Flying Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
Flying Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
By
David Gottfried
Once upon a time, Campbell’s soup and Heinz Ketchup sufficed to connote dignity and even success. One did not eat expensive sushi (one did not even know what sushi was), and the metastasizing paraphernalia of late 20th Century and early 21st century Capitalism and the succession of ever more gaudier and expensive accoutrements had not yet arrived. I am thinking of the 1970’s, when people did not feel compelled to be fabulously successful and so, instead of taking cocaine or Prozac, took Quaaludes and blimped-out on Veal Parmigiana heroes. I am thinking of Mary Tyler Moore who, under no compunction to enlarge her mind or tone her muscles, tells Rhoda that she spent the preceding evening washing her hair as if hair-washing were such a big event that an entire evening had to be dedicated to the chore. This sense of moving slow, this ambience of the pre-digital age, was amplified in my school, which I will call Escargot, because it was situated in sedated, semi-rural Pennsylvania, and this was a school, after all, where “calming down” was a cardinal virtue.
And my Friend, Stephen Rudick, would be quite happy and proud to tell you that he had spent the preceding evening watching the “Mary Tyler Moore Show,” along with the other inane television shows of the era. I knew him at Escargot, the school for adolescents who knew how to infuse their tantrums and fights with the sort of psychological profundity that made doctors pay attention. The school had as its mission the modification and rectification of the kids’ character quirks.
However, Stephen Rudick’s objective was diametrically opposed to that of the school’s. Whereas the school found him athletically graceless and feminine in his fastidious attention to hygiene, manners, table settings and flowers, and saw as its goal roughing him up, Stephen decided that the other schoolboys were just a bunch of barbarians, that he had no reason to change, thank you very much, and that he would, if anything, try to change the school around him.
And the very first thing he insisted upon was the way he was going to spend his evenings. Escargot considered it essential that all our time be scheduled. And so we went to school in the morning and afternoon, and in the evening we were to be engaged in activities. Activities could encompass any number of things, but if they were not sports, they were usually just a poor and horridly regimented way to kill time, given the fact that no one really could draw, or carry a tune, or craft a line of poetry, notwithstanding all that claptrap about the artistic proclivities of the maladjusted. In any event, evening activities were a universal feature of school life, and everyone, with the exception of those in sickbay, could always be found, between the hours of seven and ten PM, engaged in some sort of scheduled “activity.”
But this was not for Stephen Rudick. He was not about to get his hands dirty with paint brushes or increase his perspiration from playing ball. (He lived in mortal fear of dirt, which he thought stimulated acne, and acne was anathema to the good, the true and the beautiful.) Besides, he wanted to relax. He was quite emphatic about this point.
He would lie on his side, with his head resting on one raised hand and his lazy butt pointing upwards from the point where his knees came together, and say, imploringly and all-seriously, “I need to relax at the end of the day,” and his deep Betty Davis eyes made it clear that his position was non-negotiable. And he wasn’t Bette Davis in Jezebel, and he wasn’t Bette Davis as a Rich Southern Belle. He was Bette Davis in the “Catered Affair,” tired, weary and working class. No, don’t for a minute imagine that his only task in the course of the day was the completion of ten absurdly simple algebra problems and, perhaps, reading about twenty pages in a social studies text in large print with pictures. He was so adept at projecting an air of matronly self-sacrifice you would believe he was breaking his back, slaving over a hot oven, and that relaxation was what the doctor absolutely Ordered.
The means to relaxation was television, and he considered it his Constitutional right, under the Declaration of Independence, to watch at least three, and preferably five, hours of television every night. The school might disparage television as mind-numbing. It may be deemed antisocial. It is, of course, wholly sedentary. It might be any one of these things or more, but to Stephen one simple answer shot down all of these arguments.
Television was out there and everywhere and everyone watched it. One should watch television because everyone watches television, just as everyone who is male wears pants instead of dresses. It is, very simply, the thing that is done. Besides, if it was so bad for you it wouldn’t be everywhere. This argument, finally, seemed to do the School in because the School, a great apostle of conformity, could not help but accede to the idea that one should do what everybody else does.
And so Stephen watched lots of Television. Interestingly enough, he took the TV commercials just as seriously as his beloved situation comedies. He made it abundantly clear that Reynold’s wrap really was the best aluminum foil. He intoned, with the utmost seriousness, that Heinz ketchup was a very slow ketchup and considered its absence from a pantry a mark of the utmost deprivation and degradation. Kraft cheese was very neat and wonderfully predictable and he appreciated its colorful, pretty, plastic packages. He was the emotional, intellectual and psychosexual antithesis of Norman Mailer.
He was more like Bea Arthur. The television program Maude, which starred Bea Arthur, was a big hit in the Seventies, what with its ebullient, bitchy, ballsy style, and Stephen reveled in its rich big girl obnoxiousness. He was so excited when the show came on that he even sang the Maude theme song. Although his deepest affections were reserved for Maude, all the other chatty, dim-witted situation comedies with a girlish, cutesy state of mind pulled at his affected and unctuous heartstrings. And so he adored the Mary Tyler Moore show, told us that our school would be much improved if we could all have therapists like Bob Newhart, and considered his affection for “Rhoda” evidence of his good Jewish taste (As a thoroughly assimilated and Episcopalianated Jew, his Semitic identity consisted of only the ingestion of Lox and his predilection for regaling his acquaintances with the huge amount of money spent on his Bar Mitzvah).
