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.