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What A Stupid Thesis

"My God Richard,what a stupid ridiculous thesis you presented in your last entry, the one titled 'The editing and Composition of Dreams'" What are you doing fantasying that you are Freud now, and going to broaden our understanding of the unconscious."

Actually, I am glad you brought Freud up. Because he was always one to state a premise, and then turn around and demolish it. But then, like Dostoevsky, nobody reads or talks about Freud any more. And even more to the point, Freud loved to read Dostoevsky. as a matter of fact, Freud is just Dostoevsky revisited. Freud's half-wit successors have dismissed him, even though he put the words ego, id, unconscious and Oedipus complex, into the language. He did all that, but his successors, are happy to just give people prosaic and call it a day.

But I am way off the point. I was saying that dreams employ foreshadowing and other literary devices, and therefore must be considered as composed, if not edited and embellished with an artistic devices. Earlier I used a dream of mine where seeing a puddle in the street leads to finding a building engulfed in a flood. But the problem with describing that as foreshadowing is that in real life a puddle may foreshadow a flood, and also in cinema or a movie. But in a dream, anything can come after the puddle. In a dream I may go to see what is causing a puddle and find, not a flood but a train car in the middle of the street in which a group of midgets are playing Mozart on Kazoos. The flood was only foreshadowed the flood because the flood happened to come after the puddle.

It is probably more likely that with dreams we are dealing with two things, stream of consciousness thinking and the connection of one image to another by association. Flood, Mozart, kazoo, and midget must be all connected in my mind in some way, unknown to me, for me to use them in one sentence. I dreamed it up, although I am awake.

But the problem remains that our dreams contain content that is beyond our meagre powers of invention, and we have to wonder where the skills of invention and composition are coming from. Personally I think that dreams are created in the mind for a reason, ( I have no idea what reason). Dreams are also important, so therefore there is a program in the mind which is in charge of constructing dreams. Not only does it construct dreams but it employs craftsmanship , and invention. All of the materials of dream construction are stored in our memory, and they are pieces of our actual experience. From this store house of images and occurrences, are taken snippets and segments and they are sewn together to create a narrative story. I think the story is trying to tell us something, in the most obvious and simple minded way. The dream perhaps is intended as warning, instruction, hopes, fears , that sort of thing. This is Malcolm's razor, such a purpose is the most obvious purpose of a dream.

But purpose does not concern us here, method is what I want to talk about. All the materials are stored in the brain as memory, and we use the snippets of pieces of it to build up the dream. A person who has never seen a monkey in real life or in a picture does not dream of monkeys. That is obvious.

But what about movies, do the images we see, and the stories we ingest watching T.V. become a part of our store of dream images. Actually, I don't think so. I can only use my own experience as an example but I will give this as a proof. My dreams never employ the "zoom" and they never employ sweeping "panorama" shots. Since my eyes do not have a "zoom" I cannot dream of zoom images. The significance, at least to myself, is obvious. The mind does not store movies, sitcoms, advertisements, photographs in books, etc. in the bin for creating dreams because they are IRRELEVANT. The mind knows that the billions of hours we spend watching television are IRRELEVANT. The program for dreams in out head is set up to process real stuff we have experienced, and to process and compose it with a definite purpose. The brain creates dreams with the same determination , singlemindedness, and careful devotion to detail as the kidneys do when they filter the blood. The heart goes about its business also, and never takes a break, never procrastinates. It has a job to do, and it does it from start to finish, lets say for eighty continuous years,and it never does anything irrelevant. All the functions of the body are like that, including the brain. It works its job, and does not give a good god damn how you feel about it. The brain is just as independent of your so-called will as your liver or your spleen. But your consciousness lets you go along for the ride. We are like the child in the toy car at the fair, pretending to steer, as the car runs around on its track.

But I would like to conclude this polemic by talking about Mozart. Do you remember in the film "Amadeus" that Salieri is jealous of Mozart because his manuscripts do not have mistakes and corrections in them. Now, "Amadeus" was a fictionalised account of Mozart, but was it correct in telling us that Mozart's manuscripts were usually without mistakes and corrections? Lets take a look.

The Editing and Composition of Dreams

In my dream of the flood in the studio building, first I see a puddle in the road from a distant vantage point (see previous post). After that I continue to talk to Lauren but the puddle in the distance gets larger, and finally my attention is aroused and I must walk down the street and see what is causing the flood. What I find on investigation is that the water is coming from a broken water line in the building I have my studio in. The ground floor is flooded up to the joists of the second floor, and the water threatens to damage my goods. Now this is a dream, all well and good, it doesn't have anything strange, or shall we say, un-dreamlike in it. But I find it extremely puzzling that the dream seems to have a sort of foreshadowing in it. That is to say, the detail of the water in the street foreshadows the image of the flood. This raises the question, "whose dream is this anyway?"

If it is my dream, and I am making up the parts of it in my own mind, then how can the dream contain foreshadowing? How can there be a question (where is the water coming from) which has to be answered later in time, (from a broken water pipe). If it is my dream then I made it up in my mind all by myself. This seems perhaps like an obvious and dumb question, but it isn't. Even if we postulate that the dream comes from the unconscious, what is this crude, and primitive unconscious mind doing employing literary devices like foreshadowing?

There is another device in literature and screenwriting which to my knowledge has no name but I would call it, "riddling." Riddling is where the composer of the story places an object, an occurrence, or a situation in the narrative, which raises a question which is not answered. The question then remains suspended in the narrative. For example, we are watching a movie and at the beginning a woman opens a dresser drawer, takes out a box, out of the box she unfolds a note, and as she reads it her face clouds over. We are not told, nor shown what that note contains, but we think that it must have something to do with the plot. We don't know. The character knows however, but more importantly, obviously, the person who wrote the story knows what is in the note, and they are not going to let us know till they are good and ready, as the story develops. This is riddling. Some movies begin with a series of riddles, so many in fact that we think, oh come on now, let's get into the story, and stop setting up these confusing puzzles.

But what if it is not a movie or a book we are reading, what if it is our own dream that has presented us with the riddling? We are dreaming the dream so how can we not already know what is to come?

But we don't. We absolutely do not know. Now I do not dream other people's dreams, ever, so I must reason about this dream structure entirely from my own memory. I cannot trust other people's descriptions of their dreams because there is no way to know to what extent someone else's description of their dream is edited, embellished mis-rememberd, or artistically modified to sound either more impressive, strange, or interesting. Indeed, I don't even know if my memory of my own dream is accurate, or retouched with the artist's skills for more pleasant consumption.

This, however, doesn't matter. We dream millions of dreams in our lives and often they have composition, drama, quirky and amazing details, which all exceed our meager creative abilities in waking life. In my dreams I compose music that moves me to tears, make dramatic speeches, and escape danger with unheard of cunning and brilliance, so that it sometimes happens that I wake up trembling, my heart pounding, and I ask myself, "How did I ever dream that up?"

Flood In The Studio

My studio is in an old mill building on the Housatonic River. The wall of the building goes right down into the waters of the river. It is a remaining building of a complex, and many of the other buildings have been swept away by floods. My building also has been often flooded, and been in danger of being swept away. But either because of luck or strength, it remains. Here have a look at it: My studio is on the second floor. In a flood it is the entire first floor that is under water, right up to the joists of the second floor. But before the water could engulf the second floor, it would need to submerge the whole county, I think.

The first floor is a huge open space, where trucks used to load and unload. Now it is empty and unused, dirty and abandoned looking. With or without floods the ground floor is no stranger to water. There is a large artisan well there, in big cement vats, in which water is running all day long. Here you see a cavernous hundred-year-old room all coated with dust, old cars and car parts, windows covered with leaves and mold, a rotted ceiling giving a view through to the next floor, no lights on, just pale green light through the mold on a few windows, high up, and the sound of running water in the artisan wells. Here have a look at that: And in the main room there was a plumbing leak for two month so that when you entered you could hear water dripping into a bucket, the bucket overflowing onto the floor, and a large puddle like a little lake, spread out on the cement floor amid the gloom, beer cans, trash, old rags, rusted tools, wet plaster, and cheap sheetrock walls covered with black mold, and full of holes punched in them by teenagers.

Last night I had a dream about this building. Here is that dream:

I am standing on the porch of Lauren Clark's gallery talking to her. Lauren Clark is two buildings away from my studio. Out in the street I see a large puddle of water, but it is a dry day. It is one of those big puddles like you might see when a hydrant is being cleaned. I continue to talk to Lauren, but then I notice that the entire road has become flooded, and it can't be coming from a hydrant. The studio building is blocked from my view by another mill building, both in my dream and in actual life, so Lauren and I walk down the street to see where the water is coming from. What we find is that a huge water main has burst in my studio building, and the entire structure is engulfed in a flood. The ground floor is completely full of water all the way up to the joists of the second floor, but since there are windows high up in the structure, the flood is exiting these windows, and not ascending to the second floor. I say to Lauren, "It looks like my things will not be damaged."

Next, I am on the roof of the building amidst the swirling torrent of the river in full flood. The water is now right up to the roof, and Carrie Haddad, an art dealer from Hudson, New York, is trying to deliver a huge piece of sculpture to me, from a little boat. There are other people involved, and everyone is screaming and shouting, as I am trying to haul a very heavy window, which is also a painting, from the boat to the relative safety of the roof of the building, but suddenly the tide of rushing water sweeps Carrie, the boat and the window away.