He watched television with all the raptness of someone taking in Beethoven. When Kenneth Posner, our roommate, ate too loudly, Stephen was sure to notice. Apples were so noisy that Ken simply could not eat them during certain shows, such as Stephen’s believed Maude, and I can vividly recall Stephen’s matronly and bitchy voice sniping, “Ken, stop chomping on that apple,” when Ken dared to masticate while Maude was delivering one of her brilliantly withering put downs of a male, or of maleness, or of anything pertaining to with masculinity. If Kenneth did dare to eat loudly during Maude, all of Stephen’s sensitivities were unsheathed and seething, and Stephen would be inconsolably distressed. In times like this, he reprimanded Ken for breathing too loudly.
I think Stephen wanted us to be perfect, like Tricia Nixon or Karen Carpenter. To be blond, dolled-up, bottled-up and breathless – to have an ass that filled up a pair of jeans perfectly but never produced bowel movements -- this was the apotheosis of Stephen’s dreams.
Actually Stephen never mentioned Tricia Nixon, or her more important Father, or anything pertaining to politics. He had only one interest, the world of entertainment, and since entertainment had not yet discovered politics, politics had not been discovered by Stephen. During the Yom Kippur War of 1973, there happened to be a Writer’s strike in Hollywood, and Stephen said to me, with complete seriousness, “Isn’t it nice that there is a war going on in the Mideast while there is a writer’s strike.” I did not know what he was talking about, and he explained that the simultaneity of these events allowed us both to be upset about important affairs at the same time. He was not joking: He gauged the writer’s strike as something as momentous as the carnage in the Mideast.
But that’s because blood and guts were never as important as pretty images which is the manna which Hollywood, the governing religion, has bestowed upon us. And Karen Carpenter sat upon the world of pretty people, and the world of people who admired pretty people, like a diadem upon a princess’s head. For Stephen Rudick was not alone in this, there were tribunes of girls who bowed to the same gods, who mightily endeavored to be like a girl in the “Brady Bunch,” who thought that David Cassidy was an authentic expression of rock and roll, and who rejected the Beatles at the time of the “White Album” because although their music had scaled new peaks of the aural imagination, the Beatles, the girls flatly told you, stopped looking cute.
But Karen Carpenter never stopped looking cute. She wasn’t gorgeous. She wasn’t particularly sexy. Actually, as I write this I can hardly recall what she looked like; the sound of her voice is enough to tell me that her looks were not exceptional. But she was emphatically cute. And she was perfectly cute because everything was in place.
Not a single strand of super fine hair barely thicker than a microbe would ever be out of place. The hair was sculpted, sprayed and positioned into place like a helmet on a pilot who worked for Nasa and traveled to the moon (And of course drank Tang, another commodity that Stephen was enthrall of). The idea of wrinkles in her clothing would be as absurd as the idea of row boats in the United States Navy. Her voice box was as perfectly calibrated as heat seeking missiles used in the Vietnam War and had just the right decibel level and just the right octave to make you completely despair of rebellion and individuality. She was music’s auger of Margaret Thatcher.
But Stephen would be screaming if he were to read the preceding.
He would say, “But she’s just such a nice and lovely girl and why do you have to use your mean, brainiac powers to attack her I really don’t know.” And that is precisely how she sold herself: She was a strong woman with a pretty, sweet and perfect voice who would sing on key with such compulsive fortitude that all chaos, and everything that represented disorder, would simply have to disintegrate. She would shame the world into being nice. And the barbarians, who had been streaming toward the gate, would be in utter disarray.
And so while my contemporaries celebrated John Lennon and the Rolling Stones, I had to bunk with a little momma’s boy whose prime intention in life was to build a little cupcake of a world. A world with lovely, sweet and colorful icing and a filling so soft and kind you almost felt guilty biting it, as if the filling were really alive and you wanted to kiss it, or at least take it home with you and let it lie in bed with you while you watched “Rhoda.”
Therefore, for Stephen the greatest people in the world were the people who made cupcakes and other bakery products, And so he loved mommas and gravitated to them all the time. His extreme momma hunger, a hunger which made him seem like a giant mouth poised to pounce on any corpulent bosom with nothing but the most unsexual and wholly immature needs, was particularly pronounced when we visited shopping malls. (When the school did not know what to do with us, they just shoved us in buses and vans and headed for the shopping mall.)
When we went to malls, Stephen would invariably insist that we visit the confectioner or store selling baked goods. He wasn’t interested in just any confectioner. It had to be a confectioner staffed by one or two women and those women had to be at least forty and hopefully fifty. A little bit of excess fat on their bones was essential. Hopefully, they would seem vigorous and strong so he could indulge the illusion that they would be ready to pick him up and kiss him if he fell and scraped his knee. He may have been the scion of a very wealthy family, but he would have given half of it away in a flash if he could have had a Mammie just like Scarlett Ohara in “Gone with the Wind.”
If I recall correctly, he most adored Fannie Farmer chocolates. The first name, fannie, makes one think of a rear, and the second name, farmer, connotes all things good and homey, and the conjunction of those two words connoted fat grannies, with generous asses, baking cookies in divine domesticity.
He didn’t just buy chocolate from the ladies. No. He spoke to them for about thirty minutes. That was a long time to talk, but, as I said, the school was in a semi rural area, and we were trudging through the recessions of the early seventies, and, just like Mary Tyler Moore, who tells Rhoda that she spent her entire evening washing her hair, there was a time when one could get away with shooting the bull and doing nothing. Computers had not yet been invented and people spent a whole lot of time pleasantly goofing-off.
