THE NEXT day of school, Lears came into class in a grand mood. He was primed for a splendid discussion. He had jolted us into life with the SDS class, like Victor Frankenstein rousing the lump of inert human stuff lying flat on the slab. But now, everything was different. It was a Monday, and it had snowed over the weekend. Boston snow—great, huge drifts, to make the all too familiar world into another planet, someplace virgin, inhospitable, resistant. Yet it was another planet that somehow manifested the cold essence of our own. This is what it really comes down to, this unwanting earth, and us, alien, running on top of it, hopping and blinking and trying to find our way.
What did people think of the SDS invasion?
Think? Come on? Give us a break. Let us be. We’d performed once, right? Now it was time for a rest, a long winter’s nap.
The snow had narcotized us, like mind-flattening smack, and we had gone under willingly. All the tumult the visitors had brought with them to Me’ford was hard to bear, and we had shed it, most of us, when we walked out of school that Friday, to think about the poolroom or a date or a quart bottle of beer, maybe three or four.
Buller, of course, was never at a loss. He worked his acne and brayed at Lears that the guys from SDS were losers and fools, with nothing to say. When there was a war, you went to it. (Though one could have bet that Buller was a ready candidate for 4F; his genes were not blended happily into one Darwinian triumph. Flat feet would probably be his ticket out, but there would be more besides.)
Buller always brayed, perpetually cried out like an angry, put-upon beast. But the pity was the rest of us. We had nothing to say. And given that Lears must have dreamed, as I, a teacher, today still do, that one fine class will send people spinning into intellectual life and that they’ll never fade or fail thereafter, never come down, he must have felt flat misery at what was unfolding in front of his kind, always tired looking eyes.
Buller would not stop. And after fifteen minutes of it, Lears came through with an idea. “Let’s go outside,” he laughed. “Let’s go out in the snow.”
The teacher calls for an escape from school! A jailbreak! What could have been happier, more cage-rattling than that?
So we shot off to our lockers, pulled on our coats—all as surreptitiously as possible, so as not to wake the drowsing authorities, the prematurely aged archons of Medford High—and headed out behind the burned-out section of the high school. Lears was in the lead, jabbering away with Sandra, maybe about a concert at the Boston Tea Party, the place you could go to hear the Byrds or the Jefferson Airplane or Big Brother and the Holding Company. By the time he arrived, everyone was standing around with no idea what to do.
But Lears knew exactly what he had brought us out there for. He was well dressed for it, wearing a big black frock coat and a padre’s hat. He held the hat on his head with one unsteady hand, bent over, and with the other hand, the free one, he scooped up some of the dense snow. He stood and packed it together. He clomped his pale hands at each other in a clumsy way while we all looked on, perplexed, as though someone were cooking something that we were going to have to eat soon but that was, as of now, impossible to identify. Lears stared down into his now reddened mitts and—behold—what he had seemed to surprise him nearly as much as it did us. It was a snowball, a singularly malformed one.
He gave a what-the-hell shrug, or the Harvard variant of one, reared back, and—of course, he threw like a girl—heaved it with what force he could muster at Dubby O’Day.
Suddenly everything was clear. Frank Lears had brought us out not for a Thoreauvian walk in the pristine or, magnifying glass in hand, for an inquiry into the variegated and glorious geometries of the snow crystal. No, we were here for nothing other than a snowball fight. I can’t imagine he knew what he was getting into.
We boys were snowball warriors nearly from birth. When I was eight years old and living in Malden, my friends and I would stand up on a little bluff close to my house on Main Street. The traffic flowing by was very heavy—getting across the street as a pedestrian could be an Olympic event. There were cars, buses, and trucks, mostly moving, by what was then one of the more direct routes to or from Boston. From that glorious promontory, we would chuck snowball after snowball. It was especially prestigious to sight a bus driver or a truck driver with his window open and paste him across the cheek.
