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.

We Were Just As Relentless

We were just as relentless in music class with Mrs. Hopkinson. We put tacks on the hammers of the piano. We replaced the lyrics of songs with mumbled rhymed obscenities. Principally however, we simply refused to sing, but simply mouthed the words of her songs, and pretended to sing.

Music class antics were of the normal sort, I am sure the same thing is happening right this instant across town at Morningside, as it is a weekday. I don't think it is the same, I know it is the same. A few years ago I was a substitute teacher over at Morningside. The music room was in the basement. It was winter. The little slum-dwellers filed into class in single file and as each entered he threw his scarf, his coat, his boots and a sweater in a heap in a corner. Soon all 40 of the creatures were in the room. They did not sit down, and they did not pay any attention to me. The crowd of them milled around expectantly as if waiting for something. It was the second bell they were waiting for, and when it rang they all screamed at once, and all dived together into the huge pile of coats and boots. Then there was a screaming free-for-all for 40 minutes as they lunged on top of each other, struggled and fought each other. The screaming and yelling was so intense that even when shouting at them I could not hear my own voice. I was thinking adult thoughts: "What if one of them gets hurt, will I be liable?"

I spent the class standing out in the hall with my back to the door. That was their music class, a free-for-all. And I had walked to the school thinking, "I am sure I can think of analogies that fourth graders can understand that will explain to them what the overtone series is. From there I can probably introduce the idea of the difference between major and minor chords."

So our antics in music and art were the standards, still in place across the country. But there was a boy in our eighth grade class for whom the bar of delinquence had been raised. He was not one of us, he was not a normal person. He was very tall and overweight, he had failed eighth grade twice and was doing it a third time. He was an orphan and lived at the House of Good Shepherd.

The House Of The Good Shepherd! I am sorry but it seems that I can't even begin to tell you about how Clarence made me loved by Mrs. Hopkinson. I can't begin to explain what a wasteland sixth grade was before he came, because now, accidentally, I have stumbled across this image of the “House of The Good Shepherd." Her image rises in my mind like a huge monster in an old black and white horror film coming up out of a steaming swamp. I am going to have to pull the car over here and tell you children all about the House Of The Good Shepherd, Utica New York, in 1956.
In my mind, if I drive through Utica now, here it is, on Genesee Street, out in the south end. I have to look at with my memory's eyes because it was torn down in 1962 and replaced with the Pin-O-Rama bowling lanes. The bowling lanes are still there. The House of Good Shepherd "orphanage" sat on a huge lot, about the size of a football field, or a big city block. It was a three story gothic cathedral sort of building of dark brown rustic stonework. It was the type of architecture used after the Civil War for armories. It had turrets, and battlements. It had huge double doors as an entrance and a big porch with massive rails all around. Inside it was a dilapidated smelly prison. Many of my classmates were residents of the orphanage. If they had really been orphans then that place perhaps would not have been so tragic and menacing, but none of them were really orphans. They all had parents, either one or both, who could not afford their cost. Thy lived at the orphanage and their parents visited them on Sunday morning. I went to church with my mom on Sunday morning at the "First Church of Christ Scientist" at 1608 Genesee Street. I always walked home alone after church, as my mother would stand outside for about three hours talking with other members of her clan.

After church I would walk up Genesee Street and cut through the lawn of the House of The Good Shepherd, there would be all these broken down cars parked in the driveway and here and there I would see some boy or girl I know talking to an adult. I would think, "That must be Eric's mom." From the looks on their faces was driven home in an eloquent way all those trite sayings in the boxes in front of churches that admonish you to count your blessings because there are others worse off than yourself. Perhaps you can't make your car payment this month, but just think, somewhere there is a leper being stoned to death by a mob. So aren’t you glad that God loves you and just does not want you to be able to make your car payment?