Stephen would tell his adopted Grandmas how he loved the smell of the chocolates and confections, that he thought they were doing such nice and wonderful jobs, and that he was sure they all made the chocolate themselves (but please don’t tell me if this isn’t true because I don’t want anything to spoil the dream), and the women, none of whom had the audacity of the Bea Arthur whom he thought he was in love with and were instead sweet and mild Pennsylvania ladies, smiled and said “God bless you, honey.”
After about five minutes of being a little Dutch boy in a Hallmark greeting card, singing “Edelweiss” and wearing faggotty Lederhosen, Stephen became whining, hysterical Woody Allen sans the intellect. He proceeded to talk to the old ladies about his medical problems and the serious relationship between his ailments and his gustatory desires. With the utmost solemnity, he explained that he loved chocolate but that he should not eat it because it might exacerbate his acne. And so he was at the point where two great things came together, or were at a “crossroads,” and they were acne and chocolate.
I had told Stephen that Lionel Trilling of Columbia University told us that his criticism stood at the “bloody crossroads” where politics and literature intersected, and now Stephen decided that he too had bloody crossroads of his own to worry about, and if you did not believe him, he would be all too happy to pop a zit and spray you with its blood and pus. And so he would tell the old ladies that he wanted to eat chocolate, and he said it with all the passion of a woman who explains that she wants to get back together with her ex, and then, a moment later, he would primly and puritanically castigate the sins of chocolate. As his cognition wiggled back and forth like a voluptuous woman’s sexy butt, he became the embodiment of feminine indecisiveness, and in this way hoped to become closer to the grannies at Fannie Farmer chocolates.
But all oily and fattening things must pass, and even the generous old women at Fannie Farmers would, after a while, tire of Stephen’s shtick and they would, with the utmost tact and diplomacy, send us on our way. And then as we left the bakery ladies, and strolled through the Mall, Stephen would clutch onto his little bag of chocolate as if it were a security blanket, and as he ate each candy he did it with reluctance, knowing the sooner it was all eaten the sooner it, and the remnants of mommy which inhered in the chocolate, would be gone.
However sooner or later we would run into other colorful, disturbed students from our school, and their manifold foibles and peculiarities always gave us lots to ponder. We would run into Bart, who had lost his Father and who was crazy, but in a very upright and self-assured sort of way. He told you, confidently and without equivocation, that the only thing he really liked to do in this world was eat and, goddamn it, he was going to eat everything that he wanted to eat. He did not want skis or footballs or records or paint brushes – save all that money and just give him more burgers and fries. And when he went to the mall, he promptly went to Mc Donald’s where he would eat lots and lots of beef, ordering two Big Macs, two large fries, a chocolate milk shake, a fish sandwich and an apple pie.
Occasionally, he would have epileptic seizures, and although I don’t think his feats of ingestion triggered them, I am sure he would not have changed anything if they had. Stephen didn’t like Bart too much, and he looked down on him the way a pretty toy bride on top of a wedding cake might glare at common, thick meat sauces in a blackened, beaten cauldron. Stephen, wholly enchanted by sweets, was aloft with orange zest and sugar and mint and cream, his taste buds tingled as if microscopic ballerinas with magic sugar wands were dancing on his tongue, and Bart and his heavy, slow, virile procession of beef and fries and hearty cooking would not dare rain on Stephen’s parade.
At the end of his sojourn in the shopping mall, Stephen might buy a Karen Carpenter or Burt Bacharach record, or perhaps a coaster or knick knack or other piece of junk imprinted with Karen’s beatific countenance, or her Brother’s wavy blond hair and faggotty good looks, and, his shopping complete, he would walk back to the bus, with the fatigued satisfaction of a dowager who has done a day’s hard shopping, and wait to be driven back to the school.
Slowly but surely the van filled up with our classmates. Eddie, who had a manic fascination for Gilligan’s Island, would invariably ascend the bus toting a toy more appropriate for a child half his age. Ken B., who had a strange and perhaps very gay habit of pulling his penis up and under the waist band of tight and starchy underpants, would climb aboard looking as he always did, with perpetually charged eyes that suggested that although he did not appear to be doing anything, he was quite contentedly stimulating himself. David Cetto, who looked like a hearty jock and spoke like Truman Capote, sauntered into the bus with sewing patterns.
As the van drove us from the mall back to the institution, Stephen told me of his plans. He would soon leave this place and partake of the gilded world of Hollywood, engage in ennobling conversations with erudite gossip columnists such as Rona Barrett, and feast on shrimp cocktail and lobster and coca cola at the academy awards ceremonies.
He already knew exactly what he would do in Hollywood: He wanted to be an executive vice president at a major movie studio. He denied any ambition to be an actor or to be in any way a star. Although he was a melodramatic, hysterical sort of guy, his melodrama was not stirred by any aspiration to rise to the top; rather, he was mad about the idea that he just had to become a member of the respected, protected upper middle class. Although he raved and ranted if his television set – his umbilical cord to the cultural world of Hollywood – was on the blink, his emotional outbursts were not engendered because he feared he was being denied stardom, but rather because he feared that he would lose-out on his quest to live like a comfortable, burgher watching television and eating snack food.
He wanted for himself what a Jewish Mother wants for her son. When she says she wants him to be a doctor, she is strongly implying that he should be successful, but not dazzlingly successful, not in any position where he could be embarrassed or subject to fall should conditions change.
And so Steve, fearful of embarrassment – when his acne was agitated he simply refused to leave the house for fear that the blemishes would invite derision – liked the idea of being a vice president. He could rock his heels from side to side, playing Vice President Spiro Agnew as Richard Nixon did the really heavy lifting. What’s more, he hailed from the State of Maryland, and Spiro Agnew was from the State of Maryland, and so he may have thought his state of origin made him inherently vice presidential.
