whose name again I do not recall, whom I liked because she was pretty and alleged to “put out” and the other boys envied me or at least respected the fact that she considered herself “going” with me.
For Kathy’s debut party itself, the summer after we had all graduated high school, she – this blond hottie – actually spent the night at my house, but I couldn’t get her to put out, though she might have if I’d asked or approached her, but I lacked nerve. We were sitting on her bed in the guest room that night. We’d both had plenty to drink, for debut parties were all about our age cohort’s debut as fledgling alcoholics, but the best I could do was whine, “It seems like your so grebeci to me.”
“What’s that?”
“Ice berg spelled backwards.” Kathy had taught me this phrase. My date laughed. I kissed her. She didn’t exactly come alive with passion, so I let it drop and said good night, retreating to my own room the worst of failures. Again.
It’s amazing to me how persistent the sexual competition is. Even at almost 65, happily married, with prostrate challenges diminishing my libido, whenever I pass a woman on the street, my mind automatically judges her and makes some comment to itself on her looks and whether she is sexually desirable or not (usually in the most vulgar terms). This is very annoying, though not so annoying that I put much effort into trying to stop it. I suspect I am not alone among human males in this regard. I suspect this tendency is close to universal, the reptile brain searching for a multiplicity of mates to replicate its DNA. A reptile brain conditioned by the society’s obsession with competition.
Sunday, August 2, 2009
Schools of Thought
SCHOOLS OF THOUGHT
My Sixty Years in Education
A Constructivist Manifesto
1.
My earliest school memory is also my favorite memory. I was at nursery school, 5 years old – the kindergarten concept hadn’t reached rural Wisconsin yet. It was only October, the air was crisp like fresh apples, but somehow I had convinced my mother to let me wear these really neat black leather ski boots with stubby toes that had been my older sister’s. Just at the end of outside time, I was the last one outside behind the fire station that housed the nursery school, standing by a mound of dirt. I climbed that mountain. I crossed my arms and surveyed the whole yard, my domain.
“I’m going to be a robber!” I thought.
At 5 years old, I was so powerful – and knew it – that I could imagine doing anything. I never shook that outlaw self. It was a defining moment as well of my stormy relationship to schools over the next 60 years, as a student, as a teacher, as a parent, as an educational change activist. I loved nursery school – fingerpainting, playdough, blocks, what’s not to love. But apparently I wasn’t buying the indoctrination to be “good.”
That was the last time I loved school. I liked school okay for the first few years. My first grade teacher, Ms. Gunderson, was beautiful – tall, slender, with flouncy brunette curls – and I adored her.
Miss Miles in 3rd grade taught me about “constructivism” by allowing me to do a “project” about the addition they were building to the Stone Bank School, which had been a two room school when my sister started there 3 years before me. But parts of rural Milwaukee, like parts of rural USA, were quickly exurbanizing, and the school was adding six rooms. I talked to the architect, who was a family friend. He showed me the plans. I learned how to make concrete. I wrote about the names of all the machines and drew pictures of them for my report: the front loader, the back hoe, the cement mixer, the pile driver, the bull dozer.
Constructivism is another term for “hands-on” learning. The idea, which derives from Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget and Soviet educator Lev Vygotsky, is that children construct their own knowledge out of their experience. The philosophy is widely practiced in nursery schools, day-care centers, child development centers, Head Start programs and many kindergartens. It stands in contrast to the behaviorism of extrinsic rewards (and punishments) which dominates instruction in grades 1-12, and beyond.
Both a premise and a conclusion of this memoir is this simple proposition: in the US at least, after preschool, all schools suck, big time. Public, private, urban, suburban, no Marker what their reputation or Academic Performance Index rating. They suck because they were designed to serve an economic system based on competition. Competition is destructive to human beings, creating far more losers that winners, and even the winners lose in their isolation.
I sub-sub-titled this memoir a Constructivist Manifesto because what I am hoping to do is describe the experiences in my life that taught me what I know about schools and society, and thereby suggest ways we might go forward to develop schools and a society that transcend competition, that honor the fact that human beings have far more in common that they have differences, and that if we work together, we may really be able to arrest our seemingly inexorable slide toward self-destruction and the destruction of our beautiful planet.
