Alan Sivell's A Boomer Life

Irving Kravsow wasn’t wrong in his assessment of my skills at that time. It was the seeming finality of his words that made the message so cutting. I was a 19-year-old with one semester of journalism classes under my belt. He was used to dealing with seasoned, adult reporters who could better handle the unvarnished truth.

My dismissal from the Courant plunged me into a mental fog that shrouded my self-confidence for years.

I had figured my only above average skill in life was my writing. It was the only thing I’d ever been praised for in school. It was the only aspect of my life that I felt I had an edge in. My self-assessment was that I was an average face in the crowd when it came to everything else: athletics, arts, intellect, height. You name it. I was never picked first – or last – for anything. I always landed somewhere in the middle.

I dragged myself back to Boston for the spring semester but my heart was no longer in the city or the school. I had lost contact with my friends from freshman year and wasn’t involved in any school activities or outside political protests.  I only had a few acquaintances in my journalism classes and now that I had been told by a respected editor that I wasn’t going to succeed in my recently chosen field, I didn’t have much of a connection to them, either.

My roommates, not trusting me to find our next apartment, had signed us into a sterile, singles complex in a suburb about 20 minutes from campus. It further alienated me from the school and the city. It was a better apartment. Cleaner. And all the windows, doors and appliances worked. There were two bedrooms so we took turns getting the room with a single bed. However the walls were thin and one of the roommates snored like a saw mill and the other had a girlfriend that would often scream in the middle of the night. Sometimes it was the roommate doing the screaming. I charitably chalked it up to mutual nightmares.

I was either in class or back at the apartment. It was not the college experience I wanted. I was miserable.

Besides the sleepless nights, there are only a few things I remember from that semester. I went on another diet, this time a yogurt diet. Meaning I ate yogurt for every meal for a month. It worked. I lost weight. But to this day, I can’t stand yogurt.

Also, I dropped my reporting class for a creative writing class since apparently journalism wasn’t in my future. I didn’t realize the writing class was for seniors majoring in English. The professor thought I was too young and inexperienced for the course, and at first, tried to get me to drop it. But after hearing my comments during the first few classes and after reading my first short story, he decided I could stay. I’m glad I did. That professor’s positive feedback and encouragement were the first steps in the long road of rebuilding my confidence.

The semester, with my daily commute, lack of a social life, uncertain future, and the screams, moans and snoring coming from the next room, seemed like it would never end. Finally, when it did, Harry and John decided to throw a party, reserving the complex’s swimming pool. They invited some of their friends, including Tiny, the guy who had ripped off the door to our previous apartment.

At one point during the party, Tiny went back to our apartment to get more beer. While he was  there, the phone rang and he answered it. It was for John. The phone had a long extension cord so Tiny walked with it to the balcony and held it up.

“It’s for you,” he called to John. John was floating on a raft, beginning work on his summer tan. He did not want to get out of the pool.

“Well,” John said, “bring me the phone.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes. Bring me the phone,” John insisted.

I was staring at Tiny to see how he would handle this directive. I was sure that even he could see the cord wasn’t long enough. But I wasn’t sure that Tiny could realize that John was half joking with him and half trying to provoke him to do something outrageous.  

So Tiny thought about it for a few seconds and decided to double check if John really wanted the phone brought to him.  

“You’re sure?” Tiny asked again.

“Yes,” John answered forcefully, with a bit of an exasperated laugh in his voice.

 Tiny then suddenly jerked the phone cord out of the wall and threw the now unanchored phone across the parking lot into the pool.

Everyone at the party thought it was the funniest, craziest thing they had ever seen. Everyone laughed. Except me. The phone was in my name.

I headed into that summer knowing I needed to make a life change. I couldn’t take another year like that.

When I got home, I went belt and suspenders as far as jobs go. I got two of them. During the day I worked as a laborer for a contractor, one of Doom’s customers. At night, I worked at the East Hartford branch of Lincoln Dairy, working the grill during the dinner hour and then spent the rest of the night scooping ice cream cones for Little League teams. It was a pretty good summer financially. I made good money and had no time to spend it, but it was terrible for my social life as I had no spare time.

Working on construction sites that summer introduced me to adult men who were far different than any that I had encountered up until then. My experience had been with male teachers, Doom and his friends, my neighbors who were doctors, lawyers, ministers, insurance executives. Mostly educated and mostly refined. To put it mildly, the guys I worked with that summer were a bit rough around the edges. And they took it as their mission to roughen my edges up a bit. Especially the sheet rock guys, many of them French Canadians.

I worked on a crew that had an extended job sheet rocking an apartment building in Stamford, which was about an hour commute from our home base in Hartford. The beauty of this was that the union contract paid them for the commute.  The boss also paid me for the commute at double my hourly wage.  Not for carrying sheet rock up a narrow staircase, but for simply sitting in a car. I could do that all day.

We saved money by carpooling, but riding with that crazy crew, even at double my hourly wage, made me feel underpaid.

For one thing, they had a religious fanaticism about highway tolls. Like Catholics of the day refusing to eat meat on Friday, these guys refused to pay tolls any day. However, the toll road was the easiest and fastest way to the job site. So that’s how we went. The guys I rode with made it even faster because they didn’t stop at the tolls.

Each way, there were two tolls we passed and they were not that expensive. One cost 15 cents and the other was a quarter. Split four ways, it was only ten cents each. Even in 1971, that was not a lot of money.

Maybe it was the principle of the thing. But every morning on the way to the job and every evening on the way home, we would slow down at the toll plazas, but then the driver would stomp on the gas and we would speed through the toll. At that time, it was more an honor system and there were no cameras to catch who was going through.

After about a week of this, though, the toll collectors had called the cops and one night as we approached the first toll plaza on our return, we could see half a dozen state troopers surrounding the plaza waiting for the car. The good thing about us car-pooling is that we never used the same car more than once a week so the cops might have had a pretty good idea of what car we were in that day, they couldn’t be 100 percent sure.

Added to the worry of the cops up ahead was the beer in the car. We all had purchased a six-pack each or a quart for the ride home and were about a third of the way through our allotment.

While my friends and I had engaged in risky drinking behavior in high school, these guys were professionals. They worked hard putting up the sheetrock and taping it. My job was carrying the 4 foot by eight foot, ¾ inch thick sheets – two at a time – up four flights of back and forth stairs as quickly as I could to stay ahead of them. They were fast and good if somewhat unhinged. And after a day of walking around on stilts in an unfinished apartment building with the smells of drying cement, glue and new plastics with little air circulation, they wanted beer. I did too. At least a 6-pack. And that was just for the ride home. More would come later.

The crew would buy for me because I was underage. That I didn’t have to go looking for someone to buy me beer was about the only good thing about the whole trip. As soon as we were done for the day, we piled into the car of the day and drove directly to the package store that we had spotted the first morning on the way in town. These guys didn’t want to waste a lot of time, driving around after work, looking for a place.

As we approached the toll plaza with a car loaded with beer and lawbreakers, we knew we were cooked. At least I thought we were. I was already imagining Mom and Doom having to come to headquarters to pick me up. At least I could blame this on the sheet rockers. Doom knew these guys were crazy. They definitely weren’t his type.

The driver on this day, a guy who’s eyes seemed to be always spinning as if his brain could never settle down and think rational thoughts, spotted the cops first. Then the other guys saw the cops and there was a very brief, very loud and very animated conversation in French.

We were driving right into trap and certainly would be arrested. And, all the beer we had just bought would be confiscated. I don’t know which of those results would bother the guys more. 

Our driver broke into a slightly maniacal laugh. Then suddenly, he yanked the steering wheel hard to the left and for a second, we were sliding down the highway sideways. But then the sliding stopped and the spinning wheels took hold and we were off the highway, driving through the grass, dodging trees and ditches. We popped up in an adjacent neighborhood still going 50 miles per hour. All I could do was scream. So did the other guys. I was screaming in fear while the driver’s  compatriots were screaming with delight at the brilliance of his plan.

Now you would think we’d be captured pretty easily as we were now racing through the side streets of sleepy Wallingford, Connecticut. And the cops would be looking for the car. But no, our genius had this mapped out ahead of time. He actually had an escape plan on back roads and we eluded the cops and the trip home only took about 5 minutes longer than the usual route.

It turns out that running from the cops was a regular occurrence for these guys and they had eluded the tolls for years. I don’t know if they ever got caught, but during that summer that I drove and drank with them, they never did.

The hardest part of that job, though, was hauling that sheet rock up those narrow stair cases. The reason I was using the stairs was because our boss didn’t hire union workers and the union electricians wouldn’t let us use the elevators. And they hated those guys I worked with. Since our crew spoke French and laughed a lot, the other guys on the job site were sure they were making fun of them.

Once in a while, an electrician would take pity on me and give me a ride up or down. But that was just once or twice a day a day. Otherwise I was carrying two sheets of the stuff up the stairs a hundred times a day.

It was really hard work because the sheet rock was heavy and above all, I was not supposed to let the fragile corners of the product touch the ground or the walls because then the tapers had to use more mud and it weakened the sheet. It would have been easier to bring one at a time because it would have been lighter and more maneuverable. I would have been able to get up the stairs faster.

But not fast enough. The guys would have hung that one sheet by the time I got back with the next one. So I had to carry two at a time to try to stay ahead of them. But any foolishness like going to the bathroom or pausing after lunch to let my food digest and these guys would be screaming my name and cussing me in French.

On other days, I installed ceiling tile standing on a 4 by 8 foot plywood platform on scaffolding some 25 feet in the air of a soon-to-be grocery store. Until then, I never looked up and realized how high the ceilings in grocery stores are. Nowadays, that’s about the first thing I do when I enter a store. I found I couldn’t move very fast when I was worried about falling. It was as if my joints were lubricated by 40-weight motor oil in winter.

Once in awhile, I got sent on jobs by myself, either to deliver supplies to a work site or to do clean up or prep work on other jobs. My favorite job was working in an elementary school in the worst part of Hartford. Deep in the bowels of the empty corridors was the only safe place in the neighborhood. The boss had won the bid to retile the school and it had to be prepped. I was to remove the glue gobs that had been used to stick the old tile to the ceiling. I liked it because the ceilings were only about 10 feet so while I was on a scaffold, it wasn’t very high and I was by myself. I would just report there every day and get to work. I wasn’t as fast as a pro, but I think I gave it $2.75 per hour worth of effort.

Still, I watched the clock all day.

When I was done with my day job, I raced home, changed into work out gear and went up to the fields behind Plant Junior High about two blocks from home, where I had gone to school. There I would run around the field until my high school buddy, Ernie – who I had gone to Boys’ State with – got there. Ernie was doing the same thing, working two jobs so we didn’t meet every day. But at least 3 days a week our schedules matched up and we’d work out together. After running, we’d spend a half hour kicking the soccer ball against the side of the building. We made it a game and got in some great workouts. Then we’d split and head home to take showers. Ernie was working nights at AC Petersons, another ice cream place in WH. Same as Lincoln Dairy, really, but a little higher class.

Then I headed across the river to the East Hartford Lincoln Dairy where I worked the 6-11 shift as night manager. I didn’t really have time to eat and that was good in a way as I lost a lot of weight and was probably in the best shape of my life. I would treat myself to a small bowl of vanilla ice cream topped with strawberries after the dinner rush was over. And I drank a lot of Tab. It was awful, but the only diet drink around at the time.

It was a good summer in that I worked a lot, got into great physical shape, made a lot of money and had no time to spend it. I had no idea of where I was going, but Irving Kravsow’s words … and his eyebrows … were always top of mind: Change your major.

Do something else.

Next time: Chapter 32: Southern Man

I was a “love it or leave it” kind of guy when I left for college. I was proud to say I was a reactionary. “Better dead than red” I had written on the binder I carried around senior year. It should have contained notes from my classes but didn’t. Just my naïve political proclamations. I also had written, “The world is changing but I’m not!!”

One of the biggest insults that we would hurl in my circle of high school friends was, “You’ve changed.” As if growth of any kind other than physical was a bad thing. I had heard that college could change you and with my limited view of myself and the world at that time, I was determined not to let that happen to me. And at first, it didn’t.

I went home every weekend for the first month or two of school. Home was just an hour and a half away down the Massachusetts Turnpike. If I got an early enough start on a Friday, I’d head toward the entrance of the turnpike on Mass. Ave. after lunch carrying a piece of cardboard with “Hartford” lettered in red magic marker. If I were lucky, I’d catch a ride within an hour or so and be home with enough time for a shower before dinner.

On the days drivers weren’t picking up, or if they were only going half way and you needed to hitch a second ride, the normal 90-minute trip could take much longer and mean missing dinner and definitely the shower.  If I didn’t want to chance the vagaries of hitchhiking or if it was raining, I’d shell out the $5.25 – if I had it – for the Greyhound bus.

I wasn’t crazy about spending a lot of time in my dorm room at first. White Hall was not built to be a dormitory. It had been an apartment building before Northeastern bought it in 1960 and it seemed to be held together mainly by the many coats of paint that had been plastered on it over the years. Even when it opened, it couldn’t be classified as luxury living. It featured rooms with sinks but the communal bathrooms were down the hall. Exposed pipes ran across the ceilings. Every year, it was the first home away from home for almost 400 yet to be domesticated guys. It had seen its share of abuse.

We learned diplomacy by trying to determine what TV show to watch in the basement lounge where, after dinner, there were usually about 75 18-year-old males, three channels and one TV. There were the occasional shoving matches on Wednesday nights when we reached an impasse over whether to watch the tried and true “Hawaii 5-0” on CBS or the hip, new anti-establishment show “Then Came Bronson” on NBC. I was a Bronson fan.

Most of us were from the Northeast, but Northeastern at the time was making a big push for international students, especially for its engineering college. In our dorm, there were a bunch of kids from Taiwan. They stuck pretty close together and always played ping-pong on the other side of the dorm basement while a lot of us watched TV.

One night, when nothing good was on the tube and homework was definitely not on my mind, I challenged one of the Taiwanese guys to a game. It was a little like walking into a small town bar and challenging the local sharks to a game on their table.

I held my own at first. Even though I was quickly behind 5-2 and was probably going to lose, I thought I could be competitive. But the fact that my opponent’s friends laughed derisively at him each time I won a point should have served as a warning.

Apparently, my two points were gifts while he was practicing his topspin. After the teasing, he reeled off six straight points for an 11-2 win. The next game was 11-0. Not in my favor. I gave up.

After each trouncing, the Taiwanese students laughed. They might have been laughing about the food in the cafeteria or about the politics of the day, but I was pretty sure it was about me. And it made me uncomfortable.

For the first time in my life, however briefly, I felt like I was in the minority. But for me, the escape from that feeling was easy.

I stopped trying to make friends at the ping-pong table, walked back across the basement and went back to fighting – in English – over what TV show to watch.

In mid-October, roommate Mike broke the news that he was moving down the hall to join Steve, our old roommate. He delivered the news, looking at his shoes and choosing his words very carefully, as if we were breaking off a long and ardent relationship. He obviously didn’t know how thrilled I was. He and Steve had worked out a trade and one of the guys in his new room would move in with me.

The new guy, Kevin, had been the star of his high school basketball team and he walked on at Northeastern and made the JV team. Even though he was only 5’ 6”. He had thighs that were about as big as his chest and he could almost dunk the ball.

Kevin and I got along great. I went to all his games and since the varsity had a pretty decent team, finishing 14-8, I’d stay for their games as well. A game the varsity lost was the highlight of the season for me and the rest of the crowd. One player on the UMass team just sliced up the Huskies. It was obvious: he was much, much better than any other player on the court. I borrowed someone’s program to see who this guy was. A guy named Julius Erving. He later became a doctor. Dr. J.

Kevin was gone a lot at night for practice and hanging out with his team, but during the day, he and his friend, George, a commuter student who was also on the BB team, hung out in our room. Before I had time to resent having this guy in the room all the time, I was drawn down the hall to play cards with some new friends of my own: Pinky, George and Willis.

We met one Friday night while serving a weekend of house detention because we’d all been caught with alcohol in the dorm. Until that weekend, I was still clinging a bit to my old high school life, going to the football games, the parties and hanging with old high school friends who hadn’t left town.

But increasingly, with each visit home, I began to realize that my time in that comfortable social scene had passed. I became an outsider – the old guy at 18 – at social gatherings that had once been “mine.”

