The winter of 1950 lingered on into April. The gift of a warm, sunny Sunday caught us by surprise. Instead of going right home from Mass, I had fallen in with some of the kids from our street. Joey McCann and I were twelve and in seventh grade together. Kenny Bergman, who went to public school, and Frannie Gleason were two years older. Alan Gregory was only eleven, a sixth grader.
For most boys, flowing water in anything like a natural state can have an attractive force stronger than gravity. On that warm, almost muggy Sunday morning, the small, dirty stream that ran through our neighborhood park, on its course from the distant suburbs to the Delaware River, exerted its pull upon our collective unconscious. Still in our church clothes, good leather shoes, wool suits with neckties, we drifted on our inclinations toward the banks of the grayish creek under the narrow trestle of Tabor Road.
On the rocks under the bridge, we tempted fate in our Sunday shoes, jumping rock to rock as far out into the flowing water as we could. Litter had not yet emerged as a social or political faux pas. It still hasn’t in that neighborhood. All sorts of trash clung along the waterline. My curiosity has never developed to the point where I have to have an explanation for everything I encounter. I was not unaware of the longish, white slippery-looking things that occasionally draped themselves around rocks or hung on waterline tree branches. I had seen them before, but like so much of the larger world, they didn’t warrant further investigation. I kept my interrogatories ready for serious topics, like how submachine-guns worked, or were Apaches more fierce than Sioux or Cheyenne.
The precise moment remains fixed in my mind. Kenny Bergman; cigarette in the corner of his mouth, we were already regular smokers, was standing on a rock halfway out into the creek. He had a wet stick in his hand. Dripping and waving from the end of the stick was one of those long, white things.
Joe and Frannie set up a knowing wail and began putting distance between themselves and Kenny’s slimy trophy. I was savvy enough to know that whatever it was, I didn’t want it stuck in my face. Alan, on the other hand, had no idea of just what was going on. He didn’t even move as Kenny flipped the gooey looking mess right at his head. At the last instant, as Alan did a quick sidestep, the thing landing on his shoulder. Looking only slightly offended, Alan casually brushed it off into the creek where the moving water carried it downstream and out of sight.
“What the hell was that,” Alan whined, rinsing his hand in the rapids. “He doesn’t know. He doesn’t know,” the other three chanted. I didn’t know either, but the tone of their cries and laughter put me on high alert. I knew that I had to make an instant choice: do I join Alan as another butt of whatever the joke; or do I take on protective coloration and pretend to be in the know? Being twelve, I did the expected. “He doesn’t know. He doesn’t know.” I joined the jeering chorus.
“It’s a rubber,” Kenny said with disdain. As he began his informative discourse directed at Alan, I stood aside among the already initiated, desperate not to be unmasked. “A rubber, a rubber, what’s a rubber,” I wondered in silence. No way was I going to ask. Fortunately, for my dignity and for my continuing education, Kenny elaborated. He did so with all of the comprehensive, graphic and lurid details one would expect from a fourteen-year-old boy who had been twice left back in school.
It’s not that there hadn’t been clues about any of this. The evidence had been strewn all about me. I had been tripping over it. It’s just that none of it had had any relevance to my life. There had been the famous Life Magazine photo essay on childbirth. My parents had hidden it away. I knew where it was, but the subject just didn’t interest me. Had the same magazine included a profile on the Lockheed P-80 Shooting Star, I would have found my way into their closet with a flashlight.
I knew that boys and girls were different, but the purposes or functions of those differences had not led me to seek any answers. It hadn’t even entered my head to ask questions. My mind was now jumping, flashing, flip-flopping. In an interior monologue of absolute panic, I tried to stem the flow of images generated by this monstrous revelation, tried my best to refute this awful intrusion into my tidy world. It couldn’t be true. How could anything this overwhelming be true when it was coming from that asshole, Kenny Bergman? But each new instantaneous correlation, each terrible but logical connection, blew out another of my synaptic fuses.
Now, all of the schoolyard allusions, the “dirty” words, the smirky comments of the older kids, the inexplicable and undeniable blossoming of fourteen-year-old Marie Cullen, just two doors up the street, all of it now made sense as the roaring in my ears increased.
On that unseasonably warm and muggy Sunday in April, along a polluted city creek, the skies parted, the cosmic gong clanged and I tasted for the first time the bitter fruit of the tree of knowledge. I had stepped out upon the slippery slope. The rest was to be as certain as the flow of that fouled creek toward the Delaware River and the Atlantic Ocean.
I glanced at Alan. Had he been as unhinged as I over the implications of Kenny’s little seminar on the facts of life? He didn’t show a thing. Maybe, like me a year before, or a day before, he just hadn’t been paying attention. Maybe none of it made sense to him. Or, maybe I had it all wrong. “Let’s go up to the falls,” Alan yelled.
Tags: 1945-1955, 1950, apaches, cheyenne, delaware river, lockheed p-80 shooting star, memoir, olney, philadelphia, rubbers, souix, submachine guns, tabor road, tree of knowledge
