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.