In September 1954, my senior year of high school had just begun, just barely. I had flunked summer school, my third summer school in as many years. According to the rules that meant I wouldn’t be going back to my high school. I would have to go to a public school and repeat junior year.
One part of me really didn’t give a shit. Had I cared, I would have at least attempted to do the course work. Maybe even study, do some homework. Nah. The subject this time was Spanish. But, if it hadn’t been Spanish, it would have been something else. As a thoroughly confused, and genuinely screwed-up kid, my ambivalence was stronger than the pull in any one direction. That September there did emerge, out of the contending contradictions in my head, a muted thought that maybe it might be a good idea to try and salvage what remained of high school.
In the aftermath of the summer school debacle, I went with my mother, over to school where she tried to plead a case. With actors, writers and stand-up comics now mining the horrors of their Catholic upbringings, it’s a good time for a little revisionist history. I don’t know what those Christian Brothers saw in me. My record was a disgrace. I was an academic disaster. My demeanor and attitude were outside any acceptable prep school standards. The school was a prep school of sorts, a day school that catered to the upwardly-mobile, blue-collar parents of bright kids, and to the newly middle-class Catholic families seeking something with a little more cachet than the crowded diocesan high schools. Getting into the school was through competitive examinations, and even now, I test far better than I can perform. My decision to take the test was an afterthought. My cousin was there a year ahead of me, and the kid across the street had signed up for the test. When the eighth-grade nun asked who was interested in applying, I casually raised my hand.
Invisible machinery clanked and rumbled and in September of 1951, I parted company with most of my friends, they on their way to the diocesan “Big House” for boys, me bound for elitism. Today, my alma mater is a true college preparatory school and it is elite and expensive. I would have trouble getting in, and if I made it with the baggage I was then carrying, I wouldn’t last through the first semester.
My easy successes in elementary school crashed head-on into the rigor needed to pass subjects like algebra and Latin. It was awful. Faced with “a” plus “b,” or the conjugation of Latin verbs, my brain and my will went limp. I suspect now that in addition to my oft-cited bad attitude and laziness, there were some low-level learning disabilities at work. My inability to begin to understand even the instructions for abstract mathematics or the mechanics of a foreign language plunged me into what I know now to be a kind of depression. What compounded my situation was an inability, or an unwillingness, to try and do anything to make things better. My parents were to be put through a lot of grief.
Like Joyce’s young Stephen, I was also attempting to deal with a monster whose presence drove academic concerns to the margins of triviality. I was obsessed with all things sexual. So obsessed in fact, that virtually all things became sexual. The context or ground for this teen-aged wasteland or battleground was the continuous raging of implacable hormonal firestorms against a total and inescapable immersion in the Latin/Irish Roman Catholic Church. The results were predictable; failure in school, attractions to the margins of my world, bad companions, beer, auto-eroticism and an almost complete apathy about anything to do with my future.
All of the above worked themselves out during my first three years of high school. What a mess. The good Brother who listened to my mother’s pleas could have waved me off on the basis of the rules. I had blown it; go somewhere else. But he didn’t. He suggested that I enroll with a tutor in Spanish. At the start of the school year I would be given a test put together by the language faculty, and if I could pass that test, I would be allowed to return as a senior. If I failed; goodbye. The offer went well beyond the extra mile.
I took the tutoring. An eight or nine block walk, three times a week in the row house of an inscrutable middle-aged Polish woman. She was a public school language teacher. It was hopeless. She was getting paid and went through the motions. I was paying her out of my own money and I went through the motions. It was all kind of weird.
At the start of the school year I took the test. It was another disaster. Meeting with the guidance counselor in the principal’s office, I was severely taken to task. It was all over. Public school here I come. Inexplicably, as Daffy Duck would say, I was to be given yet another chance. The deal was that I would start my senior year on academic probation. I would be reviewed at the end of the first marking period. If I did well, I could stay. If not, hit the road. My Irish-born grandmother had always held that “good luck beats early rising.” Once again, I had dodged a bullet.