After nursery school, grade school was generally boring, though I don’t recall minding so much. I enjoyed learning to read. I especially remember a story in my Dick and Jane Reader where baby sister Sally was setting the table and ended up one setting short because she forgot to count herself. That was the kind of mistake I could relate to.
Because the academics came relatively easy to me as a Doctor’s son in this amalgam of farm kids, children of grocers and workers at Waukesha Motors or Hartland Plastics, the local factories, competition didn’t affect me much at first. My father probably justified sending me there because he hoped the farm families would impart pastoral values to me, though the real reason was that he wanted to live in the country. He wasn’t a people person, to say the least. Gruff is the word that describes both his bedside manner as a physician and his parenting style. A well-regarded eye surgeon with snow white hair by the time he was 30, he also lacked eye-hand coordination – a trait I inherited – so that his entire being as an adult was channeled into keeping his hands steady as he maneuvered the scalpel near the optic nerve. There wasn’t much of him left over.
Competition began on the playground with the archetypal children’s game, “Nigger Pile.” The only version I remember was the one in which someone in a gang of kids raging through the playground yelled “Nigger pile on Henry!” and five or seven or some number of kids would swarm after me and pile on top of me, mimicking the social hierarchy and traumatizing me into a mild case of claustrophobia. I don’t remember yelling “Nigger pile on” whoever, nor do I recall being near the top of a pile on someone else, though most likely I participated in those versions as well.
Baseball killed me. We had three sport seasons at Stone Bank, baseball, baseball, and baseball. It was really softball, but since the ball wasn’t soft, it was the same difference to me. Thanks to the bad coordination I got from my father, I couldn’t play baseball for shit. I couldn’t throw (“You throw like a girl,” was a frequent taunt from my schoolmates), couldn’t catch, and couldn’t hit. I could run okay, but that was about it.
Still because I was seen as smart, and because at a working class school, competition wasn’t central, I was part of a gang of friends. My 4th and 5th grade teacher, Mr. Babinek, was a genius in that when he organized an interscholastic softball team to play North Lake and Merton, he made me the batboy, so I went to the games and wore the uniform and was an integral part of the team without having to embarrass myself (or the team) by actually playing. Even so, it was baseball that first made me suspicious of competition.
While I couldn’t have articulated this, the class differences in attitude to competition became evident to me early on. The house I grew up on was on Pine Lake, at the time a favorite summering place for the industrial, brewing, tanning, and banking titans of Milwaukee. My great grandfather, Frederick C. Winters, a corporate lawyer for Allis Challmers and the Milwaukee Road, and a General in the Civil War, acquired the 7 acre property on the lake in the 1880s, as a summer place. In the late 1920s, my grandfather and namesake, Henry B. Hitz, an eye-ear-nose-and throat doctor, built a largish house on the property overlooking the lake. Large by most people’s standards, only medium sized by Pine Lake standards.
To give you an idea, the area around Pine Lake was organized into the Village of Chenequa, which in my youth from 1950-70, had 400 residents, but a full time police and fire department, giving it possibly the highest ratio of police to residents of any community in the country.
It was a beautiful lake, not large, perhaps 3 miles by 2 miles, with deep blue water and not a single commercial establishment, all kinds of trees – pine, oak, maple, birch – vast well-manicured lawns, lush gardens, and homes, most of them grand.
Beginning with my grandfather, who died a few months before I was born in 1944, we were among the first families to spend winters as well as summers on the lake, and remained one of the few at least until the expressways were built in the 60s. So winter nights could be eerily quiet.
I still don’t know how our branch of the Winters family won the competition to get the best piece of the property, and it was never discussed, but because of this “victory”, our family had a little more money than our cousins who ended up with the smaller cottages next door. I know that some resentment simmers subterraineanly to this day. So it goes with competition.
In the fall, winter, and spring, despite the baseball challenges, I played exuberantly with my working class friends from Stone Bank. We rode our bikes to Oconomowoc 7 miles away, seeing how high we could get our speedometers to go as we raced down the one serious hill; we played “Civil War” with real antique guns given me by a family friend (my idea, they wanted to play cowboys); we had a club called the “Moon or Bust Club” with a clubhouse above our garage where we painted a skull and crossbones on the door in radium glow-in-the-dark paint; we developed naked pictures of my sister in my dark room, frustrated by a black streak covered the most interesting parts; we played with my electric trains, a double-transformer layout with a Union Pacific passenger train and a freight train with a log car that automatically dumped its logs; we hunted frogs and turtles in the swamps of Moose Lake, a neighboring lake where the working classes were welcome to live. My friend Jeffery’s mother was den mother to our Cub Scout troop, and we made lanyards and picture frames around the kitchen table in their Moose Lake bungalow.
