Tape 3, Side B

[Begin Tape 3, side B]

It got to be so bad…

That in their eyes I got the worst form of punishment that they could devise, which was, during meal times everybody sat with their group: there were four tables: the big boys and the little boys and the big girls and the little girls, and right in the middle of this huge dining hall where we had meals there was one table in the middle and that was the matron’s table, and usually she sat there all alone and ate by herself. Occasionally when there were distinguished visitors they would come and dine with her, and there were wait-persons to pass things to her and to us too, and what she did was set up a separate little table next to her that I had to sit at facing away from everyone else [laughs]. That was my punishment. I had my own table and my own setup and it was supposed to be very humiliating and that was the worst thing they could do at that time, plus, you know, all sorts of restrictions and withholdings of money and that sort of stuff, but those never meant anything because as I say they never took extraordinary measures to enforce them.

So do you think you would have had limits if the punishments had been severe enough you might have curtailed your activities?

Ah yeah, probably, or tried to run away. I did run away once, and the reason I ran away, it was a question of, to me I think it was a question ultimately of fairness. We had work assignments on Saturdays. You know, you scrub the hallway; you do this, you do that, and my job was always to scrub the stairs from the second floor to the first floor. And one Saturday I did that. You get your big slop bucket out there; get your scrub brush, scrub these stairs, rinse them off, go down one, scrub ‘em; and it was hard to do because it was this gritty red—I don’t know what it was—and they have these metal cleats at the front of each stair with grooves in ‘em and you had to scrape that out and scrub ‘em, and everything had to be clean. And I did that. I kind of liked it actually.

Why did you like it?

I guess because it was something I had control over; it was physical, and it was my responsibility; so I always thought I did a good job. But this one Saturday the matron came around, and I don’t know what else had happened to bring it to this point, but we weren’t on good terms, and she basically told that it wasn’t done well enough and that I’d have to do it all over. I said: I’m not gonna do it all over; and she said: Yes you are, you’re gonna do it all over. I want you to take your bucket, go back up the stairs, come back down and do it all over. And I picked that bucket up and I threw that bucket of water all over her. I just threw it on her, and I cut out [laughs]. I ran out the front door, and I was out, I was out there in the world.

In the neighborhood?

Yeah, but I just kept on running.

Were there gates?

Gates? No.

So once you were out the front door you were out in the neighborhood?

No, there was like a huge expanse of lawn and steps, you know it was way up high, so you had to run down the steps to get to the street, but then you were out in the neighborhood.

So what was your feeling?

I was just afraid, you know, I gotta keep going because they’ll get me and they’ll do something. I didn’t know what they would do, but that was, again, nobody’d done anything like that before, so I didn’t know what they would do. They probably didn’t know what they would do.

And where did you go?

Well, I didn’t know where to go. I just kept running. I knew sort of how to get to the park, Forest Park, and I stayed there in the park, and when I got hungry I went into supermarkets and stole stuff to eat [laughs]. This was only a couple days really, three or four days or something like that, and I remember the first night I climbed up a tree in the park and slept in a tree [laughs]. The second night--

--And you actually slept?

Yeah. Up in a tree.

It sounds like quite an adventure. Was there a little bit of enjoyment in the…?

Oh yeah. I think I was havin’ a ball, especially the stealing the food part. That was great.

Really? Was that a new thing?

No.

[Laughing] You’d done that before?

Well, not exactly food, steal records, toys. Woolworth’s was a great place for that.

Now you say it was great because it was kind of a buzz, kind of an adrenaline rush, or…?

Ah, no, it was, it just made me happy that I could get these things that I wanted and I didn’t have to pay for them and I didn’t have any money anyway.

So you had nothing in your pocket?

No, nothin’.

They’d probably taken away your allowance before.

I don’t know. It wasn’t that much anyway. Yeah, I had nothing. And so I just wandered around aimlessly, basically.

How long did you make it?

The second night I went back to the home and broke into the tool shed, the gardening shed where the handyman hung out and found a place to sleep in there; so that was indoors at least, and then I went away and wandered for another day. I don’t know about the third night. But the next day was probably Sunday—I’m guessing. I knew that everybody would be coming around to church. And that Katz drug store was there on the corner, so I was just in there in that Katz drug store reading all their comics, and they collared me.

Somebody from the home?

Somebody from the home, yeah. I knew that somebody… I probably wanted to be caught at that time, because I’d had enough, I’d had enough of that.

You were getting tired.

