Prelude
I was thrown out of Hebrew school.
For breaking the rabbi's glasses.
Which he was wearing at the time.
While he was trying to drag me
from the room because
I was bouncing a ball. On the wall.
Over the head of the teacher.
While he was leading a class.
This was one of the first overt
demonstrations that I
"lacked the religious sense"
and also prefigured several years of:
"Wipe that smile off your face."
I was terribly pleased.
***
Did anyone ever really masturbate successfully
to a Dagwood and Blondie porno comic?
I suppose so. At fourteen, two pears on a
countertop, certain photographs of sea lions
or a month-old memory of Georgiana Bellisimo
walking out of the girls' room would do the trick
handily. Georgiana's gym shorts still have a pulse.
***
When I was fifteen, my family moved to Queens.
I faced Manhattan and started walking
but too late!- Grover Cleveland reached out with his
fat, tobacco-yellow fingers and dragged me to his high school,
a wet woolen building of great girth and heavy moustaches.
Not the French furniture and fine editions of
Thomas Jefferson High School, not the peg-legged
dance rhythms of Stuyvesant or the teachers in powdered
wigs at Washington. In the yearbook to come, many of the girls
aspire to be secretaries, but many others fear to aim that high.
Typists, they write. The boys all want to be firemen, cops, and Marines,
they say, but not really. Really, they just want to be mopes and
hang around the locker room forever.
***
It's only been half a century
so if you go to the old high school
break the rusty padlock
and feel your way toward
the dripping ruin of the locker room
if you give your eyes a chance
to find shapes in the blackness
there's every reason to think that
way over there in the corner
where the ash of his Lucky Strike
glows and fades and glows
Joe Dooley left fielder and back-up guard
who was never seen in a classroom
or a hallway or a cafeteria
who was always a senior but never a graduate
is still sitting there reading Smokey Stover
and old yellow Dick Young columns.
Dooley didn't commit too many
complete sentences but when the coach
didn't name him to the starting five
he said Hey, Hogan—
yer persecutin me on accounta my religion.
***
Marty and I discovered theater and
foreign movies and also that we
could get served in almost any gay bar
I presumed it was because I looked older,
maybe a little world-weary. Years later,
I realized that any sixteen-year-old
could probably get served in any gay bar.
even if he looked like Quasimodo and
there are probably bars where Quasimodo
would attract special interest. It also
occurred to me that Marty was looking for
more than a few underage beers.
***
This is for Billy Trowbridge
who knelt down in the crowded
locker room of Grover Cleveland
High School and fixed the zipper
on my fly which had come off
the track. May the gods bless Billy
Trowbridge.
In our junior year at Grover
Cleveland High School Bob
Johnson who was covered all over
in blond fuzz as though
his mother had never licked him
clean ran away and joined the Marines.
He went all through basic training at
Parris Island before they discovered
how old he was and sent him back to
the Ridgewood section of Queens and
Mrs. Greco's Spanish class and Mr.
Boyle's earth science class and
he had still, in his whole life
never crossed the river
into Manhattan.
Why have I not run into Nick Carbo
on the subway? We hardly knew each other
at Grover Cleveland High School but
we became pretty friendly on the subway.
Every five years without exception
I run into Nick Carbo on the subway.
Now suddenly
forty years have gone by and I haven't
run into Nick Carbo anywhere.
***
During a busy lunch hour, I am walking
down West 47th Street, the diamond block,
on my way to the Gotham Book Mart to
see if my new book is in the window,
(so I can stand off to the side and watch
people looking at it) and
a man in a dirty gray uniform is sweeping
the sidewalk in front of a jewelry store while
a horrible blue-haired shrew tells him loudly
and in colorful detail what a useless, incompetent
asshole he is.- He is Al Novack, who once held
a knife to my throat in the Grover Cleveland High
School locker room. Do I catch his eye for a
fraction of a second? Maybe, could be. But do
you understand? He is Al Novack who once held
a knife to my throat in the Grover Cleveland
High School locker room and I think
I'll have some wine with lunch.
***
Mr. Stone the economics teacher
in some dumb inappropriate connection
said to the class, Alas, poor Yorick
I knew him well, and the class laughed
too heartily. Not me: sixteen, pedantic, in opposition
and unamused. Humor is based on
knowledge, Stone said to me.
Horatio, I said
I knew him, Horatio.
We hate the bad teachers for a lifetime
for their lies, their betrayals, their preening egos
and their cold stupidity.
Where would Stone be buried?
There's a use for that skull.
***
Marion Toshack accuses me of plagiarism
in 11th grade English, although the paper
in question was written in class on a subject
assigned at the beginning of the hour. I have
apparently memorized the entire piece in advance
on the slim chance that she would pick that very topic.
Have I memorized a selection of essays on a variety
of topics? Is this seasonal or by category? Do I
offer a choice of voices, a little Francis Bacon, a
little E. B. White? Do I follow MLA style?
What faith the woman has in my abilities!
Does she boast of me to her colleagues?
I have a student so dedicated to his English studies
that he has written and memorized a hundred
essays just on the odd chance that I might
choose one of those subjects.
Yet she glares at me with her hard blue eyes, seemingly
unable to express the deep affection and gratitude she feels.
Meanwhile, not having figured any of this out yet,
I stand in front of her desk, shocked and helpless,
sputtering inarticulate protests.
But right then a door begins to open—the main door
that students aren't allowed to use and I
am out in the air
flying down the steps—two, five, ten
at a time. I am so light!
Heavy gray Grover, goodbye!