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.