And I don’t think they did anything bad to me, but, you know, many serious talking-tos, and I remember the superintendent had to come and talk to me, and he never did that; he never talked to the kids, or the old people for that matter. He always talked through these intermediaries.

Now was the matron, through all this, was the matron still talking like there was something, you know: After your father comes back, maybe the…?

Yeah, it was always in the background, and in fact later on, when my brother and sister were there all by themselves, it was still there. That’s what they say. This was after he had come back from Turkey with a wife, so I don’t know…. Who knows what was going on? I certainly don’t. She may have just been using it all the time; just another item in her repertoire of manipulation.

Do you remember having any hopes or objectives when it got that bad, after you’d run away and everything, were you hoping that your father would come and take you away, or that somehow you’d be able to live somewhere else, or…?

No, I don’t think at that time I had any hopes or expectations. I think I was just moving from day-to-day, you know, just more or less accepting the reality that was and waiting to see what might happen, waiting to see if anything different would happen. You know it was always in the background that he was going to come and take us away, but so much time had elapsed without that having happened that none of the three of us thought that was gonna happen.

How long had you been there, at this point, say when you ran away?

Oh, three years I guess. Three or four years, something like that, and actually it was only another year or two to go before we actually were taken out. But still, I mean that’s a long time, for a kid. That became the reality. And you could see there were kids there who had been there for eighteen years. There was one girl there they were putting her through college; yeah, she was in her twenties, been there since she was five or six. So you can see this was your home; this was how it was gonna be and these were the powers that were in charge of you, also though there were a couple of kids who ran away and never came back; they just never heard from them again.

Did you think about that?

Ah, no, I think it just didn’t seem feasible, plus it was a good deal there. You had your own room…. Weighing the two alternatives, especially after a taste of how it was out there, it was much more… it was just no contest; I mean you just have to live with a certain amount of regimentation and so on, but it didn’t really make much of a difference. I wasn’t really punished, and none of the other kids who ran away. Every now and then somebody’d run away and somehow they’d find their way to their parents’ house and they’d bring ‘em back after a week or so and they just accepted it as part of the deal that the kids were sometimes gonna run away, and then they’d give ‘em some restriction for a week or a month or whatever and then…. But they didn’t like the throwing the water on the matron though, and she was never the same with me after that [laughing].

I was gonna ask you…. She didn’t really forgive you then huh?

She never forgave me but she never came down hard on me like that again anymore; I mean she just sort of stayed away from me [laughs]. And that was okay, that was okay with me. I just sort of, I didn’t necessarily clean up my act, but I wasn’t provocative.

So you didn’t do anything, I mean directly to her after that?

No, but by then also there were other things that were going on that were neat too. And this gets back to your other question about outside contacts and who could you look up to. I was starting to do jobs. I was delivering papers there in the old folks’ home, and that got me off; I could hang out in their rooms. I could do errands for them. I could go get them tobacco and liquor, because the drug store people would sell me booze, would sell me anything because they knew that I was from the home, that I was probably doing errands for all the old people, so I could get cigars, pipe tobacco, cigarettes, booze, anything.

But now all this was kind of surreptitious though?

No, this was official. They said I could have a paper route. Oh, the delivery stuff, that was surreptitious ‘cause you weren’t supposed to bring anything to the old people.

So they said you could have a paper route.

Yeah [laughs].

So that got you in to everything, and then once you were in you made these arrangements about deliveries.

Yeah, and they’d give you stuff too. That’s why you did it; they’d give you stuff, plus I just liked listening to their stories, you know, ah, I can’t remember any of them. The only thing out of that time that I remember anybody saying as I was talking to this one old guy—jeez, must have been in his seventies—he was telling me stories of his life and I don’t remember any of that but I do remember this, he said: You never lose your desire for a woman.

[Laughs] He said that?

That’s what I remembered.

You thought this might come in handy later.

Yeah, but that paper route gave me access to the locked sixth floor, where they kept the mentally disturbed old people.

You actually delivered papers there?

Well like to the orderlies or whoever’s running it. So you could drop off a couple papers there.

So was the main payoff that you got to kind of look around?

Yeah. You were supposed to use the elevator to deliver these papers, but I found out that there was a back staircase which was unlocked from that way, so I would come in that way and hang out in the day room with the wacky old people [laughs], while they watched TV, or watched TV even when it wasn’t on.

Were they old?

Yeah, they were old. Most of them probably had Alzheimer’s or what they probably called senile dementia or something like that.

So the way the thing worked was there were the kids and the old people, and the only sort of middle-aged people, or people between twenty and sixty-five, were the people who worked there?

