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.