Now having had a dream like this, I think most people would be expecting that I would be self indulgent, and proceed to analyze what this dream might mean, as symbols in my life, and indications of my situation. But, not a bit of it, I want to talk about structural elements of the dream, its characteristics as a work of literature, or as a film. I intend to treat it as a film critic might treat it, for, indeed it is a film, composed and screened for me, in my head, by a self of mine, a very unknown self.

Like a Woman

Lauren Clark Fine Art is pleased to announce an exhibition of small works by Richard Britell, titled “NY, NY”. All of these paintings have as a subject, details of the architecture of New York City.

Mr. Britell says of this exhibit, "I am not a New Yorker. This came home to me the first time I ever entered a gallery to show my portfolio. It was a large room in which were eight foot square black and white photographs of woman's heads. In the corner was a beautiful woman talking on the phone in a German
accent. I said,'I would like to show the director my portfolio.' She said, "I'm sorry sir, this isn't a gallery, it's a hair salon.' "

Later that same day I did acquire gallery representation. Four years later I had my first one man show which was sold out, and reviewed in the New York Times. All of those paintings back then were of the architecture of Pittsfield. New Yorkers bought them all up. Now New Yorkers are buying up the city
of Pittsfield itself, go figure.

Hilton Kramer, in his review of my work said, "If there is an element of nostalgia in these works it is not too bothersome..."

Of these current works I would say, if there is an element of nostalgia in them , it is entirely the point.

I learned to love New York, and I realized that it is possible to love a place in the same way that one might love a woman, in the same way, and with the same consequences.

Fake Money and The Duomo

A one hundred dollar bill is worth one hundred dollars. No one would question that. It is worth one hundred dollars until the instant that someone discovers that it is a counterfeit one hundred dollar bill. At that moment it does not begin to depreciate in value, and drop say to a value of fifty dollars, but it just plummets right down to zero. Since a counterfeit bill may involve its owner in some difficulties, you might say that as a counterfeit bill it is worth considerably less than nothing.

The fall from grace of some one hundred dollar bill, however does not call into question the monetary system because all of the so-called “real” hundreds retain their status.

But if a piece of artwork is found to be fraudulent, or a forgery, does it call into question the value of all the other works by the same artist, thought or known to be authentic? Does it even necessarily render the object valueless?

If it was discovered that the dome of the Duomo was not designed and built by Brunelleschi, but, through some bookkeeping error was attributed to him, when actually it was designed and built by someone named Brunelleschky, an itinerant Russian architect, would the dome suddenly have no value in our eyes as a work of art? No, the dome would retain its grandeur and the Russian Brunelleschky would be added to the history books as a great architect; and Brunelleschi’s fame would be diminished. The dome supports Brunelleschi’s fame, and not the name the fame of the dome.

I was visiting an art dealer’s home one time, and in his collection he had a painting by De Chirico. It was a very good painting and I asked him how much it was worth. He named a figure which I thought was modest, but he explained, “Unfortunately it is unsigned. If it had a signature it would be worth a lot more.” So, in that instance, the work supported a certain value, and the dealer was not tempted to give it to "good will” just because it had no signature.

In the news there was a piece about a Pollock painting which was unsigned. The owners of this painting wanted to prove that a fingerprint in the paint was Pollack’s fingerprint, therefore authenticating the work. Here was a situation like the hundred dollar bill. If the painting could be proved to be by Pollock it was going to be worth millions. But if not, it would be worth nothing. Because unlike Brunolescki’s dome, the name supports the value of the work, and not the work, the value of the name.

In ancient Roman times, fires would sometimes burn down entire large neighboorhoods. During these fires, real estate agents would roam around the threatened houses and offer the owners small sums for the purchase of the threatened buildings. Then, if by chance the wind changed, the new owner would possess a building for a pittance. But if it was engulfed in the fire, then not too much was lost, at least by the agent.

It is interesting to wonder how people would bid on an object which was about to be analyzed, to establish if it is a fraud. If the Pollock was offered up for sale before the thumb print was analyzed, then we might expect that people would not bid in the millions, but perhaps only ten thousand.

Now, let's imagine that there is some old friend of Jackson Pollock’s who was present in his studio when that exact painting was painted. The friend knows for a fact that it is authentic but unsigned, because he engaged in a discussion about the piece, and even knows that the stretchers used in this painting were different in some way. So with certainty of the painting’s authenticity, he bids ten thousand dollars, buys the painting, and the fingerprint turns out not to be Pollock's, but someone else's.

The fact that the fingerprint is not Pollock's, does not prove in any way that he didn’t paint the work. It could still be authentic.

Some unknown work claiming to be by the hand of some master is like some person, before the age of DNA testing, claiming to be related to some wealthy person. “I am actually the bastard son of John F. Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe.”

Pollock and Frankenthaler

But we know that the next chapter in Janson's History of Art was about people like Helen Frankenthaler. Although I would never have doubted the logic of a person like Jackson Pollock becoming famous in his decade, in this country, I was extremely suspicious of the fame of Helen Frankenthaler. It struck me that she was another person who was reading the art history books, and she laid out a plan of how to theoterically fit her paintings edgewise into the existing rhetoric about abstract expressionism.

Pollock had a place in our society, just like a prize fighter. Millions of people, fat ugly people who have long ago gone to seed, sitting in their Barcaloungers overflowing with fat around the edges of their chairs lay back watching their TV and they see the prize fighter and they think, "Thank God there is somebody who is fit, and can fight."

And Jackson was to out society of the fifties like that prize fighter. And all the bankers, dentists, accountants, and businessmen go to the grind of their hated jobs, in their hated lives, and yet they think "At least there was someone who was great just because he threw things, and was always out of control." He was a Janis Joplin. And thank God for the Janis Joplins. If the Janis Joplins didn't exist, God would certainly have nuked the entire planet long ago in desperation saying, "What is the use of these boring, God forsaken drones?"

But then we have to consider Helen Frankthaler with her townhouse and her lap dogs. How does she fit in? Was she a passionate, suffering individual bleeding for her art? Or was she a person who purchased a paragraph in Janson's History of Art book with about five million dollars and some well connected friends? I think her fame was purchased and paid for. So was Jackson's, but in entirely different and more respectable coin.

I went to an opening of Helen Frankenthaler's once. She was there, and I met her, and I got to talk to her. Her paintings were huge. They consisted of colors that had been poured out onto the raw canvas. When you pour paint out on a canvas it tends to run, so, when looking at these paintings on the wall one involuntarily begins to wonder how is it that these big puddles of color didn't run down the canvas in big streaks? And one thinks, probably the color didn't run down the canvas because, like Jackson Pollock, her paintings were done stretched out on the floor of the studio.

So I asked her. I said, "How do you do these large paintings?"

She must have been asked this question many times because she gave me a prepared answer of which she was obviously proud. She said, "I have a large scaffold built in my studio that I can walk around on that hovers over the canvas which is stretched out on the floor."

"So," I said, "that means when these paintings were painted they were laying on the floor, and when you were looking at them, and planning them out, they were laying on the floor. And when you finally brought them to completion they were stretched out and laying on the floor."

"That's right," she said.

"Then if that is the case, shouldn't we really be looking down on these paintings?"

Well, I left the gallery and walked out into the night air of Manhattan, and I was feeling so smug and so proud of myself that I had said such a mean and insulting thing to a great artist. And I have to say, soon after that I began to feel guilty and ashamed of what I had done. Because it was a proud criticism, and it cut deeply to the quick which I saw in her face the moment i said it. Because it was the truth. The truth is that Pollock's paintings should be unstretched and put out on the floor, and so should Helen Frankenthaler's. The moment they took stretchers and stretched their work out to be hung up on the wall, they declared that all that they had done had to play second fiddle to presenting the entire output as product for sale in the market.

But I felt ashamed because I saw in an instant that Helen had listened to an astute criticism, the type that can damage a career. Because life can sometimes be brought to a stop at the utterance of three of four words.

And she, and Jackson were in agonies in their day, wondering if they were, when all was said and done, really artists at all, and not just victims of an elaborate market hoax.

This is why Jackson would get drunk, sit late at night on the curbs of Manhattan and say to his drunken friends, "I'm the greatest artist. The greatest artist. I am, aren't I?"

Waiting for the police to come

Please forgive the long delay in continuing this story. On September 30 I decided to move my studio from Housatonic back to Pittsfield. All month long I have been packing up my things and telling everyone that I am moving. But yesterday I decided to remain where I am and not move. I have received some wonderful compliments in my life. My most favorite was said to me by my sister Romy. She said, "You know that song by Simon and Garfunkel caller 'The Boxer,' where it says 'I am leaving, I am leaving, but the fighter still remains?' That's you, Richard"

Perhaps I couldn't go on with my story at this point because the next chapter is hard to write, so I will continue on a different track — the art world — if there is such a thing.

When we were students we read Janson’s History of Art. We were filled with awe when we read about Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Franze Kline. It didn’t cross our minds that what we were reading was just advertising copy, not art history. It may have been advertising copy, but we knew that they had done something exceptional, something worthy of being remembered for and written about. We were willing and anxious to give them the credit if only that next paragraph in that history of art book would begin with our name; if only we could start the next chapter.

Never mind that we had no ideas what sort of works that fame would be based upon, we were young and we would have time to figure that out later. It was a matter of making the reservation.