I was inside the House of The Good Shepherd once. I was playing marbles with Raymond. We had leather pouches that were stitched along the edges with red thread, our precious collections of marbles in these bags. I had about 50, and several cat's eyes. Apropos of nothing, Raymond said to me, "At home I have two thousand marbles." I didn't comment.

"Want to see them?"

Seeing Raymond's marbles meant going inside the "House of Good Shepherd" and I had never been inside, I didn't even think outsiders were allowed to go in.

Raymond took me into the House, this is how I know it looked like an old unattended prison inside. We went up two flights of stairs and entered a cavernous room which had about 50 army cots on each wall. Raymond pulled his footlocker out from under his bed and opened it. Inside were thousands of marbles, marbles and nothing else.

Jay Sweet sat in front of me in homeroom. He would wear those old brown sweaters with the red reindeer on them, full of moth holes, real man's pants from a discarded business suit covered with lint and stains. None of his clothes fit him. He had a beautiful wristwatch. One day Miss Wagner said to him, "Jay, where did you get such a lovely wrist watch?" Jay pulled the sleeve of his sweater up to display his wristwatch collection which went up all the way to his elbow, about 14 expensive wristwatches.

Miss Wagner took a step back from him. He looked into her face and said very distinctly, "My father's a jeweler."

Miss Wagner, coincidentally, never attempted to discipline Raymond. She treated him and the other boys from the orphanage exactly like they were little rabid racoons.

It was Jason Towbart of the orphanage that put the idea into Clarence Cheshire's head that saved my life in eighth grade, he did it one day by acting out in assembly in a way that put the entire school into lockdown.

Me and Clarence

I'm not a racist. I've got friends who are black. Not only that, but even when I was a child living in an all-white neighborhood I had friends who were black. But perhaps I am exaggerating. When I was I child I had a friend, he was black, he was my only friend in the world and I was pretty much hated by everyone else.

My friend's name was Clarence. He was a good friend to have as he was easily able to beat up the few boys who were stronger than me in the world, and so as a team we were an invincible terror.

But before I tell you about me and Clarence, I would like to describe myself a little. I'm a pretty simple person and I was a slow child. I had to start kindergarten a half year late because I was a "late starter." I was supposed to repeat third grade because I hadn't started reading yet, but my parents’ tearful pleas prevented it. Even now I can remember my father's frustration when he had been told how badly I had done on the IQ test for kindergarten. I was in the kitchen and my father called me over to him in that way that every child knows is momentous yet unexplainable. He took out a piece of paper and on it he drew a plane, a boat, and a car. He said "Which goes the fastest?" "The boat” I said. “Which is the slowest?” "The plane" I said.

"But Dicky," he said, in sad desperation, "Why would you think a boat would be faster than a car?" I didn't answer this question, and stood by his side dumbfounded with shame, and mystified at how complex the world was. We had spent the summer at Carlie and Shirlie's camp. They had a Chris-Craft with a hundred and seventy horsepower engine. Every day we roared across the lake a million miles an hour and no one ever stopped talking about how fast that boat could go. And here was my father, apparently he thought cars went faster than boats.

After that he said, a note of anger creeping into his frustration, "but why do you think a plane goes the slowest?" I looked into his worried questioning eyes and said, "Dad, just look at them."

Then again I was supposed to fail eighth grade, I would not have been able to go on to the high school with the rest of my grade school class. I don't know what it is like now, but back then you did one through eight just like a prison sentence. Those other classmates were your blood brothers and sisters, you knew every freckle on their stupid faces. Imagine a gang of thieves who have done eight years in prison together. The day comes when they are all released, but, for some trick of fate, you alone stay behind while they go out into freedom. And high school for us was freedom, because my grade school was... I'm not going to attempt to say. But my school was so repressive that a special study was done about it and published in a Journal of Sociology. It was a study having to do with the effects of corporal punishment.

