I'm Back for More Cash

by Tony Kornheiser

  This one is better, I think: Stanley made a lot of money in business, employing hundreds of underpaid laborers. One day he bumped into another of our classmates in New York, whom he hadn’t seen in twenty years.

  “So, what do you do?” Stanley asked Dave.

  “I’m a union organizer,” Dave said. “What do you do?”

  “Um, nothing,” Stanley said.

  When I got home from the reunion the first thing my kids asked me was: “Had your high school classmates changed?”

  Well, that’s not quite true. The first thing my kids asked was: “Can we go out to dinner?” The second thing was: “How come I have to take out the dog? I took the dog out last night. Make Michael take out the dog.”

  My kids never actually asked me anything about the reunion. I’m not sure they even knew I had been away. How would they know? It hadn’t been announced on The Simpsons. But the point is: Other than adding a few pounds and losing some hair—and in one noteable case replacing the lost human hair with something that appeared to have been ripped from a yak’s underbelly—the guys hadn’t changed much (except for the one who now, to everybody’s amazement, looks exactly like Bea Arthur). The funny ones were still funny. The quiet ones were still quiet. The boring ones were still boring. And not everybody had become a rocket scientist.

  For example, at one point we were discussing where to hold our next reunion, and Steven said, “Let’s have it in Puerto Rico, because that’s one of the few states I haven’t been to.”

  Wait, it gets better.

  Steven then said, “How many states do we have now? Fifty-two, right?”

  And I said, “Yeah, the continental forty-eight, Alaska, Hawaii, and then in the last few years we added Puerto Rico and France. It was in all the papers.”

  Later in the evening the scholar-athlete of our class, as smart and handsome as the Robert Redford character in The Way We Were, turned to me and asked, completely serious, like he has been living on the third moon of Jupiter, “What team does Cal Ripken play for? Is it the Cubs?”

  “He came up with the Cubs organization as a baritone,” I corrected, “but was traded to the Utah Jazz for Wayne Gretzky and Wallace ‘Two-Ton’ Twombley. Later he played for the Topeka Oysters in the Negro Leagues, and finally retired to Poughkeepsie, where he runs the numbers racket.”

  “Oh,” was the reply.

  That picture we posed for was taken on the steps of the dining room of the hotel our last evening there. We’d been together for forty-eight hours by then, and you can see the joy in our eyes. But there were some scratches at the edges. At our age the curve is no longer going up. Every one of us had our triumphs and our tragedies, too. Parents were gone. A sister. A wife. There were children born with terrible defects. There were operations, chemotherapies, divorces, business reversals. The gift of the reunion was the chance to reconnect, however briefly, with the friends we’d known in happier times.

  I look at the picture and smile to see that we’ve become our fathers. We’re fat, old, bald, and loud. Some of us have even started driving Cadillacs. Fifteen years from now they’ll have to wake us up for the next picture; we’ll be sleeping off dinner in the easy chairs in the lobby. I’ll be the only one not snoring.

  You Camp Go Home Again

  This past weekend I went to my camp reunion. Camp Keeyumah was in business twenty-five years, from 1949 to 1974. (Official motto: “Send Us Your Child for Eight Weeks, and If We Don’t Send You Back Your Child, No Sweat, We’ll Send You Somebody Else’s.”) About two hundred people showed up, ranging from their forties to their seventies. Because I’d gone to camp for sixteen summers as a camper and counselor, I knew almost all of them, though their faces had changed; now they had the fuller, weathered faces of their parents that I remembered from Visiting Day thirty-five and forty years ago. It was like something out of Stephen King—if Stephen King loaded up on downers.

  In the main, the women had aged better than the men. I say this because some of the men were so fat they could have been entered in the Pennsylvania State Fair. Women are quicker at recognizing the perils of aging. For example, women usually know when it’s time to stop wearing halter tops. Men blithely continue to wear form-fitting shirts even when their “form” now resembles a big ol’ sack of feed. Women would never be so blissfully ignorant. Like the woman in her mid-forties who showed up with spectacularly platinum blond hair, and when a man said she looked like Marilyn Monroe, she responded: “Do I look more like Marilyn Monroe when she was alive or dead?”