But we were not alone. There were thousands of us, and we all wanted to be in the beginning of that new chapter. And now that modern era’s history is being written and it is a Baroque era. What do I mean by that? A Baroque era is a time when there are so many famous and important people that you can’t keep track of them all, their names and an account of what they did would read like a phone book. And though they are all famous, actually none of them is really known, and none of them actually matters.

In this age, famous artists are like the peas in a huge vat of boiling pea soup. The peas appear on the surface of the soup and then disappear again. That was their career, that was their moment, and that was their fame. Now we long to be one of those peas that appears for a brief instant. In short, we want to have a show in New York.

The last person to become famous in the art world was Andy Warhol, and that was over forty years ago. He was our last famous artist, and the first to understand that the art itself was irrelevant, it was theater, showmanship, and media coverage that were the building blocks of fame, and not works of art. Since then there have been many artists whose works have been considered important, but none of those people are thought of like Picasso was, like Pollock was, and like Warhol.

Now it is Damian Hurst. Damian Hurst is the most famous artist in the world at this time. But look around. No one knows who Damian Hurst is. He is famous, and yet he is completely unknown. But everyone knows who Thomas Kinkade is. He is considered a lumonist. He is the most famous artist on Ebay — the richest, most successful artist in America.

It is two o’clock in the afternoon and I am sitting in an art gallery talking to friends. By five o’clock I can be a famous artist, talked about around the world. I cross the street to the hardware store and buy ten feet of rope. Then I go to the dog pound and adopt a dog. I go back to the gallery, throw the rope over the sprinkler pipes and I hang the dog. I leave the dead dog hanging from the rope in the middle of the gallery while people come and go, and wait for the police to come and arrest me and for reporters to arrive to begin my rise to stardom as an artist.

“Why did you hang the dog?”

“Why are we allowing the war in Iraq to go on, and on. You care about this dog. Then why don’t you care about...?”

I no longer believe in the concept of “The History of Art.”

Dostoevsky's Button Collection

I read the first several pages of “Crime and Punishment” with a strange interest. I felt enveloped, not by the story, and from the first I didn’t find myself interested in the story. Here was a fictional character, one Raskolnikov, and he was going to interact with other fictional characters and a story would develop just as in any of countless movies I had seen, why should I care? But my brother had instructed me, and I was going to carry out his directions. I was going to read books, but classics only.

But it was as if a drug had been placed in my coffee, and as I read I gradually became intoxicated, not with the character, but with the way things were described, or elaborated. On the first page I read:

“He was in debt to the landlady and was afraid of meeting her.”

“But to stop on the stairs, to listen to all sorts of nonsense about commonplace rubbish, which he could not care less about, all this badgering..."

“He was so immersed in himself and had isolated himself so much from everyone that he was afraid not only of meeting the landlady but of meeting anyone at all.”

This was all on page one, and I thought, this Dostoevsky, he was in debt to a landlady, and he was a recluse, and he avoided people, he must have been. Otherwise he would not have described it in just this way.’ It was like the difference between a drunken person, and a person acting the role of a drunk on the stage. Dostoevsky was the true drunk, and his characters were himself.

But how could I have known at that time that on page one I was reading a synopsis of what the rest of my like was going to be about? Not that I was ever going to kill anyone, but the killing of the pawnbroker woman is just the story which I think can not be of any consequence to anyone. What is of consequence is the description of the strip of rag that holds the axe, the oil on the pawnbroker woman’s hair, the tin tinkle of her doorbell.

But I know now that what mattered to me, and what I was so enraptured with, and what altered my perception of the world, were just the things that everyone else skipped over to get to the “Story” and its “Significance" and "Meaning.”

The story, its significance and meaning have never meant anything to me, otherwise, how could I keep reading it over and over?

Finally, at the beginning of the second chapter I read this:

“He was dressed in an old, completely ragged frock coat, which had lost all its buttons. Only one managed to hang on, and this one he kept buttoned, obviously not wishing to shirk convention.”

At that point I closed the book and I felt like that character, whomever he was, was in the Bible, and he is listening to Jesus’ sermon where he says, “Having eyes you see not.” That was me, I was 17 and I had never seen or noticed anything at all. If a description of a button could so obviously tell the story of a person's life and character, then I had been going around blind, and I felt that it was time to start collecting buttons.

But I am not being fair to myself. In actual fact, I had started my own personal button collection as early as five years old. My buttons, however, did not tell stories, and they did describe characters. The buttons I was collecting asked questions about situations I was trying to figure out. These questions were, First: did my mother really love my father? Second: did my father really love my mother? And third: was I really stupid, as my mother and father thought I was?

Who Does Not Desire His Father

The full statement is: "Who does not desire his father's death?" It is in The Brothers Karamazov. I don't remember what character says it, and it may be that Dostoevsky says it himself rather than through the mouth of one of his creations. I think it is his most famous statement, and is considered a herald of psychoanalysis.

People don't read Dostoevsky anymore. But they don't read anything anymore as a matter of fact unless it is a titbit of text on a computer screen. Certainly people buy books, and they place them on their coffee tables, or on a desk with the title page up so visitors to their home can notice. A book is not something to actually read. Who has the time? It is an intellectual merit badge displayed as a status and identity marker. This is not to say an identity marker is not important. An identity marker is anything that establishes one's place in, or level achieved in society, for purposes of mating, procreation, and/or marriage.

So when people say, "I saw the show at the Met when I was in New York," this is as opposed to "I saw the Met's game when I was in New York." The person who would date the person who went to the Met, will not even consider talking to the person who saw the Mets. The extremely sad thing about this is that the people who go to the Met hardly look at the works there, but the people at the baseball game really care about what is going on.

But why this diversion? It is because I am about to describe my father's death, but before I do I want to say some things about Dostoevsky, since at the moment his name appears at the top of this page.

I have been reading the novels of Dostoevsky all my life. I am sure I have read all of the novels and all of the short stories at least six times. I have two daughters. One shares my love of Dostoevsky, and the other thinks I am ridiculous. One says, "After reading Dostoevsky, other writers just don't seem to have any content." The other says "Why would I read that stuff? Do you think I want to cry myself to sleep at night? Everyone is always dying."

Well, it doesn't matter, and I know that using it as a marker in my text well guarantee that my text will never become popular anywhere. It will not be read by millions of people. No, if I want to be read by millions of people I don't stand a chance unless I dedicate my life to the skills of writing about Paris Hilton, or the next Paris Hilton, and I better become damn good at it, and make some powerful friends in the media industry, because the competition would be tremendous. The lights of our entire society illuminate the actions of a few individuals, and even the uninterested cannot take their eyes away. But I write my text for one reader, and I don't know who that is!

My brother, as a child was extremely precocious, and intelligent, the opposite of myself. When I thought I would fail to get into any college, I asked for his advice. He advised me to read books constantly, on any subject, and that this would broaden my base of understanding. This was fine for him to say, he could read 1200 words a minute, and would read a book like, "War and Peace," or "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" in one day. For me to read a book took more like a month. Entering a bookstore to begin reading books, I was confronted with a daunting problem. Thousands upon thousand of books, they couldn't be equally important. Since I read so slowly, I could spend years just reading the books on one shelf, and they might all be irrelevant. What if I was to read 30 or 40 science fiction works, that would take a few years. Would I then be able to get into Harvard? I didn't think so.

The word "Classics" caught my eye and I thought perhaps if I only were to read classics that would give me sort of an advantage. So I started to read only classics. The first one was "Crime and Punishment."

Why Would a Tree want to Add and Subtract

My father drove a new Pontiac. The first Pontiac produced the first big argument of their married life. On the day of their marriage my father bought a new car without telling my mother he was going to. She was outraged because she thought it should be a joint decision. What he thought about it I have no idea. That first car I don’t remember, but he purchased a new car every two years on the odd year, always Pontiacs. I remember the '53 because it had chrome decorative circles on the dash over on the passenger side that a child could hold on to and pretend he was driving the car. In '53 I was nine, which , I suppose is a little old to be pretending to drive the car, but I was a slow child as I have said before. At the time Dad was driving the '53 Pontiac he was doing a route to collect the premiums for the insurance agency. Apparently back then payments were made monthly and the insurance salesmen went door to door collecting them. I was involved and so was my brother Jim, and my sister Suzy, as we were all in the back seat eating olives, provolone, pepperoni, and Italian bread. The bread was from DeVito’s Bakery, Uncle Tommy’s bakery that I keep mentioning. Several customers were friends and relatives, so these collection trips included stops at peoples' houses for coffee or conversation. As a consequence it seemed that my father knew everyone and was loved by everyone.

My father was very generous with his time and talents, and often these visits involved paper and pencil, and discussions about how to move a door or how to install a new bathroom by taking down a wall. As I mentioned before about my Aunt Mary’s ceiling, sometimes these projects were not just on paper but involved ripping parts of houses apart and rebuilding them. Several years after he died I was visiting his my Uncle Frank. We were in his kitchen and he was saying. “Nobody knew how to redo a kitchen like your father. He build all these cabinets, and moved the back door over to here so we could put the stove here. Who would have thought of that, moving the door like that?”