He already knew what movie studio he intended to work at: Paramount Pictures. He had ready answers for any questions on this score. He wanted to work for Paramount because he liked Paramount because he liked their “mountain symbol.” Also, he readily noted that he “just loved” Paramount’s “Paper Moon,” and so wanted to work for an outfit that turned out so many nice pictures. Once, when we stood by a theatre watching customers walk out after the close of “Paper Moon,” he said that it was such a pleasure seeing contented customers who had just viewed a Paramount product.
But the customers did not look too happy. They weren’t crying or screaming in agony, but they were not happy. Their lips were, in most cases, like a tight, straight, line; they did not turn down in a frown or up in a grin. Their expressions were vacant and vacuous. After about two hours of sitting passive and silent, being visually and aurally face-fucked with the unctuous detritus of Hollywood, they were too damn tired to be happy or angry.
But this sort of vacancy and emptiness was, to Steve, perfectly emblematic of happiness. A hearty, roaring guffaw was in his view crude and far too volatile a thing to suggest happiness. If someone was capable of laughing with zest, then he might be capable of striking a cymbal with gusto and producing the noxious, rebellious music of the Beatles, whom he thoroughly detested. Enthusiasm was plainly very dangerous as there was no telling when a loud party might lead to lewd pranks and lascivious acts. And so his happiness was a sort of geriatric happiness, the happiness of an old woman whose idea of a nice afternoon is sipping very weak tea while listening to soap operas, of getting the 4:30 early bird dinner special at the diner (Entrée, with soup, salad, two sides, appetizer and desert and tea and coffee), and of squeezing her ass into a very cute dress that she did not think would fit.
So the people who walked out of the movie theatre – slowly, as if they were afraid of what the bright lights of daylight would portend – seemed, in their vacant expressions and leaden gait, to approximate what Steve thought of as happiness: An absence of angst insured by an evisceration of all feeling and soul.
Reading over what I just said makes me feel sick, as if I am betraying Stephen. Although Stephen was a goddamn pain in the ass, I feel for him and I think I know him better than he knows himself. He sought out the safe, pretty, sissified world of Fanny Farmer’s chocolates, and Mary Tyler Moore, not because of some essential chord of femininity but because of some sort of fear that made him forever enthrall to mommy love, to protection, to the sweet, the saccharine and a life manicured of all blemishes. Something -- I don’t know what it was -- had terrified him years ago and his terror was so true and constant that he wanted to hide under the covers and view the most inane chocolate milk and grilled cheese situation comedies.
Actually, I feel guilty writing about all of the colorful students at Escargot. In my rendering, they appear emotionally stunted, utterly infantile and grotesque. However, they all had some very good qualities. When I was physically ill, Stephen and Kenneth helped me got food (The few things that were edible) when I couldn’t make it to the cafeteria, and they made sure that Mrs. Tracey, the obese house Mother, laundered my sheets and clothing. Most of the people had a capacity for ingenious humor, a wicked imagination and were devoid of the crabby selfishness of the well-adjusted.
In any event, back to the narrative: By the time the van had driven us back to the school, our bed times were fast approaching. The night can be the most exciting time of the day for the emotionally mangled and sexually maniacal, or so we were encouraged to believe, and it seemed that every night was a full moon night, the evil, witchy orb shining on us with its rabid, rodent eyes. At times, there would be gasps and shouts and hoots as Teddy, a/k/a cucumbers, was discovered once again inserting objects into his anus. Michael, who was besieged with an obsession that he was losing his teeth, which compelled him to examine, pick at and pull at his teeth every chance he got – and thereby cause innumerable oral infections and perhaps the loss of a couple of teeth – might drool all over some one’s property while practicing his peculiar art of self-dentistry, and this might prompt the owner of the property to pummel Michael in a hail of fists. Two guys might start duking it out for no particular reason other than that they were young and healthy and bursting with energy, and since the banner of mental depravity imbued their behavior with a certain profundity and poignancy, they were quite ready to free themselves of any restraints in the art of teenage warfare, and they fought harder, cursed louder, and whined with all the accumulated bitterness of veteran analysands.
Stephen reacted to this the way a frontier woman would react to Indians on a rampage in the Old West. With superiority and indignation, he told you that they were savages, no more than that and no less than that, and that they did not deserve any of our time or consideration. If he folded his arms, I imagined that his hair had turned white and that he was a member of the Woman’s Christian’s Temperance Union, inveighing against alcohol and sin. If a bit of a Southern Drawl came into his voice (He was from Maryland), he morphed into Margaret Mitchell, wife of Richard Nixon’s attorney general, who was given to loud, preachy pontifications about the decadence of our liberal, modern society. If someone alleged that Teddy was now plunging pork sausages into his posterior, Stephen would comment that Teddy was not only queer but an unkosher queer at that and speak with the assured confidence of a sleek and suntanned Miami Beach matron. If his bathrobe was on, he simply became his holiness the Pope, and in this way got to wear the greatest gown and finest jewels of them all, and so became the Queen of all the Women.
Stephen reacted to lawlessness like some sort of raving queen and a John Wayne sheriff all in one. He believed in punishment, and shame, and, above all, the utmost self-control.
After he had about all that he could stand from the noisiness and unruliness of his classmates, Stephen would warn the boys, “Wait till Peter hears about this.”
Peter was just another student, but he walked, talked and dressed like a fifty year old policeman.
