Posts
Impurity in the Sixth Grade
Sixth grade seems to begin a period of degeneracy, learning all the dirty words, speculating on their meanings, hearing from cheesey kids who claimed to know older kids who had done it, etc. There is a picture of me and two friends with, as Tolstoy says of Ivan Ilich’s son, “the eyes of boys who are not pure” (though I was then about three years away from the sin of masturbation). A schoolmate, Charles Slavin, who claimed to know someone who frequented the Black Cat Cafe, which like our parochial school was downtown, explained the price structure and procedures.
Later Slavin became the only guy I ever saw hit a nun–-Sister Ramona in the eighth grade, who, from one viewpoint, started it. Charles was talking during class and she walked back, red-faced and quick, hauled off and slapped him. Horribly, he stood up and slapped her back, and as she stormed out of the room, he quietly and deliberately gathered all his stuff from his desk and walked out of the school. I later heard he went to public school, dropped out, and eventually joined the navy, which may explain my fuzzy memory that the Black Cat Cafe was frequented by sailors.
But our memorable teacher in sixth grade, Sister Alice Marie, stayed with me. She was extraordinarily pale with intense, mad eyes set off by her black habit. In 1977 or so, when we went back to celebrate Virginia’s parents’ fiftieth wedding anniversary, I shuddered at the news from Virginia’s old voice teacher, then retired, that Alice Marie was still teaching grade school somewhere.
In my sixth grade she often let certain girls in on notable secrets: that Our Lady of Fatima had secretly told the children that by 1950 the streets of Milwaukee would be running with blood. That one evening she and some other sisters had gone for a walk down along the river (I recall that the San Antonio River flowed right by St Mary’s), “and the things we saw! It’s a shame that a man lays his naked body on top of a woman!” Was this a variant explanation of the facts of life? I kept my eye out for anything involving Milwaukee in 1950 and noted only that the Braves moved there from Boston (or decided to) that year. Maybe the words for blood and beer are close in Portuguese.
Authorities on Dirty Words
My friend Frank Southers had a moving story. His father was quite old and I think unemployed; they lived in a housing project on the near south side of town. Frank’s khaki uniform—we wore them daily--was washed but never ironed, one of several sources of embarrassment for him. As he started high school, Frank lost his father, whose death involved a bad hemorrhage that he witnessed alone. He lived with a foster family through school; in college, where we met up again, he was somewhat on his own, though I think his foster father paid his tuition. He later entered law school and became a notable accident attorney–I recently read in our college news magazine that he’s retired to Austin and has written two mystery novels.
From that same project, was Anthony Kalka, another respected authority on sex and dirty words. Once, in sixth grade, when we were waiting to be tested for singing ability, I asked him about a major news item of the day, a scandal involving a high-school sports hero named Bubba Bowman, who had “raped” a girl. I asked him what was rape. He said it’s when they take a knife and make your asshole bigger. For a long time I wondered why Bubba Bowman would want to do that to a girl. Kalka had thinning blond hair, a cunning disposition, and kept much to himself, though on one occasion he became what in Roman comedy would be called my parasite. My father had sent me a check, out of the blue, and somehow Kalka found out about my funds. We spent a large part of one Saturday walking around downtown, with me buying him candy, treating him to a movie, and maybe even just giving him money. He disappeared after grade school. My mother had known a fellow nursing student named Angie Kalka, and there was some reason to think she was his mother.
Up in Pontotoc
In 1948 I spent my first summer with Uncle up in Pontotoc, in north Texas. How many visits did I make there–five? The last one, for his funeral, came in 1957 (my only Masonic funeral, which featured guys in aprons forbidden to perform the whole rite until we mourners were gone), the night before which a fat country girl took me to run an errand in her car and tried to get me to have sex. I was talked into taking the bus ride up there to “represent the family,” i.e., his sister, my grandmother.
I’m sure about 1948 as the first year because I remember that another kid visiting a family nearby was preoccupied with Lyndon Johnson’s senatorial race against Coke Stevenson. The democratic one, the only one that mattered. Several recounts were (famously) necessary before Johnson’s victory was assured, and those were by no means the last Texas election recounts. Ever after that, at least till I moved away from Texas, I paid no attention to election night totals, because there would always be a recount.
That first summer (and the other summers there, for that matter) was insufferable: stifling heat by day and night, interrupted by a brief interest in Uncle’s chickens (who, he thought, had souls and could therefore not be eaten–though eggs were OK), but mostly heat, rocky white dust, grasshoppers, dying vegetation and scrubby mesquite trees. To this day when I teach “The Nun’s Priest’s Tale,” Chaunticleer sits atop the gray, dilapidated henhouse behind the chicken wire, thinly shaded by a scrubby mesquite or live oak. I befriended two boys named Bode (Charles and Ken), who showed me how to ride a calf rodeo-style, holding on with a “surcingle,” or rope tied around its head, and how to ride their old dun horse, a frighteningly large, loopy-droopy, irritable creature. This all led up to Uncle’s wife’s brother, David, taking me up to a rodeo in San Saba, I think–to this day the only rodeo I’ve seen.