These trips to all these houses involved always a long stop at my grandfather’s house. One day we were all in the kitchen and my father took out the pencil and paper, but before starting to draw he said, “You kids, go out a play for a while.” Later I came back through the kitchen and I saw my father and my grandfather head to head at the kitchen table, deeply engrossed in some project. In the car I said, “What was that you were doing with Grandpa?” He wouldn’t say, and he ignored the question, but meanwhile he was thinking about it. At home, as we were getting out of the car he said, “I’m teaching your grandfather to add and subtract, but he doesn’t want anyone to know that he doesn’t know how.”

“Why does he need to know?”

“He makes and sells sausage, and he has to make up bills for the customers” was the reason.

To me, my grandfather was an absolute, like one might feel about a tree, or an old beautifully built building you pass every day, or a big black bull chained to a post in a farmer's field, that you admire for its tremendous strength and indifference. Why would a tree or that bull ever need to add and subtract? The fact that my grandfather couldn’t add made me wish that I couldn’t add, or read or write either.

But why should you respect my grandfather, after all I have not said one word about him. After he died and the family got together we would tell endless stories about him. Everyone had a story about him, all either touching or funny. Now all those stories are forgotten, and all the people who told them are dead. Our family had no storyteller; the storyteller, that would be me. I’m the one with the infallible memory who can describe things, but I was not doing my job, and now it is almost too late. Thanks to television, there is no need for this sort of sentimental garbage anymore, as we can watch every night REAL stories that take thousand of people and millions of dollars to produce.

As I said before, when my grandfather got off the boat the first thing he did was buy a house. The house was a tiny bungalow in the Italian section of Utica, directly across the street from his house was a small red brick building, which was the “Boy’s Club." One day my grandfather and his friends were sitting on the porch of his house and three girls come out of the Boy’s Club, and stopped on the sidewalk to talk. My grandfather said, “Do you see that girl there, the tall one? I am going to marry her.”

Her name was Elizabeth, and he did marry her.

That was the first of the forgotten stories about him.

At Christmas one time he wanted to buy her a bra. He went into a store and asked to see bras. The clerk said, “What size, sir?”

“Ha bout like deez” he said and he held up two hands together as if cupping the end of a watermelon.

Why would such a person want to learn to add and subtract?

He called my father every day on the phone. I would answer the phone and he would say, “Lemme speak a you Fatch.”

He never had a beard, and he was never shaved. He always kissed you hard on the cheek, and it felt like a wire brush that had been used to scrub stogie cigars.

East Side Italian Section

My father’s family was a very complicated business. In the year 1956 my grandmother was already dead, and so my grandfather lived alone in an extremely small house out at the end of Lansing Street, in the Italian section of Utica. If one were to visit the neighborhood now one could still see traces of the fact that it was an Italian section because of the names on the signs of businesses long closed and shuttered. Today the neighborhood is Bosnian, Spanish and Black. In the time I am describing, 1956, the neighborhood called the East side, was distinctly Italian with numerous small grocery stores and churches, those little churches that appear to be have been built for a large family rather than a congregation. Furthermore, the churches were painted strange colors like hot pink and red.

It was the intent of every single Italian family on the East side, to move away as soon as possible and buy a house in any other section of the city, preferably the South end. Over the years they all did move away. My family was one of the first to relocate to the South end.

These Italian families left a great many things behind in the Italian section: things like real bread, home-made wine, sausage aged in the attic from the rafters, hugh gardens surrounded by wooden palings with doors attached with hinges of tied up rags. Very loud laughter. The smell of stogies. The pinching of the face on both cheeks. Real names with real histories and real meanings. Names like Bennacasa (good house).

They left all these things behind and replaced them with Wonder bread and Campbell’s soup. There were those, however, more educated I think, who understood the value of what we possessed back then, for example Uncle Tommy. From him we all were in the habit of referring to bread as “Real” bread, and "American" bread. The difference was so striking that we could not really have thought of it otherwise. Uncle Tommy’s bakery was in the back of a garage on the East side. The oven was entirely made of brick, and when you opened the door you entered a room where the bread was being taken out of the oven with long wooden paddles. A customer might say, “Is it fresh? I want fresh bread.” And Tommy would had that person a loaf saying “See for yourself.” The bread in question, would be so hot, that you couldn’t hold it in your hand, but Tommy could hold the bread in his hands which had become sort of heat-proof over the years.

The bread itself defies description. We would bring three loaves home on Sunday morning. It had to be morning because by one o’clock every loaf would be sold. We children, in the back seat of the car would eat an entire loaf of the unsliced bread. We would tear the heal off and then scoop out the hot inside of the bread and pass it around among ourselves. When we were done we would have eaten the entire inside of the loaf and the rest would still be completely intact. The fact that it didn’t change its appearance even though we had eaten the whole thing was always comical to us. People would say, “Tommy, why is the crust so hard?” And he would say. “We mix lead in with the dough.”

Or he might say, “Wonder bread! It’s a wonder it’s bread. Use it to wash the windows in your house.

The reason that the Italian community was in such a rush to exit the Italian section, to stop talking Italian and to change their names to something Anglo Saxon sounding, was because of a very intense fear of, and hatred of, Italians in Utica New York, in the middle fifties. The Appalachian Gangland Meeting had been uncovered and broken up at that time and Utica was in the news as a result as the "Gangland Capital of America." People were terrified of the Mafia, and the Mafia was a serious menace and threat to small business like for example Uncle Tommy’s Bakery. Italians were the principal victims of the Mafia, and for this reason it was the Italians who hated the Italians the most, and wanted to be disassociated from them.

It was difficult for Italians to buy houses outside of the East side. But it was easier if there was a name change involving the dropping of the vowel, but more importantly, an alteration of speech patterns such that the grammar and pronunciation of words was subtly different. Young woman of high school age took jobs as maids for rich families. My Mother worked for a Mrs. Owens whose husband was a factory owner. From Mrs. Owens she brought home a small salary, plus the correct pronunciation of the English language according to Anglo Saxon usage. Mrs. Owens was a member of the Christian Science Church, which my mother attended even as a child, hence the connection. Growing up in my house, therefore, everything was American middle class, and I actually did not understand that I was Italian in the Mafia sense of the word.

I Don't Get Stabbed

Now began a very strange few weeks, in which I lived in constant fear of Clarence. From the very first day he entered the classroom I had to improvise a plan for survival. The first order of business for me was to establish for myself his route home, and where he lived. When class ended on his first day I took my time leaving the classroom so that he went down the stairs in front of me. Outside, I let him get about a block ahead of me and then I trailed him as he walked home. His destination, I discovered, was only about five blocks from my house. He lived in a housing project by the name of Gilmore Village. His path to school overlapped my path to school for the majority of the distance but I soon started taking an alternate path to school. It was possible to take a left at the corner of Mildred and Sunset, then go up Rose Place to Genessee, over to Prospect Street and then ascend to the school from behind. It was a path that took an extra fifteen minutes but it was well worth it.

Obviously, at this remove of so many years I am embarrassed to state that I was so afraid, afraid to the point of paranoia. But since it is the truth, I have to describe it, or after all what is the point of all this document in the first place? Well, actually there is no point, why on earth would someone want to read such a lot of meaningless passages about something long ago forgotten by everyone? It is rather like one might listen to phone conversations of no import, recorded fifty years ago, spoken by people long ago dead, and furthermore about nothing. But I for one can’t imagine anything more interesting.

Going home was much easier, I just left class later than Clarence and trailed him home following always by about a block. This went on for abut three weeks, and then I had a very strange idea. I was walking behind him and I noticed that his hair was cut very short. The shortness of his hair made his ears stick out a little, and it was at this very moment that I was thinking about how his ears stuck out a little that it suddenly dawned on me. He walks home from school every day alone, and no one ever talks to him or even gets near him. Most likely he is just as frightened as I am. Then I had the further idea that if I were to be friends with him he would not be very likely to stab me.

I came up beside him, on his right hand side. I walked along next him and I said, “Would you like to be friends?” These were my exact words. And printed in my memory like a clip from an old film, is his reaction. He continued walking. He did not look over at me at all. And he said “yes.”

Now I don’t have any idea at all why this is true, but ten minutes later we were the best of friends. I have to draw the curtain on these two boys because although I can remember those words and although I can remember the shape of my friend's ears, I cannot remember a single thing that happened for the rest of that year, and when the curtain rises again we are in Mr. Hodenger’s seventh grade class, in 1956, the year of my father’s death.

It Was Like Dickens

So, as Dickens would have said, my twelfth year was my best year and my worst year. I had mastered the old English alphabet and the drawing of block letters. I drew three views of a Wheeties box in isometric perspective. I understood the difference between isometric perspective and one point perspective and could chose one or the other for my block lettering. I was beginning to draw objects and scenes from memory, and at last my father stopped having a worried look on his face when he explained things to me.

On the other hand, every day I was being punished, lectured and screamed at in school so that the very act of walking the mile to the building had aspects of going to your own execution. And WHO goes willingly to their execution, especially on a grey and overcast day? Most ordinary people would be inclined to run away.

At home, however, life had become like broad daylight. My father seemed to understand how all mechanical objects worked and we were always asking him questions such as “What is a transmission? How does an engine work?” He always had the same answer, “Get me a paper and a pencil.”

Then he would draw a diagram on the paper and as the drawing progressed there would be a narration and an explanation of the parts and their functions. One thing I loved about him was an oddity of his speech, which probably came from the study of geometry. He would say, for example, “Let this be the drive shaft, and this 'might be' where the gear is attached.” Instead of “This is the drive shaft...”

