Step by Step Page 5

  I kept a blog during that book tour that brought me to Terrace Hill—something else I’d never done before, and rather doubt I’ll do again. And after my breakfast with Mrs. Vilsack I mused in my blog on the ham I’d eaten, and the ham I had on Starin Avenue, and our family’s sole and singular taboo.

  I learned we weren’t the only ones. “It was exactly the same at our house!” a woman emailed me. “Ham yes, bacon yes, pork no. I always wondered why.”

  Why? Because Jews don’t eat pork, that’s why. I thought everybody knew that.

  I’VE NO IDEA what percentage of the kids at Hopi Village came from kosher homes. Enough, surely, to warrant a kosher kitchen, and a separate mess hall, and, ultimately, a wholly separate camping experience, in which we shared the lakefront and the hiking paths with the rest of the Scouts, and nothing else.

  Looking back, it seems so antithetical to the whole notion of Scouting. Why were there Jewish troops in the first place? Why weren’t Boy Scout troops established by neighborhood instead of by religious affiliation?

  Well, they were, sort of. But they were generally centered in neighborhood churches, because those institutions had the space available. And…well, never mind. We had our little ghetto, our camp within a camp, and barely knew the others were there. And they hated us, and it’s hard to blame them.

  Eventually matters came to a head. The consortium of Jewish troops pulled out of Scout Haven, bought a tract of land, and established their own camp. But that was years after I’d outgrown the Boy Scouts. The camp I remember is Scout Haven, and I had a good time there, and once a week I got to go on a hike.

  Every Friday every Hopi Village camper picked one or two partners, and we all filled our canteens, tied our shoes, and made sure we had a couple of dollars in our pockets. Then we set off for one of several nearby towns.

  Scout Haven was south of Buffalo, and its mailing address was the town of Arcade. Arcade was a popular destination for us, because it boasted a restaurant where you could get good short-order food. EAT

  HERE OR WE BOTH STARVE, proclaimed the sign over the door, and I thought that was as brilliant a marketing device as I’d ever encountered, though I suspect the people who actually lived in Arcade got pretty tired of it.

  Arcade was seven miles away. It took a couple of hours to get there, depending on whether or not you saw any reason to hurry. Eating and loitering took another hour or so, and then we’d walk back. That pretty much did it for the day. The counselors and camp staff got a day to relax, and we got some pleasant exercise, plus a chance to get away from the herd and go off in pairs and trios.

  As an alternative to Arcade, we could walk instead to Freedom or Sandusky. One was five miles distant, the other a little closer. Sandusky was on the way to Arcade, as it happened, and there was a store there, catering to the local farm folk; you could buy a Coke or a candy bar, and one time I came back with a straw farmer’s hat that set me back half a dollar. I don’t remember what they had in Freedom, though it couldn’t have been much, and it’s possible I never went there.

  The roads were two-lane blacktop or gravel, the traffic light. We’d been taught to walk on the left, facing traffic, so that we could see cars coming and move onto the shoulder. Nobody ever got hit by a car, and as far as I know nobody ever got into any real trouble, except for Larry Biltekoff, a camper a few years my senior, who earned his twenty-first merit badge, the one that would qualify him as an Eagle Scout, and celebrated the accomplishment by going into one of the nearby towns and losing his virginity.

  God knows how he managed this. He couldn’t have taken his prize by force or he’d have been thrown in jail, and it would have to be easier to find a rich man in heaven than a working girl in Arcade. So he must have gotten lucky with some eager amateur.

  For this he was quietly disciplined—no one would come out and say for what—and at the camp’s closing ceremony he was denied his Good Indian award. (You stood one at a time before a council of elders, with your fellow campers in a great circle around you. The elders asked you if you accepted the Good Indian; in other words, did you feel you’d been a good camper? If you said no, that was the end of the matter. You resumed your place in the circle. If you said yes, then it became their turn to say yea or nay. If the answer was yea, someone accomplished at arts and crafts painted the profile of an Indian on your webbed Boy Scout belt. If not, not. I think the whole deal was more for the benefit of the counselors than the rest of us. It was their only chance to say a hearty Fuck You to the worst of us.)