The first time I met Peter was during dinner when he roared, apropos of nothing, “I’m Irish Catholic.” I couldn’t imagine what had prompted him to profess his faith and ethnicity, but he did it all the time. He was a big, fat angry man, in baggy pants and suspenders, with a perpetual frown engraved on his face, who seemed perfect for a role in a crusty, hard-bitten movie starring Humphrey Bogart. (Of course, he was not right for a Bogart role as Peter was the fatty quintessence of the uncool.)
As I said, he behaved and looked as if he thought he was a policeman. He became an Irish cop, but certainly not one of those tough but tender Irish cops, with lilting brogues, that one learned about in “A Tree grows in Brooklyn” or other sentimental claptrap. He was a mean, hard cop, with a true Augustinian sense of the ubiquity of evil and sin, and he was not going to let anyone transgress the laws of god.
Of course, if transgressions against divine law were not always apparent, Peter would be there to alert us to all of our stinking sins.
“Darn it, Benny, eat your damn peas and carrots, you know you got stupid niggers in Africa starving for want of what the good lord put on your plate,” Peter scolded.
“But please, Peter, I don’t like the food and I am full from the donut I wasn’t supposed to eat.,” Benny pleaded.
“Damn it, Benny, don’t you go contradicting me. We have to catch the school bus and you are going to eat your damn peas if I have to break your goddamn head.”
Peter had to discipline Benny because he knew someone had to do it. Peter might have been sixteen years old, just like Benny, and they both might have been students at a school for emotionally disturbed students, but none of that stopped Peter from being the crusty Irish cop that he was. He may have been crazy, but like a truly crazy person he had a great imagination. Now he may not have been able to use his imagination to think up brilliant plays on the football field, or scientific experiments, or poetic couplets, but like a true loon he made his life the subject of his art and he morphed into an old Irish man. He truly was the sadistic Father Benny masochistically adored.
In those days, no one under the age of twenty wore boxer shorts, but Peter did. Of course, no one ever saw him in his boxer shorts, or ever got a look at his legs, because he always wore his old man baggy pants. And his dumpy, baggy sweaters. And glasses with thick Barry Goldwater black frames.
When he scolded Benny, or Ken Posner, or any other students at the school, he seemed to imagine himself a latter day Barry Goldwater, bringing the gospel of law and order to the disturbed sick shits in the school. Of course, one might wonder by what rights he had acquired the role of disciplinarian and perpetual scolder since he was also a student.
Of course, we would not dare question him on the reason for his enrollment; if we did such a thing, he’d surely clobber us.
(Years later, I learned that doctors once identified a condition they called “paranoia proper.” I think it is given some other name now; when I took abnormal psychology we were apprised of the diagnostic classifications contained in the DSM 11. In any event, in paranoia proper, a very rare condition, a patient is so thoroughly steeped in a delusion that he convinces those around him that his delusion is fact. Although Peter never said he was a cop (he was too cagey to sound like a patent nut job) and although no one believed he was a cop, most of us believed that he had malevolent powers equivalent to those of a cop. Actually, as I will demonstrate in a moment, members of the staff and faculty deferred to Peter, and acceded to his judgments, with such regularity that it appeared that they thought he had some special powers that could be used against them.)
Eventually, he conveyed some of the elements of his story and the The Great Injustice of his Confinement in our school, and we were given to believe that his Northern New Jersey town had been corrupted and abased by disturbed liberals of the Jewish persuasion, that these Jewish people were apostles of laxness and hedonism, that the laxness and hedonism had led to drunkenness, and lewdness and girls wearing short skirts and chewing gum in class, that he, Peter, was the lone voice of reason and morality in the depraved Sodom of his suburban town, and that the school authorities, which allowed girls and boys to touch one another at school dances, his parents, who were wonderful Irish Catholics but had been corrupted by the pervasive new permissiveness, and his malevolent, Jewish doctor contrived and conspired to incarcerate him in the nut house.
Much of the staff of the school readily agreed with him. One may have thought they were merely humoring him, but given the intellectual deficits of the staff, I am sure many of them concurred with all of Peter’s edicts.
And so while the students played ball on the lawn, Peter would sit on the porch in the shade, and hold court on America’s rising tide of Moral turpitude and the old folks employed by the school readily assented to his every word.
“Take those girls with the short skirts and the boys with the long hair. They all ought to go to hell.”
Hunter Mumpford, a man who told me, upon hearing that I was Jewish, that the Jews always shirked their obligations in war time (When I told him that my Father was injured in North Africa in World War Two, he said, “Them New Yorkers always have some fancy answer for you.”), promptly expressed his concurrence with Peter, grunting something to the effect that “they’re all a bunch of no good bums.”
Maynard Lane, the house Father of the school, a man who in his chiseled, gaunt, geriatric propriety was supposed to inculcate feelings of respect for Fathers and Order, said, “All started going to hell ever since they elected Roosevelt.”
Hunter and Maynard then took deep drags on their Marlboros and Peter, who did not smoke, then proceeded to bellow some more, in a voice that in its bitter rasp simulated the effect of forty years of heavy cigarette smoking.
He might bellow about the sins of women’s short skirts, never once considering that this may seem to place him oddly outside of the heterosexual norm. He might bellow about the glories of the Chicago Democratic Party Machine of Richard Daley, and with a hearty chuckle he told you that on election night the Mayor’s minions threw the papers ballots into Lake Michigan to prevent a recount. But what he really wanted to bellow about, and what he would eventually bellow about, were the rectums and the reaming.
I never knew exactly what reaming means, and I don’t know what it is to ream someone’s rectum out, and I don’t know why this particular course of action assumed such capital importance to Peter, but it did. And he would, at some point in his monologues, invariably tell us of his disgust with so much of young manhood, of their slothfulness and their lack of military training, and he would scream, “We gotta ream their goddamn rectums out.”
