A Tale of the Old West...kind of....

The Lone Ranger and Tonto were in a bar when a cowboy came in and hollered,

"Hey, anybody got a white horse parked outside?!"

The Lone Ranger looked up from his beer and said,

"Yeah, pardner, it's mine, why?" said the Lone Ranger.
"Well," the cowpoke said, "that noon sun is beatin' down on that thar horse and he looks like he's gonna pass out!"

With some concern, the Lone Ranger said,

"Thanks, pardner, I'll go put him in the shade if I can find some.
"No, Kemo Sabe," said Tonto, "me go run around Silver, wave arms in air, make fan, keep Silver cool."
"Well, thanks, Tonto," said the Lone Ranger as Tonto headed for the door.

About five minutes later, another cowboy came into the saloon and shouted,

"Hey, anybody got a white horse out front?"

"Yeah, pardner, it's mine, why?" asked the Lone Ranger.

"You left your injun running!" the fellow replied.

Crawling Down Memory Lane

There was a live kiddie cartoon show on from 4 to 5, Monday thru Friday, on Channel 13 out of Newark in the late 40's and early 50's that featured terrible silent cartoons starring Farmer Gray, a cat, and tons of mice...the show was called Junior Frolics, hosted by "Uncle Fred" Sayles... after sending in enough boxtops from cereal or something, I got to be on the show...my mother took us down to the station by bus from East Orange and we got there pretty early and I wanted to sit right next to Uncle Fred and whoever she talked to put me there...then the show started and out came this mostly bald guy in a shiny blue suit who announced that Uncle Fred was sick and he was subbing for him...then he sat right down next to me...with a really bad case of  nervous armpit odor mixed with stale cigarette stench...all I remember is he had a silver pinky ring with a fake blue star sapphire in it...when we got home, my grandmother was really mad at me because she said I had sat there for the whole hour with a pissed-off frown on my face....it would have been different if UNCLE FRED had been there! If you want to see how bad those early black-and-white cartoons were, Google UNCLE FRED JUNIOR FROLICS on YouTube and you should get a cartoon called "The Life of a Cat."

A former student asked me recently, “B., what’s the coolest thing you’ve ever done?”  It wasn’t something that I’d been considering at the time, but after a few moments, here’s what I came up with:
In the spring of 1963 – my freshman year in college – Count Basie and his band came to Montclair State College.  I was supposed to meet Charley Blakely, a fellow freshman from North Bergen, and I did, but he was about ten minutes late and when we entered the large gym where the basketball games were played, it was about 8:15 and the place was jammed. 
They had the bleachers on both sides down but there didn’t seem to be a space anywhere.  Directly across from us (we were standing inside the lobby doors), against the back wall, Count Basie and the band were already putting the jazz into the New Jersey air.
“It doesn’t look like there’s a seat left. Whaddaya wanna do?” Charley asked me. “Shit, I don’t know,” I probably replied. “How come no one’s sitting on the floor?” he said. “You know they don’t want anyone to walk on that floor with shoes on,” I said. “But we’re both wearin’ tennis shoes,” Charley answered. (This was long before today’s hundred-dollar, glorified sneakers; you either wore black-and-white high-tops or white “tennis” shoes, even if you never picked up a racket.) “You wanna go sit in front of the band?” I suggested, without thinking much about it. “Yeah,” Charley said…and we started walking across the darkened gymnasium floor, knowing that every eye in the stands was probably watching us.
“If The Count looks at us like we’re a couple ‘o dickheads, I’m gonna die,” Charley whispered, voicing my exact thoughts.
Anyway, we got to the out-of-bounds or base line, right under where the basket and backboard had been raised, and we sat down, like in the lotus position.  The band was still blasting away, and off to the right, behind his piano, sat Count Basie, dressed in some kind of nautical outfit with a blue blazer and a white captain’s hat.  As I watched, he looked up from ‘tinkling the ivories,’ did that thing with his hand, like he was shooting a pistol, then gave us a nod and a wink, and went back to playing the piano. 
Within a minute, the entire stands had emptied out and there were about five thousand other MSC students sitting on the floor behind us.  We stayed there the entire concert, unwilling to lose our “seats.” 
When the band had played the last encore, I found a sheet of red poster board that had been stapled to a bulletin board on the back wall and tore a piece off and went over to ask The Count for his autograph.  He took a pen out of his blazer pocket and signed the piece of red cardboard and then, with a smile, kind of whispered, “Pretty gutsy move you boys made tonight.  I was ‘fraid they’d come drag you off the floor. I woulda told them to leave ya alone. You like jazz?”
After I stammered out some kind of “yes,” I shook his hand – he had rings on three fingers – and left. 
That autograph is still in my wife’s hope chest – don’t ask me why.  I guess that was the “coolest” thing I’ve ever done…unless someone reminds me of something “cooler.”