These new skills of mine did not help me in any way at school. For a child, a year is a particularly long time. As a matter of fact, at twelve a year is like forever. I could imagine that eventually I would go on to seventh and then eighth grades and escape the tyranny of Mrs. Wagner, but the teachers of the other grades were reputed to be just as bad so there was no relief or end in sight to my miseries. And then, about half way through the year, the situation became decidedly worse.

It was 1956. Rosa Parks had only been riding in the front of the bus for one year. At the same time that Rosa Parks was riding the bus down south, Clarence and his mother moved from the north end of town, where all the black families lived, to the south end, which was entirely white middle class neighborhoods. It is impossible to write about this subject without the filter of history distorting every word I say. For example, if I say the Clarence and his Mother were “Black” this is misleading because the term “Black” was not in use in the United Stated” in 1956. If I say that Clarence was a "negro," this has a sound that is also distorted.

But the hardest problem is to describe the significance of a black boy in a white school, in 1956 for a twelve year old. I knew very little about black kids. The subject had never come up at home. If I had any ideas about race at the time it was from the strange rumors that circulated among us as children. The fifties was the age of the juvenile delinquent. There was the Corn Hill section, this was a part of town where poor white kids threw gasoline on old people in a park, and set them on fire. There was Liberty Street, where the negroes lived, they were people who carried straight razors in their pockets, and if you got to close to them you got slashed.

So, I was twelve, and in sixth grade, snow was beginning to fly, and I was being punished every day for crimes I had not committed. And now there was a negro boy who had entered our class, and was seated just four seats away from me. It was only a matter of time now, I thought, until I was stabbed.

Block Letters

I wouldn’t have mentioned the nature of our
punishments — the slap, the strap and the pinch — except
that it is necessary in order to understand my parents'
indifference to the injustices of Mrs. Wagner’s sixth
grade class. I repeatedly explained to my mother what
was going on at school. I could not then put into
words my understanding of the situation however. My
mother assumed that if I was being punished there was
probably a good reason for it. It would not have even
entered her head that it was a psychotic situation.
Her response was invariably the same, “The teacher is
always right.” I was dealing with typical immigrant
mentality. Life was about one thing, going to college.
In order to go to college, the teacher must always be right.

Even though I did not know either the words
or the concepts, I could see that Mrs. Wagner was a sick,
disturbed woman who was looking for and inventing
opportunities to dole out punishments. This led to a
certain release of tension for me however, because if
punishments could not be avoided there was no reason
to try so hard.

The realization that I could have a teacher who took
pleasure in punishing children slowly altered and
colored my entire world view. I stopped thinking of
Utica as the center of the universe. I stopped
thinking that we lived in the "better" part of Utica. I
no longer felt that America was the best country.
Crazy thoughts would flash through my mind, crazy sick
and frightening ideas like, "From each according to
his abilities, to each according to his needs." I had
heard that someplace, why was it wrong.

We were fighting a war in Korea, perhaps we were in
the wrong. Needless to say I kept these thoughts to
myself.

This conflict came to a head over a sentimental
incident which still embarrasses me to think about. At
home my father had started to do drafting on the
dining room table. His day job was selling automobile
insurance, but at night he was creating large drawings
of objects to be manufactured in a factory. I do not
know what the objects were, I only remember big sheets
of paper with complicated shapes, little lines and
arrows and indications of size. These drawings were
brought to a place where they were copied and became
“blueprints.” Dad had gone back to high school nights
and learned drafting, now he was employed part time,
and this factory work was being done in the living
room.

The aspect that most fascinated me was the mechanical
lettering and the numbers, put in with a pencil but
drawn as if a machine had printed them. I began to
memorize the various lettering styles copying them out
of a book he had entitled “Mechanical Engineering.” I
memorized the old English alphabet first because it
was the most complicated, and after that I learned to
do block lettering. Very soon I had mastered these
skills to such an extent that I too had little jobs
and was making money with my lettering. I did all the
names on diplomas for a high school fraternity. For
25 cents I created name plates for my classmates
with letters that looked like blocks and went
back in space in perspective. And finally my
father began to realize that I was not a slow child,
and I am sure he thought to himself, “Well at least he
can draw.” #

Do You Want me to Take off my Belt?

THE SQUARE ROOT OF TWO

This is what my father was like. One day when I was twelve I went with him on Saturday morning to my Aunt Mary’s house to have coffee. While we were having coffee my father said, “There are cracks in the ceiling.”

My aunt said, “We keep patching them up, but they just keep coming back.”

The next Saturday I went with my father to a construction yard where he bought plaster and some lath. Then we went to my Aunt Mary's for coffee, after which he pulled down the whole ceiling, nailed up the lath, and spread a coat of plaster over it.

When he was done the ceiling was dark brown. I asked him, “Why is the ceiling brown?”

“It’s the base coat,” he said. “Next Saturday we will put up the finish coat.”

That was 1955. The next year my father died. He was 45.

When I was 45 I went to visit my Aunt Mary on a Saturday morning for coffee. We got to talking about my father. She said, “You know, your father put up this ceiling and plastered it.”

“I remember.” I said.

“You know what was odd about it though,” she went on, “when he cut the lath he mitered all the corners.”

“Why not miter them?” I said, “After all, you have to cut them anyway.”

A strange expression crossed my Aunt’s face and she said, “Those were your father’s exact words at the time.”

So that explains the idea behind this subtitle, The Square Root of Two.

The notion that things can actually go on forever.


When I was a child I was punished by being hit with a belt. Just writing that sentence I know that it will not be understood. The various times I was punished in this way do not seem at all terrible in my memory. The idea that my parents were abusive seems ridiculous to me. The “Belt” was simply an extreme last resort when repeated warnings had failed.

How hard was I hit? Hard enough to make me cry, and raise a welt in which I could see the little white dots of the holes punched in the belt. My parents hit me in the same way one might whip a horse. My mother also was fond of the slap across the face and the pinching on the leg. The pinch on the leg was usually accompanied by a twist. The pinching was sort of a secret punishment and was reserved for times when we were with company.

My mother is in the kitchen doing some ironing. It is Saturday. It is raining out and the radio is tuned to a soap opera. My brother Jim and I are in the bedroom we share upstairs, and we are playing a game called “war.” From the kitchen my mother hears shouting and screaming, so she goes to the foot of the stairs and shouts, “What’s going on up there?”

She goes back to her ironing but the shouting continues and then there is a loud thudding on the floor.

Mom goes again to the foot of the stairs and shouts, “Do I have to come up there?”

The shouting continues and there are several more very loud crashing sounds.

My mother starts up the stairs shouting “That’s enough.”

When she enters our bedroom she finds that the sheets and blankets have been removed from the beds, the mattresses are on the floor, and the bed frames have been pulled apart. I have my back to her because I am over at the window in the process of throwing my brother’s blankets out. He has already thrown my blankets into the yard, as a response to my throwing his pillow out. This is “War” the gradually escalating response to your enemy’s provocations. The war begins from the accident of a disturbed coverlet, and proceeds to the complete disruption of everything in the room.

My mother sees what is happening, and turns around and goes to her room. My brother and I know that in about 40 seconds she will return with the belt. What she will do then is strap us on the legs four or five times. We know that this will happen for an absolute fact. While my Mother is gone to fetch the belt I stand there in my underpants waiting for the inevitable, but not my brother. Brother Jimmy instantly grabs a pair of longjohns from the floor. He pulls on the long Johns and then a pair of jeans. He has only just got the pants up around his waist when my Mother rushes into the room with the belt doubled up in her hand. She goes directly to Jim and gives him five good ones on the legs.

Finished with him she turns on me and I shout out, “It’s not fair!”

She stops for just a second and says, ”What’s not fair?”

“You hit Jimmy through his pants, and I’m going to get it on the bare legs.”

There was something about the ethics of this situation which struck her as so funny that she couldn’t proceed.

How hard were we hit? This I think explains it best. On some other day my Mother might have decided to deal with us in a different way. She might have us sit at the kitchen table, and then give us a long lecture about how our behavior was unacceptable. I cannot at this remove remember the words of those lectures, but I can remember my response which was in the middle of it to say, “Please Mom, just give us the strap.”

She Looked Like Jane Russell, but Old

This is a picture of Jane Russell.

This is not my first attempt to write an account of my childhood. I began this same book 23 years ago at a time when I was teaching art in a private school in Lenox, Massachusetts. The school was the Berkshire Country Day School, and I taught art to sixth through ninth graders.

The title of the book I started at that time was going to be, “Moo So Lean Ne, The Italian Cow.” I also considered the title “Medieval Experiences in the Twentieth Century,” not taking into account that it was a title that would have become dated in my lifetime.

The first paragraph of my first attempt begins: My mother never understood sexual symbolism. I became aware of this when I was 15 at dinner. My mother served spaghetti, meatballs and sausage. My particular plate, with all those items, looked exactly like a penis. I tried to point this out, “Mom,” I said, “this plate of spaghetti, meatballs and sausage seems to be arranged exactly like a penis.”

She looked at me with dismay saying, “How can you say such a thing or even think it? It only looks like that if you turn it upside down.”

My intent back then was to write a farce. My mother never said any such thing.

That text floundered on a shoal, and that shoal was my sixth grade teacher. Twenty-three years ago I tried to write a description of her and my experiences in that grade, but I couldn’t do it. I kept thinking that no one would ever believe something like that actually happened.