While all of this was playing itself out, I was also involved in a torrid relationship with a girl, torrid of course by the standards of the time, the place and my own vast experience. I was sixteen, she was seventeen and considered among the more desirable neighborhood beauties. Her mother worked nights as a waitress and the father was not on the scene. It was before air-conditioning and the feel of our co-joined perspiration against the coarse cut plush of her living-room couch is secure in my inventory of erotic memories. A succession of warm twilights, into dusk, into darkness on that couch played against do-wop ballads from a black radio station at the far end of the AM band. That whole summer was a heated, but ultimately a constrained 1954 version of Bob Seger’s “Night Moves.” She wouldn’t go all the way. Thank God. I can only guess how badly I would have handled a fully consummated union at that stage of my life.
Unfortunately or not, my magnificent obsession of that summer was also a bit of a head case. Whenever my tumescence would subside, I realized that I was being taken places I didn’t like going. I was being played off against other guys, my devotion was being constantly put to the test, “If you love me, you won’t go hanging out with the guys tomorrow. If you really love me you won’t…” And, my not having access to a car was always just below the surface. Worse yet, she continued to keep what I believed was the big reward out of reach. Beyond our sessions in that warm murky living room, we didn’t seem to have much else in common. Most nights that summer however, it seemed more than enough.
By the time the good Brother made me the offer to turn around my life in school, I was ready for a change. Knowledge you can’t use is worthless, and until that exact moment when you actually do get it. At that time, all the wisdom of the world couldn’t help me. But the big wheel had begun ever so slowly to turn.
It was the first weekend following the first full week of school, always a disorienting time of distraction. It’s still summer, but out of context with the season, you’re suddenly trapped in the regimen of a full-time school week. Time warp, culture shock. The preceding summer months, despite summer school and a part-time job, had been an interlude of wonderfully shapeless freedom. You could stay out at night, any night of the week without getting too much hassle at home. And, the days were made for drifting, sleeping late and just hanging out. There were also those hours spent on that sofa in that hot, dark living room.
I now had a sense that school just might be different this year. Nothing concrete, more the absence of that feeling of dread, of waiting for things to turn bad, as they always had before. In some minor way I had begun, tentatively, secretly, to take charge of the course of my life. I wasn’t in any way sure of what I was doing, but I knew I was beginning to feel just a little better about everything.
An onerous part-time job the A & P on Fifth Street kept me in cigarettes, spare change and enough to pay for the quart bottles of beer that I spent emptying on Friday and too many other nights. In fact, the ordeal of a full Saturday working in the store was often compounded by a sour hangover from the preceding night out. At sixteen into seventeen I had no idea of what I wanted to do with my life. What I did know, however, was that my life was going to have nothing to do with places like the A&P.
Saturday nights were always the payoff. While the evening often held little more than drinking beer in the back seat of a car, the possibility of exciting alternatives was real. I would try to keep my Saturday night options open. I could just hang out and see what developed, I could catch a movie, or I could even go where there were girls, to one of the neighborhood parish dances.
To get into a dance meant having to dress up in a suit or a sport coat. My Saturday night dance outfit which I thought was an irresistibly cool, devastating knockout included a long, dark blue single-button, suit coat, baggy pegged pants with a hi-rise, blue suede shoes and one of my father’s good shirts. Getting out of the house wearing his shirt was a challenge. Close attention was given to my long greasy hair that I combed up and back into the definitive hoodlum’s insignia, the D. A. or duck’s ass. There was no mistaking me for an honor student.
The Saturday night dance in the parish hall of a neighboring Catholic Church was just far enough away that much of the crowd was made up of strangers and thus seemed exotic. Dances at our own parish, held on Sunday night, drew too many people that you knew too well, or worse they knew you too well. There was no sense of the foreign or the exotic, no excitement, no romance.
After my day in the A&P, after supper, after getting washed and dressed, and after making sure my father didn’t see me wearing his good shirt, the white one with the green pinstripes, I left for the corner. As I grew up, I drifted in an ever-widening circle away from home. Initially, you played on your own street. At about age twelve or thirteen, the lure of adventure, the lure of tales about great events occurring on neighboring streets, schoolyard tales spread by kids living on those distant streets, bred a kind of urban wanderlust. Usually your passport to cross over into other streets was a schoolmate or schoolmates from those streets. It never occurred to us that the kids from other streets coming around our way were creatures lured by the same promise of something different.