  The reunion’s organizers planned a surprise Color War break. Color War is a (mostly athletic) competition in which campers are divided into teams according to camp colors; my camp’s colors were blue and white. Typically, the announcement of Color War—the “break”—is done in some off-center way; maybe by painting colors on campers’ faces while they’re asleep, or, you know, marauding through the bunks and tying every third child to the rafters.

  This “break” was by helicopter. The local veterinarian has flown his own chopper to get to his patients for forty years. Now as we stood around the flagpole for the welcoming ceremony, he passed low over the camp, dropping blue and white streamers. Except the streamers didn’t drop cleanly—they hung over the runners of the helicopter. As the streamers began swirling wildly, all of us on the ground had the same terrifying thought: The streamers are going to get into the rotor, and the chopper is going to crash and kill us all! I began to fantasize the first sentence of my own obituary: “Tony Kornheiser, who was afraid to fly and preferred his feet on the ground, died yesterday when a helicopter fell from the sky and crushed him.” Fortunately, the vet flew off without incident.

  At that point, we did what any reasonable group of middle-aged adults whose lives had just flashed before their eyes would do: We ate lunch. It was the traditional camp picnic lunch we had forty years ago, hamburgers in the basket. They tasted just as we remembered them: like death warmed over. I don’t want to say the meat was tough, but some of the hamburgers had tattoos.

  After lunch people wandered around camp, and ultimately gathered around the main softball diamond for the traditional Color War game. The score went to 8–7 Blue, and White was down to its last batter with a runner on third base. The White captain, my friend Keith (who wanted someone else to drive in the tying run, so he could drive in the winning run), spotted me watching the game and said, “Tony, get up there and hit.” I declined, saying I hadn’t swung a bat in twenty years.

  “Get up there and hit,” he said. “Do it for your children.”

  “My children don’t speak to me,” I said.

  “Then do it for my children,” Keith said.

  I went to the plate and swung, missing the ball by a “Dukakislike” margin. I missed the second pitch, too. Keith called time and walked into the batter’s box. He said to me, “Stevie Wonder would come closer than that.” Then Keith put his arm around me and said, “Okay, Tony, let’s go—just like we did it in practice.” That cracked me up. Our last practice was in 1966.

  I swung and hit a line single to right. Unfortunately, I pulled a groin muscle running to first and needed medical attention. (Though at my age the good news was that I even had groin muscles.) That was my one moment of glory.

  But as much as a reunion—any reunion—is about glory and camaraderie and reliving the best moments of your life, reunions are also about time gone by and friends lost. When you go fifteen, twenty-five, thirty-five years without seeing somebody, sometimes it’s too late. These were people I spent every summer of my youth with, people I loved in a place I adored. And lately I’ve begun to count the wrinkles and the bald heads and the artificial hips, and I know there’s more time behind us than ahead. You come together on occasions like this, aging and slowing, and you don’t know whether to cry or laugh.

  At the end of the reunion, we gathered at the lake, where people made small speeches about the campers, counselors, and staff who had passed on—then we lit candles that were fastene
d to paper plates and cast them out onto the water. One of the people we mourned was my Aunt Shirley, who died recently. My Aunt Shirley and my Uncle Arnie owned the camp and were beloved by all who went there. Arnie, now in his eighties, was the last to place a candle on the lake.

  I loved being there, rocking in the cradle of my childhood, seeing dear friends, deceiving myself into feeling momentarily young again. But every step I took I saw my aunt, and I felt the presence of my mother and father, coming one last time to visit me. Mostly I wandered around alone, standing silently in old, familiar places, inhaling the aromas, and trying to press every square inch of the camp into my mind’s eye like flowers in a book.

  There would be other reunions, but I guessed I’d never be back again. The book of the dead would be too long. So I wanted to memorize this one perfect day and hold on to it forever. And I stood on the shore and looked out at the lake, crying gratefully as the tiny flames bobbed in the water.