 

Fifty Years Ago Today

       June 5, 1964: the last day of finals for the spring semester at Montclair State.   It's around ten o'clock that morning and I'm walking to my car, figuring I can get to work early and make some overtime that week.  That's when I was interrupted with a "Hey, stupid, where ya going?" from behind me.  Looking back, I see Dave heading for the same student parking lot.  He jogs up and asks the same question again.
        "Goin' to work, where else?"
        "Screw that!  Let's celebrate.  Get some beer and go swimmin'!" he counters.  I ask him where, since it's only June fifth and most of the lakes would be closed during the week, since public schools would be in session until the third week in June at least.
        He mentions a lake up Route 23 in Butler.  I tell him I don't have a suit or a towel and I want to make some overtime.
       "We can stop at my house an' I'll get you a towel.  You can wear one of Bob's (his younger brother by a couple years) suits.  Pick up a six-pack of Chug-a-Mugs.  We've gotta celebrate!"
       Well, the temptation was too great and anyway, it was a beautiful day, I was sure I had aced the English exam I'd just taken, and between five extra hours at E.J. Korvette's in West Orange or three cold Rheingolds, well, I followed him to his house where I left my car and off we went to the lake called McDonald's...which we found closed with a wire cable across the entrance.  Two more lakes farther up Route 23 were also closed.
       "This sucks!" I said, "take me back to your place so I can get to work."
       "Wait a minute, there's one more lake up ahead.  If that's closed, I'll take you back."
       A mile or two north was Sun Tan Lake...and the entrance was open. We drove in and looked around but all that was there was a Jeep on the highway side of the lake and next to it, some guy raking the sand.
       "It's not open, either," I said. "Just that guy doin' some maintenance an' he probably has the entrance open to go in and out."
      Dave reluctantly nodded and drove in far enough to make a U-turn.  That's when we saw a group of people on the opposite shore waving to us.
      "Wait!  It's open!" he shouted.
      "Naah, those are probably the kids of the owners who live in that white house up over there (on the hill above the lake)," I argued.
       Dave ignored me and drove his 1958 Ford over to that side.  Three girls in bathing suits came running up to the car: a chuibby brunette, a cute little blond, and another brunette on the thin side.  On a blanket sat a guy and behind him, something large and round, wrapped in towels, that reminded me of a statue of Buddha.
      "Hey, is this lake open?" Dave asked.
     "Yeah,"  the larger brunette said in an overly loud voice. "That guy over there (pointing to the one raking the sand next to the Jeep) will come over and get your money.  It's three bucks.  You can change in that building over there," she added, pointing to a cinderblock building a few yards away.
      Dave looked at me; I just shrugged.  So we drove over and parked next to the building, went in and changed into swim trunks.
      "I want the blond," he informed me. 
     "Fine.  Margot's coming home from Boston late tonight an' I've got no interest in some other babe," I told him.  Margot was my girlfriend from high school and was returning from her first full year at a two-year business school in Beantown, where her old man had sent her in hopes of our two-year romance dying because of the long-distance situation.  The last time I'd seen her was at Christmas, although we wrote each other almost daily.  Anyway....
       Going back outside and joining them on their blankets, we found out right away that the girls were all skipping school on Senior Skip Day at Clifton Senior High School.  We swam a little, played that "chicken game" where the girls sat on the guys' shoulders and tried to pull each other off; much to Dave's displeasure, the little blond chose to jump on me.  We went back to the beach blankets and talked, although I don't remember anything we talked about.  I think the girls were impressed that the two of us were "older" and "college boys," although it had never impressed me.  The problem was that after three hours of finishing our Rheingold and sharing their sandwiches, the little blond had plopped herself down next to me on the beach blanket each time,  much to the increased irritation of Dave, who had been stuck with the loud brunette.  I found out that the little blond was named Toni (the others were a girl named Danny -- for Danielle -- she was the loud, chubby one...and Jane, who was the girlfriend of the guy whose name was Charlie; he was home on leave from the Air Force).  The large person in the towels turned out to be the younger sister of Toni and she was wrapped up like that because she got sunburned easily and painfully.
