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security, companionship. More than half a century later it still is.
Safe, cared for, nurtured—and mere minutes away from the wild,
noisy, vast and exciting world of New York City. Bessie and I traveled
at least three days a week to midtown where we haunted the racks
and counters of cathedrals of consumerism like Macy's, Gimbels
and Klein's. Noontime we'd go to Mass at the Franciscan church on
32nd Street. Then we'd attend the most sacred ritual of all: lunch
at the Automat. Squirming around for long hours on hard wooden
benches in a church basement couldn't hold a candle to the celestial joys of mashed potatoes, peas and creamed spinach. And these
hundreds of pilgrimages to the world's busiest urban center gave
me something more—a sense of vast possibility. You could get on a
train and in a matter of minutes entirely change who and what you
were. A subconscious lesson at the time but one I'd put to good use
before long. I mastered the Broadway-Seventh Avenue I R'l at a very
early age.
When I was six Bessie left us to work for a Japanese family, an
interesting move in 1944. ("How could she do this to me?" Mary
wailed. "Leave me for a Jap family?") I didn't care. I was in Corpus
Christi by now and my Bessie period was behind me. After-school
without Bessie or Mary or even Patrick was an unparalleled education in street life. I started exploring early. I had a mile-square play2 8
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ground of colleges and churches and their grounds at my disposal:
a thousand hallways, classrooms, labs, theaters, lounges, libraries,
dorms, gyms, chapels and lobbies just asking to be terrorized by me
and my playmates. Security—a more recent American obsessionwas minimal and a handful of small kids can scoot, scatter, disappear and reappear with amazing ease. In addition of course we were
in our pre-vandal stage and attracted little attention.
When we got tired of being little pests, there were games: Chinese
and American handball, boxball, ring-a-levio (called ring-a-leary-o
in my neighborhood), blacksmith, Johnny-ride-a-pony, kick the can,
roller hockey and a strange game called three steps to Germany.
Plus all the city-street variations of baseball: stickball, punchball,
stoopball, curb ball and baseball-off-the-wall.
We had three parks nearby: Morningside Park, Central Park and
Riverside Park, which stretched five miles along the sewage-laden
Hudson, where we bathed in summer with no apparent ill effects.
All the parks were dotted with playgrounds, many recently installed
by Mayor La Guardia and called Tot Lots. Basketball courts, baseball diamonds, wading pools, thousands of trees to climb, countless
hills for sliding, sledding, rolling down and running up and miles
and miles of paths for riding bikes. Not designated bike paths, not
shared paths. Paths where pedestrians had to get the fuck out of
the way.
Actually I rarely rode my bike in the park—it was more stimulating when ridden in the streets, weaving adroitly through fast-moving
vehicles. "Go play in traffic" wouldn't have been a put-down for
us—just another glaringly obvious suggestion from an adult. Heavy
traffic as an obstacle to play offers a level of stimulation simply not
found on the farm or in nice suburbs where kids enjoy the innocent
idyll of American childhood. Heavy traffic focuses the mind. Going
out for a long pass on a busy crosstown street develops impressive
coordination skills unknown in Iowa.
Heavy traffic as a form of transportation is even better. Grabbing a hitch on a fast-moving truck when you're on roller skates or a
bike is idiotic, spectacularly dangerous and every bit as thrilling as
it sounds. Techniques vary. With a bike you only have one hand to
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control the bike and must stay beside, not behind, the truck or risk
massive head trauma. On roller skates the fun is all in tiny metal
skate-wheels going thirty miles an hour over Upper Manhattan's
cratered streets. I'm ashamed to admit that we did not wear safety
helmets, kneepads, elbow pads, shoulder pads, gloves or protective
eyewear. We could at any time have put our eyes out or broken our
necks; curiously none of us ever did. And those lightning-fast, hipswiveling maneuvers we learned dodging two-ton automobiles trying to cut inside and make the light blossomed later on the dance
floor.
By the time I was seven I was slipping into the subway to head
downtown to Central Park, Times Square, Rockefeller Center, Wall
Street, Chinatown, the waterfront—great tracts of unexplored territory, an urban El Dorado, just sitting there waiting for an adventurous child. Afternoons of collecting autographs, sneaking into
movies, browsing in department stores, walking up the stairs to the
observation decks of the RCA and Empire State Buildings, stealing stuff from novelty stores, climbing trees in Central Park, riding
elevators on Wall Street or simply walking around taking in the big
show—the greatest entertainment on earth. It gave me the feeling I
belonged, I was entirely at home in the vast city I was growing up in.