Sometimes, to our unequivocal pleasure, the driver would pull over and give chase. We’d fly over backyard fences and be a block away before he’d pulled his road-stiffened bulk out the door. We were selective in our assaults, bombing some kinds of vehicles and leaving others untouched, daily creating a treaty amongst ourselves, a Malden concordat, elaborately negotiated each time, as to what constituted fair game and what did not. Trucks bearing the Roadway logo were sacrosanct, because Michael Lundell Hansen loved them with an irrational passion, and Mike, who got his way on nothing else, somehow prevailed in this. Roadway trucks were greeted with a hollered “Yay, Roadway!” B&N Corkum’s vehicles we pounded mercilessly. Buses were a delight, because always, somewhere, there was an open window. Michael Hansen, Paul Rizzo, and I once thwacked a bus driver so hard and so many times that he stopped the loaded bus, got out, and ran for us—a futile gambit usually reserved only for truck drivers. But the driver left a whole busload of commuters stranded in their seats watching him lumber up the hill after us.
Did our parents disapprove? Were we punished for putting lives at risk? On the contrary. Far from prohibiting the sport—“You’ll cause an accident! We’ll get sued!”—they often watched with amusement from their windows. My father would rap the glass with glee when we got off a large-scale fusillade at a bus.
And of course we fought each other for hours in numberless snowball versions of the OK Corral. These sometimes lasted two or three hours, and involved major-size snow fortresses, charges and countercharges, and hand-to-hand combat, where heads were pushed into the snow and kept there.
Snowball was integrally linked with baseball, and by the age of sixteen most American boys—as though they were preparing to heave javelins or boomerangs on the prehistoric savannah—can let a ball fly like a bullet. Then there was Cap, the football quarterback, who also, for this is almost requisite, played shortstop for the baseball team. When he threw a ball, flame licks came from the surface. I had caught a few throws of his at first base. You saw an arcing blur, like a tracer shell coming in, but no ball per se. There followed a sound like a shotgun going off in the palm of your glove.
There was gender rancor to contend with. Here was a chance to whap the girls for saying no, for saying maybe, for saying sure, for being female, for saying things that were way too hard to comprehend, period, for judging us more coldly than anyone in their position—our mothers, I mean—had ever done before. I’m not sure that Lears knew what sort of bottle he’d pulled the cork from.
We went to work, lumping snowballs together, but all our eyes, all the boys’ eyes, anyway, were on Cap. This was his chance for assassination. And truth be told, he had not been treated terribly well by Lears. He had reasons for payback.
But before Cap could load and aim, Buller was into a number of his own. A plow had been by and left lots of snow chunks. Buller immediately grabbed a massive, black-encrusted boulderlike mass in both hands. He heaved it over his head as though he were a caveman going off to brain his foe before battening down to wreck some celebratory havoc on the corpse. Buller’s human features, such as they were, disappeared, and all you could see was a hunch-backed silhouette against the darkened sky. There
was
something unmistakably primitive about the form. Buller,
Pithecanthropus
erectus,
headed in Lears’ direction.
Everyone watched in breath-held silence as Buller brought the mock boulder crashing down at Lears—the way Diomedes might have done it on the windy plains outside Troy. Lears just managed an ungainly slide to the left, which sent his padre’s hat flying but absolved him of the blow’s full force. He took it off the back and shoulders, not across the head, where Buller presumably wanted the great ugly chunk to fall. So Buller didn’t score the full nose-bleed, off-to-the-nurse, let’s-think-about-the-hospital hit that he probably had in mind.
Lears took the blow gamely, laughed a cosmetic laugh, then went after Buller to try to push him into a snowbank. Things took on the aura of a science-fiction story, time machine–style; the caveman was now being assaulted by the avatar of modern humanity. Lears was not skilled in the art of push-and-shove, but he was surely game, and Buller, to say the least, had been cruising for it for a long time. Lears spun, got low (the essence of the football assault—get lower than the opposition—maybe he’d been reading Jerry Kramer on the sly), and sent Buller stumblebumming into a drift. Buller fell in a sloppy, limbs-amok way that evoked scenes outside a Somerville bar, the Jumbo maybe, where they served anyone who could reach the counter and where, on a February night, when the street was glassed over with ice, the patrons enacted pachyderm ballet outside. Down Buller went.