        Sometime around noon, Toni had asked me if I wanted to take a walk so we followed some kind of nature trail around the small lake.  What I had begun to marvel at was that I could talk to her very easily, without feeling as if I had to act "cool" or make up some bullshit to impress her, the way I'd usually felt when I first met a girl.  After all, Margot was only my second girlfriend, the first having been stolen from me by divorce and the state of Maryland (you can read about it in my novel, FOR GLORIA, WHEREVER YOU ARE).  And much to my dismay and surprise, by the time we were making our way back to the rest of the gang, I found her hand had found its way into mine.  Talk about feeling guilty!
         Around two, I told Dave I needed to get back to my car so I could get to work by three, so we said our goodbyes and went into the building to get back into our clothes.  He bitched at me the whole time about being stuck listening to Danny "babble on and on about nothing." 
        "Whaddaya want me to do?!  Toni just kept sittin' down next to me!" I grumbled as I rolled up Bob's swim trunks in the borrowed towel.  "I told ya that Margot's coming home tonight.  Goin' swimming was your idea, remember?!"
       "Yeah, well, you got a girlfriend, I don't at the moment!  That Toni has a really nice ass and Danny's got no tits at all, if you didn't notice!" he snapped.  I had noticed that Danny, for all her chubbiness, was really lacking in the chest area.  I hadn't noticed Toni's rear, however.
       "Fine, let's go, okay?!" I growled, having a lot of other thoughts racing through my mind all of a sudden.
       The two girls were standing next to Dave's car when we exited the building.  We said our goodbyes and thanked them again for sharing their ham-and-tomato sandwiches with us.  He started the car and we headed out the gravel drive toward the highway.  We were halfway there when I suddenly shouted "Stop!"
       "Huh?!" he said.
       "Stop the fucking car!" I shouted again.  He slammed on the brakes and then looked at me.
      "You forget something back there?!" Dave asked with a frown.
      "Yeah!" I said.  Digging in his glove compartment, I found a matchbook and a ballpoint and jumped out of the car.  I ran back to where Toni and Danny were still standing, now with frowns on their faces.
      Walking up to Toni, and cleared my throat, I think, because I seem to recall that it was suddenly dry.
      "Uhh, do you think I could have your phone number...umm...to call you sometime?" I stammered.
      She just smiled and told me what it was.  I wrote it down on the inside of the matchbook.  I guess I said "thanks" and trotted back to the car.
      "What the hell was that all about?!" Dave asked as I closed my door and put his pen back in the glove compartment.
      "Asked her for her number," I explained rather lamely.
      "You what?! I thought your fucking girlfriend is comin' home tonight an' you're not interested in anyone else!" he yelled as he put the car in gear and spun gravel until we hit the asphalt of Route 23.
       Between the confusion in my mind and the guilty feelings I was experiencing, it took me five days to call her to ask if I could take her out.  It took another month of secretly seeing her before I broke it off with Margot.  And the rest is history.
       If I hadn't gone swimming that day, our paths would never have crossed.  I lived in Livingston, she lived in Clifton, miles apart with only my college in between. 

        And the rest is history...a long, fifty-year history that'll have to wait for the next stories.  But every time I taught Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken" in my high-school English classes, I always told this story.

CHILDHOOD etc.

 When childhood still held a certain amount of innocence....