On my first night of “house arrest,” I met Pinky. Pinky, because he was the first guy to do laundry and got his reds mixed in with his whites.

We were both out in the hall, smoking a cigarette. He looked like a guy I might have hung out with in high school. Well, I had to look past his deeply pink T-shirt and his long, bushy hair that looked like he had blow-dried it with a heat gun. At least, the T-shirt advertised his high school football team.

“Why are you here on a Friday night?” he asked.

“Aww. I got caught sneaking in a six-pack,” I responded.

“Is that all? George, Willis and I got caught with a case,” he said with a laugh that seemed to acknowledge that their plan had been a bad one from the start.

He then chided me in a friendly, self-deprecating way. “C’mon, if you’re going to break the rules, you gotta go big.”

We had passed each other in the halls for a month without speaking, making silent assumptions about each other. But within two minutes of actual conversation, we knew we shared many sensibilities and were destined to be good friends.

Pinky invited me to a card game down the hall and I was introduced to his co-conspirators, George and Willis and they introduced me to the game of Eights and not incidentally, marijuana.

I didn’t accept that invitation right away. I mean, I’d been to Woodstock where the guy sitting next to me on the hillside had a grocery sack filled with nickel bags and I didn’t accept his offer of a free one.

“No, man,” I had responded lamely. “I’ve had enough.”

Which doesn’t really make any sense. If I had had “enough,” I wouldn’t have known I had had enough.

Bob said I should have punched him.

At Woodstock.

We could have been responsible for the entire festival unraveling. But that illustrates our attitudes at the time.

At Northeastern, these guys became my friends and didn’t seem like some hippie weirdos. George always wore buttoned-down, oxford dress shirts with his jeans and urban boots rather than the ubiquitous flannel of the day. I suppose I should say that we didn’t know that he’d go on to law school and perhaps a judgeship. But we all knew it, even then.

Willis was a good-looking, six-foot tall blonde with a perpetual semi-smile that seemed to signal he was ready for fun, any time, any day. And he was.

Pinky, the guy I was probably closest to, often looked as if he just stepped out of a port-a-potty at Woodstock. Appearance was not a priority for him. Ideas were.

After much thought, I reasoned that if whip-smart George thought it was OK, I could try smoking. So when I wasn’t studying or trying to reconnect with Bethany, who was also going to school in the Boston area, I wandered down to George’s and Willis’ room where we – along with Pinky – played cards– hearts and 8s – and discussed politics.

We also began wandering around the streets of Boston, getting to know the city a bit. One of our regular stops was The Boston Tea Party, a venue that often featured well-known acts. None of which we could afford, but we liked to stop by and look at the names on the marquee and imagine we had the money to go in.

On January 22, 1970, we stood outside and saw – and could hear – that The Byrds were the headliners.

“Man,” said Pinky. “I wish we had the cash to see them.”

“I know,” I agreed. “I’ve been a fan since Mr. Tambourine Man. I got their second album as soon as it came out.”

“The one with Oh Susannah?” Pinky countered.

“OK. That sucked, but the rest of the album was good,” I argued.

While we were moaning about not getting in to the show, Willis, the guy who looked like he should be the model on the university’s admissions flyers, had been checking all the doors on the back side of the venue. And he found one unlocked.

He slowly opened it, saw the coast was clear and waved us over. No one inside was watching the door, so we all crept in, undetected. Even though we didn’t have seats or prime line of site, it was a thrill to hear The Byrds. For free. After that, checking the side and back doors on the Tea Party, Boston’s answer to the Fillmore East, was part of our regular weekend routine. Most often, all the doors were locked. But sometimes one was left open.

I stopped going home. My new life began to get interesting.

In the Spring, I began to change from my love-it-or-leave-it political views and got involved with the peace marches. I think a lot of it had to do with the discussions with George, Pinky and a political science TA who taught his students to think from a perspective other than one’s own. Try to see the world how someone else might see it, he suggested. I had never done that before.

The TA was from a DC ghetto and was giving his experiences to a bunch of white, middle-class kids.  He explained the 1960s riots and the frustration and feeling of hopelessness of deep poverty – generations of poverty – in the ghetto. It didn’t happen often for me in a traditional classroom, but a light bulb went off in my head. And I could see reasons for actions that I couldn’t before. Actions that are incomprehensible to people raised in a safe, free-from-worry environment like I had been.

Still, I was not fully politically in tune when S.I Hyakawa, the conservative, liberal-baiting educator (and later senator) from San Francisco came to speak in January that year. As the date for his presentation drew closer, there were more and more posters of protest stapled to phone poles and campus bulletin boards. It was hard to walk to class through the quad without being stopped by three or four people handing out flyers the decried Hyakawa and his ideas.

Still, on the night of his appearance, I didn’t even realize it was the night of his appearance. I went out for beer. By then, I knew better how to sneak beer into the dorm, but since I was underage, I couldn’t just by a six pack from the corner store. I had to go a several blocks out of my way, cut through some rather dark alleys to get to the store that I knew would sell to me without an ID.

What I didn’t know was that all the postings and leafleting about Hayakawa’s speech had inspired about 3,000 people to show up on the campus quad to protest it, a lot more than the 400 who showed up to hear him speak.

With the escalation of the war in Vietnam as added motivation, the protestors worked themselves into a frenzy.  At some point, some of them decided their voices weren’t getting enough attention. They picked up rocks and threw them. Windows were smashed.

That got attention. From the police.

None of this I knew, as I left the liquor store, carrying my precious twelve cans of beer back toward the dorm. All of it was happening two blocks north, parallel to the route I was travelling. And I didn’t know the police tactical units were mobilizing to halt the protest on the side streets that were between me and the dorm.

With the beer tightly in my grip, I was hurrying down alleys that I didn’t like to walk even in the daylight. I wanted to get back to my room while the beer was still cold and, frankly, the darkened alleys of the Back Bay scared the heck out of me.

 I was within two blocks of the dorm and safety when I got to the end the last alley and practically bumped into a full squad of Boston cops putting the finishing touches on their riot gear. They had their helmets on, batons in one hand and Plexiglas shields in the other. They looked like they were from another planet.

The cop closest to me saw me put the brakes on. He raised his baton, more, I think, as a threat than with an intent. Before he had a chance to bring his arm down, I did a 180 and raced back down that alley and circled several blocks deeper into the neighborhood way out of my way to get back to the dorm. Maybe it was obvious that I was carrying beer, but apparently and luckily, the cops didn’t think I was worth their attention.

When I was finally safely inside the dorm and we were sipping our beers, I had to ask George and Pinky what the big deal was. I was a dumbass about that stuff. George took a deep drag on his cigarette and explained that Nixon had begun escalating the bombings and expanding the war. The argument that we were trying to stop communism there otherwise it would spread to America – the domino theory – just didn’t make sense to me.

So in the spring of 1970, protests popped up at campuses all over the country and peace marches took place in all major cities and Pinky, George and I started going to them. Willis came along too, but he was just looking for girls. I suppose you can’t blame him. It was Boston and there were a lot of them.

George began volunteering us to help with the rallies, whether it was handing out fliers, helping with crowd control or starting supposedly spontaneous chants. By April, the rallies were growing larger and more frequent.

Because we kept showing up and doing what we said we were going to do, George, Pinky and I had moved up the ladder of volunteers by the time a massive rally called Moratorium to End the War was being planned for April 15 on Boston Common. We got assigned to rumor control and helped run a phone bank in the basement of city hall.

It might seem crazy that a city would get involved with a protest against the government, but this was, after all, heavily democratic Boston. And the Massachusetts legislature had just passed a legal challenge to the war, signed by the Republican governor two weeks earlier. The politicians there were against the war and President Nixon. They wanted the rally but they didn’t want it to get out of control. And at the time before the internet and instant communication, it was tough to stop a rumor once it gets out there.

But this had been the year of the “Paul is dead” rumor that had college kids all over the country glued to their radios for 48 hours. So we basically lived in the basement of city hall for several days, answering questions about logistics of the rally and who was going to be there, etc.

At one point, some official came in and asked several of us who weren’t on the phone at the moment to come up stairs and say hello to the Boston mayor, Kevin White. He wanted to thank us for what we were doing.

George, the future lawyer and judge, was on the phone and couldn’t get away. I’ll never forget the look of disappointment he shot me as we left to go upstairs for our meeting. After all, he was the brains of our group and got us involved and yet he was missing his chance to meet the rising star of the Democratic Party.

We were whisked upstairs and Mayor White showed us around his office and thanked us for doing what we were doing. We were speechless. At the time, a lot of us thought he was going to move beyond the Mayor’s office to something big. He didn’t, but that’s another story. And not mine.

On the day of the march, 60,000 people showed up, about twice the capacity of Fenway Park. We marched down Commonwealth Avenue and it was wall-to-wall people for blocks.

Boston has about 100 colleges in the area and tens of thousands of students and it seemed as if most of them turned out that day. As did all the prominent Boston politicians including Ted Kennedy. And marches like that went on all over the country that day.

We felt as if we were shouting in unison to the government: Stop the war. But then Nixon came on the news and said he didn’t pay attention to that stuff, that it was just a small number of individuals. He said he paid attention to the Silent Majority. I think by dismissing us, he radicalized some of us.

The war continued and so did the protests. They went on day after day. Every night, after school – and even during the day – there was some form of protest or agitating going on our campus and campuses all over the country.

Then came May 4, 1970. Four students had been shot dead in protests at Kent State. Nine more had been wounded.

For most of the day, we sat, stunned, in George’s and Willis’ room and tried to get what information we could, twisting the dial on the radio. Suddenly we seemed so far away from the people we had been when we arrived on campus just nine months earlier.

I had changed.

When it was time for the nightly news, we didn’t want to face the crowd in the basement TV lounge, so about 15 of us squeezed into Frank Fugazzi’s room because he was the only guy who had a TV in his room. Throughout the year, that’s where we had all met every Sunday night to watch Mission Impossible. This was different. Up until that hour, we had never watched the news together or talked politics with this wider group.

We were silent as we watched the reports about the shooting on CBS. But Frank, still staring at the TV, broke the silence.

“They got what they deserved.”

George, Pinky, Willis and I walked out.

11 days later, 2 more students were killed at Jackson State when police fired on a school dorm.

Then, all hell broke loose on campuses across the country. At first it was relatively small. And school officials thought they could control it. To keep us out of the street and to keep us from clogging traffic on Huntington Ave, the Northeastern administration scheduled bands almost every night on the quad.

The kicker for me – the moment when I knew they were desperate and had no idea how to control us – was when the SGA began passing out joints. These joints were obviously machine made (at a tobacco company?), the best I had seen until some years later when I got my hands on some government issued joints rolled for an experiment at UCLA. I guess they figured if we smoke enough of this high-grade dope, we wouldn’t riot.

But after the Kent and Jackson State shootings, what we had done with youthful exuberance and optimism, suddenly took on a much more serious and ominous tone. The cops who showed up to keep control were no longer representing the establishment, but the enemy. The events in Ohio and Mississippi had us worried and angry that they could at any moment lift their rifles and begin firing. 

Then the city started imposing curfews and we had to be off the street by dark. A couple of days later, the order came that we had to be in our dorms by dark and the lights had to be out. Finally, because things had gotten so bad all over the country, with the tension between the students and anything resembling the establishment, Northeastern, along with many other schools around the country, decided to close early. It was a smart idea from the establishment’s point of view: disperse the students.

We were given the option of taking the classes we were in Pass/Fail or taking the grade we were getting at the time. I took a mixture and asked Mom and Doom to come get me as soon as possible. It had just gotten so tense.

All I could think of was getting home and playing golf. I wasn’t a big golfer. But after the last few months of tension in the big city, it represented peace, normality and suburbia to me.

The sudden end of the year meant we didn’t have a final party, didn’t say goodbye or make plans to stay in touch. Although Pinky and I did for another year or two. Willis transferred but did write for a few years, always about his latest girl friend and always in too much detail. Never about politics.

I never saw George again.

Next time: Chapter 28: Summer Work and Sophomore Year.

Until college, I had no idea that freedom could be associated in any way with the word school.

In high school, the piercing tremolo of the electronic school “bell” controlled our lives. It rang almost two dozen times each day, the first blast signaling it was time to stop the sweet, before-school socializing with friends and ordering us inside to our stuffy, artificially lit homerooms where the ancient fluorescent lights buzzed and blinked above us.

The rooms were filled with the smells of musty, 50-year-old text books, yellowed and brittle pull-down maps of a pre-war world and 30 kids, most of whom had – that morning – lavishly applied the latest cologne or perfume being marketed as a sure-fire aphrodisiac.

Then, throughout the day, at 45-minute intervals, the bell paced our lives, signaling the end of one class and offering 3 minutes of freedom before ringing again and strapping us down to serve another 45 minute sentence.

In high school, I lived for the freedom and socializing of those three-minute passing periods.

So when I got to college and realized there was no bell controlling my life, there was no one taking attendance and my academic life was mine to control, I plunged into the deep end of the freedom pool.

Starting out, I did go to my classes regularly. It was ingrained. I could still hear the bell in my head.  But soon, going to my Spanish class proved more and more difficult. After all, it was my first class of the day. At 10 a.m. I had to get up by 8 if I wanted breakfast, easily the most adequate meal the dorm cafeteria produced. Or I could sleep in until 9:15 if I just wanted to shower and shave before class.

I had been taking Spanish since the fifth grade when it was introduced with a slide projector, stick figures and rudimentary phrases repeated over and over and over again.

Narrator on the accompanying record: “Yo soy un hombre.”

Class of less than enthused 5th graders: “Yo soy un hombre.”

Narrator on the accompanying record again: “Yo soy un hombre.”

Class of even less-than-enthused 5th graders: “Yo soy un hombre.”

I hated it. Not the language, but the way it was taught. It was just like the nuns taught us religion at Saturday school at the local Catholic grade school. In those days Catholic kids had NO free days. School five days a week, church on Sundays and all Holy Days and our religious training on Saturday mornings. We had to study the Baltimore Catechism and memorize the exact answers to the questions at the end of each chapter.

The exercises started out pretty easy. So easy I still remember the first couple of answers 60 years later.

First question: Who made the world?

First answer: God made the world.

Second question: Who is God?

Second answer: God is the Creator of heaven and earth, and of all things.

And then each answer gets longer and longer. Question #12 was a doozie. You had to recite a 113-word prayer, The Apostle’s Creed. This was in 5th grade. I was just getting the hang of the Hail Mary.

I would wait until Friday night and try to memorize the answers but after the first few weeks, as the responses got longer and more complex, my cramming would inevitably fail me.  Then, the next morning, Sister Mary Frances would threaten me with a graphic tale of eternal damnation if I didn’t memorize it by the NEXT week.

Getting yelled at by nuns who seemed to be guarding the religion from public school kids rather than lovingly inviting us into it, combined with the rote memorization, taught me to dislike that style of learning. If only I had known that they weren’t going to kick me out of the religion if I didn’t memorize the answers, perhaps I wouldn’t have been as terrorized. And I most certainly would have skipped Saturday school more often.

So with a background of seven years memorizing Spanish in grade school and junior and senior high school, I was a bit advanced for a college Spanish 101 class.

By the time the professor realized that I should have been enrolled in Spanish 102, it was too late for me to switch classes. She told me I didn’t have to come everyday because that would allow her to work more with the other students.

“Don’t disappear,” she advised, “but you won’t have to work too hard to get an A.”

She obviously didn’t realize she was talking to a freshman with a terrible academic track record. I did disappear from that class and didn’t work at all, except on my sleeping.  Spanish was my only morning class and after I had what I took as permission to skip, I slept through every Spanish class the rest of the semester. 

I did show up for the final – and can still remember the very disappointed look of the professor. I think she realized her mistake – and mine, obviously. My previous knowledge helped me through the final, but there was no A for me. The B I managed turned out to be the only decent grade I got that semester.

Though it took many years to sink in, I learned from that episode. I am careful with what I say to students, especially freshmen. There is so much of their new life spinning in their heads that while they often may understand the individual words that I say, but they may not understand their meaning in the context of the full statement.

 I don’t remember much about move-in day except Doom and me hauling my belongings up to room 520 on the 5th floor of White Hall and Mom putting things in the dresser. She made me make the bed, something I had never done before. I really didn’t have that much to unpack: just my clothes and my stereo, which at that time consisted of an old Sony reel-to-reel with a built in amplifier and attached speakers that Doom had used in his presentations and about seven tapes.