“I don’t care what you gotta do, take a garden hose. Take a police hose that Bull Conner used on his niggers in Alabama, but just ream those filthy rectums out until every last bit of their crap is shitted-out of them.”
If the old men of the school, Hunter and Maynard, found this comment a bit too vulgar, they did not say so. Instead, they cheered him on as if they were an older version of Joe Mc Carthy and Peter were a whippersnapper of a Roy Cohen out to do holy war against the infidel communists. And so they said “Atta boy, Peter, go get them,” and I was very impressed with the aggressive energy these men would summon for the proper job of reaming rectums out.
Although his diatribe was shot through with sado-masochistic, homosexual longing, I was, on a conscious level at least, wholly oblivious to the sexual angle in his tirade and, given Hunter and Mumford’s ready concurrence in Peter’s general drift of thought and ridicule, thought that reaming rectums out was a very manful and worthwhile thing to do.
After a while, many of the boys at the school, in awe of Peter because of his deft impersonation of an Irish cop more than twice his age, started ranting about reaming rectums too. And so when we were mad because the train was late, we reasoned that lazy niggers were to blame and we slammed our fists into the palms of our hands and exclaimed that we ought to ream their rectums out.
We soon wanted to ream everybody’s rectums out. When we heard that people were trying to bring soccer to America, and thus corrupt us with unhealthy European values, we growled that we ought to ream their rectums out. When we were subjected to Yogurt and granola and all manner of effeminate food, we promised to ream men’s rectums out. We never talked about reaming out the rectums of women or explained why their gender was to be spared rectal reaming.
Instead of advocating the wholesale reaming of female rectums, Peter simply proposed that much the girls at the school simply be put to death. The basis for his belief, he avowed, was the Cuban leader Batista who, according, to Peter, shot blacks when he found them disagreeable.
“That’s all you gotta do. Shoot them. What do you think Batista did when the niggers gave him a problem? He just lined them against a wall and shot them.”
I don’t want to leave my reader utterly nauseated with the fecal drift in this little discussion of reaming rectums, but the bathroom, the aura of the bathroom, the dumpy plumpness of rotund buttocks, and the patently retarded smell of shit all figured prominently in our collective Weltangshang.
Stephen was consumed with all things pertaining to excretion and evacuation, piously intoning that there comes a time when one must sit on the toilet bowl and remain there until everything, every last brownish worm of defilement and debasement, is purged from one’s belly, and Steve said this in much the same manner as the Star in “I remember Mama” said that there came a time when one must get on one’s hands and knees and scrub the floor. Ken Posner’s enchantment with the bathroom led him to spend countless hours on the toilet bowl, periodically rising from his perch to examine every aspect of his stools, assessing their buoyancy in the toilet water (stool that floated like happy sail boats connoted health), agonizing over their color (Stools should be dark, but not too dark, and his fierce belief that stools should have just the right measure of brown pigment reminded me of Jackie Mason’s comic skit of a diner demanding that his coffee be dark, but not too dark), and inevitably concluding that his stools were not up to snuff, were not brown gold, and that he required a full diagnostic work up to identify the precise nature of his rectal tribulations.
This bowel and rectal consciousness made itself felt not only among the patently mad, but also afflicted the ranks of those who could even, on occasion, pass for normal. For I, too, was impressed by all things anal.
I was particularly impressed by, and still am impressed by, the fat buttocks of fat women. There is something about an obese woman, with record-holding watermelon buttocks, that has always seemed extremely funny, sloppy and animalistic. A fat women with a big fat ass, without saying or doing a funny or stupid thing, is, simply by virtue of how she looks, the female equivalent of the Three Stooges.
My obsession with obese women and their mountainous asses prompted me to laugh at, imitate, and discuss the asses of fat women with fervor and lewd fascination. Moreover, the presence of a particularly fat woman at Escargot, a woman with an ass so huge that it was the center of not only her body but of every room she ever entered, energized my anal imagination.
The fat woman in question was Mrs. Tracey, our house Mother at Escargot. She hailed from the State of Maine, and she proudly and stupidly told us that she was a Maniac, because she was so devoted to the beloved state of her origins. She was a country woman, and she moved in a slow and deliberate country way, and she seemed to be the spitting image of every rural stereotype we learned on the situation comedies “The Beverly Hillbillies” and “Green Acres.”
She once spent an entire evening or two folding over each and every page in an enormously fat telephone book in order to make a door stop – and she did not find the work the least bit boring. When the Yom Kippur war erupted in the mid-East, she could not seem to grasp that Israel was at war with Syria and Egypt; rather, she said that the Jews were at war with “the Arabians.” When Cambodian communists seized a US vessel shortly after the fall of Vietnam in 1975, she flatly said that we ought to drop a “whole lot of atom bombs” on “all them gooks.”
But I did not need to hear her to know that she was rustic and Republican; I only had to look at her. A being with her ass just had to be stupid.
I never took the precise measurements of her ass – although I did from time to time case the joint, lurking behind her with a measuring tape and making varied estimations – but I do know that she would never fit in a seat in the New York Subway, that her can could not contend with even the seats that platoons of buxom black ladies could fit into, and that her ass was packed high and deep like a truck filled to the brim for a hay ride. With a little imagination, her ass became an all-encompassing organ that extended from her knee caps (The immense blubbery thighs were mere extensions of the ass, tendrils of excitement before the bulbous globular prize) to her tits (The stomach and the tits were but a crown atop the ass). Her ass did not seem to be a mere repository of fat and gristle and various forms of lard. Rather, it seemed as if she ate to feed her ass, that her ass was an animate thing, that her ass did not simply accumulate fat because she could not burn up what she ate, but that her ass commanded her to eat so it could keep getting larger.
