The Price of Dignity

It was raining here a few nights ago.  But nobody told me and I no longer go anywhere near the window that faces the street.  Not since the accident.  In consequence,  I wasn't wearing the right clothes.  I was expecting a dry, bitterly cold night.  Not the mild, rainy night I found.

To protect myself from the conditions I expected,  I was wearing highly absorbent "Polar Tech."  I didn't have an umbrella. Walking home, close to midnight, with three bags of groceries, I stayed close to the buildings, under the overhangs, trying to stay dry. I was hoping to avoid the hassle of getting my clothes professionally dried and, even more, that my watch would still work when I got home.

It isn't an underwater watch, after all.  It's good to a depth of zero.  It overreacts to fog. All it is, is the big old, dinged up Omega "Chronograph" I got from my stepmother after my father died.

Probably not certain he even intended to give the watch to me, he never bothered to explain it before I snapped the metal band around my left wrist,.

But you walk in the rain at night and you see things. A couple of bodegas still open.  A subway train pulls into the station and a voice inside makes an announcement I can't quite hear.  Two or three people hurry past me.  But you sometimes see things in the rain that make you forget about yourself and the rain and everything you ever thought you knew about doing whatever it takes to stay alive.

A homeless man had set up for the night in front of the post office.  I'd seen him there other times, living and sleeping in a pile of cardboard, plastic supermarket bags, newspapers and garbage.

He was hunched over,  doing something with his hands.  When I got closer I saw what it was.  He was giving himself a manicure, using both a trimmer and a cuticle tool that resembles a blunted knife.  Every few seconds the man stopped and held out both hands, palms down, to appraise his work.

"I couldn't do that," I thought,  "None of it. Not in a million years."

When I got home, I piled my soaked clothes on top of the radiator in the living room.  They'd be dry in an hour.   The rain continued until just past dawn.  I was dry for the night.

The High School Lesson

This piece is more personal than my usual posts.  I'm not sure posting it is a great idea. What the f.

My father, who had money in those days, decided, probably more for his own ego than mine, to get me out of high school and into college, whatever it took. The way I saw it, only two things could do it.   Much higher grades and a miracle.   I guess that would be two miracles. 

My father talked to his friends, called everybody else and finally, found a way which satisfied “The Mission,” as he called it. With only a few days notice, he pulled me out of my Long Island public school class and, now half way through 12^th grade, enrolled me in a very unusual and private (one to one) school he  found.  

The New York Tutoring School, since renamed the NOT ALLOWED TO SAY IT School, had existed and prospered since 1925, because of a never spoken arrangement designed to get troubled kids, with grades like mine, a genuine, recognized-by-the-state, good as gold, high school diploma.  A pot of gold at the end of my father’s private rainbow.

The classes at The Tutoring School were carefully monitored.  The moment a student began to have the slightest difficulty with a subject or assignment, that class came to an end.  The student’s most recent successful assignment or test became the student's final grade.  This all but guaranteed the final grade would be an "A".  To make certain there was no slippage, some classes, like geometry in my case, lasted only eight days.  Some students had even shorter courses. 

And so it was that abruptly and finally, the class simply disappeared from the schedule, the final grade recorded, the page turned.

I got straight A’s in everything and was thrilled.  Again without warning, late that spring, I was called to the head mistress’s office.  There I received my diploma. It happened in the privacy of a thickly padded, perhaps sound-proofed, office.  The room was green and poorly lit.

"Here," said the head mistresses, in a low voice, extending her right arm, the one with the hand that held the diploma.   She never made eye contact and the entire event took less than a minute. It was just me and Ms. McDermott, who insisted on being called Miz Mac-der-mot.

There was no Pomp, no Circumstance.  No nothing.  A real graduation ceremony, of the kind I would have received in public school, would have been impossible; The Emperor's New Diploma.

Finally, as painlessly as it had been from the beginning, it was over.  I never had to lift a pencil, though I did.  But lots of kids didn’t.  What  point?

I had excelled in every subject for that brief period and the grades that were sent on to college raised my average from the  D’s, F’s and incompletenesses  to which I was accustomed to, to a giddy C+.  I was delighted.  My “inner student” had emerged, I thought, just as I always suspected it would, given half a chance.

Despite the nature of my accomplishment I did learn a lesson I have never forgotten. The rules didn’t matter.  There is no “right” way of doing anything. Somebody or something, would always protect me from failure and the real world I had learned so much to fear.

