Catcher In the Rye Bread (part #1)
The first of a four part boarding school fable, most of it true.
It was Marchesi’s fault that I ran away from boarding school. Well, it wasn’t exactly his fault, but he set the wheels in motion. Randall Marchesi, a loud, little squawking parrot of a kid. Twelve years old and barely 70 pounds, he was Ellis-Island-Italian brown with a jagged, garden-shears haircut and a pair of dark BBs for eyes. He’d start to talk, and you couldn’t stand him by the third syllable. By the time he had finished two sentences you wanted to beat his ass. With his white, ribbed turtlenecks and mouth full of stray teeth, it was infuriating just to look at him. Maybe if it had been the ’20s, that face would have made sense. You swap the goofy turtlenecks for a newsboy cap and a pair of beat-up leather soled shoes, and he might have come off like one of the Dead End Kids. But this wasn’t the ’20s or the Lower East Side. It was 1975 Lake Placid and Marchesi was a pain in the ass who someone needed to deal with. Two weeks before Christmas vacation, that someone turned out to be me.
I don’t remember exactly what happened. It was probably just the sound of his voice that sent the synapses firing in the core of my lizard brain. It was no surprise; it had been coming for a while. The first problem was we lived in the same house, so we were around each other day and night. There was no Marchesi relief, no respite from Marchesi. And to make matters even worse, he had his own room as a seventh-grader, whereas I, an eighth-grader and senior, was stuck sharing a room with Donny Lewis, a sweet but fantastically stupid kid, with a swollen face and fat, rubber lips that may as well have been bought in a joke shop. Donny’s folks were old-school New England wealth, and he’s probably running some corporation now, but back then he was a large paperweight of a boy, and there was no reason he shouldn’t have been bunking with his fellow seventh-grader, leaving me to perfect my masturbation techniques in privacy.
As I mentioned, the specific violence of the Marchesi incident is a blur, but what is not a blur is the retaliatory violence—or discipline, as some might see it—that I received from Harry K. Eldridge, school headmaster and ex-Marine. What went down between he and I remains as vivid in my mind as if it happened an hour ago.
Harry Knapp Eldridge was a badass Nordic motherfucker, as dissimilar in his DNA to me and my Warsaw Ghetto brood as could possibly be. The word strapping was invented for him. He didn’t walk; he chewed up the terrain with a wide-hipped, khaki stride. Part-time farmer-educator, part-time Norse god of his sacred Adirondacks, he was an L.L. Bean wet dream come to life.
Harry lived on the other side of the main road, in the “south meadow,” with his equine wife, Betty, her monumental overbite, and his three daughters. Janey, who was my age, had inherited her mother’s teeth. The twins, Becca and Shani, were a year younger, and two of the most beautiful living things I had ever seen. They had dirty-blonde hair and darker eyebrows, and their skin would have made Rembrandt blush. Those eyebrows alone could produce boners in wind-chill factors of 40-below. They were frisky and free, and their red-wet mouths played tricks with your mind, and you wanted to taste them so badly your ears buzzed, and when I would look Becca in the eye (or was it Shani), she’d look right back like a 12-year-old Angie Dickinson, and anything was possible. But you had to be willing to cross that line, to lay hands on the offspring of Harry Knapp Eldridge, and as much of a habitual line-crosser as I was, that was a cookie jar I was keeping my dirty little Jewish paws out of.
I really do not remember whether I punched Marchesi or just threw him to the ground or what. I might have grabbed him around his throat for all I know, ’cause though I don’t recall the blows, I do recall the surge of crimson rage blasting my brain. His face had that look of terrible surprise, the one you get when you realize your safe, little universe of words is about to morph into the Bizarro world of physical violence. I was on him in a flash, and it was over quickly.
I can still hear him crying, shrieking his threats of revenge—that delusional, high-pitched squeal of the weak. It was an awful sound, and I had no business doing what I did. Poor kid. I bullied him. He was weak and I was strong, or at least a lot stronger than him, and the last thing he needed was me turning my own issues—the seething lack of love and the deep abandonment I was dealing with—into a can of whoop-ass on him. But hey, I was 13 and pissed-off, so I forgive myself. Fuck Marchesi. He was born to provoke. His entire personality had been cultivated for these type of encounters. His wife is probably slapping the shit out of him as I write this.
So, as Marchesi wailed and wept his undescended testicle tears, I took off with the glow and guilt of what I had done. I was outside the math room with Alex Tangalos, recounting what had happened, and I must have been very engrossed in my tale, because I didn’t even see it coming. I just felt it. I just felt the rough and massive hand grab the back of my neck like a vice. It was Harry Knapp Eldridge. He had literally snatched me by the scruff of the neck and now had me suspended in midair, my feet kicking for the ground, like in a cartoon. Harry Knapp was not happy with what I had done to young Randall, and he was showing me in no uncertain terms. I could feel the rage in his grip. He was calm, but his hands were livid. Those hands of his. Those Harry Eldridge hands.