When we were finished, we went off to get something to eat and then Mom and Doom hit the road for the hour and a half ride back to West Hartford. I went back up to my room. My two other roommates hadn’t arrived yet.

I’d been itching to be on my own – and had acted as if I were – the last two years of high school. I didn’t need parental supervision. I used my family for financial support, meals and a place to sleep, but emotionally after the death of Page, I thought my life was in the outside world. I didn’t need the family. That was for kids.

But I began missing them five minutes after they left. I was in this massive dorm, with the constant movement and chatter of people in the hallway and suddenly felt very alone. I had never stepped foot on the campus of Northeastern University before the day Mom and Doom dropped me off. I didn’t know what I was getting into.

I had thought I was worldly. I had been to Woodstock. I had worked on construction sites. I had driven a truck. I had dated pretty girls. I had lost a brother. I thought I had been a big shot in high school, knowing everybody and everybody knowing me. Now, in this new environment, I knew nobody. And no one knew me.

I sat on the edge of my bed thinking my life was starting over as I waited for my roommates to arrive. Those roommates proved to be a bit of a challenge. They put three of us into a space far more suitable for two. And when there are three in a group, someone is always the odd man out. In this case it was me.

But thankfully, I had read “Lord of the Flies” in high school and it prepared me for living in a freshmen dorm with about 400 other 18-year-old boys. By age, we may have been classified as draft-eligible men, but by behavior, we definitely were still boys.

The first roommate to arrive was Steve, a kid from a New York suburb. I figured we’d have no problem getting along as his suburb had a similar makeup as mine did. He seemed like a braniac, nerd type of guy. I had gotten along with those guys in high school. I didn’t hang out with them, but I’d gotten along with them.

And at first, I did get along with him. Most of the first day. Steve initially seemed like a good guy – a little over eager and a little talkative, but I chalked that up to first day nerves. Very quickly, though, within a couple of hours, he soon became very interested in anything I was doing. By the end of the second day, he became clingy, increasingly nosy and very concerned about my talking to anyone who wasn’t part of our roommate threesome.

I decided to give him enough space to find someone else to cling to. I started leaving my room early in the morning and not coming back until late at night, exploring the city: walking the Freedom Trail and riding the subway to the end of the line and back. And it was apparent, judging by the picture taken for my student ID on the second day, I also spent time at a few bars that were happy to serve students, regardless of age.

Steve quickly sensed our incompatibility and made friends with some guys down the hall. He moved in with them when one of their roommates dropped out soon after classes started.

We got along much better after that. One down, one to go.

My other roommate, Milo, was a little harder to shake. Like a lot of guys at age 18, he was very sensitive about his masculinity.  So one of the first things he did upon arriving was announce that his name was Mike.

He was the son of immigrants who spoke their native language better than English and came from a blue-collar town that didn’t send many of its sons and daughters to college. While I truthfully may not have been as worldly as I let on, at least I had been out of New England twice on weeklong trips, one to upstate New York where the highlight of the trip was touring the Utica Club Brewery and one week in Washington D. C. as part of a school exchange. Mike, on the other hand, had rarely been out of his factory-filled town of East Shoe, north of Boston.        

I don’t know what challenges life inside the classroom posed for Mike, but life outside proved difficult for him. He immediately took a liking to the social atmosphere of the frat party. He was like the midlife salesman who goes to a convention and stays drunk for three days.

Since he never had consumed alcohol before, Mike didn’t know how to handle it and it didn’t take him long to get drunk. He wasn’t the brightest guy in the world to begin with and when he was drunk, he was less so.

If a party started at 8, Mike was slurring his words by 8:15 and trying to slobber on some poor girl’s neck by 8:30. By 9 or so, you could count on Mike to be sleeping it off wherever he might have landed: a couch, the floor, the front steps. If he was in the way, we would drag him into a closet, shut the door and let him find his way home. Once we did that on a Friday night and didn’t see him again until Monday morning, just before his Western Civilization lecture.

It wasn’t long before I stopped inviting Mike to come to parties with me. But by then, he was addicted to the social scene. He found parties on his own. And he found them every night. He learned how to buy his own booze or get someone to buy it for him. I was feeling really guilty. I had met his parents and even though they were just in their 40s, they reminded me of my grandmother and her immigrant roots.

You could tell by the lines on their faces and their hands that they worked hard – probably taking any overtime offered at their factory – and sacrificed to give their son a better life. They were going to die early for it and their son was drinking up his opportunity.

When he was in the room, he wasn’t studying. He was writing to some girl back home, the daughter of a woman who worked with his mother. Each letter would take about 7 or 8 other attempts. He’d write a few lines, read them to himself half aloud, then crumple the paper up and toss it in the wastebasket. When he got closer to what he regarded as a finished attempt, he’d read it aloud to me, since I was a journalism major and he regarded me as a writer.

The letters were painfully awkward, even for an 18 year old away at college. It seemed as if they were something Booth Tarkington would have written about to point out the awkwardness of the teen-age years. The poor guy. He was lonely and I was relentlessly trying to get him to move out, perhaps down the hall to join Steve if and when another bed opened up.

From time to time, I would feel guilty and vow to take him under my wing, this time in a positive way. But any sympathy I felt disappeared the night I came home and the room smelled as if someone had thrown up. Because Mike had. The room was dark, but I could hear him, in the upper bunk, spitting, trying to get the taste out of his mouth. He repeatedly assured me he was spitting on himself and into his own bed.  

This admission didn’t reassure me much, but somehow, I managed to ignore the situation and fell asleep. It was my only escape. But about an hour later, there was a mad scramble as Mike leaped off the top bunk and found a waste paper basket and threw up again. As he started to climb back into bed, I yelled, “Wait a minute, jerkface!” Or words to that effect. “You’re not going to leave that puke in here. Clean it up. It stinks.” 

I was pretty mad because the wastepaper basket was one I had made in Cub Scouts, about the only thing I ever did in Cub Scouts. It was painted New York Yankees blue and had stickers of baseball players that had come with the cards I bought in 5th grade. It had been with me about half a lifetime at that point and meant something to me. So I wanted it clean.

But my roommate wasn’t the brightest guy. Even when sober. After hearing my command, Mike, in a seamless series of motions, dropped down from his bunk, opened the window of our 5th floor room, grabbed the bucket of puke and pitched it out the window. By the time it landed in the dormitory courtyard, splashing on several couples that were saying their intimate goodnights in the last few minutes before curfew, Mike had closed the window, leaped back into bed and was snoring.

The next day, I contacted my RA about getting a new roommate. I used the bucket of puke in the courtyard – which by then was the talk of the dorm – as my leverage. The RA said he’d see what he could do.

Next time: Chapter 27: From Right to Left

I headed off to college about as unprepared as anyone in the history of heading off to college. When I got my class schedule, I was surprised you didn’t have to stay in school all day like high school. I didn’t realize that your time was your own – before, between and after classes. And I didn’t realize, you didn’t even have to go to class.

But very soon after I arrived at Northeastern University in Boston in the fall of 1969, I transformed myself into a guy with a 4-point grade average. I lettered in football, basketball and baseball. Engineering was my major.

At least that’s what I told the guys from the engineering fraternity when they were looking for recruits. Since there was the potential for parties, girls and help with tests and term papers, I told them I was a National Merit Scholarship finalist and an all-star athlete. And very quickly, I became their prime recruit. They didn’t bother to check my stories. They were engineers, after all. Not journalists.

The plot began raveling on the second night of school in the dorm. I had gone to dinner with my roommates the first night because I thought, by luck of the draw, they might be my new best friends. But I quickly recognized I had nothing in common with them. Nothing. I wasn’t going to eat another meal with them and I began plotting to get rid of them.

On the second night, I went to dinner on my own. I went down the line, calmly collecting my dinner. But I knew the dreaded moment was coming: The moment when I had finished my purposed march through the food line to the instant when I turned to face the vast maw of the cafeteria. It’s an experience most school kids know. You look for friends, or a friendly face or an empty table. It feels as if everyone is staring at you to see if you indeed have friends. I scanned the cafeteria faster and with more precision than the Terminator, hoping to show as quickly as possible that I belonged.

Finally, I spotted a table that had several empty seats with just two guys who looked like guys I would hang around with sitting at the end. I headed in their direction. As I neared the table, they seemed to sense that I was the type of guy they would hang around with. They invited me to sit.

That’s how I met Glenn and Bob.

 We hit it off immediately. For one thing, they thought I was funny. That’s always a deal maker. Glenn, especially, burst out with big guffaws at most of my attempts at humor. And for another thing, the three of us had similar high school sports experiences: we were on the teams, but we didn’t play much. Where we differed was that I focused on my social life in high school while Glenn and Bob had focused on their grades.

Now that they were in college, though, Glenn and Bob wanted to mix in a bit of socializing with their studying. Since they were engineering majors, they planned to pledge the engineering fraternity. In fact, they said there was a social at the frat that Friday night and they asked me to come along.

I didn’t know anything about declaring a major at that point, much less declaring myself an engineer. And I wasn’t on the invite list. But Glenn and Bob said I could go as their third roommate, Dale. Dale was an engineering major and on the invite list. He didn’t have a social bone in his body and there seemed to be no chance anyone in the frat would ever see or meet him. He was the type who went straight to class and then back to his room – or the library – to study.

So that weekend, I became Dale.

The frat was located in a 100-year-old, four-story, gorgeous row house on Commonwealth Avenue. Everywhere I looked, there was dark, rich woodwork that screamed – in an understated way – old money.  There seemed to be fireplaces in every room and the art on the walls had thick wooden frames that were works of art themselves.

However, I didn’t really have too much time to soak in the details of the house because there were so many friendly people approaching, saying how happy they were to have me/Dale there. The people approaching were not just the frat brothers. There were a lot of women at the party that night, too.  The brothers had invited many more women than men. After introductions and kind of pairing each of us off, we were escorted to a well-stocked bar.

One of the senior brothers was the bartender.

“What’ll you have?” he asked as he wiped the counter in front of me.

This was the first time I was in a house being offered alcohol and I did not have to have that nagging thought in the back of my head that the parents might come home any minute. I could relax.

 Ordering a beer seemed like a childish choice, what with a pretty, older upperclasswoman sitting next to me, chatting me up. And too pedestrian. The only mixed drinks that I’d had up to that point were gin and tonics and rum and cokes. Choosing one of those might indicate I wasn’t as sophisticated as I wanted to appear.

“I’ll have a martini,” I answered.

Luckily, the bartender caught on to where I was going.

“Shaken, not stirred?” he asked, appearing to take me very seriously, as if I were a peer.

“Quite right,” I responded, revealing to anyone paying attention that I got my cocktail ideas from James Bond movies.

That one martini led to another. And another. And I lost count after that.

As the evening wore on, I began inflating Dale’s already impressive academic credentials with a few impressive sports and social credentials. Just for fun. I wasn’t going to assume just any identity.

That’s when I became a 4-point student from White Plains (that was true – about Dale) and lettered in football, basketball and baseball (definitely not true – about either me or Dale) and still had two girl friends from high school, one was going to Harvard and the other to Tufts (which was partially true). The added brag about me still dating both of them and them not knowing it was, of course, not true.

It hadn’t been my intention to go that far. But the alcohol, the flattering attention of the women and the atmosphere of the frat house that made me feel as if I entered adulthood that night got my mouth out in front of my brain.

After that night, I was the prize pledge. Number one of the recruiting list. I was invited for dinner, for drinks, set up on dates with older women (juniors and seniors!) who would pick me up after classes and take me wherever I wanted to go. They showed me the sites of Boston, took me to the best bars and pizza joints and brought me to great parties.

Well, they were engineers, so the parties weren’t completely out of control, but engineers are creative and I was 18, away from home for the first time and these were college women, fawning all over me. So the parties and the people seemed pretty great to me.

I became known as The Martini Man.

It was a great ride. But after a few weeks, I could sense, just like in the spring when I was downing several beers between classes in high school, I was getting out of control again. And by October, I realized I was spending more time on the charade than I was on anything else, including school, ostensibly the reason I was at Northeastern.

Trying to keep straight the details of my made-up life and the studying of engineering just to keep up on the terms, the professors and the deception was wearing me out. The superficial relationships with the “older” women was something I always thought I wanted. But it in no way was as warm and fulfilling as my relationships with Bethani and Sam had been.

And I discovered I wasn’t a naturally a deceitful person. I had to work at it. It wasn’t fun anymore.

Even though I actually liked a lot of the people I met, my potential brothers, I decided to ease myself out of the situation. I stopped going around to the frat house every day. At first, I skipped a day here and there. Then it would be two.

After a week, Glenn and Bob said the brothers were worried that I might be getting attention from other fraternities. They wanted to seal the deal with me and decided to send an intervention party to “my room.”

I had no idea that they were coming. But on the day of the intervention, they didn’t come to my room. Because Alan Sivell was not their prize pledge. Dale was. And he lived in Glenn and Bob’s room.  And that’s who they found the day they came to our dorm, White Hall, looking for their recruit.

Uh-oh.

I only discovered this by accident.

White Hall was a big dorm, five stories high and home to about 400 freshmen. The building itself was shaped like a “C” with three wings – A, B, C – of about thirty freshmen on each of the upper floors. Glenn and Bob … and Dale lived on the 5th floor in the C wing. I also lived on the 5th floor, but at the other end of the floor in the A wing.

While the frat brothers were in Glenn, Bob and Dale’s room learning of the deception, I was in my room, thinking about how hungry I was. So I decided to head down Huntington Avenue to Ugi’s for a pepper steak sub.

I locked my dorm room door and began walking to the elevators that were in the middle of that floor, in the B wing because they were the fastest. Everyone knew that. Even the frat boys. Because just as I was about to push the down button, the curve of the dorm hallway suddenly revealed my soon-to-be former admirers and they didn’t look happy. It didn’t take a genius – or a 4.0 from White Plains – to figure out where they had come from. And what they had learned.

We saw each other at the same time. I figured I was a dead man.

I didn’t think. I reacted. I dove through the nearest door, which, thankfully was not some random guy’s room, but the door to a stairwell. I raced down two flights of stairs and popped out on the third floor. I ran back in the direction I came from along the third floor corridor.

When I came to the next stair well, I raced back up to the fifth floor, ran to my room and locked myself in for the night. I not only didn’t get Ugi’s, but I also skipped dinner in the café.

According to my engineering friends, the frat brothers were very disappointed. They weren’t really mad, just hurt. Which made me feel bad.

I was a little worried about bumping into the frat guys on campus, but it was a big campus. 40,000 students. The largest private university in the country. I figured I could wait them out. But just to be safe, I stayed mainly in my room for the next two weeks, growing out my beard and gaining 20 pounds by going back for seconds and thirds at each meal.

While I was in my self-imposed witness protection program, I got a letter from my Spanish professor. I had been getting an “A” in the class before I disappeared. Now she told me that I had missed a major test and was in danger of flunking the course.

Panicked, I ran to the mirror. After a few minutes of turning left, turning right, taking a few steps back and then getting really close, I decided it was safe enough to try going to classes again.

Once our fun little game had run its course, Glenn and Bob joined the frat and, even though they initially had been in on the ruse, switched sides. It had been their idea, but they acted as if I had done something terribly dishonest. And maybe I had stretched the game out too far. Anyway, we soon stopped checking on each other about when to go down for dinner. And we weren’t even speaking by the first of November.

I had tired of going down to Glenn and Bob’s room anyway. Maybe tired isn’t the right word. Frightened. I had to pass through the middle, or B, wing and that was a real no man’s land.

The University had decided to upgrade its hockey team that year and had landed a bunch of prize recruits. These guys were great hockey players, but not great scholars. They were very big, very strong and kind of cruel.  It was a real adventure getting from my wing – A – to the engineer’s C wing.

I had heard about guys who got yanked into the hockey players’ rooms and had to serve as their servants for the night. One guy was particularly unlucky: they held him for close to three days before he escaped. A few of them got kicked out for that, but no formal kidnapping charges were filed.

Before I had heard that, I would pass through their wing at a pretty swift pace, because I didn’t want to be hit by one of the bodies that occasionally would come flying out of their rooms. I certainly wouldn’t make eye contact. After I heard about the indentured servitude, I would, at first, try to make myself invisible as I passed their rooms.

