How Precious Was That While, page 3
It took me three years and five schools to get out of first grade. Not every school was bad, but taken as a whole, it was a nightmare. I remember sitting beside a boy the teacher didn’t like, and seeing how she changed the rules, such as being allowed to use the bathroom, to exclude him. Once she went after him with a ruler, but he avoided the blow. That made her angrier. “Didn’t feel that, eh? Well, take this!” She wasn’t satisfied until she knew he was really hurting. I had not seen such violence before, and hardly knew what to make of it, but the clarity of my memory over fifty years later shows the impression it made on me. A girl told of the worse school she had come from, where they made kids vomit, and then made them lick it up again. I wasn’t sure I believed that, but wasn’t sure it was untrue, either. Once my sister Teresa, who was now in the same grade I was, encouraged me to go with her to join a throng of children who were playing in a school field. I was doubtful, having experienced some of the new-student syndrome, but went along with her. But they quickly drove us away with epithets.
So did I ever stand up for myself? Well, sometimes I tried. Once I was visiting a neighbor boy, who had been friendly before, but then he had some other friends, so he told me to go away. I demurred, not liking the change in attitude and not yet understanding the gang syndrome in children. He became threatening. I kicked up with one foot, not really at him, just threatening to. He stepped in and punched me in the face. He was bigger than I was, and completely demolished me. I fled in tears, to some jeering. This was my first lesson in the rationale of the bully. Before I was out of first grade I began to learn to fight, and as time went on I got better at it, though inevitably my opponent was larger than I was. When it got so that I could take just about anyone within ten pounds of me, the bullying mostly stopped. But I did take some lumps from those who were considerably larger. One boy outweighed me by about thirty pounds, in ninth grade, when I weighed just under a hundred pounds. I wrestled him down to the floor, then let him go. He got up and started swinging, and his reach was so much longer than mine that I couldn’t get at him at all, and got beaten. After that he pushed me around constantly. Another was my own size, so I knew I could take him—but he palled around with a larger boy, and when anyone stood up to him, he brought in the larger boy and they both went at the one. The bullies ruled the roost. I was not the only one who stayed out of trouble mainly by not resisting, though sometimes this meant allowing the bully to copy my homework. I didn’t like it, but it was easier to yield my homework than to get beaten up. The school administration was oblivious, as always. That was a Quaker school, preaching the virtues of nonviolence, but those in charge wouldn’t have approved of the price of nonviolence had they taken the trouble to look into it. Reality can differ sharply from idealism.
In adulthood the arena became more intellectual than physical. While many boys finish their physical growth at fourteen, I did not; I gained almost a foot thereafter. All physical bullying stopped. Along the way some tested me, and that was as far as it went. One of the notorious bullies wrestled me in a friendly match; he offered to take on two of us together, but the other boy demurred, so I took him on alone. He was older, larger, and stronger, and he did beat me, in a clean match, but evidently he respected my effort, because he never bullied me. Oh, he could have, had he chosen; he could demolish much larger boys. There was a case when another bully was going after one who wasn’t fighting him; he kept snapping and snapping with a wet towel, the kind that can leave scars on bare flesh. No one could stop him, being afraid of him. Then the one I had wrestled came on the scene and told the toweler to get the hell out, and the other had to go. I didn’t see it, but another boy told me that the toweler started to turn back, to resume his attack—and the other simply swung his straight arm around and cracked him on the side of the head. That ended that. But he and I always got along. I think it was that he respected my attitude: I had tackled alone what another boy had not dared to as a pair, and I had fought cleanly. So he had tacit respect for one who was no threat to him. And I, with a lifelong hatred of bullies, make an exception for him.