I could have told them something about corporal punishment. For example, let's say you do something really bad. Your seventh grade teacher decides you need the "Corporal Punishment" so he asks you to come to the front of the class and to bend over a chair with your rectum facing the rest of the class. Then he takes a long wooden paddle which rests in the chalk tray and hits you in the ass with it as hard as he can three times. How hard does a person hit a child with a wooden paddle? Well it would be hard enough to give that person some sort of personal sexual satisfaction. Now the sociologist might want to concentrate on how that ostracism might affect my feelings of alienation to the rest of my classmates, or something like that. But the most important thing about being paddled is the fact that you have on Levis and the copper studs at the edge of your pockets feel like they are on fire for the rest of the day. Your ass is like a slow, really hot fire, and these little copper studs are like the red embers where the sparks keep shooting out.

So I knew what they were talking about when I read that study about my school, it made me laugh 'til I cried.

But, how did it affect my relationship to the rest of my class, was it alienating? It made me a strange and lofty figure. None of them except me and Clarence had ever been paddled. They all hated me, no girl would speak to me. I endured my punishment in a proud way, sat down without crying. For a moment I was the gunslinger in a film who kills all six of his enemies from a dusty spot in the middle of a street and walks off without looking back, while the beautiful widow whose husband's death he has avenged looks on.

But I must not leave out my crime, because perhaps some person may think I — I don't know what they might think. It was December. I was with Clarence and we were walking to school. Across the street from us there were a group of girls also walking to school. Clarence and I were throwing snowballs at these girls. Neither of us could hit any one of them as they were too far off. As we walked along, the girls came into range and I had the good fortune to hit one of the girls in the arm, just below the shoulder. I threw the snowball and a moment later a white circle appeared on the red sleeve of one of the girl's coats. I went sick with terror at that moment because I realized I had hit the girl with the amputated arm. We had a girl in out class with only one arm, and my snowball had hit her right in the stub of her amputated arm.

Now if my crime was to hit this poor girl, whom everyone felt sorry for, right in the amputated arm, then what kind of punishment did I deserve? We were all well aware of that arm because she used to wear short sleeve shirts and we could see where the arm ended with that strange little knot in the skin that looked just like the end of a sausage. Well, if ridiculing and abusing a young girl's amputated arm was my crime, you can imagine how hard the paddling I received was, two hours later after I had returned from my visit to the principal's office.

But I have wandered from my train of thought. I was trying to tell you how I almost failed eighth grade. In eighth grade my grades were just above failing the entire year, even though I worked with might and main to pass. My teacher, Mrs. Rowley, hated me from the instant she laid eyes on me. Later, as an adult, I learned a lesson about classroom discipline: Establish your authority as soon as you enter the classroom the first day. Your first act is to pick out some child doing something wrong and give them a good punishment right on the spot. I was Mrs. Rowley’s test mouse for that theory.

I had read in my mother's copy of Reader's Digest that students who sit in the front row of the classroom do better than those in the back. I had positioned myself in the first seat in the first row. I was the first child Mrs. Rowley laid eyes on when she came into the room that first morning. For some reason she was delayed that day and stood for almost twenty minutes talking to Mrs. LaSalle out in the hallway. I could see their silhouettes through the fogged glass of our classroom door.

I had a new blue ring binder, the surface of which was a very rough canvas. The night before I has spent a few hours decorating this binder with my name “DICK” in capital block letters which were three dimensional and went back in space in perspective. My penciled letters did not show up on the binder, however, because pencil does not mark blue cloth very well. I had started on coloring in all these letters with white chalk pencil, and was fully engrossed in my task when suddenly, out of the sky, or somewhere over my head, a hand descended, grasped me by the hair, pulled my head all the way back till it touched the seat behind me. Above me I saw the hideous, wrath-filled face of Mrs. Rowley.

Her pronouncement was this: "You're in eighth grade now, and we don't draw pictures in here." After that she sent me to the cloak room.