Finally, I chose a safer route. I would take go down the stairs in our wing down to the lobby, go outside no matter what the weather, walk to the C wing lobby and climb the stairs to the 5th floor, avoiding the hockey players altogether.

I eventually decided it would be best to spend more time in my wing of the dorm. And I needed to focus on my living situation and my room. Which meant getting rid of my roommates.

Next time: Chapter 26 Out with the old. In with the new.

Senior year, I lost a fight to a guy on crutches.

And it’s worse than it sounds.

He wasn’t even standing during the fight. I was.

It started because I was in charge of the student lounge, previously an unused, first-floor classroom on the science wing which became a place where students could escape school without leaving school.

Until our senior year, school was pretty prescriptive. Once you walked onto the grounds, you were either in class, at lunch or in study hall. If you were in the hallways at any time other than between classes, you needed a pass. There were even student guards – hall monitors – who could demand to see your pass.

Needless to say, we chafed at this and looked for ways around the system. This was the 60s, after all. We were fighting the man. Sometimes we’d would steal a pad of passes from a teacher’s desk and forge their signature. Or better yet, we’d steal them from the efficient teachers who had signed the passes ahead of time. If you distracted those teachers, your partner-in-crime could rip a couple of the passes off the stack and you had authentic currency to move freely about the school.

But a new day dawned our senior year. SSP. The self-supervision program. We no longer had to forge our names or steal passes.

If you qualified for SSP, you got a badge and you were allowed to go wherever you wanted to go when not in class. The hall monitors lost their power over us. You could go to the library. You could go outside. Or you could walk two minutes to the town center and spend your 48 minute free period drinking coffee, eating donuts or smoking cigarettes or all three rather than daydreaming in the cafeteria study hall with 75 other kids.

But not everyone qualified for that freedom.

You could get an SSP badge if you were on student council, elected out of your homeroom. That wasn’t going to happen for me because after three years with the same students and my smart mouth, I was not universally revered by the 30 kids in my homeroom.

Or you could get one if you had to a high grade point average and good citizenship grades. I had neither of those. But I did have a friend in a high place. The president of the school, John Abraham.

John appointed me to his “cabinet,” making me in charge of the student lounge, another option for our new found free time. That gave me all the privileges that all the other members of the student council and the students with good grades and good citizenship had earned.

It could have been the stereotypical political do-nothing job. I just had to be in charge of the room. Whatever that meant. I didn’t have to clean it. It was simply an extra classroom that the school had given us to use between classes. The idea was that if you didn’t want to go to the library, outside or to the Center, you came to the lounge. The administration wanted to grant a bit of freedom, but they didn’t want students wandering the halls.

I didn’t really have to do anything but at the beginning of the year, I had enthusiasm. I decided to act as if I had campaigned for the position: I was going to get furniture, vending machines and a rug for the lounge.

I got Walt, the head janitor, to take me down to the bowels of the school where he let me have my pick of some ancient furniture that was last used in the teacher’s lounge just after the war.

Dr. Dunn didn’t say no to the vending machines because he didn’t think he had to. He figured it would take me forever to figure out whom I needed to call. And when I did make contact, they would want a deposit. And even if I had managed to come up with that, Dr. Dunn was going to stall on the install. But by late fall, we had a candy machine.

Getting the rug was easier. Doom’s company was now selling rugs for office buildings. So I figured we would get a good deal and Dr. Dunn was OK with that. The only problem was that I was the one measuring for the carpet.

That was a mistake.

The day the carpet showed up, so did the bill. Dr. Dunn called me out of physics class. Normally, he was a pretty mild-mannered guy, even when he was upset. He was not a yeller, like Coach Chalmers. He talked to you out of concern. But when I got to his office that day, he was waving the bill at me and his face was red.

“This bill is twice the price you told me it would be!”

Really? How could that be.

“Maybe it’s because you ordered twice the rug!”

He marched me down the hall to check on the workmen as they finished installing the carpet. It was easy to see there was enough carpet to cover the lounge and the room next door and with some probably left over after that.

Dr. Dunn was mad and disappointed. I couldn’t decide which bothered me more. He decided to leave the extra roll of carpet in the lounge leaning against the wall so I could see it every time I went in there. And so could all the other kids.

“What’s up with this extra carpet?” they would ask.

“Shut up,” I would answer.

Dr. Dunn never outed me. But he let me sweat for awhile. A few weeks later he told me to get rid of the carpet.

“I don’t care what you do with it. Just get it out of here.”

So I took it home and Doom installed it in my room on the third floor.

I learned a lesson. These days, I measure three times. Then four. And still, more times than not, I get it wrong.

The lounge proved popular, especially on rainy days and throughout the winter. It was a much better place to be than study hall. Unless you wanted to study.

I surprised myself about how serious I was about the lounge and my job. I viewed it as MY lounge and I was determined to protect it, despite there not being much to protect.

On the day of the fight, the lounge was crowded, with a half dozen clusters of kids. They were spread out all over the room, some stretched out on the furniture and others sitting on the newly-carpeted floor. Some were simply socializing, while others worked on school projects and a very few, on homework. I was pleased the lounge had become a happening spot.

Then I saw Bob sitting on the arm of a couch and my mood changed.

I had been raised in a house where we never sat on the arm of a piece of furniture. So I told Bob that the arm is not a place for sitting and that he needed to sit on the seat of the couch. Despite being my best friend, he said no. You don’t tell me what to do. And he said it loud enough and with enough defiance that the buzz of conversation in the room suddenly stopped.

It was a challenge to my authority and my lounge that I could not ignore. And since we were best friends and everyone knew it, there was added interest in this argument. It had the potential to be more interesting than any homework or weekend plans they had been previously talking about. Everyone’s attention turned to the corner of the room where I stood above Bob as the argument escalated. I got madder and madder as Bob refused to get off the arm of that rickety couch.

I didn’t care that he was on crutches. I didn’t care that he had broken his leg skiing a month before. I finally had had it. My words had failed me so I did a quick calculation. This might be my only chance to beat Bob up.  I generally had a pretty good idea of which fight I might win – not many – and which I likely would lose – most of them. I figured with Bob in his condition, the odds had tipped in my favor.

So I took a swing at him.

There was no way I should have missed a sitting target. Yet I did.

I was so mad, I swung wildly. And because of my wild swing, I stumbled toward him like a drunk at closing time. That left me close enough to him so that he could easily punch me in the stomach without having to leave his perch. He knocked the wind out of me.

I lost a fight to a guy with a broken leg who never had to get off the arm of the couch.

Bob may have won the fight, but I was right about what his sitting on the arm of the couch would do. By the second semester, that particular arm that he was sitting on, on that particular couch, had fallen off. And the rest of the furniture looked as if it would be more at home in a dumpster than a student lounge.

Spring semester, I was busy at school and not because of schoolwork. Other teachers had begun to notice that I was good at organizing students. Other than Bob, they listened to me.

The Spanish teacher, Mrs. Freundel, got me to co-chair the American Field Service club. We raised money to help bring an exchange student to school every year. I helped organize and publicize a student workday and we set a record for most money raised.

In addition to organizing a school dance that raised money for the baseball team’s pitching machine, I was on the homecoming committee, helping plan the end of the year party.

And I had a social life. It drove my mother crazy every time I said yes to something because she was well aware of something I wasn’t: The academic work I didn’t do that year and the years before were going to hurt me when it was time to go to college.

I did have pretty solid SAT scores, the trip to Boys’ State, sports and the school service. And I wrote a good essay about why I played baseball left-handed (Doom gave me a left handed glove for my 6th birthday and I didn’t tell him it was for the wrong hand because I was afraid he’d take it back. So I became I left-hander. It’s the only thing I do left handed.).

Despite my guidance counselor having said that the only school that would have me would be the local community college because of its lack of admission standards, I got into 6 of the 7 schools I applied to. The problem was, the one school I really wanted to go to, the one school that might have saved me from myself during a disastrous freshman year, was the one that didn’t want me: Stonehill College, a small, Catholic school outside of Boston.

I desperately wanted to go to school in Boston. Not because of all the great academic institutions. But because of all the young people that attended the roughly 100 great academic institutions in the area.  Still, I realized at that time I needed a structured environment to succeed, which is why Stonehill seemed like the perfect choice.

Doom and I spent a day touring a few schools in the Boston area and had an interview at Stonehill. Apparently, I was on the bubble and they wanted to get a measure of me. I didn’t prepare for the interview and so when talking to the admissions counselor, I mumbled monosyllabic responses to questions while slumped in my chair. I didn’t appear interested. Doom was really pissed off when we got back in the car. He knew that there was no way I was getting in there. He was right. They rejected me.

My friends went to Duke, Tufts, Harvard, John Carroll. Bethani was the #1 student and Sam was in the top 10% of the class. But I wasn’t focused on being a scholar.  Even if I had been able to hear my parents admonishing me, pleading with me to work as hard on my grades as hard as I worked on my school and social lives, I am not sure I could have changed a thing.

One day in early Spring, Bob showed up at school with an ad he had clipped from the new music newspaper, Rolling Stone, that said 40 acts were going to appear at a three-day concert in August in the countryside of upstate New York, at a place called Woodstock. Free camping. Just bring coolers and sleeping bags. All for $18. It sounded great, but the price seemed pretty steep to a high school kid earning $1.60 an hour. The tickets alone would be two day’s wages.

Bob was really excited about it and said we HAD to go. I said I would think about it, kind of hoping he would forget about it. It seemed too big, too fantastic, too far away for it to really happen. After all, Bob had just turned 18 and I was still 17.

Then, Sam and I broke up. Or, she broke up with me. Right after the school year ended. There wasn’t a big fight. The relationship simply had run its course in the confined space of high school and that time of our lives. Again, I was not an ideal boyfriend. Even with my academic failures, I had an inflated sense of myself and was beginning to notice some other girls in town.

Sam definitely felt the distance increasing between us as we faced the gulf of life outside of West Hartford and she was starting to explore her options, too. She was very smart. And a babe, after all.

We had raced through the end of the year events together: prom, beach weekend and graduation. But a day or two after graduation, Sam said we should see other people as we were headed off to different colleges in the fall.

Normally, I would have fought to save the relationship on instinct (“Nobody breaks up with me!”), but since there was one girl in particular who kept coming into the Dairy to flirt, I accepted being dumped without an argument. After seeing each other almost every day that year, Sam and I saw each other only once in the next 10 years.

I pursued that girl from the Dairy but that didn’t work out nor did any other relationship that summer.  Or for the next 12 years, for that matter.

After three years of my life wrapped up in high school and my friends there, graduation came, and overnight, I was no longer a part of it. The social scene was gone.

My summer job gave me a preview of what adult life might become: I got up, went to work, worked with a bunch of older, coarser guys who didn’t read and came home exhausted and often fell asleep at the dinner table.

The good part, I suppose, was that I was too tired to go out and there was no one to go out with so I saved money for school. And for that summer festival Bob kept talking about. He had already bought his tickets. He kept urging me to buy mine.

My job was unloading bundles of ceiling tile from boxcars, which I then loaded into a truck that I then would drive to various construction sites. Other days the load would be 4 X 8 foot slabs of sheetrock. Sheetrock days were the worst. Because not only did I have to unload the truck at the job site, I then had to distribute the boards to the carpenters installing them.

It wasn’t too bad at the start of a project becasue I only had to carry them to the first floor. But as the project moved to the 2nd floor and then the third, etc., the extra steps made the job progressively harder.

First of all, 4 X 8 sheets of anything are awkward. And these sheets were heavy, about 45 pounds. At first I could only carry one at a time. But that wasn’t fast enough for the installers because they’d always be waiting for me to bring the next sheet. So I had to carry two at a time.

And, since we were a non-union shop, the union electricians who controlled the elevators made me take the stairs. And the stairs to each floor had a switch back which I had to navigate carefully so as to not ding the corners of the easily damaged drywall.

It was a job Doom got me with some customers of his, acoustical contractors Genovese and Didonno. It may have been a lot of work, but it was a big pay hike, $2.50 an hour. I could earn a $100 a week!

The owners were pretty rough around the edges. They swore. A lot. Especially at me. But I’d been out of the house and knew that a lot of guys talked a lot differently than Doom.

They especially liked to swear around Doom, since they knew he didn’t. When he showed up for a sales call, the language at Genovese and Didonno got coarser than usual. Doom knew their game. But as long as he made a sale and could get to the golf course, he let them have their little fun.

I liked driving the big trucks, although I had no training. Genovese had just thrown me the keys one day and told me to gas it up. When I returned 15 minutes later, myself and the truck intact, he figured I had learned how to drive it.

It really wasn’t that difficult to operate, except you never knew when the brakes were going to catch. They were air brakes and if you simply stepped on them like you are in the habit of doing in every day driving, the pedal would go straight to the floor. You had to think ahead and begin to pump them before you planned to stop. But, the amount of pumping varied from stop to stop. Sometimes you needed to pump a little and sometimes a lot. Driving those trucks carried some risk.

One rainy morning I was heading to Stamford, Connecticut down I-95 with a full truck of tile. As I approached a tollbooth, I began the pumping process, except for the first time, the brakes didn’t need any pumping and they caught immediately. More accurately, they locked up and the truck went into a spin.

I didn’t close my eyes, but as the truck spun, I couldn’t focus on anything. I tensed up, waiting to get hit and die. It seemed like an eternity before it stopped. In my mind, the truck spun around at least twice. When it stopped, I was facing oncoming traffic. On I-95, one of the busiest stretches of road in the country.

Luckily it was about a half hour before full rush hour so cars had enough room to maneuver around me and there was just enough time to turn the thing around and head to the tollbooth. There was a cop sitting there, watching the whole thing. He didn’t move a muscle. I suppose I could have gotten a ticket for driving too fast for conditions. But I would have argued for giving a ticket to Genovese and DiDonno for making me drive the dangerous piece of crap.

On another delivery, I was working with one of the carpenter’s apprentices. Richie was very big and strong and had played a half season with the Hartford Knights, the local semi-pro football team. He favored sleeveless T-shirts, which exposed his massive arms. He was a nice guy, however not clever enough to ever become a full carpenter. But he had more stature on the job because he wasn’t a “college boy.” The more education you had in that type of job, the lower down the ladder you were.

That particular day, we had two job sites to deliver to. We didn’t know which site we were going to first, as no one was in the warehouse to tell us. We faced a dilemma. If we didn’t load the truck, we’d get yelled at for standing around on company time and not working. But if we loaded the truck out of order, there’d be a lot of extra work for us when we got to the job sites. So instead of loading the jobs front to back, we got the bright idea to load one job’s tile on the right side and the other on the left side.

Just as we finished loading, the boss showed up and told us which load to drop off first. So Richie climbed in behind the wheel and I hopped into the passenger seat and we drove to the first site and unloaded the left side and headed to the next site.

We were feeling pretty pleased with how smoothly the day was going as this was the first time we had loaded the truck without the boss’ supervision. And the boss had seemed pleased that we had taken the initiative to load the truck without being told. Which was ridiculous because how hard is it to load a truck? And our packing method had made it easy to unload without having to know the order of the stops for the day.

It was about that time that we had to get on the interstate. As we were accelerating on the curve of the ramp, we felt something funny, as if the truck was beginning to lift off the ground. And it was. On the driver’s side. Because like 2 idiots, we had left all the weight on one side of the truck. It took us only seconds to realize what was happening and I dove across the bench seat and practically sat on Richie’s lap in an effort to keep from flipping the truck.

It was more instinct than a plan as I was trying to keep from falling out the passenger window. Luckily, Richie remembered to pump the brakes, and the tires slammed back to earth. Once we stopped hyperventilating, we laughed. And rearranged the load. We didn’t tell the bosses about our brilliant loading strategy.

That job paid well, $2.50 an hour, about a dollar above minimum wage. But it was so physical and tedious that when Bob began talking more intensely about that music festival in New York, I started paying more attention, seeing it as a possible escape hatch.

We studied the acts scheduled to perform and it was mostly headliner after headliner:  Richie Havens, Joan Baez, Creedence Clearwater Revival, The Who, Santana, Jefferson Airplane, Sly and the Family Stone, Jimi Hendrix, Country Joe and the Fish, 10 Years After and John Sebastian.

There were some unknowns: Sweetwater. Melanie. Joe Cocker and his Grease Band. But we figured there were enough names to make the trip and money worth our while.