  Larry Biltekoff, who’d been given to understand what was coming, said nay himself, and there the matter rested. So Larry got laid but didn’t get his Good Indian, and I don’t know anybody who wouldn’t have cheerfully traded places with him. All the same, I don’t think they should have withheld it from him. I think they should have given him a special merit badge, for resourcefulness.

  NOT EVERY FRIDAY, but every once in a while, the Hike Day options included a cross-country trek to Lime Lake. This was undertaken not in twos and threes but in a body of fifteen or twenty boys led by one or more counselors. (We didn’t use that term, incidentally; besides campers, there were junior and senior officers, JO’s and SO’s. Older campers moved up to JO when they were deemed ready for the responsibility, and I suppose they got the summer for free. SO’s were paid counselors, but almost all of them had come up through the ranks.)

  Our destination was a lakeside resort, and you got there by going over hill and dale some twelve miles. After a couple of hours eating and swimming and going on the rides, everybody reassembled for the walk back to camp. The Lime Lake contingent left right after breakfast and tried to make it back before the mess hall stopped serving dinner. It made for a good day’s outing, and called for a certain amount of stamina, as the distance was not that far short of a full marathon, and some of the hills were imposing.

  WE ALSO DID some overnight camping, and that involved hiking, since that’s how you got to where you were going to camp. The usual destination was Council Hill, and about a dozen of us would go at a time, climbing the hill, spreading our sleeping bags on the ground, building a fire, and cooking meals only a hungry boy would willingly put in his mouth.

  Hopi Village was itself divided during each two-week period into six or seven smaller villages, each consisting of three four-person tents under the aegis of a village leader in the person of a JO. (Each tent had a tent leader as well. I was never in the military, but aspects of camp life would have helped prepare me for it.) Sooner or later, each village had its turn to hike up Council Hill, cook out, sleep under the stars, and return to camp the next morning, no doubt the better for the experience.

  I did this a few times, and I always enjoyed it well enough, but there wasn’t all that much walking involved, and nothing terribly interesting ever happened. Except for the time that my good friend David Krantz, an occasional companion on my walks around Buffalo, insisted on laying out his sleeping bag on the slope above the campfire.

  David was an exceedingly bright fellow; he taught himself math as a hobby, and wound up acing the final examinations in every math course offered at Bennett High, all in his freshman year; by the time he graduated from high school he’d gotten through differential and integral calculus. (I remember the terms; I have not the faintest idea what they mean.) He went on to Yale, picked up his doctorate at Penn in physiological psychology, taught for years at Michigan, did research at Bell Labs, and has of late headed the statistics department at Columbia. David, let me tell you, is no dumbbell.

  And he explained why we were mistaken, and why his sleeping bag would be perfectly safe. Because he’d positioned it perpendicular to the fire, not crosswise, and thus gravity would not enter into the picture, and he’d be fine. The way he explained it, we all felt like idiots for not having realized as much. Of course! Perpendicular! What were we thinking?

  Then around two in the morning everybody woke up, because David’s sleeping bag was on fire. Just the end of it th
at had been closest to the fire to begin with, and it was merely smoldering. He got out of it before it had a chance to roast his feet.

  THE ONLY OTHER noteworthy Council Hill incident that I can recall was one for which I wasn’t present. It was another village’s turn, and shortly after they came down from the hill next morning, one of their number packed his trunk and was sent home.

  Word got around quickly. One of the seniors in charge had caught him giving a blow job to another camper. This got him booted, as the blower, while as far as I know the blowee escaped any disciplinary action whatsoever. (Someone may have told him to wipe that smile off his face.)

  It’s interesting now to note that I was never too clear on what they were talking about, nor was I the only ignoramus around. I remember a couple of boys speculating as to just what a blow job might be. There is, I must say, nothing self-evident in the term. You have to wonder who thought to call it that in the first place, and how it ever caught on. The term, I mean.

