My Mistake (4 page)

 

Mrs. Giles, my ninth-grade English teacher, assigns us homework of writing sentences that are declarative, compound, complex, interrogative, and imperative, and one sentence in the passive voice. I write:

 

“The dog chased the cat.”

“The dog chased the cat, and then the cat chased the dog.”

“After the dog chased the cat, the cat chased the dog.”

“Did the dog chase the cat?”

“Dog, chase the cat!”

And, of course: “The cat was chased by the dog.”

 

She says it's very funny and gives me a C.
What?
A
C?
But it is the beginning of my humor-writing career.

 

Fourteen to twenty-one

 

In Nyack, The Boys play sports, get into small amounts of trouble with the cops, find bars that allow us to pretend to be eighteen. Peruna's in Spring Valley, the Deer Head in Blauvelt, but mainly the wonderful bar owned first by Charlie and called Charlie's, and then, when Charlie's bartender Paul O'Donoghue takes over the business, O'Donoghue's. When I'm home from college, and when Paul gets a little tipsy himself and starts talking with a brogue and calling out “Up the Irish!,” I sometimes get to tend bar, at two or so in the morning and after the place has been locked up and only The Boys and a few stragglers—like the closeted doctor who once treated me for groinal ringworm with a little too much interest and the high-school Latin teacher, Stan Callahan, the good Callahan, grizzled, portly—remain. (There was also a bad Callahan teaching at Liberty Street. I stole the key ring from his desk and threw it away. Everyone hated him.) I sometimes run into my brother at O'Donoghue's and am proud to be seen with him, as he was one of The Boys in his class.

Mainly, for both of us, Nyack High School is “American Graffiti East.” There are sports and friends and Fifties clothes, like white bucks and argyle socks and white shirts and khakis and at one point chartreuse shoelaces, and for the girls sack dresses, girdles, white blouses, and circle pins, and there are romances and diabolically unique bra clasps and soccer and baseball practice and loud-muffler cars that break down all the time and “marriage manuals” left in bookshelves for adolescents to read and pickup basketball games in the freezing cold, when your hands start out like slabs of ice and magically end up as warm as waffles and tingle when you go indoors, and the mesmerizing Army-McCarthy hearings on television sets that show test patterns in the mornings and summer jobs as park attendants and the blunt truths, for middle-class white kids, of “race music” and then the rest of early rock and roll, which seems so impossibly innocent now, and dancing the lindy—yes, the lindy—for hours at parties. My girlfriend Pam, who when we graduate is voted Wittiest, is the daughter of the man who drives the bus that my parents take to their jobs in New York.

Mike is cool. Six feet two, black hair, very white teeth, handsome, smart. On the swimming team. He works construction one summer—he's a hod carrier—and at the end of August he is Mediterraneanly tan and has put on ten pounds of muscle. He has good girlfriends—one especially good one thinks I'm cute and kisses me—and he drinks as much as he should, as much as we all do, with our class rings turned around at Peruna's so that they look to the bartender like wedding bands, we hope. The drinking age is eighteen, so kids from neighboring New Jersey, where it is twenty-one, cross the state line to drink and get into fights with us.

For all the fun, I continue to be anxious and timid, at least outside familiar circumstances, but Mike takes care of some part of that after I get to Nyack. He makes me go out for sports by not allowing me into the house after school. He takes over from my father in teaching me how to drive and sees to it that I fit in. He still makes terrific fun of me. My hair is thick and, to my shame, curly verging on kinky, and I am always trying to straighten it, with the aid of Brylcreem or Vitalis. One day, when I'm about to go somewhere with him in his '49 Plymouth with Duotone mufflers and I ask him to wait because I have to comb my hair, he says, “Your what?” And from then on, to him, my hair is my “what,” as in, “Get a whatcut—your what's too long.” But I often get the better of him in the taunting that goes on between us—I am quicker and sharper with words. I set the gold standard for ridiculous, devastating insults when, after he has punched me in the arm, leaving it close to paralyzed, and called me a “blivet” for taking a long time in the shower, I look at him with his towel wrapped around his waist and say, “At least I don't have Jewish nipples.” He looks down at his chest with concern and goes to find our mother to ask her if what I said was true.