So we saved our money all summer, quit our jobs on August 14th and then got up early the next morning and started driving west in Bob’s mother’s 1969 yellow Mustang, on our way to our last chance for adventure before college. Woodstock.

The first time I tasted beer was in my grandmother’s kitchen. We were down from Connecticut in her front-to-back row house in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn on Easter Sunday. I was 4.

I had mixed emotions about going to my grandmother’s house on holidays. I loved my grandmother, of course. Her personality had a few layers of sternness that her grandchildren had to penetrate, but once we did, you could almost physically feel her love. We physically felt it when she pinched our cheeks.

I also loved to see my relatives. What I didn’t love was always being dressed for these occasions like, in my mother’s words, “a little gentleman.” And I wasn’t crazy about being paraded in front of the adults to be admired like a cow at the county fair.

Luckily, the lineup didn’t last long. Pretty soon, the adults would get drinks and the conversation got loud and, to a kid, unintelligible. Too many adults, not enough kids. I’d get bored.

That’s when I’d wander upstairs to my mom’s and Aunt Aggie’s old room, which remained how it was when they were last living there, after college and before they got married in the 40s.

With the roar of conversation and glasses and ice clinking downstairs, the bedroom was so quiet in contrast. I would slide open each dresser drawer and find that the few contents – an old missal, a scapular, a hair brush – never changed from visit to visit.

After my ritual explore upstairs, I’d head down to the dark, dank basement and visit my grandma’s manual sewing machine. I was very pleased when, one year, I found that my legs were long enough to reach and operate the treadle. I’d also look over at the far front corner and think about my grandfather and how, when he was alive, he’d be in that space, making wine.

I loved the smell of the old house, especially those coming from the tight confines of Grandma’s kitchen. I learned, through experience, that a dinner of epic proportions would eventually be coming through that door. When I had first been allowed to sit at the big table with the big people, I made a youthful mistake.

After the antipasto, grandma brought out the biggest, most beautiful bowl of spaghetti I have ever seen. The abundant helping of thick red sauce – what the Brooklyn side of the family called gravy – which sat atop the pasta, looked as if a Gourmet Magazine art director had positioned it. So I ate. And when I was done, asked for seconds. The adults laughed. Grandma frowned at them and gave me more.

Then she disappeared into the kitchen and, in a few minutes, brought out the main course, the “secondi.” Which was a turkey. And ham. And vegetables. My mother gave me a look as if to say, “Now you know why they were laughing at you.” The spaghetti was just the primo course.

Then there was salad. Then cheeses. Then the sweets and coffee. Nobody had warned me that a Sunday Italian dinner was a marathon. And that you needed to pace yourself.

But on the Easter of my first encounter with beer, I was too young to explore more than the first floor. I wandered into the kitchen and saw my grandmother at the stove, her back to me. She was focused as she was entering the final hour of preparation of a six-course meal for sixteen and didn’t see me.

One of the male guests had just grabbed a beer from the fridge and noticed me as he was punching holes in the can. He smiled and wordlessly offered me a sip.

My grandmother must have sensed that offer because after a delay of 1.5 seconds, she broke her concentration and turned around just in time to see him help me lift the can to my lips. I took a drink.

“Heeeeyyy!” she shouted, which, with her accent, sounded like she said it in Italian. “What’s the matter with you?”

She vigorously waved a towel at the perpetrator as if she were fighting off an attack of hornets. “Get out of my kitchen.”

My grandmother turned back to her stove and stirred one of the pots and then came at me with a large spoon.

“Here, taste some of the gravy,” she said. “It will take some of that beer taste away.”

My grandmother needn’t have worried. I liked it. Even though I was just 4 years old, I’ll never forget the taste of that beer. A Ballantine Ale.

The first time I decided to drink on my own, I was 15 and I planned to do what a lot of kids do: raid my parents’ liquor cabinet. My plan was to pour a little out of each bottle in the cabinet into a flask and drink it before the next town dance to celebrate the end of football season.

But I didn’t have a flask. And at 15, had no idea how to get one. The week before the big night, getting one was all I could think about.

I even was thinking about it in the shower before school that Monday when, after rinsing the shampoo out of my hair, I opened my eyes and saw my 12-ounce bottle of Old Spice shampoo. It was shaped just like a flask. Perfect. Right in front of me all this time. And it was plastic so it wouldn’t break if dropped or sat on.

I simply had to empty it and rinse it out. Which I did, but it stilled smelled like Old Spice shampoo. So I rinsed it again. And again. In fact, the rest of the week, any free moment I had, was spent rinsing that bottle.

At the end of the week, there was still a faint odor of the shampoo, but I figured there was no way there was any shampoo left in the newly anointed flask. I was wrong. I don’t remember much about that night except the awful taste of the concoction of the booze that still had hints of Old Spice (a scent that I used to love). And I remember having to leave the dance very early. Because I got sick.

I swore off the hard stuff for a long time after that. And alcohol in general for six months. But then it was spring and I was so much wiser then. I thought. A bunch of us decided to meet in the cemetery near the Center to have a couple of beers to celebrate the end of baseball season. But getting alcohol and getting that alcohol to another location wasn’t easy without a car or driver’s license.

On this night, I walked up my street to the main drag, Farmington Avenue, and then walked another four blocks to Roger’s package store (a package store was about the only place to buy booze in Connecticut, a state that was still honoring many of the laws enacted in the eighteenth century).

Even though I was starting to shave and my voice had changed, I had just turned 16 and did not look close enough to the legal drinking age to buy beer on my own. So I stood at the edge of the store’s parking lot and tried to guess who might be willing to take my $1.25 and buy me a six-pack of Schlitz.

Eventually, a guy in his mid 20s, who had been in my position just a few years before, agreed to buy for me. Until my stubble got thicker and darker and I was able to buy on my own at certain locations the following year, that’s the type of guy I’d target to buy for me.

Once in a while, an older, seedier type – guys who looked as if they just escaped the city jail – would buy for me if I kicked in and paid for their booze, too. We called them balkies.

Once I had my beer, I headed back to Farmington Avenue and caught a bus for the two-mile ride to the Center. The adults on the bus seemed to be focused on my brown paper bag. I felt like the narrator in Poe’s Tell-tale Heart: It was all I could do to not scream out “Yes! I did it. I had someone buy me the six-pack that is so obviously wrapped in this brown paper bag.”

When I got to the center, I met my friends at the predetermined headstone. We hadn’t been drinking long when there was a lull in the conversation that allowed us to hear others guys talking. And we saw a flash of light. By the sounds of their voices, we determined the voices belonged to minors who were drinking illegally. So were we. But that was OK. Because it was us.

I decided to make use of my recently acquired adult voice to scare these kids away.

“Hey!” I intoned. “You kids. What are you doing here? You don’t belong here. Leave your beer and get out of here or I’m calling for back up.”

The other group was silent. Then there was a bit of whispering. Then finally one of them responded.

“Hey, Sivell. Is that you?”

Turns out, most of the rest of the team had made plans to drink beer at the cemetery. Until we got our cars, that was a favored place to drink.

That was sophomore year. Junior year, when I was with Bethani, I only drank on the rare occasions I wasn’t at practice or with her.

Senior year, I didn’t drink at all during football season because that was forbidden. If you got caught, you were tossed off the team immediately, no questions asked, no matter how good you were. And then you were nobody. The high school scarlet letter.

We didn’t always follow the rules, but only the truly stupid went against Coach Robinson. He was the type of coach you never wanted to disappoint.

So that year, we waited until after the last game and that night we started drinking and kept on drinking all year. The yearbook described me as “hub of the action.” I didn’t try to earn that reputation. It just happened.

When I wasn’t with my usual group of friends, I fell in with the jocks who called themselves the “Juicin’ Squad.” Of course, juice was booze. Just like “microscope material” was code for cigarettes when we were in junior high, in case our parents or nosey siblings were listening on the extension line.

I don’t know how I fell in with them. Maybe because I looked older and could buy beer at some locations such as the liquor stores near from Trinity College. Maybe because I had my own car. In high school, there was often a catch to a relationship.

I was never part of the inner circle. But I was pretty friendly with a couple of charter members like Jay Hershman, who I had known since 7th grade. And that circle was a bit empty during the basketball season because several of their guys – including Jay – were on the team. So I filled in.

Our routine was to get drunk, go to the basketball games and behave obnoxiously. As I was louder and even more of a wise guy when I had a few drinks and fewer inhibitions, they liked having me around. Plus, as I say, I had a car.

On game nights, we’d get out of the house soon after dinner and meet up as early as we could before a game. We’d buy a 6 pack apiece and down as many as we could as quick as we could, offering encouragement to anyone who was slow.

And it wasn’t positive encouragement. “Come on, you drink like a girl!” was the popular motivator. Although the language was a bit coarser. And it was a bit ironic because some of the girls we hung out with could drink more than we could. Usually we had time to drink at least 3 beers before tip off. That was the minimum to get our cheering squad lubricated.

We’d go to all the games, home and away, often getting lost on the way to the out of town games, but the longer the time on the road, the more beer we were able to drink. Considering how my brother died just the year before, it’s hard to believe I did any of this. But I did and it helps me see how stupid kids can be. Because what about the kids who have no painful lesson to guide them? My 17-year-old brain was at least 10 years away from maturity.

At one home game, I was very loud and very cutting. Abusive. A ref was the target. I was sure he was costing us the game. And at that moment, it was the most important thing in my life. He kept looking into the crowd to see who was saying these terrible things. I kept shooting my mouth off and I kept hitting the target.

Late in the game, the ref spotted me and signaled that he wanted me out. The bleachers were crowded so I hid behind the guys and watched the game from beneath and between their heavy duffle coats. The teacher who came looking for me couldn’t get to me. Maybe I had gone too far. Hell, of course I had. But after the game, I went out and finished my 6-pack.

Sam told me her parents liked her going out with me because I was such a gentleman and that they felt that they could trust me. And that was generally the right feeling for parents to have about me. I wasn’t going to harm their daughter in the way that most parents worry about their daughters out on dates.

But I was drinking and driving. By spring, three to five times a week. And not just at night. I was out of control but most people had no idea. I didn’t.

Baseball season began and I knew it might be my last shot to ever play the game. So I worked hard and finally made the team, starting in right field. Yes, I was the 9th guy in the lineup but I was starting.

I ran all the laps I was supposed to run, taking no shortcuts. While there are gifted kids who are good at every sport, I was not good at any sport. I wasn’t even like Ernie or Tehan, who were kind of gawky at ball sports but good at football. My short, stumpy body just wasn’t built to be an athlete.

I helped organize a couple of fundraisers for the team, including a big town dance and we had enough money for a pitching machine. With that machine, something finally clicked in my head about hitting. Or maybe it simply was knowing the ball wasn’t going to hit me in the head as Coach Fitz would invariably come close to doing when he was throwing batting practice. I could never tell if it was an accident or on purpose.

I was able to translate what I had learned in the batting cage to live pitching. When we started playing, I found I could see the ball all the way in to the bat. I started to hit. It was a revelation.

Success on the field, however, didn’t translate to success in the classroom because I had been too busy drinking, socializing and – since the girls still had to wear skirts to school – staring at Sam’s legs in World History class. I had done marginally better academically over the winter semester, but then spring fever hit. My third quarter grades were terrible: 2 Ds and 2 Fs.

That meant no baseball. I was academically disqualified.

I had to tell Coach Fitzpatrick the next day. I approached him at the start of practice, dressed in my street clothes. While the other guys were warming up, I broke the news, figuring it was a lot harder on me than him.

After three years of football and baseball together, I knew I was not Fitz’s kind of guy. He was the young, good-looking phys. ed./driver’s ed. teacher who had played minor league ball. He liked the guys with genuine athletic skill. I wasn’t one of those. He liked rah-rah guys. I wasn’t one of those, either.

But as I was telling him the news, he reached out and put an arm around me and pulled me close to him. He was slowly shaking his head while I finished talking. I didn’t know what was coming as I’d never been that close to a coach without him yelling at me.

But I needn’t have worried. Fitz told me that he knew how hard I had worked to make the team that year. He knew I ran all the laps. And that the team owed a lot of the success of our fundraisers for the pitching machine to me. He said I had made a big contribution even before the season started.

In the one moment of genuine understanding between the two of us in three years, he said was truly sorry I would not be on the team. Then he took his big mitt, his calloused pitching hand, and put it around the back of my neck and squeezed, just enough to cause pain but not quite enough for me to cry out.

“Now don’t be stupid,” he said, pushing me away as he let go. “You’re a whole lot smarter than this. Learn from this.” Then he turned and walked back to practice.

That year the team went 3-23. I am under no illusion that my bat would have made much of a difference. We were not a baseball school. In my 3 years there, we only won 8 games.

Earlier that day, Dr. Dunn had called me down to his office and told me I was not going to graduate if I didn’t raise all four grades. Doom was so mad when he saw the grades, he didn’t speak to me for a week. I think Mom did only because Doom wouldn’t.

You’d think disappointing the caring adults in my life and getting booted off the team would set me straight. It didn’t.

Dave Cole and I kept right on drinking. Yeah, the basketball season was over, but that didn’t mean we couldn’t enjoy a few beers … between classes. We used to leave school after first period because we had 2nd off and we’d get in his car, drive 2 blocks to his parents’ house – they were both at work – and straight into his garage. Then we’d drink 2 or 3 beers in that hour.

We thought we were so smart. The old pull-into-the-garage trick where no one can see what you are doing. We did it at my parent’s house during spring break while they were gone and we were tired from our temporary jobs of unloading boxcars for a furniture store. Although occasionally, we moved the party inside.

The turning point came one day after a visit to Dave’s garage. I was sitting in my 3rd period class daydreaming about the usual – baseball and girls – while Miss Papa was explaining cosines in trigonometry. I looked up front to see Jay Hershman trying to catch my attention. He was slowly waving his hand in front of his face, signaling he could smell my beer breath up front. If he could, I figured, so could the teacher. She was only two feet in front of him.

Suddenly, it finally dawned on me that maybe I wasn’t so smart and I was in danger of the everyone finding out what I was doing. And most importantly, Dr. Dunn, who had championed me when my teachers and coaches hadn’t. It FINALLY dawned on me that I might be out of control and on the path to ruin.

Luckily, I was sitting next to the window and I spent the rest of the class breathing out the window. I’m sure Miss Papa thought I wasn’t paying attention. I was. But not to trig. I was paying attention to not getting caught.

I stopped going to Dave’s garage for beers at 9 a.m. and I stopped hanging out with the juicing squad. I didn’t stop drinking, but I kept it to the weekends. Sam had been pretty tolerant of my behavior, but was disgusted with my grades. Bob didn’t care about my grades, but had been pretty disgusted with my behavior, abandoning, as he said, my true friends. 

Since I wasn’t on the team and had nothing to do after school, Sam and I went to the library or my house every afternoon that spring to study. Thanks to her, I raised my grades in all subjects. And thanks to all my positive, in-school activities and decent SAT scores, college wasn’t ruled out.

Next week: Chapter 23. School is Out.

It was a seemingly innocent remark. But with it, early in our senior year, our new school president, John Abraham, set in motion one of the hottest social events of the year.

John was at his locker, exchanging his books from the previous class for his books for the next. Now that he was president, guys had begun to crowd near John’s locker between classes to curry favor or just so they could brag they talked with him or said hello to him.

One of the guys in the crowd, Steve Blanford, was talking loudly about some movies he had. He just knew all the guys would like to see them. That they were far more revealing than the Playboy magazines most guys were too embarrassed to buy. Steve also claimed to have a projector, just nowhere to project them.

John, overhearing the conversation he was intended to overhear, wanted to be accommodating. Or so he said. But Steve could be a big talker and John impulsively called his bluff.

“My parents are out of town this weekend,” John offered. “My basement might be a good spot.”

I soon would come to learn that John liked to play the innocent bystander. Throughout senior year, he seemed to be standing next to nearly every fire of excitement and tagging of the school. But nobody suspected the school president could be the one carrying the matches … or the paint.

“My grandmother is staying with me,” John said. “But she’s old and doesn’t hear so well. Plus, she doesn’t like to go down to the basement.”

The word went out. No parents at Abraham’s house Friday night.

That weekend, a half hour before show time, cars were parked up and down Riggs Avenue. And more kept coming.

