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.