Of course, we never got a very good view of the shape and rotundity of her behind owing to her predilection toward wearing loosely fitting enormous clothing. Of course, she always wore the same sort of thing. They may have been gingham dresses; I don’t know; I never knew what a gingham dress was but it sounded like something she would wear when Ed Koch said, in the course of his 1982 gubernatorial campaign, that women in rural New York wore stupid Gingham dresses.
And when she walked in gingham dresses, bewildered by the emotional minefields in our school for disturbed teens, she seemed to lumber like a slow-moving bus in New York City Traffic, her heavy body barely able to navigate the City’s serpentine streets. And as busses tend to emit exhausts, she was no exception, but her exhausts consisted of not the relatively clean-smelling smoke of combustion; her exhausts were the dirty smells of farts, and each fart was announced with all the solemnity of a Maine Foghorn in a John Singer Sargent painting; and when she farted she farted prodigiously and portentously, gusting forth with waves of foul aromas that would waft through the air from one commercial break on TV to the next.
Yes she farted a lot and she ate a lot. She ate fried chicken and fried potatoes and shepherd’s pie and anything, or almost anything, that could be derived from a pig. Although her intestinal behavior may lead the reader to imagine that she was a vulgar sort of a woman – a speculation that in all respects is emphatically correct – she was not a willful, hostile or contrary creature. She seemed to aspire to being good, wholesome and correct as befitted a house mother in a school for emotionally disturbed teens.
And so she uttered wholesome inanities all day long. In the middle of a TV show, for no particular reason, she would declaim, “I like art,” or “I like poetry,” to continually remind we poor lost souls that the world was good and wholesome. Of course, her conception of art and poetry was fixed along the lines of “roses are red and violets are blue,” but she did realize that her tastes were a bit on the prim and primitive side. But she was happy to be prissy and she would utter prissy pontifications on decorum, manners and morals, telling us that women who frequented bars were “cheap,” that we should never want to marry a woman who frequented a bar (but it was alright if we saw the woman, from time to time, on the sly), that the human body was essentially ugly, and that even the prettiest girl was, in her opinion, still sort of ugly.
Although her viewpoints may have seemed a bit grim, we could not help but tend to agree with her, especially about the ugliness part, when we looked at each other. The house, to a boy, was filled with ugliness. I am not speaking of only the ordinary sort of male teen ugliness and its assorted pimples, piles of putrid laundry, and pervasive athletes’ foot. I am speaking of the ugliness of the crazy.
There was Michael Simpson, who as I said before picked his teeth all the time because he thought they were about to fall out and so felt compelled to regularly assess the status of his teeth with toothpicks, pens and pencils and any other object that could get down and dirty in the recesses of his gums and make matters worse.
There was Ken B, who as I stated before, decided to point his penis toward his navel, keep his penis firmly in place with the waistband of his underpants, and constantly feel the crotch of his pants pushing against his testicles.
And each person’s ugliness seemed to harmonize with everyone else’s ugliness until all the streams of ugliness converged together like a diarrhea-colored gravy that seemed to have been drawn and bottled from Mrs. Tracey’s ass. And any attempts to transcend this ugliness was disapproved and nipped in the bud. I might have gotten a beautiful, expensive shirt from Harrod’s Department Store in London, but Mrs. Tracy would not look kindly on any affected and effete European airs and when she was finished laundering the shirt it was little more than a wrinkled dish rag, suitable for drying dishes that had been piled high with fried chicken and macaroni and cheese.
The ugliness was entrenched in the house, in the cans of soda for our evening snack that were called Farmer Bill’s soda, or were known by some other dowdy name, and did not even bother to advertise themselves as tasty treats; in the scraple we ate for breakfast that, I was told, consisted of odds and ends of discarded pieces of pork that were slovenly fried in lard; in the T shirts that were a sorry shade of white that seemed tinted with the grays and yellows of mucus and urine; and in the beds we slept in that seemed so institutional, and laden with so many old and ugly smells of confinements and mad houses, that I feared, upon lying in the bed, that I would regress, become subject to the bed’s enfeebling spirits, and wet the bed for the first time since I had been a toddler.
Even nice things became ugly. Salisbury steak seemed just a hop, skip and a jump away from feces. Milk, served from pitchers that were never completely cleaned, and that always seemed to have the residue of milk that had been poured weeks past, always seemed more than faintly sour and in the ugliness of the taste we would imagine, on our tongues, the taste of a milk-lapping cat that had, entangled in its teeth, the sinews and flesh of a dead mouse.
And then there were all the incongruous smells and tastes: While consuming what was supposed to be roast chicken, we often got a whiff of moth balls, especially on the filthy underside of the bird, that was so strong, and so undeniable, that I was convinced, and still am convinced, that the chickens were actually packed in moth balls to guard against the plenitude of vermin that must have besieged the food storage areas. The pearl onions in the peas emitted the taste of insecticide, and as the brash and cancerous taste jolted our mouths with misery, the eyeball-like pearl onions glared at us with Schadenfraude. The soup always seemed to be generously spiked with laundry detergent. The mashed potatoes were so heavy and sodden that they seemed to have been comprised of plaster of paris. The coffee invariably tasted like graphite pencils. The fruit cocktail, appearing in tiny Styrofoam cups, seemed to have the consistency of Styrofoam or some other unpalatable product, randomly shaped and dyed in a euphemism of pastels.