John quickly decided to turn a potential disaster into a business opportunity. He put his little sister at the door to take a cover charge. He began acting like a nightclub owner, warmly greeting his customers as they arrived.

I was an usher, installed at the bottom of the basement stairs, with the job of guiding our guests to a spot on the floor. At first, we tried to maneuver around the ping pong table, but that was eventually folded up and leaned against the wall so more customers could be accommodated.

As the lights went out and the projector began to flicker the first images, cheers and shouts erupted. The mixed reactions of approval, disgust and embarrassment started loud and grew louder with each new movie and each new technique. At one point, John went outside to see if it could be heard on the street. It could.

Even his hard of hearing grandmother could hear the roars of the 35 teenage boys in the basement. Early in the screening, the door at the top of the stairs opened and the light from the kitchen flooded down toward me. I could only see the outline of her tiny, angular body, draped in a house dress.

“What’s going on down there?” John’s grandmother hollered past me with her thick Assyrian accent. “John?”

John hurriedly worked his way through the sea of bodies, stepping on a couple to get to the stairs.

“Nothing, Nanny,” he said, looking up at his grandmother. “It’s just a student council meeting.”

The movies were short and there weren’t many of them. A couple of favorites were rerun. But the event was over in an hour. The basement emptied quickly and within five minutes, Riggs Avenue was once again the quiet picture of 1960s suburbia.

Few of us spoke of the “student council meeting” the rest of the year. Certainly not to the girls. It was almost as if it never happened. We had plausible deniability until the end of the year when a yearbook photographer produced pictures of those in attendance. Funny, there were no pictures of the school president, the guy who had set the event in motion.

Shortly after the movie night,  there was a very brief rekindling with Bethani. We’d gone to a reunion dinner/dance for the Boys and Girls State attendees. Our high school contingent sat together and, after our summer apart, Bethani and I just kind of glared at each other. But after dinner, it was easier to dance with someone you knew, so that’s what we did.

And for a few weeks after that night, I pursued Bethani. I called her and drove her home after she was done with the library or cheerleading practice and I was done with football.

But there was a complication.

Bethani hadn’t been idle that summer while I had been dating Annie. She had started dating a guy from the rival high school. It seemed as if I might be winning her back when my rival for her affections broke his leg during soccer practice. Bethani said she had to be there for him.

We were sitting in my F-85 as she told me and Mary Hopkin came on the radio: “Those were the days, my friend. We thought they’d never end.” A song about nostalgia for a lost relationship wafting from the radio while I was experiencing a lost relationship. 

It was such an obvious sign, I gave up. Bethani said we could be friends. But that was the last time we spoke to each other that year, even though it was a small school and we passed each other in the halls several times a day.

With Bethani gone, I had time to help John with his crisis. Over the summer, he had attended a leadership forum for rising seniors elected to student government. When he got home, we never heard a word about the forum. He wouldn’t stop talking about a girl he met there, Kelsey Turbo. 

“She came on to me,” John said in amazement. “I didn’t have to do a thing.”

There were some issues, though.

Kelsey lived two towns over, on the other side of Avon Mountain. And John didn’t have a car, which, at age 17, wasn’t surprising. But neither did he have his driver’s license. So when Kelsey called to invite him to a big dance at her school, John wanted to decline.

I said he should accept.

“You have a girl calling you!” I said. “How often does that happen?”

I thought about the situation for a minute.

“Driving is not that hard, “ I said. “I mean look at all the morons who get licenses. The guys and I can teach you to drive.”

We decided teaching him on Ernie’s 1959 Chevy station wagon was the safest bet. It already looked as if it lost a demolition derby – twice. And the paint was so faded, you’d have thought the previous owner parked it on Miami Beach every summer.

When Ernie bought the car, the front passenger door was already permanently welded shut. And it didn’t get better with Ernie’s driving. By the time we were teaching John, it only had one working door, the passenger side rear door.

It was a terrible car. Still, with only six days to teach John to drive, I figured I could at least make him a better driver than Ernie.

I suggested we should drive over to Kelsey’s house, to see where she lived, and familiarize John with the route. When we set the pre-date date up, we thought we’d been clear that Kelsey should have a friend with her. For me. She did. Her mother.

Kelsey’s mother wanted to get a look at John and the type of friend he had. She quickly began grilling him about his life and ambitions. John answered, but was obviously more interested in spending time with Kelsey.

So like a good wingman, I took over the conversation and began prattling on about my family, how they came over on the boat, and some made-up-on-the-spot grandiose future plans. When I ran dry, I dove deep into the story of Page in full, sordid detail, including robbing houses, stealing cars and the year in Juvie hall.

Meanwhile, John and Kelsey had stopped talking. I didn’t notice because I was so absorbed in my tale of woe and I had a sympathetic audience. I also didn’t notice John standing behind Kelsey’s mother, waving his arms as if he was trying to direct a plane into a hangar.

Back in the car, John just kept shaking his head. “I was trying to get you to shut up,” he said, somewhat in bewilderment. “I figured you were going to start talking about your heroin business next. Or your plans to rob a bank.”

It turns out, it didn’t matter. John – and I – passed the test and he was allowed to take Kelsey to the dance.

Teaching John to drive proved slightly more difficult than I imagined. John said he knew what happed to the front wheels when you turned the steering wheel to the right.

“But what happens to the back wheels?” asked the future Ph.D. “Do they follow?”

He learned well enough to drive Kelsey safely to the dance and back. But they never saw each other again. Maybe it would have worked out differently if John really had his license and a car.

That left us both back where we started the year, endlessly discussing potential girlfriends and then daring each other to call them. I say dare because calling a girl was the ultimate demonstration of bravery. You had to go through the parents – by way of the phone – to get to the girl.

After dinner, with my parents in the living room reading or watching TV, I’d head downstairs to use the phone in the basement. Before picking up the receiver, though, I had to pace the basement for at least five minutes to work up my nerve. It was one thing if a girl passed you her number in class and wanted you to call. It was quite another if you were making a cold call.

When I did pick up the phone, I slowly dialed each number, trying to mentally prepare myself if the dad answered. That was the worst scenario. But quite often, by the time I spun the dial on the last number, my throat was completely dry and my nerve was gone.

I’d hang up.

Then it was more pacing and self talk. Then, I’d pick up the phone and start the routine again. And again. This would go on until I realized it was after 9 p.m. and it would be impolite to call at that hour. I could relax and tell myself that surely, I would make that call tomorrow.

At school the next day, while we talked near our lockers before the first bell, the guys would want to know if I had called Maggie, a girl I was interested in. The answer was always the same. No. Eventually, they decided to give me the courage I needed to start the relationship.  That Friday night I was talking about my plans again.

“I’m definitely going to call Maggie Monday night,” I promised. “Or maybe Tuesday.”

Suddenly, all the guys lunged at me, each grabbing an arm or a leg. They held me down while another guy grabbed a rope. They tied me up. Then, they tied me to a sled.

“We’re taking you to Maggie’s house and we’re going to dump you on her front lawn,” one of them said. “If you’re not going to make it happen, we’re going to make it happen.”

“No, wait,” John said. “I’ve got a better idea. Let’s lean the sled against the door so when she opens it, he falls in.”

The rest of the guys loved the epic nature of that idea. It would be a story they could tell and embellish for the rest of their lives. While I tried to wriggle free, I worried what would be worse: the broken nose I was sure to get when the door opened and I slammed to the ground or the embarrassment of having to confess my feelings to Maggie. Especially if I had to do it with a bloody face.

In the end, the guys realized they had a problem: They didn’t know where Maggie lived. But they didn’t want to waste an opportunity of making a fool out of me. They knew Liz Mason was having a slumber party so they dropped me off – still strapped to the sled – in her front yard, rang the doorbell and sped away.

The guys actually did me a favor. The girls, already dressed for bed, felt sorry for me. They untied me and snuck me inside to join the party. I got to spend the rest of the night hanging out with them. The guys had to hang out with themselves.

Because I doubted I would ever dial all the digits of Maggie’s phone number, I knew I needed to head to the library. Not for the books, but for the girls. That’s where they studied at night.

Going to the library was a great way to get out of the house in the middle of the week. It was one of the few places our parents let us go to without too many questions. At that age, our lives were pretty prescribed. We had school, then sports or music or religious instruction, dinner, and then homework while listening to our favorite DJs chatter between playing the Top 40 songs on our transistor radios and then to bed.

There weren’t many chances for casual social interaction except for a few minutes before and after school, in the three minutes between classes and on Friday nights, cruising from the Park Road Friendly’s ice cream shop, which was our turf, to the Bridlepath Friendly’s, which was our rivals’.

At the library, the girls actually did want to get their homework done. But the guys would be urging them to pack it in early so we could hang out longer before our curfews. Most of us had to be home by 9:15, 15 minutes after the library closed.

In those few social minutes that we had, Samantha and I often found ourselves pairing as we all crowded into one or two cars so we could cruise together.

Sam and I had first met a few years before at The Fort, a well-kept secret teen hideout. It was hidden deep within one of the last large tracts of wooded land in town that would become, in just a few years, the site of a new housing development. Some of the kids from Sedgwick Junior High had gone into those woods and built a pretty solid fort, complete with a floor and roof, using material swiped from nearby building sites. It was a perfect place for 14 and 15 year olds to escape adult supervision and learn to smoke cigarettes. Among other things.

Early in our sophomore year, someone brought me to The Fort and introduced me around. Sam was one of the few girls allowed there. I told her later that I thought she was one of the guys’ molls. We made note of each other but never went beyond saying “Hi” to each other as we passed between classes.

Until senior year.

Sam said she liked pairing up with me at the library because she could stay true to her boyfriend, Tom, who had graduated a year before us. She said I was safe. Being the safe guy wasn’t something I aspired to, but I pretended I was OK with it since I liked being with her.

Pretty soon, though I am a bit slow at these things, I began to notice that something more than a friendship might be developing. But there was a hitch.  

Sam’s boyfriend, Tom, was in Vietnam. And he wasn’t some accidental soldier. He was a Marine.

I realized nothing could happen while Tom was away. You couldn’t just break up with him like you could a high school classmate. At home, with a broken heart, they could just go to Friendly’s and drown their troubles in a milk shake. Not so in a war zone.

Plus, Tom and I had a relationship. Every day at practice the previous year, I had lined up across from him, then a senior and a starting linebacker. Tom was taller and had these long arms, which Coach Robinson used to call our flippers. When the ball was snapped, I would charge at him as hard as I could and Tom would use his arms like flippers in a pinball machine to stand me up. Whack. Whack. Whack. Every drill. Every day. He’d clobber me.

Sam told me later that Tom thought I was a hard hitter. He’s the only guy who ever said that about me. I didn’t believe it, but this was coming from a guy who went to Vietnam at the height of the war. Whatever he says. It’s not the kind of thing you can brag about to anybody, like my teammates: “Hey, you guys may think I suck, but Tom Kay thinks I am a hard hitter. And he went to Viet Nam!”

Others began to see there was more to our relationship before we did. Tom’s younger brother wrote to him about it. However, Tom was cool and he knew – as did everybody – that Sam was a flirt and he told his brother if she were going to hang out with any guy, it was best she hang out with me. He thought I was an honorable guy. I really was honored by that but as my feelings for Sam grew, so did the pressure to stay honorable.

Then one night, we left the library with about 45 minutes left for cruising around town. I found myself in a car with Sam and four other girls. Sam’s best friend, Barbra, was driving and Sam was in the middle of the bench seat and I was shotgun. There was a lot of coded talking and teasing going on that I was not part of, but I began to have a sense it had something to do with me.

While we drove around, listening to the radio, Sam leaned over and said she had a secret to tell me. So I leaned over toward her and she cupped her hands as if to tell me but instead, she started … well, just breathing.

All the girls in the car knew exactly what was going on. I had been clueless. I turned to look at her, my eyes very wide open and she simply smiled. I could tell from that smile our relationship was about to change. I volunteered to drive her home.

It turned out, she had gotten a letter from Tom telling her it was unfair of him to make her stay true. This was her senior year and she should enjoy it. So he was breaking up with her.

Now we were free to be a couple. To go steady. I was excited but also worried.

It could be great. A popular, good-looking, smart girl to be with at all the parties and not have to face that dreaded phone in the basement every week. But being in a relationship had its downs as well as its ups.  I knew from my experience with Bethani the previous year, there was that commitment of time, energy and emotion that could possibly offset the pleasures and convenience of a steady relationship.

But Sam and I didn’t have the fights that Bethani and I did. I had matured, a bit. And neither of us tried to get the upper hand of the relationship. Sam was easy going, quick to smile and got great grades but wasn’t obsessed with them.

It didn’t bother her that I was a terrible football player and was no longer a starter. She had a sense of humor and occasionally would chant, “Put Al in” on her megaphone while I knelt on the sidelines during games. Thankfully, the coach was too busy to pay attention. But I would turn and try to shush her for fear the coach would really put me in.

Mostly we went to parties and movies. Lots of drive-ins on the Berlin Turnpike. I have no idea what movies we saw. We’d often meet up with other kids at the movies, pile into one or two cars together and hang out for the first movie. Then we’d pair off, go back to our own cars and make out during the second. Sometimes I was embarrassed about my lack of creativity in thinking of things to do.

But we kept doing it. My social life was so good senior year that I almost flunked out. (Three songs off the soundtrack of our senior year together: The Beatles , The Chamber Brothers and Blood, Sweat and Tears).

Next week: Chapter 22. Who Are You?

Last summer I wrote the first 17 chapters of my blog. A couple of those chapters dealt with Bethani, my first serious girlfriend. Since I’m plumbing the depths of my memory and I’m doing the writing, the stories are told from my perspective.

But over the winter, going through some notes and letters I’d saved but forgotten, I found a note from Bethani that sheds some light on our teenage romance from her perspective.

So throughout this chapter of the blog, I am going to go back and forth between Bethani and me, with what Bethani wrote in bold. As far as the audio goes, I don’t have a lot of range and I certainly can’t recreate the sound of a 16-year-old girl. But I will try to read her part with the energy with which she wrote it.

Look Creep,

Shut up and read this because I’m sick of talking to you while you act like such a cool head. I’m going to scribble until I’m blue and you’re going to read, no questions asked.

The note is from November, 1967. Definitely not a love note. Bethani and I had been dating for six months at the time. I’m 16. So is Bethani but she has the maturity and focus of a grad student.

OK, so you decided not to go with me and to hack with the guys. Groovy. That’s great because I need time to do other things, too. Besides, theoretically we can still feel the same, maybe more, if we see less and enjoy more. It’s a good idea and I like it. BUT, it’s produced a bunch of problems that have got to be solved, no matter how long you try to avoid the issue with phone calls to your friends and football meetings.

We’re going to solve it now.

It was just three months after my brother died. I had blocked out most of the pain of his death and his absence by focusing on my social life. I had a job, my own car, I was on the football team and I had a pretty girl friend who was also the smartest kid in the school.

At 16, I didn’t have any experience expressing romantic feelings. Up until then, I’d hung out with the guys. Together we played football and baseball and rode bikes. We went to downtown Hartford on Saturday mornings to buy records and then rode the bus home to listen to them.

With our new music providing the soundtrack, we discussed the merits of the bands, baseball and the girls in our classes. Feelings were not something we expressed toward one another unless it was to laugh at a sarcastic putdown or take a swing at someone when that putdown struck a little too close to home.

You’ve changed a lot. You used to act appreciative of the fact that you even had me, but now you’ve got this stinky idea in your head that it’s prep to act like you could care less. Well, the one reason you are so sure that I dig your bod is because I let you know it. Why shouldn’t I? It would be pretty sad if I couldn’t. But you do the exact opposite.

We had started dating in May, just as the school year was ending. During the summer, we had full-time jobs at businesses a block apart in the Center, the hub of our sleepy suburb. Any free time we had, we spent together. We went to a lot of movies, to dances at the high school auditorium and to the beach on days off. For the most part, we were in our own little world.

But then school began again and our social sphere got bigger and more complicated.

This “I could give a damn” attitude is driving me up a wall and I’m not going to tolerate it much longer. I admit I was wrong by accusing you of trying to impress your friends. I only wish you could be as considerate to my face as you say you are behind my back.

She hadn’t been wrong. I had been trying to impress my friends. Car, job, sports, girlfriend. I figured I had it all. The problem was, I had begun to take the girlfriend for granted. But Bethani refused to be lumped in with the inanimate passions of my life. She wanted at least equal attention.