The class broke into a huge blast of applause. “Awwright!” Rick screamed. Dubby did an appreciative combination of a war dance and the boogaloo.
But he came up angry, Buller, looking for all the world like a club fighter who’s taken one to the chops and rather liked it and now wants to even things up. He had murder in his face, or more murder than usual.
Mine may have been the first snowball to hit Buller, but there were a lot of others, including shaky salvos from Carolyn and from Nora. (He’s cute, Frank Lears, remember.) Rick, who played third base on the team, sent one at Buller with a little smoke on it—you heard a thud on his greasy green parka, the kind trimmed with fake wolf fur. Then Cap, arm cocked, catches Buller’s eye. And even Buller, who is almost blackly noble at times in his recklessness, clearly does not want a piece of this. One full in the face from Cap—throwing all-out—and you will lose teeth, probably worse. And the chances of his missing are small. Buller backs off.
A general melee begins, with Lears pelting everyone in sight, including, to his peril, Cap. But Cap is knightly, a gentleman, and keeps all his throws at three-quarters speed, if that. The girls especially want to tag him, want any relation they can get with him. But he just responds with fumbly, soft lobs in their direction. He packs the snow so loosely, the balls fall apart a bit en route. Then all the rest of us, Dubby and Rick and John Vincents and I, knowing our better—herd behavior, would Lears call it?—follow suit. We do it the way Cap does, for fun, kindly, with ease. I’m not sure Lears, sharp as he was, ever saw it, caught the dynamic, and knew what was going on.
“Nor did he refuse to play five stones with the boys,” says Montaigne of his hero, Socrates, “nor to run about with them astride a hobby horse. And he did it with good grace: for Philosophy says that all actions are equally becoming in a wise man, all equally honor him.” To be fair, Socrates was a reasonably accomplished athlete; he’d been a soldier of some repute. He’d have known how to throw much better than Lears did. But there was Franklin Lears, running gamely enough in Socrates’ tracks, doing the most undignified and childish thing and thereby enhancing his dignity no end.
In ten minutes it is over and Lears and all of us are bending over panting, panting and laughing. It’s the first time in a long time at school that I’ve had something that you could call fun, the first time I’ve laughed this hard without someone being humiliated.
Does Lears see how much he’s triumphed today? Does he understand what it meant when the class refused to take this chance—for he had offered it—to smash him, like those poor bus drivers and B&N Corkum guys of yore, to run the scapegoat number? With those snowballs, we could have done much more than erode Lears’ dignity. There was a hospital not far away.
When the time had come, when Buller had started out to initiate the big payback, things had worked out much differently. It was Lears, really, who had taken out a little aggression on us. As to our aggression toward him, well, Buller aside, we didn’t really seem to have much. We had, or were beginning to have, a dose of gratitude and affection for the strange little man in the padre’s hat. Cap and Rick, Nora and Carolyn, and I and Dubby, too (Sandra, true to herself, pretty much stayed out of the missile blizzard), had expressed that gratitude as well as we could.
And from that point, the class began turning around.
Chapter Nine
BLACK AND WHITE
"Hey, what you lookin’ at, boy?” This question is issued by the guy sitting across from me on the bus. His tone is not friendly.
The answer to his question is in one sense obvious. What I’m looking at is his outfit—his pants, yellow as a plastic sun, and his shoes, pink, with ribbons on them. I’m also checking out his cape, which is trimmed in velvet. He’s William Billings; he is seventeen years old and in my class at Medford High. He is black.
It’s Saturday night and we’re on the West Medford bus, heading to Medford Square. I’ll be stopping there to shoot pool at Stag’s and hang out in the parking lot of Brigham’s ice cream parlor, maybe sit around in my friend Ryan’s new car, a gold Plymouth Duster with all the trimmings, and demolish a few Schlitz Tall Boys. William, I suspect, is going farther down the Mass Transit line, to Roxbury probably, for what looks like a party.