When I was about eight or nine, at the dinner table one night, I asked my parents what a lesbian was, having encountered the word in my reading.  There was a stunned silence except for my two older brothers and sister, who either had milk spurting from their noses or were choking on their food.  The bulging eyes and the silence of my parents was odd because my father considered himself the font of knowledge.  Realizing that something was extraordinarily wrong, after dinner I consulted the dictionary.  The next night, to save myself further embarrassment, I told them all, with a happy smile, that I had discovered that a lesbian was an inhabitant of the island of Lesbos, and this resulted in the same milk episode and stunned stares, but I felt vindicated…although I didn’t know what vindicated meant, either. 

I was a young child…or a not-quite-old boy…when I saw these large letters on the sides of milk cartons in our family fridge: HOMO (which, of course, stood for HOMOgenized)…but having recently heard more-informed friends (who were blessed with OLDER brothers who could explain things that parents wouldn’t) …and seeing those letters and having heard those same classmates calling other guys “Homo!  Homo!” made me not want to drink any more milk…

35 YEARS OF TEACHING - a retrospective of sorts

THE BEGINNING AND THE END…FIRST AND LAST DAY….

Christmas vacation, 1971, soon to be 1972. 

       A weekday in a chilly, empty school.  I was sitting in an old wooden chair with casters in room C213, central wing, Clifton Senior High School, in what was going to be my first classroom.  Four classes: two junior English honors, one A-track, one C-track.  Only four classes because the elderly woman that I was replacing halfway through the school year had been in poor health and her department chairman had given her one fewer class than everyone else, replacing it with a hall-monitor duty that amounted to little.

       I had just finished my student teaching in the senior (or north) wing in the week before Thanksgiving break, and had evidently made a good impression on Mrs. Rudin, the English department chairman, who had come in to observe me six times, not the usual procedure dictated by my college. My cooperating teacher had left me (gladly) with her least desirable three classes (two D-track, one C-track), keeping her two A-tracks for herself.  Two days of “observing” her right at the start of the school year – the observations amounting to hearing her yell a lot while handing out books and forms to be filled out – I had told her I was ready to start on that Thursday, September 7^th.

                “You want to take over a class tomorrow?!” she had asked with some surprise in her voice, having been used to other student-teachers who had observed for two weeks before taking anything on.
                “No, give me all three.  I want to get started now,” I had replied, explaining that since it was the beginning of the year, I would be more like their teacher from the beginning instead of replacing her a couple weeks in.  I wanted to start teaching; I had done enough “observing.”
                So she gladly left, only to reappear twice in the following two-and-a-half months to do the required (by my college) two teacher observations and fill out the accompanying forms.  But she had also raved about me to Mrs. Rudin (I guess she had heard some kids talking about my classes) and without my knowledge, they had already decided that I would replace Mrs. Eckstein, hence Mrs. Rudin’s stern request to me that I not accept any job offers from other schools between Thanksgiving and New Year’s.  I also found out later that year that students in my cooperating teacher’s other two classes had constantly bugged her about why they hadn’t gotten me for their teacher, too.  If I never mentioned it, Mrs. Moeller was long overdue for retirement, not because of her age as much as the fact that she hadn’t changed her teaching in twenty years…some of the worksheets she had offered to me had been brown with age.  But she did give me an A for student-teaching, glowing reports to my college, and was instrumental in landing me in that creaking wooden chair that I was now occupying in room C213.

                After what had begun four months before in a different wing of the school, now I was sitting in what was to be and would become, on January 3^rd, my classroom.  I stared at the class lists on the nicked and scarred wooden desk in front of me.  I had read the brief notes my predecessor had left for me, about which kids might give me trouble.  She liked to use the word imps a lot.  But considering the level of homogeneously-tracked classes I had inherited (Clifton Senior High School had made English classes in ability groupings, from Honors down to D-track), and being in a suburban New Jersey school that sent 97% of its graduates (average graduating class: 1,000-plus to four-year schools, many of them Ivy-covered ones, I didn’t foresee problems.  After all, I hadn’t had any with the three classes of “sweathogs” that I had received from Mrs. Moeller, my cooperating teacher.  In fact, those three classes would be ones that threw me such memorable goodbye parties on November 22^nd  that I would never forget them – the parties or the kids. 