My sixth grade teacher was Mrs. Wagner. I have introduced her already as the woman who asked me to punish myself by hitting my hand with a ruler. She was famous in her lifetime as a notoriously wicked, violent woman. For years after her tyrannic rule, whenever classmates got together who had graduated from Hughes, the question would come up, “Did you have Wagner?” If the answer was yes and it involved several people, an evening might be dedicated to the swapping of our horror stories.

Now again, I will attempt her portrait, knowing that it will not be believed. I could use as a guide the text I wrote 23 years ago, but I don’t need to. It is all still etched, as if with acid, on the zinc plates of my brain.

She was a tall, shapely woman and I would bet that she resembled Jane Russell. I came across a picture of the old Jane Russell on the Internet and I thought yes, old Jane sure reminds me of old Mrs. Wagner. I see no reason to elaborate on the irony of that comment, as I am sure there are a great many old married couples for whom this oddity makes more than perfect sense. She wore spike heels every day, and for the entire year of sixth grade the sound of the clack of her heels coming down the hall towards our door produced in all of us a Pavlovian dread and trembling. She sounded like what she was, a Nazi in jack boots. The heels were a blessing however because we were all SILENT when she opened the door to her room and entered.

She was tall, well built, and always wore dresses. Her dresses were rather tight fitting and always of a shiny material and with some sort of tie, or decorative belt at the waist. Her posture was stiff and erect.

I sat in the center seat of the front row. She had placed me there because I was a "troublemaker." This was an undeserved reputation, as at that time I was the exact opposite of a troublemaker, all I cared about was finding some way to keep from flunking and failing test after test.

Mrs. Wagner would give her lectures standing in front of my desk — right in front of it — so that at times he legs pressed against the desk’s front edge up there where the inkwell was. The center of gravity, and I emphasize the word gravity, of her body, was, therefore, only a few inches from my face. That implied triangle in the center of her dress, which was right in front of my face, never registered in my conscious mind. I was in a state of terror for an entire year.

Why was I in terror of her? Because she viscously hit me with a ruler every chance she got. Beating myself in the cloak room was not some unusual experience, it was a thing of everyday life.

I am left-handed. Left-handed people have difficulty writing because their hand covers up the letters they have just written. In order for a left-handed person to write they cramp their hand around so the pen comes down to the letters from above. This cramped style was not “Palmer Method,” which was the only way we were allowed to write. Palmer Method is not possible for left-handed people, it was invented without taking them into consideration. If I saw that she was watching me I would pretend to do the impossible Palmer Method, but when she looked away I would resort to my own personal crippled calligraphy. We used dip pens also, whose ink would smear if I wrote in the proper way. To get me to write with “Palmer Method” Mrs. Wagner would creep up behind me quietly when I was writing and then hit my hand with a ruler from behind just like killing flies. She was sadistic. This was everyday life for a year, and the physical punishments were not the worst of it.

Her most tragic victims were girls however, and I use the experience of Dorothy as the best example of Mrs. Wagner’s sadism. Dorothy was a average student, not remarkable in any way. She was asked to stand up one day in class and recite the months of the year. Dorothy set in to name them, but when she was nearly done, at about October or November, her mind went blank. Mrs. Wagner kept her standing there, as she struggled to think of the word November, but she just couldn't pull it up. Probably if one could have looked into her mind it was like a curser was stuck, telling you to shut down and reboot the computer. Dorothy continued to stand there for a long time, the room was silent, then tears began to run down her face.

I was only beaten. What was done to Dorothy over the next several weeks was much worse than any beatings. A tough child is proud of beatings, they are merit badges. I was envied for being slapped across the face, and being shaken by the shoulders so that my head was tossed around like a rag mop.

But Dorothy was being ruined as a human being.

The following day, in the middle of some unrelated subject, Mrs. Wagner stopped the proceedings and said, out of the blue, “Dorothy, stand up.”

Dorothy stood up.

“Recite the months of the year.”

Dorothy would again rush through the months breathlessly until she would again crash at November, and again she would have to stand there until she was fully engulfed in tears. Only after Dorothy’s sobs were audible was she allowed to sit down.

This happened every day at some unexpected moment, for several months. Toward the end of this ordeal Dorothy would not say “January, February, March...” she would simply stand up and begin sobbing. She would stand there sobbing for several minutes, not saying a word, and then Mrs. Wagner would ask her to sit down, with a tone of distinct disgust in her voice.

That actually happened.

And inhumanities of a similar sort from first bell to dismissal every day for a year.

It was my First Erotic Experience

My earliest memories of school are idealized images like the image of myself to the left. It was taken at Bagg School when I was five years old. Although my lazy eye was to straighten itself out over the years, it is still detectable in this photograph. It is an image of a small boy who, moments before the photograph was taken, has had his first actual erotic experience. I describe it as erotic only in retrospect, I didn’t know anything about such ideas at that time. I was standing in line to have my picture taken. I had worn my best shirt, which, as you can see was my Roy Rogers shirt. Adults were passing by in the hall, they were all strangers to me. Some young woman I had never seen before crouched down in front of me, took me by the shoulders, and looked into my face carefully. She said, “You can’t get your picture taken looking like this.” She proceeded to open her purse, take out a comb and comb my hair. She took her time doing this with me looking straight down at the floor. When she was done she took hold of my face tenderly by the chin and twisted my face up so she could see what a good job of combing my hair she had done. She held my face and looked into my eyes and this was the first time in my life I experienced that sensation of one's stomach turning over, because you see this feeling in someone else’s eyes, and it invades you, and takes you over.

All this is an adult’s retrospective elaboration, made the more clumsy by my ineptitude in describing it. But I do remember thinking, “She likes me.”

Perhaps it was doubly memorable because I was not petted and made much of as a child. If it had been my mother she would have said, “Hold still,” and she would have given me a vigorous washing of my face with saliva and a handkerchief, and the photo would have made me look like I had smallpox.

I suppose also that I should at this point attempt a description of myself. Actually I am quite vain, and all my life I have considered myself to be very beautiful. At times of the greatest adversity and catastrophe in my life I have always been able to look at myself in the mirror and be pleased with what I saw there, even now at 63.

The fact that I received little physical attention at home as a child was more than made up for in the outside world. There is always a group of young attractive women in the world who feel they have the right to descend on any young boy under the age of ten, and do anything they want with him. They will pick them straight up off the floor, pretend to dance with them at parties, refer to them as their boyfriend, and flirt with them in every possible way. This was done to me throughout my childhood, but most frequently by strange beautiful women who would corner me someplace, grab me by the shoulders and exclaim always practically the same words, “What are such long eyelashes doing on a BOY?” Then they would look at me in that way, as if they were attempting to make me a part of some collection they had at home.

There is a little known short novel of Dostoevsky’s called “The Little Hero,” in which a young boy describes such experiences that lead to his falling in love. The boy enters a theater alone and can’t find a seat. This voluptuous blonde stranger sees that he can’t find a seat and grabs him by the hand and forces him to sit on her lap. He sits there mortified and she will not let go of his hand. As the play progresses and reaches a critical moment she suddenly starts to squeeze his fingers so tightly that he is in agony, yet he can’t cry out. He struggles to get free but she won’t let go of his hand. So begins a most charming love story that should be read by anyone who thinks that Dostoevsky is all crimes and punishments.

My looks did not belong to me alone but was evident in my extended family. If you got us all together in a room we looked like a set of the Fayum Portraits, which can be seen in the Egyptian section of the Metropolitan. Those portraits were all faces painted on casket lids. That's me, second from the left, two thousand years ago.

We Were Transformed into Angels

This is how we must have seemed to Mrs. Hopkinson on that strange day.

It was in the middle of my eighth grade year, at a time when Clarence and I had been friends for almost two years, that Mrs. Hopkinson decided to teach the class to sing barbershop harmony. The voices of the boys had changed sufficiently so that there were several baritones, if not basses, if the parts did not go too low.

The girls were to sing soprano, and the other boys were divided into altos and tenors. As with all of Mrs. Hopkinson’s projects, we all refused to sing, and the singing we did do was not enough to really drown out the ceiling fan.

I think Mrs. Hopkinson chose barbershop harmony because it is constructed from such a simple sequence of vertical chords. All the singers just hop together from one chord to the next, unlike actual part music such as a madrigal where the lines weave in and out and each has a specific identity.

Mrs. Hopkinson overlooked two aspects of barbershop, however, that doomed her project to failure from the start. The first was that the music was the music of our parents' age and we perceived it as stupid and mawkish. The second was that the chord progressions are dissonant for long periods of time, and then end in sickeningly sweet chords. The harmonies were gibberish to a child. The fact was, even if I exerted all my little singing skills to rescue Mrs. Hopkinson and give her a success she so wanted I could not have done it. Barbershop was not going to happen in music class at Hughes school, 1958, Utica, New York. No, something rich and strange was shaping up, no one could have expected it.

There was no school bus in Utica in 1958. School was a mile from my home. School was also a mile from Clarence’s apartment in the new low-rent housing project that had been built in the South end. Each day Clarence and I would meet at the corner of Sunset and Arnold Avenue and walk to school. We would walk home at lunch, return in the afternoon, and then walk together to the same mailbox in the evening.

