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.