Mike is always telling me, as I trail three grades behind him, how much harder school will be “next year,” but I keep on outdoing him, at least partly because he keeps on challenging and goading me. So then he disdains me as an intellectual, even though I am also a pretty good athlete. But I can tell that he's also proud of me, especially after I get to college. My striving is not only to compete with him but to please him. His opinion of me means more than anyone else's. (Later, on the day before his wedding, we're playing pickup basketball outside his fiancée's house in New Jersey, and I make some semi-fancy move or other, and Mike stands back and says, “I can see I've taught you well, my boy.”)

 

Younger brothers often idealize their older brothers, but Mike really is pretty remarkable. He is admired and praised in high school, and at Dartmouth he is rushed by Alpha Delta Phi, the crazy and wonderful fraternity that later becomes the basis for
Animal House,
and is beloved by his brothers there as well. Chris Miller, who wrote the screenplay for
Animal House,
is a Dartmouth freshman when Mike is a senior. I actually know some of the real-life people whose nicknames the movie uses—Otter and Flounder, for example. There is a room under the attic stairs in Nyack that my mother names Flounder's Room, because Flounder—Nick Fate, a name I always wished I had—being far from his home in Oklahoma, sleeps off some of his Thanksgiving drunks there. My girlfriends always, but always, fall in love with Mike. He is smooth, funny, relaxed.

He and I talk to each other a lot about sex and other basic matters. He tells me about resorting one night, in the absence of something more conventional, to bacon grease. I tell him about sleeping with a girl who, once she is interested and involved in what is going on, can have an orgasm from simply being ordered emphatically enough to have one. He tells me about a prostitute he unwittingly picked up in Copenhagen who was obsessed with Buddy Holly and, to his shock, gave him a squirting demonstration of lactation. On long-distance car trips we don't stop to use gas-station bathrooms but piss in the beer cans we've just emptied—and then marvel at how warm piss is. We practice flatulence as a second language.

For all these and other mild delinquencies, at Dartmouth, where he careens around the Northeast on “road trips” to women's colleges, betting his life against alcohol and sleep, Mike becomes more and more conservative, in reaction to our family's radical background and as a result of hanging around with kids much richer than we are. He wants us to put “estate lights” around the house in Nyack and is embarrassed that the windows don't have beautiful curtains. In law school and for a little while afterward, he supports the Vietnam War, which makes my parents and me both angry and sad. Eventually, though, he changes his mind, no doubt partly because of the strong views of his girlfriend, who works for a nonprofit agency. He seems to be headed toward the liberal fold—the fold into which most children of the mid-century Socialists and Communists my family know have folded themselves. He never gets all the way there.

 

Fifteen

 

My biology teacher, Mr. Z., asks the class if anyone knows the name of the bush that has yellow flowers early in the spring. I raise my hand, am called on, and say, “Forsythia.” A few minutes later, when the class ends, Mr. Z. asks me to stay behind for a minute. He says to me, “You know, it's a good thing that you know the names of flowers and things like that, but you might want to keep that kind of stuff to yourself.” He adds: “You know.”

“No,” I say. “Why?”

“Well, because other kids might think you're a homosexual.”

It will take me years to purge most of the racism and homophobia that I inhale in the Fifties at Nyack High School. I actively dislike myself for giving in to these and other bigotries—though it's true that my friends freely, relentlessly use such slurs against and among each other, along with insults (a lame white version of the Dozens) to each other's mothers and disparaging nicknames based on the way we look. My nickname for six years was “Schnoz.”

Honestly? Vestiges of these hateful reflexes remain in me to this day, like a splinter or buckshot under the skin which never works its way out.

