Memories of Adolescence

                           Memories of Age 14

It was one of those,

‘I’m having the first major testosterone rush of my life!’

‘No! I’M having the first major testosterone rush of MY life!’

‘Oh, yeah?’

‘Oh, yeah!’

‘Asshole!’

‘Sissy!’,

clumsy punches ending up in a grunting clinch

wrestled to the ground

type of fights.

Y’know?

               Wasteful Dimwittedness

It was 1961.

I was working in a land survey party

for the summer.

Since this was long before GPS

or even laser technology

it involved considerable grunt-work.

The first time I got out of our beat-up old van

at a refuelling stop

I was astounded to see the redneck who was driving

shoot a few squirts of petrol onto the ground

after he’d finished filling the tank.

He explained that he liked to see

the cost of the fill-up be a nice, round number.

I mean, even though gasoline

was only about 25 cents a gallon then

and the company was paying for it, not him,

that still seemed to me

to be about the most pointlessly dumb thing

I’d ever seen and heard in my life.

                 My Bongos and Beret Experiment

In 1961, when I was fifteen,

I was dead keen on becoming

a beatnik,

even though, living in a new suburban subdivision,

I’d never met one or to my knowledge even seen one at a distance.

I had, however, read some of their stuff and heaps of stuff about them,

and of course looked at pictures.

In 1961, when I was fifteen,

I listened to modern jazz

and folk music

as well as to rock & roll and the other crap that was on the radio.

In 1961, when I was fifteen,

I wrote free verse

and a savagely pessimistic short story that didn’t have a happy ending.

In 1961, when I was fifteen,

I dreamt of smoking pot and drinking cheap red wine

and of growing a beard.

In 1961, when I was fifteen,

I bought some bongo drums

because I’d seen some purported beatnik playing a set

to someone reading poetry

in a film clip somewhere,

but nobody would tell me how to play them

and my older sibling sneered when I tried to teach myself.

In 1961, when I was fifteen,

I bought a beret

because I’d seen pictures of beatniks wearing them,

but I’ve always been horribly allergic to wool,

and it felt like a strip of fire across my forehead.

In 1961, when I was fifteen,

I decided that I didn’t need to be able to play the bongos

or to wear a beret

in order to be a beatnik.

                             Mass

I was sixteen or seventeen,

and went to the beach

with a carload of friends.

We rented a room,

bought a shitload of beer,

and went out drinking all night.

I remember throwing a beer can

out the car window onto the beach,

thinking poetically

that since I knew that was wrong

it was clear evidence of my fallible humanity.

How the driver kept from crashing the car I’ll never know.

I crashed on a mattress at about dawn, myself.

An hour or so later my good friend John,

whose surname was of course Kennedy,

and who was a huge, brawny broth of a lad,

shook me awake,

telling me it was time to go to fisherman’s mass.

Reminding him that I was Jewish, I told him to go away,

but he physically lifted me to my feet

and dragged me to the church.

Still drunk, not even hung over,

I sat through too many minutes of the Latin mass –

this was the early sixties.

It reminded me of my grandfather’s shul,

where a bunch of old men mumbled prayers in Hebrew,

each at his own pace.

Different, yes,

but I didn’t know what the fuck was going on

at either place.

                             The Yard

Tough young sons and grandsons

of tough immigrants from Naples and vicinity

hung out in the schoolyard

of St Elizabeth’s Parochial High at night,

smoking, spitting, drinking

cheap fortified syrupy-sweet wine,

talking trash,

hoping to find a fight,

preferably unequal,

before the night was through.

Some daughters of conservative,

old-money, socially impeccable,

Anglo-Saxon families

found some members of the Yard

irresistibly attractive –

in a sexual sort of way.

I avoided direct conflict with them, myself,

which took some doing sometimes.

                 Authoritative Advice

The crew was the three of us,

all of us, ranging in age from 18 to 22,

coopted into that cushy summer gig

by having connections in local government,

an ancient and worthy form of corruption.

We drove around all day in a county car,

big, roly-poly Von from Wilmington’s ghetto,

cheerful, upper-class John, and me,

counting houses and other structures,

and coding them on maps and data sheets.

We were, officially, engaged in a ‘land-use survey’.

We also clowned around excessively,

took long, leisurely lunches, and drank beer.

Once or twice Von and John took an hour or so off

to go bowling, but I wasn’t into that.

Once when we were surveying a posh rural district

where the DuPonts and so forth lived,

all green and rolling, like in 19th-century landscape paintings,

with horses and mansions and tree-lined roads,

we stopped for lunch at John’s house,

where his suave upper-crust father,

in expensive leisurewear, served us beer and advice.

‘Boys,’ he told us, ‘always remember this:

there’s nothing as overrated in life as fucking,

and there’s nothing as underrated as a good shit.’

           At Nineteen

When I was at university

many long years ago,

I watched a movie called The Collector,

that won prizes and stuff.

It had layers upon layers

of textured meanings, mostly noir,

and presented deep, subtle

psychological insights.

I remember that what I took with me

when I left the theatre

was mostly a hormonal response

to the female lead.

                               On The Phone, In The Dark

During 1967, the last year of my undergraduate work,

I took to making frequent telephone calls

to various young women, trying to connect with them,

gormless about why it was impossible.

I was vaguely aware

of being good-looking and broad-shouldered,

intelligent and creative,

but was still in the dark about

my being psychologically damaged beyond repair,

and would be so for another forty years or so more.

               Sixties Student Sleaze

We shared an apartment, but I didn’t know him.

He spent every weekend with his parents,

who were friends of my aunt.

She was a friend of my girlfriend.

I don’t know how he met her.

It was a shotgun apartment,

so I had to walk through his bedroom

to get from the bathroom or the kitchen

to the front room or the front door.

One afternoon, whilst in transit,

I couldn’t help but notice them fucking.

She kept shouting his name.

I kept walking.

I was playing an LP and smoking a joint

when the noise from his room stopped.

Then one of them – I forget which –

came into the front room

and invited me to take part in Round Two.

And so she shouted my name

for however long we kept it up,

just as she’d shouted his.

Then, when we got to the short rolls

she reached down and grabbed my scrotum.

Nobody had ever done that to me before.

When I was pulling on my clothes

she stayed lying on his bed,

calling out both our names.

Callow and clueless as I was,

it wasn’t an experience that I savoured.