But Mrs. Tracy sat at the table, her mammoth buttocks occupying about three chairs at the same time, and ate all the food with abandon. And she was not going to take any lip from any spoiled no good New York Jew boy about the insufficiency or ugliness of the food stuffs. The food, she insisted, was all good and fine.
“We got fine bread with fine, white, Christian flour,” she stoutly declared. She reminded us that our dinners were replete with Nice white butter as smooth and creamy as a baby’s bottom; Sturdy, manly pork chops that knew nothing of neurotic kosher fastidiousness; heaping mounds of potatoes that summoned the virtuousness of the good earth; and assorted greens and vegetables that had been boiled for hours, and that now stood in serving trays marinating in pork fat, that made our meal balanced and ensured regular evacuation of the bowels.
This hardy fare became hardiest, and to me most vulgar, at breakfast. Since the breakfasts were grossly unkosher, and since I was more Jewish than I had admitted to myself, the breakfasts were pageants of barbarity.
The centerpiece of the Anglo American breakfast is eggs and bacon. I had never been a religious Jew, and I had not been raised to abide by the rules of Kosher dining, but they never seemed as meritorious as when I was confined in this School and compelled to endure its meals.
The bacon was adamantly, eternally, unashamedly greasy. It seemed to be a food stuff that mocked us, claiming, “you believe meats should be lean and refined; I will be a meat shot through with fat and gristle and all things artery-clogging.” The strips of bacon were elongated, like phalluses, and the brown color made them the penises of black men, and the very act of eating them seemed like a form of fellatio, dragging one down into vile sins and the depths of ignorance and depravity.
The brutality of the bacon was perfectly in tune with the innocence of the fetal eggs. The eggs were so yellow, so white, so pure – and they sat ensnared and surrounded by bacon strips poised to rape the nest.
And the sound of the percolating coffee was the like the sound of a roiling witch’s cauldron simmering with fetid and filthy poisons, its acrid taste a promise of an ulcerating future for your stomach. The pancakes were never really completely cooked, and the eggy mushiness suggested salmonella and other furtive pathogens.
To obtain some sort of respite from this onslaught of disgusting Christian Food Stuffs, Kenneth P and I decided to dedicate every Saturday looking for decent food and eating decent, civilized New York food, preferably with the pick me up and moxie of dill pickles and corned beef on rye with mustard.
We were given the whole of Saturday to occupy ourselves as we wished, and Ken and I, loving nothing other than food – neither of us were athletic or had any interests of any sort other than the consumption of food – would walk for many miles, from about noon on Saturday till 5 P.M., inspecting the various restaurants in the region. We had a decent amount of money to spend since we were bereft of interests and never spent a dime on records, or athletic equipment, or apparel, or concert tickets. We saved up all our money for our Saturday repast, and made an evening meal stretch before us to fill the entirety of the day. Neither of us knew too much about food, and so we were always distracted by the decor and ambience of the restaurant. When we saw a Chinese restaurant with red lanterns, and a miniature brook and fountain with magnificently dyed water, our memories of our Jewish boyhoods in the New York Metropolitan area, and the favorite food of assimilated Jews, Chinese food, would be stirred and we would be homesick for soup with wontons as gentle and generous as tender white breasts. Somehow, pork did not seem unkosher in a Chinese restaurant. The Chinese seemed to cut the pork down to size and refine it with a multiplicity of exotic seasonings that gave pork so many tangy beautiful flavors that it was no longer dumb, clumps of meat, sitting on a plate with all the energy of a football player who had been knocked into unconsciousness, but rather seemed, in the myriad sweet and sour and scintillating sauces, as sprightly and as blithe as ballerinas in tights and tutus.
I can remember the procession of foods in Chinese Restaurants of long ago as if it were yesterday. First, a bowl of what for want of a better term I would call Chinese breadsticks would be placed on the table, along with the magical duck sauce that was as sweet as candy and the potent mustard that seemed like a species of medicine. While we waited for our food, Ken and I would pick up the breadsticks and dip them into the sauces, alternating between the sugary duck sauce and the acerbic mustard which let us prove our macho.
Then, the soups would come. The wonton soup was demurely placed on our table by a waiter so quiet and apparently deferential that we could imagine ourselves, amidst all the lanterns and garish grandeur of the restaurant, heirs of the Manchu dynasty. We consumed every last cubic centimeter of the soup.
The soup was followed by the meal which was, inevitably, exotic. In the seventies, before any real Americans knew anything about Korean food or Japanese food or heavens forbid Thai food, the Chinese menu was the height of the avant garde. It was the food of magnificent and opulent despotisms, of savage and wrathful communists, of brilliant people who were building hydrogen bombs, and we expected, from their kitchens, nothing less than culinary masterpieces.
And we were never disappointed. Whether we ate such esoteric dishes as Chicken Chow Mein or Lobster Cantonese, we always felt ourselves at the forefront of change and geopolitical tumult. When I ate an egg roll, I thought of Yoko Ono, because she was also Asian, and I fancied myself as striking a blow for peace in Vietnam. When I ate fried rice, I remembered my Ninth Grade social studies teacher, who seemed to like me because I was a commie, who opined that rice was the food of peaceful Asia whereas wheat was the grain of the violent west.
But alas, all good things must pass and so by about 5:45 PM our dinners were completed. To brace ourselves for the cold and cruel occidental world we had a western desert of ice cream, invariably topped with a fortune cookie. To postpone our departure, we dawdled through the desert until the ice cream could only be sipped as a soup. Then we read our fortune cookies and interpreted the omens in the worst way possible.