The summers were different. I didn’t see my Stone Bank friends. The Milwaukee owning class swept over the lake and I learned to claw my way into the various cliques that arose among this privileged population.
Just as baseball was the only game in town in Stone Bank, sail boat racing was what we did in the summer. It was in sailing school that I first became acquainted with the art of hazing. My cousin, Billy Winters, a pudgy boy with a prominent cow-lick above his forehead, lived next door to us, in the Red Cottage my father had sold his father (and about which deal there was some trace of bad blood). They later built their own house, which we snobbishly belittled.
The earliest I remember Billy being scapegoated was at day camp, a precursor to sailing school, led by a teenager named Dick Gallun. My mother was picking me up at the end of the session. She asked Dick conversationally, “So, what’s the dope?”
“Oh, Billy’s the dope, everybody knows that,” Dick riposted, and my mother chuckled. The adults blatantly colluded with our hazing.
There were times I remember enjoying hanging out with Billy when it was just him and me playing laboratory or some such in the basement. We would make thermite, a mixture of ferrous oxide and aluminum powder that once lit, made a blinding flash and left behind a little hunk of iron. Or we would explore one of the many I had hide-outs all over the property. There was a boat house, an ice house, a cottage where my grandmother stayed in the summer, an outhouse, a toolshed, a barn converted into a garage with an upstairs, where we would look for pictures of naked natives in the old National Geographics.
But if anyone else was around, the game quickly degenerated into “picking on Billy.” We would taunt him with cruel rhymes:
Wee Willy Winters sat on a sprinkler and he began to cry,
Oh ma, oh ma, oh what a stinker am I.
We would shun him or ditch him, push him in the lake, splash him with water until he cried, belittle his inferior boats (he had a 7 ½ horsepower to our 15).
I understood full well, and felt only slightly guilty, that hazing Billy was my ticket to the inside of the prestigious clique. The incident that best illustrates this dynamic happened quite late, when I was 16 to Billy’s 15, after I had achieved a modicum of popularity. I was having a party for the 4th of July. It was the party of the season. My parents understood my need for popularity enough to sanction my purchase of 4 cases of beer at the Beer Depot in Nashotah, another nearby town. At least 50 people came from all over the lake and from Milwaukee. Of course I hadn’t invited Billy. But Billy came over anyway. I greeted him at the door. “Hi, Billy! How you doing, man?” I gushed with enthusiasm as I shook his hand. Then with an evil grin, I pressed my lit cigarette into the back of his hand and held it there. Once again, for the jillianth and perhaps last time, Billy ran home squealing, and my status was secure.
My Sixty Years in Education
A Constructivist Manifesto
1.
My earliest school memory is also my favorite memory. I was at nursery school, 5 years old – the kindergarten concept hadn’t reached rural Wisconsin yet. It was only October, the air was crisp like fresh apples, but somehow I had convinced my mother to let me wear these really neat black leather ski boots with stubby toes that had been my older sister’s. Just at the end of outside time, I was the last one outside behind the fire station that housed the nursery school, standing by a mound of dirt. I climbed that mountain. I crossed my arms and surveyed the whole yard, my domain.
“I’m going to be a robber!” I thought.
At 5 years old, I was so powerful – and knew it – that I could imagine doing anything. I never shook that outlaw self. It was a defining moment as well of my stormy relationship to schools over the next 60 years, as a student, as a teacher, as a parent, as an educational change activist. I loved nursery school – fingerpainting, playdough, blocks, what’s not to love. But apparently I wasn’t buying the indoctrination to be “good.”
That was the last time I loved school. I liked school okay for the first few years. My first grade teacher, Ms. Gunderson, was beautiful – tall, slender, with flouncy brunette curls – and I adored her.
Miss Miles in 3rd grade taught me about “constructivism” by allowing me to do a “project” about the addition they were building to the Stone Bank School, which had been a two room school when my sister started there 3 years before me. But parts of rural Milwaukee, like parts of rural USA, were quickly exurbanizing, and the school was adding six rooms. I talked to the architect, who was a family friend. He showed me the plans. I learned how to make concrete. I wrote about the names of all the machines and drew pictures of them for my report: the front loader, the back hoe, the cement mixer, the pile driver, the bull dozer.