                  The D-track kids used to like to say that the school gave them that designation because “it stands for Delinquent…Degenerate…Derelict…Doofus…or just Dumb.”  These were kids that were able to understand, to read, and to actually enjoy Beowulf; they hated Ethan Frome.  They couldn’t understand why Ethan didn’t just “boink” Mattie when Ethan’s wife Zeena was out of town. I had tried to explain the morality of the time period, but….and I still don’t think that one D-track class paid for the Seiko watch they gave me…but I was afraid to ask how they managed to raise the money. And yeah, it was a real Seiko, not a New York City sidewalk knock-off with plastic gears.
                So in a few days, the day after New Year’s Day, I would meet four classes (average of 25 in each) of students that I would be able to call “my kids” and not kids that I would have to return to another teacher, like books at the library.

                The room itself, one wall made of tilt-in windows covered with banks of Venetian blinds, the rest painted cinder blocks with attached chalkboards and a bulletin board along the back, smelled faintly of chalk dust and floor wax.  The desks were relatively new, with chairs that slid under them instead of the old one-piece desks that I would inherit in subsequent years in subsequent classrooms. (We never got to keep the same classrooms from year to year, one of the numerous annoyances perpetrated but an unfriendly-to-teachers administration, led behind the scenes by a vindictive and evil assistant female principal who preferred women (both in her little coterie and in her sex life).  It was always a real thrill trying to find a janitor who wasn’t on “light duty” to help move the full, three-drawer file cabinet to the next rooms at the beginning of each year, the new room which was often on another floor; the custodians were trusted with keys to the elevator, but we college graduates, most with master’s degrees, were not.  The principal himself was a spineless ex-shop teacher who had been appointed by the politically connected (and politically appointed) superintendent to be a complete ‘yes man.”  When the principal took one of his very infrequent walks out of his office (which was far removed from where any learning was going on) just before Christmas break to wish each of us a “happy holiday” (he was Jewish), kids would always ask who the man was.  One year, a kid named Stanley thought he was Bela Lugosi.

                Anyway, the kids came back on January 3^rd that year.  It was a magical and challenging year and I remember almost every memorable kid from those four classes.  And the rest is history -- ten more years of Clifton history.

                THIRTY-FIVE YEARS PASS….

                Last day of school, June 2^nd 2006…first day of almost summer vacation. 

             A weekday in an air-conditioned, almost-empty school.  I was sitting in a slightly stained, upholstered, high-back chair with casters that a former principal had bequeathed to me when he got a better one.  The lights were still on in room 121, the inner, windowless classroom that I had occupied for 24 years, the only classroom I had occupied, so it had become the room where “MR. B’S BUNCH” had resided for those years as well, filing in for 180 days under the sign that announced “Through this door pass the greatest people in the world.”  They’d liked that for all those years…at least, most of them, I think.

                It was a room that had developed its own character – probably because of the character who taught there…a room filled with unimaginable stuff – more like the interior of a thrift store, if you disregarded the school desks: a grill from the front of a VW, a hanged teddy bear with a sign that read “SLACKER,”  a rack of sweaters hanging from the ceiling, sweaters for the girls who were always too cold for some reason…too much else to record here -- hanging from the ceiling in defiance of one psychotic fire marshall who had mistaken her fire marshall’s badge for Wyatt Earp’s.  A toilet seat that served as the bathroom pass (“Place over head” it said for the gullible).  The two full-glassed walls covered with posters and signs to keep the distractions passing outside in the halls to a minimum; two full file cabinets bursting with the accumulation of file folders filled with stuff that had been part of successful lessons.  Three bookcases and one tall turning stand stuffed with paperbacks and discarded library hardcovers; three separate tables scrounged and carried up from the dusty storeroom in the basement.  A computer table;  a cabinet like a shelved wardrobe.  And a huge old solid-oak desk once used by the IRS, purchased at a school auction for $40, the top sanded, stained, and refinished twice. 