I grew intellectually, too. By the time I got out of high school I had a tested IQ of 131, after testing subnormal earlier. In college I was tested at 132 on a similar test. Sure, it’s not supposed to be that way; IQ is supposedly constant. Maybe so; as I said, I was always slow, so in effect in the early years I was competing with classmates who were well ahead of me mentally as well as physically. But in time I not only caught up, I went ahead—and stayed ahead, intellectually, in adulthood. But I had come up through a rough school, in more than one sense. I use the qualification “tested” because I question the validity of the IQ concept; a test is only as good as its mechanism, and it has been said an IQ test tests the ability to take IQ tests, rather than true intelligence. I agree.
So what was my problem? It could have been dyslexia. My daughter has it, and her early problems in school were eerily reminiscent of mine, though she quickly learned to read while I spent three years in first grade trying to learn, and never did become a fast reader. My grandfather Edward Jacob never got good at reading, though he was an excellent businessman. So it seems to be something in the family, which looks from some angles like stupidity but from others like intelligence. The evidence is growing that dyslexia is the inability of the language-processing centers of the brain to coordinate, so the dyslexic must think about what others do naturally, so is at a disadvantage until he learns to compensate. Once he does compensate he may go far, because it’s not lack of intelligence so much as lack of integration that is the problem. That seems to describe me. I was called stupid in early school, and was not great in later school, but more than one reader has called me genius for the way I write. Maybe I learned to compensate so well that now I do it better than those who never really had to sweat it. Thus my liability became my strength. I don’t know; it’s just conjecture.
There were other facets of my life, and these, too, were not necessarily good. The marriage of my parents was dissolving, and though it was to take about a decade for the divorce to become official, the stress of it affected me. I began to wet my bed, for several years, and developed compulsive mannerisms, such as shaking my head or hands every few minutes. No one understood why. I was sent to a number of child psychologists, who I concluded did not know beans about children. Fear became the most constant nemesis of my childhood. I was afraid of being alone, and of the dark, and of strangers, and of my own dreams, the most ravaging of all. Sometimes it seemed that my whole life was a bad dream; I wished I could wake up and find myself back in England with the nanny. But it became apparent that there would be no such reprieve.
There came a time when I declared my independence, in a fashion: I told my mother I would not see any more psychologists. She didn’t like it, but I was immovable. I date the onset of my recovery from that point. Slowly I assumed increasing control of my own destiny, at first emotional, later intellectual and physical. In effect I cut the problem of my parents off from me, so that the ongoing struggle of their separation and divorce no longer tore me up. The bedwetting stopped, and the twitching. I began to grow again—I had stopped for several years—and my intellectual effectiveness increased. It was no overnight salvation; my problem had taken years to develop, and it took longer to abate. But my life gradually improved on every front. My mother was appalled when I once remarked that my parents were folk I knew and liked, but did not love; she did not understood why that had to be.
Another aspect of my education was sexual. I was originally naive. I remember once playing behind a shed with my sister and a cousin, and of course we came to the point of showing our private parts. I had seen my sister many times, and knew that girls were different. The other boy, though younger than I, had an erection; his penis stood out at right angles, while mine was small and limp. Years later I came to understand that he had understood better than I the naughtiness of what we were doing. I was capable of erections, and sometimes had them, but had not been sexually excited by that scene. But when I sometimes stayed overnight at another house, and had to share a bed with another boy, he was always feeling for my penis, and asking me to feel his. I didn’t understand why. He kept working the skin up and down, up and down, interminably. It seemed pointless to me, but I let him do it to mine. One night I felt a strange sensation growing in that region. Alarmed, I asked him to stop, and he did. Only years later did I understand that that would have been my first orgasm. In my ignorance I had stopped it before it was completed. In retrospect, I wish I had been more knowledgeable. Similarly, once I was playing with a girl, and she wanted to share some genital exposure, and I refused. In retrospect, I wish I hadn’t. Once I dreamed I was playing with a girl, and she bared her cleft and invited me to enter it, and I was strongly tempted, but knew it would be wrong, so didn’t. Then I woke, and cursed myself for not having done it, as all is forgiven in dreams; it would have been perhaps my first wet dream.