Sometimes after a few hours of goofing I'd show up at my mother's office around five-thirty and talk her into taking me to the Automat for a cocktail of creamed spinach. Often, during the meal,
she'd give me a quarter and ask me to bring it over to some person
she'd spotted sitting alone, nursing a cup of coffee with no place to
go. Being down on your luck, she called it. She really did have a generous heart. She just made it so goddam difficult to love her.
New York City was a great education, but first grade with Sister
Richardine in Room 202 also meant other awesome new experiences: sex, music and the roar of the crowd.
First grade generated first kisses. Two of them. The first first kiss
was one afternoon when Sister Richardine announced the imminence of the annual church bazaar. This so aroused a little girl
named Julie—clearly a future shopaholic—that she threw her arms
around me and planted a big wet kiss on my cheek. An uproar en30
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sued in the class. Small as I already was, I shrank even further—a
tiny, beet-red creature in short pants.
But deep down under those ill-fitting shorts, something was stirring. My second first kiss came not long after, alone in the clay room
with Ilda Muller-Thym. I bided my time, then made my move—and
gave her a big wet kiss. My only memory was that it was good, she
didn't hit me and we didn't get caught. To this day I can't see a
child's poorly made clay bunny without a vague churning in my
loins.
Room 202 possessed an odd homemade musical instrument consisting of rows of glass bottles filled with varying amounts of water, suspended in a wooden rack. The player struck the bottles with
soft wooden mallets, producing a musical note. After much effort I
learned "Frère Jacques" and one day played it for the class. My first
ever public appearance! A real charge! Having thirty people (okay,
six-year-olds, but they had pulses) sit without fidgeting and watch
something you were doing—which they couldn't do—was intensely
satisfying. Having them applaud at the end, even though many had
difficulty bringing their
hands together with any accuracy, produced an odd sense of power. It was an intoxicant. As would be the
case with many intoxicants, I immediately wanted more.
Actually my attraction to the spotlight had begun earlier when
my mother taught me to do two things: an impression of Mae
West—whom I'd never seen—and a dopey little dance popular in
the thirties called the Big Apple. Whenever we had company or I
visited my mother's office, she asked me to do my little act. I never
needed to be coaxed. I even added another impression I'd worked
up on my own—Johnny, the Philip Morris midget. Philip Morris
cigarettes featured a midget dressed as a bellboy who walked around
upscale hotel lobbies yelling, "Call for Philip May-ray-us." Since I
was in effect a midget my impression was flawless.
Second grade brought my next big career move. Our teacher
Sister Nathaniel had organized the class into a band. A big band,
though not quite in the Duke Ellington sense: the thirty-odd children had a single form of instrumentation—sticks and clappers.
The band was in effect a large percussion section with one actual
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instrument, a really crappy xylophone. Still, it was the only thing
that could play a melody, and I leaped at it. After incredible effort I
mastered "March of the Little Lead Soldiers" and became the featured soloist.
The highlight of our band's schedule was an invitation to perform at the Horace Mann School in Teachers College, across 121st
Street. The occasion was a tribute to Joe Louis and the First Lady
of the United States, Eleanor Roosevelt. At seven years of age I was
about to do my first liberal benefit.
Two ensemble stick-and-clapper numbers brought the audience
to the REM portion of the sleep cycle—and my big solo. I stepped
out in front of the band for "March of the Little Lead Soldiers," and
without false modesty I have to say I nailed it to the wall. A great
rendition—tasteful, restrained and yet spirited. I may have made
xylophone history with my daring, cross-hand four-mallet ending.
I glanced across the stage to where the guests of honor were seated.
Thank God they were awake—and applauding! I did notice that
one of the First Lady's stockings was drooping rather badly. At that
stage of her life it was probably just part of a larger pattern.
Corpus Christi School, revolutionary for its time, had no report
cards or grades. There was none of that cutthroat competitive spirit
which so improves our American way of life. We were encouraged
to study and excel simply for the joy of discovery. If we were inculcated with anything it was the simple idea that the future would take
care of itself if you did right by yourself today.
I grasped the work easily and had a lot of time for daydreaming.
If there'd been a course in "What's Outside the School Window" I
would have been head of the class. But idle classroom time can lead
to more than just looking for brassieres on the rooftop laundry line
next door. It is the breeding ground of the class clown.
Class clowns are dedicated to attracting attention to themselves.
Traditional Freudians might attribute my chronic need for attention
to the fact that I had no father and half a mother. Naaah. The truth
was much simpler. Then as now, I was a consummate show-off.