A Real Cowboy
In my memory there is a shrine to David Webster, in fact to his whole family. His father had been a real cowboy in the 1880s, having done cattle drives from San Antonio to points north–at least one beyond Texas, I think. This old man–always a gentleman, always clad in long-sleeved khakis, bandana, and straw hat no matter the heat, rolled his own cigarettes and told a few stories about outlaws caught or almost caught or active around the area–including the James gang and Belle Star. He saw his first dentist in San Antonio at 18 or 19, needing to have a tooth pulled. Trying to draw out that deep-rooted tooth, the dentist pulled him out of the chair and led him around the room.
His only son, David, fixed windmills and did other odd jobs, besides farming on the little land the family still owned. The Websters all looked something like the lexicographer, especially around the mouth and chin, at least as his picture appeared in several dictionaries I saw back then. They had a civilized sense of culture, too–after all, the two daughters became teachers. David explained to me the difference between Democrats and Republicans--the parties of the average man and the rich man--and once took me jackrabbit hunting in his car by night. As he drove off-road into a meadow and turned on his lights, the ground came alive with these creatures jumping like kangaroos and seeming almost as big. While he drove, I leaned out of the window and fired his nine-shot Sears .22 pistol into the mob, probably not hitting one, but enjoying the thrill of police-style hot pursuit with a blazing gun.
Some years later–-he must have been sixty or so-–David married an ex-waitress and they started up a home for old people in, I think, Mason, 20 or 30 miles away. His sister Ned, who taught in a school in south San Antonio, I liked for her sense of humor and a sort of twilight attractiveness. I later came to know her daughter Mary Jo, some three years older than I, as an equally good-humored, attractive girl. She’s the last Webster I saw, after she had married and was living in a little rented place on Blanco Rd., not far from mom’s.
North of San Antonio, in LBJ country, the Blanco River was dry in those days and the only animals that could live on the landscape were jackrabbits and snakes. I recently read an article about the history of that 1950s drought in Texas, including the fact that in Llano, maybe 15 miles from Pontotoc, things were so bad that by 1956 the town had to ship water in by train.
Adventures in Scouting
In seventh grade, the highlights of the boy scout experience were a 14-mile hike and, later, an overnight campout. The scoutmaster took Frank Southers and me 14 miles out of town and dropped us off with instructions to call him by pay phone when we got back in the city limits. It was Saturday, with weekend traffic on the two-lane road, including a few joyriders who swerved close to us so that we’d have to step off into the ditch alongside. We both had sack lunches, but otherwise all we did was trudge. I think our scoutmaster was late, since I recall my mother being furious with him. She had not been keen on the idea from the start. As for the overnight, it featured several eighth graders hunting for us and rubbing our faces in cow manure. I secured myself in our shared pup tent and kicked hard at any of the older guys who tried to extricate me, a poor sport.
Race
Neighborhood friends, who attended the nearby public school, included a kid named Brian whose teeth were turning brown with decay in his mouth (one molar he showed me was already hollow) and two redneck boys named Sims: Sunny Boy and Dinky Lee. They often spent evenings at the Moonbeam Inn, out of town, where their parents worked, while afternoons they belonged to our hapless, occasional baseball group, along with a black boy named James Young. We would wander the neighborhood with James in seeming brotherhood, though Sunny Boy would often comment on racial differences, observing, for example, that you could hit James in the head all day and it wouldn’t hurt him. They once got into a “play fight”, which looked pretty real to me. This lore about black people I had never heard. James lived in a gray, dilapidated shack behind the Main Avenue Bowling Alley across Main Street from us. James once came upstairs to see if I could play, to the great consternation of the landlady, my mother, and grandmother, who ordered me to tell him never to come into our house again. This conflicted with the ideas of racial tolerance they had taught me on other occasions, and I, being mainly interested in playing with someone other than myself, and assuredly not a child of noble sentiments, resented this order. But we moved away not long after that.
Horsing Around
Two neighborhood figures belong in my memory. Mister Gwynn owned his own drugstore on Main, being in competition with Summers Rexall drugs down the street. From him I would purchase comic books, cigarettes “for my mother,” various chemicals for the chemistry set, and once saltpetre “for my uncle to preserve meat with”–though actually to make gunpowder, and if I had known what I was doing (I had the sulfur and powdered charcoal) I surely would have blown my hand off or worse. Why do I now recall that Mr Gwynn had a delivery “boy”, man really, named Tony, with Italian features? Gwynn once hired two of us to go around the neighborhood with flyers advertising something.
The other personage was my barber, George T. Smith Notary Public, whose shop had three or four chairs but only one barber. Smith wore a high-collar, medical-looking white tunic and loved to talk and tell stories. Here’s a George Smith joke he told me later in my teens: A University of Texas boy home for the holidays decided to take a girl out in the country on his horse-drawn wagon. He fixed the horse so that it would drop dead after an hour or two. As they sat there, the boy put his arm around the girl and then put her hand between his legs. “What’s that?” she said. “If you went to the University of Texas you’d know what that is,” he said. “That’s flesh, and if you put it into flesh it makes life.” “Well, said the girl, “why don’t you stick it in that horse and get us out of here.”
Richard Hardin
No comments:
Post a Comment