William’s face is almost spectacularly ugly. He’s got an enormous nose, unformed, like a smooshed fruit, and a vast mouth full of huge, widely spaced teeth. But the face is also somehow very appealing, the calm, easily bemused face of someone who has figured himself out early, said yes to the whole eccentric package, and doesn’t much care what the rest of the world thinks. He was a kind of male version of what the French call a
jolie laide,
a beautiful ugly woman.
Beside William is his best friend, Edgar Lincoln, also black, a little less flamboyantly attired, serene in presence, courtly in his movements. Both are very thin, refined-looking. The two of them together outweigh me, but not by much. I could massacre them both at once, with little effort. But that is not where things would end. They know this, and wait with suppressed glee for my reply. “What you lookin’ at, boy?”
“Nothing” is not a wise response. It incites a standard Medford comeback: “Callin’ me nothin’?” Matters degenerated from there.
I have a history with Billings and Lincoln, and it is not bright. Once, in ninth grade, when I first moved to Medford, we had an unfortunate run-in on the playground. Billings and Lincoln were in my gym class, and that day we’d played softball. I had struck out twice, hit a double, made a bad fielding play.
“You good at softball,” Billings said.
“Very good, very good, I hafta say,” Lincoln added. Both had all they could do to lift the bat; they were more swung by it than swinging. But they joked about the game and made the best of things.
Their intonation sounded nasty, carping. What to them was a playful tone, campy and a little affectionate, was to me aggressive. I had no ear for their art. I got mad and told them to fuck off or something equally original. They tried to explain themselves and preserve their dignity, too. I got madder. They left in what seemed to me an embarrassing, purse-swishing huff.
The next day after school, I had a compulsory chat with a representative of theirs named Johnny Malloy. Johnny was in no way similar to William and Edgar, and I’m not even sure he liked them much. What he did like was trouble. I was new to the school, unconnected to the tough Italian kids who ran it, at least on the playground, and thus fair game.
Johnny was the kind of guy who only has to fill in a few of the bubbles on the psychology test before he wins the sociopath rating. He was wiry, very quick, underweight, and dangerous. He had well-sculpted, handsome features; he’d have looked like African royalty if not for the leering expression he generally wore. On the second day of school, in ancient-history class, he took the time to inform me that he always carried a blade and that he was very, very good with it.
During the conversation about Billings and Lincoln, I was pretty sure I saw the switchblade open and down by Johnny’s thigh. I listened to him tell me what would happen if I messed with his “boys” again. I agreed with everything Johnny had to say.
Later, on a basketball court—we both were going out for the school team; neither of us made it—I drove into the lane for a layup with habitual Humvee grace, saw Johnny, and laid my shoulder into him, catching him squarely above the sternum. He fell away and skidded off on his butt toward the basket, not without some style, like a pat of butter sliding across a hot griddle. He grinned the psycho-kid grin and did a knife-across-the-throat gesture.
I walked around in terror for a few weeks, but ultimately nothing came of it. By then I was partway connected to the Italians. I was semi-friends with Paul Vincenzo, probably the toughest kid in the school. On the offensive line, I played guard next to Paul, who was in the tackle slot. By rights I should have been the tackle, since I outweighed Paul by thirty pounds and he had about twice my mobility. (Guards need to pull out of the line and head upfield to block.) But he insisted that he was going to be the tackle and the coaches went along with him. Why he needed to be tackle I’m not sure. It might simply have been that the word “guard” sounded too passive, too stand-around-at-the-palace-gates-and-salute, for someone of Paul’s temperament. Anyway, with Paul and a few others of his ilk as semi-friends, if Johnny had done something to me, there would have been an echo.
My last run-in with William had been fairly recent. Walking to Medford Square, I’d met up with him; he was with another guy this time, not Edgar. I, too, was with a friend, who got along okay with William. Still, it was not what you would call a cordial encounter. William had a dog, a German shepherd, which he said was a trained attack dog. I suppose experience should have told me to listen carefully to what William had to say. But no, I expressed doubt about the dog’s credentials. William whispered a phrase to the dog—it sounded like German as intoned on the TV show
Combat
—and the shepherd flew at me, straining the chain, yellow eyes popping, staring lovingly at my throat. “Do you believe me now? Or shall I let him go?” I confessed full credence.