We were kids, and our conversation was circumspect to the point of being cryptic and coded. We didn’t read books, we did not have opinions about things, we did not have much to say. We walked together shoulder to shoulder. A fragment of conversation might have been, on some bitterly cold winter day:

“If somebody tells you to put your tongue on a mail box, don't ever do it.”
"Why not?”
“Because the saliva on your tongue will freeze to the box, and your tongue gets ripped out.”
"Do you know anybody who ever did?"
"I said never do it.”
"Do you think a woman's parts hang down like a man's parts, but have a slit in the end like Mike says?”
No answer.
“Do you think Mike and his father really went fishing on Saturday and lassoed a hundred pound turtle?”
“Mike doesn’t have a father.”
Clarence informed me that Mike, who lived in the projects and made himself an unwanted third on the way to school with us sometimes, was a congenital liar.

One day Clarence said, “Can you sing a bass line?”
“Yes,” I said, “can you?”
He replied in the affirmative, and I asked him how he could be sure he could sing a bass line.
“I sing the bass line in the hymns in church every Sunday.”
“Let’s sing the shit out of the bass line in Mrs. Hopkinson's class this afternoon.”
It was going to be our Star Spangled Banner.

But it was not barbershop that Mrs. Hopkinson handed out that day. It was Negro spirituals. The first was "Over Jordan.”

We sang it through and then Clarence and I began to sing in a mock basso profoundo, emotional way. But neither of us could keep it up. We were so deeply and tearingly wrought up by the sound of it that we began to truly sing. The rest of the class became completely silent, and Clarence and I sang the entire work as a bass duet. Then another. Then another.

Feebly at first, the other parts began to enter in, trying to find the key, trying to see if they too could put their heads into the Nirvana that Clarence and I had found. And they did find it. Gradually the classroom was filled with the most stupendous music one could imagine. Kids, singing about suffering and death.

The music room produced such a volume of sound that twice during the class the door opened and other teachers and the principal himself looked in.

Class ended. Class was dismissed. Mrs. Hopkinson said, gesturing to Clarence and I, “Just a minute.”

We went over to her desk and she said, “I want to thank you boys for giving me the happiest day of my life.”

So that is why I say that Clarence saved me in eighth grade. But I know my reader might object and say that that is just a contrived way of looking at it. After all, it was my father who had saved me really. It was he who had given me the skills that made that day so memorable. And you would have thought I would have rushed home to tell him about it but I didn’t. I couldn’t.

He had been dead already for a year.

My Mother Loved Jimmy Stewart

My father looked and acted like Jimmy Stewart, the fifties movie star, who presented a laconic and passive temperament in the characters he portrayed. My mother as a young woman was in love with Jimmy Stewart, and my father admitted that he was certainly a Jimmy Stewart substitute. My father's name was Jim, he had no middle name. My brother, who is two years older than myself, is named James Stuart Britell, after my father of course.

I attended the wedding of my sister's son, Matthew Zegarelli, last year, and it was an opportunity for all of what's left of my family to be together in the same room at the same time. We were all sitting in the church in silence, and there was a delay in the proceedings. I turned to my siblings, nieces and nephews and I said, "You do know that all of us are just a big accident, the result of a mistaken communication."

I had their attention.

I said, "Dad dated Mom once, and although the date went well, he felt he couldn't measure up to her expectations. He did not call her again, and a year went by. Then she received a letter from a person named Billy Britelli, a distant cousin of my father's, asking her out on a date. She thought the letter was from my father and called him up and accepted the date. My father thought that my mother was making this all up to go out with him, and so took place the second date."

Not only did my relatives not believe this story of mine but they accused me, with some aggravation, of making it all up right on the spot just to entertain them. They thought it was an "Uncle Tommy." An "Uncle Tommy" would be to pull people's legs in complete seriousness, at important social gatherings.

For example, we didn't go out to restaurants very much in 1958. Restaurants were for wedding receptions. When I was ten I was sitting in the dining room of Twin Ponds, in their huge room for catered events. It was a wedding reception, I have no idea whose. A hundred people were sitting at round tables separated into family groups. First soup was served. Everyone sat, eating the soup, but Uncle Tom was slurping his soup. He would set each spoonful to the very edge of his lips and then suck the soup into his mouth making as much noise as possible. As with all gags of this type, probably handed down from generation to generation and probably formalized by the "Comedy Dell Arte" in the seventeen hundreds, probably done in Rome under Vaspasian, he did the routine three times, each time louder than the previous. Then, when he was sure he had the attention of everyone in the room and the necessary silence, he turned to everyone waving the spoon about and said, "Mixing the air with the soup improves the flavor and helps the digestion. It is the only way to eat soup."

My mother loved the actor Jimmy Stewart, and she loved my father for looking and acting like Jimmy Stewart, but I think actually she was more in love with Rock Hudson and Cary Grant. That was the tragedy of my father's life, and mine, indirectly, by fall out. But don't expect me to mine that vein of my childhood, after all, it is only conjecture. And every man must compete with the imaginary men that pervade womens' minds. My dad was Jimmy Stewart and not Tony Curtis. I was not Elvis, but aspired to pass for Albert Camus in high school. Clarence was not Little Richard.

I WAS IN LOVE WITH JANE RUSSELL


And, yes I am well aware that the opposite is true. Women back then had to compete with Marilyn Monroe, and not just Marilyn but the abstracted and idealized image of that woman as hinted at in cinema. I was not in love with Marilyn, and I never liked
Bridget Bardot either, those movie faces had no effect on me. But for a few weeks, almost a month, I was in love with Jane Russell. She was the first of a number of beautiful women who have loved me, and then cheated on me. How could that be, if when I was 12, she was 20? I will explain later, if I can just ever get back to telling you about Clarence.

Since my father died when I was in seventh grade, when I was thirteen, I have only snapshots of him in the form of fragments of his conversation which in time became the truths of my existence,
and my only beliefs, such as: "Never use force," or "You are a Britell, and Britells don't kill people."
This is how it happened that he said "Never use force." I was trying to undo the bolt on the back wheel of my bicycle. The bolt was rusted shut. I had balanced a wrench on the bolt and was hitting it with a hammer for all I was worth. This was happening in the cellar, in the old part of the cellar that we called the "cold" cellar. My father had been in the kitchen and he heard all this hammering, and he came in and saw me doing this and he said, "Never use force."

I asked him why he didn't go to World War II. He said that both my grandparents fled Italy to avoid the first World War, and that, "Britells don't kill people." I often think of this when I see all the endless arguments against war. They are all lost on me. When my time came to go to VietNam my only concern was how much it would cost to go to Canada, and nothing else. But I wasn't drafted into the army because of my lazy eye, my amblyopia. It was my right eye, so I couldn't sight down a gun. When the doctor told I was a reject, I was sitting naked in a cold room in Detroit. It was in 1966 and I immediately thought of that day in sixth grade when I tried to instantaneously heal my right eye. It turned out that eye was just perfect and hunky dory all along. As any Christian Scientist would have said, "There was no NEED to even PRAY, it was perfect all along, a reflection of the DIVINE mind all along." That is the way Christian Scientists talk.


SINGING WITH MY FINGERS IN MY EARS

My father was talking on the phone in the kitchen, and I was trying to get his attention. He was saying, "It's going to take two more weeks....I've been tied up." I was pulling on his pant leg and I was saying. "Dad, do you believe in God, do you believe in God, Dad???" He pushed me away and continued his conversation, but I wouldn't release his pant leg. He hung up the phone and looked at me for a very long time in silence, then he answered my question with, "I don't know, what do you think?" It was the silence more than the answer that struck me.

Another snapshot I have of him is of his having me sing with my fingers stuck in my ears. Across from me on the living room rug was my brother Jimmy Stuart, who was also singing with his fingers in his ears. Then there was my sister Suzy, she was also singing with her fingers in her ears. My father, who was playing the guitar and also singing, did not have his fingers in his ears. The reason for blocking out hearing was because we had all memorized different parts of a piece of music, and in order to sing our own parts without being drawn off key by your neighbor you had to sing with your fingers in your ears. We were singing "That Old Gang of Mine" in four part harmony. My father lover barbershop harmony. He was a member of the SPEBSQSA, The Society for the Preservation and Encouragement of Barber Shop Quartet Singing in America.

So that was the key, and now you have the key finally that unlocks the mystery of how Clarence saved me from failing eighth grade. It was because I was an expert at barbershop harmony. I had been doing it for several years. My brother and I had won prizes in New York for duet part singing.

Jason was the third repeater

Jason Tobart was a three-time repeater, the boy who was older and taller than everyone else. He was from the orphanage. He was a true outcast. He had been in jail, and he didn't even have friends in the orphanage. His voice had changed and he looked, if you didn't consider the clothes and the rabid glare in his eyes, rather like an operatic tenor. Looking at his face you might have thought of Enrico Caruso. Jason Tobart, being in eighth grade for the third time, had figured out how to disrupt school procedures with artistic insight.

One of the great miseries of Mrs. Hopkinson was that she could not get the children to sing "The Star Spangled Banner" with any volume and conviction. Clarence and I used to call it "The Star Strangled Bananas." I didn't make that up, my Uncle Tommy called it that. Uncle Tommy is in Forest Hill Cemetery right now but you are going to have to meet him eventually. He only has a small part to play in this book, but when he comes out on the stage, he takes over the show.

But Mrs. Hopkinson would beg and plead with us to sing with patriotic fervor, she would even try to explain what pleasure crowds at baseball games felt when they sang: "It makes even a Communist love this country."