The magnets for our evolving social groupings, for the sorting out by birds of a feather, were any one of the dozens of Mom and Pop variety stores that occupied the corners at the ends of nearly every block of row houses. The stores that were operated by people with any business sense at all wouldn’t tolerate corner-lounging kids, much less allow them to congregate inside the stores. And yet there were store owners, so far gone in failure and apathy that they hadn’t the will required to keep chasing away the crowds of adolescent boys seeking escape from the weather, from boredom, from the close confines of family life in small houses. Kids in fact, seeking freedom or the closest thing to freedom many of them would ever know. Like the Springsteen song about being free on the street, we were free on the corner, and on some corners we were freer than on others.
My own social evolution in the world of corner-lounging was advanced. By the summer of 1954, I was a member in residence at what was probably the ultimate corner in the neighborhood. Isolated from any nearby houses by an abandoned ice house and a foundry, we never had to concern ourselves with neighbors calling the cops to complain about us. That was the death knell for many corner crowds, unhappy neighbors and zealous cops. We bothered almost no one, no matter how obnoxious our behavior, no matter how loud or how late. You had to be there to be outraged by us and hardly anyone but us ever came there.
It was a pizza joint before pizza. They sold tomato pies. How the guy who ran the place ever made a living was never a concern of ours. He did some take-out business, there was a public high school across the street that gave him day-time customers, and the foundry operated a middle-shift with an evening lunch hour. I know that in the three years plus that I made it my home away from home, I didn’t spend ten bucks in there. Our business didn’t cover the heat we absorbed.
Late summer, early September, seven-o-clock on a Saturday evening, headed for the corner; the air warm, the sky still full of angled orange sun, dressed to kill, ten-to-twenty dollars in my pocket and nothing in my head but vague expectations of undefined excitement. It wasn’t bad. The six or seven block walk to the corner took me through back alleys, driveways and past rental garages, body shops and small manufacturing buildings. We had no curiosity at all about what went on in any of the factories, machine shops or warehouses that filled the neighborhood. Like one of Gasset’s post-modern savages, I moved unconsciously through my environment, utterly unaware of its purposes. I wasn’t alone in this kind of socio-centrism. The larger world existed only to the degree that we bumped into it, or it into us, like the cops, or a job, or the draft board. It was an adolescence of existential, if not entirely moral innocence.
Looking down the final stretch to the corner, you could make out who was already there by the cars lining the curb. This was the early 1950’s, and the cars of blue-collar kids then as now, were marginal heaps; ‘41 Plymouths, ‘46 Ford sedans, a couple junkers that went back into the mid-1930’s. There were a few classy items, like customized ‘40 or ‘41 Fords, but taste in cars was largely a function of aspirations. We knew what was cool, but nobody had the kind of money it took to be really sharp on wheels. My family had no car at all. I didn’t even have a driver’s license.
On a pleasant Saturday night there would be a good turn-out of the local elite. Those with girl-friends, or dates, or somewhere to go would usually check in on their way out. By about eight, the hard core would be left. “Whaddaya wanna do? I dunno, whadda you wanna do?” The parodies are close to the reality. What most often followed was a night spent riding around drinking beer from quart bottles. What then followed that was unpredictable, and often a bit edgy. There could be confrontations with other kids, sometimes ending in fights, there could be girls, there could be trouble, vandalism and usually there would be someone throwing up in the street. It was exciting, it was trashy, and I think I was beginning to see that it was also sad and wasted.
As a kind of experiential opportunist, I was prepared for whatever happened to present itself. I was dressed for a dance, but the outfit would work equally well for crashing a wedding reception or for getting into a five-dollar night where, if you weren’t carded at the door, the price of admission included as much draft beer as you could drink.
When the corner crowd began thinning out, I turned to one of my fellow leading lights, who with one foot propped behind him on the stucco wall was spitting methodically on the sidewalk next to his other foot. “Wanna go to the movies,” I said. As a budding proletarian intellectual, I was given to reading, among other things, movie reviews. Jaques Tati’s “Mr. Hulot’s Holiday” was running at an art house in a Jewish neighborhood next to ours. “To see what,” I was asked. I recapped the review and asked, “who wants to go? There’s an eight-fifteen show.” My spitting friend, who happened to have a car, said “sure.” We had people in the theater turning around to look at us as we went into near convulsions during the train arrival scene that opens the movie. A little after eight-thirty we came out of the movie, drained from laughing. We were back to “Whadaya wanna do?”