Supposedly—but this was white kids’ lore; I never got it confirmed—William did the same thing a while later to a guy named Dickie McGuire, a weight lifter and star hockey player, who went to Boston College High. When William asked the signal question about whether he should let the dog loose, Dickie said, “Sure.” Purportedly, Dickie caught the German shepherd in full flight, one hand wrapped around the jaw, one arm around his belly, and threw him—the dog was a scrawny, mangy version of the breed—into a passing bus. No more dog.
So there sat William, dogless, on the West Medford bus, staring me down and waiting for my reply. “What you lookin’ at, boy?”
“William,” I said. “How you been?”
Silence. Slow time passes. I’m conscious of the dingy, tired smell of the bus, acquired from carrying too many people too often to places they do not wish to go, and back to places they’ve no desire to return to. I begin reading the UNICEF poster across from me to calm myself down.
Then from nowhere a grin and a laugh. “I been good,” William says. “In fact I been very fine.” Then he and Edgar go off in a storm of giggles, falling all over each other, goofing on the straight white guy in his football jacket and white track shoes. (I had unscrewed the cleats from the bottoms of my sprinter’s shoes—I ran the quarter-mile occasionally on the track team, though I was mainly a shot-putter—and when I walked, the metal cleat-holders played an ungodly tattoo on the pavement. But I took the shoes to be the epitome of jock cool.) William and Edgar were high and jittery as bats, pleased with themselves, and having a very good time. The mood shifted. We talked a little. No big deal.
But it could have been a big deal, at least to me. If you went to Medford High, and particularly if you lived in West Medford, where the city’s black section was, your life was likely to be punctuated by this sort of black-to-white, white-to-black exchange. From time to time, one of these encounters blossomed, and you’d hear about how one of the South Medford Bears, the city’s premier Italian street gang, had gotten jumped by a crew of blacks. Then the Bears would get into their cars and drive to West Medford and something large-scale and bad would go down. But usually things stayed on the level of petty annoyance, petty squabble, scuffle, intimidation, and retreat.
Blacks made up about 10 percent of the high school. And all of them, without any exception that I knew, lived in West Medford, in about a ten-block area, of modest, well kept up houses. In a way, it was the most solid neighborhood in the city, surely the most long-standing. A lot of the Italians, for instance, the parents of my classmates, were first-generation Medfordites; they had made enough money to leave the North End of Boston, get out of their triple-decker houses in a neighborhood where, whatever the culinary attractions and general high spirits, the candy store was owned by a bookie-loan shark and Mob enforcers recently brought in from Sicily slept two to a bed in fetid rooming houses. The children of these North End expatriates, my classmates, would, if all went well, make a few more dollars than their parents and move away to Winchester or Newton or Melrose, places where people walked their dogs on leashes and Republicans occasionally got elected to the city council.
For the blacks, things were much different. Blacks started settling in West Medford at the beginning of the Civil War, around 1860. At first it was just a few families, headed by carpenters, blacksmiths, skilled laborers of various sorts. Over time the neighborhood grew and became a haven for enterprising, churchgoing black people who seem to have looked out for each other pretty well and sustained dignified, slightly aloof relations with the mass of whites around them. Among the parents and grandparents of my classmates were a lot of “firsts”—the first black man to get a dental degree from Tufts, the first black to work in management at General Electric, Raytheon, or some other major corporation. They were people who won one quiet victory after another, often well before the civil rights movement got into full swing.