But it was hopeless. We wouldn't sing but we mouthed the words. It wasn't that we weren't interested in music. Every girl in my class at that time was very deeply and passionately in love with Elvis Presley. The boys too were well aware of Elvis. We would have loved to take him behind a garage and dismember him. Every child in Mrs. Hopkinson's class understood in a very deep way the immense power of music -- more powerful than bombs and guns, more powerful than huge amounts of money in the bank. We were confronted with its power. Using only his voice, Elvis had secured the hearts of every one of the girls we were secretly in love with. Don't you think we wanted that power? I myself was teaching myself piano. I could already play "Good Golly Miss Molly."

Elvis had the power, Little Richard had the power, and so did Enrico Caruso, that is, Jason Tobart of the orphanage. At about the second stanza of "The Star Spangled Banner," one day in a full school assembly we began to hear Jason's rather rich baritone voice over and above all the other feeble mumblings. Very gradually he was becoming a soloist and we were being turned into an accompanying chorus. But this chorus consisting of the rest of the school could not maintain its volume or concentration as we slowly became mesmerized by Jason's voice. As it took over the auditorium, Jason's voice became operatic, and then at the end, his voice became full of passion and a truly burning pathos.

There was no doubt that he was ridiculing "The Star Spangled Banner." Just the fact that HE was singing it made that clear. Here was this boy being slowly crucified by circumstance, showing us the power of music. I don't know, perhaps he was taking voice lessons, stranger things than that happened at the House of Good Shepherd.

Just a moment after he stopped singing, that moment when a concert hall has been stunned into silence by a great performance, that electric three seconds before the clapping and the bravos begin, someone threw a coin out onto the basketball ball court floor which took up all the center of the auditorium. It clinked, it rolled around aimlessly for a while, and then did a little rapid spin as a crescendo. The coin too seemed to understand its importance, and did its performance superbly in the silence.

But there was no applause. There was no cries of "encore!" The principal at the lectern, and the faculty in the various seats with their classes, were in a state of acute consternation. Great writers let the reader draw their own conclusions, but I am just an amateur, so I cannot resist the temptation to drag this out and explain what had happened here.

For eight years we had been told that we MUST sing "The Star Spangled Banner" with fervor. Our inability to do this was a shame to the school and even to the country. And now, only one person had sung with fervor and it was obvious that it was done in mockery. But even those dimwitted teachers and the principal himself had been silent while Jason sang, overcome by the emotion they felt, brought down by the power of music. And Jason really was not mocking the music, because in his heart he probably really wanted to love America, and have America love him. But that is a little grandeolinquet. I should rather say he wanted Hughes school to tolerate him, and perhaps even accept him.

A faculty meeting was called to decide what to do, the meeting came to no conclusions. No one was punished. The teachers seems blue and dispirited for a few days, as if they felt we were falling yet farther behind in the Cold War.

Christian Science, yes, that is what i said a few pages back. I knew I could not leave it at that, I would be required to back up and say a few words about that part of my childhood, especially as it is pivotal to my story. It is directly connected to my friendship with Clarence and his kissing of white girls on the mouth. What has Christian Science got to do a black boy kissing thirteen year old white girls on the mouth in 1958? I will try to explain it.

It would be silly of me to try to describe or explain Christian Science. I could no more overcome or change the prevailing notions about it than some book about the Mafia could alter people's notions of that institution. The stereotype is simple. Christian Scientists are religious zealots similar to Jehovah's Witnesses who occasionally let their children die of appendicitis because they don't believe in doctors. Every so many years one of them is brought into court and charged with the murder of their child.

On my mother's side of the family there were my Uncle Paul, my Uncle Lou, my Aunt Mary, and my mother, Frances. There were six children in Uncle Paul's family, and five in Aunt Mary's family. There were four children in my family and three in Uncle Lou's family. All of these people were Christian Scientists years ago when I was a child. My father was an agnostic, and Uncle Tommy was an atheist. Not only that but they were, all of them, born Christian Scientists, seeing as my mother's father, Carmen Scalzo, became a Christian Scientist just after getting off the boat coming to America from Calabria. Calabria is the poorest part of Italy . Our family was a great rarity, Italian Christian Scientists. This is sort of like having monkeys in the graduating class at Harvard, but monkeys who actually believed all the things they had been taught and, furthermore, remembered them and took it all seriously.

I remember a family reunion when I was about ten at my Aunt Mary's house. My Uncle Tommy was my aunt Mary's Husband. Tommy had "married into" the family. He was the atheist. He was saying, "Will someone please tell me why a Christian Scientist should not be charged with murder if their child dies of appendicitis because they were not brought to the hospital? Tell me! I want to know!" Everyone else at the table was silent. Not content with the silence, Uncle Tom would direct the question to an individual, signaling me out he would say, "Dicky, tell me why..."

No one ever knew when Uncle Tommy was joking or not. He was a terrible cynic.

"What about Amy," is she a "Perfect reflection of the Infinite Mind?" he would ask. Amy was his only daughter. She had Down's Syndrome, but in 1958 she had not developed Down's Syndrome yet, that wouldn't happen to her until around 1975. At that time, 1958, she was still just a retarded Mongoloid.

But I need to push Uncle Tommy back behind the curtain or what will happen is this book will become an account of the strange thoughts and actions of a totally bizarre individual, Thomas DeVito.

DeVito means "The Life" in Italian. Scalzo, my grandfather's name on my mother's side, means "bare foot". Britelli, which was my name before my father changed it to Britell means "suspenders" in Italian.

Coincidentally, my father, who was an agnostic, also had a very large family, larger than my mother's family. Every one of my father's family was Roman Catholic. My father's father came from the same village in Calabria as my mother's father. Both my grandmothers came from the same village also. My sister tried to do a search of the family back by generations to see who our ancestors were and she said, "At the third generation everyone in that village is named Joe, and every woman is Maria." My grandfather's name was Joseph Britelli. Everyone knows that southern Italians were being enticed to America to work as cheap labor and be exploited in the mills. My grandparents came to America to avoid conscription into the Italian Army at the beginning of World War I. The first thing my grandfather did was buy a house on Lansing Street in East Utica. He never worked in a mill. Nobody in my family knew how my grandfather had enough money to buy a house when he got here. Nobody ever asked, and there is no one alive now to even try to remember. He was not in the Mafia.

So one-half of my family were Christian Scientists, and the other half were Roman Catholic, and my mother considered that my father's Catholic family was living in the middle ages. They all had crucifixes on the walls of their houses, had bad taste in furniture, purchased shower curtains with flamingos on them, had Christmas trees which were plastic and only had silver colored decorations, and drove DeSotos instead of Pontiacs. They screamed instead to talked and could not speak quietly.

Once a year I was allowed to go to Midnight Mass with my Catholic cousins, on Christmas Eve. Every aspect of it was awesome and strange. I knelt with my cousins, and I crossed myself devoutly when they did. I said the "Hail Mary." In my father's family was preserved a secret among them, which they did not tell me until I was an adult. I crossed myself with my left hand, where as you are supposed to cross yourself with your right hand. They had all agreed not to tell me, so that each Christmas they could watch me out of the corner of their eyes and laugh at me. I was the left-handed Catholic.

My uncle Tommy had no use for Catholicism either. He had an Italian Bakery in the heart of the Italian section of Utica. Many of his customers spoke no English. Cigar smoking Mafia men and widows wearing nothing but black were among the customers. When the Pope died he would say to these Italian customers, "I hear the POOP died." He baked a big cross and hung it on the wall of the bakery. Sometimes he would ask, "Are you Catholic?" Then, regardless of the answer, he would ask the same question louder, and then again louder. He pronounced "Catholic" as "Kat Lick." Then for the culmination of his gag he would say, "I'm not Kat Lick, I'm Dog Lick." After the punch line of this gag he would start laughing a loud but theatrical laugh, then suddenly become serious in an instant and say to his customer: "Here's your change, have a nice day."

In the Christian Scientist half of the family no one ever came down with appendicitis.

I practiced Christian Science as a boy. Christian Scientists believe in instantaneous healing. Instantaneous healing occurs as a result of a kind of spiritual epiphany, after a spiritual insight. The spiritual insights are available in the Christian Science textbook, which is called "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures," by Mary Baker Eddy. Some of her statements are profoundly beautiful. For example, "There is no life, truth, intelligence nor substance in matter. All is infinite mind and its infinite manifestation." "God is Love, can we ask him to be more?"

As a child I suffered from amblyopia. Amblyopia means lazy eye. I couldn't see very well out of my right eye. If I covered my right eye with my hand I could read all the letters on the eye chart. But with my right eye, although I could see everything, I couldn't bring it into focus. One morning in sixth grade we were brought to the nurse's room all in a line to get our eyes tested, and there, while standing in line, I decided that it was time for an instantaneous healing. I closed my eyes and began to repeat, "There is no life truth Intelligence nor substance in matter..." I understood that my sight came from God and not from matter, God was perfect, therefore my eyes were perfect.

I covered my left eye with my hand, and low and behold everything was in focus, I could see clearly the smallest line of type. I had had an instantaneous healing.

My turn came, I walked up to the black line. The nurse said, "Cover your left eye." I covered my left eye. The nurse said, "No, Richard, that isn't your left eye, cover your LEFT eye, that's your right eye you are covering."

So, because of a dyslectic mistake I discovered that I had healed my good eye. Later I would have equally disastrous results when I tried to raise my father from the dead.