  I could tell you the names of both boys, but you’re not going to hear them from me. While it now strikes me as manifestly unfair that one of them got punished and the other did not, I can assure you that no one questioned it at the time. Obviously, one would have to be a pervert to perform the act, while anyone might have the ill fortune to be its recipient.

  Ah, well. I lost track entirely of the boy who was sent home; he went to a different school, belonged to a different troop, and I never saw or heard of him again. I ran into the other fellow from time to time, and he was a nice enough guy in the limited contact I had with him. Nothing queer about him. But I do remember hearing that his idea of a quiet afternoon at home generally involved jerking off his dog.

  4

  THE SUMMER AFTER MY SOPHOMORE YEAR at Bennett, when I’d just turned fifteen, there was an international Boy Scout jamboree at the Irvine ranch, in Santa Ana, California. The Buffalo Area Boy Scout Council did something uncharacteristically wonderful; they put together a month-long trip, which would begin with a ride on a private train across Canada and down the Pacific coast, then pause for a weeklong encampment at the jamboree, then back on the train for a ride across the American heartland to Buffalo.

  My parents thought it was a wonderful opportunity, and the whole package cost all of $350, including all meals. My good friend Larry Levy signed on as well, and the two of us buddied up for the trip. Our conveyance was a Canadian troop train, with bunk beds, and it was comfortable enough. The first day out we all had to learn “O Canada” and for the next couple of weeks we sang it often, and with commendable enthusiasm.

  At Banff in Alberta everybody got a day at leisure, presumably to explore Jasper National Park. Larry had somehow learned that there was a terrific golf course there, and decided we should play. So we found the place, and realized that we couldn’t really afford it. With a little subtle coaxing from the club pro, we came up with a plan. We would pay one greens fee, rent a single set of clubs, and once we were out of sight of the first tee we could each play a ball.

  I can still remember two things about the day—the beauty of that golf course, brilliantly green in its Canadian Rockies setting, and the nightmare of our golf game. Larry was a better golfer than I, but that’s faint praise indeed, and the two of us made a dog’s breakfast of the whole business. We’d bought two three-packs of golf balls, and by the sixth hole we’d knocked five of them to where God himself would have had trouble finding them. We took turns swatting the last ball, and somehow made it last through the remaining three holes (a half round, we figured, was plenty). It was with a certain amount of relief that we got back on the train.

  WE GOT TO SEATTLE on a Friday, and some resident genius decided that this was an opportunity for the Jewish kids to attend Sabbath services at a local synagogue. There were seven or eight of us, and I don’t think any of our number felt a great need for spiritual succor, but nobody asked us and off we went.

  I mention this not because any aspect of the services made an enduring impression upon me, but because of something I did afterward that I still find remarkable. There was some sort of reception for the congregation, and there was a very pretty girl in attendance, and I announced to somebody—Larry, probably—that I was going to introduce myself. “Oh, sure you will,” was the response, or words to that effect.

  I was in my Boy Scout uniform, of course, and must have looked like an idiot, but something empowered me, and I strode across the room and presented myself in front of this vision. “You look like someone I’d like to meet,” I said, and we began talking, and when we all went back to the train, I had her name and address on a slip of paper in my wallet.

  Karen Hochfeld.

  I wrote to her from Buffalo, and she answered me, and our correspondence went on for a year or two. Her father was a doctor, I remember that much, and she was a pretty accomplished golfer. Somewhere along the way one of us left a letter forever unanswered, and that was the end of that.

  I wonder whatever became of her. I’ve often wondered, over the years, but even in this Age of Google I haven’t turned up a trace of her. Women’s names change with marriage, and that makes them harder to track down. She must have been a year younger than I, maybe two, so she’d have been born in 1939–40.