The history of this neighborhood, and a good deal more besides, is set down in a strange and marvelous volume called
This Is Your
Heritage, a Newspaperman’s Research, Sketches, Views & Comment/
United States, Hometown, and World History,
by Mabe “Doc” Kountze. In seven hundred or so pages, Doc Kountze, who seems to have been black West Medford’s griot, its resident poet and wise man, narrates the history of nearly every family in the neighborhood, from slavery to the present. Prefacing this ungainly, slightly disordered, generous, and often moving story, there is what amounts to a history of black contributions to American and world history—a section that takes a wide sweep, at top velocity, as though one were being blown over the major events of Afro-centric history in a shakily designed balloon. The idea, from Doc Kountze’s point of view, seems to have been to connect the young people of black West Medford circa 1970 to their own parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents, as well as with early black notables—Cleopatra, Aesop, and (maybe) Jesus of Nazareth.
The black section of Medford was a reasonably prosperous working-class neighborhood, in many ways not unlike mine. But by 1969 the reigning style, at least among the boys and young men who lived on Jerome Street and Sharon Street and hung at Dugger Park, a strip of grass that bordered the Mystic River, was more than a little disconcerting to the elders at the Shiloh Baptist Church and, I assume, to Doc Kountze. (His general concern about the rising generation was, it’s pretty clear, one motive for his writing the book.) It was a style by and large imported from Roxbury, the black ghetto in Boston. The boys and young men wore their hair conked, in do-rags on Friday and Saturday afternoons and at night in gorgeous, often hennaed rolls. They affected tight pants in luxurious colors, the whole Life Saver pack, high-heeled shoes, and silky shirts with flowerlike ruffles on the front, the kind of thing an eighteenth-century French nobleman, a dandy out of
Les Liaisons Dangereuses,
might have put his tailor to work on. They walked with a cocky, bantam-rooster stride. It was the pimp aesthetic in high vogue.
The black girls were very much a society unto themselves. They laughed together uproariously on the bus, goofing on one thing or another. They wore tight skirts and danced, occasionally, in the aisles. They virtually never looked at or talked to a white boy. They referred to us as honkies and ofays, in a high-hearted, rambunctious way, talking loudly and simultaneously among themselves so that we could hear the insult, though never quite be sure who had uttered it.
Johnny Pearl, an enormous black kid with a gimpy leg, once dropped his lit cigarette butt on a bus seat as Dubby was sitting down. Predictable results. I wound up to swat Johnny—friend defense being all in Medford—but pulled back at the last minute. There was probably enough weaponry on the bus to have ended me that morning.
On the day after Martin Luther King’s assassination, a day when the elders of West Medford’s black neighborhood were in church, many in tears, lamenting the death of the greatest man of their lifetimes, the black kids at Medford High took a different tack. I was walking down the New Corridor with Dubby when a phalanx of tough black kids, maybe fifteen of them, came roaring through the other way. When they saw someone white, large or small, bad or not, they simply grabbed him and tossed him against the wall. No fists, no blades, just a ferocious grab-and-heave, done with furious, adrenaline-pumped strength, so relatively diminutive blacks were tossing big white kids with ease. I saw it coming, forced my back against the shiny pine boards, and stood at terrified attention.
Dubby got the toss. Ronny Jensen, who told all and sundry that he was going to become a pimp of some standing in not too long, an estimable figure in Boston’s “Combat Zone,” sent Dubby flying. Dubby caromed, then got tossed by another kid, rebounded, and got flipped by yet another.
When it was over, the cyclone passed, Dubby looked at me and, never at a loss, said, “What are they so pissed off at us for? We didn’t kill him.” This observation, which I found penetrating in the extreme, was about representative of our thinking on racial matters.
There were two worlds at Medford High, black and white, and they lived, on the most immediate level, in tension and remove from each other. It was a kind of small-city adolescent apartheid. But that’s only the superficial side of the story. There was also a fair amount of commerce. The phrase that William had accosted me with, “Hey, boy,” was a common mode of salutation between whites. It was often followed by the return remark “Who you callin’ boy?” which is what a black guy would be likely to say if so addressed. And some white kids did—I did on occasion—provided that the black guy was a friend. But even then, you were playing with fire and knew it. Bad black kids almost always called the whites “boy,” sometimes with affectionate intonation, sometimes not. Then, occasionally, they got it back in return. What happened next was unpredictable.