When I Was In The Sixth Grade

          The above photo was taken in May of 1959.  It shows my entire sixth grade class, with our teacher, Mr. Warren, to the right (YOUR right) of the principal, Mr. Long.  I am located in the middle row at your extreme right.  That little boy with the strained smile and the upswept hair- is yours truly. 

            Memory provides me with the names of almost three quarters of these people.  The scowling boy in front of me, sitting on the bench, recently got in touch with me.  He's a successful attorney with kids and grandkids.  He was always affable and known as a superb athlete.  When I tap his memory, things look very different from the way they look in my own memory.  My classmate remembers not only the shoes he was wearing that day, he remembers the shoes I was wearing that day.

            Most of these kids were eleven or twelve.  Sixth grade was the last moment of innocence before we were pushed into Junior High School and the fierce competition that would ride on our backs like flying monkeys all through high school.

            WE HAD NO IDEA THE HELL THAT WAS WAITING FOR US!

            Some of these kids look dumb as telephone poles and others look like they're plotting to bomb the school.  I'm positive that at least one of the boys farted.  I'm also positive that at least one of the girls suppressed a fart, thereby precipitating her very first menstrual period.

            The guy standing next to me, whose name was Lansing Boyles-Hertz, invented a working time machine in 1967.   He went back to see his father during the Battle Of The Bulge and accidentally shot his dad in the head.  Lance wasn't seen after that.  He erased his own existence.  The tall guy in the top row is in the Witness Protection Program.  The boy standing just below the teacher is doing time for arson, and the guy next to him is now the Rabbi at United Hebrew, St. Louis' largest Reformed congregation.

            That was the sixth grade.  At the time there were only three billion people in the world.  A mere fifty two years ago.

`          

A Jewish Nazi

My father cut out the image of my mother sometime during his second marriage.  He had his reasons but I regret not being able to study the visage of the woman who had such a devastating effect on our family.

            I come from a Jewish family.  When I was a kid I attended Hebrew School four days a week until I was thirteen.  As you can imagine, I hated it.  While my gentile friends were out playing, I was wearing a yarmulke in a stuffy classroom taking instruction from a stuffy alte-kocker named Mr. Ansky.  My Bar Mitzvah brought four years of religious education to an end.

            I've never had much sympathy for organized religion.  Over time I've cobbled together a personal interpretation of the cosmos and my place in it.  That's all I need to say on the subject.

            When I was eleven or twelve I became fascinated with Vikings and Nordic mythology.  I discovered the operas of Richard Wagner and spent hours listening to The Ring Cycle.  This tied in with all things Germanic, and I was engrossed in the history of World War Two.  In retrospect I think it was about style: the Germans had the coolest uniforms.  I read everything I could get my hands on.

            Then I fell in with an older kid who was a neo-Nazi.  He had an amazing collection of memorabilia.  He had photos, documents, models, weapons, uniforms.  I found the whole Nazi mythos fascinating.   I was hooked, big time.  I couldn't get enough of it.  I can, in a weird way, understand why so many Germans fell under Hitler's spell.  He exuded a terrifying magnetism.

            I didn't appreciate the irony of being a Jewish Nazi.  I rationalized that I was a history buff.  Only in retrospect do I understand what I was doing.  I was in rebellion.  My mother was a Jew-hating Jew.  If you're not Jewish you may not understand this phenomenon.  Trust me.  Some of the most anti-Semitic people are Jews.  My mother planted in me a deep shame.  She said awful things about Jews and I developed a loathing for my ethnic identity.  I also loathed my mother.  Or shall I say we loathed one another.  That's very sad.

            My Nazi friend drew me deeper into his fantasy world.  He believed that Hitler was still alive and that an organized Nazi movement was preparing to spring forth and begin another war of conquest.  Bear in mind, this was 1960, and memories of the war were fresher than they are today.  My dad and all my friends' dads had been in the war.  They didn't talk about it and we didn't ask.  But they had been in the war.

            My acquaintance showed me letters in German that he was receiving from Argentina.  They appeared with authentic looking Nazi letter heads.  They were scary looking.  My companion told me that I could be "safe" and even "useful" if I renounced Judaism.  Meanwhile my Bar Mitzvah was only months away and I was singing from the Torah several times a week, rehearsing my portion of the reading.

            I had to get away from this guy.  He was asking me to paint swastikas on synagogues.  He wanted to beat up Jewish kids.

            When I told him I was done with all this crap, he threatened to kill me because I was now a security risk.  I believed him.  I lived in silent terror for almost six months.  I was too ashamed to tell my dad.