I steal 45s from the little record store in Nyack. The owner of the store follows me out the door one Saturday and grabs me by the shirt collar and drags me back inside and calls the police. A red-faced cop yells at me for half an hour. He asks me who else steals records. I give him the name of a bully—someone everybody detests. I doubt that he steals records. The cop then calls my parents. They come to pick me up, and they say nothing to me about this embarrassment except, from my mother, “This is very disappointing.”

I never steal again. Well, I do. That summer, in the record store in Great Barrington, I steal the same record I had tried to steal in Nyack when I was caught. It is a two-disc Elvis Presley 45 album with four of his biggest hits, including “Blue Suede Shoes.”

I soon learn that this is a cover of Carl Perkins's recording of the same song, the song he himself wrote—as Pat Boone covered Little Richard's “Tutti Frutti,” hilariously, and the Crew Cuts covered the R&B hit “Sh-Boom” (with a little less self-embarrassment). This appropriation makes me indignant, now that I have gone straight, at least with regard to other people's property.

 

Sixteen

 

I get a summer job as a park attendant at Hook Mountain State Park, in Upper Nyack. The boss is a guy named John. He does the Jumble in the
New York Daily News
in thirty seconds flat. There is a park cop on duty here in the summer. He is a high-school teacher in a nearby town during the school year and is for some nutty reason allowed to carry a gun here at the park. A gun. In 1957. He keeps touching it, and once, when some picnickers disregard his barked order to clean up the lawn around them, puts his hand on the butt of his gun and says, “Don't make me use this.”

My job is to clean out the toilets and pick up stray pieces of paper on the grass with one of those sticks with a nail on the end of it. Cleaning out the toilets: Better not to go into it, I think, as the toilets did not flush but needed to be flushed out with a hose. Never mind. The Dalit of Nyack, New York—that's me. Anyway, the park is on two levels—down by the Hudson River and high up on a kind of plateau—connected by a winding road. And when I'm supposed to be on litter patrol I often sit and relax on a big rock above that road, so that I can see when John is driving up and get up and get to “work” about ten seconds before he arrives. Sometimes I jog for a minute, in this direction or that, so as not to be in exactly the same place every time he reaches the top of the hill. A good deal of work to avoid work.

John calls me “Bob,” because the legal name on my working papers is Robert D. Menaker. I feel like a different person when he calls me “Bob.” I feel like—well, Bob.

 

Seventeen

 

A few months before graduating from Nyack High School, I am walking through the halls with my shirt untucked—against the rules. Doc Malinsky, the trainer for the athletic teams—a mean, small-eyed man with a belt-cantilevered belly—stops me in the hall.

“Tuck it in, Menaker.”

“I'd rather not.”

“I ought to punch you right in your fucking mouth, you fucking Communist.”

A few weeks later, Doc Malinsky suddenly leaves town. He was caught blowing a junior with a perpetually maniacal grin in the training room. Jack Lawrence, the handsome baseball coach, Doc's friend, who wears colorful muscle T's and is married to a gargoyle of a woman, and the one who deliberately threw a hard pitch at me during batting practice one day, disappears with Doc.

 

Just before high-school graduation, I and a friend of mine—the guy whose house I stole money from when the family was away—sneak out at 2 a.m. with a can of green paint and two paintbrushes. We walk up to the high school, about a mile away, and paint our class number—'59—in six or seven different places on the outside of the building. The next morning, it elicits admiration from the high-school kids and outrage among teachers and the administration. I have an impulse to tell them that when we found an open window the night before, we went inside the building but, after talking it over, decided that vandalizing the interior would be going too far.

 

We are studying a poem in Dr. Roody's Advanced Placement senior English class. She asks us to say what the word “grace” brings to mind. I raise my hand and say something like “Being physically graceful.”

“What else?” Dr. Roody says.

“Kindness or courtesy—like ‘gracious,'” I say.

“Well, yes, in a way. Isn't there something else important?” I can't think of anything besides my mother's maiden name, Grace, but to mention that would bring some after-class derision from my classmates and probably a reprimand from Dr. Roody. I don't make my mistake.