While my spitting friend was company and transportation for the movie, spending the remainder of the evening with him was not a promising prospect. His idea of a good time was removing intake manifolds from flat-head V-8’s. In my full juvenile delinquent finery I was ready for finer things. I was for the dance. He wasn’t dressed for it. I doubt he owned the suit jacket needed to get into a neighborhood dance. We split a quart of beer as he drove me to the dance.
My arrival was late and casual. The muted sound of a recorded dance band standard leaked through the closed doors of the hall out into the lobby – A freebee, nobody there to collect the twenty-five cent admission charge. Inside, the music and the light from a rotating mirror ball turned a darkened parish hall into a teenaged fantasyland. The room was charged with the heat of several hundred overactive kids who had been at it for over an hour when I arrived.
If you thought you were cool, if you wanted others to think you were cool, or if you were by yourself, the first thing you wanted to do upon arriving a dance was to circle the room. I moved through the clusters of people, acknowledging the kids I knew, letting myself be seen. If you were a nerd or a drip or a geek, or if you were fourteen, you didn’t have to do all of that. In fact, it was better if you didn’t. Visibility had to be a natural part of your aura. And, if you came alone, it was a necessity to scope the room for trouble. There was a crowd of genuinely nasty Italian kids from an adjacent neighborhood, occasional marauders who showed up like animals of prey. They operated as a group in choosing their victims. If you were too visible, you could become a candidate. Once in a while they would go after the wrong guy, somebody with enough backing to turn their easy stomping session into a full-scale rumble. That whole scene was too mean for my tastes. I knew guys who had been badly beaten up in those encounters.
If things looked dicey, and you were not with your own crowd, the most politic move would be to seek out the indigenous tough guys and pay your respects. By some unstated code of honor, if your presence was acknowledged by the baddies who knew you, you could then count reasonably on their aid if challenged by outsiders. Security, your personal safety at a Saturday night dance, had all the complexities of Bismarck’s alliance system or membership in NATO. People talk about the untroubled days of their youth. It’s always a matter of context.
If your tour of the hall revealed the presence of outside bad guys, and the absence of enough guys you knew who could balance the equation, then the wise move was to get out as quickly as discretion would allow. You might be out two-bits, and you definitely would be out the possibility of walking some girl home, of maybe groping in a doorway, “batting it out,” trying to get your hand inside a blouse or sweater. But, you did get out with your teeth intact.
That night there were no real sharks in the water. A gang I occasionally hung out with after school was the dominant presence, and I joined their cluster at the end of the hall. I can’t even remember what the music was like that night. In 1954, rock and roll hadn’t yet arrived, and the people running parish dances had no tolerance for the rhythm and blues or jazz that we affected as our hipster credentials. The mainstream pop music of those times was generally awful.
I danced one slow dance with a girl I had known since grade school. We were “friends,” not romantically linked, but I was not entirely disinterested. The number of girls I had categorized in that way approached the infinite. I practiced a kind of romantic opportunism. The slow dance, the primitive one-two-three-shift, box step was my outer limit. Despite my cool guy posing, I was far too self-conscious to go out on the floor and fast dance, jitterbug. Some things never change.
Scanning the room’s darkness, I spotted a group of girls. I knew a few of them, the rest I knew of, rather than knew. They were from an adjoining neighborhood. A few of them had gone with guys from our corner. They were my own age, seniors, and that was the problem. Seventeen-year-old girls didn’t go out with seventeen-year-old guys. They went out with guys older than themselves, older than me, guys who had cars. In fact, I was surprised to see them at a dance where most of the crowd was socially beneath their notice. I found out later that they had come to the dance with a group of younger girls from their high school, as a preliminary to a 1950’s girl-type phenomenon, a pajama party.
In the sparse patches of moving light, I picked out a couple of new faces in that animated crowd of girls. Hmmm! What have we here? Before I knew it, I had focused on one girl. In my memory of that moment, now over a half-century ago, she seemed to be isolated from the group and the little bit of light in the room seemed to be drawn to her. I found myself watching her, moving as she moved, to keep her in sight. The next number was a fast one, and she jitterbugged to it with one of her girl friends. I moved as close as I could without drawing notice to watch as she danced. Again, despite my “Mister Cool” pose, I was anything but aggressive in going after girls. The truth was that in most of my relationships up to that time, I had been the object of pursuit. I tried to hide my shyness, my debilitating self-consciousness and a paralyzing fear of rejection behind a non-committal, jokester’s facade. It probably didn’t work, but I couldn’t face the alternatives.