  If you’re out there, Karen, I’d love to hear from you…

  But wasn’t I the lad? “You look like someone I’d like to meet.” Where did all that self-assurance come from? Somehow I don’t think it was the uniform. Whatever brought it about, it had never happened before.

  Or since.

  WE CONTINUED on down the coast, saw the redwoods, and wound up in tents in Orange County. My friend Larry had the special pleasure at the jamboree of falling in with a detachment of Puerto Rican scouts. He’d been studying Spanish at school, and was able to speak with them.

  This impressed me profoundly. At Bennett you could be a language major or a science major, and for no particular reason I’d chosen science. I had taken two years of Latin, which I’d continue, and in the fall I was scheduled to study chemistry, with physics on tap for my senior year.

  I came home from the jamboree with other ideas, switched to a language major, and took first-year Spanish along with third-year Latin. I never did study chemistry or physics.

  Spanish came easily to me. It’s not a difficult language, and two years of Latin did a lot to pave the way. I had two years of Spanish when I went off to college, and would have studied it there, but I didn’t have the chance. The professor who’d taught it for a couple of years was up for tenure the year before I got to Antioch, and didn’t get it, and left—and that was the end of Spanish at Antioch.

  AT THE JAMBOREE, except for those of us who were practicing our Spanish, what you mostly did was swap things. Kids from all over the country, all over the world, brought indigenous crap along and exchanged it for somebody else’s indigenous crap. Some kids managed to trade uniforms with foreign scouts, which gave them a terrific souvenir, but left them without anything to wear to meetings. There was a particular shoulder patch that was much esteemed, for reasons I cannot begin to recall and very likely couldn’t fathom at the time. I managed to get a bullwhip, which I thought I’d be able to trade for the patch, but I couldn’t. It’s hard now to imagine any sort of shoulder patch a sane person would prefer over a bullwhip, but that’s by the way. I brought the bullwhip home, but don’t ask me what happened to it. It disappeared, but then the patch probably wouldn’t have lasted, either.

  The really dumb thing I did was send a postcard to Murray Davis’s girlfriend.

  Murray was in Troop Seven, along with me and Larry Levy, and lived in Kenmore, and for a couple of years he’d been going steady with a girl named Leslie, whose last name was also Davis. They were crazy about each other. And for some reason I thought it would be really comical to write a postcard saying something along the lines of “I know you’ve been screwing other guys and I’m really mad,” sign Murray’s name to it, and send it to her.

  I have no
idea what made me think this was a good idea.

  Next thing I knew, the postcard was written and stamped and in the mailbox. And I pretty much forgot about it.

  THE JAMBOREE ENDED after a week, and we packed up and boarded our train for a quick return to Buffalo. The only thing I remember from the trip home was looking out the window as we passed through Kansas and seeing an enormous blood-orange full moon a few degrees off the horizon. Funny what sticks in the mind. A few years later I would write a poem about it, describing the moon as “stroking desperate tides in the liquid land.” It’s probably a good thing I turned my attention to paperback novels, where all that desperate stroking could be put to good use.

  Back home, I told my parents I wanted to study Spanish, and they thought that was fine. I unpacked, and everything went into the washing machine. Except for the bullwhip. I don’t know where that went.

  And then one evening Gene Davis came over. He was Murray’s father, and he was really boiling, and he wanted to talk to my parents. He may have wanted to talk to me as well, I’m fairly sure he did, but he never got the chance. I was sent upstairs, and stayed in my room with the door closed.

  He must have been downstairs for the better part of an hour. How did I spend that time? I have no idea. Picked up a book, most likely, and thought as little as possible about what was going on downstairs.

  Then he was gone, and my mother came to my room. “That was Mr. Davis,” he said unnecessarily. “Murray’s father. He had a nasty postcard that someone had sent to Leslie Davis with Murray’s name signed to it. He was very upset, especially because the mailman and anybody else at the post office could have read it.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “He was certain you were the one who wrote it. We looked at it and told him it couldn’t possibly have been you. For one thing, it wasn’t your handwriting. And we knew you would never have done anything like that.”