                     ROOM 121, LOUISA COUNTY HIGH SCHOOL, “MR. B’S ROOM”

        

               On that June day, almost everything was gone; all the posters and personal stuff given away, purchased, or auctioned off to either students or other teachers, enough to buy a used laptop on eBay for $170.  All that remained were the pieces of school-issued and county-owned stuff: student desks, the flag, the computer and printer on the one table...and that stained chair. 

                As I sat in that hand-me-down chair, the sounds of lockers slamming shut and the last students dashing out of school on that last half-day, I thought back to what I had begun this whole experiment in mind-expansion with.  It didn’t seem like thirty-five years.  And I thought of my best friend John’s remark from a few years before, a man I had met and had immediately liked in my first year in Jersey. 

                “Remember old Mr. Hopkins when we first started?” John had asked.  Mr. Hopkins, an elderly history teacher who knew, on any day of the year, how many school days were left.
                “Did you ever think we’d be one of those ‘veterans,’ those old-timers?” John had added.
                I’d laughed a little ruefully and had shaken my head.
               Yeah, I thought about all of that…and all of the lessons I had taught, year after year, lessons that students had annually told me, on their written evaluations of me and my class – whether it was an English class or a writing course -- had had meaning for them.

“It’s over.  I’m never going to be doing this again,” I thought, and the feeling of the stress beginning to leave my body became replaced with some kind of panic.

“Who’s gonna teach them to write?!” The Voice asked me.  “Who’s gonna teach that stuff from Our Town and Huck and Beowulf?  The rest of them (referring to my “colleagues” at the time) don’t teach writing, they don’t teach grammar, they don’t do a damn thing or bring in a damn thing from outside the textbooks!  They teach to the damn SOL (state-mandated standardized) tests!  There’s not a single section of Advanced Comp scheduled for next year!

My anxiety was extinguished – at least momentarily – by a female colleague from another department who came down to give me a hug and wish me a happy retirement.  When she left, I got up and shut off the lights.  On my last classroom…on my last day of teaching.  And I could feel everything slowly draining out of me. 

The Voice returned one more time to tell me that I’d done my part and I couldn’t do it forever.  And The Voice was right, even though there is still no one teaching writing there anymore.

It was a good trip.  And retirement is wonderful. 

My Latest Novel

Hi.  My 16th novel on Amazon for Kindles and other readers  is now available.  Attached is the cover and below, the synopsis.  Thanks in advance for any and all support.

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WHISPERS

For everyone who has heard the voices, some of them are real. For everyone who has seen the signs, they are everywhere.  Listen, and you will hear; look, and you will see. Then you can understand. On your eighteenth birthday, someone your own age, someone that you have known for less than a year, goes off to die so that you may continue living; what do you do?  If you’re Matthew Morning, you make an annual pilgrimage to his grave to remind yourself of why you are still alive…and you tell the story. 

 

Start with Matthew, approaching eighteen in depressed rural Lee County, Virginia, in 1961 as he learns to understand the power of love for a girl named Ginger, daughter of a poor mining family. Add adventures in the woods, a mysterious and hidden old mansion on an equally mysterious mountain, abandoned houses, and the daily goings-on of a high school.   What do these places hold for three young friends -- one black, the others descendants of long-gone Native Americans -- brought together by accident, growing up quickly and trying to deal with the bigotry in a world that is not kind or patient, but also holds many beautiful secrets?  What will these boys – Matthew, TeePee, and Jeffie -- do without giving in or giving up?  Their backgrounds couldn’t be more different, yet the common ground they share and the strong bonds they form create a connectedness that will last beyond their lifetimes. Honor, justice, revenge, strength of family and heritage, tenderness, and bitterness – these will draw the reader into the story of a man, a teacher, as he recounts the turmoil of the most powerful year of his life, the year he lost everything and everyone he had come to love.  The novel moves between Matthew’s life with his mother in their first real home and his final year of high school, where he meets friends whose values and understanding will help him through the turmoil of death and incredible loss.  Ultimately, Matthew will be drawn into a dark experience that will require him to kill.