WORDS
Over my mother’s dead body, my Aunt Lil taught me how to read. Lil was the oldest of the three Proser sisters and the smartest. She was a reading specialist in the school system and she had a Masters Degree. Helen, my mother, was the youngest and never made it past the first year of Nursing School. But Helen was attractive and had children and Aunt Lil wasn’t and didn’t. And so their sisterly shitstorm played out. I was the tennis ball in their game, swatted back and forth in their attempts to wound each other. It was a shit job. I was somewhere between three and four years old at the time.
“He’s a child,” emotionalized my mother. “Can’t you let him have his childhood?”
“He’s ready, Helen. I know what I’m doing. And he wants it, don’t you, Michael?”
When someone called me Michael, that wasn’t a good sign. The sisters were both staring at me, eyes blazing; I had no idea what they were talking about. So I froze. This became my go-to reaction for the rest of my life. When attacked or in danger, freeze; blend in with the wallpaper; wait for the danger to pass. I’m now eighty years old and so far, so good.
Anyone remember the pressure cooker? Back in the late 1940’s, early 1950’s, a pressure cooker was a staple in a lot of people’s kitchens. It was a heavy pot with a lid that snapped on tight and sealed in whatever was inside – pot roast maybe, or spaghetti sauce. And sticking up out of the center of the lid was a round heavy metal disk that registered how much pressure was building up inside the pot. You would light the burner and wait for the disk to start jiggling.
“Oh, it’s getting hot in there,” the disk would say. “Jiggle, jiggle, jiggle.”
“Oh, it’s really getting hot now!” said the disk and it would jiggle like a sonovabitch -- like it was going to blow right through the ceiling. This was all before Julia Child and everything.
Anyway -- my mother was the living, breathing embodiment of this particular piece of cookware. Aunt Lil had sent her out of the dining room with an imperial wave of her hand, and my mother huffed into the kitchen and slammed the door. Aunt Lil and I sat silently at the table and listened to the build of my mother’s jiggle. The banging of a pot; the slamming of the silverware drawer. It was terrifying.
But Aunt Lil had seen it all before – as had I, actually – and she calmly opened her briefcase and took out a chart showing the alphabet in big block letters. She dramatically pronounced each letter’s name and then made its sound and I parroted her all the way through the chart. Then she taught me the Alphabet Song – to the tune of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star -- and we sang it together, unbelievably slowly, and she tapped her pointy red fingernail on each letter as we came to it. That song, of course, is still with me.
Then she wrote the letter D on a piece of paper – a big capital D.
“What letter is that, Michael?”
I couldn’t remember at first, so she pointed to the Alphabet chart.
“Sing it with me.”
“A B C D …”
“Stop.” She pointed at the D. “Sing it.”
“D,” I sang.
“What sound does it make?”
I made the ‘D’ sound.
Then she wrote an A next to the D, and she asked what letter it was.
“A,” I sang.
‘What sound does it make?”
“Ay.”
“Right. Good. And sometimes, it can also can sound like Aaa. Sing it.”
“Aaaaa,” I sang.
“Now put the D in front of it and sing it.”
“Dee Aaaa.”
“Not the name of the D; just the sound of it. ‘D’ Put the sound of ‘D’ in front of the Aaa sound. Sing it.”
I was lost. So, she showed me.
“Daa,” she sang.
“Daaa,” I sang.
“See how it works?”
I did see.
Then she drew a second D on the other side of the A. And she put her pencil down, folded her arms, looked at me and waited. I stared at the letters and silently sounded them out in my head. A shaking started inside me; not so much a shaking as the vibration that precedes an earthquake.
“Dad,” I said, and she nodded with the most wonderful smile on her face. And I started to cry, because the whole world had just opened up for me.
Aunt Lil came once a week to continue my lessons. I didn’t need prodding. I read everything I could see, whether I understood it or not. I intuited somehow that the meanings would make themselves known to me when they were ready. I remember riding home at night in the back seat of our car after visiting some uncle or aunt. My brother Ed, who was four years older, sat in the back with me and my parents were in the front, riding in silence as they often did. I knelt on the seat so that I could see out the window and I read the neon-lit signs as they passed. It was drizzling and dark, and the cars swished by.
We passed the A&P, where my mom shopped. I got the A and I got the P, and I filed away that squiggly thing in the middle for later in life. We passed a sign that said Wines And Liquors. I tried to sound it out in my head. Maybe it’s another language, I thought, like when my parents spoke Yiddish to each other. They did it so that I couldn’t understand them, which is exactly how I felt about Wines And Liquors. I couldn’t know then how familiar I would become with these words as I weaved my way through life.
