In 1956, Elvis took the country by storm. My parents weren’t
sold on this being a wonderful thing. I was slightly too young to take their
ambivalence as a cue to start modeling myself after the great man. Others,
either older or more sophisticated than I, had no such misgivings, and there arose
in my part of the word — Westchester, near the new high school — a new
archetype, the rogue. His (there were no roguettes, so far as I knew, not that
I knew much at all) hair was slick with grease, and his sideburns obscenely long — sometimes nearly to
the bottom of his ear. He wore his blue jeans too low (and around a foot higher
than modern homies), and was prone to random acts of violence. In other necks
of the woods, he might have been called a greaser, I suppose, or a hoodlum. I
dreaded him, as I’d been led to believe he would beat dutiful little Jewish
boys senseless on sight.
At Loyola Village School, several boys with rogue or rogue
wannabe older brothers or dads started wearing their trousers very low, and to
discard their belts. Those in Charge ordained that any boy caught without a belt would
be required, humiliatingly, to wear a length of twine instead. Naturally, a
length of twine immediately became a coveted badge of honor. I’d never realized
before how spectacularly clueless grownups could be, though of course no one
used the word clueless in those days.
The problem I had with bicycle-riding was that I’d failed to
notice that one’s forward momentum precluded his falling over to either side.
It seemed to me that my getting up a good head of steam put me in greater
jeopardy of a painful fall, rather than less. My dad got fed up quite quickly
with my timidity, adding my fear of his growing anger to my existing terror. And then we stirred in a little guilt. I (that is, a Hughes Aircraft
Co. staff artist my dad had enlisted for the job) won a shiny new Schwinn
bicycle in the local Thrifimart’s coloring contest. I was sleepless the night before I was to be presented with my prize wondering what I'd do if they asked, "Well, don't you want to take 'er for a little spin?" Not yet nine years old, and
already so full of terror and self-loathing it was a wonder I could get into my
scrupulously beige jeans.
Of course, it wasn’t just the self-loathing that made me, to
my infinite horror, require jeans in a size their manufacturers called…Husky.
It was also that my mother derived no pleasure whatever from cooking, and that
we filled up each night on sweets. I got a little bit portly, which of course
looked more to many of my classmates like obscenely obese. Another brick in the
wall!
I did what any self-respecting self-loather would do:
injured myself, taking a face-first dive off the infernal shiny new Schwinn one
morning after my dad, hopelessly frustrated and seething, threw up his hands and
left me alone to learn (or, more likely) fail to learn at my own pace. I
knocked out my two front teeth, and came home bloody. How do you like your
handsome, hopelessly fucked-up little boy now, Mommy and Daddy?
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