When we had culled the chickens, I had seen those hands in action. Culling chickens is a process to find out which of your hens are laying eggs and which are just eating up feed. You put your fingers on the laying track. It’s like you’re finger-fucking them, but you don’t have to go inside. You just lay your fingers on top between their legs. If you can only fit two fingers in the laying track, they still have muscle, which means the laying track is in use and they are producing, but if you can fit three fingers, that means they are flabby, and not laying any eggs at all. We were to separate the layers from the non-layers. The whole thing was pretty out-there, as you flipped and fingered the birds, the entire coop reeking of that chicken-shit, ammonia stink. But it all became truly barnyard-twisted when Harry Knapp, instead of separating the birds, took the first non-layer he encountered and casually snapped its neck, tossing its lifeless body toward the wall.
And now those chicken-killing hands were around my neck, pulling me through the school, dragging me for almost fifty yards, past a line-up of startled faces, yanking me from outside the math room, past the library, into the old building and down the curving hallway lined with open lockers, the lockers where our “barn chores” clothes hung—our dark blue denim, wool-lined, five-button, communist barn coats, and those knee-high, rubber, cow-shit galoshes that took a PhD in physics to get over your shoes. And whoosh, flying, past KK Kenner’s locker and his proudly displayed, brand new, candy-red Nordica ski boots, and out of the hallway and into the empty dining room, where Harry K deposited me into a chair with a thud. He stood there for what seemed like an hour, saying nothing, staring down at me, and me staring down at the floor. You want to know what it feels like to have to have much bigger boy pick on you? It feels like this!
He never said a word, and I never looked up from the floor. Finally, he turned and walked away.
I sat there for a while, in a state of humiliated shock. Harry Knapp had made an example of me. He had gotten physical with me, here within the naturalist borders of his pre-preparatory fiefdom. I had no source of reference for anything like this. I was from hardcore left-wing, pacifist stock, and my father had never so much as laid a hand on me, save for that one slap in the chops, on the porch outside the kitchen in Great Neck, when I called him a jerk and he channeled his 1000-pound, Flatbush depression into some proper, active rage. When I look back on it all, I wish my dad would’ve given me a good, bi-weekly beating. I’m sure it would have turned out better for both of us, but instead he just drank a large glass of cheap vodka with a hit of Tropicana grapefruit and zoned, as the Parkinson’s foreclosed on his nervous system cell by cell.
The entire school was silent in the wake of Harry’s actions. The weather inside the main building had gone from daily school-kid careless to “Oh shit, did you see that?!” After my initial shock had worn off, I had the entire afternoon to process what had happened, or more accurately, to not process it. As the day pushed on, everything inside my head and heart began to swirl. That first original pain had been reactivated: shame, trauma, rage, the entire cocktail of inner hysteria was in play. Innocence had been lost once again, and if there is one thing I hate, it’s losing innocence. And what I hate even worse is the five lifetime’s worth of crazy shit I have done to soothe that loss.
But at thirteen, it’s different. At thirteen the impulse is still pure, and rebellion a beautiful piece of marble to be carved into a masterpiece. And besides, I was in the right. The big jerk had dragged me down the hall by the neck. He had crossed the line, and now I would have to do the same. I knew this game. I had been well-trained by my brilliant, inconsistent, and emotionally treacherous mother. The only way to deal with an irrational act was to counter it with an even more irrational one. That right there is juvenile delinquency 101.
Andy Petrosky was alright. He wasn’t a great friend, but he was good enough for what I had in mind. Petrosky had red hair and a strong crop of legitimate acne he had grown over the summer. He used to wear those Adidas cross-countries that were all the rage back then, with the green stripes and the brown rubber sole going up the heel. As I said, we weren’t especially tight, but something told me he was the man for the job.
I could have asked my best friend Eric Lindquist, but he wasn’t quite right for this assignment. He was too New York City eastside goyum. Petrosky and I were Jews from the suburbs. Him Philly, me Long Island. It made sense that Eric, a nice, smart, gentile lad in the Holden Caulfield tradition, would end up at North Country, but a Jewish kid from the suburbs who ends up at boarding school at the age of 12 clearly has issues. I mean, part of the reason your parents moved to the suburbs in the first place was for the schools, so if you have to pack it in and be shipped off to the Adirondacks in the middle of 7th grade, you’ve got problems. I know I did, and Petrosky was cut from the same troubled Jew-boy cloth.
I found him in the Quonset hut. That’s what we called our gym. It was a funny-shaped building, like a long, sheet metal tube cut in half lengthwise, and had a military barracks vibe. Petrosky was shooting his awkward, two-hands-to-the-side set shot when I approached him. He looked at me with that “You okay?” look you give when someone’s been through some shit.
“I’m running away, you wanna come?” And with absolutely no hesitation he answered, “Yes!” Eric Lindquist never would have risen to the occasion like that. He might have ended up going, but only after some thoughtful option-weighing. Petrosky didn’t have to weigh options. He heard the words “running away” and he was in. His blood was Romanian hot, and it was in his genes to defy authority. He clanked one last shot, and we walked out of the Quonset hut, got our jackets, and headed down the long dirt road, toward Route 73 and whatever lay ahead.
I retract humble.
Thank you