I know, I am old. There are no more cloak rooms, but there were cloak rooms then. They were separate rooms, all to themselves, in the back of each classroom where our coats were hung on pegs. A place of ostracism. A place to await one's corporal punishment. I spent a lot of time in that room. I was in there from the first minutes that Mrs. Rowley spent in the room so I never found out if she had to leave to wash all the Vaseline off her hand. I started each morning of my life at that time by putting two handfuls of pure Vaseline on my hair and combing it into a duck's ass, with a little careful curl in the front.

This Mrs. Rowley, who hated me for some unknown reason, made it her special task to torment me for a year, and it was her intent to flunk me right from the very start. I will have more to say about this woman but for now I want to explain how she nearly flunked me, but was unable to.

To graduate from eighth grade in Utica, New York in 1958, you had to pass the math state Regents exam. Passing grade was 65. Mrs. Rowley informed me that I was doing so badly in all my subjects that unless I got a 75, she would recommend I not go on to high school.

Regents exam in 1958 in Utica New York, just after Sputnik (just after America found out it was losing the space race) was a spectacle right out of Nazi Germany. Police guards and detectives to enforce no cheating. Rules spelled out in detail, ending in threats of punishments, read out for fifteen minutes. For example, "Any student who gets out of their seat at any time, without permission, for any reason, receives a zero." And such was read to us by strangers who entered the classroom with locked black trunks in which the tests were stored.

I was terrified, sad, and sick to my stomach. I started on the test. I became more and more sick. I realized I would throw up. We were allowed to go to the boys room with an escort if we raised our hand and made the request. I raised my hand. No one noticed. I raised my hand and just sat there, and then I realized that my time had run out.

I think that there is no child who would not prefer to repeat a grade rather than shit their pants or vomit in front of their classmates, and I was no exception. I left my seat and walked up to Mrs. Rowley’s desk. She looked up at me and an expression of extreme amazement came over her face. A great crime was being committed right before her unbelieving eyes. I said, "I have to go to the bathroom."

"Return to your seat" she said.

I did return to my seat and again I put up my hand. She asked me what I wanted. I said I had to go to the boys room. She sent for the guard and motioned for me to go to the door. She didn't mind at all, for I had scored zero on the exam. I am sure I could have started playing hopscotch right then for all she cared about it. I walked across the back of the room, I walked along the aisle to the door. To my right was the blackboard, to my left students engrossed in their exam. Then I threw up all over the blackboard. I stood there and watched as it ran down, gathered in the chalk tray and dripped onto the floor. Everyone in the room said, "Gaaaaaaaaaa" very loud and in unison.

I wiped my mouth on my sleeve and returned to my seat, I didn't need to leave the room anymore.

My grade was 76 so I passed by one point. Mrs. Rowley insisted that my grade be zero. Someone must have overruled her because I graduated.

Thirty years later I was visiting my mother. She still lived alone in the house on Mildred Avenue where I had grown up. She was having the house painted by a young college student. I could see that she doted on this painter. She would make him breakfast, lunch and dinner, and I am sure if the house painting took four years she wouldn't have noticed.

The most distinct indication of his status was the privilege of smoking in the house, something nobody had ever done, except my father who had been dead now 28 years. He pushed his chair back from the table after dinner, lit up a cigarette, and put the match in my father's ashtray, a chrome globe of the world set on a backlit base with a little shovel on a pivot at the top to dump the buts down into the center of its little world.

Looking at me, a complete stranger, the painter said, "I know why you didn't flunk eighth grade."

I didn't reply. I thought that I was the only person in the world except for Mrs. Rowley that knew I was supposed to flunk eighth grade, so there could be no doubt that he knew something very personal and intimate about myself that I did not know. This was his explanation:

"My Mother was Mrs. Hopkinson, your music teacher in eighth grade. There was a faculty meeting concerning you. All the teachers at the meeting voted that you be flunked except my mother who cast the only vote in your favor. After the vote my mother stood up and said, 'If you flunk the boy I will never enter this building again,' and she walked out of the room."