  Fast Women

  Did you read the news story about a driver’s ed teacher in North Carolina who got so angry when someone cut him off that he ordered the student who was driving to speed up and catch the guy? And when she did, the teacher got out of the car and punched the offending driver in the nose!

  Is this really the kind of behavior we want from a teacher? Is this really the lesson we want to be giving the youth of America? I mean, if you have the dirtball cornered, shouldn’t you kick him in the groin, too?

  Okay, okay, I admit that this guy was probably not the world’s best role model for containing road rage. Hiring him as a driver’s ed teacher would be like hiring a personal fitness trainer who weighs four hundred pounds, slugs bourbon from the bottle, and chain-smokes cigars.

  This story got me thinking about my own driver’s ed teacher from high school. His name was Mr. Cmaylo (pronounced, I swear, “Mister Smile-O!”). Mister Cmaylo never smiled. He seldom talked. He was never big on driver’s ed theory. The only actual rule he ever imparted, to the best of my recollection, was: “Never run over a cardboard box, because a kid could be inside it.”

  Mr. Cmaylo was a big, beefy taciturn man who would sit in the passenger’s seat reading a newspaper while we drove, as if he didn’t have a worry in the world. A lot of students were grateful for Mr. Cmaylo’s calm demeanor; they interpreted his reading the paper as a sign of confidence in them. I realized he just was a rabid fan of the Jumble. There were three of us in the driver’s ed car. Me, Tina, and Susan. Tina was wild and exotic. She ran with an older crowd, many of whom left on sabbatical from time to time to attend prison.

  Being in the driver’s ed car with Tina was really different. There were always two lessons going on simultaneously: driving and anatomy. Tina wore skirts the approximate width of a wedding band. By the time she was sixteen she’d already been driving for four years. I didn’t know why she was taking driver’s ed; she should have been giving it. I assumed Tina’s earliest driving experiences involved getaway cars.

  Susan wasn’t nearly the polished driver Tina was (neither was Shirley Muldowney). In fact, the only time I ever saw Mr. Cmaylo put his newspaper down was when Susan was driving. Susan didn’t inspire confidence when she got behind the wheel, perhaps because she appeared to be legally blind. Her glasses were so thick they came with a defroster. And she was scary pale and terribly sensitive, and tended to become flustered when the slightest thing went wrong—for example, if she found out that people in Yemen were starving, she would throw her pasty hands in the air and begin to cry, which, as Tina and I told her, wouldn’t have scared us as much had she been in the backseat and not behind the wheel at the time.

  Once, when Susan was supposed to shift from park to reverse, she dropped it into drive by mistake, and when she felt the car going forward, she panicked and floored it. We shot forward like John Glenn on the launchpad. The G-force made our cheeks flap. And since we had all turned around to look out the back window, our heads nearly snapped off. Mr. Cmaylo slammed down so hard on the dual-control brake that I thought he’d go through the floorboards. When we came to a stop we were so shaken we all asked Tina for a cigarette—Mr. Cmaylo, too.

  The first time I ever drove the driver’s ed car, Mr. Cmaylo had me park it on a busy street in the commercial section of town. I signaled that I was going to pull over to the right, and I guided the car to the curb and pulled easily behind another parked car.

  At that point I was supposed to switch from the front seat to the backseat, so Tina could drive. (Tina liked to drive because she could use the rearview mirror to put on her makeup.) I carefully checked the street for cardboard boxes—all clear—and flung open the driver’s side door, and bam! These were narrow streets, and a huge tractor-trailer sheared off the door!

  One instant the door was there, and the next it was gone. The force of the impact pushed the door one hundred feet up the street. This is my first time ever behind the wheel. And I see the truck driver running toward the car, screaming about how I shouldn’t be allowed to drive even a little red wagon. And I begin to shake because I didn’t even have a license yet and already I’d been in an accident. And I looked at Mister Smile-O, hoping he’d say something reassuring.

  And he said, “Mmmph. I guess I better drive back to school.”

  (Makes you feel warm all over, doesn’t it?)