Constructivism is another term for “hands-on” learning. The idea, which derives from Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget and Soviet educator Lev Vygotsky, is that children construct their own knowledge out of their experience. The philosophy is widely practiced in nursery schools, day-care centers, child development centers, Head Start programs and many kindergartens. It stands in contrast to the behaviorism of extrinsic rewards (and punishments) which dominates instruction in grades 1-12, and beyond.
Both a premise and a conclusion of this memoir is this simple proposition: in the US at least, after preschool, all schools suck, big time. Public, private, urban, suburban, no Marker what their reputation or Academic Performance Index rating. They suck because they were designed to serve an economic system based on competition. Competition is destructive to human beings, creating far more losers that winners, and even the winners lose in their isolation.
I sub-sub-titled this memoir a Constructivist Manifesto because what I am hoping to do is describe the experiences in my life that taught me what I know about schools and society, and thereby suggest ways we might go forward to develop schools and a society that transcend competition, that honor the fact that human beings have far more in common that they have differences, and that if we work together, we may really be able to arrest our seemingly inexorable slide toward self-destruction and the destruction of our beautiful planet.
After nursery school, grade school was generally boring, though I don’t recall minding so much. I enjoyed learning to read. I especially remember a story in my Dick and Jane Reader where baby sister Sally was setting the table and ended up one setting short because she forgot to count herself. That was the kind of mistake I could relate to.
Because the academics came relatively easy to me as a Doctor’s son in this amalgam of farm kids, children of grocers and workers at Waukesha Motors or Hartland Plastics, the local factories, competition didn’t affect me much at first. My father probably justified sending me there because he hoped the farm families would impart pastoral values to me, though the real reason was that he wanted to live in the country. He wasn’t a people person, to say the least. Gruff is the word that describes both his bedside manner as a physician and his parenting style. A well-regarded eye surgeon with snow white hair by the time he was 30, he also lacked eye-hand coordination – a trait I inherited – so that his entire being as an adult was channeled into keeping his hands steady as he maneuvered the scalpel near the optic nerve. There wasn’t much of him left over.
Competition began on the playground with the archetypal children’s game, “Nigger Pile.” The only version I remember was the one in which someone in a gang of kids raging through the playground yelled “Nigger pile on Henry!” and five or seven or some number of kids would swarm after me and pile on top of me, mimicking the social hierarchy and traumatizing me into a mild case of claustrophobia. I don’t remember yelling “Nigger pile on” whoever, nor do I recall being near the top of a pile on someone else, though most likely I participated in those versions as well.
Baseball killed me. We had three sport seasons at Stone Bank, baseball, baseball, and baseball. It was really softball, but since the ball wasn’t soft, it was the same difference to me. Thanks to the bad coordination I got from my father, I couldn’t play baseball for shit. I couldn’t throw (“You throw like a girl,” was a frequent taunt from my schoolmates), couldn’t catch, and couldn’t hit. I could run okay, but that was about it.
Still because I was seen as smart, and because at a working class school, competition wasn’t central, I was part of a gang of friends. My 4th and 5th grade teacher, Mr. Babinek, was a genius in that when he organized an interscholastic softball team to play North Lake and Merton, he made me the batboy, so I went to the games and wore the uniform and was an integral part of the team without having to embarrass myself (or the team) by actually playing. Even so, it was baseball that first made me suspicious of competition.
While I couldn’t have articulated this, the class differences in attitude to competition became evident to me early on. The house I grew up on was on Pine Lake, at the time a favorite summering place for the industrial, brewing, tanning, and banking titans of Milwaukee. My great grandfather, Frederick C. Winters, a corporate lawyer for Allis Challmers and the Milwaukee Road, and a General in the Civil War, acquired the 7 acre property on the lake in the 1880s, as a summer place. In the late 1920s, my grandfather and namesake, Henry B. Hitz, an eye-ear-nose-and throat doctor, built a largish house on the property overlooking the lake. Large by most people’s standards, only medium sized by Pine Lake standards.
To give you an idea, the area around Pine Lake was organized into the Village of Chenequa, which in my youth from 1950-70, had 400 residents, but a full time police and fire department, giving it possibly the highest ratio of police to residents of any community in the country.