Disgusting tricks are the key components in the class clown's repertoire. These are useful not only in subverting the whole process of
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elementary education, but in making girls sick. That's really all you
wanted to do when you were nine or ten—if you could get Margaret
Mary to throw up on her desk in the morning, you knew it was going
to be a good day. And though I doubt I deprived my schoolmates of
much of their education, I certainly curtailed my own. My entire
public-school education ended at ninth grade and I barely made it
through that. On the other hand, the credentials I earned disrupting class and making girls throw up stood me in good stead a quarter
century later on my 1972 album Class Clown.
I had several disgusting tricks I could do: I could bend either
thumb backward till it lay flat on my lower forearm. I could crack
every one of the twenty-eight finger knuckles officially recognized
by the Knuckle Institute. I could also control each eye independently. First both eyes left, then keeping right eye left, move left
eye right, then right eye right. Done at high speed, with the right
girl, this will definitely make her vomit. But I was outclassed in
this category. Ernest Cruz could turn his upper eyelids inside out.
Wow. Even I would heave. "Don't do that, Ernest, you look like a
devil, man!"
My class clown arsenal included all the standard weapons: weird
faces, fart sounds, belching, mimicry, random wisenheimery and
sickening physical contortions. I had an unusual additional talent:
blowing small bubbles of saliva about a quarter inch in diameter off
the tip of my tongue. (Pat taught me this.) Here's how you too can
be a bubble blower: With jaw slack, tongue relaxed and mouth open
you form the bubble by drawing the tongue away from the floor of
your mouth and quickly wedging your tongue under the bubble.
Once the tongue holds the flattened, nascent bubble, you exhale
gently, releasing the bubble in an eccentric little arc. It will usually
travel anywhere up to three feet, making it hard for anyone in front
of you to ignore. The flying spit bubble's virtue is stealth. Unless the
student sitting in front of you takes exception to the mounting layer
of saliva on the back of his or her collar, it goes undetected—until
it's too late.
Making faces had the same silent power. I was gifted with a rubbery face and took pride in contorting it in the most revolting ways.
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The trick here is to identify students with minimal self-control and
loud or goofy laughs. This goes to the heart of being a class clown,
because class is one of those places you're not supposed to l a u g h like kneeling in front of a casket—so it's the one place the urge to
laugh is uncontrollable.
First you get your target's attention with a rubber-band-powered
paper clip to the neck. When you have their attention, you whip
some interestingly twisted face on them. They explode in giggles,
you relax your face into a mask of innocence and they get reamed
out. You're off the hook. You're ready to strike again. This time instead of depriving only one child of his or her education, you can
stunt the development of the entire class. Welcome to the world of
revolting sounds—a symphony of bodily functions, pre-eminent of
which is the fart.
Class clown was always the first to discover the artificial fart under the arm. You place your palm vertically in your armpit (under
the T-shirt and against the skin) and snap your elbow sharply downward against your side. The air escaping from the armpit pocket
erupts in an impressive blatt. (I've never understood why this action,
which involves no actual bodily fluid, results in such a deliciously
liquid-sounding fart.)
The fart sound
is an important sound when you're a kid, so you
find as many ways as possible to make it. You can do it in the crook
of your arm or by blowing against your forearm. I didn't need any of
the fancy ones because I was into the bilabial fricative. In plain English, I could blow a fart with my mouth. I was so glad when I found
out it had an official name. "Raspberry" and "Bronx cheer" never
made it for me. It was always the bilabial fricative.
I had competition. There was John Pigman, Grandmaster of
Gross-out, who could belch at will and for what seemed like five
or six seconds at a time. He had a large oral cavity and so the belch
would resonate and gather force inside his mouth before making its
majestic exit. There was something about the texture of his throat
that gave the impression of little food particles rattling around down
there. As a bonus he would recite as much of the alphabet as he
could while the belch lasted.
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Sometimes John would be in the movie theater and you didn't
know he was there. If anyone on-screen opened their mouth without
saying anything—John provided the dialogue. John was an artist.
He taught me something about guerrilla theater long before there
was such a thing. I once saw him sneak up behind two old ladies
who were walking arm in arm on our block. He got behind and between them and pulled back each one's inner shoulder so they were
both facing him, then loosed a horrific, interminable belch right
in their faces. They were so stunned I'm surprised they didn't drop
dead on the street.
They should've. Because he pulled another, even better stunt.
(John Pigman, as natural a performer as ever lived, knew how to top
himself.) Same scene, same two old ladies, same buildup. This time
instead of belching, he unzipped his fly, pulled out one of those
gray-white wieners and cut it in half with a pocketknife. Is it any
wonder I idolized this man?
Probably the most disgusting thing I could do I learned from Pat.
Here those of you who are parents might want to exercise that ageold method of sheltering children from the real world: as they read