Staff, yeah. And I also hung out with the handyman guy. Now this was the guy, I think he lived there, but he had a son about my age, so I got to hang out with him and do chores and also hang out with his son. I think he was Cajun or something like that ‘cause he had a strange way of talking; I’d never heard anybody talk like that, but now, in retrospect it seems like it might have been a Louisiana thing. But he was a salty devil and he’d take me along also when he went off the grounds of the home to pick stuff up or to do errands or something like that, and that was okay too. That was one of my jobs, and the other job I had was with the boiler crew. They had a big steam plant and a big boiler right there on the grounds, and that was great because these guys they didn’t do anything but sit around drinkin’ coffee and smokin’ Camels. All day that’s all they did was sit around drinkin’: You want some coffee? Want a Camel? So I’d sit there and drink coffee and smoke Camels with ‘em. Every now and then I’d climb inside the boiler and give it a brushing or something like that, but they had it made, these old rascals.

Did you get in the habit of drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes?

Yeah, I probably did. Probably did. But I really liked pipe smoking. That was my thing. I started collecting pipes from everywhere, from these old people, the corncob pipes, regular pipes; they’d give me pipes and things like that.

So you had actually a collection?

Yeah, and that takes, it takes longer to smoke a pipe. You know a cigarette you can sneak, so I’d get in trouble for that too, for that sort of behavior. I also hung around, there was a guy who came in to fix the TVs, and he apparently asked if there was anybody: Do any of these young men need some extra money ‘cause I have fixed TVs all throughout the area and I could take one of these boys with me and learn ‘em how to fix TVs. So I did that.

So you took the job?

Yeah, but he wouldn’t let me, he wouldn’t tell me anything about fixing TVs. I just rode around with him all day and he went into houses and I’d watch him fix a TV and he might have talked to me or something like that but I don’t remember. It turns out later that I hear that this guy was like a chicken hawk. He was trying to find a young boy that he could seduce.

How old was he?

He was middle-aged. You mean the TV guy?

So what do you think it was, he just didn’t take a fancy to you?

Just didn’t take a fancy to me, or I was asking him too many questions or…

You really thought it was about fixing TVs.

I wanted to learn how to fix the damn TVs, and all he’d say was: Don’t touch that; you’ll get a shock [laughing]. At least I don’t remember anything. I was happy just to ride around, I mean that was enough. I don’t remember anything he said, but I remember we went into lots of places and he took some TVs apart and fixed ‘em. Also there was one guy, one of the youth advisors at church—they sent us to church, to the Methodist church around the corner from the home—all the kids had to go there, go to Sunday school, and then go to church, had to. No way you could get out of that. Like I say, there weren’t any Jewish kids in this…

There wasn’t any Methodist-Mason connection?

No, it was just the nearest one.

Are Masons drawn from among all the Protestant denominations?

Yes, because in their minds they’re not a religion; there’re some quasi mumbo jumbo, quasi spiritualistic aspects to it.

So you can be any sort of Protestant. You can’t be a Catholic.

Masons didn’t have any problem. Catholics say you can’t be a Mason. Masons supposedly would take anybody. Nowadays they’d probably take anybody. They might even take Satanists [laughs]. As long as they’re willing to go through the mumbo jumbo. But there was this guy; he was a young man connected to the church, and he was a chemical engineer, and sort of took a liking to me, and he took me over to his apartment and met his family, and he was trying to get me to declare that I would go to college and become a chemical engineer because he thought I was, he just wanted to, that was his Christian way of taking some action.

Was the deal that they would help you through school?

No, I don’t think there was any of that; he was just trying to convince me that I had brains and that it was real nice; and it was kind of interesting the things he talked about except his hands were all messed up from chemicals [laughter]. That wasn’t a good selling point.

He wasn’t a good advertisement.

No, that wasn’t very good, but I could see that he had a nice job, and he had a nice place and he had a nice life. He took me around; I could ride around with him a bit too, and he was real nice and he offered to give me books and things like that. So that was just his way of encouraging a bright young lad.

You got out quite a bit; more than most of the kids.

Yeah, more than most of the kids, and I did have other errands. I would take shoes down to be repaired and I would hang out with the Italian guy at the shoe shop and watch him repair shoes. I could just hang out there, and he would sing. He’d sing O solo mio or Santa Lucia….

He was actually from Italy?