It was a beautiful lake, not large, perhaps 3 miles by 2 miles, with deep blue water and not a single commercial establishment, all kinds of trees – pine, oak, maple, birch – vast well-manicured lawns, lush gardens, and homes, most of them grand.
Beginning with my grandfather, who died a few months before I was born in 1944, we were among the first families to spend winters as well as summers on the lake, and remained one of the few at least until the expressways were built in the 60s. So winter nights could be eerily quiet.
I still don’t know how our branch of the Winters family won the competition to get the best piece of the property, and it was never discussed, but because of this “victory”, our family had a little more money than our cousins who ended up with the smaller cottages next door. I know that some resentment simmers subterraineanly to this day. So it goes with competition.
In the fall, winter, and spring, despite the baseball challenges, I played exuberantly with my working class friends from Stone Bank. We rode our bikes to Oconomowoc 7 miles away, seeing how high we could get our speedometers to go as we raced down the one serious hill; we played “Civil War” with real antique guns given me by a family friend (my idea, they wanted to play cowboys); we had a club called the “Moon or Bust Club” with a clubhouse above our garage where we painted a skull and crossbones on the door in radium glow-in-the-dark paint; we developed naked pictures of my sister in my dark room, frustrated by a black streak covered the most interesting parts; we played with my electric trains, a double-transformer layout with a Union Pacific passenger train and a freight train with a log car that automatically dumped its logs; we hunted frogs and turtles in the swamps of Moose Lake, a neighboring lake where the working classes were welcome to live. My friend Jeffery’s mother was den mother to our Cub Scout troop, and we made lanyards and picture frames around the kitchen table in their Moose Lake bungalow.
The summers were different. I didn’t see my Stone Bank friends. The Milwaukee owning class swept over the lake and I learned to claw my way into the various cliques that arose among this privileged population.
Just as baseball was the only game in town in Stone Bank, sail boat racing was what we did in the summer. It was in sailing school that I first became acquainted with the art of hazing. My cousin, Billy Winters, a pudgy boy with a prominent cow-lick above his forehead, lived next door to us, in the Red Cottage my father had sold his father (and about which deal there was some trace of bad blood). They later built their own house, which we snobbishly belittled.
The earliest I remember Billy being scapegoated was at day camp, a precursor to sailing school, led by a teenager named Dick Gallun. My mother was picking me up at the end of the session. She asked Dick conversationally, “So, what’s the dope?”
“Oh, Billy’s the dope, everybody knows that,” Dick riposted, and my mother chuckled. The adults blatantly colluded with our hazing.
There were times I remember enjoying hanging out with Billy when it was just him and me playing laboratory or some such in the basement. We would make thermite, a mixture of ferrous oxide and aluminum powder that once lit, made a blinding flash and left behind a little hunk of iron. Or we would explore one of the many I had hide-outs all over the property. There was a boat house, an ice house, a cottage where my grandmother stayed in the summer, an outhouse, a toolshed, a barn converted into a garage with an upstairs, where we would look for pictures of naked natives in the old National Geographics.
But if anyone else was around, the game quickly degenerated into “picking on Billy.” We would taunt him with cruel rhymes:
Wee Willy Winters sat on a sprinkler and he began to cry,
Oh ma, oh ma, oh what a stinker am I.
We would shun him or ditch him, push him in the lake, splash him with water until he cried, belittle his inferior boats (he had a 7 ½ horsepower to our 15).
I understood full well, and felt only slightly guilty, that hazing Billy was my ticket to the inside of the prestigious clique. The incident that best illustrates this dynamic happened quite late, when I was 16 to Billy’s 15, after I had achieved a modicum of popularity. I was having a party for the 4th of July. It was the party of the season. My parents understood my need for popularity enough to sanction my purchase of 4 cases of beer at the Beer Depot in Nashotah, another nearby town. At least 50 people came from all over the lake and from Milwaukee. Of course I hadn’t invited Billy. But Billy came over anyway. I greeted him at the door. “Hi, Billy! How you doing, man?” I gushed with enthusiasm as I shook his hand. Then with an evil grin, I pressed my lit cigarette into the back of his hand and held it there. Once again, for the jillianth and perhaps last time, Billy ran home squealing, and my status was secure.
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