When we were in study hall, I didn’t study. I just stared at her.

“Stop staring at me,” she’d whisper.

“I can’t,” I said.

I know you still care, whether you choose to show it or not. But don’t you see that care and consideration are one in the same? You act like you don’t like me to my face … “Maybe I’ll see you this weekend, if you’re lucky.” Or “Maybe I’ll take you here or there…”

After football practice, I’d wait for her in my car outside the library and then drive her home. She spent more time in the library after school than I did at practice and she got much better results. And I’d call her almost every night at 9 and we’d talk for about ten minutes.

I was thrilled to be with Bethani, but being in a relationship was new and it was hard work. Hanging with my friends, something I’d done for years, was fun and natural.

My friends had encouraged me, or rather dared me, to go out with Bethani. But, then they were resentful of the time I spent with her. I didn’t want the guys to think I had abandoned them for a girl. So I tried to balance my social life … by acting like none of it really mattered. 

You must care a lot! (sarcasm, Creep). Judging by the way you talk, you could give a hot damn. I realize you’re trying to be cool and funny, but you make no effort to show that you actually do care.

When she had confronted me about this in person a few weeks before, I knew she was right. But this was my first relationship. I didn’t know how to react. So I lied. I acted deeply wounded that she would accuse me of such a thing.

I consider you first, whether my plans include you or not. And you jolly-well had better do the same or I’m going to have to leave you, that’s all.

I’d miss you like hell and I don’t want to, but I am not a piece of dust that you can brush around and I’ve got too much pride to take this garbage you call “caring deeply” any longer.

Friday nights were nights to hang out with the guys. Saturday nights were usually date nights and often movie nights. It sometimes became routine, but every once in awhile, a must-see movie was released that elevated the movie date into an event. The Graduate, with its Simon and Garfunkel soundtrack, was an event.

Bethani and I had plans to go together on a Saturday night. However, on the Friday night before, my best friend Bob, insisted we go see it rather doing our usual thing, watching the Friday Night fights on TV, especially if Mohammed Ali was fighting or shooting hoops in his driveway.  

I told Bob no. Even though I couldn’t wait to see the movie. Still, it was like tempting a kid with the chance to see his presents before Christmas Day. I protested a while, but Bob was able to wear me down in about 10 minutes. “She’ll never know,” he lied, not even convincingly.  I told myself that it didn’t really matter if I saw it first with Bob and then with her.

I kept repeating that thought as if I was seeking absolution by repeating “Hail Marys” ahead of time before committing an egregious sin.

I understand that you have a great time with the boys and want to spend a lot of time with them. But that doesn’t mean we don’t have a good time and that I’m off the list completely. Quite the contrary. You ought to appreciate a little more the value of someone’s affections which far surpass those of any campaneros tuyos.

At 16, Bethani could express indignation in two languages.

I went to the movie the next night with Bethani. But as we settled into our seats, I let it slip I had seen it the night before. I knew I wouldn’t be able to keep that a secret. She didn’t take the news well. It was as if I had cheated on her. Her lips were pursed into a thin line of anger throughout the movie. And they were still pursed later, in the darkened auxillary parking lot at Fern Park.

Where we talked. Or, she talked and I listened.

So before you trample something you can’t replace into the mud, you ought to realize what you’ve got as far as a girl goes and realize you won’t have her if you don’t show a little carino.

Don’t get sarcastic and say, “What do you want me to do, fall all over you when I see you?” Not at all. But my concern for you is an accumulation of 6 months that have meant more to me than you can imagine. Not everyone can care about you that way, so think before you get too sure of yourself, buddy.

On Sunday afternoons, we’d hold hands and slowly walk through the expanse of deeply green grass of Fern Park, looking for a secluded spot to spread a blanket. Or we’d pretend we were in our own mansion in a grove of towering pines at The Resevoir. Sundays were my only days off and the only time she would take off. Partly, I think, because the library was closed.

Stop acting like such a hot rooster and look at things the way they really are. Act like “Alsa” – a person with feelings instead of “cool.” That’s what I found in you that I liked so much. You weren’t just another guy trying to put down a girl if she really cared. You were able to feel and appreciate the good things that come from a close relationship … from life.

The weather on those fall, New England afternoons set the mood. The sun was still powerful enough to shine through the trees and warm the air. As it started to set, and the day and our time together started to fade, the air turned chilly. The color of the light and the leaves began to change. I remember wanting hold on to the last few moments of those days. To freeze them. To not to let time take another step. To not have Sunday turn into Monday.

You weren’t just a shallow “guy.” You were too good for them. Yes, I’ve cried my eyes out lately, but not because I was losing my little “Alsa.” It’s because it’s a heart break to see all the virtues that made you so wonderful and everything we had so wonderful deteriorating beneath your “cool.”

We had a soundtrack.

Groovin’ by the Young Rascals. Sunday Will Never be the Same by Spanky and Our Gang.  I Think We’re Alone Now by Tommy James and The Shondells.

Every time we were together and we heard one of them, we’d reach for each other’s hand.

It’s what this attitude does to you, more than me that has me so upset. Please cut it out right now and I’ll know I didn’t blow half a year on a fake. That would break my heart – to find out that you were a fake.

If that were the case, I’d be glad to leave you … sad to have once again found out that I’ve got to look again and find the guy who can love life, love people, hate people, yet be considerate of loves and hates all at once.

When I said we were perfect for each other, I meant that I had found in you the person that didn’t try to impress the world; that was honest with himself and everyone else. Was I wrong?

            X          X          X          X          X          X          X          X          X          X

I hope to God this is the last time I have to ask.

If we’d been living in a Disney princess fairy tale, it would have been the last time she had to ask and we’d have ridden off into the sunset, been married for 80 years and died an hour apart in our matching wheelchairs while holding hands.

My mind would sometimes race ahead and I’d feel trapped, even by the best version of that future.

Bethani’s note offered an important relationship lesson. Don’t take your partner for granted. It’s a lesson I have had to relearn several times over the years.  

Her note did get me to focus on our relationship, though only briefly. We stayed together for another month or so, but we were teenagers, living unscripted lives. I was a bit too immature at that point to be the boyfriend she wanted. So we broke up shortly after New Year’s Eve.

Until the ski trip.

You can find that story on the blog in Chapter 15: Cold and Calculated.

Next week, we’re moving forward to Chapter 21: Checking Out More Than Books

Senior year started off going my way. I was recovering socially after the breakups with Bethani and then Annie. I survived the final football camp of my life. I had made the starting team and that meant something: getting presented at the beginning-of-the-year, all-school assembly.

We were announced individually and then jogged to about where our position would be if we were on a field and not a stage. The audience let loose when each player was announced, as it was the one school assembly of the year students were not overly monitored by the teachers.

The loudest cheers were for the best players, of course. The cheers for me were not at that level, but the sarcastic shouts from my friends kept me from an embarrassment of silence.

I didn’t care. I was on that stage. At that assembly. From the moment you saw that scene as a lowly sophomore, that became the dream: to be up on that stage and introduced as a starter. Except for the genetically gifted, it wasn’t easy to get there.

Sometimes, as an underclassman, you hit that point where you felt like the season, or your football career in general, had already gone on forever and yet forever was still in front of you. But the thought of standing on that stage for that brief moment of adulation in your senior year was enough to keep you going. Or at least enough to keep you from not quitting at that particular moment.

Once on stage, all the guys on the team stared straight ahead. We tried to look as if we were about to run out on the field for our biggest game of the year, rather than, in a few minutes, heading to 3rd period algebra. I wanted to look as big as an offensive left tackle for a small suburban school could look. So for a few days before the assembly, I practiced puffing my chest out and trying to keep it puffed out for the three minutes we would be on the stage. Without it looking like I was puffing up.

The other big moment for seniors on the team was the yearbook picture. Yes, just like all the other school sports, the yearbook featured the write-up about the season, the obligatory team photos and the random action shots. However, football was the only sport that featured all the seniors – starters and scrubs and the team managers – posing for individual photos in a special two-page spread.

This was a huge deal. Bigger than appearing at that ephemeral school assembly that only the players would remember. These individual pictures would be in the yearbook forever, for everyone to see. As sophomores and juniors, whenever we had a free moment, we’d repeatedly talk about how we were going to pose when we got to be seniors.

Often, guys would strike potential poses when we were changing in the locker room, asking for feedback. Or it would be a topic of conversation on a bus ride home after a game, if Tommy McLoughlin weren’t singing every word of Arlo Guthrie’s 22-minute long “Alice’s Restaurant.” But fun and talking were only allowed if we won. When we lost, it was quieter than a Catholic Church in the suburbs.  We were taught to be silent, to be sad and mad and to reflect on why we lost.

Running backs had a lot of cool poses to choose from. But not lineman. Previous yearbooks, which we studied for inspiration, showed most of them down in a four-point stance, looking up at the camera. Even if you were a good football player and a good-looking guy, you didn’t look good in this pose. You had no neck. It was as if your head had been pasted to your back in an awkward position.

I didn’t want that for my journey into Hall High School posterity. After a lot of time and thought, I hit upon what I thought was the best pose I could hope for as a lineman. In a game, after the ball was snapped, my job was to put my helmet in the chest of the defender. That meant I was somewhat upright and I didn’t have to do that stereotypical lineman pose, being down, but looking up.

As picture day approached, I spent a lot of time in front of the mirror – more than usual – searching for that perfect facial expression that said I took football and the school’s tradition seriously, but also let people know that I didn’t take them too seriously. It was a fine line to walk, but on the eve of picture day, I finally had the right expression and I had practiced it enough that I was sure my facial muscles would remember it just as the picture was snapped.

On picture day, while the underclassmen were beating each other up at practice, we seniors put on our freshly laundered, home game uniforms and went with the photographer to a shady spot on the northwest side of the school. One by one, the photographer called the guys up for their immortal pose and one by one, they revealed the poses they’d been practicing for three years.

Finally it was my turn. By then, all the guys were critiquing the poses, commenting on style and degree of difficulty, as if they were judges at an Olympic ice skating competition. As I was about to get into my pose – which I had kept secret for fear of imitators – the guys were giving me suggestions.

My attention turned to them for a moment and since I had what I often coveted – an audience, I momentarily forgot about the photographer and focused on the guys, trying to make them laugh.

“Maybe I should pose like Scott,” I said, referring to our teammate who psyched himself up for every play, be it in a game or at practice, by growling loudly.

“Grrrrrrr!”

The guys laughed. I succeeded.

Click.

“Next,” the photographer said.

“What? NO! I was imitating Scott,” I said as I pointed at Scott who didn’t always get our jokes, but sensed this one was on me and he was enjoying it.

“I wasn’t ready!” I pleaded with the photographer.

But he said there were no do overs.

My moment of football glory captured in amber was a joke. Lord knows, I was always up for a joke, but not one that would be frozen in time. Not one that did not reflect my personality in the slightest. Or my feel for football. Not one that I felt needed explaining.

The last picture taken, we went back to the locker room, changed into our practice gear and slowly jogged to join the rest of our teammates. I knew that picture would come back to haunt me. But I didn’t realize it would still be with me, more than 50 years later.

Before we knew it, it was Hell Week. Hell week is what Coach Robinson called the week before we played any tough team and there were at least three Hell Weeks during each season. Most weeks of practice were hell, in my opinion, but during “official” Hell Weeks, the coaches ratcheted up the intensity of the drills, the barking of their instructions and their looks of disappointment.

Hell Weeks came the week before we played Weaver, an inner-city school, at the beginning of the season; and the week before we played the farmers from Windham in the middle of the season; and the week before the final game when we played our cross-town rival, Conard.

Weaver was usually our opening game.  It was a team from Hartford that was out of our league in more ways than one. We played in a small city/suburban conference, while they played big city schools. They had some very big and talented players. We were a bunch of skinny kids from a very small school. Once in a while, say every two or three years, we’d get a kid who weighed more 200 pounds. Mostly, though, we featured a line of 160-180 pounders. But our coach scheduled the game early every year to toughen us up.

The toughest drill of Hell Week came right after warm-ups on Monday. It was called Crossroads, an open-field tackling drill. Coach Robinson would rub his hands together and grin maniacally anytime he or anyone said “Crossroads.” Kind of like a teen-age boy using or hearing the word intercourse in any context. Everyone dreaded Crossroads, except for the few psychos who loved to hurt and get hurt.

We formed two lines, facing each other, destined to meet at a particular spot that Coach Robinson deemed The Crossroad. One line was loaded with linemen and defensive players. The other with guys who handled the ball. The guy with the ball would start running as hard as he could straight at the opposing line. And you, in the other line, would start running, ostensibly as hard as you could or dared and the two of you would meet – at The Crossroad.

The idea was to teach the ball carriers how to take a hard hit and not fumble and for the guys on the other side how to deliver a hard hit and perhaps cause a fumble.

Coach would watch the drill to see the hit, but mostly he was listening for the sound of the hit. He wanted a particular pop and it had to be at a certain decibel level. If he deemed it loud enough, you could head over to the practice field. If not loud enough, you had to get back in line and go again.

There was no attempt to evenly match the opponents so as you got closer to the front of the line, you kept leaning out to count and recount the other line to see who you matched up with. After two plus years and hundreds of drill with these teammates, you knew how hard each one of them could hit. And how much pain they could deliver. There were guys you definitely wanted to avoid.

Sometimes Coach Robinson would see an obvious mismatch at the front of the line and he would make a quick switch. But other times he would just rub his hands together and relish that mismatch, especially if he thought one of the players involved needed a wake-up call.

After warmups on this fateful day, I jogged over to where the drill lines were forming and got in my line. Soon it was my turn. I was pleased to see that my opponent would be a third string running back. He wasn’t too big and he wasn’t too fast.  He ran at me at about 3/4 speed and I ran at him at 3/4 speed. I made a clean tackle and he held on to the ball. We bounced up, ready to be sent on down to the practice field.

It had been the picture perfect Crossroads. It looked good. But, because neither of us had run at top speed, it didn’t have the sound that Coach wanted. So we were told to get back in line and do it again.

Since there were fewer ball carriers, their line was shorter and if you had to do the drill twice, you never went against the same guy. So I leaned out of line to see whom I was going up against this time. I recounted, probably a dozen times.

No.

It couldn’t be.

Barney.

Actually, his name was Greg Kelleher, our quarterback and co-captain. We called him Barney – and still do – because he reminded us of Barney Rubble. He always needed a shave, even 5 minutes after his last shave. And he was about 5 feet 6 inches tall and weighed 200 pounds. He was a human bowling ball.

In addition to his throwing and running abilities, his build was an asset. There was no good way to tackle this guy. There was no way to knock him over. If you ran straight into him, you would just bounce off. You couldn’t hit him high, because there was no high side to him. If you tried to hit him low, it felt as if you were trying to tackle tree trunks. There was no upside for me in this match up.

I tried to stall and let the guy behind me pass me. But this wasn’t like a line for a free bag of food at Howdy Beefburgers. No one wanted to pass anyone. And the guy behind me had leaned out and he certainly knew whom I was matched up against.

Of course, the line moved quickly and too soon I was at the head of the line. Barney’s was grinning at me. I could make him laugh in the classroom, which was OK. I didn’t like the fact that I made him laugh on the football field.

Barney didn’t mind Crossroads because of his physical advantage. Actually, he seemed to take a perverse pleasure in the drill. He looked across the field and saw me and knew he wasn’t going to get hurt. His only concern was that he might have to go again because I surely wouldn’t hit him hard enough to make the pop loud enough.

Barney started running. And I started running. I was sick of running the drill and on my way to meet Barney at The Crossroad; I decided to just let it rip. Hold nothing back. If I popped Barney loud enough, coach finally would let me on the field and I’d be done with it.

As I got near Barney, I realized I was exceeding my personal speed limit and was a bit out of control. My head was bouncing up and down as I tried to pinpoint my target. I began to lower my shoulder and my body while trying to keep my speed up. We’d been taught that the ideal tackle was to put your head on one side of your opponent’s thigh and wrap your arms around his legs and keep your feet moving and drive him to the ground.  

But we were running at top speed and I slightly misjudged where my shoulder would hit his legs. Instead of his thighs, the sharpest point of his hips hit the sharpest point of my shoulder. We made a loud bang! It was definitely loud enough for Robby to grunt a laugh of appreciation and grant us entrance to a 2-hour practice full of more hitting.