Yeah, I think he was, or second generation or something like that. That was a good smelling place, that shoe repair place. So I had opportunities to get out and see things. Now my sister, she was involved with one of these—The Rainbow Girls—which is one of these Masonic things they have for youngsters. They have the Rainbow Girls and the DeMolay.

Kind of like Campfire Girls?

Yeah, but it’s much more service oriented and you’re supposed to do things and dress up and go places. She was actually adopted by them and became sort of a star. So I took a lot of pride in that. Oh, you know, that’s my sister, all the Rainbow Girls like her.

You say ‘adopted’ by them?

Yeah, they took a special interest in her.

Did they legally adopt her?

No. She got involved in that. And my brother… like I say, there at the home was the first time that I realized or sort of understood that I had this brother and sister and that we were all bound up together in this deal. I mean they were there all the time, but I wasn’t able to focus on them as having any real relation to me. And my brother, he was this cute little kid. He was kind of goofy. His shoelaces were always untied. He was always getting into trouble for not dressing right and so I had to look after him. And I remember once he got circumcised.

How old was he?

Four, five, something like that; six maybe.

Ouch!

So he went around showing everybody [laughter]. Look! Look what they did to me! So he was kind of, he was funny.

So did you kind of get to know him there? I know that before you’d been kind of indifferent when you first…

Yeah, sure, got to know him and my sister and understood what the deal was and what we were up against and sort of developed some rudimentary protective feelings.

About them or about you as a family, the three of you?

Yeah, right. But still not very deep or extended. We didn’t, we just never bonded up right. And then later on we got completely separated. Speaking of operations; my second ether trip was in there. I had to get a tonsillectomy. They took me out to the hospital and this time, you know they put that thing over your mouth, I remember I started breathing real deeply real quick [laughter].

‘Cause you knew what was coming.

Yeah, I sort of knew what was coming.

Was it similar?

Yeah, it was sort of similar.

Did you have any Xs?

No, there was something else. There was some fire or something. I don’t remember exactly. You know your second--

It’s never quite the same.

That’s why you want more. You want more! And that’s when I started buying ether from the other kids [laughs].

And became an ether huffer.

But a lot of things changed when again they discovered that I was smart, or they thought they discovered that I was smart. Like in the sixth or seventh grade they gave me some tests. That’s what they always do; that’s how they getcha; they give you the tests; and I didn’t know I did well on the tests, and suddenly they snatched me out of that school and I was supposed to take this bus every day to go out to this school in the suburbs where they had gifted classes. I was informed that I was gifted. So [laughs] that’s really how they getcha. Gifted.

So how did that alter things?

Well I couldn’t hang around with my buddies, you know. It was a long trip out there; long trip back. All the friends that I had made at this school--

--All the giftless children…

All the giftless children, yeah, and all my buddies, the guys I could run around with and play with, sing doo-wop with

Oh really?

Yeah, because this was when doo-wop was really big. You’d go into the school and any four guys that you’d see they would buddy up and go off and start singing doo-wop; they’d make up their—I can still remember some of ‘em.

Making them up? Really?

Yeah. And the girls over there, you could see four girls doing doo-wop over there or just singing or whatever. Yeah, I’ve never seen anything like that. That was good.

They don’t do that now.

No, they don’t do that now.

Although rap maybe is a little bit…

Well this was a simpler time. I mean there was stuff on the radio. There was no music program, if there was it was something really sterile or…

So radio wasn’t a big…

Radio starts to become a big deal at this time.

When you were in your early, were you in your teens yet?

Not even teens, not even teenager yet. So I go into this gifted school and they start trying to teach you French and geometry and social studies, stuff I didn’t—it’s kind of interesting—and all these kids are smarter than I am. They can already speak French. They’re from wealthy families. I catch on quick, but I start hanging out with the one or two kids that aren’t interested in this either, that sort of got forced into it, other disruptive elements. So I lasted probably a year at that, and they shipped me back. I said I want to go back. I don’t wanna do this anymore. And if you make me do this I’m gonna… I made it clear I was going to be even worse.

So you were officially gifted but you bombed out.

Yeah, I bombed out. And all the other gifted children knew that too, they knew that they weren’t really special only insofar as the adults put them into this category. They all wanted to play more and roughhouse more.

So as far as the other kids it didn’t mean anything, just with the adults.

Not really. A few. There were a few snooty ones.

So you’re back at your old school.

Back at the old grade school, yeah, about ready to get out of grade school and go on to high school.

And you wanted to go on to regular high school?

Regular, yeah. No, I was out of that whole thing entirely, back with my homies.

[End Tape 3, Side B]