One misunderstanding was humorous. My cousin called an erection a “boner.” I remembered the term. Then one day I saw a book whose title was 10,000 Classroom Boners. I was amazed; I wondered just what kind of a class that was. I was somewhat let down later when I learned that a boner was merely a funny mistake.
Another episode was merely mischief, and I was the perpetrator. One summer at Hilltop Farm we got to know other kids our age, which was then early teen. We got a sixty-pound canister of honey by mail order. Now the problem was to transport it to the neighbors with whom we would share it, and on home, a total route of miles. The other boy was big and fat, and he carried it in a pack on his back without undue trouble. But when my turn came, it was rough, because I weighed a scant hundred pounds. When I tried to lift that pack, 60 percent of my own weight, I fell over under its weight. But I tried again, and did manage to hoist it up and walk my walk. It was balance that was my problem, rather than strength; at that time I was able to carry my sister, who weighed more than I did. We took it to the house of Marshall Smith, where his wife Lois supervised the pouring out of some of it. The hole was small and the honey was thick; it oozed out a blob at a time, the string thinning between blobs. Just when a blob was squeezing out, I made an ooomph! urgent grunting sound, as of someone getting out a load in the outhouse. That set off the other boy, who burst out laughing. The woman gave him a severe stare for that transgression. I had gotten away with one.
Back to sex. When I went to boarding school in ninth grade, my roommate straightened me out in a hurry. “Haven’t you ever played with yourself?” he asked incredulously. I didn’t know what he meant. So he told me, and showed me, and then it all began to fall into place. I was late maturing, being slow in that respect as in others, and didn’t reach puberty until age eighteen. But sexuality didn’t wait on puberty. The difference, my roommate explained, was that before you got hair on your balls you couldn’t ejaculate, so your orgasm was dry. And it was so. I, like most boys, would have been capable of orgasm at any time in childhood, had I known how to masturbate. Now I learned how. There was a joke going around: “Are you one of the 95 percent or the 5 percent?” That meant, the 95 percent who masturbated, or the 5 percent who lied about it. Indeed, it did seem to be universal. Some did claim they didn’t; presumably they were among the 5 percent. It was a nightly occurrence, and some kept at it until they orgasmed a second or third time. Some liked to do it in pairs or with several; some preferred alone. One boy would get into bed with anyone who let him, and massage the other’s penis, expecting a simultaneous return of the favor. One once demonstrated how far he could spurt; he went into the closet to work himself up, desiring privacy for that, then emerged to jet into the air and onto the floor. But my impression was that as they became interested in girls, masturbation diminished. I doubt that they were having sex with the girls, because the rules were strict and there was almost no opportunity, but they had a new orientation.
Girls. I was the shortest person in my ninth grade class, male or female, and this militated against much of a social life. I have been on only one formal date in my life, and that was an arranged one, required attendance, with a classmate, Nancy Horsefield. We sat together at a program, and I had to take a brief leave to go onstage for a bit part, then return. That was it; there was no mutual interest. I never had further interaction with her, other than seeing her in classes. She was a fully developed girl, and I was far from the equivalent in boys; physiologically she was about five years ahead of me.
However, I was encouraged to attend some evening dances, and did dance with several girls. I was beginning to get into the feel of it. Then a couple of older boys told me that I should cut in on a couple they pointed out to me. In my naïveté I did. It was a practical joke, and they got out of there in a hurry. I had cut in on a senior boy and his steady girlfriend. He was nice about it, cutting back in after a minute, and never seemed to hold it against me. But it was a grievous lapse of etiquette, and when I realized the nature of my transgression, I was totally embarrassed. In four years at that school, I never attended another dance. My social life ended at that point, and did not resume until I was in college.