            I remember this scene so well.  Dad and I were sitting in a booth at an ice cream parlor called Jack And Jill's.  The owner created monstrous castles of ice cream.  The premium super-duper top of the line sundae was called The Empire State Building.  It was two feet high with buttresses of wafer cookies and whipped cream, topped by a giant spike of chocolate.

            It was a special moment, being with my dad at Jack and Jill's, but I was too nervous to enjoy myself.  I was constantly looking over my shoulder.  I watched every person who entered the establishment.  I looked so wan that he asked me what was wrong.  At last, swallowing my shame, I spilled the story.  I told him that Nazis were going to come for me, to kill me.

            He laughed.  "That's total nonsense," he responded.  "No one's going to kill you.  It's only kid stuff."

            Just like that, my father dispelled my terror.  I felt as if I had been released from a set of medieval stocks.  It was over.

            Of all the things my father has done for me, I can never forget the relief he gave me by responding as he did.  My father, in his wisdom, said exactly the right thing.  He might have gotten freaky and suggested calling the police, or talking to the kids' parents.  That would only have prolonged my misery.  That would have treated the threat as real.  But it wasn't real.
And dad knew that; he had his own finely tuned threat-gauge that seems to belong in the toolkit of fatherhood.  He quickly consulted his gauge, saw that the needle was way down on the Green
zone, and dismissed my terror as unnecessary.  I wasn't humiliated.  Dad wasn't the kind of dad who called his son a pussy.  He simply enabled me to gain a perspective on the situation, which I grasped with total instant clarity.  My Nazi friend was all hot air.  End of story.

A Life Lesson: The Moral Quality Of Intelligence

  

I'm in the middle. That's my bro and sis.

            When I was a kid I knew that I was smarter than other kids.  My grades weren't good.  I was a bored student who squeaked by with C's and a few B's without exerting an  ounce of effort.

            I just knew.  I was different.  I had complex thoughts going on in my head.

I was interested in different things than other kids.

            I first realized this at about the age of seven.  I hated school but when I came home I read the entire set of World Book encyclopedias from A to Z.  By the time I was eleven my interest in music confirmed my suspicions that other kids weren't quite as deep as I was.

            I had joined the Capitol Record Club because that label had Miles Davis' Birth Of The Cool LP.  They had Stan Kenton's Orchestra.  After that, their jazz catalog grew a bit slim, so I fleshed out the required number of purchases with some Nancy Wilson and then quit.

            That poor kid, I now think, sitting in his basement room, the room built by his dad to keep him and his mom apart.  They were like flint and tinder.  Mom hated music, loathed it.  The eleven year old kid hunched close to his blue and white Zenith stereo automatic record player and absorbed The Birth Of The Cool note for note.  He memorized everything and tried playing along on his trumpet.  He was learning to master intricate bop melodies like Budo and Boplicity.  They were difficult, but he kept practicing until he could play in perfect unison with the recording.
            As I got into adolescence I thought it might be comforting to join Mensa.  I would find people like me.  Mensa administered their IQ test and I scored an impressive number.  I was accepted.  I quit after the first meeting.  It was so boring it was like watching steel expand in sunlight.

            I had a strange misunderstanding about the moral quality of intelligence.  I thought that intelligence also made people good.  It wasn't until I was sixteen that I lost that mistaken conviction.  I was in New York City chasing jazz musicians and trying to get into bands that were way WAY over my head.  In the process I managed to be around a few great and famous jazz musicians.  They had to be intelligent, they were geniuses. 

            Several of them were very wicked..  I saw one of them beat his girlfriend and that was a fundamental shock.  My whole worldview had to be re-arranged.

            Well.  If there are evil intelligent people we're in big trouble, aren't we?

            All of my subsequent experience has borne out this observation.  The world is loaded with people carrying around high powered minds, and using those minds to damage other people and wreak havoc upon the planet.

            I thought intelligence was a gift.  I overheard teachers talking to my parents, calling me a "gifted child".  This label was then followed with another phrase which seemed to be glued onto the first two words; "who's not living up to his potential."

            I was following my own path, that's all.  I treated my mind like a gift and I thought god had made me intelligent for a reason.  I also thought that imagination automatically came with intelligence, and I was wrong about that, too.

            Eventually I concluded that there were different kinds of intelligence and that my kind was one kind and there were other kinds that people had, like scientists and bridge builders and soldiers.  There were all kinds of intelligence.

            I will never get over my shock that being intelligent didn't automatically make a person virtuous.