  And I got into the backseat, next to Tina, who was wildly excited because of the violent, random, and idiotic nature of the crash. And you know, it could have been worse.

  The Fighting Hasidim

  After fifty-three years of proudly being called the Colonials, my alma mater, Binghamton University, recently rated by Der Spiegel as one of the “better schools” in south-central New York state (motto: “We’re Only 207 Road Miles from Yale”), has decided to change the nickname of its athletic teams.

  No, this wasn’t some political-correctness fix. Colonials isn’t a hideously embarrassing racial slur, like, say, Redskins—if there could possibly be somebody insensitive enough to use that as a name for a sports team. Colonials is a benign term, meaning either “a member or inhabitant of a colony” or, as I’ve just learned, those pathetic buckle shoes nobody has worn since the time of the Pilgrims, with the possible exception of Elton John.

  (Jeez. All this time we were named after shoes? Whose idea was that, Judy Garland’s?)

  Binghamton decided to dump “Colonials” for a much more practical reason: “Colonials” wasn’t moving T-shirts. End of discussion.

  Name changes are nothing new to my school, which was originally Triple Cities College and then—when I went there—Harpur College. When people asked me where I went to school, I would say “Harpur” very fast and deliberately slur the pronunciation to see if I could fool some dopes into thinking I went to “Harvard.”

  Later, it became SUNY—Binghamton. Now it’s simply Binghamton U. In a few years, it’ll probably be a Starbucks. (I took my daughter up there a few years ago, showed her the familiar red brick neo-penal architecture, and she said, “Daddy, it looks like a drug rehabilitation center.” I smiled and told her, “Sweetie, you don’t know how close you are.”)

  I have to laugh when I think back to the athletic teams we had when I was in school. We were not a jock school. There was no football team. The center on our basketball team was only six feet two; he had a terrific view of the opposing center’s armpits. After his junior year, he left to join the circus! Everything you need to know about the state of Harpur College athletics is embodied in the name of one of the school’s legendary stars: Jack “the Shot” Levine.

  We never won anything. It wasn’t just that your guys could beat our guys; your girls could beat our guys. The piccolo section of your band could beat our guys.

  Along with a new nickname, Binghamton wants a mascot, too. When I was at Harpur, we never actually had a mascot the students could relate to—I’d have suggested a cuddly stuffed animal who sat immobilized for five hours playing the first side of the Moby Grape album and babbling about how if you cut
open a Cheez Doodle, the colors were really far out.

  It’s okay with me if they want to change “Colonials” to something else, but I must express my outrage at how the new nickname was arrived at.

  A marketing company was hired to prepare a list of thirty names. I quote from the alumni newsletter: “The following qualities were considered in selecting the name: gender-neutral, non-offensive, powerful, aggressive, dignified, and marketable.”

  (So I guess “Big Hairy Chicks on Crack” had no chance.)

  What kind of nickname can you get from that commercialized, politically correct crap?

  I asked my friends at work to brainstorm a name using those guidelines. Here’s what they came up with:

  The Smelt

  The Binghamton Empowered Persons

  The Bisexuals

  The Binghamton Bada-Bing!

  The Bolivian Swarming River Rats

  The Golden Geldings

  The Binghamton Crosbys

  The Fighting Beiges

  The (Name of Your Corporation Here)

  The Binghamton

  The Fighting Hasidim

  And my personal favorite: The Swiss.

  But for some reason, Binghamton picked Bearcats.

  There’s no such thing as a bearcat. It’s a mythical animal. A fraud.

  My friend Tammy, who has two cats, points out quite correctly: “Of course, it is mythical. I am absolutely, positively certain my cats would never, ever, like, do it with a bear.”

  (Tammy also asks, “Why aren’t there beardogs?” But that is a question for another day—and possibly another galaxy.)

  The alumni journal praises the choice of Bearcat: “A cross between the power and ferocity of a bear and the cunning and quickness of a cat.”

  Well, if what you want is power and ferocity, and cunning and quickness, why not choose a nickname like Psychotics With Chain Saws? You think that’s not marketable? That’s got big-time WWF Smackdown! potential!