One of my unkind chronic awarenesses is of death. My two closest calls were a car accident I mention in Chapter 3, and the measles. Normally measles is just another childhood illness, but the later it comes the worse it may be. In my senior year at Westtown one of my friends came back to school with it, and sure enough, two weeks later I got it. I was, I believe, the second worst case among the boys; the worst was my classmate Han Broekman. As I recall, his temperature peaked at 105 3/4, while mine was 105 1/2. For three days I had no appetite, and ate nothing, and so nothing passed through my system. The nurse, whose book of instructions said that there had to be a BM every day regardless, gave me enemas each of those days, looking for what wasn’t there. Actually on the third day there was something, though where it came from I don’t know. But what bothered me more was the weakness. When I was moved to another infirmary room the poor nurses had to carry me, a difficult job for them, and the disruption made me vomit. I was allowed to take myself to the bathroom, but lacked the strength to get out of bed. I had a cough, and it came to the point where I no longer had the strength to cough, so had to lie there with that nagging tickle in my throat. Then, indeed, did I feel the deepening shadow of the valley of death. They gave me a sleeping pill, but I stayed awake all night until at last they gave me something to counter the pill, and then I slept; apparently the pill had the opposite effect on my metabolism. One night I developed a terrible thirst; every hour I woke and asked for water. It got so that the nurse was by my bed with a glass of water the moment I stirred. I felt sorry for her; she could get no rest herself, with patients like me. But slowly the crisis passed, and my appetite and strength returned—slowly. I remember when one of the other boys got up to go to the bathroom, ran out of strength, so lay down amicably in the hall for a few minutes to rest, before recovering enough to complete his trip. That was the way of it for us all. As I improved, I was moved back to the main infirmary, where I woke to find a wonderful basket of fruit by my bedside, sent by my Uncle Ed and Aunt Dorothy, the parents of my cousin Teddy Jacob, whose early death colored the rest of my life. It was like emerging into bright daylight after being lost in a dark burial cave. Thereafter it was as if my life had passed a significant marker; Teddy had died, but I was not destined to die just yet.
Two
PEOPLE
No one exists in a vacuum, and certainly I did not. I was shaped by my experiences with other people as much as by my genes.
My outlock was so negative in much of my childhood that I reasoned it out, and concluded that if I could be given the choice to live my life over, exactly as it had been, or never to exist at all, I would prefer the latter. I was not suicidal; I just would have preferred to have been spared the travails of existence. This may suggest that I was strongly depressive, but I think it was rational. Nonexistence is better than negative existence. But probably I was mildly depressive, because I seem to have been that way all my life. That doesn’t mean I’m unhappy all the time, just that my thermostat is set lower than the norm, and my joy of existence, taken as a whole, is less. This seems to be the case with many creative types; in fact there is a question whether creative genius is bound together with madness, loosely defined, the most creative being the maddest. I doubt that there is any universal truth in this, but if there is, it is my fortune to be far enough short of the extremes that I am able to function in the real world while taking advantage of my creativity to earn my living. In fact, I may be close to the line of viability, gleaning as strong a trade-off between genius and competence as is feasible. Thus I have not become alcoholic or otherwise nonfunctional, while achieving considerable success as a commercial writer whose interests are not limited to personal well-being. Not many achieve that fortunate a compromise. This was more luck than design, but the underlying balance had to be there.
So why wasn’t I too fouled-up to achieve anything? I have pondered that over the years, and concluded that I had enough good support at a critical time in my life to enable me to become well enough adjusted to recover from the bad times. I think the first support came early in life, most of it before I remember: in England, with my parents, and then with the nanny. The nanny, I suspect, had but one object while on duty, and that was to take good care of the children in her care. She surely did that, and that gave me my secure original base. Though I lost my contact with her, and my well-being eroded, that foundation remained. Maybe she was only doing her job, but I feel that I owe her much of my sanity. I always had the memory of happy England to sustain me in adversity. Perhaps it was a fantasy realm, as I did not know her name or that there were actually two of her, and I have no memory of her hair (could she have had long hair? That would explain a lot!), eyes, form, or face. She’s just a presence, always there, always nice.