Aunt Lil brought me books. At first, they were baby books – big pages with brightly-colored pictures and just one word on each page. Or sometimes, just one letter. I tore through them. Then she brought books about Dick And Jane, an odd pair of gentile children who were able to express only one brief sentence per page.
“Look, Jane.”
Turn the page.
“Look. Look.”
Turn the page.
“See Dick.”
Even then, I knew this story wasn’t going anywhere.
Dick and Jane were in tons of books, and I learned things from them, I suppose. I learned that I should avoid people like Dick and Jane if I was ever going to have any fun in my my life.
Thank you, Dick.
Turn the page.
Thank you, Jane.
It turned out that already knowing how to read is not a good way to start kindergarten. It throws the teacher way off her rhythm and makes the other kids hate you. Also, my mother took me to school on the first day, and she never left. She lurked in the hallways and corners, looking for ways to control the situation. She brought apple cake to the staff in the principal’s office; she made friends with the guidance counselor, who turned out to be a neighbor of her cousin; within days she convinced him to give me an IQ Test so that she could have written proof that I was a superior child. She wormed her way into the Teachers’ Room, which existed for the sole purpose of protecting teachers from people like my mother. Again, she bought her way in with apple cake. Her apple cake was good; in retrospect, a little dry. Anyway, my mother’s behavior at school was an early instance of her desire to live my life rather than her own. Looking at her life, I can’t say I blame her, but it was a mind-fuck then, and it’s still a mind-fuck thirty years after her death. She was a powerful woman.
Anyway, kindergarten was a write-off. I already knew everything. So, while the other kids were looking at big block letters and singing that stupid song, I drifted into my head, into my fantasies, which I must say have served me better over the years than anything I ever learned in school. I also developed a mildly interested, somewhat bemused expression on my face that made it seem like I was listening, while, indeed, my mind was elsewhere. That expression has also faithfully traveled with me through life.
So school wasn’t for me. Books were for me. In no particular order: Lad, A Dog by Albert Payson Terhune -- a collie of unbelievable sensitivity and loyalty; The Black Stallion by Walter Farley -- a gallant horse of mysterious ancestry; There was a book of sports stories – teenagers playing various sports, learning life-lessons along the way. It was okay -- better than it sounds. Treasure Island! Treasure Island was an eye-opener. My god, the characters are still with me! Jim Hawkins! Long John Silver! Billy Bones! And what’s his name, the doctor! Fantastic. These were the first human characters to affect me as powerfully and emotionally as did the collie and the stallion.
I was around ten or eleven, I think, when I first read a play – a book in which the whole story is told by what people say to each other, or say to themselves; or say to something called the audience. I immediately understood the form because I was already an actor. I had given a performance every day of my life for my mother. Acting meant that I hid who I really was and put on a show so that I could survive my childhood and eventually move on to my real life. This was not a terribly good kind of acting; good acting is more about revealing than hiding. Although sometimes when actors hide themselves – with a mask or a costume, for example -- they free their imaginations to become someone else. Acting is complicated. Easier to do than talk about.
The play that I read when I was eleven years old was Cyrano de Bergerac by Edmund Rostand in the magnificent translation by the poet, Brian Hooker. And I cannot for the life of me remember how I got hold of this book. It was just there. It had dropped somehow from the sky onto my bedside table. Hmm, what’s this? I picked it up, settled into my pillow, turned to the first page and tumbled headlong into puberty.
Cyrano! Poet; swordsman; lover; iconoclast; playwright; dedicated bohemian. I knew I had met my true self, if I could only find the courage to live up to it.
Cyrano has a speech in Act Two. His best friend, Le Bret, is chastising him for having just flipped off the nephew of Cardinal Richelieu, and Cyrano answers him with a speech of some two pages – in verse -- about what he owes to himself if he’s going to hold his head up in the world.
“What would you have me do?” he says to Le Bret. “Seek the patronage of some great man, and like a creeping vine on a tall tree, crawl upward, where I cannot stand alone? No thank you.
“Dedicate, as others do, poems to pawnbrokers? Be a buffoon in the vile hope of teasing out a smile on some cold face? No, thank you.”
And he goes on with this pattern of rhetorical questions, answering each one with “No, thank you.” and ending the speech, theatrically, with, “No, thank you! No, I thank you! And again, I thank you!”
“But …
And then he switches tone:
“To sing, to laugh, to dream,
To walk in my own way and be alone,
Free, with an eye to see things as they are,
To travel any road, under the sun, under the stars,
Nor doubt if fame or fortune lie beyond the bourne,
Never to make a line I have not heard in my own heart.”
I memorized this speech at age eleven or so. I used it later in life for auditions. I also used it to impress girls; Cyrano would have smiled at that. I still remember it, and I don’t remember much these days.