Years later,  I wondered what might have happened without my father's help.  

The old adage, "What does not kill us, makes us stronger," might have applied.

Soon, however, I internalized the lesson and, in the fog of forgetting, the circumstances

of my remarkable come-back faded from my consciousness, replaced by a vague sense of magic and superstitious beliefs that are with me still.  

I believed in the magic that seemed to have saved me.  It surrounded my life.  But, unsure of just where the magic came from, I took no chances.  Not long after school, I began to wear charms on my fingers, wrists and around my neck.  Stones, metal things with funny markings, unusual rings and jewelry, that were gifts from special people. 

My belief in a special magic, always at the back of my brain, undoubtedly protected me from an unimaginable number of adventures and successes. 

*

A couple of funny things.  There were hand written notes on the report cards which accompanied the grades sent to my parents.  In the report cards Ms. McDermott wrote things that totally contradicted the grades.  Ms. McDermott ranted, raved and told another story in what she wrote.  One of mine read, “This boy is either too sick or too spoiled to ever amount to anything.”   When I found a few of these report cards a few years ago, I was shocked.  I had done so well at The Tutoring School.  What was all this crazy stuff about?  I thought she was crazy.

I also remember a few of the teachers, some of whom were real scholars, obviously in need of a few bucks.   Miss. Maitland comes to mind. She “taught” English Lit. but there was something wrong with her makeup.  It was perfect except that all of it was an inch and a half to the right of each feature.  Her red lipstick, for example, nearly missed her lips entirely, creating a kind of second mouth right next to the real one.  And her eye makeup didn’t start until the middle of her eyes and extended well beyond them.  There were other teachers I remember.   But that’s enough.

Bills Bar BQ and Other Mysteries of Wilson, North Carolina

The place is made to look like an old time dinner shack - using the "House of Blues" style of architecture.   Bill's Bar BQ in Wilson, NC has a slogan that comes right to the point,,  "From The Squeal To The Meal." it says  And they mean it. Because attached to the back of Bill's shack is stainless steel tunnel that descends about 100 yards to a large, windowless, rectangle of a building that can only be a piggie Auschwitz.

Inside Bill's, the tables have little, pink piggie salt and pepper shakers.  The clock on the wall is also a piggie, it's tail pointing to the hour.  But while  the ribs on your plate are falling off the bone (delicious),  the piggies in "Auschwitz" are being hooked through a shin and swept into an upside down position and put onto the assembly line, where automated blades quickly gut each piggie alive and send the carcasses down the line.

Wilson is a tobacco town about 60 miles from Raleigh and Diane's entire  family, on her mother's side, has lived there, in the same homes, on the perimeter of a 200 acre field for 150 years.

Searching for her history, Diane and I flew to Raleigh and drove down to Wilson, hoping to find the siblings and cousins and stories that had haunted Diane's mother for 77 years.

Martha was the first member of that family to ever make it over the wall, getting out of Wilson by marrying an army band leader from Everett, MA where they both eventually settled after the war. In the home where Diane was born and where her dad still lives.

The night we drove down was especially foggy.  Still, after driving around for half an hour, we found the fogbound field and the small shacks surrounding it.  We sat with the car running and the headlights on for fifteen minutes.

Out of the night fog, fog so thick you could only see about ten feet ahead, came the eyes.  Wide set, pale blue eyes.  Eyes just like Martha's.  The eyes belonged to Martha's remaining brothers and sisters;  Gillium,  Billy,  Little Billy, Yank and the women, Daisy and Hortense.  More, for a total of thirteen, were dead and buried.

We spent hours going from shack to shack and finding out what happened.  Gillium showed us his shotgun collection including, I remember,  a small "Ladies" shotgun.   The talk was mostly about Roselle, the father whose name was new to Diane. Martha had made a point of never, ever speaking her father's name, such was the trauma.

Roselle was an alcoholic and a brutal man.  He beat his wife and his children frequently, once beating Gillium nearly to death.  It was obvious that the children, all now in their 70's, still feared Roselle, who, within a few years, ran off and started another family not far from Wilson, never bothering to divorce the other Martha Matthews, Diane's grandmother.

More about all this in a later post.

The L.H. Oswald Blues Band (Dallas, 1963 - Tracks Available on iTunes