Neither a Cub Scout Nor a Boy

My principal memories from my first couple of years at Loyola Village School, the first elementary school north of Los Angeles International Airport, are of Jan Richter, with whom I was secretly in love in third grade, throwing up all over her own poodle skirt, and with that one act transforming how I felt about her, and my fourth grade teacher, Miss Gabby, inspiring some of my most ardent early lustful thoughts. But she seemed to have eyes only for Mr. Eisenberg, the Sandy Koufax lookalike who taught fifth grade. And I'd have made her so happy!

I was good at drawing and writing, and was probably reading three or four grade levels above my own, but rotten at the monkey bars, tetherball, and other masculine recreations at which an LV boy needed to be good. My ineptitude was reflected in my low standing in the pecking order. I was neither a Cub Scout nor a Boy. The thought of having to learn to tie a lot of different knots was just too daunting; I had enough trouble with my shoelaces.

In fifth grade, though, my scholastic brilliance finally paid a small dividend when I was chosen as a Junior Helper, an honor accorded only the high-achieving and docile. My first assignment was to make sure that not too many second graders tried to crowd into a particular restroom at the same time; if I’d been smart, I might have been able decades later to parlay the experience into a job as a doorman at a trendy disco. My second deployment was even more glamorous. I (in association with a Mr. David Aaron, later a teen suicide) got to push the milk cart around at lunchtime, selling hits of the nutritious beverage to its many young addicts for five cents — $14.35 in 2010 dollars.

Both my best friend and most implacable tormentor were the mercurial Mr. John R. McWilliams, who I wished, during his Mr. Hyde moments, would be a pre-teen suicide. He would turn at such times into a seething little maelstrom of rage — would dash back and forth across the playground disrupting every game in sight, even those in which the sixth grade alpha was playing. His complete indifference to his own well being made him all the more terrifying.

At eight, I enjoyed playing on the wonderful rock formations on the east side of Pershing Drive, north of Manchester Blvd., which looked like a miniature Bryce Canyon. Judging from Google Maps, though, persons much smarter than I decided at some point that it was important to have wall-to-wall ugly cheap cruddy fucking ugly apartment buildings obscuring them.

I was flabbergasted to learn around this time that I was soon, at last, to have a younger sibling. I couldn’t have explained the physiology of impregnantion, but I had a hunch that a physical expression of affection was involved in some way, and I’d never seen my mother so much as kiss my dad. On the evening my sister Lori came home from being born, I was trying to watch my favorite TV show, The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood, and her crying made it almost impossible. Our relationship would remain rocky.

One Sunday afternoon, when I was helping my dad work on our postage-stamped front yard on Earldom Avenue, I was nearly hit by an arrow some careless young archer who couldn’t see us had shot from the adjacent hill. My dad’s fury made me think he really cared about me. I have long since realized he always did.

When I was 10, we moved even nearer to the beach, and I amused myself by starting a stamp collection and joining an informal gang specializing in petty vandalism — uprooting plants neighbors had been foolish enough to leave on their front steps, for instance. I came to idolize folkabilly singer Jimmie Rodgers, of “Honeycomb” fame. It was one of the happiest stretches of my childhood. That wasn’t saying a great deal.