Something beyond my conscious understanding was overriding my emotional survival instincts, an unreflective courage, a boldness. Who was this girl? What was happening that could cause me to put my persona at risk? Remember now, the personality crushing-rejection, the angst, the lifelong chilling effect on your ability to form lasting relationships that resulted when some unthinking teen-aged object of your desire responded negatively to your “wanna dance?”
As the jitterbug number ended, a slow piece began. I crossed the few steps separating us and asked her to dance. I passed the first cursory inspection and we moved together out into the flow of the dance. I remember those moments. We didn’t exchange three words during that first dance. At the end of the song, I said thanks, and with feigned casualness, I strolled back toward my friends. I was bothered, bothered, bothered and I didn’t know what it was. My head was already mapping plans. I wouldn’t push this tonight. I knew several of the girls in that group, and on Monday or on Tuesday, I would call one of them. I would find out who I had been dancing with, where she lived, and I would take it from there. This was completely out of character for me; not the ardor, but the taking of action in response to the ardor.
Not more than five minutes had gone by since that dance number when the voice on the P.A. system announced a “ladies choice.” Once in a while, I would be the recipient of such a choice. It was flattering and might even indicate that a girl was interested in you. More often, it was no more than a friendly invitation from someone you already know, someone who just wanted to dance.
I turned to look across the room and found myself face to face with my immediate obsession. She had crossed the hall and was asking me if I wanted to dance. This time it seemed I couldn’t shut up. I asked her name, where she went to school, what was she doing with that crowd, and on and on and on. The music seemed to end almost as it had begun, and I immediately felt that I had just blown my chances, prattling away like an idiot. What kind of a jerk-off impression had I made? I dove into my emotional bunker and began thinking in terms of damage control. I would keep away from her for the rest of the night and maybe I could figure out a way to make a better second impression.
The dance went on forever. I kept my distance, but I kept a close eye on her the rest of the evening. I couldn’t help myself. Promptly at eleven-thirty, the syrupy lines of “Goodnight Sweetheart” began playing, the lights came up and the dance was over. Instead of heading outside to hang with the guys, I took a perch on the foyer railing so that everyone coming out had to go past me. I’m sure my taking up this strange position was noted by more than a few of the people who knew me. “What the hell’s he doing up there?” But, not even my awful self-consciousness was a factor at this point.
Near the end of the crowd coming out of the hall was that gaggle of chattering girls. And, there she was among them. Throwing myself to the fates, I dropped from my perch on the counter and cut my way through the crowd, heading her off before the door and the world outside. Without explanations, without niceties, in the moving crowd, I asked her for her telephone number. Somehow in the midst of the people milling through, I got the number. The kid who couldn’t remember the simplest lesson in eleven years of school, immediately committed the exchange name and the number to the hard disk in his head. While I was repeating the numbers, she disappeared.
I got a ride to the corner. Jimmy’s Tomato Pies was closed for the night and three or four of the guys were standing around under the street light. I hung out for a while, but I was feeling bored, restless. A kid who lived a few blocks from me announced he was going home and I joined him on the late night walk through the neighborhood. We stopped on the darkened street in front of his house and sat on the concrete steps under the fast moving clouds of a blue-black September sky. I remember talking, feeling compelled to talk. My companion on the step could have cared less. I was like young Stephen on his walk with Lynch. I had to have an ear to articulate in some way what was happening to me. I told him that I wanted to start doing things differently. I wanted something more. I told him that my life had become a kind of a drag; just hanging out, drinking, always in trouble. It wasn’t all that much fun anymore. I told him that I had met a girl tonight.
Tags: 1945-1955, 1954, a & p, am radio, bismarck's alliance system, blue suede shoes, blue-collar, bob seger, christian brothers, corner-lounging, dioscesan high schools, do-wop, duck's ass, existentialism, flat head v-8, goodnight sweetheart, hipster, james joyce, jaques tati, juvenile delinquent, ladies choice, latin, latin/irish catholic church, memoir, mr. hulot's holdiay, nato, night moves, olney, ortega y gassett, pajama party, parish dances, pegged pants, philadelphia, portrait of the artist as a young man, prep school, public school, spanish, springsteen, stephen deadelus, summer school