I didn’t grow up to be Cyrano. I won’t be single-handedly holding off a hundred ruffians with my sword at the Porte de Nesle. But Cyrano had a message and it seemed he spoke it directly to me: “It’s not what the world thinks of you that lifts your head up. It’s what you think of you.”
Cyrano was my first lightning bolt. The second was a very seductive fellow named Jerry Levin, who taught me English in my freshman year of high school. Earlier, I said that I never liked school, and Jerry’s class was a singular exception to that. I call him Jerry because we eventually became friends and kept in touch with each other over the years. Jerry was young for a teacher – in his early twenties, I’d say. So, he was closer in age to us than he was to our parents. He eschewed the coat and tie that other teachers wore; he dressed in khakis, a button-down shirt and loafers. He ran the Folk Music Club. He was droll, which was new to me. I immediately went to school on Jerry, watching him deliver one after another of his drop-dead lines. Half the class got it; half the class never knew it happened. By the end of the year, droll had become stitched into my personality. You can lose friends being droll, if you’re any good at it.
Jerry never spoke down to us. That was big. He had an open contempt for the syllabus that the Board Of Education directed him to follow. And he was on a mission to open our fourteen-year-old minds to the miracle of the English language.
This was an all-boys public high school. The hallways and classrooms rocked and reeked with testosterone. So, classroom discipline was an issue. Jerry had his own way of dealing with it.
It was on the second or third day of school, and a kid named William Jarrett was mouthing off, telling a joke that interrupted the lesson.
“Mr Jarrett,” said Jerry, “you have something you want to say to me?”
“No,” said Jarrett, in a way that got a laugh from the class.
Jerry paused, then continued with the lesson. Then Jarrett mouthed off again.
“Mr. Jarrett,” said Jerry.
“What?”
“Get out of my class.”
There was a silence.
“What?”
“Get outta here. I don’t want you in my room.”
Another silence.
“Where do you want me to go?”
“I don’t care. Just get out.”
“You want me to go to the principle’s office?”
“I don’t care where you go. Go on, get out. We’re doing something here.”
We all watched as Jarrett melted into a confused, frightened fourteen year-old. Where was he supposed to go? What was he supposed to do? He walked nervously to the door and let himself out and Jerry picked up the lesson where he had left off. That was the last discipline problem we had all year.
He taught us how to diagram and parse a sentence. This probably sounds dry to you, but I lapped it up. I wanted to know everything about adjectives and adverbs; I wanted to get my prepositions, interjections and conjunctions straightened out. All these intricate inter-tangled parts of a sentence are what you need to lift your discourse above the level of Dick and Jane. I wanted it all.
Jerry did a day on metaphors and similes. Mettys and Simmies, he called them. He drilled us on the difference between them – which, at the same time, gave us a preview into how dazzling and dangerous the English language could be.
While all that was going on, Jerry passed out a book to each of us that would be our first literature assignment. It was called The Catcher In The Rye. It had not been approved by the Baltimore City Board of Education. Over a couple of weeks, we read the book out loud – taking turns. Some read better than others. It didn’t matter. At the same time we were reading about Holden Caulfield, each of us was Holden Caulfield. His words were coming out of our mouths.
Then we did Shakespeare. Once again, we were fully engaged, on our feet, acting in the scenes. It was Twelfth Night, and Jerry insisted on playing Sir Toby Belch. He felt he had an angle on it. My god, we had fun doing Shakespeare!
Then Poetry. Jerry started us off with a Dylan Thomas’ poem, Lament. Instead of Jerry reading it, or have us read it out loud, he put on a record of Dylan Thomas himself reading the poem.
It was all about this old man dying. He’s looking back. A lot of his poems have that theme. First he was young – around our age I would say. Here’s the first verse:
When I was a windy boy and a bit
And the black spit of the chapel fold,
(Sighed the old ram rod, dying of women),
I tiptoed shy in the gooseberry wood,
The rude owl cried like a telltale tit,
I skipped in a blush as the big girls rolled
Ninepin down on the donkey’s common,
And on seesaw Sunday nights I wooed
Whoever I would with my wicked eyes,
The whole of the moon I could love and leave
All the green leaved little wedding’ wives
In the coal black bush and let them grieve.
Aunt Lil is long gone. My mother made it into her eighties, then finally succumbed to her Alzheimers. Cyrano is still with me, by my side. Jerry is gone. He and his wonderful wife, Effie, came to visit us in Italy a few years ago. We had some of our crowd over to meet them, and Jerry borrowed our friend Bruce’s ukelele and led us in some folk songs from the old days. A year or so later he was dead.
Turn the page.
Love this!