Music teachers in junior high are not replaceable, it is the most difficult job on earth. So to keep Mrs. Hopkinson they let me pass.

But this is about Clarence, and I have not introduced him to you yet. And before I can introduce Clarence I have to describe what a terrible wasteland my life was in sixth grade, before he came into my life. Clarence appeared in my life like an oasis in a desert . And now without telling you about sixth grade, and without talking about that first day when Clarence was brought into our sixth grade class, the only black boy to every appear in the South end, like the amateur storyteller I am, I am going to jump ahead and tell you why Mrs. Hopkinson loved me so much, and would have quit her job to defend me. It was Clarence's doing.

Mrs. Hopkinson. She had been our general music teacher for eight years. Twice a week our class was brought to the music room for a session. The purpose of music class was to allow the homeroom teachers, who had us the rest of the day without a break, to go off to the teachers' room to smoke cigarettes and talk. Every child knew that music was not the purpose of music class, just as art was not the purpose of art class. Those classes, music and art, were considered indoor recess, and we were allowed a tremendous level of physical freedom in those rooms. Discipline was not enforced in the music or art rooms. But draconian strictness was in place in the important subjects, because we were involved as a nation at that time in catching up with the Russians.

For example, one rule in the regular classroom was that if we were caught talking when the teacher entered the room, you were brought to the cloak room and given the "Corporal Punishment." I know this does not sound possible. I know this sounds worse than peoples' stories of parochial school. My only proof that this happened lies in the idiosyncratic details of the events. The purpose of idiosyncratic details in literature is proof that the thing describes actually happened, as it produces that response, "who could have made that up?" and "stranger than fiction."

David Cohen, Ben Rhodes and I were talking when Mrs. Wagner entered our sixth grade room. She looked at us aghast and was silent for 30 seconds. Then she sent the three of us to the cloak room. After that she proceed to teach all of math class for 40 minutes. We could hear it all from the cloke room:

"Dorothy, what is the definition of a denominator?"
Dorothy stands up. "A denominator is the number..."
"A denominator is THAT number, not THE number."
"The denominator is THAT number..."
"Stand up straight, Dorothy."

After 40 minutes of "the denominator is that, the numerator is that," math class was over. Mrs. Wagner entered the cloak room. She was holding some wooden rulers in her hand. She said to us,
"do you know how bad you have been?"

"Yes" we said.

"Then let me see." She handed us the rulers and said, "punish yourselves."

Our self-punishment consisted of holding out one hand and beating it with the ruler. Now I don't think I could have invented that. It is just too idiosyncratic.

But music class and art class was the exact opposite. One day the art teacher called Ben Rhodes and myself up to her desk and said, "would you please do me a favor? I have received a shipment of art supplies and I have all these new watercolor sets, and the little pads of color are all in separate boxes. I need you to put a red, yellow, green, blue, and violet into each of the tin boxes.
This was a job that took three consecutive art classes, and Ben Rhodes and I had the storage room to ourselves. The job was sort of fun, it was like having a factory line assembly job. We put out all the boxes of the colors and we stacked up the tins, we arranged everything so the job would be efficient, but we didn’t put the full range of colors into each box. One box would be all yellows. Another would be black and reds. I remember one in which there were mostly reds with a yellow right in the middle. We thought about each tin, and each tin became a little work of art in a way, but they were all useless for art class. Mrs. Bach was not impressed. She opened a crate and took out a tin. She opened it, and set it aside, then she opened another, and another. Then she put her head in her hands and began to sob.

Ben and I walked to the desk and I said, "I'm sorry Mrs. Bach, we'll fix all of them."

But we had hurt her feelings, and she wouldn't stop crying. Looking back on it, I suppose she was in love with Ben and I, but we could have never known that, we were 12. Ben was my best and only friend in sixth grade.