But I wasn’t going anywhere. I was on the ground in agony, writhing in pain at The Crossroad. Something was wrong with my arm.

People were shouting at me to get up, but I couldn’t, so they moved the drill over a few feet and kept on running Crossroads.  Coach Robinson came over, looked down at me and asked what the problem was.

“I can’t move my arm,” I groaned. It was the strangest sensation.

Coach looked at me, then my arm. Despite my pain, I could see in his eyes, he was making a decision to do something. Before I could protest, he grabbed my arm, and ignoring my screams, he twisted it and gave it a shove. I could hear it – and feel it – distinctly click back into the socket.

“There,” he said. “You’re fine. Get over to practice.”

“Good hit,” he added.

The excruciating pain was gone as was the weird feeling of not having any control over my arm and hand. But a dull ache in my shoulder remained. Still, I did as I was told and endured the entire two- hour practice. I got yelled at a lot that day. Apparently, I wasn’t getting my right arm up and that’s why the defense was getting by me.

No kidding.

Toward the end of practice, Coach Chalmers – who had been down on the practice field and didn’t know about what happened at Crossroads – was so mad at me, he had someone challenge me for my starting spot. We went one on one and I had to keep the lineman on the other side of a line for 5 seconds. I still couldn’t raise my arm much above my waist but I compensated by overplaying that side so the defensive guy would go the other way to my still working left arm.

Chomps – which is what we called Coach Chalmers behind his back – was still mad, but grunted approval that I could get the job done if I was so determined. The pain was so fierce, I guess it made me fierce.

I went home in terrible pain. I didn’t tell my mother what was wrong. She wasn’t in favor of football one bit. You got hurt playing football. Mom grew up in Brooklyn and in a world of women, tailors and dressmakers and didn’t have much contact with football or football players.

I wanted to tell Doom what had happened. Doom knew and loved football. He’d had been a co-captain of his college team. But he was no fool about it, either. He knew how dangerous the game could be.

When all the other kids were signing up for peewee football, I wanted to sign up too. I figured it was going to be just like baseball. But Doom refused to let me play until I got older. He said that it was a hard game and people got hurt. And it was one thing to get hurt at age 10 and another when you were in high school.

When Doom got home, I was already in bed, not asleep, but crying in pain. The next day we went to the orthopedist. The doctor said I had stretched a bunch of ligaments and it would have been a whole lot better if I hadn’t practiced after it had happened. He wrapped me in a lot of tape and gauze, immobilizing my shoulder and my arm, kind of like a body cast without the plaster.

I had to go back twice a week for four weeks and have it rewrapped.  I was out until the Windham game. I was a bit disappointed. Not that I’d be out for four to five weeks, but because the doctor said I’d only miss half the season. I figured I was done.

At first, I still went to practice every day and watched my teammates run the repetitive drills. I stood on the perimeter of team huddles and meetings. But I began to feel myself separating from the team. I wasn’t a player anymore. The team managers had a purpose. I didn’t. And it was one thing to participate in the tedium of practice. It was another to just stand around and watch it.

So I began skipping practices. The fall weather had set in so I spent several afternoons a week driving around. Sometimes with my friend from the rival high school, Dave Armstrong, who had a 1956 Chevy.

If Dave wasn’t around, I drove myself. It was a bit challenging as I had a 1962 Oldsmobile F-85 with 3-on-the-column shifter and it was my right shoulder that was wrapped tight to my body. Only my right hand, which poked through an opening of my shirt near my belly button, could move.

So I learned to drive shifting with my left hand. It didn’t look especially cool and it wasn’t especially smooth. And it was a bit dangerous when I wasn’t on a straightaway. But it was a lot cooler than walking. I would hold the bottom of the wheel with the right hand of my incapacitated arm and then reach through the steering wheel with my left hand and shift. It really wasn’t that hard.

The only hard part was turning and shifting at the same time. As I approached a turn, I had to slow way down, to about the speed of someone driving from their nursing home to church on Sunday morning. I’d push in the clutch, quickly reach through the oversized steering wheel to the shifter, down shift, and then quickly pull my arm back through the wheel so I could use it to turn the wheel. Once I was through the turn, I released the clutch and gave it gas.

People honked a bit, but no more than they honked at my mother, who always drove under the speed limit.

“That’s the limit,” she would explain. “Not the speed at which you’re supposed to drive.”

I told my mom that my arm was good enough to shift, although that would have been physically impossible if she wanted to think about it. But she didn’t. She was no fool, but she didn’t say anything.

I was out for five weeks. When I was cleared to play again, they had to shave my chest and tape me every day before practice. By that time, the energy I had mustered to be a starter was gone. I was ready for the season and my football career to be done.

I was a member of the team and got to wear my team sweatshirt to school on the Fridays before a game, but I had lost my starting job and wasn’t going to win it back in the weekly challenge drills. I didn’t have the fire and frankly, my arm still hurt so I wasn’t going to risk it. I did get sent into several games in a mop up role.

We were pretty good that year, only losing the two games we were expected to lose although it wasn’t quite the success we had hoped for. The year before, we hadn’t had the greatest team, but we had some magical spirit when it came to important games and pulled off some big upsets, especially the last game of the year against our archrival and knocked them out of the championship. 

But in our senior year, when we had a more complete team, we couldn’t duplicate those miracles. After we lost our last game, against our archrivals, a lot of the guys were crying in the locker room because the football season and their high school football careers were over. 

But I didn’t cry. Not even close. I wanted to shout for joy.  

Next Week: A special edition. I’m calling it Chapter 10A. Because it follows up on Chapter 10, A First Girlfriend. I recently found a note from that first girlfriend. Bethani wrote it after we’d been dating for six months. It provides her perspective of our relationship. Apparently, I was not the perfect boyfriend. Rather than starting “Dear Alan,” her note starts with “Look, Creep!”

That’s next week.

The coaches could clearly see I was no running back. I had no speed, no athleticism and without glasses, could only see to the end of my arm. I did have talent for gaining weight so I was moved to the offensive line.

That was fine with me. All I had to do was take a couple of steps forward and hit the guy in front of me. Although, sometimes the coaches tried to confuse us with “blocking schemes.” That meant on some plays you didn’t block the guy directly across from you, but the guy to the left or right diagonally across.

While I had no trouble remembering baseball statistics, important dates in history and the names of every member of every band in the top 40, I often couldn’t remember which of the three directions I might go on a particular play. The secret codes inside the names of the plays just wouldn’t stick in my brain.

Still, I thought, it shouldn’t be too difficult in that both of us could only get up so much speed and hurt the other guy only so bad. As with so many other things about football, I was wrong about that assumption.

There are people who just exist on a different athletic plane than other people. Paul St. Onge, our captain, for instance. In practice, as I got into my stance across from him, I would analyze the situation. He was my height – maybe an inch taller – but he didn’t weigh as much as I did so I should be able to hit him with equal force and if I couldn’t knock him back, I figured I should be able to hold my ground. And if he hit me first, all things being almost equal, it shouldn’t hurt that bad.

I was wrong.

Paul played the game ferociously and hit you hard every single play, as if it was a Friday night fight after you danced with his girlfriend. I couldn’t understand where the power and fury came from. I couldn’t conjure it. But we knew, almost from the first day of practice on the first day of school, Paul was going to be our captain.

Even on the days I really tried, I couldn’t ring anyone’s bell. Still, I thought,maybe if I got contact lenses, it would help me in the two narrow concerns of my teen-age world: girls and football. Girls, because like every teenager who has to wear glasses, I thought the only thing holding me back from the opposite sex were my four eyes; in my particular case, my thick, tortoise-shell frames … chosen by my mother. Freed from those, I was sure to attract a greater number of the girls at school. Or at least one.

People often mock the idea that Superman could disguise himself simply by putting on some black-rimmed glasses. Not me. I bought it completely. I knew glasses could totally transform a person’s looks and life. I came to that belief after countless hours of staring into the mirror, studying myself with glasses and without.

With my glasses, I was a gawky, under-confident third stringer whose hair didn’t always do what it was told. Without glasses, I was instantly suave, my clothes fit better and I had the confidence of a first stringer. Of course, these realizations came to me as I was staring into a mirror … without my glasses.

And some of my visions may have been true. The glasses frames in those days were hardly fashionable. The choices ranged from the cats’ eye frames for girls to those that were – for boys – about as thick as a stout man’s belt. You could barely see a person’s face. Google images of Roy Orbison and Buddy Holly and you’ll see what I mean. By the time the Beatles came to America, John Lennon got rid of his glasses in favor of contacts.

In addition to needing them for my love life, I needed contacts for football because football is confusing enough when you can see with all those bodies running every which way. But when you are legally blind without them, it’s hopeless.

I finally had saved enough money to split the cost with my parents on a pair and I felt transformed. It was in the early days of contacts and the pair I bought were made of strong, rigid plastic. Although, even after a long break in period, they were just barely tolerable. I didn’t care. Too much. It  was worth it because while my play may not have improved enough to cover the $300 cost of the lenses, I finally could see which coach was yelling at me.

Whatever my athletic improvement was, it wasn’t that great and it didn’t last long. Shortly after we got back from football camp, we were two hours into a practice on a field off to the southwest side of the school. It had been a dry summer, hadn’t rained in weeks and even though it was September, the summer heat had remained. The dirt on the field had been turned into 2 inches of a fine powder by our metal cleats.

Sweat was pouring off my brow into my eyes like a waterfall. My vision was blurry and I kept wiping, rubbing and blinking, trying to bring things into focus. As I lined up for the next play, just before the ball was snapped, I realized I had wiped the contact out of my right eye into the pillowy dust of the football field.  I stood up just as the ball was snapped. Of course, I got creamed on the play because I was looking at the ground, thinking about the $150 lense that was down there.

At that moment, football mattered even less than it had before and I began screaming for everyone to move out of the way and began pawing through the dust. And of course, Coach Chalmers started yelling out me. He was running this practice, not me.

I told him about my contact and, as a parent, he could appreciate the cost, but he was not happy about moving his practice even a few yards away so I could look. Everyone knew my search was futile and after a few minutes, Chalmers was grumbling again about moving the practice back to his field, so I gave up the search.

Because I couldn’t afford the replacement cost, I played the rest of the season using just the left lense. And I went to my classes with just the left lense. Which may partly explain my not-so-great grades. And the headaches.

A few months after the football field incident, after I had managed to secure a replacement lense, around Christmas time, I lost my contact case. No problem, I reasoned. I was wearing my lenses and it was empty. It’s just a container. So is a glass. I tried to think of any possible downside if I put them in a glass and couldn’t come up with one. So I put them in a glass of water beside my bed. That was fine as I was the only one living on the third floor and the only one who was ever up there. Usually.

Once in awhile my mom would come up to gasp at what a mess it was. Although, if I got any warning such as hearing her coming up the stairs when the volume of my radio just happened to be down a bit, I heaved a bunch of stuff in the closet. Mom did try to come up the stairs slowly and clear her throat or cough loudly so she wouldn’t see anything concerning a teen-age boy she didn’t want to see.

But I hadn’t thought of every scenario.  

The glass was sitting next to my bed and I was in the shower getting ready for a date. Just about that time, my 2-year-old niece, Jen, who didn’t yet understand the rule about not coming up to the third floor yet, came up to my room to explore. And while exploring my room, she got thirsty. And drank the glass of water that contained my contacts.

Luckily, I suppose, she only drank one. So it was a lesson for half the price. I was all for turning her over until the thing came out. Or feeding her laxatives. But everyone in the family got mad at me for my persistence about the matter. I couldn’t understand it. I wasn’t the one who just drank expensive eyewear. Jen had.

Contacts cost me a lot of money and grief over the years. Freshman year in college I woke up blind one morning. And it wasn’t the Moscow Mule I’d been drinking the night before, although it did play a part. I simply couldn’t open my eyes when I woke up. When I tried to lift my lids, I was in great pain and tears just started pouring out of my eyes. I was in agony. The RA had a couple of guys walk me over to student health where I sat for a couple of hours.

The folks there decided the case was too complicated for them. They made an appointment with an ophthalmologist in downtown Boston and put me in a cab and sent me on my way. The cabbie tried to cheer me up because he was sure he was meeting a guy on his first day of being blind. He helped me up the stairs and got me settled in the Dr’s office and wished me good luck.

A few minutes later a nurse led me back to the doctor’s office and all I could hear from the doctor was grave concern.

“Hmmmmmm,” he said as he gently touched my eyelids.

I could feel that his face was about 2 inches from mine.

“Oh, my my my my,” he exclaimed softly.

I couldn’t take it anymore.

“How bad is it, Doctor?”

“Oh, it’s bad,” he answered. “Very bad.”

“Will I be able to see again?”

“Well, I don’t know,” he said, not sounding hopeful and stretching out every word. “You might have to begin learning Braille if this doesn’t work.”

And with that, he pried my eyelids open and put a couple of drops of numbing solution in each eye and my eyes popped open.

“In the future, don’t leave your contacts in all night,” the doctor said. I could see him now and he was smiling. He had been through this before and had enjoyed scaring me. “You scratched your corneas when you did that. They should be fine in a couple of days, but I wouldn’t wear your contacts for a week or so.”

Looking back, maybe I’d have been better off if I’d just stuck to glasses. I’ve never had a problem with them that a little athletic tape and a black magic marker couldn’t fix.

I eventually gave up on contacts. When I was 50. After I got the girl of my dreams. And was pretty sure she wouldn’t leave me.

Being able to see what was going on during football led to a couple of good moments on the field senior year before I came to the crossroads of my athletic career. I weighed 180 pounds by then. I’d like to say the 15-pound weight gain since my sophomore year was muscle from time spent in the weight room, but probably 50 percent of the gain was beer.

I finally made first string and was starting at left tackle. I would say that was owed probably more to attrition than to ability. Not everyone could stand the tedium of three years of football camp and then three years of showing up everyday for practice. The 100+ kids who showed up for that first meeting in August before our sophomore year had dwindled to about 20 seniors.

My first big moment was when we were playing Hartford High in a preseason game. These city schools were big: lot of students and lots of size. When I ran out onto the field for the first series, I saw the guy across the line from me was as wide as two of our guys. He weighed over 300 pounds. My first starting assignment and I’m going up against a sumo wrestler.

The ball was snapped and out of fear, I tried to channel our captain Paul’s ferocity and, screaming at the top of my lungs, I drove as hard as I could into this guy’s stomach. I knocked him back 5 yards and as my helmet disappeared into his belly, I realized he had the build of the Pillsbury doughboy.

All game long, I kept driving him back at least five yards on every play. To the coaches, it looked impressive. It wasn’t. But I kept that to myself as Coach Chalmers smiled at me for the first time in three years. And patted my helmet after the game. Gently, this time.

My other moment came in our second preseason game. We were running a play and suddenly the ball popped out of the back’s hands and went flying. I was still holding my block and churning my legs as I had been taught the past three years when suddenly I looked down and saw the ball. It was right between my feet. And, just as I also had been taught, I yelled, “Ball!” and gave up my block and fell straight on the ball. I was suddenly at the bottom of a pile of the ten heaviest guys on the field. Until I had to give it up, I squeezed that ball like my  4-year-old self held my teddy bear.

“Fumble recovery by …,” the public address announcer paused as the refs untangled the pile of bodies. “Hultgren!”

What?

I looked up to the press box in dismay. The only time in my life that my name could be announced deservedly on a public address system at an athletic field. And the credit goes to someone else?

To make it worse, Doom was playing golf on the municipal golf course nearby and the hole he was on was near to the stadium. And he was playing with Hultgren’s father, who often bragged to Doom how good his son was and always asking if I had seen any “action” when he knew, up until then, I hadn’t.

When we both got home later that afternoon, Doom told me he heard the announcement of the fumble and how Hultgren’s dad bragged about it the rest of the round.

“But the announcer got it wrong!” I said. “I recovered that fumble.”

“Really?” Doom said. He and I both knew it was more likely that Hultgren would have recovered the fumble. But this one time I had done something right on the football field and I was the only one who knew it. Well, Hultgren knew it, but he wasn’t about to tell anyone. And he didn’t. Still, with two pretty successful games under my belt, I thought that I might be able to keep the charade of my football competency up all year.

But the real season – long and revealing – was about to begin.

Next week.

Chapter 20: The Crossroad.